Leif blinked her dead-fish eyes, still stuck on that bizarre metaphor.
She could somehow feel that Natiaveda was desperately trying to praise her… yet she didn’t feel even a trace of the joy of being praised.
“Sorry.”
Natiaveda’s ears flushed red.
“Knight, I may have been a little too… enthusiastic.”
“…”
Leif fell silent.
Did this lady-in-waiting misunderstand what “enthusiastic” meant?
And what was with the blushing?
She still had no idea why Natiaveda had been standing outside her door for so long. It couldn’t possibly be just to bring her tools for spinning wool. So she went on staring at the lady-in-waiting in confusion.
“Knight.”
The lady-in-waiting’s face fell, her amber eyes flickering uneasily.
“I’m very worried… that I’ll be treated as an accomplice of the fake queen. I mean, I took care of her for so long, did so many things for her, even if I didn’t know anything…
“Oh, I just know I won’t sleep a wink these few days. I’ll be terrified that someone sent by Princess Sophie will drag me off to prison in my sleep, put me through every torture one by one, and then have me hanged alive—”
As Natiaveda spoke, she turned sideways, revealing the wagon train behind her loaded with household goods. She had practically moved her entire home here.
Then she looked at Leif with open expectation.
“Knight…”
Leif hadn’t understood what Natiaveda meant at first, but seeing that setup, she couldn’t pretend not to.
The shepherd girl stepped aside to clear the way for the wagon train.
“If anything does happen, just hide behind me,” she told the lady-in-waiting.
“I’ll protect you.”
As she spoke, she gave a little shake to the chopping blade on her back—the one that almost never left her side except when she bathed.
“Knight, you’re so kind.”
The lady-in-waiting covered her mouth, looking utterly terrified yet deeply grateful. Her tear-bright, pitiful expression seemed to beg for someone to pull her into their arms and comfort her.
When Natiaveda, eyes shimmering, leaned toward her, Leif instinctively moved to catch her.
But then she suddenly recalled that moment facing the prophetic behemoth, when the lady-in-waiting had somehow unleashed a mysterious spell and a terrifying power out of nowhere.
Her overly delicate face and overly fragile nerves always made Leif forget that.
All at once the shepherd girl felt her own arms far too narrow, and the promise she’d just made—to protect the lady-in-waiting—sounded laughably arrogant.
Feeling ashamed, Leif slipped back into the house and went on to the next round of washing the wool, missing the flash of disappointment on Natiaveda’s face.
After she had rinsed the wool many times and left it to dry for several days, she began carding it, teasing it until it was soft and fluffy, every fiber loosened and spread.
Then Leif took up the spindle and began to spin.
After several days of work, the heap of messy, filthy fleece had become fine, soft, snow-white yarn.
Leif then plied it together into a thicker, eight-strand yarn.
By the time she realized what she was doing, she already had four oak knitting needles in hand and was working on a sweater—she’d knitted over a dozen rounds…
The shepherd girl stared at the loops of wool in her hands, stunned.
“Knight, what’s wrong?” the lady-in-waiting asked.
Leif didn’t answer. She simply pushed the half-knitted piece to the side.
She still didn’t know what Sophie wanted her to do with this batch of yarn. The best outcome would be for Sophie to let her keep it. A princess of such rank would hardly ever need woolen clothes, but since Sophie hadn’t said anything, she’d better not rush to use it.
These past few days, though they hadn’t gone out, rumors from the outside still reached their ears. The entire kingdom was buzzing about that incredible affair.
According to the stories, an evil witch had colluded with Prince Noren, attempting to deceive Aeseya Kingdom. The innocent, kind princess was turned into a sheep, then—by a twist of fate—she was brought back to Gino City by a brave knight.
The matter had even alarmed the central Holy Temple. A white-robed divine envoy, keeping his name concealed, had personally come to the royal capital of Gino to reveal the truth.
After that, the woman who had used black witchcraft to turn herself into a queen was struck by a backlash from her own dark arts. After days of suffering, she died.
Prince Noren’s true face was exposed as well. It turned out he had never come to Aeseya to marry the princess, but to secretly transport metal and warhorses to Lodmon Kingdom.
On the other hand, the flute carved from a branch of the Prophet Tree had already sounded the late king’s final will.
In the last moments of his life, the old king not only expressed his concern for his people, but also instructed that his only daughter—the noble and beautiful Princess Sophie—was to become the heir of the kingdom. At least until she found a partner worthy of her trust, she would rule Aeseya under the guidance of the former prime minister’s daughter, the talented Duchess Listinger.
These rumors, half true and half false, reached Leif’s ears in fragments.
“To have impersonated Princess Sophie, she can’t have been from some obscure little family. There’s no way the royal house hasn’t learned who she really was. Yet they haven’t made the fake queen’s identity public. Still…”
Leif hadn’t heard anything about Duchess Listinger yet, but she did feel a faint concern for that weak and gentle little girl in her memory.
“Did she… really die?”
“Knight, do you care that much whether the fake queen is dead or not?” Natiaveda asked curiously.
Leif said nothing.
“If the rumors are true, then she was nothing but a dark witch,” Natiaveda said, her tone carrying a hint of meaning.
“Everyone on the Deya Continent believes that dark witches, vampires, werewolves… oh, and demon dragons, and all other beings that stand for evil, can only inspire disgust, fear, and hatred. The moment they appear, they must be slain.
“When cattle, sheep, pigs, or dogs die, people still feel sympathy. But when those creatures die, everyone only thinks they deserved far worse.
“Is that what the knight believes too?”
Leif’s eyes flickered at the mention of “demon dragons”. Her fingers idly flicked the knitting needle.
She only said, “The fear the fake queen showed when she faced Prince Noren didn’t look like an act. I don’t think they could have been in league.”
The lady-in-waiting had been about to press her for a clearer answer when she suddenly saw the shepherd girl reach back for the scabbard on her back and draw her chopping blade.
Natiaveda’s pupils constricted, the smile freezing on her face.
—
Prince Noren had clearly never imagined he would suddenly fall into such a miserable state.
Sophie was nothing like he had thought—not just some spoiled, willful, ignorant little princess. On the contrary, she resembled the late king of Aeseya very much in one regard: she knew exactly how to wield public opinion.
Once she let those rumors—half truth, half fiction—leak out of the palace, Noren changed in an instant from the beloved “King” in the people’s hearts to a rat that everyone wanted to beat to death in the street.
The citizens of Aeseya, both enraged at being deceived and full of sympathy for poor Princess Sophie, were furious with Noren to the point that only his death could satisfy them.
He knew perfectly well that not everything Sophie said was true, yet he couldn’t refute it. Because the moment he tried to correct any particular detail, those extremely confidential documents would be exposed by Sophie under the full light of day.
He had no idea how those documents—signed in his own hand and stamped with his secret seal—had been discovered in the fake queen’s chambers. But any one of them, once made public, would be enough to prove his treasonous dealings with another nation.
By the time Noren realized Sophie had driven him into a corner and, driven by vengeance, decided to expose the fake queen’s real identity, he discovered that no one believed a word he said anymore.
He couldn’t help remembering how his father had warned him before he left not to be too hasty. Now, regret came too late.
He could only write to his father in humiliation, begging for aid. He never expected that this man he had always respected—and who had once promised him the throne—had already decided to cast his own son aside.
The letter in reply fiercely denounced Noren’s stupidity and recklessness. From there it went on to recount his birth from a low-born mother and his ever-worsening arrogance and defiance growing up, all to prove that he had been wicked from birth and was beyond saving.
His father wrote that he bitterly regretted not smashing him to death on the ground the day he was born.
The letter also very skillfully severed all diplomatic ties between the Lodmon Kingdom and Noren’s crimes. It declared that the framing of Princess Sophie and all subsequent acts of evil that violated the Holy Temple’s teachings had been committed by Noren alone. As for the warhorses and metal he had hauled across half the continent, they were merely bribes he had prepared on his own. To show good faith, Lodmon Kingdom would return everything in full, and even add ten percent as compensation.
When this letter reached Noren’s hands, he still did not know that his venerable father had already had several copies made and sent to the rulers of other nations and to the Holy Temple, determined to display a monarch’s noble resolve in punishing his own kin for the sake of justice.
Driven into a dead end, Prince Noren lashed out like a trapped beast.
He decided to kill Princess Sophie.
By the time Leif arrived, Prince Noren had completely shed the cultivated demeanor he’d had when she first met him. His very form had changed.
“Damn you, Sophie…”
His hair stood up rough and hard like the bristles of a wild boar. Muscles bulged grotesquely beneath his skin, the nearly flayed flesh mapped with pulsing, blood-red veins. His face had twisted out of recognition; his once deep blue eyes were now bloodshot red, and his nose was pushed upward by the fangs bursting from his mouth.
This was no longer a man, but a beast.
Leif was nearly knocked off her feet by the screaming crowd surging around her.
“Noren swallowed a demonic beast core…” Natiaveda, who had rushed over as well, frowned.
“When a human swallows a monster core, they gain immense power in an instant. But along with that power, they’re twisted by the demonic beast’s influence and become something neither human nor monster—a true abomination.”
Leif turned her head and glanced at the lady-in-waiting.
“He’ll soon lose his mind entirely,” Natiaveda said in a low voice, “and become no different from a demonic beast.”
Noren was howling, the lipless maw of his jawless face emitting a rasping hiss like a broken bellows. His huge, hair-covered hands, big as palm-leaf fans, grabbed Sophie’s guards one by one and hurled them away like ragdolls.
In the end, only Princess Sophie was left, fallen to the ground and scrambling backward into a corner.
“Sophie… Sophie… die… just die…”
Leif forced her way through the panicked crowd, her body as lithe as a fish in water, pushing toward where Sophie was.
Everyone present knew the princess was in mortal danger, yet not a single person dared to step forward. They could only watch, helpless, as tragedy unfolded before their eyes.
Noren seized Sophie by the arm and began to swing the screaming, struggling girl through the air. While savoring the despair and terror on her face, he swung her toward a marble pillar.
“Die… damn you, Sophie…”
He seemed to know only how to repeat her name and tell her to die.
Just before he could smash Sophie’s skull against the pillar, a brown-haired girl burst out from the crowd. Her body, nimble as a hunting leopard’s, leapt high as she raised her chopping blade and brought it down on Noren’s beast-like, towering back.
With a wet tearing sound, black-red blood fountained out, splattering the patchwork roughspun clothes of the would-be knight.
Leif caught Princess Sophie as she fell from Noren’s grasp, the girl landing squarely in the crook of her arm.
The squire landed as well, her body bending under the sudden weight in her arms.
“Ha…”
Having snatched her life back from the jaws of death, Sophie clutched tightly at the brown-haired girl’s sleeve, her voice thick with the edge of tears.
“Leif, I… I thought…”
Kneeling on one knee, the would-be knight held the shaken little princess in her arms, her face set and solemn.
“A knight,” she said, “never allows a lady to be harmed before her eyes.”
The princess sucked in a few ragged breaths. Hearing that, she choked and coughed hard.
