After Sophie left, Leif watched her back for a while, then slumped into the satin-cushioned chair. Propping her chin on one hand, she absently flicked at her empty money pouch with the other.
Sunlight poured into the room, gilding the brown hair of the shepherd girl and lending the place a faint, lonely air.
Leif felt a nagging sense that something was off. She remembered she’d wanted to say something to Sophie—but what exactly had she meant to say…?
“Lady Knight.”
After a while, the white-robed lady attendant finally appeared, as quietly as a shadow.
Leif looked up and saw a smile on the woman’s face, as if something had delighted her. Then she noticed the red bead in the attendant’s hand, about the size of an egg.
“What’s that?”
Natiaveda held the bead out to her. Leif took it and weighed it in her palm.
The feel of it was oddly familiar. It was almost the same sensation she’d had when she’d touched the crystal core of the oracle behemoth—cold at first, but gradually, wherever it touched her skin, a light burning sting spread.
“Could this have come from His Majesty the King… from Noren…?”
“Your guess is correct, Lady Knight,” Natiaveda interrupted her. “But this… let’s call it a beast core for now—there’s something very strange about it.”
“What’s strange about it?” Leif glanced at her, then studied the red core.
“This clearly isn’t a crystal core. Crystal cores are a fixed size. This one’s far too big.”
“That’s true. But in principle, something like this shouldn’t exist at all.”
Natiaveda’s golden eyes watched Leif’s fingers roll the core back and forth. Seeing Leif’s puzzlement, she explained,
“If an ordinary person swallows a crystal core, it melts quickly and vanishes without a trace in short order. Noren had already beastified to that extent. One would expect the time between him swallowing the core and now to be more than enough for it to dissolve completely. I only examined his body because I sensed something odd about his condition… I never imagined I would find this.”
Though she had just searched Noren’s corpse, Natiaveda’s white robes were still spotless, not even a wrinkle in them. Her expression was as calm as if she’d merely gone out to pick a flower.
She sat down beside Leif.
“I thought you, Lady Knight, might find it useful.”
Leif nodded in gratitude.
But going by her hazy memories of The Knight and the Princess, any descriptions of how to use a beast core had long since slipped her mind. Insetting it into the cleaver’s hilt was clearly impossible—the thing was simply too big.
She looked closer. At the center of the core, there seemed to be a carved sigil: an inverted pentagram.
Leif decided to experiment, to see if she could pry out the “heart” of the beast core.
The moment she applied force, a sharp crack rang out as the core split.
A fissure spread from a single point on its surface, webbing rapidly across the entire core. In no time at all, a red liquid began to seep out.
Natiaveda yanked Leif back. The core tumbled to the floor and, almost instantly, crumbled into blood-red powder.
Leif felt the cleaver strapped to her back give a faint shudder. She shrugged off Natiaveda’s hand, drew the blade, and the cleaver immediately drew in the red powder, just like iron pulling in filings.
The difference was, the moment the blood-colored dust touched the cleaver, it was absorbed completely.
Leif noticed that the small cracks and chips that had been on the blade’s edge were now gone. That meant this kind of beast core could increase a weapon’s durability.
The brown-haired shepherd girl snapped the flat of the blade with a fingertip and heard a clear, ringing note. She couldn’t help but break into a delighted grin.
“Oh, right—Lady Natiaveda, I’ve already spoken with Princess Sophie. She won’t be holding you responsible.”
“How considerate of you, Lady Knight.”
Natiaveda’s smile deepened, the gentleness in her eyes so soft it was nearly overflowing.
“This is only what I ought to do.”
Leif took out a strip of fine linen to wipe the cleaver, checking the edge against the light as she spoke.
“So you, my lady, can move back to your own quarters without worry.”
The air stalled for a heartbeat.
The white-robed attendant’s smile faded. Only after a long pause did she say,
“Lady Knight, I believe you’ll want me to stay.”
“No.”
Leif shook her head.
“I can take care of myself just fine.”
The lady attendant had her people load up her belongings and move them back. Leif watched from the courtyard as Natiaveda rode away in the four-wheeled carriage, glancing back again and again.
When Leif returned inside, the house suddenly felt much emptier.
—
The maid Natiaveda had sent to look after Leif’s daily needs appeared at the door. She knocked a few times, then entered, only to see the knight girl famous throughout the kingdom bent over, sharpening her blade.
The maid hesitated for a while before walking in.
“Lady Leif…”
Leif wiped the sweat from her forehead.
“What is it?”
“You’ve been renting this courtyard for a month now.” The maid forced herself not to look at Leif’s patch-covered clothes. “Even with Lady Natiaveda as your guarantor, it’s time the rent was paid.”
“Oh.”
Leif set down the blade and went to the table, rummaging through the inner pocket of her money pouch.
Before leaving Edde Village, she had sold the old house Grandma Samantha left her, the sheep pen behind it, and the land with the fruit trees and vegetable patch. She’d used all that money for her journey, pinching every coin along the way.
After arriving in Gino City, she’d barely spent anything, so she hadn’t paid much attention to how much she had left.
She poured the remaining coins into her palm and counted.
“One, two, three… seven silver Gosha, two copper Gosha, and a dozen or so iron Gosha…”
The more she counted, the more uneasy she felt.
“May I ask how much the rent is?”
“Lady Leif, the rent is one gold Gosha.”
The maid looked at the brown-haired shepherd girl with worry and apology. When Leif heard “one gold Gosha,” her dark eyes flew wide in disbelief.
“You have to understand, this is a prime location, and the courtyard is very large. In Gino City, you absolutely couldn’t rent anything half as good for the same price. And then there’s the food these days, and the water…”
Leif clenched the few Gosha coins she had left and finally understood what Natiaveda had meant earlier by “I believe you’ll want me to stay.”
She also understood why Sophie had suddenly looked so reluctant when she took away the wool.
If at the very beginning there had still been a chance for her to “strike it rich” by selling it off as “the princess’s wool, limited edition, one gold Gosha per strand”—in fact, a few wealthy collectors with unusual hobbies in the city had recently offered even higher prices, but Leif had turned them all down—then after Sophie took away her wool, Leif was now truly left with nothing.
She looked at the maid’s apologetic, hesitant face and felt a chill settle in her chest.
Not just nothing.
She was in debt.
—
“Excuse me, where is Princess Sophie?”
Leif grabbed the sleeve of a maid coming out of the palace.
The maid didn’t answer. Her gaze slid toward the palace gate.
The princess’s carriage was just then rolling out of the gate.
Leif hurried after it, but before she could call out, the royal four-wheeled carriage had already sped away.
And so the penniless shepherd girl had no choice but to pit her two legs against what was probably the finest warhorse in the Kingdom of Aeseya—renowned across the whole of the Deya Continent for its steeds—and its four legs.
After chasing it for several streets, she still lost it.
Relying on instinct, Leif made her way into a quiet, out-of-the-way alley and saw the four-wheeled carriage stopped outside a half-open gate.
It was a peaceful, though somewhat dilapidated, compound. From the look of it, whoever had just moved in had worked hard to clean and put the courtyard back in order.
About twenty guards stood outside the gate. Though they wore plain clothes, their straight backs at their posts and their well-drilled, uniform steps marked them unmistakably as palace guards.
Leif had no idea why palace guards would be stationed outside such an inconspicuous little courtyard, nor why Sophie would come to a place like this.
She hunched down and slipped past the guards’ line of sight. Using a tree outside the wall, she scrambled up in a few quick moves, then dropped down lightly inside. Straightening her bent knees, she took off running toward the inner yard.
Passing a square pavilion by the water, Leif stopped in her tracks.
Inside the pavilion sat two blond, blue-eyed girls, one taller and one shorter.
One was Sophie. The other’s face was unfamiliar. If Leif hadn’t known Sophie was the old king’s only daughter, she would have thought the other girl was her blood sister.
Sophie sat there quietly, her green eyes with their long, curled lashes blinking softly. Her small hands lay neatly on her knees as she let the other girl gently comb her long golden hair with an ivory comb.
It was the first time Leif had ever seen Sophie so docile and demure.
Inevitably, the shepherd girl felt a bit like someone else was shearing wool off a sheep she’d raised herself.
The taller girl seemed to sense something and looked toward where Leif was hiding.
The face was unfamiliar, but the gentle expression on it, and the faint, sickly pallor to her complexion, made a forbidden guess flicker through Leif’s mind.
Sophie felt the combing pause and asked,
“Big Sister Listinger, what are you looking at?”
“Sophie,” Listinger said softly. “Look who’s here.”
