Chương 206: 30. Destroying Evidence 1

By the time we reached the Harbor District Command Post, I finally understood something—belatedly, as usual, but at least before it got me killed. The picture I currently presented was spectacularly unsuited for walking into any building that might require an explanation. I—Cedric Rosa, emergency envoy of the Kingdom of Eckhaus—had vanished for an entire night, and now here I was at dawn, escorting an elven woman I'd just walked out of the Fairy Parlor with.

Trailing behind me was Jessi, wearing the unmistakable expression of someone who'd paid good money for front-row tickets to a scandal, and Alvira von Rosenberg, whose face was doing an excellent impression of a woman drafting a formal statement titled I Do Not Know This Man. A formation like this—forget getting past the front gate of a command post. Set up a ticket booth on the street corner with this exact lineup, and people would still line up to pay.

The problem was, there was no ticket booth inside the command post. There was only Ignicia. And she had most certainly not come for the show. The soldier standing guard at the door spotted me first, and his face went through a very specific sequence: relief—then Yozora, standing at my side—then the relief got violently swallowed back down. I knew that look intimately. Translated into plain speech, it read approximately: We got him back. Why does he come with a bonus round? I'd have loved to know the answer myself.

Unfortunately, life doesn't always grant you the luxury of understanding why. Sometimes it only grants you the more urgent task of figuring out how not to die before the question becomes relevant. We were escorted straight through to the temporary command room. The moment the door swung open, the air inside hit heavier than the tension outside—the specific density that accumulates when serious people have been doing serious things in a cramped space for too many sleepless hours.

Nautical charts, personnel rosters, half-copied dispatches, and red wax-sealed documents lay strewn across the long table, alongside a lamp that had clearly been refueled twice already. Ignicia stood behind the table, still in the same cloak from the night before, her complexion no better than it had been then. She'd probably gone the entire night without sleep—but people like her didn't get haggard from exhaustion.

They just looked more like a dragon that had spent all night deciding exactly what she intended to bite first. Lei Lian stood to her left, one hand resting on her scabbard, as immovable as an iron post driven into frozen ground. The harbor commander occupied the far side of the table, brow furrowed; the look he gave me upon entry was almost comically complicated—a man with several urgent questions who had correctly calculated that this was not the room to ask them in first. Ignicia looked at me. Just once.

That single glance contained, at minimum, three complete sentences. The first: So you remembered how to come back. The second: You'd better have brought something useful. The third: If all you've brought me is a woman, I am using you to boil my bathwater today. Standing in that doorway, I found myself genuinely nostalgic for the moment last night when Yozora's spell had paralyzed me. At least then, I hadn't been required to think. I cleared my throat.

"Your Highness," I said, "I've brought her."

"I can see that." Ignicia's gaze slid—slowly, deliberately—toward Yozora, then, with the same unhurried precision, slid back to me.

"You disappear for an entire night," she said, tone perfectly flat, "and return with an elven beauty on your arm. Cedric, your recent approach to official duty is looking less like a royal envoy's, and more like a port-town prodigal son's." Behind me, Jessi made a strangled noise and forcibly converted it into a cough. If I turned around and strangled her right now, I was fairly confident any reasonable court would rule it justifiable.

"I wasn't out carousing," I said.

"Oh?" Ignicia raised an eyebrow by roughly three degrees.

"Inspecting the structural integrity of mattresses, then?"

"…I was following a lead."

"A lead that led you into a bed at the Fairy Parlor?"

"Something was slipped into me." The instant those words left my mouth, Alvira's expression sharpened, and Lei Lian's chin lifted a fraction. Ignicia didn't so much as twitch.

"And then?"

"And then I paid for the room and listened to songs the rest of the night." I forced the sentence out to the end.

"Nothing else happened." You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. The room went silent for exactly one beat. In the next, even the harbor commander turned his face toward the wall. Jessi finally lost the battle entirely, shoulders shaking with helpless laughter. Alvira, ears flaming red, stomped down hard enough on Jessi's foot to strangle about half the noise back into her throat.

Ignicia looked at me, and for the first time all morning, something rare surfaced in her expression. Not fury. Contempt—the fond, almost affectionate kind reserved for people who manage to be exactly as useless as expected.

"You really are…" She paused, as though searching for some way to let me die with a shred of dignity intact, then abandoned the project.

"Forget it. I'll mock you properly later." I let out half a breath of relief. Only half. Because her next sentence arrived without pause.

"Assuming what you brought back is actually worth a night's room fee." With that, she finally turned to look at Yozora directly. The moment that gaze shifted, the whole room changed. Where Ignicia's look at me had carried the particular irritation reserved for a familiar nuisance, her look at Yozora carried none of that warmth—no heat in it at all, which was precisely what made it worse.

It was pure appraisal: the look of someone deciding whether a thing was worth keeping, or worth throwing straight into the furnace. Yozora had shed her cloak and stood in the same red, vaguely eastern dress from the night before. She didn't bow her head, and she didn't feign arrogance either. She simply stood—the way a bowstring stands at full draw, soft-looking on the surface, taut enough underneath to sing at the slightest touch. I recognized that tension.

I'd already tripped over that exact string once, the night before. When Ignicia spoke, her voice was, if anything, quieter than it had been with me.

"Name." Yozora paused half a beat.

"Yozora."

"Your real name."

"The name I can use right now." Across the room, Lei Lian's gaze sharpened. I broke into a cold sweat on Yozora's behalf. That kind of answer would pass as clever with most people. With Ignicia, it barely cleared the edge of the fire pit. Sure enough, Ignicia wasn't fooled.

"You're an elf," she said.

"You surface in this harbor. You've been staying at the Fairy Parlor. You arrived with a caravan from outside the city walls. And last night, you didn't dare go back. Put those together, and there are generally only two possibilities." She held up two fingers.

"One: you're bait. Two: you're garbage." The room went dead still. The smile vanished from Jessi's face entirely. Alvira straightened without seeming to notice she'd done it. The harbor commander's frown deepened—he clearly wasn't accustomed to phrasing this blunt, and just as clearly understood this wasn't his room to object in. Yozora's lashes trembled, once. She didn't step back.

"And which would Your Highness prefer this one to be?" Ignicia studied her. The corner of her mouth twitched, barely.

"I don't prefer," she said.

"I evaluate." She took a single step forward. A small one. Yozora's shoulders tightened all the same.

"If you're here to deceive," Ignicia said, calm as a woman discussing the weather, "I can burn you today—songs, bones, and everything between. If you're not, then tell me what you know. Whatever part of it you can say right now. Give me the most useful piece." She paused, gold-red eyes fixed unblinking on Yozora.

"I'm not asking how well you entertained my idiot envoy last night. Even in exhaustive detail, that information wouldn't make you worth one copper more."

"Your Highness, I did not—""Quiet. You."

"…Yes." I shut up immediately. It was probably the first time Yozora had ever watched someone silence me that efficiently. She glanced my way—brief, faintly startled—as if something had just clicked into place, some explanation for why I'd spent the whole previous night looking like a man being hunted. She turned her attention back to Ignicia.

"The caravan this one belongs to is called Wave & Tail Caravan," she began, her voice carefully steady.

"We came from the Yanxia Empire—performing, trading, making our way as we traveled." Ignicia didn't interrupt. Her silence was more oppressive than any interruption could have been. It meant she was waiting to see whether what came next would be filler, or something worth sinking her teeth into. Yozora continued.

"At first, it was only a feeling. People like this one survive by reading faces, by listening to what slips out over tavern tables. Watch long enough, and you learn to smell certain things before anyone says them aloud." Her gaze didn't wander. If anything, it grew heavier.

"It's been running very hot, lately, inside Yanxia's borders." The harbor commander frowned, visibly resisting the urge to say that's your intelligence? —but he clearly remembered exactly who was standing at the head of the table, and kept his mouth shut. Yozora went on.

"Not the weather. The people. The ones in the cities, on the roads, drinking, collecting tolls—even the soldiers manning the checkpoints looked like something had been burning in them too long. It used to be simple hostility. Then it became excitement. It used to be stricter inspections. Then it became the anticipation of some great occasion. That atmosphere—it didn't feel like things merely getting worse. It felt like an entire nation was holding its breath, eager for disaster to finally arrive."

Something shifted low in my chest. It didn't sound like a military report. It was worse than one, precisely because of that. She wasn't describing troop movements. She was describing the way an entire country breathes—and telling us that the breathing had changed. Ignicia finally spoke.

"Since when?"

"Since Queen Wahlin truly took the reins of power." Yozora lifted her eyes.

"At first, only in the great cities. Later, even in the small ones. The street storytellers, the tavern arguments, the talk at the gambling tables, the notices posted along the imperial roads—all of it pulling in the exact same direction."

"What direction?" Lei Lian cut in for the first time, her voice cold and clipped. Yozora looked at her.

"Fervor." The word landed and stayed there. No one spoke immediately. Because it was too precise. Not a description. A verdict. Yozora's fingers curled slightly inside her sleeves.

"This one doesn't understand courts, or strategy. But people like us fear one thing above all—when an entire place starts looking at you with the same eyes. It means they've stopped being people. They're only stones now, lined up on a slope, waiting for a shove in one direction so they can roll down together." A memory flashed through my mind—the view from the border, flying alongside Ignicia.

The closer we'd gotten to the Dragon Nation's frontier, the more we'd seen: troops on the move, lights burning where they shouldn't, not in one place or two, but the entire line shifting at once. Not routine patrols. Not local unrest. Something enormous, already set on its rails, sliding forward under its own weight. And what Yozora described now was the same storm's echo, arriving from a different road. Ignicia had clearly reached the same conclusion.

Her expression didn't change, but I knew she was listening—because if it had been empty words, she'd have crushed them on the spot. The fact that she hadn't meant she was cross-referencing it against everything she'd already seen herself. Yozora pressed on.

"So we started moving outward."

"You caught the wind that early?" Ignicia asked.

"People who live on the road have always had a better nose than officials." Yozora's tone was dry, without quite being humor.

"When things are merely chaotic, you can still work around it. But chaos with a direction isn't a question of profit anymore. It's a question of whether you get crushed on the way past." Behind me, Jessi drew a quiet breath—the sound of someone who wanted to laugh and had correctly read the room.