Chương 53: 23-1.Confession, Anomaly, and Stew

After Alvira followed me into the side corridor, the first thing she did wasn't speak. She looked back toward the tower stairs. Erina was still standing there. She hadn't come down, hadn't called out—she was simply leaning against the cold stone wall, head lowered, as though even the act of wiping her own tears away was something she needed to first calculate whether she had the strength for. Alvira brought her gaze back. Then those silver-grey eyes settled on me. I rarely saw her look at anyone like that.

Her usual approach to me ran somewhere along the lines of"say one more word and I will personally kick you off this ledge." But this time, there was something more specific in her expression—something that reached directly into my stomach and twisted. If I had to translate it into words, it would come out as: How is someone like you still alive? I leaned against the stone wall and preemptively held a moment of silence for myself.

"Let me say this first—it's not what you're thinking." Alvira let out a cold laugh. It was shallow, that laugh. Which made it considerably more dangerous than no laugh at all.

"Oh?" She brought her cane down against the stone floor, and her voice dropped low enough that each word seemed to arrive already frozen.

"Then what should I be thinking? That you brought her up a tower alone in the middle of the night, made her cry, and then decided explanations were someone else's problem?"

"I didn't make her—""Cedric." She cut me off, her gaze flicking briefly upward toward where Erina still stood, then slicing back down to me.

"If you're in the mood to play word games right now, I don't mind climbing back up that tower and throwing you out through one of the windows." Right. When this woman threatened to cut me on an average day, I'd estimate roughly sixty percent of it was conversational habit. But the way she looked right now, I genuinely suspected that if I pushed her, she'd break my knee with that cane first and then take her time deciding whether to throw me. I exhaled and abandoned whatever response I'd been building.

Anything I said in that direction would only give the misunderstanding more room to grow.

"I was standing outside a door in the corridor. I overheard Conrad talking to the old steward." The expression on Alvira's face—already loaded and aimed—paused. Only for a moment. But that was enough. I had her attention back.

"They mentioned Erina," I said. Alvira's brow drew together. She didn't immediately ask what did they say. She spent two full seconds studying my face instead, as though calculating whether I was using real information to launder my own reputation. When she apparently concluded that my expression didn't look like someone telling a convenient lie, the layer of you absolute reprobate in her eyes retreated slightly, replaced by something colder and more familiar.

"Talk," she said. I didn't start immediately. Not because I was stalling—but because some information, once spoken aloud, stops being intelligence and starts growing teeth. Something that reshapes the entire situation in your head whether you want it to or not. Alvira clearly interpreted my half-beat of silence as something else. Her eyes darkened another degree.

"If you're waiting for me to guess," she said coolly, "I don't mind going back up to get Erina and asking the question a second time in front of her."

"They mentioned—" I looked at her and released the words one at a time.

"The daughter of Varaen the Third." The wind in the side corridor seemed to pull back for a moment. Alvira had been standing very straight. When those words landed, her eyelashes gave the faintest possible tremor. Not the wide-eyed shock of someone caught off guard—nothing as theatrical as that. But the fingers wrapped around her cane visibly tightened, and the knuckles went a shade too pale in the torchlight. That was already enough to tell me a great deal. I held her gaze.

"You knew." She didn't deny it. She didn't confirm it either. The silence lasted only a moment—but it was more infuriating than a direct answer would have been. Because it placed the answer right in front of me while declining to unwrap it. As if the information was already mine, and she simply couldn't be bothered with the formality. Something almost like laughter moved through me. Not the good kind.

The kind that surfaces when you realize you've been comprehensively outmaneuvered the entire way here, and the only person who didn't know the shape of the room was you.

"I see," I said quietly.

"So tonight wasn't the first time I've been the fool. It's just the first time anyone's bothered to let me know how thoroughly." Alvira looked at me. Her voice stayed cold—but the quality of it had shifted. The I am currently convicting you of crimes against decency edge had gone out of it, replaced by something more measured.

"I didn't know much earlier than you did," she said.

"That's a uniquely personal style of comfort."

"I'm not comforting you." A pause.

"I'm telling you this isn't the moment to be angry." This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Funny," I said.

"I was thinking the exact same thing up in that tower. Didn't stop me." Her gaze rested on my face for a moment. In that instant, she was probably comparing me side by side with Erina—the girl who had walked down from the tower slowly, still crying quietly. And so the contempt in those silver eyes didn't disappear, but something else moved in alongside it. Something more inconvenient. Understanding. I found myself suddenly preferring the version of her that just thought I was scum. At least that was simpler.

"What exactly did you hear?" she asked. I leaned back against the stone wall, dropped my voice, and gave her the fragments I'd caught through that half-open door as cleanly as I could reconstruct them.

"Conrad was confirming Erina's identity. The old steward said something about if she truly is the daughter of Varaen the Third, then brought up troop movements—the Iron Mountain cavalry and the Black Mountain Legion. Conrad cut him off." I paused.

"'Five ten-thousands of heavy armored cavalry aren't something you scramble on rumor. Whoever panics first, dies first.'" This time, Alvira went genuinely quiet. She turned the words over internally. Her expression didn't change much—but I could see her beginning to connect things, one line at a time. The Iron Mountain Duke. Heavy forces. Erina's identity. That fractional, almost convulsive lapse in Conrad's composure during the reception hall.

And tonight's banquet—so attentive, so perfectly arranged, with the particular thoroughness of a host who intends to digest his guests slowly. After a moment, she spoke.

"So you brought her up to the tower," she said, "and in the middle of all this—you told her you knew everything." I looked at her.

"The way you say that makes it sound like I chose the wrong location."

"It's not about the location." Alvira said flatly.

"It's that you chose the phrasing most likely to make someone cry."... I couldn't argue with that. Because she was probably right. And the part that genuinely stung was that I already knew it. I was quiet for a moment, and finally let out a low sound somewhere between a sigh and a click of the tongue.

"I wasn't trying to make her cry."

"Men always say that."

"You're really not letting this go."

"I just watched the results firsthand." I looked at her, and something about the whole exchange suddenly struck me as absurd. The banquet downstairs might not have fully dispersed yet. Conrad was probably already repositioning his guards and rethinking room assignments. Erina's identity had shifted tonight from something feels wrong to the kind of secret that gets people killed.

And here I was, standing in a side corridor, being evaluated on my conversational technique by an elven adjutant with a cane and a face colder than the stone walls. There are certain thoughts about one's own life that it is better not to follow to their conclusion. Alvira didn't continue pressing the point. She turned her head slightly, looking out toward the window at the far end of the corridor where the night wind was making the light shudder.

Her voice began to settle into something flatter and more businesslike.

"All right," she said.

"Set aside everything irrelevant for now."

"You were just calling me scum thirty seconds ago."

"That was the previous matter." She returned my look without expression.

"This is the next one."... Fine. Clean categorization. No unnecessary carry-over. No wonder she made adjutant. She shifted her cane forward and resettled her weight, and the whole quality of her presence changed—the private, I would very much like to hit you with something energy folding away, replaced by the cold, near-surgical mode I actually recognized.

"If Conrad has genuinely identified Erina's background, he won't be idle tonight," she said.

"But he also won't move openly. Not until he knows how much we know."

"So?"

"So the most dangerous thing right now isn't a direct confrontation." She looked at me.

"It's arrangements." The word came out of her mouth thinner than a blade. I understood immediately. Arranged rooms. Arranged servants. Arranged guards. Arranged circumstances—the kind that look like hospitality until a door closes and no one opens it again.

"What's your plan?" I asked. Alvira didn't answer right away. She was already running through it internally—the team, the rooms, the defensive positions, who among us could actually be relied upon when it mattered. After a moment, she looked back at me, voice dropping further.

"Two things first," she said.

"One: besides you, did anyone else notice Conrad's reaction. Two—" A pause.

"How much did Erina actually tell you." I pulled one corner of my mouth up.

"I know this one. The answer is: not enough." Alvira looked at me with an expression that said clearly: you deserve that. I elected not to see it. Wind pushed in from the far end of the corridor, carrying the cold of stone walls and the faint remnant smell of wine and roasted meat that hadn't quite cleared from the air. The whole of Vasach Fortress seemed to contract slightly around us—close enough that even breathing felt like something the walls might remember. Alvira was quiet for a moment.

Then she lifted her chin.

"Good," she said.

"Tell me everything you heard. Every word. From the beginning." I looked at her. She looked back at me. The you are a man who makes women cry and should be tried for it verdict hadn't truly disappeared—she'd simply folded it up and filed it somewhere behind her eyes. When tonight was over and we were still alive, she would probably take it back out and finish the sentencing. But for now, she was standing here. Standing on my side.

Or more precisely— Standing on the side of getting through this particular night without anyone dying. I pulled in a breath of air cold enough to ache, straightened against the stone wall, and starting from that half-open door, began to tell her everything I'd heard. The wind on the balcony was colder than it had been inside the tower. The night sky over Vasach Fortress pressed down on the mountain pass like a sheet of iron that had never quite finished cooling.

Below, torches along the walls still flickered, and from somewhere in the distance came the intermittent sound of patrol boots and the dry ring of armor plates—the fortress still breathing, but each breath tasting of snow and iron. Alvira stood on the windward side of the balcony, her cane planted, silver hair stirring in the night air. The half of her anger that had wanted to render immediate judgment on me had been pushed down by what I'd told her in the corridor.

The other half was still sitting somewhere in her chest, waiting for one wrong word to bring it back out. I leaned against the stone railing, exhaled a breath of white vapor, and fixed my eyes on the dark mountain shapes in the distance.

"The kingdom is going to change," I said. I paused, and looked at her sideways.

"Not a small adjustment. A rupture." Alvira had been watching me with the particular expression of this had better be worth my time. When those words landed, her brow finally drew together in earnest. I didn't make her wait. I took everything I'd forced out of Erina on the tower and everything I'd caught through that door, and put it together in one uninterrupted line.

"According to Erina herself—she's the daughter of Varaen Eckhaus the Third and his third wife. High enough birth, but originally far from any real power. Under normal circumstances, even if the capital descended into chaos, a princess ranked that far down the succession wouldn't be urgently recalled." Alvira listened without interrupting. The edge of her cloak tapped against the stone railing in the wind, keeping time.

"But six months ago, things changed." I said.

"The first prince died on the southern front—the war with the Southern Empire. The second prince disappeared during an expedition. You know how the capital's legal code works: missing for more than half a year, and even the living get counted among the dead." The air on the balcony seemed to drop another degree as the words settled. Alvira's eyes went slowly dark. I could see her already connecting what came next herself, so I gave her the last piece without ceremony.

"So the old king is urgently calling her back to the capital." Alvira drew a quiet breath and finally said, low:"... So the moment Conrad caught wind of it, he couldn't sit still."

"Correct." I looked at her.

"For a duke who already commands heavy forces and has spent years making himself into something very close to a sovereign in his own territory—the moment a new succession variable appears in the capital, it's not simply a matter of a new princess joining the court." I laughed once, but even I could hear how cold it came out.

"That's called reshuffling the deck. And the people most afraid of a reshuffle are always the ones who've already picked up their cards but haven't had the chance to play them yet." Alvira was quiet for a moment, then said under her breath:"No wonder."

"No wonder what?"

"No wonder that old bastard looked like someone had slapped him across the face when he heard her name in the reception hall." She paused, then added, cold and precise: "And no wonder you currently look like a man who has just rolled himself into a barrel of oil that is actively on fire."

"Thank you for that vote of confidence."

"I'm not thanking you for anything."

"I'm nearly able to recite that line from memory at this point." She gave me a look that could have stripped paint. Good. The ability to deploy withering glances indicated the analytical functions were still running normally. At a moment like this, a person either began to think clearly or began to contemplate violence. With Alvira, both processes typically ran in parallel—it was only ever a question of ratio.