Chương 93: 38-1.Tideguards

That night, I gained a profound understanding of the horror that is woman. No. Let me be more precise. The horror that is drunk woman. After my sister dragged the girls through that inexplicable makeover session, things didn't end there. If anything, that was merely the opening act. Once the wine was refilled and the atmosphere loosened, the entire room transformed—from a noble family's evening dinner into some kind of runaway tavern disaster summoned from the depths of hell.

And the worst part was that my sister was clearly just getting started. She drank. And she made sure everyone else drank too. Jessi was the first casualty. She kept saying, "I'm not drinking any more," but one mild look from my sister and she meekly accepted the glass. Alvira tried to play dead, but even she ended up drinking, half coaxed, half cornered into submission.

Erina started out like a portrait from the royal gallery—spine perfectly straight, fingers delicately pinching the stem of her glass, her expression radiating the serene certainty that I shall not associate with you degenerates. It didn't last. Before long, her glass was empty too. As for Olivia—she was the most alarming of all. She wasn't even the drunkest person in the room, yet she looked like someone quietly enjoying a natural disaster for research purposes. As for Matthews, Lucas, and Kuroga? Right.

By the time I realized what was happening, those three cowards had vanished without a trace. Gone. Completely and utterly gone. Despicable. The least they could have done was take me with them. And so I became the only person left in the room who was still marginally sober and constitutionally unable to escape. I spent the rest of the evening trapped in a loop that I would not wish on my worst enemy. Pour wine. Collect glasses. Wipe up the spills that almost made it onto the carpet.

Clean up whatever ungodly substance someone had deposited at the edge of the rug. The moment I finished one round, my sister or Jessi would automatically extend an empty glass in my direction. Once I refilled it, they'd drag me down for "just a sip" with them. By the time I set my own glass down and turned back around, someone had knocked the fruit platter to the floor.

Somewhere between wiping tables and questioning my life choices, I began seriously considering whether I should relocate to the Eisenberg townhouse in the capital first thing tomorrow morning. Genuinely. If this continued, my sister was going to be the thing that finally broke me. She was terrifying enough under normal circumstances. Add alcohol, and that particular brand of terrifying didn't diminish—it acquired momentum.

I was beginning to suspect that her usual composure as a great house's matriarch was actually a very well-maintained shell for something considerably more chaotic underneath. But even disasters have limits. Eventually, the room began showing signs of winding down. The first to fall was Adeline. She'd never been comfortable in settings like this—she'd spent the whole evening like a small animal that had been gently lowered into warm water and wasn't sure how it had happened.

She'd sat carefully, drunk slowly, and as a result was the first to simply run out of resources. Her head tilted, and she was gone. Then my sister. I cannot overstate the relief I felt at that moment. When she was drunk, she didn't shout or cry or make scenes. She was far worse than that. She smiled, and she reasoned, and she quietly, methodically moved everyone exactly where she'd decided they ought to be—and you didn't notice it was happening until you were already there.

So when she finally leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes, and stopped reaching for the bottle, I came very close to offering genuine thanks to whatever powers governed the universe. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. I called the servants immediately and had her escorted back to her room. The servants' faces showed nothing—not a flicker of surprise, not a trace of judgment. Just calm, professional competence.

Watching them work, I felt a complicated respect. To serve in this household and maintain that level of composure required psychological armor thicker than plate. Olivia, Jessi, and Erina presented an entirely different problem. All three of them were unmistakably drunk. All three stubbornly refused to admit it. I offered to have someone walk them back, even offered to do it myself. I was turned down three times, in three entirely different ways. Jessi was direct.

"Back off. I can walk." She wobbled when she stood up, then caught herself and raised her chin with the defiant determination of someone who would rather fall down a flight of stairs than show weakness in front of me. Erina's cheeks were flushed, but her eyes still carried the last surviving remnants of royal dignity.

"There is no need to trouble yourself, Lord Rosa. I am... I am perfectly capable of managing." And Olivia simply inclined her head toward me, voice as measured as if she were filing a report.

"I will see to them." I genuinely wanted to ask: Can you actually see straight right now? I didn't. Because the next moment, all three of them were already moving. Not just walking. They moved like some magnificent, deeply questionable nocturnal procession—each carrying a bottle, making their unsteady way toward the guest wing. Jessi led the way, already humming something she'd clearly learned in a back-alley establishment.

Erina followed in the middle, ears red to the tips, yet somehow forcing her spine even straighter. Olivia brought up the rear—unhurried, steady, moving less like someone stumbling to bed and more like someone conducting a midnight inspection. Three women. A pickpocket. A daughter of an imperial duke. The next ruler of the Eckhaus throne. All of them marching down the hall, bottles in hand, singing their way back to their rooms.

I stood there and genuinely could not decide which nation's future I should be more concerned about. Then Jessi started teaching the princess a song. Not a respectable song. One of those filth-ridden gutter shanties you heard drifting out of frontier taverns—the kind that made seasoned veterans look uncomfortable, with lyrics that had no legitimate business existing in civilized society. Erina's initial expression was one of aristocratic distaste. Then she listened to another verse.

Something vital apparently snapped, because she started singing along. Loudly. With the earnest, full-throated conviction of someone reciting a coronation oath. I stood there and watched Her Imperial Highness raise a wine bottle and deliver verses about dockworkers, tavern wenches, and a sailor of genuinely shameless character with the unwavering commitment of a state ceremony, and I felt something shift inside me that could only be described as genuine concern for the Eckhaus dynasty. Not just the Eckhaus dynasty.

The Empire's future suddenly looked considerably less stable. Their voices—three different tones, drunk and off-key—stumbled down the corridor and eventually disappeared around the corner. Only then did the hall settle into silence. Not the comfortable quiet of an evening winding down. The hollow, scraped-out silence of a place that had been thoroughly wrung dry.

I stood amid the wreckage—overturned glasses, scattered fruit, the lingering ghost of too many different wines—and felt like a soldier who had just walked off a battlefield. The only thing missing was a couple of arrows sticking out of me. I exhaled slowly, pressed my fingers to my throbbing temples, and was about to tell the remaining staff to start clearing up when my gaze suddenly stopped. Alvira was still there. She was the last one. And the one who had gone under the deepest.

Whatever energy she'd had left had apparently been spent somewhere in the middle of the evening's chaos. Now she sat slumped quietly by the long bench, head tilted slightly, breathing soft and even, like she had finally stopped fighting the night and surrendered. Nothing like her usual self. The Alvira I knew was always braced for something—always carrying that invisible edge that said don't get too close even when she was just sitting still.

Even at rest, there was always something taut about her, some layer of thorns that kept the world at a measured distance. All of that was gone. What remained was just—her. Unguarded, and quiet, and somehow smaller than she ever looked when she was awake. Something tugged in my chest. Not much. But enough to stop me for half a second, which was half a second more than I was prepared for.

It arrived without warning—the way these things always do—like someone had waited for the exact moment I was most exhausted and least defended, then reached out and pressed one fingertip, very lightly, against the inside of my ribs. It didn't hurt. But it made it impossible to pretend it hadn't happened. I stood there looking at her without moving.

And that was when I realized: of all the insanity I'd witnessed tonight—the princess belting out tavern ballads, Jessi being reconstructed by my sister until her soul vacated the premises—the thing I was least prepared to deal with was right in front of me. Because with her this quiet, I was forced, for the first time, to really admit— I couldn't just think of her as that bad-tempered, sharp-tongued archer who was perpetually trying to glare me into the ground anymore. The thought made everything worse.

I let out a quiet breath, pressed my thumb against the bridge of my nose, and looked away. No. If I kept standing here, my brain was going to produce more thoughts along these lines, and I had absolutely no interest in dealing with that tonight. I called for one of the maids. My voice came out steadier than I expected.

"Be careful with her. See her back to her room." The maid acknowledged quietly and moved forward with the kind of gentleness you'd use with something fragile. I didn't follow. I stayed where I was and watched them ease Alvira upright—watched a loose strand of hair slide from her shoulder, watched the maid carefully tuck it back into place. Only when that slim figure disappeared through the doorway did it feel like I could finally breathe all the way out.

That night, for the first time in recent memory, I genuinely thought that going to war might actually be less exhausting than this. Though if I was being honest with myself, the exhaustion wasn't entirely the problem.