Chương 94: 38-2.Tideguards

I had assumed, with what I now recognize as spectacular naivety, that after that kind of night, I'd sleep straight through until noon. What dragged me out of bed wasn't sunlight, or bells, or any of the gracious morning rituals appropriate to a noble household in the capital. It was the sensation of a dedicated construction crew attempting to disassemble my skull from the inside using blunt instruments. I opened my eyes and immediately reconsidered the decision. Headache. Dry mouth.

My stomach still carrying the combined memory of red wine, fruit wine, spiced wine, and whatever unidentified accelerant someone had introduced to the proceedings—the whole composition suggesting I had been sealed inside a barrel, shaken thoroughly overnight, and was only now being tipped out to dry. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling, slowly reassembling the previous night's events. My sister. The wine. The makeover circus. Jessi teaching the princess tavern songs. Erina singing louder than anyone else.

Olivia von Eisenberg watching the entire catastrophe with surgical calm. And— Alvira. At that, I rolled over abruptly and buried my face in the pillow. Not from embarrassment. Or at least not entirely from embarrassment. It was more that I had a strong suspicion this morning's breakfast was going to be more difficult to survive than escaping Angel City. A soft knock at the door.

"Young master? Are you awake?" I answered without opening my eyes.

"What if I said no?" A brief pause. Then, with impeccable composure:"Madam left instructions that if you said that, the hangover remedy should be brought in directly." Of course she did. I sat up with the grim resignation of a man accepting a sentence, and felt the entire engineering team in my skull begin a new phase of construction. By the time I'd made myself presentable and made it downstairs, the dining room was nearly full.

I stopped in the doorway and experienced, with great clarity, a universal truth: that a hangover is unpleasant, but a hangover combined with having to face everyone you collectively lost your mind with the night before is a different category of suffering entirely. The table had the atmosphere of a post-battle debrief. Everyone was present. No one looked particularly glad about it. My sister sat at the head of the table, disgustingly immaculate.

Hair perfect, posture perfect, expression the picture of unhurried morning contentment as she applied butter to her toast with leisurely precision. There was not a trace of the woman who had spent last night reorganizing everyone's wardrobe and somehow engineering a situation where the imperial princess ended up performing dock ballads. I looked at her and felt the deep, cosmic unfairness of the universe settle over me like a blanket. She was completely fine.

Erina, seated to her right, represented the opposite extreme. The princess was more composed than usual—which was to say, she had apparently decided that the correct response to last night was to become more regal, not less. Her spine was a straight line. Her chin was elevated. The way she handled her cutlery suggested she was demonstrating proper form for a court etiquette manual.

If I had not personally heard her deliver the chorus about a morally flexible sailor with full-throated commitment, I might have believed she had maintained perfect dignity all evening. She noticed me looking. She met my eyes. The message was crystal clear: Say one word about last night and I will ensure you don't survive the morning. I looked away immediately. Understood. The princess's dignity was currently balanced on the thinnest possible surface, and anyone who touched it would go straight through the floor.

Jessi was at the other end of the table, staring into her soup with the expression of someone whose soul had left the building and hadn't confirmed a return date. She stirred it without apparent purpose, spoon moving in slow circles. The tips of her ears were still faintly pink—whether from lingering wine effects or the memory of being personally reconstructed by my sister, I couldn't say. She saw me. Her eyes narrowed.

"You."

"What about me?"

"You'd better not remember anything."

"That's going to be difficult."

"Then pretend you don't."

"That's a fairly tall order." She tightened her grip on the spoon.

"Don't test me. I will pour this soup on your face."

"I believe you," I said honestly.

"I think today might actually be the day you'd do it." Jessi made a sound that wasn't quite a word and returned to stirring. Last night's shame was apparently still running at full operational capacity. Alvira was sitting beside her. Her condition was more straightforward. She was pale in a way that was entirely convincing, with shadows under her eyes that spoke to a night that had not been particularly restorative.

The atmosphere around her communicated, with quiet but unmistakable clarity, that anyone who addressed unnecessary words to her would be doing so at considerable personal risk. She held her teacup carefully, moving with the deliberate precision of someone for whom lifting a cup had become a task requiring conscious effort. I hadn't intended to look at her. Genuinely. But eyes are unreliable, and mine moved in her direction before I'd made any decision about it.

She looked up at the same moment—some instinct, apparently—and we made eye contact. She frowned. Not her usual sharp, pointed variety. This was the frown of someone whose headache was severe enough that even irritation felt like too much effort. And somehow, that one small difference made my chest snag again. Still. That hadn't cleared yet. I reached for the water glass with great purpose, as if simple thirst could explain everything. Alvira watched me for two seconds.

"What are you looking at."

"Confirming you're alive."

"Sorry to disappoint you."

"Not really." She looked like she was considering a follow-up, then apparently decided against it and pressed her fingers to her temple instead.

"... Shut up. My head hurts." I shut up. Provoking her in this condition was not meaningfully different from self-termination. Olivia, by contrast, looked like a different species entirely. She was seated with perfect posture, red tea at hand, expression composed, not a thread out of place. There was even that particular quality of someone who had washed their face in cold morning air and come out refreshed.

If I had not personally witnessed her participation in last night's proceedings, I would have suspected she'd simply retired early with a book. She noticed me looking and spoke without preamble.

"Greetings, Lord Cedric."

"... You look like you slept well."

"Reasonably well," she said, taking a composed sip.

"Better than some, at least." I surveyed the table. I could not argue with the assessment.

"No headache?"

"I have one."

"You don't show it at all."

"That's because having a headache and appearing to have a headache are separate matters." Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. That was so thoroughly, completely her that I couldn't decide whether to be impressed or simply accept the stomach ache it produced. It was at that moment that my sister looked up from her toast, smiling pleasantly.

"Everyone's here? Good. Saves me the trouble of calling for you individually." An inexplicable chill moved down the back of my neck. Coming from her, that sentence—warm, reasonable, perfectly ordinary—had no business sounding like the opening line of something I wasn't going to enjoy. Lucas, Matthews, and Kuroga were also at the table—though those three cowards were behaving with pristine innocence.

Lucas in particular had his head down, methodically cutting his sausage with the serene focus of someone who had simply stopped by for breakfast, as though he hadn't been the first to vanish the moment disaster struck last night. I stared at him the second I sat down.

"You moved fast last night." Lucas didn't even lift an eyelid.

"Assessing a crisis and executing a timely withdrawal is a fundamental skill for any experienced coachman."

"And abandoning me there—also part of the skill set?"

"Young master, you share blood with madam." He finally looked up, his expression painfully sincere.

"I do not."... I had absolutely nothing to say to that. Kuroga pressed his palms together, his face as tranquil as if last night had never happened.

"Young master, madam was in exceedingly high spirits last evening. This humble monk felt it inappropriate to intrude."

"That wasn't 'inappropriate to intrude.' That was fleeing with great enthusiasm and calling it courtesy."

"Seeking fortune and avoiding calamity is simply human nature."

"Aren't you a warrior monk?"

"Warrior monks are still human." I nearly snapped my fork in half. Matthews sat to the side, produced a single quiet cough, and returned to his soup with the deliberate focus of someone who had decided this conversation was not his concern. Right. Every single one of them had figured out exactly how to survive. Erina, apparently unable to tolerate the atmosphere any longer, finally spoke with ice in her voice.

"What occurred last night is not to be mentioned again. By anyone." The table went quiet for a beat. That wasn't a request. That was a royal decree. Unfortunately, the more firmly she said it, the less likely certain people were to comply. Jessi set down her spoon, held out for exactly two seconds, and failed.

"Which part exactly? The part where you were keeping time with the wine bottle, or the part where you said, 'Once more, We did not quite hit that note'—""Jessi." Olivia said her name. Quietly. Once. Jessi closed her mouth immediately. Not from fear. She simply recognized that if she continued, the princess would in all likelihood draw steel at the breakfast table. Erina's ears went visibly red—though she kept her spine perfectly straight through sheer force of will.

"... We simply refused to let a vulgar melody compromise the rhythm."

"Of course, of course. Purely artistic, Your Highness." I kept my eyes on my bread and muttered just loud enough. She swept me with a look cold enough to preserve meat.

"Lord Rosa. Should you find a fork inconvenient this morning, I am prepared to replace it with a spoon."

"No need. The fork is excellent." Order at a breakfast table was never maintained through silence. It survived because everyone retained just enough sanity to recognize who would flip it first if things escalated. Which was precisely when my sister—apparently deciding the situation wasn't precarious enough—set down her teacup and added with unhurried calm:"Speaking of which, Princess Erina truly did have the finest voice last night." I froze completely.

Jessi pressed both hands over her mouth, shoulders already shaking. Alvira set her cup down and closed her eyes, caught between suppressing laughter and enduring physical pain. Even Lucas lowered his head another measurable degree. And Erina— She went rigid. Not the ordinary rigidity of aristocratic composure. This was the specific stiffness of someone whose dignity had just been gently but precisely skewered, yet who was required by birth and breeding to maintain perfect royal deportment.

"Madam," she said, each word placed with desperate precision, "I believe you also drank rather generously last night." My sister smiled.

"Which is exactly why my memory is so vivid." Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. I bent over my soup, trying desperately not to laugh—and choked two seconds later. Alvira glanced sideways at me.

"Serves you right."

"... Noted. Thank you." Olivia, meanwhile, wore the expression of someone observing a particularly elegant political maneuver. The faintest curve at the corner of her mouth—barely there, yet somehow more unnerving than open laughter. I suddenly understood why she'd seemed so engaged during last night's chaos. For her, this was just another form of intelligence gathering. Who loses control when drunk, who doubles down, who holds on past reason, who absolutely cannot be pushed—all of it filed away as actionable data.

The thought made me glance at her. She seemed to know exactly what I was thinking.

"Don't worry. Last night's events won't be entered into any ledger."

"... I knew that's what you were thinking."

"I simply have a habit of categorizing things."

"That habit is genuinely alarming."

"How kind of you to say so." I realized then that the most dangerous person at this table had never been the princess who sang the loudest, or Jessi wandering around with a wine bottle. It was this woman—sitting there perfectly composed, calmly drinking her tea, looking for all the world like someone having a pleasant morning. Breakfast crawled forward in that peculiar atmosphere. Some stared into their soup. Some performed selective amnesia with varying degrees of success.

Some quietly reassembled their dignity piece by piece. I sat through it all with a hangover pressing against my skull, absorbing the aftershocks of every absurd thing that had happened. Honestly, this was more exhausting than combat. But when I looked up and saw this group—people who yesterday had carried their own separate wariness, their own wounds—now sitting at the same table, collectively wrecked by the same hangover, something quieter moved in underneath the irritation.

Because no matter how ridiculous it had all been, everyone was still here. Even the princess still had enough energy to issue threats. Looked at that way, it wasn't the worst outcome. Then my sister set down her cutlery, looked up at the table, and said:"All right. That's enough." Her voice wasn't heavy. But every person at the table went instinctively quieter. Here it comes. I exhaled internally. Last night was last night. Morning meant returning to business.

And my skull, with impeccable timing, chose that moment to resume its complaints. The moment my sister set down her cutlery, the atmosphere changed with it. The hangover, the embarrassment, the carefully shared understanding—all of it was pressed beneath the surface by a single sentence. The dining room was still bright. The tea was still steaming. But I felt it with complete clarity: playtime was over. That was what made her truly dangerous. She could drink last night.

She could drag a princess and a pickpocket into an impromptu makeover session. She could smile and reduce everyone to various states of ruin. Then, come morning, if she decided to, all of it simply ceased to have happened. Victoria Rosa von Blackwell raised her eyes and swept across the table.

"Let me be clear. Who sang the loudest last night, who was sick on the carpet, who nearly passed out in the corridor clutching a bottle—none of that concerns me today." Erina's brow gave the faintest twitch. Jessi immediately became fascinated by a smudge of jam on her plate. I observed a private moment of silence for the carpet. My sister's voice was level, stripped of any warmth.

"But from this point forward, anyone who continues behaving like last night's version of themselves will discover what genuinely unacceptable looks like." No one responded. Not even Jessi. I took a sip of the hangover remedy. It was bitter enough to make me wonder if Vincent had introduced something punitive—but honestly, the bitterness helped. My sister leaned back and tapped one finger against the table.

"The ledger first." Those words, and the table was fully in session. Adeline straightened instinctively, her fingers tightening. She'd gone under early last night, but the moment she heard "ledger," her face shifted. My sister didn't look at her.

"Before last night, that book was your insurance. The moment I took it, it stopped being that." I didn't interrupt. I knew what was coming.

"Insurance only works temporarily. Let people know you're holding something, and they never stop watching—waiting for you to sleep, to slip, to make one mistake." She looked up briefly.

"But if everyone believes it's no longer in your hands, you stop being their primary target." Lucas wiped his mouth and finally spoke.

"Madam means to have them chase shadows."

"Not shadows," my sister said.

"Each other." I saw something shift in Olivia's expression. She liked that answer.

"The three factions in Angel City were never unified," my sister continued.

"The Bone-Shred Sharks think Elysian Poppy operates too crudely. Elysian Poppy despises the Conquistador Syndicate for treating people as inventory. The Syndicate considers the other two idiots who don't understand how to make filth look like legitimate commerce. The moment any suspects a leak, their first instinct won't be solidarity—it'll be finding out who let it slip." Jessi propped her chin on her hand and clicked her tongue.

"Elegant. Even when dogs eat dogs, there's a hierarchy." My sister didn't glance her way.

"People who live in darkness don't fear death as much as they fear dying without knowing why—and taking someone else's blame on the way out." The sentence landed quietly. The table absorbed it quietly. She meant the syndicates. But somehow it sounded like something else entirely.

"So. Three layers of rumor will circulate." She extended one finger.

"First: the ledger has been destroyed. Whether that's true is irrelevant. What matters is Angel City destabilizes first." A second finger.

"Second: your party didn't destroy it. It was intercepted in transit. As for which house in the capital, which faction, which individual had the reach—let them speculate." A third finger, tapping once.

"Third: ensure the people with the most reason to be afraid understand that if copies surface, the first casualties won't be the runners. They'll be the ones who sat at the table from the beginning, assuming they'd never be written into it." I understood then. She wasn't hiding the ledger. She was converting it from a thing into a possibility. As long as no one knew whether it existed, whether copies had been made, whose hands it had passed through—it could keep biting indefinitely.

And the ones it bit hardest would always be those with the most to lose. Adeline went paler. She finally understood too. What she'd fought to carry out of Angel City wasn't just evidence. In the right hands, it was a garrote that could close around half the city's throat. My sister turned to her.

"Your task, starting today, is simple." Adeline's lips parted.

"... Me?"

"Yes. Everything you remember—divide it into two categories." Adeline blinked.

"Two?"

"First is names," my sister said.

"Who took money, who released people, who signed, who altered transcripts, who can testify." She paused.

"Second is habits." Both Adeline and I looked up.

"People who survive don't do it by knowing what someone did," my sister said with perfect calm.

"They do it by knowing how someone operates. Where they prefer to meet. What wax seal they favor. What hour they send messages. Who they call when they've drunk too much and need cleanup. That knowledge is worth infinitely more than any single transaction." Olivia set down her cup.

"Because habits don't change easily," she said quietly.

"Precisely." My sister glanced at her.

"And once someone's habits are mapped, even if the old ledger burns, a new one grows back naturally." The air felt colder. Sharing a city with people like this was not a comfortable prospect.

"As for the rest of you," my sister said, her gaze moving toward me, "your next steps in the capital are considerably less free than you imagine." I knew it. I set down my cup with resignation.

"So. Are we being protected, or confined?" My sister smiled faintly.

"If you'd been born any later, I'd suspect someone had steeped you in a judicial archive."

"The answer?"

"Neither," she said.

"You're being managed." I nearly rolled my eyes. This woman had an extraordinary talent for making unpleasant arrangements sound like considerations. She ignored me and continued.

"First: for the next few days, no one enters the Lower City or approaches the port district. King's Harbor especially—it looks safest right now, which means it has the most eyes." Lucas nodded.

"Docks are the easiest place to hide people. Also the easiest to be seen."

"Precisely," my sister said.

"Second: moving separately within the city is acceptable. Leaving separately is not. If someone strikes, they'll pick off isolated targets first. They won't come through the front door." Jessi wrinkled her nose.

"So I can't even lift a couple of purses?"

"You're welcome to try." My sister finally looked at her.

"After which I'll nail your hands to this table and explain exactly what you cannot touch." Jessi went silent and quietly moved both hands under the table. I suppressed a smile and felt unnecessary sympathy for the furniture.

"Third," my sister continued, "until things stabilize, everyone needs a legitimate reason to be in the capital that withstands scrutiny." Erina looked up.

"I have one."

"Your Highness certainly does." My sister's tone was courteous but yielded no ground.

"But your reason is too large. Large enough that it sometimes becomes a liability." Erina's expression cooled, but she didn't argue. My sister was right. Being a princess was a door in ordinary circumstances, a target in the wrong ones. She could stand in this city openly—but anyone wanting to use her politically would generate maximum noise doing it.

"Cedric." My sister turned to me.

"You remain here for now."

"Knew you'd say that."

"Stop complaining." Her expression didn't shift.

"Your name isn't secret anymore. The Marquis of Acros' son entering the capital draws attention naturally. Given that, you may as well stand somewhere no one dares touch." I made a sound of reluctant agreement.

"Your house?"

"My house." She said it like a law of physics.

"You're welcome to test whether your neck is harder than the capital's rumor mill is fast." I stopped talking. Because she was right. The capital wasn't Angel City. Blades here rarely drew blood—but they struck with surgical precision.