.
A very large and familiar pair of orange tabby cat ears protruded four inches out of the head of copper hair vigorously rubbing my bosom, and an equally familiar orange tail was standing straight up from behind the girl, its tip languidly curling and uncurling as she literally hung from the arms hugging my chest. She had actually let the strength out of her legs, so my back was carrying her full weight. If I only possessed the strength of a human girl my size, she would have probably pulled me right over.
No, let me correct that. If not for my fairy vampire strength, she would have already knocked me onto my butt with that first hit. It’s a good thing she didn’t, and that my escort had still been in the door behind me, unable to prevent the ‘attack’.
“Lady!” she repeated joyfully. “Lady! Lady! Lady!!!”
Catkin do not purr, but if they did, I’m sure she would have been doing so as she continued to press me. I finally gave in and stroked her head and ears with a smile.
“Hello, Ceria.”
Two more figures emerged from the nearby door she’d sprung out of at the same time I passed through the front entrance. The first was a tall, athletic, golden-haired amazon, and the second, a middle-aged scholar.
Being Ceria’s half-sister and adventuring partner, Bruna was no surprise. But the scholar…
“Uncle Matthias?” I exclaimed.
He beamed at me. “You still remember me! It’s been a long time, My Lady.”
Tiana grew up with three ‘uncles’ and an ‘aunt’, as I’ve said before. The ‘aunt’ was actually her niece, Eleanora, and the three uncles were actually her mother’s friends: Owen the human king, Arken the elven mage, and the half-dwarf sage, Matthias.
It’s a little difficult to explain what defines a ‘sage’. Scholarly orders issue the title, so it’s similar to a ‘PhD’, except that it isn’t the doctorate they also issue. (And, depending on the field, doctorates can also come from colleges, academies, magical orders and religious orders. It’s complicated.)
Matthias once explained it to Tiana this way: the difference between sagehood and a doctorate is fighting strength and the difference between sagehood and magehood is knowledge.
I hadn’t asked him, but I suspected Manlon was also a sage. I knew for a fact that this man Matthias was one.
He had been an occasional tutor in Tiana’s youth, but most importantly he had been the person who managed to teach her how to use the crude mana methods of a magic swordsman when all normal teaching methods had failed. Matthias possessed a sage technique that allowed him to induce flows of mana inside her body so that she could feel the process for herself. From then on, until my bond with Ceria taught me normal magic, these simple coating and circulation techniques had been the only magic I could cast.
Uncle Matthias looked past me and said, “You’re Andia, from the student council, I believe?”
“Y… yes, sir,” the girl in the pink and white school uniform stammered. “My Lady needed directions here. May I leave her in your care?”
“Yes. Well done. You may go.”
“Thank you, sir.”
I think the girl fled rather than departed. She probably found the spectacle Ceria was still putting on disturbing. Incidentally, said catkin was now sniffing me and muttering perverse things like, “It’s Lady’s smell!”
“Ceria, you should stop now,” Bruna said. “Lady doesn’t know what to do with you.”
Ceria finally let go of me. At that time, more people were emerging from the door, so they got an eyeful as my Servant threw her arms around my neck and covered my lips with an ardent kiss.
I managed to end it without having to get forceful, although she released me reluctantly. I finally could see who had been watching. Having just witnessed the most PDA I ever participated in, Melione, Arken and Brigitte all looked like they weren’t sure where to look.
“Exactly why are you guys all here?” I asked.
Arken was the one to answer. “That will take some time to explain, My Lady. Matthias, I assume we can use your office for this?”
Once seated and served tea by Matthias’s secretary (with Melione firmly positioned between Ceria and me), I learned that he was, in fact, headmaster of this school– first I’d heard of it. To me he was just the old scholar who visited Mother on a regular basis– and I at last learned what was going on.
Arken began the explanation. “The same day that the news about the declaration of war came out, I received a returning bird ordering the hero’s party to meet the king in Thuriben. We bought passage on an airship the same day, so we actually arrived before the first expeditionary troops.”
A returning bird is the same thing as his “sending bird” flying letter, only it finds him after someone else writes a message on it. He leaves stacks of them behind with certain people, such as Uncle Owen.
I glanced down at his fully-healed leg. I hadn’t felt Melione pulling healing magic through our connection for several days, so I had already suspected it was now healed. Still, the time since she stopped hadn’t been quite long enough for the timing he described.
Having noticed my glance, he noted, “Melione didn’t complete the treatment until we arrived in Thuriben, but we were traveling by airship, so I was fine.”
Airships are easier to explain than Talene’s boat. They’re just big bags of lighter-than-air gas, just like airships on Earth. The difference is that the propulsion is direct wind magic and the lighter-than-air gas is just hot air created with fire magic. They’re slower and the ride gets turbulent when they encounter bad weather, since they aren’t flying above it like Talene can. Encountering a thunderstorm in a Huadean airship is as perilous as encountering one in a sailing ship.
“At first, the King directed us to sign with the adventurer’s corps, but he pulled us from the war and put us on a special task force when he received the news from home.”
When armies hire adventurers, they organize them as the ‘adventurer’s corps’. Every army has one.
“News from home? You mean, the news about me?”
“About you?” Brigitte retorted, her blond fox ears twitching in agitation. “He’s talking about what happened to his daughter!”
It seemed I still wasn’t getting any love from Brigitte.
Arken covered his forehead for a moment, then, in the silence, stated, “Brigitte, it’s a private matter, so you and the others were never told this, but the King regards Tiana as his adopted niece. He raised her himself. She grew up beside the royal children. He is exceedingly angry over what happened to her.”
My ears had barely heard him, since I was focused on something else. I ignored Brigitte’s confusion and said, “Arken, what happened to Amelia?”
“She vanished along with two escort knights. One of them was later found dead of a sword wound.”
Once I found my voice after several stunned seconds, I demanded, “With the sheer number of royal knights in Copen, how could anyone manage such a thing?”
“She wasn’t in Copen,” he explained. “She went to Atius with legal papers for the Three Lords Executive. Prince Roderick had her file them, because he had to fly north to warn the King about what was happening to you. She disappeared some time after filing the papers.”
One knot immediately replaced another in my heart. I knew now why Rod and Amelia never showed on the day I escaped. Aristocratic betrothal vows have to be filed with the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Treasurer, and the Grand Master of the Royal Knights. But now it was those very betrothal papers that sent Amelia to the Palace to be kidnapped.
“So she’s been missing for ten days?”
He nodded. “Fortunately, the great majority of Royal Knights remain loyal, including undercover investigators. We’ve been able to determine that she was brought into the Dragonbacks. As soon as we knew she was here somewhere, His Majesty formed this team and sent us out after her.”
“She’s here in Arelia?”
“Probably ‘near’, not ‘in’,” he corrected. “We came here to seek Matthias’s help, and we’re using Dausindiu as our temporary base. We’re only now getting our leads sorted out.”
I looked over to Ceria. “What about these two? How’d they end up involved with you?”
Bruna fielded my question. “Your mother sent a message to ours. Send your daughter Ceria to Thuriben so I can meet her.“
Ceria grinned. “Mom didn’t want me meeting nobility on my own, so she and Bruna came along. The army was hiring adventurers when we got to Thuriben, so we signed up.”
“Huh? What about her store? And the children?”
“Mom’s paid the landlord two years advance rent, and Bartomo can manage basic potions. He just has to make enough money to feed the brats. They’ll be fine.”
The thought process that could see things that way is beyond me, but I’ve come to understand that working class people on Huade lived with different expectations than in the US. The same expectations that sent pre-teen Melione and Brigitte out of their village to become adventurers. Even if that left a fourteen-year-old boy in charge of feeding a household of three, and once led Ceria and Bruna into prostitution, it was simply part of life on this world.
“So you guys met Mother?” I asked, fearing how that had gone. I was trying to imagine Allia Destia vs. Princess Deharè. Mother would win, of course, but the collateral damage…
“I wish we had,” Bruna groused. “We ended up meeting the king, instead. Your mom had gone off to her duchy already. But since he knew about our abilities from you and Arken, he stuck us on this team.”
As I searched for some way to respond to the bizarre situation, the only thing I could come up with was denial. “Hang on! Amelia can’t have just disappeared! They put tracer magic on her after those raiders tried to abduct her!”
Technically, I shouldn’t have said that, since it was a royal secret. But if she was gone anyway, the secret was no longer meaningful.
Arken considered that, then noted, “Such magic could have been dispelled by a mage who knew about it. The mage knight who was with her would be the prime suspect.”
“What do you mean?” I demanded, feeling cold. The idea that one of my fellow royal knights would turn traitor was hard to swallow.
“The knight still missing is a young woman who only recently received her accolade. She’s connected to a lord who has aligned with Duke Parna.”
I blinked. “Marquess Brosia is with Parna?”
Bray is a major commerce center. That would be seriously bad news.
“Um… no, I don’t believe so,” Arken shook his head with a puzzled frown. “Why Brosia? Owen said she’s a relative of Baron Gandon.”
I rubbed my chin. “I thought you were talking about Lady Chiara. Were there two brand-new female knights?”
“Hm. The name Chiara sounds correct, though. Why do you believe she’s from Brosia?”
“She has a very distinct Bray accent, just like my friends here.” I indicated Ceria and Bruna.
He nodded. “Gandon is southern. One would never mistake a southerner for a Braysian.”
My feelings over this situation were a tangled mess. Foremost, I was worrying about Amelia, but in addition, the Chiara I met had been sweet, friendly, and hadn’t shown a trace of prejudice toward me, either as a vampire or, as she first mistook me, a succubus. I couldn’t imagine her as an enemy. Could she really betray the princess she was supposed to protect?
“So,” Arken stated, “That’s the general situation. Now we discuss the path forward.”
“Actually, first I have a question,” I said, holding my hand up like we were in a classroom. “Where are Ryuu and Graham?”
