"—Lady Rosalind. I beg of you, please, return to your homeland."
The envoy's voice fell into the audience chamber.
On the carpet, a white-haired old retainer was down on one knee. The Foreign Minister of the Kingdom of Albert, Count Sutherland. A face Rosalind had seen around the royal palace since she was a child.
—In past-life terms, a board director on the verge of retirement.
"His Majesty and His Highness the Crown Prince both offer their most heartfelt apologies—"
Rosalind tilted her head slightly.
"Apologies, you say."
"Y-yes. That the broken engagement was a rash decision on the part of His Highness in his youth."
"My."
"In the name of His Majesty the King, he wishes to retract it..."
Rosalind let out a soft breath.
It was not a laugh. She was simply arranging the meaning of the words she had heard once more in her head.
Once she had arranged them, she tapped the bundle of documents at hand lightly with a finger.
"Lord Sutherland. Might I confirm one thing?"
"A-anything you wish."
"By retracting the broken engagement, you mean—"
Rosalind's voice stayed level throughout.
"—that I am to take the Crown Princess's seat once again?"
"Precisely so."
"In the sense of telling someone who quit, six months later, 'Please come back'?"
The envoy blinked, as if caught off guard.
He had likely been unable to digest the foreign turn of phrase on the spot.
Only Anna, at her side, gave a small twitch of the shoulders. She had only recently learned to recognize the corporate-slave idiom that slipped from her mistress's mouth.
(Ahh... So that Crown Prince couldn't get a single thing done on his own after all.)
Inwardly, Rosalind sighed lightly.
She remembered a single phone call Ritsuko Tanaka had received in her past life, six months after she quit.
"Tanaka, sorry to ask, but could you come in for a bit about the handover? Nobody can read the materials you wrote."
—I left them concise and organized, so anyone with basic knowledge could read them in no time.
If they couldn't read them, it was because they lacked the knowledge to read between the lines.
And the Ritsuko Tanaka of back then hadn't been able to say, on the spot, "No, I can't do this anymore."
Out of guilt, she had taken a half day off and gone to the office, and an explanation that should have taken an hour had stretched to three days. Made to work for nothing, on the way home, her knees had shaken on the station platform.
—I'd like to show the me of back then.
(This time, I shall decline properly.)
"Lord Sutherland."
Rosalind drew a single sheet from the bundle.
"Since you have gone to the trouble of coming, allow me first to give you an administrative explanation."
"Y-yes."
"I am currently employed as Economic Advisor to the Grand Duchy of Vernant, under a framework arranged between our two nations."
A copy of the memorandum. A wax seal. Signatures—two.
"Article Three. The interference clause."
Rosalind indicated it with the pad of her finger.
"Should your nation, in breach of this memorandum, interfere with my employment contract—the burden of compensating any damages incurred by the Grand Duchy shall fall entirely upon the signatory nation, the Kingdom of Albert."
"...B-burden."
"The amount of compensation is as per the attached calculation. —I have set it at a sum your nation's finances could never possibly pay."
The envoy caught his breath.
Still on one knee, he clutched at the carpet. On the back of his hand, aged veins stood out.
Rosalind slowly turned the memorandum on the table face down.
"There is one more thing I should like to bring to your attention, my lord."
"...This is."
The signature page. The signatures lined up there—two.
Lucas Vernant, Grand Duke Vernant.
And Erwin Garrett, Chancellor of the Kingdom of Albert.
The envoy's finger stopped atop his own Chancellor's signature mark.
"Do you recall, Lord Sutherland?"
Rosalind's voice neither accused nor pitied.
"A few days after my departure for the Grand Duchy was decided. —His Excellency your Chancellor signed this with his own mark."
"..."
"Article Two: no demand shall be made for the return of my person. No intervention shall be made in my employment contract. —And Article Three, which I have just read to you."
Rosalind gently set the copy of the memorandum before the envoy's knees.
"In other words, my lord, your very visit today constitutes 'interference' under Article Three."
The envoy's throat made a sound that did not become a voice.
"The preferential allotment your nation received, and the right of official inquiry concerning me—those were the price of that signature. To accept today's request would be for your side to tear up His Excellency the Chancellor's signature yourselves. —As for which faction His Excellency hails from, my lord, you know far better than I."
The line of the kneeling old retainer's shoulders sank, ever so slightly.
"P-please wait, Lady Rosalind... surely that is going too far—"
"My lord, these are not terms of my own making."
Rosalind shook her head quietly.
"They are the conditions set by my employer, His Grace the Grand Duke Vernant, upon my appointment. I, as the worker, cannot alter them at will."
And she let her gaze drift, just slightly, back over her shoulder.
The tall man standing there—Lucas, Grand Duke Vernant—opened his mouth without moving a single feature.
"I have no intention of changing the terms."
His low voice fell into the space between them.
"If anything—with your currency falling the way it is. Collapse is near. I was considering there may be room for an upward revision."
"U-upward revision."
"Triple would be reasonable."
Lucas slid a single document across the desk.
"The office has already run the figures."
(Your Grace, how merciless.)
Rosalind smiled, only in her heart.
Lucas's calculations were thoroughly rational. Right now, in the envoy's head, the figure of triple was being set beside the homeland's revenue.
Set them side by side all he liked, there was no answer. The homeland could no longer pay.
Since Rosalind's departure, customs revenue was down twenty percent. The currency's credit had fallen three grades, and the nobility had begun to flee. The reason Lord Sutherland was on his knees here now was that he was the bundle of straw tossed in at the final stage of that collapse.
To that bundle of straw, Rosalind courteously bowed her head once more.
"I am deeply grateful for the trouble you have taken in coming."
"Lady... Rosalind..."
"I must respectfully decline."
For a while, the envoy could not move.
Still on one knee, he stared at the pile of the carpet.
Then, in a trembling voice, he played his last move.
"His Majesty and His Highness the Crown Prince both deeply acknowledge your achievements, my lady."
Rosalind blinked.
Then, just a little, she laughed for real.
"Acknowledge, did you say?"
"Y-yes."
"Then you will show it—not with words, but with action, I trust?"
The envoy caught his breath.
"The budget documents of that time, the tax reform proposals, the diplomatic white papers. I am the one who wrote every one of them. Kindly have them re-entered in the histories under my name."
The envoy could not answer.
—Ritsuko Tanaka's past life. "You're a real help to me," her boss had always said. And yet her pay and her title had not gone up even once, right to the very end.
The words she had swallowed each time she heard that, Rosalind now spoke aloud, clearly, in the middle of the audience chamber.
"Unless you show it with action rather than words, no one will follow you."
The departing envoy's footsteps faded out far down the corridor.
Anna let out a long breath.
"Lady Rosalind, that was, truly... magnificent."
"Oh, what was magnificent was His Grace's contract."
Rosalind answered calmly as she straightened the bundle of documents. Then, on a thought, she looked up at the man beside her.
"Your Grace. The upward revision to triple—since when?"
"Since last week."
"I was not consulted."
"A labor-management decision."
His eyes still lowered to the documents, Lucas moved the corners of his mouth, just slightly.
"Your workload looked like it was about to go up again. That's all."
(Workload?)
Rosalind stopped for an instant.
Workload going up—true, if pressure from the homeland mounted, the paperwork to deal with it would increase. I see. A rational preemptive move. As labor management, perfectly correct.
(As expected of His Grace. So very thorough.)
Rosalind nodded deeply.
No other interpretation existed within her.
Just behind her, Anna alone pressed a hand to her forehead and looked up at the ceiling.
Tomorrow morning, Lord Sutherland's carriage would cross the border.
Beyond it, the homeland, unable to bear its own weight, would begin to sink of its own accord.
—And a sinking ship, in the end, throws the lightest overboard first.