Not even half an hour had passed since the Crown Prince had been sent off to the antechamber.
"Lady Rosalind."
One of the guards knocked on the door of the office. His voice was oddly quiet.
"Pardon the intrusion. —There's another carriage at the gate."
Rosalind set down her pen.
"Whose crest does it bear?"
"Well... it doesn't have one."
The guard held out a scrap of paper. His fingertips were trembling. The writing was a hurried scrawl.
Saint candidate Miria Lowe. I humbly request an audience with Big Sister.
—Big Sister, is it?
—I don't recall ever being anyone's sister.
Rosalind read the scrap twice, then laid it face down at the corner of the desk.
"The meeting will be held at a later hour. During office hours, for fifteen minutes. We will use the castle's reception room. She may bring one attendant only. No one else is to be admitted past the gate."
"Understood."
After the guard had withdrawn, His Grace, on the other side of the desk, laid the document he had been holding face down on the desk.
"If that's your judgment, then that's fine."
"Yes. However, Your Grace—"
"Go on."
"For those thirty minutes, please be sure to have a record-keeper present."
"...You're keeping a record?"
"Yes. There's no telling how that woman's words might be rewritten later."
His Grace's gaze moved from the face-down document to Rosalind's profile, and stopped there for a beat. He seemed about to say something, and in the end, didn't. His fingertips drew the documents on the desk slightly toward his own side. Rosalind paid it no mind.
—Every dispute begins with keeping a record of what passes between the parties involved. The very first iron rule I learned in my past life.
At the appointed hour, the reception room.
Seeing Miria shown in, Rosalind mentally traced the line "Meeting, thirty minutes" on the schedule in her hand once more.
Traveling clothes like mourning dress. Her makeup had crumbled, and the roots of her hair had changed color. Of that calculated pure white from the days she'd been called a Saint candidate, there was no trace left.
"Big Sister."
Those were her first words. The same form of address as in last night's scrawl.
—So you've come with that form of address after all.
Rosalind tilted her cup. Only after checking the temperature of the tea with a single sip did she open her mouth.
"Lady Miria. We have only thirty minutes. Please, state your business."
"Big Sister... Big Sister, help me."
"Your business."
"You knew this would happen, didn't you?"
The tears fell, in the regulation amount, at the regulation moment. Her technique was intact.
"Why—why didn't you tell me?"
Rosalind saw the record-keeper's pen tremble faintly over the paper. She gave him a very brief nod. —A signal that he was free to write it down.
"Everyone says Big Sister is an economic genius who could see the future."
"......"
"I really... I've always looked up to you, Big Sister..."
Belated respect. The red carpet rolled out at a successful person's feet after the fact. Cheap stuff.
Rosalind set down her cup.
"Lady Miria."
"Y-yes."
"I have never seen the future."
Miria looked up. Her green eyes swayed behind a film of tears.
"What I saw were the clauses of a contract."
"A-a contract...?"
"At the scene of the broken engagement, I stepped down from that chair. How comfortable the chair you sat in afterward might be, I couldn't possibly know."
Rosalind carved out each word slowly, one at a time.
"It was a chair no one forced on you. You chose it of your own free will."
Miria's mouth opened, shaped around words that didn't come.
"I didn't know anything... I was deceived..."
She collapsed forward onto the table. The shoulders of her mourning dress rose and fell in small heaves.
Rosalind could see the record-keeper's pen meticulously taking down the word "deceived."
Rosalind brought her second sip of tea to her lips. —This tea isn't bad at all, she thought, somewhere at the edge of her mind.
Even looking at Miria slumped over the table, nothing stirred inside Rosalind.
She had been made to read through the reports before coming here. How the girl had tumbled down in her homeland. It sat in her head merely as "background on a matter to be dealt with," and meant nothing more than that.
"...Big Sister."
Her face still buried, Miria murmured.
"I'm the one who gave birth, in your place."
Rosalind returned her cup to the table.
The sound rang harder than she'd expected.
"In my place?"
For the first time, the warmth drained from Rosalind's voice.
Miria looked up. Her tears were twice as many as before. —Not the technique, but the real kind.
Rosalind looked that face squarely in the eye.
"I never asked you to take anyone's place."
The maid standing by the wall drew in a small breath, as if she couldn't help it.
Only the faint ticking of the reception room clock remained—or so it should have.
"...Why..."
Miria's lips moved.
"How can you say something like thaaaaat—"
The real tears still on her cheeks, only the eyes behind them had stopped crying.
"If only you... if only you had groveled on your knees back then, or whatever it took, made some kind of apology, anything, and become Queen...!"
As she shot to her feet, her chair toppled over behind her.
"Then I wouldn't have had to go through this! It's all, all your fault...!"
The record-keeper's pen stopped for an instant.
—Oh my.
Still seated, Rosalind blinked once.
—You're the one who set it all up.
—And even now, you've forgotten that.
With only her eyes, she prompted the record-keeper. The pen began to race again. Every last word, meticulously.
"Lady Miria."
Rosalind didn't so much as glance at the toppled chair.
"I've been remiss in not saying so sooner, but allow me to thank you."
"...Wh...what...?"
"I am grateful, you know."
Miria's eyes went wide.
"You took that chair from me. Thanks to you, I am—free."
"Wha..."
"So this is neither a personal grudge nor revenge."
With her fingertips, Rosalind straightened the edge of the schedule on the table.
"I am the Grand Duchy's Economic Advisor. I make every judgment based on the national interest. If those at the top tip the scales with personal feelings, they set no example for those beneath them. I am not helping you, not because of personal feelings, but because there is no reason to help you anywhere in this country."
—Mind you, if I were allowed to decide based on personal feelings, I'd have even less intention of helping you.
"—There is just one thing, however."
Rosalind lifted her finger from the edge of the table.
"Someday. If you stop blaming that chair on someone else. If a day comes when you sincerely regret that standing on your own two feet, and kicking others down, were all things you did with your own hands—"
She paused, for just one beat.
"—then I might be willing to give it a little thought."
A pleading light flickered across Miria's face.
"That said,"
Rosalind wiped that light away without ceremony.
"from what I see of you now, I can hardly imagine that day ever coming."
The strength went out of Miria's knees.
She planted both hands on the table and slumped over it, crumbling.
"Three minutes remain in the meeting," the record-keeper announced, lowering his voice.
Rosalind stood.
"Lady Miria. Please take your leave. —We will provide one of our country's carriages to take you as far as the gate. That is not my mercy, but for the sake of the Grand Duchy of Vernant's dignity, so please do not mistake it."
It was the very moment she turned her back.
"Wait."
Miria, who had been slumped over the table, jerked upright as if spring-loaded.
"Wait, Big Sister...!"
Her voice had cracked.
"I'm telling you to help me! Were you even listening!? You're abandoning me!? When it's your fault this happened—!"
She came around the table, her hand reaching for Rosalind's back.
Another hand caught that arm from the side and stopped it.
Miria's maid, who had been standing by the wall. Her one and only attendant, who had followed her all the way from their homeland.
"Lady Miria, you mustn't...! Please, I beg you, stop this...!"
"Let go! Let go of me! Big Sister... Big Sisterrr!"
Half carrying her, the maid dragged Miria back toward the door. The hem of her mourning dress came disheveled and scraped the floor.
The record-keeper rose swiftly and opened the door to clear the way.
Rosalind did not look back.
"Big Sisterrr...!"
The scream was carried away into the far end of the corridor. —The door closed.
Rosalind was left alone in the reception room.
—You didn't even give me time to decline.
The rest of what she had almost said and swallowed, Rosalind quietly pushed back down her throat.
—No.
Come to think of it—there was one more person in the antechamber. Someone who had been shown in first, sent back, and was being kept waiting there.
—How very convenient.
If she dealt with them one at a time, there would never be enough hours in the day. Related matters get handled together. —A rule she'd kept ever since her past life.
When she stepped out into the corridor, she could see two carriages beyond the window, in the courtyard.
The Crown Prince's, who had been shown in first, with its pompous crest. Behind it, the plain hired carriage that had brought Miria. A rather mismatched pair to be lined up side by side.
—Ritsuko. We're dealing with them all together after this.
Inside her sleeve, she tightened her grip on her pen.