After taking a large bite of the ham sandwich, Nadon seemed to have completely lost interest in the topic of elves. He looked at the owner and me back and forth as if he were dying of boredom and then asked. The astute owner quickly put the tray under her arm and folded her hands together politely. Nadon flicked a few gold coins in her direction and then asked for something called ‘Gustavo’.
After the half-elf retreated and disappeared, I tried to guess the identity of “Gustavo” while wiping a precarious mound of cream off the edge of my tiny coffee cup with my lips. The coffee was incredibly bitter—so strong it could probably clear any nose congestion in a single whiff. My past experiences had already proven my terrible luck with gambling, and this coffee experiment only confirmed it further.
It didn’t take long for me to discover what—or rather, who—“Gustavo” was. A bard in a pointed hat came to our table, hesitantly and nervously. He now knew Edgar’s identity—or rather, Nadon’s, so it was difficult to find the previous cheerfulness he had before.
Nadon, on the other hand, greeted him warmly, as if they were old friends—though I knew the prince was well aware of how this man had ridiculed the prince with a heart hotter than hot sand. It seemed to me that by doing so, Nadon seemed to feel that by acting this way, he was somehow getting closer to the things he vaguely valued(such as freedom or equality).
“Gustavo, my friend, sing my mother’s song.”
“But your highness…”
“Don’t be shy. I asked you to sing.”
Nadon waved his hand as if he were annoyed. Then the bard broke into a cold sweat and bowed his head. His brown face turned red at a glance. I don’t know what ‘Mother’s Song’ Nadon requested, but it clearly made Gustavo feel like he was on pins and needles.
In fact, from the moment he made eye contact with Nadon, he looked like he had half-swallowed an insect with many legs. No matter how dreamy Nadon looked or how sweet the words he concocted, he was a man of power and could cut off the bard’s arm with an inhale or a leg with an exhale.
“Glorious Ro, Resilient Ro…”
As I sipped my bitter coffee, the bard looked around him very carefully, and only when he was sure that no one was paying attention to him except me and Nadon did he start singing in a small voice. His fingers were shaking as he plucked the strings, and his voice was thick, as if he were forcibly scraping something stuck. So his singing didn’t sound as beautiful as before.
“Eyes as hot as the midday sun, she wore half a crown.”
Perhaps it was the words themselves that made the song so jarring. It contained the tragedy that happened to ‘Ro’. She was the noblest, wisest, and bravest of the foolish king’s children, but she was stabbed in the back by her greedy confidant, and robbed of the throne she thought was hers.
“Lovely Ro, Sweet Ro, with a body more curvaceous than a cactus, her beauty gave birth to tragedy.”
‘Ro’s’ fall did not end there. The traitor, who coveted her beauty, relentlessly pursued her until he eventually took her by force. Unable to endure her humiliation, ‘Ro’ tried to end her life several times but failed each time and eventually conceived the product of a disgusting sin.
As Gustavo the Bard described the two globules of blood pouring from between her legs, Nadon laughed and stabbed his index finger into his own chest. I didn’t find it funny at all. It felt like the bitter taste of the coffee I drank earlier was rising along with my stomach juices.
“Crazy Ro, filthy Ro, heart as crumbly as sand, no clown, however skilled, could mend it…”
The bard ended the song with a melancholy coda, as if mourning Ro’s wretched state of merely surviving. Then the bard takes the gold coins handed to him by Nadon and runs away.
“How is it?”
“I didn’t know; I didn’t know that it was such…”
“Hey, you’re sweet, but you don’t have to worry about it that much. Although they are keeping it quiet to the public, it is already quite widespread, and I did not tell you this so that you would dare sympathize with ‘Ro’ or us brothers.”
‘Mother is holding up well. She’s a little crazy and a little too obsessed with her lost glory, but I think her moderate madness has actually made her strong.’ Nadon raised an eyebrow and downed his coffee in one go.
“You asked me if I wanted to be king. As the son of ‘Ro’, of course. As for ‘Bryce’, well, he’s always longing for a place he doesn’t even know.”
“… … .”
“You’ll probably get a similar answer if you ask Ed. There’s only one reason why he devotes himself to me and his duties, even by throwing himself away. That’s because he is the son of ‘Ro’ like me and was born later than me by mere minutes. If Ed had been the one to fall into the midwife’s arms first, we would have done the same thing under different names.”
After thinking about it for a while, I felt that what Nadon said made sense. Even if he were ‘Bryce Ramos’, it was clear that he would live as his brother’s shadow without a second thought.
I knew there was a Florence Belle world out there, not just a Rosemary Blossom world, so maybe there was a Bryce Ramos world out there somewhere too, and in that world, would I have been friends with this guy and been at odds with Edgar?
Suddenly, as I stirred the foam into hearts with a tiny spoon, I felt a longing to see Edgar Ramos.
“I wanted you to understand Edgar. It seemed like he was quite fond of you.”
“Sorry to disappoint, but that’s just a neatly spun lie that has nothing to do with me caring for Edgar as a friend.”
When I dismissed his romantic suggestion so flatly, Nadon let out a snort of derisive laughter. ‘Stupid.’ He grunted harshly.
“I pity my brother for falling for a girl like you.”
***
Since we weren’t exactly thrilled to linger in each other’s company, Nadon and I agreed to go our separate ways as soon as we left the coffee house.
On my way to the teleportation magic circle to Fitzsimmons Academy, I bought some snacks and a quill to draw magic formulas—something Edgar Ramos had shown interest in at one point. I remembered the gleam of his red gaze under the awning.
I dutifully chewed on my snack, feeling a bit melancholy. The best part about fall was the abundance of delicious food on the streets. The feeling of the thick chestnut paste filling my throat was quite satisfying. Now is the season when the sky is high and Ariel gains weight.
By the time I reached the dorm, more than half the bag of pastries was gone. This time too, my earnest wish to have a teleportation magic circle installed on each floor of the dormitory building was not granted.
Over the course of nine semesters, I put in about a hundred proposals, but I doubted whether they were even read (Lady Edwards, the landlady of the girl’s dormitory, had never once been seen taking a suggestion out of the box in all my years at the academy. Either she knew a spell to erase her presence or had lost the key to the locked suggestion box.)
As I reached the 4th floor, where my room was located, something felt slightly off. There were many students walking up and down the hallway, but they weren’t faces I saw every day, and I kept making eye contact with them.
There were even boys among them. The boys’ and girls’ dormitories were connected by an indoor passageway, but it was on the third floor, not the fourth.
I had a similar experience once. In my first semester. When I chased after Jacqueline Faulkner, who was running down the stairs. Judging by the fact that the crowd was not as large as it was back then, I guess it wasn’t as big of an event as Anais and Brianna punching each other.
Anyway, I was certain that something interesting had happened on the fourth floor of the girl’s dormitory, probably in my room. I pushed aside the shoulders that stood in a circle blocking the doorway, and a disastrous sight came into view.
[Welcome back, Fitzsimmons’ finest prostitute, Ariel Mitchelle Dalton!]
There was a thin placard hanging on the wooden door. Below it were pictures of me hanging out with boys, engraved with magic ink. The scene of me running away with Bolton’s jacket or bickering with Nadon over a notebook that was captured so well and subtly altered to look much more…intimate.
It was during the first semester of magic science class that Kyle draped his jacket over my shoulder as I slept on my stomach. I also thought back to the last time I danced with Keran, and it seemed like it was at the Love Month Banquet. Apparently, I’d looked like that.
One of the pictures was a cutout of Milua’s social newspaper. It contained information about Prince Spencer’s mysterious partner, ‘the daughter of an unknown viscount’. A man and a woman wearing matching dragon masks and dancing closely together looked like lovers no matter where you looked, which was only fitting since we’d tried hard to give that impression.
Colorful confetti and glitter adorned the whole setup.
“This isn’t even me.”
I shouted, pointing to a newspaper illustration that didn’t show my face. It was an excuse thrown to an unspecified number of people surrounding me. No echo returned; my voice was lost in the hum of whispers, fading away almost pathetically.
“Hey, what’s the show here? A nice little circus for you all?”
While I was taking the damn things off, my roommate appeared with Lady Edwards. Bree fiercely attacked onlookers even though she was wearing a sweater embroidered with the words ‘Future Common Language Spelling Bee Champion’. The group of students who had gathered together like a swarm of bees suddenly dispersed.
“Dalton, is it you again?”
Lady Edwards with her arms tightly crossed, glanced at me. Maybe it was the shock of being dragged here on a hard-earned weekend after enduring the whims of cruel teenagers, but she did not look pleased at all. I was used to the cold attitude of disciplinarians towards incorrigible troublemakers, so I just shrugged my shoulders.
“Instead of asking, ‘Is it you again,’ you should ask, ‘Was there a conspiracy targeting you again?’”
“If you really think so, why don’t you ask Mr. Ramos, the perpetrator of the previous incident, to stop harassing you?”
“That’s Manuel Cleveland…” !”
“Enough.”
Lady Edwards held up her hand, and my lips clamped together as if under a silencing spell.
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