Chapter 17 Unknown Warnings
As she turned around, she saw a young man with blond hair running towards her.
He was standing in the corner, staring at her the whole time.
She didn’t mind, as she was used to people not taking their eyes off her when they saw her for the first time…
“Pleased to meet you, Lady. My name is Glynn Glasscok.”
The man introduced himself and inclined his head slightly.
“I’ve been joining the gathering for a few months now, but I’ve never met your ladyship before.”
Delphine noticed immediately that his manners were oddly clumsy.
Was he just making his social debut? He didn’t look that young.
“You must be… Nice to meet you.”
Delphine smiled slightly at him, her guarded face still up, and the man blushed honestly.
He was not a very good socialiser after all.
“Haha. What a… They said you were beautiful. I guess sometimes rumors are downplayed and not exaggerated.”
He said cheerfully, studying her eyes carefully.
Then, as if deciding something, he suddenly looked around and whispered in a very low voice.
“I… know it must be embarrassing for me to say this out of the blue.”
“…”
“Ioan Pride, beware of him.”
Delphine’s eyes widened in surprise.
“You’re just a victim, My Lady, so… be careful.”
“What’s that… Wait. Hey!”
“That’s all I can tell you.”
The man moved quickly toward the door.
He walked so fast that Delphine, in her evening dress, could barely keep up.
“Hey…!”
The man slipped through the revolving wall before Delphine could catch him.
“Stay alert!”
He shouted out piteously, just before he slipped completely out of his body.
By the time Delphine made a hasty motion to open the wall door, the man was gone.
Only a doorman with a newspaper stood in the corridor.
Delphine stared down the empty corridor in despair.
He was a strange man.
***
Delphine climbed into the carriage alone, ignoring his escort’s urging.
“Shall I take you to the mansion?”
As soon as the carriage door closed behind her, a flood of repressed thoughts washed over her.
Her father’s unreasonable rebellion.
The man who had cut off her father’s head and demanded she marry him.
The missing forbidden book. The strange warning to beware of Ioan Pride.
“…My Lady?”
Just then, the coachman called out to her in a questioning voice.
“May I escort you to the mansion?”
“Oh, yes.”
Delphine snapped out of her reverie, her face pale as a sheet.
“To the mansion…”
At that moment, a blood-red mansion appeared before her eyes.
The Pembroke Manor, now the Pride Manor.
Delphine’s stomach churned violently, and she hugged her stomach in panic.
Another bout of nervous gastritis had set in.
Trying not to sound sick, she commanded in a dignified tone.
“No… mansion, go to… District 2, Portland Grove.”
***
“Well, well. You’ve been fine for a while, and then you’re sick enough to call me to the mansion?”
The bespectacled old doctor asked worriedly, looking at Delphine’s white face.
Delphine was hurried to a high-class doctor house that catered mainly to nobles and wealthy merchants.
After taking the medication she prescribed, Delphine smiled bitterly.
“I was just passing through, so I stopped by.”
“You must have run out of placebo, so I’ll prescribe you a new one.”
The old doctor scribbled on a white sheet of paper.
“Is there anything else bothering you? I was overwhelmed with work last month and didn’t get to visit the mansion…”
The old doctor was perceptive, as he usually dealt with the nobility.
She blamed her father’s treasonous behavior for the lack of check-ups.
Delphine hesitated for a moment before speaking.
“Actually, I’ve been having a bit of trouble sleeping lately.”
The old doctor peered over his glasses at her face.
“…Do you have trouble sleeping?”
“Well, it varies from day to day.”
Delphine explained in a nervous tone.
“Some nights I sleep like the dead, some nights I can’t get to sleep at all.”
The doctor nodded with a knowing look.
“I see. Hmm… Do you have any other symptoms?”
“And…”
Delphine hesitated for a moment.
But the old doctor, who had been her physician for many years, was trustworthy.
He dealt mostly with the nobility, so he wasn’t afraid to make light of things.
“Actually, I often… see an optical illusion before my eyes. Like, say, a mansion stained with blood…”
Delphine didn’t go as far as to say that she suspected her husband’s identity, or that no one remembered the beaten slave boy who had previously resided at Pembroke Manor.
She felt that what she had already said was enough to make her a lunatic.
The old doctor, however, did not seem surprised and nodded coolly.
“Yes, I can do that, it’s not impossible.”
“…You can do that?”
“Yes.”
Putting down his feather pen, the doctor cupped his hands under his chin and stared at her.
There was genuine concern in his eyes.
“I think,” he said, “that you may be suffering from ‘trauma’.”
“Tra…uma?”
Delphine repeated the unfamiliar word in confusion.
“Yes. According to one medical book I read, our minds have a profound effect on our bodies.”
“…”
“Didn’t you have a rough time of it, with the downfall of your family overnight?”
“… Are you saying I’m crazy?”
“Oh, no!”
The old doctor hurriedly threw up his hands in response to the shaky-eyed question.
“It’s not like that, it’s an illness. Just as our arms break when we bump into something, so does the mind become ill when it encounters a difficult event.”
I’m sick? My mind, too?
Delphine mumbled in confusion.
“I’ve never heard that before…”
“Because it hurts so much, your brain creates an illusion, to take your mind off reality for a while.”
My brain creates an illusion?
…That’s.
In one day, she lost her family, her father, and her noble title.
Unable to accept it, she wondered if she had created the illusion herself.
Hating the man who saved him from certain death as her father’s enemy, suspecting that he is not the slave boy who disappeared?
Or was the slave boy, Ioannes, a hallucination of her own making, created by her own loneliness…?
“There’s really no medicine for what ails the mind, at least for now.”
The old doctor said, looking at her with a stern gaze, like he was looking at his young granddaughter.
“Just try to put down your complicated thoughts and focus on resting well.”
Let go of complicated thoughts…
Delphine nodded weakly, and then suddenly asked.
“How do you know these things, anyway?”
A strange passion flashed in the old doctor’s calm eyes at the question.
“Because… secret, won’t you, Young Lady?”
Calling herself Lady, not Lady Pride.
He meant to ask her to keep the secret for old times’ sake.
When Delphine nodded stiffly, the old doctor pulled something from a safe at one side of the room.
It was a book, written in a distinctive script that was not Imperial.
“Wait a minute. You can’t possibly have this…”
“I recently acquired a book on the Northern Continent from a black market.”
The Northern Continent was the name given to all the other countries beyond the Wall.
Books from there were unconditionally forbidden, no matter what kind.
It was illegal not only to read them, but to possess them.
Delphine stared at the old doctor in disbelief.
“You…”
“Hehe. I’m a scholar, isn’t? I can’t help my curiosity.”
Delphine turned uneasily to make sure the door was closed behind her.
Two knights of the Imperial Guard stood outside the door.
She was the daughter of a traitor.
The old doctor hadn’t calculated that when he confided in me.
It would be as much against her as it would be against him to violate the royal decree and look at the Forbidden Book.
“Where did you learn to speak the Northland language?” Delphine asked, her voice low and stealthy.
“Where in the world did you learn the Northern tongue?”
“Self-taught. It’s surprisingly not difficult, the sentence structure and spelling are similar to the Imperial language.”
The old doctor said in a whisper.
Even at a cursory glance, Delphine could see that the writing was eerily similar.
“And, My Lady. There’s a surprising amount of knowledge here. It’s fifty years… no, a hundred years ahead of medical knowledge.”
“What? …No way.”
Delphine looked at the doctor suspiciously.
Beyond that barrier, there are beasts of ancient power.
The reason the wall was built in the first place was to keep monsters and barbarians out.
She was taught that the Northern Continent is a primitive society…
“It’s true, look at this as proof!”
The old doctor quickly pulled out another strange object from the safe.
It looked like a telescope.
A long body with glasses at the end.
It was too small to be a telescope, however, and an unknown transparent crystal was embedded in the center of its body.
The old doctor spoke up quickly.
“It’s strange, isn’t it? I bought this with the book, and I still haven’t figured out what it’s for.”
“… This is from the northern continent?”
“Yes! Look at the intricate workmanship! What savages could have made something like this?”
