Chapter26:If Hidden, the Flame Burns【秘すれば焔】

Veranola’s Perspective

By the time the heat of battle had finally begun to fade, night had already drawn its curtain across the sky.

The glow of the Luminaria mingled with the magical lamps carried by the knights’ investigative unit, their intersecting light casting long shadows across the scorched garden.

In every direction, shrubs had withered into something like charcoal, and the earth itself bore strange hollows—

as though some monstrous thing had raged through it.

I stepped over a blackened flowerbed.

My eyes settled on what lay ahead.

Inside the castle wall, something had been driven into the stone alongside an uprooted tree.

No—

someone.

The force required to drive an entire tree into masonry.

And he had done it without sword or armor.

—That was not the strength of a man.

My own flames had certainly scorched the sky and seared the earth.

And yet, even so,

the blow he had delivered—

the wrongness dwelling within that fist—

stood out in a way impossible to overlook.

…So. There is, after all, something he cannot bear to let others touch.

The tea party, that day.

He had stubbornly refused to offer me his hand.

I turned that memory over once more.

…I see.

It went beyond the pride of a knight.

He was hiding something.

If that was the case—

then perhaps drawing him gently closer would prove worthwhile.

A faint smile touched my lips, unseen by anyone.

“I am relieved to find you unharmed, Your Grace Ash.”

At the voice from behind me, I turned.

The habit of stroking that red Kaiser mustache had not changed.

“…Ah. Valdis.”

—Ash.

A childhood name no one spoke any longer, save for the one man who still dared.

Carlos Valdis.

Right Chancellor.

A man who had remained faithfully at my side after the deaths of my parents, after my brother withdrew to the detached palace—a man who had never once wavered.

He was the one who had taught me the sword.

In my earliest years, he had scolded me, guided me, protected me—

a loyal retainer like a father to me, and the right hand upon whom I relied.

“Quite a… ruin.”

“No. This was… Ray’s doing.”

“…Lord Barriston’s adopted son, then. He exceeded expectation.”

“Yes…”

The wind stirred.

A cluster of Luminaria swayed nearby, pale and blue, flickering like living fire.

I reached down and plucked a single bloom.

The pale flame resting in my palm seemed to flinch—

and quietly, it shrank.

…Is this your heart?

And in that instant, the image that rose before me was—

his face, one hand pressed to his wounded side, smiling with that awkward, embarrassed softness.

I think it was Your Majesty’s flames that were magnificent.

He had stood there within that inferno.

He had not feared it.

He had not retreated.

He had burned there beside me.

…How great a flame are you carrying alone, I wonder?

What slept within him—

strength, secrets, and the shadow of solitude.

If there were any way to help him bear it,

I would have wanted to reach out.

Not as a queen.

Simply as—

Gently, I returned the flame in my palm to the Luminaria.

The blue shifted into violet.

A full blossom opened soundlessly into the night.

Behind me, Valdis, who had been watching in silence, spoke at last.

“…Shall I investigate him? The boy.”

Without lifting my eyes from the flower, I answered.

“…Yes. I would ask that of you.”