Fourth Arc: Eleventh Chapter

"Was it just my imagination?"

After parting from Remie and Lady Julia, I went and looked at the colonnade where the emerald-green-clad shadow had been, but there was no one. Here, which you could call the royals' private space, there's little coming and going of people to begin with. None of the maids or servants I occasionally passed wore such a color, so maybe I really did see wrong.

Michael being the flashy sort, I'd even considered the chance he'd made the servants' uniforms fluorescent green. But the only person working at the royal castle who wears flashy clothes is Master Hattori. The one person who really shouldn't be flashy, it feels like.

"I can't very well go searching someone else's house... no, someone else's castle, so I'll head back to my room."

My voice echoed in the hushed, empty colonnade. My chest was uneasy and restless, and I let slip a meaningless bit of talking to myself, meant to reach no one.

"Come to think of it, if I ask Michael, I should be able to find out."

I'll go back to my room and get word to Michael. As I walked on toward the room I'd been given, not far now, I noticed servants standing quietly in the shadow of corners and at the ends of corridors.

...There are an awful lot of them. Is there some event on?

Thinking that, I glanced back behind me.

"Huh...?"

My eyes met a servant who seemed to have been watching me. Holding a cloth, apparently polishing a decorative vase on display, she was staring intently at me, in the same posture as when we'd passed at the corner.

Being watched...? I hadn't paid it much mind until now, but this is another country's royal castle. Feeling that strongly all at once, I quickened my pace, holding back the nameless dread crawling up my spine.

---

The colonnade, which should have been short, felt oddly long. Letting out a relieved breath and pushing the room door open, I went stiff. Noticing the sound of me coming in, maybe, a servant turned around in a fluster.

"What are you doing?"

"Lady Cosette! ...Tidying up. Excuse me."

Suspicious, I stepped toward the servant and checked what was in her hands. She seemed to have opened the drawer of the writing desk and been going through its contents. Paying me no mind, brows knit in displeasure, the servant hurried out of the room. She wasn't the maid assigned to the room, but an unfamiliar face.

"What was that..."

There's hardly any luggage here to begin with. Tidying up, she said, but a writing-desk drawer feels like quite a private matter. In Lumelica do they tidy even a place like that? I haven't opened the writing-desk drawer myself since coming to this room. But used or not, in Altria a servant doesn't open the drawer of a noble's private room without leave.

Up until yesterday, there was nothing like this. Somehow, since before I met Remie and the others, since this morning, the air of the castle felt completely different.

"Is something happening? Is this the business the prince and the others spoke of?"

Sitting down in the writing-desk chair, I gazed out the window at the dark garden.