Chapter 1
“It was love at first sight.”
There it was. That cliché of an opening line.
“I knew it the moment I saw you at the last garden party. That you and I, Miss Reinhardt, are a fated pair.”
All we did was exchange a single greeting, yet he felt the hand of fate in that short time. How astonishing.
Esdel, sitting in a demure posture, shifted her gaze toward the novel that would help her endure this tedious moment. A book lay open right in front of a flower vase, hidden from the uninvited guest’s view.
The title of the novel was <Autumn Wheat Field>.
It was a preposterous story about the widowed wife of a farmer and a young lord overcoming their differences in status and their families’ opposition to find love. A lord marrying a commoner was unbelievable enough, but a widow on top of that?
Esdel scoffed inwardly.
It truly was a ridiculous tale.
Fated love that transcends reality is of no help in life. They’ll likely live one season lost in a dream, only to face a gutter-like ending.
But whether it made sense or not, if it held the honor of being the most-read book in the Kingdom of Arpenta, there had to be a reason.
And just before her current suitor had shown up unannounced, Esdel had been on the verge of desperately realizing that very reason.
“I… I have nothing. My status is low, I’m not good at anything, and I’m not beautiful enough to ruin a country. I’m not someone worthy of your heart, my lord….”
“But I like you anyway. Your nose, a little too low as if it wasn’t quite finished, your eyebrows, as dark as an owl’s, and your freckle-filled cheeks—they are all lovely. I knew from the start that you had nothing. But what am I to do if I like you anyway!!”
The moment he finds the woman who had been hiding in another territory, the lord runs out barefoot and confesses. Moved by his overly honest confession, the woman opens her heart, and as soon as their feelings align, they immediately attempt to align their bodies as well.
“Not here.”
“It’s fine, no one is around.”
“But….”
“Shhh.”
The lord kissed her tenderly, his fingertips catching the hem of her skirt. The skirt, fluttering in the westerly wind, was soon pulled up to her thighs. And….
The open page ended there.
Esdel clenched her teeth. The fingertips resting on the handle of her teacup trembled.
Would he notice if I reached out to turn the page now? He probably would, right?
If I had known this would happen, I should have placed the book on my lap the moment I heard the knock on the door. Then, secretly turning a page would have been nothing at all!
Esdel was busy contemplating how she could sneak her hand over. Just then, something was thrust before her eyes. The faint scent of flowers brushed past her nose.
“This is….”
“F-flowers.”
Esdel put on a picture-perfect smile.
She wanted to whisper that she had eyes and knew very well they were flowers, but she held it in. The number of riff-raff suitors she had chased away like this could fill ten carriages, but for the time being, she had to restrain herself.
After a series of madmen who would either grab the back of their necks, turn beet-red, or throw their gloves at her face in a daze, her parents were starting to get worried.
Their only daughter, of marriageable age, was not even thinking of finding a distinguished husband but was instead tarnishing her own reputation. It was only natural for them to be concerned as parents. Esdel was not unaware of their feelings.
‘But….’
That didn’t mean she could just meet with anyone.
Esdel had one firm standard. A minimal standard, in her opinion, that was nothing special.
He must be, at the very least, a better person than her.
In every aspect—swordsmanship, face, and figure, as well as cooking and flower arrangement—he had to be superior to Esdel herself.
With an indifferent expression, Esdel looked at the flowers thrust before her. The price tag ribbon was still attached to the bouquet. A man who didn’t even know the etiquette of gifting flowers. Just facing him was dreadful.
‘What’s the point of being with someone lesser than me? I’d rather grow old and die a spinster.’
After marriage, her husband would become a live-in son-in-law to the Reinhardt County.
A manor spanning well over ten thousand hectares, a mountain range with hot springs, and a vast resort developed around it.
When choosing the person who would be responsible for all of that, this standard was only natural.
It was better not to let someone in at all if they were going to ruin the County and the lives of its people.
However, there was one minor problem….
The fact was, Esdel Reinhardt was too exceptional.
A lovely lady with rosy cheeks, silver hair that shimmered whenever it touched the sunlight, and a face that shone even brighter. Her tendency to be indifferent and easily bored was a small flaw, but when a rare smile graced her usually expressionless face, she looked like an angel.
Judging by the flood of marriage proposals she received after attending a single ball, it was impossible not to know the public’s opinion of her.
Was that all? The world was too easy for Esdel. The languages of the continent’s three kingdoms were a given, she had long since mastered etiquette, and when she took up the sword for fun, it didn’t take long to reach the level of a low-ranking knight.
Therefore, finding a man who was better than her in every way was like plucking a star from the sky.
Alfred, his hand holding the bouquet trembling, spoke.
“You wore a vermilion dress that day. The sight of you strolling among the autumn leaves was so beautiful, it is still vivid in my mind. I chose this bouquet for you, Miss Reinhardt, in memory of that day.”
“Ah, I see.”
“Please, accept it. I put my heart into choosing each and every flower.”
“Ah, I see.”
Esdel accepted the bouquet with a formal smile. At that, the man’s eyes widened with emotion. He was so excited that he began to speak twice as fast as before.
“The vermilion hue is as red as your cheeks, Miss Reinhardt. If you permit me, I wish to offer you flowers that resemble you every season. No, if you wish it, I will buy an entire flower shop and gift it to you!”
“I don’t think that will be necessary. This one bouquet is more than enough for me.”
When Esdel feigned a look at the bouquet, the man was moved. He was so impressed that he shot up from his seat and tried to kneel on one knee.
It wasn’t the man’s fault that a handkerchief happened to be on the floor beneath his feet, nor was it his fault that he moved so hastily in his emotional state.
“Ack!”
The unlucky man’s back foot hit the handkerchief, and he tumbled backward with a clatter. At the same time, the shoe on his foot flew off, and something fell out from inside it. It was an insole, at least half a handspan thick.
“Oh my.”
The maid, Marie, who was standing behind them, dropped the teapot she was holding at the sudden sight.
Clang! Red tea flowed out from between the shattered pieces of the teapot. The man, amidst the chaos, scrambled to hide his shoe but ended up falling forward once again.
Esdel calmly rose and offered him a hand.
“…Are you alright?”
“Damn it, get away from me!”
Alfred roughly slapped Esdel’s hand away. His face flushed red, he snatched up his shoe, shoved Marie hard by the shoulder, and ran out of the room.
“Ouch….”
Marie, pushed to the floor, clutched her knee and whimpered. She must have fallen hard, as her knee was already turning a dark blue.
Esdel, who had been frozen in bewilderment at the sudden turn of events, found one thing about Alfred that was superior to her.
Certainly, she wasn’t that ill-tempered.
👑🏰
“So, he was wearing shoe lifts?”
“Yes.”
“Your suitor?”
“Yes.”
“Pfft, hheup, ahahaha!”
Esdel’s friend, Lin, laughed as if she were about to run out of breath. It was no use telling her to stop. Cackling while clutching her stomach, Lin only stopped laughing after she nearly fell off the horse she was riding.
Esdel let out a small sigh.
Lin, born to a knight father and a mercenary mother, had learned to grab a horse’s mane before she even learned to walk. For her to slip from the saddle… if her mother, Baz, had seen this, she would have been put through three straight days and nights of riding practice.
Wiping away the tears from her laughter, Lin asked.
“So are you going to marry him?”
Esdel replied indifferently without even looking at Lin.
“As if. His height is one thing, but his personality is the problem. To push Marie down like that. I won’t let him off the hook if I see him again.”
“Whyyy, Esdel. Isn’t this the first time you’ve had a suitor that short? I think it’s the first time you’ve met a man with a worse temper than you, too.”
“But in every other way, he’s worse than me.”
Lin, righting her posture on the horse, shook her head.
“Esdel, give it up. I don’t think you’ll ever get married. There’s no man in this world who is better than you in every way.”
“It’s not that I’m completely unwilling to be flexible.”
Esdel let out a small sigh.
It was fine if his abilities were a little lacking. She could just help him. It was fine if his family was lacking. The Reinhardt County wasn’t a powerful house anyway. But there was just one thing she could not compromise on.
“I don’t want a man who’s uglier than me.”
Hearing that, Lin’s jaw dropped.
The reason the proposals toward Esdel never stopped, despite her considerable temper, was all thanks to her face. At least among the nobles Lin knew, there was no man with a more handsome appearance than Esdel.
Lin clicked her tongue and said.
“…Just say you don’t want to get married, Esdel.”
“Yes, I don’t.”
Esdel, expressing her aversion to marriage in a firm tone, gripped the reins tightly. At that, Lin burst out laughing, ha-ha, and continued.
“See, isn’t it so much better when you’re honest! Marriage, what marriage. If someone like you gets married to the wrong person, you’ll end up just like my parents.”
Lin ran her thumb across her neck and drew it to the side. Gack, she stuck out her tongue, and her impression of dying was so realistic it was nauseating. Esdel feigned ignorance and turned her head away.
The story of how Lin’s father, a low-ranking knight, was caught cheating by Baz and subsequently departed from this world was no secret in this territory. For that act, Baz was sentenced to life in prison and gave birth to Lin in her cell, but she was pardoned five years later on the condition that she serve the territory for life.
Neither Lin nor Baz was the least bit ashamed of this incident and would speak of it like a joke, which told you what kind of people they were.
Lin guided her horse alongside Esdel’s and said.
“Still, if you’re set on getting married, just remember one thing.”
“What?”
“A man is all about this.”
Lin’s finger rested on her waist. Then, it slowly began to trace down the line of her spine. Her hips, her lower abdomen, and between her legs….
“Ah! Ouch!”
Esdel snatched Lin’s arm away. Lin cried out as if in pain, but her lips were brimming with a smile.
Letting a laugh slip through her lips, Lin added.
“Don’t ignore me, Esdel. My mom sometimes talks about my dad, and there’s only one thing she misses. This.”
“Stop disgracing your dead father and take this.”
Esdel pulled a book from a small bag tied to her saddle. It was <Autumn Wheat Field>, the book that had become a ray of light amid the flood of suitors. Lin took the book Esdel tossed her and flipped through the pages.
“So, Lin, the next volume?”
“My mother promised to get it on her way back. As soon as she arrives, I’ll read it first and bring it right over.”
“Read it and bring it within a day.”
“I’ll send it over in half a day, so you just worry about how you’ll receive it without the Count noticing.”
“There won’t be any problem as long as you don’t just toss it in the mailbox like last time.”
“Ah, that was a close call.”
“If Marie hadn’t found it and quickly picked it up, it would have gone straight to my father’s office.”
Esdel shuddered, recalling that moment. If her father had read that book, he would have silently gifted her all sorts of edifying literature. But leafing through something like <One Hundred Guidelines for a Beautiful Home> was more than enough during her lessons.
“We’re here.”
Lin slowed her horse, calling out, “Whoa, whoa.”
Having reached their destination, the two dismounted and tied their reins to a tree.
Esdel and Lin walked toward the area beneath the old castle wall. In the space under the stairs was a hideout they had decorated themselves.
Lin plopped down and lay on the tapestry Esdel had brought and spread out. Seeing Lin just lie down like that, Esdel grabbed a cushion and threw it at her. The cushion hit Lin square in the face, but without a hint of annoyance, Lin just grinned and tucked it under her head.
“Hey, Esdel.”
“What.”
“Later, if you really don’t get married, just hand over the County to some random collateral branch and let’s go traveling. You never know, you might find a man to your liking if you go outside Arpenta.”
“What for? If I don’t have to worry about the County, there’s no reason to get married.”
“Not interested in romance either?”
“Not particularly.”
“Don’t lie. Then why does someone like you read so many romance novels?”
“Just because I’m not interested in my own love life doesn’t mean I can’t be interested in someone else’s.”
Esdel replied with a bored expression, plucking a flower growing in a crack between the flagstones and twirling it between her fingers. A half-bloomed dandelion spun between her fingers.
Fated love, fine.
Marriage for love, that’s not so bad either.
She didn’t have to look far; just seeing her own parents, she could guess how much happiness it brought to be able to spend a lifetime with someone you connected with. After all, the entire kingdom, not just the people of their territory, knew how well her parents got along.
But when someone enjoys more freedom than their share, someone else has to bear the responsibility.
‘And Mother already scraped the bottom of the barrel for this century’s allotment of freedom.’
The eldest daughter of the Marquis Sermonde, considered a flawless candidate for queen since birth, had suddenly become pregnant. The social circles would have been overturned even if the child belonged to the Crown Prince, with whom marriage talks were underway, but the child’s father was a count from the frontier who hadn’t even made his way into the capital.
She had no complaints since she was born because of it, but if Esdel also chose a partner who wasn’t up to par, what would the public gossip about?
‘They’d say, like mother, like daughter, for sure.’
As the daughter of parents who held a wedding that would be talked about for another ten years, Esdel had a duty to restore her family’s honor and strengthen its foundation.
‘So how could I be interested in something like a love affair.’
She had long since abandoned the expectation of finding a suitable partner who also captured her heart. For now, she was being picky with all sorts of conditions, but if she couldn’t find a suitable partner by the time she was twenty-three, she would have no choice but to compromise.
The dandelion dropped from between Esdel’s fingers.
If I’m going to choose, I’d prefer someone easy on the eyes, but if I can’t find one, what can I do?
A man, what’s the big deal.
Esdel gave a cynical smile.
👑🏰
It was a big deal.
Esdel fiercely regretted having dismissed love, marriage, men, and all the rest earlier in the day.
‘What did I just see?’
Her hand, gripping the doorknob, trembled. Her knees kept buckling as her strength failed her. Esdel desperately tried to calm her heart, struggling to bolt the front door. But the bolt just wouldn’t move all the way.
Why, why won’t it lock? Panicked, Esdel pushed against the lock with her whole body before she finally realized.
‘Someone is holding the doorknob from the outside.’
There was no other way a perfectly fine door lock would suddenly break.
While Esdel was frozen, she felt the person outside pull the door. Her own strength on the doorknob was ignored as if it were nothing. Her body was dragged forward, and then the door swung wide open.
“Ugh….”
‘The smell of blood.’
The moment the door opened, a fishy stench so strong it turned her stomach washed over her.
Esdel fought to keep from looking down at her feet. But she couldn’t ignore the slick feeling of blood seeping under her shoes.
In the end, Esdel’s gaze drifted downward.
Through the open doorway, she saw Alfred, slumped at an angle. The man, his fine blond hair fallen over his face, was dead with his eyes not even properly closed. As her eyes shifted, she saw a metal garden skewer sticking out from near his heart.
Just a few minutes ago, he had been perfectly alive.
“Ugh….”
Esdel clamped both hands over her mouth. Fighting back the urge to vomit, she took in a ragged breath. This was no time for this. Beyond Alfred’s corpse, she could see the perpetrator’s two legs.
‘I have to run.’
But how?
The opponent was far stronger than Esdel. Moreover, he was someone accustomed to killing, enough to instantly kill a grown man with something like a metal skewer.
A heavy voice reached Esdel’s pale ears.
“Good evening.”
Her body flinched on its own. She almost lifted her head by reflex, but Esdel clenched her fists and kept her gaze fixed downward.
‘Don’t look, Esdel Reinhardt. If he sees your face, he might try to kill you too.’
Esdel muttered to herself, her mind racing desperately.
‘How many knights are on duty tonight?’
Was it two? Or three?
Could she survive until the knights noticed the situation and came?
She fought back the tears that threatened to spill, looking at the face of the man dead on the floor. Alfred seemed to have been unable to accept death until the very last moment. His two eyes, wide open and contorted in pain, proved it.
She had no personal fondness for him, but she had never wished for him to be killed like this.
Everything had started to go strangely after midnight, when the doorbell rang.
When the doorbell first rang, Esdel was in her room reading a book. She couldn’t sleep after mulling over her conversation with Lin and was just passing the time when she sensed a presence downstairs.
Until then, she had no intention of opening the door. She had only come down to the entrance to peek at the uninvited guest’s face.
But the moment she looked outside through the round peephole in the door, Esdel had no choice but to open it. Alfred, the suitor from that morning, was begging for his life with blood trickling from his lips.
Startled, Esdel had flung the door open.
“Mr. Maxwell? What’s….”
“You, you damned bitch, because of you, do you, do you think I’m going to die alone?”
As soon as she opened the door, Alfred spat curses and swung his hand. He seemed to be holding something, but it was hard to make it out in the darkness. However, Esdel could clearly see what happened next.
A metal skewer shot out from Alfred’s trembling chest. And then, Alfred coughed up blood and collapsed.
‘After that….’
She had immediately tried to close the door, but….
“Good evening.”
The greeting, heard again from beyond the threshold, pulled Esdel back to reality. It was the exact same greeting as before, but the voice was a note lower.
“…Yes, good evening. It’s a nice evening.”
“Yes, it is.”
Esdel struggled to stand up straight.
I have to get a grip. This was no time to be frozen in fear.
A greeting is a prelude to stating one’s business. That man surely had something to say to her, which meant he would at least keep her alive until he finished saying what he wanted to say.
‘Though it’s unlikely that any business spoken after stabbing my suitor through the heart with a skewer in the middle of the night would be a proper one.’
At any rate, she wouldn’t die right now.
