Chapter 14: Before the Wedding ⑬ ~No Sense of Imminent Danger~

In the dimly lit prison cell, Edel was at a complete loss over what to do.
There were only three people here.
Edel, the Viscount of Earclut, and the student recognized by the violin.

“Well then, what do we do now.”
“You’re surprisingly calm. Still, it’s a good thing your friend wasn’t with you.”
“Seriously. If he’d been here, this would already be a huge mess.”
“Indeed.”

Though they were captives, Edel and the Viscount of Earclut were having a remarkably relaxed conversation.
It was their first meeting, but the Viscount knew Edel’s friend well, the one who had acted as their intermediary.

Count Faberti was a well-known young noble even in the royal capital.
The Count himself had said he would arrive late due to other business, so he had not been caught up in this incident.
Had he been dragged into it, a search party would already have been dispatched from the capital, plunging the Viscount’s territory into chaos, so his absence was fortunate.

Despite having been kidnapped, the Viscount preferred not to make a major incident out of it, and in that sense, the fact that only he, the minstrel Edel, and a music academy student had been taken was still a relatively mild situation.

“I-I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry!”

Edel walked over to the student who was crouched in the corner, hugging her knees and crying.

“It’s okay. Um, Jessie—no, Jessica.”
“S-Sorry…”

Her words were slurred by sobs and barely intelligible as Edel offered her a handkerchief.

“There, there, calm down. You were dragged into this too, so it’s not your fault.”
“Sniff… E-Edelsan…”

Though she was a girl, she was wearing a standard male uniform and presenting as a man.
Because of that, the situation appeared to be three men confined together.

“It’ll be fine. I’m sure Count Faberti will come looking for us, and my wife will probably come to rescue us too.”
“Oh, a wife. You’re married?”

Having heard Edel was a minstrel, the Viscount had assumed him to be a rootless wanderer.
Such people marrying was rare, and choosing a husband who was never home was rarer still.

“I got married recently. So I stopped traveling and settled in neighboring Lodnight.”
“I see. That’s good to hear. Lodnight territory, hm. Have you ever met the Margrave?”
“I have.”

‘Every morning.’
‘Matching earrings.’
‘We have a son.’

‘…I wonder if my son is all right.’
‘After his biological mother, now his stepfather has gone missing.’
‘I may have put an unnecessary burden on him.’
‘I hope his mother can comfort him somehow.’

Unbeknownst to Edel, a secret pact had already been made to scold him together once he returned.

“She’s a beautiful woman, isn’t she, the Margrave. We don’t interact much despite being neighboring territories, but all kinds of rumors reach us. I hear she’s recently taken an interest in music, so if things go well, you might gain the honor of performing before her.”

The Viscount said this without knowing anything, but Edel was already performing music whenever Aria wished, and she was always the first to hear his new songs.

“Come to think of it, I once heard rumors that Count Faberti was a candidate to marry the Margrave.”
“Ah, A— the Margrave and Raffaello? They’d be an overwhelming sight together, such a beautiful pair.”
“Indeed. Ordinary people like us would probably retreat immediately.”
“We’d be blinded before we could even look properly.”
“Haha, quite so.”

Leaving Jessica, who still looked like she might start crying again, Edel and the Viscount chatted animatedly about their mutual acquaintance.

Edel imagined his friend Raffaello Faberti proposing to Aria, but in his mind, Aria rejected him with a cold smile and that was the end of it.

Even from Edel’s perspective as a man, Count Raffaello Faberti was handsome enough to deserve the title of the most popular man in the capital.
He efficiently finished his work every day, accepted constant invitations from women, and openly claimed he could never choose just one.
Setting aside his relationships with women, he was a trustworthy friend, boldly declaring Edel his friend despite their vastly different statuses.

“By the way, the man who was with you wasn’t an ordinary person, was he.”
“Ah, yes. My wife insisted on assigning him to me. So by now, my wife may already be on the move before Raffaello.”

‘She’s not the type to stay quiet when her husband goes missing.’
‘Still, I’d really rather she stay calmly in the castle.’
‘Couldn’t Theodore handle this somehow.’
‘If Aria herself shows up, there’s no way to gloss over things.’

Edel didn’t want the Viscount of Earclut to be saddled with the disgrace of having kidnapped the Margrave’s husband.
Aria and Edel were already married, even if it wasn’t widely known yet, and Edel’s status was that of the Margrave’s consort.

This time, however, he had come not in that capacity, but merely as a friend of Count Faberti, which had been a mistake.
Had he arrived openly as the Margrave’s consort with a full guard detail, he would never have been caught up in a kidnapping.

“I-I’m really sorry. I touched that violin…”

Jessica, finally having stopped crying, apologized to both Edel and the Viscount.

“You didn’t do anything wrong. Since we’re involved now, I want to ask—why are you dressed as a man?”

Jessica had been presenting as male the entire time, and even the Viscount had assumed she was a man.
It was only because Edel was used to seeing gender-crossing performances that she had confessed the truth.

“…I was admitted under a special exception. Professor McWell recommended me and arranged for my tuition to be waived, but when I first met him, I was dressed as a man, and he misunderstood… I couldn’t bring myself to correct him later.”
“Hm, did you happen to meet at a tavern or something?”
“What? How did you know?”

When Edel heard Jessica’s violin performance, he noticed melodies common among commoners, specifically songs drunken old men sang arm in arm at taverns.
If a young female performer appeared in a tavern, she would certainly be harassed, so in that sense, her disguise was the right choice.

Edel himself had the opposite experience.
After performing in a play in women’s clothing and then playing at a tavern without changing, he had naturally been harassed.
Letting the men touch his chest and feel how flat it really was had left them kneeling in despair.
One even prayed to the gods, but praying wouldn’t turn Edel into a woman.

“This was the only way I could earn money.”
“You’re skilled. Who taught you?”
“My mother. She passed away, but she taught me music. The violin I usually play was hers.”
“I see. That skill you learned from her must be why that violin, Akatsuki, chose you.”

The silent violin had been named Akatsuki by the Viscount.
The first song it played announced the dawn, and the name celebrated the instrument’s beginning.

“B-But if I hadn’t touched Akatsuki, it would have chosen someone else…”
“No, I don’t think so. No one else could even string it properly, right. You tried too, didn’t you, Viscount?”
“Of course. The strings snapped the moment I tried. Others stubbornly attempted it as well, but only Jessica managed to string it, let alone play it.”

Akatsuki had chosen Jessica alone.
Man or woman didn’t matter.
It chose Jessica as a musician.

Naturally, there were those who didn’t like that outcome, and this kidnapping was the result.

“Why were you kidnapped too, Viscount?”
“I am the owner of the violin, after all. It will be lent to Jessica in name. If she dies or stops performing, it returns to my house.”

Named instruments owned by nobles were often lent to performers.
This also meant the noble acted as the performer’s patron.
The performer gained access to fine instruments and a stable livelihood, which many aspired to.
Some even had royal patrons.

With Akatsuki choosing its own performer, however, it wasn’t so simple.
By being chosen, Jessica gained the Viscount’s protection, and if necessary, he could appeal to higher-ranking nobles.

As the ruler of a grain-rich territory, the Viscount was wealthy, and Jessica’s future would likely be secure.

“Even if Jessica declined Akatsuki, no one could touch it without my permission, so they must be rather desperate.”

The Viscount laughed, showing not the slightest sense of danger.

“Uh, doesn’t that mean I’m the one in the most danger here?”
“You’ll be fine. You came with Count Faberti’s invitation. They know better than to anger him by harming you.”
“Then they shouldn’t have kidnapped me at all.”
“Well, you happened to be there, so they probably had no choice.”

It truly had been an accident.
Edel had gone to satisfy his curiosity about the cross-dressing and stumbled right into the kidnapping.

“Our estate having hidden passages everywhere is a remnant of wartime construction, but the effort they put into researching and using them is impressive.”

The Viscount’s mansion, built in an era of frequent wars, was riddled with escape routes.
Even the Viscount himself didn’t know all of them.
This time, those passages had been used.

That was how they were taken without Theodore noticing outside the door.

‘I hope Theodore isn’t getting scolded by Aria.’
‘We just got along, so I’d hate for him to be replaced.’

“Either way, help will arrive soon, or the culprits will come to negotiate, so let’s behave ourselves for now.”

Once again, the Viscount spoke with absolutely no sense of urgency.

“…Help, huh.
Quiet would be preferable.”

Edel couldn’t shake the feeling that both Aria and Raffaello would make their rescues anything but subtle.