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“Don’t tell Chevalier” was a phrase I needed to strike from my lexicon. Just saying it practically guaranteed whoever I was talking to would tell Chevalier. The only question now was who would tell him: Licht, Julius, or Byron?
Who was I kidding? If, by some miracle, I convinced the one prince and two guards most intimately acquainted with my panic attacks not to tell Chevalier, Charlie would probably climb down from the coach box and march straight into his office to tell him.
And yet I persisted.
“I’m feeling better already,” I tried again, steadfastly ignoring my still-racing pulse, which said otherwise. “There’s no reason to interrupt his work.”
Three pairs of eyes remained unconvinced. Three sets of arms remained crossed over three chests. And I was uncomfortably aware of the multiple additional pairs of eyes watching from guard posts scattered around the outer courtyard. I chewed my lip, wondering which was more embarrassing: being treated as a helpless damsel in distress who couldn’t function without Chevalier, or continuing this losing argument.
“What if I stay with Licht?” I suggested. “We were supposed to spend all afternoon together, anyway. Then, when the workday is over…” I swallowed and forced my chin to remain lifted high when I wanted to let my shoulders droop. “Somebody can tell Chevalier.”
I thought it was a good compromise, but Licht frowned.
“The domestic affairs faction is training with their knights right now,” he said flatly. “Since we got back early, I was going to join them.”
“Well, that’s perfect,” I said, my voice squeaking with a little too much fake enthusiasm. “I’ve been wanting to watch you guys train.”
“By training, I mean sword fighting,” he said dubiously, furrowing his brow. “I’m not sure—”
“I know,” I interrupted hastily. “That won't be a problem.”
Julius raised a strawberry blonde eyebrow, nearly invisible against his ruddy complexion.
I suppressed a sigh and added, “If it bothers me, I’ll go straight to Chevalier myself.”
Licht finally nodded. “I should warn you, though,” he said, uncrossing his arms and turning to walk inside. “Jin’s instructions to his knights can be…a bit crude.”
I smiled and followed him, relieved to have the matter settled. “Theresa is my roommate,” I reminded him. “Every recounting of her dates is ‘a bit crude.’”
“Not like this,” Licht muttered.
“It can’t be that bad.”
We paused inside the main entrance, and Mark helped me out of my coat. Mark. Not a servant. The thought crossed my mind that he might be planning to stop by Chevalier’s office on the way to or from my room, but what could I do about that?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And there was no point worrying about it, either.
“I haven’t really seen sword fighting,” I said to distract myself. “When Chevalier rescued me…well, that wasn’t much of a fight.”
“I’m sure,” Licht said. “The only people who can keep up with him are Leon, Clavis, and Cyran. And if he’s mad, they don’t even stand a chance.”
He was definitely mad at the time. The image of his blood-spattered face and narrowed eyes filled with animalistic aggression flashed through my mind.
“Cyran?” I asked, exchanging it for a picture of the smiling red-headed knight. My limited interactions with Clavis’ right-hand man gave me the impression he was a fun-loving guy, more a friend to Clavis than a subordinate. An often exasperated, often sarcastic friend. I’d never seen him with Chevalier.
“Everybody in the domestic affairs faction trains their own knights, but it’s different for the foreign affairs faction,” Licht explained. “They say they’re too busy to do it themselves. Since Clavis handles most of Chevalier’s personal affairs, he delegated the charge of their knights to Cyran. And as the commanding officer, Cyran has to meet Chevalier’s standards whenever he performs a random spot-check.”
I often forgot the strange relationship between Chevalier and Clavis, or rather, between the Michels and the LeLouches. The concept that Clavis was not only Chevalier’s younger brother, but essentially his servant, never sat well with me.
“What about you?” I asked, diverting my thoughts in another direction. I seemed to be doing that a lot, I noticed. “You train all the time. Can’t you keep up with Chevalier?”
“No,” Licht said immediately. “Physical ability is important, but even if I could match him, I still can’t strategize the way he can. He knows what his opponent will do before they even know.”
“I can believe that.”
The conversation lapsed into silence. I glanced back over my shoulder, and as I suspected, Mark hadn’t caught up to us yet. But maybe they were right. Maybe I shouldn’t be on my way to the training arena, full of clanging swords and clashing steel. I hated that sound. I’d hated it since the day I first heard it outside of Chevalier’s office, the day after Jack attacked me, when Leon blocked what would have been Chevalier’s killing strike against Jack. The sound had reverberated through my entire body when I had been too afraid to even breathe. And then the next time I heard it was when I was hanging in that dungeon, when it brought me back to consciousness in time to watch Chevalier kill and maim people to reach me.
That never made it into my nightmares, oddly enough. The clanging did. Chevalier shaking a dead soldier from his blade didn’t.
We stepped through a large, plain wooden door into the cold, stone arena, a massive space devoid of decorations or comfort, eerily similar to that dungeon except for the sunlight. The noise hit me right away, echoing off the rough gray walls and the smooth gray floor, down the stairs of the upper level where we stood to the lower level, every clash and clang traveling from my feet through my bones to my pounding heart. I forced air into my lungs and followed the sound to the two men fighting down below, surrounded by hundreds of cheering onlookers.
Two men. Only two. White and black. Colliding and dancing away and crashing into each other again, silver flashing in and out almost faster than I could keep up.
Somehow, seeing Chevalier and Leon behind those swinging swords eased my tension just a little.
“Hey, look! Ivetta’s here,” Jin called out.
If Chevalier and Leon heard, they gave no indication. It was nothing like watching Chevalier attacking Baron Flandre. Flandre had been on the defensive from the start, desperately parrying each vicious strike, but Leon gave as good as he got. My anxiety came back as Chevalier twisted to the side just in time to avoid a blade in his face, and then he kicked out while Leon was off balance, catching him in the knee and sending him to the ground. He followed through with a hard swing down, one that Leon narrowly avoided by rolling to the side. Sword hit stone, and sword lashed out, forcing Chevalier backwards as Leon regained his footing.
“They don’t look like they’re training,” I said nervously.
“Chevalier approaches every fight as if it were the real thing, so Leon has to fight the same way,” Licht explained. “But they’re using practice swords. The blades are dull.”
That wasn’t much reassurance. Especially since I could see the glacial intensity in Chevalier’s narrowed eyes from here.
“Winner gets to kiss Ivetta,” Jin called out again.
“You trying to get me killed?” Leon answered breathlessly, a smirk on his lips even as he evaded another attack.
“Stop distracting them!” Yves warned Jin.
Leon dodged again and grabbed Chevalier’s sword wrist, twisting it in a way that looked painful. Chevalier's sword clattered to the ground, but he didn’t miss a beat, slugging Leon in the jaw with his other fist and wrenching Leon’s sword from his hand when he stumbled backwards.
“Are you sure this is okay?” I asked Licht.
“When it’s a matter of life and death, you use whatever you have available,” Licht replied. “This might be it, though.”
Leon was on the defensive now. The watching knights scattered as Chevalier forced him back into the crowd with a relentless onslaught of attacks, looking for all the world like his sole purpose was to decapitate his brother. Leon grabbed the nearest knight’s sword just in time to block Chevalier’s sword inches from his face. He grunted and shoved Chevalier back, and then he was on the offensive, driving Chevalier toward the center of the arena.
“Or not,” Licht muttered.
Leon lunged forward with a vicious strike, but Chevalier spun away and kicked the sword out of Leon’s hand in the same movement. Before Leon had time to react, the point of Chevalier’s blade was at his neck.
They both froze. Leon was visibly panting.
“That’s it, then,” Licht said. “If you weren’t here, Chevalier would probably call for his next sparring partner now, but I doubt he’ll stick around. Which means nobody goes to the infirmary.”
“The infirmary?” I asked. Chevalier had dropped his sword arm and stepped back, flipping the sword around to hand it to Leon. Leon took it with a grin.
“It’s always busy after one of Chevalier’s training sessions,” Licht explained nonchalantly.
“Show’s over,” Leon announced to the watching knights. “As you were.”
The disordered crowd spread from the perimeter of the arena across the center, forming orderly lines among clearly marked groups. Yves took his position in front of one group, already giving orders his knights were quick to obey, and Licht left me to trot down the stairs as Chevalier and Leon retrieved their sword belts down below. Jin, on the other hand, stripped off his jacket, vest, and tie, rolled them up, and set them on the ground. His knights seemed to know what to do in the absence of any instructions from their leader, though, pairing off and sparring while he opened the top half of his shirt to expose his very muscular chest and lay down, using his clothes as a pillow.
I was wide-eyed with shock and blushing furiously before he even opened his mouth.
“Joe, throw your hips into it,” he called out, interlacing his fingers behind his head and crossing his feet at his ankles. “Imagine you’re romancing a beautiful woman. You wanna give her a good ride, don’t you?”
Even more heat rushed to my cheeks and spread to my ears. A strangled squeak sounded behind me. I turned, startled, to see Theresa arriving with Mark. Her green eyes were wide as saucers, and her face was nearly the same color as her messy red curls.
“Knock it off, you old pervert!” Yves shouted in exasperation.
“You seem tense, Yves,” Jin replied lazily. “Not getting any?”
I spun back around to see Yves’ face practically glowing red down in the arena. “I—you—” He groaned and stormed over to Jin. “There are ladies present!”
“Now they’re about to get into it,” Leon said, shaking his head as he climbed the stairs with Chevalier. His amber eyes moved past me to Theresa, and with a good-natured smile, he said, “Hey, Theresa, eyes on me.”
“S-sorry,” she stammered.
I sent her a curious glance, which she avoided, and decided I’d have to ask her about it later. I was more worried about Chevalier and Leon, anyway. They looked no worse for wear, but I knew they had to have injuries after that fight.
“Are you okay?” I asked, looking from one to the other and back again.
Leon rubbed his jaw and shrugged. “Yeah, nothing that needs a doctor. It’s been a while since we sparred, hasn’t it, Chevalier?”
Chevalier’s eyes had been searching my face while Leon spoke. They didn’t bear the cold ferocity of before, and I knew he hadn’t missed the detail that Licht and I weren’t supposed to be back yet. He ignored Leon and took my hand, leading me toward the door without a word of explanation. In and among the metallic clang and echoing booted steps of the knights behind and below us, Jin and Yves were still arguing. Or rather, Yves was arguing and Jin was goading him.
“Of all the disgusting—”
“Hey, don’t knock it until you try it. See, the trick is—”
The thud of the door closing behind us prevented me from hearing the rest of that sentence, thankfully. But then the image of Licht and the Stotts boys playing and laughing in the leaves came to mind, and I had to smile to myself.
Boys will be boys.26Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡLSHrLqeYOj
