Ascendance of a Bookworm (LN) - Volume 4.3 - Chapter Ep

Epilogue

After her request for praise, Rozemyne gave a half-hearted smile and lowered her gaze. It was the expression she made when giving up on something—such as when she had given up on visiting the library in the Royal Academy or when she had conceded that her separation from those in the lower city was necessary. But what had she given up on this time?

“Lord Ferdinand, that much is necessary for Lady Rozemyne.” Justus chastised his lord with a grimace, having noticed the significance of the situation. “As I reported earlier, she has suffered a loss equivalent to losing one’s bed and hidden room. You have been foisting responsibility for her emotional stability entirely on her lower city associates, but now that they have been taken from her, you must step up as her guardian.”

Rozemyne gazed up at Justus, her golden eyes wide with surprise. Her look of defeat was gone, now replaced with one of curiosity. Ferdinand, in contrast, wore a marginally conflicted expression as he contained his urge to protest and instead searched for Justus’s true intent. He looked at Justus while tapping his temple.

“You talk about responsibility, but does Rozemyne not already have a new family?”

Justus raised his eyebrows to indicate his doubt, which earned him a grimace in response. Had Ferdinand truly believed that Rozemyne’s new family was enough to support her, then he certainly would not have taken such great pains to grant her an opportunity to say farewell to her lower city associates.

Ferdinand turned his attention back to Rozemyne. “If your lower city family is equivalent to a hidden room, and the Plantin Company to a bed, then what are Sylvester and Karstedt equivalent to?”

“My fathers? They are like... doors,” Rozemyne answered after a moment of thought. “They block the entry of intruders, while serving to both protect me and stop me from leaving.”

“I see,” Ferdinand muttered. These analogies made the emotional distance between Rozemyne and her new family very easy to understand. There was little chance they would bring her any real peace.

“That’s an interesting analogy...” Justus observed. There was a noticeable gleam in his brown eyes. “How about Lady Elvira and my mother? What would they be?”

Regardless of what Rozemyne answered, it was important to know what she thought of those around her—after all, she had a different set of values than Justus and everyone else due to her lower city upbringing.

Rozemyne pondered her answer while eyeing Eckhart and Ferdinand. “Mother and Rihyarda are like fireplaces—they’re bright, warm, and absolutely necessary for me to survive... but I can’t lean on them. Getting too close just puts me at risk of getting burned.”

“Hm. Quite interesting...” Ferdinand said, his lips curving up ever so slightly in amusement. He and Justus went on to ask about several other names, and Rozemyne answered each in turn.

“Angelica and Cornelius... My guard knights are like bookshelves—they protect what I care about. That would make Damuel a locked bookshelf, I think. He knows my secrets and keeps them to himself.”

“I see you value Damuel more than I expected,” Ferdinand said, to which Justus nodded in agreement. They had known that Rozemyne liked him, but none had thought she valued him more than Cornelius.

“Fran and my temple attendants are like desks—a place to work, but also to read books. There’s both public and private life with them, and I need them to live.”

Justus couldn’t quite empathize with needing a desk to live; it was an analogy that made it hard to tell what Rozemyne considered important. “Perhaps you are the only one to mix your personal life with your work desk, milady?” he suggested.

“I don’t think it’s wrong to call it a personal space,” she replied, “since it’s where one can thoroughly enjoy their reading.”

Huh. A place to enjoy reading. It must be pretty important to her, then.

Justus came to realize this instantly. Rihyarda had mentioned to him that Rozemyne had maintained that she could forgo even food so long as she had books. In fact, he had seen this attachment with his own eyes at the Royal Academy.

Rozemyne’s temple attendants were absolutely necessary for her to live, and an important source of compassion that healed her heart. Her answers showed that she valued people more the closer they were to the lower city, and that she had very little attachment to the nobility. Perhaps that was logical, considering how much more time she had spent with those in the lower city, but it still made one concerned for the future.

After bringing up several more names, Ferdinand fell into thought for a brief moment. “Rozemyne, you will henceforth need to rely on Wilfried, your betrothed... but what exactly is he to you?”

“Wilfried? Hmm... He’s like a stool. A chair without a back. I can take a momentary breather with him, but not relax entirely. He’s grown a lot over the past couple years, and given the state he was in before his baptism, it’s clear just how hard he’s working... but I would find no relief or comfort in attempting to depend on him.”

Her answer was spoken flatly and without any of the deliberate euphemisms one would normally expect from a noble.

She’s cut Lord Wilfried off so cleanly that I’m almost impressed.

Justus had noticed this with how she had made Traugott resign, but on the inside, Rozemyne very sharply delineated those she did and didn’t need. She was called a deeply compassionate saint in the temple, but she just displayed an unusual distaste for death, and she wasn’t particularly compassionate toward those she didn’t care about.

Still, it’s not good how little she thinks of Lord Wilfried.

As Justus pondered these things, Ferdinand raised an eyebrow to indicate his agreement. “He certainly is unreliable,” he remarked. “We will need to raise him to the point that you can trust your back to him.”

“If possible, I would appreciate having armrests too.”

“I will consider it.”

But will Lord Wilfried be able to keep up with Lord Ferdinand’s training...?

Rozemyne always completed the harsh tasks Ferdinand gave her one after another, despite how much she grumbled about them, but that wasn’t something that just anyone could do.

After all, Lord Ferdinand teaches from the perspective of someone who hasn’t slacked off a single time in his life.

Ferdinand had put his all into his studies to minimize the complaints he received from Veronica and to earn praise from the previous archduke. Attaining high grades in the Royal Academy had been necessary for him to be accepted as an archduke candidate, and that was precisely why he was so thorough with Rozemyne, an adopted daughter. However, with those grades and that drive for self-improvement came danger.

“Milady, what do you think of the last-generation Count Leisegang?” Justus asked.

“Great-Grandfather? He’s like a delicate ornament placed atop a shelf or fireplace—one so fragile that it might crumble to pieces if so much as poked, as though it were made of sand. I feel anxious just watching him from afar.”

“I agree. We don’t want anyone poking Great-Grandfather,” Eckhart said with a chuckle. Then, his expression hardened a little. “But no matter how fragile of an ornament he may be, he is still surprisingly tough and dangerous, Rozemyne. He is currently forming a political bloc around the Leisegangs, with the ultimate aim of making you the next ruling aub. Haldenzel and Groschel are answering his call while he works on Illgner, the first province to incorporate your paper-making industry. As you are the archduke’s adopted daughter and possess both the grades and mana capacity necessary to become the next aub, he views you as a beacon of hope for the Leisegangs, and the final blessing the gods have given to him in this life.”

“I get the feeling he might outright die of despair if I tell him I don’t want to be a ruling archduchess. Is that okay? We all know I don’t intend on becoming the next aub, right?”

Rozemyne was a commoner by birth; it was unthinkable that she might become the next ruling archduchess. Sylvester wanted to preserve her connection to Ehrenfest through an engagement, and the first partner he had suggested in this regard was Ferdinand. The proposal made perfect sense—Rozemyne wasn’t Sylvester’s daughter by blood, nor was she someone Sylvester wanted to succeed him. It was easy to deduce that he didn’t even particularly want her to marry Wilfried.

“We likewise do not intend to make you the ruling archduchess,” Ferdinand noted. “The engagement with Wilfried will settle matters somewhat, but the last generation Count Leisegang is a crafty old man who has certainly earned the long life he has lived; getting a naive, affable girl like you in the palm of his hand would be nothing to him. You will most likely be interacting with the Leisegangs more often now due to the printing industry, so approach them as little as possible and rely on Elvira where you can. You may even pretend to rely on Wilfried, simply for appearances’ sake. Show that you are intent on supporting the next archduke, not becoming one yourself.”

But will even that be enough? I’m not so sure.

Assuming that Rozemyne continued to excel in the Royal Academy, spreading trends and achieving first-in-class grades while socializing with the higher-ranking duchies, the situation would potentially evolve beyond a point that Ehrenfest could handle. Things had already gotten so bad that they had been forced to stop Rozemyne from attending that year’s Interduchy Tournament and graduation ceremony.

I don’t think improving Lady Rozemyne’s socializing skills and educating Lord Wilfried on the whole is going to be enough to fix this.

So Justus thought, but it wasn’t as though he had any better ideas. It was also his duty to silently follow his lord, or at most, subtly indicate his perspective.

“I believe something else must come before educating Lord Wilfried,” Justus said. He knew that Ferdinand was trying to take the easy way out by placing the focus on training Wilfried, but that was something for his parents and retainers alone to concern themselves with. Instead, what Ferdinand needed to do was protect Rozemyne, whom he had dragged into noble society against her will.

Despite now having the status of a noble, Rozemyne was still a commoner on the inside. She would doubtless continue to protect the lower city with all she had, as she had promised... and that ran the significant risk of her one day ending up opposed to the nobility. Given her exchange with Sylvester and his scholars after her old magic contracts were canceled, it was even easy to imagine her opposing the archduke head-on.

They needed to educate Rozemyne so that this wouldn’t happen. She needed to learn to express her wishes and achieve cooperation in a way that was acceptable to other nobles, and the only one who could provide such an education was someone who knew about her commoner origins and that she desired connections to the lower city more than anything.

Ferdinand fell silent, having understood Justus’s perspective at a glance. He lowered his eyes in thought before looking at Rozemyne. “You live a life with many secrets—secrets that you can discuss with almost no one. Justus has told me that you are not adjusting well to noble society as a result, and that, under proper circumstances, those who know your secrets would provide you with more direct assistance.”

Rozemyne looked up at Justus with surprise. He nodded at her before providing an explanation.

“It is by no means easy to adjust to a culture and way of thinking that one is unfamiliar with. And this is not something we need merely to fake temporarily—you are going to be living in noble society for the rest of your life. I simply informed Lord Ferdinand that it would be unwise to force this without explaining why. Lutz said the same.”

Gathering information through disguise required one to learn the culture of wherever they were sneaking into, but Justus needed only to appear normal temporarily. Rozemyne, in contrast, had to act the part of a noble indefinitely. Justus had seen Rozemyne and the others speak with complete honesty for the first time in her hidden room, and it was then that he learned that, despite her being so close to Ferdinand and speaking to him with apparent frankness, she was still dressing herself up quite a bit. Her acting skills were far better than Justus had initially thought.

“Justus... you spoke with Lutz?” Rozemyne asked.

“Some things came up in conversation during our time together in the workshop. I have little in common with the people there, and so you were a regular topic of discussion. Details about the temple’s gray priests, the Plantin Company, and the Gutenbergs were also mixed in, which made for some exceptionally interesting conversation. It makes sense that you would adapt so poorly to our culture, considering that you were of such poor health that you could rarely go outside, and that you saved the orphans with knowledge you gained from conversing with the gods in the world of dreams.”

Justus couldn’t help but laugh as he recalled his exchanges in the workshop, but Rozemyne just looked at him quizzically. “Oh? And what did Lutz say, exactly?” she asked.

“He said you were like a business partner,” Justus replied, “in that he always needed to point out to you all the problems, why they were problems, and the ways to fix them.”

It seemed that Ferdinand had more of a reaction to Lutz’s thoughts than Rozemyne did. He fell into thought for a moment and then looked at Rozemyne with clear resolve. “As per Justus’s advice, I intend to observe your behavior more carefully and identify errors going forward. Your adjusting to noble society is our greatest priority—it would not do for you to disclose any secrets.”

Rozemyne listened to his resolve with an expression that made it clear she found this more of an annoyance than anything. In truth, nobody would be happy to hear that a perfectionist such as Ferdinand was going to be keeping an even closer eye on them with the intention of pointing out and criticizing their mistakes.

Still, she’ll accept it, since she knows it’s necessary for her to survive in noble society.

“It is not easy to live a life of secrets,” Ferdinand continued, “but considering the ripples that would result if any were to leak, they must be kept at all costs. You can understand this, yes?”

“What secrets do you have?” Rozemyne asked, answering his question with a question.

Ferdinand glared at her. “They are secrets precisely because they cannot be shared. Do not ask what you know I cannot answer, fool.”

“Sorry.” Rozemyne suddenly looked rather distant, and then she muttered under her breath, “So Ferdinand has secrets too...”

Sadly enough, plenty.

Ferdinand often worked alone in the shadows; he likely had secrets that not even Justus knew. The hardships he had put his attendants through in the Royal Academy made him not unlike Sylvester.

“Listen well,” Ferdinand said. “Politics within the duchy will shift once again upon the announcement of your engagement to Wilfried. My intention is to attempt to organize all nobles under one banner. It is crucial that you act with the utmost care; speak with me before you try to make any moves. The trip to Haldenzel in the coming spring is of particular importance, since that is Elvira’s birthplace and a province of the Leisegang nobles who hope to make you the next aub. I intend to have Karstedt and Elvira accompany you, but take care to watch what you say and do.”

“Right.” Rozemyne nodded with a solemn expression.

It would be especially challenging for Rozemyne to avoid making any clumsy decisions when she didn’t even understand what she needed to refrain from doing. No matter how skilled Elvira was, it was no simple matter to cover for Rozemyne’s often incomprehensible actions, and Karstedt wasn’t particularly astute when it came to picking up on the subtle feelings of others. All signs pointed toward something significant happening in Haldenzel.

The discussion ended, despite Justus’s unease, at which point Ferdinand stood up. They had spoken for much longer than expected; he had come only to fetch Rozemyne, not to engage in lengthy debate.

“It is past time for us to leave for the castle,” Ferdinand said while heading for the door. Rozemyne began to follow him, and it was then that Justus realized—he had forgotten to ask her what her thoughts were about his lord.

“Milady, if we were to continue the analogies from earlier,” Justus began, interrupting their leave, “what would Lord Ferdinand be to you?”

Rozemyne looked up at Ferdinand and paused for a moment in contemplation. “A bench. I can lounge around and read on it, but were I to entrust my body to it and fall asleep, I’d suffer for it with aches and pains or a full-blown cold.”

“Oh? A bench, you say?” Justus stroked his chin as he repeated the answer. Associating Ferdinand with lounging and reading almost certainly meant she placed an extraordinary amount of trust in him—even more than she placed in her temple attendants. He would never have guessed that she had grown so close to Ferdinand despite how harshly he treated her.

Justus wanted to pat Rozemyne on the head and praise her for grasping his lord’s hard-to-understand kindness, but it seemed that Ferdinand felt quite differently about being compared to a bench.

“Hm. A very interesting answer,” Ferdinand said, his voice noticeably darker than usual, perhaps due to his displeasure at her answer. He wore a relatively bright smile, but Rozemyne knew him well enough to know it was fake; she had already turned white as a sheet.

“Um. Er. Eep...”

Her mouth flapped open and closed as she desperately tried to think of an excuse. Ferdinand stepped toward her, his smile broadening.

Ah. His amusement overcame his displeasure.

His expression and tone shifted somewhat. It was exceedingly rare for him to speak with another in this manner. Justus wished only for Ferdinand to enjoy himself, so he had no intention of interrupting. He and Eckhart were both loyal retainers; if their lord was content, then so were they.

What happened to Rozemyne next can easily be guessed.