Chapter 6

“I don’t get it. So, His Grace the Grand Duke and Damien chose my family? Do you think that makes any sense?”

Surprisingly, Arkin was nonchalant.

“Of course it doesn’t make sense. Your family isn’t from Luxen, nor are you some insanely high-ranking house. In this case, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say they looked at the person, not the family?”

Ha.

“Because I’m close to Adelinde?”

“Honestly… it feels a bit wrong to say this, but Lady Adelinde has gone through a lot of unpleasant incidents since she was very young. It’s a fact that if someone is going to be Damien’s marriage partner, she also needs to be close to Lady Adelinde, but there are very few people who can be trusted.”

“Your younger sister is there too!”

“She’s fourteen!”

Arkin was appalled, but in truth, a seven-year age gap in an engagement wasn’t particularly rare in this era. That was precisely why people had assumed Damien would be Adelinde’s future husband.

Of course, Tislin knew better than anyone that Damien would never marry Adelinde. So, if they wanted to match someone closer in age, choosing Tislin made a fair amount of sense. Even so, Tislin certainly wasn’t the only person who met those conditions.

“In the end, there’s no real special reason then. It’s not as if I’m the only trustworthy person, and among the options, there are quite a few families that would actually be helpful to Adele.”

“Well, if it’s His Grace the Grand Duke, he would have prioritized Damien’s wishes over things like that. But is that really so important? You seem extremely dissatisfied.”

Tislin kept quiet for a moment.

Would it be alright to tell Arkin that she wanted to break off the engagement? She didn’t think he was the type to go around gossiping, but if he knew that Damien opposed breaking off the engagement, he wouldn’t give her any more information.

“You like Damien anyway. Isn’t this a good outcome?”

“Hey!”

Her face flared hot in an instant. Not wanting to show her flushed face, Tislin lowered her head deep and began stomping recklessly on Arkin’s feet. Knowing he had slipped up, Arkin quietly let his feet get stomped on.

Once her anger cooled down a bit, Tislin asked sneakily.

“…How did you know?”

“Hey, you… How could I not know when you act like that?”

Arkin grumbled, waving his fingertips in front of Tislin’s flushed face. Tislin cooled her face with her cold hands while glaring fiercely at Arkin.

“Is it really that obvious?”

“There’s no one who doesn’t know. It’s not something to be that embarrassed about, either. Whether in Luxen or here, girls who like Damien are overflowing anyway.”

That was true.

Tislin let out a sigh.

While Damien was special to Tislin, Tislin certainly wasn’t special to Damien. There might be some affection or familiarity built up from spent years half-raising Adelinde together. But that was by no means the kind of emotion that should decide a marriage.

“I don’t know what Damien is thinking. Why on earth did he say he’d get engaged to me?”

“Well, he must have a reason.”

A reason that neither Arkin nor Tislin knew?

The reason why the Grand Ducal House of Luxen chose the completely unremarkable Tislin Ermiz as the engagement partner for Damien Xsanov—the Grand Duke’s sole disciple and Grand Duchess Adelinde’s closest confidant.

And the reason why he insisted on maintaining an engagement with someone he had no feelings for—enough to casually reject her confession—even when that person asked to break it off.

She couldn’t come up with a single plausible reason.

Having remained buried in thought while staring down at her toes for a long time, Tislin let her shoulders droop. Stand here and babble as two clueless people might, a clear answer wasn’t going to come out of this anyway.

“…Alright. Thanks. I’ll get going now.”

Even though she hadn’t gained much.

Tislin left a promise that he could ask whenever he needed anything from the Department of Administrative Sciences, then turned back.

Left alone, Arkin lightly tapped the floor of the training ground that had recently been worked on, before strolling back to the dormitory lounge.

It was two hours later when Damien returned from the Order of Knights.

The King had assigned this magic swordsman—whom he had temporarily snatched away from the Grand Duke of Luxen—a position in the Royal Guards to squeeze as much utility out of him as possible while he attended the Royal Academy.

It would be even better if he happened to switch allegiances along the way.

However, having seen that his desperate wooing hadn’t worked in the slightest, the King was likely coming to accept the reality of being rejected by now. Probably.

Damien was the sole prized disciple raised personally by the Grand Duke of Luxen since childhood; no matter how tempting a deal was offered, how could he possibly switch masters? The minds of absolute rulers were simultaneously so simple in that regard.

Arkin formed a bitter smile internally.

“You’re a bit late?”

“The Commander of the Knights held me back.”

“Was it something important?”

“No. Nothing much.”

Though one would have to hear the Commander’s side of the story to know for sure. Arkin chuckled and blurted out:

“Well, I had something happen.”

Damien, who was wiping down his sword, raised his head as if waiting for the next words. The sword, which he had constantly infused with mana to tame, gleamed with a subtle black luster despite being made of standard quality iron.

“Your fiancée came looking for someone.”

“Tis did?”

“Me.”

Damien knitted his brows. Wondering what brought this on from a guy who rarely showed expression and treated everything with utter indifference, Arkin spoke up further. Since it was about Damien’s fiancée anyway, there was nothing to hide.

“She asked me how she ended up engaged to you.”

“Why would she ask you that?”

“I don’t know either. Well, we didn’t talk about much. She thought her parents were the ones who sent the proposal. So I just mentioned that it probably originated from our side.”

Come to think of it, did she think that? Damien mulled over their previous conversation. She had spewed words out so frantically that he hadn’t listened properly while trying to soothe her, but it seemed she might have.

But now that the engagement was finalized, did such a detail even matter?

“And then?”

“And then? That’s all. Why you were trying to get engaged to her. We just talked about that for a while before she left.”

Arkin suddenly remembered saying something like, ‘You like Damien anyway,’ to Tislin, but he quietly erased that memory from his mind.

“Honestly, I haven’t heard anything either. You just notified us out of nowhere that you’re getting engaged without any context. But why her specifically? Tislin Ermiz isn’t bad, but… why go out of your way?”

She was pretty enough, and it was true that as she grew older, more guys were sneaking glances at Tislin Ermiz. There were even rumors going around asking if the Grand Duke would marry Miss Ermiz off to a man from Luxen if he ended up arranging her marriage.

Her personality didn’t have any sharp edges either, and since she was the only person Adelinde relied on besides the Grand Duke and Damien, it wasn’t bad for the Grand Ducal House of Luxen either. Having known Damien for a long time, even if they didn’t know each other inside out, they must have areas where they clicked.

However, weighing the pros and cons, the women the Grand Duke had pushed in front of Damien until now also met those conditions.

“She’s pretty, but it’s not like there aren’t women prettier than her, nor are you the type to…”

“Arkin, keep your nose out of another man’s fiancée.”

Weighing various conditions meant dissecting Tislin Ermiz and putting a price on her, which was undeniably a shallow act. Even if he tried to excuse it by saying everyone does this when looking for a marriage partner, that excuse wouldn’t work on Damien at all.

Arkin brushed it off while avoiding Damien’s chilly glare.

“Anyway, since I didn’t know anything, I told her I didn’t know. That was the end of it. Since a girl from another department came all the way to the dorms, some random rumors might float around, but I’ll just gloss it over by saying she came regarding a joint assignment we did together for last year’s general elective class.”

Damien, who had sheathed his finished sword and set it upright, asked:

“You did that with her?”

“Uh, yeah. It was a joint project between different departments anyway, and neither she nor I knew anyone in other departments. We just did it casually, so we only met up a few times.”

“…Why didn’t you tell me?”

It wasn’t a question directed at Arkin. Arkin let out a hollow laugh.

“You were busy being called around back then. I don’t think you were even at school most of the time. If those absences hadn’t been excused, you would have been held back a year.”

From the Royal Guards to the Department of the Great Parpanan War, he was called here and there to the point where having ten bodies wouldn’t have been enough. Traveling around the border regions, he couldn’t even show his face near the school. It was natural that his end-of-term attendance, as well as the entire exam period, were blown away.

The King had subtly suggested that he repeat the year and attend for one more year, but thanks to the Grand Duke of Luxen taking a firm stance, such a disaster was avoided.

Raking through his memories, Damien scowled.

“So she did it with you.”

In truth, Arkin thought that even if Damien had attended school properly, Tislin would never have asked Damien to do the assignment together.

That Tislin Ermiz liked Damien was already common knowledge in Luxen, but at school, it wasn’t even known that the two were acquainted. Besides, Tislin wasn’t the type to cling to someone or chase them around just because she liked them.

Above all, although the two were engaged now, seeing her react so violently made it seem like Tislin hadn’t even entertained the idea of marrying Damien. In that case, since she would have had to find a marriage partner herself, she wouldn’t have wanted to make it obvious that she liked another man.

Even setting all that aside, Damien Xsanov was always a difficult figure for the boys and girls of Luxen to approach. So ‘most likely,’ Tislin had no intention of asking Damien to do the assignment together in the first place.

Though well, there was no need for Damien Xsanov to know that.

“Most likely.”

“Don’t do it this year.”

Now this was a sight to behold. Arkin burst into a hollow laugh.

“…What, do you actually like her? Is that why you got engaged?”

Without so much as replying, as if it were beneath him, Damien left the lounge and walked straight into his room.

Watching his straight back, Arkin tilted his head. Seeing him act like that, it didn’t seem like that was the case. What was his deal, really?