Chapter 7: Night
Night had settled deep over the Aindra estate, and the mansion had fallen into its quietest hour.
The wall lamps at the end of the corridor were still burning, their soft magic crystal light filtering through translucent shades onto the carpet below, like a thin coat of frost had settled on the floor. The servants had finished their work for the day. The whole residence had gone still, broken only by footsteps so faint they were nearly imagined.
Lucian lay in bed and stared at the ceiling.
The ceiling looked fairly dim at night. He had been staring at it long enough to get bored.
He rolled over, facing the wall.
Then the door was pushed open.
Very gently, barely a sound at all. Had Lucian been asleep, he would never have heard it.
He didn't move. He stayed facing the wall and just listened.
Barely-there footsteps: bare feet on carpet, nearly soundless, just a faint whispering shuffle. Then a rustling, like something being dragged.
Before Lucian could turn over, the corner of his blanket was lifted and a warm little bundle burrowed in beside him.
"Onii-chan--"
Lakyus kept her voice very low, a faint guilty breathlessness in it. A small hand settled on his shoulder. "Are you asleep?"
Lucian was quiet for a second.
"Asleep."
"Liar." She poked his shoulder. "If you were asleep you couldn't talk."
"Talking in my sleep."
Lakyus laughed, a small sound she immediately clapped her hand over. The other hand kept poking. "Onii-chan is so silly. That's not how talking in your sleep works."
Lucian turned over.
By the moonlight coming through the window, he could make out how she looked: golden hair slightly disheveled, clearly having rolled around on her own pillow before coming here. A pillow clutched to her chest, her equipment. White nightgown, the lace at the collar gone crooked, probably from running over.
The moonlight slipped through the gap in the curtains and fell across her face, catching those bright, shining eyes.
"Why did you come over?" Lucian asked.
"Can't sleep." Lakyus said this with complete conviction.
"So you came to bother me?"
"Not bother." Lakyus settled her pillow into place and burrowed deeper into the blankets, leaving only two eyes showing above the edge. "It's to keep onii-chan company. Sleeping alone is scary."
"When did I say I was scared?"
"Onii-chan didn't say so, but..." Lakyus blinked. "I think onii-chan might be scared. So I came to keep you company."
Lucian looked at her.
Those eyes were remarkably bright in the dark, holding an unguarded seriousness that didn't try to hide itself at all.
He wanted to say he didn't need company. He wanted to say that as her older brother he was supposed to be the one keeping her company. He wanted to say get back to your room and go to sleep, you have class tomorrow.
He said none of it.
He just shifted over, making more room for Lakyus.
"Sleep."
"Mm!" Lakyus made a satisfied sound, and then seemed to remember something. "Onii-chan, tomorrow..."
"Tomorrow is a full day of classes. And I already spent all afternoon with you today."
"I know." A different note crept into Lakyus's voice. "But... onii-chan, tomorrow, can you take me out?"
Lucian blinked.
"Out?"
"Mm." Lakyus pulled the blanket down to show her whole face and looked at him seriously. "Just once. Not anywhere far. Just walking around outside. I heard Aldred say the capital's market is lively, all kinds of things to see..."
Her voice trailed off, but her eyes got brighter and brighter, as if she had already filled them with the whole scene.
Lucian looked at her, and found himself thinking of one particular afternoon a few months back.
It had started the same way, a request just like this one. Except that time it was him who'd brought it up. He had deliberately wanted to tease this impossibly well-behaved little sister of his, to see what a flustered Lakyus looked like.
"Lakyus, why don't we skip class tomorrow. Onii-chan will take you out."
Little Lakyus's eyes had gone wide, like a startled fawn. She twisted the hem of her skirt anxiously, her voice going wobbly. "But... but Cecilia-sensei will be angry... and Father too..."
They'd gone anyway.
Lucian had marched an almost-crying honor student out of the estate while she was still making up her mind. The sun had been good that morning, the streets full of people. Lakyus went from anxious at the start to stopping dead in front of a toy stall halfway through, to on the way home clutching something she'd found and smiling so hard her eyes curved into crescent moons. That smile, Lucian still hadn't quite forgotten.
They had braced for trouble and crept back through the estate doors.
Nothing happened.
The Count was still in his study dealing with business. He looked up when they came in, nodded, and apparently noticed nothing. Cecilia-sensei the next day said nothing at all about the day before, only a faint knowing smile at the corner of her mouth.
Lucian worked it out later: Cecilia-sensei had most likely been happy for the free day. Getting paid to do absolutely nothing, who would report that? Lucian understood that particular calculation very well.
What he hadn't expected was that from that day on, Lakyus had had some kind of switch thrown inside her.
"Onii-chan, can we go again tomorrow?"
"Onii-chan, this weekend..."
"Onii-chan, I heard there's a new place on East Street..."
The soft stream of "onii-chan"s came at him one after another, and Lucian found he had no defense against them at all. He started carefully managing the balance between Cecilia-sensei and Lakyus, counting the days when he scheduled excursions. Too many and Cecilia-sensei would never be able to keep it from their father.
Young as he was, Lucian had become a master of time management.
Unable to hold out against the stream of "onii-chan"s, he'd given in. It had been a month since the last skip anyway. It should be fine.
The moonlight lay quietly across the pillow. Lakyus's breathing had steadied into sleep. Lucian looked sideways at that sleeping face, her eyelashes casting faint shadows in the pale light.
A strange feeling of disorientation came over him.
The more you have, the smaller your courage becomes.
Plan A's conservative version still carried too much risk.
Maybe he should run Plan B instead. It was the option with the lowest upfront risk and the simplest. Simple enough that Lucian didn't need to draw up a decision tree on paper.
Run.
Move the entire family to the Argland Council State.
The Argland Council State lay to the northwest of the Re-Estize Kingdom, its territory a peninsula wrapped on three sides by sea, mountainous terrain throughout, the Roble Holy Kingdom visible across the water.
It was also, as of the last volume old Maruyama had published by the time Lucian crossed over in his first life, a country the Bone King had not yet reached.
Hiding there would buy peace, at least for a while. His uncle Azuth Aindra was also based there making his way. Getting the family established wouldn't be difficult.
But a real isekai world was not one of Maruyama's novels. Maruyama could stop updating whenever the mood struck him. The Bone King was not going to pause his campaign of conquest on anyone's schedule.
"Hiding in the Argland Council State would probably buy two, maybe three comfortable years." His first life was getting hazy, and Lucian had to think hard to pull the details together.
As for the other human countries nearby, the Bone King had gone through almost all of them.
The Kingdom was still better than most alternatives. If you ran somewhere at random and got caught as a two-legged sheep, that was a fate genuinely worse than death.
Being used as raw material for a human-skin scroll would practically count as the favorable outcome.
If you ended up as one of Demiurge's grafting experiments, spliced with some orc stock, you'd come out the other end as a roasted furry. And that would be absolutely cooked.
As for fleeing to the beastman territories, Lucian gave it no consideration whatsoever.
Even if the entire Aindra family went, they would simply become a meal. Literally a meal. A significant portion of the beastmen in this world ate humans, and had done so even six hundred years ago, before the Six Great Gods arrived. Humans had been kept like livestock back then. Beastmen would not care whether you were a noble. In their view of the world, noble human meat might even taste better.
Lucian's practical mind reasserted itself.
Plan B was off the table, as it had always been.