The young lady was helped out of her carriage, her legs as stiff as her shoulders, by a knight who flashed her a bright white smile, though she hadn't even looked up to see it as she climbed out safely while watching her feet.

This man must have been starving and exhausted, because he had to protect himself with Mana the whole time they were moving. Otherwise, they were covered only by a pair of rectangular goggles over their eyes and a scarf over their noses and mouths.

They rode horses next to her carriage to guard Rowena from the outside - she was starting to feel bad because she was whining about her butt hurting.

In order to thank him properly, she tried to focus on him.

He had taken off the bandana that was now hanging loosely around his neck, but when she managed to look up far enough to see that he still had his goggles on, she could finally take in the whole picture. And then she saw it.

His naturally golden hair was unrecognizable from hours of riding on a Tevak horse, and the glasses looked extremely foggy from the dirt that blew on them in the wind. She quickly covered her mouth, but couldn't help the snort that escaped as she tried not to laugh in his face.

'Shit, he looks like Chuckie Finster from Rugrats, but blond.' Her love of spending her empty evenings watching TV just made her life a little more difficult, one might say. He even looked like he had freckles, which reminded her of herself when she was Celia.

She could feel her cheeks burning from the pressure of her suppressed laughter, and trying to keep herself from laughing made her body want to laugh even more. It really was like a reflex, completely outside of her control.

The man scratched his cheek innocently after she let go of his hand, chuckling awkwardly. "Sorry, I think I might look a bit funny right now."

She finally put her nasty personality into an empty chamber of her mind and locked it very securely. "No, no, not at all. I just..." she started and her voice trailed off, "I couldn't breathe. I'm not out much, so fresh air upsets my lungs."

"Fresh air with a lot of oxygen is?" he asked calmly.

"Yes," she said, looking him straight in the eye. 'How did we even get here? Please, spare us the embarrassment and don't answer that.'

But he just chuckled, this time with less embarrassment, and then jumped in surprise when someone behind him suddenly cleared his throat.

"Logan," a deep male tenor was heard, "what are you doing with our young lady?"

Chucky, no, Logan seemed horrified. "I'm not doing anything, I swear! We have barely spoken - have we, my lady?" He looked pleadingly at Rowena, who didn't even know how to react and instead just nodded her head confusedly, which didn't seem right either.

"Stop bothering the young lady, are you deaf?" The black-haired knight, who also looked disheveled but had definitely pulled his hair back and removed his glasses, grabbed his fellow soldier by the collar of his uniform and dragged him away.

A third man, tall with brown hair and a very warm gaze, appeared as the comedic duo finally left the scene. She looked back and saw that the third knight must have helped her maids out of the carriage after her.

His skin looked a little darker than what one would get from a simple bath in the sun while training as a knight. He was a southerner.

It was rare to see a southerner on the North-Western Continent, Rowena could hardly remember one being mentioned in the entire book. 'Well, they don't have airplanes, after all.'

In the end, that meant he had been recruited, he was probably not a noble from Arlen - or even from the Empire at all. And Carlisle van Varnhagen wouldn't recruit someone with no talent.

Now that they were actually interacting with her, instead of standing there solemnly, bowing to her father and mounting their horses, she began to get a better feel for them. Somehow, she felt a little better.

There were only two more people in their little entourage. The coachman simply peeled himself from his seat at the front, took off the helmet he was wearing, and dropped onto the grass next to a spot where the black-haired knight and "Logan" were preparing a small campfire.

The second-in-command of the Silver Lion Knights' Brigade, Sean, a former commoner from a village on the outskirts of the Empire that no one seemed to have heard of when asked, was disgusted by his subordinate's behavior. Not that he didn't understand him, but even if they didn't know it, he had seen the young lady before.

Without intending to be rude, he still knew that staying away from her was the better option. He glanced at her as she faced her two maids and looked around with a blank expression.

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And suddenly she took off, crouching next to a tree at the edge of the clearing they had chosen to set up camp in. It would be important to mention that they were halfway to the north by now.

This meant that the ground had grown considerably colder, and a thin layer of frost covered much of the forest soil. "My lady!" he called assertively.

It made Rowena stop in her tracks, as she had just tried to reach for a stray branch on the whitened ground. When she looked in the knight's direction, he flinched and turned away to cough into his hand.

Since he didn't seem to say anything, she stood up and confronted him instead. "Is something wrong, Sir Knight?"

She noticed his gray eyes and felt that he reminded her of someone, too. Like the young woman who had silently watched her apologize in the temple, they must have appeared in the book.

Though the woman in the temple could only be one person after further reflection, the same could not be said for the man in front of her.

"It is unseemly for a woman to gather firewood in the cold of the north."

"But we are not that far up north yet?"

"Far enough," he insisted, and it was true, if she hadn't started coursing her Mana through her body to keep it warm, she would have been shivering already. "Please take a seat on the blankets your maids have spread out by the campsite." He wanted to know why she bothered at all, but he was afraid to make her angry by prying.

"I was just curious if the wood would even be usable for a fire." It seemed cold and damp.

It wouldn't be the first time she had to stake out a forest to take care of a rift - a place where a few Visitors had already come through, leaving enough residue for many more to come after them if it wasn't sealed immediately.

Surprised, he looked into her eyes for the first time and blinked in confusion. Whatever he had meant to say was gone like a lie.

'Again?' she thought, 'are my eyes that scary?'

Sir Sean had to pull himself together and try to come up with an answer that made some sense. "No," he replied, "but we have High Priests with us, they will use fire-related magic to dry and ignite them."

'Fair enough.' A Spellkeeper could mainly use their Mana and apply it skillfully to things like blessing grounds, infusing a will into Mana Stones, or using Mana Stones to heal, but some, with a larger Mana reserve in their body, would be able to manifest things with Mana.

But Manifestation required more than just skill. It was like a genetic code, often hereditary, dictating what someone could manifest, and the most common of the few people who could do it were elemental Manifestations.

It acted like an extension to the human body, drawing Mana from the Aether naturally, while mixing in one's own essence with the intention of manifesting something like an additional limb. That's why those Manifestations were just as unique as one's face – while there might likely be a Doppelganger somewhere in the world, yours was still yours and it could not be chosen or changed.

'In this case, one might be able to manifest a literal firestorm, while another willed a sentient phoenix made of flames to life,' she recalled from things she had seen with her own eyes when she was Celia, 'it was crazy.'

To her, it was a far cry from Executors like herself, who only had the ability granted to them by their Numbered, like some sort of leech. Then again, she wasn't even that anymore.

That train of thought ended up making her chuckle in self-irony, which earned her another puzzled look from the knight. "Oh, well, may I have your name, Sir Knight?" Rowena deflected like a pro.

Startled by the realization that he hadn't actually introduced himself, he bowed with a hand on his chest. "Please forgive my tardiness, I am Sir Sean, Vice-Captain of the Silver Lion Knights," the man explained, "and I will act as head of your guard for as long as we travel together, until you are safely reunited with His Grace."

'That's such a weird way to put it. Why would being reunited with the Grand Duke be my ultimate goal?' It just sounded wrong to her. 'As opposed to 'going home'?'

Anyway, "I appreciate your service," she said, not too high and mighty, but with a bit of attitude. She didn't want them to abandon her on some mountain but she had to live up to her name.

None of the nearby men said anything, they just looked up and stared at her curiously. Even the guy on the ground turned around, forgetting to play roadkill for a second.

Ava and Norina, on the other hand, smiled warmly and, without a word, led their lady to the now burning fire that the knight named Logan had lit about a minute earlier.

'As I thought, my lady has really changed, it wasn't just for looks.' As Norina sat her down, she shot warning looks at the three knights, telling them to stop looking at her mistress so rudely.

Even Ava joined in as she slapped the lounging coachman across the back of his head. Rowena didn't understand any of their behavior and simply wrote it off as a cultural difference from one world to another.

'They said that traveling to a faraway country was like going to another world, right?' Without further ado, she sat down with Norina on her right and Ava on her left, feeling a warmth she had never felt on a trip into the woods before.

'Must be the warmth of their bodies,' she thought, sitting between them like a chicken on its eggs. 'I wish it could always be this comfortable.'

She just needed to figure out how to keep that feeling. While she pondered, her maids handled a small basket that Norina had packed in the morning and moved closer to either side of their lady, shielding her from the wind while covering themselves with thin blankets.

That reminded Rowena, "What about the second coachman?"

As they began to prepare a stand with a kettle for cooking, and Norina took the basket to retrieve two tin bottles and a few iron cups, there was a moment of silence.

Then a light bulb went off in Logan's head. "He wouldn't come out, he said he was staking out for us tonight."

She nodded. But something was strange. If he spent the night watching the camp, how would he replace their first driver?

Said driver, Hauser, had already fallen asleep, and all he had said was that he wanted to be woken up when their stew was ready, and not let him maliciously skip the meal to have more. Because he would be at the reins for quite a while.

"By the way," the blond man said, after he had washed his face with ice-cold water in a nearby stream and looked more civilized now, "my name is Logan Randall, since I'm technically not a knight, I'm not a Sir, but I do belong to the Brigade. I am honored to finally meet the young lady of the Duchy."