She looked at him dazedly for a second. 'So it was just dirt, not freckles, huh?' Slightly disappointed, Rowena received a steaming cup of tea just as she looked at Norina and was surprised. "How did you do it so fast?"

Norina, completely unaware of her mistress's actual confusion, began to laugh warmly. 'She is so cute sometimes, making jokes like that to cover her shyness.' Of course, she had to help her. "We prepared it beforehand, my lady."

Rowena realized the nature of the tin bottles from before. They didn't have thermos flasks here because they didn't know how that technology would work, but they did have man-made artifacts with Mana Stones that would heat everything inside or keep it at a preset temperature.

It was just a minor gadget, so she forgot about it. Mana Stones were rather rare in this world, but nobles would have such objects.

A Mana Stone could be influenced by a person who was able to manipulate Mana. The whole process was based on intention. A stone already filled with one intention could not be inscribed with another.

For example, a stone that was supposed to heat up something in the container it was part of, could not be changed to a stone that would cool things down, or make something float.

The more the stones had to work, the faster their energy was used up. As a result, tiny objects with the stones built in, such as those bottles, would become useless when the stone exceeded its limit and crumbled.

Normally, devices with Mana Stones inside could last for decades if they were checked frequently and had their stones refilled with Mana by a Spellkeeper – no, a High Priest in this world. And bigger ones, like fridges, were made so that the Stone could be replaced if needed as well.

'They're so versatile, if you're good at your craft and give it a one-track command, those things can do almost anything except for your homework,' she thought in regret, 'not that I tried or anything.'

A little interested, she looked down into her cup, only then realizing that she had not even acknowledged the High Priest in front of her.

Without so much as looking up, in an effort to make her pause seem more natural, she opened her mouth: "How should I address you, if not as Sir?"

She read nothing into the renewed silence, while the men and women around her felt the urge to pat her on the head.

Her petite frame could only be described as "delicate", and the way she hunched over her iron mug, red with steam rather than embarrassment, made her look very vulnerable.

Logan Randall had been a part of the Duchy's Brigade for quite some time. He had joined at the age of fifteen, now he was twenty-one. Back then, shortly after he had enlisted, he had heard how everyone was worried about the sick young lady. He didn't know exactly what happened, but the manor was in chaos for days because she wouldn't wake up.

Afterwards, it was said that the lady was an insufferable and entitled child, filled with hatred and anger. She was also said to be quite eccentric, apparently trying to get her own servants into trouble by pretending to be mistreated so that her father would pay attention to her, which never worked.

All these stories, and more, would go around the estate, its servants, and finally reach the knights' training grounds, where they usually fell on deaf ears. A knight didn't care about entitlement, he cared about lineage.

When they swore allegiance to the head of a household, they were swearing to that family as well, so anyone by the same name had to be treated utmost respect until the one they swore allegiance to said otherwise.

However, their Vice-Captain, the only one in his first division of the Silver Lion Brigade who had ever actually met the young lady, would never talk, or clear up the rumors about her. All he would say was that they should watch their words when talking about their master.

He always looked down with a complicated expression on his face when he talked about Lady Rowena. Logan couldn't understand the reason for it when he looked at her now.

One of the wildest rumors surrounding her was that she was originally gorgeous, as she looked like the spitting image of her mother, the late Duchess – but that she looked like a horrifying corpse these days, a scarecrow before men. When he looked at her again and again, he saw none of that.

She was beautiful, surely by any man's standards. 'Where did these horrible stories come from?' He thought of the man lying on the extended back of the carriage as he watched Yaakov bring a bowl of stew in that direction.

When he returned to his mistress with her two maids by her side, his eyes met those of the second-in-command. Even Sir Sean didn't know exactly what had happened to Lady Rowena since he'd last seen her about three years ago, but he assumed it wasn't his place to comment on that.

His captain, the Grand Duke of Varnhagen, was going through a lot of pain over his only biological daughter. That is, he didn't blame her for it, nor did Sir Sean.

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He could only remember the sheer malice and pain she exuded then and was relieved that when her eyes met his, there was nothing left of that hostility towards him and everyone else. She also didn't seem to be in constant pain anymore, which had been the most worrying.

He sensed her wariness, maybe a bit of insecurity and curiosity. If anything she seemed like someone who had never been on a journey outside of her home before. She actually did travel before, obviously, but it had been about five years prior, so her attitude was understandable.

These days, he had heard that she rarely ever left her annex to set foot in the garden, let alone travel all the way to the Northern Heights.

When Sir Sean looked at his mistress again, after alternating between his fellow knights and the young lady's maids, he noticed that she was holding up her bowl, and a young maid, perhaps about eighteen years old, had to get up to refill it. "Wait, I will do that for you, so you don't have to take off your blanket."

Blinking, the servant with the frizzy blond hair looked up and smiled. "I will gladly do that much for my lady, you need not go out of your way, Sir Sean. Thank you for your concern." As she said that, she got up to refill the bowl with stew, as Norina knew best that her mistress would probably need her to get up at least two more times anyway.

With that rejection, he watched as Lady Rowena, the smallest of them all, gratefully accepted the bowl, which was actually her third, as he had been too lost in thought to even see her suck in her second helping.

'Good thing they watch me only now and then, otherwise I'd feel quite conscious of that,' she thought, when in reality, she usually never realized people staring at her eating behaviors anyway.

"I'm glad my lady seems to be enjoying the food," Logan began from behind her when she was almost done vacuuming the contents of serving number three.

Turning slowly as she handed the bowl back to the maid on her right, she thought for a second and swallowed what was left in her mouth. It was a really good stew, she couldn't deny that.

"Yes, thank you for the effort," she said, well, she intended to say her thanks after she was done, to make it less awkward. She felt a new, warm bowl being placed in her hands just as the not-quite-knight was about to say something in return.

'Thank God we made a lot,' Sir Yaakov, who was currently sitting further away on the carriage's roof, thought to himself as he naturally watched the most important person on this mission as well as the others.

He was already preparing to get a few hours of sleep, but watching a young lady, barely more than one-and-a-half meters tall, obliterate at least three liters of beef stew all by herself was just a little too fascinating to ignore. When, after her sixth helping, he wondered if she might be rolling around in the carriage instead of sitting tomorrow, they heard a sigh of relief and then, again, a bout of silence.

She had to maintain her body temperature, even with the help of her servants, because her body hadn't endured many temperature fluctuations in recent years. She was small and, though healthier now, not someone with a particularly thick skin.

She had to run on Mana all the time, which ate away at her nutrients, and she didn't want to lose what little muscle tissue she had managed to regain to this journey. And the hunger, though still manageable, had reared its ugly head an hour or two before they had finally stopped.

Rowena put down her bowl, now truly focused on this voyage again, and smiled at her knight, Sir Sean, who had done the work on the food together with High Priest Logan Randall. "That was really delicious, I'm grateful for the food," she said, earning a look of pure astonishment, and maybe a little sweat on his face, when he could only nod in return.

'Maybe it wasn't that she didn't eat, but ate like a regular person and it wasn't enough…?" he wondered, but scratched the thought.

He had expected they would have to throw the rest away, having made too much out of habit, if they couldn't pack it up somehow, but the problem had solved itself in the most unexpected way.

The noble lady who had "solved" their unaddressed crisis, on the other hand, simply lay down with her maids at her side to catch a wink of sleep herself. Since they couldn't and wouldn't prevent her from doing so, and knowing that they should do the same, as they had another fifteen hours of stressful riding ahead of them, they followed suit, and the campsite slowly settled down.

The only person who had stayed awake had been out of sight the whole time, watching the scene from his safe distance and scoffing at them. Now he didn't really care. A strand of lavender hair fell into sight of his deep red eyes, so he brushed it aside and made himself comfortable to watch the group for the next few hours.

By the time they packed up and left the clearing, when it was already light and the sun was high in the sky, Rowena knew she was in for many more hours in an uncomfortable carriage. The view outside the window of the small carriage grew whiter and whiter as they approached the Northern Heights, as the mountain range on the northern edge of the North-Western Continent was called.

Beyond those heights, from the top of the mountains, it was said that one could see the northernmost landmass on the map, which wasn't exactly big enough to be considered a continent, but it was its own little island - the Northern Peak.

Those "Devil's Horses" that were currently making noises reminiscent of tales of the so-called "Wild Hunt" in her old world were originally from the Tevak region of the Northern Peak. It was cold and barren, and anything that lived there had to be resilient.

She could feel the cold permeating through the thick wood of the carriage, and the green leaf trees around her had gradually turned into pines or trunks with bare branches many miles ago. But it was only when she felt the constant rattling become lighter and more pronounced that she realized they had begun to slow down.

"We're almost there," Norina exclaimed enthusiastically, knowing by now how much her mistress hated riding in the carriage, "a new environment will surely be exciting."

Rowena nodded and watched intently as the rural surroundings became more and more vibrant. More houses appeared in the distance, their lights still on. It was already dark again, but the snow on the ground was clearly visible. It wasn't much of a layer, but she hadn't expected the region to be covered as they had come from the capital where summer was still very much alive.

It took a few more minutes for them to slow down considerably, and suddenly the carriage came to a stop. Muffled voices could be heard from outside as the coachman and the three knights guarding the daughter of the lord of the territory had to answer who they were trying to bring inside.

As she looked out, though it was too dark to see details even with the moonlight above, she saw a high, towering wall that she looked up at in amazement.

It was the wall of the capital city of the Varnhagen Territory, Vandenberg - they had finally arrived at their original northern homeland.