Everything had been going wrong ever since her brother died.

Since the attack on the castle, Renea hadn’t even had the chance to stop moving. She wished so desperately for a single moment to properly mourn Ailn, but she knew that the barrier had to be inspected as swiftly as possible.

So, she and Sophie went.

That was only proper. The anxiety wrought by duty was what kept her going. Just like anyone else, she would’ve preferred the chance to stay at the castle, just a short reprieve to pull herself together—but Renea also understood she wasn’t the only one in the castle who’d ever lost a loved one.

There was no way to hack it in a land this bleak without knowing how to turn distress into determination. That’s what it meant to protect the duchy.

Even so, her feet were so heavy. Almost as heavy as her eyelids. Renea was tired from stress and grief from the very start, and simply forced herself to keep going.

Then she received something unbelievable. It was a missive from the knights, informing her that Ailn had survived. But how? It made no sense. She’d seen Ailn’s body herself, and even up to the moment she’d left the castle, she stayed by him, praying in her sorrow.

And yet… the knights would never joke about such a serious matter. Certainly not one so important to her.

So Renea let the hope bubble up, right from the soles of her feet. Her head in the clouds and her heart beating fast, she believed that, maybe, God had heard her prayers.

And there Ailn was, waiting for her when she returned to the castle. He really was alive! That was the only thing that mattered. Who cared if he’d lost his memory, or that his behavior had allegedly turned strange?

Renea knew head injuries could affect personality. She’d happily work with him for as long as it took to recover what he’d lost, and remember who he was—and if he never did, that was just as well.

She’d be there for him, no matter what abrasive traits he took on.

Aldous had mentioned in his missive that Ailn had begun to antagonize the members of the Azure Knights.

That he’d been gallivanting around the castle, stirring up the rumors that involved him and Sophie.

That he’d become close to Sir Kylian, and seemed to be using him to take advantage of Ennieux’s crush on the hapless knight, inveigling his way into her good graces.

All of this bewildered her, but she banished her doubts to the back of her mind. She just wanted to be close to Ailn again. She saw these grating and perhaps even opportunistic traits on display herself at dinner, and chose to ignore them.

Because Renea was selfish.

She knew that. She was painfully aware of the lies she had woven and the kindnesses she had exploited.

But that’s exactly why she realized it when she caught the scent of smoke—it tugged at a distant memory, and all the peculiarities surrounding Ailn suddenly started to snap into focus. They coalesced into a coherent image, like an optical illusion she’d been desperately trying not to recognize.

The image flickered. The dots came together. This wasn’t someone whose better self had been marred by physical trauma. This was a liar.

This wasn’t Ailn.

It was a creep who’d stolen her brother’s body. It must have seemed like a game to him, a fantasy world with characters he could exploit for his own gain.

That’s why he used his fancy title to lord over Aldous and all the other knights. That’s why he was so keen on probing his relationship with Sophie, and why he belittled her family at dinner and picked at their sore spots with his leading questions.

He just wanted to gauge their weaknesses and grasp them. He didn’t care that they were real people.

Renea felt like an idiot, falling for his saccharine words and crocodile tears. She’d let vain hope cloud her judgment and missed such blatantly disgraceful behavior from a fake who—who carried himself like scum.

The man even had the gall to smoke on top of the northern wall, in plain view of all the knights.

And because he’d taken Ailn’s identity, the world would just keep going while her real brother was forgotten, his memory stained by this stranger who’d keep trashing things as he pleased.

There would never be a funeral for her brother. The stranger pretending to be Ailn had stolen her chance to grieve.

----------------------------------------

“Hold up, hey, hold up!” Ailn yelled out to the front of the abbey, turning everyone’s heads. “Oops, sorry!”

The second knight who tried to grab him found their elbow twisted and hyperextended when Ailn ‘tripped and staggered’ forward. Shuffling quickly and awkwardly through the pews, Ailn rushed up the processional aisle.

Things really couldn’t wait any longer.

“Kylian, hold it,” Ailn ignored the look of disgust Renea was giving him. “I think we need to re-examine some of the facts of the case.”

He’d been watching Renea slowly unravel all day, her erratic behavior seemingly justifying the knights’ multiplying suspicions, and alienating all of them to boot.

This one was definitely his fault.

If dinner hadn’t gone so disastrously last night, Renea wouldn’t have figured out he was a reincarnator. She wouldn’t have realized that her real brother was truly gone. And she wouldn’t have been forced to lead the inquest right after she was thrown right back into grief, and her world was flipped over.

He wanted to strangle himself from twelve hours ago. Surely he could’ve played the lie a little better, even after she smelled the smoke on him. Well, he could’ve just not smoked, but frankly that one was just a bad beat—there’s no way he could’ve known that would set her off.

At any rate, the real problem was…

When he saw the pain in her eyes, Ailn couldn’t bring himself to keep playing dumb. He’d only communicated through subtext, but he still essentially confirmed for her that her brother was gone, and a stranger had taken his place.

And even though he’d always intended to tell her the truth, it was the absolute worst time for her to figure it out.

Everything today had gone about as badly as it could, and it was clear from Renea’s flippant, actively antagonistic apathy that she’d had enough. She reached the wallowing stage of her downward spiral, and it was pointedly self-sabotaging.

“Your Grace,” Kylian seemed to sigh with relief, but he looked quite exasperated at the same time. “I expected you to give your thoughts. In fact, I’d expected you to come sooner.”

“I got held up,” Ailn stole a glance at his knightly escorts. “...But I could’ve stood to show up sooner, you’re right.”

He could sense the disgust floating all around the abbey like he was breathing in bad air.

Though Kylian seemed to take Ailn’s arrival rather graciously, the knights in the abbey did not. Saying the mood had soured in the last few minutes was an understatement.

“There are holes in the knights’ case, and I’ve come to defend my sister,” Ailn said.

“Don’t bother,” Renea snapped, to the bewilderment of all the knights watching.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“...Ignore her,” Ailn said. “As the actual victim of the crime, I have every right to give my view of the case.”

“My ‘brother’ has amnesia,” Renea said. “He’s unreliable. And I’m admitting my crime freely: I left him to die.”

The abbey, already quiet, went utterly silent for a moment.

Ailn took a deep breath to calm himself. He was a patient man. He understood why she was acting like this. He knew what he was getting into when he came up here.

He just had to keep pushing through.

“The knights’ case has failed to explain where the shadow beasts came from,” Ailn said. “Don’t you find your explanation of events lacking?”

“Surely there’s another passage from somewhere in the bailey to the outside of the castle,” Kylian frowned. “If such passages are preserved for the safety of the noble family, then it would make no sense to only pass from the keep to the bailey.”

Ailn winced. That was sound reasoning; he wouldn’t be surprised if further investigation of the castle did end up revealing something like that.

“There’s too much at stake here,” Ailn said. “Incriminating the future Saintess on that kind of specul—”

“I used a secret passage,” Renea said, almost sounding bored.

Ailn clenched his fists, earnestly, very earnestly trying to calm himself.

“Where? If you used a secret passage, where was it?” Ailn asked, maintaining a steady tone.

“It’s… a secret I guess,” Renea mumbled. She was staring at the floor.

“My sister is behaving erratically. Disregard her self-incriminating testimony,” Ailn said. “Unless we can actually find a secret pass—”

“There’s a passage from the castle’s secondary storage room, right through to the outer walls at the back of the castle,” Renea interrupted blandly. “That should suffice to explain their appearance, no?”

“It makes a good deal of sense,” Kylian said with a look of dawning realization. He paused in thought, trying to work it out. “It’s one of the only places you could feasibly hide them away.”

“The crates in the back left corner hide a false wall,” Renea said quietly, while Kylian gestured for a knight in the back to make haste and check. “It’s easy enough to find if you know it’s there.”

Ailn turned his head slowly toward the girl he was trying to save and stared at her in speechless astonishment.

But she didn’t even look back.

Sophie next to her was bewildered and emotional. Every so often it seemed like she was about to speak, but it would get caught up as a lump in her throat.

“Renea!” Sophie finally just started shaking her sister. “Renea, what are you doing? Why are you doing this?”

Renea listlessly let herself be shaken, not even bothering to keep her own head from thudding back against the chair.

For the briefest moment, the indifference on her face contorted into spite and hurt. But it was gone in a flash, her expression going right back to apathy.

“...That’s weird. I thought you ‘detested me,’” Renea said, looking away from her sister. “Aren’t you tired of ‘living like a dog?’”

“It was an act, Renea…” Sophie whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

“Was it fun pretending to be my family?” Renea asked.

Sophie bit her lip as tears once again streaked down her face. But she said nothing.

Unfortunately for Renea, this little bit of pettiness was all it took for the knights’ impression of her to rapidly plummet.

None of the knights enjoyed seeing their formerly beloved Saintess roll around in the mud. Wasn’t her guilt evident in her behavior? Hadn’t she all but admitted her crime?

It was an ugly display, and cruel to her at the same time.

Out in the pews, one of the knights said a single word, just underneath his breath.

‘...Disgraceful.’

The word was spoken quietly. It was hard to tell who’d said it, or where it came from—and difficult to even hear what had been said. But up to this point, all the knights in the audience had been respectful enough of the proceedings to keep their noise to a minimum, and the utterance was barely audible.

The biggest problem was how it had echoed. Everyone in the abbey heard it—including Renea—and the subtle amplification of what should have been a whisper gave it an almost serpentine quality.

It was clear by the way Renea’s limply clasped hands started clenching—she was about to puncture the skin, frankly, with how intensely she was digging with her nails—Renea’s bad mood was about to boil over into rage.

“Moving on,” Ailn started, glancing over at her and trying to get a march on the nascent disaster, “I wasn’t attacked duri —”

“...Who said that?” Renea asked coldly, interrupting him.

She turned furiously on the knights, and all Ailn could do was groan.

“I asked who said that!” Renea snapped.

“You’re only making yourself look worse,” Ailn said, trying to calm her down. “Renea—”

“I told you never to say my name!” Renea shouted even louder than before, taking just a moment to give him a vicious glare. Then turning away in anger, she bolted upright, stomping around the chancel of the abbey to shout into the void.

“Of all the asinine, witless things, you have the gall to call ME disgraceful? All of you faithless, treacherous knights act like you know everything!”

Her voice started cracking, but she transfigured it into a snarl.

“To hell with all of you!” Renea yelled. “Not a single one of you knows what loyalty is!”

‘Celine must be weeping…”

‘Does this really need to go on any longer?’

‘This inquisition is only tarnishing our honor.’

‘Shut your mouth you fool! The truth will prove our Lady’s innocence!’

A single voice was yelling in dissent, but that only served to make the abbey louder. Sir Fontaine had grabbed another knight by the collar before being forcefully restrained. And unfortunately, this act of unwavering faith and fealty was entirely counterproductive.

“Renea, this isn’t…” Even Sophie started nervously picking up on the sea change.

“Isn’t what, Sophie?” Renea snapped.

“Renea, don’t yell—” Sophie’s shoulders shrank. It was hard to imagine she was the same insensitive girl who just last night was pettily and expressionlessly hiding Kylian’s fork.

“Just shut up, Sophie! You really have the cheek to act delicate now?” Renea’s wrathful tantrum was completely directionless at this point. “I don’t want to hear your voice!”

Renea looked Sophie in the eye before turning her face away in a grossed out huff. Ailn could guess what moment she was thinking about.

‘The way she treats her poor sister is despicable…!’

‘Has Lady Renea always treated Sophie so poorly behind closed doors?’

‘I can’t believe Our Lady has such a forked tongue!’

“A forked to—” Renea gawked. “How dare you two-faced ‘paladins’ lecture me about duplicity? When all you vipers were convening in the barracks, scheming on how to bite my heels!”

As he listened to the flowery lines Renea yelled during her fit, and compared them with the scathing, melodramatic flourishes Sophie made in her performance, the thought crossed Ailn’s mind that perhaps Ennieux had not been a perfect role model for these girls.

It got even worse. The knight who’d been sent to check for a secret passage came back with perfectly awful timing, and confirmed its existence just as Renea’s behavior took its ugliest turn.

Aldous who had been seemingly content to observe this whole time, finally had enough of sitting idly by while the Saintess-apparent made a fool of herself.

“Sir Kylian, is it not time to end this unsightly display?” Aldous asked, in a solemn tone. “Every moment this goes on only serves to spit on the late Saintess’s grave.”

Though she’d been tempestuously shouting, Renea seemed to freeze in her tracks, plaintively staring at the high marshal.

But Aldous ignored her. Turning toward Ailn, who stared back at him warily, he began to speak.

“Your Grace. There are no words for the anguish you must be going through. And yet—”

A loud crack echoed through the room.

More modest than Aldous’s had been, both in noise and luminescence, the resonance of Kylian’s holy aura was still an act of authority.

And impudence.

To interrupt Aldous with his holy aura, in exactly the same fashion the high marshal used his aura to silence the Great Hall, was a challenge, a reprimand of his better—and the fact that his aura was so much weaker than Aldous’s merely heightened its insolence.

It was the audacity of it, not the sound, that silenced the abbey.

“...Is there something you wish to say, Sir Kylian?” Aldous asked coldly.

“Sir Aldous,” Kylian looked his superior and mentor straight in the eye. “You’ve appointed me as bailiff for this inquisition, and invested me with all the corresponding power.”

“I’ve not gone senile yet, Kylian. I penned your appointment yesterday.”

“Then I won’t mince my words. I do not intend to end this inquisition until His Grace, the young master Ailn has given his thoughts.”

“To what end, Kylian? To soothe the feelings of His Grace?” Aldous spoke through gritted teeth. “Are you his hound, now?”

“I trust His Grace. And I believe what he has to say is worth hearing,” Kylian’s voice was clear. “I’m appealing to your honor as a knight that you respect the position you’ve given me. And I’m staking my honor on this as well. Stand down, Aldous.”

Aldous stared him down. Kylian, however, did not relent.

Finally, jaw still clenched, Aldous shook his head.

“... By your leave then, bailiff. That is within your power.” Aldous said. “And as high marshal of the Azure Knights, I shall exercise mine. Seize Lady Renea.”

“Huh?” Renea asked blankly. Knights came up from the pews, and forcefully restrained her arms.

“What are you doing?! Stop! I said STOP!” Sophie yelled, as the knights pulled her sister from her.

Dragged in front of the altar to the customary sinner’s spot, and forced to kneel, Renea was soon facing the pews with swords at her neck. Her breath shallowed and shook.

Ailn couldn’t recognize the other knight, but he passively noted that one of them was Sir Reynard.

“This inquisition will continue, but it shall continue by the same procedures as any other. There will be no preferential treatment given to Lady Renea,” Aldous said. “She is a defendant. She will be treated like one.”