Evenel looked at Shuher, who was sitting across from her, and couldn’t help but ask.

“Are you not going to your room?”

“I need to drink water. I think I need to wake up a bit.”

“Ah, I’ll get you a glass.”

She quickly brought a glass of water and filled it to the brim before placing it in front of him. Shuher gulped down the water in one go.

“Weren’t you going straight to sleep?”

“There’s a lot of work to do these days. I need to prepare before the full onset of winter.”

“Indeed, the mountainous terrain here would certainly require more preparation.”

Evenel nodded, recalling the geography of Karies she had read about in books. It felt like even tending to magical beasts alone would be overwhelming, not to mention the affairs of state.

“It must be exhausting for you, working up to this hour every day.”

“Isn’t that the same for you?”

“Can I even compare myself to you? This is the first time I’ve had such leisure. I can sleep in without any concerns and choose how to spend my day.”

Back when she was a knight, her days were so busy that she hardly knew how they passed. In addition to her knightly training, there were many other external matters to attend to.

At least now, she didn’t have the pressure of having to accomplish something. She didn’t find it particularly draining to do only what she wanted.

“Hasn’t it gotten busier for you? I heard you spent most of your time at the mansion in Aodin.”

“……You could say that. Haha.”

Realizing belatedly that she had mentioned her past as a knight, Evenel took an awkward sip of water.

Fidgeting with the empty glass in his hand, Shuher unexpectedly spoke.

“Why did you say what you did earlier today?”

“Earlier today? ……Did you see everything?”

At first, she didn’t understand what he was talking about, but then she realized he was referring to the incident with the young lords and Harlan, and she asked in surprise.

Shuher responded with silence.

Truthfully, the fact that he had seen that scene was purely coincidental. Thanks to that, he had heard her entire response.

At that moment, Evenel slammed both hands down on the table with a thud. Shuher’s gaze turned to her.

“Weren’t you angry at what the young lords said? It was truly absurd.”

“Is this really the time to be discussing that?”

“Then what else is there to discuss in this situation?”

Evenel couldn’t understand his reaction. Aside from talking recklessly about the knights, what else could they argue about?

After a brief silence, Shuher finally spoke.

“I was just… standing there watching.”

“And why is that? There’s absolutely no reason for you to step in.”
When Evenel spoke as if it was only natural, Shuher closed his mouth. He had thought she would be angry for not showing up at that moment.

It was almost as if she had ignored the difficulty.

However, she didn’t think so. She rather thought it strange that he would help. Hadn’t he always just watched, no matter what she had heard?

“Definitely so.”

Shuher himself found his own words absurd and laughed. Why had he thought that way, even though he had resolved to just watch, no matter what happened to Evenel?

‘Is it because I owe her?’

He concluded it was because of events in the Perti domain. Otherwise, he had no reason to act on Evenel’s behalf.

“As I’ve said myself, I didn’t intervene because it would be a waste of my time to deal with such people one by one. So why are you so angry?”

“It’s a matter not to be joked about.”

Shuher still couldn’t understand. Evenel had no reason to defend the knights by risking uproar. It’s not like they had slandered her.

“They ignore you, don’t even consider you a colleague. If it were me, I’d ignore whatever they said.”

“That might be so, but what’s wrong is wrong. It’s not that important at the moment. You’d be angry too, wouldn’t you, if someone spoke ill of your people?”

As she said, he could never tolerate anyone treating his own people so poorly. But he had not actively intervened, as that was for them to overcome.

He wasn’t so weak as to need help from anyone.

“By the look of it, you weren’t keen on listening to me. But if you had admitted your mistake in the first place, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. I just hope there isn’t someone who gets hurt by those words.”

There was no sense of injustice in her words about being slandered. With her focus solely on the knights, what more could Shuher say?

“Well, in that situation, anyone would have said the same.”

His thought on that was ‘no.’

There were far more people in Carien who thought like the knights that had picked a fight with Evenel. Especially among the nobility.

Moreover, there was no one like her who would stand up for the knights.

‘Does she really not know?’
Evenel moistened her throat with water before she spoke about what would happen next. She thought it was not an issue to simply overlook if he had heard everything.

“So you must have heard the conversation I had with Duke Harlan.”