“Th-there was an accident!”

It was a sudden outburst. Before my mind could catch up, my mouth had already started improvising to get through the crisis. Oh well, whatever. Let’s just say something.

“An accident? What kind of accident are you talking about?”

“Well, um. A carriage, it was a carriage accident. I fell from the carriage and…”

“…”

Karl’s eyes narrowed. His gaze seemed to say he’d listen to see how far I’d go with this story.

“I hit my head a bit. My memory…”

“You lost your memory? From hitting your head?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

A classic drama trope – accident and memory loss. The fact that I thought of it now probably shows the limit of my improvisation skills.

“So I lost my memories from before. And because the after-effects of the accident persisted, I came here to quietly recuperate. But then suddenly someone brought a child and said it was mine… Not knowing what was going on, the best I could do was call a detective. That’s roughly the situation.”

“Ha. You expect me to believe that now?”

“You don’t have to believe it. But it’s the truth.”

What can you do if you don’t believe me? I don’t know, and it’s not like I can ask the baby who can’t even talk, ‘Am I really your mother? Who’s your father?’

I glanced sideways at Hannah beside me. Hannah gave me a look that said, ‘Well done, my lady!’

Karl, still seated, moved only his eyes to look at the child in my arms. Seemingly comfortable in the warm embrace, Valerie was quietly making cooing sounds, “Buu, buu.” It was her behavior when sleepy.

Yes, sleep, sleep. Sleeping is helpful.

I passed Valerie back to Hannah and asked her to put the child to bed in the room again.

As Hannah patted the child’s back to lull her to sleep, Karl opened his mouth and stood up.

“We’ll have to verify this.”

As I raised my head to follow Karl rising from his seat, I noticed the knights’ eyes fixed on my face.

“What? Why are you… staring at me?”

Then the knights’ eyes swept over the potion on the table once, then returned to my face.

That’s when I realized the situation. Ah, so that’s it. They want to use that potion to directly confirm if Valerie is really Celeste’s daughter?

“I need to verify whether the Count is lying or not.”

I had to watch as the knights instantly pinned one of the detective’s arms to the table and pointed a knife at him in response to Karl’s words.

What’s going on? They’re testing the blood relation between Valerie and me, so why the detective…

Unable to understand their actions, I just blinked, then suddenly realized.

Karl was clearly suspecting a connection between me and the detective.

The potion test required blood from the test subject. They were moving so roughly now to extract that blood.

A short groan escaped the detective’s mouth as his wrist was gripped immovably by the knight’s strength. Bright red droplets were welling up on the back of his hand.

Was it really necessary to resort to a knife?

The detective’s action of taking out a needle to draw a single drop of blood from me last time was quite gentle in comparison. Looking at the detective wincing from the unnecessary wound he’d suddenly received, though not too deep, made me think that.

As a drop of dark red liquid fell onto the clear potion, the knights’ eyes moved again. There were a total of three potion bottles on the table. All of them had been confiscated from the detective by the knights.

Why does this detective carry around so many potions? He’s not running a paternity test lab or anything. The more I learned, the stranger he seemed.

“Bring the child here.”

“Ah, no, wait a moment…”

No sooner had the man’s order fallen than the surrounding knights approached Hannah. They snatched the child and pressed down on Hannah’s arms and shoulders. They were trying to prevent her from moving.

The child was transferred to the arms of the tallest knight who had been sitting as Karl’s aide. Unlike the other knights, he wore a red medal on his chest – I guessed he might be something like the vice-captain of the knightly order.

In any case, the large knight with eyes sharp enough to freeze a person with just a look held the child quite skillfully. That was a bit unexpected.

“Abubbu.”

Though she should be wary of strangers, the child seemed quite taken with the epaulettes on the uniform. She was busy playing with them, making clanking noises.

“…So you’re happy with anyone as long as they hold you, is that it?”

Just as a strange sense of betrayal was starting to creep in, the knight’s voice, speaking as if reading from a textbook without any emotion, snapped me back to attention.

“Now we need to add a drop of the child’s blood as well.”

Even adults find it hard to bear the stinging and throbbing when pricked with a needle, and they want to do that to this tiny baby?

Karl nodded at the knight’s words. It was a sign of permission.

Are all the men here sociopaths? It was chilling to see them approach, not even blinking an eye, to extract a single drop of blood from such a small child.

But there was nothing we could do. We were just two people, while they numbered over ten and were all knights, with a considerable size difference to boot. When they resorted to force like this, we had no way to fight back.

But that doesn’t mean we could just stay quiet.

“Where on that tiny hand do you think you’re going to stick a needle?”

“That’s right. Do not lay hands on Lady Valerie’s body so carelessly!”

When I shouted angrily, Hannah joined in with a yell. But the knight just glanced at Hannah indifferently and continued what he was doing.

I looked at Karl, meaning for him to stop that knight. But Karl didn’t even snort. His arrogant posture, arms folded, looking down at me, couldn’t have been more annoying.

The child, unaware of the painful moment about to befall her, was nothing but cheerful.

One man wiped the needle tip with a handkerchief and took hold of the child’s hand as she was held by the knight. Annoyed at being interrupted in what she was doing, the child started to whimper, twisting her body.

“Waaah, waaaah!”

The needle grazed the tip of the child’s tiny finger, and immediately a cry burst out. The cheerful smile disappeared in an instant. Tears fell in big drops onto her face, which had turned bright red.

Because her hand was so small, the blood drop was incredibly tiny. When there wasn’t enough to drop onto the potion, the knight squeezed the child’s finger, forcibly creating a blood drop.

The sound of the child crying in pain stabbed into my heart.

You, I’ll remember your face. Just you wait. I glared at the knight who had made Valerie cry, making a useless vow of revenge.

“…You sociopaths.”

“There, take her back now.”

Having finished what he needed to do, the knight returned the child to me. Valerie, startled by the sharp pain, wouldn’t calm down easily.

“Shh, shh. There, there. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

The child is crying so pitifully, are these people really not affected at all?

Unable to hide my distressed feelings, I held Valerie, rocking and patting her, but the child continued to cry loudly. What’s the point of making a child who was playing happily cry like this? Anger welled up suddenly.

“Now we just wait, right?”

“We’ve added blood drops from two people, so after stirring the potion well, we leave it for a few minutes.”

The knight shook the potion bottle a few times, then carefully placed it on the table.

“If the blood drops spread and the potion turns red, it means the two bloods are unrelated.”

“And if they are related?”

“It will be absorbed and become clear.”

“So if it turns red, they’re not blood relatives. If it becomes clear, they are.”

“That’s correct.”

The man took out a pocket watch and placed it next to the potion bottle.

Tick, tock. The sound of the second hand created a tense atmosphere.

I was the only one here not curious about the result. My feelings were complicated.

No matter how twisted the original content had become, there was no way Celeste could have had relations with a village detective whose name and face she didn’t even know. After all, in the novel, she was a serious lookist.

So the most likely candidate here was only Grand Duke Albrecht. The unnecessarily, excessively handsome male protagonist.

Tick, tock.

Everyone was watching the potion’s change with bated breath. As I looked around the eerily quiet room, I suddenly remembered the magic stones I had momentarily forgotten about.

Of the four magic stones hidden in the first floor, the closest one was… right under the pillar behind where the knights were standing now.

As I was gauging whether now was the time to use that magic stone to escape or not, the potion mixing the detective’s and Valerie’s blood turned red.

“The color of the potion has changed.”

Of course. Naturally. How could they suspect a connection between the detective and Celeste, no matter how much they doubted? By the way, what was the spell to activate the magic stone again?