System of the Beast Slayer [litrpg Adventure]
Copyright© 1999 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 264: When the World Stands Still
“The garden? You and Foltest buried him in the earth?” Roy gave Luisa another long look, faintly annoyed with himself. Why had he not simply dug the ground up when he had the chance?
“The scent of flowers everywhere was the perfect cover. Under those circumstances, there truly was no better choice. Hill Vea mentioned that you go to the garden every day to clear your head. In truth, you were going there to destroy the traces of the crime, were you not?”
“Poor Amos. He thought fortune had dropped from the sky, only to throw away his life and end as flower fertilizer. He probably died with his eyes open.” Roy said it, though in truth he felt little pity for Amos. Greed had clouded his wits. He lacked the strength for it, yet still chose to blackmail a king. A man had to be tired of living to do that.
“And Aryan? How did you deal with him?”
Lady Luisa gazed at the boy’s gaunt face on the bed and answered in a soft voice, “Once we had buried the body, His Majesty cleaned the blood from his clothes as best he could and left first. Then I went to look for the child. Unfortunately I had no idea where he was hiding. I feared my husband might notice something wrong, so I returned to the banquet hall first ... I should have kept looking.”
“You searched the maids’ quarters beside the garden and found no one inside?”
The woman shook her head. “A few minutes later I heard Rosie scream from the banquet hall. Only then did I know something had happened to the child.”
The Witcher more or less believed her. She had already confessed to the tryst with Foltest, to murder, and to hiding the corpse. There was no need to conceal what had happened to Aryan.
“Then who turned Aryan into this? Did the boy suffer such a blow that he collapsed on his own from grief?” The thought flashed through Roy’s mind and he immediately shook his head. The conclusion was too flimsy. And his instincts told him that night, near the garden, there had been a third person besides Lady Luisa and Foltest.
The real culprit.
“All the castle servants who were questioned have been cleared. Who have I overlooked?”
“Two masters, I have said everything.” Luisa interrupted the Witcher’s thoughts and smoothed back her hair. “Ask whatever else you like. I will hide nothing, so long as you do not let this matter spread outside.”
Now that she had spilled the secret weighing on her heart, she seemed to have cast off the last of her tension. Her expression grew composed again, and she recovered her former radiance, that alluring, graceful bearing.
“If this becomes public, House La Valette will be disgraced. And my husband, with his stubborn nature, might very well break with Foltest. If that happens, all of La Valette could fall into war. Countless innocent townsfolk would be dragged into it. How could either of you bear that on your conscience?”
“We are not running a charity. Whether the people of the barony live or die has nothing to do with me,” Letho said harshly, then changed tack. “But we gave our word. Amos is dead, and speaking more of it is pointless. If you clear Aveline and the other two of the stain on their names, give them justice, and generous compensation...”
“Then the Kid and I will naturally keep our mouths shut.”
Watching the woman’s expression, Roy added, “Barring necessity, we have no desire to fall out with the King of Temeria and turn ourselves into wanted men.”
Inwardly, though, he was thinking something else. This lever might still prove useful later.
Lady Luisa studied the nearly identical expressions on the faces of master and apprentice and found nothing she could read in them. At last she sighed.
“If The Sea Scorpion’s Enigma troupe are friends of yours, master, then I will do all I can to persuade my husband. Generous compensation will not be a problem.” She pressed her lips together. “But all of it depends on one condition, Aryan must not die. If anything happens to him, my husband will bury The Sea Scorpion’s Enigma with him.”
“Only the hunter who set the snare can undo it,” Letho said. “Only by finding the person who harmed Aryan can we wake him.”
“And that is precisely the difficulty,” Roy explained. “Every clue points to you and His Majesty Foltest. But you two were occupied with disposing of Amos’s body, which clears you. Our investigation has run into a dead end.”
Who was it? Who could have found that exact moment, laid a curse upon Aryan without anyone knowing, and done so for what purpose? Mere robbery?
“What we can do next is search for anything previously missed, summon all the guests from that night. But in the short term it will be hard to make any real breakthrough. Whether young master Aryan can hold on that long...”
Lady Luisa’s nose stung. She wrapped both arms tightly around the boy beneath the blanket and began to weep softly.
Roy kept silent, not without feeling something stir in him.
Most Witchers were separated from their parents when they were very young and had never known much family affection, men like Letho, or the Orin brothers.
And Roy himself had not seen Old Mole and his wife in a very long time.
The woman before him had betrayed her husband and helped cover up a murder. Yet in this moment, the grief pouring out of her was real.
Time slipped by unnoticed. When Luisa finally came back to herself, wiped the tears from her face, and pressed her red lips together, she asked in confusion, “There is something I do not understand, something that has been lodged in my mind this whole time. Your investigation proves at most that Foltest went to the garden. Why did you connect me to him?”
“Just because I left the hall midway through the banquet, you concluded that I met him in the garden? That is far too arbitrary.”
Once she asked, the Witchers themselves fell into thought.
Roy knew about the filth between the Baroness and the King of Temeria because of what he had seen before, his foreknowledge. So not long after the investigation began, the hazy outline of that suspicion had already formed in his mind.
But Letho...
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