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foxinthestarsChapters: 1/1
Fandom: 本好きの下剋上 - 香月美夜 | Honzuki no Gekokujou | Ascendance of a Bookworm Series - Kazuki Miya
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Karstedt & Sylvester (Ascendance of a Bookworm)
Characters: Sylvester (Ascendance of a Bookworm), Karstedt (Ascendance of a Bookworm)
Additional Tags: Sylvester has just been through the wringer and may not be the most reliable narrator atm, Karstedt however is reliable in general, Minor Character Death(s), Past Child Abuse, Animal Death, Veronica was horrible, and now there’s a purge, this gets dark is what I’m saying, but I tried to end it on a hopeful note, takes place during part 5 vol 1, spoilers through the end of part 5, and in the best and truest tradition of AoaB people sit in a room and discuss things, Blanket Permission
Summary: During Ehrenfest’s winter purge, Sylvester is resolved to face the ugly consequences of his decision, and in the process, he finds himself facing ugly truths about his brother’s childhood and his mother’s crimes. Seeing how much had escaped his notice leaves him shaken, but Karstedt is there to support him and remind him of his own better qualities.
Wanting to Know what you Don’t Want to Know
“Aub Ehrenfest! Aub Ehrenfest!”
“Lord Sylvester!”
Karstedt’s voice reached him through whatever was roaring in his ears, through his vision jumbled with color — mostly red — and images fractured and twisted like some sort of fever dream.
“Listen to me. Follow my voice. You have to come back. You have to end the synchronization; it’s too dangerous.”
He did listen, and gradually he could hear Karstedt more clearly, feel the gauntleted hand on his arm, feel something cold and hard press against his skin and drain some kind of pressure.
Oh, yeah. That’s what’s happening.
As he felt someone take the circlet from his head, he managed to open his eyes a little and look past his own hand, which he had unconsciously pressed to his face.
The interrogation room. Right.
“Aub Ehrenfest?” someone asked.
“It’s okay. I think I’m fine.”
He did not in fact think that he was fine, but he did think he needed to stop everyone worrying about him. He had flown into a rage and let his mana run wild in the midst of searching someone’s memories; even he realized how foolishly dangerous it had been. Still, he seemed to have made it through shaken but unharmed. He pulled his hand back a little and was able to count his fingers. He was able to remember where he was and what was happening.
The critical first stage of the winter purge was finished and successful, rushed and ugly as it was. All the targets were either captured, confirmed dead, or presumably dead. Georgine’s name-sworn had had their memories searched where possible, and now they were searching those of the next-highest-priority prisoners.
And he as the archduke had insisted on ‘taking responsibility’ and helping. Karstedt is going to give me one heck of an ‘I told you so’ lecture, isn’t he? He couldn’t deny that he deserved it.
“The prisoner is still alive,” one of the knights said. “Whether his mind is intact is...”
Sylvester let out an angry huff. He’d tried for some kind of laugh but had failed completely. “It doesn’t make much difference. I saw him try to kill an archduke candidate.”
The room fell silent except for the scratching quill of the scholar on duty.
“Can you tell us any more about what you saw?” Karstedt eventually asked.
Sylvester tried to consider the question but without much success. His mind still felt like a storm had just ripped through it.
“Only in a cleared room,” he found himself saying. “One with plenty of wine.”
He didn’t remember how he got from the interrogation room to his office, but soon he was indeed at his desk with Karstedt pouring him some wine and telling everyone else to clear the room.
Sylvester didn’t even wait for them to file out before draining the cup. “Gah. I wish it was cold.”
“I will see to it, my lord.” Norbert held the door open for the others before bowing and stepping out.
It was no good starting this conversation knowing that the head attendant would soon return and interrupt, so Sylvester instead used the time to take deep, slow breaths and get himself further under control. Karstedt didn’t press, just dispelled his feystone armor and settled into his seat. They waited in awkward silence for several minutes until Norbert knocked politely, wheeled a trolley in beside their two chairs, then took his leave again.
The trolley held bottles misted with dew from how cold they were, plus one more — a stronger distillation not usually served chilled — buried in a bucket of ice. There was also a second bucket with only ice. And towels. Sylvester didn’t know why the towels were there, but as soon as he saw them, it turned out that he had wanted them.
Attendants. Always looking to put in that extra bit of care. It wasn’t Norbert’s fault that his lord didn’t want to think about that at the moment.
Karstedt poured again, one of the ordinary chilled vintages, and Sylvester savored a mouthful which did further cool his head. Throwing decorum aside, he leaned back in his chair and draped a towel over his eyes.
“So, Vedrick,” Karstedt said at last.
“Vedrick,” Sylvester agreed. His last glimpse of the prisoner — a disheveled body with drool on its cheek — had barely registered as a person, let alone the fastidious retainer he would have recognized, but it certainly was Vedrick.
“I did tell you I had a bad feeling about him,” Karstedt pointed out, but the scolding in his tone was gentle.
“I had a bad feeling, too. That just made me more determined.”
“Yes, yes. You’ve shown your resolve.”
Now leave the rest to people who won’t endanger the duchy if they mess up and hurt themselves, Sylvester guessed at the subtext, but even with the pain and rage and confusion still burning inside him, he wasn’t sorry. Ferdinand had praised him once for facing his most important responsibilities head-on. If he’d chosen to sign this many death warrants, he didn’t want to be the kind of man who would just push the butchers’ work onto other people.
“Were you able to see his memories about Georgine before whatever it was that happened?” Karstedt queried.
Sylvester nodded with a frown. “He was definitely on her side, but he’d already given his name to Mother. Since he couldn’t give it to Georgine, they were careful that he didn’t know too much. He and his wife were happy about some plan for her to take over soon, but that’s not news.” Vedrick’s wife had been name-sworn to Georgine, and she… Well, she had made certain that no one would be reading her memories. The investigators had held out some hope that she’d confided in her husband, but no.
“So his crimes had more to do with Veronica?” Karstedt guessed.
Another unhappy nod.
“It always did seem odd that she retained male attendants,” the knight commander mused. “They kept the proper distance and stayed above the usual suspicions that could create, but...”
Sylvester, for his part, hadn’t questioned anything like that; his ‘bad feeling’ about Vedrick had just been intuition. “Mother said it was only natural for a lady in a position to host high-ranking lords, but now that you mention it, I don’t remember anyone but her actually doing it.”
“More common in greater duchies, perhaps.”
Sylvester managed a wry smile and lifted the towel from his face. “It’s probably a good thing I was the one to search his memories after all. If it had been anyone else, we’d have to...” His words ground to a halt as he realized that Vedrick’s experiences were probably not unique. He collapsed back into his chair with a heavy sigh. “How many times am I going to have to kill my mother?”
“None,” Karstedt assured him without hesitation. “At this point, it would only be throwing mana away for no benefit. Even the Leisegangs among the knights can accept that, although they would like to air enough of her crimes to make releasing her unthinkable. Of course if she’d been plotting something against the Zent, it would be another matter, but there’s been no hint of that.”
No, that’ll be Georgine’s innovation. Sylvester wasn’t sure why that idea crossed his mind. There had been the ternisbefallen attack at the Interduchy Tournament, connected with Old Werkestock, half of which belonged to Ahrensbach… And then that had been the pretext for the meeting when the king had somehow ended up doing Ahrensbach’s dirty work and stealing Ferdinand for them… Thin threads to pull at, but if that was where they led...
“The attempt on the life of an archduke candidate… Ferdinand, then?” Karstedt surmised, oblivious to his archduke’s woolgathering.
“He at least thought about it with Charlotte, too, but yeah, Ferdinand. Several times. Mostly poison,” Sylvester confirmed. “He did it because he knew Mother wanted it, but he wasn’t waiting for orders or getting reluctantly dragged around.” An attendant, always looking to put in that extra bit of care.
It hadn’t been the final straw, somehow, but seeing Ferdinand just as he’d looked when he arrived at the castle — the adorable little brother the gods had granted him — and seeing him gag on his soup and clutch his throat in a way that Sylvester instantly recognized while feeling that man looking on with pleasure… It had taken all his focus and willpower not to lose control right then.
Karstedt solemnly crossed his arms. “That is enough to settle the matter.”
“Did they have any children?” Sylvester asked. He was willing to take the hint about searching prisoners’ memories, but he was still determined to ‘show his resolve’ and not gloss over the ugly consequences of his actions.
“None baptized,” Karstedt replied, “but when we found his wife there was a small boy, just at the age where they start putting words together. Vedrick married late, and his wife was still young, so I suppose the boy was their first.”
Sylvester nodded, even as his stomach twisted at the thought of a toddler in the midst of that awful scene. He felt more gratitude than he had ever thought he would for Rozemyne going out of her way to provide for the orphans. With luck, this one was young enough that he wouldn’t remember any of it when he grew up.
A few moments of silence passed, but Sylvester still felt a need to talk.
“Do you remember his mother?” he asked.
“Vedrick’s mother?”
“Yeah. I knew her face when I saw her in the memory, but to him she was ‘Mother’ first and foremost. She had some funny name...”
“Ah, Ermentrude.”
“Ermentrude,” Sylvester repeated. Despite everything, it was still a funny name, which at this moment made it worth savoring. “Do you know how she died?”
“How could I forget?” Karstedt sighed. “She suffered some sudden fatal illness just outside the dining hall during lunch with a guest. She knocked over a cart of food as she fell, so the noise surprised everyone and we knights rushed to investigate. Maybe it was during winter socializing one year...? I remember Lady Veronica was deeply shaken and retired to her quarters for some time.”
“Yeah, that was it, but it didn’t happen quite like that. Vedrick saw the whole thing.” Sylvester finally bent forward and leaned his elbows on his desk. When he noticed his empty wine cup, he began to reach for a bottle, but Karstedt was faster and poured for him. “His mother was name-sworn to mine,” Sylvester continued, “and Mother... told her to poison Florencia.”
His knight commander’s brows shot up.
“She tried to say ‘You love Lord Sylvester so, surely you don’t want to hurt him like this,’ but Mother made it a command. She’d waited until the winter after our Starbinding, so Frenbeltag had largely lost standing to complain, and the guest at that lunch was a giebe with connections to Leisegang.” In one fell swoop, Veronica could have cleared the way to match Sylvester with the Ahrensbach wife she wanted for him, framed the opposing faction for a capital crime, and dispossessed at least one of their giebes so she could bring more lands into her own sphere of influence. The temptation must have been too much.
But it hadn’t happened. “Vedrick was following his mother in to serve the food, and… She stopped a little before the dining room door, tipped the cart over on purpose, and then fell over dead.”
Karstedt stared for a moment, then took a deep breath. “We should pray earnestly for that lady in the distant heights.”
“We definitely should.”
“And it seems her son learned all the wrong lessons from her example.”
“You can say that again,” Sylvester agreed, massaging his forehead. Reliving the man’s feelings in that moment had brought only a brief wave of grief and horror before the self-defensive bristling of ‘that fool; that traitor; I certainly won’t come to such an end...’
Indeed he wouldn’t. His end was turning out to be far more ignominious.
Sylvester managed a bitter half-laugh, but his face quickly fell.
He had barely known anything about the incident before today. Karstedt had said ‘how could I forget?,’ but Sylvester had never remembered much except the sound of the crash. He’d even been thankful for it, since the lunch meeting had been so unpleasantly tense. He remembered his mother’s stricken face when one of her knights whispered something in her ear; in hindsight, it seemed she’d at least had the decency to be horrified by what she had done to the loyal attendant who had served her for so long.
But what about himself? Surely he could have noticed that he stopped seeing that attendant after the incident, but even with the puzzle pieces lying in plain view, he had never bothered to put any of them together. Maybe he just hadn’t wanted to know.
And even now that he did know...
Sylvester could still feel the heat and tension. If he held out his hand, he would probably still see it shake. The things he’d seen Vedrick do had sent him into a blind rage, and yet he had also seen his mother do something just as bad or worse. If anyone else had tried to kill Florencia before his very eyes, Sylvester was sure he would want to kill them with his bare hands and then smash their feystone for good measure, but he’d watched his mother do exactly that, and there was nothing. Nothing worth speaking of, at any rate. His hands shook, but he’d practically begged Karstedt ‘please tell me I don’t have to kill her.’
Am I really that soft on her? After everything, do I still love her that much?
But at this moment, what he found in his heart wasn’t love. It was blank resignation. Mother is Mother. That’s just the way she is and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. It seemed that he’d begun thinking that way long, long ago, and that he’d gone on quietly thinking that way ever since.
And if he just accepted that there was nothing to be done about it, then he only had to accept her moods and actions and work around them the way he would work around the weather. Not once had it done any good to argue with her, and what else was he going to do? In that case, there was no point in knowing the things he didn’t want to know; it would only be throwing his comfort away for no benefit.
But that wasn’t true. It hadn’t been for a long time, if it ever was at all. And it had taken him so long to realize. So much had happened in that time: to Florencia, to Ferdinand, to Wilfried, to Ehrenfest...
“We know what we need to know for our investigation...”
Sylvester nearly jumped as Karstedt’s calm voice suddenly cut the moody silence.
“...But if I as your knight were to hear what made you react that way, it might help in some future situation.”
You don’t have to tell me, but I’m here for you, Sylvester interpreted. Karstedt knew him well; it always did do him good to unburden himself at times like this, and he thought he was calm enough now.
He held out his cup, and Karstedt obliged him by refreshing his drink. He was keeping the open bottle in one of the ice buckets; when had he put it there, anyway? Sylvester took a sip. Only now did he realize that chilled drinks in winter had been an odd request, but it did taste good.
“Do you remember Himmel?” he asked, swirling his cup.
“Himmel...” Karstedt considered it. “Was that what you called that shumil...?”
“The one I gave Ferdinand, yeah.” Shumils that looked like Rozemyne were common, but ones that looked like Ferdinand were rare. Even if you found one with fur the right color, the mane was usually darker and spoiled the look — or at least Sylvester thought so — so when he had found one that was sky-blue from ears to tail with just a few patches of white on its mane and chest, he’d been certain that it was meant to be. His grim-faced little brother had obviously needed some cuteness in his life.
“But he didn’t know what to do with it, so he just let it go,” Karstedt recalled.
Sylvester sighed and cradled his head. “He didn’t let it go.”
That was what Ferdinand said he had done. He’d told Sylvester ‘I took it outside, and it ran away’ in a soft, flat voice. Indeed, his attitude toward Himmel in the meantime had been more quizzical than anything else, so Sylvester had never thought to question his brother’s story.
But now...
“Vedrick killed it.” He’d seen the shumil struggling in that man’s hand...
And he’d seen Ferdinand sitting on the other side of a dining table facing a platter of roasted meat.
‘You should thank my son for giving you such a fine meal. He didn’t have to do that, you know.’
Sylvester forced the words out. “Mother had Vedrick kill it, and she made Ferdinand eat it.”
“Agh...” Karstedt massaged the bridge of his nose with a grimace.
“She was spouting some nonsense about ‘useless creatures’ being good for something and made it clear she meant him, but he didn’t cry or get mad or anything! He just agreed with her!” Sylvester let the awful story spill forth. “Or not really agreed but was just like ‘oh, I see, that’s how it is.’”
It would have been infinitely better to see Ferdinand scream or cry than to see those calm, dead eyes, that blank resignation — or something worse, like somehow he had expected it all along. Those two had already poisoned him at least once, but at that meal he just ate what they gave him without the slightest protest.
The memory had begun to go red, the voices drowned out by his own heart pounding, and then Vedrick — that lackey who spat on his own mother’s sacrifice and helped his name-sworn lady debase herself — had gone around the table to place another serving of Himmel on Ferdinand’s plate. He had turned back toward Veronica, secure in the knowledge that he would see her approving smile, but before his eyes could reach her face, the scene had been Crushed to splinters in a storm of noise and color.
That had been the breaking point. Sylvester had not wanted to see that smile. He hadn’t wanted to know what his mother’s face looked like at that moment.
“And I remember he was so depressed after that!” He buried his face in his palms. “I just thought ‘oh, he’d gotten attached to Himmel after all,’ but it was really...
“I feel so pathetic,” he lamented. “I was letting things like that happen right under my nose because apparently I just didn’t want to know.”
And now he couldn’t even apologize. Ferdinand was gone, snatched away to Ahrensbach and to Georgine’s tender mercies. Once again he had calmly accepted the dish his poisoners gave him, and Sylvester hadn’t been there or known until it was too late.
“How am I still… Why is everyone still putting up with me?”
“You needn’t go that far,” Karstedt argued. “Isn’t your resolve to face these things what got us here right now?”
Sylvester looked up at his old friend, his mind suddenly blank. Their eyes met for what felt like the first time in days.
That was... true. At the Archduke Conference, after all the angry shouting he’d done, no one could accuse him of having not wanted to know what was happening. Now, in the purge, he hadn’t just insisted on helping with the memory searches because he wanted to prove he was willing to work. The resolve to face this responsibility head-on had also been the resolve to face the truth for himself, no matter how hard it was.
And just like that, Karstedt had pierced the bubble of his dark thoughts. Suddenly it seemed to Sylvester that not everything that had been going through his head moments ago had necessarily been true or as important as he thought. It felt like a breath of fresh, cool air, finally.
Not that he could absolve himself so easily. “I just hope it’s not too little, too late,” he admitted.
But he could finally breathe. His arms and hands could finally relax a bit. His head and his bones still ached, but once an attendant put his appearance back in order, he finally felt as if he could get back on his feet and back to work on something, even if it was just — ugh — paperwork.
“I also remember,” Karstedt added with a bit of a sharp smile, “that after that shumil disappeared you kept dragging Ferdinand this way and that to ‘cheer him up’ — including the time you brought him along on your highbeast while you performed foolish stunts.”
“Hey, I’d done it all before; I knew it would work,” Sylvester insisted.
“There was the backward loop where you turned upside-down...”
“If you don’t slow down or level off in the middle, you’re not going to fall.”
“...Then you swooped through a gateway narrower than your highbeast’s wingspan...”
“Birds do that kind of thing all the time, right?” Sylvester argued, a little less certain. Still, he happily remembered the thrill of the gateway whooshing past, the pressure of Ferdinand leaning back against him quite hard now that he thought about it...
“And then I laughed at him,” he sighed. “When we landed he just looked so stunned.” Even after Sylvester dismounted, Ferdinand had made no move to do the same, only sat there on the lion’s back with his gold eyes wider than Sylvester had ever seen them. “At the time I thought it was funny and cute, but I guess I just scared him.”
“I’m not so sure,” Karstedt said, unfazed. “By the time I landed, he was trying to give you a rather animated lecture while you were grinning and patting his head. It seems to me that he never was so depressed again after that — and that he was more attached to you.”
“Huh. Maybe you’re right.” Probably Karstedt was right. Sylvester had always been worse at keeping the timeline of his youth straight, at least for his time at home in Ehrenfest.
“You know,” he realized, “the first time I did that stuff, at the Academy, Florencia gave me quite an earful, but it was easier to get her to talk to me after that.
“Maybe —”
“No,” Karstedt declared.
“I didn’t even say —”
“You shouldn’t even be thinking it.”
Sylvester laughed and let it pass as a joke. His knight commander had drawn the obvious conclusion.
But he had actually been thinking of Rozemyne. Yes, she was a chaos gremlin, but after each terrifying ride was over, wasn’t the truth that he’d gotten more and more attached to her?
Those thoughts about himself and his adopted daughter brought a fond, bemused smile to his face as he asked for an attendant to be called back in.
*
A year and a season later, Sylvester would learn that that was indeed something he liked about Rozemyne.
And that it was something Ferdinand very much liked about her.
