Saved By The Mad Duke
Chapter 81: Woe Is Me!

Chapter 81: Woe Is Me!

"Your Grace, you have been wearing quite a grim expression since early morning. Is something troubling you?"

Stanis scrutinized his lord’s dark countenance once more, his curiosity piqued by the unusual distress. It was evident that from the moment the man stepped out of the castle, he exuded an invisible yet ominous aura of gloom, unsettling to anyone who dared to glance at him even briefly.

Upon hearing his assistant’s observation, Tillian flinched, tightly clutching the reins of his horse, suddenly aware of his own expression. He furrowed his eyebrows and shook his head, releasing a long sigh.

"Nothing of real consequence, but I seem to have inadvertently created another awkward situation between the princess and myself."

"What did you do this time?" Stanis inquired, his tone heavy with exasperation.

Another heavy sigh escaped Tillian’s lips.

"I didn’t do anything wrong per se, but... Aideen saw the letter from my mentor the other night."

"I beg your pardon?" Stanis’s eyebrows shot up in surprise.

He offered the Duke a look that carried a strange blend of perplexity and disbelief. Once he fully comprehended the situation painted by Tillian, the knight burst into a loud fit of laughter, which only served to make his lord even more embarrassed and confused.

"How can you laugh at my misery so easily?"

With his shoulders still shaking from the dying laughter, the knight wiped the tears that had formed at the corners of his eyes. He then shook his head and replied,

"Don’t you find it funny, Your Grace? From all the letters she could have picked, she chose the only one she wasn’t supposed to see! Talk about unlucky coincidences!"

Duke Valentine responded to his aide’s excitement with a disappointed frown.

"I consider it an unfortunate negligence instead, Stanis. You were the one supposed to intercept that letter before it could end up on my desk!"

"I apologize, My Lord. I am indeed at fault here. But what did he even write in that letter that you had to hide it from the princess?"

Unexpectedly, even for Stanis, who had witnessed the Duke in numerous flattering and not-so-flattering situations, Tillian’s face turned incredibly red. His embarrassment was so overwhelmingly strong that even the knight suddenly felt somewhat uncomfortable.

Turning his horse around, Stanis stopped right next to his lord, their horses parallel to one another. He leaned closer to the Duke, narrowing his eyes as he asked again,

"So? What did he write there?"

With yet another long exhale, Tillian brushed his blond hair away from his face and decided to surrender to Stanis’s curiosity.

"I asked him about the wedding and, you know, what comes after..."

"What comes after...? You mean the wedding night?!"

The knight’s voice echoed through the cold forest, bouncing off the frozen trunks of the dead trees, as if ensuring that every part of their surroundings heard his words.

Startled, the Duke covered Stanis’s mouth with his big, gloved hand and shot him a sharp glare.

"Do you have to be this loud? Yes, it was about that, alright? I have no clue about these things, and those foolish books you brought me from the Capital were not really helping. I had to seek advice from someone who actually has some experience behind his shoulders."

Somehow, the knight felt offended by Tillian’s response.

"What about me, then? Don’t I count as someone with experience in such matters?"

He winked at the Duke and nudged him playfully on the side, but the latter only dismissed his gestures with a judgmental look.

"Do you really want me to answer that?"

"I am hurt, Your Grace! All these years I have been raising you as my own, but you turned your back on me in the end! Woe is me!"

Tillian sighed again and commanded his black horse to move away from the knight, but Stanis could not give up. Following behind Duke Valentine, he pressed on in a persistingly mocking tone,

"Come on, Your Grace! What did he tell you? Let me be the judge of the accuracy of his suggestions!"

***

The castle’s reading room was enveloped in comforting quietness, the occasional turning of pages and the hasty movements of the quill in Ahspid’s hand the only sources of sound in the room.

For the first time since the beginning of their lessons, both Ahspid and Aideen were engrossed in their own tasks. The magus was jotting something down in one of his thick notebooks, occasionally using spells to erase the ink from the pages and start over, a rather irritated look on his pale face.

The princess, on the other hand, was focused on reading one of Ahspid’s books on magic and spells, carefully infusing her sparkling mana into the pages, mentally going over their contents.

The young woman was so immersed in her reading that she failed to notice the book on magic she was supposed to be studying slide down, revealing another book—or rather, a leather-bound collection of thinner books containing summaries of every trading report since the day Duke Valentine started his trading ventures.

Although their first attempt to work on something related to Tillian’s duties ended in a clear fiasco, Aideen still insisted on sorting out his correspondence, and to her astonishment, the Duke agreed without hesitation. Moreover, perhaps ordered by his lord as well, Stanis gave the princess the collection of trading reports so that she could learn more about what Tillian did based on that information.

The lady accepted both tasks with unconcealed eagerness and excitement.

However, while she thought that her plan of deciphering the intricate trading reports during her magic lessons was being perfectly executed, Aideen did not realize that her ability to stay incredibly focused, while very useful and admirable at other times, was capable of betraying her in the company of a more skillful and experienced opponent.

Setting the quill aside, Ahspid stretched his lips into a somewhat evil grin and hissed,

"Well, well, well, and what do we have here?"