100x Rebate Sharing System: Retired Incubus Wants to Marry & Have Kids-Chapter 392 - 391- Noble Knights in Millbrook

The capital smelled different.

Every man in the squadron carried it — that particular quality of city-born arrogance that clung to pressed cloaks and polished boots the way perfume clings to imported silk.

They’d been riding since dawn and they still looked like they’d descended from somewhere elevated, their horses well-bred, their formation tight, their eyes moving across Millbrook’s main street with the specific sliding assessment of people evaluating something they hadn’t expected to find.

Seven of them.

Division agents of the crown prince’s intelligence arm, officially designated as ’hunters’ — tracker-specialists, the kind that didn’t appear on official rosters and answered questions about their unit assignment with polite deflection. The kind sent when the crown prince Leo wanted information gathered without the information knowing it was being gathered.

Their leader rode slightly ahead.

Cassius. Twenty-eight, second son of a marquis, the kind of face that had been told it was handsome so many times it had started to ’know’ it. His traveling cloak bore no insignia. His horse bore no marking. Nothing about him announced anything — which was itself an announcement, to anyone who knew how to read the absence of announcement.

He was looking at a bakery.

At its window, specifically — at the fresh loaves arranged inside, at the ’glass’ of the window itself, at the complete absence of frontier-town shabbiness that the briefing materials had led him to expect from a northern border settlement.

"’Well,’" said the man riding beside him. Jonah. Freckled, sharp-eyed, the youngest of the group at twenty-three. "’Someone’s been busy.’"

Cassius didn’t answer.

His eyes moved down the street. Cobblestones — not dirt-packed earth, not the irregular flagstones of a town that had laid stone wherever it could be afforded and left gaps in between. Actual cobblestones, uniform, well-mortared, the kind of street maintenance that implied not just wealth but ’sustained’ wealth, regular investment, someone who cared about the infrastructure rather than just the income it produced.

The fountain in the square.

The children at it.

The ’faces’ of the people here — the specific quality of a population that was eating enough, sleeping enough, not constantly braced against the low-grade uncertainty that defined most frontier settlements.

Cassius’s mouth thinned.

"It seems," he said, "that the rumors were not exaggerated."

"Megan said the same thing," Jonah confirmed. "She passed through two months ago on the eastern survey. Said it was nothing like the reports from six months prior. Said it was—" He gestured at the street around them. "’This.’"

"What changed six months ago?"

"The tower," said the man behind them. Rett. Older, the unit’s tracker, face like weathered stone. He was looking not at the street but at the skyline. "’That’ changed six months ago."

They all looked.

The tower rose from the town’s center with the complete disregard for conventional architecture of something that had grown rather than been built — dark stone at the base, the upper levels transitioning to materials that Cassius’s eyes kept trying to categorize and failing, and at the very peak, through the morning haze, the spread of something gold-green that was either an extremely ambitious garden or something else entirely.

Cassius looked at it for three seconds.

Filed it.

"And the ducal family," he said, returning his eyes to street level. "Confirmed?"

"Confirmed arrival," Jonah said. "Three days ago, according to the northern post road register. The Duke of Ktor’s daughter herself." He paused. "With an escort of Ktorian battalion knights."

Several of the men behind them exchanged looks.

Rett made a sound.

"’Bulls,’" said a third-rank agent at the rear, whose name was Fellan, and who was grinning.

The grin spread.

Two more of the unit were smiling now, the specific smile of men who had grown up in a court that had opinions about the Ktorian ducal family and had expressed those opinions, over many years, in the form of a nickname that had attached itself so thoroughly to the lineage that everyone used it privately and no one used it publicly.

’Bulls.’

For the specific reason that the Ktorian ducal line had, across four generations, consistently demonstrated the spectacular military courage and the equally spectacular political density of an animal that charged directly at the thing in front of it without asking whether the thing warranted charging. Enormous in presence. Formidable in direct conflict. Entirely without the sideways thinking that capital politics rewarded.

"’Dumbheads,’" Fellan said, still grinning. "The lot of them. What’s the daughter doing out here instead of— the capital has been expecting her at the seasonal court for two months."

"That,’" Cassius said, "is what we’re here to determine."

"Right." Fellan’s grin faded into the professional expression. "’Right.’"

"’Stop grinning,’" said the man beside him.

"I’m not—"

"You absolutely are. Stop it."

Cassius raised one hand, the brief gesture that meant ’enough,’ and the unit went quiet with the practiced efficiency of people who understood the economy of that gesture.

They rode toward the battalion colors.

’’’

The Ktorian knights were hard to miss.

Silver armor — not the polished decorative silver of ceremonial plate, the ’working’ silver of knights who had been trained in a tradition that considered battlefield utility and ornamental significance to be the same conversation. The Ktor crest on the pauldrons. The specific standing posture of soldiers who had been trained to stand a particular way and stood that way whether they were on a battlefield or helping an old man with a market cart.

Which was what three of them were currently doing.

The old man’s cart had lost a wheel — the wooden spoke had split under the weight of what appeared to be a substantial load of late-season root vegetables — and the cart had listed hard to one side in the middle of the market lane, creating a minor obstruction that the rest of the market had begun politely routing around.

Three Ktorian knights had simply ’stopped.’

Armor and all. Greaves and all. One of them was crouched by the wheel with his gauntlet off, actually examining the split in the spoke with the focused practical attention of someone assessing what could be salvaged. Another was holding the cart’s frame steady. The third had apparently gone somewhere because the old man kept gesturing at a direction down the lane and the knight kept nodding.

And at the center of all of this, directing the entire operation with the calm efficiency of someone for whom ’this is the work’ was Celestia.

Cassius had seen her once, briefly, at a court function two years ago. He recognized her now by the silver armor with the distinctive etching at the collar — the ducal mark, subtle, the kind of thing you had to know to see — and by the way the knights around her oriented toward her even while doing separate tasks, the specific gravity of a command figure that wasn’t performing command, was just ’being’ it.

She was speaking to the old man.

Low voice, his distance too great to make out the words. Her helmet was off, hanging from her belt. Her dark hair was short, practical. Her face was — Cassius had been told she was handsome in the way of the Ktorian line, which was true, and also that she was difficult to read, which he was currently confirming.

Cassius dismounted.

His unit held position at the lane’s edge.

He approached.

He walked with the specific deliberate quality of a man who was extending professional courtesy downward, which was visible in the angle of his shoulders and the precise measurement of how much he extended the approach before stopping.

He greeted her.

Full noble form — the address, the acknowledgment of ducal rank, the brief formal clause that established the crown prince’s division and by extension the weight of the introduction. Correctly rendered, efficiently delivered, the product of seventeen years of capital court education.

Celestia did not look up.

The old man was describing something. She was listening to him — actually listening, her head slightly inclined, her eyes on his face with the quality of someone who had decided this conversation was the current priority and was not re-evaluating that decision.

Cassius stood.

Waited.

She continued listening to the old man.

Cassius’s jaw moved.

Behind his mask — the unit’s standard silver travel mask, face-covering, the kind that allowed expression at the chin but communicated nothing above it — something tightened. The specific tightening of a man who has been ignored in a context where he has never previously been ignored, processing this as data and arriving at a provisional response.

The old man finished speaking.

Celestia said something to the knight by the wheel.

The knight nodded and stood and walked away in the direction the old man had been indicating, apparently to find a replacement spoke or a carpenter or both.

Celestia straightened.

She looked at Cassius.

The look was — he catalogued it. Not hostile. Not the aggressive dismissal of someone making a statement. Just — he was now the current item in her visual field, and she was looking at him with the same direct attention she’d given the old man, which was somehow more unsettling than hostility would have been.

"Division agent," she said. Statement, not question — she’d processed the greeting while appearing not to.

"Lady Celestia," Cassius said. Smooth, recovered. "A pleasure. I understand you’ve recently arrived at—"

"Three days ago." Her eyes moved briefly over his unit behind him, cataloguing with the efficiency of a trained military eye, then returned to his face. "If you’re here about the Millbrook report discrepancy, you’ll want the administrator’s office on the east street. They keep the census updated."

"I’m actually here regarding—"

"If you’re here about the tower," she said, "you’ll need to speak with Lord Viktor directly." Her expression didn’t change. "Through the appropriate channels. I’m not one of them."

Cassius paused.

"Lady Celestia, I was hoping to—"