Chapter Text
Luigi knows people consider him a very calm person. Patient. Stable. An unmoving anchor for those around him, like the earth he commands. That’s not to say he doesn’t feel emotions, he’s just unflappable and capable of rational thought no matter the situation.
That belief is not exactly incorrect. He’s never been one for emotional outbursts like the rest of his family. Moreover, he’s been born with powerful magic, just like his son Keith, and thus had to work a lot on his self-control, or risk hurting someone.
To call him rational, however… He definitely wouldn’t agree. A rational man would confess his feelings to the woman he loves, rather than binding her in a political marriage (that Mili turned out to love him too is an incredible blessing, but as he didn’t know it back then, it doesn’t excuse his actions in any way). No, when emotions come into play, he’s very irrational, just good at hiding it.
Which is why the only thing stopping him from cursing out the royal family so much anyone who heard him would assume he is planning an insurrection, is not the potential accusation of treason were the information to get out, but that he swore to never curse in anger after Katarina was born. He still remembers being scared when he overheard his own father cursing in anger, and he refused to let his own children fear him.
An emergency, the king’s messenger said. Potential national scandal. Duke Claes is ordered by His Highness to come to the royal palace at once to help with it.
He doesn’t even care that the sun has already set and he would be working past midnight, he’s done it before. What he cares about is that his beloved children are leaving for the Academy in the morning and he won’t be there to see them off! And the king knows it! Whatever that emergency is, it surely can wait several hours for him!
Unfortunately, as royalty declared this as an emergency, even he, a Duke, cannot ignore the order.
That is why he’s walking the dark corridors of his mansions at hours even most of the servants are asleep, carrying a small candle to light his way. Though he feels bad about waking up his children, he’s not leaving without a goodbye, not when they won’t be seeing each other for months.
He’s already been in Keith’s room, and now he’s approaching Katarina’s. Surprisingly, there is candlelight coming from her room. Is his daughter still awake? He knocks lightly at her door, but after not hearing any response, he slowly opens the door.
He finds his daughter not in the bed as he expected, but at her desk instead, having fallen asleep on a notebook. Her desk candle suggests she was working late at night on something.
Luigi finda himself smiling. His daughter was probably writing in her diary about how excited she was to start the Academy. That’s just like Katarina.
His smile drops, however, when he notices how tense her body is. He puts the candle is his hand on the desk and reaches out to check if his daughter is alright, when he hears her mutter with a scared voice.
“Don’t… die…”
Ah, his poor daughter is having a nightmare. She must be more stressed about leaving home than she lets on.
He grabs her shoulders (unusually strong ones for a noble lady from her farming and sword training), noting under his fingers that she’s trembling, and shakes her gently.
“Katarina. Katarina. My princess, wake up.”
Perhaps due to the influence of the nightmare, his daughter jumps when she wakes up, accidentally throwing the notebook off her desk and almost doing the same to both candles.
“I don’t want to die!” She clutches his shirt at chest area and his left forearm (he barely holds in the grunt of pain, her grip strong enough to surely leave his forearm bruised) and starts crying into his shoulder.
He doesn’t even have to think, his body instantly hugs her. “Shhh. It’s ok.”
“I’ve done my best to be good!” His daughter keeps crying like she’s not hearing him, perhaps still trapped in a nightmare despite being awake. “To not be a villainess!”
“You’re not one, you’re the kindest person in the world.” Why would she even worry about that? Come to think of it, he remembers hearing her calling herself a villainess once or twice. He thought it was for some kind of game she was playing, but…
“I can take exile, I know how to farm… Just, please…” She stops crying, her voice dropping in tone and energy, as if his daughter got tired enough to fall asleep again. As if the world wishes for balance, the quieter she got, the more he wanted to scream.
“It won’t happen, dear. Your dad won’t let anyone exile you.” He tries again, despite knowing she won’t hear that either, trapped in a nightmare as she is.
As if to mock him, this time she seems to hear him, given her chilling response. “But… he… did…” Her breathing calms down, suggesting she fell asleep again.
But… to say that he did let her be exiled… is that what her nightmare was about? He wishes he could accept that being all there was to it… but he has a sinking feeling there was more to that.
The way she’s called herself villainess…
The ability to farm food would be useful for an exile… As would the skill to defend with a sword…
He shakes his head to stop those thoughts. They are ridiculous. What single reason would his beloved daughter have to ever seriously consider such a thing? The stress is making him paranoid, that’s all.
Carefully lifting his daughter up, he carries her to her bed. He wishes he could have told her goodbye, but after such a nightmare, she will need all the sleep she can get. Instead, he settles with just a kiss on her forehead and covering her with her blanket.
He returns to her desk afterwards, to blow off her candle and pick up his own, when he spots her notebook on the ground. Ah, right, she hit it in panic. He leans down to pick it up, when…
He swears he wasn’t planning on reading it. He respects Katarina’s privacy. She’s open with everyone as is, if there is something she wants to keep to herself, she has every right to do so. It’s simply that the drawings were slightly glowing.
He knew why they were glowing, of course. During one event or another, he was given an experimental magical pen from the Ministry, one that used fire magic to make whatever was written with it glow. He had no need for such a thing, but he knew Katarina would love it, so he gave it to her. He was right, of course, she loved it and used it for everything. It broke quickly, a few days before he adopted Keith from what he remembers, it was experimental after all. Seeing the glow just made him stop on the page for a moment in nostalgia.
But that moment was enough for him to notice something wrong about it.
It wasn’t the strange symbols. Although he has no idea how she came up with such a thing, Mili has told him a long ago that Katarina would sometimes write notes from her lessons in it when trying to rush, though it became less frequent as she grew older. They thought at first that Katarina was just getting distracted and drawing random lines, but she proved to be able to read old history notes that, as much as he loves her, she was too… uninterested in to remember in such detail.
He remembers wondering if his daughter was some kind of linguistic genius, but introducing showed not only that it wasn’t the case, but that her invention of that code was detrimental as she would be mixing up parts of the runes with it. Ditto for checking her talent in cryptography.
Anyway, the symbols weren’t the problem, even though looking at them filling the whole page made him feel like he was holding a foreign book and not his daughter’s notebook. No, what was wrong was the drawing of Nicol Ascart. Though it wasn’t an artistic portrait and more a colorful sketch, it was very well done, enough to use for wanted posters. He could very clearly see the resemblance to the young man he saw not too long ago when Katarina’s friends all came to visit her.
Yes, his 8 years old daughter who hasn’t even met her future brother yet drew a very good picture of a 16 years old Nicol Ascart, a boy who at that point she shouldn’t have even known existed.
There probably was some kind of rational explanation. Maybe his daughter got a second magical pen somewhere and hid that fact from him, o-or maybe she somehow secretly met him and the drawing was how she imagined he would grow up, or-
Luigi Claes wasn’t a rational man, despite what many thought.
All he knew was that he was holding an image of future made in the past, and that moments ago his daughter told him he didn’t protect her from exile using past tense.
Ignoring his daughter’s privacy made him feel guilty, but, well, it wouldn’t be the first time his love towards someone pushed him to actions he would feel guilty about.
The royal messenger forgotten about, he sat down at Katarina’s desk and under the candlelight went through the whole notebook. It wasn’t easy to get much information out of it, as most of its content was in Katarina’s code, but thankfully Katarina would sometimes attatch drawings.
Nicol Ascart wasn’t the only of her friends that Katarina drew before meeting. His son Keith, Prince Geordo, Prince Alan, Mary Hunt, Sophia Ascart, all with their names below the drawings, then written again with her code (at least that’s his assumption)… She drew herself too, though, despite perfectly reproducing her future (current?) dress, she utterly failed at her expression. It’s like she put Mili’s ‘I will destroy you and I shall enjoy it’ on her own face. He’s not sure his kind daughter is even capable of feeling such a… hostile emotion, much lesz showing it on her face.
Strangest of all though must be the blonde girl drawn like some kind of angel named Maria Campbell. He hasn’t ever seen her, she’s not Katarina’s friend… at least not yet. He may have not seen her, but he has heard the name in passing. If his memory isn’t fooling him, Maria Campbell is a commoner girl capable of the rare light magic, and she is also starting Academy this year.
Those drawings aside, other pictures are mostly doodles. Small, kid-like drawings of Katarina with a sword in her hand cutting Keith’s golem in half. Her throwing a snake at Prince Geordo, who runs away in fear. Katarina in commoner clothes holding a big carrot. Many doodles of that girl Maria with the boys in various scenarios, like listening to Prince Alan playing on a piano or holding hands with Keith, often with hearts around them.
And a few of Katarina bullying Maria.
In general, the notebook seemed to be more about Maria than about Katarina. Though he couldn’t read the context, thanks to Katarina writing the names at the begining both in Sorceran and in her code, he could recognise their mentions elsewhere, and Maria’s appeared almost everywhere. Katarina’s was second. Each of the boys seemed to have a section dedicated to them, though strangely in Nicol Ascart’s and Prince Alan’s sections Katarina appeared very little, while also being the biggest concentrations of the names of, respectively, Sophia Ascart and Mary Hunt.
Once he got to the end, he found himself staring at a blank page for several minutes, as if hoping that it would reveal some wisdom to him that would make sense of everything.
The blank page, unfortunately, stayed silent.
Despite feeling like a blind person trying to navigate a city through solely the sense of temperature, Luigi tried to form the half-clues he had into something resembling a theory, but this just couldn’t be explained without some ancient magic or divine intervention, and those produced as many questions as answers. His best theory is that, when Katarina hit her head, she awoke some kind of far-reaching divinatory power, but…
In the end, there was only one person who could answer his questions, he thought as he looked at his sleeping daughter.
But would she? She seemed to try hiding it very hard, to the point of creating such intricate code. Moreover, she seemed to think that he would fail to protect her in the future. If he actually confronted her about it, would she answer truthfully, or would she panic and run away or clamp down?
“My lord?” He nearly jumps at the voice interrupting his thoughts. Turning around, he spots Anne, Katarina’s personal maid. “What are you doing here at this hour?”
“I could ask you the same thing.” He immediately cringes on the inside at the answer. Anne doesn’t deserve him taking his stress out on her.
The maid shows her professionalism by not even blinking at his uncharacteristic rudeness and answering without hesitation. “My lord, my Lady often kicks off her blanket during sleep, so I always make sure to check on her during the night.”
He didn’t know that. Neither that his daughter has such a habit, nor that Anne wakes up each day in the middle of the night just to correct for it. Then again, the two have always been incredibly close with one another. He wouldn’t be surprised if Katarina trusted the maid more than anyone, even her friends and brother… and parents, as bitter as the idea is to swallow.
Wait… trust more than anyone? Perhaps…
“Anne.” He raises Katarina’s notebook. “Do you know what it is?”
“It’s my lady’s notebook, my lord. Though not a diary, it holds a similar significance to her as a place to write about private matters that she doesn’t want anyone else to know about.” Luigi has to admit, he didn’t know it was possible to give someone such a scathing look while maintaining a perfectly polite demeanor. The maid must have assumed, correctly, that he opened and read it, and definitely didn’t approve.
“Yes, yes it is.” He sighs, leaning back on the chair. He doesn’t like this plan, but it seems the most likely one to help his daughter, and that’s what’s most important. “Anne, I have a special task for you.”
“My lord?”
“After I leave this room, wake up Katarina and start questioning her-”
“I cannot do that.” She instantly interrupts him. “If she wishes to keep something secret from you, my Lord, then that is her right and I cannot betray her.”
He nearly snorts. He’s pretty sure a servant speaking like that to their master would be thrown out at the very least in any other House. Anne is so adored by his daughter that she’s untouchable even to him, however. Then again, the very fact that she would speak up for her like that is why he’s willing to trust her with this matter.
“You misunderstand.” He says wryly. “I don’t expect you to report to me anything you hear. If after this my daughter wishes to speak about it with me or Mili or Keith, it will be great, but if not, that’s still fine.” It’s not fine, but for Katarina he can deal with the hurt. “The important thing is that someone understands what she’s going through and how to help her. You are the one she trusts the most, if she opens up to anyone, it’s you.”
The maid doesn’t answer immediately. Her eyes bore into him, perhaps seeking something, he doesn’t know. He lets her do it patiently, already knowing that she will agree. It’s about helping his daughter, after all.
As expected, after a glance at the snoring beauty, Anne consents. “What should I ask her about?”
“What kind of knowledge or power she gained when she hit her head seven years ago.”
“Pardon?”
“I suspect she had some vision of the future, but I’m not certain.” He continues, not really explaining anything. He understands too little himself to explain anyway. “Try asking her about why she fears exile to get her to talk, or why she thinks she’s a villainess, and what Maria Campbell has to do with it.”
“Who?” The maid asks, completely thrown off.
“A commoner with light magic who is also starting the Academy this year. If Katarina asks how you know that name, say she muttered it while asleep, that’s how I heard it.” The lie is another pin of guilt stabbing at his heart, but he doubts Anne would be willing to make such a direct lie if she knew the truth, and Katarina thinking that the maid went through her secret notebook isn’t going to help matters.
“I… I understand.” It’s clear that she doesn’t, but years of serving Katarina taught her how to roll with confusion.
“After you’re done, come to me if there is anything I can do to help.” He orders, standing up and grabbing his, now shorter, candle. “And I don’t just mean today. If Katarina needs anything, inform me and I will have it done, no questions asked, whether that’s some extra money or me personally killing the king.”
“My lord?!” He leaves the room before the maid can recover from her shock. Guess his daughter is not the only one who can get her to make such a face. If he was in a better mood, he might have celebrated that a little.
Was saying such treasonous words while a royal messenger who could technically be a royal spy using wind magic to eavesdrop on him rational? No. He doesn’t feel regretful about it though. He’s not a rational man after all.