“Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to depart. Please remain seated and hold on tight.”
The conductor’s voice drifted from the corridor, muffled by the heavy wooden door of the private compartment.
A moment later, a low whistle sounded from the direction of the locomotive.
Not a sharp one—it was deep, thick, a growl pressed out of the iron lungs of the steam engine.
Olivia leaned back into the leather seat, a few strands of her silver-white hair catching on the friction of the headrest before falling back onto her shoulders.
She glanced at Hui across from her, then at Snow, who was flipping through his notebook, and decided not to make an issue of it.
Fine.
As long as they didn’t ask her to do anything inappropriate, and as long as there was food.
A silver dragon’s bloodline was several times more sensitive to hunger than an ordinary person’s, and her days of eating dirt in Silverport City of the Federation had proven that point well enough.
She hoped the train meals in Urske wouldn’t be too awful.
Snow tucked the worn leather notebook with its frayed corners into his inner pocket, then reached up and took a slim cylindrical leather document case from the luggage rack.
He unscrewed the cap, pulled out a rolled map, and spread it across the tea table.
The map was parchment, corners weighed down by brass paperweights, with black ink tracing the entire route from the Eldron border to northern Urske.
The railway line was marked in red, with station names and distances densely annotated beside it.
The carriage gave a sudden, gentle jolt.
The platform outside the window began to recede.
At first it was slow, an almost imperceptible slide, then faster and faster.
The steam locomotive’s smokestack belched out a great cloud of gray-white steam that surged past the window, swallowing the platform’s cast-iron pillars and spitting them back out.
The bear-eared conductor was still standing in place, maintaining his slight bow of farewell, and was quickly swallowed by the steam.
Olivia turned her head and studied the scenery outside.
There wasn’t much to see.
Grass was scarce, dry and yellow, with occasional patches of gray-white stones flashing by.
The sky was leaden, pressing low against the horizon.
A mountain ridge was faintly visible in the distance, with a hint of white at the summit—snow, probably.
Past the station, it was all a gray, drab wilderness.
The Eldron border region was a transition zone between hills and plains, with very few trees.
In October on the Urske border, the snow line was already pressing low.
She pulled the curtain closed a bit, leaving only a thin gap.
“Hey, Hui, do you have a plan prepared?”
Hui shifted the slender-necked vase on the tea table half an inch to the side, making room for a teacup.
“For business, I’ll handle the negotiations myself. Princess, you just need to attract the attention of the other nobles at the banquet.”
Olivia’s fingers stopped on the armrest of her seat.
“So you’re just going to leave me hanging like that?”
“There’s more.”
Hui extended a long, slender finger and pointed toward the window.
A thin layer of condensation had formed on the glass—cold outside, warm inside, the temperature difference making the glass sweat.
“Princess. When we reach that little city, the weather may be a bit cold. Make sure to dress warmly.”
Olivia stared at his perpetually gentle face and felt like she was punching a pile of cotton.
She asked about the plan; he answered about the weather.
She asked “why are you leaving me out”; he answered “stay warm.”
His way of deflecting topics was exactly like Prunier’s way of diverting her attention from sweets—except Prunier would offer cake, and Hui would offer a weather forecast.
Snow looked up from the map, pencil spinning between his fingers.
“By the way, is there any other information on this Vishkov? My records aren’t very complete here.”
Hui didn’t answer immediately.
He reached over and pulled the window curtain open a wider gap.
The light from outside fell on his half-black, half-white hair, the edges of the strands catching a gray glow.
“Regarding his city, Akhamatova. The locals are said to be quite devout followers of the mountain god Sergei.”
Snow’s pencil paused on the paper.
“There’s also a legend circulating in the area.”
“About Mount Sergei?”
“It’s said that if you look at a certain block of ice at the summit, you can see a person’s true face.”
Olivia turned her face away from the window, her silver pupils catching the lamplight with a faint gleam.
“That sounds mysterious~”
Her tone carried a light, dismissive playfulness.
Snow probably expected her to ask about the ice crystal, but she didn’t.
She just leaned back against the seat, flicking a small bit of lint off her skirt with an ease that suggested she’d just heard a mediocre fairy tale.
After all, she already had two godlike beings living inside her.
One was Victoria, the first-generation Hundred-Winged Angel and the world’s Goddess of Scales—though that one always spoke only in halves, always gave only partial clues.
Last time in the angel ruins, she’d said a whole lot, but the core information was probably less than one of Hui’s notes.
The other was Nuolina, who called herself the God of Love, dozing off in the depths of her consciousness.
Two gods crammed into the same body—she was used to it.
One more mountain god from Mount Sergei probably wasn’t much more than that.
Olivia straightened back up in her seat, tapped her slender fingers lightly on the armrest twice, and looked around the compartment.
The crystal chandelier’s light fell on the velvet curtains, casting a soft, dark-red glow.
The brass corners of the table were polished to a mirror shine, and the little white flowers in the slender vase trembled gently with the steam engine’s vibrations.
“Hui. You must have spent the entire brigade’s funds on a compartment like this.”
Hui was reaching for his water glass on the tea table.
His hand paused midair for a moment, then he picked up the glass as if nothing had happened.
“The ticket prices are the same for everyone. Seating is simply assigned by status.”
Snow folded the map and leaned back in his seat, a slow expression spreading across his face that could only be described as “life is pain.”
“If only people of viscount rank and above can ride… then the fare probably isn’t exactly small either.”
“That’s right. I booked the tickets. I paid eighty percent of the cost.”
Hui took a sip of water.
His expression didn’t move an inch.
“How tragic~”
Olivia’s tone carried undisguised schadenfreude.
Snow’s face—that characteristically handsome Wuling man’s face—grew even more bitter.
“So, Princess, could you possibly…”
“No.”
Olivia’s answer was as crisp as slicing a radish—this guy actually thought being a princess meant being rich.
Although by bloodline she was indeed a princess, there was no necessary connection between being a princess and having money.
Back when she was working as a laborer in Silverport City, Osteria—wages delayed, rent unpaid, starving to the point of losing control and transforming into Olivia at night—if she told Snow those stories, he’d probably turn to stone on the spot.
From a Wuling man’s perspective, a silver dragon princess starving to the point of not affording food next to a Federation assembly-line factory was probably scarier than any horror story.
“Alright. So, we have to make this deal work.”
Hui set the glass back on the table.
The bottom clinked against the wood with a low, muffled sound.
“Otherwise, we’ll be…”
His nostrils caught the lamplight for a brief moment, his left gold and right red eyes meeting in a flash.