I reached for Lilian's hand and squeezed it tight.

  Now that the selection was over, the Majordomo had already moved on to discussing retively insignificant affairs. However, it was doubtful that many of us were actually paying attention. The Crown Prince's surprise expedition had surely thrown a wrench onto everyone's pns, and I could only imagine that many of us were still processing the news.

  I was concerned for Lilian's safety, for instance.

  While I had never traveled with the military, I was naturally skeptical of an expedition that involved the Royal Guard. They were a company of elite soldiers, but it was practically a golden rule that bad things were liable to happen if you mixed a handful of female servants and a hundred or so heavily armed young men who were hundreds of miles from home. In the light novel, JK Haru is a Sex Worker in Another World, one of the protagonist's friends actually dies from being banged up by a company of soldiers for five days straight.

  There was really no way for us to know what sort of attitude the commanding officer might have towards female servants, and we couldn't predict exactly how tight of a leash they would hold on their subordinates. As professional maids, we were legally free and independent women who earned a sary, but our profession was prostitution-adjacent and shared superficial simirities with svery. It was hard to know if a bunch of a soldiers could distinguish between us and the other spoils of war they may have interacted with in the past.

  There was a lot of uncertainty.

  Positive uncertainty was possible too — since this was an expedition accompanying the Crown Prince and a handful of Otherworlders. If a maid was fortunate enough to win the interest of the next heir of the kingdom or a transmigrator from another world, that was essentially the same as winning the lottery. Every maidservant wanted to secure their future with a rich and powerful (and kind) noble.

  But was Crown Prince Leopold even the right person to gamble your entire future on?

  I wasn't confident.

  Yet Lilian smiled reassuringly at me, as if it convey that I shouldn't worry about her.

  + + +

  As the Majordomo spoke, I ended up examining the Crown Prince very carefully.

  I wanted to understand how his brain functioned and how his mental reasoning worked. What were his underlying motivations?

  If the nightmare that I experienced in the garden shed was truly real, then it only made sense that the owner of 「Excalibur」 was the vilin responsible for stabbing Kang Jiesu. However, it must have been done for a reason, and the prince must have known something that compelled him to take such a drastic cold-blooded action.

  I wanted to see the reactions on his face.

  I paid attention to the way that he moved his hands and shifted his legs.

  I also examined the sword that hung from his waist.

  My eyes were glued to him like a hawk, monitoring him for any suspicious movements that might indicate that he was about to go looking for another victim to stab. I frankly just wanted to see if I could identify a single abnormality in his behavior.

  + + +

  The reigning King Casimir had seventeen children. The first eleven were the children of concubines, but the twelfth was Prince Leopold — the Queen's eldest son. If I recalled correctly, the prince was something around 35 or 36 years old this year, which made him a fully grown adult. People on Earth often had this erroneous impression from YA fiction and Disney movies that princes and princesses were typically teenagers — whereas in reality, a majority of princes kept their rank until their forties and fifties. The crown did not pass from father to son until the reigning monarch died, which obviously meant that a King's son could be quite old when they inherited the throne.

  The rumors surrounding Prince Leopold generally centered around the fact that he was extremely difficult to control.

  As a child, he was rebellious, and he constantly disobeyed his father. As a teenager, he ran away from home and somehow appeared on the Western Front months ter — and allegedly slew a commander of the demon lord's forces. A few years ter, he got the Prime Minister's daughter pregnant, and then after that he showed up at the Archduke's mansion and demanded that the most powerful man in the Kingdom hand over control of his private army. It was more or less impossible to force him to do anything, and by corolry, you didn't ever want to be the poor messenger assigned with the task of telling him, "No."

  He supposedly grew out of his childhood temper tantrums as he matured, and many people said that the Crown Prince's temperament had improved in more recent years. However, most of the maids agreed that it was never a good idea to upset the Crown Prince. If anything, it was almost as bad as angering the King.

  The most infamous mark on the Crown Prince's reputation was the fact that he (allegedly) killed his second younger brother. It was passed off as an "accident" five years ago, but I think everyone tacitly knew that Prince Leopold was responsible for the incident.

  At the time, the Third Prince had just turned eighteen, and he was growing immensely popur among the aristocrats and commoners. The Third Prince was essentially the living version of a "perfect" Prince Charming that you could only find in fairy tales. He was intelligent, handsome, powerful, empathetic, and chivalrous. Supposedly, there were wild specutive rumors that that the King might even favor the younger son for succession... although the rumors didn't st very long.

  They abruptly vanished because the Third Prince died in his sleep with a sword thrust through his chest.

  After a long investigation, it was deemed an "accident" and the culprit was never found.

  + + +

  Incidentally, I couldn't take my eyes off the legendary weapon in the Crown Prince's scabbard.

  Was that the same sword that he used to stab his brother?

  The sword that he used to stab Kang Jiesu?

  The Crown Prince's eyes were currently wandering around the room, biting his lips with a rather serious expression on his face. His mind was clearly preoccupied with with something else, and it didn't seem like he was currently filled with blood-thirsty intent. It appeared as though he was thinking about some kind of puzzle — or an unsolved curious riddle that was gnawing at his mind.

  —Suddenly, I realized that I made a huge blunder.

  Crown Prince Leopold's gaze met with mine, and he caught me staring at him. At first, he looked confused to find a maid watching him so intently, but the bewildered expression on his face slowly transformed into a wide, ravenous, hungry grin.

  ........

  ....

  Well shit.

  Obviously, I quickly pretended that I hadn't been staring at him this entire time, but it seemed like the Crown Prince had already noticed that something strange was amiss.

  I was quite sure that Prince Leopold's eyes were trained right onto me for the rest of the staff meeting. It seriously made me sweat like buckets, because nobody would feel comfortable if such a frightening individual was examining you like a research specimen for twenty minutes straight.

  When the assembly was over, I tried to blend in with the rest of the maids as we shuffled out of the ballroom like a herd of sheep, but an ominous six foot tall monster stopped me at the door like a castle wall.

  "You are Hanamarie Stiria, correct?" The Crown Prince said.

  "...Yes." I swallowed a knot in my throat.

  Prince Leopold smiled.

  "Come to my bedroom," he said. "You will spend the night with me."

  ?