The Villainess is the Villainess [Otome Isekai LitRPG]

Book 3: Chapter 17 - Loyalty [Part 1]

- Morihei Ueshiba.

Morning in Meridian slipped across the sky in shades of pinks, all fresh light and blush. On a quiet street where a crooked arch threw a blade of shade across the stones, Seraphina sat with her knees together and her easel squared to the water. A Serenelle drifted past, the ferryman’s pole kissed the canal bed and rose again, leaving rings that widened and forgot him. The young girl had taken this time to simply get away from it all, a fragment of peace all for herself.

Her Knights and the corrupt Captain Fanzazino of the City Guard made sure of that, cordoning off this small section of the city.

She dabbed into a blob of paint on her palette, stirred and softened it until the color lost its raw shock. Meridian’s water was never one color, she had learned; it was a quarrel of tones—olive where weeds braided the stone, wine-dark beneath shadowed bridges, bright where the sun spilled gold. She mixed until the quarrel on her palette looked honest, then drove a clean line along the canvas where water met the quay. The brush whispered the truth that she saw.

On the other side of the canal, laundry hung from a balcony in squares of faded blue and yellow. Somewhere, someone cried out for something. The sounds came thin and far on this street; Meridian did most of its shouting elsewhere. Another Serenelle returning from the dawn markets, stacked with green bundles that smelled faintly of fennel, scissored past. The ferryman doffed his hat at Seraphina, not so much a greeting, but as an acknowledgement of her beauty.

She did not smile. A smile would pull her mouth and tilt her hand and send the line astray. She breathed instead, slow and sure, and let the breath dictate the stroke: in for the length of a bridge, hold to gather, out for the curved belly of a hull.

One of her flower arrangement instructors had once told her that painting, like shaping line and space with flowers, lives in the small breath where intention settles into harmony—or some nonsense like that. Seraphina had laughed then and diplomatically called it a poet’s beautiful lie. Today, with the canal so peaceful and the sun’s light still soft and kind, she wondered if it were true.

Her fingers moved with a care that had nothing to do with fragility as the hours and minutes passed. Precision was not gentleness. She turned the brush and shaved a shadow along a mooring ring, then broke it with a flick so it looked lived-in, like something that had simply been for a very long time.

“Pretty.” The word came from the small Fae fluttering about her. Her curiosity had elbowed out Seraphina’s explicit instructions for silence.

“It will be, if my brush behaves,” Seraphina murmured, not looking away. She laid in a wash for the far bank where bright awnings flared and slumped, then dragged the heel of the brush through it to suggest the crooked smile of a brick line.

Distracted by a butterfly, Tia left Seraphina alone for a few blessed moments. Had Tia been human, the young girl would have thought of her as one of those with addled minds… what did the Americans and Westerners call them? Ah, yes—autistic. On a certain spectrum of craziness. The countries in the West seemed to produce them on an almost industrial scale, and she wondered if it had something to do with all the chemicals they liked to put in their food.

“Tia, don’t fly too far away,” Seraphina said absently. “There are fish in the canals that eat ducks.” The Fae paused for a bit, looking cautiously down at the canal's edge.

Seraphina added a bead of white to the water where the Serenelle’s prow should cut its own reflection and smiled at her own skill. On the opposite quay, a man unrolled a strip of net to mend, hands like knotted wood moving an efficient grace; his wife sat beside him shelling beans that dropped into a pan like green rain. Seraphina put them both in with three strokes; the idea of a fourth she denied herself. Too much truth was as bad as none. Art was more than that.

The water changed before the sound reached her. A long, heavy ripple shouldered the lesser waves aside. She looked up, brush paused above the canvas. Around the bend came a Serenelle painted the color of dry ash. No flowers on its prow. Only her would-be rival, the Saint of Silver, was all by herself with a grey hat low over her eyes. A picture of false serenity so easily shattered.

How easy would it be to seize this opportunity… to end this here and now. But a whisper stopped her, not one of guilt or conscience, but of purpose. Este Lize still had her role to play, and your enemies were the whetstones you used to keep your claws sharp. Besides, Seraphina was not entirely sure she would be able to get away with such an act in broad daylight.

Their eyes met, but it was Este Lize who pointedly looked away, like a child caught where it shouldn’t be. Why? Was that fear? Had the blonde girl’s campaign of indirect, ‘focused pressure’—she would never admit to it being bullying—been so effective? Either way, she enjoyed that look. Savored it as one would a snack between courses.

However, a small part of her was disappointed. Was that all it took to break one of my creations?

As the Serenelle turned another corner and disappeared from view, the girl suffered another intrusion into this, her carefully cultivated private moment. She heard Miriam’s tread from behind her. The girl could almost hear her maid’s hesitation and worry.

The young noblewoman set her brush down, careful as if she were laying a child to sleep. She would finish this painting from memory, like many other things, later.

“What is it, Milly?” Seraphina asked, folding her hands in her lap as she closed her eyes, as if steeling herself for another round of banal incompetence.

“It’s about the training program, milady…” Milly’s voice wavered, thin as paper in the wind.

“I do hope you're coming to me with a solution and not more whining,” Seraphina murmured, her tone clipped and cold. Her eyes remained shut, but her voice sharpened like the edge of a whetted blade. “I would be most disappointed if the next words out of your mouth were anything but helpful.”

The maid hesitated, but only for a breath. Duty demanded that truth, however bitter, would be spoken. “With the schedule you have set, there simply is not enough time to bring recruits to that level of competency. Not even, I must add, with all the incentives.”

Miriam winced and braced for the storm, eyes shut tight. But when the silence stretched on too long, she dared to take a peek.

Seraphina had not moved. She sat in thoughtful stillness, brow drawn in a furrow of contemplation.

“Could we extend the training period?” Seraphina ventured, encouraged by the quiet. “Perhaps relieve them of their factory shifts? Give them time to focus solely on—”

“I’ve already accounted for that, milady,” Miriam said flatly, cutting her off. “But humans, regrettably, require a certain amount of sleep. There just are not enough hours in the day.”

Seraphina tsked softly, shaking her head with something like disappointment. “Then we shall make hours in the night.”

Miriam blinked. “I... I don’t understand, my lady. That isn’t…”

The young noblewoman sighed, a long breath laced with theatrical weariness. “We will simply have them study and train while they sleep.”