Chapter 46
Big News
Mary primly turned her head towards the now opened portal and saw something that she had not truly been expecting: a troop of maids marching in.
At the head of the troop was a maid that the princess had only rarely seen, but Mary had been educated by Sylvia for over a year now; naturally, this education had often included the general state of the royal palace and its staff. As such, she could recognise the approaching woman as the head maid of the Royal Midgard Palace, Katarina Ashford.
Considering the fact that they had never actually spoken, Mary knew a surprising amount about the head maid, including the fact that she, much like Sylvia, was a member of the minor nobility.
Specifically, this refers to the House of Ashford, which had a small territory adjacent to a local river.
Although Sylvia had often spoken about Katarina, her comments had been less than complimentary. As far as Mary had been able to discern, this dislike came from a mix of being unimpressed by the head maids' lack of combat capability, a completely baffling reason to not like someone, and some other unspoken quarrel.
Mary held back a grimace at some of the words that her maid had said regarding this woman and couldn’t help but wonder what sort of trouble she was about to drop on the princess.
‘Can’t this wait until tomorrow? I’d like to at least somewhat enjoy my birthday.’
Mary thought to herself with a despondent sigh.
The princess shook her head and stared at the approaching maids, immediately noticing that behind the head maid was an apologetic Sylvia.
‘Maybe she’s sorry that she couldn’t warn me about this? Unlike all the other times.’
Mary thought to her second minds sarcastically; distantly, she felt their amusement at her annoyance.
For a single brief moment, Mary was tempted to reach out with a telepathic link, something she had long since figured out how to activate at range so that she could question her personal maid about what exactly was going on.
However, she ultimately reconsidered her decision.
While it had been some time since the princess had successfully learned how to hold telepathic conversations without physical contact, she also knew that the stealth of such a connection was theoretical at best.
And non-existent at worst.
Such a lack of stealth would ordinarily not be much of a problem; after all, a noble lady checking in with her personal maid to figure out what was happening was very much something that might have occurred in Midgard.
Or so Sylvia had assured her.
Mary was still only one year old today, and while the maids had seen her enough to note that she was more intelligent than average, this was not something that could be easily hidden; there was a difference between being clever and being able to use telepathy spells at such a young age.
Despite the tremendous growth spurt that had made her appear closer to a five-year-old on Earth, she knew from conversations with Sylvia that this growth was partially constrained to physical size, not emotional intelligence.
A regular Terran baby could be expected to be somewhat more articulate than a modern Earth one at her current age, but it would still be a year or so before she could be expected to hold something like a conversation.
Overall, even a genuine non-reincarnated genius mage or scholar would have needed several more years to start using a proper spell matrix, so her articulate speech for her age was impressive.
Which means that if she got caught using any complex spell or runic lore, her true nature would get found out immediately and would reveal to people that she was in fact a reincarnator.
Objectively, such a conclusion should have been difficult to reach, but as she had learned over the last few months, Mary was hardly the first reincarnator to have been born on Terra; she wasn’t even the first member of a royal family to be one.
When considering it this way, Mary immediately wondered why she had not been tested at birth, even as a precaution, but the eventual answer was clear.
The truth was that a newborn's soul could be crushed by an observation, and so despite the potential problems of a reincarnator, people put off such tests until later, when the children wouldn’t die.
Which means that it would still be several years before anyone could safely check an ordinary baby’s status. And so as long as Mary successfully hid her abnormality, she would be assumed to be a merely intelligent child, rather than an adult who has been reborn.
All of this information passed through Mary's mind in an instant, forcing her to hide a frown.
‘How do I open this conversation without giving anything away?’
The troubled princess wondered.
Fortunately for her, Katarina chose to start the conversation herself and, in a cold, professional voice, announced.
“Princess, with your first growth spurt nearing its end, the palace maid corps will begin to assist Sylvia in raising you.”
At this news, Mary allowed the frown she had been restraining to form on her face.
The announcement sounded strange to her, and how could it not?
It had been an unshakeable truth in her life that she was destined to be socially isolated, made to feel plaintive and broken. She was to endure minimal contact with a small number of people, potentially even only knowing Sylvia in any real way.
That was what Sylvia had told her, so then why the change in plan?
Mary stared at the troop of maids intensely, attempting to subtly catch Sylvia's eye without the notice of the nine other maids in the room.
As their eyes briefly lock, Sylvia smiles brightly and, with an elegance that Mary had not realised existed in the battle-hungry maid, steps forward to inform her princess of the good news.
“This room is enchanted to be perfectly soundproofed, so Princess, you wouldn’t have heard the announcement.”
Sylvia stated knowingly, causing the other maids to glare at her sharply.
“But the King, your maternal grandfather, is dead.”
Mary's face blanked at the monumental news, but not due to any familial sadness at the word of the man’s death; Mary had never met him, and in the end he had not even been present at her birth. He had not witnessed the sight of her mothers, his daughters, or ruin, nor, as far as she knew, had he visited either of them even once in the year since then.
Or at least, that was what Sylvia had informed her.
It was something that Mary could well believe; after all, who would want to see that corpse-like sight, firm in the knowledge that they were a large part of the cause?
Furthermore, Mary had discussed the political situation of the Kingdom of Midgard with Sylvia extensively since her birth and so knew that a great deal of her current troubles could be traced back to that spineless king.
The princess had been informed unequivocally that he had spoilt her mother, Elizabeth, fiercely in her youth.
Perhaps if he had remained the king from back then, then Mary would have felt sadness at his death; he had been, as far as she could tell, a respectable figure back then.
It was ultimately due to his spoiling of his daughter that Elizabeth had originally escaped what should have been her definite enslavement to a noble-blooded husband.
The King had even secretly funded Elizabeth's magical education so that she could become the powerful mage that she had ended up being.
Sylvia had told her that there was no doubt about it, that the now former king had once been a reformer who had wanted to abolish the institution that the former hero had cursed the world with.
It was, Mary thought, a truly noble and respectable goal.
To accomplish such a reformation, he had attempted to empower his daughter; the hope had been that together they could both force the Midgardian nobility to listen to reason without a ruinous civil war and then defend the Kingdom's borders from the inevitable reprisals of their still traditional neighbours.
From what Mary knew of A-ranked mages, it was entirely possible that this plan could have succeeded. Between Sylvia and the books that she had read, it painted a picture of a person who could tell entire armies to mind their own business or else.
But the man had proven to be spineless when it counted most.
Mary flexed her jaw, withholding the look of anger that wanted to peak through at the mere memory of what Sylvia had told her.
The maid, though noble, didn't know what made him back down from his reformist agenda.
All that she knew on the matter was that he had ultimately betrayed his daughter, Elizabeth, which had resulted in the sight that Mary had seen at her birth.
So at the mere mention of the man and his subsequent death, Mary had to restrain herself from celebrating at what she assumed was a richly deserved and, not to mention, miserable death.
The problematic existence of potential witnesses made that restraint much easier.
Mary thought Sylvia had privately celebrated the news before arriving, which was probably why she mentioned it.
But she knew less about the other maids.
All of them were women, of course, but apart from Katarina, they were all commoners.
And Mary didn’t really know what to expect of such people.
Objectively, the commoners should have supported Mary, as they had long opposed the ridiculous law.
At least that is what Sylvia had told her.
But they were also maids in the royal palace, and part of their work contract included a relatively weak human-enchantment. This meant that, in reality, these maids were technically considered slaves of the royal family.
And unlike her mother, it was something that they had accepted willingly.
“Then the new king consort is…?”
Mary asked lightly.
Katarina visibly twitched and aggressively moved to correct the princess.
“The new king is your father, Albert Midgard.”
Mary frowned at the correction, knowing that she would have to refrain from using the word "consort" in respect to her father's title from now on, lest it invite significant trouble.
Still, it was a curious correction, or at least so Mary thought, after all the royal line descended through her mother and thus eventually through her.
By all accounts, at least according to the standards set by Earth, which Terra should have inherited, the appropriate title would have been king consort.
Even with how twisted Midgard and the world had become due to the outright evil enslavement laws that the hero had instituted, it was still strange to hear the absence of consort in the title.
This is particularly true for someone like Alexander, who had grown up in the constitutional monarchy of the United Kingdom.
‘What would that even make mother?’
The princess asked herself with a degree of bewilderment.
Mary sighed visibly and instead asked Katarina.
“The maid corps is going to help raise me? What does that imply?"
Katarina raised an eyebrow at the surprisingly coherent question but nonetheless answered with a veritable list of duties that they would now take part in.
“Primarily, we will be bringing you your meals and ensuring you are learning to comport yourself in a manner fitting of Midgardian royalty.”
Katarina turned a glare toward Sylvia and continued to talk, her explanation turning into a slight accusation.
“The Izayoi family, despite their preferred uniform, are more well known for their graceful combat talent rather than their participation in noble balls.”
Mary turned her amused eyes towards a now bashful Sylvia, and yet part of her could not help but wonder, how does a self-proclaimed berserker look graceful?
“We will ensure that you receive treatment befitting your station as a princess.”
Katarina finished stiffly with what the princess took to be a blatant lie.
Mary frowned at the answer; once again, it didn’t sound like this was going to be the isolation plan that Sylvia had once told her about.
Perhaps her father had different ideas than the former king on how to force her into compliance?
For a moment, Mary forced herself to recall the day of her birth, but from what she remembered, the man that she now knew to be her father had clearly agreed with the priest about her enslavement.
Worse, he had stood by and done nothing as that mage had hovered over his supposed wife, working some sort of spell on her unresponsive corpse-like mother.
Mary had to restrain a violent twitch as she remembered that day—her birth day—when her father, if he could even be called that, had looked at her with a truly dark expression; she remembered it perfectly.
‘That man is not my father.’
Mary thought to herself bitterly.