At dusk.
Glass Island, Silver and Tin Palace.
"Say, Sofia. You really aren't nervous at all, are you?"
A clear child's voice rang out in the Queen's bedchamber.
Ligeia sat at the foot of the bed, swinging her legs as she gnawed on a bright red apple. Her tail swept over the blanket in fits and starts, wrinkling it with one pass before smoothing it flat with the next.
The Queen lying beneath the blanket did not answer.
Compared to a month ago, she now looked visibly older. Her eyes were so swollen that she could barely open them, and her spirits seemed much more depressed as well.
She merely spread out the sweater she had just finished knitting and admired it for a while before carefully folding it and placing it beside the bed.
"Sofia?"
When her old friend failed to respond, Ligeia turned around unhappily and looked at the silent old woman. "I'm talking to you! Didn't we all know that Miss Aleister was Lily Drost? Now that Charles has kicked the bucket, why don't we just reveal her identity? Would those people from the Drost family really dare to object?"
"—It would be best not to. The former Minister Drost is still 'alive,' after all."
Yanis's voice suddenly came from nearby.
In a landscape painting depicting a summer beach, hanging in the bedchamber, Yanis sat leisurely beneath the shade of a parasol in a white gauze dress and sunhat. She peeled a grape at an unhurried pace and casually said, "Besides, Iver should prefer this way of handling things."
The information that the former Minister Drost had been killed remained classified.
In other words, on the social level, he was still alive. He had merely been secretly detained, occasionally spitting out some crucial intelligence—and those things could