TYMKM 04

Chapter 04

“What are you going out for? What is there to see at someone else’s wedding?”

“It’s not someone else’s wedding. It’s the princess’s wedding.”

Lanram answered sulkily, still unable to shake off her resentment toward her brother.

Wherever a festival took place, seagulls naturally gathered to pick over the scraps.

The goods sold by merchants of all sizes were interesting, while clowns in ridiculous costumes and the songs of wandering minstrels provided no small amount of entertainment.

But there was something else Lanram was really looking forward to.

“I promised to go watch the joust with Sera.”

“The joust?”

The joust, or jousting, was a form of mock combat. By this point, however, it had taken on a much more recreational character. Whenever the nobles of Bigland had an important occasion to celebrate, they held these events to draw crowds and provide entertainment.

With the kingdom becoming peaceful, knights had fewer opportunities to distinguish themselves in actual warfare. As a result, the joust became the easiest way for men who needed fame to play the hero, and knights seeking glory eagerly flocked to participate.

Putting brave men on horseback and having them fight was a spectacle enjoyed by everyone regardless of status or gender.

Nobles certainly enjoyed the brutal entertainment, but commoners did as well.

Lanram was no exception.

She simply preferred seeing vigorous young men display their heroic physiques to watching them bleed and die.

Shining plate armor, slender lances, muscular warhorses…

Everything she associated with romance and adventure was there, enough to make her cheeks flush just imagining it.

“What’s so fun about stabbing people with swords and killing them…?”

Lanram’s brother was a man who neither understood nor had any desire to understand such notions of valor.

His uninterested, pursed lips made her want to yank them right off his face.

“It’s not a sword. It’s a lance. And it’s not a competition where you win by killing someone.”

Well, someone could lose their life if they were particularly unlucky…

Lanram sometimes imagined a magnificent knight suddenly entering her life.

She slowly buttoned her outer garment, imagining a gallant, handsome man punishing Nilgi on her behalf.

All sorts of people lived around the harbor of Saltcoast.

It was the kind of neighborhood where the peculiarities of foreigners did not stand out very much.

When Lanram mingled among them, even her small stature and red skin seemed like things that hardly mattered.

Tichite Lanram was not an especially outgoing person when it came to making friends.

But neither was she someone who lived isolated at home without interacting with anyone.

Whenever she had the opportunity, she was more than willing to form connections with other people.

Sera, who had promised to go watch the joust with her that day, was one of the friends she had made that way.

“You call someone like that family?”

Whenever Sera heard Lanram talk about Nilgi, she became angry as though the matter concerned her personally.

Nothing was fundamentally resolved by talking about it, but simply having someone willing to listen was a comfort.

“You told me you even paid off his gambling debt last time. And then you give him money again and send him straight back to the gambling table?”

“At least Nilgi has started working at the drying racks lately.”

He’s getting a little better.

Lanram muttered as though she wanted to believe it.

In truth, Sera did not know that Lanram was sometimes beaten by Nilgi as well.

Feeling uncomfortable about having to explain the awkward silence, Lanram quickly changed the subject.

“Let’s stop talking about Nilgi. I can finally breathe now that I’m out of the house. Besides, aren’t there an incredible number of people here?”

Sera turned her head as well when Lanram looked around in amazement.

At some point, the harbor had begun to teem with more people than seagulls, and the main streets were packed so tightly that there was hardly room to set foot down.

Ships had already been arriving one after another at the Saltcoast docks for several weeks, and even more people were coming from inland.

The Lord of Salt had opened a new road in preparation for this day.

Thanks to that, the harbor was rapidly flourishing as a major trading hub with well-developed land and sea routes.

Just as the merchandise was diverse, so were the people crowding the streets.

Unauthorized peddlers had haphazardly set up stalls, while itinerant merchants shouted their wares and rang bells.

Men of uncertain origins occasionally cast lecherous glances at Sera—the sort of attention that inevitably followed an attractive woman.

As though accustomed to it, Sera paid them little mind.

Lanram looked up at her with renewed appreciation.

Sera was a tall, curvaceous Endelian woman with blonde hair.

In other words, she had the sort of appearance that would win people’s favor wherever she went.

Despite the harsh sunlight, Sera’s skin remained as white as jade.

Lanram wondered how red her own face must have become.

“I think those strange men are sneaking glances at your skin.”

“Let them look if they want.”

Sera replied calmly, with a confidence that matched her expression.

Then she pointed out Lanram’s clothing.

“Speaking of which, your clothes are so boring I can hardly stand it. You cover your wrists, your ankles, and every inch of your neck.”

The skirt Lanram wore was so long that it looked as though it might drag along the ground.

Her sleeves extended past her wrists and covered her palms, while the collar, buttoned all the way to the top, looked particularly stifling.

“Of course, all the Tilamin people I know dress like you, too… but do you really have to make it so obvious?”

In fact, Lanram stood out in her own way, for reasons quite different from Sera.

Part of it was due to her natural coloring, but the way she deliberately styled herself played an even greater role.

Lanram had eyes so black that it was difficult to distinguish the boundary between her pupils and irises.

Her hair was similarly black and dark.

But what made her look especially unusual was the way she kept her long black hair braided and tightly wound against her head before covering it with a hairnet.

As a result, it was impossible to tell whether her hair reached past her shoulders or all the way to her chest.

“I just don’t understand why you people can’t give up your own style even after coming to another country.”

Sera said it casually.

She was probably talking about every Tilamin she had ever encountered.

That included Lanram, of course, but there was no malice behind her words.

At Sera’s comment, Lanram spread her arms and examined her own clothes.

Her blouse was a plain yellowish shirt, but her skirt and headscarf were made from woven fabric distinguished by the vivid colors and patterns characteristic of the Tilamin.

Lanram was well aware that she looked extremely foreign.

But she also knew that a foreigner who openly looked like a foreigner was often treated better than a foreigner who desperately tried not to look like one.

People disliked outsiders who tried to assimilate into their community more than one might expect.

Rather than welcoming someone who wanted to blend into their culture, they often viewed such people with suspicion and rejected them.

It was not easy to step inside their firmly guarded circle.

Instead, the outsider was treated as a shameless foreign intrusion and became the object of suspicion and contempt.

People had a habit of placing those they perceived as outsiders into categories they had already created, and they became uneasy when they could not do so.

That was why Lanram had chosen to remain recognizable as a stereotypical Tilamin.

“Just because. I’m comfortable like this.”

She had no desire to explain all those thoughts to Sera, however.

Lanram answered in as light a tone as possible.

“I guess other people have the same reason.”

Besides, these were clothes she had inherited from her grandmother.

They were also the finest clothes she owned.

Among commoners, who routinely passed down a single set of clothing through several generations, there was nothing particularly unusual about that.

“You braid your hair, twist it up, and wrap it around your head like that every morning, and you call that comfortable? Don’t lie, Tichi.”

Sera replied while flapping the fabric of her own clothes back and forth, apparently finding the weather unbearably hot.

“Your grandmother isn’t here. Nobody’s going to say anything if you take some of it off.”

Lanram merely shrugged as though the comment did not deserve a response and kept quiet.