"Don't smile," she blurted, flustered.
She had yearned for a father once. She remembered the shape of that wanting very clearly. But she had learned since then that family was simply a word people used to be hypocrites with, and she was not going to be caught by it twice.
He was a genetic link. Nothing more than that.
Get a proper hold of yourself, she told herself, her eyes hardening.
Her tutor came out of the lesson that week suggesting she might skip ahead to the advanced classes.
Sophia looked embarrassed and privately congratulated herself. A completed high school education was, she felt, a magnificent cheat key.
"Is there anything in particular you would like to study?" Theodore asked.
Sword arts, she thought. Obviously.
Then her gaze drifted across the massive library, and her eyes lit up, because there was a veteran of the Magic Beast War sitting three feet away from her, and opportunities like that did not come around twice.
"Magic beasts," she declared, with all the innocent curiosity she could put on.
Her real reason had nothing to do with curiosity. There had been a magic beast attack on a border town, and everything about it was suspicious, starting with the fact that the town's mine had never produced a single magic stone. She was going to find out the truth of it. She had promised herself that.
Theodore sat with her while she began.
She opened a large dark book, ready to learn.
There were two kinds of magical beast, the book said: transcendental and mutated. Transcendental beasts attacked out of hostility. Mutated ones raided settlements in order to eat people.
She remembered her tenth birthday, and coming home to a town the beasts had gone through.
The culprit had been a transcendental beast — purple, and covered in eyes.
The attack had come from the direction of the town's mine.
And on that day, Monica had been working at that very mine.
In the memory, her younger self stood frozen. She remembered standing over the aftermath, over all that blood, and not being able to move.
The miners' bodies were never found. She had never stopped noticing that. Why had there been no remains? She dismissed the easy answer — that the beasts had simply eaten them — because the easy answer left too much unaccounted for. There was something buried under that story.
She was so far inside it that her father's hand on her shoulder startled her.
"Rest," Theodore said. "Before the council of elders meets."
She clutched the book to her chest. There was a secret inside that tragedy; she was certain of it now, and her gaze fixed hard on nothing at all as she thought about the atrocity that had wiped out the border town.
She thought about Monica's betrayal, too, and about how badly she had wanted, in her last life, to ignore all of it and stay safe.
Sitting with her bear, she decided that she couldn't give up on the truth.
She had never been a coward. Whatever else she had been in that first life, and the second, she had not been that. If there was something she could do, she was not going to turn a blind eye to it.
To investigate properly, though, she would need a network of informants.
"Sylvie—"
"Well, if it isn't Miss Little Thief."
A cheerful silver-haired girl had come in instead.
Sophia made a small horrified noise as Melody recited, with relish, the rumours about her stealing.
"Are you going to steal the Herman name next?" Melody asked. She smiled smugly. "I know all about your commoner past, you know. The idea of you becoming a Herman is ridiculous."
She gestured at the book on the table. "And why are you even bothering to study?"
She leaned over it, caught sight of an illustration and recoiled, covering her mouth. That, she announced, was proof enough that Sophia was not a true Herman.
"I'm studying magical beasts," Sophia said calmly.
"Nobles don't fight magical beasts." Melody's voice climbed. "You can't hide what you are, and you'll never be acknowledged as a Herman—"
Then Melody began hitting herself.
"Stop it! Why are you doing this? Why?"
Two maids came running at the noise and found Melody wailing on the floor.
Sophia realised, with disgust, exactly what she was watching. She was being framed for assault by a child, and she was so frustrated by the childishness of it that she could hardly speak. She couldn't even hit back.
"She attacked me," Melody sobbed. "She just — she attacked me—"
A white-haired boy was sitting in the window.
Sophia stared at him. Who — who was that?
He came inside and stood watching while Melody performed her plight for the maids, and Sophia was left speechless, partly by the performance and mostly by the fact that this boy had just climbed up to a fourth-floor room.
He was Theodore Herman's second son. His engagement to the princess had been arranged by the imperial family — a boy holding a girl's hand gently, somewhere among white lilies.
Melody ran to him. "Brother Ian! It's that book — that lowly book — it's made her violent—"
Ian gave the scene one cool, assessing glance. He nodded at the table.
"An introduction to magical beast study," he said, correctly.
Then, calmly: "I heard you say that the war with the magical beasts is trifling. A matter for commoners."
"It is," Melody said. "Father taught me. Aristocrats don't engage in unsophisticated acts."
"Were Sir Theodore's actions on the battlefield unsophisticated?"
"That's — it's different, for a Herman—"
"What did you mean," Ian said, "by acting?"
Melody was taken aback.
"I watched all of it from the window," he said. "I saw you tearing out your own hair."
Melody had nothing to say.
"If you frame people," Ian told her, his gaze sharp, "you will have to reconsider what you think dignity means. Go and reflect on whether what you did today was worthy of a Herman."
He turned to the maids and instructed them to escort Melody back to her room; he had something to discuss with Sophia.
"And don't trouble the adults with something this trifling."
The maids agreed quickly and led the disgraced girl away, telling her it was time to go back to her room.
Watching them go, Sophia thought that Melody was in real trouble now, and wondered when on earth that girl was going to grow up.
"Why does she dislike you?" Ian asked.
"Because I'm a Herman, probably."
"That's nonsense. You are a Herman."
"I don't look like one." She eyed him. "And you're only here because you're suspicious of me too."
He admitted that the rumour about a princess who steals had been interesting, and Sophia cringed so hard she nearly folded in half.
Then he looked at her seriously. "I came because I believe you're a Herman."
They walked together down a grand gilded hallway, past a long row of ornate portraits, Ian leading. Sophia looked at his back and turned that sentence over and over.
He stopped in front of a large door.
"Here."
The portrait inside was magnificent, and he introduced the woman in it simply.
"Our mother. Dorothy Herman."
Sophia gasped. She stood staring up with tears coming into her eyes, and something enormous opening in her chest.
The woman in the painting was smiling. She was blonde, and she looked so much like Sophia that it stopped the breath in her throat.
"I knew you were a Herman the moment I saw you," Ian said.
Sophia was stunned into silence.
She thought about her past life, and about how she had never once had the chance to become an adult. She looked up at her mother's face and wondered whether this third life would finally let her grow up.
A look of longing crossed her face. Would she ever get that chance?