Ch.1216Why Is It That There Are No Normal Parents Around Me?

After the brief commotion caused by my absurd misunderstanding.

Only after emptying three cups of black tea in succession did Nigel finally collect himself. After clearing his throat a couple of times, he slowly began to tell me more details about his past.

“As I mentioned earlier, I had an older sibling two years my senior. The name Nigelus Winlandria was originally my brother’s name.”

Surprisingly, Nigel had not only parents but also an older brother. Unlike his parents who were executed as traitors, his brother had apparently died in an accident much earlier.

“Were you close with your brother?”

“I can’t say we were close… since he died before I was born.”

He explained that his brother had been growing up well as a noble’s son without any major hardships, but unfortunately got caught in a carriage accident at the age of three and died.

At that time, the Lady Winlandria was near the end of her pregnancy with her second child, and the shock of her son’s death left her bedridden. Not long after, she gave birth to a daughter—in other words, Nigel.

Up to this point, it was just an ordinary tragedy that could happen in any family. Children dying from accidents or illnesses was fairly common among both commoners and nobles alike.

The problem was what happened afterward.

The Winlandria household heads, slightly unhinged from the shock of losing their son, named their newborn daughter Nigelus and raised her as a replacement for their brother.

They lied that their son hadn’t died in a carriage accident but that they had miscarried their second child, and that their firstborn son Nigelus was recovering from injuries. They kept Nigel hidden until she was weaned.

Whether a child is four or six, they all look equally young to adults, and after a few years, a two-year age difference isn’t particularly noticeable anyway.

Even afterward, they dressed Nigel in boys’ clothes and treated her strictly as their son Nigelus. Among the mansion staff, only two people knew her true identity.

Thus, Nigel became “Nigelus” from birth and was raised as the Winlandria family heir, receiving all manner of education and training before successfully becoming an imperial knight.

I wondered why they would push her into such a dangerous profession as knighthood when there were easier paths available, even if raising her as a boy… Apparently, the head of the Winlandria family had a strange obsession with the position of “knight.”

Nigel said she simply followed her parents’ orders faithfully without understanding why, but now she seemed to know the reason.

Since the family itself was descended from the Great’s Twelve Knights, they naturally believed the heir to the family should become a knight.

Even though Nigel was actually a daughter, she showed talent in swordsmanship and spearmanship, so their wish gradually transformed into something like an obsession or conviction.

I understood that much. Though the reason for the male disguise still made no sense to me.

“Why go through all that unnecessary trouble…? Couldn’t they have just raised you as a female knight?”

“Ah, you didn’t know. The Empire only officially recognized the status of ‘female knights’ just a few years ago. Before that, they were only called that informally in the provinces, but their official status was merely that of a lord’s private soldier.”

“Oh, really? Come to think of it, I don’t recall seeing any older female knights in the Imperial Knights…”

It wasn’t that there were no female knights in the Imperial Knights, but all the female knights I had met so far were young knights in their early twenties.

Male knights ranged from middle-aged to elderly, and most of them held quite high positions within the order, which was in stark contrast.

I hadn’t found it strange at the time, but it turns out this was evidence that there were no senior female knights in the Imperial Knights.

“Yes. Female knights were first recognized as having equal status to knights through Her Highness Leonore Wittelsbach’s ‘Rose Cross Knights.’ The late Emperor changed the existing system at her request.”

“Leonore did? I didn’t know that.”

Surprisingly, the person who broke down that rigid system was none other than Leonore.

When the Emperor’s favored princess personally gathered talented women and established a female knight order, the Imperial Knights had no choice but to acknowledge the existence of “female knights.”

Therefore, after the Rose Knights were established, the Imperial Knights reluctantly began accepting female knights, and “unofficial” female knights in the provinces also received official recognition of their titles.

However, when Nigel took the knight examination, it was still an era when neither imperial female knights nor even the Rose Cross Knights existed.

So for Nigel to become a knight, there was no choice but to conceal her gender.

It wasn’t just about cross-dressing; they had to resort to all sorts of underhanded methods like bribing medical officers.

“So that’s why they raised you as a boy. To get you into the Imperial Knights somehow.”

“That was probably not the only reason; the family succession issue also played a part.”

“Succession issue?”

“If I were a daughter, they would have to lower their standards and bring in a son-in-law to continue the family line, but if I were a son, a strategic marriage with a daughter from a good family would be possible.”

Ah, so since a son from a good family wouldn’t become a son-in-law to the Winlandria family, which was publicly known as an ordinary noble house, they pretended to have a son to target daughters from such families?

It’s an unusual idea, but… does that even make sense?

“Wouldn’t they be found out as soon as you got married anyway?”

Even if they disguised their daughter as a son and brought in a daughter-in-law, unless they brought in a blind woman, they would be discovered on the very night after the wedding.

If discovered like that, they would have deceived the other family so thoroughly that the aftermath would be unimaginable.

“Once they got her into the family, there would be plenty of ways to deceive one young lady. None of them would be right, of course.”

So first they’d take the dowry and the lady, then deal with the aftermath by using drugs or mental magic—or illusion magic—to deceive her and smooth things over? That’s just…

“What a despicable family.”

They’re crazy bastards. It’s wrong to do this to Nigel, and above all, what sin did the deceived bride commit?

“…Ah, sorry, they’re still your parents, so maybe I shouldn’t say such things?”

“No, it’s… fine. It’s not like you’re wrong.”

Oh, really? Surprisingly cold. I thought there might still be some affection left, despite everything, since they were family after all.

Well, given that they were crazy enough to raise a girl as a male knight, Nigel must have accumulated a lot of resentment while growing up.

Considering she hadn’t mentioned even the slightest thing about her parents to me until now, that entire period might be something she wanted to forget completely.

—-

Anyway, Nigel—or rather, Nigelus Winlandria—became an imperial knight at the age of fifteen.

Since the Imperial Knights believed her to be seventeen, she wasn’t officially recognized as the youngest imperial knight, but she was effectively the youngest.

“I did become a knight, but… life wasn’t easy afterward either. I could never relax, and every day felt like walking through a field of thorns.”

As memories she had buried resurfaced, Nigel sighed deeply and shared stories from her time as an imperial knight.

Because she was hiding her gender from her fellow knights as well, there were countless uncomfortable and dangerous situations.

There was even someone who discovered her identity by chance and demanded her body in exchange for keeping quiet.

“What? There was such a bastard? So what did you do? Surely not…”

“What do you mean ‘surely not’?! Of course I quietly took care of him!”

“Oh, you killed him? That’s fine then.”

I thought… When she said she was blackmailed, I worried she might have experienced something like those adult comics where a lover gradually falls into corruption after giving in to a scoundrel’s threats.

“Forcing ‘such acts’ on a fellow knight is punishable by death under military law, so he couldn’t even complain about dying. He should be grateful to me. He was treated as having died in the line of duty rather than as a criminal, so his honor was preserved.”

“You’re right. He should be thanking you for killing him.”

Anyway, if she killed him on the spot, there wouldn’t have been any problems.

She handled it well, in fact. Since there was no guarantee the bastard would keep his promise even if she gave in, killing him was the surest way to silence him.

Such men serve the public interest better as fertilizer than as knights anyway.

“Still, perhaps because he was once a fellow trainee… I didn’t feel entirely comfortable at the time. That was probably when it started—when I began to seriously contemplate my future.”

Just as tigers leave their skin when they die and people leave their names, that scoundrel left Nigel with a heavy burden of contemplation after his death.

Was it okay to continue living like this? Was it right to obey her somewhat mentally unstable parents, deceiving everyone else?

A life where she could never open her heart to anyone, keeping everyone at a distance for fear of her identity being discovered, never relaxing even during rest?

Though she only became aware of it at that moment, such concerns—or rather, frustrations bordering on discontent—had been piling up in her heart for a long time.

From the moment she became aware of it, these feelings began to grow uncontrollably.

The suppressed emotions finally reached their limit, to the point where she felt the urge to throw away everything she had achieved and run away.

“So I left the knights. I also abandoned the Winlandria name. Having directly defied my parents’ wishes, I knew I could no longer return to the family.”

“In other words, you ran away from home because your family situation was terrible.”

To think our Nigel was a runaway girl. What a surprising truth.

“R-ran away?! There’s a better way to put it—I established my independence with determination!”

“Can you really call cutting ties ‘independence’…?”

Wasn’t she too young for independence in the first place?

From what I heard, Nigel was at most sixteen or seventeen when she decided to cut ties with her family… right in the midst of her stormy adolescence.

It’s the age when doubts about one’s life and rebelliousness toward parents reach their peak. It seems Nigel was no exception.

Of course, unlike immature kids who leave home over trivial complaints, Nigel’s family was truly dysfunctional enough to justify cutting ties, even from my perspective.