Oliver has served Arnold for a decade, and even he was surprised by the prince’s decision to ask for Rishe’s hand in marriage. He’s also never seen the prince happier. While wedding preparations are ongoing, there’s also a big party to be thrown that sends the message that the crown prince is still searching for a bride.
But while Arnold decries its pointlessness, Rishe holds out her (gloved) hand for Arnold to take, and gives him leave to go ahead and reveal her as her fiancée, turning the search party into an engagement party on the fly. As always, Arnold is surprised and impressed by Rishe’s reply.
After her previous princely fiance dumped her in front of the entire court back home, the attention, curiosity, jealousy, and likely scheming that surround her after she is revealed feel like “nothing at all.” She’s had her trial by fire in this environment, while also having fought actual martial battles in her past knightly life, after all.
When she asks why Arnold announced so quickly, he says it’s better to make it apparent now that he will protect her, no matter what happens. This surprises Rishe, who is so used to holding in her mind the image of him slaying her. She comes out and says she thinks he might be the most dangerous person to her, for one because she can’t match his swordplay.
After he invites her to spar with him and agrees to give her training in the near future, the two engage in a dance in the center of the ballroom. Each time Rishe tries to surprise him by taking the lead, he counters with a twirl, resulting in a dashing display of footwork and shifting tensions.
I love dance scenes, and this one did not disappoint, not only because it looked great, but because it’s a dance only two swordsmen could pull off. Delighted witnesses even mention how it felt like a sword dance. It’s also the closest Rishe has physically been to Arnold since the night a life ago when he killed her.
In effect, the dance is their first sparring session, and there was no need for swords. As expected, the women who had come specifically to present themselves as the crown prince’s potential wife don’t use swords either to express the frustration with his choice. One such woman offers Rishe a very obviously glass of wine as a gesture of goodwill.
Sure enough, it contains red pepper. Rishe knows because of her herbalist past. Knowing what’s in it, she has a sip and shows no discomfort. When she steps out to the balcony, Prince Arnold joins her, and finishes off the wine she didn’t want to waste (her merchant past shining through).
Arnold, who is no dummy, wants to confirm if Rishe was thinking of someone other than him while they were dancing. She can’t say it was his future self in another life, so she pivots to her medical experience, saying she was worried for his health, asking if he had ever been wounded where the neck and shoulder meet.
Sure enough, he unbuttons his collar to reveal a nasty scar made form multiple vicious strikes with the intent to kill. She noticed he had trouble moving that shoulder while dancing, but it is also the same spot she was able to draw blood from during their swordfight in her future past. He is clearly impressed she noticed it, as he’s never revealed it to anyone, but he’s not ready to tell even her how he got it.
With the party over, the maids anticipate who among them will be chosen for the crown prince’s fiancée’s household staff, completely unaware that Lady Rishe is right among them doing her own laundry. The maid’s queen bee, Diana, scolds Elsie and her fellow newbie, saying they don’t have a chance at being chosen.
Rishe asks them about Diana and learns she came from a wealthy merchant family that drowned in debt and necessitated her going to work as a maid. She also observes Elsie and the other newbies closely and concludes that they know what they’re doing, they’re just doing it at a slower pace, and there’s a good reason Diana is frustrated with their inability to retain her instructions.
Rishe makes things extra-dramatic as Oliver announces her and she slowly descends her staircase. At that point, Diana is certain she has this in the bag, while also observing that Rishe’s villa is awfully clean, and wondering who did it. When their lady turns out to be Rishe, Diana is shocked. She’s even more shocked when all the newest maids are selected to be her maids, while she and her more experienced colleagues aren’t.
She breaks protocol to protest—not surprising considering her previous well-off status, and receives another shocker: as of today, she’ll no longer hold the position of maid. Diana falls to her knees, bereft, but Rishe asks her directly if she always knew what to do when she first got here. Diana said she didn’t.
Then Rishe points out why she was able to learn faster than her new maids: she can read and write, and thus could study what was told to her without bothering the more experienced maids. Diana gets teary-eyed as she admits her family had nothing and there was no one to protect her, but she worked her ass off to become a maid, only to fail to teach the newer ones properly.
Watching her genuine remorse, Elsie and the other newbie come to her side to comfort her, but they are all mistaken: Rishe isn’t firing Diana, she’s promoting her. She chose newbies because wants her villa to be a training ground for new maids. Teaching them to read and write will not only make them better maids, but make them more quick to adapt to changes in their lives, should they come about.
To that end, she asks Diana to create teaching materials for the other maids. Diana agrees, and the next we see her, she’s no longer in her maid outfit, has syllabi in her arms, and is super motivated and excited. She’s having fun. Diana was only ever nasty to Rishe, but once Rishe learned where that bitterness came from, she decided that helping her was more beneficial to her than casting her off.
That desire, that urge to avoid conflict and try to bring people together, is no doubt borne from all of the different lives she’s led so far in vastly different stations. She’s been all of the people she encounters in this life, and so is better suited to knowing how to unite them. And I truly believe that attitude and drive will continue to influence Prince Arnold, who was far more pessimistic and even misanthropic before meeting her.
With her household staff in place, Rishe dons her gaudiest and most expensive dress for her first meeting with the Aria Trading Company. She explains to Elsie that the dress is her battle garb for her talks, and in her head she knows that wearing something so loud will give them the impression of a mark, even though in another life they taught her everything she knows about trade and economics.
Her meeting with Aria’s leader Kaine Tully is auspicious, and has a similar feel to her first meeting with Prince Arnold in this life. She finds herself in the strange position of meeting someone she’d known, in this case for five years, meeting her for the first time.
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