Chapter 71. Secret
Young Blair craned her neck from her seat and stared at the spot where Esmeralda had been.
Just moments ago, she had witnessed Esmeralda opening the floor and burying something there.
"What did you hide in the floor?"
"...You saw that already?"
"Could it be... a treasure hunt?"
At the answer Blair offered after a moment of serious deduction, Esmeralda burst into laughter.
"Well, something like that. It's something very important to me."
"What is it?"
"It's a secret. Because it's very important."
Esmeralda raised her index finger to her lips, making the gesture for secrecy.
"So, could you keep what you just saw a secret?"
"A secret?"
"Yes. Don't tell your mother, your father, or your brother. And of course, you mustn't tell anyone else either. Not even my ladies-in-waiting or the maids."
"Then it's a secret only I know?"
"That's right, a secret only you know, Blair. Even that child Herdin doesn't know."
At Esmeralda's words, Blair's eyes sparkled.
Sharing a secret with someone meant becoming closer to that person.
It meant she had become someone special to Esmeralda.
"Can you keep the promise?"
"Of course! I'm good at keeping secrets. I didn't tell anyone about Anna's secret or Karen's secret either."
Esmeralda watched Blair confidently make her claim, finding her utterly adorable, and extended her hand.
Understanding the gesture, Blair hooked her pinky finger around Esmeralda's.
"Promise!"
"Yes, promise."
After Blair pressed her thumb to seal the promise and pulled away, Esmeralda chuckled and gently stroked Blair's head. That touch was endlessly tender.
As she quietly received that gentle touch, her heavy eyelids drooped of their own accord, beyond Blair's will.
Those tender eyes gazing at her as she fell asleep flickered beyond her closing eyelids, then vanished into complete darkness.
* * *
"Gasp...!"
Blair woke from sleep with rough, ragged breaths. Outside, it was still covered in darkness—a time ambiguous enough that one could hesitate to call it dawn.
Blair fumbled for her own two hands with trembling eyes.
The touch of Esmeralda's hand that had caressed her, the gaze that had watched over her, that touch... remained vivid.
'How could I have forgotten this and lived on?'
It wasn't even a memory from the time of the accident, yet she had lived completely forgetting it.
The sudden return of a memory forgotten for years was likely thanks to the hypnosis. There was no other cause besides that.
Whatever the cause, the returned memory pointed to one thing.
'There is something Empress Esmeralda left behind in the Empress's Palace.'
Of course, it could simply be something truly precious to her, or emergency funds.
But she had a peculiar premonition.
A premonition that something decisive related to the fire that day lay there, beneath the floor of the Empress's Palace.
There was no basis for it. It was merely an instinctive intuition.
'I have to find it. What Her Majesty the Empress left behind.'
The Empress's Palace that Esmeralda had used was left abandoned after the fire incident.
Katrina, who succeeded her as Empress, refused to use the building, calling it inauspicious, and since the palace had no master, there was no immediate need for repairs.
Therefore, if she went there, she would be able to find what Esmeralda had left behind.
'But if I go looking during the day, Mother will find out.'
Blair gazed out the window, still pitch black, then rose from bed with determined eyes.
It was the hour before dawn, when even Katrina would be asleep.
Now was the only chance.
* * *
As the dim light of dawn began to spread, the carriage carrying Blair of House Delmark came to a stop in front of the Imperial Palace.
The palace gatekeepers, who had been yawning and chasing away drowsiness, were surprised to see Blair.
"What brings you at this hour, Madam?"
"I have urgent business to see my mother."
The gatekeepers wondered what could be so urgent to visit at this early hour, but they had no reason to stop a daughter from visiting her mother.
The carriage swiftly passed through the palace entrance. However, the carriage headed not to the Grand Empress's Palace, but to the abandoned Empress's Palace.
After stepping down from the carriage, Blair ordered the coachman to stand by and stood alone at the entrance.
It had been a full ten years since she last visited the Empress's Palace.
It was time to face, however faintly, the memories she had been running from for ten years.
Blair stared at the door for a moment, then, as if finally making up her mind, pushed open the closed door and stepped inside the Empress's Palace.
Creak—
Inside the building, left abandoned for a long time after the accident, soot still remained.
Blair followed her faded childhood memories and climbed the stairs leading to Esmeralda's bedroom.
As Blair ascended step by step, the young Blair from those days overtook her with an excited expression, climbing the stairs ahead of her.
Following the young Blair who led the way with bouncy, light footsteps, a familiar corridor appeared. But unlike the scenery in her memories, the corridor full of black marks created a desolate atmosphere.
The young Blair, walking down the corridor where the dim dawn light was beginning to seep in, stopped in front of a door and then disappeared inside.
At the same time, the footsteps of Blair, who had been following the child, also stopped.
It was Esmeralda's room.
Upon opening the door and stepping inside, a scene completely different from the peaceful and tidy one in her memories came into view.
Everything in this room, scattered with black burn marks, seemed frozen on the day of the accident, and living in the flow of time all alone felt strangely bizarre.
Staring blankly at that scenery, Blair recalled the dream she had before coming to the palace and approached near Esmeralda's bed.
'It was around here.'
Considering the position where Blair in the dream had been lying, this was approximately where Esmeralda had buried something.
Blair tapped the spot with the heel of her shoe. Then, among the marble tiles on the floor, there was a spot that produced a subtly different sound.
Feeling along the edge of that marble, Blair noticed that the gap between the tiles was slightly wider than elsewhere. It was just the right width to insert a lever.
Blair surveyed the room for something to use as a lever and began gathering whatever she could get her hands on.
A comb, a mirror, a candlestick—trying each one in order between the marbles, Blair finally succeeded in lifting and opening the tile.
Beneath it lay a metal box with a keyhole.
"It really... was here."
Feeling briefly relieved that it remained undiscovered just as in her memory, Blair soon encountered another problem.
She didn't know the whereabouts of the key to open the box.
'Where could she have kept the key?'
Blair pondered from Esmeralda's perspective.
Esmeralda had said that only she knew of this secret box's existence. If so, she wouldn't have placed the key somewhere the maids might discover.
She likely kept it in a secret place untouched by anyone's hands, where even the maids didn't clean.
Blair looked around the entirely blackened room when she suddenly recalled the memory from her dream.
'At that time, Her Majesty the Empress noticed I was awake and came right over. But there was nothing in her hand that stroked me.'
Between the bed and the sofa, there was a place to keep a key.
'Could it be...'
After pondering for a moment, Blair suddenly thought of something and reached her hand toward the ceiling side beneath the bed frame.
If it were on the floor, the cleaning maids would find it quickly, but if she had attached it to the bed frame, it would at least be invisible from an adult's line of sight. Unless they felt around with their hands directly.
As she felt along the reachable area, something caught in her hand just as expected. Blair peeled it off.
It was a key.
Taking a small, deep breath, Blair pushed the key into the keyhole of the metal box. At first it seemed a bit stiff, but when she applied force, the key meshed perfectly with the lock and turned, opening the box.
And inside, there were documents.
Blair took them out.
Since the darkness hadn't completely faded yet, she couldn't read the text precisely, but the unique emblem on the first page was clearly visible.
'A magic circle...?'
Below it, a single sentence was written in Esmeralda's familiar handwriting.
[It is said there exists black magic that connects the second condition of the contract with the Divine Beast, severed long ago. Perhaps...]
Looking at the text by the dawn light, Blair heard a bell faintly ringing in the distance and snapped her head up.
It was the bell signaling 6 o'clock.
'Dawn will break soon.'
Once morning came, the news that she had visited here would reach Katrina. There was no time to linger.
Moreover, if this was related to the power of the family, Herdin would know more about it than she did.
Blair decided to wrap things up here and return to the ducal residence.
She couldn't take the box, so she closed it again and only took the key and the documents inside. Before leaving the room, she looked back at the desolate landscape.
She had hoped that visiting the accident site might bring back memories, but ultimately nothing more came to mind. Because of that, this room still felt to Blair only as a place of memories.
Blair recalled the traces of Esmeralda remaining throughout and made a resolution.
'I won't run away this time, Your Majesty.'
Turning away, Blair slipped out of the Empress's Palace and boarded the carriage.
The coachman, who had rushed out early in the morning following her, had been dozing off but hastily set the carriage in motion. The carriage quickly departed from the Imperial Palace.
Blair opened the documents she held in her hand again. She tried to read the following pages, but the rocking carriage made her nauseous and it was difficult to read the text.
Eventually, Blair gave up on reading the documents and fell into thought.
'Why was she looking into the second condition of the contract with the Divine Beast?'
And why did she keep these documents in secret?
From what she could see, there seemed to be no connection between the contract with the Divine Beast passed down in Delmark and the fire incident.
The thought crossed her mind that her intuition about these documents being related to that day's accident might be wrong.
'Still, for now, I should deliver this to Herdin.'
The moment she organized the documents with that thought—
Boom!
With a massive impact that shook the carriage, Blair's body slammed violently against the carriage wall.
In suffocating pain, Blair lost consciousness.