Side Story 1. IF—A Certain Beginning
Side Story Chapter 1
“Rishi. Here, you must be quiet and very well-behaved.”
Little Lizan nodded, her eyes wide as she kept looking around. Everywhere she set her gaze was so brilliant and dazzling that she hardly knew where to look first.
So this is the Valdemaera mansion.
The great mansion she had set foot in for the first time was truly another world. It shared only one thing with Lizan’s house—that it was located within Cleris. In every other respect, it was as different as heaven and earth from her home, which had only two rooms. The mansion, which seemed more fittingly called a castle, was magnificent, and the garden, vast enough to be called a forest, was immense.
It was as though she had become a tiny person dropped into a world of giants. To young Lizan, everything belonging to the House of Valdemaera was far too big, too high, and too wide. Before she could even admire anything she saw, she was first overwhelmed and shrank back.
If you lived in a house like this, even family members might never have time to see each other’s faces. A whole day could pass without knowing who was where.
In the middle of imagining it, Lizan hesitated.
Mm, that would be a little… lonely.
“Who’s this child?”
“Lizan. She’s our daughter.”
“Ah, that, where was it, the one who goes to school?”
“Not just some school, Milena Girls’ School.”
Lizan’s mother quickly corrected the name. Among the servants, all of whom were in similar circumstances, they were the only couple who had decided to send their child to school.
Though the House of Valdemaera was not stingy with its servants’ wages, school was a matter on a different level. A school that looked after a child for years, taught her, fed her, clothed her, and gave her a place to sleep demanded payment equal to that. Even then, after searching for an affordable school and choosing with great care, the place they had settled on was Milena Girls’ School.
Their child’s education was the first and greatest luxury committed by a couple who had spent their lives knowing only how to save. Her mother continued proudly.
“She usually stays in the dormitory, but she came home for the first time in ages, so I brought her along. I thought I’d at least feed her something tasty.”
“Well, there’s food to spare here. Lord Akenaus’s tastes are so terribly particular. If something displeases him even a little, he tells us to bring it again, make it again, and by the time the meal is over, there’s heaps of food thrown away without even being touched. It’s nice that we can eat the leftovers, though. …Oh my, but the child is like a doll. She’ll be a real beauty when she grows up.”
The servants stroked the crown of Lizan’s head with their large, rough palms.
But the adults’ interest in Lizan went no further than that. The scenery of the mansion, which at first glance seemed exceedingly peaceful and tranquil, could only be maintained thanks to dozens of servants bustling about beneath the surface like swans paddling furiously underwater. The bells summoning the servants rang constantly, and Lizan’s parents also had many duties to attend to, so they had to take turns leaving their places. In the end, Lizan was left all alone in a corner of the kitchen. Knowing well that their daughter was mature and calm for her age, her parents disappeared without much concern.
I should have brought a book.
Lizan sat on a chair before a table piled high with ingredients, swinging her two dangling legs as she suppressed her regret. Nibbling at the snacks the adults had given her and looking around stopped feeling novel after about an hour. If she were allowed to look around this beautiful mansion, she would not have had time to be bored even for an entire day, but she was not a guest. She was an uninvited tagalong who had come because she did not want to be left alone in a house where her whole family had gone out to work. It would not be proper for her to wander around the mansion as she pleased.
Lizan sat quietly and helped with simple little tasks, such as polishing plates with a dry cloth until they shone or rinsing ingredients in water. But even those were soon finished. No matter how much more work she wanted, there were not many tasks that a girl of about ten, visiting a great mansion for the first time, could naturally slip into and help with among servants who moved like turning cogwheels.
“Oh my, look at me. Where did I drop my necklace? Did the knot come loose when I was mopping upstairs earlier? I don’t have time to leave my post right now… Child, you said your name was Lizan, didn’t you? Could you run one errand for me?”
And so Lizan actually felt pleased when one of her mother’s coworkers, an older woman, asked her for a simple errand.
“Yes.”
“If you go up to the floor above this one, there are rooms all in a row. Could you open the doors one by one and, if you see a necklace on the floor, pick it up and bring it back? It has a silver chain and an amber pendant. You know amber, don’t you? An orange jewel that looks like candy. Don’t go up any higher, because the masters are on the upper floors. Just the floor right above this one. Those are all empty guest rooms, so it’s fine.”
“Yes, I’ll go right now.”
Lizan hopped down from the chair.
After asking for directions and climbing the stairs, the girl heard her heart thumping. For some reason, it felt as if even the rooms where guests stayed in this mansion would be extraordinary.
I’ll look around slowly while I search.
With a fluttering heart, Lizan opened the door to the first room she saw.
Wow.
The girl immediately realized that when one was too amazed, even admiration would not come out aloud. The room, with its high ceiling and open, airy feel at a glance, was dyed bright yellow by fragments of sunlight drifting softly through the air.
If I fell asleep in a room like this, I’d feel like the heroine of a masterpiece painted by some great artist.
Lizan imagined a glossy velvet dress draped over the very ordinary muslin one she was wearing. She straightened her waist and back, and took careful steps so the heels of her worn shoes would not strike the floor in a frivolous clatter. Refined gait, posture, and hand movements were all essential virtues she had to learn in order to work as a governess. Of course, the virtues learned in a crash course could not compare to the level of “true nobles,” born into good bloodlines in houses like this and having embodied elegance as naturally as breathing. They were merely enough not to offend such people’s eyes too greatly.
As she looked around a true noble’s room in a true noble’s mansion, a good idea came to her just in time.
With the end of the year approaching, the students of Milena Girls’ School had been divided into teams by year of enrollment and were preparing plays to perform before the entire school. Whenever she thought of that performance, in which everyone had to write the script and act it out together, Lizan’s heart felt as heavy as a thousand pounds.
She had been born with an introverted nature to begin with. If she had been able to exit quickly as a passing bit part, she might at least have endured it, but because her face was pretty, her classmates had assigned Lizan the role of a haughty noble young lady. On top of that, the performance dress roughly made from poplin had become a dreadful sight because everyone who wore it had patched it up as they pleased, plastering lace all over it, and the props were all shoddy as well. If it were a game of house played by three- or four-year-old children, perhaps it would be one thing, but brazenly pretending to be a young lady while wearing a ragged dress did not suit Lizan’s bashful disposition.
But this room made her feel as though she had naturally become a precious young lady. Lizan pointed at the paintings covering the wall with her finger and practiced her lines.
“Look, these paintings are works by the painter Lembre. The lines are powerful, and the colors are bold.”
Lizan did not know whether the paintings hanging in the bedroom were truly works by that painter. It was simply a line that had tossed out the name of a famous painter of the age at random.
Lizan was walking lightly around the room and reciting a few more lines from the play when she flinched at the sound of low laughter from somewhere. It was nothing more than a short chuckle, but it was enough to startle the cautious girl out of her wits.
A horrified Lizan looked back toward the doorway.
As if out of consideration to let her be embarrassed to her heart’s content, whoever had witnessed Lizan’s little farce was already closing the door. The only thing visible through the crack was dark-colored hair.
Her cheeks burned with shame. Crestfallen, Lizan needlessly ran her fingers over the soft bedding and retied the ribbon of a curtain that had been fastened slightly crooked, dragging out the time before quietly slipping out of the room. From then on, she silently searched only for the necklace she had been sent to find.
That was how she was making her way through the rooms one by one.
“…Huh?”
When she took hold of the next room’s handle and tried to open it, there came a clack, the sound of it being locked. Since every room’s door had been closed, but not a single one had been locked, Lizan was a little flustered.
She gripped the doorknob and rattled it. She had clearly been told they were empty rooms, so she could not understand why it would not open.
How did it get locked? Did I touch something wrong? Could it possibly be broken? Should I go call someone?
She had been lost in thought for only a short while. All of a sudden, the door swung open from the inside with a thud. Without time to prepare for anything, Lizan was caught off guard and tumbled over.
As she sat dazedly in the doorway, blinking with a bewildered expression, a woman clutching at the collar of her clothes, which had slipped below her shoulder, came rushing out from the dark room within. Perhaps walking was a little uncomfortable for her; with unsteady steps, the woman narrowly brushed past Lizan and disappeared. The woman’s eyes, glimpsed for an instant, were red around the rims.
But Lizan had no time to think for long.
“What’s this? Why is there a little rat here?”
A chilling voice suddenly drove down into the crown of her head.