Chapter 6
“You can’t see anything? Completely?”
“It seems so.”
They said that, as he sent her parents home, Akenaus could not hide his smirking grin. At first, it had bothered him a little that the man had merely been blinded, but after thinking it over, he found this outcome much more satisfactory.
“Yes, no matter how detestable he is, he’s still my brother by blood. Killing him would be too heartless. Now he can’t even fire that precious gun of his, and he does nothing but lie there all day. Yesterday, I went to see him and stared at him for quite a while, but instead of grabbing me, all he could do was flail his arms.”
He had spoken with a face that looked so pleased he could die.
Under Akenaus’s tacit approval, her parents’ theft was overlooked. He even sent them away with a considerable sum of wealth. It was the price for turning a war hero blind.
Even if the Valdemaera mansion remained silent, they could no longer live in Cleris. To Rose and to her parents, Cleris had become a city of sin. As long as Akenaus kept both eyes open, Rose and her parents could be caught by the ankles by the sins they had committed and brought crashing down at any moment.
Their flight in the dead of night was swift, and very quiet.
“Even if Akenaus Valdemaera isn’t pursuing us right now, it’s dangerous for our family to travel together. If he changes his mind and decides to chase after us, he’ll surely start by searching for three travelers who look like a family.”
“Then?”
“For now, you go back to school. With this money, you can finish your studies. We’ll find a place to stay on our own.”
The family scattered. Her parents decided to make the rounds of their relatives’ homes in search of a town where they might settle anew, and she, having nowhere else to go, returned to school.
It was winter.
Cielsa, where the school was located, was in the north, notorious for its nasty weather. In particular, there were overwhelmingly more foul days than clear ones, and the fierce snowstorms that raged until late winter were the worst of all. Of course, once early spring came, those snowstorms transformed into downpours accompanied by squalls, so even with the change of seasons, one could hardly let down one’s guard.
Moreover, this year’s winter was harsher still. It was because the chimney had collapsed, unable to withstand the heavy snow and strong winds. The students, faced with the spiteful cold without a fireplace, all came down with severe colds at once and took to their beds. Rose was no exception.
The headmaster hurriedly searched for a doctor, but for some reason, there was not a single physician nearby who could make a house call. When a doctor finally got in touch and came to the school, Rose heard a strange story while being examined.
“There are no doctors around here right now. Every doctor in this area has been called to Derosa.”
“Derosa? Why?”
“The Valdemaera villa is there, isn’t it?”
The name that had driven her out of Cleris suddenly caught her ear. Without realizing it, Rose began to pay close attention.
“That villa is calling in doctors. They’re especially looking for physicians with plenty of experience who are well-versed in pharmacology, apparently... I didn’t meet their requirements, so I couldn’t even see the patient and had to turn back at the entrance to the mansion. But that mansion was truly strange.”
“......Why?”
“Goodness. I don’t know how densely they’d drawn all those curtains, but even in broad daylight, the whole place was as dark and eerie as midnight. I would have believed it if someone had told me it was the mansion of Báthory Erzsébet, the one I’d only heard of in legends. It wouldn’t have been strange if something leapt out at any moment, and the servants’ attitudes were so unpleasant that I even thought it might have been fortunate I simply turned back...”
Rose knew it by instinct. It was Ejekail. The second son of Valdemaera had hidden himself away in Derosa.
That day, Rose packed only one simple travel bag and left the school.
Her destination was Derosa, where the Valdemaera villa stood. Without any certainty as to what she would do once she got there, she squeezed herself onto the stagecoach that ran only twice a day and rattled down the road.
Rumors had already spread through Derosa by word of mouth. The sources were the servants who had been driven out after failing to suit the eccentric temperament of the master. Everyone agreed that it was not a place anyone could endure for long. People called it the Beast’s Mansion.
Late at night, Rose knocked on the mansion’s door.
What was it that had urged her legs on and brought her, in the end, to this mansion?
Someone would call it hypocrisy.
Someone else would call it atonement.
Neither answer was wrong.
“Do you know who ruined my eyes? A maid just like you.”
Ejekail had never suspected wrongly.
She understood his anger. And he had every right to be angry. When the man’s powerful hand seized the nape of her neck and squeezed as though to kill her, even as she struggled, gripped by the terror of suffocation, a part of her thought it was karma.
Even if she stayed by his side for the rest of her life and served him, she would never be able to clear this karma.
By these fingertips, an honorable soldier had fallen.
Akenaus had now erased his blind younger brother from his mind entirely. As both a soldier and the heir to the family, Ejekail was no different from a man whose limbs had been severed, and he could no longer be Akenaus’s rival.
Rose wrapped her hand around the glass bottle. It was so light she could barely feel its weight, yet her hands dropped onto her lap as though she were gripping a solid lump of iron.
The pressure weighing down on her hands was heavy. It was the weight of the sin she had committed.
2. The Lie Began
Standing at the end of the long corridor on the first floor, Rose closed her eyes.
Her vision was faintly mottled. The sensation was not perfect yet. She took out a handkerchief and tied it tightly over her eyes.
Only then was it flawless darkness.
She thought she remembered the width and length of the corridor well enough, but once her sight disappeared, her sense of space vanished with it. It felt as though something might suddenly leap out from somewhere and crash into her, and at the same time, as though the floor might suddenly drop away beneath her.
This was the sensation he lived trapped in every day.
Rose took a cautious step. Groping hesitantly through the air, she followed it with a second and then a third. Every direction seemed like a swamp, so she could not even take wide strides.
She understood why the furniture and household items had all been chased up to the second floor, leaving only the bare minimum behind. With even a little bad luck, it would be easy to suffer a serious injury from a small ornament.
Since she never knew when she might veer off course, she walked while groping to the side, trying to guard against the corridor wall. Unexpectedly, however, the wall appeared first not at her side, but in front of her. It blocked her path so suddenly that she had no time to notice it. Rose ended up slamming into it face-first.
“What the hell. What bastard is this?”
For a moment, a firm, muscular resilience seemed to catch her face, and then a fierce hand seized her by the shoulder and shoved her away without mercy.
It was the strength of a man who had once served as a soldier. Moreover, because her eyes were covered, it was impossible for her to regain her balance by stepping backward.
Rose was pushed back just like that and went sprawling onto the floor.
If she could see the floor when she fell, she would have quickly braced herself with her arms to avoid being badly hurt, but her sight, submerged in darkness, gave her no such chance. At most, instinct told her to protect her head, and she barely managed to wrap both arms around her face.
She was so startled that no scream came out. Because she had tumbled blindly, her shoulder and wrist were caught beneath her at a bad angle and twisted. A stinging pain rose along with a throbbing heat. Rose pressed the handkerchief down and wiped away the tears that sprang to her eyes.
“Were you not given Serva’s instructions? That there must be no obstacles whatsoever on the first floor.”
A low voice fell over the crown of her head. Rose immediately bowed her head.
“I was given them.”
“Even the blind furniture does not get in my way, so what business does a sighted obstacle have obstructing me?”
“I’m sorry.”
Rose hurriedly fumbled at the knot of the handkerchief. But because she had tied it too tightly, it did not come undone at once.
Just then, the sound of Mrs. Serva’s cane tapped sharply down the corridor.
“Master Ejekail. How many times have I told you that these old knees of mine cannot keep up with your impatient steps... Rose? What are you doing there?”
Mrs. Serva looked down at Rose with wide eyes.
At last, the knot of the handkerchief came undone. Rose quickly rolled up the piece of cloth in her hand.
“Rose?”
Ejekail repeated her name. It was a name he felt he might remember, or might not. Mrs. Serva naturally stepped in and added an explanation.
“She’s the young lady who recently joined the laundry room.”
Ejekail inhaled the scent hovering at the tip of his nose. No wonder it seemed familiar—the soft, cozy fragrance of laundry soap called up the memory of a certain recent night. The dawn when thunder and lightning had raged, and a woman had entered his bedroom.
“Is she the maid from last time?”
“Ah, yes. You must have seen... met Rose once before.”
Mrs. Serva hastily corrected herself and looked over Rose’s appearance.
“But Rose, what were you doing here? And why were your eyes covered? Are you hurt somewhere?”
“I wondered why you were loitering stupidly in the corridor, but I suppose you wanted to play at being blind.”
Ejekail sneered.
Flustered, Rose looked up at him. It had never been meant as a game. She had simply wanted to understand more of the inconveniences she did not yet fully know. Because there must be many difficulties that were no longer ordinary for this man.
She quickly explained.
“No. I only wanted to know in advance and prepare for the inconveniences you don’t tell me about...”
“What does that have to do with you?”
Ejekail cut her off and asked. His tone was cold.