The Farming Elves #1
"P-please... j-just spare my life this once...!"
She wore the plainest of dresses, without so much as a single ornament—a pitiful figure at a single glance. I shook my head in secret as I looked at Agnes, who had fallen from a duke's daughter to a candle flickering in the wind. Even from where I stood, as someone who had every reason to resent her, the way she was ending left me feeling a little sorry for her.
That didn't mean I intended to plead for her life. Every decision rested solely with Helena, who sat with her legs crossed before her.
"Spare you, is it..."
Helena kept her arms folded and tapped her upper arm with a finger. Judging by the light gone from her eyes alone, it would not have been strange if she had simply cut Agnes down on the spot—yet she seemed to be drawing the moment out, as if genuinely weighing something.
She had dragged Agnes here on the pretext of taking her head herself, but it had never been an absolute necessity that she die. Declaring she would take Agnes's head had simply meant that Helena alone held the right of life and death over her. Albus Kilinaire had known that and accepted it all the same—and the result was the sorry spectacle before us.
"But even if I spare you, there's nothing in it for me. You can't lean on the prestige of House Kilinaire anymore, and it isn't as if you have any useful skill to offer..."
"I-I will! I will! I'll do anything! So please, just my life...!"
Not a shadow remained of the woman who had once been so proud she tipped over into arrogance. The way she let tears fall as she begged for her life, the utterly abject tone of her voice—stripped of the mask of nobility, Agnes was nothing more than an ordinary commoner you might meet anywhere.
"So if I told you to live the rest of your life as a whore, you could do that?"
"Th-that's...!"
Helena's eyes remained as cold as ever as she demanded the lowest of the low—a slave beneath even other slaves. What she meant was not a mere prostitute, but a life in which every coin earned would be taken from her without exception. Even Agnes, thrashing for survival, could not help but flinch—and that instant became the decisive line between her life and death.
"You said you'd thrown away pride and everything else, but that was a lie, wasn't it? Leave a woman like that alive and she'll only become a nuisance..."
"N-no! I'll do it! No—please, make me! If you'll only let me...!"
As if Agnes's belated shriek never reached her ears, Helena drew the sword from her hip and swung. The motion was as light as brushing away a gnat—but the result was not light in the least. A blade of pure, merciless white sank deep into the place where Agnes's heart had been.
"Ghk—! You... damned... dog-like...!"
The dying woman spat blood and forced every last scrap of strength into her eyes. She had shed the ugly spectacle of begging for her life only moments before and returned to the arrogant self she had always been. A life already forfeit—there was no further need to debase herself.
"You're not wrong. I am Zion's bitch."
"Crazy... bitch..."
I startled at a remark that would have turned the household upside down if anyone had overheard it—then relaxed only after realizing there were no ears to hear. The fact that I could even think such a thing while a person was dying in front of me was astonishing in its own right.
"So you shouldn't have touched him. You brought this entirely on yourself."
"Go to hell... you damn... dam..."
Agnes breathed her last with her eyes fixed on Helena, who wore a thin smile from start to finish. She never finished the sentence, but what she had meant to say was easy enough to guess.
"Well then... time to clean up this hunk of meat, I suppose."
Helena murmured as she pulled her sword free of Agnes's corpse. She was utterly matter-of-fact, as if treating Agnes not as a person but as a simple lump of flesh. Even allowing that the time for being shocked by killing had long since passed, her manner was cold enough to raise gooseflesh.
"Zion, clearing away a person—no. Clearing away a corpse like this would be unpleasant for you. Better to burn it first and handle the rest afterward."
Helena's words caught me off guard. Cremation was not unheard of in this world, but I had assumed she would at least return the body. There was no point nursing a grudge against the dead. Still, the fact that she was considering the servants even now—sparing them the task of disposing of the body—was something worth praising. Unlike Kane, where there had been the pretext of an attempted poisoning, this corpse was the product of purely personal feeling.
"You mean to leave no trace at all?"
"Hm? Of course. She's a beast who dared try to lay a hand on Zion. Even burying her in the ground would be too good for her."
"Even so, leaving the body intact might be better."
I had no desire to desecrate a corpse on top of everything else, so I did my best to coax Helena gently. My first reason was selfish—the whole business made my skin crawl—but I also wanted to give a quiet burial to a woman who had once been nothing but trouble. More than anything, if we reduced her to bone dust and scattered even that, I had a feeling the weight of it would follow me all the way back to the Divine Realm.
"...Haa. You really are far too kind, Zion. Fine. I'll have her buried somewhere decent, like a common graveyard."
"Thank you."
Fortunately, Helena accepted my request and settled on interment. It meant a somewhat more troublesome process, but that was still far better than living with a permanent sour taste in my mouth. Matters had already twisted to this extreme—there was no need to push them all the way to the end.
And so the next few days were rather busy. We began by cleaning Helena's room, washed the corpse thoroughly, anointed it with fragrant oil, and finished by finding an undertaker and having her buried in a reasonably sunny spot.
The matter of House Kilinaire was settled with equal speed. According to Helena, weakening the aristocratic faction had been little more than a convenient pretext; the real point of the condition she had set was simply to shove their faces in it. In that spirit, the next Duke of Kilinaire she named was the family's third son. A man who had originally stood farthest from the line of succession was now duke—so there would be no quiet days ahead for a while. The third son would scramble to consolidate power, and the eldest and the rest, left suddenly as dogs that had lost the chicken they were chasing, would scheme endlessly to snatch the seat back.
"You want to make a vineyard?"
"Yes. We'll plant a few trees as well, but I was thinking—what if all of you grew grapes and sold them?"
One day, after we had finally finished every nauseating scrap of business, I was sitting with the dark elves on the land they had been given, talking at our leisure. The plot was far too large for six people to live on as it was, so something had to be done with it. Building a single house alone in the middle of wasteland would have felt too empty anyway.
"Even if we grow grapes, is anyone going to buy them? It isn't as if there are hordes of eccentrics like you out there."
Ellen gave a wry smile and voiced a thoroughly practical objection. The other dark elves nodded in silent agreement, and I had been thinking much the same myself. Even so, I could hardly leave these people who had only just come to live within the same fence to simply sit and do nothing. I wanted, at the very least within the Krauser territory, to make it impossible for anyone to treat them like filth.
The fastest and simplest method would have been a single word of command from Helena—but forcing obedience would clearly accomplish nothing. If anything, even more furtive and contemptuous stares would trail after them than before. In other words: quick, but hollow.
"That's true enough. So I was thinking we'd grow the grapes, make wine from them, and for now handle it only within the Krauser manor."
"In other words, you want us to treat it as a pastime and produce a luxury for nobles."
"Exactly. If we make wine so good it turns heads and serve it to guests, people will start seeking it out on their own. And that, I hope, will improve the way they look at all of you."
"It's kind of you to think of us, but... can we even make wine like that?"
A practical objection, followed by a practical doubt. Entirely fair. Dark elves were still elves, but they had never made wine before—and most of their lives had been spent on battlefields. It was only natural that growing anything would be foreign to them.
"Of course I plan to invite a separate craftsman for the winemaking. Combine that with the grapes you grow, and I'm sure we can succeed."
"Do you really think so...?"
"I do. You've spent your lives being shuttled from battlefield to battlefield and treated like refuse—but that doesn't change the fact that you're elves at the root. People who love nature and take joy in raising plants."
In a way, I might simply have been forcing my own view on them. Even so, when I saw their faces light up with clear emotion, I was freshly certain I had not been wrong. Their temperament and appearance might differ somewhat—but they were elves all the same.
Once I had Helena's approval, I set the plan in motion at once. Building houses for the dark elves and cultivating this barren ground.
The houses were made from logs given a simple treatment. Left to my own preferences I would have built something like the small, ordinary cottages you see everywhere—but they asked for wood, so we went with log cabins.
What mattered next was tending the land itself—and it was then that I felt most keenly that dark elves, too, were elves. Whether they were helping the laborers transplant trees along the perimeter or planting and raising the grapevines, the speed of growth was nothing short of unnatural. The trees swelled thick and lush as if declaring that this was their place, like watching someone whose growth plates had closed keep getting taller anyway.
The first harvest, months later, was grapes so good they defied description. Bright and clean, yet with a rich sweetness that made you understand what the word truly meant—a masterpiece. There hardly seemed any need to turn them into wine; selling them as they were would have been more than enough. No doubt the flavor came from having been raised by elves themselves.
"Wow... how is this so good?"
The land we had worked for so long was no longer a wasteland. Touched everywhere by elven hands, it had become so beautiful it called to mind a carefully tended village nestled in a forest.
"I-is it really that good?"
"Yes. Of all the grapes I've ever tasted, these are the best."
Truthfully, I had rarely eaten grapes on this continent at all, so I couldn't claim expertise—but the flavor was unmistakably high-grade. Even someone like me, who didn't particularly care for grapes, kept reaching for another berry.
Ellen flushed at the praise and gave a shy little smile. With her slender, small frame—so different from her companions—she really did give the impression of a delicate girl.
"I'd never tended a field or trees with my own hands before, so I was worried... I'm so relieved."
"Relieved doesn't begin to cover it. Thinking about it now... if we sold these without revealing who grew them, they'd be famous in no time. Revealing the names afterward might not be a bad idea either, but..."
For a moment I considered some clever little trick—then shook my head and set the idea aside. I couldn't even begin to imagine the backlash that would come from something so underhanded, so even if it was inconvenient, taking it slowly seemed the more comfortable path. And if all else failed, we could simply keep them for internal use.
"I don't know much about business, but... honesty is still the better way, isn't it?"
"Right. We have plenty of time, so going slowly is fine. Living like this already feels like a dream... honestly, I don't even want to ask for more."
As if Ellen were not alone in being content with the present, the other dark elves who had been quietly listening all nodded at once. For people whose reputation was so savage, they were disarmingly unassuming.
"Understood. From where I stand, I can't quite accept 'I don't want to ask for more'—but we'll take it easy."