7. Trial of the Rose Windmill Cabaret (27)
7. Trial of the Rose Windmill Cabaret (27)
Anais's flight landed around noon on Saturday.
Her butler had gone to the airport to meet her himself.
A state-of-the-art airship, its hull stretching over a hundred meters long.
Four enormous propellers, mounted fore and aft on both sides, drove the vessel forward, while dozens of smaller ones fitted to the airbag's frame handled the turns and kept her steady.
The airship descended in a long, diagonal line with no attempt to level out, then halted over the landing point in a single smooth stop.
The veteran pilot's touch was unmistakable.
In the arrivals lounge, children pressed their faces to the glass, gasping louder as the ship drew closer.
The butler allowed himself a fond smile.
Watching them called up memories of his own boyhood, running to the river every day just to stare at the steamboats.
Every child, he reflected, was born with an ache for giant machines.
The gondola doors opened.
A slender woman in an elegant blouse, tailored jacket, and skirt stepped from the ship.
Long green hair swept beneath a rounded hat with a short brim.
Anais always booked first class, so she was always the first off.
Her personal guard, the musketeer Sir Porshu, and her secretary and handmaid followed behind.
Anais climbed into the carriage under the butler's escort.
Blaniak Airport served as the gateway to the northern canal cities.
Rouge lay three or four hours away by carriage.
"We should arrive by late afternoon, my lady."
"Then I can still catch the final performance. Now, tell me everything. How has the competition been going? How is the troupe leader?"
When she had first heard the theme of this contest, Anais had half expected Wonderstein to come asking for her help. Commerce was her field, after all.
But he had only asked for a few costumes and some armor and let the matter drop.
The question of whether he could actually pull this off had gnawed at her ever since.
Not because she doubted his skill—a good performance and a profitable venture were simply two different beasts.
Throughout the carriage ride, the butler brought her up to speed on the past week.
He told her how Deputy Leader Ella had collapsed from pushing herself too hard. How Wonderstein had gone onstage in clown makeup. How the portrait product line was faring and where the competition stood.
An experienced merchant, she listened with growing admiration.
Wonderstein possessed a remarkable instinct for commerce.
The products he had conceived, the way he had chosen to market them—all of it was so sophisticated it was hard to believe.
This went beyond mere experience or seasoning.
You needed a prodigy's feel for human psychology and the flow of money to come up with ideas like that.
Anais felt her heart tap against her ribs.
That the man she had fallen for could show such talent in the very world she inhabited was, well—more than a little gratifying.
The moment Anais reached Rouge, she headed for the cabaret without even dropping off her luggage at the hotel.
She climbed down from the carriage with a gift hugged to her chest.
Her plan was to catch him right at the end of the final performance, rush up, and hand it over with her congratulations.
She stepped into the hall with a bouncy stride—and stopped dead.
"Wh-what in the world...?"
For a fleeting, panicked instant, Anais pictured a hall full of slaughtered patrons, torn apart by rampaging monsters.
The floor and the walls were drenched in red.
The sour, grassy smell stinging her nose told her soon enough that it was nothing but tomato.
She knew the theater idiom well enough.
Had the troupe leader suffered a catastrophic failure? Had the audience pelted the stage in protest?
While she stood spinning nightmare scenarios, Wonderstein emerged from the practice room.
"Viscountess. You've arrived."
"Troupe Leader... what happened here?"
Wonderstein gave her a tired smile.
"Ah. About that."
He summarized the events of the first performance that day.
Baron Dosville charging in with hired thugs. The counterassault he himself had led—with tomatoes.
"Then it was Baron Dosville who did all this?"
The gift box crumpled in her hands.
A flame kindled in Anais's eyes.
That insect. She ought to have ruined him so thoroughly he could never crawl back.
Wonderstein calmed her with a steady voice.
"Ah—no. He wasn't the one. In a sense, he was the victim."
"......What do you mean?"
The person who had reignited a fight everyone had thought was finished was, bafflingly, the Pandora Magic Show's own leader, the magician Luini.
Baron Dosville's humiliation had haunted the man with nightmares ever since.
Having his arguments picked apart by a whelp who knew less than nothing about the circus had rankled unbearably.
So when Wonderstein had launched that magnificent counterstrike, Luini had been the first to roar with laughter.
It felt like ten years of indigestion finally easing.
The trouble was, Luini hadn't stopped there. Grinning ear to ear, he had bought a fresh tomato from one of the ratmen and—hurled it straight at Baron Dosville.
The baron, just then struggling to his feet, took the hit square and landed hard on his backside with a squelch.
When he sputtered in outrage, Luini's reply was as brazen as it was shameless:
"Doesn't the 'wet seat' disclaimer include 'moisture generated by the audience'?"
The original notice had been a playful warning about the potential for, well, accidents of a bodily nature. But Luini brazenly twisted those words, insisting they granted every person in the hall the right to throw tomatoes—and that anyone hit had forfeited the right to complain.
Sitting right beside him, the Mango Troupe's director, Sol, had eagerly backed the absurd argument.
He had his own grievances with Baron Dosville.
Everyone in this venue had the right to throw tomatoes, Sol declared with boisterous delight, and no one here could object.
That was his mistake.
"It seems that Mr. Hobbs, the leader of the Papael Circus, has been quietly grinding his teeth ever since Sol got his star by beating him—yet still lurks around the city instead of departing for the next. So no sooner had Sol's little speech ended than Hobbs threw a tomato straight at him, parroting Sol's own words back at him. Sol, trying to retaliate, hurled one in return—and hit the wrong person entirely..."
Wonderstein let the rest go unsaid.
Anais heaved a sigh.
She could guess how the rest had played out.
Once you were already dripping in tomato guts, you had nothing left to lose. Everyone was sitting on coin they were required to spend before the day was out, so of course they bought up every tomato they could and gleefully pelted whoever was nearest.
Even the patrons who bolted for the exits did a complete turnaround the instant a tomato smacked them. From that moment, their sole purpose became to hit someone else. Everyone ripped through their coin with wild abandon until there wasn't a single clean surface left in the hall.
Wonderstein shook his head ruefully.
"Every performance afterward was canceled. The entire cabaret staff pitched in to scrub the place clean, but—heh heh, at this rate, the teams competing in week four might find their plans affected too."
"But this trial isn't measured by ticket revenue. Even without performances, if you focus on merchandise sales..."
At that, a bitter smile crossed his face.
"In the thick of it all, Miss Maya's sketchbook took a direct hit from a tomato."
"The sketchbook... you mean—?"
"The magic tool responsible for our illustrated portraits. Core of the whole portrait venture. Even a magic tool can't do much when it's been soaked through. Paper is paper, I suppose—once it got that wet, it stopped working."
Wonderstein glanced toward the practice room.
Maya was marshaling everything she knew in a desperate effort to restore the sketchbook. So far, nothing had worked.
A pained look settled on Anais's face.
"Can you not salvage this with the profits you've already made? With the tomatoes priced so high, revenue must have been enormous."
"We had to refund every unused portrait card. The losses from that alone offset our entire tomato revenue. Heh heh, right now, the whole troupe's crowding the concession stand, pushing food and liquor, but I don't see us narrowing the gap. In the end we..."
Wonderstein started to say something, then stopped.
Anais could guess what word had been on his tongue.
Defeat.
That was where he had been heading.
And until just a few seconds ago, she had been thinking the same thing.
But it wasn't over yet.
One card remained.
She clutched the gift box against her chest.
"I paid a visit to the Tomato Greenhouse this week. A matter related to aftercare for one of my properties."
"Tomatoes?"
Wonderstein blinked, thrown by the sudden turn in the conversation.
Again with the tomatoes.
What on earth was the Tomato Greenhouse?
"Tomatoes weren't originally native to this continent."
The vast majority of people living on the Columbia Continent were descendants of immigrants who had journeyed here from another world.
They had crossed an ocean in search of a new land and carved out a fresh world with their own hands. Yet still, deep in their inherited consciousness, a stubborn nostalgia for the home they had left behind clung on.
That was what made Princess Charlotte's presence so singular.
Among all those immigrants, she alone had been of royal blood.
When the aristocracy had set about forging a new nation, Charlotte had been raised up as its queen—a choice owed entirely to the symbolic weight of her lineage.
The tomato, too, she had brought from that old homeland.
The tomatoes grown in abundance today all came from vines, but the original fruit she had carried with her had grown on a tree.
The Golden Tomato.
The progenitor of every tomato that existed now.
Every vine-grown tomato people ate today traced its origins to a single cutting, taken from that one golden tree and planted in the earth.
"The Tomato Greenhouse, in the northwest corner of the palace gardens, is where that single tree is preserved. After the queen's disappearance, the regent established his official residence there—as a symbol, meant to show that he guards the tree in her stead. The actual care of the tree, of course, falls to the head gardener."
She held out the gift box.
"I've never tasted one myself, but it's said to possess a savor so profound it feels like nothing of this world. The tree produces fewer than thirty Golden Tomatoes a year. The regent sends them out as gifts whenever an important diplomatic or political gesture is called for. There's a running joke that they represent the greatest power the regent truly wields. But he doesn't decide the fate of every single fruit. The very first tomato harvested each year belongs to the gardener who tends the tree."
Anais opened the box.
Nestled in silk lay a single tomato, its gentle yellow glow calling to mind pure gold.
"When I stopped at the Regent's Residence to handle the aftercare issue, the greenhouse's own gardener presented this to me as a gift. He called it an artisan's apology. He told me he was sorry he had let politics leave the gardens of such a storied hotel to go to ruin—and sorry for the trouble it had caused every guest who had stayed there."
By now, Wonderstein understood exactly why she was telling him all this.
She held the box toward him.
"What if we put this up as the prize?"