Tea Party (4)
“What did I do wrong?”
When I asked whether she wanted me to move because of that cold stare fixed on me, Irene nodded at once, as if she had been waiting for the question.
Had I made some mistake today? She had suddenly asked me whether I thought she was pathetic, then brought up the way the young ladies were deliberately pretending not to notice her. I ran through the day in my head, but no matter how hard I thought about it, I couldn’t find a single thing I’d done wrong.
I had even kept my schedule packed tight, just so I wouldn’t run into Irene.
And although I had ended up meeting her for the first time on guard duty today, I hadn’t actually made any blunder at the tea party either.
I couldn’t figure out what on earth Irene’s strange behavior could have been based on.
I had even wondered if she was testing me, but wasn’t that a little too much?
At this point, the thought that kept surfacing was that maybe she disliked me.
There had been the way I’d gotten her title wrong when we first met, and the way I’d blurted out nonsense to myself because she had seemed so lonely being alone.
Come to think of it, wasn’t it the very next day that she had started treating me like that?
“Damn.”
That had to be it. Testing me or not, if she simply disliked me in the first place, then it made sense.
The way her blue eyes seemed even colder whenever she looked at me, the way those red lips looked ready to spit out something cruel—
I dragged a hand over my face and let out a sigh, sitting on the edge of a corner of the garden.
Just a little while ago, I’d been secretly pleased with myself for trying to look after her, but once I considered what she might really have been thinking, it felt as if the sky had gone dark in front of my eyes.
For me, who had in my own way grown attached to Irene Yuris from the novel, it stung far more than I wanted to admit.
I thought if I showed her how hard I was trying, she’d acknowledge me.
Instead, the thought that the first impression had already ruined everything escaped me in an endless, weary sigh.
“Why are you sighing like that?”
Just as I was brooding over my own miserable situation, I lifted my head at the clear voice in my ear and found Ropena staring down at me.
Frowning, she looked from the tray in one hand—loaded with her favorite cookies—to my face and seemed to ask why I was sitting here doing this.
“I got kicked out.”
“...Huh?”
“She said she wished I’d go somewhere else.”
“Oh my, did the young lady really say that?”
In truth, Irene had never actually said such a thing, but I scowled and muttered anyway.
I had even dealt with an assassin, made my first kill, and gotten hurt for it. Surely she could understand this much complaining.
When I pouted, Ropena snorted softly and sat down beside me.
“Mind if I stay here?”
“The young lady told me to do whatever I wanted. Besides, I’ve got nothing else to do. I even brought cookies.”
Crunch.
Ropena bit into a cookie and hugged her cheeks with a blissful expression.
Were they really that good? I had tried them a few times myself, but they’d been so sweet they had only spoiled my appetite.
Watching her happily devour what tasted like sugar packed into dough instead of flour, I found myself smiling for no real reason.
Her yellow hair was tied up, and the way she grinned so openly made her look like a child.
And since Ropena was rather small for her age, she looked for all the world like a little sister.
“What?”
“Pfft.”
Ropena puffed out one cheek and tilted her head, and before I knew it, laughter escaped me.
“Finish eating first, Ropena. I’m not going to steal it from you.”
“Should I get you some milk?” I asked, lifting the teapot beside her, and Ropena beat her chest and nodded again and again.
“Oh, thank you.”
“...You like cookies that much? I can’t stand how sweet they are.”
“I’ve got good memories attached to these cookies. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of them.”
“Good memories?”
Come to think of it, Ropena had never really talked about herself, so I took the chance to ask.
After narrowing her eyes in thought for a moment, she finally opened her mouth.
“Well, it’s nothing all that grand. It’s just that when I first started working in this ducal manor, I saw cookies for the first time.”
“Come to think of it, how did you end up working here?”
“There wasn’t any big reason.”
“Still, I’m a little curious.”
Ropena was Irene’s personal maid, after all.
It seemed only natural to be curious about how she had come to work in the ducal manor.
When I kept staring at her, Ropena swallowed the cookie in her mouth and began to speak.
Shaaa—
I was used to rain. I was used to the cold seeping through thin clothes, and to the hunger that had long since clung to my bones like a second skin.
Clutching ragged scraps over my chest, I wandered from one trash heap to the next.
Whenever I found a discarded piece of cloth, it became a fine blanket.
Hoo—hoo—
Maybe it was the snow mixed into the rain, but today felt colder than usual, and my body trembled all over.
I rubbed my chilled palms together, trying to coax some warmth back into them, and breathed onto my cold fingers.
Winter nights were a trial every single moment. Even breathing felt like a struggle, and the cold clawing at my chest made the inside of my nose ache.
Rustle.
“Ah!”
At the sound behind me, I sprinted without even looking back. Even if I had heard wrong, I had to react like this.
This was the capital’s street, where if you failed to react to a sound you could lose your life in the blink of an eye, and I was a body that had survived years on those streets.
Probably no one knew better than I did how to act in moments like this.
“...No one?”
Only after I’d run for what felt like ages, once my breath had grown ragged, did I finally look around.
When I saw that no one was near me, a regretful breath slipped out. That blanket from earlier—I hadn’t been able to bring it with me.
My hands were cold. My feet too, and my body. But the coldest thing of all was my heart.
As I hugged my shivering body, a voice reached my ears.
“Who are you?”
It was as cold as the winter air itself, and it snapped me fully awake. I lifted my head.
For a moment I flinched beneath those blue eyes fixed on me, and then I realized who the woman standing before me must be.
The dress that wrapped around her body, so splendid it could never be compared to the rags I wore, made my knees buckle before I could even think.
No matter how much she looked like a little girl, age meant nothing beneath the name of status.
Nobility.
My body, thinking of that name, shook uncontrollably.
I remembered rumors I had once heard—people who treated human lives like insects, who would sever a neck without hesitation if someone displeased them.
The thought that I might die here and now turned my vision white.
“S-s-sorry...”
Before I even realized what I was saying with a mouth shaking harder than it had from the cold, I felt something drape over my body.
Warm cloth. A layer of fabric that felt as though someone had taken off their own clothes and wrapped me in them, carrying their body heat with it. I stared blankly at it, and the noblewoman standing before me spoke.
“Come with me.”
I don’t like seeing anyone in my domain shivering in the cold.
With those words, the girl turned away without a second glance, and I could only stare at her back in a daze.
Was this a dream? But the cheek I’d pinched still hurt, and the cloth wrapped around me was warmer than anything I’d ever known.
The blue eyes that had looked at me lingered in my vision.
When I lifted my head, I saw a moon that resembled those eyes, and like someone following a light over the night sea, I slowly took a step forward.
The tiny footprints pressed into the muddy road, traces of that grown-up girl who was probably not so much older than I was.
I followed her as if bewitched.
“That’s how I ended up going to the ducal manor, and the first thing they gave me there was cookies. I’ve worked as a maid ever since.”
“...No wonder you like cookies.”
“Right?”
After hearing Ropena’s story, I stared at her face for a while.
Had the reason Ropena never mentioned her family name been not that she refused to say it, but that she didn’t have one to tell?
She was a commoner, something rare in this ducal manor.
My mouth turned bitter for no reason. Guilt rose in me at the thought that I had made her tell me something like this.
Status was, in this medieval world, not just important but a kind of chain that shackled an entire life.
“I’m sorry.”
“Huh? For what?”
“You didn’t have to tell me that. I asked you for no reason.”
“It’s fine. Well, I thought we’d be seeing each other for a long time, anyway.”
She scratched her cheek as she spoke, then grinned and picked up another cookie.
That smile, so casual and unconcerned, bothered me, and I looked away with a bitter smile of my own.
Still, there was more than just Ropena’s story that had me surprised—I’d also been a little taken aback by Irene’s unexpected side.
I had grown used to the villainess from the novel, and I had also become accustomed to the version I’d seen over the past week.
The way she readily offered help to the people in her own territory—how could anyone call such a person a villainess?
“Besides, that’s surprising. The way she talks to me doesn’t make her seem like that at all.”
Trying to lighten the mood, I looked at Ropena and laughed playfully, and she giggled too, nodding.
She had heard how Irene spoke to me from beside us, so she’d probably understand at least a little.
“But when you say you’ll be seeing each other for a long time... I might get fired soon.”
“Aw, no way.”
“Every time she looks at me, her expression gets worse, and I don’t even know what I did wrong. Maybe she just doesn’t like me.”
When I sighed out those words, Ropena shook her head as if to tell me not to say such things.
“That’s not it. She just doesn’t really know how to express herself.”
She doesn’t know how to express herself, huh.
But the coldness in her expression whenever she looked at me still seemed, no matter how I looked at it, like simple displeasure.
“Does the young lady really look like such a bad person to you? Like she’d say something like that because she doesn’t like you?”
“...No, not really.”
At the very least, the Irene I had watched over for the past week was not someone I could call evil.
She had been quietly doing what she was responsible for, and despite her cold appearance, she seemed to care a great deal for the people around her.
Whenever Ropena came back from seeing Irene, she was always chewing on a cookie, and that alone said plenty.
“She’s a good person.”
Then I nodded toward the shoulder where a bandage had once been wrapped.
The feeling that had clouded Irene’s eyes when she looked at the bandage I had wrapped—faint, but unmistakably worry. How could I have missed it?
It was only that she couldn’t express it.
She was always holding herself back, putting the brakes on every single thing she did, trying her hardest to carry out the role of the perfect successor.
Maybe I simply didn’t satisfy her.
At the thought that suddenly came to me, bitterness filled my mouth again, and I rubbed my face with my hand once more.
“Evan.”
But my thoughts scattered almost at once, because of the voice that came from behind me. As always, that chill in her tone made my body stiffen.
Coldness slid down my spine, and my heart gave a heavy thud as if it had dropped straight to the floor.
Of all times.
Even as I rose in embarrassed defeat, I couldn’t quite bring myself to lift my head.
Then that cool voice came again, striking my ear like an arrow.
“Well, that was an interesting conversation.”
How long had she been listening?
Maybe she could tell from my face that I was already rotting from the inside, because her icy voice drifted past me on the wind.
“To think I might dislike you.”
“......”
“Could you tell me exactly what gave you that impression?”
With her next words, my expression began to harden into stone.
---