Claire's Coming-of-Age Ceremony (6)

One after another, Claire, then Arina, then even Isabella had their eyes fly wide open.

Shayden would never take Karsein's side in a matter like this. Arina demanded the reason at once.

"What is that supposed to mean, Shayden? Food he mustn't eat?"

"I wonder if you might be aware of the Kelvia allergy."

All three of them shook their heads. One alone flinched, shoulders shuddering.

But Shayden looked straight past it and said, "I thought as much," wearing the air of a man whose suspicions had been confirmed.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

"The Kelvia fruit contains a small amount of toxin. Ordinarily it does the human body no harm whatsoever... but for a patient who displays an allergic reaction, it is another matter entirely."

"An allergy... you say?"

"Surely you don't mean to tell us that Karsein has this Kelvia allergy?"

"Yes."

The moment Shayden confirmed it, the walls of the ducal house could not tear their eyes from the table.

Karsein, who had already left the room, had not touched a single dish. Except for one — the roast turkey that had sat at the very center.

Claire, recalling the sight of Karsein tearing into the meat, asked in a trembling voice.

"Th-the symptoms. What are the symptoms? Karsein already ate the meat!"

"It varies in severity. In mild cases, it may go no further than a sense of revulsion toward the fruit itself — in taste or in smell. But when the symptoms are severe, the patient can distinguish food containing the fruit from food that does not."

Karsein had deliberately refused to eat the dishes.

He could tell them apart. Plainly so — enough that it would have been obvious to anyone watching.

"But that only covers stages one through three. If the young master belongs to stage four — the most vulnerable, as he does..."

Gulp.

"Even a slight ingestion would send the toxin raging through him, and without an antidote he would be bedridden, wracked with pain, for days."

"What?!"

"Wh-what did you say...?"

"Fortunately, the meat he ate was only coated with the fruit in the seasoning, and it appears he stripped away the skin and ate only the flesh inside. Even so, he could not escape the aroma, so the revulsion must have been severe."

Why had he not eaten the food?

Because his allergy allowed him to detect whether the fruit was in it.

Why had he torn at the meat like a beggar with his bare hands?

Because he was trying to avoid the skin coated in Kelvia seasoning and eat only the flesh of the meat.

Why had he not apologized for doing wrong?

Because he had done nothing wrong. Because there was nothing there that could be called a wrong in the first place.

Not food — poison.

To Karsein, this table had held nothing but poison.

-I really am being treated unfairly, you know. I only ate because I was told to eat, so why is it that no matter how I explain myself, I'm the one who gets struck?

-Honestly, I'd rather be sick in bed with a cold than sit through that. At least nobody slaps you then, and at least a proper meal actually arrives. Don't you think so, Claire?

-I apologize for being vulgar and filthy and lowborn. Someone like me would be better off simply absent from your coming-of-age ceremony, wouldn't he?

-The eyesore leaves first. Enjoy your meal, everyone.

Only now did Karsein's voice, which had rung through the dining hall as he declared he'd go on ahead, rise to the surface of their minds.

It amounted to inviting him to a meal only to tell him he must not eat. While everyone else dined, he would have had to stand alone like a folding screen, staring blankly. No — accounting for the illness itself, it may have been crueler still.

"I felt it last time as well, but the malice directed toward the young master is excessive. I say this again and I say it earnestly: you would do well to investigate your own servants. Good day."

When Shayden closed the door behind him, a long silence settled over the dining hall. The maids had been expelled the moment the investigation began, leaving only the four members of the family.

"How... how could such a thing happen..."

BANG!

Isabella, her face wearing an expression rarely seen on her, slammed her fist down on the table.

"Who? Who ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠in the world committed such a despicable act inside the House of Bagrand?!"

Her voice, thick with fury, filled the dining hall to bursting. She was not blaming her own daughters seated there, but neither was this something that could simply be let pass.

"Arina! Assemble every last servant. Now! At once!"

"Mother! Calm yourself!"

"Calm? You would have me calm after seeing that? Even after seeing that barefaced scheme — telling him not to eat at his own family's table?"

"I know. I understand, Mother, I do. But punishing all of them harshly will not catch the culprit. We may only end up harming the innocent along with the guilty."

"Karsein. Ah, ah...!"

"Mother!"

"M-Mom!"

As Isabella's legs gave out beneath her, Claire and Arina caught her and eased her into a chair.

"You must rest well, Mother. I will investigate the culprit together with Claire."

"I'll catch them. I will catch them, so you just rest. Okay?"

"How could anyone in this house stoop to such a humiliating, cowardly act...!"

Even so, Isabella fumed for a long while, unable to swallow her rage. Only after her two daughters coaxed and soothed her, offering compromise after compromise so that her body would not suffer, did she finally withdraw.

But in that dining hall turned upside down —

one person alone could not hide her agitation.

'Wh-what do I do...?'

The look in Karsein's eyes as he had gazed at them — as if he knew everything — still would not leave her. No. It had felt, in that moment, as though he truly did know.

'This time it w-wasn't me...!'

Snap.

The girl whose feet had gone numb broke her own thumbnail.

Click.

"Young master? You're back already... Huk!"

Camilla, in the middle of tidying the bedding, whipped her head around in alarm.

But it could not have been his voice alone that startled her so.

"G-good heavens... Young master! What in the world...?"

The clothes he had been meant to wear to the ballroom were a complete wreck. It made the morning's effort — the several changes of bathwater since the small hours, the meticulous washing and dressing — seem utterly wasted.

Worse, he looked nothing like a man returning from a meal. One cheek was slashed open in a sharp line, blood trickling down along his skin and staining the white fabric at his shoulder a deep red. Watching it, one would sooner believe he had gone somewhere to be punished.

"Camilla."

"Ah — yes. Yes, young master..."

Caught off guard by the sudden call, Camilla answered a beat late.

"I only answered my mother's summons in keeping with Claire's intentions, and went down to dine. I even made a show of wearing the outfit you reported was prepared for me. So where, exactly, did the problem lie?"

"N-no... nowhere..."

"Then the state I'm in was caused purely by what happened at that meal. Isn't that so?"

Camilla silently inclined her head.

At that, Karsein began to lay out what had happened in the dining hall.

"When I answered my mother's summons, I saw something truly fascinating at that table. My, my — how is it that only the foods I cannot eat managed to make their way onto it?"

"I... I don't understand what you mean..."

"The Kelvia allergy. Because of it, I couldn't even eat a proper meal. And so — this."

"...!"

Camilla's heart shriveled at those two words.

Even she — who, on request, had tormented her master time and again — had known it well.

The Kelvia fruit. To Karsein, it was nothing less than the devil's fruit.

"They set food I can't even touch in front of me and tell me to eat. How could I not be angry?"

Camilla could not bring herself to speak.

She had been a noble once, and she had known something like this before.

Inviting someone to a meal and then staging a situation in which they could not eat was malice made naked and plain.

Which meant that that hour had been time reserved for the four of them alone — everyone but Karsein.

'I see. Not only the madam — none of the young ladies seated there noticed a thing...'

Something unspoken beneath Karsein's words made Camilla lower her head.

"I was angry, you see. So I did everything I could to avoid the Kelvia — tore the meat apart with my hands and ate only the flesh inside. And then Claire slapped me across the face. See this?"

Karsein pointed a finger at his cheek, where blood still ran in a thin line. The sight made Camilla's head swim, and she hurried off to fetch something to staunch the bleeding.

Whereupon he — battered and bloodied as he was — let out a short, dry laugh.

"Do you understand reality a little better now, Camilla? Filthy, graceless, and lowborn. That is precisely where I stand."

There could be no more direct an expression. Anyone who heard it would grasp the meaning at once.

Because you meddled when you had no business doing so, I came back looking like this. So from now on, do not act on your own initiative.

That was the warning.

And in telling her to face reality while engraving his own station upon her, he carried a second message: she would never be accepted as a noble again.

In other words, Karsein was quietly making it clear that he was not a man who had any place at the coming-of-age ceremony.

She had ten mouths and not a single word to say. As his exclusive maid, it was she who had guided her master into returning beaten and bloodied.

She ached to tend at least the wound on his face, but even that seemed a thing he would not permit. The most she could do, she realized, was hold her tongue about anything touching the ceremony — and that was the limit of it.

And so Camilla, wearing a bitter expression, turned to leave Karsein's chamber.

Or she tried to.

"Oh, right. Camilla — there's something I want to ask you."

The question he posed before she could turn away was:

"If you converted this morning's breakfast of the ducal house into money, how much would it come to?"

It was a very, very strange question.

After Camilla left the room, I shed the ruined clothes without ceremony and headed for the bath.

When I dabbed away the blood that still seeped with water from the tub — not yet gone cold — a sharp sting answered.

Well. It was no loss, all things considered. Trading one slap across the cheek for the possibility of skipping the coming-of-age ceremony was hardly a losing bargain.

A hit like that could be shrugged off easily enough.

'Funny how the second one hits the same as... tch.'

It had felt strangely familiar. No doubt because I'd been through something just like it before.

My second sister's birthday — the night the clock passed midnight and she turned twenty, in Korean reckoning. That day, just like Karsein, I had taken a slap across the face from her.

'Of all days, it had to be her birthday, too. And...'

That was also when the number beside the name in the status window changed by one.

'Looking at it like this, there's really almost no difference at all, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠is there.'

It would be the same here. These family members, too — they knew nothing. Not a thing.

I checked the mirror, confirmed the color had sufficiently drained from my face, left the bathroom quickly, and changed into fresh clothes. Then I sat for a while at the table, turning over what had happened in the dining hall.

"I've seized my opening, at least. Now let's see where it goes."

That move had aimed at three things at once.

It put pressure on the one person whose efforts had been devoted solely to tormenting Karsein.

It placed a certain constraint on the movements of every servant in the house, head maid included.

And last, it planted the trick of destroying my own clothes — a gambit to keep me from attending Claire's coming-of-age ceremony.

Honestly, I couldn't say which of the three would actually bear fruit. That would only be clear from how things developed — and all the more so because this was a scene that had never existed in the game.

Still, I could reasonably expect one effect: they wouldn't dare treat me carelessly for a while.

One of them, in particular, would be grinding her teeth the moment she realized her grand plan had failed spectacularly. That alone was enough for me.

"First order of business is Claire's coming-of-age ceremony... Hmm."

Karsein was always bound to follow the episode, forced to pick one of the given choices and react accordingly.

As far as I knew, this episode had never once failed to occur. Plenty of other episodes had been inserted ahead of it, sure — but never had it failed to play out.

How was I supposed to get past this one?

That was the question weighing on me most.

Right at that moment —

the status window lit up.

Ding!

'A hidden episode?'

...

...

If it were merely that, I'd have thought Memorials served the same function — but the explanation that followed suggested otherwise.

'Memorials aren't treated as episodes. They're nothing more than lumps of information for breaking through episodes.'

With a Memorial, I could not intervene in something that had already happened in the past. That was their limitation. But this explicitly stated that it was being treated as an episode. That was a point I needed to be careful about.

So why had this popped up now?

The answer to the question I was turning over, it seemed, arrived in the form of a knock from outside the door.

Knock knock.

"Who is it?"

No answer came to my question. Only the knocking continued — and even that, growing fainter with each strike.

'Don't tell me — is this a Dead Flag suddenly springing up right here...?!'

Right. All I had to do was ignore it.

If I didn't open the door, whoever it was would simply turn back and—

Oh, for — damn it all.

Now the status window shows up here?

Even if I tried to shrug it off and move past, there was no dodging a forced event. I had no option left but to open that door.

Resigned, I opened it.

The visitor at my door was rather small in stature.

Small enough that I had to dip my head and look down to meet her eyes.

"Why are you here?"

"B-because I have something to say."

The one who had come looking for me was none other than Flora.