The Precarious Stone Tower
"Mom, look, look! It's snowing!"
"Yes. It's snowing today."
On one side, a group of commoners had come out to enjoy the festival.
"Heh heh, anyone else up for a snowball fight? Everyone else is already out cold—oof!"
"That's what you get for taking your eyes off me!"
"Hey! Why are you throwing at me and not them?!"
"What do brothers matter when we're crowning the king of this street? Eat this!"
On the other side, siblings were busy enjoying their own snowball war.
And then—
"Where are you going? Off to enjoy the festival?"
A sister, far younger than she would one day become.
She lacked the maturity and poise she would carry in later years. The age of that young red-haired girl, still bright with boyish energy, was seventeen.
And trailing eagerly at her heels, eyes shining, was a small boy.
"Wow. So this is the Snowflower Festival...!"
Three years her junior, the boy was taking in a scene exactly suited to a child of his age.
Children flinging snowballs at each other, streets lined with stalls selling warm food, a cozy winter unfolding all around him, the whole place teeming with wondrous things—it was wonder itself, made manifest.
For Karsein, who was unquestionably still a child—and who had always been shut up inside the estate, isolated even at gatherings—it was more than that. It was everything.
Anything would have delighted him.
What could they make with the snow falling from the sky?
How would it feel to try the strange foods he'd never even heard of before?
What would it be like to buy this and that like the other children and strut down the street?
For young Karsein, whose curiosity was blooming like spring shoots, simply being out on this street was enough.
"Karsein."
"Huh? Wh-what is it?"
The boy asked, eyes sparkling, wondering what she was going to do. And he waited—waited to hear what words would come out of his big sister's mouth.
"You said you wanted to enjoy the festival, didn't you?"
"Y-yes! Of course!"
"Well then, here. Go enjoy yourself as you like. Play however you want."
Arina pulled three hundred Pecels from her purse and dropped them into Karsein's hands. An allowance.
The boy lit up at the money—happy, and yet a little worried all the same.
"I got in huge trouble today, though... Are you really sure I can play?"
But the eyes of the sister who had brought him here had gone ice-cold.
"Yeah."
That single short word was the last thing Arina said to him.
"Yaaay!"
The boy bounced up and down with glee.
Drunk on freedom, he bolted down the street like a young colt, and nothing in the world could hold those feet back.
And so the snowflakes drifted down.
One by one, strange foods, toys, and games filled the boy's hands.
But before long, he began to lose interest.
Even though it was the freedom he'd begged for.
Even though it was permission he'd won, money in hand.
Even though it might be a chance that would never come again.
"Playing by myself... isn't any fun after all."
Karsein wasn't having fun at all. Because he was alone.
Then, suddenly, a scene on the street caught his eye.
"Here, Mom! This is a present for you!"
"Oh my. Thank you, dear."
A boy was giving his mother a prize he'd won from a street game.
The son scratched his head sheepishly in front of his smiling mother.
"I wish I could've won something better."
"Nonsense. Seeing you look after me like this already makes me happy enough."
That scene stirred Karsein out of his loneliness and set his feet moving again.
A prize for his family.
A gift.
And—
'My sisters, my little sister, Mom. They'd all love a present, wouldn't they?'
It was his family's attention he wanted.
'Yes. They'll definitely love it. I'll give them something hard to get, and they'll have to praise me for it!'
So resolved, Karsein brushed the snow from his backside.
The snow began to fall again.
Beneath a sky that had been a flawless blue, the white snowflakes soon seemed to burn red as the streetlamps flickered to life.
Karsein's arms were stacked high with bags of every shape and size. Who knew how much ground he'd covered, or how much he'd gathered?
But the boy didn't know.
He didn't know where the carriage that had brought him here was supposed to be waiting on these streets.
The only person who knew the carriage's location was Arina herself—the one who had brought him here and left him behind.
"Hmm... Arina will come back if I wait here, right?"
Wandering aimlessly, Karsein sat himself down on a pile of stones and kicked his legs back and forth with excitement. She'd surely be amazed when she saw what he'd gathered—he was looking forward to that.
In the meantime, why not build a stone tower?
While he stacked these flat stones one atop another, Arina was bound to know her way back and come find him.
But on that spot, Karsein knocked down his stone tower again and again.
Build. And build again.
Hours passed, and Arina never came.
Instead of the sister he was waiting for, what found him was—
"Yoohoo~ Well, well, look at this? Some noble young master, isn't it? My, my, what's he carrying all that stuff for?"
"Yikes. It's nothing but festival prizes!"
"Tch. What? Then isn't it all useless junk?"
"Not at all. Haul this off and sell it, it's all good money."
Hoodlums, far bigger than he was.
"Hey! That's mine!"
"Listen here, little lord. Hand it over nice and quiet if you don't want to get hurt. Doesn't look like you've got any family crest on you anyway."
"Why should I hand over things I worked hard to win?"
"Oh, for crying out loud. We told you to shut up and hand it over. Are you insane, or do you just want a beating?"
"Heh heh. There's always one of these brats. Stil think they can strut around the streets at night with their chests puffed out."
"Kids like this need a few good smacks. That's the only medicine that works on 'em."
The boy lost everything he had.
Because he'd resisted, his soft skin was stained with bruises, and every place their fists had landed throbbed and swelled.
And then, at last, Karsein was found.
Long after he'd finished his stone tower, a knight finally discovered where he was.
"Karsein...! What on earth have you—no. No, never mind. Let's go home at once, my son. Yes?"
His mother, gripped by a mother's terror, was horrified.
That was how wretched Karsein's condition was—too terrible to look at with open eyes.
And behind Isabella, Arina was staring at Karsein with wide, stunned eyes.
Only then did Karsein relax.
Because he could see his big sister—because he could finally pull out what he'd been hiding deep inside his coat.
"This is... a present for you, Arina..."
What that small arm held out from behind Isabella's shoulder was a hair tie adorned with snowflake charms. A tiny gift for the sister who so often wore her hair in a ponytail.
The scene flickers.
The precariously stacked stone tower still stood, exactly as it had back then.
Through rain, through wind, it stood as if it had spent all these years watching over the spot. The boy's hopeful heart, as he built that tower—must have been no different from mine.
Which was exactly why I was so angry.
"Karsein!"
Right behind me.
Because the very person responsible for that stone tower had just appeared.
Ding—!
It had been a blunder.
Mother had noticed Karsein's absence from the party, and the family's knights had been dispatched in every direction. Arina couldn't simply stand by either—she rode out at once and searched the carriage first.
But—
"What? No one has returned to the carriage?"
"That is correct, my lady."
Karsein hadn't come back to the carriage.
If Heron was saying it, there could be no mistake. Which meant Karsein had not, in fact, finished enjoying the festival and returned—and with that realization, a question took root in Arina's mind.
'Then where on earth is he...?'
Even now, Isabella's worry for Karsein would only be deepening. Arina seized the reins and simply rode.
After a long search on horseback—
She found him: a boy sitting on a stump, staring at a pile of stones.
'That—no, it couldn't be...?'
But once she saw that hair—black, or so it seemed, yet touched with the faintest trace of blue—she was certain.
Arina dismounted at once and called his name.
"Karsein!"
It was Karsein, all right—the one who'd been nowhere to be found all this time. The closer she got, the clearer it became that her little brother's build and even his clothes were exactly what he'd worn to the festival.
Only then did her heart settle.
If she brought Karsein back to Mother like this, the worry could be laid to rest, and the festival could go on.
Naturally, the knights had worked hard and would need to be paid for it—but she bore some of that responsibility herself.
If she had never brought up the ban on going outside in the first place, Karsein wouldn't be in such a foul mood now.
This time, she did not overlook that fact.
"I understand that your feelings were hurt. I told you to enjoy the festival, but it's true that deep down, I didn't trust you. That's why I decided to run a little test."
"What test."
"To test how much you've changed. That was the whole point."
Arina swept a lock of hair behind her ear as she went on.
This, too, was something Karsein had no reason to believe, so she had to offer sound grounds.
The family meeting held before the Snowflower Festival.
The forgotten birthday and the inadequate birthday gift that had formed its basis.
Arina intended to use those to win Karsein over. She'd planned to watch how he responded, and to bring up lifting the ban on going outside as well.
But Karsein was already sharpening his blade.
"So what I saw here years ago—was that a test too?"
"What... what are you talking about?"
"What, don't you remember? The way it was at the Coming-of-Age Ceremony?"
As Karsein turned his body, what had been hidden from her view came into Arina's sight.
"Right here. The place where you handed fourteen-year-old me three hundred Pecels, told me to go play to my heart's content, and abandoned me."
"...!"
Only then did the memory surface.
A stone tower built from a handful of flattened rocks.
Beneath it, Karsein, his body bearing not a single unmarked patch of skin.
This place was—
It was the ground where seventeen-year-old Arina Bagrand had carved her soot-stained past.
"Ka—Karsein. That was... back then, I..."
The words simply would not leave Arina's mouth.
Karsein drove the knife in once more with an icy gaze.
"Was it because I 'caused too much trouble'? Well, I suppose it was the same back then too. Wasn't it?"
"No! Karsein, I—that was—!"
"Do you want to say you didn't know it would turn out that way?"
"...!"
The very words she'd meant to say came flying out of Karsein's mouth instead.
Her blue eyes, swallowed by panic, squeezed shut.
"I was... I was too young back then. Too young to judge things properly."
She murmured it while turning her eyes away, as if offering some excuse—but Karsein didn't let go. He seized it and held it fast.
"Excuses are fine. But you shouldn't lie. You threw me out of the ducal house because I caused so much trouble, didn't you? Because you wanted to watch me suffer."
"That part isn't a lie, whatever else you believe! I never... I never dreamed you'd go through something like that on the streets...!"
It was never her intention—Arina cried out at once.
"It's true that every time I saw you causing trouble, I felt it was a stain on the family's honor. But... I never wanted to see you beaten black and blue and carried back in that miserable state. That is the truth."
No matter how much Karsein despised her, she had never imagined he would come to such harm.
She had, perhaps, wished he would simply go away somewhere—but she had never imagined he'd be found out there looking like that.
Even now, her heart was the same.
"...It was a mistake of my childhood. And I am... truly sorry. I never—"
"Spare me."
"Karsein..."
She had tried to apologize for what her past self had done, but Karsein cut her down without mercy.
"'Go enjoy the festival, your mother will worry otherwise'? Could you do that, in my place?"
"..."
"It's fucking miserable, so just leave me alone. There's no way I'm trudging back to the ducal house like an idiot, beaten half to death—like back then."
—Young master!
One after another, the knights of House Bagrand arrived on the scene. But they could not take Karsein with them.
"Karsein... wishes to be left alone, it seems."
"Pardon? But..."
"Leave him be. This is my fault. I will take full responsibility and speak with the Duchess myself."
Karsein slipped away alone between the knights.
The knights were at a loss, but with Arina vowing to explain everything to the Duchess herself, they could only trudge dumbly back to their posts.
Arina sent the knights away, then stood for a long, long while, staring at the spot where Karsein had been.
And then—
Thud, tick. Clatter.
The precariously balanced stone tower came crashing down.