Episode 15
As the imperial princess had said, a small country could be crushed flat by power alone, and by the standards of someone raised in a land of ondol floors and heated rooms, the Blium ducal mansion was absurdly vast.
How did they even heat a place like this? And how were they supposed to keep up with maintenance?
If one person were to manage it all, the moment they took care of one corner, the opposite side would already be falling apart.
The solution to that kind of problem was simple.
You poured human beings into it until it worked.
And the Blium family followed that solution to the letter. Excluding the servants who commuted in and out, there were over a hundred people living on the estate.
It was only natural, then, that the kitchen responsible for feeding them had swollen into something dinosaur-like.
The hot and cold sections were divided, and there wasn’t just one chef but separate section chefs under a head chef—no, it didn’t stop there; there was even an entire section devoted solely to prepping ingredients.
And what I was looking for was the place where they gathered the leftover ingredients after the prep work was done.
I wasn’t looking for the trash bin.
In this mansion, about thirty percent of the people working there were from noble families, so it was probably more accurate to call it a refrigerator made of people.
The knights, maids, and butlers were all top-tier personnel.
If the family head handled everything himself, then for something as minor as paperwork, they needed the knowledge to sort it and report it on their own; to command soldiers, they needed strength and charisma; to receive noble guests, they needed etiquette suited to the occasion.
There were some commoners among them, but most were nobles, and even the few commoners could, if they went elsewhere and found another job, still afford meals fit for nobility.
What would happen if you served those people a steak made from roughly sliced meat, carelessly grilled?
Setting loyalty aside, at the very least it would make the Blium family look so lowborn they couldn’t even serve a proper meal to a capable subordinate.
They couldn’t commit such a disgraceful act, so they had no choice but to carefully trim the meat, and once the best cuts had been separated out, the yield naturally dropped.
So did they throw away all the scraps?
Of course not.
Preserving the honor of Blium and wasting food were two different matters, and the leftover scraps were all given to the commoner servants.
None of the servants complained about eating the leftovers.
For one thing, there were hardly any jobs in this world that provided meals at all, and the scrap meat wasn’t unhygienic to begin with. Besides, the food was prepared by a cook skilled enough to be scouted by a ducal household, even if he or she was only a low-ranking worker. There was no reason for dissatisfaction.
“Huuu.”
“...This is where the servants’ meals are prepared, young lady.”
“Quiet.”
The place I’d found was where the trimmed scraps were stored for the servants’ meals.
I had no intention of going to the main kitchen.
In the first place, every meal assigned to me was one of those things that looked decent on the outside and were garbage in reality.
Burnt on the outside, undercooked in the middle, with bits of prepared vegetables stuck to the cut surface.
I was an illegitimate child, yes, but still a daughter of the ducal house, so they prepared the same menu for me—probably because they didn’t want to serve decent food to a piece of trash who threatened the respected family head, the duchess, and the first and second young masters.
I couldn’t say I didn’t understand that sentiment, so I went straight to the auxiliary kitchen, grabbed the meat wrapped in paper, and started tearing into it.
Crunch, crunch.
As I ripped apart the meat still threaded with fascia and tendon, a sound straight out of a nature documentary slipped out of my mouth.
The sound of a hyena tearing into a carcass.
At the same time, blood began to spurt from my mouth, and the maid who had been following me saw it, gagged, and hurried away in a panic, running off somewhere.
She was probably going to fetch the chef.
Well, whatever.
Crunch, crunch, crunch.
The raw meat spread its particular fishy stench across my tongue.
The thick iron smell dizzying enough to make my head spin, the texture of flesh indistinguishable from my tongue, the meat shredding finer with every bite and lodging between my teeth, the blood seeping down in streams along with my saliva, and the hunger sinking lower every time my throat worked.
As a faint sense of satisfaction found me, my body began crying out to follow instinct instead of the reason that had savagely abused it for so long, and at the same time it ravenously lunged for the meat.
“Sluurp, crunch! Ghk, cr-crack!”
It felt as though my body wasn’t mine anymore, as if it simply wanted to shove anything and everything into my mouth.
So this was what happened when a person starved for a month and then finally ate in earnest.
As I finished off the meat with that thought in mind, I heard a rush of footsteps gathering nearby. When I tore my gaze away from the meat and looked up, I saw the family head’s face staring down at me like I was some wild beast.
“Ptooey.”
At that sight, I spat the fascia onto the paper, and the family head drew in a breath.
Her chest rose as though her breath had caught in her throat; she bit at her lips and rolled her eyes around, and then, when she saw the blood smeared all over my body, her eyelids fluttered violently.
“What is it, Lord?”
“If you were hungry, you should have said so.”
“I didn’t want something burnt on the outside, undercooked in the middle, and still covered in dirt where the vegetables were cut, so I starved myself. And now they’re saying they won’t even make me proper food, so I came to eat on my own. Is that a problem?”
Did she not want to think of this as something she herself had made?
Judging by the faint guilt flickering in her eyes, that didn’t seem to be it. Or had she thought that if someone else came and scolded me, I might fly into a rage and kill myself?
If not that, then maybe she had simply come to protect someone else.
The imperial princess knew I had thrown myself at the knights on purpose, intending to die, but the family head seemed not to know that.
“If you wanted food, you should have come to the dining hall.”
“Well, would the young masters have eaten if I’d been there?”
I shrugged and peeled the last wrapper from the remaining meat. The family head tried to stop me and said that if I was hungry, she would bring me cooked food.
Something she’d made herself, while watching over me.
I smiled with my eyes at that.
“I’ve thought this for a while now, but Lord, you’re not very good at lying.”
Or maybe it was just that she was under so much pressure from me right now that she couldn’t even manage to lie.
“I never intended to steal your time, in the first place. This, too, is tasty in its own way.”
When I stood with the remaining chunk of meat in hand, the family head moved her mouth as if to say something. Her hand lifted, then froze; the lingering reluctance in her eyes made it obvious she wanted to stop me.
Looking at those eyes, so utterly honest, she would probably really have tried to hold me back.
So I reached out first.
“Lord. I am a child born through a transaction. An illegitimate child isn’t even sufficient to describe me—an unnamed child. If you reach out to someone like me, it will dishonor the name of Blium, so please, don’t entertain even the slightest thought of it.”
By preempting her, I shut the family head’s mouth. The knights who had gathered behind her could do nothing once the conversation had already ended in words, and obediently stepped aside to let me pass.
There was blood on the floor, but that wasn’t their problem, so it probably didn’t matter.
With that thought, I wandered along aimlessly, still eating the meat.
Before I knew it, I had arrived in front of the imperial princess’s room, and one of her knights looked startled to see me, raw meat between my teeth and my body smeared with blood.
A face full of confusion.
A face wondering whether they should call a doctor.
I raised a hand to stop them, then wiped my mouth with my forearm, showing them that the blood on my body wasn’t mine.
The knights let out visible relief, then looked at me again with troubled expressions.
“If Her Highness the Princess has not permitted it, I’ll return at once.”
They were probably trying to find a way to send me away.
As that thought crossed my mind, I spoke first, and one of them hurriedly replied that it wasn’t that at all.
“Her Highness the Princess ordered us to open the door whenever the young lady came during work hours, so you may enter. However...”
Ah. So cleanliness was the issue.
When I looked at the window, I could clearly see that I was not in a condition appropriate for approaching a terminally ill patient.
At this rate, even if the princess had given permission, they would still hesitate to let me in from the standpoint of a subordinate.
“...I’m sorry, but I don’t have a personal attendant. May I borrow one of the princess’s maids?”
But there was too much for me to handle alone.
Rinsing my mouth was one thing, but the blood smeared beneath my chin was difficult to deal with. In the end, I had no choice but to borrow help from the princess.
Fortunately, the princess readily sent one of her maids.
Whether it was the princess’s cruel sense of humor or simply the fact that she only had one maid she could trust, it was the same maid who had once asked me whether I truly wanted to die.
I hesitated at the sight of her, but there was nothing I could say about it, so I followed her, washed the blood away, and then went to the princess, where she was already in her nightclothes. She seated me on her thigh and stroked my hair.
“Young lady, if you want to gain weight, you should be eating potatoes or carrots.”
“...Pardon?”
“When I say eating meat makes someone gain weight, I mean people who normally live on grains and only eat meat once in a while. For someone like you, who doesn’t even have any flesh on you to begin with, grains will work faster than meat.”
“Is that so.”
“Still, to think you’d eat as soon as I asked you to put some meat on your bones. Thank you.”
“Th-that... I just ate. It’s not something worth saying that about.”
“Haha. Anyone would think it was because of me if you fasted for a month and then began stuffing yourself after speaking with me.”
“...”
“Haa. By the way, I’m getting a little sleepy, so I think I’d like to sleep now.”
“I’ll get up.”
“No, just sleep with me.”
“What?”
“Even if you go back to your own room, there’s nothing there for you to do, is there? Even if there are servants around, they won’t be fawning over you, and if that’s the case, wouldn’t it be better to stay with me?”
The words were only an invitation, but her actions were already decided as she lowered me onto the bed and lay down beside me.
Unable to say a word as I was pulled here and there, the princess held me in her arms as though it had already been settled, told me to sleep well, and stroked my hair. And at that, before I knew it, I found myself speaking sharply to the princess, who cared more for me than the family head who had made me with his own hands.
“If I end up telling you later that I don’t want to die, what then? What are you going to do?”
“Young lady, if you’re trying to deceive someone, that’s not how you should say it. Saying it like that is just the same as saying you don’t mean it.”
“Still, you never know. If that happened, Your Highness would end up going from being able to live to having to die.”
Just as when I cursed the family head, the princess now shook my heart.
That must have been why.
Why I wanted to say absurd things like this and watch the other person grow flustered.
I wanted her to say something cruel, to push me away and think of me as nothing more than a disposable life.
“Then I would have no choice but to ask a favor of you.”
“What?”
“I would ask you to hold me in your arms and live—for me, die for me, if you please. And if my persuasion failed and the young lady decided to live, then I would ask you again: hold me in your arms and live with me. Don’t forget. Tell me to remember that I once lived in this world.”
But the princess ignored my wish, wearing a smile suited to moonlight, and at the sight of it I darted my eyes around before closing them to flee from her smile.