It was strange. The night before, thoughts of the woman had kept Pamona from sleep, and she had tossed and turned until nearly dawn. She had dozed fitfully, and when she finally opened her eyes, it was well into the afternoon.

By now, someone should have found the woman long ago, and she had expected the royal castle to be in an uproar, but nothing was any different from usual. Not a single word had reached her about the woman who had floated up on the lake the previous night.

With a casual air of testing the waters, she mentioned in front of the servants that she ought to go take a walk near the lake alone today, but no one tried to stop her. She stepped out in front of Payen Castle to gauge the mood of the royal castle, and it was the same there. Nothing out of the ordinary. Everyone went about their assigned tasks, moving with the unhurried composure of people who were busy yet mindful of appearances. There was no sign of agitation.

Still, she thought it would only be a little longer before someone found the woman and things got noisy. Just a little longer. Any moment now, probably. Pamona felt a vague, inexplicable tension and could not bring herself to go all the way to the lakeside, spending the entire day wandering around the vicinity of Payen Castle instead. She kept glancing over at the guards to read their expressions, but they only looked bored. It stayed that way even past the evening hours.

“Has anyone gone missing from the castle?”

Pamona checked on the welfare of the internal staff with a nearby servant.

“Gone missing?”

“…Never mind.”

If it was not someone who had gone missing from Payen Castle, then it was none of her concern. Even so, she felt a nagging unease. If no one found her, would those slender calves not soon bloat and split into something grotesque?

“Your Highness, Sir Ian Dnie sent word requesting the honor of escorting you to tonight’s banquet.”

“A banquet? There’s one tonight as well?”

Don’t they ever get tired?

“Yes. How shall I reply? If you begin preparing now, you can still make it, even if you arrive a little late.”

“Hmm. I don’t want to go.”

She could not fathom what everyone found so endlessly worth celebrating, but banquets were frequent. She had heard that even outside the royal castle, the nobility held banquets among themselves nearly every day. The princes would occasionally attend banquets hosted by the nobles they kept close.

Since Pamona could not leave the royal castle in the first place, she had never mingled with any of the nobility. Even that sort of thing exhausted her. Sionel had told her more than once that, thinking ahead to when Pamona would one day become a duchess, she ought to begin cultivating ties with the noblewomen now, but, well. She had no real desire to. Was there any need to pull forward suffering she would have to endure later and bear it ahead of time?

Since the engagement, she had been escorted by Ian Dnie whenever she attended a banquet. Those occasions were already uncomfortable enough on their own, and his presence made her want to go even less. The suffocating silence and awkwardness it added made the whole thing nothing short of t*rture. It was not as though she enjoyed herself there anyway. She would simply not go.

“Shall I send word that you will not be attending?”

“Yes. Let’s do that.”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

Ian Dnie would not give it a second thought. If he were the sort of man who placed any meaning in this kind of thing, he would have sent word weeks ago to arrange it in advance. He knew she would refuse, so he sent someone on the day itself just to keep up appearances.

Looking out the window, she could see that the nobility had already begun arriving, the road a dazzling procession of carriages in every variety, each one a display of its owner’s wealth. On a night like this, it was better to stay quietly inside the castle if she wanted to avoid running into Reynard again the way she had yesterday, or getting tangled up in some other nuisance. Though…

“What… is there anything to do?”

I have nothing to do.

“Is there something you need, Your Highness?”

“Nothing in particular. Is there anything for me to do? Anything at all.”

“Shall I have embroidery prepared for you?”

“No…”

With embroidery, she would be lucky if time passed at all without her eyes falling out of her head.

Had she really had nothing to do all this time? She had forgotten, having spent so much of the past four years with Heil. How long and tedious each day had been.

At this rate, I might end up deciding to take up gardening myself.

Lying there with her mind adrift, the reality of Heil’s departure truly sank in.

Why had Ilion, out of nowhere, gone and done something so unlike itself with all this talk of peace, and taken Heil away?

Pamona grieved sending Heil off, but separate from that grief, no surge of emotion rose within her. She simply shut her thoughts down. What was the point of dwelling on this every day?

Just as Sionel had said she was being naive, perhaps Pamona really was just a naive princess. Incompetent. A layabout even more useless than Reynard.

Pamona shook her head and got up.

She took a bath to stop the thoughts. With two servants attending her, going through the motions of things she did not ordinarily bother with, she soaked for a full two hours before drying off. By the time she dismissed all the servants and lay down in bed, it was already deep into the night.

Sleep, which had never come easily to her, showed no sign of coming at all, and her mind grew sharper with every passing hour. She felt pathetic, wondering what kind of life she was living. A life in which she had nothing to do and only doubled the workload of her servants.

Was there any meaning in a life like this? She wanted to know why she should keep living. Thought after thought kept chasing its own tail.

She knew that when thoughts like these ran their course, all that waited at the end was deep despair and resignation. She had to feel it again, that sensation of being sucked into a bottomless swamp, spinning and spinning through the whirlpool. Pamona shook her head once more and cast it off.

If she were at the Twin Castle, she could have gone up onto the western bridge for a moment and caught her breath, but Payen Castle offered no such space. She lay in bed staring up at the spires visible beyond the window and the fractured strips of sky between them, and when even that grew tiresome, she turned away. At this rate, she would spend another night until morning doing nothing but thinking self-destructive thoughts.

Without even changing out of her nightclothes, Pamona pushed open the bedroom door. If she was not going to sleep anyway, she thought it would be better to go check on what had become of the woman on the lake. The royal castle lay sunken in deep darkness.

The banquet was being held deep inside, far from the lake. Even so, she kept glancing around as she walked, wary of running into a loitering Reynard. Peering into the pitch-black surroundings, she felt a chill creep over her for no particular reason, and the fleeting thought crossed her mind that running into Reynard might actually be preferable, which made her laugh at herself.

The lake was as still as it had been the day before.

Walking a little way out onto the footbridge, she could still hear the insects crying nearby. Not a single guard was in sight. The calm surface of the water and the faint fishy smell drifting from it were the same as before. She stood in the same spot where she had sat yesterday and looked down at the lake. Everything there was the same as yesterday.

Only the woman was gone.

Pamona was taken aback. The woman who should have been there was nowhere to be seen. The castle had not breathed a single word about a dead woman all day. No one had spoken of her at all. She had thought it a little strange, but assumed no one had found her yet. She had fully expected the woman to still be in that same spot.

There was no way the woman had swum out of the lake on her own. She had to have been dead. Pamona had never heard of anyone who could stay submerged for so long without the slightest movement.

Then did that mean a dead woman had been found in the royal castle, and yet it had remained this quiet, as though nothing had happened? The way it would be treated as something that happened yesterday and the day before, too. That was possible. No, it was Pamona who had been naive for thinking the death of a woman would throw the royal castle into an uproar.

She hoped that was not the case. She wanted to believe there was no such thing as a death that no one cared about.

Just… rather…

“A ghost, perhaps…”

The moment she thought how much she hoped it had been a ghost she had seen, something white came walking slowly, slowly along the footbridge toward her.

* * *

It drew closer and closer.

Could it be the dead woman? No. Had she not been dead after all?

Her heartbeat grew faster and faster, but her legs refused to obey. She could not even attempt to move.

It stopped for a moment, then moved again, advancing toward Pamona. With each step that closed the distance, its shape grew a little clearer.

Tall… so tall.

Even from that far away, she could tell at a glance that it had a body far taller than her own.

She was not close enough to make out its features in detail, but its height and build were unmistakably beyond anything she could call a woman. It was difficult to say exactly where it came from, but the air it carried was unlike anything Pamona had ever encountered in her life.

And its head. The place where hair should have been gave off a blue light. It was something like jade, something like the sky on an unusually clear day, something like the gleam of precious gems. The closer it came, the more vivid that blue grew. The unfamiliar color sent a chill crawling up Pamona’s spine.

This is not human.

She was flustered because her body had locked up on her, contrary to every thought telling her to run. It stopped moving and stood in place. It was still quite a distance away. She was grateful for that. A dread washed over her that where a face should have been, there might be something else entirely.

In the dark of night, only the cold moonlight and the blue of that thing gave off any light. A cold wind brushed past the thin straps of her nightgown. Pamona turned and ran toward Payen Castle.