“If it’s your first time, do it with me. You said you were curious. About what it would taste like.”

***

「Dear Glen,

He told me to run away with him. Do you know what that means?

Don’t give me the obvious ‘it means exactly what it sounds like, little one.’ It was absolutely not that kind of moment.

Right, to explain that, I suppose I have to tell you what the situation was like at the time.

I had just received the engagement ring sent by my fiancé. Platinum with emerald. A winding ivy design. Yes, all things I love.

I was marveling at how he could know my tastes without ever having laid eyes on me, and how he could know my ring size, when he said it. That he had known. That it was because of him.

Oh, the awkward silence that hung in the air. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why he suddenly said that. Want to know why?

Because he was the one who had handed me my fiancé’s engagement ring.

Because he was the one who had arranged my engagement….

Any other time, I would have laughed it off with a ‘You really shouldn’t try to make jokes!’ But back then, I didn’t have the energy to laugh anything off. So I just said I was tired and tried to go back to my room.

But you know what, he grabbed me.

And then he said, let’s go somewhere no one knows. There’s a place that has no name, so people just call it the cedar forest.

“There are no Rockefellers there, no fiancé twice your age, no bastards who point their fingers at you and call you a calamity.”

And that he would stay with me until the very end….

I thought my heart was going to leap right out of my mouth. It had been so long since he had come that close to me that I was trembling, my heart pounding so hard. My face had gone completely red, and I was fretting over whether I looked like a fool, but he didn’t seem to notice. He let me go without another word.

“Please run away.”

He had the saddest eyes.

At that moment, I had a feeling. That this might be the last time for him and me.

You’re going to say I was hasty. But how many times had I acted carefully and let a good opportunity slip through my fingers?

I’m the kind of person who always tells herself it’s not the right time, retreats with a straight face, and then spends the whole night locked in a petty battle with a thing called ‘what if.’ I knew that if I just said goodbye this time too, I wouldn’t be able to sleep. But then this almost unbelievable situation came along.

A situation where he wasn’t avoiding me, wasn’t pushing me away, and cared about me enough to say ‘let’s run away.’

What else could I do?

‘Oh, forget it. Things have already come this far, what can I do about it now.’ I had no choice but to throw myself headfirst into the unknown.

So instead of taking his hand, I pressed the bondsman’s papers into it and said:

“So, Cedarwood, I’m not your young lady anymore. You’re free now. Go live your life.“」

***

— Shhhh.

The midday sunlight poured down over her closed eyelids.

A place where a gentle breeze carried the scent of thick, lush greenery, and birdsong drifted through the air.

By the time she came to her senses, she had already been kidnapped.

— Clunk!

Her eyes were covered, and her hands and body were bound. Lanen twisted her body to free her arms tied behind her, but only the chair swayed unsteadily.

‘Who in the world… no, when in the world was I kidnapped?’

Lanen took a deep breath to calm her racing heart. Then she slowly traced her way back to her last memory.

“Cedarwood, I’m not your young lady anymore. You’re free now. Go live your life.”

With that, the moment she had argued with her ‘manservant’ over the upcoming engagement ceremony came back to her.

Slipping out of the Manor in secret, a roadside inn where they had stopped on the way to the city.

The time had finally come to return the bondsman’s papers to him. She had kept them hidden away all this time out of her own selfishness, but now, at last, she had to free him from his shackles.

With that resolve, she had returned them to him.

“…You want me to leave you?”

He looked at her with an expression she had never seen on him before. Cold.

“That is your answer?”

Her heart sank at his gaze, like that of someone looking at a stranger. After that, Lanen had fled to her room without managing to give him a proper answer or return the papers.

‘I paced around the room for a long time after that. I wrote a letter to Glen to settle my nerves….’

Dredging up a memory from her early teens, the most brazen moment of her short life, she had wandered in front of his room under the pretense of looking for the inn’s letter courier, but Cedarwood was already gone.

“If you were going to leave, you could have at least said something.”

Feeling strangely put out, she tossed and turned until the early hours of dawn before finally managing to fall asleep, when Lanen heard the sound of a door opening and footsteps in her half-asleep state.

She knew right away who it was. She couldn’t not know. It was the sound of footsteps that had been coming to her since she was a child.

She was debating whether to keep pretending to be asleep or to awkwardly pretend to wake up, when—

‘Right. A handkerchief had covered my mouth….’

— Creak.

Before the memory could finish, she heard the sound of a door opening.

The kidnapper. Lanen instinctively went rigid.

The owner of the soundless presence closed the distance quickly. A faint vibration carried through the floor. The smell of smoke. And finally, the familiar scent of Cedarwood.

A lukewarm hand pulled her blindfold loose. She squinted at the light that suddenly flooded her vision and looked at the man standing before her.

And she drew in an involuntary breath.

It was him.

“…You’ve got chafing marks on your wrists.”

Him. A precious presence she had been closer to than family. A friend who had grown up alongside her. The loyal manservant who had stayed by her side her entire life.

“I had just checked that you were still asleep a moment ago. Did you struggle in that short time?”

The one who had kidnapped her was Cedarwood Carlisle.

⊹ ☽ ⊹

The troublesome young lady and the family’s jinx-warding manservant.

Their first meeting had been thirteen years ago.

Montilland, a province with a dense cedar forest at its center, vast stretches of land to the northwest, a well-kept hydrangea field to the east, and a lake that was beautiful at three in the afternoon.

The great landowner of that place was the Rockefeller family, newly risen to the upper class after striking it rich through mines and military supplies.

“This child is without a doubt a child of Rockefeller blood!”

A woman grabbed the girl’s wrist and pulled her forward. The gatekeeper, unable to open or close the Manor’s iron gate because of this, looked anxiously toward his master.

“Look! This child also has eyes as green as fresh leaves and a red mark on her shoulder blade. And here, I have proof of my devotion to the Rockefeller family, and the token the young master gave me!”

The woman frantically rummaged through her pockets and pulled out a worn piece of paper. A poster that had been carelessly tucked between the pages fell to the ground. The young girl, held in her mother’s grip, stared at it blankly.

We shall depart, and at last we shall find it! The place where veins of gold flow like rivers!

A time when the continent was in an uproar with capitalists who had struck it rich from the rapid rise of industrial capitalism, and immigrants who had come chasing wealth.

The girl was the product of an illicit union between her mother, who had worked for the Rockefeller family at the time, and the eldest son, whom the family’s servants called ‘the donkey in heat.’

The day Lanen learned that truth, she was having her price negotiated in front of the family’s Manor.

“This child, while Neiman Rockefeller, the young master, was still alive…”

“Enough.”

The head of the family, Elfrado Rockefeller, stepped out of the car and took out his pipe. The gatekeeper holding the iron gate hurriedly struck a match and lit it for him.

Hff. The man exhaled a thick cloud of smoke and glanced behind him.

Behind the car he had arrived in, a long procession of trade merchants from Karent stretched out.

An immigrant widow and a b*stard child.

Any other time, he would have handled it with nothing more than a wave of his hand, without even a word to drag them away, but right now there were too many eyes around.

The head of the family jerked his chin toward the gatekeeper beside him.

“Give them something and send them off.”

“Pardon? My lord, how much would ‘something’ be?”

The man clicked his tongue at the gatekeeper’s fumbling and looked around.

Just then, his eye landed on a donkey nodding its head at the tail end of the procession. He pointed there without interest.

“About that much.”

“A donkey is a very useful animal, sir. You can use it to plow fields, and it pulls a cart well too.”

The back courtyard of the Manor, where the servants’ quarters were.

The merchants spread out goods too small to bring inside the Manor on stalls and called out to passersby.

Lanen and her mother waited in a corner of that courtyard for the gatekeeper to return.

“Just how long are we supposed to wait?”

Lanen left her mother’s sullen grumbling behind and watched the noisy, bustling marketplace.

Still, a horse is better than a donkey….

Goodness, do you know how many ways a donkey is better than a horse! A donkey can endure no matter how much its owner neglects it, no matter how hard it’s beaten with a strap. It even holds out longer than a horse without food, and carries heavy loads without so much as a fuss.

While Lanen observed the donkey merchant and the man haggling, the gatekeeper returned and handed Lanen’s mother a few banknotes.

“Here, your payment. Take it and get lost.”

Her mother made no effort to hide her disappointment at the thin stack of bills.

“I heard the Rockefeller family holds deep bonds of kinship. I suppose that doesn’t extend to affection for blood relatives?”

“An immigrant beggar with the nerve to haggle, of all things?”

“But this is far too little compared to the cost of feeding and raising her all this time.”

Lanen, who had no interest in her own negotiation, still had her eyes fixed on the donkeys shaking their heads.

And the coat is easier to manage than a horse’s! Less to feed, less to tend to. That’s right, buy one today and I’ll throw in a young servant boy as a bonus.

And there, among the noisy, crowded people, a boy came into Lanen’s sight.

A boy tied up alongside the donkeys, about her own age. Dirty grayish-white hair like a soiled scrap of cloth, and deep indigo eyes.

Around the time the crude haggling over the boy and the girl had more or less wrapped up, the boy looked at Lanen too.

“Thank you, sir! I’ll pick you out a good one!”

“Well, fine. That seems about right.”

The girl sold off as a young lady of the Rockefeller family, the boy sold as a servant. Their combined worth: the price of one donkey.

That was the first meeting of Lanen Rockefeller and Cedarwood Carlisle.