“I had a feeling things were going too smoothly. There’s no way Cedarwood would be this careless. I don’t want to spend all day wrestling with a broken car, so let’s just give up on this.”

Lanen set off toward the southwest shortcut Cedarwood had shown her. But Glen, who seemed reluctant to let it go, was still checking under the bonnet and waved her off.

“Go on ahead.”

“What? What about you?”

“I’ll poke around a little longer, if only to honor my own hard-fought efforts. You never know. I might fix this thing and pick you up on the way.”

“But….”

Glen flicked her lightly between the brows.

“Do I look like someone who’d get caught because he was too busy struggling with an unsolvable problem? I’ll take five more minutes to check and then I’ll go.”

“The reason I’m saying this is because every single time you or Cedarwood told me to go on ahead, something went wrong.”

“Did it? I don’t remember that.”

Always playing dumb. Lanen rubbed her forehead, her expression full of grievance.

“…Fine. Five minutes, you said? Don’t go burning with competitive spirit over a car. Come after me quickly. That’s a promise. Understood?”

“Sure, I’ll come before your insides turn completely black.”

“My insides burned up a long time ago.”

“My, my. Then we’d better hurry before you crumble to ash.”

Glen chuckled and ruffled her hair. Lanen primly swatted his hand away and turned to go, her expression still uneasy.

She headed off in the direction the map indicated.

Once she disappeared from sight, Glen took a quiet look around inside the car.

On the passenger seat, dried fruits and cookies were neatly arranged. He picked up a pack of cigarettes tucked among them like a bonus.

Unopened and brand new. And the exact kind Glen Raines smoked most often.

‘Come to think of it, the dried fruits are mostly prunes too—squirt’s favorite.’

And the cookies happened to be, by no coincidence, the House Bear brand butter cookies from the capital that Lanen Rockefeller was always snacking on.

Hmm. Glen put the cigarette in his mouth and looked further inside the car.

“Nothing looks broken, so I was wondering why it wouldn’t start, turns out it’s been modified to use a recoil starter.”

Glen pulled the flywheel handle connected to the engine. Once, twice. On the third pull, the car rumbled to life.

The engine was running and the car could move. He had a map to get through the dense forest, and snacks to k*ll the time. More than enough conditions for an escape.

Glen rested his hand on the steering wheel and tapped it.

Tap, tap.

“I had a feeling things were going too smoothly. There’s no way Cedarwood would be this careless.”

Then the memory of Lanen’s voice, urging him to hurry, drifted back to him. He tapped the wheel again. Tap, tap.

‘That’s right.’

Tap. His hand went still.

“…There’s no way that guy would be this sloppy.”

***

Lanen pushed through the thick undergrowth.

At the large boulder, turn right at the arrow. Watch the slope. This fork is a dead end. I mean it.

On the map and off it, the notes Cedarwood had written were everywhere. Why on earth had he noted a tree struck by lightning.

The drooping branches look just like a carp walking on all fours, don’t they?

Where, exactly. Not funny in the slightest.

Lanen crested a steep hill and drew a breath.

“Ha, Glen Raines… did the broken car roll over you or something? Why aren’t you here yet?”

He had said five minutes, but by the time the Manor was hidden behind the trees, there was no sound of a car, let alone a glimpse of the top of Glen Raines’ head.

And he’d said he’d give her a ride. What’s actually getting a ride is my anxiety. Lanen grumbled, cursing Glen for no particular reason.

But she didn’t stop walking. Life was something you lived alone, after all. She couldn’t ruin her own life just to hold on to a friendship. At least one of them had to make it out.

She passed under a long branch that scratched her cheek, trampled through low grass, and pressed on.

“Do you remember the fox hunt we did before?”

Shhhh. Through the swaying rush of the wind, his voice seemed to reach her.

The fox hunt. A memory that pricked somewhere in her heart, tender with longing. Lanen snapped off the bothersome branches that kept catching in her hair.

‘Do I remember?’

Of course she did. How could she forget? It was the day he had, with the most serene expression in the world, first pierced her chest and made it ache. And with nothing more than a small slip of paper, at that.

The branch she had snapped off without thinking must have been a thorn bush, because her finger stung. A small bead of red blood welled up almost immediately.

Lanen shook her hand out and lifted her head. The path ahead was too long to stop over a little sting.

The forest had not yet ended, and the sun had not yet set.

And the bet with him had not yet ended either.

“This way, my lady.”

The blue-green forest, thick with the scent of summer. Lanen quickened her pace again. Like the days of her childhood, when she had run breathlessly after a quick-footed fox, side by side with her manservant.

⊹ ☽ ⊹

“You’re the one who stopped me from running away, so you’re responsible for all of it. Come on, promise me you’ll take responsibility.”

“…I promise.”

After the girl’s plan to slip away in the dead of night—following a caning—was foiled by the boy’s intervention, she began summoning Cedarwood to her room whenever the urge to run from that suffocating house grew too strong, using him as a weight to hold down her temper.

Today this happened. And then there was that other time. She would chatter away through the night like that, and either she would fall asleep first, or the boy would start nodding off and they would end up falling asleep holding hands.

That day was much like any other. They were spending a trivial evening playing the marble territory game that was apparently popular among the servants.

Lanen held a marble up to the small lamp. Fractured prisms lit up the little room in a cheerful glow.

“The Manor has been quite busy these past few days.”

Cedarwood slipped a cherry into Lanen’s mouth, one he had snuck from the kitchen, as he spoke.

“Oh, that.”

Lanen spat out the pit and answered with indifference.

“And why do you give me one at a time while you eat them by the handful?”

“…You saw?”

“You were shoveling them in plain sight, and you’re asking me ‘you saw?’ You’re an idiot.”

Cedarwood had no choice but to scoop up the rest of the cherries in both hands and roll them into Lanen’s mouth.

“Anyway, what do you mean summer holiday? Are the masters going on a trip?”

“Yes.”

Early summer. A pleasant day when the sun was not yet harsh.

The head of the Rockefeller family had been making a great fuss about needing more workers at the factory, about the family’s future riding on this deal, and apparently things had worked out, because he announced with a beaming face that they would go boating on the lake the coming weekend.

The lake. Lanen had seen it exactly once, in passing. She had caught a glimpse of it riding in a cart, led along by her mother’s hand.

“It didn’t look like much besides being enormous, but there seems to be a villa there. Nathan Rockefeller was making a racket about packing his fishing gear and asking how many days they’d be staying.”

Lanen recalled the particularly insufferable mealtime when Nathan Rockefeller had been at his most obnoxious, and her face soured.

“Since it’s the head of the family’s decision, the young master and young mistress will obviously be going too. The head butler was in an uproar telling everyone to prepare this and that, so it’ll probably stay like this all the way until the weekend.”

“Then, will you be going too, my lady?”

“I’m not going.”

Cedarwood tilted his head, looking genuinely curious as to why. It was the Rockefeller family’s summer holiday, wasn’t it strange that the Rockefeller young lady wouldn’t be joining?

“Why not?”

Lanen flicked a marble with her finger. It shot off the board with a snap and rolled all the way to Cedarwood.

“Apparently I haven’t had measles yet, so if I go traipsing around outside I might come down with it, and I should stay home and mind the house. It’s all just an excuse. That’s a disease babies who are still babbling get. I’m turning twelve this weekend. If I were meant to catch measles, I would have caught it long before now. Well, I didn’t want to go anyway… but just imagine if I went and a boat capsized. They’d definitely be going on about how I’m a calamity, a curse, all of that. Wouldn’t they, Cedarwood?”

For someone who claimed to have no regrets, the grumbling went on quite long. Cedarwood was picking up the marble that had rolled to him when he blinked.

“Oh, yes?”

“I’m saying it’s much better not to go on something like a holiday. Wait, if the Rockefellers leave the Manor, that means no lessons for a while, right? No one nagging and getting on my nerves either. Perfect. Cedarwood, do you want to go pick cherries that day?”

“No, my lady. Not that.”

“Hmm?”

Cedarwood had no interest whatsoever in their holiday, or in that sort of trivial superstition. But amid Lanen’s grumbling complaints, there was one thing that caught the indifferent boy’s attention.

“Your birthday is coming up?”

So this weekend was her birthday.

“Yes. Why?”

Lanen asked back, unbothered. Cedarwood scratched the back of his neck. Only then did his expression shift to one of mild embarrassment, as if he himself was thinking, ‘Hmm, why did I ask that?’

The boy had never made a fuss over anyone else’s birthday, and had never really received anything special for his own. He only knew his own birthday fell somewhere around winter, and that was the extent of it.

For a boy like him, a birthday was nothing more than the day he had suddenly come to exist in this noisy world. Even when Tommy, who shared his room and tended to the geese, went around showing off a pocket watch he had received as a birthday gift, the boy had not been able to understand what there was to make such a fuss about.

‘So why, all of a sudden?’

“Just… I was wondering what people usually do on their birthdays.”

“Well, for me, I cut into a lemon pie. Lots of flour and sugar, with lemon zest grated in, so the bread was a little gritty.”

“And then?”

“What else? Nothing much beyond that. Oh, I washed with scented soap and went to the chapel. The nun there knew my mother, so whenever I came around my birthday she always gave me two eggs.”

Cedarwood was still turning the marble Lanen had rolled to him over in his fingers.

A blue marble, full of air bubbles, too rough to be a piece of craftsmanship, fit only for a toy. The cheap sort you wouldn’t bother looking for if you lost it after one game. But the boy kept it in his hand for no other reason than that Lanen had rolled it to him.

‘Because my lady is my master? Because I’m afraid she’ll ask for it later if I don’t keep it? Or….’

Or why?

“I carried those home very carefully, held close to my chest.”

“Carefully…?”

“Yes. Two eggs can buy you a pouch of barley.”

Carefully? The boy silently rolled the blue marble around in his palm. His gaze drifted briefly to Lanen’s grinning face, then back to the thing that had grown warm inside his hand.

Cedarwood had nothing like that.

He already had everything he needed. He was given food, so he didn’t go hungry. He had a place to sleep, so he wouldn’t freeze to death. Lady Lanen was by his side, so that was enough.

‘But eggs and barley matter. If you cook porridge with them, your stomach stays full even after hauling hay all day.’

So the reason he had asked about her birthday was because he was curious about what was precious to her, what his lady would hold dear. That was the conclusion the boy reached.

“Is there anything you want? As a birthday gift.”