To sum the girl up in one word: “troublemaker.” In several words…

“I’ve served many young ladies over the years, but she’s the first I’ve ever had who simply cannot be reasoned with! I scolded her to memorize imperial history, and what does she do but recite the history of the barbarians trampling our empire? Good heavens, I have never been so humiliated in all my life!”

“In all my years I’ve never seen a child as vicious as that young lady. She talks back to the master at every single meal. Even old Rosie, who’s worked at the Manor for ten years, still can’t look the master in the eye…”

“Hey, that young lady came from the Montana scrap district, didn’t she? You know, that immigrant settlement up north. You can always tell a lowborn one, can’t you. The candles in her room ran out, so she’s been stealing oil and making her own.”

That sort of thing.

The servants’ opinions of Lanen Rockefeller were as unrestrained as their master’s. Mostly on the negative side.

A hot potato that had come rolling in during a rather dull spring, after a turbulent time had passed.

True to the prophecy that calamity followed her, Lanen Rockefeller stirred up commotion whether for good or ill.

It was only natural that the mistress of the house would shout the girl’s name the moment she saw so much as a puddle of spilled water on the floor, and the servants whispering and cackling among themselves had become part of daily life at the Manor.

“So those nicknames didn’t come out of nowhere. Do you know what nickname she’s gotten this time?”

“What?”

“Well, you see…”

“‘Corn dog lady’?”

Cedarwood looked at the back of the girl’s head as she lay face-down on his bed, having shown up at his quarters out of nowhere to vent her frustration.

“That’s right. Now they’re calling me a corn dog. After everything, now I’m not even a person.”

It was already startling enough that she had come at the hour he was supposed to be feeding the horses, but a young lady wailing at the top of her lungs was even more startling.

“Nathan Rockefeller is the one who hates sausages, not me! If you have to feed sausage to someone who can’t stand the taste of it, you just coat it in cornmeal batter and fry it. Everyone ate it that way back in Montana, so I just showed them how, and now why am I the one being called a corn dog?”

From what he could gather, this was an outburst over her latest nickname.

Cedarwood found the cleanest-looking scrap of cloth in his drawer and rubbed it across Lanen’s face.

“At least it’s better than just ’dog.’”

“You think there isn’t a single nickname of mine with ‘dog’ in it?”

“There was?”

“Loads of them.”

Lanen blew her nose into his cloth. The scrap of fabric Cedarwood had been carefully saving to make into a handkerchief someday met its end in the rubbish bin.

“Nathan Rockefeller especially. He calls me dog-something at the drop of a hat. That must be the only insult he knows. Yesterday I was a beggar dog, today I was a rabid dog. Tomorrow we have arithmetic together, so I’ll probably be a stupid dog.”

And so, spurred on by Nathan Rockefeller’s passionate insults, Lanen made a point of acting like a complete menace every time they met. She threw caterpillars at his head, stuffed a reeking boot into the bag he took along on the adults’ hunts, and kicked him in the shin during lessons whenever he got too smug about himself.

Nathan Rockefeller, of course, did not take it lying down. He was already the sort of proud young master whose ego was his bread and butter, and now a bastard who had come out of nowhere was making a mess of the household without a shred of self-awareness.

“…He can’t stand not picking a fight with me every time he sees me. Reagan Rockefeller ignores me all the time too, but at least Reagan is better than Nathan Rockefeller. Reagan treats me like a beggar on the street, but doesn’t needle me and sneer at me every chance he gets the way Nathan Rockefeller does.”

After chattering on for a good while, the girl finally stopped crying.

‘Picking fights.’ 

Was she talking about the sort of thing that had happened the other day? Cedarwood thought back to the piece of paper he had found secretly stuck to the girl’s back a few days ago.

He hadn’t been able to read what it said, but judging from the rough, scrawled handwriting, and the fact that the girl had only noticed the paper after he pointed it out and had gone bright red reading what was written on it, it was clearly nothing kind. Probably something along the lines of those dog-something nicknames.

“Still, I’d like it if you could get along with them. He is your brother, after all.”

“I wouldn’t take a brother like that even if you gave me a whole flock of sheep.”

“…If you gave that many, you might take one. There’d be at least one decent one in the bunch.”

Well, feeding the horses is out of the question now. I’ll catch it later. Cedarwood listened to the distant sound of the horses crying out hungrily beyond the window and placed his hand over the girl’s swollen eyes. The warmth that met his cool hand was as soft and hot as the inside of a chick’s wing.

His hand, pressing slowly along the curve of her round eyes, stopped abruptly when Lanen murmured without thinking, “Ow, that stings.”

Cedarwood gently pushed aside the hair falling over Lanen’s brow.

There was a vivid blue bruise there.

The boy’s lips parted.

“……”

“Cedarwood! That little brat, where are you!”

Just then, the voice of the stable hand calling for the boy came through the window.

“Oh no, it’s almost time for etiquette lessons.”

Only then realizing she had stayed in the boy’s room far too long, Lanen scrambled to her feet.

“I’d better go. This evening, under the spruce tree, you know the spot?”

“My lady.”

“Yes?”

Lanen stopped mid-scurry at the boy’s call. Cedarwood dusted off his hands and stood up.

“I’m sorry. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it today.”

Cedarwood! The stable hand’s voice faded into the distance.

Just past noon. The hour when shadows were shortest and darkest.

Cedarwood adjusted the worn cap he wore for odd jobs and looked at the girl.

“I seem to have quite a few things to take care of.”

And the next day, Nathan Rockefeller, who had tumbled down the stairs and twisted his ankle, began claiming there was a pale, ghostly figure haunting the Manor.

⊹ ☼ ⊹

“How does it make any sense that they couldn’t even find Lanen’s body?”

Bang!

A tall man slammed his fist on the desk.

Nathan Rockefeller, the second son of the Rockefeller family. He ground the cigar he was holding roughly into the ashtray and raked a hand through his hair in irritation.

“Even in a fire that size, if a person burned to death there should at least be bone fragments left. Not a single bone fragment, not even a trace of a body, and that’s supposed to make sense?”

“……”

“D*mn it, and where the hell did the man we had watching Lanen get to?”

“Lower your voice, Nathan Rockefeller.”

Reagan Rockefeller, the eldest son of the Rockefeller family, pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose from where he sat in the office chair. D*mn it. Nathan muttered under his breath and dropped into a chair.

The Manor was unsettlingly quiet. And it was not solely because of Lanen Rockefeller’s funeral, held that day without a body.

Two years ago, their grandfather shot by an unknown assailant and killed. Then their father, who had barely been head of the family for a year after being entrusted with the position, injured while inspecting the factory in the north of the territory. The mysterious fire at the Manor’s annex, and the young lady who had died in it.

Outside the family, people were whispering that something had gone wrong with the Rockefellers, and among the servants there were rumors circulating that the family’s fortunes were declining.

Everything was collapsing in sequence, one after another, as though it were all meant to happen this way.

“…We need to search again. How long can it possibly take to go through every corner of that one small annex? Everyone going on about calamity carrying her off, about being cursed, what an absolute… If they believed in God that much, they’d all be saints by now.”

“The funeral is over. Drop it before pointless rumors start spreading.”

“Pointless rumors?”

Ha. Nathan leaned toward Reagan.

“It’s a bit late to worry about that, brother. The moment we handed that lowborn servant the reins of the business, whatever was left of Rockefeller pride went straight into the gutter. Is there even any reputation left to lose at this point?”

“……”

“Right. Maybe it’s because of him. No, it is because of him. Everything started going wrong after that bastard came back. Every last bit of it.”

It had felt off from the moment he showed up full of himself, flaunting a few medals and a rank or whatever. Not only was he making a mess of everything he touched, which was only to be expected from someone with no upbringing, but now he was running around as though he had made up his mind to bring the family down entirely.

“He should have just died over there.”

Nathan had just muttered it like a curse.

Creak.

The office door opened.

A raw, metallic smell hit them immediately. The smell of a slaughtered animal’s neck and the terrible stench of blood that had hung over the Vienco Plains last winter.

A man in a black uniform walked in.

Cedarwood threw something he had been carrying at his hip into the middle of the office.

Thud.

Nathan clapped a hand over his nose at the wave of foul stench.

It was a man’s corpse.

“…What is this?”

“The one who set fire to the annex.”

“What?”

Rather than adding any unnecessary explanation, Cedarwood dropped the black gloves he had been wearing onto the table.

Nathan hurried to check the corpse’s face. But the temple was completely caved in, making it impossible to tell where the face was.

Ugh, d*mn it. Nathan Rockefeller stumbled backward at the gruesome sight. Reagan Rockefeller stepped into the space he had vacated.

His neat brows drew sharply upward as he examined the wound a second time.

That wound. Unmistakably, the mark of a gunshot.

‘Given the size of the wound, not a hunting piece. A military sidearm, or no, a musket?’

This degree of damage means it wasn’t fired from a distance.

‘…It was fired at very close range.’

Reagan Rockefeller raised his head.

“You recognize the face.”

Beneath the dim, pale gaslight of the office. Cedarwood, whose face had the serene quality of a cathedral fresco, opened his mouth without any particular expression.

“Ugh. Recognize the face? This corpse and us?”

Nathan muttered.

“There wasn’t a servant who didn’t know him. He was the one who had been hovering around my lady lately.”

‘Around her…’

An ominous premonition flashed through Nathan’s mind and he rushed to examine the corpse again. He had only glanced at it before and hadn’t noticed, but beneath the corpse’s mustache there was a large mole.

Only then did Nathan Rockefeller recognize who the corpse was. It was the watcher he had assigned to her. A manservant he had placed with her to protect her if it ever came to a physical altercation, given that she had a sharp personality and was always getting into trouble, but wasn’t approachable enough to smooth things over herself.

“What on earth is…”

“…He must have had feelings for my lady.”

Cedarwood toyed with the deep red scar carved into his wrist and sat down on the sofa.

“He wanted to get close to her, but she was of noble standing, so he wouldn’t have dared. Couldn’t even speak to her. That petty desire would have built up, layer upon layer. He thought my lady was only kind to him, and when he realized she was kind to everyone, jealousy would have taken hold.”

A flat voice, as though tracing the sequence of events. Cedarwood murmured almost in a whisper.

If only that one weren’t around, my lady would smile at me. If only that one disappeared, my lady would notice me. If everyone disappeared, my lady would give her attention only to me.

“Thinking that way, hovering around my lady, until the spark flew somewhere it shouldn’t have. ‘The others don’t matter. All I need is my lady.’…Like that.”

“……”

“And then he set fire to the Manor.”

An uneducated lowlife, so he figured that if you lit a fire in front of a den, whatever was inside would walk out on its own. But he hadn’t anticipated that the wind would be strong that night.

The small fire grew and grew until it was beyond all control. He would have panicked at the sight of it and run. Run and run. Even as he ran, his head was full of nothing but thoughts of my lady.

So when he reached the cedar forest, he would have looked back.

He would have seen a pillar of fire reaching toward the sky.

Only then did it hit him.

“What have I done?”

“And then, as it happened, in his pocket…”

Cedarwood drew a pistol from his inner pocket.

“A gun happened to fall into his hand.”

Clank.

He set it on top of the man’s corpse.

Beginning, middle, end.

A heavy piece of metal was placed where a period should have been. As though to say, this is the truth.

Nathan Rockefeller swallowed dryly without realizing it.

“Ha, you talk about it like you were standing right there watching, you lowborn bastard.”

“I know all too well what goes through the mind of someone who hovers around my lady. You’d know that firsthand, wouldn’t you, young master.”

Their gazes met. The air pulled taut.