COARV Chapter 31

The bath was ready, and hot water had been drawn in advance, so Masha filled the empty tub and I sank into it slowly, starting with lukewarm water and easing my way into the heat.

"Is the bath far? I can walk there myself."

"Not far. But the floor is filthy. You might hurt your feet."

She wasn't joking. The hall we'd first entered had been the cleanest room in the whole manor. The further into the corridors we went, the worse it got—some unknowable black mold, everywhere, a total mess. What even was that mold? The Berke Grand Duchy, the most magnificent house in the empire outside the imperial family itself. Who would ever believe that the manor at the very root of that house looked like this?

I'd half expected the bathroom to be the same, in which case I really wouldn't have wanted to bathe at all—but thankfully, it was clean.

And once I was properly submerged in the warm water, I realized, somewhat belatedly, that my body hadn't been nearly as frozen as I'd expected. While I'd been half-unconscious on the horse, Lesche had held me tightly the whole time. His body heat had probably transferred to me more than I'd noticed.

I felt, somehow, a little strange.

Once I was fully settled into the hot water, I told Masha the whole story of how we'd ended up here.

"Goodness. So that's what happened."

"Yes."

"Actually, do you know what I thought, the first time I saw you and His Highness?"

"What?"

Masha said she'd genuinely thought Lesche had kidnapped me and was hiding me here. I asked, seriously:

"He's not the type to do that, is he?"

"His Highness is more emotional than you'd think."

Masha said this with a smile.

Emotional.

Well—it wasn't wrong, actually. If I hadn't read the original novel, I never would have agreed. But Lesche—cold and indifferent through and through, oddly weary of life itself—had, once he realized his feelings for the female lead, charged forward without ever once looking back.

Yes. It was more accurate to say he moved on instinct. In the original, there'd been nothing capable of paralyzing his reason except Lina. He wasn't, by any means, some man dried out of feeling. Emotional, actually, described him rather well.

"Now, tilt your head back for me."

I did as Masha said. She wet my hair with warm water and worked up a lather, washing it for me. It smelled of mugwort—soap made in-house, probably.

My scalp, apparently, had been just as frozen as the rest of me. After several rounds of warm water raised my body temperature, I went limp all over. I blinked and looked around the bathroom. It struck me, freshly, just how plain this bathroom was. Even the bathroom in my own annex back at the main castle was several times more lavish than this.

As if she'd read my confusion, Masha said,

"This is the one we use. The other bathrooms are all unusable."

"Are there more people here?"

"Three more besides me. There's a gardener. Oh, and a seamstress too. When the supply cart arrives, she'll dry your dress for you."

"……?"

I found myself puzzled. I'd assumed, at first, that the reason this manor was so filthy was a shortage of hands. I'd guessed—for reasons I couldn't quite name—that Lesche had shut this place down and left only Masha to maintain it, and that cleaning had simply become impossible because of that. So I'd assumed the mess was a natural consequence of that.

"For a place with a gardener, the garden's rather hideous outside, isn't it? If we'd had any word you were coming, I'd have had every weed pulled the night before, at least."

In this dead of winter?

"It's fine."

"You're very kind."

Masha smiled.

"One moment, my lady."

She left me alone in the bathroom briefly, then returned before long. In her hands was a pair of slippers.

"I happened to have a new pair made. I think they'll fit your feet well enough."

After the bath, Masha wrapped a towel around my head, rolling and pressing to dry it—when she suddenly went wide-eyed.

"My. Is this the Stern's mark? I'd only ever heard of it—"

"Ah, yes. That's it."

"Goodness. A red mark, of all things—how strange, truly."

The star-shaped red mark dead center at the back of my neck. No one else in the world had it—a mark from God—and any attempt to fake it would get a person dragged off for blasphemy, so no one dared imitate it even in jest.

Come to think of it, hadn't there been an episode in the original where Lina wore her hair pulled up at a ball, exposing the mark, and utterly crushed some nobles who'd looked down on her?

Seria could have done the same, if she'd wanted—but she'd never bothered pinning her hair up to reveal the mark and prove she was a Stern. The reason wasn't hard to guess. When Seria raised an eyebrow and glared at someone like she meant to kill them, that alone settled most matters.

What a convenient face to have....

Masha oiled my hair and combed it through with a fine-toothed comb.

"Now then, my lady. Would you give me your foot?"

I obligingly held it out. Masha took it gently and slipped the slipper on. I blinked. I hadn't noticed earlier, with all the suds and the sponge, but Masha's hands were covered in calluses.

Was she a knight, maybe? Bibi's hands were like this, too.

I couldn't say for certain, but she felt like someone who'd spent a long time gripping something heavy and hard, like a sword. And yet the smile she wore was so warm that it was, in its own way, disorienting—the mismatch of it.

She'd clearly done hard labor at some point.

Come to think of it, there don't seem to be any other servants at this Laurel Manor. Does she really sweep and scrub this whole place by herself? Why does Lesche leave it neglected like this? Did something bad happen here?

But Lesche and Masha didn't seem to be on bad terms—so why leave her to struggle alone in a manor this large?

This wasn't in the original novel, so there was a limit to how much I could guess. I pressed the towel Masha handed me against my face, drying it, and looked around the bathroom once more. Even at the edge of this rare, clean bathroom, flecks of black mold were beginning to bloom, little by little.

Linon, Berke's chief aide, was shivering. He never much cared for coming to Laurel Manor.

There were several reasons, but the biggest, as always, was that the manor was filthy. However beautiful and old the house was, Linon could never bring himself to like a residence occupied by those mold-like black shadows.

"This green mansion, still the same."

At Linon's lament, the middle-aged man handing him a dry towel smiled.

"Always has been. Ever since 'that day.'"

Linon's face twisted.

"Ben, doesn't it bother you, living here?"

"What's there to be bothered by? I've been here over ten years already."

The middle-aged man, called Ben, was dressed neatly in the black suit typical of Gleick Empire butlers. In his breast pocket sat a well-worn butler's monocle, hung with its chain squared away just so.

Linon said, with clear discontent in his voice,

"People find it odd, you know—that Berke's own butler never shows his face at the main castle. Just tell His Highness and come to the main castle already."

"Guests barely come to the main castle anyway, don't they?"

"True enough. If it weren't for Lady Seria's wedding this time—oh, right. You asked earlier who Lady Seria was, didn't you, Butler Ben."

He'd been shivering so hard from the cold that he'd nearly forgotten what he meant to say. Linon was, in particular, terrible with cold. He pressed his face into the dry towel Ben had brought, warming it against the fire as he went, and gave a brief, straightforward account of everything that had happened.

"Who'd have thought? Not just any man—the Grand Duke of Berke himself, married in a manner like that. It's a small mercy it was a Stern's wedding. If it had been an ordinary lady's wedding and that kind of disaster happened, it would've been a disgrace even to His Highness."

"His Highness wouldn't have gone out of his way to save a woman who wasn't a Stern."

"Mm, that's true enough."

Frankly, calling it a wedding at all felt embarrassing—and the imperial social circles were already going to be buzzing about this absurd wedding for years. Perhaps even after the current pillars of society had all retired with honor, their grandchildren would still be saying, back in our day, there was this ridiculous story...

—the sort of gossip that might pass down through generations.

It really was scandal on par with an imperial family affair.

In any case, Lesche had made Seria his Grand Duchess and brought her all the way to Laurel Manor. Since that was his lord's will, not one soul had raised an objection.

"...And that's how it happened. At the main castle, everyone mostly calls her 'Lady Seria.' Or sometimes 'Lady Stern.' Since imperial confirmation hasn't come through yet, and the wedding circumstances were so unusual, the forms of address are all mixed together."

"The imperial family always drags its feet approving a Grand Duke's marriage. That's simply tradition, so there's no issue there. We'll call her Lady Seria as well, then."

Ben, true to his gentle look, was gentle in temperament too. He shook out the towel Linon couldn't quite manage himself, then asked, as if something had just occurred to him,

"By the way, Linon?"

"Yes?"

"Seria Stern—I remember that name. Isn't that the cruel, arrogant Stern you complained about the year before last?"

"……"

Linon fell silent. For a split second, he had the unshakable feeling that Seria was standing behind him, glaring—he spun around sharply. Of course, no one was there. Right. She'd still be bathing. Still—

"That—that was already two years ago. She's changed so much since then—"

Linon said quickly, dropping his voice.

"Please, never let it slip to Lady Seria, what I used to say about her. Things are very good between us right now, so I fully intend to keep my line nice and tight."

"I'll be careful. But just how much has she changed, for your whole attitude to shift like this?"