COARV Chapter 33

The manor was so thinly staffed it might as well have been abandoned, but the meal had real care put into it.

Chilled ginger bread. Boiled and mashed potatoes seasoned with salt and pepper, finished with butter. Hot chicken stew scattered with small croutons. Tea poured smooth over melted sugar, carrying a warm, sweet smell.

"Here."

I poured him tea and held it out; Linon said "thank you" and took it politely with both hands. No sign of reluctance at all.

"Linon."

"Yes?"

"You have a germ phobia, do you?"

Linon blinked, then said,

"You heard from His Highness, I take it."

"Yes. But my hand's fine?"

"It's fine."

"Why?"

"Well."

Linon lifted the corner of his mouth and said smoothly,

"Lady Seria Stern, you're a high-ranking noble, aren't you? High-ranking nobles are clean, so there's no issue. It's commoners who are filthy. I only mind contact with them—high-ranking nobles are no problem at all."

"……"

A weirdly convenient bit of logic, that.

Nobles did, of course, treat cleanliness as a virtue and took great care to maintain it at all times. Bathing twice a day was common among them, and herbs said to have excellent purifying properties were considered essential possessions.

And it was theoretically true, in a manner of speaking, that lower-class people—lacking the time and resources to boil hot water regularly—were relatively dirtier.

Of course, that was speaking in general terms. If any other noble had used this kind of reasoning to call commoners dirty, I'd have thought it arrogant, contemptuous classism. But this was Linon. Nothing in his usual manner ever carried that tone.

Something about it sounds off, somehow.

It didn't seem worth pressing while I was smiling vaguely at him, so—had he read my expression? Linon smoothly changed the subject.

"And, my lady, this is a secret, but His Highness has quite a bit of germ phobia himself."

"Does he?"

Linon was nodding eagerly when he suddenly gasped and flinched.

I turned around at once. My eyes went wide immediately.

The wall that had just been plain black before—the mold on it was rippling, moving.

One thing came to mind instantly.

Demonic energy.

The shadow of evil that demonic beasts used to infect humans. Linon panicked at once.

"My lady, this isn't a sign of demonic beasts. It isn't, so—"

"I know."

"You know?"

I watched the slowly writhing mold with a grave expression. It was disgusting, like watching thousands of cockroaches crawl.

It wasn't mold at all. That's—that's hardened demonic energy.

Hardened demonic energy. What Lina would later name the "Demonic Shadow."

A key element of an event that appeared in the latter half of the original novel. The location: the imperial palace of the Gleick Empire. The one who purifies it: Lina. Even though every other Stern, and even the High Priest, would fail to identify the true nature of that strange, hardened demonic energy, Lina would purify it herself.

Because of this, Lina would end up having a tremendous impact even on the imperial court—but as a consequence, she'd fall gravely ill and collapse. Around that same time, Lesche, already having confirmed his feelings for Lina by then, would come into sharp conflict with the Emperor, and something close to an ominous scent of civil war would settle between Berke territory and the imperial family.

Though, of course, it resolves peacefully in the end, thanks to Lina's miraculous awakening.

Lina waking up at exactly the right moment let Lesche and the Emperor reconcile somehow—that was the core of the episode built around this hardened demonic energy, this Demonic Shadow.

Now that I was actually seeing it for myself, I honestly wasn't sure it was demonic energy after all.

Ordinary demonic energy from a demonic beast, if you got close enough, left clear, visible changes on a person's body. Mottled black marks blooming across the skin—anyone with eyes could recognize them.

And in the original, Lina had purified this.

But I couldn't. Because Seria's gift for purification wasn't especially strong, even among Sterns. Nothing compared to the Saint, Lina.

So did that mean the only way to solve this was to bring Lina here?

"Lady Seria? What are you thinking about?"

"Linon. When is His Highness coming back?"

"A demonic beast appeared out of nowhere, so he'll be confirming the boundary line first. He should be back by evening."

"That's a long while yet."

"Was there something you wished to say to him?"

"No. Nothing in particular."

While deflecting, a question I'd forgotten about suddenly resurfaced. The conversation Lesche and I had had in the carriage.

'Didn't you say knights can't enter Laurel Manor?'

'Didn't Linon explain it to you?'

'He didn't say anything at all.'

'…That little bastard.'

Caught off guard, I asked about the reason I'd forgotten in all the chaos, and Linon immediately looked flustered.

"That's... To be perfectly honest, His Highness was simply too careless about it."

"What?"

"Well, isn't it? I was the one left agonizing over how, exactly, I was supposed to explain any of this so a noble lady of the capital's standing would agree to come to Laurel Manor without a fight..."

"Ah, I see. That does sound like something to agonize over."

If it had been me, and I'd been told there was black mold moving on its own through the manor, and there was nothing to be done about it, I'd have seriously reconsidered coming here myself. As I said this, Linon looked at me for a moment.

"Why?"

"No, it's nothing... never mind."

Linon cleared his throat and pointed toward the shadow squirming behind the wall.

"Some sorcerers will be arriving shortly. Sorcerers from the Nesla Kingdom."

"The Nesla Kingdom? From that far away?"

"We've already exhausted every option this continent had to offer."

"I see..."

The Nesla Kingdom was a distant foreign nation you had to cross an entire continent to reach. That kingdom, said to be thriving with wandering peoples, followed a polytheistic faith and was famous for how widespread folk sorcery was there.

I'd heard that, unlike the usual charlatans, there were occasionally genuine practitioners with real skill among them... The problem was that the Grand Temple classified all of it as heresy. I tilted my head.

"But is it all right for me to know this? Linon, are you aware I'm a Stern?"

"His Highness will probably give you a rather generous sum for your silence."

Money? I had no reason to turn that down. But there was a more fundamental problem here.

"...No, wait. Couldn't you have simply not brought me here at all?"

Linon hesitated before answering.

"It's likely because His Highness wanted to show you to Miss Masha. His Highness received a great deal of help from Miss Masha from a very young age."

So that explains the warm feeling about her. Was she his wet nurse?

But Masha seemed a touch too young to have been Lesche's wet nurse. A childhood attendant, maybe? No—generally speaking, male nobles had male attendants for that sort of thing, not female ones. In any case, it seemed reasonable to assume that Lesche and Masha shared no small bond.

Even so, there was still a hole in the logic I couldn't quite close.

"You could have just brought me here after the ritual was finished. It's not as if I'm about to go running off from Berke territory."

"That's because this is the last time, my lady."

His voice wasn't heavy, but the meaning behind it was. I lifted my head and asked back.

"What do you mean, the last time?"

Lesche looked up at the sky. Snow was falling so thickly it grew tiresome to watch. A distinctive feature of the central territory's seasons. While the weather in every other season stayed mild, a few weeks of winter turned bitterly cold enough to call the northern lands to mind. This was because of the frozen lake, the demonic beasts' tomb, which spent the other three seasons quietly hoarding the north's chill before releasing it all at once, without warning, sometime in winter.

Even so, the people of the Grand Duchy loved this heavy snowfall. They believed heavy snow was the secret to a bountiful harvest. Even nobles from the warm capital made a point of visiting just to see the snow, people said—plenty of his vassals liked to remark that whatever brought good fortune was good fortune, and no more needed to be said about it.

Snowfall suited Laurel Manor well. That a green mansion evoking early summer would suit falling white snow sounded strange at first, but there was no denying how beautiful the resulting scene actually was.

Knights were already waiting near the boundary line.

"Your Highness!"

"Any beasts?"

"No more, Your Highness."

As they spoke, the knights glanced toward the black shadows rippling along the boundary line.

Black shadows stirred near the boundary as well. The knights' hands twitched. There was no denying that the strange shadow looked like demonic energy. But it wasn't the same. An ordinary person exposed to demonic energy for too long would die—yet no one had died from this, not once, so far.

Still, no one could deny that something fundamental linked the two. Most of the knights here had encountered demonic beasts before. So the first time they'd seen this shadow, they'd drawn their swords and stabbed at it like men possessed. The manor still bore dozens of sword scars from exactly that.

This was the reason Lesche had barred knights from entering the manor. In any case, the people trapped inside hadn't much wanted contact with outsiders either.

His red eyes glanced briefly down at the ring on the second finger of his left hand. A ring bearing the Berke ducal crest, split precisely in half. A very old ring, belonging to the Grand Dukes of Berke.

For a moment, Lesche let himself drift into an old memory.

It had already been fifteen years since that beautiful green mansion had been overtaken by this ominous shadow. In the beginning, he'd heard, it hadn't been this bad. The first sign of it, apparently, had simply been the maids in charge of cleaning the manor getting scolded for slacking off.

The shadows of unknown origin, whose nature no one could explain, had apparently kept multiplying after that. In truth, Lesche didn't know the details of that period well. Around that time, he'd been away at an academy for the empire's finest talents, outside the country entirely.

Even what he did know, he'd learned from the young knight, Elliot, who'd come running to his dormitory in tears, searching for him.

Even now, Lesche still remembered how it had ended—this green mansion, and its very last moment.