MHHC Chapter 138

Valentin

Laura. A name that Greta and Count Reichenau had let slip carelessly, more than once.

How on earth did this man know it? She stood there, struck dumb with shock.

Kook, who had pressed his head against the iron bars as though trying to verify the truth with his own eyes, now slowly drew back again.

Confused, he tilted his head this way and that, studying Adelheid from the dungeon's shadows with those bleached eyes.

The vague recognition that had risen like smoke in the old man's milky gaze was extinguished in an instant, swallowed up by suspicion and wariness that turned it black.

"No, that can't be... there's no way it's our young miss. Miss Laura left the castle long ago—last winter, she was already gone... That man, to me, to him..."

Kook rocked himself back and forth, muttering frantically under his breath.

Most of it was unintelligible, but piecing together the broken fragments, he was speaking as though he were still a servant toiling within the walls of Nassau Castle.

'Father's Nassau tragedy. The ring engraved with the Nassau reindeer crest. And... Kook, who lost his mind after surviving whatever happened there.'

Everything pointed like signposts toward a single truth.

"Get away from me!"

"Just a moment, Kook."

Adelheid reached through the bars to stop him as he retreated from her, but he had already buried himself back in the dungeon's darkness and was pelting her with hate-laced curses and spittle.

"You foul demon thing! Go back to the filthy place you crawled from! Hideous, terrible creature! I won't be fooled anymore! I won't fall for your tricks... Not anymore, not anymore..."

Before he could plunge further into his panic, Adelheid quickly felt along her collar and unclasped the ring she had been wearing around her neck.

She held it by its cord and thrust it through the bars where the torchlight could find it.

"Kook. Do you recognize this?"

In an instant, the rasping, grating sound of his breath went silent.

A pale, wrinkled hand shot through the bars and snatched the ring from her grasp.

As he frantically held the ring up to the torchlight to examine its surface, the old man's eyes slowly widened.

"This—this is—how did you—"

"Do you know what this ring is?"

"Of, of course I do. Is that not the heir's ring? You... you truly have... returned, young miss!"

The heir's ring. As though the very act of having held it had been a great act of sacrilege, Kook presented it reverently back to Adelheid cupped in both trembling hands.

When she took it back from his palms, Kook dropped to his knees against the stone floor with a resounding thud.

"For, forgive me. Just now, I... these days I haven't been myself..."

"There's no need for that. Get up."

"No. I, to your ladyship, I dared to—what kind of rudeness did I commit..."

It seemed Kook had truly and wholly convinced himself that she was "Laura."

Still sprawled prostrate against the floor and rambling incoherently, he suddenly snapped his head up.

"Why didn't you leave with Greta? The young master will be furious as fire now that you've defied him. What I endured, trying to protect your ladyship... No, I don't mean to blame you. Were you seized on your way to the temple?"

Greta. The moment she heard that name, Adelheid abandoned any intention of correcting Kook's delusion.

She recognized it by pure instinct—that allowing him to go on believing would serve her far better in drawing out what he knew. She chose her next words with care.

"Why did I need to go to the temple?"

"Why, because your ladyship received that kind of oracle."

"What do you mean, 'that kind of oracle'?"

"Poor young miss. How... how could you have forgotten it?"

The reproach and quiet disappointment in his face left her no choice but silence.

Her silence made Kook press his forehead to the stone floor. Adelheid recoiled in alarm and reached through the bars to grasp his shoulder.

"Kook! Don't do this!"

Kook panted like an exhausted dog, groaning, each strained sound dragged up from somewhere deep in his chest.

Just as an instinctive revulsion began to rise at this strange and fervent loyalty, Kook's hand shot out and seized her shoe.

"I dared to, I dared to blame your ladyship again..."

"Don't. I didn't take it as blame. I simply want to hear the oracle one more time."

"That—this Kook remembers every last word."

His head snapped up. His voice dropped low and quickened.

"If your ladyship has forgotten, this Kook will tell you. This time you must not forget it—you must hold it fast. This is how it begins."

He drew one long, slow breath—and released it all at once.

"WhenLightvanisheswithouttraceandShadowgazesdownupontheworldthegreatoneshallbeborntearingopenthereindeer'sbellybeholdthemasteroftheworldheshallbetheeyeofwisdomthatpiercesbothdarknessandlightwithperfectclarityheshallbeonewhowalkstheroadofhardshipandhumiliationinsilencewithacrownofthornsabovehisheadbyembraceheshallcleavethedarknessbybloodofficersacrifice thoughcursedthingscovetinthendshallbecomewholeofonensownaccord."

The words poured from those wrinkled lips and rang off the damp stone walls in shivering echoes.

Through the entire length of that torrent, Kook did not hesitate even once—did not stumble, did not search for the next syllable.

As though he had carried this oracle memorized to the very last word, walking with it always, waiting only for someone to ask.

"Young miss."

Adelheid felt the hands clutching desperately at her ankle and bent down.

The moment she crouched close to the bars, Kook's skeletal hand seized her arm. Fingers like iron spikes bit painfully into her skin.

"This oracle ruined us all. This oracle is the cause of everything."

"Please, speak more slowly so I can understand—"

"The oracle that said the child your ladyship bore would become the master of the world!"

The torchlight caught Kook's eyes and made them gleam with a wildness that had long since consumed all reason.

On that aged face revisiting those days, a pain dwelt that had taken root deep in the marrow of his soul.

"After that, everyone—all of them went mad. Trying to possess your ladyship... Even the young master, your own blood. Sons of bitches, not fit to be called dogs, every last one of them... Poor young miss, with no mistress and no master to protect you anymore..."

"..."

"That bastard—no, the young master—I should have known then what kind of monster he would summon for the sake of the family's restoration."

"..."

"You must go to the temple. Right away. They offered to hide you there, didn't they? That's why I was so certain your ladyship had gone there with Greta. You told me—you told only me, this Kook—that you'd hide there until things had calmed down, then cross the border to somewhere no one could find you."

Was it Kook's madness seeping into her through the bars? Her lips had begun to tremble with a terrible premonition. Whether he felt her state or not, Kook added, artless as a child:

"The young Lord Reichenau arranged your escape route."

"...The young Lord Reichenau."

"You'd been friends since childhood. You said he could be trusted. A man of his word, you told me—a dear friend who wouldn't think to covet something like this—you said it to me more than once..."

The last of Adelheid's composure gave way. The truth spilling out, fitting piece by piece into the shape of an answer, delivered a blow of shattering force.

The Count, whose complexion had always shifted when the name Laura left her lips. Greta, who had so often confused her name with another's. The servants' whispered rumors about a woman kept confined in the Count's bedchamber—and the only illegitimate daughter of House Reichenau, "Adelheid." Her childhood spent inside the temple. The merciless discipline that had followed from the day her father, the Count, had come to claim her and taken her away...

The guilt she had seen burning in Greta's eyes as she lay dying. That voice.

'It... finally came back to me... What I was told, to do. Miss Lau—ra...'

'Keep it... safe...... It's the young miss's... thing...'

'Mine? You're giving it to me?'

'It was always... the young miss's... from the beginning... The last of it... Now I can't bear to face...'

The trembling that had begun at her lips spread through her entire body. The temple clerics, who for all their doctrine's rejection of bastards had treated her alone with peculiar and inexplicable warmth.

Of all the children who had lived in the temple's orphanage, how many had ever been granted an audience with the Holy Father? How many had been given a high priest like Father Padre as their godfather?

'All of that—it was only ever me.'

If the "Greta" who appeared in Kook's story was the same Greta she had known. If the violence visited upon the woman called "Laura" had its origin in an oracle foretelling that she would become Adelheid's mother—

"Dreadful... absolutely dreadful..."

The hand braced against the floor scraped across the stone and curled into a fist.

'Who could have issued such a monstrous oracle.'

Only one answer rose to the surface. Morig. He was a creature that fed on her despair and her ruin.

In the previous life, too, he had found ways to corrupt her days whatever shape they took.

But... could it truly be him, even now?

'Something about it catches me. "When Light vanishes without trace and Shadow gazes down upon the world"—this doesn't feel like the kind of oracle a being like Morig, who carries a wound about being the Shadow, would put forward.'

Adelheid gasped. But if not Morig, then who would do something so monstrous?

And besides—the idea that she herself would become the master of the world. There was simply no way. That could not be her.

Someone as insignificant as herself. Someone who, whenever anyone had thought to trample her, had been trampled bitterly into the ground—that she could have been born carrying that kind of power from the very beginning...

The thought that had been circling uselessly suddenly froze on a single name, striking cold as iron. Through lips that trembled with the force of it, Adelheid let the name out.

"Valentin."