PDCOO Chapter 23

Whether this village would be the place where he finally heard those words—words he had never heard once in his life—he couldn't say.

Anna had grown quiet now. Not even a tremor.

Bertram glanced down beside him.

All he could see from down there was golden hair swaying with each of Anna's steps.

...And a reddened ear, appearing between the strands, then hiding itself away again.

"Are you alright?"

"...Bertram. Has no one ever told you that you say rather dangerous things? Especially to women!"

"A friend of mine heard that frequently—it's possible I've picked up his bad habits. I'll be more careful."

"Never mind... what's the point in saying more. You know the way to the quarters? Sleep well! And don't go wandering strange places at night and get yourself mistaken for a bear!"

Anna shot out the words and turned sharply on her heel.

She wanted to get home quickly and drown the heat in her head with her mother's scolding.

But Bertram's unexpected words stopped her.

"I heard there's an abandoned building above the village—would it be alright to go there?"

"The abandoned building? Oh—right! That's the one those mushroom-poisoners called a lodging when they sent you there, isn't it?"

"That's right. If my pursuers make it this far, I intend to take shelter there."

"There are rumors that it's a cursed castle. Will you be alright?"

Bertram spoke, as was his way, with an expression of particular absence of feeling:

"Those will be rumors. An effective curse requires a surprisingly large budget."

"...Well, if you don't believe it, that's your business. But if you're going now, don't go empty-handed—let's prepare first."

Anna dashed into the nearby grass and began pulling something up by the roots.

"Are you making a charm?"

"There are enormous numbers of mosquitoes near there. It's mosquito-repelling grass."

"More important than a charm."

While Anna pulled up grass, Bertram imagined what the castle would look like.

Mosquitoes in abundance meant drainage bad enough that rainwater pooled everywhere.

No doubt a gloomy place, thick with moss throughout.

Bertram thought up to this point and shook his head.

To shake loose the notion that such a place was exactly where he most belonged.

Anna climbed the mountain with a full handful of mosquito grass. Bertram deliberately slowed his pace to follow her.

Most women were small compared to Bertram, but Anna was especially small, and her face was consequently difficult to see. What he usually had to work with was tousled blond hair, the round back of a head, and the very tip of a nose that jutted out like a garlic clove set on top. When he needed to read her mood, he had to rely on the limited information of her brow.

But now, climbing the slope, Anna's face when she turned to look back was near level with his eyes.

The face the afternoon sun had flushed red had settled to ivory under the moonlight. Through the strands of blond hair: large green eyes, shining with a candor he had not seen in the daylight.

...What would it feel like to look at her in sunlight?

The moment Bertram thought this, their eyes met.

Anna smiled.

"Watch your step! From here on the ground is slippery—there's a stream mixed in."

"This isn't a path."

"About fifty years ago it was a stone road. Just follow where I step."

Anna's small feet pressed into the wet ground. Where each heel lifted, pooled water held the moonlight white—as though she were treading the trail of a crescent moon.

Bertram looked at his own footprints.

The kind that made him think of bones ground white.

He could not account for the difference.

With a feeling he found somewhat strange, he followed her as she scurried ahead like a rabbit.

The slope grew steeper, and thick with trees. If not for the moon that had shaken itself free of the clouds, they could not have walked at all.

Just when it seemed the lamp oil had burned down a little, Anna lit the bundle of grass and said, catching her breath:

"We're here... hah, hah. This is the castle."

Between the dense leaves, a stone structure revealed itself.

Practically speaking, it was not large enough to be called a castle. But the building brooding in the night mist wore the name cursed castle the way something might wear the only name that had ever truly fit it.

One step inside, and instead of a welcoming band, the sound of insects scattering filled the air in every direction.

Anna had lit smoke at the entrance.

"Kuh-huk. Ahem. Let's wait a moment before going in. Honestly, I'd rather not go in at all."

"You mentioned it was cursed. What kind of curse?"

"Oh, well. Apparently an old lord who used to live here got sick and died."

"Because of the curse?"

"...I honestly don't know."

An old lord sickened and died here, they said. A ghost haunts it. Step inside and you'll be cursed.

That was enough to keep the village children quiet. Which meant Anna had never actually learned what kind of curse this place supposedly carried—if any.

Bertram nodded with the air of a man who had worked the matter out and stepped forward.

"After the lord died, rumors about the cause of death must have dressed themselves up in the clothing of a curse. No one has actually seen the ghost, I take it?"

"Well, no, but—wait, don't just go in by yourself!"

"There may be wild animals inside. I'll check first."

In one motion, he stepped over the insect-repelling fire at the entrance. Anna scrambled after him, cutting across the garden. Moving forward was no easy thing—the grass had grown to her waist. Bertram seemed to notice this belatedly, and as he advanced, he stamped the grass down step by step, making way for her.

At the end of a trail as though a large horse had galloped through.

The moment Anna finally caught up to him, she saw him standing at the center of the ruins—and without thinking, her breath stopped.

A round clearing that must once have been a garden viewed from the terrace above. Its only audience now was the mournfully crumbling stone walls. Anna had always known this place as such, since childhood.

But with Bertram standing there, everything looked different.

Most of all, it was Bertram himself who seemed like a different person—standing for the first time in the moonlight at the same eye level as Anna.

...Just moments ago, he had been the occasionally-cute, generally-infuriating big bear.

His black hair, which had always seemed simply disheveled, now shone like the night's own banner. The cloak across those castle-wall shoulders lent him the authority of a sovereign. A man wearing the moonlight of a fallen castle as though it were his by birthright. If ten thousand soldiers had been kneeling for him just beyond the ruins, it would not have looked strange at all.

Anna was staring blankly when Bertram, apparently misreading her expression, added:

"Anna, you've arrived. I've confirmed there are no animals nearby. Please come in."

Anna quickly crossed to him. Standing now on the same level of ground, his torso filled her entire field of vision. The familiar view settled something in her.

Of course, none of that changed the fact that she was standing in a haunted ruin.

She wiped her clammy palms on her skirt and spoke.

"Bertram. I forgot to mention before—there was someone who came to grief from coming in and out of this place."

"Who?"

"My father. Hans Burthe."

"But I understood your father died during the war?"

"...Yes. He died in the final year of the war. But it wasn't in combat."

Anna caught hold of his sleeve and pulled. Bertram followed without resistance, and soon they found what looked like recently-used odds and ends scattered through a corridor.

Recent was relative, of course—whatever cups and bowls remained were full of mold. But they weren't relics from decades past.

"When he was alive, Father used to come up here on the pretense of researching crops."

"Wasn't your father a farmer?"

"He was. But he wasn't satisfied with just planting what already existed. How could yields be bigger, what fertilizer worked best—that's what he was studying."

"All the way up here?"

"If he did it down in the village, he'd get an earful about ruining good farmland."

There was no anger in Anna's voice. She had once been among those who found her father strange, after all.

"During the evacuation, Father always worried the farmland back home would be destroyed. As fate would have it, in the war's final year he was conscripted, and the fighting happened right here in this village. And then he came back to the evacuation shelter alone. Like a man with all the sense knocked out of him. Unable to speak a single word about the war."

"That must have been a tremendous shock for your family."

"It was. The strange thing is, the ones who tormented him most after he survived and came home were his own army's commanders."

"What?"

"'How did you manage to escape alive?' 'Testify about how brutal the enemy was.' 'Who deserves the credit?'... Pompous, self-important men, one after another, all with the same things to say. What made even less sense was that some bastard decided he'd remember if they took him back to the scene, and dragged him off with their unit—and right then a skirmish broke out, and—"

"..."

Anna swallowed a breath tangled with tears. She'd thought she'd run dry by now.

Apparently not.

"...It's just too cruel, isn't it. Not that his suffering was somehow worse than everyone else who died. But sometimes I think—if Father hadn't come here, maybe he'd have gone more peacefully."

"That must have been an extraordinarily painful thing to carry."

"What's the use of thinking about it now. That's just how life is, I suppose. And—you saying the curse is probably just a rumor helped a little, actually."

Anna forced a smile and patted him lightly on the back.

"Anyway—if you find anything here that looks recently used, it's certainly Father's, so feel free to use it. He wasn't the type to curse anyone for using his things."