RAMHM Chapter 146

Bliea's Story (1)

That night.

Bliea ran away.

The timing was poor.

A relative she called "uncle" for convenience had slipped on a wet road after drinking, and decided to take it out on Bliea.

She'd meant to take a few hits. That day the beating wouldn't stop, and Bliea couldn't take it—she wrecked him.

And rifled through his pockets, stole what money he had, and ran.

"To Pirreta. Pirreta Domain, in the east of Ronteaux."

The rain was coming down hard.

Bliea changed cheap public coaches several times, and as Ronteaux drew closer she bought newspapers compulsively, her hands trembling at what she saw.

'How can two people look this much alike?'

She ran a hand over the hair she'd dyed black with Rotsy's help—it always drew too much attention otherwise—and could not make her hands stop shaking.

In the portrait: a man beautiful as a painting, and beside him a girl just as beautiful as a painting, beaming.

The girl wore clothing that looked almost exactly like Bliea's own. Same corners of the mouth when she smiled. Same color of eyes. There was not one thing that didn't match. Not one. They were identical.

Her own rough, wild life had given her a different bearing—but the face was the same face.

"Adrienne… Pirreta."

Her mother's employer. The eastern duchy of Pirreta.

She had known Olivia worked as a nursemaid for some noble family. That the noble family happened to be Pirreta—one of the great families of the east—what were those odds.

And if, against all chance—

The probability that this girl who looked exactly like Bliea was the very young lady Olivia served as nursemaid: what on earth was that number?

She had only ever exchanged letters through the postal service. Since moving her base to Ellaconia, she had never come in person.

The money stolen from her uncle was long spent. Bliea had nothing, and was exhausted all the way down.

The rain, relentless since she'd left, was still coming down by the time she reached Pirreta Domain. She had been gone for days; more than enough time for Olivia to have learned of her disappearance.

Bliea walked fast, wanting to arrive before Olivia could set out to search for her, and got to the small house.

A dim memory from early childhood made the place recognizable—embarrassingly small to call a house, but familiar.

She had arrived in the middle of the night.

Bliea watched Olivia in the room, not yet aware of her, frantically packing a bag. Heading for Ellaconia to find her. That was obvious.

Then Olivia finally noticed the intruder standing in her dark house and drew a sharp breath.

"Mother."

"B-Bliea? Is it Bliea?"

"Who is Adrienne Pirreta?"

The newspapers she'd been clutching to her chest fell all at once.

The rain-soaked paper hit her dirty shoes with a wet, sticking sound.

"Who…am I?"

There was no defense. No excuse.

The woman she had called mother—the nursemaid Olivia, who she had thought of as mother—broke like a dam that had been sealed too long, tears pouring down her face.

And through a face wetter than Bliea's own after fighting through a rain like falling hailstones, she poured out a truth that was hard to believe.

Her vision swam, far away and dim.

Her heart boiled with the injustice of it.

Bliea had grown up without a father, separated from her mother, and she was accustomed to anger—she'd had to be, to survive the humiliations and cruelties of her relatives' household, one fight at a time.

But she had never felt a fury this violent in her life.

"Do you know how I lived?"

"Bliea. It—it's all my fault."

Olivia's sudden formal address was too strange. Bliea shook her head, tears rolling.

"In that place with no parents, just to keep my own body safe—how did I live, how…"

At the height of the abuse, when the pain had reached its peak—

She had strained every part of herself to protect her own body, and that was when her mana emerged. To quiet what felt like her heart burning, she had gone begging to Rotsy, and clung there until Rotsy took her in.

Because Rotsy threatened to cut her off if she used mana on civilians, Bliea had learned dagger work through her instead.

Olivia, shaken by the torrent of Bliea's accusations, moved toward her with arms open.

"Why didn't you tell me, why didn't you tell me—"

"You were busy being a mother to Adrienne, who already had everything. You didn't even know your own daughter's dress size."

While Adrienne Pirreta lived well at the Academy, surrounding herself with friends, and called merchants to the house to pick out jewelry and flowers to her liking—

Bliea had been scouring the countryside for mana stone mines for Rotsy's research.

When she needed money, she'd climbed over garden walls until her hands were raw, stealing roses to sell by the stem.

And—

"I was a person who wasn't supposed to live like that?"

The corners of Bliea's eyes crumpled—that look of a wounded young animal—and went dark and gleaming.

"The clothes Mother sent… those were that brat's hand-me-downs, weren't they?"

All those elaborate dresses she'd worn over the years. All rightfully hers.

Adrienne's handed-down dresses. The ones she'd grown out of.

"Fuck, really—"

Even at the best of times, nothing decent had ever come out of Bliea's mouth, and it wasn't coming out now.

She knew the truth about Olivia, if she was honest.

Olivia had never been from a particularly wealthy noble family. The reason Bliea had been able to eat and not go entirely hungry in her relatives' house was because Olivia had been sending living expenses to the relatives who took her in.

Even if they were hand-me-downs that Adrienne had outgrown, Adrienne's dresses and jewelry were things that ordinary people could barely dream of touching. A short hem or a narrow sleeve—you just let it out.

But that day, the grief erupted.

Olivia's love—wanting Bliea to have even a little of what Adrienne had—was smaller than Bliea's sorrow and her sense of betrayal. She couldn't figure out where to direct her anger. There was nowhere for it to go.

She envied and hated Adrienne—far more than the father whose face she had never even seen—for growing up with the exact same face, the exact same eyes, looking out at an entirely different world, until she felt she might truly lose her mind.

"Don't look for me."

"Bliea!"

"And don't call me 'Bliea' like that either, please—I'm begging you!"

Bliea's voice shook the small house to its frame, all her betrayal and rage behind it.

"Pour everything out on me. But please, please—"

Olivia had lunged for Bliea's sleeve as she tried to bolt from the house. Her grip was trembling.

"Please don't go to Duke Pirreta. Please don't do anything here. He will—he'll kill you, I know he will. This is my first and last request. Please…"

RUMBLE!

A peal of thunder struck, powerful enough to pierce the house. Just like the day the twins of two different fates had been born.

For the first time, Bliea let her gaze move over the old house.

The ceiling leaking rain.

Olivia's modest clothes.

No matter how highly paid a great noble family's nursemaid was—if you were sending money every month for more than ten mouths, nothing was left.

'How stupid.'

Whether that was directed at herself, who had lived this way, or at Olivia, who lived alone in a crumbling house and got this for her trouble, she couldn't quite say.

"…Don't look for me."

"Bliea! Don't ever come back to Pirreta! Contact me wherever you are—when things are better, someday—someday—!"

"He'd try to kill me the moment I showed up—why would I go there?! Quit moping like that and don't send living expenses to Ellaconia anymore. I'm not going back there."

Bliea threw open the door. A gust of wind rushed into the small house like a storm breaking in.

Olivia strained with shaking hands to reach her, but Bliea turned away.

"…I'll write. Don't worry."

She swallowed the fury that was a second from breaking loose, and stepped back out into the rain.

It was the middle of the night, but if she made the last post-coach she could cross the border and reach the nearest town.

She stopped at a shop just before it closed and exchanged Adrienne's dress—the one she'd carried out with her—for the plainest, most unassuming thing on the rack.

A new dress. Loose enough that it needed no alterations, fitting perfectly without effort.

That night, Bliea hacked the dress to ribbons she'd packed and carried all that way.

"Even if the clothes are shit-ugly garbage—"

Every time the rain hammered the window in sheets, she said it, face soaked with tears.

"I like new things."

She went through the lace and the ruffles with clean scissors, snip snip, and sobbed her grief out in ugly gulps.

"From now on I'm only wearing new things, no matter what—fuck it."

Back in Ellaconia, Bliea went straight to Rotsy's cabin.

"You ran out into the rain like that and now you're back—did something happen at home? The whole village was in an uproar, your relatives asking around for you."

"They're only looking because the money source disappeared. And they're not my relatives anymore."

Not a drop of their blood mixed with hers. That much, at least, was some comfort.

Rotsy looked strangely at her—the elaborate dress she'd always worn, which she claimed her mother sent, was gone, replaced by something plain.

"I'm going to live with you now."

"What?"

"You said you wander looking for buried mines and things. And that record you wrote long ago. I'll help you find it."

"How would you help me. I haven't been able to find it myself. The record especially—I'm nearly certain it's somewhere ordinary people can't easily reach."

"Somehow. Am I really going to fail to find even one lead while I'm still breathing?"

Rotsy took her in without much resistance.

She had always been exasperated by the girl, but a walking mana bomb was harder to leave behind than to bring along. And the child had a way of getting places—she would be useful, that was certain.

They had stayed in this small forest longer than usual on Bliea's account, but Rotsy was by nature a wandering sort, always moving in search of records and mines. And so they started wandering in earnest.

Around that time, Bliea had found work at a mine and began quietly lifting mana stone fragments.

The mine was located near Ronteaux's border—discovered not long before, it hadn't yet come under Ellaconian administration, leaving it relatively unmonitored.

Bliea quietly sold the leftover stone fragments from the cutting work, or passed them to Rotsy, making what plans she could.

If going to Pirreta meant death—then she would simply meet whatever that man was, her father, or so they claimed, somewhere other than Pirreta.

Bliea, who had always worn the finest fabrics since she was small, found the shabby new clothes a humiliation she hadn't fully braced herself for. But she wore them.

About two months after Adrienne Pirreta had settled in as Grand Duchess.

That day marked a meeting that would shake the rest of Bliea's life.

An established regular customer, apparently arriving from Ronteaux, came to the mine.

The mine's owner gave orders to bring out refreshments for the important visitor, and Bliea served tea in silence.

She had been stealing glances at the man—his presence was not ordinary—and then her breath stopped.

Novian Trovika.

From the newspapers she'd been staring down every single day.

The man who had perhaps been meant to be her husband.

The husband of Adrienne, the one who had taken her place.

He was standing right in front of her.

And the crucial thing—

Even with her hair dyed black. Even in her plain, unassuming clothes, so far below what she used to wear.

The man had clearly recognized who she resembled. His stunned face frozen there, the same face she wore when she couldn't breathe either.