SN Chapter 5

The attending servant turned sharply away from the fallen roll just as he moved to retrieve it, pivoting instead to smooth the tablecloth with entirely natural hands—precisely the manner of a man who had simply happened to notice a wrinkle. Several days spent caring for an ailing Dame Rosaline had apparently gifted him with a remarkable talent for redirection.

Edelweiss blinked. Rapidly. She was engaged, with considerable effort, in asking herself whether what she had just witnessed was truly happening, or was perhaps some elaborate practical joke in profoundly poor taste. No amount of blinking resolved it. Her daughter had unambiguously retrieved a fallen roll from the floor and eaten it. With every indication of genuine pleasure.

"...Rose?"

Rosaline chewed the last of the roll with meticulous care, dabbed the corners of her mouth with her napkin—pat, pat—and looked up at her mother with an expression of complete composure.

"Yes."

One hundred points out of one hundred for deportment.

Kallix borrowed the phrasing of the head maid and Alter: his sister had become slightly less intelligent, and her mind had grown rather endearing. Edelweiss's expression became increasingly, profoundly uncomprehending.

"Slightly... less intelligent... out of necessity...? And if one's mind has grown rather endearing... does that lead one to retrieve food from the floor and eat it?"

It did not, of course. Kallix had selected his words with considerable care, distributing just enough truth to cushion rather than flatten. She had hit her head. Her behavior would not be what it had been. The physician expected recovery.

Edelweiss wept, and pulled Rosaline into her arms.

"Our poor Rose... I was at ease knowing she had her cleverness, even if she wasn't a great beauty... and now both her face and her head..."

"...No, surely it hasn't come to that... Mother..."

Every plan Edelweiss had quietly harbored for pursuing an engagement during Rosaline's convalescence was summarily dissolved. Through her tears she ordered a servant to return the engagement ring she had received from some count. One simply could not send a young woman who retrieved food from the floor to be married. She had believed the trouble was physical. It was, apparently, the mind. She never could have imagined it.

"Does your father know?"

"...He knows she sustained an injury to her head."

"That our Rose has become slightly... well..."

Edelweiss watched her daughter continue eating and chose her next words with extraordinary deliberation.

"Slightly less sharp...?"

Nobody had yet used the precise terms—deranged, simple, the accurate vocabulary of the situation. Kallix shook his head quietly. Edelweiss pressed one dry hand to her forehead. She said several confused and contradictory things, announced that she needed to rest, and withdrew to her room.

Kallix and Edelweiss had managed almost nothing from their own plates. Several dishes had nonetheless shown their bottoms—the evidence of Rosaline's appetite. She had made clean work of the dessert cake as well. Somewhere in the distance, the count’s head cook watched, his expression quietly moved. The expression of a grandfather watching a grandchild's antics. Kallix exhaled. The interminable meal was over.

After the chaos of the luncheon, Kallix settled at the antique wooden table and accepted a bundle of papers from Alter. The quantity was woeful. When Kallix raised an eyebrow, Alter gave a dismissive sniff.

"And what, precisely, do you take this to be?"

"...The materials I asked you to collect?"

"My blood, sweat, and tears."

Kallix set the complaint aside without ceremony. Alter, however, took visible and energetic exception to this, hopping about in a fit of affronted indignation. This represented his genuine best, apparently—which it manifestly did not, coming from a man who, when tasked with investigating a person, returned with the color of their discarded undergarments from three years prior. The information was simply difficult to find. Which meant it was very nearly unknown.

Alter's expression when he'd first received the assignment had been genuinely worth witnessing—the expression of a grown man asked to investigate a children's ghost story. The additional restriction against using his network of agents or going through the information guilds may have contributed. In any case: subordinates did what they were told.

And in doing it, Alter had understood. This was not designed to torment him. A cold certainty had traveled from feet to skull in an instant. His master had already taken the measure of the truth without having seen a single piece of evidence.

Kallix read the materials one character at a time. They were short—ten minutes of reading, at most. He took considerably longer.

Alter watched his master's face move through things: eyebrows, jaw, a hand working restlessly at his chin. When the final page fluttered shut, Kallix pressed his forehead into his palm and drew a rough breath.

The document began with the well-known legend:

⌜Enter the deep forest, and the shadow will devour you.⌟

He'd heard it often enough as a child—a practical measure against small boys with insufficient sense and mountains to climb. He had assumed that was all it was. But.

⌜Many people used it to warn children away from the mountains. It is theorized that fierce demonic beasts, or the inherent dangers of the mountain itself, were represented as 'shadow.'⌟

⌜The legend takes slightly different forms across territories and regions.⌟

⌜Enter the deep forest, and the shadow will devour you. The forest's shadows move when no one is watching. In the deep forest, there are shadows that mimic people. The forest's shadows speak.⌟

⌜What these accounts share: the identification of a specific location—'deep forest' or 'places untouched by human feet'—and the established existence of a specific entity: 'the shadow.'⌟

And on the paper were the accounts of those who claimed to have witnessed the shadow themselves.

⌜Aldes Pater (66). Herb gatherer. Twenty-three years ago, in the deep reaches of the Ranshuve Mountain Range, lost his footing while collecting herbs from cliff-face growth.⌟

. . .

"Lost consciousness without meaning to. It was clearly noon, but when I came to, the morning light was already rising. No strength to move, so I just lay there staring up at the dense forest... and that's when the thing appeared."

"?"

"The shadow, I mean. The shadow I'd only ever heard about from my senior herb-gatherers. Always thought it was something invented to frighten people, but there it really was... It was a different order of thing entirely from looking at a starved predator. My hands and feet were trembling. Chills all through my body."

"?"

"At first I thought it was just an ordinary shadow from a tree. The interior of a dense forest is as dark as deep water... But as I kept watching, I could see something moving in that darkness. Very slowly. Very, very slowly—slower than a hundred-year-old elder, slow as a snail... It came toward me through the early-morning mist. A truly uncanny and frightening thing to witness."

"?"

"Well, I'd never heard of a demonic beast like it. But it's a well-known story among herb gatherers—there's a shadow with an uncanny sense for the smell of death. If you see it, know that death is nearby. So I looked desperately around me, and of course the thing nearest to death was myself. It had come for my scent."

"......"

"When it stood tall at my bedside and only looked down at me, I thought it was waiting for me to die. So I ate those rare herbs, crushed them and spread them on my wounds, did everything I could think of to hold on. Fortunately, after two or three days the bleeding stopped and the swelling in my splinted leg began to ease. I thought—I'll survive—and then the thing that had been watching me from my bedside slowly disappeared back into the forest!"

"......"

"It's the truth! Exactly twenty-three years ago! I remember it as clearly as yesterday!"

"?"

"Lord, even now, thinking about it frightens me. Ah—and I've been wondering ever since why they call it a shadow. I thought perhaps it was because the whole thing was so completely black..."

"?"

"When it first approached, you see, it looked like black smoke bundled together."

"?"

"But after a few days, it had taken on a form very much like a person. No features—no face to speak of—but a shape identical enough to my own shadow that I would have believed it was mine."

"...!"

House Redwheel received a great many visitors. The current count held considerable trust from the Emperor of Illavénia through distinguished martial accomplishments, and the territory itself was broad and prosperous enough to draw merchants in constant circulation.

That popularity did not cool with nightfall, which made matters perpetually tiresome. As a count who had served as supreme commander in a major war, Count Pertan commanded significant influence in military councils. His nighttime visitors were intensely curious about the contents of the correspondence exchanged between the Count of Redwheel and his son. On any given day, three or four might come and go; some had attempted to enter as household staff in order to intercept letters covertly.

The correspondence, however, contained nothing of use whatsoever. Both parties had always written with the understanding that foreign agents and domestic spies would be reading.

⌜Are you well. I have been enjoying venison of late. The Azurelume Duke's parrot cries quite poorly. Apparently it learned from a street cat—curious, is it not?⌟

Genuinely useless intelligence. Anyone was welcome to read it—but that hardly meant it should be delivered lovingly into a spy's hands.

When Kallix appeared on the balcony, a patrolling knight signaled that someone had entered the study. Kallix took his sword and moved carefully. He opened the door and drew in the same motion, pressing the blade to the throat of whoever stood before him. A window had been opened by uninvited hands. The wind coming through the gap moved the curtains aside, and moonlight spilled into the dark room.

"!"

A woman's silhouette was framed against the window—black hair falling to her waist. The moment their eyes met, Kallix's gaze wavered. It was the face he knew. The familiar face of his sister, who had walked in the garden that afternoon, who had called his name. She only blinked at his entrance and his threat, with no indication that either troubled her at all.