There were two reasons Kasha had been condemned as the villainess of the age.
The first was the magitools she had designed.
Born of Simon’s requests and her own pure intellectual curiosity, those inventions had been mass-produced as weapons of human slaughter — entirely contrary to her intentions — and deployed in the Holy War, where they had annihilated the empire’s proudest order of knights.
But the greater cause of Kasha’s ruin was the second: the three magestones whose seals she had broken.
Simon claimed to have come across them by chance. Kasha had studied them at his request, and eventually succeeded in breaking their seals — and went even further, separating the curses bound within them, intending only to help.
But the moment Simon learned her research had succeeded, he took the magestones before she could resist. He told her the Church would arrest her if they found out, so they needed to reseal them discreetly.
Instead, those stones were released upon the world. Against everything she had meant, they gave rise to a cascade of disasters. Chief among them: the possessed warrior Wolfbane and the host of dark creatures who rampaged through the Holy War.
What did Simon and whoever stood behind him gain by unleashing all of that?
When Simon had come to her cell before the execution, he had clearly been flattering someone whose identity she hadn’t known. Someone to whom he had been offering his loyalty — in exchange for pinning every crime on Kasha.
That person had remained little more than a sensation to her: a heavy, sweet perfume drifting through the prison air, and the sound of a fan snapping open.
She had a feeling that the identity of the woman who had come to confirm Kasha’s death lay at the heart of every disaster that had unfolded.
Unless she uncovered who that woman was and reclaimed the magestones, it didn’t matter that she had gone back in time — she could find herself condemned as a villainess again at any moment.
If it’s the early summer of my nineteenth year, then the seals are already broken. I’ve already lost the stones to Simon.
The faceless mastermind must have already begun using the magestones’ power. The disasters had, in all likelihood, already begun.
There was one consolation: this period was still before Kasha had handed over the completed offensive magitools to Simon. She had not yet given them to him. And so she simply wouldn’t.
But as long as the magestones are in the mastermind’s hands, I can be branded a villainess at any time.
Until those stones were recovered, Kasha would never be free.
Then — what do I do?
She turned her thoughts to the three magestones she had unsealed with her own hands.
Whoever came to possess an unsealed magestone gained tremendous power. But nothing that came from a demon’s bargain was purely given — whatever the power granted, its owner was fated to bear an equally devastating curse.
And yet — call it a twist of fate, or the whim of some demon — the problem was that Kasha had succeeded in separating a magestone’s curse from its power entirely.
Her intention had been innocent enough: she had wanted to find a way to wield a magestone’s strength without being consumed by its curse.
But the stones were taken before she could devise any method of dealing with the curses she had set free. And the mastermind had found a use for Kasha’s research far more vicious than anything she’d imagined.
Keep the power. Give the curse to someone else — someone who had no idea what was being done to them.
And the first victim the mastermind had chosen was Leon Aranias. The broken paladin Kasha had encountered before her imprisonment.
The curse of lust that had undone Leon — it had to have been planted by the mastermind, who now held the first magestone, Onor.
But why Leon, of all people?
Kasha sank into thought.
They wouldn’t have chosen him without reason. There must have been something to be gained by destroying him.
Someone who wanted Leon to fall.
Someone who profited from the decimation of the Holy Knights and the outbreak of catastrophe.
Someone with enough power to foist all blame onto a powerless woman like Kasha and walk away untouched.
That was the extent of what she could deduce from the clues she had.
How do I find her?
She lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling. And then—
Knock, knock.
“My lady. A letter has arrived from Master Simon.”
Sena came in and held out the envelope. Kasha took it, and for a brief moment, let her eyes meet Sena’s.
“…Thank you.”
“Pardon? Oh — of course, my lady. Think nothing of it.”
Sena was flustered. The young lady was saying thank you unprompted, and meeting her gaze directly?
Something has changed. Something has changed quite a lot, actually.
Sena tilted her head as she left the room. Behind her, Kasha stared at the handwriting on the envelope. Elaborate, fussily ornamented script — the sight of it alone conjured Simon’s slick, self-satisfied face, and she felt a revulsion so complete she didn’t even want to touch it.
I have to open it. I need to know exactly where things stand at this point in time.
Kasha took a breath. She opened the envelope as gingerly as possible, using only her fingertips, as though trying to avoid all contact.
Dearest Kasha,
From the moment I woke this morning, your face was all I could see. Three days without you — I can barely stand it.
I was holding on to the hope of seeing you tonight at the Duke of Tyrot’s ball, but I’m afraid this wretched cold won’t let up.
Though I won’t be able to escort you this evening — the moment I’m well again, I’ll fly to you like the wind.
Please wait for me.
Yours, Simon
Crumple.
Kasha crushed the letter in her fist, her expression arctic. The memory of her past self reading this letter with her heart full — it made her want to die of shame.
What he had actually meant, between every line of it, was this:
I have no intention of going to that ball with you. The very thought of appearing somewhere like that with a dull, gloomy creature like you makes me ill.
So please, struggle through it alone. Feel every moment of my absence. Let it make you miserable. It’ll make you easier to manage.
And in the past, every one of those wishes had come true.
Already overwhelmed by noble society, Kasha had used that ball — the Duke of Tyrot’s — as the last one she would ever attend. She withdrew from public life entirely.
After that, her isolation made her all the easier for Simon to approach. Within a few months, they had run away together in what she had told herself was love — though in reality, it had been nothing but her willing submission to serve as his tool.
Whoosh.
Kasha threw the crumpled letter out the window.
I will never let any of you use me like that again.
She stood slowly, her gaze drifting a moment over the empty air outside. Then she composed herself and rose to her feet.
⁂
Knock, knock, knock.
Daryl Rüschino — heir and eldest son of House Rüschino — looked up from his desk at the sound.
“Who is it?”
Silence.
Daryl’s brow creased with a flicker of irritation.
“Come in.”
Thud.
He dropped the letter onto the table and exhaled. The days he received his father’s correspondence always left him like this — sharp-edged all over.
The Red Bull of Rüschino. It was not merely a family crest. The blood of House Rüschino ran hot — principled, stubborn, incapable of compromise.
Slow as a bear in ordinary life, but impossible to stop once roused — father and son were identical in that regard.
As much as they resembled each other in face, they mirrored each other in temperament, and so by unspoken agreement they tended to leave each other well alone.
The one topic guaranteed to pit them against each other — the only one that could turn them sharp and dangerous — was Daryl’s half-sister. Kasha Rüschino.
She had arrived one day as though fallen from the sky, led into the family by their father’s hand. And she was only eight months younger than Daryl himself.
Every time he thought of his mother — who had devoted her life with quiet faithfulness to this house and died doing so — the very sight of that girl became intolerable. As did the father he had admired his whole life.
He had known, of course, that such things were common enough among the nobility. Second wives. Other families. But he had never imagined his own father was capable of it.
A man who had seemed to know nothing in the world but his sword, his house, and his family. That was what Daryl had believed.
Yet the moment his mother died, their father had brought home an illegitimate daughter and had her entered into the family register, as though he’d been waiting for exactly this.
The letter he was holding now contained another reminder about Kasha, written in their father’s firm hand.
…See to it that Kasha receives the treatment she deserves. This is my duty, and it is yours.
What duty? Their father sat entrenched in a distant territory, keeping watch over a frontier holding while leaving Kasha abandoned here in the capital — leaving everything to Daryl.
Daryl was barely twenty years old. He had no idea how to look after a nineteen-year-old half-sister.
Besides — she’s not exactly… normal.
He rubbed the back of his neck and sighed.
The door opened.
Daryl looked up at who had entered. His eyes went wide.
“You—?”
“Brother. Good… morning.”
Kasha had closed the door behind her with practiced ease and was now facing him directly.
Her face was pale as always. Her hair, untidy. The hem of her skirt, stained with soil. Her speech, slow and halting.
His half-sister had arrived in her usual incomprehensible manner — but the expression on her face was somehow unfamiliar. And besides that—
Did she just call me brother?
Daryl was thrown off entirely.
In all seven years since she had come to this house, Kasha had used every ounce of her energy to avoid him — as though he might actually eat her alive.
It was irritating, frankly. He disliked her, yes. But whether he disliked her or she disliked him — shouldn’t that be his prerogative, his reaction to manage? Not something she needed to preemptively flee from?
The maids said that on any given day, Kasha did nothing but read, scribble in notebooks, and fidget with objects that made no sense to anyone. Or else she wandered the empty garden in the middle of the night like a woman out of her mind.
She only forced herself to sit at the table with them when their father was in residence — and even then, she would steal pale, hunted glances at them both while cramming her food down as fast as possible, as though in a hurry to escape.
The maids also said that after any such meal, Kasha would spend days in bed with an upset stomach from the stress.
Once he’d learned that, he stopped trying to make anything out of it.
And yet she had just called him brother. In seven years, he had never once heard that from her. More than that — she had come to him. That, too, had never happened before.
“What is it?”
He kept the bewilderment out of his voice and answered flatly, as was his habit.
Then he caught himself — had that been too brusque? They were going to the ball together tonight, after all. No reason to make things more awkward than necessary.
But Kasha didn’t seem troubled by it. She replied, composed and matter-of-fact.
“I wanted to ask… a favor.”
