“The young lady isn’t there? What does that mean?”
The clatter of cutlery had faded, and in its place, silence had fallen over the dining room.
The Viscountess frowned, clearly sensing something was very wrong, and pressed for an explanation.
“…The surrounding area of the Foss ducal territory was searched thoroughly, but the young lady was not found. They’ve withdrawn for now, but…”
“And the Duke— is His Grace all right?”
“I only have word that he has arrived at the gates of the castle. Beyond that, I’m afraid I don’t know.”
The young lady wasn’t there.
The color drained from my face as I listened to the three of them speak.
According to the original story, she should have been in an orphanage near the Andra Marshlands within the Foss territory. That was where she was always supposed to be.
There was no way the original story could have gone wrong.
And then it happened.
My trembling gaze drifted through the air and landed on someone.
The maid’s eyes were full of accusation.
In that moment, I understood.
What was waiting for me now was abandonment. Nothing more.
“……”
As the maid’s gaze led the Viscount and Viscountess to look my way as well, a sudden, sharp pain cut through my chest— as though invisible arrows had been loosed straight into my heart.
The hands I had rested on the table began to shake.
The reason Duke Calypse had overlooked my identity as a spy had been one thing, and one thing only.
‘The contract is still valid, little one.’
Because I had told him where the young lady was.
But if the young lady wasn’t there…
My frozen heart lurched into a desperate, hammering beat.
If the young lady had not been found, the contract was meaningless. There was no reason for Calypse to keep me alive.
I was a spy from House Foss— a foreign orphan with nothing to offer.
“I must go see His Gra— Aisha!”
Bang.
The startled Viscountess called after me, but I was already on my feet, her chair toppling behind me, and I ran from the room without looking back.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
My heart pounded louder than my own footsteps— aching, hammering, like a nail being driven deep.
I could die.
No— I was going to die. There was no avoiding it now.
“Aisha?”
A familiar knight stood at the far end of the corridor and called to me. I scrubbed the tears that had already gathered at the corners of my eyes with the back of my hand and walked straight past him.
Even he— always so friendly— would despise me as a liar once he heard the young lady was missing.
Click.
I slipped into the storage room and shut the door behind me.
Ever since I had been assigned to infiltrate Krost Castle, I had memorized its interior layout in advance.
I had to run.
I stood on my toes and reached up as high as I could.
“Please— reach. Just reach—”
I was trying to get on top of the cabinet, but my arms weren’t long enough.
I looked around. There was a chair.
Tap.
Using it as a step, I climbed up onto the desk first, then landed lightly on the cabinet beside it.
It was the movement of a child raised to be a spy. Entirely out of place in House Krost.
The movement of someone who should not be here at all.
Someone who deserved to be eliminated.
I caught hold of a nearby pillar and clung to it like a cicada, inching my way up toward the ceiling.
When my head pushed against the panel at the top—
…There it is. The circulation passage.
A dark, damp tunnel, not a single light inside. A circulation passage that connected through to the garden.
I pulled myself in as small as I could and crawled inside.
It hadn’t been built for human travel. Even someone as small as I was could barely move through it.
No one will think to look in here.
I crawled forward until the passage opened up into the hidden route leading to the garden. There, I curled myself as tightly as I could manage.
But the trembling that had overtaken my body was beyond my control.
I had to calm down. Surviving this life was still my goal— no matter what.
All right. I ran. Good.
They won’t find me here.
When I felt I had gone far enough from the entrance, I stopped.
I lay on my back, folded my shaking hands together, and pressed them to my chest. Slowly, the terror began to ebb.
I’ll wait here until dark, and then slip out of the estate.
But five minutes passed.
“……”
And then an hour.
Do I really have to keep running like this for the rest of my life?
The thought arrived without warning.
I stared into the dead-straight passage before me, my lips pressed closed.
The passage was pitch dark— no way to see where it led, no way to guess where it ended.
Do I really have to spend my whole life running?
In an instant, my past life rushed over me like a flood.
My parents had died young. Through my teenage years, I had made myself invisible— slipping through the cracks of a household of distant relatives who were no kind of family at all, taking up as little space as I could.
Because of that, independence had been my only goal.
And then I had finally managed to find work— only to come home to rent notices and utility bills. Barely enough to scrape by.
…Is this it?
That had been the thought that struck me one evening, eating instant noodles alone in my room.
Is this really how I’m going to live?
Surviving on just enough money to eat, squeezed into a room barely large enough to breathe, with no family and no one to call a friend?
“……”
And now, here.
Staring into an endless passage, I felt the same loneliness I had known in my past life pressing against me in this one.
“…Hh— hh—”
I had promised myself I wouldn’t cry.
I knew better than to waste tears when I was alone.
But through my clenched teeth, a quiet, wretched sob forced its way out.
I had come here with the intention of doing things right.
I’d known the original plot. I’d had the small advantage of being the one who’d landed in this world. I’d told myself this time would be different— that I could live like a real person.
But there was nothing like that.
In another life, in another body, I was still me.
“…Hh.”
I swallowed the sob and reached into my pocket. My fingers closed around a small vial.
[Death Potion.]
It was what spies were given to take before an interrogation could begin— so they could end things on their own terms.
“……”
I turned the cork stopper in my fingers.
If I’m going to die anyway.
Maybe this life, at least, I can go without so much pain.
________________________________________
“Is this all?”
Calypse held something small in his large hand.
A single child’s sock.
“Yes, Your Grace. That’s everything.”
It had taken a week of travel to reach the orphanage, and it was bleaker than he had imagined.
A swampland where one had to question whether anything could survive— the Andra Marshlands.
A single ramshackle hut sitting amid a tangle of vines.
He had sent his knights to search every corner of the surrounding area, but exactly as he had expected— no child, and no living thing whatsoever.
A knight who arrived late had held out a single small sock, thought to belong to a child, but that was all.
Is it Eve’s sock?
Calypse closed his eyes.
The Foss ducal territory it may have been called— but this place had never known a human hand. After the war, the land had become too barren, too broken for anyone to inhabit.
If the young lady had truly lived here, as Aisha had claimed, then there was no chance she was still alive.
The small, torn, threadbare sock was evidence enough of that.
I hadn’t even had the chance to say her name properly.
How was he supposed to grieve someone he couldn’t even remember?
He worked his knuckles slowly and crushed the sock in his fist. It disappeared completely into the hollow of his palm.
The faint hope he had allowed himself, in the moment he listened to Aisha, vanished with it.
“Withdraw.”
“Yes, sir!”
He shoved the sock carelessly into his pocket and stepped into the carriage.
House Krost departed without so much as bidding farewell to the Duke of Foss, and made its way out of the Kingdom of Doctia toward the Kingdom of Frozen.
Jolt.
The carriage lurched over rough terrain, but the man who sat inside it like a mountain did not stir.
He felt no grief.
He simply felt that he had returned.
To the way things had been before Aisha came to him with her claim that she knew where the direct-line daughter was.
To the time when he had no reason left to live.
He reached out and drew the curtain across the small opening in the carriage window.
…Now it is complete.
There is no reason left to live.
He had no right to live.
That was the only form of penance left to Calypse, who had failed to protect his family.
The succession of House Krost can be passed to the Lilith Marquisate— the collateral branch.
On the day he had met Aisha and resolved himself to die, he had imagined what would follow his disappearance.
If he were gone, House Krost would be in turmoil for a while.
But the Lilith Marquisate— House Krost’s collateral branch— had been preparing to assume succession since the disappearance of his direct-line heirs. And not patiently, either— they had been waiting with barely concealed eagerness.
He didn’t like it. But House Lilith would manage.
Unlike Calypse, they had always overflowed with ambition.
With that thought following him like a thread, the journey passed in silence, and before long the Krost knights arrived at the castle.
“Your Grace. We have arrived.”
Calypse pushed the carriage door open, his face hollow beneath his mask.
A waiting steward was already outside, head bowed low, expression shadowed.
“I’ve heard the news. Please— you should rest.”
“Very well.”
He agreed without resistance, and the steward glanced up with a look of quiet surprise.
He had not expected the Duke— a man who had just failed to find his daughter— to accept the suggestion so easily.
It doesn’t matter.
It would all be over soon, in any case. The head of House Krost would be replaced.
These people who had learned to dim their own lights around him would no longer need to walk on eggshells.
Young blood from House Lilith would fill these halls with noise and brightness again.
This is as it should be.
He had no reason to live.
“Y-Your Grace.”
One of the knights stationed at the castle entrance came running toward him.
Something had happened, clearly— but Calypse had no desire to hear it.
“If it isn’t urgent—”
“The little one— Aisha, sir. It appears she’s run away.”
Calypse stopped walking.
Without warning, Aisha’s face rose in his mind— vivid and unwelcome.
Gold hair in twin fountaining braids.
Blue eyes so large they seemed to take up half her face.
That impudent voice. That irreverent little expression.
She was gone?
“Find her.”
“Yes, sir!”
The heart of a man who had been readying himself for death lurched back into rhythm.
He had been turning toward his bedchamber— but he threw off the heavy fur cloak he was wearing, letting it fall wherever it would, and strode back into the castle.
The steward scrambled after him, flustered.
“Wh-what are you—”
“I need to find the child first.”
“We’ll find her for you, Your Grace. You should—”
“No. It won’t be easy.”
She’s a spy.
“Your Grace!”
Just then, a knight who had been searching the storage room came running toward him at full speed, face tight with urgency, and pressed something into his hand.
A death potion.
“It was found on the floor of the storage room, Your Grace. We searched the room, but the girl wasn’t—”
A potion spies were given to end their own lives before interrogation could begin.
If that meant what he feared it might—
“Your Grace!”
He shoved the knight aside.
“I’ll be resting in my chamber— keep searching. No one is to disturb me there!”
There was no time.
He tore off his mask, threw a robe over himself, and slipped out through the castle grounds— disguised as a gardener.
“Aisha! If you’re out there, answer me!”
That voice— always low, always measured— split and cracked in two.
“Aisha, come out! There’s no one here but me!”
She couldn’t have left the castle grounds. Not yet.
With no lord in residence, the entrances to Krost Castle were more heavily guarded than ever.
“Aisha!”
She was just a child.
And yet the thought of that child running away had filled him with a dread that was greater than death itself— a fear that swept through every part of him.
“Aisha! It’s the garden-man!”
He searched the grounds over and over, but no flash of gold hair. No small child anywhere.
And then.
His footsteps stopped.
What if she had already taken the potion?
No. That wasn’t possible. This was the girl who had fought tooth and nail to survive. Who had wanted to live more than anything.
“…Aisha, please—”
And then—
“G-garden-man…”
He was pressing both hands over his face, overcome, when a faint sound reached him. The sound of someone sniffling.
He snapped his head up.
The inner garden.
Somewhere in that far corner.
He ran without a second thought.
Past the compost pile. Past the heaped bags of soil.
And beyond it— a drainage passage in the wall.
And inside that damp, lightless channel—
“G-garden-man… I had a lot to answer for, so I was going to die, but…”
A curled-up child, crying softly.
“Aisha.”
“…I want to live.”
Those quiet words broke something open inside him.
A reason to live.
He had far too many reasons to die— and yet the single, simple thought that he had to save this child was enough.
In that moment, Calypse wanted desperately to go on living.
________________________________________
