What had gotten into him all of a sudden?
The loyalty was intense.
“…W-what?”
I watched him carefully, then quietly took another bite of my sandwich.
“He is undeniably impressive—that I’ll grant—but as for his personality, nobody could call it exactly warm—”
“Give me that.”
Before I had finished the sentence, the gardener’s expression had gone oddly tight—and he plucked the orange juice right out of my hand.
“—!”
The abrupt theft of my daily sustenance wrung a yelp out of me.
“Why are you taking a drink from a little kid?!”
“You said carbs, protein, fat. What do you need juice for?”
“That doesn’t mean you give it to someone and then take it back! Even a dog isn’t disturbed while it’s eating—”
“You should already be grateful I gave you the sandwich. Children without gratitude don’t come into the garden. Out. Now.”
“W-mister!”
What was this sudden escalation about?
“Out.”
“I don’t want to—oof.”
He reached out to take hold of me.
I gripped the bench with both fists trembling from the effort and held on for dear life—but that enormous hand slid under my arms with effortless ease and lifted me clean off the seat.
“Mister!”
He carried me against all protest toward the garden entrance.
“Miiister. What is happening? Why are you suddenly like this?”
“Again with that mouth.”
“Miiiister—”
“Close that little mouth of yours, and we are going to the east wing. Now.”
And the gardener, without so much as blinking, set me down inside the manor and let the door fall shut behind him.
“…Is this real life?”
He actually threw me out of the garden for one comment. This perfectly reasonable, level-headed man was this petty?
It wasn’t even about him. It was about the Duke.
Didn’t the servants of noble households usually grumble about their masters behind closed doors? Everyone did that.
I’d known his loyalty ran deep—but to this degree?
I stood there for a moment with my brain completely offline, staring blankly at the closed door.
Then—out of nowhere—a thud from the other side.
“?”
The door burst open. Standing in the frame was none other than the gardener himself.
He was still wearing that pointed expression as he looked down at me.
“I don’t need the drink from a snotty-nosed child either. You have it.”
Then he pressed the orange juice firmly into my hands, turned around, and disappeared again.
The whole thing had happened so fast that I stood there for a moment with my mouth open, staring at nothing.
Then, slowly, I came back to myself.
A laugh escaped through my nose before I could stop it.
“…Even now.”
Honestly.
“He gives back the juice—! That’s flirting, mister! That is flirting! If you’re not going to raise me, don’t give me things—!”
I directed my full-volume outrage at the now-empty garden.
________________________________________
[Ariana]
The name of the garden, written in careful cursive, had been taken from the name of his wife.
Reserved for the direct members of House Krost alone, it was immaculately kept—every hedge trimmed, every stone path swept—yet there was something about it that felt as desolate as a desert.
Because while Calypse had been away at war, every member of the Krost direct line had vanished.
I am the only one left.
When the war ended and Calypse returned, he stood before the garden that had become as silent as a tomb.
And arrived at a single conclusion.
It was a pointless war.
A long shadow fell behind him as he looked out over the empty garden.
The crowds who had cheered for him. The Emperor who had praised his valor. The nobles who had looked upon him with envy and admiration.
All of it—nothing but hollow shells.
The one I was trying to protect was my wife, who had been growing round with our child.
Cedric, the eldest, who had picked up a wooden sword and declared that one day he would fight at his father’s side.
Lucas, the second, who never lifted his nose from a book—yet had come running out to wave his father off to war with both arms overhead.
…And little Eve, who had yet to be born at all.
He had fought for the people of the kingdom—that much was true. But in the truest sense, everything had been for them.
Everything.
“Ha—”
The face of the man staring out at the empty garden crumpled as though he might weep. But what he could release was only a long, slow exhale.
Because behind him, his knights were standing at attention, waiting for his command.
“…Dismissed. Everyone, rest.”
“Sir!”
The cheers for the war hero fell silent from that day forward.
House Krost turned the entire Kingdom of Frozen upside down searching for his wife and children—but the only things that returned were the darkening expressions on his knights’ faces.
“I am sorry, Your Grace.”
On the hundred and fifty-ninth day of the search.
When the knight who had been stealing glances at Calypse’s face before even opening the door lowered his head in defeat, Calypse understood.
His knights’ expressions were beginning to look like his own.
I’ll need a mask.
From that day on, Calypse’s mornings began with putting on the mask before he did anything else.
The grief of losing his family was his to carry. It was not something to be shared with them.
When Calypse began wearing the mask, the knights who had first been startled by it gradually came to see it as a mark of his character—cold, rational, unwavering. The composure of a true lord.
He also stopped visiting the garden.
“Excuse me—who are you to enter the garden?”
On the rare occasions he did venture inside—
“A gardener, hired by His Grace.”
—he had taken to concealing his face beneath a robe and telling the most transparent lie imaginable.
Because his own grief could be visible. The grief of Duke Calypse Krost could not.
And so House Krost recovered its rhythm.
As though nothing had happened.
As though the knowledge that every member of his family had disappeared belonged to Calypse alone.
Every night when he closed his eyes, he was jolted awake by the sounds of his missing family’s screams.
In the shadow that followed him through the halls.
In the empty chair across the table.
In the dining room he entered alone.
With every breath he drew, the guilt of having failed to protect them tightened around his throat.
And then, one day, after a long time had passed—Calypse realized he no longer needed the mask.
Because he had decided to go to his family.
He had never given particular thought to how he might end things.
But he was a man who, once he resolved to do something, did it.
The one thing he had failed to do was protect his family. And so, as an act of penance, it seemed right to reach their side as soon as possible.
[Death Vial]
Standing in the garden for the last time, he drew the vial from his pocket. He was already reaching for the cork—
“E-Excuse me!”
Someone had trespassed into the space that belonged to him and his family.
“There’s a scary person chasing me. I’m just going to hide inside your robe for a moment.”
The intruder was a tiny golden-haired child, no bigger than a chestnut.
Twin pigtails wound up tight as springs, shooting upward like arrows on either side of her head.
Eyes like sapphires pressed into pale dough.
“Oh, thank goodness.”
She had crawled into his robe without so much as asking permission, made herself entirely at home, and then released a breath of pure relief.
“……?”
Too baffled to make sense of anything, Calypse looked down.
A small white hand emerged from the edge of his robe, followed by a face that fixed itself in a determined glare at something across the garden.
It was one of the House Krost maids.
…What on earth—
But there was no time to wonder. He had already pieced it together without needing to ask.
The maid was the one the child had called frightening, and the maid was searching for the child.
“Excuse me—did you happen to see a small girl running this way? A girl of about five years?”
He pressed the child’s head gently back inside the robe as the maid approached.
A maid’s daughter, probably, caught up in some bit of mischief.
That would be fine. He could be a hiding place for a child before he died.
But then—
“That child said she knows where the young lady of the house is.”
At those words—news of the daughter he had all but surrendered hope of finding—the senses that had been as still as a burial ground began, almost imperceptibly, to stir.
That was why he had sent the maid away and tried to speak with the child alone.
The little one refused to simply tell him where the young lady was. Instead, she began rattling off her own demands without the slightest hesitation.
“Please become my father. The kind of father who protects me from dangerous people.”
She was an audacious little thing.
“And what does ‘safe’ mean, exactly? Where does it end?”
The first time a crack appeared in the expression behind the mask was right at that moment.
…The limits of her safety?
She spoke nothing like a typical five-year-old. But that was not why his composure had faltered.
It was because the child radiated, from every inch of her small body, a will to survive.
“Honestly, my only goal right now is to somehow stay alive—eat delicious desserts, make some friends, maybe fall in love. Doesn’t that make you want to help me?”
And yet to want to live for such reasons as those.
He couldn’t make sense of it.
To want to live just to eat something sweet. To make friends and fall in love someday.
With no one beside her now?
A street orphan without a family to her name?
She could find hope in something as small as that?
He had nothing to say. It made no sense. But he could not bring himself to trample on the child’s dream, either.
In the end, his resolve to go to his family kept getting quietly pushed back.
Partly because he needed to find his youngest daughter first.
But also because the more they spoke, the more this child’s true identity began to matter to him.
And then—
When Calypse passed by the laundry room by chance and glimpsed that fist-sized golden head, he let out a soundless, hollow laugh.
Because the clothes the child was handling were glowing blue.
That was the reaction produced by the Poison Affinity.
When the writing surfaced on the fabric shortly after, he was certain. The child was a spy sent by House Foss.
To think I’d end up being swayed by a five-year-old, of all things. I’ve gone soft.
He closed his eyes, hollowed out.
He was furious at House Foss for weaponizing a child. He was grimly amused at his own foolishness. And somewhere beneath both of those—a faint, reluctant sense of having been deceived by the very child he’d been watching over.
He had been about to call for the knights.
But then—
“Ha— I’ve done enough to deserve to survive this, haven’t I? I really, truly want out of House Foss…”
That sigh—far too old for the body it came from—caught his ankle like a hand reaching up from the ground.
As if asking him to please, just this once, hear her out.
The child who had exhaled so heavily then carefully folded the report-bearing cloth into a neat square.
That was the strange part.
It was a directive. She had seen it. The logical thing was to hide it. But the child did not do that.
Instead, she laid it out in plain view, letters uppermost, as if to say—
Anyone who sees this, please understand.
“Who told you to do the laundry?”
“…Pardon?”
Calypse understood at once.
“Mister, have you ever thought about raising a child?”
Everything she had trailed after him saying all day—it had not been a joke.
It had been a desperate, last-ditch plea.
“Your Grace! I—I think we’ve found a spy from House Foss. There’s writing on this maid’s uniform—”
“I know.”
Now it was time for the adult to do their part.
Calypse did not look at the fabric the knight held out to him.
But the eyes that had long seemed extinguished were alive again—burning, for the first time in a very long while, with a vivid, unmistakable red.
“Bring the maid called Dorothy to my study. Immediately.”
