It was probably a trick of light and shadow—but Hyderlin nearly jumped out of her skin.
She scrambled backward and barely managed to claw her way out of the pit. She had no idea how many times she slipped in the process.
Back on solid ground, she checked the gravestone. It bore not Leone Collozzo’s name but someone else’s entirely.
“How is this possible?”
She questioned what she had just seen. She brought the lantern back over the pit and looked again.
Curling gold hair. A strong-featured face. Ten fingers laden with rings so extravagant they bordered on vulgar.
There was no chance of mistaking this for someone else. It was unmistakably him.
Something buckled in her knees.
Rather than dwelling on how this could be, she began shoveling dirt back into the pit. Wet mud slid down over what was—was it?—Leone Collozzo’s body with a wet sound.
“…Hyderlin.”
Her name—spoken in a voice. Hyderlin spun around. Sarg had come up behind her at some point, holding a lantern. The sounds of rain and falling earth had masked any sign of his approach.
Hyderlin dropped the shovel.
“What happened to you.”
Sarg’s cloak and hood were covered in mud from top to bottom. The man who looked approximately like a mud creature answered honestly:
“I fell on the way here.”
“…Unbelievable.”
“Let’s go back. It’s raining. You’ll catch cold.”
“I don’t catch cold.”
Sarg reached out with a slow motion and took hold of her hand. His rough, thick-knuckled hand was warm—so different from her own hand, thin as a bundle of sticks.
“Let’s go home.”
He said it with the nuance of let’s go back to our home together. But that place could never be “our home.”
Hyderlin and Sarg had never been, and could not be, a “we.” The day they became “we” would never come. It must never come.
And yet she did not pull her hand away.
She was mentally exhausted. Sarg looked ridiculous. And she was deeply, sincerely worried about the small princess left alone back at the house.
That was all.
Certainly not because she wanted to keep holding his hand.
Hyderlin said in a tone of total resignation:
“Fine. Let’s go to your miserable house.”
Sarg had given Hyderlin the bed. Since Hyderlin did not sleep, she knocked Sarg unconscious at the back of the neck.
She struggled through the task of removing the clothes from the dead weight of the passed-out drunk, deposited the man on the bed, then shed her own coat. She left her mud-covered clothes in a heap on the floor.
In her underclothes alone, she slipped back outside. There was no one about in the rainy night. Hyderlin doused herself with cold water until the mud was gone, then went back inside and sat near the hearth to wait for herself to dry.
Being unable to sleep was a torment.
She opened the wardrobe again and took out her sword. In the dark, the blade still gleamed with a faint, ghostly light. It was beautiful. Strangely, it settled something in her.
She stared into the watered-steel pattern of the blade and thought.
What was that.
The grave she had dug had held a Leone Collozzo who looked as though he might open his eyes at any moment. Given that he had been dead for several years—this was deeply, profoundly wrong.
And: why had the gravestone over Leone Collozzo’s grave had someone else’s name on it?
Don’t think about it. My task is one thing—kill the King. That’s all.
Uaaaaaa…
The baby let out a sudden wail. Hyderlin fetched goat’s milk and fed it, patting its back. She fed it properly and changed its wrappings, and still the baby fussed. Hyderlin walked the length of the room holding the baby, lost in thought.
Right. My task is not one thing—it’s two. Kill the King and childcare.
“God, my head’s going to split open… Why do you look like that?”
Just awake and already groaning with a hangover, Sarg caught sight of Hyderlin and visibly startled.
Hyderlin’s condition was genuinely terrible.
Her complexion—never good to begin with—was even worse than usual today. Her lips and cheeks had not a drop of color. Dark shadows had settled under her eyes. Her long dark curls were hopelessly tangled, sticking out in every direction. The clothes she was wearing were wrinkled beyond saving and covered in dirt.
She looked like a ghoul that had just finished crawling up from underground—which, to be fair, was not entirely inaccurate.
And it was all because of the baby.
Hyderlin, who had sworn a vow of celibacy and spent most of her life entirely unacquainted with infants, would frankly have rather been given a foal to raise. At least she knew what to do with a foal. A human child was utterly beyond her. She had no idea how to handle something like this.
All night long, the tiny human had teetered on the edge of crying, whimpering and fussing and almost-but-not-quite sleeping, and Hyderlin had been unable to figure out how to soothe it or get it to actually sleep.
After every trick she could think of had finally worked and the baby was down, she had felt like she had been completely wrung out.
She had noticed the eastern sky going pale blue just as she was putting herself back together and pulling the clothes she had taken off the night before back on.
She had gone out and fetched Sarg’s breakfast, and had barely sat down before Sarg woke up and started criticizing her appearance. Hyderlin snapped.
“You’re one to talk—you haven’t even shaved!”
Uaaaaaa—!
Her voice startled the sleeping baby awake. It burst into full-volume crying. Hyderlin scrambled to soothe it.
Damn it all! Do you have any idea how long it took me to get this thing to sleep?
“Ugh, the noise is splitting my head open…”
Sarg groaned, pressing a hand to his forehead. Looking thoroughly pathetic with his hangover was very unbecoming of him.
It seemed Sarg had no memory whatsoever of the night before.
The way he had stared at her red lashes and insisted she was Hyderlin. The incoherent feeling he had put on display. The kiss, which had been inexplicably tender and careful and warm—all of it had apparently been thoroughly erased by the spirits.
Hardly surprising, given the quantity he had poured into himself.
Thanks to that, only Hyderlin—who remembered everything—was left feeling awkward.
Which might be a blessing, in its way. She had no interest in things becoming strange and uncomfortable between them because of a drunk mistake.
Still holding the baby and rocking it, Hyderlin gave Sarg a sideways look.
“I knew from the moment you started drinking and hitting people this would happen. Here—eat this.”
She set a basket down at his feet with a thud.
“What is this?”
Sarg frowned and pulled back the cloth covering the basket. The contents came into view: goat cheese, hard bread, and wine diluted with water—all crammed in somewhat haphazardly.
“I went through your cupboard and there was nothing in there at all. Do you ever eat properly?”
“Where did you get these?”
“I have my ways.”
She wasn’t going to mention that she had snuck out while the baby was sleeping and lifted the entire basket from the neighbor’s house.
Hyderlin turned away and began working her badly matted hair loose with her fingers, like raking through weeds. There seemed to be dirt inside her clothes as well, scratching against her skin.
Sarg looked at the basket with an unreadable expression, then pulled the cloth back over it. He watched Hyderlin go through her various peculiar activities and let out a slow breath.
“Just…go and wash. I’ll heat up some water for you.”
Sarg drove Hyderlin out of the house.
“Around that corner, straight ahead, there’s a well. Go draw some water.”
“Looking like this?”
“You’re practically normal around here.”
“The standards for normal in this neighborhood are far too disheveled…”
Technically speaking, it was an errand. But Hyderlin felt thoroughly ejected.
“Putting a woman who spent all night shoveling dirt to work again… you really like making people useful.”
Hyderlin glanced at the two water pails swinging from her hands.
She had grown up in fairly rough circumstances, for a princess—but water-carrying was not something she had ever done. Water, for Hyderlin, had always been something that appeared when you told a servant to bring it; it was not something to be hauled up from a well. All of this was strange and foreign to her.
At the well there was already a woman and several children who had arrived before her, pulling the rope to draw water. Hyderlin stood to the side and waited.
A woman who had just finished filling her bucket struck up a conversation with Hyderlin out of nowhere.
“Oh my, I don’t recognize you. Have you just moved in?”
New neighbors were apparently always a point of interest. Hyderlin gave an awkward smile.
“No. I used to live around here.”
About four years underground, give or take.
“Really? Then why is this the first time I’ve seen you? You’ve got a face that’s hard to forget, I’ll say. Not that I mean anything strange by it. I just—I know the faces of everyone who lives around here, and yours I’ve never seen.”
“I didn’t go out much…”
Hyderlin improvised something passable. She was already regretting how she had answered.
I should have just said I moved in.
The woman laughed and gave Hyderlin’s arm a light smack.
“Get out more! Though I suppose with all this rain lately, it’s hard to. Oh, where are my manners—I’m Maril. And what’s your name, love?”
“Please call me Hys.”
“What a pretty name. Where do you live?”
Is this an interrogation? Hyderlin scratched the back of her neck.
If she gave some random address she’d end up mired in a whole complicated investigation. She sacrificed Sarg.
“Not far. Straight ahead around that corner—the two-story building. I’m not sure if you know it.”
“Hm? Isn’t that the man’s place?”
The woman tilted her head.
“You know the one—he was the queen’s Holy Knight, they say. He’s nothing but a tavern-haunter and a brawler now, but a few years back he was quite the famous face. I don’t know what happened to bring him to this.”
She really did know an impressive amount of detail. Sarg was evidently well-known no matter where he went.
“You’re not…living with him, are you?”
“I am.”
To be precise, she was merely imposing on him briefly—but she answered simply. Her lips moved, and she added something that would have made Sarg’s jaw drop.
“He’s my husband.”
“…Oh my.”
The woman’s gaze swept quickly over Hyderlin from head to foot. Hyderlin made a half-hearted attempt to brush the mud off various parts of her clothing. The woman said, with genuine concern:
“Hys—I live just over there, on that street—look for the house with the flower pot under the window. Come visit anytime, if you’d like. Making a new friend is always a joy.”
“Thank you, Maril… I’ve lived near here for quite a while and I don’t know anyone…”
A corpse knowing people would be a real problem.
“Oh, you poor thing. All that time alone.”
The woman took Hyderlin’s hand and patted it. Hyderlin put on a suitably forlorn expression.
Sarg had instantly become the sort of husband who kept his wife friendless and lonely.
Hyderlin felt a fresh appreciation for the talent for deception she apparently had buried somewhere inside her.
