The Needle Tree

Mulling over a past she herself knew nothing about, Dong-hui turned slowly and looked into the mirror.

Anna scrubbed her damp cheeks dry with the back of her hand, hurried over, and set to work on Chloe’s hair with practiced fingers. The very ribbon that had sent irritation surging up in Dong-hui the moment she so much as held it, Anna turned every which way into something marvelous, and in no time at all she had the hair braided down into several plaits. Her hands moved too fast to follow.

“Wowww, Anna! You really do have a gift for this.”

Dong-hui ran her hands over the finished hair, genuinely impressed. She had always grudged the money for a hair salon and hardly ever gone to one, so having somebody else do her hair was something she could not get used to.

“Th— thank you.”

Nerves had made her slower that morning than usual, and clumsier with it, and now here she was being praised.

Anna curled her still-trembling fingertips into her palms and, for the first time, broke into a bright smile. Fine freckles were scattered across her cheekbones, and smiling made her a different person altogether. Coming in slumped, with a face on the verge of tears, she had looked like the most miserable creature in the world; now she looked like some heedless little scamp who spent her days tearing around the neighborhood.

“Thank you. Off you go now and get some rest.”

Her eyes on Anna’s still-swollen, puffy eyelids, Dong-hui said it.

“Yes! Thank you.”

Anna dipped into a bow and made for the door.

“Anna.”

Chloe’s voice called her back, and she stopped where she stood and raised her head. Anna’s hair, bound down into two braids, slid neatly into place below her shoulders.

“Get some bread from Delma before you go. Do your brothers and sisters live nearby?”
“Yes. They live in Kondal.”
“Ah, Kondal!”

Dong-hui had no idea where that was, but she nodded along for now as though she did.

“Yes. When I began working at Grace Castle, we moved inside the castle walls. It is safer than outside, so my mind is at ease even while I am working here.”

Good-hearted Anna knew exactly what Dong-hui was curious about and reeled it off as though she could read minds. Kondal, then, was a village inside the Grace Castle walls.

Kind Anna.

Dong-hui thought back to the village inside the castle grounds she had seen on her way out to Morta. What came back to her was a place every bit as ruined and bleak as Morta itself.

And Anna’s little brothers and sisters are in there.

A fresh urgency came over Dong-hui. She wanted the Mission for the village of Morta finished quickly so that she could set about putting Kondal right as well, the village where Anna’s brothers and sisters lived.

“Delma, give Anna some bread. Plenty of it. Enough for the children to eat on until tomorrow.”

She had made several runs out to the convenience store the moment she opened her eyes that morning, just in case, and here was a use for it already.

“Yes!”

Delma seemed glad of such an order from her lord. She took bread out of the box that had been set down in the room and held it out to Anna. The amount was generous, exactly as Dong-hui had said, enough for them to eat their fill on until tomorrow morning.

“Th— this is…”
“Her ladyship is giving you these especially, so hurry and take them home and share them with your brothers and sisters.”

Even Delma thought it was a lot to be giving away, and she stole glances at the lord’s face as she lifted Anna’s apron and piled the bread into it. She had meant to put in only a few, but the hollow little faces that must look just like Anna’s came into her mind, and she could not bring herself to stop at a reasonable number.

Anna’s worn old apron filled up with soft, sweet bread.

“May I really take something so precious?”

Some special magic must have been worked even into the paper the bread was wrapped in; everything inside showed through it. And it was printed all over with letters she had never seen before, and gaudy pictures besides. Only the very highest nobles could possibly be allowed to eat a thing like this.

“Her ladyship gave us ours, and we have eaten plenty already. So hurry up and take these to your brothers and sisters. They are soft — even Jake will be able to manage them.”

Jake was Anna’s youngest brother, only just turned three. Their mother’s illness had left him underfed along with her; his nose was never dry, and he had grown up with one small ailment after another. From the moment he opened his eyes until he fell asleep again, all he could do was fret in a voice no bigger than a mosquito’s.

For three years now, Jake had lived with people saying he would not last out the month.

“Thank you. Thank you, my lady!”

Anna hesitated a moment, then called out her thanks in a loud voice and bent deep at the waist. She bowed so deeply that the bread bundled up in her apron came tumbling out onto the floor. She gathered every fallen piece back into the apron, hurried and careful at once, bowed again, and went out.

Her retreating footsteps sounded unusually light.

“But my lady. Wherever in the world are you bringing that bread from? And those jewels you say you sold to Gold Rich — where did those come from?”

Delma asked the thing she had been wondering about since yesterday. She only hoped she would not have to hear that they had been stolen from somewhere.

Nothing of the kind had ever been made in the kitchen, and there was no record of any transaction bringing food in from outside. The food had quite literally gone pop! and appeared in the room out of nowhere, and yet she and the household staff had shared it and eaten it with relish and come to no harm, so there was nothing wrong with it either.

And then there was the murky question of where jewels sold for a full 1,100 gold could have come from. Even if every one of the mistress’s keepsakes were sold, they would not fetch that kind of money. Which meant that, at the very least, they were not the mistress’s keepsakes.

“It’s a secret.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’ll keep you all fed like this from here on, so look forward to it.”

Turning this way and that in front of the mirror to admire a hairstyle she was thoroughly pleased with, Dong-hui answered in a voice brimming with confidence.

Two days running now she had taken the road to the village of Morta, but perhaps because they had set out at a different hour than yesterday, it looked like an entirely different road.

“We’re going to that same village as yesterday, aren’t we?”

Dong-hui had been staring blankly out of the carriage window, and at last the question would not stay in any longer; she put it to Scrooge, who sat opposite her, nodding off again today. His head had dropped forward any number of times, and at the sound of Chloe’s voice he started violently and snapped it up.

“Yes. We are on the road to Morta.”

Scrooge answered slowly, the sleep not yet gone from his voice, and his gaze lingered a moment on the scenery whipping past the window before sinking away again.

Even so, Dong-hui could not shake the uneasy feeling. Bad as her sense of direction was, she could tell when trees she had not seen yesterday started turning up. Yesterday had been her first time on that road and her first time outside the castle at all, so she had gazed out of the window in wonder the whole way to the village of Morta, and she remembered very nearly every stretch of it.

“Ah! Is it that tree that troubles you, my lady? You asked the very same question last year as well.”
“That’s right. That tree. That tree definitely wasn’t there yesterday. There were no leaves like that.”
“That is because we went by a different road yesterday.”
“No, it’s the same road, isn’t it?”

Dong-hui pointed out of the window, her tone full of conviction.

Scrooge shook his head as he answered. His voice carried even more conviction than hers.

“They may look alike, but they are different. This one is a little narrower than yesterday’s road, and the mountains lie in a slightly different direction, do they not?”
“Do they?”

She stared hard through the glass, trying to call up some difference from yesterday. However long she looked, though, she was hard put to find what had changed.

Scrooge went on with his explanation.

“There was word that a pack of wild pigs had been showing up on the road we took yesterday, so we came by another. With no food to be had in the villages either, it seems they have taken to falling on people passing by along the roadside.”
“Not wild boar — wild pigs?”

Dong-hui’s head whipped around toward Scrooge as she asked.

“If only they were boar. You could catch those and eat them. But wild pigs are so dangerous that it is best not to go near them if you can help it. One slip and there might not be so much as a carriage left of us.”
“Wild pigs are that dangerous?”

Chloe’s question drew a deep sigh out of Scrooge, and he muttered.

“My lady really ought to do some studying…”

What studying had to do with wild pigs she had no idea, but Dong-hui shut her mouth firmly for the time being.

That thought about getting attached to him? Canceled.

Delma might be another matter, but there was no reason on earth to grow fond of Scrooge, who turned out to have a quiet streak of nagging in him.

Dong-hui caught sight of a tree hung thick with long, needle-shaped leaves and cried out.

“What is that!”

The leaves looked sharp enough to prickle at a glance, and some of them ran to the size of a man’s forearm. The tree looked very much like a pine, except that where a pine puts out its sharp needles in clustered bunches, here each single needle-shaped leaf grew evenly spaced along every branch. The effect was rather like a person wearing a head of green hair.

“It is a needle tree.”
“A needle tree?”
“Yes. The leaves are shaped like needles, and the estate’s residents do in fact use them as needles.”
“The leaves? Are those leaves really that hard?”
“They are a great deal worse than a real needle, of course.”
“Then why use them?”

At Chloe’s guileless question, Scrooge shook off what remained of his drowsiness altogether and spoke.

“Because a real needle is expensive, and the estate’s residents would have no way of buying one.”

Scrooge held Chloe’s eye, and his gaze carried sorrow and a stifled frustration at once.

“They don’t even have the money to buy a needle?”

However much she heard, none of it made sense to Dong-hui.

Just how poor do you have to be not to have the money for a needle?

All of it felt like the fault of Chloe Grace, the original owner of this body, and guilt came welling thickly up in Dong-hui.

“A single needle costs more than one bron.”
“Is that expensive?”