Lion, Tiger, Red Bear

Unease and anticipation washed through Scrooge at once. He was afraid the lord would take the money that had just come in and start clamoring for an expensive dress, and at the same time he could not wait to hear what she would say.

“It’s because I want coats made for the children. Only just now there’s neither cloth nor a tailor. Getting pelts by hunting would be difficult, I take it?”
“Our estate has no hunters.”
“Why is that?”
“Because there is no hunter alive who can hunt in the Black Forest. However much money you offer, it is not worth more than a man’s life. Besides, the warding grass in front of the Black Forest keeps the monsters from crossing over, so a hunter has nothing much to do here. Out on the snowfield there must be any amount of game with thick fur on it, but one has to pass through the Black Forest to reach it, so that too is impossible for the present.”

Chloe’s eyes were still fixed on the children, and her face was full of pity.

Come to think of it, even she, the lord of the estate, had only a handful of fur coats in her own wardrobe.

Which must mean they’re that expensive.
How wonderful would it be if I could put the children in long padded coats?
Or maybe… maybe it isn’t out of the question after all?

“We shall have to get the children dressed warmly. It’s a tall order.”

Scrooge had never in his life witnessed such a thing. Gooseflesh rose all over him and joy came welling up.

“Truly, one must live a long time to see such things. To think I should hear my lady say a thing like that before I die. Hnngh.”

In the end the butler wiped his tears away with his sleeve. The sleeve, worn but clean and neatly kept, was damp in no time.

“Dry it up!”

Dong-hui said it curtly, embarrassed for no good reason.

“Hkk! Yes, I shall dry it up at once.”

Scrooge wiped his tears away and broke into a broad smile in the same motion. Even if he died this very instant, he could look the late Marquess in the eye now.

The butler snuffled for a good while, then jerked his head up as though something had just come to him and spoke in a thick, stuffed-up voice.

“Among the household staff of Grace Castle there are some with a fair amount of skill.”

Of everything she had heard that day, that was the most welcome, and Dong-hui’s ears pricked up.

“Really? Then could they make coats for the children to wear as well?”
“They are people who make their own clothes well enough, so children’s coats they could manage any number of. But…”

Scrooge let the end of the sentence trail away. He seemed to be watching for Dong-hui’s reaction, too.

“But?”
“There is no cloth to make the children’s coats out of, is there.”
“Why not? My dressing room is full of dresses I never wear.”
“My lady’s dresses?”

Dong-hui had not a shred of attachment left to those dresses with their tattered lace, so she nodded without a second thought. But from the look on Scrooge’s face, the idea did not sit well with him at all.

“Why? Is the dress fabric too thin? Even so, if you layered several thicknesses together it would be far better than nothing, wouldn’t it? Ah, is there no way to get winter cloth from a neighboring estate?”
“Er… if one went to Sharum, winter cloth could be had. But with winter right on top of us the price will have gone up a good deal.”
“Don’t you worry about money. For now, get hold of as much as you can. Left as they are, they’ll be down with colds all winter, or freeze to death.”

Once the words were out of her mouth, the urgency of it pressed harder. Dong-hui was talking faster than she had been a moment ago.

“And until the cloth comes, make the children’s clothes out of my dresses as a stopgap.”
“Are you truly certain you would not mind the children’s clothes being made from my lady’s dresses?”

Scrooge’s face said he could not believe it.

Dong-hui pictured the dresses packed tight into the dressing room and nodded again. They dazzled, every one of them pink or purple or yellow, hung all over with fluttering lace and ribbons. Put one on and she would look like an enormous gift box, that much was obvious. She had absolutely no intention of ever wearing such a thing.

“Mm. I’ll just earn plenty of money from here on and buy clothes to my own taste.”
“My lady…”

To think her ladyship would go so far as to tell a lie like that for the children’s sake!

Scrooge had let his imagination spread its wings all on its own, and at last the tears began to roll in drops from his wrinkled eyes. This time not even a “Dry it up!” was any use.

They were clothes she was never going to wear anyway, and she had only floated the idea to see what happened, yet favorability had shot up by a huge margin. For it to have climbed as high as 1,250, Morta’s favorability must have been rising steadily all this while as well. It would be a lie to say she had hoped for nothing at all, but she had never expected it to climb this far, and Dong-hui came within a hair of letting out a squeal.

There was still a long way to go, though, and she pulled herself together at once. Already her heart was pounding at the thought of giving people work, paying out a daily wage, and having warm coats made for the children to wear.

At word that anyone who worked would be paid, the people came crowding into the hastily thrown-together temporary labor office, half believing it and half not. The village hall served as the office, its walls crumbled away here and there and its roof torn off.

With help from the household staff and the knights who had come along, Scrooge knocked together in no time a set of signboards the villagers would be able to make sense of. A few villagers aside, most of them could not read, so the method he settled on was pictures.

“Wow, they’re really badly drawn, but somehow you can still tell what they are?”

The exclamation came out of Dong-hui all by itself as she watched the people line up in front of the boards Scrooge had drawn.

“That one means pick the trash up off the ground, doesn’t it? And it means that’s the work allotted to the young children?”

Dong-hui asked whether she had understood it rightly, and Scrooge nodded with a face full of pride.

“That is right. And this one means clear away the filth that is turning the roads into a mire. This is the work allotted to the adults.”
“Mm. I can tell. That’s really impressive.”

Dong-hui stuck her thumb up to praise him, and both of Scrooge’s deeply wrinkled cheeks flushed pink as a ripe plum. The bashfulness sat oddly on a man of his dignified years. Putting Scrooge, with his fine head for work, in charge of all this really did seem to have been the right call.

Nor was that all. The knights who had come along in case of trouble were posted about the village square, never letting their guard down, and order held perfectly. The choco cream bread she had fed them before they set out for the village was proving its worth splendidly.

One of them, a tall man she took for the knight commander, seemed to carry a loyalty to his lord quite unlike the rest. Busy as he was marshaling the people, he never once let the duty of guarding her slip.

Dong-hui stuck her thumb up for the knight commander too, who had done his part handsomely.

At this rate this thumb of mine is downright bewitching!

Dong-hui looked at her own stubby thumb with fresh appreciation and smiled contentedly.

As Missions went, this was a decent one, and one with a fairly high chance of success at that. She wondered in passing what the difference was between a character who had to be given a name and a character who did not, but she did not dwell on it long. Names she could come up with any number of times over, and as for the loyalty, carrying on exactly as she was ought to see to that.

Right, then. Shall I start with the name?
A name that shows off his valor, is it…
Valiant? Then it has to be this.

“Lion.”

“Tiger.”

By this point a little stubbornness was rising in her.

Are lions and tigers the only animals that stand for valor?

“Red Bear.”

She had no real idea whether the English for a brown bear was ‘Red Bear’, but it did not seem to be ‘Fire Bear’, so she spat it out for the time being.¹

The satisfaction rating was a touch disappointing, but the naming was already complete and there was no amending it.

“Yes, my lady.”

Red Bear, thinking he had been called, answered at once. Somehow the light in his eyes seemed brighter than it had been before she gave him the name.

“I leave the handing out of the food entirely to you and your men. When they have finished eating, work with the butler to post them where they are needed and have the work begun.”
“Yes. Understood.”

Red Bear bowed his head as he answered, then went quickly to stand at his post.

The people heading home with their bread and grain wore bright smiles. Carrying that much bread out by herself had taken a fair amount out of her, but watching them so pleased, she felt she could put herself through it as many times as it took. This was a one-off however you looked at it, though, so work was something she absolutely had to give them.

“The villagers have to be able to stand on their own.”

Dong-hui looked around the bare, empty village, examining it closely for anything she might have missed.

Once the village is cleaned up, what should I start on?
Let’s not overthink it.
Think about the estate-management games I always used to play.
What did I start with back then?
Housing, farmland to grow crops on, and roads.
For now, just think about those three.

Her mind made up quickly, Dong-hui called over to Scrooge, who was busy marking work areas onto a map of the village.

“Butler.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“That forest over there — does it belong to the Grace estate too?”

Dong-hui asked, pointing at the forest that lay to the north of the village.

“Yes. The Black Forest is a forest of the Grace estate, handed down through the generations.”
“The Black Forest?”

The terrain knowledge she had bought with her points had mentioned that forest, and hearing the name again gave her a small, pleased flicker of recognition. It had a bleak, uneasy ring to it, pure ghost-story, and yet somehow she had a feeling there was a great deal to be had in that forest. Dong-hui’s eyes, fixed on the Black Forest, shone brighter than they ever had.

“Yes. When night falls the monsters run riot there, so there is not a single house anywhere near the forest.”

No wonder there’s such an absurdly wide stretch of grassland between the forest and the village.

In front of the forest Scrooge was pointing at, a broad stretch of level ground spread out, easily more than two hundred meters across. Perhaps the drought had done it. Where the forest stood packed with deep green, the level ground was covered in grasses like dried-out turf.

“What are those grasses? Don’t the monsters come down past the grassland? It seems like they’d attack the villagers.”