Builder, Son Of House

A maid earned somewhere between one silver and four for a full month’s work. Longer service meant a larger wage, but every maid gathered here had only just turned twenty, so most of them drew one or two silver a month.

And now, five bron for making three coats! Played right, this month’s pay might double. Triple, even.

The maids who had been hesitating in front of those expensive dresses only moments before now had eyes blazing with fighting spirit.

“We shall do our very best!”

Dong-hui gave the newly fired-up maids a bright little smile.

The next morning.

“Are you going as well, my lady?”

Scrooge looked up and asked as Dong-hui appeared before the logging team waiting to set out.

“Mm. I ought to go and see for myself.”
“Why would you go to so dangerous a place?”
“Because these people are going?”
“Pardon?”
“The estate’s residents are off to a dangerous place. I can hardly pretend it is no concern of mine.”
“My lady! Absolutely not. That you should go to a place as dangerous as that! Broad daylight or no, there is no telling what may happen out there.”

Scrooge was aghast, as though a monster had come leaping out at them that very instant, and he moved to hold Chloe back. The butler’s fussing did frighten her a little, but words once out of her mouth could not be taken back. Besides, favorability was hard enough to raise as it was. Go back on what she had just said, and the little she had scraped together might drop all over again.

Dong-hui shook her head, face grim and resolute, and spoke in a firm voice.

“No. I shall go too. I cannot send the estate’s residents off on their own.”
“Absolutely not. If you were to be hurt — no, if a monster truly did appear, your very life could be in danger.”

She was starting to get properly frightened. But she reckoned she had to dig her heels in three times over at least, so that when she did quietly back down there would be something she could say for herself later. Telling herself this was the last of it, Dong-hui spoke once more.

“All the more reason for me to go, wouldn’t you say.”

She said it thinking that if Scrooge stopped her one last time, she might quietly wriggle out of the whole thing.

But…

“Haah. If that is my lady’s mind on the matter, then there is nothing for it. But you must be sure to keep to somewhere safe.”
“What?”

Wait — he’s not going to stop me one more time?

Dong-hui was a little thrown, and could not let it show; her eyes went busily back and forth between Scrooge and the waiting knights. To announce at this point that she would stay behind after all would only make her look ridiculous.

Not dreaming of any of this, Scrooge gazed at Dong-hui with shining eyes. He looked genuinely moved. And not only him. The knights ranged behind her, and even the logging team standing there, grimy as they were, had eyes gone damp and bright as they looked at her.

And then, a moment later…

A raucous alarm went ding, ding, and a frightening number of favorability-rise notices began springing up like mushrooms.

Jackpot!

The corners of her mouth kept going up all by themselves, and Dong-hui bit down hard on her lip. The fear had not gone entirely, even now, but with favorability shooting up at this rate she reckoned it was well worth putting up with. And besides, was she not going with all those knights?

— Ding, ding.

With that fond little sound effect, the fear that had been oozing about inside her blew away as though the wind had washed it clean. Grinning oddly here might well eat into the favorability she had gone to such trouble to build up. With no idea that forcing the laughter down had turned her face into something strange, Dong-hui labored mightily to look dignified.

Why that dreadful look on her face…

Scrooge, still caught up in his own emotion a moment before, felt the gooseflesh rise at Chloe’s uncanny expression.

Keeping her face studiously solemn, Dong-hui took up a bold position at the very head of the logging column.

“Let us set out.”

She had cleared her throat first, and she delivered the words solemnly. At that, the knight commander bellowed out.

“Move out!”
“For the restoration of Grace!”
“For my lady!”
“Hurraaah!”

The grandiose slogans caught her entirely off guard and made her toes curl.

Still — a piddling little restoration.
Fine, I’ll get it done for you.

She lifted her chin boldly toward the Black Forest away in the distance and thrust one arm hard up into the air.

“Hurraaaah!”
“Long live my lady!”

Heh heh!

Dong-hui had never once so much as led the cheering squad at a school sports day, and now a single wave of her hand brought a roar fit to split her eardrums. The strength came surging up in her.

Hang on just a little longer, people of my estate.
I’m going to see you all eating white rice and meat soup!

Dong-hui’s nostrils flared with the effort of holding back the laughter she wanted to let out at the top of her voice.

Has her ladyship a great deal on her mind?

But Scrooge only worried the more at the lord’s unreadable expression.

The Black Forest was far more beautiful than it had looked from a distance. No human hand had ever reached it, and perhaps that was why there was not a damaged spot to be seen anywhere in it.

“Once you go in among the trees, the branches are so dense that even at midday the sunlight never reaches the ground, and it is pitch dark.”
“So that is why they call it the Black Forest.”

Dong-hui murmured it in answer to Scrooge’s explanation.

Chloe had never once shown the slightest interest in anything to do with the estate, and here she was, changing. Scrooge’s chest swelled at the sight. That strange expression on the lord’s face a little while ago had gone clean out of his mind. It felt as though he were being repaid at last for all those days of waiting, pressing down the urge to leave the Grace estate several times a day.

“The trees really are huge and thick. They must be very old trees indeed.”

Even the smallest of them was thick enough that a grown man could put his arms around it and still not have his fingertips meet.

“Yes. It has been several hundred years since a human hand last touched the Black Forest.”

Looking up at trees whose tops she could not see however far back she tilted her head, she felt an oppressive awe she could not explain. It was not fear of the Black Forest. It was the feeling of being some paltry little creature daring to lay hands on nature that had kept its primeval shape.

I’m sorry.
We’ll only trim the branches a little.
When there’s too much hair it’s a job to keep it in order, isn’t it.
No more and no less — I’ll only thin you out enough for the sunlight to reach the ground.

Muttering inwardly words that were neither a prayer nor an incantation, Dong-hui gazed at the Black Forest a long while. The temperature had dropped sharply in the space of a day, and winter seemed to have come that much closer.

“My lady, this man here is the one in charge of the logging work.”

She was still sorting out the tangle of thoughts the dense forest had stirred up when the knight commander’s voice came from behind her. She turned to find a lanky, very tall man standing with his hands folded neatly in front of him. He could not have been eating well; his cheekbones jutted out sharply and gave him a slightly severe look.

“In charge? I thought the butler was the one in charge.”

Dong-hui turned a puzzled face on Scrooge beside her; he smiled mildly and began to explain.

“This man was a carpenter by trade, so he knows a great deal more about wood than I do. For that reason I have given him overall charge of the logging work.”
“Is that so?”

She looked at him as though she had not expected it, and the man said to be a former carpenter bowed lower still in greeting.

“A carpenter?”
“Yes.”
“And what did you mostly make?”
“I built houses.”

Bingo!
Where in the world did a man of such talent spring out from!

Delighted, Dong-hui seized his hand in both of hers.

“What is your name?”

The man was flustered at having his hand seized out of nowhere by a noble, but he answered all the same, stammering.

“B— b— Builder, they call me.”

An extremely on-the-nose name.

A slightly mischievous look came into Dong-hui’s eye as she gazed at Builder and asked.

“Your father’s name wouldn’t be House, by any chance?”
“How did you know!”

Ack!

Startled though she was inside, Dong-hui put on an unruffled front and cleared her throat. This system had a way of pretending to be terribly complicated while turning out astonishingly simple.

“I have my ways of knowing. Well then — I shall be counting on you.”

Builder bowed so low from the waist that his forehead looked ready to touch the ground.

For deep respect, shouldn’t that be worth five hundred?

Dong-hui grumbled inwardly, but the status window pretended not to hear and carried on with its explanation.

No, you’re only going to take my points again.
Not doing it.
I’ll manage my own points, thank you.

The status window left behind a single syllable calculated to fluster anyone who read it, and vanished in an instant.

For people gone gaunt for want of food, they worked at a fair clip. As the logging team cut a tree down, the transport team standing by loaded it onto the carts. Dong-hui had privately worried that the work would crawl along in some rough-and-ready fashion; watching the people move in perfect order under Builder’s direction, she was genuinely impressed.

It rather looks as though Builder is going to be the cheat code for the Grace estate’s restoration.

Not three full hours had passed since the logging began, and already the sun was going down. Night seemed to come faster to the Black Forest than anywhere else. From deep inside it a darkness like spilled ink came pushing out the way fog does, the temperature dropped abruptly, and white steam puffed from their mouths.

She was about to say it was time to head back when a familiar plant caught her eye in the vast field spread out along the edge of the forest. From a distance she had taken it for overgrown warding grass, but the shape of the leaves was slightly different. Where the warding grass had small round leaves, these were a little larger and pointed at the tips.

“Hm? Isn’t that a potato? Scrooge!”

The dusk was settling and she could not see well, but the plants filling that broad field were unmistakably potatoes. She had worked in a potato field herself once; it would have been strange if she had failed to recognize them.

Scrooge had been giving orders to wrap up the work, and at her call he came hurrying over, took his place at her side, narrowed his eyes and stared at the field the lord was pointing to.

“Yes, my lady.”
“That plant there. Isn’t it a potato?”
“That weed?”
“Mm. It looks like a potato to me.”
“That is Dural.”
“That’s Dural?”

She had definitely seen that name in the status window. It had stuck in her memory precisely because it was such an odd one.

But however I look at it, that’s a potato.

“Yes. But why do you ask, my lady?”

Scrooge glanced at the not especially attractive plant and asked with a puzzled look. Thinking it must simply go by a different name here, Dong-hui went closer to the Dural.

“My lady, the sun is going down now. We must set off very soon!”

He urged her on in an anxious voice, stealing glances at the forest as it went dark. Perhaps he disapproved of a lord taking an interest in a wholly useless plant; either way, a note of exasperation had crept into his voice.

None of it made the slightest difference. Dong-hui ran to the end of the rise on the off chance, took hold of a Dural stem with both hands and hauled it up.

Out came potatoes clinging to the stem in great clusters, each one, with only a little exaggeration, the size of a person’s face.

Jackpot!
Good heavens, potatoes as fine and full as these!