The Recipe For Cement

“You said it’s a forest where monsters live. It could be dangerous. No.”

The estate’s development mattered, but not enough to buy a Komo tree at the price of driving Red Bear into the jaws of death. She could not have said whether these people were real or fictions the status window had invented; either way, the loyalty Red Bear showed her had no limit, and Dong-hui was growing fond of him a little at a time. It was the same with the other characters. She had sworn to herself over and over not to let herself get attached, and she had lived alone and lonely too long to push away people who worried about her in earnest and looked after her with everything they had.

“I shall be out of the forest before the sun goes down.”

Dong-hui shook her head.

“There will be another way.”

If the Komo trees could not be found, she would simply take a different quest instead.

Chloe would not be moved, and Red Bear set his jaw and rolled his lips in hard between his teeth. Until this moment he had not known that her ladyship worried this much about their safety. He drew a hasty breath and got his feelings in order before the sting could reach the bridge of his nose.

“It is true that the Black Forest is a place where monsters live. But however dark it may be in there, they will never come out by day, while the sun stands over the trees. And even if they should, we can cut down as many as come.”

In all his time on the Grace estate he had never once filled a role worth the name, and he had no wish whatever to let this chance slip. If he brought this off handsomely, he could make himself indispensable to the young lord.

“I shall not overdo it.”

Dong-hui had listened quietly through Red Bear’s repeated assurances. She stared hard toward the Black Forest, her face troubled, then raised her eyes to a sky where the sun blazed down. And at last, as though exacting a promise from him, she looked straight into his eyes and gave her order in a firm voice.

“Even if you don’t find the Komo trees, you are to come out before the sun goes down.”
“Have no fear. I shall bring my men out safely.”

Red Bear read a genuine concern for him in the lord’s face, and it moved him more than a little.

For all his promises to be out before sundown, Dong-hui could not put her mind at rest. She was on the point of telling him outright not to go at all.

“My lady. If it is Komo trees, there are several of them in the garden of Grace Castle as well.”

Handsome, who was handsome, had been listening in silence to the exchange between Red Bear and Dong-hui, and now he put in a quiet word.

“What?”

“I am most sorry. That I should dare break in while my lady was speaking…”

Handsome heard the raised voice as a rebuke for daring to break into a conversation between her ladyship and the knight commander, and bent hurriedly at the waist. He might be butler now, but this was no place for him to push in uninvited.

“No. Not that — you’re saying there are Komo trees in the garden of Grace Castle?”

A beat late, Handsome grasped what had actually startled the lord, and broke into a broad smile and nodded. The thought that he too, like the others, might be of use to her ladyship put strength into his voice before he could stop himself.

“I beg your pardon? Yes! There are. The previous lord took such an interest in plants that he grew several of the plants that come out of the Black Forest in the garden as well. Most of them dried up and died, though, and what has survived until now is the Komo tree. Over near the castle wall there is a garden kept apart for plants that dislike the sun, as the Komo tree does.”

“I’ve never seen any garden like that.”
“There is a hollow set into the eastern wall, and the previous lord made it into a garden for shade plants. It is closed in on every side and has a roof over it as well, so my lady may well never have seen it. Even the gardeners go in there only once a month.”

“Once a month?”
“Yes. However large a Komo tree grows, it can live on the very smallest amount of water, so they go in only once a month, to water them.”

So that was why she had no memory of any odd-looking tree in the garden.

To think I’d end up honestly grateful to a father whose face I’ve never even seen!

Handsome had remembered the thing that mattered at the moment it mattered, and Dong-hui thoroughly approved of him.

“Lead the way. We’ll put off going into the Black Forest until another time.”

First she had to work out what the Komo tree had to do with Tiestone.

“Whoaaa.”

Handsome led them to the place, and the exclamation came out of Dong-hui all by itself. She had pictured something like a small storehouse; this was on a far grander scale. The greenhouse stood solid in red brick, and apart from the door it had nothing but small vents scattered along the walls. The plants disliked sunlight, so it had evidently been built to let them grow in the deepest shade possible.

— Creeeeeeak.

The great wooden door groaned as she hauled it open, as though it meant to refuse outsiders. Shut in on almost every side, the place should have smelled stale; instead the air came cool and fresh. A faint scent of mint hung in it, and with the mint a feeling of being washed clean.

“Wow!”

Hardly any sunlight got in, and still the inside of the greenhouse was bright. Finding the source took her no time at all. Dong-hui looked about her and pointed at a plant that was giving off a faint luminous glow here and there.

“What’s this?”
“Glowmoss.”¹
“Glow?”
“Yes. It is so named because it gives out light of itself in dark places. It works wonderfully well on headaches.”

“Oho!”

The name was a little iffy, but headaches were another matter. Dong-hui’s interest sharpened, and she stretched a hand out to the moss.

Her hand came within a hair’s breadth of touching it.

“You must not touch it!”
“You must not!”

The voices burst out at her from in front and from behind, both holding her back.

“Agh, what a fright!”

Dong-hui’s hand curled into a fist with the shock of it, and Handsome, who had been walking ahead, came quickly back and took a look at it.

“You are not burned?”
“Hm?”

Dong-hui had no idea what he meant, and her face said so.

“The moment a human hand touches glowmoss it gives off a fierce heat. There are any number of people who have put a hand to it knowing nothing about it and been burned.”

“I didn’t know.”

Dong-hui curled her hand up, dazed.

“When you handle glowmoss you must always wear thick gloves.”

Handsome’s voice came out thick with worry, like a man scolding a younger sister.

“Understood.”

Some urge to play the spoiled child welled up in her, so she made her answer deliberately stiff.

Handsome walked on ahead, stealing glances back at Chloe, who was busy looking this way and that behind him and letting out one exclamation after another. Walking in front of her ladyship gave him the strangest sense of having committed a crime, and his shoulders curled in of their own accord.

“We are almost there now, my lady.”

He made his voice deliberately more solicitous. He had been in here exactly once himself, a very long time ago, and could not remember exactly where the Komo trees stood; his head turned busily as he searched. He was still worrying over what he would do if they failed to find them when the lord’s voice came out of nowhere, bright and lively.

“Is this the Komo tree?”

Of everything in the greenhouse it came closest to the description she had been given, so Dong-hui stopped walking and asked. Handsome turned around, saw that he had walked straight past it, and answered with a reddened face.

“Yes.”

A tree brought out of the Black Forest, she had assumed, would be a huge, gloomy thing. The one the butler was pointing at had a very thick trunk and stood no taller than she did. Little round leaves the size of a 500-won coin covered it all over, which made the Komo tree look, if anything, rather cute; from a distance the branches would seem to be hung all over with green coins. The leaves were quite thick as well, so that when she brushed a branch with her hand they knocked against one another, clip-clop, clip-clop, like a pony trotting along.

“It’d be pretty noisy if you grew it outdoors.”

Put one out in the garden and every gust of wind would set it rattling; she would never get a decent night’s sleep.

Dong-hui nodded to herself, then strode up to the Komo tree, took hold of a branch and snapped it clean off.

“My lady!”
“If you cut it—!”

Red Bear and Handsome cried out in the same breath, and Dong-hui learned why soon enough. From the cut face of the branch a liquid as thick and sticky as honey came dripping down, and it stank.

“Ugh! It smells like crap!”

Dong-hui clamped her nose shut with the hand that had no sap on it. The smell did not last long, mercifully.

She stared blankly at the Komo sap, sticky as glue, and then something occurred to her. She tipped out the Tiestone powder she had brought with her onto the ground and worked the running sap into it. With no proper tool to hand she stirred it with the branch, and the more she stirred the surer she grew.

This is it!

The gray Tiestone powder dissolved into the sap as though it were melting away, and the two together darkened to a deep gray and set hard.

“Cement?”

This really is a jackpot!

Tiestone powder and Komo sap had made, between them, an unmistakable set lump of cement.

Status window, I’m sorry I called you a con artist!

The haul was unexpected and it was enormous, and Dong-hui was excited enough that her voice shook.

“Red Bear. Try bringing your sword down on this.”

She said it as she set the hardened Tiestone down on the ground. Red Bear’s face said he had no idea what this was about, but he did as he was told, and brought the sword at his hip down on the block with all his strength.

— Clang!

She had half expected the thing to shatter on the spot. Instead the Tiestone threw the sword lightly back and rang out clear. The blade quivered finely in Red Bear’s hand, and his eyes went wide enough to start out of his head.

“My lady, what magic is it you have used?”

Handsome, who was handsome, stared with startled eyes and asked blankly.

The stuff clung so stubbornly that even back at the castle Dong-hui was still struggling to wash the Tiestone and the Komo sap off her palms.

So it gave me some fairly useful information after all.

She had not tried any of the rest of it yet, so there was no telling; still, it felt like rather fine information. She was drinking her tea at leisure, pleased with herself, when a knock came from outside.

“Come in.”

Anna opened the door and came in. She had not stopped smiling since the day she was given the bread as a present, and yet she stepped inside hesitantly now, watching for her lady’s mood.

“What is it?”

The tea Delma had brought suited Dong-hui’s taste very well. It smelled of herbs and of flowers at once, and the more she drank the more it wound itself around her tongue.

“Master Ray has come.”

“Who?”

Dong-hui asked as if it were nothing much, lifting the teacup to her lips again.

“Master Ray. Your fiancé.”

“I have a fiancé?”

Oh my God!

Dong-hui set the teacup down on the table with a clack and opened her eyes wide.

Well, naturally. As pretty as this, there’s no way there wouldn’t be someone.
Ah… I thought I might die with nothing in my life but work, and here romance finds me after all!
And the name is Ray, of all things — what is that, a name or a cute little city car?
The younger sibling wouldn’t be called Morning, by any chance?²

Dong-hui’s perfectly absurd imagination was still taking flight when Anna’s answer came.

“Yes. The betrothal was made a year ago.”

A curious sigh had got mixed into the answer.

“Why? Anna, you don’t like Ray?”

The question made Anna start violently, and both her hands went waving from side to side.

“H-how could I ever presume to speak carelessly about my lady’s fiancé? It is nothing of the sort, truly.”

Anna was frightened out of all proportion, so Dong-hui gentled her voice. Something in the way she spoke and in the look on her face left a bad taste, and it was too strong to let pass.

“It’s that I’m a bit too good for him, isn’t it?”

Dong-hui’s eye for reading a room was black-belt grade. She put the guess to her, and only then did Anna nod, a distressed look coming over her face.

“Anyone at all would say my lady is wasted on him. Master Ray is a noble too, to be sure, but…”

“But?”

Anna hesitated, weighing whether she could really say such a thing, and answered only when Dong-hui gave her a bright smile, her voice shrinking away to nothing.

“Apart from his face… Ack! I am so sorry, my lady. I have said a needless thing. Please forgive me.”

Anna bent hurriedly at the waist and begged pardon, as though she had turned criminal on the spot.

“It’s fine. You’re only saying I’m too good for him. I’ll take it as a compliment to me.”

The cool answer seemed to reassure her, and Anna smiled easily. The mood had softened a little, so Dong-hui pressed on. She knew not one thing about Ray, and she had to get hold of whatever scraps of information she could.

“Did Ray fall for me?”

It struck Anna as strange, a lord who spoke of her own betrothal as though it were somebody else’s business.

And on top of it all, for her ladyship to say a thing as impossible as this.

Her ladyship had been driving herself too hard at the estate’s business lately, and something really had gone wrong with her health. Anna pressed the welling feeling down and went on in a calm voice.

“I beg your pardon? Ah, no, that is not it.”
“Then what?”

“It was my lady who fell for Master Ray at first sight…”

Anna watched Chloe’s face as she spoke, and let the end of the sentence mumble away into nothing. However much her ladyship had changed from what she was, this touched on nothing less than her betrothed. And her ladyship’s obsession with her fiancé, her love for him, had been so extraordinary that not a soul on the Grace estate could have been ignorant of it, nor in the neighboring estates either.

“I did?”

“Yes.”

The lord’s face said she was utterly dumbfounded, and Anna answered awkwardly, quite unable to get her bearings. She could not even tell whether her ladyship meant what she was saying now or was joking.

“With looks like these?”

“I beg your pardon? Yes!”

I’m not keen on this development.
But is there any law that says a woman can’t go after what she wants?

She felt sure this man Ray had fallen for that side of Chloe as much as for her looks.

Anyway. A fiancé, of all things.

She did not even know the man’s face, and still the bare fact of a fiancé set her heart thumping and brought the heat up in both cheeks. She had never been the sort to hang on a man like that, so this reaction of hers had to be coming from Chloe’s habits, still left behind in the body.

Chloe really did love her fiancé.

Pity for the Chloe who no longer existed came over her all at once, and the bridge of her nose stung.

“Have him come in, then.”

Dong-hui said it once she had set her clothes to rights again. Her own heart, thudding busily away, felt strange to her. She had been too busy scraping a living to manage even the commonplace business of dating, let alone ever once fangirling over a celebrity, and she breathed slowly against the odd feeling that had her heart in its grip and was shaking it. And a fiancé would know Chloe Grace better than anyone. One careless word and she might be found out for not being the real Chloe.

A person with somebody else’s soul inside her body.

In an age like this one, that was exactly the sort of condition to get a woman denounced as a witch and burned at the stake.

I’d better say as little as I possibly can.

If he said she was different from usual, she meant to give the excuse that she was unwell.

A little while later Ray came into the drawing room, and Dong-hui understood at a single stroke why the Chloe of before had fallen for him at first sight. He was the very definition of a flower boy.

Beautiful golden hair, and green eyes that called to mind a deep-green forest, and a straight, high-bridged nose that looked ready to cry out love from the center of the world³, and full red lips with a rich gloss on them.

Hey, this is way too good-looking!

Nobody could have called it an exaggeration to say he was the best-looking person Dong-hui had ever seen in her life.

“Ray?”

Dong-hui called Ray’s name, then shut her mouth in a hurry at how foolishly her voice had shaken.

Calm down, calm down.

If Ray noticed anything strange he gave no sign of it. He came in unhurriedly, faced Chloe and smiled radiantly.

Please! Stop! I think I’m going blind!

A halo shone out behind him.

A man this magnificent is my fiancé?
All that suffering back on Earth was worth something after all.

Overcome, Dong-hui gazed at Ray with rapturous eyes as he settled himself at his ease across from her.

“Chloe. Have you been well?”

Even his voice knocks me flat.

Dong-hui nodded along to a voice that sounded as though it might whisper ‘sleep well’ to her in the dead of night. Try as she might to pull herself together, her mind kept going blank and there was no helping it.

Ray was a creature that put a spell on people.