Without A Promissory Note

“I’m breaking off the betrothal. I’ve already told Ray.”
“Ohhh! God above! Thank you, truly!”

Scrooge threw both arms up in the air, turned his eyes to the ceiling as though it were all that stood between him and heaven, and made another fervent profession of faith.

Our Scrooge has been getting plenty of grace, hasn’t he.

First of all, she had to get back the money that had gone to him. Eyes wide, Dong-hui went over and over the ledgers Scrooge had put in order while weeping tears of blood.

“Stop calling on God. Anyone watching would think we were holding a revival meeting. Jeez! 160 gold, all told.”

Converted into Korean money, that came to nearly two hundred million won.

Oh my god, what an absolute crazy bitch!

“You have finished the calculation already?”

Scrooge gave a start and came striding up to the desk.

“No. You wrote it down here yourself, didn’t you. 160 gold. And in red letters, thick ones at that.”
“Ah. So I did.”

He must have resented it deeply, to write the money that went to Ray down separately in red letters. The letters, red as blood, read like a cry of bitter grievance aimed at Chloe Grace.

“I did get a promissory note out of him, didn’t I?”

Surely I at least had one drawn up.
If I didn’t even do that, I may as well just die.

A little tense, Dong-hui fixed her eyes on Scrooge.

That was when it happened.

“…Who are you!”

Scrooge’s question came out of nowhere, and a chill went down Dong-hui’s spine.

Don’t tell me he’s worked out who I really am?

She swallowed hard against the tension and asked in a voice she forced to sound as though nothing at all was the matter.

“Who else would I be? Chloe Grace!”
“That cannot be!”

Scrooge cried it out, eyes wide, in a voice that left no room for argument.

“W-what are you talking about?”

Everything went black in front of Dong-hui. Was this where it all ended, then, with her branded a witch and burned to ashes? She was already thinking she ought to simply make a run for it when Scrooge’s anguished voice went on.

“Our lord was never, not ever, a person who would so much as study. There is no way a person like that would know a word like promissory note…”
“Hey!”

Dong-hui let fly with a shout, and Scrooge started and backed away.

“Aigh! What a fright!”
“I know. I know all of it! I’ve just been playing dumb this whole time!”

Angry for no good reason, she yelled it at the top of her voice.

“It was rather beyond just playing dumb…”

Scrooge went on edging backward, and the suspicion never left his eyes.

“I said I know.”

Dong-hui snorted and glared, and he gave an awkward smile and pointed at the ledger.

“160 gold. That is the sum given to Master Ray — without a promissory note!”

Without a promissory note.

“So you never wrote one.”

Scrooge nodded. He did give her a pitying look, as though to say she was only working that out now, but mixed into it was something that said it was a mercy she had worked it out at all.

“I’m going to lose my mind, honestly!”

As things stood, she could make a sum like that back as many times over as she pleased. But the size of it was not the problem. Her pride would not let it pass. Nothing was going to settle her now short of grinding that pair of bastards underfoot and shaking every last thing they had out of them.

“Find out what this business is that Ray means to start.”

Every step you take, I’ll be there ahead of you, waiting, and I’ll stamp on you until the juice runs out.

Once she had her temper more or less settled again, Dong-hui paid another visit to the village where the work was going on. Winter must have been drawing near; her breath came out in white puffs. A sense of urgency came over her.

“Still no word from the people who went to buy cloth?”

Dong-hui pulled her collar closed as she asked Handsome. Dressed as well as she was, she was still this cold; how much worse must it be for the estate’s residents.

Happily, the maids had been sewing night and day with their eyes gone red to earn the special pay, and the children’s clothes for the village of Morta were coming along smoothly. Today they had loaded only the finished garments into the carriage to start with.

Dong-hui looked back at the cart following along behind. The carriage was packed with boxes of children’s clothes made out of unpicked dresses. Chloe’s taste had been childish through and through, so the one virtue of the clothes the children would wear was that they were bright and pretty. The cloth was thin, though, to be all a child had on.

“They arrived yesterday and said they would be purchasing the cloth today.”
“The bodyguards — I mean the escort, they went with them?”
“Yes. We sent the twenty most trustworthy people Knight Commander Red Bear recommended, together with Vice-Commander Urun.”
“Good. It would be a disaster if they ran into robbers on the way back.”

Cloth that had been that hard to come by could not be handed over to robbers.

That was when it happened.

— Ding!

A blue status window floated up in front of Dong-hui’s eyes along with the brisk chime.

Stop it.

The status window brought the sentence to a clumsy close, then rounded it off with an awkward laugh. The needling belonged less to a status window than to an obnoxious little sibling.

Deal! Deal, no question!

At the words about lifting the time restriction Dong-hui cheered inwardly and shouted for all she was worth. If Handsome, who was handsome, had not been sitting in front of her, she would have sprung to her feet and shouted it out loud. But she could not go raving like a woman out of her mind in front of Handsome, of all people.

Anyway — upgrade the thing I made?

“What else do I have to mix in with the Komo tree and the Tiestone?”

The substance made from Komo tree sap and Tiestone was hard enough, certainly, but there was very little of it. Put to work in construction as it stood, it would swallow Komo trees by the thousand and still fall short. On top of that it set far too fast to be used as it was.

Sounds like it’s telling me to get the value for money up…

Somehow she had a good feeling about it. Once she had looked in on the village today and got back to the castle, it seemed she would be running some experiments.

The village of Morta was getting better by the day. The bleak ruin it had been was nowhere to be found now: roads trimmed clean, houses with their repairs finished, white smoke rising from every chimney now that there was heating.

Looking around a village changed out of all recognition in the space of a single month, Dong-hui felt a sting in the bridge of her nose for no good reason.

“My lady!”
“Waaah! It’s her ladyship!”

The first to spot Dong-hui were the village children. The adults were too caught up in their work to notice, and only knew the lord had appeared in the village once they heard the children shouting. That was because she had deliberately left the carriage outside the village and come in quietly.

“Have you all been well?”

In no time at all the children had ringed themselves around Dong-hui.

“Yes! We had our fill of porridge again this morning!”
“Mom said this is all thanks to my lady!”
“That’s right! My dad said so too!”

The weather had turned cold, so the children had old clothes layered on them two and three deep. That left the adults’ clothes thinner still, but not one person in the village minded. Dong-hui looked at the adults and the children with their wrists and ankles left bare, and beamed at them. The tips of their noses were frozen red with the cold, and still the smiles never left the children’s mouths.

“Today I’m going to give you all clothes to wear.”
“Clothes?”

A few of the children echoed it with their eyes gone round. Never once in their lives had any of them been given clothes as a present, and they could not make sense of what Dong-hui was saying; they only went on blinking their sunken eyes.

“Handsome.”

Dong-hui called the name that still, every time it was spoken, left the one doing the calling faintly embarrassed for no reason. The moment she called, Handsome knew ahead of her what she was going to say and sent a signal toward the cart. Several of the household staff who had been guarding the front of the cart began handing clothes out to the gathered children.

The clothes had been made in three broad kinds, divided by age. Three to six, seven to ten, and eleven to fourteen, arranged so that a child could pick. Had there been time enough and the conditions for it they would have been made in more finely divided sizes, but winter was right on top of them. Anything too big could be folded over, or rolled up, and worn that way.

“Are you really giving us these clothes?”

Even holding the clothes they had been given, the children could not believe it, and asked the question over and over. Each time, without a trace of irritation, Dong-hui nodded and smiled for them again.

“Put them on, quickly. For now, just wear those.”
“Waaah!”

The children ran off home holding the clothes they had been given, and around the time they reached their houses the alarm rang busily to say the estate’s residents’ favorability had gone up.

Dong-hui listened to the chimes with a satisfied look, then climbed quickly into the carriage before the villagers could come crowding in. They would come running in a mass, plainly, and say things about being thankful, about her kindness, that would set her face burning.

“Will you not see the villagers, my lady?”

Handsome asked, watching the embarrassed look on her face as she sat there. He was enormously proud of the lord, who had changed out of all recognition.

“There’s plenty to do. And it gets tiresome hearing the same thing over and over.”

Dong-hui grumbled it out for no real reason, and still the smile did not leave Handsome’s mouth.

The carriage had been on the road out of the village of Morta for perhaps thirty minutes.

“Butler.”
“Yes, my lady.”

Handsome had been nodding off in the seat opposite, and he answered with his eyes flying wide. She had definitely seen him sleeping with his head tipped back and his mouth hanging open, and the way he pretended in a perfectly crisp voice that he had not been was too funny for words.

“What did you say the name of the village next to Morta was?”

The question made his eyes go round, as though it had startled him, and then he answered politely. The sleep had gone out of his face entirely.

“Enol, my lady.”

Handsome wondered how the lord could not know the name of a village, then remembered what Chloe had been like in days gone by and accepted it easily enough. For the lord of the past, it was entirely possible. She had taken no interest in anything but her own affairs.

“Is it far from here?”
“The villages spread out east, west, south and north with Grace Castle at the center, so if we drove there now it would be a full three hours by carriage.”
“That long?”
“Yes. There is a fair breadth of wasteland in between.”
“No wonder there’s next to no coming and going between the villages.”
“Yes.”

Even while the village of Morta was being repaired, there had been strangely little traffic from the people of the other villages. Thinking back to what Morta had looked like at first, there was nothing strange about it. With starvation staring them in the face, they would have had no strength to spare for walking all the way to another village.

“Let’s go to the village of Enol.”
“I beg your pardon? To the village of Enol?”
“Mm. Winter’s coming on, so I need to move fast.”