Everyone Here But Her

By rights she should have gone straight back to the castle and started in on the experiments with the Komo tree and the Tiestone, but Dong-hui had changed her mind. Seeing the children so utterly happy over a set of clothes had put her in mind of the children who would be shivering just as hard elsewhere.

She had heard that the other three villages, the ones besides these two, lay south of Grace Castle at least, which made them a little warmer. The land was not wide enough for the difference to amount to much, but Dong-hui wanted to believe it did.

“Yes, understood.”

Handsome bowed his head as he answered, then slid open the little window on the coachman’s side and shouted through it at the top of his voice.

“Her ladyship says she will be going to the village of Enol!”
“…”
“The village of Enol!”

The coachman must not have caught it properly, because Handsome raised his voice higher yet.

“Did you hear the news?”

Bron, who had been filling a hole in the wall with a paste of mud, brought it up out of nowhere, as though it had only just occurred to them. Both their faces were a mess of mud, and nobody there cared in the slightest.

“What news?”

Nel answered without much interest and went on with what he was doing. Bron had a long-standing habit of launching into a subject with everything before and after it lopped away.

The same sodden mud caked Nel’s own hands. The cold made him stop and breathe on his fingers every so often, and still he plunged them back into the freezing paste without hesitating. He kept his eyes fixed on the mud half-filling the hole, his face screwed up in a frown; the paste must have been too soft, because whatever he packed in sagged and ran back down again.

“The village of Morta, I mean.”

Bron’s voice dropped lower, more conspiratorial than before.

“Why? Have more people starved to death over there? It won’t be long for our village either. Word is that as of yesterday even the village chief’s storehouse is empty.”

Nel’s face stayed hard set even as he worked at the house. A stopgap like this would never keep the winter wind out. Let it blow the least bit hard and the packed mud would crumble away to nothing. Still, it beat doing nothing, and he could not simply sit there with his hands idle. He had a three-year-old son who never stopped coughing.

The mud went onto the wall in thick daubs. The more he worked, the smaller the gaping hole grew.

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

Bron, who had raised the subject in the first place, thumped Nel on the shoulder, exasperated at how slow he was being.

“The other day Charlie ran into a band of bandits out this way and was as good as dead, and Charlie says someone from Morta came past, took them home, fed them and gave them a bed for the night. Said the houses out there are nothing like they used to be, either.”
“That can’t be.”

Nel thought it could not be, and still he could not take his eyes off Bron. Charlie was not one to lie, or to go about blowing a small thing up into a large one. If Charlie said it, then it was so. Before he knew it he had stopped moving altogether and was giving Bron’s words his whole attention.

The village of Enol, reached after several hours’ drive by carriage from the village of Morta, lay in the same north, and yet the place felt nothing like it. Where Morta had been a shambles from the entrance onward, here the houses stood with nothing fallen in and the roads were tidy.

“Is this place a bit more livable, then?”
“Their circumstances are much the same, but the village chief here is quite capable.”

Dong-hui had muttered it to herself, looking out of the open carriage window, and Handsome answered at once.

“The village chief?”
“Yes. I have heard the chief gathered all the grain harvested up to now into the village storehouse and arranged matters so that everyone could eat one meal a day. That is why nobody in Enol has starved to death yet. On top of that the communal well is kept under strict management, so there is water to drink. Only a little, but there is water.”
“Really?”

That took Dong-hui by surprise. She had vaguely assumed every other village would be another Morta, and this came like a welcome rain.

“I’ll have to meet him.”
“Shall I send for him?”
“No, I’ll go to his house myself.”

She was curious to see what sort of house belonged to a village chief who had held a village together this well under conditions this hard. The materials the houses were built from seemed different from Morta’s, too, and she wanted a look inside one. And if the chief alone was this capable, her hopes ran high for what other talent she might turn up here.

Nel and Bron were the first to recognize the lord’s carriage halted at the village entrance, since their two houses stood nearest to it.

“Isn’t that the lord’s carriage?”

Bron said it blankly, face still plastered with mud. Their feelings toward the lord of Grace were what they were, and the words came out sour of their own accord.

Nel only stared hard at the carriage and gave no answer.

“Hide, quickly. What if she starts in on you again?”

For all Bron’s urging, Nel stood where he was and did not move.

“It’s more than five years ago now. She won’t remember.”

Bron was all nerves; Nel was unruffled. While the two of them were squabbling, the lord climbed down from the carriage and came steadily closer, knights in attendance. She had grown a great deal in five years, and the air about her was different too.

Nel had said it was all right, but he was quietly uneasy himself. Going by the temper he remembered in her, she might well know him again and open with a slap across the face.

The two of them bent deeply at the waist as she came on. Bron bowed far deeper than Nel and was trembling right down to their hands, terrified that a precious friend would be dragged off by the lord.

Please, just walk on past, walk on past.

Bron was muttering it under their breath like an incantation when the hem of a fine navy dress came into view. They willed it on past. The hem did not move from the spot.

“By any chance.”

At the sound of that soft voice, Bron flung themselves flat on the ground.

“Oh dear, my lady! This man is no longer a servant of Grace Castle, he isn’t. It has been five years already since the late lord’s kindness made him a freeman. So I beg you, be kind enough to let Nel go on living here.”
“Nel?”

At the sound of his own name Nel squeezed his eyes shut.

But then…

“Who’s that, then?”

Bron, still flat on the ground, and Nel, who had braced himself and squeezed his eyes shut, both raised their heads without meaning to, bewildered.

The person standing in front of him was without question the lord he had known, thoughtless, selfish, forever wheedling like a spoiled child. Up close, though, her expression and the way she spoke had changed entirely.

And on top of that, she doesn’t remember me?

He knew the lord’s head was nothing remarkable. But that she should not remember him at all was strange.

Was she so young then that she forgot?

He was still fumbling for something to say when a well-turned-out young man at the lord’s side caught his eye and shook his head.

Handsome?

Nel knew him at once and shaped the name with his lips. Handsome gave a slight smile, nodded, and went on in a decorous voice.

“Her ladyship wishes to meet the village chief of Enol. Would you show us the way to the chief’s house?”

Handsome was behaving as though he had never seen him before in his life, and Nel caught on fast.

“I will show you the way.”

The lord, it seemed, neither remembered him nor cared in the least about anything that had happened in the past.

When the man who had been behaving so oddly in front of her set off ahead, Dong-hui turned a puzzled look on Handsome. She had the distinct feeling that everyone here but her had met before. It was awkward to press the point out here, though, so she decided to get the details out of him on the way back. Then she went after the man walking ahead of them, at something close to a run.

Nel, was it?

The instant she called the name to mind, a headache struck her dizzyingly, the same one that had come on the day Chloe Grace’s memories first came invading her head.

— Kzzzzt!

A sound like a radio signal being jammed went off inside her head, and everything in front of her went black. It felt like leaving a television tuned by remote to a channel that would not come in.

“Ah!”

Chloe had been following along perfectly well, and when she suddenly staggered, Red Bear, who was escorting her, started and caught her.

“Are you all right?”
“I just felt dizzy for a moment. I’m fine now.”
“It seems you have overtaxed yourself, my lady. What if you were to turn back for the castle even now? It would not be too late to visit the village of Enol another day.”

Red Bear’s voice was full of worry, but Dong-hui straightened up out of the sway and opened her eyes wide and steady.

“It’s already far too late as it is.”

And she followed after Nel bolt upright, as though she had never swayed at all.

The village chief came running out of his house to make ready to receive the lord before Dong-hui had even arrived. At first he had not believed a word Bron said. That a lord with no interest whatever in this place should suddenly wish to meet him was nonsense.

Enol was a poor settlement without so much as one low-ranking noble living in it, so the villagers were all commoners. Farming could not be done properly in the region either, and the taxes it paid were very small. If anything, it was only because the lord took no interest in the village that they had been able to keep it even in this state; and now here she was, visiting as suddenly as this. The chief was uneasy enough that his hands and feet tensed of their own accord.

“I greet you, my lady.”

As the lord’s party drew near, the chief pressed himself flat to the ground, exactly as Bron had done.

It made Dong-hui uncomfortable to have a grown man older than herself bowing that low in front of her. However much this might be a class society, she was a soul with the blood of the Land of Eastern Courtesy¹ running deep in her bones, a people who lived and died by good manners.

“Get up.”

At Dong-hui’s hurried word the chief got hesitantly to his feet.

Chief or not, there was no sign of better clothes on him, or of more flesh on his bones than anyone else had. If anything, his clothes were older than the villagers’. He was big-boned by birth, which at least made him look bulkier than the rest, and even that could not hide the gaunt bones showing under his loosened sleeves.

Dong-hui’s liking for the chief rose higher and higher.

But.

— Ding!

Along with the brisk alarm tone came the sound of all the favorability she had gone to such trouble to raise plunging straight down.

— Beeep! Beeep! Beeep!

A sharp warning tone rang out over and over, quite unlike the clear alarm sound that came when favorability was piling up.

Ah, dammit.
Minus!

She had braced herself for it, and still it left her hollow to watch the favorability she had worked so hard to build shaved mercilessly away into the minus. Thinking about going through the same process every time another village opened drained the strength out of her before she had even started. The one saving grace was that, having done it once, it did not feel as hopeless as the first time.