A Vault Room

Dong-hui had barely finished speaking before the carriage slowed.

“My lady, is there anywhere you are feeling unwell?”

Handsome asked, a worried look on his face, once the carriage had come to a stop. Even to his eye, the young lord’s schedule of late had been a fairly murderous one.

He was a grown man himself and his whole body ached and throbbed with it, while the lord was nothing but a delicate girl who had never known a day’s hardship in her life. What was more, barely a year separated her from the younger sister who sat at home craning her neck for her brother to come, and that was part of why Handsome kept seeing his sister laid over the lord.

“No, I just want to walk and get a look at the ground.”

For all the roughness under her eyes, the lord’s answer came back firm and steady. She knew exactly what had to be done, and the eyes searching the world outside shone quick and alert.

The distance between that girlish face and that seasoned gaze made him forget the lord’s age now and then.

This was one of those times.

“Yes, my lady.”

Handsome wiped the worry off his face and set about at once finding what he ought to be doing. With the carriage stopped, Red Bear, who had been escorting it from close by, came over to open the door and hand the lord down.

Dong-hui stepped down and strode off into ground thick with dry weeds. She did not know the first thing about farming, but even to her eye the dust flying up off it in clouds said there was no goodness in that soil. A sigh came out of her all on its own.

“What’s being done with the Dural stems?”

The information she had paid a whole five hundred points for said that dried Dural leaves fermented together with Moh moss made good fertilizer. At the time it had struck her as absurdly flimsy stuff for the points she had handed over, and yet those were precisely the choice pieces, the ones she could take and put to use straight away.

“There has been no time to deal with the stems yet, so they are still lying in the field as they were.”

Handsome stole sidelong glances at the lord’s face, braced for a scolding over the Dural stems he had not yet cleared away. Happily there was no anger in her face and no irritation either. If anything she looked relieved.

“Is that so? Then don’t throw them out — bring them here.”
“The Dural stems?”

Handsome’s eyes went round at the unexpected order.

“Mm. The leaves are the important part, so be careful they don’t come off.”

He wondered what she meant to do with a part nobody could even eat, but it was her ladyship’s order, so he nodded without a word of complaint.

Somewhere along the way the lord of Grace had become, for Handsome, someone young in years but well worth trusting and following.

“Yes, my lady.”
“I need Moh moss as well. Is there no way to get it?”
“I shall have the village women go out and gather it.”
“It isn’t anywhere dangerous, is it?”

She was worried they might have to go into the Black Forest. She had still not managed to hire any mercenaries, so there was no protection left to call on.

“It is not. Moh moss can be had easily enough near the village.”
“That’s a relief. When they bring the moss in, see that they’re paid well for it by weight. Ask the treasurer what a fair price would be. And bring the Moh moss they gather here as well.”
“Yes, my lady!”

Handsome had a great many questions, but he held them all in and answered loyally. Strangely enough, everything her ladyship said seemed to be right, so he could not go asking questions lightly.

The young man standing before her was a pleasure just to look at, pretty in everything he did, pretty in everything he said, and Dong-hui was thoroughly satisfied. She was wearing a pleased little smile when the blue status window came bobbing up before her eyes. It still turned up without warning, but it no longer startled her the way it had the first time.

Dong-hui read diligently through the letters the status window had put up for her. Her chocolate-colored eyes, brimming with anticipation, shone and glittered.

The estate residents’ favorability had risen by a whole seventy thousand points and more.

No wonder the favorability had been going up so fast.

Dong-hui looked at the favorability, its figure now visibly climbed by a whole digit, and felt a swell of pride. On top of that her Ability and her Traits had gone up by about as much as the sleep in a chick’s eye, and a strange sort of compliment had been added to the Traits field.

It’s plainly a compliment, so why don’t I feel good about it?

After that Dong-hui went round and round the area of the estate until the sun went down, and never once saw ground that looked fit to be used as farmland any time soon. She had given the order to bring the Dural leaves and the Moh moss out to this place with its wide stretch of barren ground, but she could not make herself believe it would improve. How much two plants and no more could change land that was as good as dead was anybody’s guess.

Still, the information the status window gave her had never once handed her a hopeless result, so Dong-hui resolved to go boldly ahead this time as well.

Handsome and Red Bear knew the lord was searching for farmland, and they went over the area around them with eyes every bit as sharp as hers. But however hard they looked, no land suitable for farming showed itself. Well, of course. Land that had not existed up to now was hardly going to drop out of the sky just because somebody went looking for it.

The pair of them felt they knew what was troubling the lord’s heart, and every time their eyes met they let out a deep sigh.

By the time the carriage carrying Dong-hui crossed the drawbridge of Grace Castle, the sun was already sinking low. She watched the world outside with a tired gaze, and one by one the houses inside the castle walls came into view. The weather had turned cold, and fires were being lit here and there. The houses had not been repaired yet, so not one of them had a fireplace, and to get out of the cold people crowded into the houses that did have one, or into the village hall.

Kondal, wasn’t it?

Dong-hui called up the name of the village inside the walls that she had heard from Anna. Work to put the villages of Morta and Enol in order had begun, and yet the place nearest of all to Grace Castle was the one she had never seen to. Between the Dural harvest and the grain she had bought, nobody was starving to death for the moment, but these people too would need work that could bring in an income.

Once she was down from the carriage Dong-hui went straight into the study and called Scrooge and Handsome in. The finances and the schedule had both swollen all at once and left her too busy to draw breath, so she looked worn to a rag, but her face at least was brimming with life.

“We’ll have to put Kondal in order.”
“Yes, my lady. Shall I call Builder in?”
“Shall we begin with the village cleanup? And shall we go about taking on the workers the way we did in the village of Morta?”

Dong-hui had done no more than mention it in passing, and having done it once already the two of them fell into perfect step.

“Yes. I’d like you to take charge of the village of Kondal, Scrooge. Morta has settled down well enough by now, so there shouldn’t be a problem, should there?”
“Yes, my lady. But it will be rather much for me alone — may I take on more people?”
“Of course. Take on as many as you need and put them to work.”
“Thank you, my lady.”

Scrooge’s face brightened at the lord’s hearty permission.

“Oh — you said the room next to mine was empty, didn’t you?”
“Yes, my lady. It is the room we give over as a bedchamber when an honored guest comes.”
“And an honored guest would be?”
“Master Ray, for one.”

The moment Ray’s name was out the lord’s face crumpled up, and a startled Scrooge hurriedly switched to a different name.

“Or Viscount Patrasche.”

The lord’s face crumpled far worse than before.

Scrooge found himself somehow delighted by the lord’s distaste for the pair of them, and his shoulders bobbed with it. As treasurer of Grace Castle, the man who hated those two most of anyone was Scrooge himself.

A good thing bears hearing a second time, didn’t they say?

“Master Ray and Viscount Patrasche were the ones who mostly stayed there. My lady gave it over to them — in person! — as the finest room in all of Grace Castle.”
“That’s enough of those cursed names!”
“Right you are!”

Dong-hui waved a hand at him, and Scrooge answered and broke into a beaming grin in the same breath. Her eyes met his, and she smoothed the irritable furrow out from between her brows and let out a snort of a laugh.

“It’s not a guest room any more. I’m going to do a bit of remodeling.”
“What’s a remoddle?”
“Remodeling. I mean I’m going to put the guest room to a different use.”
“To what… sort of use.”

Scrooge could not for the life of him work out what the lord meant to do with that room.

“A vault room.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Just what I said — I’m going to make a vault room. Is there a blacksmith in Kondal, by any chance?”

Scrooge and Handsome looked at each other as if by prior arrangement and put on awkward smiles. Watching the two of them flounder without managing an answer, Dong-hui asked in exasperation.

“What? Is there none? Do we have to bring one in from somewhere else, like the tailor?”

At the second round of questions Scrooge scratched his head and answered.

“There is one. Of a sort.”

The answer was an odd one.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The smithy has fallen to pieces, and it has been more than three years since Smith did any work. The calluses will likely have gone from his hands altogether by now.”

A castle where the blacksmith does no work.

Weapons were not the only things that had to be made of iron. Farm tools, and every small implement of daily life besides, would all have to come through the smithy. That it had sat idle for three whole years sounded like nothing so much as saying that farming, and every other part of ordinary life along with it, had been put on pause.

“Haah.”

The sigh came out of Dong-hui all on its own.

“Smith hasn’t gone off somewhere else?”
“No, my lady. His wife is ill, so a long journey would be more than they could manage. If there is any comfort in it, the food situation has been better of late, and I hear Smith’s wife has taken a slight turn for the better.”

That much, at least, was a relief. The more she heard about how things stood in the villages, the angrier she got, and the guilt was very nearly enough to shrivel her whole body up.

“Bring Smith to me. I’ll put him in charge of building the vault room. And the keys to the vault room will be held by nobody but me and you, as treasurer.”

“My lady…”

Scrooge hardly knew which thing he ought to be moved by first: whether to rejoice at the change in a lord who had given up the fool’s business of gladly surrendering the best room to that Ray fellow and that thief Patrasche, the two thorns in his side, or to rejoice at being told that she trusted him enough to put the vault key in his keeping, or simply to rejoice that Smith could at last do work worthy of a blacksmith.

It rather looked as though today called for a toast.