The Boy In The Bag

The tailors stood in a row like students lined up to have their homework checked, and Dong-hui looked them over slowly. Their ages ranged widely, from the middle teens to the early twenties. The long journey must have told on them; every last one of them looked plainly worn out. Dark circles ran all the way down to their cheekbones and they looked ready to drop off the moment their heads touched anything, and still none of it hid the worry crowding their eyes.

The eight young tailors watched the young lord standing in front of them without a word, worry on their own faces.

“What is it? Afraid you’ll work yourselves to the bone and never see a coin of it?”

The lord’s blunt question must have stung. Eight round heads dropped at once, as though by prior arrangement.

Dong-hui had no intention of scolding them. Had she been in their place, her own steps on the road here would have dragged under the same worry. They had most likely found work nowhere else, and settled on the Grace estate in the spirit of clutching at straws.

That straw — I’ll turn it into a golden rope for you.

She looked once more over the tailors’ faces, as dry and brittle as dried straw themselves, and then turned to Handsome and spoke.

“You’ll be tired from the long journey, so rest well today and start work tomorrow. If I had my way I’d give you tomorrow as well, but as you know, winter is coming on fast. If you don’t hurry for me, the children will be very cold.”

Spelling out every last detail would convince nobody, so for the moment, she decided, she would simply let them rest. They bowed awkwardly, trying to read the mood, and Dong-hui beamed at them and turned away.

That was when it happened.

“Aaaaaagh!”

The scream came out of nowhere, and every head nearby whipped around toward it.

“What’s happened!”

The knights who had come in with the baggage carts were the first to react. They had made it the whole way without a hitch, and now, at the very last, they were on edge at the thought that something had gone wrong.

“Th-there’s a body in that bag!”
“What?”

The coachman driving the cart loaded with the tailors’ luggage pointed at something, his fingertip shaking violently. Only then did one of the knights spot the small arm poking out between the big bags, and leap up onto the cart in a single stride. All eyes went to the luggage bag, which gaped half open.

The knight swept a hard look over the tailors, picked out a girl staring at the bag with her own face gone as white as the body she thought it held, and flicked a glance at another knight standing nearby. That knight at once forced the girl, shaking from head to foot, down onto her knees, while the knight up on the cart flung the bag wide open.

— Thud!

The old bag had barely been touched before it split open like a ripe watermelon. What spilled out instead of luggage was the body of a small boy who looked about five years old.

No. They had only thought it was a body.

Sprawled across the bag, the child blinked slowly, not properly awake yet. Then he caught sight of the armed knight glaring down at him, let out a great waaah, and burst into tears.

“Waaaaaaaah! Big Siiiiis!”

For all that he was skin and bone, the child had a fine pair of lungs on him. At the sound of his crying, the girl who had been forced to her knees flattened herself to the ground and begged.

“Please, forgive me just this once. I couldn’t bring myself to leave my little brother behind, and I knew it wasn’t allowed, and still… Please, have mercy.”

The girl pressed her two hands together, trembling, like someone who had committed a crime worth dying for.

Dong-hui grasped at once what had happened, and gave her order to the knight standing there blankly.

“Bring the child here.”
“Waaaaaaaaah! I’m sorry! Don’t scold my Big Sis!”

Even in the middle of all this, the first thing the child worried about was his big sister. The knight scooped him up in one hand and stepped down off the cart, and the girl’s crying stopped dead; she looked back and forth between her brother and the knight with frightened eyes.

“You come here too.”

Dong-hui beckoned to the girl, who lay prostrate with her face a mess of tears. She sprang up and went straight over to the knight who held her brother.

The child in the knight’s arms leaned his body across and stretched both arms toward his big sister with all his might. The knight looked over as though asking leave, and Dong-hui nodded. In one movement the child went into the girl’s arms.

He must have been frightened. Face buried in his big sister’s thin shoulder, he wept, his shoulders shaking, and she held him tight and soothed him.

“It’s all right. Big Sis will keep you safe. It’s all right.”

She kept telling him it was all right, in a voice that was anything but, trembling herself like a frightened lamb.

“Is he your brother?”

Dong-hui asked as gently as she could. The two children clung to each other desperately, as though they had nothing left in all the world but one another. Thinking of the pair of them fretting the whole way here not to be found out, she felt her chest ache.

“I am truly sorry. I never meant to deceive you, my lady. I’ll do anything you tell me to do. Please, let my brother live here with me.”

The girl begged from the ground, the tears falling from her in great drops.

“All right.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said all right. So stop shaking.”

The girl could not believe the lord’s reaction, and only nodded, her face vacant. There was no room in her to wonder whether nodding like that was a breach of manners. She clung for dear life to the thread of hope rising madly in her.

“Butler!”
“Yes, my lady.”

Handsome had been watching how things went from nearby, and he answered at once.

“This girl is to— what is your name?”
“…Julia, my lady.”

Dong-hui had broken off in the middle of speaking to Handsome to ask, and the girl answered in a voice thick and choked.

“And your brother?”
“Eugene.”
“That’s a pretty name.”

Dong-hui smiled gently and stroked the thin back of the child, who was stuck fast to his big sister like a barnacle. He was soaked through with sweat and urine from hiding inside the bag, and a salt smell came off him in little wafts.

“Butler, give Julia and Eugene a room of their own so they can stay together, and have the child washed and put into clean clothes. He’ll fall ill at this rate.”
“Yes! Understood.”

Handsome’s heart had ached at the sight of the two children, and he answered in a loud voice, as glad as if it were his own affair.

“Th-then, you’ll let us…”
“Live here while you work. With your brother.”
“Hu-hu-huuuk— thank you, my lady. Thank you so much!”

Julia sobbed, her shoulders shaking, unable even to wipe away the tears running down her face.

Half believing and half not, the tailors followed the handsome butler. They were shown to the rooms the household staff had used in the old days. Ten rooms had been put in order beforehand, against the twenty or so who had been expected, so there was no shortage.

The clean, spacious rooms delighted them. Two beds stood to the left and right of an arched window, and there was a chest of drawers as well, for each of them to put their things away in. The furniture was not new, but it had been cleaned up nicely and looked as though it would give no trouble in use.

Two to a room was the arrangement, and the tailors went hurrying in with whoever they had grown friendly with on the road. The tailor who looked the oldest among them had a room to themselves, and Julia and Eugene, by Dong-hui’s kindness, were allowed to stay in one room together.

“Wow! Can I really sleep here?”

Eugene could not seem to believe the situation, and was asking the same question for the tenth time. Julia, without the least trace of impatience, gave him a bright smile and nodded for the tenth time.

“Yes! You don’t have to hide any more! We get to live here.”

She could not believe the sudden good fortune herself, and had lost count of how many times she had pinched her own cheek. But every time her cheek stung, and there in front of her was her brother, washed clean and tidy, beaming all over his face in his new clothes.

“I love these clothes too. They’re all soft when you touch them.”

Dong-hui had given Eugene a few sets of the clothes left over from the handout to the estate’s children. They were the first prettily colored clothes he had ever worn, and he had not known what to do with himself. At first he walked with his legs splayed wide like a crab, afraid of wearing the cloth out, and set everyone who saw him laughing.

“Big Sis, are you crying?”

Eugene had been gazing steadily at his big sister, and now he came closer, eyes startled, and looked into Julia’s face. She turned her head away quickly and wiped the tears off with the back of her hand.

“No. I’m not crying.”

Julia answered with a broad smile, and hot tears came running down her cheeks all the same.

“Big Sis, don’t cry. Please?”

Eugene had been laughing so brightly with happiness only a moment before, and now he filled up in no time, the tears brimming in his big eyes.

“Mm. I’m not crying. I won’t cry.”

Julia was learning for the first time that a person could cry from too much happiness as well.

She was uncommonly good with her hands. But she was only fifteen, she was an orphan, and she had a small brother to look after, and every one of those had been a great obstacle to her finding work.

Eugene was well behaved for a five-year-old, but he had grown up without ever getting enough of his mother’s milk, and perhaps that was why his body was so very weak. When his fever shot up out of nowhere he would sometimes go into convulsions, and more times than she could count she had dropped her work, hoisted her brother onto her back and run for the physician. Employers who overlooked it at first made their displeasure plain once the same thing happened again and again, and time after time Julia was turned out without receiving even half the wages she had earned.

The hiring notice she found after two straight days without food made her eyes fly open. Nowhere did it say that family could be brought along, but Grace was far too distant a place to leave her brother behind for. There was nobody she could trust him to, and taking him to an orphanage was a thing she would rather die than do.

So she sold the one winter coat she owned and bought a big, worn traveling bag, some hardtack, and a waterskin. She punched holes in the bag as well, in case her brother could not breathe in there.

Every time the baggage cart stopped along the way she climbed up onto it in secret, took her brother out and looked him over. Fewer people paid them any mind than she had expected, so later on he came out of the bag altogether and hid among the luggage. Then, as Grace Castle drew near, he had got back into the bag.

To Julia, everything she had been through on the way here felt as distant as a dream. Above all, she was so happy that her brother would no longer be treated like a piece of baggage, and could stay somewhere safe and warm.

But the happiness of the two of them was only just beginning.