She Threw Me In The Stable?

Delma planted herself in front of the lord, braced for Ray to get back up and come at her again. But time went by, and Ray gave no sign of stirring where he lay sprawled on the floor.

“H-he must be dead.”

Delma stammered it out, staring at Ray, who lay on the floor like a corpse. Every drop of blood had drained out of her frightened face.

“Dead, my foot. He is asleep. Look at that. He is snoring.”

Dong-hui pointed a finger at Ray where he lay.

“Snrrrrk, phoooo!”

Just as Dong-hui said, Ray had not fainted; he had drunk himself into a dead sleep. His face was red and flushed with the drink, and his badly tangled blond hair lay plastered down over it like straw.

“Oh dear, what a fright!”

Only then, it seemed, did relief reach Delma. She smoothed a hand down over her chest and let her breath go, then went on checking the sleeping Ray over and over with the face of a woman who had had ten years taken off her life. A snort of laughter escaped Dong-hui at the sight.

“And this from the one who shoved him aside without mercy.”

“That was only because I feared that man would do my lady harm.”

Delma mumbled her answer, rubbing with one hand at the shoulder she had driven into Ray’s body.

She had rammed him before anybody could so much as lift a finger, and Dong-hui was not the only one it had startled. Handsome, who had been standing guard at the lord’s side, and the knights posted in front of the study stared at her with their mouths open for a good long while.

“Shall we move Master Ray to the guest room?”

Handsome gazed blankly at the fallen Ray for a moment, then asked it carefully, hesitation plain in his voice.

Outside, it was slowly growing dark. The carriage Ray had come in had already gone back and was nowhere to be found, and it hardly seemed likely that her ladyship would give up a Grace carriage for the sake of a former fiancé. The fiancé Ray, it seemed, was already of no account whatever in the lord’s eyes.

“No. The guest room is precious, so that will not do.”

“Then where… Turning him out of doors in this weather could be a serious matter.”

Winter was right at their door. People who had drunk themselves senseless fell asleep out of doors and froze to death often enough, and Delma could not help worrying. She would have been glad to see Ray clear off out of her ladyship’s sight for good, but she did not wish him dead.

“Still, there’s something there yet, for old times’ sake. He ought at least to be put to bed somewhere warm.”

The lord’s eyes stayed cold on her former fiancé, yet the words that left her mouth were unexpectedly kind.

“Mmmmm.”

At the feel of something damp and warm licking over his lips again and again, Ray stretched himself out drowsily.

For all the disgust she had made such a show of, Chloe had accepted him in the end. There was no doubt of it. Nothing else on earth could explain her pouring out so fervent a shower of kisses first thing in the morning.

“Mm, Chloe. Calm down.”

Everything was going exactly as he had intended, and Ray, thoroughly pleased with the world, turned his head and smiled, eyes still shut and puffy and swollen from the night’s drinking. Then the coarse feeling against his cheek snapped them open.

The first thing to meet his eyes was a heap of straw.

Am I still dreaming?

He blinked and blinked, struggling to work out what was going on. That was when it happened.

The warm, slick something he had felt in his sleep swept over his cheek and passed on. Surely not, surely not, he told himself, and turned his head slowly. And three enormous horses’ heads came thrusting in toward his face.

“Aaaaaaaagh!”

Ray flailed his arms about as though in a fit, then scrambled up onto his feet.

“Wh-what is this! Where am I!”

— Neiiigh! Nee-hee-hee-heeeigh!

— Brrrrrrrr!

Startled by Ray’s shout, the horses blew through their lips and set up a loud noise of whinnying.

Only then did he realize that he had been lying all night in a stable, and that what he had taken for Chloe’s lips was in fact a horse’s tongue.

“Oof!”

He scrubbed at his cheek with the palm of his hand and screwed his face up as hard as it would go.

“She threw me in the stable?”

The Chloe he used to know would never have let such a thing happen.

“Has her heart really turned from me forever?”

He could not believe it.

While he stood there stunned and at a loss, the horses drew back a little and then pushed their heads in again. Long, damp tongues began to lick at his face as though it were a stick of sugar cane.

“Aaaargh! Get away!”

Armed mercenaries began to gather at the lord’s castle, one after another. The weapons they carried and the clothes they wore were a hodgepodge, no two alike. Some were armed to the teeth from head to foot, and a fair number looked as though they had not the strength to lift a stick. The castle’s comings and goings had amounted to the household staff and a few merchants and nothing more; now the place was suddenly full of life.

“Is it really certain that the Grace estate is recruiting mercenaries?”

One of the mercenaries who had just stepped into the open ground inside the castle, there only because a friend of his would not let the matter drop, looked around him with an uneasy face and put it to the party he had come with.

“Seeing how many people have gathered, it does not look like an idle rumor.”
“I only wonder whether we shall be worked to the bone and go home without a coin.”
“Have you not heard?”
“Heard what?”
“They say the Grace lord has become a different person these days.”
“For all the good that will do. Young into the bargain, by all accounts.”

Being inside Grace Castle did not sit at all well with him, and he could not help worrying that they would work themselves half to death for nothing and go home again without a single coin.

The one walking beside him gave him a smack on the shoulder while he stood there looking around, sour-faced.

“Have you not heard the rumor about the village of Morta? They say the place has changed completely.”
“Don’t tell me you came all this way on the strength of an idle rumor like that.”
“It is not an idle rumor, I tell you. Not Morta alone — they say Enol has changed completely too!”

The two of them were not the only ones muttering. Groups of three and four stood about here and there, then went milling off in search of anybody who held even a little more information, wanting to know whether they would really be paid a proper day’s wage and whether the rumors going around were true. They had come on hearing that the daily wage was a generous one, but most of them already knew what the Grace estate was, and their faces held no great expectation. They had only gathered on the off chance, since work had dried up entirely these days and there were not many places using mercenaries.

Around that time, Dong-hui was receiving Red Bear’s report.

“My lady, the mercenaries have all gathered.”

Red Bear said it in a voice drawn up tight with discipline. Perhaps because he had been eating well, his face had a better color to it than when she had first seen him, and his voice was full of strength.

I want to feed him meat till he’s had his fill.

She was thinking it only vaguely when it struck her all at once that it would be a fine thing if livestock could be raised on the estate. She had seen the stable, but she had seen no sheds for keeping chickens or cattle or pigs. There might be sheds somewhere she had not looked at, since she had not been all the way around Kondal, but with the long drought and the food shortage that had come of it, anything there had been would already have been eaten and gone.

Should I start by building a chicken farm?
Where would I even get chickens from?
Ah! Couldn’t I bring fertilized eggs from the supermarket and hatch them?

One thought led on to the next. The trouble, though, was that the only activated area inside the supermarket was the frozen dumpling counter and nothing else.

I need to get the activated areas in the supermarket expanded, and fast.
So where should I expand?

Dong-hui had sunk into thought, chewing away at her thumbnail, when she felt Red Bear’s eyes fixed steadily on her and raised her head.

“How many have gathered?”

“A hundred and thirty in all.”

It was a fair number of people, but fewer than the number Dong-hui had meant to recruit in the first place.

“All the same, I was surprised that so many came.”

Red Bear caught the disappointment in the lord’s face and added it in a hurry.

“Did their skill look adequate?”

“There are some among them with a fair name to their credit, but there were also a good many who looked like a rabble.”

Not only the number of people gathered but their skill fell far short of expectation, and Red Bear could not bear to face her ladyship. His own face flushed red, like his name.

“A rabble?”

“Yes. It seems there are estate residents mixed in among them who are not mercenaries at all and have simply gathered looking for work.”

Dong-hui listened quietly to the end of it, nodded, and then gave her order in a light tone, as though it were nothing at all.

“Take them all.”

“I beg your pardon? But there is no question that they are people who have never once swung a sword.”

Red Bear said it with the youths in mind, the ones who had looked so feeble that a tap would have knocked them over.

“They are people who have come looking for work. If in your judgment they are unfit for mercenary work, ask them what they would have and put them onto the work sites. Builder is pulling a long face over being short of hands as it is.”

“Yes. Understood, my lady.”

Red Bear’s deep-set eyes, glistening more than usual now, turned toward Chloe. Feeling both bashful and burdened by it, Dong-hui cleared her throat with a small cough and set off for the open ground where the mercenaries were said to be gathered.

Just as Red Bear had said, the mercenaries were of every sort and description. Some looked threatening at a glance, and some scrawny ones pressed close together in a huddle, overawed by the bearing of the rest. All they carried by way of weapons were paltry sticks.

“The work won’t come round as far as us, will it?”
“I don’t suppose it will.”

Henry said it, thoroughly cowed, with an envious look at the mercenaries who stood so gallantly in the middle of the open ground.

“Well, no. Even I wouldn’t pick us. Haa, what are we to do.”

The news that the Grace lord was hiring mercenaries in a hurry had brought Henry running here in one breathless go. Henry had never learned swordsmanship, but where work with the body was concerned the confidence was there. Beside people who had lived their whole lives as mercenaries, though, a scrawny frame like Henry’s looked feeble past all comparison.

“If we can’t get work even here, there’s no hope.”
“I’m so hungry the world’s spinning in front of my eyes. Even standing up is hard work.”

Henry had walked all the way here with a few friends who had heard the rumor, without a rest by day or by night. With no means to come by carriage and no way of getting hold of a horse, there was nothing for it but to walk and walk again on their own sturdy legs. All they had eaten the whole day long on the way here was a few mouthfuls of water.

They were still unable to hide their unease, doing nothing but reading the faces around them, when the noise of the place fell quiet and a knight in armor and a young lord who had not yet lost the look of a girl came walking out.