The Village Of Morta

All Dong-hui had done was look around out of curiosity. It felt unfair, but there was nothing to be done about it.

“All right.”

Down on the first floor, three or four of the hired staff had gone ahead of her and stood waiting in courteous postures. With a guilty conscience, Dong-hui kept her head up straight and hurried past them, afraid one of them would look at her and notice something off. Chloe’s quickened step must have reassured Delma at last, because a pleased smile spread across her face.

Dong-hui had one foot out the door when it happened.

“My lady!”

A middle-aged man came pelting down the stairs, calling desperately for Chloe. Some urgent business must have been driving him, because he was taking the steps two and three at a time.

The sight of that bone-thin man flailing his way down on those spindly legs made Dong-hui nervous for no reason she could name. Only once he had made it all the way to the bottom did she breathe easy.

She had no idea who he was, and still she felt uncomfortable the moment she laid eyes on him, which suggested he was not somebody Chloe had been fond of.

“Haah, haah. Oh, Lord, I’m dying.”

He really did seem ready to die of it. The instant he arrived he folded over at the waist, a full ninety degrees, and hauled in one ragged breath after another.

“Are you… all right?”

He looked well on in years, and she wavered over whether she was allowed to talk down to him; he had called her his lady, though, so she decided she probably could.

At the question the man snapped his flushed face up and blinked. The big eyes staring straight at her were the color of a ripe pumpkin.

Somebody asking whether he was all right was hardly a momentous event, and yet he stared at her round-eyed all the same, as though he had just caught wind of some shocking rumor. Dong-hui waited a little longer, until his breathing came easier.

“I heard you were going out— hurgh! Hurgh… to inspect the estate.”
“Mm. Delma said I absolutely had to go out today.”

Hearing Chloe say her name, Delma lifted her round chin a little higher than before. Pride and smugness both showed in it, the look of somebody who had pulled off what nobody else could.

“But why are you leaving me behind?”

The man asked it with a wounded, reproachful look. Being scolded for something she had not even done dragged Dong-hui’s mood down another notch.

“Am I supposed to take you along?”
“How could you say such a thing…”

Dong-hui had genuinely only asked because she wanted to know; the man’s face turned genuinely hurt. She hesitated a moment over what she was supposed to do, then turned to Delma with a plea for help in her eyes.

Delma let out a deep sigh, took in the man on the verge of tears, and spoke in her sweetest, most coaxing voice.

“Butler, her ladyship only said that because it has not been long since you were down with a cold and she was afraid you might still be unwell. Isn’t that so, my lady?”

Delma asked, beaming.

“Of course. Naturally! The butler is far too important a man to be falling ill, isn’t he. Hahaha!”

This was the first Dong-hui had heard that the man was the butler, but she brightened and laughed it off. Her own wooden acting brought the goosebumps out on the soles of her feet.

She could feel her face stiffening unnaturally, and the smile she managed came out awkward. Nobody was going to be fooled by acting this clumsy.

That was when it happened.

— Ding!

A heart the size of a bean popped up over the old butler’s white head and was gone in an instant.

One word of concern with no sincerity behind it had raised the favorability a whole ten points. Thrilled, Dong-hui arranged her face into something even more worried than before and turned to the butler.

“Are you feeling any better now? You still don’t look well — shouldn’t you be resting a while longer?”

Please, go up more, go up.

Even as she spoke, Dong-hui kept stealing glances above the butler’s head, hoping against hope.

“I have rested quite enough. I will be going out with you today.”

— Ding!

No way!

The favorability had dropped a full twenty, all at once. Now that she looked, the butler’s face was full of suspicion. Words with no sincerity behind them had backfired on her instead.

Twenty points she had bled for, gone in front of her eyes. Dong-hui’s stomach turned.

Dong-hui had gotten her hopes right up at the words ‘the lord’s carriage.’ The shabby old thing waiting in front of her left her without a word to say, and she stood there a long while with her mouth open.

She had not expected the gorgeous pumpkin coach Cinderella rode in, but she had assumed a noble’s carriage would at least be worth looking at. That it might be this decrepit had never once crossed her mind. Happily, it only looked old; nothing about it seemed actually broken.

As Dong-hui came up to the carriage, one of the knights standing nearby hurried to open the door and held out a hand. Being escorted anywhere was a first in her life and it felt a little awkward, but she took the offered hand as though it were nothing and climbed the steps.

Inside, the carriage turned out to be roomier and snugger than its outside promised. Thick cushions covered the seats, so at least her backside would survive the trip.

Once Dong-hui was in, the butler climbed up after her. The moment he had settled across from her, he pulled a sheaf of documents out of the worn leather bag under his arm and started in on his briefing.

“The place you will be visiting today is the village of Morta.”
“Morta?”
“I know you dislike the place, but Morta is my lady’s estate as well. There are estate residents there who must be looked after.”

He said it almost as a plea.

“Mm. All right.”
“Pardon?”

Chloe had agreed, just like that, and the butler’s eyes went wide, as though he had heard something he was never meant to hear. It told her something fresh about what sort of lord Chloe Grace must have been. There was going to be a great deal of work to do.

Apparently a lifetime supply of work follows you wherever you go.

Ten mounted knights of the Grace estate rode with them, ringing Dong-hui’s carriage front and back. It left her strangely off-kilter, as though she had turned into somebody important.

Seen through the carriage window for the first time, the manor house turned out to be a castle, and far bigger than she had pictured. Built solid out of hard stone, it stood a good five stories even at a glance. Moss clung to the walls and withered creeping vines hung off them, and the whole thing looked as gloomy and dismal as Count Dracula’s castle from a movie she had seen long ago.

The carriage left the main keep and clattered on without a pause toward the high castle wall. Dong-hui could not take her eyes off the window; she studied everything they passed without a moment’s rest, like a tourist come to see an old castle.

Her delight in the sightseeing lasted right up until the view outside began, little by little, to drag her expression down.

“Are you feeling unwell?”
“Why are all these houses falling apart?”

Scarcely one house inside the walls was still sound. People moved about and worked in plain view of her, and still, everywhere she looked, doors hung off their hinges and thatched straw roofs had been stripped bare. The ground had nothing growing on it either, so the dust flew up in clouds every time the carriage passed.

The workers bent at the waist in greeting as their lord’s carriage went by, and not one of them, she could feel, was glad to see it. The eyes that followed it had an edge to them.

This is insane!

The estate residents had done nothing but lay eyes on the lord’s carriage, and the favorability had dropped a full 460.

Dong-hui squeezed her eyes shut and let her back thump against the seat. Even behind closed lids the sound of the favorability sliding kept chiming away, ding, ding, without a break. At this rate she might genuinely be better off never leaving the house again.

The chiming, which had gone on and on, stopped the instant they crossed the drawbridge. Purely because there was nobody left to look at the carriage.

Once the noise only she could hear had died down, Dong-hui gathered up her tattered nerves and called the status window to mind. She had to know how far the favorability had fallen.

It had been shaved down so violently that not breaking through minus two hundred thousand counted as a mercy.

What in the world kind of life did you live, Chloe Grace?

Dazed, Dong-hui called the name of Chloe, the body’s original owner. She was giving herself over to the jolting of the carriage, every scrap of will broken, when a blue status window came bobbing up in front of her eyes.

The favorability had collapsed so fast that she had assumed the Hidden Points from earlier had gone with it. Apparently not. Dong-hui nodded slightly, if only to take her mind off things.

She glanced across. The butler, who had been poring over his documents so diligently, was dozing now with his head tipped back and his mouth hanging open.

— Frrrrrrip!

The chart flung itself wide open from top to bottom, so long that she had to tilt her head right back to take it in. The entries at the very top hung too far away to read at all.

Out of habit, Dong-hui put a finger to the screen and swiped straight down from the top. The chart slid smoothly along in the direction her finger moved.

“So it’s a touchscreen.”

Nothing at all registered against her fingertips, and still the thing slid this way and that, which she found remarkable. It felt a little like handling a new model of phone.

“Is there anything I can buy with this?”

Dong-hui pushed the list up and down, rummaging through it, and realized that only a tiny fraction of the entries were legible at all. Anything priced at sixty-one points or more showed her the price and nothing else; the abilities themselves were blurred out past reading.

The status window blinked, and new lettering appeared.