Letter

Outside the carriage, Gus and Ugli rode side by side.

He had left the seat beside her empty so that his small wife, who despised him, could ride as comfortably as possible.

That was half an excuse. In truth, Gus wanted time alone to settle his troubled heart. But Ugli, his attendant and longtime comrade-in-arms, had trailed after him like a duckling.

Because he knew full well that if you left this master of his alone for too long, the man would start digging his own grave.

Gus thought about the baron.

He had resolved not to press his wife for details, but when he considered that she had been in the same room as that lecher while he was away, the rage boiled up.

If, by good fortune, the fire hadn’t broken out…

The veins stood out thick on the hand gripping the reins.

“Are you alright, my lord?”

“I am fine. However…”

He had broken his promise to accompany her, left her alone at her very first social engagement, one she had looked forward to so much, and let something terrible happen to her. He could not even begin to guess how much she must resent him.

Since coming to the north, Aspara’s life seemed to have been nothing but hardship.

“She is such a delicate soul. That childlike woman… I cannot imagine how frightened she must have been.”

She’s older than you, my lord — as I recall.

Ugli swallowed the retort and answered slowly.

“My lady is not as fragile as you think, my lord. She held her own quite well against the baron.”

“…Is that so.”

A master who grew this clumsy whenever a sword could not solve the problem. And yet Ugli respected him deeply.

That was precisely why he had hoped Aspara would come to truly know the castle lord. If she only did that, he was certain she could love him, or at the very least endure the life here.

And so Ugli had been nudging the two of them together in his own way.

But Jack had a point too. From now on, I’ll take a step back and just watch.

While Ugli was making that resolution, Gus, unusually, initiated small talk first.

“Tell me, are you and your sweetheart getting along well?”

“Oh, yes. Nothing much to report, really. We haven’t done anything since that kiss, actually…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“Uh, it wasn’t even that passionate a kiss.”

“…I see.”

Gus answered after a brief silence. His expression looked shaken, and Ugli fidgeted under his gaze for no good reason.

So you still haven’t kissed my lady, have you, my lord…

The road back to the castle was drowned in silence, filled with nothing but the clop, clop of hooves.

In the days that followed, the castle was busier than it had ever been. But not in a bad way.

The baron’s wife turned out to be far more capable than anyone had expected. Thanks to her smooth handling of the affair, the fire incident passed quietly, and the truth of what happened became yet another secret between Jack and Aspara.

The real busyness came from the baron’s wife’s commissions.

Having liquidated her dead husband’s assets in the blink of an eye, she established the north’s first trading company under her own name and brought in all manner of work.

Even Star, the maid responsible for the castle’s miscellaneous duties, had been a little busier than usual lately.

“I thought being the personal maid to a fine southern lady would mean doing her hair up pretty and attending to her amusements.”

That was what she had heard southern noblewomen typically occupied themselves with. Star was disappointed.

The tasks my lady actually assigned were things like brewing tea again and again, each pot stronger than the last, or hauling stacks of documents.

Whenever Star tried to make small talk, the escort knight who served as my lady’s interpreter flatly refused to translate anything beyond their usual repetitive work-related exchanges.

“He’s definitely making sure nobody else gets close to my lady. That pretty-faced little sneak.”

Star grumbled as she stepped out into the corridor to fetch hot water.

When she turned the first corner, the girl collided with something large and solid.

“Oh.”

As Star bounced off and was about to hit the floor, something firm caught her arm.

“Thank you— oh.”

She looked up to find the towering castle lord. Standing with his back to the sun, his sheer presence seemed to blot out every ray of light in her field of vision.

He released her arm hastily and straightened himself with a stern composure.

“My wife’s maid.”

“Y-yes.”

The young maid flinched hard under the gaze looking down at her.

Gus, King of Barbarians. Like many in the castle, Star both respected and was a little afraid of him.

A voice as low as a northern ravine scraped along the corridor, lower even than usual.

“…I have come to ask you something.”

[A crescent moon perched upon a shoulder.]

Strange sentences had been finding their way to Ugli lately.

Sentences.

There had been an unusual number of them in his life recently.

This was because he had taken over the translation work that was supposed to be Jack’s job.

Jack, whose command of the northern tongue was barely at a toddler’s level yet who had somehow ended up handling all of the castle’s interpreting, had a ghostwriter. And that ghostwriter was Ugli.

It was supposedly because of the secret “alliance” between the two of them, but am I not getting the raw end of this deal?

Ugli leaned against the desk in Jack’s bedroom and thought.

“I’m really sorry. Tell me if there’s anything I can do to help. Want a calf massage? I’m pretty good at those, actually. I grew up with three older sisters.”

“I fail to see what having three sisters has to do with your massage skills.”

“Younger siblings just end up good at that sort of thing. I can tell what your family situation is, by the way. Only child, right?”

Thanks to Jack’s audacious con, the rumor that “Lady Aspara seems to dislike the north” was gaining more traction by the day.

Since he, the designated interpreter, was stonewalling every bit of casual conversation directed at my lady or at himself, this was only natural.

Ugli flopped his head down onto the lap of the person who was sort-of his lover and glared at the stack of papers.

“You know, lately there have been strange sentences mixed in here and there.”

“Hm?”

“For example, this one that Star supposedly requested… and this one sent over by the stablehand, and this one too. Look — there’s something awkward wedged in the middle.”

Ugli opened a folder and showed him several notes.

[A single strand of it fell.]

[Sixty-six chests of gold.]

[Someone stole it and hid it away in a pocket.]

“Oh, those. I thought they might be some kind of northern idiom.”

“They’re not. I don’t know — maybe they’re coded messages? No matter how I look at them, they’re not the sort of sentences anyone would request for routine work.”

“Hmm…”

The two of them thought hard. But no matter how intently they stared, the words inked on the paper would not decode themselves.

“How about asking the servants who submitted them directly?”

“With my skills, how! You could, maybe.”

“And now you’re just ordering me around like it’s nothing. Besides, the whole point is that me reading these is a secret.”

Jack, apparently aware that he owed something, pulled a strange face and then flopped forward onto the desk.

Ugli read through the mysterious sentences one more time.

A faint suspicion rose in him, something girlish about the word choices, but the passing thought soon melted away as the calf massage Jack had abruptly started dissolved it into gentle oblivion.

It was, admittedly, a very good massage.

“Come to think of it, Star.”

“Yes?”

“Have you heard anything about chests of gold arriving at the castle?”

“Pardon? Well, I doubt we’d have enough to fill a chest. Where did you hear that?”

The young servant whipped around to look at Ugli in surprise.

He had sidled up to Star while she was clearing fireplace ash in the servants’ lounge, his eyes fixed on the pile of cinders as though the question were nothing worth mentioning.

“What’s got you so startled?”

“Because you’re saying strange things. Gold, in this crumbling old castle?”

“Right? I must have overheard it somewhere. Lately these words just keep popping into my head.”

He said something nonsensical and grinned slyly. Star snorted as if to say what a load of rubbish and clattered the firewood around.

Leaning in a little closer with a playful air, Ugli tried once more.

“You really don’t know?”

“I said I don’t.”

“Well, if you say so.”

“Quit talking nonsense and do your work. Oh, that reminds me — the castle lord said if he sees you with time on your hands, you’re to come by his chambers.”

“The castle lord?”

Whatever could have prompted the castle lord to summon him outside of working hours? Even that sly attendant tensed up a little.

It was because, ever since the fire incident, the castle lord had been riding an emotional seesaw like a pubescent boy.

My lady has found work and gotten healthier. That’s good. But she’s too busy to see me now. That’s bad. That was roughly how his mind worked.

It had already been several days since the castle lord had managed a proper face-to-face meeting with my lady, and he was running a touch sharp.

Knowing all this, Ugli opened the door to Gus’s office with care.

“What is the matter, my lord.”

“Ah, you’ve come.”

There sat his master at his desk, wearing an expression more grave than any Ugli had ever seen.

“I have called you here because I need to entrust you with something. A matter of the utmost importance.”

Ugli gulped.

Has something gone wrong with the trade? Or has a new military campaign come up?

Gus’s gaze was hard. It was a look Ugli hadn’t seen since the height of the unification conquest.

It might be something big enough that even I have to ride out to the front lines for the first time in a while, the attendant thought.