Gift.

The little rat had darted away and disappeared in an instant.

Gus looked at the bright-red-faced knight with a kind of pity. Was he really that hungry.

“Ugah!”

Like a mother cat carrying her kittens, Gus reached out and hoisted the short knight by the scruff of his neck with one hand, dangling him in the air.

“—… ——!”

“Your stance is wrong.”

Gus set Jack back on his feet and pressed his head firmly down into position.

“—? — ——?”

Jack, flustered, started babbling wildly in the southern tongue. Gus clamped a firm hand on the knight’s shoulders to fix his floundering, childlike posture, and then his large hand came down to cover Jack’s eyes.

“Use your ears.”

As if the meaning had gotten through, Jack, who had struggled for a moment, soon went still.

Only once he shut his mouth did silence finally fill the snowfield.

The gentle sound of wind brushing against dry branches drifted in, and from the distant castle came the faint smell of smoke.

Mingled into the smoke was the sharp, menthol-like scent of frostbloom herb; mingled into the sound of the wind was a small, pattering tat-tat-tat.

“…!”

The footsteps of a creature smaller than a fist and lighter than a nut.

A silk-furred rat.

Jack sucked in a sharp breath, about to cry out. Gus quickly pressed a hand over his mouth to silence him, and in exchange lifted the hand that had been covering his eyes.

But even that single sharp inhale was enough to frighten the rat off into the distance.

“You don’t even know the basics of hunting?”

Once he had confirmed the rat was gone for good, Gus turned a withering look on the failed hunter.

“Hah.”

Gus was slightly surprised. Jack was smiling.

Not an indignant face, not even an annoyed one, just the face of someone quietly excited, catching his breath.

“— —!”

“What.”

The knight was still stubbornly refusing to speak in the northern tongue.

So you don’t want to talk to me, is that it. The castle lord frowned faintly and repositioned Jack a little more roughly than before.

“Again.”

Ignoring the sandwich being crushed in his pocket, he began teaching the idiot knight how to wait for prey.

What am I doing with my precious break time…

In the silence, Gus thought to himself.

[10.]

“This is the closest I’ve ever come to actually pulling something off.”

Jack was thrilled.

He had spent more than an hour out in the cold in despair. A little longer and he probably would have cried. Actually, he already had, a bit, earlier.

“Thank you.”

After a few more rounds of Gus’s intensive coaching, Jack finally managed to catch a silk-furred rat with his bare hands.

About eighty percent of it had been Gus’s doing, though.

“This one’s a bit small. Must be the runt of the litter.”

A small, warm little pulse thrummed thump, thump against his palm.

It was the sensation of a life.

“Here, feel it.”

“— —?”

With no regard for refusal, and yet carefully, Jack pressed the silk-furred rat into that enormous hand. Cupped in a palm the size of a cauldron lid, the rat looked even smaller than before.

“— –…”

“Did you know? If you do this, rats fall asleep.”

Once, Ugli had turned a silk-furred rat belly-up in his hand and gently stroked its pink tummy, and sure enough, the squirming creature had dropped off to sleep in no time at all.

“Hoh.”

“You try.”

Jack pushed the sleeping rat toward Gus, magnanimous as a benefactor.

“— —?”

Chattering on in the southern tongue as ever, the knight shoved the baby rat toward him, and the castle lord stared back with an expression of sheer disbelief.

“It’d be a bit shameless of me to give this as my gift, wouldn’t it. Ah, don’t eat it.”

Jack grinned and thumped the castle lord on the back a few times, then clenched his hand shut when his palm started to sting.

“My lord, I heard you were looking for my lady’s knight.”

Someone came calling on Gus as he was changing out of his outer layers back in his room.

It was Ugli.

That fellow had an uncanny sense for Jack’s whereabouts at all times. Someone must have seen the castle lord wandering around in search of Jack and passed word along to him.

“I met him just now.”

“Did you see to your business with him?”

Ah.

Gus flinched.

He had completely forgotten about it.

“…I did what I had to do.”

“My lord, I understand that you don’t care for the fellow, but he has his cute moments, you know. He’s earned himself a bit of credit this time as well, so go easy on him, won’t you.”

Worried that Gus had been hunting Jack down to scold him over something, Ugli spoke in a fretful voice.

“Cute, he says. That little rat of a man.”

Just then, from somewhere, a faint squeaking sound drifted up.

It was coming from the vicinity of Gus’s rear end.

“What is that? A rat?”

“Hm…”

Both pairs of eyes fixed on the pocket of Gus’s trousers.

A small silk-furred rat, just waking up, was peeking its head out.

“The season’s changing — must’ve snuck in for the warmth. Hand him over, I’ll toss him out. Wouldn’t do for him to get into the food stores.”

“…I’ll handle it myself.”

“No, no — I’m headed to the incinerator anyway to check for any frostbloom residue, so…”

“I’ll handle it myself.”

With a mild flare of temper, Gus sent Ugli away.

“My apologies. I spoke out of turn.”

As the office door clicked shut, Gus and the silk-furred rat were left alone together in the room. The little rat, evidently at ease for the first time in its life, nestled in a warm pocket, had drifted back to sleep.

Slowly, Gus moved his hand and curled his fingers around the rat’s neck. It was absurd, really, that this tiny creature, which could be crushed to death with the smallest squeeze of two fingers, was sleeping so soundly in front of a predator.

He’s just too dumb to know any better.

Somehow, that foolish little sight struck him as slightly endearing.

“There’s an awful lot of this.”

Aspara was rifling through her luggage trunks.

For a collection of things she had packed when moving to a distant country, it was a modest amount; but there was so much miscellaneous clutter that finding anything was no easy task.

Now that she was going through it, there were heaps of garments and socks and hats, and knives too thin to be of any use.

“Why on earth is his stuff in here.”

She began laying the contents out on the floor one piece at a time.

Jack’s romance novel, somehow wedged in with the rest,

matches,

spare paper and chalk,

a ring,

a knife for suicide,

acorns,

a quill pen,

a folio of documents,

a personal seal and wax…

“Found it.”

At last, it had turned up. The materials for the festival gift she was going to give Gus.

Aspara’s gift preparations were proceeding smoothly.

Half-unpacked trunks lay sprawled in piles about the corners of Aspara’s room.

Most of the baggage she had brought on her journey up here had gone unsorted and been left to languish ever since. Aspara’s room was, for all intents and purposes, a walled-off refuge no one ever walked into without permission.

The only sound in the room was the faint scratching of a pen nib against paper.

Until the wooden door was flung violently open with a bang.

“Ah, ah-ahh— My Lady, light the fire, would you, please…! Your most loyal servant is going to freeze to death.”

“What’s happened to Star?”

“No, I mean me, really! I thought I was going to die out there all by myself and leave you behind, my lady — it was truly terrifying. I didn’t even notice while I was outside, but as I was running down the corridor the wind cooled my body right through…”

Forgetting even the usual formalities, Jack barged in and went scurrying over to the stove, trembling violently. His lips were pale and tinged with purple.

The sleeves and front of his coat were soaked through and clinging wetly to his body; until the adrenaline of his first successful hunt had died down, Jack had not even registered the cold.

The survival instinct that had finally kicked in, belatedly, had driven him all the way to his mistress’s room, warmer than his own bedroom.

“You should have taken a bath first.”

“There’s no hot water at the moment. They put out the fire for a bit to check something in the incinerator.”

Jack threw another log into the stove in the middle of the room and puffed out a breath to coax the flame. A bright crimson blaze leapt up with a whoosh and then settled back down.

“Haah, I might just live through this…”

“I found a lot of clothes I don’t wear in my trunks. Take some and change into them.”

“How could I possibly wear your clothes, my lady!”

An assortment of dresses and pleated skirts, pulled out while she was ransacking her trunks, covered the space beside Aspara’s desk. The spare chairs were buried under a riot of small floral patterns in every shade.

“You might not match me in height, but our builds are about the same, aren’t they.”

“But I’m a cool-tone, you know.”

“And what on earth is that supposed to mean.”

Even as he said it, Jack made his way over to the desk and started rummaging through the clothes, looking for at least a coat or something that might suit him. As he craned over to peer at the pile on the right side of the desk, his backside knocked against the tip of the quill pen.

“Don’t touch it. I’m preparing the tribute offering at the moment.”

“‘Tribute offering’ — how cold you are. Just call it a gift.”

“I told you, don’t touch it.”

“If you give him this, does that really mean you’re handing over your succession rights to the barbarian king? Does that mean he can be king of the south?”

“That would be a stretch. Still, there are times when the principle matters more than the substance.”

The festival gift Aspara was preparing for the castle lord was, in fact, a sworn pledge: an ostentatious document bestowing upon her husband a considerable portion of Aspara’s royal prerogatives in the southern kingdom, including immunity and even succession rights.

Of course, no scrap of paper she drafted on her own like this would ever be recognized by the land of her birth; but it had at least enough weight to serve someday as formal grounds for something.

For instance… if I’m killed first, I’ll have to make sure Jack flees to the south.

Aspara finished each sentence in her neat, even hand as she thought.

That would be justification enough that he wouldn’t be summarily executed as a traitor who’d served a foreign lord.

“I really don’t know about this. Do we need to go this far.”

“What I’m offering up isn’t a simple piece of paper. It’s a promise that I will never, ever go back to my homeland.”

Aspara gathered up small chips of colored wax onto an iron ladle and set it atop the hot stove.

“It’s always safer to flip onto your back and expose your belly first, before anyone catches you without a backer.”

The wax slumped softly on the ladle and melted into a grape-colored liquid.