Gift.

Aspara pressed the wax down firmly with the seal of House Bel, the one she had dug out from the very bottom of her luggage, and fixed it onto the parchment.

“That should do it.”

“Hmm.”

“Don’t worry too much about not catching the rat. Who could catch a tiny thing like that with their bare hands?”

Ah, right. I went out to catch a rat. As Jack shook his hair out to dry it, the memory struck him all at once.

After putting on such a show of going out, he had come back empty-handed, and then, on top of that, handed the rat over to a barbarian who for all he knew might roast or boil the things to eat them. Thinking about it now, the fact that he had accepted help from that barbarian, and even been pleased about it, stung his pride a little.

When he had the time, Jack decided, he was going to try again. Next time, he’d catch one under his own power.

“Well, I did catch one, technically…”

“How?”

“Under duress. Ah, this one’s fine. Can I wear it until my clothes dry?”

“Go ahead.”

Aspara was absorbed in reviewing the document’s format and didn’t ask anything further.

“Star, who are you going out to play with on the holiday?”

“Hm?”

Three maids were playing cards in an empty room. Though called an empty room, it was in practice a cozy little space used as the staff lounge.

The roughly three-pyeong room was packed tight with a card table, a thick straw mat, and a coat rack beside the small window.

“I was thinking of going to the square with one of the older girls.”

“I’ve got someone to spend it with.”

“Traitor!”

Star jutted out her lips at her fellow maid and put on an exaggerated show of fuming. The other maid, who had been watching the card game from the side, cut in.

“I’m thinking of asking My Lady’s knight — see if he’s up for it.”

“Jack?”

“Yeah. I think he’s cute.”

The reputation of My Lady’s escort knight as an arrogant, impudent sort was well known both inside the castle and out, but the maids around Star’s age didn’t view his cold attitude all that badly.

The young man, with his fine body hair and slender build rarely seen in these parts, was actually something of a favorite among the younger girls.

Star, who worked closer to Jack than anyone, considered him a scrawny runt who wasn’t much of a man at all.

“No, still, Jack’s no good. Did you hear the rumor?”

“I know he fought an electric fan and lost. He’s got a pretty face and that’s about it.”

“No, not that — a different rumor.”

“He fought an electric fan and lost?”

“Yeah. Anyway, the rumor I heard goes something like…”

The two maids listened with interest.

“He’s having an affair.”

What?

“If this is just another one of those ridiculous slanders going around, I won’t forgive you — not even you, Sis!”

Star shouted aggressively.

Aspara, the first real piece of gossip to appear in quiet Fang Castle and a lady who couldn’t understand what the servants were saying, was naturally trailed by all manner of sensationalist nonsense. Star, who as Aspara’s personal attendant held My Lady in especially high regard, was thoroughly sick of it.

Some of it was simply nonsense or ghost-story-level speculation, but as rumors go, the malicious ones always spread the widest.

“No, it’s not about My Lady. I wouldn’t say something like that right in front of you.”

“So you’d say it behind my back, then?!”

“No, that’s not — it’s, well, the castle lord!”

The two maids jerked up in surprise.

“What about the castle lord?”

“I heard a rumor that the castle lord and that pretty-faced knight have been spending an awful lot of time together.”

What kind of bullshit is that.

Star thought it inside her head. Or, apparently, she’d let it slip out loud without meaning to; the maid who’d delivered the rumor was stammering and waving her hands.

“No, look, I’m just passing along what I heard, okay? I mean — doesn’t it make sense, though? He and My Lady haven’t even been talking properly for a whole month now…”

“If that’s not talking behind My Lady’s back, then what is?! Who did you hear it from?! I’ll go swap their tongue and eyeballs around for them!”

“Now that you mention it, I saw something earlier too.”

The third maid, who had been silent until now, spoke up.

“Out in the back garden, the castle lord was holding the knight. Like this — from behind, hands on his shoulders…”

“Right, and they say the one who tattled to the castle lord about the kitchen dog hole was actually that fellow too. Trying to score points, is what it is.”

Star seemed to have calmed down a bit compared to before, but she still couldn’t quite get her huffing under control, and she planted her hands on her hips.

“So the two of them went gay, then?”

“Well, the knight does look kind of girly.”

“Long eyelashes and all.”

Only because the youngest maid was huffing so fiercely did the others hold back; no one in that room was prepared to take Gus to task over it on moral grounds.

A ruler who had clawed his way up from the very bottom and seized the throne with sword and fire. To everyone at Fang Castle, he was an object of both awe and wariness.

But for Star, it was different.

To Star, Gus was not simply the absolute power holding the north on the flat of his blade. Not to her, not when she’d grown up thinking of him as a friendly uncle and as one of her dad’s subordinates.

To Gus, who seemed to have been born dropping out of a boulder without so much as a blood relative, Star was something like his only younger sister.

“Sticking ‘*I don’t really know either, but,*’ onto the front of something doesn’t stop it from being a rumor, you know? And why is it always the knight getting trash-talked?”

“Weren’t you the one who didn’t like that boy?”

“Yeah, because! Jack’s the lowlier lackey, isn’t he?! When there’s a weird rumor going around about a powerful man and a lackey, you trash-talk the powerful one first!”

With every word she pounded the table, bang, bang, bang, until the deck of cards piled at the center collapsed in a landslide.

“This girl’s just making a fuss because she’s losing the game, isn’t she?”

“I am not!”

“What are we talking about?”

The maids’ eyes turned to the lounge door, which at some point had swung open.

Standing there was the castle lord’s closest confidant, Ugli.

The maids, who had been trading rumors, jerked their heads around in surprise at the unexpected visitor.

“Oh my, what brings you here?”

“Came by to hold a little blessing ritual, why?”

Ugli rapped playfully on the “Staff Lounge” sign with his knuckles and grinned.

“So, what are we talking about?”

“Just…”

“Absolute nonsense! About My Lady’s knight!”

Star slammed the table and shouted. Ugli, of all people, would surely know that the castle lord and Jack got along like a disaster.

“If it’s about him fighting a wall and losing, that one’s not a rumor, it’s a fact.”

“No, not that — a different one.”

“…Strictly speaking, the second incident with the slug on the flagpole wasn’t really Jack’s fault.”

“What is he doing with his life.”

“No, not that — one of the seniors was saying…”

“No, I wasn’t the one saying it, I’m just telling you what I heard!”

The three maids chattered over one another in voices like a flock of field sparrows.

Taking in the heated chatter and piecing the situation together, Ugli narrowed his eyes like a fox and laughed.

“Hahaha!”

“Ridiculous, right?”

“Well, I can see why that kind of rumor started. The castle lord does get a little sentimental when it comes to things in that direction. He talks more comfortably with that fellow than he does with My Lady — but that’s just because he’s a bit of a country bumpkin about these things.”

“Ah, I’m so relieved Master Ugli isn’t the type to believe those kinds of rumors. I was worried he might get hurt, you know.”

“Hm?”

Ugli answered the relieved-sighing Star in a puzzled tone.

“Like I’d lose my trust in the castle lord over some silly rumor.”

“No, not the castle lord.”

Tidying the card table, which had at some point become a complete mess, Star spoke lightly.

“You’re fond of him, aren’t you? My Lady’s knight?”

For a brief instant, the always-easygoing face of Ugli faltered. Only the corner of his mouth stayed curled up, out of habit.

“Hm. I didn’t realize I gave off the impression of someone who’d play romance games on the job.”

“Star, you wouldn’t know — Master Ugli really doesn’t like southerners.”

When one of the maids cut in, announcing the fact the way one might announce that the sun rises in the east, Star’s eyes went wide as a startled rabbit’s.

“You don’t like them?”

“I don’t.”

“Jack? Southerners?”

“That’s enough, Star.”

“But…”

At her senior’s intervention she dropped the interrogation and sat back down, but she went on muttering under her breath.

“When you’re next to him you smile for real, though — not the fake smile.”

The castle lord’s private chamber held furnishings that were all austere but ponderous.

The desk required six grown men to lift and carry, and the back of the enormous chair rose higher than a full-grown adult standing upright.

The rug laid across the floor was the hide of a black bear, a beast once known to have leveled two entire villages, caught by Gus himself with only a single hunting dog and one attendant.

In the middle of that dim room sat the castle lord, alone, stroking a hamster.

“I should throw it out somewhere…”

Gus shut the squeaking silk-furred rat inside a cage of his fingers so it couldn’t escape, and thought to himself. As Ugli had said, it would be a problem if the creature got into the storehouse.

“Hmm.”

Still, the fur was so fluffy that handling it felt solid and satisfying. His left hand, which he’d been stroking it with all through his work, had the nutty-warm scent worked into the calluses.

With its guard completely down, the rat had gone flat as a melted rice cake, and he found the sight a little cute.

Now that he looked at it, it seemed to resemble his wife a little, too. How it had five whole fingers, tough little things, for such a tiny hand, for one.

The fact that fingers no bigger than specks of dust nevertheless had even-smaller fingernails gamely attached to them was rather admirable.