Succession Rights.

Succession rights.

“You should talk. In what way do you think your situation is any better than mine?”

“Oh, plenty of ways — but the biggest one, for a start…”

The woman with the pitch-black eyes tapped the back of one hand with the fingertips of the other, and said it as though it were self-evident.

“My backside isn’t wedged in a garden wall.”

“…I’ll grant you that.”

A few days had passed since Aspara had taken up residence at Flower’s mansion. A span that was long if you called it long, short if you called it short.

For Flower, at any rate, it had been an exceedingly long few days.

The most obvious change was that the mansion had come to reek of strange spices. Aspara cooked one meal a day herself, and from who-knew-where she had obtained aromatics that now sat smoldering in the hearth.

He had begged her any number of times to please leave that sort of thing to the servants, but she had answered, “We’ll be eating like this from now on, so the servants had best be trained up early.” From now on. From now on, this smell, at every single meal, in his own house…

When he had heard those words Flower had broken out in a cold sweat. All the same, once the contract was sealed, he was not about to let this woman go on running wild like this. Or so he told himself.

Just hold out till the new moon… just hold out till the new moon, and we’ll see.

To let a returned bride carry on in such a manner — the state of his mansion was one thing, but it was nothing short of an affront to his pride.

There were two other things he could tolerate even less than the smell.

The first was that the two women of the mansion had taken up horseback riding. Though he warned them any number of times that if a woman rode, her womb would drop right out, they would not listen. What was more, Aspara could not be made to keep her legs together and ride sidesaddle; instead she straddled the horse with her legs spread wide, and the sight of her skirt flipping up over her knees was mortifying beyond bearing.

On top of that, she had now dragged his own lover Sebinya into that unseemly hobby with her. And somehow, the two of them were strangely good at it. Seeing Sebinya, already a better rider than he was himself, his pride was— no, no, worried about the muscle that would form on his beautiful lover’s thighs, Flower was beside himself.

The second thing he could not tolerate was the attendant Aspara had brought with her.

He had distinctly been told that the fellow was thrown out on the first day, yet somehow, who knew when he had crept back in, one of the northern servants was wandering around the premises. No, truly, he did not know when the man had got in. By the time he noticed, the fellow was simply there.

When he had asked Aspara when on earth she had let that barbarian back inside, she too had only said, “Who? Oh, you startled me! Since when has he been here?”

And on top of everything, the iron-barred section of the rear garden railing had been bent out of shape, kicked in by some horse’s hind hoof, no doubt. In short, for a good while now, not a single little thing had been going right.

No, no — I’m getting all my bad luck out of the way. From here on, nothing but good things will happen.

Flower managed, somehow, to comfort himself.

And was today not, after all, the first proper day off he had had in ever so long?

Because of that woman, I haven’t set foot in a society gathering once of late.

Sipping at his sparkling wine, Flower mused.

Today was the first society gathering he had attended since entering into the contract with Aspara.

By rights I should have been hosting a banquet of my own at my mansion right about now.

He could hardly invite people into his own home. If by some chance they caught sight of his woman riding astride a horse in that unsightly way, it would be gossip-fodder in society circles for ten, no, twenty years to come.

And yet taking himself out instead had been no simple matter either, what with his own household in such an uproar and plans to be laid for after the contract with Aspara was finalized.

For these reasons, today’s society gathering, scraped out of a packed schedule, was an exceedingly precious opportunity to rest.

Flower buried his nose in his own shoulder and sniffed at himself, wondering whether the spice smell that filled the mansion had clung to him.

Damn it all, my nose has grown so accustomed to that smell I can’t tell anymore whether I reek of it or not.

“It has been a very long while, Lord Flower.”

“My goodness! Thank you for the invitation today, Chairman Mauve.”

Flower started violently and jerked his face up out of his shoulder.

“I trust all has been well with you?”

Well. Well, there had been plenty of not-well. Where to even begin. The grilled frog that had turned up at breakfast? The barefoot barbarian roaming the premises? Sebinya’s strange new habit of talking back?

Several hundred “not-wells” flashed through Flower’s head. Keeping the smile on his face, he answered.

“Ha ha, well — what could possibly be the matter? And you yourself, Chairman Mauve — how have you been of late?”

“These days, well… ah, I’ve been running around here and there on account of the futures [TL: 선물, financial forwards — a contract to buy or sell at a preset price on a future date]. I’ve already bought up about a hundred coppers’ worth of other people’s rights, as I recall.”

“Futures?”

Flower’s ears pricked up at a piece of news he had never heard before. Clearly, while he had been absent, some new trend had come around.

“When you say futures…”

“The ones that have been going around recently, you know. Ah…”

The man’s expression turned, in an instant, into one of near mockery as he went on.

“You must have been very busy.”

“Ha ha ha.”

Damn it, he’s mocking me openly.

Flower barely managed to compose his expression, and took a sip of his drink to hide the twitching at the corners of his mouth.

“The sale-forwards on the purple dye, I mean.”

“Purple dye?”

“Yes — they’re going around at almost eight-tenths of the market price, aren’t they? Well, the buyers have started trading the rights among themselves, so if you were to purchase now it would run you closer to nine-tenths of market, but — still, it’s a remarkable price. The purple dye is a commodity one hardly ever sees in the market to begin with, is it not.”

The purple dye… was what?

As he listened to Mauve’s explanation, Flower’s face paled.

“Everyone… everyone bought sale-forwards?”

“Not everyone, but a considerable number.”

“Is it trustworthy? Are we certain? A northern lot putting purple dye into circulation, and no one thought that strange?”

At Flower’s discourteous tone, the other man frowned.

“The head of the house is a northerner, yes, but it is a trustworthy merchant house. You know — that pig of a baron’s paramour, it was — what was her name.”

He snapped his fingers, trying to bring the name to mind.

“Her — the name I can never remember because it’s such a strange one, but the surname was definitely Hipoto Monstro Ses— Cupedalio, I believe.”

“Monstro! Ah, the idiot of a man who burned to death visiting his northern mistress’s house!”

“That’s right, that’s the one! Ha ha. That mistress of his, it turns out, has got a shrewder head on her shoulders than one might have thought. She’s running the merchant house the baron used to operate in his stead.”

Mauve caught his breath between sips of his sparkling wine.

“Still — however hard she works at it, a mistress is a mistress, is she not? She must have found herself in urgent need of cash. That’s the only way to explain why she’s suddenly putting sale-certificates on so precious a commodity into circulation so freely.”

Mauve and his friend then went on to prattle about how “that woman’s son was taken off somewhere as a hostage,” “no, no — the boy’s name is Hostage, the rumor got started from that; what really happened is he was sent abroad to study,” and other such pointless gossip.

Sale-forwards on the purple dye have started circulating on the market at a discount…

A sale-forward was a contract promising to sell at nine coppers at a future date, regardless of what the market price happened to be at that time.

Which meant that certificates of that kind had suddenly begun circulating — in other words—

“—which is to say that a great number of people now have reason to want the price to fall.”

“I don’t quite follow, I’m afraid…”

Flower’s mansion parlor. Jack, who had at long last returned to the mansion, sat wearily crunching away at a biscuit.

“These biscuits smell strange.”

“A future, you see, is the right to buy or sell something at a future date — a right that can itself be sold.”

“I see…”

“The market price of the dye is about ten coppers right now. The price hardly fluctuates at all, so the projected future price is about the same.”

“Right.”

“Now then — what we sold was the right to sell a handful of dye for ten coppers at a future date. Whether a handful of dye is worth five coppers or twenty coppers a year from now, we’re contractually obliged to buy it and sell it for ten. Following me so far?”

“I think so…”

“But we sold that certificate of rights for eight coppers. Even if the price of dye is still ten coppers a year from now, the holder of such a certificate still comes out two coppers ahead. And conversely, if the price falls, the holder profits by however much it falls. No matter how low the purchase price goes, the holder of the certificate is guaranteed to sell it at ten coppers. For instance — if a handful of dye is seven coppers a year from now, the person holding a futures certificate can buy the dye at seven and sell it for ten.”

“Uh… but if you can buy it for seven in the market, who on earth is going to pay ten?”

“Whoever bought the purchase-forward certificate on the futures. Whatever the market price at that point in time, they’ve promised to pay the price agreed on a year earlier.”

In this particular case, however, things were a little unusual. All of the purchase-forward certificates had been acquired by a single party: the hostage family’s merchant house.

The arrangement had come about as the price for granting them sole distribution rights, should the commercial production of frostbloom-herb dye eventually be realized.

“It’s a hefty sum, but if we circulate our own dye in small enough amounts that no one catches on, we can adjust the market price just enough for Volmo’s mother’s merchant house to weather it…”

Jack cast his mind back to the letter he had sent to Volmo’s mother just before leaving the castle. A hastily-written letter with no evidence to back its contents. But Volmo’s mother was, as one would expect of the proprietor of a merchant house, a woman possessed of both nerve and instinct.