#49

The duchess stared at Griselda, who was clinging close to her side, with terrified eyes.

“One… naive ancestor of mine prayed to the devil for happiness, and went mad. Deeply mad… In madness, wandering alone through forests and fields, laughing madly, mistook the son who came looking for prey and shot dozens of arrows, killing him. Then drowned himself in a pond. They say his face was… full of smiles when pulled out.”

The duchess whispered to Griselda without removing her hand from her bruised blue lips.

“Someone who prayed for victory returned paralyzed and spent until called by God bedridden… Living excessively long, enduring nearly fifty years of hardship. Think that’s all? Another ancestor who prayed for wealth and prosperity… discovered treasure on the site where his entire family perished in an unexplained fire.”

“……”

“Ah, aah…. And what of me, who wished for nothing but a son…? As you’ve already seen, have I not given birth to a devil’s spawn?”

“……”

“I want to live, Griselda. I’m afraid. I’m terrified out of my mind. My husband, that butcher who seemed he wouldn’t singe a hair even falling into hell’s fire in life, terrifies me so, and I’m going mad wanting to live so desperately I could die! What, what should I pray for? No matter what I pray for, it feels I won’t escape this sulfurous pit, I… What am I to do?”

“Your Grace….”

“If I. If I. Pray for what… Even a speck… Less….”

“……”

“…It seems I’ll be unhappy.”

Of course, Griselda could give no answer.

The man did not stop sawing. The duchess could not easily make up her mind. The longer the duchess hesitated, the fainter the blood clouds became. Though Griselda had no way of knowing what that sight meant, it certainly seemed to be pushing the duchess.

There’s no other way after all. I have no other choice. The anxiously trembling duchess finally began to pray to Kretzman. That she needed a son worthy of being called a son. Not the devil he had passed to her, but a son who would grow up human-like with at least a human appearance.

A son she could present to the duke today!

“Kretzman, Kretzman! Will I, have one today? Will it be so? Hm?”

To that dying question, Kretzman answered so nonchalantly. Yes, you have received.

“…Your son grew up human in human form, Duchesne.”

And that was the moment. Blue flames burst forth from inside the coffin.

It was no ordinary fire. It was a translucent blue like rippling ice, and the smoke that bloomed like an inverted waterfall and billowed on the ceiling was black as ink. The arm inside the coffin was burning.

“Support me! Let’s go to the birthing room, now!”

The duchess cried out as if collapsing. At those words, Griselda sprang up and supported the duchess’s limp body. Meanwhile, Kretzman, who had seemed unlikely to ever stop sawing, had paused to watch them.

As she observed his movements, Griselda’s pupils were struck by Kretzman’s change. That expression. Slowly twisting both eyebrows, crumpling the right corner of his mouth, opening his mouth wide as if about to burst into laughter. He looked completely insane. Soundlessly, his face alone was like a calamity.

The aura Griselda had felt as evil entirely enveloped Kretzman’s face.

Griselda turned her head. Goosebumps ran from her nape, and she could no longer stay there. Supporting the duchess, she moved her steps in a daze. So perhaps it was like checking a burst insect that had died unnecessarily. As Griselda threw open the door and took her first step out, she looked back as if swept away.

Black snake-like smoke was crawling down the walls, and Kretzman was submerged in it. The madness visible just before had vanished as if washed away.

A face dead of shock. From Kretzman’s face, which had lost focus in bewilderment, only mumblings similar to before leaked out. Endure… Hold on.

“I… will save you.”

Kretzman spoke to the air. As Griselda pulled two bodies out of the inner chamber, she glimpsed through the barely closing door the man’s futile sawing that had resumed.

Thud!

The sound of the door closing seemed like the sound of a coffin being sealed.

“Even if you see… ‘that’, Griselda….”

The duchess spoke, wheezing.

“You must keep your mouth shut. Please don’t scream either…. Make no sound. Cover your mouth…. You absolutely, absolutely must not be surprised…. If anyone else finds out about this, we both die…. Understand? …Do you understand?”

The duchess continued to implore until the shadows of the vassals stationed near the birthing room came into view. It was surely no mere declaration. Griselda desperately nodded her head.

Isn’t the slender arm wrapped around my shoulder the arm that carelessly killed people? An unstable person. One who can consider nothing but her own safety. Griselda knew the duchess was now a woman who could do anything to survive.

And I don’t know how long we walked.

There were no more thoughts in thirteen-year-old Griselda’s tiny head. Only the upward curving stairs were vaguely endless. By then, sweat of some kind, whether cold or hot, kept trickling down, making her back damp, and her waist felt like it would snap.

The duchess leaning on Griselda walked looking only ahead. She didn’t seem to notice that Griselda, two spans shorter than herself, looked about to collapse at any moment, and though the duchess’s own steps seemed about to buckle, she showed no sign of pausing to rest. The duchess didn’t even seem to care about the eerie specter abandoned underground.

“This is the last time. Never again, absolutely, never again…! I won’t summon it again…. Ah, what should I do? I’m scared…. What will it be this time…. I’m scared! I…. I won’t summon it again…. Never again….”

An already bizarre night that seemed about to go mad. Griselda couldn’t grasp the duchess’s muttering voice or anything she was experiencing.

When she opened the door of the birthing room, pushing away the approaching vassals, she felt as if a prison door was opening. The birthing room she entered as if sneaking in was bright with an eerie blue light, as if the entire room was burning. Was it the duchess who closed the door?

Creeeeak, thud.

The heavy sound that rang out behind her back. And the corpse of the midwife lying inside and the devil standing in the center of the bed were the peak of terror.

The two women standing with their backs to the door could not even move. The bluish light flickering in the birthing room was the color of the flames burning the devil’s shoulders. The devil already appeared to have grown larger than most men by a head, and in the wickedly licking flames, its arms were growing with crunching, grinding sounds.

Would a child in the womb look like that?

The white skeleton broke through the lower skin. From that split interior, muscles and flesh grew in clumps, gradually taking on an arm-like shape, a sight like a glimpse of hell from a nightmare.

Overwhelmed by fear, Griselda felt strength draining from her limbs. The midwife leaning dead against the far wall seemed as if she might suddenly spring up at any moment, and Griselda felt she might die.

Finally, when the devil, its limbs and body now whole, wrapped its whip-like tail around the bedpost then unwound it as it descended from the bed. The world suddenly went dark.

Blackout.

***

“It was a bizarre…. truly bizarre night.”

“……”

“When I came to my senses again, I was in my bedroom. It was my husband who told me that the duchess had given birth to healthy twins, a boy and a girl, after long labor. It was a full three days later when I heard the news that the midwife assisting the duchess’s birth had slipped and died from a cracked forehead. My husband said I seemed to have fainted at the sight.”

“……”

“I believed that story. What else could I do? It was a far more plausible story than what I had seen and experienced myself. Ah, I must have had a long nightmare…. I….”

Griselda lowered her eyes.

“…That’s what I thought.”

The clamor of the banquet that had been raucous deep into the night was gradually subsiding. Griselda’s bedroom where the story ended was dark as if it had never seen daylight.

Only a thin candle bent, casting two shadows on the black wall. One was Griselda’s, sitting in a chair, and the other was Winfrid’s, sitting on the edge of the bed facing her.

“So….”

Winfrid opened his mouth.

“What’s the point of this nonsense?”

He did not smile. He did not get angry or flustered. Only blue veins stood out on the back of his hand gripping the wooden box. Griselda clasped her finely trembling hands together. The briefly twisted silence seemed to cut into the flesh.

“…I told you to accept the ring, did I say I wanted to hear some ghost story in the middle of the night? What does it matter anyway?”

Winfrid asked irritably. The implausible experience Griselda had recounted didn’t even register, and he was only concerned with the missing causality.

“Not going to answer?”

He set the ring down on the table somewhat nervously. At the metallic clank, Griselda visibly startled. Winfrid heaved a deep sigh as if for her to hear.

No doubt this excessive anxiety was the cause of her delusions. Thinking to listen quietly to see what the story was about, what? What happened and how? Underground specter? Living devil?

…Devil?

His temples throbbed anew. He could smell the alcohol on his own breath stinging his nostrils. The smell of alcohol he had drunk heavily just before coming to find Griselda.

In fact, what business did a clergyman have with alcohol, but he had his reasons for drinking. First was the nature of the banquet. No, that is, the second son of the monarch couldn’t abstain from alcohol at a celebration of victory, could he?

The knights returning in order before the end of the war each reported that human blood filled the moats and mountains of burnt corpses covered the western plains.

Some even boastfully added that there had never been a war with so many casualties in such a short period of just over a year in all of history. Of course, most of those were Valdemar’s enemy troops.

An overwhelming victory. Compared to the difficult battles of the past, it was a truly flawless victory.

Johannes had played a big part in this. Yes, the knight who was said to have charged out dozens of times in a single battle, utterly shattering the enemy’s defensive lines, was Winfrid’s elder brother. And in fact, that was the true reason for the drinking.

Winfrid was secretly filled with a chilling exhilaration as he overheard the aides clicking their tongues at his elder brother’s recent excessively aggressive, or rather reckless, actions.

From what he heard, the squire who replaced his brother’s shattered spear after each charge eventually fell ill from exhaustion, so in the end several more servants had to be attached to assist his brother.

The warhorses his brother changed exceeded ten, and the wagons carrying his brother’s spears numbered as many as twenty. Though there may be some exaggeration, still, how much must he have stirred things up.

The frequent tales of his brother’s valor, touching like an empty glass to a wine bottle, were mostly scenes Winfrid found difficult to imagine. Winfrid saw only a kind of blind obsession in the black ink. Something like the thrashing just before giving up.

Fire running precariously, unable to die or live. Ah, yes. It’s fire.

Fire.