1 — The Mansion of Nettles

— Violet sugar, rose sugar, snowflake sugar that goes scrunch, scrunch…….

The sound of a humming melody drew closer. Kasvren shuddered as he felt his body slowly going numb. He struggled with all his might to keep his hands from being pierced by the shattered glass fragments, but in the end his strength drained from his whole body and his knees buckled beneath him. The back of his neck burned, and his throat felt swollen shut, making every breath an ordeal. The thorns of the stinging nettles raked across his bare forearms where his sleeves had been rolled up, inflicting a pain like a small ember burning endlessly upon his skin.

“Snowflake sugar that goes scrunch, scrunch…….”

The song drew nearer. A woman. Her voice was low and delicate. When she spoke, an occasional metallic edge crept into it, but when she sang, she sounded like an entirely different person — soft and high. Like a lark in high spirits, fluttering its wings and chattering without pause.

When she came within arm's reach, Kasvren gasped and looked up. The song, the lark's voice — both were gone, and all that stood facing him was a single pair of black eyes. What should he call those eyes? A bottomless abyss? A long sleep tormented by nightmares?

“……Isolde.”

He tried to steady his clammy, ragged breathing, but it was useless. Kasvren turned his gaze to the syringe she held — to the one Isolde gripped in her hand. Instinctive, immediate terror and revulsion surged over him like a rising tide. And yet, kneeling there exactly as he was, he could not so much as twitch. Even his consciousness seemed to be slipping away.

This can't be happening. He bit the tip of his tongue, struggling to sharpen his blurring mind. He felt red blood trickle down between his lips. He couldn't taste the metallic tang at all — his tongue was paralyzed. But the hot, seeping warmth trailing down his jaw was vividly clear, like peering into the belly of a freshly slaughtered pig.

“You……!”

The moment Kasvren finally managed to part his lips, an agony far beyond anything before it crashed over him. The fact that his throat had swollen so he couldn't even scream only sharpened his senses and made it more tormenting. Hearing his own breath catch with a strangled click, Kasvren screamed without sound. Pain, pain, pain. A pain even God would not know. And the one who had given it to him was this beautiful woman standing before him. A woman who seemed to cast no shadow at all.

Isolde, who had driven the needle in with unerring precision straight toward Kasvren's heart, smoothed the hem of her dress and crouched down in front of him. She caught him as he swayed, embracing his toppling body as if to shield it. Through the ear that could still hear — the ear of a man vomiting breath and droplets of blood together — came the sound of Isolde's whisper.

“Why do you make that face?”

“Khh…… cough! Ngh…….”

Isolde's slender hand stroked Kasvren's hair.

“Isn't this exactly what you wanted? The wicked witch, the murderer, the cursed Isolde Drasken. Here I am, just as you sought me — so why aren't you rejoicing? I don't understand.”

Kasvren collapsed into unconsciousness without hearing the last of her words.

— You are of no further use to this house. You didn't know?

— Go to the monastery. Everything has been arranged.

— You must never go to the monastery. Your godfather means to kill you. Kasvren, snap out of it. Listen to me. I will get you out. We'll cross the sea. It will be safe there.

— Brother, where are you going?

— Where are we going? To buy presents, of course?

— Kasvren, I'm telling you, you're going to die!

“Hnngh……!”

He woke from sleep with a scream. A carriage wheel had plunged into a bog and jolted violently. For a moment he was certain that this time they really were careening off the cliff's edge — but mercifully, that stretch of road lay behind them. He drew back the thin curtain and looked out, and the landscape of the western lands, deep in late spring, spread bright and open before him. Mudpits, swarming midges, filthy weeds sprouting in patches everywhere.

Sunlight filtering through the thin glass lit the man's face. Slightly wavy dark blond hair fell across a smoothly sculpted forehead, and his periwinkle-blue eyes — still clouded with the remnants of his dream — shifted in confusion. Even the gesture of dragging a large palm down his face carried a strange power that transformed misfortune into something sensual. When his prominent brow cast a hollow shadow over his temples, his large eyes gleamed sharply, lending him an intellectual, keen-edged impression.

“Milord, we've arrived.”

Kasvren, who had been about to try sleeping again, snapped his eyes open at the coachman's brusque voice from up front. He looked out once more. It was a bare, empty plain. Either the driver had gone mad in the unseasonable heat, or Kasvren had mislaid his eyes somewhere in the course of crossing all those bogs.

“Arrived? What on earth do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said. Keep going straight ahead, and you'll find the place you're looking for.”

“Then why not drive me in? The road ahead looks better than this one, if anything.”

“I will not go one step further. Not under any circumstances.”

The coachman's answer was so resolute that Kasvren understood at once what he was after. He was just drawing his purse from inside his jacket and extracting two gold coins when the driver slid open the partition window and bared his teeth, stained yellow from steeping in tobacco, growling without the least concession.

"You could offer me ten million and it would change nothing. I will not set foot in there again. So. It's quite simple — you can get down here, or you can ride back where we came from. Those are the only two choices you have."

"What sort of nonsense is this? I can't accept it. If the fare isn't lacking, then why on earth won't you carry a passenger all the way to his destination?"

The coachman offered no further reply and turned his back. Watching him chew savagely on the worn pipe-stem, clack, snap, while counting the clouds, it was abundantly clear that his refusal was no idle threat.

“Dammit all.”

Muttering a low curse, Kasvren lifted the luggage that had been stowed opposite him in both hands and climbed down from the carriage. The coachman made no move to help him, and the moment his feet touched the ground, the soggy mire ruined his shoes beyond recognition. A foul stench he hadn't noticed inside the carriage wafted in from every direction. Suppressing a wave of nausea, he glanced back at the driver — who was already driving his horses off, vanishing into the distance.

“What in the……. Absurd.”

He looked back and forth between the bog-road, scored with the clear tracks of the carriage wheels, and the black forest that had risen before his eyes. He had weathered predicaments far worse than this, but a situation like this one he could never have imagined. How long was the road ahead? Surely there weren't brutish hunters draped in bear pelts roaming about in search of their evening meal?

“……Ha. What will be, will be.”

Casting a cynical glance aside at the thousand thoughts crowding his mind, he began to put one heavy, mud-laden foot in front of the other. The forest, where densely towering trees blocked out the sunlight, lay dark and dim despite the full light of noon. The road, the color of raw reddish flesh, was listlessly silent, as if it had no intention whatsoever of welcoming those who came seeking it.

The Dravenmoor Grand Duchy.

Such was the name of the land on which Kasvren now stood. Its master — rather, its former master, Grand Duke Drasken — was already dead and gone from this world.

It is precisely here that the story begins.