The Records of Dalby
“I’m dead….”
Yury ran a hand over his throat as Edenhurst manor drew steadily closer. His original plan had been simple enough: finish his business in the capital, collect any new work that needed attention, and return to Edenhurst within ten days. Yet here he was, facing the manor again after a full three weeks.
“Who the hell could’ve guessed everything would blow up like that?”
Perhaps people had known Mikhail was away and decided to take advantage. From the dockyard construction disputes to the petty harassment coming out of the imperial palace, urgent matters that Mikhail would normally have handled himself had piled up without end. By the time Yury finished sorting through every last one of them, he was already ten days past the date he was supposed to have returned.
As his carriage approached the manor, Mikhail himself—not even the under-butler—stood waiting in the doorway, arms folded, leaning against the frame. The moment the wheels stopped, Yury tumbled out and planted himself in front of his master.
“Wait! I’m innocent!”
“I know.”
“…What?”
“You thought I wouldn’t look into why you were ten days late? I only heard the broad strokes of what happened in the capital, so get inside. I want the full report.”
Mikhail turned and walked in without another word. Yury, who had fully expected to be seized by the collar and shaken the instant he arrived, ordered the servants to unload the luggage with a sheepish face and hurried after him.
Mikhail sat in the drawing room and listened to Yury’s report. The incidents that had erupted in Sokolov while he was gone were more irritating than truly serious—nothing that had caused catastrophic damage, yet each one had demanded immediate attention on the spot. Mikhail flipped through the documents, confirming Yury’s grasp of the situations and the instructions he had given.
“Good. Those problems are settled for now… but I’ve been wondering since you walked in. What’s that stack of papers sitting next to you? Doesn’t look like it has anything to do with the work.”
“It has everything to do with it. You ordered me to look into this.”
“I did?”
Mikhail’s face made it plain he had no memory of requesting anything that bulked up into a mountain of documents. Yury scooped the entire pile into his arms and dropped it with a heavy thud onto the table in front of him.
“That horse—Dalby, or whatever its name was. This is everything I found on it. There was a ridiculous amount of material. Hiring the copyists alone cost a fortune.”
Mikhail studied the towering stack of paper, then shifted his gaze back to Yury.
“So. Summarize.”
“What?”
“You must have read through it at least once on the way here. Anything unusual about this horse called Dalby?”
He had read it, yes, but having the entire effort of the journey compressed into a single question left Yury feeling oddly deflated. Still, this was the job.
“Honestly, the records were impressive. Count Lauderdale bought the horse for a small fortune after it was injured and forced into retirement. Being a stallion, it had high value as a stud. But the Count barely put it to breeding at all—mostly just rode it himself. The standout trait was how ridiculously intelligent it was. It kept every other horse in the same stable under control; if one of them started acting up, Dalby would walk over and calm it down. Trainers and riders both wrote that life was easy while Dalby was around.”
“And? Anything else?”
“Well… reading the anecdotes, it almost sounds like a person. When a horse chewed through all its tack and the trainer went looking for the culprit, Dalby would grab the trainer’s coat in its teeth and drag him straight to the guilty horse. It was also secretly a coward—if a person or animal got hurt and started bleeding, it wouldn’t come near. And it was picky about the freshness of its feed; if the fodder was even slightly off, it refused to touch it again.”
“…….”
The more Yury spoke, the stranger Mikhail found it. Catherine had been right—the horse had clearly been exceptionally clever. And yet that same horse had thrown its master?
Mikhail recalled the forest where he had first seen Anastasia when he arrived at this place. It was called a forest, but it had originally been a hunting ground. Riding accidents happened, of course, yet the hunting grounds attached to noble estates were usually maintained across generations to eliminate genuine hazards. For a horse that intelligent to throw the Count in a place like that, and for the Count to have the misfortune of cracking his skull on a broad rock lying on the ground…
I should go take a look myself.
He could hardly ask the Countess or her two daughters to point out the exact spot where the Count had died.
“Yury. Find me a few of the people who used to work at Edenhurst.”
“Sir? Which people?”
“When the Count died, the stable hands and the hunting-ground keepers were all dismissed for failing to do their jobs properly. Track them down.”
As Mikhail’s expression hardened, Yury’s face grew serious as well.
“…Have you caught onto something?”
“Miss Catherine said something odd. When the horse that threw Count Lauderdale was caught in the forest and brought back, it went wild trying to escape.”
“Maybe it knew it had done wrong? A horse that clever might have understood what death meant.”
“No. When it came back, it actually approached Miss Catherine.”
“Then who was it trying to run from?”
“Edward.”
“The son who died on the battlefield?”
“Yes. She said he came out holding a gun, and that was when the horse tried to flee.”
As a hunting mount that had accompanied the Count through those woods, Dalby would have understood what a gun was. It would have seen animals stop moving after a loud report. It would have smelled blood as well.
“And?”
“Was the horse really afraid of the gun?”
Yury let out an involuntary breath. If the horse had feared something other than the gun…
“Wait. You mean….”
“Yes. I think it may have been afraid of Edward.”
Most of the servants had left Edenhurst; only the Lauderdale women and a handful of loyal retainers remained. Mikhail had no one left to question about the Count’s death. He had considered asking Anastasia, but she did not seem to have been treated kindly by the Count, and he disliked the idea of dredging up old memories for no good reason. Besides, a girl who had lived almost entirely confined was unlikely to know much.
Then a village carpenter arrived to repair the storeroom. Mikhail approached him in the guise of a servant, pressed a decent bottle of vodka into his hands, and steered the conversation toward Edenhurst. The man had been wary at first, but after a few glasses the words began to flow.
“When the Count passed? Don’t even get me started. The village undertaker said he hit the ground so hard the back of his head was completely crushed.”
“He fell onto a rock and his head looked like that?”
“How should I know? He fell off a horse—maybe a hoof caught him. Anyway, he was covered in blood and his face was such a mess they couldn’t even show the body. Just buried him as he was, I heard.”
After that the carpenter had wandered off into useless gossip, so Mikhail had ended the conversation and returned.
“But… what reason would a son have to kill his own father? This house only had one son. There wasn’t even an inheritance dispute hanging over them… and don’t you remember the first time we met the Countess? All through dinner she wouldn’t stop bragging about her dead son. Anyone listening would have thought he was the second coming of an archangel.”
True enough. Catherine, too, had never spoken of her younger brother without praise.
“Looking at the old portrait, he certainly looked angelic… no. Face and temperament don’t always match, do they.”
“Why are you looking at me?”
Yury lacked the courage to say, Because you’re living proof of that. He pressed a hand to his forehead. Work the moment he arrived—again. As he dragged a palm down his face he remembered there was one more piece of business to report.
A short while later, Mikhail was glaring at him across the desk in the study.
“Do you have a problem with me?”
“Of course not. I only did exactly as you ordered.”
Yury avoided the stare and whistled under his breath. His conscience did prick a little. He had bought books indiscriminately—three wooden crates of them.
Mikhail clicked his tongue and began pulling volumes from the nearest box. How many Novgord primers had the man purchased? He flipped through them rapidly, leafing from one to the next, until he found a simplified edition meant for private tutors and set it on the desk.
“I wasn’t sure one or two would be enough, so I stocked up. Something suitable for Miss Anastasia to start with—”
“Unnecessary.”
“What?”
“I said we don’t need them.”
“What do you mean?”
They had become unnecessary. Yury thought for a moment, then nodded as though he understood.
“Learning isn’t easy. Still, I didn’t expect her to give up in less than three weeks—”
“They’re too easy.”
“…What?”
“The books are too easy for Anastasia. She’s already started reading novels.”
“Whaaat?”
Yury found the claim almost impossible to believe. Novgord was a highly inflectional language. The same letter could produce entirely different sounds depending on its position. Compared with the languages of Ils or Flanders, even a single word tended to be longer. It was widely considered one of the hardest scripts to learn from scratch—and she could read novels after only three weeks?
“Does that even make sense? It took me half a year just to learn the letters.”
“Surprisingly slow of you.”
“I’m the normal one!”
Yury leapt to his feet, but Mikhail paid him no attention. He bent over the remaining crates and examined the books still inside. Primers were not the only things Yury had bought; there were stacks of children’s fairy tales as well.
She finished all of these by the fourth day.
Over the past three weeks Anastasia had absorbed everything he taught her at a terrifying speed, like dry cloth drinking water. He never needed to explain anything twice, and the lessons had raced forward. Calling them lessons was almost inaccurate; Mikhail would read something once and Anastasia would commit it to memory wholesale.
According to Natasha, outside of the hours she spent with him Anastasia remained shut in her room until she fell asleep, reading the books she had carried out of the study and peppering Natasha with questions the entire time.
Most of the questions she asks Natasha are simple common-sense things.
Anastasia had begun devouring the study’s shelves without discrimination. The books she loved most were histories filled with maps and travelogues of foreign lands. Anything written about Ils she had carried to her room on the very first day and kept there.
There was, however, one problem.
There are still too many words whose meanings she doesn’t know.
Reading was not the end of it. Whenever a difficult word appeared, Anastasia would frown and struggle, unable to grasp its sense. So Mikhail had brought the massive dictionary from the study and taught her how to look words up. Yet the dictionary Yury had purchased was one of those showpiece volumes—explanations written in needlessly ornate and complicated language. More often than not, looking up a single word forced Anastasia to look up fifty more.
Then, still searching through the crate, Mikhail’s eyes lit up.
“This is….”