The Mark You Leave Behind

"Doesn't it feel like we've grown a bit distant lately?"

Bang—

The moment Lucas finished speaking, his bullet tore through the air and struck one of the birds in flight. And then Rafael — just before the falling bird hit the ground — displayed the artistry of shooting that same carcass with another bang—

"We attend all the same etiquette classes, so I really shouldn't be surprised."

His follow-up was thoroughly sullen, the words themselves notwithstanding. What he'd just done, after all, had been little more than a petty display of wounded pride.

Watching him, Lucas let out a low laugh.

It was endlessly amusing to see a man who had once regarded everything as easy and obvious, and therefore boring, reduced to the state of a sulking child. At the same time, he found himself genuinely curious what it was about Enya Campbell that had done this to his friend.

She was certainly cut from a different cloth than the average noble young lady, but…

I still don't get it.

The crimson flush she'd shown in front of someone she liked might be a little endearing, but it wasn't exactly a virtue unique to her. From what he'd observed up close, the woman was, in the end, nothing remarkable.

So perhaps the reason Rafael was making such a fuss wasn't because it was her — but because, for the first time in his life, he'd found something that wasn't easy.

Maybe my provocation actually landed, Lucas thought, raising his gun at a bird that had just come into view. He rested the stock against his shoulder, closed one eye, narrowed his field of vision, and took aim.

Yet even with the bird dead in his sights, he never pulled the trigger.

He waited for Rafael to shoot the bird he was targeting first. He wanted to confirm just how much competitive fire his friend still had in him. And sure enough, before long, a bang— rang out and the bird in his crosshairs vanished from view.

The corner of Lucas's mouth curved into a fine, satisfied arc.

"Haha. You're right — I can't compete with you."

"You were thinking about something else. You struck a pose and never actually fired."

"Caught me?"

"Did you even intend to hide it? Normally you'd shoot everything you possibly could. The fact that you were lounging around at all was strange from the start. If you're going to lose, at least lose properly."

At Rafael's irritated words, Lucas turned his gaze toward the game the servants had collected and laid out.

Lose properly, he says…

It was true. Where their kills had once been more or less evenly matched, today the difference was glaring. His attention had been wholly consumed with observing Rafael.

His friend's powers of observation and insight were as sharp as ever.

And Lucas disliked that, just a little. He wanted to watch his friend waver far more than this — wanted to see him break down to the point of losing all reason.

It was a malicious wish, but he had never felt any particular need to mend his own twisted nature.

Meanwhile, one of the servants clearing away the dead game came over carrying a bird pierced by two bullets.

"Um… what should we do with this one, my lord…?"

His expression said he had no idea where the thing was supposed to go.

"Put it with the Young Lord Whitmore's."

Rafael gave the order without a moment's hesitation. And Lucas, aiming at the bird that had been placed among his own game, drove one more bullet into it. The servant froze solid at his outrageousness, and Rafael arched a single eyebrow.

The acrid smell of gunpowder lingered in the air.

Lowering his gun, Lucas met the blue eyes of the friend staring at him and said, "If it's sitting on my side, I'd rather it be unquestionably mine."

"I'm well aware of how childish I was acting just now."

With a hollow laugh, Rafael admitted that shooting the bird Lucas had hit had been an utterly juvenile thing to do.

"Is it, though? If you want something, isn't it only natural to work for it? When ownership is ambiguous, leaving a mark everyone can see is simply the wise thing to do."

"Unnecessary."

"No — necessary. No matter which side of the field that bird lands on, Raphael, if your mark on it is bigger than mine, people won't accept it as wholly mine. Some of them will probably decide you were simply being generous and let me have it."

It was a loaded remark.

All the more so because the two of them had lately been waging a subtle war of nerves over none other than 'Enya Campbell.'

Rafael's gaze fell on the dead bird. Thanks to the final bullet Lucas had fired, its head was half destroyed.

Those blue eyes, fixed on that infamous 'mark,' narrowed to slits.

"…You shot it first. So it was yours from the beginning. That's all there is to it."

At his belated reply, Lucas shook his head with a smiling.

"No, Raphael. The moment you shot first — the moment you allowed my bullet into it — my claim to it became ambiguous."

"……"

"Order doesn't matter."

Whoever found it first, in the end, the one who leaves more marks is the one who gets to keep it.

At that added remark, Rafael's brow finally crumpled in a most satisfying way. Then, quite suddenly, he felt a violent impulse — to pump that so-called mark into the head-smashed carcass of the bird until there was nothing left of it.

As if he'd been aiming at someone through that bird all along.

The best thing about entering the Academy had been that she no longer had to return to the mansion where her father and stepmother lived.

The Campbell estate — its lands nibbled away and sold off piece by piece to cover debts long ago — now sat on the outskirts of the capital. And yet Enya, despite having a home she could reach within the hour, chose to remain in the dormitories, weekends included.

Count Campbell hadn't raised any real objection to that choice. He'd merely told her to make meaningful connections at the Academy, and nothing more.

But ever since Duchess Pembroke's tea party, he seemed to have resolved, in earnest, to push his daughter's marriage forward.

He pointed out that barely a year of her Academy life remained, and pressed upon her, again and again, that she must secure a proper fiancé before graduation.

Then came the absurd demand that she come down to the estate every weekend for 'bride lessons.'

He knew perfectly well that his current wife was despised in high society without even the courtesy of pretense — and still he intended to place Enya in her hands, all to make his daughter a slightly more marketable commodity.

As if, when poverty deepens, coquetry and a pretty face matter more than modesty and grace.

Enya stared at the stack of letters from her father with weary eyes.

…Tiresome.

Count Campbell had bankrupted more than a dozen ventures in his time, and still had never let go of his hunger for business. Which was to say, the man could be remarkably tenacious when he set his mind to something.

The letters that had piled up in so short a time proved it.

Enya knew that same tenacity was now being brought to bear on the question of her marriage. And truth be told, that too was about business. The more dearly Enya sold, the more capital flowed into his ventures.

And she had not the slightest intention of being sold off to fund her father's enterprises. That resolve had hardened in her when she was very young.

Right up until her death, her mother had urged it upon her.

Live freely.

"Enya, I want you to be free. The women of Darkel believe marriage is happiness itself, but reality isn't so kind, is it?"

"Then am I not supposed to marry?"

"No — I'm saying you may do anything. If you do marry someone, it must be the result of your own choice, never something forced on you. Don't compromise with reality, Enya. Compromise doesn't bring happiness. It never has."

"That sounds hard…"

"It isn't hard. It might be the easiest thing there is, truly. Simply become someone who freely chooses what she wants in every moment — and who can shoulder even the regrets that come with the result."

As a very small child she hadn't fully understood those words, and a little later she'd dismissed them as sentimental nonsense.

Then, by the time she came of age, she had made up her mind to live that way — even if the words still felt difficult.

But she couldn't go on ignoring the letters from her father forever.

He'll probably arrange a meeting in advance, the way he did with the Duchess's tea party.

And if he did, there would be no outlandishly rude way to dodge it. Enya furrowed her brow and agonized over the problem. Was there some method — one that stayed within the bounds of propriety — that would make the other party retreat first?

Until she left for Eberdeen after graduation, she would have to keep playing the role of at least a docile, and moreover an unlucky, young lady.

The answer to days of deliberation arrived from an unexpected quarter.

It came the moment she showed her father's letter to Lucas Whitmore — a man infamous as a rake.

Seeing the hand that held out the letter, Enya couldn't hide her mortification.

While sorting through the correspondence from her father, a single sheet must have slipped in between the pages of a book. Lucas had picked up the letter where it had fallen by the entrance of the Old Building's piano room and now handed it back to her.

"I wasn't planning on reading it."

"…You certainly didn't seem to have any trouble reading it outright."

"Well, it's hard to miss one's own language when it's staring at you?"

Grinning impishly, he remarked on the letter's contents just as casually.

"By the way, Lady Campbell gets quite a few proposals herself, doesn't she? I've been busy turning them down lately, myself."

Enya was still frowning at his presumption in airing her private affairs when his next words made her eyes go wide.

"…You get rejected?"

He had spoken as though rejection were simply a matter within his control. Noticing the spark of her interest, the man nodded.

"Mm. I can't very well marry everyone, can I? And frankly, I've no intention of being tied to any one person at the moment."

Continuing his easy observation, he added in a low voice, "Being rejected is easier than you'd think, you know."

A flicker of curiosity passed through Enya's golden-brown eyes.