The Stranger at the Well

"You're quite lucky, you know."

Roina blinked her eyes open. That voice again. She sat up without a word and combed her sleep-tangled hair back with her fingers, and Mayli, who had only just spoken, did not wait for an answer before chattering on.

"You! You spent the night in His Highness the Crown Prince's room again, didn't you!"

"Lady Mayli Amasto, forgive me, but nothing of the sort you're imagining happened. Truly, you don't need to come in and check me over every single time."

"Ha! And how am I supposed to believe you? A wench like you, who knows what gutter you crawled out of."

"Then how did you get into my room?"

I definitely added another latch in secret.

"There's aaalways a way! But that's not the point! Did you really think I wouldn't notice you eyeing our innocent Lord Roberto, just waiting for your chance?"

She brushed Roina's privacy aside as if it were hardly worth mentioning. With every shout, her lush golden hair tossed and rippled. Roina found herself blankly wondering how much trouble all that hair must be to dry and keep in order, then gave her head a small shake and sat fully upright. The blanket slid away, baring a body clothed in nothing but a thin nightgown, and Mayli raked her eyes openly up and down it.

Every trace of the night before had been erased. Nothing remained careless enough for those eyes to catch, nor would it have been left that way. The Crown Prince concealed his private affairs with absolute thoroughness.

Without thinking, Roina's hand went to her throat. Nothing showed there now, but a binding lay upon her neck, set to activate if she ever broke the prohibition. An invisible collar, in all but name.

"Haa. I was the maid who served Lord Roberto from nearest at hand, and somehow I lost that place to a drab little thing like this."

If she actually knew what was being done to me, she couldn't say that...

Remembering the wounds that had been perfectly healed, rendered invisible, once the night's service was done, Roina frowned, just slightly.

"Oh, look at this. The bitch really ignores me like I'm some barking dog, and now she's scowling too? Hey! You—damn it, seriously. A worm nobody even knows the birth of!"

Mayli barked at her, but she could not bring herself to raise a hand, and only stamped her feet in frustration. To injure a maid of the Imperial Palace—and one in the Crown Prince's own service, no less—was a grave crime. Ever since she had struck Roina on the first day and been severely punished for it, she had not laid a hand on her.

Roina left her standing there and ignored her, beginning to ready herself to go. Right before those staring eyes, she casually stripped the nightgown off.

"Th-that—not a shred of manners! Ugh, seriously, I knew it. Lowborn trash!"

Spitting the words, Mayli stormed out of the room.

For all her bluster, Mayli was not truly a bad person. If anything, that degree of honesty sometimes made Roina think of her as a decent one. Most of the other maids either looked at Roina with contempt, ignored her outright, or found other ways to torment her behind her back. That was the harassment Roina truly feared, and avoided.

Absurd as it was, the only person with whom she had anything resembling a real conversation, the only one who had come to feel familiar, was that same Mayli. The moment Mayli left, the tension drained out of Roina all at once.

"Ugh—hk... cough."

She stopped fighting the foreign pressure that had been climbing from beneath her throat and retched it up. A dark mass of blood spread across the floor in vivid scarlet. All the Crown Prince wanted was for the outside of her to look whole. How Roina's insides festered and fell apart was none of his concern.

Two years had passed since she fell into this strange world inside a book, and none of the dreamlike fortunes that visited the heroines of ordinary romance fantasies had ever come to her. Every day, she only turned over how she might escape this pain.

Roina curled in on herself. She was heaving up what remained of her insides, her abdomen twisting, when the door burst open.

"Wh-what!! You... you...!!"

It was Mayli. Even Roina was a little thrown.

Why did she come back? This isn't something the usual her would ever do...

At the sight of Roina hunched before the blood she had brought up, Mayli's face twisted, and she seized her by the wrist.

"Lady Mayli, I can guess what you're misunderstanding, but... I'm all right."

"What? What do you mean by..."

"It's nothing unusual. This happens some mornings. A physician wouldn't be able to do anything, and it isn't something you need to worry about, Lady Mayli."

Mayli stared at her and could not find the rest of the sentence. Then she shrieked.

"Fine, then!!! Go ahead and die like that!!!"

With that, she slammed the door and was gone again. Thrown by the girl's behavior, Roina sat blankly where she was for a while.

By the time she had barely coaxed her stomach into settling and stepped outside, she was already cutting it desperately close. As a rule, a maid of the Crown Prince's bedchamber worked through the night and might rest in the morning, but Roina, singled out for the other maids' harassment, was allowed no such thing. If she failed to work through the day as well, there was no telling what strange punishment they would invent on some pretext, so she had to keep moving.

What the head maid had assigned her was the labor everyone called the hardest: a kitchen maid's work. The first task of Roina's morning was to go draw water for the kitchens.

She hurried to the well and drew the water. Or rather, she would have, had a man not appeared behind her without warning. Startled, she lost her grip on the bucket, and the hollow thud of it striking the bottom of the well carried up to her.

A glance showed a complete stranger. A cold-looking man, long black hair tied low, with golden eyes.

He had appeared at her back, far too close. Gooseflesh rose sharp along the nape of her neck. When she turned, their noses nearly touched.

She froze.

"I... I don't know who you are, but there's nothing here a guest would find worth seeing..."

"What's your name?"

He caught her chin and tipped it up, forcing her eyes to his. For a moment she had no choice but to go utterly still. That gaze was intense. Even setting aside the force of the hand on her jaw, there was something else in him that would not let her slip free. A fine shiver raced through her whole body before she could stop it. She felt like a mouse driven into a corner before a predator.

"...Roina. I am Roina."

With a sharp twist she barely shook her chin free of his hand and took one step aside. She could not deny he was a breathtakingly beautiful man, but the distance had been far too close for speaking with someone she had never met.

"I see."

He gave a small nod. His tone was so unruffled that it seemed not she who had pulled away, but he who had chosen to let her go.

He stared straight at Roina with eyes whose feeling she could not read. Longing seemed to have gathered in them, and yet they looked as hard as a river locked in ice. Even so, they were a little different from Roberto's lust-laden gaze, the one she had grown so used to. Without meaning to, she looked away.

He spoke her name, each syllable perfectly clear.

Roina flinched, caught in a feeling she had no idea what to do with. Her heart seemed to be racing. She liked it. She liked hearing her name in his voice. She could not have said why, but a man she was meeting for the first time today felt familiar, as if she had missed him. Even so, a wary strangeness lingered, and the faint tension would not leave her.

"Do you know me?"

That, surely, was why she asked.

She had never seen him before she possessed this body, nor after, and he seemed like a man she would have no cause to meet again. Even so, she wanted to know the reason for what she felt now. The true shape of this pull, this wanting to draw closer, when he was already standing right in front of her.

For a moment he wore the look of someone considering the question. Then he answered something else entirely.

"Are you always here at this hour?"

"Ah, yes. Most of the time."

"...I shall see you tomorrow as well."

"What? But why are you suddenly speaking so formally to me..."

And then he vanished, as sudden as his arrival. Truly, with no warning at all, in the brief instant she looked away. Startled, she blinked a few times, then slowly sank down where she stood. The body that tension had locked rigid came loose, and a sigh slipped out of her on its own.

"Heavens above! What are you doing flopped down there?"

"Ah... it's nothing. A cat sprang out all of a sudden, and... I was just startled for a moment."

Explaining that some man had appeared and then vanished would only drag the story out. The longer she spoke of things that did not need saying, the more chances she handed them to find fault.

Roina hastily set her clothes to rights and stood. The maid looked coldly down at her, then snapped.

"Pathetic. Quit loafing and get to work!"

She scrambled up and began hauling the bucket that had fallen into the well back out. She had not actually been loafing, but she offered no retort. The woman eyeing her with such contempt was only a kitchen maid, while Roina, a palace maid, officially held the higher place. But Roina was of slave birth.

The Crown Prince had personally led the abolition of slavery, yet prejudice against slaves lingered all the same. At times like this, the best she could do was lower her head and grovel. She had become a maid for no reason but a single command from Crown Prince Roberto. So she was to know her place, and grovel of her own accord.

She was badly late, and even as she hurried off beneath the weight of the heavy bucket, her mind churned with tangled questions.

Who was that man? And why my name, of all things...?

She recalled those golden eyes, deep enough to fall into. Long black hair, and eyes of gold. Something hovered at the very edge of memory, and yet nothing came.

Somehow... I want to see him again.

Promises made by aristocratic men of that sort were, as a rule, not kept. Even so, Roina felt strangely certain that he would come back. Holding in her mind that gaze, the one that woke a burning thirst and a longing she could not name, she threw herself into the work she had been given and saw it done.

It had been a day of mindless rushing, so much so that Roina clean forgot even what had passed with Mayli that morning. Their eyes seemed to meet for an instant, but she was too busy to spare it a thought.