Hannah arrived unsummoned. Caught off guard for a second, Rita composed herself and raised her voice.
“…Come on in.”
Hannah stepped across the threshold, pale as a corpse and shivering from head to foot.
At least there aren’t any bruises left around her neck. They must have tended to her properly.
Rita figured the girl was still rattling from the violent fit she had thrown over the scent of patchouli earlier.
If she harbored any memory of that night, she would hardly still be drawing a wage here at Birch Castle. She probably remembered nothing at all. And my family clearly never suspected she played any part in my vanishing either.
Any normal child would have raised alarms immediately. Whoever took control of her ten years ago had been meticulous in wiping away the tracks.
Rita took in the girl’s trembling figure by the door. She had reddish-brown curls, light brown eyes, a soft, rounded jawline, and a dusting of freckles.
Looking at her now… she really does resemble Rita Pascal. Though her expression is completely different.
Rita had carried the very same auburn curls and freckles, though her eyes were sharper and her face harder. Spending her youth in the trenches had never afforded her the vanity to study her reflection, so the resemblance hadn’t registered at first glance. She had simply brushed it off, thinking only that their hair shared a similar shade.
It was like looking at a distant cousin. A passing glance would miss it entirely, but stare long enough and the bloodline showed.
Under Rita’s silent appraisal, Hannah drained of what little color she had left.
“M-Milady…?”
“…Ah.”
Catching herself, Rita gestured toward the sofa.
“Have a seat, Hannah. I was meaning to talk to you anyway.”
Instead of sitting, Hannah’s knees buckled. She crumpled to the rug and pressed her forehead directly against the floorboards.
“Please, Milady! Punish me with death!”
“What? What on earth are you—?”
Rita’s eyes widened. A torrent of weeping burst from the maid.
“It was me… on that night… I was the one, Milady…”
“…What did you just say?”
Rita’s face went rigid.
“You remember that night? You remember what happened and dared to stay in my family’s service all these years, keeping your mouth shut?”
Her tone had grown razor-sharp. Hannah snapped her tear-drenched face upward, shaking her head in frantic denial.
“N-no! I swear to you, I didn’t know! I could never be so wicked—I didn’t, truly, I… I only just—!”
Choking on her words, she reached deep inside her apron pocket. Rita’s combat reflexes flared, but Hannah drew out no weapon. It was merely a scorched tangle of fabric and leather, charred into an unrecognizable lump of black.
With shaking hands, the maid laid it on the floor, weeping uncontrollably.
“Milady… do you know what this is?”
“…No.”
“It’s… it’s the slipper you were wearing the night you were taken.”
“—!”
A flare of newly returned memory sparked in Rita’s mind.
Ten years ago, as she had struggled against Hannah’s grip, the hem of her nightgown had torn and one slipper had slipped from her foot. Rita hadn’t noticed the fabric caught in the brambles, but Hannah had spotted the slipper. Rather, whoever was piloting Hannah’s limbs had seen it fall and scooped it up.
Yet when Lilietta had been placed inside the coffin, her feet had been entirely bare. Just as Rita herself had been barefoot when she broke the surface of the lake in her true form.
The Laskails had presumed the girl was abducted with her shoes on, so no one ever looked for a solitary lost slipper. But it had undoubtedly fallen along the trail that night.
And Hannah had kept it in her possession this entire time.
“Last night… when that explosion sounded out from the lake… word spread that you had remembered the past, Milady. And… right then, I…”
Her eyes swimming with fresh tears, Hannah confessed everything. The sentences came out fractured and disorganized, but Rita slowly fitted the mosaic together.
Shattering that runic coffin yesterday must have triggered something in Hannah as well.
The morning after Lilietta’s disappearance ten years ago, Hannah had been found unconscious on the floor. A furious fever had gripped her, accompanied by nausea, rashes, and violent spasms. Even the ducal physician couldn’t find an explanation. Lacking a diagnosis, they could do nothing but soothe the symptoms as they arose.
Curiously enough, she had made a full recovery after only a few days.
Those were textbook signs of an Od rejection. Whoever orchestrating it channeled magical power straight through Hannah’s untrained body. That would explain why she purged the affliction on her own.
When the girl finally woke, that fateful night was wiped clean from her thoughts. The ducal household, consumed by the terror of Lilietta’s loss, questioned her only briefly. Nobody thought to suspect a child who had nearly died of a sudden illness, and they let the matter rest the moment she said she knew nothing.
A thorough sweep of the grounds turned up nothing in Hannah’s quarters, least of all a lost slipper. The gardens and birch groves held neither tracks nor clues, and not a single witness linked the little maid to the crime. All they ever retrieved was a bloodstained scrap of Lilietta’s hem hooked on a briar.
Hannah herself had never doubted her own innocence. She had simply wept for the lost young lady alongside everyone else.
Until last night, when the locked memories had suddenly broken free.
“It came rushing back… all at once. Scattered pieces… A voice told me to sneak over to the annex… into your bedchamber. I had never even been inside your quarters before, but my feet… walked right there. I told you to follow me outside… told you we were going to play…”
Hannah recounted how an alien will seemed to wrap around her thoughts, steering her like a marionette. She couldn’t resist—she hadn’t even possessed the capacity to consider it. She had drifted through the corridors like a sleepwalker. Whenever her body hesitated or slipped, the foreign mind had clicked its tongue in annoyance, and after that, the world went black.
Rita silently confirmed the missing pieces.
That was the exact moment Hannah’s clumsy demeanor had shifted, when her voice turned eerily clear and she had smiled. The controller seized direct possession once the vessel proved too clumsy.
The next clear memory Hannah possessed was waking up upright in her own quarters, drenched to the skin. Staring down at her wet nightdress, she had assumed she had suffered a mortifying accident in her sleep. Terrified of a thrashing, she had changed in secret, hung the soaked cloth out to dry, and buried herself under her blankets.
The fever had overtaken her shortly thereafter. And just like Lilietta, Hannah had forgotten the nightmare entirely.
“Then last night… after that thunder woke me… there was this strange light glowing under my frame. I-I crawled underneath to see, and… I know how mad it sounds, but there was… a tiny slipper sitting there.”
For ten years, she had swept and scrubbed beneath that very bed, yet not once had she ever laid eyes on the shoe.
Intricate golden patterns had flared to life across its leather, and then it had burst into flames out of nowhere. Hannah had panicked, dragging it out and emptying her washbasin over it, but the fire refused to be smothered. Only when it had burned down to brittle cinders did the flames extinguish as abruptly as they had sparked.
“And the moment it burned, your memory returned?”
“Yes… I know it sounds like a desperate lie, but it’s the truth! Up until yesterday, my mind was completely blank! But now… now every second is right there, and I… Merciful heavens, I think… I think I’m the monster who stole you away, Milady… It was my hands…”
Still on her knees, Hannah clawed at the carpet in misery, her tears pooling dark against the woven threads.
“Please… strike me down, Milady. I deserve no mercy. After everything your family did to raise me… to return their charity with this? How could I… how could I ever have laid hands on you…”
Rita let out a slow, measured breath.
Much like the runic box that locked away Lilietta’s past, Hannah’s memory of the abduction had been bound inside that slipper all these years. Shattering the coffin in the depths of the lake had fractured the Od maintaining the ward on the shoe as well.
No matter how many divers scoured the lake, ordinary eyes could never have pierced that magic. The slipper had been cloaked in Od the entire time. No mortal could have uncovered it.
Rita rose from the cushions and walked over to the weeping girl. Hannah remained curled against the rug, trembling. Rita leaned down and retrieved the charred lump of leather.
Though ruined, traces of runic lines were still etched into the blackened surface. The surviving dye and nap left no doubt: this was the very slipper Lilietta had worn that night.
Hannah was telling the absolute truth.
Which meant the mastermind behind the whole tragedy really was…
Archmage Pascal. Even if other hands were involved, sorcery of this caliber could only point to him. He had hijacked Hannah’s body to tear Lilietta away.
I’ll need to study these cinders more closely. Alongside the fragments from that box.
Slipping the scorched remains into her pocket, Rita looked down at the girl sobbing quietly on the floor. At last, she opened her mouth.
“Hannah.”