3
Now then, the day after Subaru’s day of playing with Beatrice.
“Well, well, weeell, aren’t we up early this morning, Subaru.”
“H-hi, Rozchi…Y-yeah, it is kinda early…”
A servant never had a day off that felt like a day off. Subaru was once again up early in the hallway, greeting the master of the house, Marquis Roswaal L Mathers. Today, just like any other, the eccentric aristocrat wore his clownish makeup proudly on his face.
Under the gaze of his heterochromatic eyes—blue and gold—Subaru shivered as he managed to get out a “Good morning,” then he cracked his neck and slapped his cheeks as he gazed out the window.
Roswaal gave him a curious look and said, “You don’t look very well today, my boooy. What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong? It’s freaking cold, that’s what’s wrong!” Subaru cried in a flash of white breath, the last straw finally broken.
It was cold—too cold. The snot dribbled out of his nose, and it promptly froze. Subaru stomped on the floor and said, “There’s something wrong with this climate! Until yesterday, I thought maybe I was just imagining things, but that’s not gonna fly today! The windows are iced over, and my breath is solid white!”
Subaru pointed at the frozen windowsill. His body was wrapped in layers of blankets. He had put his servant’s uniform over his sleeping sweats—his ensemble was a desecration of society’s conventional fashion. But even with all these precautions, the cold threatened to seep through the cracks in his blankets and steal his life.
“What gives? Is the change of seasons around these parts really that extreme? We’re talking a difference of like twenty degrees on the daily here! With a sudden temperature plunge, even bears would freeze to death before they made it to their dens for hibernation!”
“Oh dear, oh dear, you poor frail little lad. You mustn’t be that way, my boy. Always keep a positive mind and body. No matter how cold the weather gets, always keep a calm mind and—”
“That’s rich, coming from a guy in a fluffy fur coat!”
Roswaal’s stirring mind-over-matter speech was incredibly unconvincing because he was brazenly wearing cold-weather clothing. He was quite the spectacle with his thick fur coat and winter clothes. He could probably survive the coldest snowy mountain in that ensemble.
“The extreme discrepancy in our quality of dress could get you convicted for attempted murder at this rate…zniffle!”
“Your sinister staring and sniveling sinuses show that we prooobably have reached our limit… I would have turned a blind eye yesterday, but it’s just come tooooo far for that now.”
“You sound like you know what’s causing this cold…so let’s do something about it! If some winter demon beast is causing it, let’s kill him. And make a big spectacle of it, too. C’mon, Master, help a guy out—zniffle!”
As Roswaal put a hand to his chin in thought, Subaru stomped his feet in a pitter-patter, adding kindling to the fire. Subaru had reached his limit between the frozen snot and his frozen brain. It wouldn’t be long before he broke the moral code and started ripping other people’s clothes off.
“Tell me, Subaru, by any chance, do you not handle the cold very well?”
“I complain about the cold in the winter, I complain about the heat in the summer, I complain about how tired I am in the spring, and I complain about how expensive matsutake is in the fall. I don’t handle any sort of change well—zniffle!”
“I don’t exactly know what ‘matsutake’ is, but you’ve made it quite clear that you are a very impatient young man. Then you leave me no choice. I’ll just have to complain to the one who caused this.”
Flipping his fur coat, Roswaal began to walk. Subaru followed behind. Subaru looked at the scenery outside the frozen-white windows as his feet sank into the deep carpet and frowned.
“Something outside catch your interest?” Roswaal asked.
“Well, yeah. I grew up in a temperate zone, so I don’t know much about snow. However, isn’t it cold enough for snow right now? If it snows, the village fields will freeze, and it’ll be hell to plow them.”
Earlham, the village near Roswaal Manor, was approaching harvesting season. Subaru, who was friendly with the villagers, had promised the children that he would help with the harvest. Even if he took back his promise, this was not the time of year when snow was a welcome visitor.
“Well, I understand…you are quite close with the villagers, especially the children.”
“Not that close. I don’t actually care for kids—way too selfish and reckless. I’m just nice to them because they’ve taken a liking to me…”
“Yes, yes, I suppose you’ve just given a great example of what your hometown calls tsundere characteristics.”
“Zniffle! Ack, my nose is gonna get frostbite! Zniffle-zniffle! This’s bad, dude!”
Subaru forced the focus onto his nose to avoid facing an inconvenient truth. Roswaal smirked and let his hard segue pass without comment as he touched the foggy window with a finger and said, “Well, rest at ease, my boy. The cold surely hasn’t reached the village. The cold only extends to the perimeter of my property.”
“Not exactly reassuring, my dude! What is this mysterious phenomenon? How does this sort of thing even happen?!”
“We’ve got not one but two little lovelies making the rounds to ensure the cold does not travel beyond my property. And I believe one of them was secretly at work just before you apprehended her yesterday?”
“…You mean Beatrice?”
Roswaal’s cryptic response reminded Subaru of Beatrice’s odd behavior the day before. What she was doing so early that morning was a mystery, but it seemed she was trying to combat the cold. And if he needed to borrow Beatrice’s help, it was clear who they were all up against—
“Now, I don’t suppose I need to tell you just who was the cause of all of this cold, hmmm?”
Subaru arrived at the answer just as Roswaal stopped walking. They were on the top floor of Roswaal Manor’s east wing. The door before them led to a room Subaru frequented. After all, this was a room he made a habit of stopping by once a day.
Roswaal called to the door. “Lady Emilia, sorry to disturb you so early in the morning. Maaay we speak with you for a minute?”
A frantic voice sounded from the room. “Roswaal?! Um…um…just a minute! Be right there!”
The bell-like voice was clear, even through the wall. When he heard it, Subaru was filled with panic, and he couldn’t hide. Something felt amiss. Starting with the very fact that the occupant of this room was awake at this hour.
During the few weeks they’d lived together under the same roof, Subaru had noticed she wasn’t exactly an early riser.
“Suuubaaaruuu?” Roswaal called, pointing to the doorknob with a grim frown on his brow. He didn’t mean for Subaru to open it. Doubtfully, Subaru reached for the doorknob.
“It’s cold?! What the hell?! Emilia-tan, are you okay?!”
“What?! Oh, you’re there, too, Subaru?!”
“I am, but who cares—isn’t there something more important you have to say right now?!”
“Something important? To say? Um…good morning?”
“Ah, what good manners to greet me even in a—wait, no! Agh, I’m just coming in, okay?!”
The doorknob was so cold that it felt like it was made of pure ice. With the doorknob this cold, it was likely that the room was filled with an even more intense cold.
“I’m coming in! If you happen to be getting dressed, thanks!”
“Don’t you mean sorry?!”
Subaru threw the door open, his pure concern and deviant desires on full display. The door resisted, cracking from the floor as the cold that was once sealed inside the room burst out of it.
“What the shit?! It’s freezing! How did this even happen?!”
Crying out in the unimaginably cold blast, Subaru’s shocked eyes scanned the inside of the room. There, he found Emilia standing still with her back to the bed, both arms stretched out.
Her flustered face was red as she desperately tried to hide her bed from Subaru’s view.
“Emilia-tan, how did this—”
“Y-you bad boy! How dare you come into a person’s room without their permission… It’s rude. That’s right, it’s really rude! So—you know—um—do it over!”
“So that’s what Emilia-tan is saying, but what does the master of the house say?”
“I permit him to enteeeer.”
“Roswaal!”
Pushing Emilia’s protests aside on a unilateral technicality, Subaru finally entered the room. The source of the extreme cold unmistakably lay in her room. And from Roswaal’s testimony, Beatrice’s actions, and Emilia’s body language resembling a child trying to hide their prank, it was obvious what it was.
“So where’s Puck? He’s the source of this, and as representative of the Cold Haters, I’ve got a bone to pick with him.”
“The source? The source of what? I have no idea what you’re—well, um—okay, it’s not like I have no idea, but I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s okay, Lia—either way, it looks like you can’t hide me anymore.”
Emilia’s frantic stubbornness and strange inability to hide her lies in her subterfuge were brought to a close by the instigator himself.
Emilia raised her eyebrows, turned to face the bed, and put her hands on her hips.
“Oh, Puck, you big dummy! We almost had them fooled…”
“Sorry, Emilia-tan, but you couldn’t fool anybody in a million years.”
“Huh?!”
Subaru slipped past the genuinely shocked Emilia and peered into the bed behind her. The cat, the presumed source of the extreme cold, lay curled up on a small, rumpled blanket on her bed.
“You really look like a cat when you’re curled up like that.”
“Mmm, sorry? Didn’t mean to cause this mess.”
The gray ball of fur squirmed at the sound of the voice, his beady black eyes looking up at Subaru. The palm-sized cat smiled sheepishly at Emilia’s look of disappointment and said, “Please, don’t get angry with Betty and Lia. They just wanted to do something nice for me.”
And with that, Puck stood up to defend his beloved daughter and little sister.
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