Outbreak Company: Volume 7

by Ichiro Sakaki

  “Ahh...” Shinichi-sama scratched his cheek; it almost looked like he was smiling. “It’s one thing to shut yourself up in your house. But to have it forced on you... That must be terrible.”

  “I think so, too,” I said, nodding.

  In fact, I had been kept in near imprisonment in my own adoptive home on the grounds that it “wouldn’t look good” for me to be seen. Unable to stand it, I had run away from that house and ended up living like an orphan on the streets. But even then, I simply couldn’t imagine going back.

  “After they found out Falmelle-san was with child, they debated whether or not to end the pregnancy. Ultimately, they thought maybe her child might have prophetic powers like its mother, so they decided to wait and see... But even as a baby, I showed no sign of such gifts.”

  I understood that Falmelle-san had considerably more magical ability even than most elves, but as for me, my magic powers were closer to those of a human, and it was decided that I was unlikely to develop prophecy or any other unique gifts.

  “And so I was given up.”

  “Jeez, that’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard!” There was an uncharacteristic stiffness in Shinichi-sama’s expression. “Didn’t they care at all about their grandchild?”

  “Shinichi-sama...”

  “Is the whole family obsessed with what will or won’t help them in their business?” He seemed genuinely agitated.

  It surprised me. These were all things that were over and done with long ago. They didn’t have anything to do with him. And yet he seemed so involved...

  “They just didn’t have any choice,” I said.

  “Didn’t have any choice?”

  “It’s bad enough for an elf to be with a human. If people knew that a child had come of it... It would be more than bad for business. The whole Faugron family might collapse. Many humans of the Holy Eldant Empire aren’t very open to the idea of elves trying to expand their business...”

  “Oh...” Shinichi-sama’s eyes widened with a flash of understanding. “So you could even use that as an excuse...”

  “An excuse? Use what?” I looked at him, not understanding.

  “I don’t know your grandpa, Myusel, and I guess it’s possible he was just a really terrible guy.” Shinichi-sama crossed his arms as he spoke. “But is it possible he used the excuse ‘she might prove useful’ to prevent his grandchild from being killed before she was born?”

  I caught my breath, amazed. The thought had never so much as occurred to me. But now that Shinichi-sama said it, I saw that of course, it was a possibility. Although now that Falmelle-san’s father, my grandfather, was dead, there was no way to be sure...

  “If his business was really all that big, then I’m sure he had lots of staff members, people whose livelihoods and families depended on him. In that case, maybe sending you away was the least awful thing he could do.”

  “Maybe...”

  Naturally, everything Shinichi-sama was saying was speculative. It was always possible that none of it was true, that my grandfather had simply foisted an inconvenient child on someone else. That was what I had always believed, and I really had no way of knowing what the truth was. But still...

  “I mean, maybe it’s just me,” Shinichi-sama said with an uneasy grin. “I have a bad habit of looking for the best in people. Now your grandpa’s gone, right? And we can’t turn back time. Maybe it would make your life just a little happier to believe something better about him instead of something worse.”

  I didn’t speak, but I could feel heat rushing to my head. Ahh, sweet Shinichi-sama, he’s so—

  “Shinichi-sama. I—I don’t resent the fact that I was given up for adoption.”

  “No?”

  “It’s part of what led me to working here at this mansion.”

  Part of what led me to serving at your side. My dear Shinichi-sama.

  In my mind, the happiness I felt now more than made up for whatever I had suffered arriving at it.

  “Myusel...” Shinichi-sama blinked in surprise. Finally he said, “I see. I’m glad you feel that way.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, smiling.

  But then Shinichi-sama, also smiling, added, “Plus, now you get to live with your mom, huh?”

  “Wha...?” I felt my expression freeze.

  “Your mother. She must have come for you, right?” He was still smiling.

  It was a happy thing that Falmelle-san had come to bring me home. It should be happy. I knew in my mind that I should be overjoyed. Why shouldn’t Shinichi-sama smile for me?

  But at that moment, I couldn’t for the life of me feel happy.

  If this had all happened before I had started working at this mansion.

  Before I had started serving Shinichi-sama.

  Then, maybe I could have been happy, like I was supposed to be.

  “Yes... Yes, she did...”

  “That’s great.”

  I didn’t say anything. I felt like he was talking me into a need to be happy, and it left me deeply anxious.

  Living with Falmelle-san would mean leaving this house. It would mean I couldn’t live with Minori-sama and Brooke-san and Cerise-san and Elvia-san, and above all, with Shinichi-sama.

  True, I might still be able to see them again, sometime. But...

  “But if you go with her...” Now Shinichi-sama turned to his desk, as if deliberately putting his back to me. I could see him playing with the empty teacup. “I guess we’ll have to ask Petralka to hire a new maid for us, huh?”

  I still didn’t speak. Was he... saying they didn’t need me anymore?

  I felt a sharp pain deep in my chest. I knew well enough that there was nothing about me that made me irreplaceable. I wasn’t a warrior like Minori-sama or Brooke-san. I couldn’t do art like Elvia-san. What did I do? Cook and make tea and do laundry—but as the kyara-ben and the cup of tea in the parlor proved, none of this was anything Minori-sama, Elvia-san or Cerise-san couldn’t handle.

  Maybe they would even be able to hire a better maid than me.

  In short, there was no reason at all that I absolutely had to be here. No reason I had to be the one serving Shinichi-sama.

  I started to feel dizzy as I absorbed the fact. But I couldn’t say anything to Shinichi-sama about it; I just stood there staring at his back.

  The next day, I was to appear at the castle with Shinichi-sama. In other words, I was to attend an audience with Petralka an Eldant III, the empress.

  There were a number of audience rooms at Eldant Castle, of which we were shown into the very smallest. Even so, it was bigger than any room in our mansion, and it had a unique atmosphere that always made me a little uneasy. Normally, someone like me would never get anywhere near the empress.

  “..........And that’s the story.”

  Altogether, four of us were shown into the audience chamber. Shinichi-sama, Minori-sama, myself—and Falmelle-san. Since the subject of a replacement maid for me was expected to come up at this audience, I had been brought along. And Falmelle-san, insisting she wanted to pay her respects to the empress, attached herself as well.

  Just a visit with the empress would raise her stature as a merchant in the Holy Eldant Empire, so she didn’t want to miss this opportunity—or so I suspected. Falmelle-san may have spent her life imprisoned, but she had certainly absorbed the commercial know-how of the Faugron family.

  Shinichi-sama explained the broad contours of the situation before concluding, “So we’re going to need a new maid... Is that all right?”

  “Will you indeed,” the empress mused from her throne. Her Majesty held the imposing title of Empress of the Holy Eldant Empire, but in fact she was impossibly cute. She had luxurious, beautiful silver hair and round eyes as green as emeralds; she looked like the delicate work of a master doll maker. Her Majesty, however, seemed somewhat uncomfortable with the fact that this made her look a bit young—she seemed to be concerned that it would undermine her authority—and she would not be very pleased to hear anyone
actually pronounce her “cute.”

  “So you are Myusel’s mother.”

  Her Majesty looked past Shinichi-sama to where Falmelle-san and I were standing behind him. I felt myself straighten up, but Falmelle-san somehow seemed even calmer under the imperial gaze.

  “The resemblance is apparent. We might have taken you for sisters.” The empress sounded intrigued.

  Falmelle-san offered an elegant bow in return. “My father told me she looked exactly as I did when I was an infant. Thus some expectation attended her, but sadly it seems my daughter has not inherited any of my powers.”

  “Powers, you say?” Her Majesty leaned forward, her interest apparently piqued by Falmelle-san’s pregnant hint.

  “Oh, nothing very remarkable. Sometimes it is called ‘The Foreseeing Eye.’ It’s terribly vague, never showing me any details—but once in a while, images of the future are revealed to my sight.”

  “My goodness...” The empress’s eyes widened. “The power of prophecy? We have heard tell of it, but...”

  “Apparently it’s helped business go very well for her family,” Shinichi-sama added.

  “We do have some magic-users who tell fortunes here at the castle,” Her Majesty reflected. “But besides being most imprecise, these fortune-tellers claim that to see the future is to change the future, or some such thing. If your power is indeed what you say, it could be of great use to our nation in everything from governance to war. We could wish you were one of our retainers.”

  “It is a tremendous honor,” Falmelle-san said with another bow—but then she shook her head. “As it happens... I cannot simply peer into the future any time I please. When and what I see is beyond my control. But even the faintest glimpses can often be useful in commerce.”

  “Commerce...” Her Majesty glanced at Shinichi-sama before saying, “That’s right—we haven’t asked your name. What are you called?”

  “Your Majesty. My name is Falmelle Faugron.”

  “Hm?” The empress raised an eyebrow. She thought for a moment before exclaiming, “You mean of the Faugron house?!”

  “The very same.”

  “You know them?” Shinichi-sama asked in surprise.

  “We know the name. Permission to trade for concerns above a specific size is issued in our name, and we are sure the name Faugron was among those we approved. We remembered it because it’s so unusual for elves to become such successful merchants. The house even came up when considering companies that could assist in the export of otaku goods.”

  “Huh!” Shinichi-sama looked back at me and Falmelle-san, impressed.

  “But what a very strange coincidence. Who would have guessed that Myusel was a daughter of the Faugron house...”

  The fact was, I myself still didn’t know that much about the household; all I really knew was what Falmelle-san had told me.

  “In any event, it is certainly well that mother and daughter should live together,” Her Majesty said earnestly. That was when I remembered—the empress had lost her own parents when she was young.

  “We are convinced,” she went on. “Shinichi, you may entrust us with finding you a new maid.”

  “Thanks, Petralka,” Shinichi-sama said with a smile.

  Minori-sama smiled, too, as did Her Majesty—and Falmelle-san. No one expressed any objection to getting a new maid.

  Nobody tried to stop this.

  I tried to push aside the pain that caused me as I stood staring at the ground.

  However great and powerful the empress might be, even she couldn’t get a new maid the very same day she was asked to do so. Thus, until someone new could be found, I would continue to work at the mansion as I had before. Minori-sama, Cerise-san, and Elvia-san all wanted to help out, but the fact was that when I was with Falmelle-san, I could never quite calm down.

  It wasn’t that I hated her or something. I just...

  “Sigh...” I found myself letting out a long breath as I did the wash. It was perfect laundry weather, not a cloud in the clear, blue sky. But my heart was a leaden grey. Even my body felt unusually heavy.

  I hadn’t slept a wink since the audience the other day. Maybe that accounted for why I had to drag myself around. Every time I tried to sleep, my mind filled up with the image of this house without me in it. Someone, some stranger, standing beside Shinichi-sama as he smiled and drank his tea. Standing there like it was the most natural thing in the world... Just thinking about it was enough to put me into a depression.

  And so, in order to avoid thinking as much as I could, I spent sleepless nights cleaning the house. When I was working, when my body was moving, was the one time I could keep the awful thoughts at bay.

  “Sigh...”

  I sighed for the umpteenth time as I fished the clothes out of the laundry hamper and dunked them in a bucket of water. In my head, I frequently went over the steps. Separate the clothes into two or three loads and wash them...

  “Oh...”

  I stopped in the middle of putting the clothes in the bucket.

  I was holding one of Shinichi-sama’s shirts.

  When the new maid came, she would wash Shinichi-sama’s shirts instead. It could be as soon as tomorrow. And then this would be the last time I ever did Shinichi-sama’s laundry...

  The thought made my chest ache. I hugged the familiar shirt tightly. Shinichi-sama’s smell clung faintly to it.

  Gripped by an intense sadness, I buried my face in the shirt—

  “Myusel.”

  I jumped, the unexpected sound of Falmelle-san’s voice bringing me back to my senses. I turned around to see her walking toward me, and quickly dropped Shinichi-sama’s shirt in the bucket of water.

  How long had Falmelle-san been there? Had she noticed me hugging Shinichi-sama’s laundry?

  She stopped right in front of me, then looked at the bucket. I saw her eyes narrow slightly. Shinichi-sama’s shirt was still floating at the top of it, absorbing water.

  Her expression flickered as if she wanted to say something. “Myusel, you...”

  Her eyes on me burned; I turned my face away as if hoping to flee. There I had been, hugging Shinichi-sama’s shirt, sniffing it. What a base and unrefined daughter I was. I squeezed my eyes shut, shame tinting my face red, and braced myself for the words I was sure were coming.

  But I didn’t hear them. Only silence. No matter how long I waited, Falmelle-san didn’t say anything.

  Finally, I slowly opened my eyes and looked up.

  Falmelle-san was looking down at me with an expression that was difficult to describe. She wasn’t angry. Nor frustrated or annoyed. Nor sad. She wasn’t even happy. And yet it could have been any of those things.

  At length she murmured only, “Well, never mind.” Then she turned and walked away from me.

  What was it she had wanted...?

  I watched her go before I finally collected myself enough to finish the laundry.

  If only they never find another maid...

  The thought came to me sometimes when I was especially depressed. But of course, it was in vain—eventually we received word that someone new had been found. They would arrive at the mansion within the next few days.

  It would take the newcomer some time to get accustomed to how things were done at our house, so Minori-sama, Elvia-san, Cerise-san, and even Brooke-san would take over some of the work I had been doing until the new maid was settled in.

  “Uh... About meals,” I said, looking around at Minori-sama and the others, who had joined me in the kitchen. “Elvia-san generally prefers less intense flavors and about one-third the seasonings I use in Shinichi-sama’s food. How much to cook it is really a matter of feel. If you’re going to grill something, a light scorching will do. If you’re boiling something, make sure to take it off the heat before the flavor gets too stringent. For Brooke-san and Cerise-san, I mostly try to leave the ingredients alone as much as possible—but when it comes to fruits in particular, it has to be something ripe, just about to spoil. Shinichi-
sama and Minori-sama get roughly the same things, but be careful when you’re serving mushrooms.”

  “Mushrooms?” Minori-sama repeated.

  “Yes,” I said, nodding. “Shinichi-sama doesn’t really like mushrooms.”

  “Izzat right?” Elvia-san said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “He’s never told me so specifically, but he always leaves his mushroom dishes until the very end. And then it takes him a moment or two before he starts eating them. He doesn’t chew them very thoroughly, which I think is bad for his digestion. So please try to avoid serving mushrooms as a main course, or chop them finely and include them in something else.”

  Minori-sama and Elvia-san looked at each other dubiously. Had I said something wrong...?

  Even while part of me wondered about it, I moved on to the next thing. “Now, about the laundry.”

  “Right,” Cerise-san nodded. It wouldn’t do to have someone with such a different sense of taste in the kitchen, so in addition to her usual chores, I asked her to take over the washing.

  “Shinichi-sama likes the color green. He’ll always wear his favorite clothes as long as they’re washed, so if you see anything green in the laundry, please start with that. And then... Oh, yes. About the cleaning.”

  I was always responsible for cleaning Shinichi-sama’s room, so there were some pointers I had to give them about that. “When it comes to Shinichi-sama’s room, be sure to check it thoroughly, especially around the wastebasket. Shinichi-sama has an unfortunate habit of not getting up to throw trash away. If he happens to reach the wastebasket with a toss from his chair, well and good, but if he misses, trash can end up piled by the wall. It can also hide in the shadows of the bookshelves and other hard-to-see places, so be careful...”

  And on and on.

  Was there anything else I needed to tell them? I looked down, counting on my fingers, numbering off the important details. That was when I felt several gazes upon me.

  Minori-sama. Elvia-san. Cerise-san. Brooke-san. All of them were watching me intently.

  I could never tell from their faces what Cerise-san and Brooke-san were thinking, but Minori-sama’s and Elvia-san’s expressions, I could read.