Something was different.
At first, I thought it was the noise.
Heavy chests scraped along the floor in the corridors, and people never stopped shouting at one another to hurry. Servants and soldiers came and went from this house on ordinary days as well, but today the very nature of their movements was different. More people were running than walking; some gathered up documents while others crammed clothes and valuables into chests without care.
I lay in bed and watched them.
The world had become rather clearer compared to when I had first been born into this body. I could see the beams crossing the ceiling and make out the expressions of those near me. I had even begun to hold up my head.
That did not mean I had many more options.
Lie there and watch.
Cry when I was hungry.
Sleep when I was tired.
And cry again when something displeased me.
In my previous life, I had been someone who checked the state of equipment in a laboratory and set experimental conditions. Now, properly straightening even one finger was a considerable achievement.
So all I could do was watch what was happening today.
A maid shoved clothes into a chest that she would ordinarily have spent a long while folding with care. She did not even pick up the garments that fell to the floor. The male servants abandoned large ornaments and instead took small pouches and jewel boxes.
There came the heavy clink of metal striking metal.
Most likely gold coins.
‘Moving house?’
For a moment, that was what I thought.
But I soon corrected myself.
These were not people preparing to move.
They were not choosing what to take with them. They were leaving behind everything except what they could carry when they fled.
A candlestick toppled over.
No one picked it up.
Armor and scabbards clattered in the corridor, and in the distance, I could even hear horses neighing.
‘Are they running away?’
If so, there had to be a reason.
Someone had attacked.
Or something had happened to this household.
Perhaps both.
The door opened.
It was Mother.
I was certain of that now.
She was the woman I saw most often, the one who usually fed me, bathed me, and put me to sleep. Whenever I began crying, even in the middle of the night, she was the first to appear.
But today she looked different from usual.
She had cast aside her splendid gowns for dark clothes and a heavy cloak, and her hair, always so neat, was disheveled.
Her face was deathly pale.
The rims of her eyes were red.
The moment she entered, she looked at me.
Then she stood still for a while.
Then she smiled.
That smile struck me as strange instead.
She was clearly smiling, but tears fell from her eyes.
"Daemon."
That word, at least, I already knew.
My name.
Daemon.
Mother picked me up and drew me into her arms.
Her hold was tighter than usual.
Her body trembled slightly as well.
Words I could not understand continued above my head. I did not know their meaning, but I could distinguish the tone of her voice.
She sounded happy.
And frightened, too.
Emotions that did not belong together were tangled inside her all at once.
‘Has someone died?’
The thought occurred to me.
There was one person I had not seen for days.
A man of absurdly enormous build.
A man with a second small face attached between the right side of his neck and shoulder.
At first, he had not even known how to hold me. He improved after being told to support my neck, and the last time he came, he had been wearing armor.
I had grabbed one of his fingers.
He had looked down at me for a long while before leaving.
He had not returned after that.
The man who was very likely my father.
And after he vanished, Mother was smiling as she cried.
‘...The odds are high.’
I withheld judgment beyond that.
There was too little information.
I could speculate, but not conclude.
Then an old man entered the room.
Raymund.
I had not known his name at the time, but his face was already familiar.
Graying hair, old scars, and a back straight despite his age. Above all, he always wore a sword.
As soon as he came in, everyone in the room made way for him.
Raymund personally inspected the things to be taken. He discarded the bulky silverware and kept the jewels and gold. After reading through several documents, he carried them to a candle and burned them.
The sheets of paper curled black one by one.
‘They really are fleeing.’
Now I was sure.
If it were merely an evacuation, there would be no reason to erase their own records as well.
A little later, Raymund stopped in one corner of the room.
A bronze brazier.
And atop it, a dark-red egg.
My gaze naturally followed his.
After observing it for several days, I had already ruled out the possibility that it was an ornament.
At regular intervals, people changed the charcoal, reduced the fire when it grew too hot, and sometimes lifted the egg to turn it. It did not resemble an attempt to heat it up; it was closer to maintaining a steady temperature.
‘Hatching?’
That was the most natural guess.
Of course, I did not know what sort of egg it was.
It was the size of a human head, with a dark crimson shell and overlapping scale-like patterns across its surface.
None of the creatures I knew from Earth laid eggs like that.
But reincarnation itself had already happened.
One more creature I did not know of was hardly enough to surprise me now.
Raymund and Mother discussed something concerning the egg.
Judging by their expressions, they disagreed.
The conclusion was not difficult to predict.
They would leave the egg behind.
It was bulky and conspicuous. If it was something they had specially cared for all this time, it might also reveal their identity.
For fugitives, it was a reasonable decision.
I thought so, too.
The egg remained.
We left.
That was all.
At least, that was all until the moment Mother turned toward the door with me in her arms.
Something suddenly tugged deep inside my chest.
‘...What?’
My heart began to race.
I was not hungry.
Nothing hurt.
Yet I was unbearably anxious.
My head turned back on its own.
The dark-red egg.
It was steadily growing farther away.
This could not happen.
That thought came first.
‘What can’t?’
I did not know.
Before I could find the reason, my body reacted first.
My little arm stretched toward the egg, my fingers clawing at empty air.
Mother took another step.
The anxiety surged.
"Uh..."
I drew in a breath.
Then I began to cry.
"Waaah!"
Mother started and shifted me in her arms.
She patted my back.
The crying did not stop.
When she turned so that I could no longer see the egg, it only grew worse.
One by one, the people around us stopped moving.
Raymund looked at me as well.
Then he saw where my hand and gaze were directed.
After a moment, he picked up the egg without a word.
He approached slowly.
It was strange.
The closer it came, the weaker the sensation constricting my chest became.
At last, when the egg was directly before me—
My crying stopped.
It was instantaneous.
The room fell quiet.
I looked at the egg.
Raymund looked at me.
Mother’s face grew even paler.
‘I don’t know either.’
I truly did not know.
After considering it for a moment, Raymund ordered someone to bring cloth.
He wrapped the egg in several layers.
Its surface was completely hidden, but this time I did not feel anxious.
Somehow, I knew.
It was close.
It was moving with us.
That alone was enough.
I stared at the cloth-wrapped bundle.
‘What in the world is that?’
*
Valena Adarys read her father’s letter twice.
She did not read it a third time.
Maelys was dead.
At Bloodstone.
At the hands of a young knight from Westeros.
The Golden Company had recovered his body, and the landing had failed.
At the end was Alequo’s command.
Do not leave the manor.
Wait with Daemon.
Do not move until he returned.
Valena stared at that final sentence for a long while.
Then she held the letter to the candle flame.
The fire devoured the edge of the paper.
The sentence announcing Maelys’s death vanished first, followed by her father’s command, curling black in the flames.
"I won’t wait."
Strangely, speaking the words calmed her.
Maelys was dead.
When Valena first read that sentence, she laughed.
Then she cried.
Not because she loved him.
Quite the opposite.
She had feared him from the beginning, hated him more as time passed, and by the end had nearly loathed him.
His massive body.
The deformity attached to his shoulder.
His eyes when he looked at people.
The way he inspected his own child’s neck and shoulders before anything else.
Most of all, she hated the way he saw blood and a throne before he saw people.
That man would never return now.
There was certainly relief in that fact.
But with Maelys gone, something else had vanished alongside him.
Protection.
While the monster lived, other monsters could not come near.
The name of Maelys Blackfyre’s son was a shackle upon Daemon, but it was armor, too.
Now the armor was gone, and only the name remained.
To the Golden Company, he could become their final banner. To the Iron Throne, he was a seed that might someday grow again.
And to her father, Alequo...
Valena did not linger on that thought.
She loved her father.
Her father loved her as well.
She did not doubt that.
But Alequo was a man who could calculate love and necessity together.
Just as he had married his daughter to Maelys when he needed an alliance to gain Tyrosh.
He could love his grandson and use him at the same time.
Valena lifted Daemon into her arms.
The child looked at her with a face that knew nothing.
"Let’s just live."
Her voice was quiet.
"This time."
She needed neither a throne,
nor the Black Dragon,
nor grudges aged over generations.
They could live in a good house, eat their fill, and if her child wished to learn something, she would let him learn it.
And if possible, she wanted him to live for a very long time.
Long enough to grow weary of it.
"Don’t become a king."
After leaving words the child could not possibly understand, Valena kissed his forehead.
At that very moment, Raymund came in.
His gaze went first to the ashes scattered across the floor.
The place where her father’s letter had been.
"Are you planning to leave?"
"Tonight."
Raymund’s expression hardened.
He had served House Blackfyre for a long time.
He had borne a sword beneath that name from his youth, taught Maelys the sword, and done the same for Maelys’s cousin.
Valena had never forgotten that.
That was why she relied on him.
And for that very reason, she could not wholly trust him.
To Raymund, Daemon might be the last heir of Blackfyre before he was the child Valena had borne.
"It would be safer to wait for Prince Alequo."
"I do not think so."
Valena’s reply was brief.
Raymund said nothing for a while.
"Daemon is Maelys’s trueborn son."
In the end, he said precisely what she had expected.
Valena’s hand closed more firmly around the child’s back.
"I know."
"You cannot decide lightly to cast aside that name."
In that moment, Valena confirmed where Raymund still stood.
Though Maelys was dead.
Though the war to seize the throne had crumbled.
One of the old man’s feet remained beneath the banner of the Black Dragon.
The fact unsettled her.
But there was no one in this house more skilled at fleeing than he was.
"Let Daemon decide what name he wants when he is grown," Valena said.
"For now, he must be alive to choose any name at all."
Raymund did not speak of bloodlines again.
A little later, he ordered a map brought to him.
That was enough.
The two did not think alike.
They merely shared one purpose.
Keep Daemon alive.
For now, that was all that mattered.
*
The east was ruled out early.
Alequo’s trade network did not belong to Tyrosh alone. He had partners in every port where ships came and went, and wherever they went among the Free Cities, money and rumors were likely to travel faster than they did.
Places too distant would be difficult for the infant Daemon to endure.
In the end, only one direction remained.
West.
Westeros.
Raymund had disliked the notion from the start.
Naturally.
It was the land where Maelys had marched with an army, claiming he would seize the throne, and died.
But that was precisely what Valena liked about it.
Who would expect Maelys’s newborn son to hide within the Iron Throne’s own lands?
They avoided the south.
It was close to the royal court, and there were too many people who remembered the Blackfyre wars firsthand.
On the map, their fingers moved steadily north.
Beyond the Neck.
The North.
And a great port on its eastern coast.
White Harbor.
"It is far," Valena said.
Raymund looked down at the map.
"Is that not why we chose it?"
There was no reason to dispute him.
They decided to go there.
They took only the small, valuable pieces among their gold and jewels.
They discarded extravagant possessions and removed anything that might hint at their identities.
At first, they had intended to leave the dragon egg behind as well.
But after witnessing Daemon’s reaction twice, they changed their plans.
Whenever they took the egg far away, the child cried.
When they brought it near again, he stopped as if by magic.
It was too exact to call coincidence.
Watching this, Valena felt foreboding.
The moment she escaped Maelys, an object that seemed like his legacy had become connected to her son.
Even so, she did not abandon it.
They were fleeing to save her child.
She could not keep him crying throughout the journey because of one object whose nature they did not know.
They wrapped the egg in layers of cloth and leather, then hid it beneath the bottom of a chest so that it would look like ordinary baggage.
That night, Valena left the manor with Daemon in her arms.
She did not look back.
---
260 AC, the Narrow Sea
I remembered that journey by its smells rather than its dates.
Salt.
Wet timber.
Damp wool.
Oil.
And vomit.
The last was mostly mine.
We boarded a ship.
I vomited.
We disembarked at another harbor.
We boarded another ship.
I vomited again.
By then, I had developed a personal grudge against the sea itself.
Once, we even met a storm.
The cabin floor tilted to one side, then swung back the other way, and the tied-down chest pulled its ropes taut. Mother held me with a pale face while, outside, Raymund’s shouts mingled with the sailors’ curses.
I vomited again.
‘Is my second life ending here, too?’
I even had that thought.
Fortunately, I did not die.
We changed ports several more times.
The people traveling with us gradually dwindled.
Our clothing lost its finery, and jewelry became gold coins.
Raymund disembarked first to inspect the surroundings, and if he judged there to be a problem, he found another ship.
Valena entrusted most things to him.
That did not mean she looked at ease.
Whenever Raymund stood too long near Daemon, her gaze would shift toward them, and whenever he spoke the name Blackfyre, her expression stiffened.
Yet when night came, she gave Raymund the nearest room.
What one disliked and what one needed were separate things.
During that journey, Valena quickly grew accustomed to that fact.
At some point, the air became colder.
In the mornings, we could see our breath.
And at last we arrived somewhere the scent of burning firewood lingered longer than the smell of the sea.
---
261 AC, near White Harbor
It was around then that I began to understand speech.
The world was not translated all at once one day.
First, I learned names.
Valena.
Raymund.
And Daemon.
Then came the words needed for daily life.
Water.
Fire.
Eat.
Sleep.
Do not come.
Get down.
I learned the last two particularly quickly.
The reason was likely me.
Once I began walking, the time I spent sitting still sharply decreased.
I climbed things.
I fell.
I touched anything within reach.
Each time, Raymund watched first.
If I got up on my own, he left me be. Only when I truly could not rise did he offer a hand.
Mother was the opposite.
At the mere sound of me falling, she came running first.
Their methods of raising me were entirely different.
Strangely, I needed both.
That year, I gradually began to learn letters as well.
First my name.
Then Mother’s.
Raymund’s.
I learned numbers too.
They looked somewhat different from those of my previous life, but the principles of counting had not changed.
Most of my memories from those days were like that.
Walking.
Falling.
Learning words.
Learning letters.
Waiting for the seasons to change again.
But I had to wait far longer than I expected.
---
262 AC
The first time I took notice of the year was while Mother was sorting account books.
A number was written at the top of a document.
262.
I could already read numbers like that.
At first, I thought it was money.
But the same number appeared repeatedly on other papers.
I asked about it.
Mother told me it was the current year.
And that I had been born in 260.
Only then did time acquire numbers.
260.
261.
262.
‘Two years have already passed.’
The time I had spent in this body had always felt vague.
For an infant, a day was long, and a month was difficult to distinguish.
Now, for the first time, things fell into order.
I asked more questions.
Why was it 262?
What event marked the first year?
The answer was conquest.
Long ago, a king had conquered several kingdoms, and people counted their years from that event.
Here, they recorded it as years after the Conquest.
‘Ah.’
At first, I merely thought it was a different calendar.
Even in my previous life, the basis of a calendar differed by region and era. Some counted from a king’s accession, others from the founding of a state or a religious event.
But as I became able to read more, that thought changed as well.
The maps in books did not match the world I knew.
A vast land to the west.
An even vaster continent to the east.
The sea between them.
No matter how I turned it in my mind and compared it to a map of Earth, the shape did not fit.
The countries and people that appeared in history were the same.
They were not merely medieval kingdoms unknown to me.
I could find no connection at all to Earth’s history.
And decisively, when I looked at the night sky and searched for constellations I had known before, I could not find a proper match.
I did not possess precise astronomical knowledge.
Still, by then, I could discard one hypothesis.
‘I did not come to the past.’
Reincarnation.
That alone was unreal enough.
It seemed that the place was not Earth as well.
Strangely, the shock did not last long.
I had already died once and been born again as a baby.
To someone who had accepted that, the addition of one planet was relatively trivial.
It was closer to having a question answered.
‘So that is why I knew nothing.’
I looked at the map again.
White Harbor.
The North.
Westeros.
None of those names had existed in my previous life.
Of course I could not have remembered them.
From that day onward, I almost entirely gave up trying to compare this place to any era of Earth.
This was simply another world.
Once I organized it that way, I actually felt more at ease.
The problem was this world’s seasons.
---
263 AC
Another year turned.
263.
I had been born in 260, so roughly three years had passed since I reincarnated here.
In numbers, it was simple.
The problem was beyond the window.
Snow was falling.
Last year had been winter, too.
I remembered a long stretch of cold before that as well.
I stood at the window and watched the snow for a long while.
At first, I assumed it was simply because we were in the north.
In my previous life, winters were long at high latitudes as well.
But the more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed.
‘Last year was winter, too.’
I tilted my head.
‘Why is it winter again this year?’
My first thought was that perhaps my memories were confused.
They were the memories of a young child.
Perhaps I had failed to distinguish the seasons properly.
So I asked Raymund.
When would winter end?
The answer was unexpected.
He said he did not know.
At first, I thought he was giving me a careless answer because he could not be bothered.
But when I asked further, he truly did not know.
It might end this year.
It might last into next year.
It might last longer still.
Conversely, summer could continue for years as well.
I was speechless for some time.
"Years?"
Raymund stopped polishing his sword and looked at me.
"That happens sometimes."
After that, I did not need to ask any more.
Seeing my expression, Raymund looked at me as though I were the strange one.
To him, it was common knowledge.
Only to me was it madness.
A season extended beyond a year.
Without any fixed cycle, at that.
‘Wait.’
Another issue immediately followed in my mind.
Agriculture.
When to sow.
The growing period.
The harvest.
Preserving seed grain.
Feed for livestock.
Stored grain.
Even in my previous life, agriculture was severely shaken if the weather went wrong by only a few weeks. That was why people had spent thousands of years storing surplus grain in good years, eating it in lean years, and transporting food from other regions when local production fell short.
The reason Rome brought grain across the sea into its cities, and dynasties in East Asia maintained granaries, was ultimately to solve the same problem.
Save what remains in good times and use it in bad ones.
The principle was simple.
But bad times here did not last a single season.
They could last years.
If winter dragged on, farming was impossible.
People kept eating.
So did livestock.
Stored grain suffered losses as time passed.
Insects, moisture, and mold consumed it.
Fuel was needed constantly, too.
This was not a problem solved simply by increasing the harvest.
Storage.
Transport.
Reserves.
Fuel.
Everything had to work together.
I looked out the window again.
The fields lay buried beneath white snow.
‘This is not a season. It is a gamble.’
I only thought it.
These days, I had been trying not to swear aloud as often.
There was a reason for that effort.
*
I made a mistake once not long ago.
While listening to Raymund speak of long winters, a familiar curse slipped from my lips.
In my previous life, it had been an exclamation with little meaning.
The problem was that this was here.
There was no reason for a three-year-old child to say such a thing.
Raymund immediately decided that one of the servants had used foul language in front of me.
That afternoon, several people were summoned into the yard.
At first, I watched from hiding.
It was even a little amusing.
The positions in which they were punished were so familiar.
The men lay prone, supporting themselves with their arms, while the maidservants stood with their backs to the wall, knees bent.
It was not greatly different from what I had seen in the military or physical education classes in my previous life.
‘So these exist even in another world.’
That thought did not last long.
Their arms began to tremble.
One young servant clenched his teeth, while a maid fought to keep her legs from giving way.
No one had done anything wrong.
I was the one who had cursed.
Yet others were being punished.
Only then did I realize it was not funny.
I went to Raymund and told him to stop.
I told him no one had taught me the word.
I could not explain it, but at the very least, I insisted it was not the servants’ fault.
Raymund stared at me for a long while before finally sending them away.
After that day, I became more careful.
My body was three years old.
But people saw me as the young lord of this house.
A careless word from me could become someone else’s problem.
In my previous life, if I misspoke, it ended with me being cursed at.
Here, that was not always so.
It was a difference I needed to remember.
Of course, I had no intention of cutting down on the curses I made in my own head.
I considered that a basic human right.
*
As I learned to speak, I began to notice other things one by one.
Our house was not ordinary.
At first, I thought we were simply somewhat wealthy exiled nobles.
But there were too many words people avoided saying.
Once, in the middle of the night, I happened to overhear Mother and Raymund speaking.
Raymund called me prince.
Mother told him not to use that title.
On another day, I heard the name Blackfyre.
The Golden Company.
Heir.
Your Grace.
Words like these vanished whenever I entered the room.
I deliberately pretended not to know.
Even with the information I had, the rough outline was clear.
My father had been of high birth.
He died in a war.
Immediately afterward, Mother fled with me.
It seemed I had held a position worthy of being called prince.
And now, that fact had to be hidden.
‘A fallen royal family.’
It was the simplest conclusion.
Whether they had been stripped of a throne, failed in rebellion, or had their dynasty driven out, I could not know the details.
One thing was certain.
This was not a family that had prospered.
In my previous life, I had been a graduate student.
In this life, exiled royalty.
The genre of my life had changed far too abruptly.
Still, I had no intention of demanding answers right away.
I was three.
I had no army.
No property of my own.
A few days ago, I had missed my footing on the stairs and rolled down two steps.
I needed some self-awareness.
For now, I would eat.
Learn.
And not die.
That was enough.
Someday, once time had passed, I could find out.
What Blackfyre was.
Who my father had been exactly.
Why Mother’s face hardened whenever she heard that name.
And why Raymund still could not abandon it.
If there was not enough information, one did not fill the gaps with speculation.
It was something I had learned countless times in my previous life.
I merely needed to gather more data.
But there was another problem I wanted to solve first.
I was cold.
*
The manor near White Harbor was not a bad house.
By the standards of this age, it was actually a very good one.
Its stone walls were thick, its windows properly sealed, and there was no shortage of firewood.
There was a fire in the hearth almost all day long.
Yet it was cold.
More precisely, it was strangely cold.
When I sat close to the fire, my face grew hot.
Two or three steps away, it was comfortable.
On the other side of the room, it was chilly.
The floor was cold no matter where I stepped.
At first, I thought it was simply because I was accustomed to modern central heating.
After living there for about three years, I could see the problem itself.
It was not that there was too little firewood.
The use of heat was crude.
The radiant heat from the fire warmed people and walls directly, but a considerable amount of heat carried by the combustion gases escaped straight up the chimney. Once the fire went out, the room’s temperature fell faster than expected.
‘What a waste.’
The thought occurred to me.
It was something I had been sick of seeing in heat-transfer courses in my previous life.
Create heat.
Transfer it somewhere.
Store it or discard it.
Here, they were discarding far too much at the last stage.
People of old had tried to solve the same problem.
Roman hypocausts sent hot air beneath the floor, warming the stone and the building itself. Korea’s ondol sent the hot smoke from its furnace a long way beneath the heated floor, allowing the stones to absorb the heat.
Their forms and development differed, but the essential idea was similar.
Do not warm only the person sitting before the fire.
First, store the heat in a material capable of retaining much of it, such as stone.
Lengthen the path as well, so the hot gases cannot flee directly up the chimney.
Then, even after the fire dies, the structure slowly releases heat.
Thermal storage.
There was nothing extraordinary about the principle.
‘It should be possible here, too.’
There was stone.
There was clay.
They knew how to fire bricks, and they already knew how to build chimneys.
Of course, I was no ondol master.
Nor did I remember any plans for a hypocaust.
There was no reason to reproduce some finished design from the past exactly in the first place.
In alternate-history novels, people from the modern age often fell into the past and immediately produced perfected technology from their heads one after another.
Having experienced this myself, I understood just how convenient an ability that was.
I was not like that.
Even if told to do so at once, I would not be confident of the exact proportions for gunpowder.
I knew the principle of a steam engine, but precision machining would stop me.
Even for a generator, I would need to organize the theory again.
There was no search bar.
No textbooks.
No papers.
So I had to begin with principles I remembered clearly.
Fire.
Hot smoke.
Temperature differences.
The flow created by a chimney.
The heat capacity of stone and brick.
I knew that much.
The rest could be tested.
There was no need to tear up the floor of the house from the beginning.
Make something small.
Light a fire in it.
See whether the smoke escaped properly.
Check where it became hot and by how much.
If it failed, tear it apart and make it again.
It was not so different from what I had done in my previous life.
There was only one problem.
I was three years old.
I could not properly lift even a single brick.
‘First, I’ll have to persuade someone.’
I pressed my palm to the cold floor beside the hearth.
My fingertips quickly grew cold.
I disliked it, just as I thought I would.
Then Mother’s voice came from behind me.
"Daemon."
I took my hand away.
Valena stood in the doorway, looking back and forth between the floor I had been touching and the hearth.
"What are you looking at now?"
"The floor."
"I can see that."
I considered it for a moment.
Mother would at least listen.
"I want to make it warm here."
Valena looked down at my feet.
"Shall I have them put more wood on the fire?"
"Not that."
I pointed in turn at the hearth and the floor.
"If we do not send the hot smoke from the fire straight outside, but make it go underneath, the stones will grow warm too."
Valena looked at me for a moment.
She did not look as though she failed to understand.
Rather, she looked worried because she did understand.
"You mean to put smoke inside the house?"
"We have to make sure it doesn’t leak."
"How?"
I did not have an answer that far yet.
"We’ll have to try it and see."
Mother said nothing for a long while.
Then she stroked my head once.
"Daemon."
"Yes?"
"We only have one house."
"I know."
"Then do not test it on this house."
I thought for a moment.
It was a reasonable request.
"We can make something small first."
Valena’s expression became odd.
"You are already thinking of making it."
I did not answer.
Perhaps that was answer enough, for Mother gave a short sigh.
"Tell Raymund first."
"Why?"
"Because I do not want to be the only one listening to unpleasant things."
I looked up at Valena.
After a moment, I smiled.
Mother smiled a little as well.
That much conversation was enough.
I looked at the hearth again.
Outside, the snow continued to fall.
I had seen snow last year, too.
This year was winter as well.
No one knew when this winter would end.
If so, there would be problems that could not be solved merely by waiting.
The name of this world.
Its history.
The unknown blood I had inherited—there was still far more I did not know.
But the cold floor was certain.
I knew why it was cold.
And I roughly knew how to make it better.
I only had to begin with that.
I placed my palm against the stone again.
It was cold.
‘Yes.’
This time, I was certain.
‘I can fix this.’
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