Amery

Behind Hodgson Manor, just outside the stone gate is a wide, grassy field. Sometimes the soldiers train here, but more often it is quiet, empty and private. It’s where I like to go when I get a moment to myself, though my work as a maid allows very little free time. Today is an exception, though. It is June third, my birthday in this world, and Mrs. Agate let me have the afternoon off. I turn sixteen today, and it feels a little strange. I haven’t been sixteen in nine years.

It’s not really my birthday, of course, and I’m not really sixteen. My real birthday is in September, and in my home world I would be twenty-five by now. But I don’t look twenty-five.

From all the isekai genre novels and comics I’ve read, I was expecting to get a new body when I learned I’d transmigrated. That’s how this works for other girls in my situation— they all get silky, waist-length hair and eyes like glittering gemstones. But when I checked the mirror I found myself unchanged, except that I looked younger.

I was teenager Amery again, with the same dark brown hair and a face full of freckles. Not that I’m dissatisfied with my looks or anything. I just thought it would be fun to change. Or maybe not. My face may be ordinary, but I’m a little vain about my eyes— they are an unusual pale color, like flax, and framed with long, dark lashes. They are my best feature, or so my mother used to tell me.

This morning I woke up to a message from the game’s system. The tutorial is over, and the game is officially beginning. I’ve been on edge the whole day in expectation, but so far nothing special has happened.

Mrs. Agate must have noticed I was feeling anxious about something; after lunch she pulled me aside to ask what was wrong. The big, authoritative head cook runs her kitchen with an iron fist, but she is not without her soft spots. She is fond of me, and shows it occasionally with an extra ladleful of stew at dinner, or a warm bun at breakfast while everyone else eats leftovers. I don’t normally try to take advantage of her good feeling, but today I did. I lied; told her it was my birthday and that I was missing my family, and I asked for the afternoon off. To my astonishment, the request was granted.

I left the house quickly, before she could change her mind, and I’ve been sitting out here behind the estate wall ever since.

It’s a beautiful, almost summer day. The sky is half cloudy, half blue, and the breeze cools the sweat on my neck pleasantly. But while my body sits in quiet appreciation of the weather, my mind agonizes over all I know of the game, and what I guess is to come.

The year in Contrarian is 1161, which means nothing to me. But I can somewhat gauge the setting by the age of my employer’s son Tristan. Besides the general himself, he is the one person from the game I’ve been able to positively identify at close range.

Tristan Hodgson is thirteen years old, a beautiful, slender boy with pale skin and delicate features. He is a musical prodigy like his late mother, unsuited to the military life his father will soon force upon him. Because of this he will grow up with deep-seated feelings of inadequacy and resentment that will drive much of his plot in the game.

It goes without saying that Tristan is a potential love interest for Court Captive’s female lead, one of six—or seven, if I count Artair.

In the game he is seventeen, three years younger than the female lead. That makes our present day four years before the events in the game begin, and puts Artair at about eighteen-years-old. It was around this time that he first came to Hodgson estate, which explains why the game has me here working as a maid. This is the best place for me to interact with him before—

I hear a noise and glance behind me. It’s the familiar figure of Lulu, my fellow maid. She is a pretty girl, about the same age as me and not very bright, but she’s got that kind of open, honest personality I can’t help but like. It’s my natural instinct to care for her like I might a clumsy kid sister. Or a big, goofy dog.

Spying me, Lulu bounds over like a 150 lb Newfoundlander, all out of breath and grinning.

“Amery! I knew I’d find you here!” she calls excitedly.

“I told Mrs. Agate I wanted to be alone. If there’s not a birthday cake in that bag, you’d better go back the way you came.”

“But it is a birthday cake!” Lulu exclaims, tripping over a rock and barreling once over before somehow plopping down unharmed right beside me. I eye the bag with a pang of self-pity. My poor cake. More like a pancake now.

Astoundingly, Lulu pulls out a container with the logo of a famous local bakery, and inside I find an almost intact cake. A birthday miracle. It’s black forest with cherries on top, and I feel especially touched. She even remembered my favorite dessert. My eyes grow a little moist as I look to her big, honest face.

“Lulu…”

“You don’t mind it’s chocolate, do you? I was going to get you a carrot cake but then I saw this and I just had to try it. Isn’t it pretty?” Without even offering me a bite, she pulls a fork from her bag and stabs right into it to take a humongous bite. I gape as she grins at me, showing big, chocolate covered teeth.

“Happy birthday!”

The dear idiot. Her smile is infectious. I grab a fork of my own and mimic her motion. Chocolate with whipped cream, cherries and rum. It’s delicious.

We eat in silence for a minute, then, when Lulu has had enough, the chatter ensues.

“We’ve had our hands full in the kitchen this afternoon with you gone. I was asking where you were and Mrs. Agate said it was your birthday. Why, she could have knocked me over with a feather!” she laughs as she reaches for a pint of milk, also in her bag and miraculously not shattered. She takes a long swig before passing it to me. I eye it warily, wipe the rim with my sleeve, and drink.

“Then Mrs. Agate gave me some money and told me to go buy you a present, so I got changed quick as I could and—oh!” Her eyes widen and she flushes deeply. “That was supposed to be a secret!”

“It’s alright. I’m not listening.”

“Oh, thank goodness! Anyway, I ran down to the cake shop and you won’t believe who I met along the way…”

Well, so much for a thoughtful afternoon to prepare myself for the next stage of the game. But this kind of distraction is alright, too, I tell myself, stealing a liquor-soaked cherry from off my cake.

“…and that’s when she told me the prince was coming here. Can you imagine it? A real prince, training here at Hodgson manor? Why, you could have knocked me over with a—”

“Prince?” I sit up, suddenly alert. “What prince?”

“Well, he’s not a proper prince, you know. But he is the king’s bastard, the one with the foreign mother. People say he’s broody and mean and no one really likes him much. Oh, what is his name?”

“Cain,” I say, and I feel the butterflies start in my stomach. “Artair Cain.”

“That’s the one,” says Lulu, then resumes her prattle, though I do not hear her.

At last. After a whole year of waiting. He’s coming for me.

I’m giddy with excitement. It’s finally happening! My very own love story (with a friendship ending) is about to begin!

I lay back in the grass, full of cake and a little buzzed from the cherries. Artair at eighteen. What will he be like? What will he think of me?

I meant to just relax a bit, but as I wonder these things and Lulu drones on, I guess I doze off. And I dream of Artair Cain. Not as an adolescent, but as the man I remember from the game.

His face is handsome, but his expression is wooden, reacting to neither pain nor pleasure. His dark eyes are empty.

He kills without thinking, without feeling. No matter how much blood he soaks the ground with, those eyes are unchanged. He walks in a straight line, looking neither right nor left, like a grim reaper, harvesting a thousand souls with a single sweep of his sword.

That awful sword. So great it would take three men to lift it, red to the hilt in blood. He points it at his homeland of Contrarian, at the capitol and his father the king. And he points it at Hodgson’s estate.

He cleaves the front gate with a single swing. The general’s disciples rush him, but he cuts them down one by one, methodically slaughtering everyone within. Down to the last servant, and the last weeping child.

He’s wreathed in blood, the sky is dark with smoke from his burning. And still, those dark eyes do not see a single thing in front of him. Only that goal of his is fixed in the distance.

Vengeance. Vengeance!

And death.