The Berthier ducal house had been destroyed. Adelaide Charlotte Berthier was lucky. She had earned a reputation as the unbridled troublemaker of the Berthier family, her conduct so far outside the norm that the nickname had practically become her title.
Duke Berthier had cut ties with his daughter, and Adelaide had gone on living with the Berthier name cast aside. Thanks to that, she had likely met a peaceful death.
“A life without regrets…”
The mage had never known Adelaide in life. But she was the last remaining variable, the only one left. Every other option had already failed.
Adelaide had refused to acknowledge Duke Berthier’s illegitimate child. Because of that, her own father had disowned her.
The mage had nowhere left to retreat. Duke Berthier had driven his daughter out again in the second attempt, just the same as before. The mage decided to give Adelaide the chance to choose differently.
The crown prince and the Berthier lady. Both had been betrayed by family they trusted, yet the two had lived lives that were complete opposites. The crown prince should never have stepped back, and the Berthier lady should have stepped back when she had the chance. The mage had to stake her final move on the one remaining hope, an uncertain variable.
“Perhaps your life without regrets was the very cause of it all. And so.”
A hand of nothing but bone emerged from within the black robes. The mage groaned through clenched teeth, the pain of moving even her finger joints almost unbearable.
“Please, let this become a life of regrets.”
A blue light spread slowly from the mage’s hand. It crept forward until it swallowed the gravestone whole.
“Ugh!”
Adelaide woke to a pain that felt like someone had grabbed her by the hair and was shaking her violently.
She checked her head first, in a panic. No disembodied hands floated in the air, no torso-less horror in sight.
“My lady, are you thirsty? Shall I bring you some water?”
A voice she didn’t recognize came from below the bed. In that same moment, Adelaide noticed that the mattress supporting her back and hips was remarkably soft.
‘Did I put on weight back there?’
The bed Adelaide used was a cheap wooden frame with barely enough to call itself a bed, stacked with several worn-out mattresses sold at a discount precisely because all the life had been pressed out of them. In short, it had absolutely no business being soft.
“My lady, I’ve brought water.”
Come to think of it, the bed wasn’t the only strange thing. Adelaide brought the hand she’d been running through her hair up in front of her face. Even in the dark, she could see it clearly.
“There are no scars!”
“My lady, what’s wrong?”
After being thrown out of the Berthier household, Adelaide had quickly come to understand that she had to work if she didn’t want to starve to death.
She had no friends to turn to for help. No one had reached out a hand to Adelaide.
The money and jewels she had taken when she was driven from the house were all stolen. After three days of starving in a row, she learned what hunger truly meant.
“The scars, I had a large burn scar, I was certain of it…”
“A burn? My lady, you were burned? I’ll go fetch a physician right away!”
The flustered voice finally made Adelaide realize there was someone else beside her.
“You…”
It was the maidservant who had attended to Adelaide before she was expelled from the family. She didn’t know the girl’s name.
Adelaide’s maids changed constantly, unable to endure her temperament, and none ever stayed long enough for her to bother remembering their names.
“Why are you here?”
“Pardon? I’ve been sleeping under your bed every night for the past few days, my lady.”
“The bed, something’s wrong with this bed!”
“The bed?”
Adelaide slid out of the bed. She felt disoriented. This was not the small attic room she had been living in.
Soft rugs lay underfoot, luxurious curtains half-covered a large window, and when she turned her bewildered gaze around the room, a vanity table crowded with perfume bottles came into view.
“This is my room…”
“Of course it’s your room, my lady. Shall I call for a physician? I really do think you should be examined.”
The maid muttered that something had to be done and threw on her outer robe. Adelaide did often throw fits about not being able to sleep at night, but she had never looked this vacant and lost before.
“Stay in your room and don’t move. I’ll go fetch the physician quickly.”
The maid hurried out, then went down with a shriek of “Eek!” She had moved too fast and missed her step.
Even without the confusion of the moment, Adelaide was not the sort of person to concern herself with whether someone fell or not, so she tried to focus on making sense of what was happening.
“Wha, what?”
But Adelaide’s body moved on its own, shot to its feet, and helped the fallen maid up.
It even bent slightly at the waist and smoothed out the wrinkles in the maid’s skirt, brushing them flat with a few quick pats.
“My, my lady…?”
The maid stared at Adelaide, startled by the unexpected kindness.
“Don’t bother me over something so trivial. I don’t need a physician either, so go sleep in another room tonight.”
Adelaide was just as frightened. A body that moved however it pleased without the owner’s permission! She blurted out whatever came to mind to send the maid away. The maid backed out of the room clutching the skirt Adelaide had smoothed for her.
“What is this, what is going on!”
Her body moved according to Adelaide’s will again, just like that. She spread her fingers wide, then curled them into a fist. She swung her arms up and down, and even jumped in place.
Adelaide, hopping up and down, caught her own reflection in the mirror across the room. She stopped and ran to it.
“This can’t be…”
In the mirror stood a version of herself that looked at least ten years younger. Adelaide ran her hands frantically over her face. She pushed back her bangs and checked her forehead.
“Here, there was a scar from a grease burn…”
She lifted her skirt and looked at her leg.
“The leg that broke when I was hit by a carriage is perfectly fine…”
An unlucky carriage accident had left Adelaide with a limp. The coachman had been drunk. Adelaide had screamed and argued until she wrung a hefty settlement out of him.
“It doesn’t hurt. I can walk properly.”
Adelaide walked from one end of the large room to the other. Nothing hurt anywhere, and she was brimming with energy on top of that.
“I must be around seventeen, by the look of it.”
Seventeen was also the age when Adelaide had been thrown out of the house. Duke Berthier had declared he would no longer tolerate Adelaide’s misdeeds.
The rift between father and daughter had grown beyond repair from the moment Duke Berthier announced he would name a child he had brought home from an orphanage as his heir.
People gossiped that no nobleman in the world would make an orphan of unknown origins his heir, and that the duke had clearly been hiding the child all along and was only now bringing him forward. Adelaide thought the same.
“If I’m seventeen, that means it’s around the time that boy came to the house.”
Adelaide tried to recall the boy, a memory now hazy at the edges.
“No, what am I doing? I’m having a bad dream right now. My body moving on its own was part of the dream too. I need to wake up.”
There was a pile of laundry waiting for her early in the morning. Get to the communal washhouse even a little late, and someone always snatched the good spots.
Adelaide decided the whole thing was a dream, went to the bed, and lay down.
“Even if it is a dream, at least the bed is comfortable.”
Certain that she would wake to her small, worn attic room, Adelaide drifted off to sleep.
‘You want to make that vermin into the Duke Berthier?’
‘Watch your tongue, Adelaide. You were the one who said you wouldn’t carry on the family line.’
‘If you had brought in a husband to marry into the family, I might have at least considered it. How like you, to drag in the worst possible solution!’
‘You were the one who drove away every eligible young nobleman!’
‘Yes! I did! Because you kept bringing me nothing but empty husks!’
A dream. A dream within a dream. Adelaide watched herself argue with Duke Berthier as though it were someone else’s business.
Behind Duke Berthier stood a scruffy boy, at a complete loss for what to do.
“Lionel.”
Right, that was his name. Adelaide’s voice reached no one.
Adelaide had hated that boy. She hated him so unbearably that she refused to even look at his face, and whenever she was forced to cross paths with him, she never hesitated to cut him with sharp words.
One day, Adelaide had shoved the boy down a flight of stairs. She heard afterward that he had struck his head badly and nearly died.
Duke Berthier declared he would no longer stand for Adelaide’s behavior and expelled her from the family.
Adelaide had no regrets. If anything, it only deepened her conviction that Lionel was Duke Berthier’s hidden child.
What other reason could there be for casting out his own flesh and blood over harm done to a mere orphan?
Lionel was only a year younger than Adelaide. She swore she would never forgive Duke Berthier for betraying her mother, not until the day she died.
Even as she suffered through hunger and cold, Adelaide never once entertained the thought of going home and begging for mercy.
Living on sheer spite, she gradually grew accustomed to hard labor. She had been charging forward without looking back, too busy to think, and now here was a dream dragging her back to her days as a young lady.
Adelaide turned away from the scene before her and sat down somewhere on the featureless floor. She thought to herself that she was going to be exhausted when she woke up.
“I’m not waking up.”
Unless she had somehow gained weight exclusively in her back and hips without noticing, she was still lying on that soft bed.
“I need to go do the laundry.”
Laundry paid better than most other work, hard as it was. Even if her body took a beating, if she took on a full load of washing, she earned enough by evening to have bread alongside her thin soup.
“At this rate, someone’s going to take all my laundry.”
An enormous amount of washing arrived at the washhouse where Adelaide worked every single day.
