Hilda

Hilda once used her low-key skills to purchase items at the same store for five consecutive days, and she managed to get new customer discounts each time.

Most people struggle to get to know Hilda.

Most of the time, she can be seen with her mistress Flora, yet people's attention always seems to focus on Flora. Hilda, who always stands behind her, often goes unnoticed. Most people's impression of this maid consists of, "There seems to be a person there... or maybe not? But who cares? Let's just talk about the extraordinary Miss Flora."

As a maid, Hilda loves keeping a low-profile and not being noticed by others. In other words, she purposely remains unnoticed. That explains why she always lowers her head, speaks softly, hides herself away, and stands in Flora's shadow.

In other words, when people learn her name is Hilda, it is not because they have gotten to know her, but rather, Hilda feels they are worthy of knowing her.

In private, Hilda is not reserved at all. In fact, she can even be quite aggressive. That may be somewhat surprising, but also entirely unsurprising.

Hilda's childhood was bright and privileged.

Each morning, she woke in a bed of velvet and lingered there, savouring the dreams of the night before, untouched by the everyday worries that governed most people's lives.

At breakfast, she would carefully pick the crusts off her bread; at afternoon tea, she would scrape a little cream from her cake to make it less sweet.

At night, before bed, she liked to read poetry beneath the great chandelier in the drawing room, softly reciting everything from ancient myths to fashionable love verses.

In those days, Hilda's life was much like her smile: a picture painted in pastels.

Yet she knew perfectly well that a life like that was no more real than a painted canvas, lovely to look at, and ready to tear at the lightest touch.

One thing vital was missing from the picture: her parents.

Both were nobles who served in the Empire's Legions, or rather, worked as agents.

In truth, few nobles were willing to become one. The endless brutal training and the life-threatening missions were the least of it. Worse was what came after: once drawn into the Empire's intelligence network, a person was caught there for good, reduced to a single knot in its mesh, with little hope of ever breaking free. It meant giving up any hope of a secure life, accepting the collar and living as a hound, unless one was so desperate to rise that freedom, dignity, and even life itself seemed a fair price to pay.

Hilda's father, an agent himself, had once been a minor noble from a fallen house. Born a little above the common lot yet never truly at ease among the pleasures of high society, he was driven by that contradiction to make something of himself. Through a friend's recommendation, he entered the 13th Legion, which answered directly to the Emperor, and was posted abroad. There, day after day, he wore carefully pressed suits, carried a cane, passed himself off as a government official, dined and drank with bureaucrats and magnates, and from their aimless drunken ramblings fished out one scrap of useful information after another for the Empire.

And then, as romantic tales of espionage always seem to go, in his sixth year abroad he met a red-haired lady. Code-named "Concerto", she too belonged to the 13th Legion, a special agent admired by everyone in it.

Nightfall. Trench coats. Bullets. Perfume. Wind-scoured rooftops. Enemies with no taste for romance. Crimson dregs in a wineglass. A ballgown just as red. Intelligence recovered at great cost.

Once all those elements had fallen into place, all it took was a single pull of the trigger to set it all ablaze.

And Hilda was the lingering afterglow of it, bright, fierce, and alone.

She lived by herself in her father's old mansion, seeing her mother only once a month. As for her father, Hilda knew little more than his name, and retained only the vaguest memory of his face.

Even among other excellent maids, Hilda still stands out. She is an all-rounder and excels at cleaning, no matter what or who requires cleaning. Her favourite tool for cleaning is firearms. Whenever she uses them during work, she has a slight smile on her face, as if she is about to have the time of her life.

Hilda enjoys being in Flora's shadow because it gives her a sense of control over the situation.

She appreciates the feeling of being behind a two-way mirror, lurking in the darkness and quietly yet cautiously observing others.

There are only two circumstances in which Hilda would step in front of Flora.

One is if she believes that the person can help Flora and she can negotiate on her behalf.

The other is if she perceives that the person poses a threat to Flora and she can eliminate them.

However, distinguishing between the two situations is not easy. Therefore, in most cases, Hilda does not step forward until the very last moment.

Hilda had another identity before she became a maid.

At the age of twelve, Hilda finally came to understand what was unusual about her family, and why she was allowed to see her mother only on nights of the full moon, nights when moonlight flooded the world, making it difficult for agents to remain unseen, and granting those who lived in the shadows one of their rare respites.

On such nights, Hilda would close her book of poetry. She no longer needed to light every lamp in the house to keep loneliness at bay, but could sit beside her mother on the balcony and talk instead. Most often, Hilda would speak about lines she had read lately; now and then, her mother would answer with stories drawn from her own experience, cats chased through foreign streets by dogs, lovers whispering beneath towering city walls, old tales that did not quite match the versions in books.

Lady Concerto, Hilda's mother, never cared to tell too many stories of her own. The dangers she had lived through were hard to put into words, and once told, might take on a dangerous glamour in the ears of whoever listened. She had no wish to see her daughter walk the same road. She did not hate her profession, but that did not mean she wanted anyone else to endure what she had.

Her father, however, who rarely had the chance to return from abroad, believed otherwise: Hilda, like both her parents, ought to embrace the shadows and become an agent herself. Part of that may have come from a simple loyalty to the Empire, but more from this conviction: a child born into such a family was never likely to have anything like a normal life. Even if Hilda did not join the Legion, the Legion would have found some way to pull her in.

Once that rift opened between them, it was like a canvas torn through: the tear would not easily mend.

Only the second time Hilda had ever seen her father, she heard her parents shouting at one another, and, beneath it, the sound of brick giving way. Their quarrel leapt from words into battle in an instant, engulfing the drawing room and drawing a ring of Legion soldiers to stand and watch.

It was then that Hilda made her decision. She would somehow mend this family, fractured and strange though it was. At the same time, the lure of adventure began to stir in her. She wanted to see her parents more often, to follow them into any corners of the world, and to speak with them more than she ever had before. She even imagined herself carrying out secret missions at their side, with nothing shining ahead of her in the dark but the cold gleam of a blade and the warmth in their eyes.

So, one snowy night, when she was fifteen, after seeing a recruitment poster for the 4th Legion in the streets of Dismania, she set aside her book of poetry, put out the bright lights in her father's old mansion, and knocked on a door that opened into darkness. It was no blind flight: she already knew where she meant to go. From then on, she began to learn the things her mother had mentioned only in passing, and never in any detail, ammunition, firearms, and hidden blades.

She formally joined the 4th Legion, and from then on she became a thorn among flowers, a poison in honey, a shadow beneath the moon, much like her mother before her. At the time, she did not yet know that the 4th Legion she was about to serve and the 13th Legion her parents served, two Legions whose names differed by only a single number, would one day leave them standing on opposite sides of a gulf neither she nor her parents could ever cross.

Hilda and Flora share a relationship that goes beyond a mere mistress-maid dynamic. In private, they are also friends, selecting clothes together and experimenting with various make-up styles. It is hard to compare Hilda during these moments with the one who, in the midst of battle, unleashes a hail of bullets without hesitation. She is like a dancer waltzing to the rhythm of bullets being loaded and whizzing through the air.

Throughout their flight, Hilda and Flora kept themselves hidden, though never in anything like desperation. More often than not, they would settle somewhere no one was likely to find them and wait in perfect composure for the soldiers searching for them to pass by. Only once they were certain everything was safe would they continue. For fugitives, theirs was an almost enviably measured routine.

Flora, for her part, had prepared for just about every scenario. She had even packed a wilderness survival guide she had once read out of idle curiosity, and had jokingly asked Hilda whether they would soon be reduced to living off insects.

Hilda had merely sighed and shaken her head. Then, with complete seriousness, she began laying out every detail of the life she meant to build for them after their escape. It had all been planned with the precision of a railway timetable, down to the minute, with contingencies for every likely setback. In fact, it almost seemed as though she had first mapped out exactly how a fugitive princess would be pursued, then simply worked backwards from there to devise a perfect way around capture.

Hilda loves trimming flowers to soothe her emotions, for being both a maid and an agent are professions prone to stress and could even trigger self-loathing.

Hilda could scarcely remember the details of the days before she met Flodia. At the time, her mind had been occupied by matters far more pressing. The target of the mission was a girl named Flodia, daughter to a nobleman so highly placed that even his name was scarcely spoken aloud. Hilda's assignment was to pass herself off as a maid, remain always at the young lady's side, record everything she said and did without attracting notice, and stay on guard against agents from the other Legions. Repeating the rules of the mission to herself under her breath, with equal parts curiosity and unease, Hilda passed through three heavy doors and found a familiar figure waiting beyond them.

It was her mother, Lady Concerto.

For a moment, Hilda could not make sense of what she was seeing. Then, before she could stop herself, she blurted out, "Wait... are you Flodia...?"

"Don't be absurd. You are Hilda Godfrey of the 4th Legion. I am Lady Rosa, chief lady-in-waiting here. And from today onward, you too will serve here as a maid."

"But... Mum..."

"You have no mother here. If you must call me something, use my codename. Since you have already passed the 4th Legion's tests, you should know how a competent agent is expected to conduct herself. Or is the 4th Legion no longer capable of finding anyone better suited to this post?"

Lady Concerto's expression did not change. Hilda, recovering quickly from that brief moment of confusion, soon understood the situation: Flodia was important enough that both the 4th Legion and the 13th had dispatched an agent to watch her.

So she gave a small shake of her head, as if to cast off the image of the mother she had always known, and resolved to carry out the mission alongside this woman who was at once familiar and strange. No, not merely carry it out, but do it better than Lady Rosa, if only to return that barb in kind.

So when Flodia finally appeared, Hilda greeted her in a voice made deliberately bright and cheery. But nothing in Flodia's response matched what she had expected. She did not even look up as she approached. Only at the very last moment did her eyes rise to meet Hilda's.

Flodia's eyes were like solid gold, bright, yet utterly without life. In other circumstances, Hilda might have reached for some gentler comparison, something like wheat rippling under the sun. But that would not have been true. There was no spark in Flodia's eyes, and it reminded her of the tower's own splendour: magnificent at a glance, yet always somehow veiled, as though its brilliance could never fully break through.

In that instant, Hilda, who had thought herself already a capable agent, felt a flicker of panic. This was nothing like the assignment she had imagined. Faced with the arrival of a complete stranger, Flodia betrayed no shift in mood at all, as though Hilda were no more worthy of notice than one of the flowers blooming in the garden.

That would not do. Disheartened though she was, Hilda quickly resolved that she had to do something. Otherwise her reports on the mission would yield next to nothing, and her career as an agent would meet its first real setback.

So she rifled through everything she had learned and began, half out of genuine feeling and half by design, to draw close to the girl she had been sent to watch.

Flodia would never be won over by anything money could buy, Hilda thought. Anything rare or costly had almost certainly long since ceased to mean anything to her. So perhaps something rougher, less refined, might catch her attention instead. And so Hilda began speaking to her in a brighter, more lively way, bringing her fresh sprays of berries, snatches of verse picked up in the streets, or curious tales of far-off lands brought back by travelling merchants.

Before long, Hilda realised she had already run through every note she had studied on how to win a target's trust as quickly as possible. And yet, day after day, she kept finding her own ways of letting light into the sealed cage of Flodia's world.

There were moments, only a few, when she would hesitate and wonder what any of it was for. The care she took had long since gone beyond pity for the girl she had been assigned to watch, and it had nothing to do with the deference a servant owed her mistress. It felt more like... friendship.

The thought was absurd. Hilda shook her head and told herself she was only doing it for her own sake. Her own childhood, after all, had not been so different from Flodia's: privileged, perhaps, but lonely. At least Hilda had been free, and once her duty to the Legion was over, nothing would be left to bind her. But for all that Flodia possessed, this gilded cage was the only thing that was truly hers. Hilda knew why Flodia kept her silence, and when she looked at her, she could not help seeing the lonely child she herself might once have been. The thought sat ill with her. More than anything, she wanted to see a smile bloom on Flodia's face.

Yes, she had a mission to carry out, and she still went on recording Flodia's every movement. But notes such as "she smiled", "she smiled again", or "she smiled ten times today" no longer made their way into her reports, because such things had ceased to be rare enough to record.

At times, Hilda felt that what she did in the shadows was a betrayal of Flodia's trust. But then she would think of what would happen if she were deemed unfit for the task and replaced by another agent. That, without question, would only make things worse for Flodia. So she let herself think of it as a way of protecting her, and carried on nonetheless, despite the self-loathing it stirred in her.

As a maid, Hilda remembers where all of Flora's dresses are placed. She also knows her way through all the nearby streets so that she can protect Flora and escort her away if she comes under threat. Her mind can hold numerous similar trivial details, yet they are well categorized and organized, like pieces of jewellery. In short, her memory is flawless.

Although she had been reunited with her mother in the tower, Hilda somehow felt even more distant from her. Their shifts seemed deliberately arranged never to overlap, and serving in different Legions meant they had little contact to begin with. After all, Hilda had no idea what sort of work this "Lady Concerto" actually carried out. One of her own duties, meanwhile, was to keep watch for agents from the other Legions.

And yet Hilda had come to see a side of Concerto she had never known before: the way she could trail a target like a shadow without ever putting them on guard, the way she could tell when food had been tampered with, the way she could win people's trust without seeming to try. Concerto would only speak a little more when Hilda asked her about such things. Even then, it felt less like a conversation between mother and daughter than an exchange between colleagues.

Hilda could sense that Concerto was always speaking to her through a mask. What lay beneath it, she could no longer tell.

In the end, the order Hilda had always known would come reached her at last: Flodia was to be killed in secret, and her death made to look like an accident.

She had always known this day would come. The commanders of the 4th Legion were notorious for their ruthlessness, and Flodia, regarded as a threat to the throne, had long since become a thorn in their side. They had gone so far as to decide on her elimination without waiting for the Emperor's decree.

Hilda had thought she was ready for that. Long ago, she had already resolved that when the order came, she would forget everything she had done for Flodia and carry it out cleanly. Everything up to this point, every kindness, every effort, every tenderness, had merely been part of the mission.

She had been ready. Or so she told herself. All she had to do was follow orders. Once the job was done, it would be one more credit to her name, one more proof of her worth as an agent. To refuse the mission, on the other hand, meant facing a far more dangerous question first: what, then, was she supposed to do about Flodia?

It was madness. But like a curse, the thought clung to her. With time, it took root in her mind, until she found herself forced to think through, in earnest, every possibility that choice would entail.

They could not remain in Dismania. That much was certain. If she failed the mission, another agent would be sent to take Flodia's life. Hilda would never leave that chance to anyone else.

If they went south, they would be heading for the lands of the Elysian Church. But the border there was heavily guarded all year round; crossing it would be all but impossible. Aethyrie, the Free State between the two nations, might offer slightly easier passage. To the east lay the endless desert of Khemet. To the north there was perhaps one slender hope of survival as well: Icelake, on the Empire's outer edge, and beyond it Askard, where the old Charon tribes still lived...

And even after Hilda had traced every possible route by which Flodia might flee, one voice inside her still would not fall silent: "Have you truly thought this through? Because once you took that step, there would be no turning back."

"Hilda... is something troubling you? Has something happened?"

The concern in the voice beside her belonged to the girl who was at her side from morning to night. Hilda was unaccustomed to hearing such a tone directed at her. More often than not, the words addressed to her had been orders or praise. Those were the terms on which she had learned to live. Concern, by contrast, was not something she had ever heard in another person's voice. For an agent, such things were not supposed to matter.

What if I'm really Flodia's friend? The question rose in her mind again.

Ordinarily, she would have smoothed a hand over her hair, poured the tea, or gone out to tend the garden, and put the thought from her mind. But this time she could no longer do that. Now it demanded an answer, an answer to a question that should never have arisen, and one whose answer would alter not only her own fate, but that of countless others as well.

Hilda closed her eyes, trying to think of the right thing to say to Flodia. To her surprise, the next instant found her drawn into a warm embrace.

"I probably can't do anything to ease your troubles," Flodia said softly, almost apologetically, "but I hope this will make you feel a little better."

With that, the wavering scales in Hilda's heart tipped at last.

"Flodia... do you want to leave this place?"

Her voice came out rougher than she had meant it to. Half her mind was berating her for her insanity; the other had already broken into song. And in that moment she made her choice. She would free the girl before her from this gilded cage, from all the hollow reverence within that golden prison, and let her fly beneath an open sky.

Flodia froze, whether because Hilda's voice sounded so unlike itself, or because for a moment she simply could not make sense of what she had heard.

Then her expression softened, and she gave the answer Hilda had known all along.

"Yes!"

To Flodia, Hilda's invitation sounded almost like the kind of sweet, perilous temptation a witch might offer in a fairy tale. But it was Hilda who offered it, her maid, who seemed capable of anything. Hilda had brought a glimmer of the world beyond those walls into her life. Surely she could make good on such a promise as well.

So the two of them planned together for three days and three nights, until at last they had devised a meticulous escape from the gilded, flower-draped cage that had held Flodia for so long.

Then, on an evening when Hilda was once again permitted to go home on leave, the gates that both guarded and confined Flodia rolled open as they always had. Hilda departed with another maid at her side, a slight, unremarkable servant of the lowest rank. By the time the ladies-in-waiting and guards in the tower discovered that same slight maid lying fast asleep in Flodia's bedchamber, drugged by a sleeping draught, Flodia herself was nowhere to be found. By then, seven finely dressed young women had already taken their places in seven different markets across Dismania. There, amid the noise and bustle of the city, each of them began to sing the same song. Every one of them was flawlessly disguised and looked exactly like Flodia. Even Lady Rosa, hurrying from one market to the next, could not tell which of them was the real Flodia.

For a time, the citizens of the Imperial Capital and the agents among them alike were thrown into confusion. And amid all that uproar, the two runaways, now dressed as plainly as possible, slipped away against the flow of the crowd. Following the route Hilda had mapped out in advance, they left the city behind, its walls and streets flushed red by the last light of sunset.

After Flora once again fell into the 13th Legion's hands, Hilda was seized by a kind of panic rarely seen in her. The new life she had envisioned for the two of them had come apart, and she was left with no choice but to confront the Empire that ruled this vast land.

It did not take her long to regain her composure. As revelry spread through Icelake that night, she began weighing, one by one, who she might turn to for help. Then, from the corner of her eye, she caught sight of a familiar white-clad figure heading towards the Galea Theatre... the very same figure she had seen on the day she and Flora arrived in Icelake, when a violent gale had suddenly swept through the city.

Hilda embraces a new life, wandering through landscapes she has never seen before and strolling down streets she had previously only read about. But just as before, she is protecting Flora from behind.

At times, as Hilda gazes at the petite figure of the girl before her, a slightly "intrusive" thought surges into her mind, she believes that even though she and Flora have their own blood relatives, they are now the true family to each other.

In Hilda's memory, her mother's face had already begun to blur. Her father, more distant still, was little more than a pale, indistinct shape.

After joining the Legion, she began to hear the stories told about Lady Concerto. Ordinary people had scarcely heard the codename, but whenever some force opposed to the Empire was shaken by an unexplained explosion, an assassination, or some other baffling disaster, her fellow agents would murmur that Lady Concerto of the 13th Legion was behind yet another flawless operation.

Hilda found it difficult to reconcile those stories with the woman she called Mother. Perhaps that was why they lingered in her mind.

Everything further back remained in Hilda's memory only as if carefully pruned, until all that was left were a few beautiful fragments: the first time she met her father, when she was ten; the day she learned a rare word for sweetness; the afternoon she finished reading the book of poetry her mother had brought home for her. And in every one of those memories, her mother was the same, patient, gently smiling, answering her questions now and then, and always listening.

And yet there was one expression of her mother's that remained perfectly clear in her mind.

It was from the night of her father's second return, after he and her mother had quarrelled bitterly. Perhaps it was because it had been so long since Hilda had last seen her mother's face clearly, or because the moonlight was so dim, but that night she suddenly realised that the first faint lines had begun to show on her face, like the faded flowers she used to bring back for her.

Looking at the quiet sadness on her mother's face, Hilda began to imagine a different kind of life for herself.

It might be a path full of thorns and hardship. But perhaps it was also one that might spare her mother at least a little of that sadness.

And so Hilda made her choice, and stepped into the shadows. Yet that choice only drove her further from her mother, even as they began to meet more often. Even the brief warmth they had once shared grew harder and harder to recover.

Perhaps it was because they had grown so far apart that Hilda finally began to understand what her mother truly was: the Empire's finest agent. And once she had seen that clearly, she could not help but regard her as a formidable enemy from the moment they met again in Icelake. What relieved her, then, was that her mother asked for nothing but her brooch as a keepsake.

That meeting softened her feelings towards her mother. While serving Flora, she had more than once found herself wondering whether her mother had cast off all motherly feeling even towards her own daughter. And yet Hilda now realised that, beneath the mask of the Empire's finest agent, her mother still cared for her. She even began to wonder whether the security plan for Flora that she had once glimpsed at home had been deliberately left where she might see it. For the first time, she felt a twinge of guilt over the hostility she had harboured towards her mother. She even began to wonder whether she herself had become more like a finely honed instrument, colder, more stripped of feeling, than her mother ever had.

But what followed made it clear that Hilda had been wrong about both her mother and herself. If anything, Lady Concerto had gone beyond even Hilda's worst imaginings: she used the brooch she had asked Hilda for to make Flodia believe that Hilda had been captured, and lured her back into the hands of the 13th Legion.

With that, the last image Hilda still held of her mother broke apart like a dried flower crushed to pieces, scattering on the wind. She understood then that if they ever met again, they would only greet one another with gunfire.

And yet one doubt still lingered in her mind. Lady Concerto could have completed her flawless operation by taking both Flodia and Hilda. So why had she taken the princess alone and let her daughter go, the one who had been the true architect of the princess's escape?

Unless this, too, was a way out Lady Concerto had deliberately left open for her.

But Hilda did not want to know the truth. She no longer cared whether she was an agent, a maid, or a daughter. Only one thing mattered to her now: she was going to save Flora, the only friend she had.