Chapter 173: Shifting the Blame
“…Uh… huh?”
Rachel froze awkwardly when she heard the sudden question, quickly placing her hand on the book in front of her.
With her tiny size, her whole hand barely the size of the book’s corner. At her age, most people wouldn’t expect her to be able to read. And a book like this, filled almost entirely with words and barely any pictures, shouldn’t be something a child could understand.
Oh no… she had forgotten something really important.
Even though she had been pretending to be a little kid for a long time, Rachel had lived as a normal adult for so many years. A lot of her habits were hard to change, no matter how careful she tried to be.
Sometimes, when she got confused right after waking up, she would still think she was the alchemist who used to spend her days cooped up in a workshop. It wasn’t until she rolled over and nearly hit her head on the railings of her tiny bed that she would remember, her old self was already gone. The person she was now was just a clueless but cute little girl.
Rachel secretly glanced over at Evelia, nervously gulping.
Evelia was still staring at her.
After dealing with the interrogation earlier from Armand and Carle, now Rachel had to face an interrogation from Evelia.
‘Ahhh—damn it, just send me to jail already! At least they would feed me and give me a bed in prison!’
But after thinking it over, Rachel managed to calm herself down.
Even though Evelia’s stare was giving her tons of pressure, Rachel knew she had to find a way to bluff her way out of it.
Even if Evelia’s eyes clearly said “Don’t lie to me,” Rachel had no choice, she had to lie like her life depended on it.
If this were one of those choice-based games, she would probably be seeing a list of options pop up in front of her right now. She needed to choose the best way to tell Evelia that she could read.
‘Tell the truth and get leniency’ was out of the question. There was no way she could tell the truth.
Playing pitiful and trying to get sympathy wasn’t going to work either. She had already used that trick before, and Evelia didn’t fall for it.
Saying nothing to act mysterious? That would just make it look like she wanted to die young.
In the end… there was only one option left...
“Yes, Mom! I can read!”
Rachel admitted it.
But this wasn’t really ‘telling the truth.’
“I learned back when I was living on the streets!”
Instead of avoiding the question, she decided to face it head-on.
Now, Rachel was going to play the role of a confident child. After all, kids often had strange confidence and believed they knew everything, even when they barely understood anything.
Rachel’s plan was to make her ability to read look like a child’s silly confidence, not an adult’s hidden skill.
“You learned?” Evelia walked over to Rachel’s side and casually flipped open a page in the book Rachel had. “Then read this part out loud.”
For someone who looked about three or four years old, being able to read was a suspicious thing.
It was sad to say, but Evelia herself hadn’t been able to read when she was young either.
Of course, Evelia wasn’t a street kid like Rachel claimed to be. But she had just been the daughter of a farming family.
Her family didn’t have educated people, only hardworking farmers who worked for the landlords. So she didn’t need to learn to read or write. The landlords or landowners, or you could say, slave owners, didn’t care if their workers were educated. Most people could only write their names at best. But even then, most of the time they just used a handprint as a signature. That red handprint looked like they were signing their life away to a future with no hope.
Evelia hadn’t been born in the House of Nightingales, but even her so-called “free” childhood wasn’t much different from slavery.
It was kind of funny when you think about it, the person who actually gave Evelia the chance to learn to read and write was the Second Prince.
He had hired teachers for her so she could be trained. Most of what she learned was very basic, and the focus was really on things like assassination and survival skills. Reading and writing were just “extras.” But still, it was better than not being able to read at all. At least she didn’t end up as an illiterate assassin.
That’s why Evelia was very curious now. She herself didn’t start seriously learning to read and write until she was in her teens. So how could Rachel, a street child who looked about three years old, possibly know how to read?
As she wondered about it, a sense of caution quietly crept into Evelia’s heart. After all, Rachel’s background was still a mystery.
She’d heard that Armand had once tried to figure out who Rachel really was and where she came from. There were many orphans in the world, but as the Captain of the Royal Knights, Armand should have at least found some clue. But in the end, he never brought the topic up again. It was like he had hit a dead end. No clues, nothing to follow, and nothing left to say.
Rachel was like she had just grown out of the ground, or popped out of thin air.
But really, there’s no such thing as someone who appears out of nowhere. There should always be traces to follow. If you can’t find them, it just means you’re looking the wrong way… or asking the wrong questions.
Could it be that this little girl Rachel still had some secret no one knew about?
But aside from that, Evelia hadn’t noticed anything too strange. She had to admit, even if Rachel might slip up now and then, most of the time she played her role really well.
Because even now, when both Armand and Evelia were starting to wonder if Rachel was hiding something, they were still thinking of her as just a “child.” That word, child, was still the key label they used to understand Rachel. Neither of them had ever thought Rachel might be something else entirely.
Not even Evelia, who had gone through body modification herself, had considered that maybe Rachel had also been changed by alchemy.
Evelia stared at Rachel, who was pointing at the words in the novel and slowly trying to read them out loud. She fell into deep thought.
“Um… so… the sun in the sky came down…”
Rachel spoke with a kind of forced confidence, pretending she was sure of herself while still hesitating a bit. She looked at the words she knew, and then said something slightly different from what was actually written.
She mentally marked the complicated characters, the ones with too many strokes, as “words Rachel wouldn’t know,” skipped over them, and made up her own version based on the general meaning. That way, she sounded like she sort of understood, but couldn’t read everything word for word. She mixed truth and guessing to get through the sentence.
“The sun in the sky went down.”
Evelia, sitting beside her, gently corrected her reading. If it weren’t for the tension between them, this could have looked like a sweet scene of a mother teaching her child to read.
“The moon rose into the sky, and the stars blinked ten million times…”
“The crescent moon rose into the sky, and the stars were like ten thousand watching eyes.”
“They saw the sun… um… land on the ground…”
“Their eyes looked down at the earth, watching the last rays of sunlight disappear.”
“People… walk… eat…”
“…People walked on the road, coming and going again and again.”
“And for eating… um… braised pork… hmm… steak with potatoes, and cream soup.”
Rachel fully leaned into the classic child trait of “there’s no way a kid can focus on reading for more than five minutes!” When she saw the character “è¿”” (meaning “return”), she confused it with the similar-looking “饔 (meaning “food”), and instantly jumped into reciting her dinner menu.
What could you do? Kids had wild imaginations, and the character Rachel was playing had a wild imagination too.
“And also chocolate cake, blueberry yam, and that thing… the super juicy tomato sauce egg roll?”
Rachel was trying to describe that thick, tube-shaped food item that was about the size of her wrist and oozed tomato sauce when lifted. She had no idea what it was actually called, so she simply named it “tomato sauce egg roll.”
“That’s tomato sushi.”
“Tomato… sushi?”
—That thing was sushi?!
Rachel looked completely shocked when she heard Evelia say that.
That long, thick thing overflowing with tomato sauce… was sushi?
Also, why was it tomato sauce sushi?! Was this person a tomato demon or something?! Why was there tomato sauce everywhere?!
“Yes, tomato sushi,” Evelia replied calmly.
She immediately knew what Rachel was talking about. It was the special tomato dish she had carefully made for Mr. Armand that night, tomato sushi.
Because it was the kind of sushi with a runny filling, it would spill everywhere once cut. So when serving it, Evelia hadn’t sliced it up, but instead served the whole roll as part of Armand’s dinner set. That dish had left quite an impression on Armand.
“But…” Evelia looked at Rachel, and it seemed like she was no longer focused on whether Rachel could read. “Why did sushi like that end up on your table? Who did you have dinner with tonight? Was it with Mr. Armand?”
“Huh? No, I had dinner with Grandpa Butler—”
Mid-sentence, Rachel suddenly realized something.
And at that moment, the temperature in the room seemed to drop like ice.
She thought back to the way Evelia and Armand had reacted differently to the tomato sauce dishes at the dining table. Evelia seemed to love tomato sauce, while Armand looked like he didn’t really enjoy it.
No, actually, most people would probably find those strange tomato dishes hard to accept. It’s just that Evelia loved tomato sauce way too much. Honestly, she should stop being a top-class assassin and become a “tomato sauce assassin” instead.
So… that tomato dish was something Evelia had specially made for Armand, but Armand had just casually “passed it on” to the poor old butler?
…Oh no. And this wasn’t even the first time.
Rachel remembered that when she played around the estate and sometimes ate with the maids or knights, she often saw someone eating what looked like a fancy, single-serving tomato dish.
So that’s what was going on?
Evelia loved tomato dishes and made them for Armand every time, but Armand didn’t like them, so he just gave them away?
Oh no… Is Armand actually… a jerk boyfriend?!
Well… Rachel could kind of understand… Just thinking about all that tomato sauce was enough to make her stomach churn.
“…I see.”
Evelia, sitting next to Rachel, seemed to have realized something too. She pressed her lips together tightly.
She no longer cared about Rachel’s issue. Without saying a word, she blew out the candle and quietly went back to her bed.
The silence in the room became so heavy that Rachel felt like even breathing had become hard.
She didn’t know if her little “crisis” was officially over, but she did know that someone else was definitely about to go through their own crisis.
Sorry, Captain Armand!
I didn’t mean to… I swear!