The next instant, Tohko gasped and came to a stop in the doorway.

Peeking in from beside her, I tensed as well.

The window facing the veranda had shattered spectacularly and fine shards of glass were scattered on the desk and floor.

Maki was holding a rumpled sheet of paper in her hand and was staring down at it.

"Maki! What happened?"

"Aw, you came." Maki looked over at us.

"We were just passing by," Tohko said spitefully, then went into the room and peered down at Maki's hand. Her voice became shrill. "Wh-wh-wh-wh-what's that?!"

Maki opened the paper for us with a dry rustle.

It was traditional rice paper that might be used for calligraphy. It was wrinkled up and the upper half was ripped diagonally.

Words were laid out on it in red brushstrokes.

"Don't forget the promise."

Something cold ran down my spine.

This was obviously a warning. But from whom? About what?

Maki pointed at a rock about the size of a fist on the table and said, "That was wrapped around this. I was thinking of heading to bed when it came flying in. It's a real pain this late at night."

"H-how can you be so flippant? If you'd gotten hit by a rock that size, you'd be in real pain then. Everything's fine because you happened to be away from the window, but you might've gotten seriously hurt if you weren't lucky. Besides, with these-these-red letters like blood-" Tohko declared, shaking. She looked over at the window and froze.

A moth had landed on the broken glass.

All around it tiny red beads had dripped, dropped.

At last they had turned into red streams, and moving as slowly as a crawling slug, they dripped down the glass.

The skin on the back of my neck prickled instantly.

A white moth.

Several streams of red, creeping sluggishly.

When they got to the shattered spot in the glass, the streams turned back into droplets and pattered to the floor in the room.

I couldn't get my voice out, as if a cold hand was squeezing my throat tight.

We were all staring at the window tensely. The warm, muggy air blowing in from outside mixed with the cold air from the air conditioner and smelled of rotting fish.

"Yuck! Wh-what's that?" Tohko murmured at last, her voice sounding as if she'd forced it out. Her thin legs were shaking.

Maki went boldly over to the window.

"Maki, be careful!"

She ignored Tohko's warning, opened the window, and went out onto the balcony.

The white moth flitted away.

"Maki, come back here!" Tohko shouted.

"It's fine."

As soon as Maki turned her face to look up, it happened.

A huge amount of red water cascaded over her head.

The red torrent engulfed Maki's entire body instantly, accompanied by the sound of water pounding against the ground.

"Maki!"

I ran to the window with Tohko. A sharp smell assaulted my nose. An intense smell like rotten cheese or fish guts that had been butchered and extracted with a kitchen knife.

I covered my nose with one hand reflexively, and we froze in place. Maki slowly lifted her face to look at us.

The pale moon floating in the sky illuminated an unearthly figure.

Her long, undulating hair was stuck all over her face and the stinking red liquid was dripping from it.

Her silk shirt and loose pants were both soaked through with the liquid, and the now-translucent cloth lewdly accentuated the curves of her breasts, her hips, and her thighs.

Plus, fish guts and scales and eyes had in fact been mixed into the liquid, and they hung from her hair and shoulders, giving off a foul stench that made me feel nauseous.

The servants, only now running in, let out a shout at the doorway and leaped back.

To them, Maki herself probably looked like a ghoul who had crawled up from the bottom of a pond, dripping with blood.

Tohko and I, our faces half covered with our hands, were also still staring at Maki without so much as a muscle twitching.

With one hand, Maki brushed away the hair stuck to her face.

When only the right half of her face was revealed, we got goose bumps even worse than before.

That was because Maki was smiling.

The corner of her mouth was hitched up, her eyes were glinting, and bathed in the moonlight, drenched with blood, letting off a rotten stench-even so, she was brimming with joy.

I was unable to discover even a hint of fear or dread or anger, nothing but an almost evil exultation, which was vividly present.

A chill ran down my spine and the hair on my body stood on end.

Were we seeing something not human-?

Silky words slipped from her smiling lips.

"It seems Shirayuki has appeared at last."

It sounded as if she had been awaiting the arrival of a hated enemy and welcomed it.

The instant she wildly shook the other half of her hair aside, fish guts went flying and smacked into Tohko's forehead.

Tohko didn't scream.

She just quietly fainted.

When was it that I sensed the fraying begin?

She was extremely cautious in weaving her stories, and she hid that from me, so I was unable to see it.

But in that tiny room of books, she gave me many hints.

For example, when she would suddenly fall silent.

For example, when she would lower her eyes sadly.

For example, when she would pull away slightly, her cheeks flushed.

When she would get angry with me and tell me I mustn't get close to her.

There was always meaning in her inexplicable behavior.

One day she grew suddenly furtive and fidgety and started avoiding me.

It was for a mere two or three days, but- She was confined to her bed with a cold for some time after that, and when we next met, she had a bright smile and squeezed my hand like before.

So I quickly forgot about it...

Chapter 4-The Princess's Situation.

The next morning I woke up when I got bonked in the head.

Tohko was the one who'd kicked me. I turned onto my side and her toes were planted on the pillow. When I tried to get up, I got swatted in the face again and again.

"No! No! It's a fish monsterrrr!"

I guess she was getting chased by a halffish monster or something in her dream. She thrashed her legs as if she was drowning. Each time, her heel or her toenails caught me on the nose or forehead.

"Owwwww! That hurt."

After I'd taken a full five shots, I finally caught hold of Tohko's legs and managed to get up.

Dressed in a nightgown and braids, Tohko was hugging her pillow as if it were a life preserver and wore a distraught expression. The blanket I had pulled up to her shoulders at dawn had slipped back down to her waist; plus, it was wound up sideways there and the lower half of her body was completely hanging out.

I sighed.

The night before when Tohko had gotten hit in the face by fish guts, she had swooned toward me. I'd hurriedly caught her in my arms, but she'd lost consciousness.

It would have been better if she'd stayed unconscious. But it didn't last nearly long enough, and she woke up totally terrified that Shirayuki had come, and pulling the blanket over her head and sitting down at the other end of the bed, she'd said, "K-Konoha, you'd be afraid to be alone, wouldn't you? It's okay. I-I-I-I'll keep watch for you to make sure no ghouls or ghosts come in here."

I couldn't chase her away, trembling and sniffling, after something like that had happened, so I said, "I'd worry if you were keeping watch. Just go to sleep," and shut out the lights.

At my feet, Tohko had complained, "I don't think there's any need to talk that way," while lying down and snuggling into bed. She immediately started to breathe evenly, asleep. She must have been tired after her all-nighter the previous night.

I fell asleep instantly, too.

Incidentally, Tohko sleeps badly.

Whether it was because she was beset by nightmares or whether she was normally like this, she would toss around frequently, kick the blankets off, and kick me in the face or neck.

Each time, I woke up and fixed her blankets with a pinched look.

Thanks to that, I got hardly any sleep.

When I saw her asleep, I got ticked off and pinched her nose shut out of spite.

"Nnngh. Nnngh. Nnngh."

Her eyebrows came closer and closer to the middle of her forehead, and this time it wasn't just her feet swatting around, but both hands as well. She looked as if she might suffocate at any second.

I quickly pulled my hand away.

"...Geez, why can't you just wake up?"

There was the fact that a human man was more dangerous than some monster, too.

How many times did this make now? The blanket had slipped, and I pulled it back up to her shoulders, changed into my clothes, and left the room.

When I went down to the living room on the first floor, Maki was elegantly partaking of breakfast (or would it be lunch soon?).

"Good morning, Konoha. Yesterday was quite an adventure, huh?"

She said this as if it had all happened to someone else. I gaped.