“Of course not,” Scroll took another sip of her tea, smiled and shook her head, “The interval of becoming aware of Nightingales existence until Wendy made contact with her, more than one month’s time had passed; during which we also recruited other sisters, such as Red Pepper and Windseeker…” Speaking until here her expression turned blank, “Unfortunately, they are now buried in the wild lands. At that time, if we had only chosen to settle in Border Town, they could still be alive today.”
Roland also felt quite sorry for them.
“But right now we weren’t speaking about them,” Scroll took a deep breath, “we were talking about Lily. During the search of the shelter as well as following the host’s tracks, we discovered an astonishing fact — the small country house was neither a real shelter, nor was it an establishment to screen for witches.”
“Then what was its purpose?”
“Its only purpose was to satisfy the owner’s selfish desire.” Even for a person with a good self-control like Scroll, when speaking these word her facial expression became somewhat dreary, “Every week the owner would go to the slums of Redwater City, abducting those vagrant girls, and deceive them by saying that he was a kind and selfless aristocrat, who had opened up a shelter in the suburb. Furthermore, his shelter would often be visited by powerful nobles who were looking for girls to be adopted as daughters. As long as they were selected, they would no longer need to worry about food and clothing for the rest of their life. Of course, not everyone would be deceived by his sweet words, but… after ten years of running, in addition to the 66 who still lived in the shelter, there were still several hundreds of names written in his books.”
“So many?” Roland frowned. “But you said that it was not such a big shelter.”
“Hundreds of them now only remain as names in those books. Most of them were already… dead,” she whispered. “During the last ten years, he had discovered three witches, who were all sold to the Church. While the other girls — who had better appearance— got dressed up nicely and then sold to people, who had a need of them. However, those for those who no one had any interest in were killed and buried in the woods behind the shelter.
“…” Hearing her story, the Prince didn’t know how to respond. At that moment he suddenly felt from his back, someone gently place their hands on his shoulders.
“The chances that a girl awakens to become a witch is not high, so after reducing the living cost, within all the years, he hadn’t earned more than 20 gold royals, based on the data we were able to gather from his accounting book. Because of those 20 gold royals, more than 300 women had lost their life in the woods, filling the pit in the woods with corpses.
“When Cara had interrogated him why he did this, he’d said, that it had never been his intention to earn gold royals, that was only to keep the shelter running. Because of this, he only sold them when they became adults, after all, a witch could be sold at a much higher price than an ordinary woman. His only goal was to enjoy the power to decide about life and death and to feel the pleasure of forcefully taking it away; giving him the feeling as if he had become their King.
“Afterwards, Cara killed him in anger, and when we later wanted to dispel the girls from their belief, most of them only glared at us as if we had taken away their chance of being adopted by a noble.”
At first the same was true for Lily, and only after Cara took her to the grove behind the building, where she then saw her friend was buried — a month ago the owner had lied and said that she was one of those lucky girls who were selected by a noble and with that could leave the shelter. Soon after seeing the several corpses in the already stinking pit, Lily threw up and turned into a total mess, fainting and falling into Cara’s arms. Later when she awoke her look had become stupefied, without any trace of spirit left in her eyes, she was only later under Wendy’s care that she was slowly able to recover. Since then, Lily is full of vigilance and distrust to ordinary people, especially the aristocracy. “Scroll explained, “But I believe that she will be able to slowly change her point of view. After all, you are also a member of the nobility.”
