Viola Rosenfeld sat across from Elaine now, head bent as she slid the fine silver needle back into her sleeve.
The needle was very narrow, with a shallow band of pattern at the end of it. This ought to be a Sacred Object with no negative effects.
Three minutes ago Viola had pressed that thing lightly against the seal-tag Raea had left at the window, and the seal Raea set had been temporarily lifted.
"So Raea won't notice?"
Elaine found it rather marvellous. Her family had been the family that collected marvellous little devices, after all. A convenient, effective item with zero negative effects was generally called a Sacred Object, and on the licensed exchange or on the black market alike, they were absolutely in demand.
Viola's hands paused.
"Of course not. This is a Sacred Object I collected specially, made specifically for breaking seals. Even the person who set the seal wouldn't necessarily find it on a careful inspection."
Viola pushed her chest out with some pride, except that the chest in question was flat, which made for an enormous discrepancy with Elaine's.
Elaine went quiet, taking in how unreliable the girl looked. She was starting to suspect that coming out with her had been too hasty.
Half an hour ago, once this purple-haired girl broke into Raea's home, matters had begun developing in a strange direction.
Elaine sat in the carriage with the hood of her cloak pulled low. The rain had stopped, and sunlight was cutting through the overcast.
The wheels ground over rain-wet flagstones, a damp, cold noise travelling up through the soles of her feet one beat at a time. The street sounds outside came through the carriage panels as though muffled under heavy cloth, too indistinct to follow; only now and then could she pick out the driver's low call, or the drawn-out cry of a hawker somewhere further off.
This was Castibury, the royal capital, the most prosperous city in the north of the continent.
Elaine turned her head to look at Viola's rather childish profile, and could not help marvelling inwardly at how easy children were to fool.
Even Elaine hadn't expected "I'm Raea's little sister" to actually carry her through, and yet this noble young lady Viola had believed it without so much as a flicker of doubt.
What would she do if she ran into a genuinely bad person...
And besides... Elaine thought back to how, on the way, Viola's mouth hadn't closed once as she introduced every small gadget she carried about her.
A hothouse flower, truly. Not the slightest wariness of strangers.
Still... looking at the clear blue sky, Elaine felt an unreality of her own. She had not stepped out of that door once since Raea picked her up, and being outside again felt like surfacing into another age.
She also hadn't expected that her means of getting out would turn out to be this scatterbrained young lady beside her. She wondered whether Raea would be angry when she found out...
In Elaine's memory, Raea had hardly ever been angry about anything.
Or perhaps... Elaine had simply never seen what Raea looked like angry.
Then again... thinking about her current identity, she really ought to shore it up a little. She had only been fobbing Viola off just now. If the girl actually pressed, that identity could fairly be described as riddled with holes.
The identity Elaine had fobbed Viola off with was Raea's little sister... Except that Elaine had once heard from the household servants that Raea was an orphan her grandfather had taken in from an orphanage...
If Viola wanted to check, she could simply say they were sworn sisters from that orphanage, the two of them with nobody but each other... That didn't seem unworkable.
"Hey. Hey. Hey. Are you actually listening to me?"
Elaine came back to herself and looked across.
Viola was staring at her with her arms folded and displeasure written across her whole face.
"Never mind. Let's get to business."
Viola coughed lightly, then added, "Since the orphanage you came from has closed down, and you have no birth certificate and no orphanage records, all we can do is start with a temporary registration."
Castibury was one of the few cities with a household registration system. Naturally that system was confined to Castibury's Upper City and Middle City; as far as the Lower City was concerned, population registration could fairly be called a luxury good.
If the capital had not needed extremely cheap labour every day, and if Castibury's land had not been running short, those in power would have liked nothing better than to strike the entire Lower City off Castibury altogether.
Still, since household registration was Castibury's system, the Lower City had population registration all the same.
What was giving Elaine a headache now was, naturally, the problem of her identity. In the eyes of the world, Elaine White had been blown apart until not even "human fragments" remained, so the identity of Elaine simply could not go on being used.
Without a legal identity, you could not take a single step in the capital.
Elaine had raised the matter with Raea a few days ago. Raea hadn't answered it head-on; she had only said she would think of something when the time came.
And then today she met this young lady of House Rosenfeld, who said she had a way, and who announced — with what appeared to be no thought at all — that she would arrange a legal identity for Elaine today.
So Elaine had come out with her, on the principle of give it a try and give up the ghost.
"So, temporary registration first." Viola pulled a folded sheet of paper out of her little bag. "The capital has a window specifically for the unregistered, orphans and servants from outside to make up their paperwork. As long as someone stands surety, and you have a local witness seal, you can get a temporary identity to start with."
Elaine looked at the paper in her hand.
"I wouldn't have expected a noble young lady to know so much about this sort of thing."
Elaine sat back into the comfortable seat. This carriage had been made to order for House Rosenfeld.
House White had owned one too, once. It had simply come down in the world.
Elaine felt a touch of nostalgia at that. Though she had heard that the capital meant to build some new form of city transport in the Upper and Middle City, and that an "outdated" conveyance like the carriage might be on its way out.
Nobody had said what exactly it would be, but Elaine guessed something along the lines of a commuter tram.
The thought struck her as a pity. Before she crossed over, Elaine had not studied the sciences, and so could not deliver even a small "shock" to this late-medieval world by way of modern knowledge.
"House Rosenfeld used to fund a number of relief houses, and my father was worried I'd be bored, so he often had me look after the charitable side of things." Viola sounded as though she were explaining herself.
"Besides, you say you're Miss Raea's little sister. And since you are Miss Raea's little sister, obviously I, Viola, am going to help. And a thing like this is a piece of cake for me anyway."
The carriage worked its way down from Elaine's Greybridge District into the Lower City, and the buildings around them went from orderly to derelict. So did the clothes of the people on the street. Once they were inside the Lower City, Elaine could feel that the eyes fixed on this carriage had changed as well.
"It's normal that you have no legal identity. Records break easily for children out of an orphanage."
Viola was still talking without pause, and Elaine could only conclude that this young lady had never in her life encountered what was meant by the wickedness of human nature. A stranger she had known for roughly half an hour, and she could trust the person completely.
Elaine was quiet for a moment, then turned her eyes to Viola beside her.
"You trust me just like that?"
Viola blinked, then said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world:
"Miss Raea left you in her house. How could you possibly be a bad person?"