She deliberately ignored the piercing stare and tore open the letter. Glancing at the amused eyes, she ripped the envelope completely apart.
"...Stop staring at me."
"Why?"
"It bothers me."
Cider's eyes narrowed. A different light flickered momentarily in his previously gentle gaze.
"Does it?"
"Yes."
With everything already exposed, there was no point in trying to hide it anymore. She just needed to maintain the final line. Until a decision was made...
Ah, this was really cowardly.
But there was no other way. Esperanza sighed deeply and turned over the messily torn envelope.
"From Cordelia."
She unfolded the letter. Jack seemed to be doing well. Complaints about the tutor Cordelia had assigned being overly enthusiastic and wanting to turn him into a proper young master, and the welcome news that the food was delicious. The clumsily scrawled handwriting was sometimes hard to read, but it was generally legible.
Cider took the envelope Esperanza had set down, looked at the sender, and frowned.
"Cordelia Mabelwood."
"Do you have bad feelings toward Cordelia?"
"Not particularly on my part. But she seems to, apparently."
"What did you do to Cordelia?"
"Why do you think I did something?"
Cider spoke as if wronged, but still. Even with rose-colored glasses, one could still distinguish right from wrong.
"To a much younger child. Act your age."
A snort came back instead of an answer. When Esperanza glared at him, Cider clicked his tongue and added.
"That young lady just didn't like that I was monopolizing you."
Monopolizing. It didn't seem like they had been sticking together that much from the beginning.
The forest. The village. Hunting. Research. As Esperanza went through each one by one, she let out an exclamation. They had stuck together tremendously. Back then, they had only just met and couldn't fully trust each other yet, so how had that happened?
"What do you want me to do about you liking me more? Right?"
Did he really have to say it like that? Esperanza buried her nose in the letter. Pretending she hadn't heard the question at all.
Cider tossed the envelope onto the table and propped his chin again. His gaze touched the flushed earlobes among the curly hair, then slid away pretending he hadn't seen anything. He lifted the cold teacup to cover his curved lips.
The letter was three pages total. One page was Jack's letter, another was Cordelia's letter. She could almost hear the chattering. After reading both pages, Esperanza turned the paper. The last page wasn't a letter.
"This. Look at this."
Esperanza tapped Cider's hand.
"May I look at it?"
Cider, who had set down his teacup, leaned over. He had no trouble reading upside-down text. However, Esperanza didn't seem to think so, as she got up from her seat and sat down by Cider's knees like before.
"Look at this."
"Don't sit on the floor."
"That's not the problem."
Their eyes met, and Esperanza realized Cider had no intention of yielding. The Count graciously yielded his seat to the lady and leaned back against the chair. Belatedly, she could see the sofa that was spacious enough for four people, but he didn't suggest moving there. He was satisfied with the current arrangement.
"Now that I'm seated, is it okay? Come on, look at this quickly."
"This is..."
Cider, who had been grabbing a handful of Esperanza's hair and sweeping it back over her shoulder, trailed off as he saw the array of numbers filling the paper.
Clean names that looked like they were typewriter-printed and random numbers. The long edge was uneven, making it look like a page torn from a phone book. In some ways, it looked like addresses too. The same names were repeated several times.
For example, like this:
Wilhelm Ida Ludwig Leopold 57-142
Samuel Theodor Anton Yverdon 102-98>
Had Jack played a prank? That thought briefly crossed her mind at first, but she soon discarded that assumption.
Typewriters were expensive items. A family like the Mabelwood Barony might have one, but it didn't seem likely that Cordelia would have taught a child who couldn't even write properly by hand how to use a typewriter. And for it to be something Cordelia herself had included, the color and texture of the paper were slightly different from the previous ones. It was thin and glossy, really like something torn from a dictionary or phone book.
What she could guess was...
"It's a code sent by the Duke."
"Do you know how to solve it?"
"I wonder."
Duke Galliston, if he was going to send a code, he should have at least confirmed whether the recipient knew the code first. Esperanza pursed her lips and grumbled. The Duke seemed thorough and calculating, yet always had gaps in strange places. Or maybe this wasn't a gap?
"At least it doesn't seem like the serious military type. It would be best to know the rules, but even without knowing them, I think we could figure it out after struggling for a day or two."
"The possibility that he included the rules..."
"Let's hope the Duke isn't that stupid."
Fortunately, the Duke wasn't that stupid. Even after thoroughly searching the letter paper and envelope, there was nothing like a paper with the rules written on it.
"So you're saying two days would be enough to solve it?"
"How about asking first if I have that much time?"
Ah, right. Cider Claiborne's time was too precious to waste on code games. Moreover, they had already wasted two full days.
"But why did the Duke send you something like this in the first place? Esperanza, it seems like there's something you haven't explained to me. What do you think?"
Esperanza hesitated for a moment. It wasn't a good story. She knew Cider wouldn't genuinely care about it, but... anyway, she also wanted to appear as a better person in front of the other party.
But it would be better than lying.
"It's the price for Henry Bayman's life."
In that brief moment when the Duke's head attendant was being dragged into the monster's maw, Esperanza had made a deal over his life. Even thinking about it again, it wasn't particularly pleasant.
"Back then, in exchange for saving Henry Bayman in the dungeon at Pinement House, I agreed to use the Duke's information network. Formally."
"You did well."
"I knew you'd say that."
Esperanza pouted.
"But what is this? I asked for information, not to play code games with him."
Cider looked down with satisfaction at Esperanza's cheek as she burned with hostility toward the Duke with sullen eyes, then snatched the letter from her hand.
"I'll try it for now. It doesn't look like a very complex code, so once we find the pattern, it should be finished quickly."
"After you find the pattern?"
"Sorry, but we'll have to interpret it by hand. My interpretation device is fast at processing information, but it doesn't have a large amount of accumulated information."
"I'll do that?"
Cider pondered for a moment.
"Should I call Millen?"
"...I'll do it."
It's not like she hadn't spent entire days scribbling with a pen, even if she disliked it.
Esperanza's eyes glared at the code written densely in tiny letters like a phone book she had seen as a child. Why was there so much text?
"How is it, do you understand something?"
"I've only been looking at this for less than five minutes."
"Genius doctor, no answer in five minutes?"
Cider rolled his eyes and pointed to the sofa with his chin.
"Sit down and eat some snacks, young lady."
"That's not my snack, it's your dinner. Wait, come to think of it, you're starving, aren't you? Give me that. You can't even touch that paper until you finish eating all of this."
Esperanza quickly snatched the paper from Cider's hand. Cider looked back and forth between Esperanza and his empty hands as if dumbfounded, then clicked his tongue. However, he didn't make her say it twice.
While Cider ate quietly without even making the sound of moving utensils, Esperanza read through the paper once more.
The characteristics of this paper were as follows:
1. There were an enormous number of names.
2. There were numbers next to the names.
3. It was a code sent by the Duke. In other words, it was made to be solved.
4. It was somewhat long.
When grouping names and numbers as one unit, there were roughly 100 of them. To convey sufficient content, each group likely represented one word.
Hmm. Hmmmm. Esperanza, who had been staring at the paper intently, reached a conclusion.
"I have no idea at all."
"It's phonetic symbols."
Cider said. Having apparently finished his meal, he was warming a cold teapot. He wasn't even looking this way as he pressed a small magic stove to turn it on.
"What did you say?"
"Phonetic symbols. Simply put, it means you just need to read the first letters of those names."
Aha. It was an easier problem than expected. But even reading just the first letters like that, they didn't particularly form words. For one thing, they were too short. While quite many words in the world consist of three or four letters, sentences that serve the role of conveying information couldn't be composed entirely of such words.
"But they still don't form words."
Cider said while taking out and wiping two teacups.
"They're probably abbreviations. Rather than being words themselves, they should be seen as serving a kind of coordinate function."
"Coordinates. Speaking of coordinates..."
Esperanza slowly rolled the first letters of the names on the paper in her mouth. Looking at the two numbers placed side by side and repeating the abbreviations, a faint image came to mind.
"It's scripture!"
"It would be the Tisbia language edition. That's why the phonetic symbols use Tisbia language too."
Then she couldn't read it.
"Do you know how?"
"What do you think?"
Clear tea steeped from the newly brought tea leaves. Black tea filled two ornate gold-plated teacups. Esperanza answered while receiving a teacup.
"I think you know how."
"I'm not very good at it, but it's at a cultured level."
She had thought he would be very skilled at foreign languages too. Esperanza, who had been tilting her head, was convinced as she recalled the works in the laboratory. Since he had been making such things from childhood, where would he have had time to properly learn other countries' languages?
"Then isn't it all solved now?"
Why had he acted like he didn't know?
"There's a problem."
"What is it?"
"I know seventeen editions of Tisbia language scripture. And since this is coordinates, it's a code that can't be solved without knowing the exact edition."
What kind of thing is that?
"That Duke bastard with another petty trick..."
There was no reason to use it. Esperanza, who had been about to get angry, carefully retraced her thoughts.
"Why did he send it as a code in the first place? And sneakily attached to a lady's letter. Last time he sent a letter telling me to be careful in plain language."
"The situation must have changed."
"It must have gotten very bad. Bad enough to expect someone to open his letters."