Spring in Cumberland arrived reluctantly, like a guest who had been late for so long that he no longer dared to smile.
Half the snow had melted; mud and withered grass mixed together.
On the distant slopes only a few scattered wildflowers, foolish enough to risk their lives, had poked up their heads.
Every morning, before the sun had fully climbed over the horizon, Claire was already running.
She wore a thin training suit and a pair of old military boots half a size too large, driving herself forward along the mountain roads outside Cumberland.
The boots were too heavy.
The muddy ground sucked at her soles as if countless hands were reaching up from below to seize her.
Her breathing grew more and more rapid; the heart that had become fragile because of her childhood transformation protested frantically inside her chest.
A doctor had once examined her body.
The old physician had pushed up his glasses and, in a voice full of sympathy, delivered the diagnosis: this child’s heart was far too fragile.
She could not remain active under the sun for long periods like other high-ranking vampires; exposure to sunlight would endanger her life.
“In other words,” the doctor closed the medical file, “this child is simply not suited to become a spy.”
Herta had been sitting nearby at the time.
She listened quietly to every word the doctor spoke, then reached out, took the diagnosis, and without expression tore it cleanly in half down the middle.
The sound of the paper fragments fluttering down was unusually clear in the quiet consulting room.
The doctor’s face became quite interesting.
Herta did not look at the doctor.
She turned, lowered her head, and gently ruffled Claire’s newly dyed black hair.
Her fingers were still ice-cold, yet there was a clumsy gentleness in the motion.
“Don’t worry,” Herta said. “I will train you.”
And so the training began.
Every day before sunrise Herta appeared punctually at the door of Claire’s room.
No knocking, no calling—she simply stood there.
But Claire had already learned to wake automatically the moment Herta’s presence approached.
It was a vampire’s instinct, and also the first skill she mastered.
The two of them rode fox-trotting horses across the fief, arriving at the mountain camp before the sunlight poured down.
The place was empty and silent, filled only with the sound of the wind and the occasional cry of birds.
Claire changed into thin summer clothes and those damned heavy military boots, then began to run.
Wind, frost, rain, or snow—there was never a day of rest.
When it rained, rain mixed with sweat glued her eyes shut so that she could not see the road ahead and could only press forward by instinct and muscle memory.
Snow was worse.
The drifts swallowed her calves; every step demanded twice the effort, and the cold wind knifed its way down her collar.
Herta always rode behind her at a distance that was neither too near nor too far.
She rarely spoke, and never shouted encouragement of any kind.
She simply followed, using her presence itself to convey a silent message: I am here, therefore you are not allowed to fall.
There were several times when Claire truly could not go on.
Her knees went soft, her vision darkened, her heart pounded as if it meant to tear free of her chest.
She collapsed to the ground, face buried in the muddy water, certain she would never rise again.
But Herta’s boots would always appear within her field of vision at that moment.
Those black military boots stood in front of her, unmoving, not urging, simply waiting.
Claire gritted her teeth, climbed to her feet, and continued running.
After every training session Herta would bring her back to the camp.
An iron frame already stood beside the campfire, and on it roasted a bloody steak.
Meat juices sizzled under the fierce heat of the flames; the iron-like scent of blood mixed with the smoke of charcoal and filled the air.
This was a vampire’s food.
When Claire first ate such things she would gag.
Her sense of taste still retained the memories of being human; she had once loved the strawberry cakes and mint tea of the palace, not these half-raw, still-dripping chunks of meat.
But hunger is the best seasoning, and the body’s instincts are more honest than pride.
Gradually she stopped resisting, and even began to look forward to the steak after training.
Half a year.
One hundred and eighty days.
Under Herta’s nearly cruel training, Claire’s body changed slowly yet steadily.
Her steps, which had once been stumbling, became firm and powerful.
Her breathing, which had once been rapid and chaotic, became even and long.
Even that fragile heart of hers seemed to have been tempered into something a little more resilient.
The doctor’s diagnosis had not been wrong, yet Herta, in her own way, had turned an impossibility into something that was barely possible.
In summer Claire carried a survival pack and an old hunting rifle as she tracked herds of deer through the mountains of Cumberland.
More than half a year of physical special training had already forged the delicate little princess into someone else.
She had learned to make use of a vampire’s senses.
In the darkness she could hear the heartbeat of a deer three hundred meters away and smell the almost nonexistent scent of blood carried on the wind.
The world unfolded before her in the night a side that daylight never revealed.
The texture of every leaf, the vibration frequency of every insect’s wings, the direction and temperature of every current of air—all of it appeared in her perception with perfect clarity.
The first time she shot a stag, the bullet struck dead center between the eyes.
The deer’s body stiffened mid-run, then crashed to the ground like a toppled statue.
Claire lowered the rifle and looked at her own hands.
They did not tremble.
She was not certain whether this was progress or loss.
When autumn arrived the wind mercilessly lifted the leaves and flung them down again, as if fate were turning the pages of a book no one could ever finish.
The perch in the Thames were especially plump that season; fishermen set out in small boats before dawn and returned at dusk with holds full of the catch, the river surface drifting with the smell of fish and the last light of the setting sun.
But the great hall of Cerberus Headquarters cared nothing for perch.
Night deepened and all was silent, yet the gray building at the heart of Londinium remained brightly lit.
Silvery moonlight poured through the windows and fell upon the pale-faced, black-clad vampires seated around the round table, coating each of them in a thin layer of silver frost.
This was the annual regular meeting of the Cerberus Bureau.
Participants were limited to the heads of vampire families of the third generation and above, together with their secretaries.
The young secretaries each performed their duties: some stood motionless behind the heavy curtains like shadows waiting to be summoned; others moved silently through the hall, heads lowered, delivering files and notes into the hands of their superiors.
Among these secretaries Claire was probably the youngest.
She stood quietly behind Herta, wearing a small black formal dress.
Her frame had not yet fully lengthened, and a trace of childishness still lingered on her face.
Yet her expression was unusually composed; those red eyes calmly swept across every person and every detail in the hall—who was lying, who was nervous, whose fingertips trembled slightly, who was quietly passing notes under the table.
Herta’s purpose in bringing her was clear: to soak her in advance in the oppressive, undercurrent-filled atmosphere unique to the Cerberus Bureau, like curing a piece of meat so that these things would slowly seep into her bones.
Claire silently memorized every detail she heard during the meetings.
The disputes over territorial division, the bargaining over blood quotas, the marriages and betrayals between families—everything formed a vast and precise web, and she was learning how to recognize every node on that web.
In the process her understanding of the United Kingdom became far deeper than anything any textbook could provide.
Winter never announced its arrival.
One morning she woke to find the world had turned white.
Blizzards swept through the entire city of Cumberland; streets and alleys were buried under thick snow.
The nobles huddled inside their warm mansions, drinking scalding ale around fireplaces while the antlers hanging above cast enormous shadows.
Out in the shantytowns of the slums, people could only stuff the gaps in doors and windows with tattered felt and curl together, using one another’s body heat to resist the bitter cold.
The study deep inside the castle was Claire’s favorite place.
Not because it was warm—in fact Herta insisted on keeping only a small charcoal brazier in the study, on the grounds that “an environment that is too comfortable is not conducive to thinking.”
Claire liked it because the things Herta taught her in that study reminded her of the past.
At this moment several heavy books and a continental map covered with annotations lay spread across the table before them.
Herta was explaining, in her characteristic manner—orderly to the point of coldness—the situation of the north-south struggle for supremacy, the balance of power between the United Kingdom and the Lucis Empire, the positions of the various vassal states, the contest over trade routes, and the distribution of military strongholds.
Claire listened with complete seriousness.
She was not truly interested in the political games themselves.
But the content made her remember those distant afternoons in the palace when Phine had sat across from her, pointing with the hilt of a sword at some location on the map and saying with complete seriousness, “Flora, as a princess you must understand every inch of the Empire’s land.”
And she, back then, had always been distracted, her eyes fixed on the butterflies in the garden outside the window.
At the thought the girl now called Claire’s mouth curved slightly—she did not know whether she wanted to smile or to cry.
Herta’s training of Claire was comprehensive and without blind spots.
Physical conditioning, sensory development, firearms, infiltration, intelligence analysis, interpersonal disguise, political common sense—every item had standards strict enough to suffocate.
Herta was like a stubborn sculptor who, over the course of five years, polished a rough block of raw stone into a precision weapon.
But Herta was never merely training a weapon.
Whenever Claire was exhausted to the point of collapse or frustrated to the point of wanting to give up, she would always feel Herta’s gaze resting on her.
That gaze was deep and steady, like a lighthouse in the night; as long as you knew it was there, you would not lose your way.
Herta rarely expressed emotion and smiled even less often.
Yet on days of raging blizzards she would ride thirty miles to the town simply to buy Claire a box of the chocolate she had mentioned in passing.
When Claire ran a fever she would keep watch at the bedside all night, repeatedly testing the temperature of her forehead with ice-cold fingers.
On nights when Claire woke from nightmares she would sit silently on the chair beside the bed, saying nothing and doing nothing—simply sitting.
Sometimes in the half-awake state Claire would see that silhouette: Herta leaning against the back of the chair, moonlight outlining her straight spine and slightly lowered head.
She was Claire’s mother, and also her strictest mentor.
These two identities never conflicted in Herta, just as the sharpness of a blade and the warmth of a hilt can exist together on the same knife.
Five years.
One thousand eight hundred and twenty-six days.
From a trembling former princess who could not even swallow half-raw steak to a quasi-agent who could silently track prey through the night, march continuously for twelve hours through a blizzard, and write intelligence summaries in three languages.
Herta watched the change and said nothing.
But Claire noticed that near the end of the fifth year Herta added an extra lump of charcoal to the fireplace.
That was probably Herta Vandro’s way of expressing pride.
In the spring of the sixth year Herta decided to send Claire to the Intelligence Academy of Orfa University in Londinium for advanced study.
It was called “advanced study,” but the term was merely a respectable wrapping paper.
In reality this was the only legal path by which the major vampire families sent their newly raised scions into the Cerberus Bureau.
Just like a university diploma in the human world, without the qualification certificate issued by the Intelligence Academy no vampire could take up a post in the Cerberus Bureau.
It was a ticket.
And on the other side of the ticket was written the word freedom.
The train station in Cumberland was very small—so small that it had only one platform, one ticket office, and a row of moss-covered wooden benches.
The train bound for Londinium came only once every several days.
Apart from the two of them the platform was empty; only the wind blew from the direction of the tracks, carrying the scent of rust and distant places.
Herta stood at the edge of the platform with her back to the rails, facing Claire.
She described to Claire in detail every aspect of the Intelligence Academy—from the curriculum to the daily training schedule, from the personalities of the instructors to the evaluation standards of the qualification examinations—leaving nothing out.
Claire listened quietly.
In truth she no longer needed these instructions very much.
Five years of training had long since given her the ability to face unknown environments alone.
But she did not interrupt Herta, because she realized that Herta was nervous.
Herta Vandro—the woman who could tear a doctor’s diagnosis in half without changing expression, the woman who rode through blizzards as if walking on level ground—was now repeatedly explaining precautions in an overly detailed, almost long-winded manner.
Because she did not know how to say goodbye.
The sound of the train whistle came from the distance, deep and drawn-out.
Claire looked at Herta.