A Knight Gets the Autumn Blues (5)
"You weren't cold...?"
The pond was a fairly recent thing. While they were digging the Tunnels, they had happened to break through an underground shelf of rock, and groundwater plentiful enough to drink had pooled into a pond. Thanks to that, Lee Han would never need to buy water again. Bedrock water, though, was viciously cold.
Cold as a sheet of ice? It went well past that. Drop fruit into the water and the fruit froze solid. This was Pendragon, after all, a land that held Mystery, and even its groundwater refused to be ordinary. A natural spring that doubled as a freezer. Which was precisely why—
"I never once expected a person to get in."
"Hehe. I'm a mage of water and wind, remember? I made a film of warm air and just held out underwater. See? All soft and dry."
"...You've got talent."
"Any mage could do it, I bet."
"I doubt that...."
As far as he remembered, not one of the spell-slingers whose throats he had cut had ever managed a trick like that. There had been one who crowed that he, of all people, was the true lord of water, and even that one couldn't fight beneath the surface.
Either he was all bluster, or this girl's talent is insane.
Lee Han clicked his tongue. Truly—
So this is what wasted talent looks like.
A girl with talent of that caliber, spending it on sneak photographs. He didn't know whether to be dumbfounded or simply sorry for her.
What is she even trying to do, taking pictures of a man like me...?
He had given his permission, and still he could not understand the mind behind it.
The sneak photographer—no, the girl who had only filmed legally, once leave was granted—was, for all she looked like, the cherished jewel of the most powerful house in the kingdom. No. On the southern continent.
Irene Windler.
The world already took her for a talent certain to become an Archmage by her mid-twenties, and even as an adopted daughter she was someone who, from the standpoint of a ducal house without blood kin, could reach for the succession of Galahad. Set her mind to it, and she could do anything in the kingdom, and have anything in it.
And yet that girl...
"Instructor, if the Duke's real daughter showed up at this entrance exam, would you believe it?"
"...?"
She wasn't even playing the fool, and still she was talking nonsense he couldn't follow.
"When you said you came for counseling, did you mean counseling because something's wrong in your head?"
What was he supposed to do? He didn't know a single psychiatrist. Lee Han gave serious thought to whether Holy Power could fix a mind as well.
"I am not crazy, Instructor!"
But Irene Windler met him with a gaze so clear it seemed determined to prove her sanity.
"I mean, if I heard something like this, I might think it was nonsense too. But Instructor, I have never told a lie, and I swear I am speaking nothing but the truth."
"...Hmm."
"I swear upon my ma—"
"Stop. You little chick."
"Mmph!"
In a flash, Lee Han clapped a hand over Irene's mouth.
An oath sworn on mana. For a mage, that was an absolute vow—if one reached for Greek myth, the equal of an oath on the River Styx. Break it, and the mana inside the body would run wild and tear the oathbreaker to shreds. The young really were little thugs. They had no idea what fear was.
"You don't need to do that. I'll believe you, so quit pulling insane stunts. I don't like using violence on a woman."
"Y-yes..."
Irene, her face faintly flushed, answered at once. Had his hand really been that hot?
"Hehe. I like how big your hand is. I want to take it with me..."
"......"
Slowly, he drew it back.
How was he supposed to take a remark like that? Did she mean she wanted to cut his hand off and carry it away? Lee Han tucked the hand behind him, newly convinced that the girl's affection ran a long way off the usual track. Honestly, it was a little frightening.
"I don't know if you know this, Instructor, but the Duke had a wife, long ago. ...She's gone now."
He had already heard that story.
"Sadly, they say his lady left a child behind when she died. And I know that child is still alive...! I found out completely by accident......"
That child is you.
"And there's a chance the Duke's daughter—the one everyone thinks is dead—will appear!"
...I said it's you.
"Haa."
Lee Han let out a heavy sigh. Was this how that old righteous outlaw had felt, the one who could not call his father Father? He was sorry for the student whose pupils trembled as if she were confiding some tremendous secret, but there was probably no one in the kingdom who knew the truth of that father and daughter as well as he did.
He hadn't gone digging for it. He had simply ended up knowing that Duke Blake and Irene Windler were father and daughter, because the ripple of their energy, and the distinctive scent that came of sharing blood, were identical. It was a fact he had learned through his own senses, though. He had no logical means of proving it.
Even if I told them they really are father and daughter and begged them to have their tearful reunion, they wouldn't believe me.
This world had nothing like a DNA test. A spell that could read a bloodline would have been welcome, but as far as he knew, no such magic had been developed yet.
...Not officially.
The royal house seemed to have some means of its own.
Early this year, his sister the princess had asked him to keep watch on the pair, and she had said as much: that Irene Windler might be the Duke's blood child. But was that really only a guess? The princess he knew never opened her mouth on prediction alone. That nine-tailed sister of his must have been reasonably sure before she asked him to watch them. For instance—
She might already have invented something like a bloodline test kit.
This was a woman who had succeeded in making even a mythical elixir like Ambrosia. He wouldn't have been surprised if she had whipped up a way to identify a blood child on the spot. The problem was elsewhere.
Even if she knows, she isn't the sort to tell me straight.
He was certain of it. She would never help that father and daughter. Not so long as the Duke and the girl remained political rivals who threatened her place. Never.
Stifling....
It was not a matter Lee Han could stick his nose into lightly. He was tied to all three of them, and for now, at least, he was closer to his sister the princess. So—
"...That's a surprising story. A serious one, too."
"You're surprised too, aren't you, Instructor!"
He had to hum along at the proper pitch, put on a grave face, and react as if he were hearing it for the first time in his life. He did feel sorry. What else was he supposed to do?
I'm not getting into a power struggle.
That was how a man made his own life miserable for nothing.
"Haa. You might think everything I'm saying is a lie, Instructor, and you probably can't understand how an orphan mage like me would know a truth like this."
"No. I understand."
"Right, I knew you would. But once you hear the rest of this... w-wait, what did you say...?"
"I believe you."
"......"
"So enough with the excuses. Get to the point, Irene Windler. What is it you actually want to tell me?"
"......"
He would still hear her out properly. He could not step into the matter of blood, but counseling he could give for as long as she wanted.
"Instructor..."
"...Ahem."
Watching Irene Windler look so moved did prick at him, for no good reason.
Irene Windler was overwhelmed. To think he would believe a story this absurd!
Our Instructor really is the best. Hehe.
Our Arin, came the ghost's murmur, such a hopeless little fool....
Be quiet. Whatever you say, Instructor is the best!
Well. I'm not denying that.
The ghost nodded. Even she hadn't been sure he would believe every word Arin said. Or else—
Did he already see it coming—?
Huh? What was that?
...Nothing. Never mind.
??
Don't focus on me. Focus on the Instructor. He'll think you're being strange.
Oh. Right, right!
The girl promptly turned her attention back to the man she yearned for and chattered on with great enthusiasm, as if she were pouring out every sorrow she had kept hidden until now. The ghost girl bound to her by fate, by contrast, looked from one of them to the other with a meaning Irene never caught.
Arin. Does this world still look like a romance-fantasy comic to you?
She pitied the girl for still treating this world as nothing more than a made-up place. A girl who still held the wish to return to her original world. A girl whose whole self was still frozen as Iarin, a third-year high school student sitting the college entrance exam, and not as Irene Windler. The ghost could only find her pitiable.
Do you miss that place so much?
A sorrow she could not quite name threaded the ghost girl's voice as her gaze turned toward the knight Arin favored.
Please. Protect Arin, Instructor.
In place of herself, who could do nothing.
......Well.
"If the Duke's real daughter appears, I don't know what will happen to me. So, um, Instructor... c-could you maybe... take me in?"
There was no fool quite like this fool. Even so.
Haa.
The ghost girl sighed and shook her head. The Duke, and the girl....
Why won't they just talk?
Was that what most fathers and daughters were like? The ghost girl felt stifled.
What a stifling relationship.
After hearing Irene Windler out, Lee Han shook his head.
Neither of them actually talks.
In one corner of his heart the Duke believed Irene was his real daughter, and yet he suspected her all the same, wary that she might be some trick of the fanatics. Irene, for her part, was convinced she was not the Duke's daughter at all, as if the true daughter were someone else entirely.
The real daughter shows up among the examinees. This is completely...
Wasn't this one of the iron laws of romance fantasy? A worn-out cliché from the romance fantasies he had watched until he was sick of them, back in his days as an NCO. The girl everyone thought was the real daughter turns out not to be, and the girl who lived in poverty was the lost daughter all along. That sort of textbook plot did exist.
Pure classic....
Irene and Duke Blake, though, were classic with a slight variation, and the variation was the part that mattered. And when a story carried a variation like this—
They drag the plot out forever....
And when a story carried a variation like this, he knew, as a reader, that the truth took a very long time to come to light. Knowing that, Lee Han could only feel sour. And as a reader who hated being stifled—
—an unavoidable accidental death during the exam would make a decent enough story, wouldn't it?
He decided to overturn the whole thing.