Irene Windler Is the Neighbor Next Door (2)
Polenta is a porridge made from whatever grain comes easiest to hand—corn, barley, chestnuts, and the like. It is cooked so the coarse grain shows, and the first bite is rougher than it looks, though that roughness has a charm of its own. The ingredients are cheap and common, which makes it popular, and a generous meal for commoners with no money to spare.
Made well, it can stand beside any finer dish, and you need not eat much of it before you are full, so it serves handsomely as emergency rations. Best of all, it does not have to be eaten as porridge. Add a little more cornmeal or barley flour, let it set firm, and what you get is something else entirely.
This is good rice cake.
A chewy, delicious cake of corn, whose coarse bite was the whole of its charm. Goat's-milk cheese and a few herbs had gone into it, so the flavor was anything but dull. A fine meal, the sort that would see a person solidly through one sitting.
"Good thinking. Eating it like porridge was fine, but this way it's different, and my hand keeps going back."
"I learned it ages ago, working a part-time— no! At an inn. It's tasty like this, so I make it for myself a lot."
"Yeah? Never seen it done that way. Mind telling me which inn? I'd like to go eat it there myself."
"Ah, it's probably gone by now. It was... it was a really long time ago."
"That so?"
"Y-yes!"
......She was lying through her teeth.
If you were going to lie, at least put some effort into it.
Whatever she did before she possessed that body, it sure as hell wasn't the performing arts.
Otherwise she would never be acting this badly.
In a whole other sense, she's completely empty.
Was that what came of being a romance heroine? The ones stuck playing the romance lead always pretended to be thorough, always took a blow to the back of the head, and always watched their intelligence drop off a cliff. Was she that sort?
She's a match for the maid. What am I looking at?
Off to one side, Layla—who had been shoveling the cake down because it was good and had choked—was dashing about in search of water. She scooped a gourd full and planted her face in it. She could simply have drunk. Did it have to be like that?
...It was not boring to watch. From the standpoint of someone who knew her, though, it was embarrassing to put her on display for anyone else.
"Um, i-is that person all right?"
"Just ignore her."
"Pardon?"
"...You don't have to worry. Her health, if nothing else, is incredible."
"...Ah. Yes."
Irene blinked, still watching Layla with a look of wonder, then felt Lee Han's eyes and ducked her head again. She looked like some wretched soul come to borrow money from a loan shark.
Seeing it, Lee Han thought—
Did I do something awful to this kid?
Irene was trembling like a kitten, and the sight was pitiful enough that he half-convinced himself he must have wronged her. Awkwardly, he scratched the back of his head.
Sending a neighbor straight home after she had brought moving-in rice cake—no, moving-in polenta—would hardly have been mannerly, and they were not without acquaintance, so Lee Han offered her tea and sat her down for a while. More to the point, Irene herself showed neither refusal nor displeasure.
Unexpectedly, as if she had been waiting for the invitation, she took her seat, drank the tea, and had nearly finished the polenta she had brought. Quick to adapt, it seemed. Perhaps that was the trouble.
Suspicious.
Honestly, she was so lacking in caution that it was suspicious in itself. Think about it. There was no point of contact between her and Lee Han. He was, yes, in a position where he had to look into the person called Irene Windler, but that was a matter known only to Isis and himself. And yet surveillance target number two had suddenly moved in next door.
...The house had unquestionably stood empty only the day before. Someone moving in overnight could only be suspicious. His wariness spiked, and Lee Han slipped the question in.
"Student Irene. Sorry to pry into private matters, but may I ask you something?"
"Yes?"
"I'll take that as a yes. Why are you in a backwater like this? A student like you could use the dormitory, or if not that, stay in a mansion owned by House Galahad. As I understand it, Galahad owns seven-tenths of the buildings around the academy."
"......"
"If that was an awkward question, I apologize."
"Ah, no. It's a perfectly fair question for you to ask..."
For someone insisting she was fine, Irene's color was not particularly good. Wondering whether some private trouble lay underneath, Lee Han sharpened his focus where she would not notice. He had, after all, only just been through the intelligence on the Duke of Galahad. You never knew. She might be suffering some harm. Or she might have been thrown out of the dormitory for being lowborn...!
"—The dormitory application period ended before I even knew there was one, and the ducal mansion of Galahad felt like too much of a burden, so I decided not to use it. Honestly, that man is gross. I don't want to be anywhere near him."
"...?"
"No, seriously, isn't he really strange? Every time I meet his eyes I get chills! He looks like a girl, and the way he talks and the way he acts are both creepy! Honestly, I don't even feel like going near him. So I refused everything he tried to give me. I don't want to get tangled up with him for no reason, and also... ah."
"......"
"C-could you pretend you didn't hear that?"
"...All you like."
"...Thank you."
She seemed to have been storing up quite a lot. A considerable grudge against the duke, by the look of it.
So there were reasonable reasons for all of it, in their way.
Someone else might ask what guarantee there was that every word of it was true. Lee Han was certain it was neither a lie nor an act. The reason? Simple enough.
Thump. Thump.
Hearing that caught the beat of her heart more exactly than a stethoscope laid to the chest. He was glad to trust an ability that had drawn even Isis into open admiration.
—Awkward, but honest.
Letting the talk run a little longer, Lee Han took the measure of what sort of person Irene Windler was. There was something clumsy and lacking in her, but that was a condition common to people in their teens and twenties: a shortfall born of a still-narrow span of experience and human relationships. He was not running Irene down. He was stating something perfectly ordinary.
Well, she was a little clumsy, and she had a habit of letting her mouth run too freely, but if you filed that under the mental illness every spell-slinger came equipped with, there was nothing more to say. And at that level—
For a spell-slinger, she's astonishingly sane.
Nine in ten spell-slingers were psychopaths. Set beside that, this was not even a sharp edge. Lee Han's view of mages was, in places, thoroughly prejudiced, but he did not especially think himself mistaken. In practice, nine in ten of the mages he had met had been psychopaths. All of them had died by his hand. Still.
"E-eh!? Wh-why did I just get a chill...?"
"The cabin cold? I'd appreciate it if you understood. Plenty of it still hasn't been repaired. That'll be why."
"Ah, I'm fine. More than that, Instructor—please look after me from here on. We'll be living this close, so I'm sure I'll be seeing your face often."
"...Same to you, Student Irene Windler."
A well-meaning hand, offered first. The only times Lee Han took a spell-slinger by the hand were when he was crushing that hand with a hammer or burning it with a torch, so clasping one in the ordinary way left him with a strange, unfamiliar feeling. Why were his impressions of holding a woman's hand this wretched? You did not sort spell-slingers into men and women. They were too vicious for that.
The mere fact of being a mage already cut her feminine appeal in half. Go further—she was the adopted daughter of a mad duke, or perhaps his daughter by blood—and the loss of appeal only deepened, tipping over into the negative. Get entangled with her, and the entanglement itself would be the wrong kind.
Her heart is good. Only her heart...
No matter how many positives you multiplied against a negative, the result could never come out positive.
...And above all else.
...Madman. How many people has he got planted out here?
The bastard who called himself her adoptive father was such a lunatic that the negatives only kept piling up, and—
Tsk!
Feeling the furtive presences and smells thickening around the cabin, he frowned at last and clicked his tongue. No householder welcomed hyenas slinking past with the smell of blood soaked into them.
Irene Windler, for her part, only grew more tense, her body locking stiff.
D-did I make some kind of mistake?
...This is all your fault.
The ghost had fussed all day long that she ought to move in beside the knight instructor, and in the end Irene had had no choice but to go through with the move itself. Well, she had not lied. Not about failing to get into the dormitory, and not about disliking that duke of a man. She was only unhappy that she had not been able to take a better house. She had no taste for cabins. A high-class inn, properly soundproofed, with someone to do the cleaning, would have been more convenient, and far more to her liking.
Perhaps because the ghost knew exactly how she felt, Irene let a sorry look show. But—
The apology lasted only a moment. What sat there now was a pervert, desire on full and shameless display.
...Degenerate.
...You say that so easily. That's my social standing you're telling me to grind into the dirt.
...Shut up.
At the lunatic declaration from the ghost in her head—the sort that made a curse nearly impossible to swallow—Irene barely held a sigh down. Even so, without quite meaning to, she stole a look at the knight instructor's body. He wore only a short-sleeved shirt cut low at the chest, and the lines of him showed clear. The ghost would not stop going on about muscles, right out in the open, and Irene's eyes went there before she knew it.
And once she had confirmed it—
I-it really is a feast for the eyes.
Hearts in tune. Keep company with someone long enough and you begin to match them; after seven years side by side, even their tastes in food and clothes had grown nearly the same.
...Their taste in men, too.