A Knight Hates a Dysfunctional Family (3)
In his previous life, Lee Han had been a bookish boy who dreamed of living by letters. Poverty had forced him to fold that dream early, and so had the adults around him—violent teachers worse than filth, the sort who would rather break a hope than nurture one. Even so, he had read with the diligence of a true aspirant, and the romance of those young years, of that previous life, had never quite left him.
Perhaps that was why.
Knowing only that the head of a noble house had written it, he opened the fairy tale with no particular expectation.
"This guy is actually one hell of a writer?"
It was astonishing—no, it was a masterpiece so fine he could hardly keep from revering it. Set beside works that had been famous even in his previous world, it did not fall short in the slightest.
On the whole, the story had the feel of a personal epic about one woman, Felicia de Offen. That was no blemish at all. The writing was far too good for it to matter.
The age is medieval, so it's closer to an illustrated novel than a fairy tale. That isn't a problem in the least.
The tale itself was plainly cruel and thick with hard reality, and even so it was fantastical. Child and adult alike could find in it a child's heart, and a lesson. The pictures were original and genuinely artistic, and the story and the prose were endlessly beguiling. Someone would surely seize on the places it diverged from true history, but that was the author's craft, and the license a fairy tale is allowed.
Which was to say—
This is fucking good.
Adaptation or whatever else one cared to call it, the thing was overwhelmingly entertaining and overwhelmingly art. That was enough.
With a soft thump, Lee Han nodded over the last page of the tenth and final volume of the Lady Knight series. He closed his eyes and turned the words over in the quiet they left behind.
Sparrows were cheeping. He had stayed up the entire night, forgetting even to sleep, and the hours had been worth every one. Here was why people called books food for the soul. Far from tired, his mind was keener than it had been in a long while, and his mood was bright.
"You seem to have been quite the passionate woman, back then?"
"Ahem..."
"The romance was good, though. That scene where you bring a great boulder down to save the village from the flood was really—"
"Ahem!"
"Oh, and your first meeting with your husband wasn't bad either. Why did you kidnap him? Was that the fashion fifty years ago, or—"
"S-s—stop!! Stop talking, I tell you! Why in the world are you dragging my past out in front of me?!"
"I was just curious. How closely the real experiences of the lady knight this story is based on match what's in the book. As a fan, I kind of want to know."
"A-and since when have you been a fan of that disgraceful thing!"
"Since the moment I read it?"
"!!!"
Felicia thrashed and flushed like a master swordswoman struck by some maddening art, her face going red again and again. It was not a sight one could reconcile with the great swordswoman said to have cut the clouds apart with a wooden sword, but he had to admit he would have been mortified too.
If my whole past got dug up—my love life especially—and then turned into a fairy tale the entire world read... ugh. I'd be too ashamed to leave the house.
Having the foolish things of one's youth spread in every direction was shameful, no two ways about it. Lee Han knew he was being wicked, and still he did not stop. He was not doing it merely for the pleasure of teasing her. Unless he held his life cheap, how was he supposed to make sport of an Aura User of her stature? Every question he asked was, to the last, a fan's sincere curiosity. Felicia, for her part, could only burn with shame and swallow her temper.
"H-how did it come to this, that you read that..."
"Your son said so. That if I read it, I'd understand you better. Since we're teacher and student now, I suppose he hoped we'd grow a little closer."
"Haa... Iliad. That child has always had that in him. A deep-hearted boy..."
"He is certainly a different person from the Sword Duke."
"Yes. Unlike me... hm? The tone of that seems a little strange."
"Let's skip what doesn't matter."
"...??"
Felicia felt something faintly off, but she only tilted her head and let it pass with a look that said, well, so be it.
...There was a simple streak in her after all.
No. Has she been made simple?
Rejuvenation was a frightening thing. Look only at the fairy tale, and there was no one so splendid, so thorough, and yet here she had gone soft in the head.
The least talented knight in history...
Lee Han brushed a hand lightly across the cover.
Lee Han put the question to his tutor.
"So what am I supposed to do now?"
"Hm?"
"Not 'hm.' I'm asking how the next training is supposed to go."
"...Ah."
"Ah?"
"...Ahem. Forgive me, child. In truth, I had forgotten. I did not think you would follow along this well."
"...Well. At least you're honest."
It was absurd, but he neither nagged her nor scolded her. To say it again, the great swordswoman called the Sword Duke was, at present, emotionally very unstable. Had Iliad not said as much when he counseled him the night before?
Remembering that advice, Lee Han did not press her. Her manner of speaking was what it was, but when the matter touched the sword, she knew how to grow more serious than anyone.
And sure enough—
"Yes. By now you, too, ought to have a rough sense of what willpower is. Do you not?"
The moment she began to teach, the air around her changed. The spirit she released as naturally as breath was sharp and heavy enough to sting the skin.
"But you still do not truly know what willpower is. You do not yet know how that power is used."
"That's... true?"
He agreed without resistance. Just as she said, he now understood how tremendous a force willpower was, but he had not reached the stage of feeling it.
I know a new organ of sense has appeared in my body, a new sense. I still don't really know how to use it.
A wing or a tail would do for an example. If a human suddenly grew wings, or a tail, could they use the thing naturally? Probably not. It would have appeared all at once, where nothing of the kind had existed in a lifetime; of course it would be awkward, and difficult. Willpower was harder still than tail or wing. A seventh sense had come into being, and it was only natural that he had no feel at all for the trick of handling it. As Baltar had said, he had only ever used it without knowing, and only through the Sword Duke's teaching had he barely come to recognize that the sense existed. His level now was no different from a baby who had just begun to walk.
"Ho ho. There is no need to lose heart, child."
"I'm not disappointed in the slightest, though?"
"I was the same, once. But where there is effort, this is a thing one may overcome as much as one pleases!"
"...She's not hearing a word I say."
Felicia ignored the mutter and launched into a speech.
"You will remember when I first took willpower into my mouth. Grit, and faith! Those two, I said, are what matter. And those words were never the ignorant rattling of some theory of grit."
"They weren't?"
"What—do you take me for so ignorant a woman?"
"......"
"Child?"
"...Setting that aside, what about grit and faith?"
"Child!?"
Lee Han was a man who hated to speak a lie, even one offered as empty courtesy.
He heard a great many words.
For more than half an hour Felicia opened her mouth and did not rest. There was a dizziness in the mere fact that a person could talk for thirty minutes without drawing breath. Everyone knew the elderly liked to talk, but to be on the receiving end of it to this extent made his very mind swim, and had he not been the one receiving instruction, he would have fled long since.
His ears were worked until he wondered if they might give out, and he fought off sleep, and in the end he succeeded in interpreting what she meant to say.
...So grit and faith really are what matter?
Absurd as it was, the longer he listened, the more he found himself convinced.
Willpower, taken at its word—
It's the theory that if you believe it, it comes true?
A person cannot fly. A person cannot breathe underwater. A person cannot move faster than the wind. That was common sense everyone knew, and more than a few candidates for the Darwin Award had demonstrated the danger with their own bodies, leaping from rooftops in the hope of taking to the sky and ending half-paralyzed for it.
And yet willpower was the power that smashed those impossible things. Leaving a sword hanging in empty air. Or, if not that, parting the clouds.
It was a sentence he had labored to compress out of Felicia's talk, and he thought he understood why Iliad had called willpower the road to transcendence. The man had given the most intuitive explanation, and the easiest.
"That guy—no, the author—is good at teaching people."
Lee Han, a fan of Iliad as of that very day, gave him the name of author out of respect and let the admiration out. The moment praise of her son appeared, the woman who had been talking without rest took on a proud smile.
"Ahem! O-our Iliad did turn out rather fine, did he not!"
"Yes. Very fine. Head of a house, and a great man of letters who brought forth a masterpiece."
"Ohoho!!"
Was there a parent alive who disliked hearing their child praised? Caught by the sudden compliment, Felicia showed how pleased she was and lifted her chin, smug. It was a little unpleasant to look at, but Lee Han understood the feeling. Had he a child like that, he would have wanted to boast as well.
Of all things—
"He showed me, in the flesh, just how unfair the world is."
"Not because he is my son. He is excellent. Indeed he is!"
"Even the statue he made of copper was art. Not only the pictures—he seems to have a fine sense for sculpture and craft as well."
"Yes. In sculpture, as well..."
Her voice stopped dead.
Felicia looked up at him with her eyes gone wide, and Lee Han nodded. It was the satisfaction one feels when a guess hardens into certainty. A clean smile came to his mouth.
Yes. A child possessed of a talent his own parents did not have.
"That author was strong, after all."
"Wh-when did you..."
"Notice, you mean?"
"......"
"Hm. The day I first met you?"
"??"
"You don't remember?"
At their first meeting, Felicia—passing herself off as her own grandson—had pointed at the statue, and...
"You were enormously proud of it."
"......"
"Later I even misunderstood. I thought you wanted that badly to boast you'd carved it yourself, and I wondered if you had a streak of narcissism. I know well enough now that the Sword Duke isn't that sort of person."
"......"
"Of course, one can look proudly at a statue one made. A gaze that full of longing is another matter. So I wondered whether someone else had made it, and I guessed it might well be a student of yours, or blood kin..."
"......"
"Process of elimination leaves only the author."
"...Ha."
"Of course, it wasn't only because of the Sword Duke that I grew certain. Listening to the author explain willpower to me, I felt he was a considerable master. Most of what he explained felt different from something known only in theory."
Lee Han knew it, because he stood in the place of teaching students himself. To give another person instruction or advice, one first had to have built up a very deep study of one's own. In that sense, Iliad—
"It means he has studied the sword in depth as well. Perhaps, as a swordsman, his skill—"
"—is finer even than mine."
"......"
"Far finer. Overwhelmingly. Truly, immensely..."
"...Mm. Did I bring up the wrong thing?"
Lee Han let his regret show. He wondered if he had touched something better left alone. At that apologetic look, Felicia slowly shook her head.
"You have no cause at all to be sorry, child. Rather, the one who ought always to carry a sorry heart, and a guilty one, is—"
"Me..."
She reproached herself, wearing a hollow, fading smile like a candle on the verge of going out.