The Lost Child
"Did you dream?"
"Magicians don't dream."
"……."
He had slept three days straight, she said.
Harad nodded at Elaine's words with a face that registered nothing. He'd also just been told that she hadn't dreamed a single one of those three nights.
'Can only you give me stimulation?'
Every time you stirred me — that was how past-life Elaine used to phrase it.
Would it work indirectly? There was no telling. The sample was still small. She had dreamed all of twice.
Dreams are not linear. They paid no heed to the current of time, nor did they simply replay meetings between Harad and Elaine. Elaine's second dream — the tunnel — was proof enough of that. The era when a coward named Harad had been made to crawl through tunnels at the Second Knight Order's heels, dragging half a month out at the Boundary.
She must have taken the stimulus from the tunnel. That much he hadn't foreseen. Elaine hadn't been there with him back then.
Dreams follow the stimulus. Whatever Elaine dreamed was decided by what Harad supplied. In those dreams, Harad might appear alone — or Elaine might appear at his side.
"Not going to ask what this is?"
Elaine spoke up as he turned the matter over. To her eyes, he must have looked like a man quietly admiring the severed head.
"What is it?"
"…Cassion of the Second Knight Order left it behind. Said he was sharing the results, or some such."
Meaning it was the head of an Outlands magician taken at the Boundary.
Elaine peeled back an eyelid. No eyeball underneath. "So his Origin was the Eye," she added.
The Eye. So it watched Ios die. And it would have passed what it saw along to the Tailor.
Yet there had been nothing like a crystal orb at Harad's bedside. Did Cassion carry it off separately? He couldn't ask. The mood was far too wrong for questions.
"He seems to have taken a thorough dislike to you."
Elaine knew Cassion's hatred of magicians all too well.
"Did you wrong him somehow? The Second's commander is usually such a measured man." Elaine tipped his chin at the head as he asked. The condition of the evidence alone told how furious the man had been.
Harad laughed inwardly. It would be closer to jealousy than anger.
"And what brings you here?"
"…I received the report. Impressive work."
Elaine looked anything but impressed. The anger that belonged to Cassion seemed to have migrated onto Elaine's face.
"I hear you left three knights half-crippled."
"Not quite half-crippled."
A knight's recovery was formidable. Wounds that would lay out an ordinary man were, for a knight, light injuries mended by a few days' rest.
Not the answer he'd hoped for, apparently. Elaine's brows rose.
Harad had his own grievances. Out the window, noon had not yet arrived — which meant Elaine had skipped training yet again.
Not that he was in any position to say so. The laziness grew out of loneliness — a skin-crawling way to put it, but an accurate one. And in the first place, they were hardly close enough for criticism.
Though a little cheek on my part should be fine. It went over well enough last time.
Such was the relationship he kept with Elaine, heir of the Grand Duke.
To Elaine, Harad was a loach.
An outsider who had barged uninvited into the Inner Citadel and put three knights half out of commission — and a magician on top of it all. Whatever he actually thought, he had to act the part. Because Elaine was the Grand Duke's heir.
The strong are generally in the right.
Duels. Harad knew exactly why that northern tradition ended on those words. Because Serzilla stood at its summit. And in the North, that name was always right.
That was why a knight could afford ignorance. Why he could believe the victor was in the right. Serzilla was there to guide them.
And it meant Serzilla itself could never afford the same. The master and idol of the North could not be allowed such softness. It had to be right — invariably, unconditionally.
To Harad, who knew the future, it was a laughable creed. But at least until now, it had held true. Ignorant Northland stood intact because of that Serzilla.
That weight rested on Elaine's shoulders. It rested on Grand Duke Aratus's as well — though as Harad read him, the Grand Duke rather enjoyed the weight. Here was a ruler who had been ground through decades of it. Beside Aratus, Elaine was a green officer, still stiff with drill-yard discipline.
Not that Elaine lacked character. The problem was the talent. Heavenly Might, inborn — a genius without precedent in Serzilla's long history. The North's expectations for Elaine ran higher even than those Grand Duke Aratus had once shouldered. Every Serzilla before had been great, but Elaine would become a greater Serzilla still. That faith had bred in Elaine a compulsion to become the ideal Serzilla.
It would be an unbearable weight. A ruler's destiny — and Elaine had another destiny stacked on top of it. Harad felt, once again, how badly Elaine needed a way to stray from the path. Without such small escapes she would never have endured. Perhaps even those were not enough. The Elaine past-life Harad had known had not been made of steel at all.
"Long time no see."
He had barely stepped into the Footprint of the Snow Leopard when he spotted Ellen. She exhaled a mouthful of smoke along with her greeting.
"You smoke now?"
"Sometimes. Only when I'm irritated."
Harad took the seat beside her, and Ellen looked at him as she pressed her cigarette out against the tabletop. Her gaze was positively scalding.
"What's the matter?"
"Nothing. You know how it is — everyone looks like a magician to me now. Whatever people do, it all reads as suspicious."
The answer came without a beat's pause, as if she'd rehearsed it. And it would have been the truth, too. She believed Harad was the only person alive who could tell a magician on sight. Three days without him must have been three days steeped in doubt.
"I hear you fought the Grand Duke's heir?"
Harad gave a hollow laugh. So the second thing out of her mouth was the real business.
"Fought, was it. I was beaten one-sidedly. A fight is only possible between equals."
Not a word of how do you know. Such tired questions never got thrown at Harad. With Ellen, he always had to be a move ahead — the one who handed her the answers.
"I hear you provoked him first."
"I merely stated facts."
"And the message was — if he's sore about it, let him take it up with His Grace?"
She had put it rather more delicately than the original.
"His Grace has let the matter pass."
The duel had been legitimate. The graffiti had been proven magic. And beyond that, disposing of a fourth-circle magician who had infiltrated the North was an indisputable merit.
"He hasn't said one word to me about it, though?"
"Words aren't the only way a man speaks. Why else do you think the heir drew his sword and never swung it?"
"……."
Ellen bit her lip. She set a fresh cigarette between her lips — then passed it to Harad instead.
"I'll pass. The Sun doesn't care for it."
An Origin, spoken of like a person. Ellen's eyes went round at that. They brimmed with fascination — but her mouth went another way.
"I hear the heir has sworn to keep watch on you."
So this ranked above her curiosity, then.
"I understand it. Arms bend inward, as they say. He won't care for the man who hurt his knights."
"Because you're a magician?"
"Could be that. Could be something else."
At the evasive answer, Ellen put the cigarette between her lips, and Harad lit it for her.
Eyes still round, she at last smiled a crooked smile — as if their first meeting had surfaced in her memory.
"What would it take for the heir to trust you?"
Harad's eyes widened a fraction.
Ellen was the identity through which Elaine's true nature found its outlet. Elaine's honest heart came out only when she was Ellen. And now that Ellen was asking for his counsel. Because she wanted to trust him. Or because she wanted to keep this relationship alive.
Either way suits me fine.
She wasn't the type to follow advice to the letter just because she'd asked for it — but the asking itself meant something.
"Is it a hard question?"
Ellen pressed when no answer came. The cigarette burned down fast.
"It is. That's not something the heir can do."
"So it falls to you?"
"There's little I can do either. Time will have to sort this one out."
"……."
"You think the heir trusted the knights from the cradle? He came to it by seeing and by living through things."
As answers went, it was unsatisfying. But Ellen couldn't open her mouth — because it rang true.
Whatever Harad did, Elaine stood in a position where trust could not come easily.
"He is the Grand Duke's heir first. Before anything else, he must put the North and its people first. Defending me would be the stranger choice."
"So you're saying he's right?"
"Not entirely. People can be so hopelessly stubborn."
"……."
Ellen went still for a breath.
"And for all that, I hear he's lazy about his training. Trusts nothing but his inborn Heavenly Might."
True, at least to that extent.
Heavenly Might. It wasn't called that for brute strength alone. Elaine's body was tougher than anyone's — and when aura was channeled into it, tougher still. The quality of that aura brooked no comparison with any knight's. As though a god had laid a blessing on her. That was why it was Heavenly Might. Strength handed down from heaven.
"I can imagine the feeling. Like solving the exam with the answer key already open."
Ellen flinched.
"Maybe she even finds it lonely. Why was I the only one born so extraordinary?"
Crunch. The cigarette snapped.
Above the fallen stub, Ellen's lips parted slowly.
"Were you like that too?"
"……?"
"Lonely?"
Her eyes were sparkling now, as though her thoughts had never tangled at all.
At the sight of them, Harad confirmed it yet again, with finality.
She had been well and truly mad.
Ellen was Elaine.
The eyes that had shone like stars settled into stillness.
It was around the time the conversation about Ios, the fourth-circle magician, drew to a close. It had not been a long conversation.
Unlike Gulen, Ellen knew the Hierarchy well. She had a fair grasp of the Magic Towers too — those names appeared in Serzilla's own histories, after all. The knight orders might be spared that knowledge; Ellen could not be.
Though not in detail. Past-life Harad had studied those histories as well. Slew a magician belonging to such-and-such a Tower — that was the full measure of how the chronicles put it.
It was likely why Ellen wanted to meet every night. Harad knew the Outlands more thoroughly than Serzilla ever had — and he gave her the chance to face it firsthand.
"Next time, I'm following you."
Ellen regretted the times she hadn't gone along. Even so, she marveled at how Harad had passed himself off as one of the Outlands and pried information out of Ios.
"Where did you even learn to do that… ah, don't answer. You'll say any magician could manage it, won't you? Or else that you're simply special."
Just as Harad did, Ellen refused to ask the stale questions. To his eyes, she seemed to be strangling her suspicion by main force — perhaps she felt she had hardened inside after her brush with death against that patchwork magical beast.
The reason hardly mattered. What mattered was that Ellen wanted this relationship to continue. Not because she liked Harad the man — for her curiosity's sake.
"This place is lovely enough, but the food is terrible."
Ellen drank with nothing but a cigarette for company.
"Your palate's been tamed by magicians, then."
"Ah."
Remembering their regular haunt, Flowerbed's Flesh, Ellen took a long pull on her cigarette and pulled a face of pure disgust.
Watching the smoke pour out of her, Harad spoke.
"What's become of the Guard's Squad Three captain?"
The man who had seized Harad at the tunnel's mouth. Through him they had to reach whoever had filed the report — only then could the other tunnels be found. A step that simply had to be taken.
The connection between the Outlands and the tunnels — they had only grasped it after losing the North. Until then, Elaine had dismissed every suspicion of the tunnels. It had been her particular arrogance — and her pity for so-called good magicians.
Because of that, the tunnels Harad remembered were not many.
"Still under interrogation."
"By whom?"
"My senior. The answers should surface soon enough."
Ellen handled her senior the way one handles a subordinate. The interrogation, she said, was under way inside the Information Bureau's inner offices. An agent of Ellen's choosing would be capable beyond question. Just as she promised, the answers would come soon.
"You're not drinking?"
Ellen tipped her chin at Harad's glass. Still his first — he'd done nothing today but pick at the food.
"Drinking's a bit dicey at the moment."
"Why?"
"Wine makes holding back difficult. Didn't I tell you? I'm all fire — I've merely been keeping it banked."
A magician's temperament tends to follow his Origin.
Ellen snorted. It sounded like an excuse. The Harad she knew was fire's very opposite.
"You can burn anything you like with magic anyway."
"That's exactly what worries me. My mana is spilling over."
The aftereffects of forcing a fourth-circle Projection. Three days of sleep had mended his body, but his mana was still beyond easy control. Strike so much as a match now, and he had a feeling he would become a demon of flame.
"I'll admit I'm curious what you look like aflame."
"You'd be very, very sorry."
Ellen rose with a light laugh. Time to head home, it meant.
She was settling the bill when the door opened — quietly. So carefully that no one else even heard it. Only Harad and Ellen turned toward the door.
"L-Lady Ellen."
A soldier with a shaggy beard. Terrified of her though he plainly was, he came forward step by careful step.
"You must have put him through quite a lot."
"He's lucky 'quite a lot' was the end of it."
The North kept no custom of guilt by association. Which meant this soldier, unlike the Squad Three captain, had proven his innocence.
"What is it?"
Ellen spoke down to the man, her voice cold enough to sting. Apparently he belonged to the Guard's Squad Three.
"You ordered us to report everything, even the trivial…" the soldier mumbled.
"Stammer one more time and I'll arrange a visit with your captain."
"The lost child we found this evening — we still haven't been able to send her home!"
Ellen's face went rigid.
It was a world where, pressed for coin, parents sold off even the children of their own bodies. But the North stood outside that world. Some called it romance.
That was how dearly the North treasured its children. It was the same reason commoners — neither knights nor nobles — were permitted to live around Serzilla's Inner Citadel. Because they were weak.
Northerners knew better than anyone how grueling life on this land was, and so, toward children alone, they were kind. They didn't abandon them or sell them, and they didn't love the strong child more than the weak one.
Which meant a lost child was grave business.
"No one knows the child. It seems she rarely went outside."
"……."
"We suspect abuse. Not one person has come searching the streets for her, even at this hour."
At the soldier's report, Ellen's face hardened further.
"What kind of son of a bitch—"
The words carried her fury for her.
In the North, child abuse was a graver crime than murder. Anyone who sought profit through a child went all the way to the executioner. Under that ethos, the soldiers' expressions were none too bright either. Should the creature called a parent ever show its face, fists would certainly fly.
"Where is the child?"
"Ulluric is minding her in the second-floor lounge."
Ellen strode up to the second floor with long, hard steps, and Harad followed at her back.
Bang! She shouldered into the lounge, and a startled Ulluric snapped to a salute. Ellen did not return it.
Ulluric was the least frightening-looking man in Squad Three — and even Ulluric had failed to open the child's mouth.
"She doesn't seem able to speak."
"Out."
"Y-yes, ma'am."
Once Ulluric was gone, Ellen turned on the child a gentle smile, as though her anger had never existed at all.
The girl looked about ten, her cheeks plump and healthy — no one would have called her starved.
Ellen circled her slowly, examining her from every angle, but found no trace of abuse.
"What's your name?"
Ellen asked it softly, but the child didn't answer.
Though she seemed to hear well enough. The child stared straight up at Elaine. It lasted only a breath. And then, somehow, she was gazing at Harad, who stood quietly behind.
Harad found those eyes striking.
Green — deep as moss. They suited the thick brown hair, and yet felt somehow other to it.
No. This was déjà vu.
Those colors, those features — for some reason, Harad knew them.
Tap. Ellen nudged him.
"Your turn. She's looking right at you, see?"
Ellen was right. The girl's gaze would not leave Harad.
What exactly is she looking at?
Tap. Ellen prodded him again.
"What's your name?"
Harad asked it just as Ellen had.
"It's Shura."
The girl answered. Her voice was utterly calm. Nothing about her said lost child.
"Tell me — are you a magician, by any chance?"
The question slipped out of Harad before he could think.
"I'm a magician."
"…Have you lost your mind?"
Ellen's glare was withering, but Harad paid it no mind.
"I can afford to believe her. The fourth-circle Ios of the Ivory Tower was a friend of mine."