Catalyst (2)
Cassion, Commander of the Second Knight Order, was a proud and loyal retainer.
He was also a virulent hater of mages.
When the mages of the Outer Realm had raided the plaza, this was why he had chafed at Archduke Aratus's order to simply let them be.
Back then, Cassion must have burned with fury at the mages who dared lay hands on Serzila.
So that's why he shoved Harad into the tunnel... he's truly lost his mind.
Elaine smiled bitterly at the thought.
It had been a dream.
The plaza of reality stood untouched, and Cassion had never shoved Harad into any tunnel.
If she had been bewitched, then what had bewitched her was not Harad, but the dream itself...
Commander Cassion's face stiffened slightly as he stepped into the office.
The room was thick with tobacco smoke.
"Tobacco is bad for you."
What seeped out of him was, as ever, that steady loyalty.
Every knight commander was devoted, but Cassion's loyalty ranked among the finest in all of Serzila.
"It will do the Grand Duke's Heir no good."
"I'll cut back, little by little."
She had no such intention, but Elaine said she would.
"And your drinking—do you still indulge?"
"I've cut down of late."
"That is a relief."
Cassion was gladdened.
So it was that in Serzila, no one lacked faith in the Grand Duke's Heir.
No one who disliked her. No one who expected nothing of her.
"Sir Pallaz has been worried about you, my lord. He says you have missed your duties rather often of late."
"There was much work. More still that needed pondering."
"And yet you will overcome it, my lord."
Cassion simply had no doubt that she would prevail.
Of the trouble itself, he asked nothing.
"Thank you."
Elaine smiled gently.
"I am glad I paid this visit. I had heard you had grown irritable of late, yet seeing you now, I find it was a misunderstanding."
He seemed to mean the time she had suspected one of the manor's servants of being a mage.
She had let it show only that single morning, and yet there was not a soul in Serzila who did not know of it.
Such was the position of the Grand Duke's Heir.
Putting on airs was the job, and lending those airs their dignity was the talent.
"Ah, you mean that day. I had been having unusually violent dreams. I suppose it means I am still wanting."
Elaine gave a small, abashed laugh.
"You must have heard it a thousand times over... but you are one who must never be swept away by private feeling."
It felt like being graded. Like being weighed.
It was the same whoever she met. Every Northerner took the measure of the heir called Elaine Serjila.
"I bear it ever in mind."
The North's expectations pressed upon her, but never once had she found them hateful or crushing.
Elaine had borne it all this while, and she was confident she could bear it still.
"The North will rejoice."
And yet today, for some reason, she felt stifled.
The North. The word caught in her throat like a thorn. She craved tobacco more than water. Instead of tobacco, Elaine licked her lips.
"Sir Cassion, your fault is that your preamble runs too long."
Elaine said it with easy grace.
Cassion. He was an outsider who had come north more than ten years ago.
Perhaps for that reason his manner of speech differed from the other knights'. He had the air of a man who had learned the coarse tongue.
"Speak freely. When have I ever disregarded your counsel?"
Honest counsel becomes bone and flesh, and completes the hypocrisy.
Elaine had heeded every word they gave her. There were times she had waited for it, and times she had needed it.
"Haha, you are Serzila itself, my lord."
Cassion looked a man with much still to say.
Unlike his mouth, his eyes were not smiling at all.
"I hear another mage has entered the Inner Castle."
"That's right. You must have passed one another on your way in."
Elaine did not give the answer he wanted.
Again. Again, the same subject.
"As I understand it, it was at the request of a mage called Harad."
"It was."
"Then why—"
"It was a request His Grace the Grand Duke saw fit to grant."
Cassion's eyes went round.
Because Elaine, of all people, had cut him off.
"The newly arrived mage, Kubel, will surely prove useful in his own way. Our eyes may not see it, but His Grace's do."
Elaine spoke as slowly as she could manage.
Otherwise her irritation seemed certain to seep into her voice.
"Do you trust that mage?"
"I do not."
Elaine answered without a heartbeat's pause.
"Do you trust the mage called Harad?"
"That is His Grace's decision."
"..."
"Besides, I hear he has already lived up to His Grace's expectations. He disposed of the Outer Realm mage, and went on to earn the recognition of the First Knight Order besides."
"...Are you telling me His Grace places expectations upon a mage?"
Cassion's face hardened.
"His Grace alone would know. But this much is certain: it is not a matter for us to pick apart."
"Twenty years have already passed since the Imperial Sabbatical. His Grace's sentence—"
Cassion hastily shut his mouth.
An obvious blunder. This time it was Elaine's face that hardened. Cassion had just crossed a line.
"I will pretend I heard nothing. You may go."
"...It was a slip of the tongue, born of loyalty."
"Which is precisely why I let it pass."
Cassion did not rise.
As if there were some other answer he was desperate to hear.
"I understand your meaning perfectly. It must be hard to believe. Anyone would feel the same—trust takes time."
"..."
"Only, the First Knight Order's time was short, that is all. No one can force you to grant the same."
Cassion did not answer.
Elaine sighed and went on.
"Watch and wait for now—I am doing the same. Whether Harad is to be trusted or not is a question time will settle."
Not "the mage." Harad.
Cassion's brow twitched.
"...Since when have mages been that kind of being to the North?"
Elaine did not answer.
It had never been like this before... yet the sighs kept coming. Her chest felt tight. It was not the tobacco smoke filling the room.
"You are one who must hold your center, my lord."
It was, without question, honest counsel.
The kind of advice one ought to heed—the kind she had always needed.
"...I am trying to be."
Today of all days, she was tired.
Trust takes time.
True words.
When they had first met, who could have guessed they would come to spend this much time together?
Ellen had never imagined she would be at Harad's side night after night.
Of course, the price of it had been the first stirrings of suspicion—was there a mage hiding among the people around her?... but weighed against what she had gained, it was a trivial side effect.
Because Harad could tell mages apart.
So whenever she was with him, there was no need to suspect anyone nearby.
If that too counted as trust, then trust it was.
And that trust... unwilling as she was to admit it, ran deeper than the time she had invested.
Trust takes time, but every person's time is different.
As with the First Knight Order, Ellen's own time had piled up more than enough.
Short as it was, it was dense. Not mere days spent together—they had crossed the line between life and death side by side.
Before the patchwork magical beast, Harad had not run. In the Sacred Ground of Fire, at that watchtower, Harad had killed Hervis.
Had Harad chosen defection in that moment, Ellen could not have stopped him.
Projection, the 4th Tier. That pitch-black sun held power of that order. The Red Tower would surely have welcomed him with open arms.
But Harad had chosen Serzila, not the Red Tower.
Looking back... that choice had been the decisive one.
"I shall become a retainer of Serzila."
Trust enough to believe even those words had, before she knew it, taken root in the Grand Duke's Heir Elaine as well.
Put another way, it was only so much trust.
"I'll keep watching," and nothing more.
Cassion and Harad.
Forced to choose between the two, Elaine would have chosen Cassion.
Such is trust—a relative thing.
...But with everyone gnawing at the question, Elaine had no choice but to drink.
"They say even a rich man's stomach aches when he watches a beggar receive alms."
Because Harad was a mage?
Then first she would slaughter the First Knight Order, forever scampering off to Harad's side at the drop of a hat.
"Why the hell is it only me they bitch at."
Did they take the Grand Duke's Heir for a joke?
Ellen drank the bottle whole. A searing heat slid down her throat. Her side dish was tobacco. One long, deep drag, and her insides felt blasted clean.
She went to drink again, but the bottle had grown light.
Ellen ordered a fresh one and tipped it straight back. Half the bottle in one swallow; a whole cigarette in one breath.
This damned extraordinary body of hers needed that much just to feel anything.
"Ah. Now I feel alive."
Work and rest had to be kept firmly apart.
The same went for the line between Elaine and Ellen.
Only after two bottles could Ellen draw that line.
Now was the time for rest.
Ting.
"Ah, damn it."
The line smudged.
Because Harad had come in through the opened door.
At the sight of him, Ellen's face scrunched up with all its might.
"You look at me like I'm a bug."
"Then leave, if you know."
Harad sat down beside Ellen.
He conjured a tiny flame above the bottle Ellen had been drinking from, and it hovered there over the glass.
"Well, well. Drinking liquor this fierce. Without so much as a side dish."
"The side dishes here taste like garbage, you know."
This place, the Footprint of the Snow Leopard, had terrible food.
"Then why not drink at Kubel's annex?"
"Because I can't smoke this there."
Ellen waggled the fingers holding her cigarette.
Tobacco was forbidden in Kubel's annex. Even Kubel sneaked outside to smoke.
Ellen snatched the bottle out of Harad's hand and drained it in one go. Puffing her cigarette in place of side dishes, she ordered another bottle.
"Keep that up and you'll die."
"I don't die."
Drink as she might, Ellen never suffered a hangover.
No addiction, either. Whenever she wished, she could scatter the drunkenness to the winds. That was the kind of body she had.
"Something happen?"
"Nothing happened."
"There is, though."
Harad's answer was strange.
He was certain of it. Come to think of it, he always was. Harad saw straight through her, every time.
"Speak freely."
Ellen's face crumpled.
Because the face of Knight Commander Cassion had surfaced in her mind.
When she had thrown him those very words, Cassion had brought up the matter proper.
"Might I not be of help? No—in truth, I would certainly be of help."
Of a matter he knew nothing about, Harad was making himself out the expert.
"Forget it. You've never had to live in society a day in your life."
"I'm hardly in a position to."
"See?"
"Never was in a position where I had to be, either."
At Harad's follow-up, Ellen tilted her head.
"Believe it or not, I was once the heir to a count's house."
"...Ah."
A fact she had known all along.
She had merely forgotten it for a while, what with the face he had been showing her all this time.
"Iagar was quite the distinguished house. Not on Serzila's level, mind you."
Iagar had been a family with a fairly long history.
Its fame was nothing spectacular, but it was a count's house, well-loved and respected. A learned, ink-stained family that had even sent administrators to the imperial capital from time to time.
"An heir's education? I had my fill of that much. It simply stopped being of any use."
Harad had been that count house's sole heir.
Ordinarily, she would have dismissed it.
The Harad of Iagar had been a crybaby and a coward, after all.
But now she could not.
The odds were high that Serzila's intelligence bureau had been wrong.
The Harad who had come to Serzila was neither a crybaby nor a coward. He was closer to the exact opposite.
If that was his true self, then Harad Iagar must have been a fine heir indeed.
"..."
Ellen gazed quietly at Harad.
Even without that, mages carried an image of cunning shrewdness.
Layer on the reminder that he was heir to a learned house, and he looked all the sharper for it.
"If it's a political matter, I'm afraid I'd be of little use. Iagar had no ties to politics."
"It's not about politics."
Ellen's lips wavered, then she took a drink.
She lit a cigarette, and her lips wavered again.
"Hard to put into words?"
"...Yes. It is."
It did seem he might actually be able to help.
But she couldn't say it wearing this face.
Would it be better to drop the disguise and come as herself?
...You're the one who's insane.
Insane enough that the Grand Duke's Heir of Serzila would pour her troubles out to a mere mage?
Her troubles with the position of Grand Duke's Heir, at that.
Ellen set a fresh cigarette between her lips.
The tip kindled on its own. Harad's magic.
"If it's hard to say, you needn't say it. I'll talk on my own."
"What?"
"Sometimes the answer hides in things that have nothing to do with anything. My grandfather, I'm told, completed a scholarly treatise while gazing at a waterfall."
Not that she had ever read it.
Harad added this with a smile. Then he looked at Ellen.
"This is a story about a friend of that grandfather of mine."
Taking her silence for permission, he began again.
"The identity stays secret—a matter of private life. The family was extraordinary. To stretch the truth only a little, only Serzila stood above it. And that person was the sole heir of such a house."
Ellen snorted a laugh before she could stop herself.
The only house that grand was Enberk—the imperial family.
She didn't bother to object.
The story hadn't begun with that claim, after all.
"That person once told my grandfather this: the fewer the heirs, the more the retainers come to expect. With only one chance, the result must be perfect."
"..."
"No particular complaints, apparently. It would be strange to have any! And my grandfather, I hear, retorted in turn that it was the idle chatter of the well-fed."
Ellen listened quietly, rapt, like a child hearing a story from a grandfather.
"He called it only natural, too. Retainers give their loyalty and the people give their love, so of course one must repay them. There was no reason not to become perfect."
Ellen found herself nodding along.
"And that is how that person lived. Nothing was ever done half-heartedly. Not that he was without flaws—but weighed against what he accomplished, they were trifles."
Harad paused, then glanced at the liquor Ellen had been drinking. At the row of short cigarette stubs she had piled up, too.
"Not one word of honest counsel went unheeded; no love given ever went without its due. An extraordinary person."
Ellen wanted to know that person's name.
Enberk, the imperial house, had no one so fine.
"And so that person became head of the house. And then, I'm told, said this to my grandfather:"
Ellen swallowed hard.
She waited for Harad's mouth to open.
"I'll just live however the fuck I want."
"What?"
Ellen's eyes went round.
"He had come to regret the days behind him."
The conclusion made no sense.
"That person was the house's only heir. He could have lived like a degenerate, and the head's seat would have been his regardless."
Only once he had become head of the house did he realize it.
"But the family wanted him to become perfect."
"Why must I be perfect?—that's what he said. Why must I mind the eyes of those who follow me?"
"..."
"To repay their loyalty, their love, their expectations?"
Ellen nodded heavily.
"He received those things before he ever became perfect. Not because he became perfect."
"..."
"It had been so from the day he was born—would they simply vanish because he was imperfect?"
Perhaps they would.
Harad said, low as a whisper.
"If a heart would vanish for a reason like that—was it ever worth repaying?"
Harad's voice was soft and mild.
But it did not sound calm. It felt like being struck.
"Why must he receive it? Why must he take in even the hearts of those who wanted not him, but a perfect him?"
Their eyes met.
She realized Harad was not looking at her, but at someone else.
"Looking back, even my own father never wished me perfect."
But those eyes were terribly sharp.
Ellen felt as though everything in her had been raked bare.
Her deviation had not begun of her own will. It was Archduke Aratus's suggestion.
Doesn't it stifle you, living only as that self?—so he had asked.
"Why should I."
"..."
"Well, that's the sort of story it was."
Harad ended the tale with a smile.
"Clichéd, if you insist. But then, isn't the crush of expectation common enough in noble society?"
None of it reached Ellen's ears.
From there, her memory blurred.
She hadn't been drunk, yet at some point Harad was gone, and she was in the Inner Castle manor.
By the time she registered it, she was already lying in bed.
...And she dreamed.
—Why should I.
The Elaine in the dream said.