The Attack (2)
Harad thought back to a night in the Boundary — the night before the rabbit appeared.
"If you and they were drowning together, I would save them without a moment's hesitation."
That remark of Elaine's had stayed with him. Nothing captured what Elaine was quite so well.
Elaine was the perfect heir — and yet her beginning and her end were Serzila, always.
Retainers came in every shape and kind, but when Serzila spoke of retainers, it meant knights. Such was the North's creed: strength of arms above all else. And Serzila was the master of that North. True to form, Elaine's scales tipped toward the sword — which is to say, her faith in knights ran deeper than most could imagine.
The Elaine of the previous life had been no different.
"She never put it so bluntly, though."
He should have asked her, just once. Who would you save, if we were drowning? Perhaps the chance would come someday. In any case, the Elaine of the present had chosen her knights.
"A long road yet, then."
The dream had swayed her. Even as heir, she had tried to trust Harad — and so, on his advice, she had strayed from the search route. Then, the moment she grasped that the knights were in danger, she had ordered a return. In the end, Harad had failed to beat the knights.
"Natural, if anything. The meal had only just begun — no one fills up on the first spoonful."
Today, of all days, the sky was remarkably clear. Hardly a cloud hung in it — and perhaps for that reason, even the snowfall had softened. It hadn't been only today, either; the past four days had been the same. And, as it happened, four days had passed since he had seen Ellen.
"Ellen. Did you see it?"
"Pardon? Yes... Couldn't you? You even ate and left earlier."
Ellen had been doing her best to avoid Harad.
"...Did you two fight?" Kubel asked carefully.
"Hmm. I suppose so."
"You seem to fight rather often." By Kubel's count, this was already the third.
"This is tame, actually. It used to be far worse."
"Pardon?"
"These things happen."
He and the Elaine of the past life had fought plenty.
"Tell me — why do you open your eyes like that?"
"I was born this way, I'm afraid."
"A family matter, then."
"Fuck's sake."
So many fights.
"You've been drinking again."
"You gave me this liquor yourself, didn't you?"
"Do you just drain whatever anyone hands you?"
"More of your bullshit."
Looking back, every reason they had ever fought over was trivial. And the vast majority had begun with Elaine picking the quarrel. Yet she was also always the first to apologize.
"I was wrong yesterday."
Sometimes she even bowed her head, and once he had wondered what drove her to go so far.
"You're the Grand Duke's heir. How does your head bow so easily?"
"Because it was my fault."
Elaine said it as though embarrassed. It wasn't the apology that shamed her — it was whatever she had done the day before.
"You know it already, but my temperament is a poor thing."
"Only toward me, though."
"It is never because I dislike you."
Elaine was careless with Harad alone.
"It seems, somehow, that I am very much at ease with you."
The Harad of the past life had been indifferent to Serzila. He had been entangled with Serzila, yes — but he had never once stepped in for it. The past Elaine's values were much the same. And those values were something Elaine had forged herself, not something Harad had given her.
Such was how people changed. Harad wished Ellen would change a little faster.
"Might I ask what it was this time?"
"I crossed a line."
"Pardon?"
"I laid hands on something precious to Ellen. Deliberately."
Harad had laid hands on the knights — on the retainers most vital and precious to Serzila. He meant to compress the years and the anguish Elaine had endured in her past life and hand them to her whole. Friction was inevitable.
"Why would you do such a thing?" Kubel asked, knowing nothing of the workings behind it. If it was faith, then it was faith — the quiet conviction that Harad must have his reasons.
"Perhaps I wanted to become more precious than what is precious to Ellen."
"Pardon?"
"A joke."
Harad laughed under his breath at the guileless look in Kubel's eyes.
"Why. Why, indeed."
He murmured it over as though savoring Kubel's question. To erase Elaine's regrets. To change the future. Reasons, he had any number — and not one of them an excuse. All of them true. Wasn't that what the regression was for? He felt its worth afresh every single day. The future was changing, and it would change further still.
And yet... apart from all that, he was impatient. Harad read his own heart with uncomfortable precision. The Elaine of the present was only twenty. In the past life, twenty had been an age when she was sealed fast — but this life's Elaine was different. She had already begun to change, and the pace outran anything he had projected. If he wished, there was time to spare. But Harad did not wish it. He ran as though something were on his heels.
Why? His ignorance of the Outlands. The unknown beast called the rabbit. A future in flux... There were reasons aplenty. But Harad knew the greatest of them, in the end, was Elaine.
"I suppose it's because I feel wronged."
"Pardon?"
"Or perhaps because I feel sore about it."
Harad thought of Elaine. The first face to surface... was, as ever, the Elaine of the past life — the Grand Duke who had sent him back in time.
"Or maybe because I want to fight with her."
In the past life, Harad had been taken hostage at twenty and had died at forty. Five of those years he had lived as a bug-eater. The next five he had lived as the young heir Elaine's nemesis and friend both, and the final ten as Grand Duke Elaine's guard, until death took him.
What if there had been no Elaine? His was a life that could not entertain the question. And he doubted the thought was his alone.
"Or maybe because something feels empty."
The Regression Stone. Only at the moment of his death had Harad learned that such an entity from beyond existed. Elaine had carried it far, far longer.
"If the chance ever comes, I should like to tell my past self — that I matter more than Serzila does."
A dream Elaine had dreamed of late. Perhaps those words of the past had never been mere regret.
"Still, I could idle away far more time with the likes of you."
"I'd rather not."
That was how Harad had answered, back then — an answer with no heart in it.
"I suppose it's because I miss her."
And so he was impatient.
"...Do you have feelings for Miss Ellen, sir?" Kubel, who had been listening in silence, asked with a knowing look.
"Ah. That's not it."
"...?"
"There is no one I love."
That longing of his — it was not, he was sure, a romantic thing.
Harad recalled the night he had last seen Ellen. The day he returned from the search, Elaine was attacked — and Ellen smashed three tables at the Footprint of the Snow Leopard.
"Show me, then."
That was what Ellen had said, when he told her he could imitate an aura.
"Can't. Not right now."
For the Harad of the present, it was impossible. He had the nerve to pass himself off as a knight, but not the means to fake an aura. Origins that could manage the feat were so rare they could be counted on one hand. The Harad of the past life had possessed an entity from beyond even rarer than such Origins — though of course, even those Origins and entities came with their limits.
Harad had never bothered to explain. She wouldn't have believed him anyway. No — in truth, there had never even been a chance to tell her.
"Ha."
Ellen had sneered at him and walked off without another word. That was ten days ago now.
A cold war only dug the rift deeper the longer it ran. But Harad had no intention of raising the white flag first. If anything, he hoped the rift itself might prove a spur.
"She won't have dreamed it, though."
A magician who could pass for a knight existed — that much, Harad had explained in words alone. For words to work as a spur, they needed proof behind them, just as the keeper of Flowerbed's Flesh had once unmasked himself as a magician.
"Or she begins to wonder on her own."
The most recent dream had come about in just that way — he couldn't say why, but Elaine had reached for change.
"Hard to count on the latter, though."
This time it would have to be the former. To Elaine, knights were that kind of existence. The road didn't feel hopeless. Hadn't the first spoonful already been taken?
"I'm back."
In truth, Ellen had not come by once in those ten days — but Elaine had visited from time to time.
"How did yesterday go?"
Elaine answered by holding out her scabbard instead. Blood was smeared across it.
"A magician again."
Over the past ten days, Elaine had met Harad four times, and shared four drinks with him. And she had been attacked four times. Every culprit had been a magician.
"...It seems you were right, after all."
In the end, Elaine had believed him.
"So it seems."
"But they're no knights, I'd wager."
She did not believe it completely. For Harad, that much was enough.
"I tried to look into it quietly... but it was hopeless. Being the heir, you see."
Elaine drew two letters from inside her coat. Both bore the Grand Duke's seal — one addressed to Elaine, the other to Harad. The sender had styled them warnings rather than attempts on her life, but an attack was an attack. Naturally, Grand Duke Aratus had worried — and then he had raged.
"Mine came with an order of confinement."
For the time being, Elaine was barred from leaving the Inner Castle.
"This one is yours. His Grace the Grand Duke's order: uncover the hand behind it."
The Grand Duke's fury had landed on Harad.
"Because the culprit is a magician, no doubt. No one in the main castle knows magic as well as you."
Harad took the letter. Its gist was simple: deal with it, or be dealt with.
"By myself?"
"With the 2nd Knight Order. Though if you'd rather go alone, that's fine too."
But if he truly moved alone, Grand Duke Aratus would be disappointed in him. In short, it was the Great Wall painting all over again. Just as he had exposed the painting last time, he was now to expose the hand behind this affair — and, in the process, to win the 2nd Knight Order's recognition besides. Furious as he was, the Grand Duke had chosen to tie the matter to the 2nd Knight Order.
"It can't be merely because the 2nd Knight Order is on its rest cycle."
The Grand Duke was sharper than his face let on.
"You may use the Information Bureau if you wish. His Grace didn't say so, but I will allow it."
"Am I permitted?"
"The connections you've built are your ability too."
Harad thought of Arika. The future head of the Information Bureau — she was always useful, if only he could make use of her.
"Be careful. The 2nd Knight Order is not the 1st."
They were not so different, really. Knights were knights, wherever you put them.
"The Order, or its Commander?"
"...Why ask what you already know."
Cassion, Commander of the 2nd Knight Order, was a rabid magician-hater.
"I can hardly picture Sir Cassion ever acknowledging you."
Harad couldn't picture it either.
Over those ten days, Harad and Elaine had drunk together four times. Every session deep in the night, every one of them in Harad's small annex.
It had been Elaine's suggestion, and a clumsy one at that. Ten days was far too short a span to judge anything by. And yet the bait had been taken — beautifully. The hand behind this affair, for all its cunning, had behaved like a naive child: every single time Elaine sat down to drink with Harad, it sent a magician.
"They must truly despise me."
There was meaning, too, in the very fact that Elaine had made so clumsy a proposal. No doubt she had offered it to prove Harad's hypothesis wrong — but the Elaine of only a short while ago would never have made the offer at all. She would have ignored him, or flown into a rage, as she had when three knights of the 1st Knight Order came back wounded.
"That, too, was a reward."
Elaine was changing, and faster than he had ever projected. It meant he had no cause for impatience... and yet the heart seldom moves the way one wills it. Harad found himself laughing.
"What kept you so long?"
Ellen was waiting in front of the Inner Castle.
"What are you doing here?"
"Didn't the heir tell you?"
Elaine had granted permission for the Information Bureau. Harad had naturally thought of Arika.
"Didn't expect it to be you."
Because, come to think of it, the confinement order had fallen on Elaine. Not on Ellen. A blind spot, if ever there was one. Harad knew Ellen's true identity — but scarcely anyone else did. To all outward eyes, Ellen was a low-ranking agent of the Information Bureau. The culprits might come for Elaine, but Ellen would never be attacked.
"Why? Don't you want me here?"
"I was about to ask you that. Have you cooled off?"
"...I was never angry."
"The keeper of the Footprint of the Snow Leopard billed me for his tables."
Harad had paid, because there was no way around it. It was money Elaine had once pressed on him for drinks.
"You said the heir gave it to you."
"I did. You're the one who smashed them."
"Wow."
Ellen gaped at him, the picture of disbelief.
"That's so petty. Fine, I'll pay you back. Wait here."
Ellen turned away — she clearly meant to fetch the money. Harad stopped her.
"I'd rather be paid in something else."
"Like what?"
"Never mind, then, if you don't know."
This time it was Harad who turned away. And Ellen who caught him.
"...I'm sorry about yesterday," Ellen said. "I suppose you're just easy for me to be around."
It was a face he had missed.
"Same here."
Harad couldn't help but smile.
Ellen said nothing.
Ellen's face went red. Just barely.