Provocation (1)
"There was this tavern I used to love. Beautiful owner, and the food was out of this world."
"I beg your pardon? This, from the esteemed lord who barely ever set foot outside the Inner Citadel?"
"I went in secret. Truly, I did. There's always a way. Anyway — I was a regular at Flowerbed's Flesh."
"Where at?"
"Fine. I'll concede the point. I was every bit the idiot you are. I didn't even know who the owner was — just lapped up every drink she poured."
"So you really were an idiot."
"...You know, it's been a while since anyone smacked you."
Back in her days as the Grand Duke's Heir, Elaine Serjilla had been famous for shutting herself away. She trained with no one, so her private sparring yard sat all but abandoned, and her one daily amusement was drifting over to the communal training grounds to torment the knights.
More precisely — that was the routine known to the Inner Citadel. Outside of those hours, nobody had any idea what Elaine did with her days.
Even Harad hadn't. That was only natural before they grew close, but even after he came to his senses and drew near her, he still hadn't. There were times she simply could not be found, no matter how he searched.
"Your skills are simply lacking, that's all."
That was how Elaine had sneered at him back then.
So this is how she used to vanish. He had wondered how the most famous man in the territory managed to keep a secret watering hole.
More than that, though... she really was a woman.
A wealth of black hair, eyes of crimson, a smooth nose and a delicate jaw, foxlike eyes... The woman standing before him was, without question, the Elaine Serjilla he had seen before he died.
Harad was more stunned by that than by the discovery that she had been enjoying this little deviation for the past twenty years.
And here I thought it might be a prank. After all, last night Elaine had shown no mana at all.
Not that there was none — I simply couldn't sense it.
Harad's eyes glinted with intrigue. A foreign object that functioned perfectly yet gave off no mana whatsoever. What manner of magician had ever crafted such a thing?
Living a true identity behind a false face, and a false identity behind her true one.
Harad let out a quiet, hollow laugh. This was not a thing one person could manage alone.
Intelligence Bureau affiliation. More people know than just the Grand Duke.
He didn't know how many, but the Bureau's director had to be among them. Otherwise there would be no way she could operate so openly as one of their own agents.
"We meet again."
"This is our first meeting."
Ellen was curt. Her glare was outright murderous, too — no doubt thanks to last night's insult. Not that Harad could let on to any of it. For now, he had to play the perfect stranger.
"Did you happen to dream last night?"
"Out of nowhere? I wouldn't remember. I never do."
"I see."
The stimulus had been too weak.
Does she even dream in the first place?
Harad studied her face. His position demanded he assume she dreamed whether she did or not. It wasn't a very magicianly way to think, but he believed he had to — otherwise, something in his chest felt stifled.
A stronger stimulus, then.
How exactly was he to provoke her?
"What are you doing out here, anyway?"
"The Grand Duke was good enough to grant me leave."
Harad produced the seal of Serjilla. With that alone, a man could come and go freely through every corner of the domain — everywhere but the Great Wall.
Ellen took the seal and turned it over, examining it closely, then handed it back wearing a look of distinct displeasure.
"...It's genuine."
"I'm not much of a liar."
Ellen flinched. She must have heard it as: last night's insult had been every bit as sincere.
"Why would the Grand Duke give you this?"
"Seems I pleased her somehow. She told me to prove my usefulness — her words."
Prove my usefulness. Which meant she'd been at least somewhat pleased with him.
"...So you're here to prove your drinking tolerance instead, is that it?"
"I'm just here to watch how things play out for a while."
Before either of them had ordered so much as a cup, the owner poured one and set it in front of Ellen.
A regular, and no mistake.
Ellen downed it in a single swallow. Harad ordered the same for himself. The breath that rolled out of her afterward was ferocious — the liquor was stronger than anything he'd been drinking alone.
"You like it strong, then?"
"That's the only way it tastes like alcohol."
Likely the aura she carried. Elaine had been raised pampered from childhood, fed the priciest elixirs and cultivation pills. Even without all that, her natural talent alone had been monstrous.
"You're oddly aggressive for someone I've never met."
"...Here. Eat. My treat."
Ellen's manner turned around at once. The rebuke had been fair, after all — baring hostility at someone she'd supposedly just met was as good as advertising her guilt.
Easy. She's a bit sloppy at this stage. Even the alias is half-hearted.
She must figure there was no chance in the world of being caught. Sex, face, voice, build... every last thing was different. The only being alive who could piece it together was a regressor.
And in the old life, she was never caught, after all.
He raised a hand, and the owner poured him something new — something weaker than what Ellen was drinking.
Ellen, who had been staring fixedly at him, cut in.
"In the North, they'd look down on you for drinking that."
She swapped her own cup for the one he'd ordered. The fumes of the hard liquor stung the tip of his nose.
"I'm not one to mind the cold."
Northern liquor was strong because the northern cold was vicious. That was no concern of Harad's.
"Is that because you're fire?"
Ellen's eyes lit up.
"Everyone seems to know me as fire."
"Well, only the person themselves knows the details."
A magician's Origin could not be known until the magician named it aloud. All anyone could do was guess at its attribute and scale from the magic it produced.
"Not fire. The Sun."
Ellen's eyes went round.
"What's the difference?"
There was no restraint anywhere in those eyes. They brimmed with nothing but curiosity — and the appetite to satisfy it.
A little more honest, this one.
Elaine would have weighed him once before asking. Such was the position of Serjilla's Grand Duke Heir. She had to be the paragon the North looked up to, and she ought to swing a sword at a magician rather than ask him questions. Just like last night.
Ellen, by contrast, simply hurled her questions out — hers was only a cover identity, with nothing to be careful about.
This side is closer to her nature.
For the Elaine of the previous life, the seat of Grand Duke had been heavier than anyone could guess. The heir's seat no less so.
So this is how she blew off the pressure.
Harad understood at once. Because the name "Ellen" bought her room to breathe, Elaine had been able to keep performing the ideal heir.
"Broadly speaking, the larger the concept, the higher the potential. A puddle simply has more talent in it than a droplet."
"Then the Sun is absurdly grand, isn't it? Isn't it just a really big fire — sun-sized?"
The eyes asking were achingly clear. That innocence sparked an idea in Harad.
Harad was a hostage. He stood nowhere near a position where he could lay hands on Elaine, heir to the Grand Duke. But the person standing before his eyes was Ellen, agent of the Intelligence Bureau.
He looked back and forth between the owner and Ellen, once, twice, again. Ellen tilted her head at him. She looked terribly innocent doing it.
An opening.
Tonight, Elaine would dream. Harad decided it then and there.
Lazy — that single flaw aside, Elaine had been an ideal ruler. She loved the North and every soul living in it, yet never let that love bend her judgment. Elaine's choices were always rational. She may have wavered inside, but she never once let the trembling show. It surfaced only now and then, and only to the guard who watched over her.
"There were times I wanted to throw it all away. Sometimes I still do. More often, back when I was the Heir."
"I don't doubt it."
"How could I, though? There's no one but me to carry Serjilla."
"Shall we run off now, then?"
"Would you come with me?"
"Gladly."
"There. Kind of you to say, even if it's only words. Come — back to work."
"That work is yours, my lord. Mine is guarding you."
"And here you were, promising to come with me."
The world called Elaine the "Iron-Blooded Grand Duke." But Harad knew she was no such cold-blooded creature. She had simply performed the ideal Serjilla, day after day.
So Elaine always drew a line — and never crossed it. She made sure no one else could, either. Were she to allow that line to blur, she would lose the confidence to keep performing perfection. Only her guard, Harad, had been free to stand upon it.
Regression had wiped even that away, though.
There's no line to be seen.
For Ellen the intelligence agent, that line simply did not exist. She mingled without ceremony with common mercenaries in a rundown tavern — a sight he could never have imagined from the Elaine of the previous life. That Grand Duke had never once treated her authority lightly. Not even as heir.
"I'm out of drink."
"Over here!"
When Harad rattled his empty cup, Ellen hailed the owner, who poured fresh rounds — the same liquor Ellen herself was drinking.
"Now you can tell me."
The first-meeting hostility was gone without a trace. The Ellen before him meant only to sate her curiosity.
Get him drunk first, then handle him as she pleases — that's the plan, I take it.
Harad laughed. To think such a side had been hiding in that Elaine all along.
"You are beautiful, and I am handsome."
"..."
"Look at that. No denial. One can be modest about such things, but deep down you know them for what they are. The Origin is no different. No one can know it but the one who bears it."
"There's a little sun."
When he first became aware of his Origin, newly born into the world, that was what Harad had told his mother — even though what he held was a fist-sized clump of flame. Such it was: a magician cannot mistake their own Origin.
"We cannot distort the Origin we were born with. It simply isn't the sort of thing that can be."
Origin. It was the wellspring of magic — and the wellspring of the man called Harad. At least, that was how Harad had always seen it.
"You know perfectly well that you are you. Think of it as something like that."
"..."
Her expression shifted, just slightly. The look of someone pricked by a needle.
Harad drank down the cup Ellen had given him. Bitter, as promised — but no drunkenness followed. The little fire smoldering in his stomach sent the alcohol packing before it could settle.
Hoo — white smoke curled out from between his parted lips. To every other eye in the room, it was just breath.
"Does the Sun feel the cold too, then?"
Apparently it looked like breath to Ellen's eyes as well.
Of course. At this age, she's still short on experience.
The fire living in his stomach was magic. Small as it was, and cunningly veiled, the Elaine of the previous life would have clocked it at once.
"It's magic."
"...!"
Ellen's eyes bulged. She whipped her head around, scanning the room — but the booming laughter of the northern drinkers had spared them any witnesses.
"Are you out of your mind?"
Ellen's brows knitted as she glared daggers at him. Harad was a bomb. If he went off, Serjilla went off with him. The Empire and the Church would seize on him as their pretext to squeeze the duchy dry.
"Now that reaction is the suspicious one. Watch closely."
Harad beckoned the owner over.
"What for?"
"The truth is, I'm a magician."
"Is that so."
Ellen's face went hard as flint — but the owner only smiled and slipped back into her kitchen.
"The only time a magician can be known for a magician is when they make magic real before your eyes."
Until you saw the magic itself, you could never be certain who was one and who wasn't.
"Before that, even magicians can't sort magicians from anyone else. Until magic shows itself, all anyone can hold is a hunch."
The Church's way of smoking out magicians amounted to intimidation and guesswork — and to catching them in the act after a long stakeout.
"Keep your face thick as iron plate, and half the battle's already won."
"So only the magicians with guilty consciences ended up dead?"
"And plenty of people who were never magicians died too."
Such was the Judgment of the Sun and Moon.
"Well — carrying yourself proudly never meant everyone was telling the truth."
Harad knocked back the liquor, smiling. Hoo. As he exhaled that breath-like smoke, the owner, standing right in front of him, topped up his cup.
"For all we know, the owner herself could be a magician."
Ellen's eyebrows twitched.
"...Let's take this somewhere else."
To Ellen's eyes, Harad looked for all the world like a drunk.
"I'm not drunk."
Harad breathed at her. The breath was far drier than it should have been — not a trace of drink in it. Ellen's eyes went round.
"I did tell you. It's magic."
He grinned. No more breath came from his mouth. Only then did Ellen catch on: everything she had taken for breath until now was smoke — the alcohol, vaporized on his tongue.
"Well? Ready to hear me out now?"
Ellen nodded.
Well, well. That's a welcome sight.
Her sudden meekness wrung a dry laugh out of him. The Elaine he remembered had always been like this — if Harad's reasoning held water, she listened.
"The root of magic lies in the Outer Realm — and yet magicians are born on the continent too. Even ones with no tie to the Outer Realm whatsoever."
"So?"
"I propose we try suspecting that lovely owner of being a magician. A continent-born one."
"Hey."
Ellen scowled and glared at him, but he wasn't looking at her. He was looking only at the owner — and his profile was utterly grave. Only when she realized he meant every word did Ellen follow his gaze.
"What do you see?"
"...She's pouring drinks. Smiling."
"Is she truly smiling? That owner heard every word we said. And now she isn't listening at all. No interest in us? Or is she avoiding us?"
Truly smiling? No. The mouth smiled; the eyes did not. If anything, they trembled, faintly, over and over.
"...To avoid us."
Ellen reached the conclusion before she knew it.
"Exactly. And why would she avoid us?"
"Because her conscience is gnawing at her."
"Then why put on the smile?"
"...Because she wanted to look unashamed."
The magicians with clear consciences survived. The guilty ones were found out — and died.
"How about it? Does everything that looked harmless until today look suspicious now?"
Ellen nodded without a word. To her eyes, the owner no longer looked like an ordinary woman. She looked like a magician. Every little thing she did looked like the concealing of one.
"That is the gaze of the Sun and Moon. The Church suspects everything. Were one of theirs sitting in this room, a stake would already be through that owner's heart."
There was once a soul who joked that it might rain on a bright, cloudless day. Someone reported the quip to the Church — and that merry joker became a magician.
Ellen's expression cracked.
"...You're saying she is a magician?"
"She may be. She may not be. Didn't I just say? You cannot be certain of a magician until you see the magic — even when you are a magician yourself."
Ellen's face twisted.
Had he staged all this just to teach her that anyone can die wrongly condemned? If that was the intent, the lesson had landed. From this night on, Ellen was remade into someone who would live carrying suspicion.
"Could you kill a person on suspicion alone?"
Ellen shook her head. If that owner was no magician, then she was a daughter of the North.
So this is how it was, back then.
Ellen sorted the people she had to kill by whether they bore magic. The Elaine of the previous life had sorted them by guilt.
"Then go on — shrink that suspicion, or grow it."
Ellen looked at Harad. The owner had left the counter and gone to sit among the mercenaries in the corner.
"Let's start from what's certain. Does that owner know you serve the Intelligence Bureau?"
Ellen nodded.
"Then if the only soul she deceives is you, she is deceiving the Intelligence Bureau entire. An agent of the Bureau, of all people, drinking at her counter like a regular."
"..."
"An owner who would need to be bolder than ever to fool you is tiptoeing around us instead. What do you suppose is sticking in her throat?"
The mercenaries rose from their benches. The owner hurried to hold them back. Aside from Harad and Ellen, they were the last customers of the night.
"...I don't know if she's a magician. But she is hiding something."
Ellen lifted her cup. It had sat empty for a long while — from the moment suspicion took root, she had stopped ordering.
"Harad — what would you do?"
When Elaine lacked something, she asked whoever knew the answer. She had never been ashamed to learn from those beneath her. The Ellen before him was doing exactly that. Different, yet the same person. The truth struck Harad all over again.
"I'd seize her and question her. And if the answer I wanted didn't come out, I'd use harsher methods."
The Church's rate of catching magicians was one hundred percent. Go down into the church cellar, and anyone becomes a magician.
"I asked for your way. Not the Church's."
"If she's a good magician, I'd let her live. If she's a bad one, I'd have killed her."
"Don't spout nonsense."
Harad fell silent for a moment.
"There were, without question, kind magicians on the continent. Magicians who helped people."
Words the Elaine of the previous life had spoken — and gibberish to the Ellen sitting across from him.
"I meant it."
"..."
"Understood. Here is my way, then."
Harad turned his gaze. The owner, catching his eye, smiled. The sight of it felt strangely awkward to him.
"In my eyes, that one is a bad magician."
"What?"
It happened in an instant. Flame bloomed from the soles of the owner's feet and climbed her legs to the knees. By the time Elaine registered the magic, the fire had already swallowed the owner whole. She never managed so much as a scream — she simply charred black.
"...You just—!"
Ellen shrieked and kicked back her chair as she shot to her feet, and a sword — somehow already drawn — leveled at Harad. His face remained perfectly composed.
"Watch closely."
Harad gestured at the owner, burned to a blackened husk. The fire would not die, though its owner already had. That kind of flame had a strangely clinging quality to it — proof that it was burning mana.
"Congratulations. Your suspicion was right."
"..."
"The owner was a magician."