Recuperation (1)
His convalescence was peaceful.
"Harad, you holding up?"
"Smooth sailing."
"Good to hear. Still... is Lady Ellen truly the one nursing you?"
Horn, Vice Commander of the 2nd Knight Order, had come to check on his recovery—and at the sight of Ellen sitting at the bedside, his face curdled with dismay.
"If you've seen what you came to see, leave, Sir Horn."
"Y-yes, yes! Carry on!"
Horn fled on the spot.
Gulen, who'd come yesterday, and Jambello the day before had fared no better. However sincere the knights' worry for Harad, the moment they spotted Ellen at his side they blanched—because that collateral branch of House Serzila was keeping watch over his sickbed in person.
Special treatment, then. He'd take it.
It was an indulgence no one but Grand Duke Aratus could hope to enjoy—and since the Grand Duke was hardly the type to get himself wounded, it was fair to call it a pleasure reserved for Harad alone.
"What's so funny?"
"I don't know. I just find myself laughing. Would you fold that blanket back? It's getting warm."
Ellen dutifully pulled the covers halfway down.
"Draw the curtains for me."
"Yes."
"Open the window as well."
"Yes."
"Tsk. All that dust piled up over there is making my illness worse."
"...And where, exactly, is this dust?"
"Can't you see it?"
"..."
Eyes squeezed shut, Ellen distilled her fury into a long sigh—and swept away dust that existed only in his imagination.
The feeling of looking down at her from the bed wasn't half bad. When would he ever have been able to work Elaine this hard? That, too, was one of the fruits of regression.
"Dear me. Today's lunch doesn't appeal. Bring me something else."
"...You'll eat anything. You know you will."
"You're telling a patient to eat 'anything'?"
"..."
Gritting her teeth, Ellen fetched new food.
"Not Kubel's cooking, I notice."
"...Shut it and eat."
The spoon trembled violently in her grip. It looked less like she meant to feed him than to drive it straight into his stomach. Through the belly, if need be.
"None of that."
Harad ate meekly. There were still lines between them that could not be crossed.
But why was she nursing him at all?
Well—she was doing it, and he intended to enjoy it while it lasted.
"Can you see this?"
Ellen waved her palm before his eyes, testing the regenerated left one.
"I see it."
When Harad nodded, Ellen backed away step by step—until her shoulders met the wall.
"How many is this?"
"If all you're holding up is the middle one, that's an insult."
"Your eyesight's come all the way back, then."
Ellen nodded, looking satisfied.
Most of his external wounds had closed. They would tear open if he pushed himself, granted, but even then they wouldn't gape very deep. Thanks to the vitality peculiar to the Sun, his progress had been swift.
Harad remained convalescent all the same. The reason was internal injury—aftereffects of the White Flame.
"Didn't you ascend to the 4th Tier?"
He had—as a result of consuming Psina's heart. Ellen seemed to find it hard to grasp how a breakthrough in realm and a crippling internal injury could arrive hand in hand.
"That's a separate matter."
His heart, and the Sun living within it, were fully intact. That was the heart's doing: its condensed magic had fed his Origin and shielded the organ from the aftereffects. But its benefits ended precisely there. The blood channels throughout his body were still a ruin from the backlash. Magic was out of the question—even moving about was an ordeal. He needed time.
It still hurts, though.
The White Flame that had killed Psina was smaller than the one that had struck Cassion's Origin. Naturally, the aftereffects that time had been far worse. And yet the pain now was greater—because, unlike then, the moon orbs were all spent.
"That's what I told you, didn't I? If you can't use the orbs, don't go charging off."
"'They were never there to begin with'—that's what I said, no? I'll be saying the same this time."
"You said you had no intention of pushing yourself."
So much for the man who claimed no one cherished his own body better than he did. Harad had overdone it yet again.
"I didn't want to, either. But it had to be done."
"For Sir Delic and Sir Pissarro?"
Not for them alone. The Ivory Tower's 5th Tier might have made it home alive otherwise.
"Psina had to die."
"Why?"
"Because she's Outlands."
Where the Outlands were concerned, Harad was absolute—and Ellen could not fathom that resolve.
"...Anyone would take you for a Serzilan."
He'd been settled in Serzila for barely half a year, yet he held the Outlands in as much enmity as any native son.
"You're a magician yourself, you know."
"Now that's an insult."
"Yes, yes. I'm sorry. Is there anything you need?"
"I'm thirsty."
Ellen poured water into a cup.
"I can drink it myself."
"Stop talking and just drink. I'm doing this because I'm sorry, that's all."
And so Ellen fed him the water with her own two hands. Her touch, for all her sniping, was careful—he'd half expected her to jam the cup down his throat.
"I'll have to find out quickly how to refill the orbs' magic."
"Would be nice if you did, but there's no need to rush. I'm 4th Tier now."
The risk of Projection was gone. That alone was plenty. Days of writhing under aftereffects like these would only grow fewer from here on.
"So now you're a 4th Tier as good as a 5th?"
"It just might be."
The White Flame would come a little easier. Truthfully, everything up to now had been absurd.
A wonder he'd lived through it at all.
He'd been wielding 5th-Tier fire while a mere 3rd Tier—a feat impossible without regression.
"The 4th Tier,"
Harad murmured to himself. There really was more he could do now. Short of Manifestation, but still—
"Keep that up and you'll die, you know."
Ellen cut in. Her gaze was remarkably sharp—the keenness she showed only now and then. She acted like someone who could see straight through him.
"I won't."
"And if you truly die?"
How nice it would be if she really could see through me.
"I absolutely won't."
Until the day that became true, Harad had no intention of dying.
Once his convalescence began, Kubel and Shura came by every day. Kubel alone in the mornings and at noon; Shura alongside him in the evenings.
The reason Kubel called three times a day was simple: Ellen refused to leave Harad's side, so Kubel ran her meals to her.
"I told you I'm fine."
"I didn't say a word."
"Then what do you want?"
"...?"
She wasn't a child, after all.
No—come to think of it, at twenty she was still closer to child than not.
In any case, nobody had pressed the duty on Kubel. If Ellen hadn't volunteered, the nursing itself would have fallen to him—and he was weighted with guilt and a sense of debt. Thanks to that, Ellen's lunchbox was always packed to the brim with meat.
"Thank you, Kubel."
Ellen sank into a chair, tucked Shura snug against her chest, and lifted the lid. That was her recharge time.
"How are you feeling today?"
"Better than yesterday."
Harad answered by showing him a flame. The mass of it was denser than he'd expected. A full fifteen days had passed since Psina's death. His intact heart, and the Sun now risen to the 4th Tier, were sending more vitality through him than ever before.
"Four days more, and I should be fully mended."
Even now his daily life suffered no impediment—he could manage the Boundary if it came to that. His caretaker was simply so strict that he idled his hours away in bed.
"That's a relief. Is there anything I can help with?"
"I'm fine. What work does a patient have?"
"Have you had your dinner?"
"The maid will bring something. Though you could bring me anything, too—you know how it is. I'll eat anything."
At that, Ellen buried Shura deeper against her chest and glared at Harad like she could kill him.
"Well, of course you would. You even eat hea... things like that."
"What's 'things like that'?"
"You don't need to know, Shura. It's something bad."
Ellen stroked Shura's back. She'd softened the word for the girl's sake—Ellen had never been comfortable with the fact that Harad had devoured a heart.
"If I hadn't eaten it, things would have gone very badly. I'll say it again, Kubel—it's all thanks to you."
Psina's heart. Only Kubel had caught on to what Harad had intended.
Ellen's eyes narrowed. She couldn't say a word against it—without Kubel, Harad would have died. Back then, consuming that heart had been his only choice.
"But, um—is it really all right to go on eating them like that? There's a woman who hates it, after all."
There was indeed someone who disliked Harad's habit of eating hearts, and that someone was a woman. Both Ellen and Kubel knew it.
"Well, I'd wager she dislikes it less than she'd dislike me dying."
It wasn't the first one he'd eaten, either. Harad said it as though it were nothing, and the sourness in Ellen's manner thawed a little.
"Fair. Otherwise she'd be a madwoman."
"She is a madwoman, mind."
He agreed with her, and Ellen buried her face in the lunchbox again. Kubel nodded along, eyes brimming with contentment.
It was just as Ellen scraped the box clean that Cassion pushed open the door, his face distinctly displeased.
"...Lady Ellen really is nursing you."
Harad gave a hollow laugh. Every knight who visited threw those words at him. Ellen's standing, it seemed, was higher than he'd assumed. Collateral she might be—but collateral of the Grand Duke's own line, he supposed.
"Setting that aside—Harad."
Cassion rounded on him without warning.
"Be honest with me. Were you a 5th Tier all along, hiding your age?"
"...?"
"I've heard tell of 5th Tiers who bury every last year of their age and prance about acting young. Was that you?"
"Have you lost your mind?"
Harad looked at Cassion as though he were a hopeless case.
"Spare me the ignorant drivel. If that were true, you wouldn't be standing here."
Had Harad truly been a 5th Tier, Cassion would have died in the Sacred Ground of Fire.
"Nothing else explains it."
"What's there to explain? You lost to me yourself, you hunk of ivory."
"..."
"Inflating me to inflate your own worth, are you?"
Stung square in the sore spot, Cassion averted his gaze.
"I'm glad you lived, Harad."
"You're late."
This was Cassion's first visit—not out of any grudge over Harad's survival, but because he'd been busy. The 2nd and 6th Knight Orders, newly charged with holding the tunnel, could not afford to ease up.
"By the way, Harad—do you happen to know where the Grand Duke's daughter is?"
Harad's eyes drifted toward Ellen without his meaning them to. She, who had been playing with Shura, flinched.
"What about her?"
"No one's seen hide nor hair of her lately. Fifteen days now, hasn't it? Quite a few people are worried."
Fifteen days it was. And Ellen had spent every one of them eating and sleeping here.
"I thought you, of all people, might know. You're close, no?"
Closeness was a relative thing. Compared to his previous life they were still far apart, yet he did think they'd grown reasonably close. Only, the line had to be drawn clearly. Harad was close with Ellen—not with Elaine.
"If you're not close, then who is? You're the only soul the Grand Duke's daughter could call a friend."
"That much is true. Ugh."
"What's the matter?"
"Seems I haven't quite mended after all."
Harad let out a sudden groan and burrowed under the covers. It ought to have been hot in there. It wasn't.
"Sir Cassion."
The room had gone cold around her voice.
"Y-yes, Lady Ellen."
"Out."
"Pardon?"
"We don't know where the Grand Duke's daughter is, so leave."
"At once!"
Cassion bolted from the room. Harad poked his face out from under the blanket.
"So I'm your only friend too, hm?"
Then he dove straight back under.
Toremote, Commander of the 1st Knight Order, arrived several hours later—after Kubel and Shura had gone home, and Ellen had lain down on a pallet spread across the floor.
"I was going to have you come report to His Grace the Grand Duke with me, but..."
Toremote, who had thrown the door open in all his towering grandeur, stopped dead in his tracks. Like every knight before him, he panicked at the sight of Ellen.
"Did I... interrupt something?"
"You're the first one to actually ask."
"I'll come back later. How many hours should I give you?"
Passionate as ever, Toremote was blazing even in his presumption.
"..."
Ellen's face looked rather warm as well.
"The room's gotten awfully toasty."
Ellen chased Toremote out too. Truly, the collateral branch's standing was more formidable than he'd imagined.