A Heart Soaked Through
Juhwan lay still and watched Lizzie's face, sunk in the blankets as if she had been buried in them.
She slept like a doll cast in plaster. Too quiet. She did not even seem to breathe. Was she alive? Fear took him all at once.
He set a fingertip lightly against her cheek. Warm. Not cold. Only then did he ease.
Watching her again, he saw her lashes tremble now and then. In the room where the lamp flame danced, shadows wavered across the white of her face, and if he listened closely her quiet breathing threaded through the winter wind beyond the window.
Once they left to work the merchant caravan, there would be no time that belonged only to the two of them for a while. Perhaps that was why he had been a little stubborn about it. He stroked her cheek again and again, and still Lizzie did not wake.
He remembered her standing in front of him, facing the leader of Red Sword. A low laugh escaped.
He had liked her all this while. From the moment they married, love aside, she had simply become someone dear. It would be truer to say he was already loving her before he fell in love. Another woman in her place might have been the same. On the single fact of having become family, he liked her, and he loved her.
But she had begun to change the color of his heart. She scurried for him like a chick, thought of him a little more each day, and told him she liked him, that she loved him. Slowly he felt himself being drawn.
He had believed he already loved her, and then he learned that he had been wrong. Perhaps only now was he falling in love.
The moment that decided it was when she stood against Karin and fought for him, shaking from head to foot. A sound landed in his mind. Plop. He had been poised on the lip of the lake of love, barely keeping his footing, and that was the instant he went all the way under. His heart soaked through with her.
I think I understand, if it's now.
The words the women had spoken when they left him, back when he lived on Earth—he felt he could finally take them to heart. What sort of wound he had given them. Only now.
"..."
How lonely it must be, how sad, to feel that the person you love does not see you. In his own way he had held every one of those women precious, but love was not a thing that could be made of that alone.
Offering, in the quiet of his heart, an apology that came far too late, Juhwan slipped out of the bed.
Dorothy seemed to have rolled more than a full turn around the bed in her sleep. She was still near the place where she had first lain, but her head was the wrong way around, and the blanket was half wound about the child's legs.
He drew it up to the neck of Dorothy, who slept sprawled like a starfish, then gathered their things and left the room.
He called fire into his hand and lit the pitch-dark corridor. Wood creaked, and the sound rang out into the empty air.
It was deep night. Even outside the building, not a human voice could be heard.
From the sack he had left on the wagon roof, Juhwan drew a torch. When he lit it, the flame rushed up with a flare and brightened everything around him. He set it in the bracket at the wagon's corner and busily began to unload the cargo.
On the road a wheel might come off, or the wagon might lurch hard. If the load then piled to one side and spilled, whoever was inside would be hurt. With a small child like Dorothy, he had to be all the more careful.
A sturdy shelf was already fixed to one wall, and there was a large chest as well. Traces of the villagers who had used the wagon before remained just as they were.
He emptied all of it and packed the goods back in, neat and tight. What they had bought today and what had already been in the wagon he set out by kind, and he turned about half the space into a bed of straw. That would be where Lizzie and Dorothy slept while they escorted the merchant caravan.
Putting things in order showed him what was still needed. With everything gathered by type, the gaps stood out at once.
He had tried, as far as he could, to follow the way Lizzie had arranged the cabin, but the space was narrow, and somehow it still looked a jumble.
I wonder if this will only make more work for Lizzie later.
He might have to pick a day and let her set it to rights however she pleased.
After he had tied down and sorted even the luggage on the roof, he fitted a lock to the inside of the door at the last—a simple thing, a long iron bar slid sideways to fasten it. Even so, it had cost a fair amount.
Before he knew it, the dark in the sky was thinning.
He was thinking it was about time they left when Lizzie came out, the wool blanket she had bought yesterday wrapped around her shoulders.
A winter dawn, once the day's warmth was gone, was cold. Her white breath climbed the night air.
"Why are you out? It's cold."
At his words she looked from the wagon to his face, flustered.
"Juhwan, did you do all of this by yourself? It's hard work. Why did you do it alone? If you'd told me, I would have helped."
"It's all right. It isn't hard for me."
He smiled, but Lizzie seemed a little angry. The fluster on her face had given way to cheeks puffed round. She was doing her best to show that she was upset, and it was only cute. She looked like a child.
Come to think of it, she was twenty-one. On Earth that would still have been an age for wanting to play, for only just beginning to fall in love.
She doesn't just look young. She really is young.
He had heard that in this world a person was born with no age at all, and that a year was added without fail on the first of January.
He had been twenty-nine in full years when he met Santa, so by this world's reckoning he was thirty now. Twenty-one and thirty. The difference...
The hunter Lizzie had originally married had been far older than Juhwan. He did not know exactly, but from what she had said the man had been past forty or so, and she had been his third wife besides.
He stepped close and drew her into his arms as she glanced at him sidelong, almost in reproach. In his heart he spoke to her.
I'll make you happy.
But what lived in the heart did not pass easily to another person. Lizzie murmured, soft, as if scolding.
"It's already nearly time. That's enough now. Dorothy will be up, and th-this..."
"..."
Somehow the front of his trousers had gone tight. Very tight. He was hardly some spotty boy in the thick of puberty; he could not tell why he was like this. Were heart and body going their separate ways? Or had he simply settled into this life too well?
As if he were being wicked, Lizzie slapped his chest with a face gone bright red. A little angry, she caught his hand and pulled.
"Let's go in. I asked the landlady yesterday to make stew. I thought it would be too early, but she said it was all right—maybe because the owner is an adventurer. You eat, and then you sleep in the wagon. I'll drive."
He did not strictly need the sleep, but perhaps he would lean on her words for a little while. It would be a problem if fatigue kept him from bringing out his strength when it mattered.
"...All right. Once we set out, let me sleep a bit."
"Hehe. Don't worry. You can sleep as much as you like. I'm better at driving a wagon than you are."
Lizzie lifted her head and laughed. She looked a little proud.
When the two of them returned to the room, Dorothy was talking in her sleep.
"...Meat... mine... Sin...bad... I won..."
She seemed to be having a good dream. That was a relief.
When they went out to the square, the Red Sword party was already waiting with a cart in tow. It held a little food, some blankets, and a few other things. Not much. Most of it was old and worn.
He did not know the road exactly, but he had heard the rough of it. Even so, Jessie of Red Sword drew lines on the ground once more, explained the way, and gave them a few cautions. Do not go too fast. Rest the horses about once every few hours. If the ground glitters, it may be slippery ice or a surface where a wheel will sink, so do not cross it carelessly. Small things of that sort.
He had heard that guide duty meant someone who taught an adventurer the basics they needed to know. The month spent with a guide was a stretch for learning what daily life required, from how to choose an inn to the unspoken rules that passed between adventurers.
He had thought Red Sword was given guide duty over his family because theirs was a party with women in it. Perhaps it was also because of how careful they were.
Karin, it seemed, was to drive first. When she climbed onto the driver's seat, the other two got into the cart.
"Juhwan, you get in too. Hurry."
Lizzie pushed at his back toward the wagon, shove after shove. Her eyes were sparkling; she looked terribly pleased.
"Don't overdo it. I only need a little rest."
"No. You have to sleep properly, a deep sleep. If you don't, you'll hurt yourself."
Looking at Lizzie, who smiled and told him not to worry, Juhwan climbed into the wagon. Inside, Dorothy was asleep on the bed of straw. She slept the sleep of the utterly untroubled, snoring softly. Left alone, she might well sleep straight through until noon.
He flopped down beside the child. When he closed his eyes, the wagon slowly began to move. It rattled and swayed. Even with all that noise, the child really did sleep.
There's no way I can fall asleep.
Juhwan stared blankly at the ceiling. The vibration of the wagon only made his eyes clearer.
They had stopped at two places near Goblin Village, but no trace of the man could be found. His looks were unusual, and they had been told he took a large wagon, so the Margrave's aide had been certain he would find him at once. Strange.
Unless he took a wrong road, those were villages he would have had to pass.
Both of them lay in the direction the man had taken out of Goblin Village, places anyone leaving that way was bound to meet. Even if he had not stayed, an outsider stood out. Someone must have seen him, and yet not a single person claimed to.
Don't tell me he noticed he was being followed and turned aside ahead of time.
The thought flickered through him, and he shook his head at once.
From what the villagers said, there had been no sign of that. To begin with, no one had even known the village chief meant to sell a mage. The man would not have noticed.
Either way, he had to hurry. If it was not the village he had already stopped to check, the next destination was fixed. The aide spurred his horse and tore across the ground.
Then, a little way off, he saw a wagon and a cart coming on. They were not moving fast. It was hard to tell whether the two were traveling together; the distance between them was subtly wide, and the wagon was quite slow.
In the dim light of dawn his eyes narrowed as he studied them.
Three women rode in the cart. Shabby, but wearing trousers—adventurers, most likely. Aside from that, a woman almost never wore trousers.
The cart passed, and his gaze turned to the wagon. It was quite large. Could this be the one said to have left Goblin Village?
But a woman was driving it. It was not unheard of for a woman to drive, and still it was rare.
If there were a man, a woman wouldn't be the one at the reins.
Men disliked women stepping into their domain, and driving horses was, to the last, a man's work.
Still, better to make sure.
He was about to stop the wagon when a woman in the cart shouted toward it.
"Keep close behind our cart. If you roll over the wrong patch, a wheel might sink."
"All right."
So the woman driving the wagon and the adventurers in the cart were companions after all. Perhaps they were women hired to escort it. A woman traveling alone was dangerous, and now and then a female guard was attached.
The aide looked away. They might have bought an escort because of whatever was inside the wagon.
Tch.
He had no time to spare on a thing like this. The Adventurer's Guild might get its hands on that mage. He had to find the man before that happened, and anxiety tightened in his chest.
He set the horse he had briefly halted moving again. The soldiers followed in a quiet pursuit.
After a short run, a wall of stone came into view in the distance. A village famous for its many adventurers. In other regions they called the place the Bern Adventurer Village.
It was small, but it brought in more money than one would think. One could say the whole village lived off the Adventurer's Guild, and the guild's power was that great in proportion.
The aide clicked his tongue inwardly. If he could help it, he did not want to go there. The face of the talkative man who worked in that place rose in his mind, and his stomach soured of its own accord.
The man was decent enough at his work, but he had no sense of what not to say. And yet he caught other people's secrets easily, learned them easily, and let them out just as easily.
If that had been all, the aide himself might not have hated him enough to drive him out. But the man did not know how to reflect. Even when exposing an affair or an infidelity threw everything into chaos, his manner was that he had only said the truth as it was, so why should he be the one in the wrong?
Shameless wretch.
He had thought that once the man was cast out there would be nowhere left for him to work, and then this place's guild master had snapped him up without a second thought.
I truly cannot understand it. Why a man like that.
A gatekeeper came forward at the sight of him. But he seemed to remember the aide, who had been here several times. He did not bar the way. He bent at the waist and bowed.
The aide passed through the gate without stopping and rode for the village chief's house.
When he burst in, lights came on in the still-dim rooms, and people came running at once.
He brushed aside the chief's invitation to come inside and asked whether anyone had seen a mage of that appearance. The answer that came back was that they were not sure.
"I'm sorry, Lord Aide. But as you know, this is a place where countless adventurers come and go. Sometimes there are several men like the one you described, and sometimes there are none at all. In all honesty, I couldn't say."
The chief's son, watching the aide's face, repeated much the same.
There was no way to know whether these people were telling the truth. If the Adventurer's Guild had already caught a thread about the mage, they might have been told to keep their mouths shut.
Unlike other villages, the income here from adventurers was greater than what farming brought in. No one wanted to make an enemy of the guild.
The aide clicked his tongue, but there was nothing he could do.
He could not threaten them by talking of mages, either. This was not Goblin Village. While no one yet knew the man was a mage, he could not carelessly spread the fact.
And if relations with the Adventurer's Guild soured, the Margrave would be in difficulty as well. There was a chance they would get no help when magical beasts appeared, and things would grow inconvenient in any number of ways. The fees the guild paid for the right to keep a branch in each region were no small sum, so he could not act rashly here.
He turned with a rough motion. Staying would get him nothing more.
He went to the Adventurer's Guild because he had no choice, and it was the same there. All they would say was that there were so many adventurers that each piece of information would have to be checked one by one.
On top of that, Chatterbox—the man he hated the sight of—looked even better than before. His face had filled out, taut and full of life, and that only made it more shameless.
He was about to leave with nothing to show for it when Chatterbox, as if the thought had just occurred to him, spoke to his back.
"Ah, and now that I think of it, a remarkable mage joined our guild recently. A man with two attributes."
"!"
When the aide turned, the man smiled with that shameless face.
"Haha. We really were lucky."
"..."
So he knew. This chatterbox knew I came looking for a mage.
"..."
There is still a way. Even if the mage had registered here, his wife and daughter remained. The woman and the child were domain people of this place. If he used that to lure the man...
While the aide was quickly working his head, Chatterbox went on.
"The thing is, that mage formed a party with his family. It's the first time we've taken a small child as a party member, but when we sent the papers up to the main branch, they gave their ready permission. Really, in all sorts of ways, a remarkable person has joined the guild. Hahaha."
Chatterbox laughed brightly.
I've been had.
The aide ground his teeth, but all he could do was turn and go.
When I return to the Margrave, what am I even supposed to report?
The world went dark before his eyes.
The Guild Master rubbed his newly bald head and looked at Chatterbox. Here, that guild member's name was Chatterbox. No one called him by any other.
"Feeling better now?"
"Of course. Though I always feel fine."
"That aide was the one who drove you out, wasn't he?"
"He was."
Chatterbox tilted his head, then said, "It's strange, really. I don't particularly hate him, or resent him. But he hates me a great deal."
"Well, he has reason. You spread every last story about the women that aide was seeing."
"Those weren't even much of a secret. He was the one going around bragging about them."
Chatterbox wrinkled his face. The master, at a loss, opened his mouth.
"Even so, you can't just tell those women's husbands the truth to their faces. The husbands were the same. Even if they already knew, they couldn't sit still, not with their pride on the line. That aide made an enormous number of enemies over it, didn't he? And as I recall, he fought more than a few duels."
"I wonder. If a man has the will to do a thing, shouldn't he also be able to bear what it costs?"
Chatterbox said it as if it were nothing.
The master looked at his face for a moment, then laughed.
"I like you. You look dull, as if you can't read a room, but I don't think that's the truth. I can tell from the way you went out of your way to tell that aide about the mage this time, too."
"..."
"Look closely, and you're terribly narrow inside. You know that, don't you?"
When the master said it, Chatterbox shrugged.
"Maybe I am."
"No. You are. You're narrow. One of the women that aide was seeing was a woman there'd been talk of you marrying. In the end that talk came to nothing because of it."
"...You know a great deal. But what became of the merchant caravan? They wanted a Rank 2 adventurer, and you're giving the work to a novice. That isn't like you, Master."
At the question, the master smiled.
"There's someone in that caravan who knows magical beasts well. I asked them to take a look at the horned rabbit."
"Why?"
"Hm. Do you know much about horned rabbits?"
"Not really. Magical beasts were never something people knew well."
"No."
The master quietly called up the image of that horned rabbit.
"I don't know magical beasts all that well myself. That one—how should I put it—seemed a little strange. At the time I thought it was because the master's family was in danger. Like a dog someone keeps. But if I think it over, a magical beast isn't a creature that takes to training so easily."
Thinking of the child and the beast, he hunched his shoulders a little.
"As far as I know, that's how it is. A magical beast has to be trained with real effort over a very long time, and it doesn't readily follow anyone but its master. The chance that a child only a few years old could be its master is almost none."
"Is that so?"
"Well, that's about as much as I know, and I don't know what the truth really is. Beast tamers themselves are extremely rare. It's just the instinct of an adventurer who's been knocked around for a long time."
"Is that so?"
Chatterbox tilted his head as if it were odd. Well, he would not understand. Ordinarily the master himself would not do a thing like this.
But it was something he felt by instinct, the way gooseflesh rises on the skin. That he ought to learn more about that magical beast. The mage, and the beast—both of them stood out far too strangely.
The master stroked his gleaming scalp with his palm, rub after rub. At first he had touched it because being bald felt strange, but the more he did it, the more addictive it became. Somehow, when he was touching his head, his heart settled and his mind felt clean. He thought it might have been better if he had gone bald sooner.