Before Becoming a Professor

“……”

For a moment I lifted my head and let my eyes rest at ease on a clear sky that asked nothing of symmetry. Then I gathered up the papers I had flung aside and lowered my gaze once more.

In truth, House Alfred had never been on good terms with House Brutein. Ill blood between them would hardly have been strange.

Yes. If I meant to be suspicious of anything, the premise itself—that House Alfred stood at odds with House Brutein—was surely the heart of it. However I turned the matter over, it looked far too blatant.

Uriel Wayne Dana Alfred……

Second daughter of House Alfred. And the memories bound up with her—

Not as bad as I expected.

What had been carved into Perzen’s mind was only this: at an engagement arranged on House Alfred’s initiative, he had taught her to know her place.

House Alfred. In raw power it could be said to stand level with Brutein, yet set beside Brutein its roots were of another kind entirely. No—rather than roots, perhaps the difference lay in the soil it had grown from.

In swelling its strength, House Alfred had never been particular about means. If Brutein was a statue cast of pure gold, Alfred was a statue gilded only on the skin, stood upon filth. Yes. The honor they cried aloud was, before Brutein, nothing but refuse.

To put it a little more gently, it was the difference between a weeping girl who stops her tears at the sight of a bandit and one who stops them at the sight of a prince. Small wonder the highest flattery one could offer House Alfred was to compare it with Brutein.

And so the old men in Alfred’s back rooms were a breed more starved for honor than any other. Sensing some defect in Perzen, who had never once shown himself in private company, they had quietly arranged an engagement with their second daughter, Uriel.

The elders of Brutein and Perzen’s parents had, of course, broken that engagement with great ceremony on the spot. Perzen, who had prepared a place of his own, turned his back on Uriel after casting a single line.

Perzen had known the engagement would collapse. Uriel would not have. So even at a first meeting she must have clung to him, tiresome in the considerable favor she showed. After what had passed with Jeremiah, Perzen kept a fixed distance whenever he faced another person, and Uriel had kept trying to cross it. From his side of things, he had exercised what patience he possessed.

Set beside Lizzy, it isn’t so severe. Did I mark it apart at the very top of the list simply because it was House Alfred?

Holding that doubt, I looked to the bottommost passage. There it was written that the eldest son of House Claudia and the eldest daughter of House Alfred might marry. A note added that the source was uncertain, and so the truth of it could not be known.

So there is a chance House Alfred becomes the power behind House Claudia.

I read only that far, then rose. A tangled skein of thread—no, not even a skein. How was I to keep these things from becoming stepping-stones for Ciel Midford? I came back to the room, throwing at myself a question to which no answer would surface.

“I wouldn’t have reproached you if you’d started without me.”

“I couldn’t bring myself to say as much……”

Euphemia sat rather stiffly, waiting for me without having touched the breakfast laid out, and the corner of my mouth lifted of its own accord.

“Eat.”

I reached for knife and fork, then, seeing her take up a spoon, closed my other hand around a spoon as well and lifted a mouthful of soup.

Truly, a tiresome body.

Obsessive compulsion. I wanted to mend it somehow, but even in the modern twenty-first century, mental illness had been judged incurable. There were medicines that eased it. I did not know a single ingredient of those drugs. Lee Seojin had never suffered such an illness.

Whatever struggling could be done alone, Perzen had already been doing it for twenty-four years, and I could not find any proper direction for what more ought to be attempted here. The habit of deliberately worsening his sight, and of holding a set distance and blurring his focus whenever he looked at a person. The labor that let him write until left and right stood in perfect symmetry. The perfection of keeping every garment unrumpled. If I clumsily tried to widen the fence Perzen had raised at the end of such desperate flailing, I would only make the matter worse.

“Um…… Ruerug. When are we going back?”

“Ah? Did I not tell you?”

Thinking on it, I seemed to have given Euphemia no notice at all, so I explained what lay ahead in detail.

“To the capital…… you’re saying you’ll take me?”

I had never meant to shut her away in Ruerug, and so I nodded without an answer. A mansion had been bought in the name of House Brutein. Living there would be no difficulty. The ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠maids I brought along, I thought, had better be older if it could be managed. Should they be near her in age, they might grow familiar with her for no good reason. Amid one change of surroundings after another she would feel the strangeness of it, and when loneliness pressed in, the only one she could lean on would be me. That arrangement would be best.

Now that I think of it, the mansion was considerable in size.

Living alone in the capital, where she knew not a single soul, with only a handful of maids—would she not try to greet me more warmly when I came home from the day? I could do nothing about ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠House Alfred or House Claudia for the present. Euphemia, at least, was in my hands, and I had to see that she did not become a variable.

“We depart in three days.”

Whoever did not refuse the offer of a professorship had been told to present himself at the Academy by the third of February. Reckoning the time, a departure in three days seemed exactly right.

“Everything I ever hear from you…… is nothing but a notice.”

“If you have a reasonable compromise, speak it. I will not hear any talk of going up to Ruerug on your own a few months from now.”

“Is that how you negotiate?”

“What passes between the one who holds the advantage and the one who does not is not called negotiation.”

“If all you want is to spend your lust, you don’t particularly need me beside you, do you…… Are you afraid that taking just any woman in your arms would scratch the worth of the name Brutein?”

Euphemia pushed her lips out as if to mock, but her voice began to shrink. She could see with perfect clarity how I would answer her, and her own feet must have been going numb.

“Thinking of yesterday, I rather feel it was I who spent your lust for you.”

“The food is getting cold……”

“You have no gift for turning a subject.”

She gave no reply and began to eat her breakfast roughly, as though taking her anger out on it.

“And these are table manners……”

The words a vulgar thing nearly sprang out by reflex. I swallowed them and filled my stomach in silence.

“……”

To wear away the idle hours, Euphemia sat on the bed with a book. Then she rubbed at eyes that had gone dim all at once and shifted her gaze out the window. Forcing her way through something that would not properly enter her head was a considerable torture, but neither did she want to sit blankly, like a living corpse.

“Euphemia.”

“What……”

A low voice, pitched in the middle register. She turned her head. Perzen, seated at the desk, was holding a sheet of paper out toward her.

“……”

So she was meant to come and take it. How far could it be? He might just as well have risen and handed it over himself. Contrary to that peevish thought, Euphemia got up from the bed and received the paper in both hands.

“Solve all three of these, and I will grant you one request. You seem to have nothing to do in any case. That much ought to stir your will.”

“To Ruerug……”

“If you wish to go, I will send you.”

“What?”

Euphemia’s body flinched at his words. Still, if he would say as much, he must have set problems ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠she could not solve to begin with. She looked down at the paper with no expectation at all.

“The limit is our arrival at the capital.”

“What is this……”

“You mean to ask me that already? I did not make them up of problems that are crudely difficult. If you dislike it, then quit.”

“I—I didn’t say I disliked it.”

At the reach of Perzen’s hand, moving as if to take back what he had given, Euphemia hurriedly hid the paper behind her.

“Then I will step out for a while. Use paper and ink as you please, but if you stain the desk or the floor and leave a mark, I shall punish you.”

With that he rose and left the room. Euphemia, who had been standing in hesitation, carefully took the chair where he had sat, set the problem on the desk, and closed her hand around a pen.

“Hmph……”

Even if she solved them all, she thought he might well go back on his word. That was all right. The sight of him trying to smooth away a word once spoken with logic that would not hold would be satisfying in its own way. Picturing the moment she brought down that arrogant, self-righteous aloofness, Euphemia began, out of sheer stubbornness, to work the problems through.

“……”

Unlike that eager beginning, night had come before she knew it. Lying on the bed and blinking, Euphemia tossed one way and another, then quietly raised herself.

She had tried every sort of mathematical approach, and still she had not found the answer to the first problem. A thought came that perhaps it was not mathematical at all. Yet when she recalled Perzen saying she might use paper and ink as she liked, it did not seem entirely so either.

She shifted beneath the covers. The road from Brutein to Ernese, the capital, took roughly a week. In a word, scarcely ten days remained, and Euphemia, growing a little impatient, decided to try a shortcut. Whatever else, she needed only to learn the answers to the three problems.

Her hand stole out. Even when she held her palm before his face and cast a shadow across it, there was no response. Certain then that Perzen was deep in sleep, Euphemia lowered her head and whispered, very small.

“……The answer to the problem.”

Drunkenness and the pull of sleep had, from old times, been the traditional truth serums that drew a person’s unconscious out into the open. With the feeling that success would be welcome, and failure no matter.

“……The answer to the problem.”

“……The answer to the problem.”

“……Say it.”

“……You rotten bastard.”

“Ah……”

Partway through, feeling slipped out before she meant it to. Her tone seemed to have risen as well. Euphemia clutched at a chest whose heartbeat was quickening and drew her head back. Fortunately he was still silent. Unmoved.

“So pathetic and childish a notion that I cannot even sigh.”

Perzen’s crimson eyes, burning like a candle set against the dark, fixed clearly upon her, and Euphemia forgot the way of drawing breath and letting it go.

“Hk……!”

She might call her own conduct eccentric, but was a Perzen who opened his eyes with the precision of a knife, merely because she had whispered a few words in the deep sleep of dawn, any more normal than she? She had never truly expected, in the first place, that he would give her the answer out of sleep. Had she been a little greedier, it would likely have ended with her adding a curse or two, whispered straight into his face. Perhaps this man had been pretending to sleep the whole while, from the moment he lay down until now.

“……Breathe.”

And to Euphemia, startled past the point where he could have remarked on it without awkwardness, Perzen spoke in a soft, unhurried tone, as if soothing her.

“Huu, uh……”

Only then did she manage to let out the breath that had stopped.

“The first problem need not be approached by arithmetic.”

To Perzen, who knew the answer, the problem looked comparatively simple, and so he had deliberately led her to attack the first of them with mathematical knowledge that had nothing to do with it. When he returned to the room after his work and saw the papers strewn about, he had been surprised at how well his intention was taking. He had meant to tell her only later, as though granting a favor, should she ask for a hint.

“If that answer satisfies you, lie down.”

This looked to be the moment when the carrot would work at its very best. He saw no need to push that moment any further back.

“I—I never asked you to tell me……”

“Yes. I know.”

Whether that humoring reply felt like some writ of absolution, Euphemia lay down with a faint pleasure held in her. But that was that. Ought there not to be a penalty for waking someone from a sound sleep? Thinking so, Perzen laid a hand upon her lower belly.

“W-why……”

For Euphemia, his stroking of her lower abdomen had been stamped in as the sign that came before they lay together. Startled, she reached to stop him—

“Nngh……!”

At the pressure of his index finger bearing steadily into her navel, she could not bring herself to push him off, and gathered both hands meekly over her chest. Only then did she dimly understand that he was giving her a kind of punishment.

All I did was speak a little ill of him……

In truth it was not even ill-speaking. She had only said what was true.

“D-don’t…… nngh!”

A puppy lying with its belly bared, allowing itself to be touched, is a plain declaration of surrender. It seemed to her that Perzen was doing this with exactly that intent, and she tried to catch his thick forearm in the hands she had gathered so stiffly. What answered her was only pain, as though that large hand were crushing the whole of her abdomen and bearing down upon her womb.

Humiliating……

If she only stayed still, his hand swept gently down her lower belly, behaving like a lullaby meant to lay her comfortably to sleep. A taming whose intent was far too bare. She had, of course, no mind to yield so tamely. Euphemia closed her eyes and let out even breaths, pretending to sleep. Once he judged she had drifted off, he would take his hand away.

“……”

But before long, before she could even feel that hand leave her belly, Euphemia had truly sunk into a deep sleep.