Before Becoming a Professor
The carriage that had been running along the well-kept road slowed, and came to a gentle stop.
They still had roughly a day of travel ahead. He supposed the halt was only meant to give the horses a little rest.
"Do you intend to go on like that?"
Perzen opened the door and stepped down, then turned his head to look at her.
Beyond him, the beautiful current of the Tisbe River mingled with fresh greenery into a crisp, bright scene. Euphemia only shook her head. Clutching a sheet of paper smudged all over with the marks of her hands, she kept her eyes fixed upon it.
Nothing remained to her now but the cruelty of it, and her one desperate wish was to solve at least the first problem.
"Don't mind me... Just go."
"I shall."
For a moment Perzen entertained the thought of dragging Euphemia down with him whether she wished it or not. She seemed more at ease alone, though, and so he quietly shut the carriage door.
"Ugh..."
Once he had gone off into the distance, Euphemia lay down comfortably on her side and set her mind turning. The approach itself can't be wrong.
From his remark that there was no need to come at it mathematically, she dimly understood that the equation was a metaphor for one and the same thing called by different names. A lady and a woman, for instance.
Six plus eight is symbolic, surely. But the result ought to be the clue that tells me exactly what is being compared...
Fourteen, and two. Whatever bound those two so that they shared a single meaning—that was the answer.
I don't know. It might be simple. It might only be that she herself did not know.
Unlike her, who had remained in Ruerug, Perzen would have seen a great deal, heard a great deal, learned a great deal. The thought struck her all at once that this might be a problem meant to do nothing but humiliate her ignorance.
Should I stop... Even if she solved the first, she could not imagine managing the second and the third in the single day that remained.
"Ah..."
And then understanding arrived without warning.
"I... I solved it..."
Six plus eight equals fourteen. Six plus eight equals two. The condition under which both could hold was time. Ordinarily one said two in the afternoon, but a day was divided into twenty-four hours, and so the precise notation was fourteen o'clock. What six plus eight symbolized had to be the hour hand and the minute hand of a clock.
She was still adrift in the afterglow of having undone a problem that had so long refused to yield when the door burst open and Perzen stepped into the carriage—the same Perzen who had left his papers behind, meaning to read them as he walked. Euphemia sat up before she knew it.
She had expected him to scold her for lying in the carriage with no dignity at all. He did not. As if she were of no interest to him, he turned his back at once.
"Um... excuse me..."
Euphemia reached out a slender hand, caught the hem of his clothes, and brought his steps to a halt.
"Have you something to say?"
"I... I solved it... The answer is the time on a clock."
She said it clearly, piece by piece. As she explained why it was so, Perzen listened in silence and did not interrupt her once. Then, in that pleasant mid-low voice of his, he answered.
"Correct."
At that, a small sound escaped Euphemia's nose before she knew it, and her spirits lifted on a pride she could not quite name.
"Euphemia."
"What?"
"A gift."
A mere emerald—so it was, from Perzen's point of view. A beautiful necklace, made by sacrificing jewels of greater worth so that a comparatively cheap green stone might be given light.
"Why, all of a sudden...?"
"The condition that I would grant you one request, should you solve all three problems, will vanish once we reach the capital. Apart from that, I had meant to give you a prize each time you solved a single one."
As if he intended to fasten it on her himself, he took her by the shoulders, turned her about, and lifted her hair.
"Lower your head a little."
"I... I don't need it."
It was not that she was fond of jewels. More than that, she had seen often enough the way Perzen tried to tame her. As the marks of a hand settle into a thing long used, she wanted, if she could, to keep his traces from being carved into her body.
"Euphemia."
"I—I said I don't want it..."
"I will not force you."
"..."
Unexpectedly, he did not insist. He withdrew without a fuss.
Or so she thought.
"I will not force you. But a person ought at least to have a spine, don't you think. If you dislike receiving anything from me, then return the clothes you are wearing. Here and now."
"What...?"
"Even stubbornness must keep to its principles, if others are to be convinced by it."
Was he only saying it once, to break her spirit? The thought occurred to her, and yet she saw that there was not a shred of falsehood in the feeling held in Perzen's eyes. If she went on hesitating, this man really might strip every stitch from her and leave her bare...
"Give it... give it to me..."
She held out her hand, as if asking for the necklace.
"Too late."
"..."
"Did you mean to refuse my consideration with a stubbornness of such paltry two-facedness? Had you truly taken off every piece and handed them over, I might have looked at you anew, if only a little."
"Th-then what do you want me to do..."
"If one has done wrong, is it not natural cause and effect that one be punished?"
Under that pressure peculiar to him, Euphemia could not even form the doubt of whether she had truly erred enough to deserve a punishment. It was as commoners prostrate themselves before nobles, as a matter of course. She was swallowed whole by Perzen's self-righteous air.
In this, certainly, the two of them differed. One side was far too overbearing, the other far too soft—enough to make one wonder whether this could even be called a conversation between nobles of the same standing.
"If you want to hit me, then hit me."
"I..."
At her words, Perzen knit his brow.
"I do not believe I have ever met you with violence."
She wanted to say that physical violence was not the only violence. But she knew a tug-of-war would only leave her the loser, and so she went slowly up to him and gathered both hands behind her waist. Her lower belly, left defenseless by the gesture, was offered slightly forward before him, and at the humiliation of it Euphemia turned her head aside.
"Your sincerity is wanting. There are times when one must bow the head to settle a matter, and if that will not serve, times when one must go to one's knees."
"Wh-what more do you want me to do...!"
Did he truly mean her to grovel on the floor like a dog? She flared up with her face flushed deep red, meeting his eyes, and Perzen caught her about the waist and sat her sideways upon his knee. Bracing her back so that her upper body might lean at ease, he lifted the hem of her skirt and compelled her to take hold of it herself.
"I—I don't—"
This was different from that time. There was a vast difference between Perzen stroking her belly by force while she remained clothed, and her lifting the hem herself to bare her stomach so that he might stroke it.
"Euphemia."
"..."
"Lift it."
It was a whisper as quiet as ripples spreading on the wind, but to Euphemia it was nothing other than a starving wolf growling at her ear. She gripped the hem tight and slowly raised it, revealing white panties and a smooth belly without a single blemish. The moment Perzen's hand touched her lower abdomen, she moved her trembling hands and let the hem softly down again. If she could stage it as though he had forced his hand in to toy with her, she might lessen the shame, if only a little...
"Khk—!"
Into her unresisting belly his hand, curled into a fist, slowly twisted and drove. Euphemia let out an unsightly gasp and shook all over.
"Do you play at petty tricks even while you are being punished?"
The cold voice clung softly at her ear.
"Hik...! Hhk...! Nnh—!"
When he closed his fist, the rounded knuckle that jutted out pressed into her abdomen and moved with domineering force, as if it meant to lift the place of her womb.
"It... it hurts..."
She said it in a voice that shrank inward, at a pain like her insides wringing, but Perzen gave no answer. Euphemia knew, all the same. She knew how to make this rough, wicked hand into a meek and gentle one.
Softly, with hands that would not stop shaking, she seized the hem hard, lifted it to about her waist, and held it fast. It was humiliating past bearing, like a puppy that had displeased its master rolling over to bare its belly and fawn, so it would not be scolded...
"Ah..."
When his large hand covered her lower belly with gentleness, a comfortable relief came over her, as if the tension in her whole body were coming undone.
"Well done."
"Sh-shut up..."
She had no wish to be praised for a thing like this, and so she turned her head aside and fled his gaze. His hand, of course, paid that refusal no mind. It patted her belly kindly and stroked down over it like a ticklish spring wind.
"Euphemia."
"..."
"If you do not mean to resist prepared to be broken, then you need only listen quietly, and obey."
"Then if I resist, prepared to be broken..."
Would he listen? She meant to ask it of him, and gave it up. If she refused to bend even at the cost of breaking, this man was one who would break her in order to make her bend.
"..."
And Euphemia was not particularly glad of herself for having understood, even for the briefest moment, the man called Perzen von Schweik Brutein.
"If you drowned, even that death would shame you so much your corpse probably wouldn't float."
She said it to needle him, measuring the words against that unbearably rigid formality of his.
At his answer, she pressed her lips shut. For some reason, it had not sounded like a joke.
Quite apart from Euphemia possessing perfect golden proportions, the station her house had held and the impurity of her blood made irritation surge in me of its own accord whenever she talked back, or tried to climb above her place.
It was an emotion produced by conditioned reflex from the self I had originally possessed as the noble Perzen—above all, from a powerful sense of being chosen. Of course the self that had been nothing more than Lee Seojin, an ordinary common man, was mixed in as well, and when such feelings welled up I felt no small dissonance. What I had shaped by keeping that under some manner of control was this, as it stood now.
"H-how long are you going to keep this up..."
A taming that was not violent. Yes. Call it training, if one liked.
I was not without the sense that I had strayed from the direction I had first set. Still, so long as the point I meant to reach remained the same, it hardly mattered.
"My... my navel... don't press it..."
Even as she whimpered like a puppy, the hand that clutched the raised hem and held it up never moved. The fragrant scent of skin the cloth had kept hidden was filling the carriage all the more thickly, and my mood was strangely pleasant.
For all that we had been together a fair while, in our way, my nose had not grown used to Euphemia's scent, nor come to take it as no scent at all. Yes. What she gave me was always fresh, and nothing else.
"We will be departing shortly."
Had so much time already passed? At the coachman's voice from outside, I drew my hand away. At once Euphemia slipped down from my arms, sat on the opposite seat, and began to put her disordered clothes in order.
"I will do it. Clumsy, even at a thing like this. You..."
Under the touch of my hands, shaped by the talent Well-Groomed Appearance, her clothes were set to rights as smoothly as if they held not a single wrinkle. Seeing her accept that touch so docilely, I drew the necklace out once more.
"..."
This time she did not refuse. Sullen-faced, she only fingered the necklace at her throat a few times, let out a sigh, and closed her eyes. Did it feel to her less like an ornament for adornment than like a collar?
I had no wish to concern myself any further than that. I took my seat and gave my body over to the carriage as it rolled on.
And so, exactly one day later, we arrived at the imperial capital.