Professor Ferzen
The back of my head throbbed.
I was still turning over how I might get through this when the quick strike of heels came from across the way. I shrugged off my suit jacket and laid it over Lizzie's lower body.
"Ha—hh—hk—!"
I had not even done anything worth calling outrageous, and still she startled and curled in on herself. Where was the girl who had stood her ground and argued back in lecture? What sat here now was a child who looked as if she had been abused for a very long time.
A groundless rumor would do no one any good. I seized control of the corpse Lizzie had been handling, had it take hold of the wheelchair, and went down the ramp to stand at the corner.
"Ah..."
A girl coming the other way stopped short when she met me.
No. Not a girl.
Uriel Wayne Dana Alfred.
Why, of all people, was she here? No—her being here was not strange. The timing was.
"Something you wanted to say? Why are you standing in the middle of the path..."
She looked up at me for a long moment. When I still said nothing, she shot me a suspicious glare and walked on past.
I considered catching her by the wrist, then let the thought go. I had done nothing wrong. I had not touched so much as a hair on Lizzie's head. I had doubted it would mean anything, and still I had tried, in my own fashion, to be kind, because doing something seemed better than doing nothing.
The result had been the worst possible.
"Lizzie? Your brother and I were waiting for you. You never came, so I went looking, and here you are..."
Was the marriage between the eldest daughter of House Alfred and the eldest son of House Claudia as good as settled? If she, the second daughter, had been waiting for Lizzie together with the Claudia heir, the grounds seemed sufficient.
"Lizzie...?"
Sensing that something was wrong, Uriel let the end of her words trail away.
"Professor Uriel."
"You...!"
"I will say this first. I did nothing."
Better to speak before she could misunderstand.
"If you did nothing, then this child—! Just how hard did you hound her? Do you not remember a single thing you did to her in the past?"
"..."
"I heard she talked back a little in your lecture. Don't tell me it was only over that...!"
"Do not be mistaken. I am not so petty a man."
In Uriel's eyes, did it look as though I had forcibly stopped Lizzie on her way out and taken her to task? Looking only at the result, she was not exactly wrong. And Uriel was not the sort to spare me the patience of asking how anything I touched had come to pass.
"The man who chased down a child for twisting her ankle with a mistake mid-dance and crushed the other foot—that man isn't petty?"
A past evil I could not refute. A label, of a kind. One that would never come off.
That evil had its reasons, of course. No one else would accept those reasons as a cause they could understand. Everyone lives with some measure of compulsion, but Ferzen's was severe enough to bear the name of a disorder. Had the rumor gone out from the beginning that Ferzen was a man sick in the mind, it might have been different. House Brutein had hidden the fact with vicious care, and Ferzen himself had felt it as his shame. To confess it now would only turn the thing into a keen blade aimed at my own heart. Too much time had passed for it to be smoothed away.
"Ask the child later what I did."
She would have feelings stacked against me and might twist the telling, but there was no better course in any case.
"With Alfred at her back, she would hardly be so afraid of Brutein as to invent words that were never spoken."
Pressed that far, Uriel seemed caught between belief and doubt. Her brow tightened, and her eyes moved from me to Lizzie and back again.
"Lizzie!"
I thought I had brought the matter to a reasonably clean end and turned to go. A man's voice came down from the second-floor railing, and hurried footsteps followed it.
A black uniform of a peculiar cut, the imperial crest worked into the cloth. A red brooch at the right breast. All of it the proof of a man of the Imperial Knight Order.
Yes. Lizzie's older brother, a knight in imperial service. The eldest son of House Claudia—Roer Paul Vistain Claudia. Had he gone up by the opposite stair and come down on this side?
"H-hold—!"
Uriel, flustered, watched Roer's face go cold. She hovered, then caught his wrist as he came for me, but it was useless. He walked the path of an Aura Knight. The bodily strength of one who walked the path of magic could not stop him.
"Ferzen von Schweig Brutein."
"...Ruerug. And I do not believe we are close enough for you to speak my full name. You will call me Count, Sir Roer."
When my eyes met those distinctive blue ones, I had the illusion, for an instant, of a cold wind scraping the length of my body. Was this killing intent? If a gaze alone could kill, he would already have killed me hundreds of times. Thousands.
Is he holding himself back?
The clenched fist trembled hard enough that the tendons stood out. Even if a bone broke. Even if some part of me were smashed. If he laid hands on me and handed me a pretext...
He announced his revenge outright, then turned away. So he had grown enough to bare his fangs, if only for a moment.
Objectively speaking, Roer's fangs were nothing to fear. But if the variable called Ciel Midford—the protagonist of the novel—were mixed into them, I could not know what they might become. And so, ironically, I felt a quiet fear of the fangs he had shown me for that brief instant.
No. It was not quiet. Cold sweat had soaked into my right hand and my left. That I could keep the fear from showing was simply because Ferzen's ego was mingled with my own.
"Lizzie Paul Liana Claudia. There is no need to return clothes stained with filth. Discard them later. And the aftermath I leave to you, Professor Uriel."
With that, I turned. For a moment my legs shook so badly the step nearly failed me, but I did not collapse.
When I came out of the education hall, the thin, persistent rain was still falling to meet me. I opened my umbrella and walked slowly through it.
Ferzen von Schweig Ruerug. A villain whom only he himself could understand. Even Jeremiah, blood family, would probably never understand the man called Ferzen in full. He was only broad of mind, as befitted a man fit for the seat of head.
Was there anyone in this world who could understand Ferzen? There probably was. But across twenty-four years, no such person had stood near him. So he had given up being understood. He had not wanted to be understood. And so Ferzen was always alone. That solitude was, perhaps, a villain's natural yoke.
If Isabel Ron Pierre Genova were still alive, she and I might have gotten on well.
The core memory of the woman they had called a witch, drawn out by Psychometry—a reading that could be invoked only once, and only upon a corpse. The peculiar affliction of House Genova, imprinted in that memory, overlapped with my own severe obsessive disorder, and I felt a kinship I could not quite name.
"Mind your health, now..."
"D-don't w-worry so... so much. J-just go... back. You l-left your s-seat in the m-middle of the f-festival..."
"Yes. I understand. Then I shall be going. My girl—I love you. Always."
"I-I do too..."
Bashful as she was, Laura opened both arms to the warm love her father offered and sank into his embrace. The farewell done, her stomach comfortably full, she made her way toward the dormitory on the academy grounds.
Let's see...
The dormitories within the academy were places where a black mage had bargained with an anomaly of the Netherworld, borrowed its power, and planted a certain law. Because of that, anyone who was not a professor, one of a few staff, or a student failed the conditions and could not enter. The reverse was also true. Once you stepped inside, you could not leave again until eight the next morning. Exceptions existed, if particular conditions were met...
Memorizing every one of these rules right now looks impossible.
Laura, who had meant to use the scraps of time while she walked, gave up cleanly and folded the sheet of dormitory regulations neatly against her chest.
"...?"
The path lay between Dormitory A and Education Hall A. More precisely, a man stood before a beautifully tended flower bed. His back looked rather familiar. Laura drew closer at an easy pace, kept a little distance, and stole a look at his profile.
"P-Professor... Ferzen?"
The voice was small enough to crawl away, and the rain swallowed it at once, yet Ferzen turned his head.
She flinched. When her eyes met that crimson gaze, Laura felt her body draw in of its own accord.
"Laura, is it."
"Wh-what are you... d-doing here?"
He hardly seemed the sentimental sort to lose himself in thought over flowers.
"I was only letting a few complaints drift."
"I... see."
Awkward. She never should have let on that she knew him. She stuttered, and she avoided people whenever she reasonably could. Laura had no gift at all for drawing a conversation along.
"Laura de Charles Rosenberg."
"Yes...?"
"Suppose a murderer who had killed a great many people suffered a sickness of the mind—an impulse he could not endure unless he killed. Do you think you could understand him?"
Ferzen wondered what he was saying to a girl of only nineteen. But when Laura's crimson eyes deepened with gravity, he waited quietly in the rain, umbrella gripped in his hand.
"I... understand."
"You understand? Do you mean to play at being a good person?"
"It's not... th-that. M-most people... t-tell someone who w-wants revenge... th-that if you t-take it, y-you'll become the s-same kind of person... and they t-try to s-stop them."
"Yes. A convenient, disgusting thing to say."
"People... c-can't understand an experience they h-haven't... been through. S-saying you understand s-something you don't... is n-nothing more than f-flattery, c-currying favor..."
At that, Ferzen let out a thin breath of a laugh.
"The logic does not follow. How does pointing out the two faces of understanding become grounds for you to say you understand my question? Do not tell me you are confessing that you yourself have suffered such an impulse and killed someone."
"Ah... th-that's—!"
"No need to be flustered. It had the look of a rather precocious child playing at being grown."
"..."
"Your way with words, however, is certainly lacking."
He could not speak of his own compulsion as it was, and so he had compressed the affliction Isabel had suffered into a brief example. Laura's answer to that example looked like a child performing maturity in front of him, the better to seem impressive, and a small laugh could not help escaping.
Beyond the thin, ceaseless rain, Ferzen turned away and slowly faded.
"B-brat..."
Only once he had vanished completely did Laura's beautiful brow draw tight around the word she had spat. Add her past life to this one and she was a little past forty, so from where she stood Ferzen looked like nothing but a child. Being treated like one, squarely and to her face, was far more unpleasant than she had imagined.