The Night the Full Moon Sets
"You... want me to work as a class assistant?"
I had woken around two, and the words I let fall over the lunch we shared put a sour look on Euphemia's face.
"You have nothing else to do in any case. If you mean to let the hours rot, this would be the better use of them. There is pay in it as well. Wealth that is not mine. Property that would be yours alone."
Next week or so ought to be about right. If the administrative assistant did her work faithfully, by then the ill will toward Euphemia should have spread well enough among the students who had gotten a taste of those fixed desk-and-chair sets.
The further question is...
Would it be better to shame her for doing the work poorly and grind her self-respect down? Or to let some blunder of hers leave me with a mess I had to answer for, and plant a debt of guilt in her? Either way, there were plenty of ways to bend Euphemia's spirit a little further. The more clearly she came to see herself as useless and worthless, the more readily she would settle into reality and stop entertaining other thoughts.
"What... would I actually have to do?"
"Nothing but assisting with my work. I will not set you anything difficult, so do not fret over it."
I left out the part where I had no intention of giving her much to do.
"Tell me exactly what that is."
"Errands. Taking attendance. If a lecture needs preparing in advance, going ahead to see to it. Passing any additional schedule on to the administrative assistant. Assisting in class."
"..."
It looked like a great deal, and yet none of it seemed truly difficult. Was that why? After a moment's thought Euphemia shot me a sidelong glance and nodded. She had made certain there was no trap, and still she was too naive to notice that the prey already in hand had gone rotten. A faint smile touched my mouth.
"Finished?"
"Mm..."
"Then get ready to go out."
"Go out...? Where...?"
"A proper look around the capital. I doubt you have ever had one."
It was the first stretch of peace in a long while. Playing at newlyweds for a time would not be the worst of things. She would hate wandering about with me, no doubt, but I judged that her idleness and boredom were nearing their limit.
"..."
"I shall take that silence as assent. Put something light over your shoulders. It will turn chilly once night falls."
"It's only just coming up on three in the afternoon."
"Do you imagine enjoying the capital ends in an hour or two?"
I rose, gave a light jerk of my chin to the maids standing nearby, and turned my back.
"I shall wait at the main gate."
There is no strict definition of a memory, but I have always held that if, looking back across a year, some moment rises clear and unmistakable, then that is a memory. People spend most of the three hundred and sixty-five days like a squirrel spinning a wheel, and time of that sort does not even remain in the mind as recollection. Ask them to recall the such-and-such day of such-and-such month last year, and most will shake their heads. But if among those days there is one they can call back without effort, that is what becomes a memory. It only sorts itself according to whether its shape is bitter or sweet.
Click. Click.
I had been sunk in thought for quite some time when the sound of heels reached me. I turned my head, and there was Euphemia in a snow-white robe over a yellow dress. A robe in name only; in form it was closer to a modern cardigan.
"What...?"
When a man looks at a woman without speaking, is there ever any other reason?
"Let us go."
I held my hand out before her.
"..."
She hesitated, glancing between my hand and my face, then carefully laid her own atop mine. She knew that even if she refused, I would take it by force anyway. A useful lesson.
"I'm not going to pull away, so ease up a little..."
I had closed my hand over hers as if to lace our fingers, and a little too much strength had gone into the grip. Pained, Euphemia tapped at my forearm.
"My apologies."
"What...?"
"Why does that startle you so?"
Euphemia's golden eyes, like sunflowers, went wide.
"Because it's the first time I've ever heard an apology out of your mouth..."
"Is that so..."
Unlike her, I showed no particular stir and simply set off at an easy pace.
"We're not taking a carriage?"
"No."
"..."
At the curt reply she seemed to realize there was no point in saying more, and only matched my stride in silence.
"This is..."
The long walk ended before the capital's great theater. Faced with the unfamiliar splendor of the place, Euphemia turned her head this way and that and began, cautiously, to look around. I left her to it, bought two tickets, and then, on a whim, stepped into the theater alone.
"W-wait, together... go together!"
Careful not to snap a heel, she came hurrying after me as best she could, reached my side, and took my hand of her own accord. The place must have cowed her for no good reason. Nerves, most likely. Was it not the same as a child at play, glancing now and then to make sure her mother was still on the bench? In any case, out here I was the only one she could lean on. Like it or not, I was her lighthouse.
"Your first time in a theater?"
"Seeing a play at all is a first..."
"Good. Then you ought to be able to enjoy it."
Ordinary seats would have required a reservation, but the boxes were expensive enough that no such trouble was necessary.
"It seems about to begin."
The glowstones that had been softly lighting the stage had gone dark. Unlike the ordinary seats packed tight below, the box was absurdly spacious, and Euphemia and I settled in with room to spare.
Not a simple play, then. Something closer to a musical?
The curtain drew aside, and the actors' harmonies, fitted to pleasant music, spread through the house. Euphemia watched closely. I closed my eyes at ease and listened only. If the stage machinery or the set pieces happened to sit out of symmetry, it would only irritate me.
The quality is... considerable.
I had not looked at the staging, but the lines reaching my ear did not sound awkward. Each of them was committing fully to the scene taking shape in my mind, and that commitment was coming through. The subject was a love story of the most ordinary kind...
"That rotten bastard..."
"..."
Watching the heroine forced into marriage with the villain and then abused by him, Euphemia muttered it under her breath.
"I-I wasn't saying it about you..."
"I said nothing."
"R-right..."
Surely I had never done anything that could be called abuse. And to draw the audience in, the actor playing the villain had been given a body so fat, a face so greasy, that it bordered on too much. The thought that Euphemia had, for an instant, surely set me on the same line as that actor made my brow twitch, but I forced myself to endure it. She did seem to be enjoying herself. Watching that reaction, I sank for a while into a different line of thought.
Here, theater was a culture of considerable worth—or, to be precise, of undeniable popularity. Then, like the protagonists of so many other novels, could I offer up the script of Romeo and Juliet and take in a tidy income? It need not be Romeo and Juliet. Hamlet, Macbeth, things of that sort... I did not know the plays well, but the works that had been loved after changing shape across so many kinds of culture still sat vivid in Lee Seojin's memory.
For now, perhaps I will only think on it...
If someday I came to owe Jeremiah, the head of the house, a truly great debt, that would be the time to try—on the principle that the worst I could do was break even. So I closed my eyes and turned my attention back to the play I had been letting wash past me.
Afterward...
The ending is a tidy happy ending, without even a small twist...
Applause poured over the stage as the curtain call came down.
"Let us go."
I drew the brightly smiling Euphemia to her feet and left the theater. It was a play in which one could find nothing worth calling artistry—nothing but stimulation, the sensibility of what people commonly call a B-movie—and yet that is precisely the sort of thing that makes money. Which was why it had gone up on a stage in the capital. The people who ran the theater were not fools enough to mount a play that would not pay.
"Did you enjoy it?"
Euphemia nodded.
"The one thing that bothered me a little was... if they'd made him a noble, it would have sat more easily, and you could see they went out of their way not to?"
"Troupes keep an unspoken rule: put a noble on the stage as seldom as they can. The moment a play becomes someone's caricature, even without intent, that troupe's future plunges."
This was also why I had held back from offering a script. A noble's authority was absolute to that degree.
"...That's a relief, then."
Was she needling me, just a little? If the villain on that stage had been a noble, might I have overturned the troupe for it? She seemed to be worrying over something of that sort.
"..."
Enough. Prying into every such thing struck me as too unsightly, so I turned and walked on, and Euphemia came trotting after me.
"...Where are we going?"
Unlike at the start, a little anticipation colored the question. It was twenty past five in the afternoon.
"To have dinner, if nothing else."
"..."
I had meant to board a ferry on the Thisbe and watch the sunset sink at its leisure, but the play had run longer than I expected.
"There is one more place to stop after we have eaten, so do not look so sullen. If you had wanted to see the capital that badly, you might have taken the maids and wandered it alone. That would have been enough."
"It isn't my money..."
"I would not tell you to pay it back later merely because you spent mine."
"Have you forgotten that you declared a territorial war on the pretext of demanding we immediately repay the money the head of Brutein advanced us seventy-four years ago?"
"..."
Astonishingly, I had forgotten. In the mingling of our selves, the lesser memories had sunk beneath the unconscious.
I knew a territorial war had been declared on Ruerug on the thinnest of pretexts, but to think that was...
That they had dug through ledgers from seventy-four years past and forced the repayment of money that had gone out in the form of aid.
"That place will do."
"So even you change the subject like that sometimes."
Her persistence irritated me, but I had no pretext for a retort, and so I only quickened my pace.
"S-slow down...! The heels are high, if you walk that fast...!"
Our hands were still joined, so she was half dragged along in my wake, pleading as she fought to keep her balance and not fall.
"..."
Only then did I slow. Together we went into the restaurant and ate a comfortable dinner. When we came out, it was seven in the evening. We had opened a bottle of wine and drunk lightly together, and so had spent longer inside than I expected.
"So... where's this last place we're stopping?"
Night had made the air chilly, but the warmth the wine had kindled drove the cold off well enough.
"You will see when we arrive."
It was not far, in any case. I took Euphemia's hand, and we walked the capital's streets in quiet companionship, where lamps set with glowstones burned bright and drove the dark away.