Three Weeks
Neither Perzen nor Euphemia had any interest left in the wedding unfolding inside this cathedral. Nothing reached their eyes. Nothing reached their ears.
Ciel...
Clutching the hem of her skirt, Euphemia quietly turned a name over in her heart—the name of a man she had never been able to forget.
Much had changed. Even so, she knew him at a glance.
You did it. You succeeded.
The man who had once played so clumsily at knighthood beside her stood there now, a knight in truth, unashamed. It was not her triumph, and still joy rose in her. It felt as though every hour he had given to her—wretched as she had been, with nothing at all to offer in return—had been repaid at once.
She wanted to hold the sight a little longer. She did not. With an effort, she fixed her gaze on some irrelevant corner of the hall.
Three months. Ninety days. Two thousand one hundred and sixty hours. Through all of it, Euphemia had not once spoken the name of Ciel Midford. Perzen had not spoken it either, and from that she drew a quiet certainty that he had wiped the man clean from memory.
No. He would not have erased him. Only, he had not thought him important—not important enough to notice the man he had become.
This is enough...
She had no intention of making some clumsy plea for help. If that had been what she wanted, she would have taken the hand Ciel offered her back in Ruerug and fled with him then. She would not tangle him up with her now and soil this brilliant, glorious moment of a life he had clawed into being with his own hands.
A bond already split, at the fork, onto parallel lines. She must not reach for him. And if he reached for her, that too must not be.
Even so...
He had not been a knight, and yet—ironically—he alone had stood at her side and been her strength, more a knight than anyone. A span of time one might call short, or long. Hard days, and happy ones, scraped through together. Ciel Midford. That name, she would remember always.
It had been one ordeal after another.
His father, once a noble, had fallen. Left with nothing but a shabby castle, he married a woman of the village, and the son and daughter born of that union grew up watching their mother waste slowly away beneath his violence.
In a life that had been hell, the first moment he understood the feeling called happiness was the day his father died. But before many months had passed he watched his mother die as well, and only then, too late, did Ciel Midford understand the saying that misfortune and happiness always arrive together.
Left an orphan with no kin in the world, he threw himself into the mercenaries' trade... and his only remaining family, his younger sibling, died protecting him in the middle of a contract they had taken together.
After that, Ciel Midford drifted with nowhere to go. Having given up on himself, he took job after job without rest, as if searching for the grave that would hold him, and the place he reached at the end of it—believing it would be the last—was Ruerug.
And there, he met Euphemia.
A woman who carried a pain like his own, and yet would not yield to it, driving her domain onward with a fierce, clinging will. Perhaps, at the beginning, it had only been the kinship of a shared wound. And so, even after the contract was done, Ciel Midford remained in Ruerug and let the time pass.
In the course of it he came, naturally, to know her. Over the wound he had thought would never close, he began to feel the faint itch of new skin growing in.
But he tried not to recognize the feeling. Everything he had held dear, everything he had loved, had crumbled to dust at his side.
Human feeling, though, does not wind itself obediently around the leash of reason and submit to being governed. If it did, falling in love would never feel like magic in the moment it happens. And so Ciel Midford suffered a mature lovesickness. It was strange to think that maturity could modify a thing like lovesickness, but at least in his case, it did.
And then the fetters of fate, like a curse, made him watch as she was plundered away before his eyes.
He resented the world. He hated his own powerlessness, and he hated Perzen, who had taken Euphemia from him.
Somewhere in the snowy mountains, where he had fled with his life barely intact, only a death as white as the snow was waiting to greet him, and Ciel Midford closed his eyes. Buried in snow that never stopped falling, he poured out a weeping from which not even tears would come, and waited to die.
But he did not die. Skin ruined and torn by frostbite, a body thoroughly broken by hypothermia, kept regenerating beneath the touch of something warm.
It was a painful, agonizing time... and yet, in the sensation those things awoke in him, Ciel Midford set himself a goal, dug through the snow that had buried him, and rose.
He walked the snowy mountains with a stubborn will to live, and along the way he realized that the energy which had pulled him back from death was mana.
Later, by the time he reached the royal capital, endless good fortune settled over him as if to repay all the misfortune that had come before, and he became a knight of the Robelium Kingdom.
But Ciel Midford was not glad. If he lowered his head even a little, the misfortunes he had lived through lay piled at his feet like heaps of corpses. His mother, his sibling, Euphemia—each of them caught up in that misfortune. The man he was now, standing as a knight, was nothing more than a cordyceps that had flowered by drinking down their suffering.
"Ciel, go and rest a while, why don't you."
"I'm all right."
"It's not as if we don't know what part you played on this delegation, so shut your mouth and go. You ought to clear your head, at least."
Ciel said nothing.
"Go on. Don't stand on ceremony. The banquet's going to run long anyway, so just be back before five."
"Yes. Then... please excuse me."
At his seniors' words, Ciel Midford bowed his head and left the fourth floor of the cathedral, where the banquet was still in full swing.
The armor that had once felt awkward now felt familiar.
Coming down to the first floor, he found the rain still falling in a thin, persistent drizzle, so he opened an umbrella and made for the rear of the cathedral.
The seniors who had sent him off had told him to see the imperial capital and lift his spirits, but he, who could not let go, trudged instead toward the yard where the carriages stood in a line, and turned his head this way and that.
"Ah..."
And he could see them. The two who had left the banquet behind and gone out of the cathedral ahead of everyone else—Euphemia, and Perzen standing at her side.
A crack split the handle of the umbrella. Without meaning to, he had failed to govern his strength.
The ruined umbrella dropped to the ground, and cold rain seeped in through the seams of his armor.
Euphemia... el Lorenne Luerg.
She rose onto her toes of her own accord, wound both arms around Perzen's neck, and offered him a kiss of her own choosing.
The rain thickened all at once.
His hair was soaked through in an instant, and his sight went dim... but Euphemia and Ciel, the two of them, unmistakably met each other's eyes.
At that she flung those distinctive golden eyes wide, then slowly let them fall shut, holding a faint and aching sorrow.
When the long kiss ended at last, Perzen stroked Euphemia's hair as if in praise, and walked away through the cathedral's rear gate.
Hard rain struck his armor. The noise of it rang loud, but Ciel did not hear it.
And then he saw himself taking a step.
She stood beneath her umbrella with her back to him, unmoving, as if she had no thought of going anywhere. The distance closed. Her back looked terribly small. She had not been so frail a woman as this. In a mere three months, she had grown this weak.
When he came within a step of her, Ciel Midford could tell that Euphemia's body was trembling, faintly.
What should he say. What words...
"You mustn't come to my side."
One small sentence from Euphemia, full of worry. How long he had wanted to hear it—the sound of a voice he had missed.
"My lady."
How long had it been since he had called her by that name.
"Are you happy?"
"Yes..."
"Then please show me that happiness of yours, as well."
Euphemia never turned. She did not look at Ciel. And Ciel, as if that alone were answer enough, opened his mouth toward her.
"Do you remember?"
She gave him no answer.
"The words you once spoke—that I was not your knight, and so I had no need to sacrifice myself for you."
Still she said nothing.
"And so I became a knight. I am ready now to sacrifice myself for you."
At those words, resolute, carrying a will that would not be moved, Euphemia took a step and opened the carriage door.
"Ciel. A life like that has no value. This is my last request. Don't live... for someone else."
The carriage door shut. And the carriage cut through the rain and went on, heartlessly.
But Ciel knew what that coldness meant.
"Do you know..."
The things he had held dear. The things he had loved. He had never once protected any of them. And so Ciel Midford wanted to live a life in which he did—even if what waited at the end of it was death.
Do not grieve...
Ciel was human too. Why would he not dream of quiet days lived at Euphemia's side? But the wall of the house called Brutein was far too high. And so he gave up the future in which he stood beside her, and resolved instead to paint a future in which she could live freely.
Even if, at the very end, the paint ran out and he himself could not be drawn into it...
He would never regret it.