Chapter 53 — The Eve
April 30th. Before he knew it, the last of April had come.
From tomorrow the Imperial Academy, cleanly restored, would resume its ordinary operations, and for the first time he would go in to work beside Euphemia. Ahead of that, he was giving a final review to the comprehensive evaluation of the assignments that had been due on the twelfth.
Unexpectedly, they had all applied themselves.
Some regarded the Academy as nothing more than an extension of society. Plenty of others, though, truly fretted over their marks for the sake of their own futures. Anyone who would not inherit the seat of house head generally had to find a way to live, and while that might have been otherwise where blood ran smooth, as a rule it did not. So they labored — to become maids of the imperial household, or officials, or, if they carried mana, to enter a mage corps or an order of knights.
Nothing omitted. Nothing mistaken.
He had told them to go and learn, taking commoners as the measure, the experiences an ordinary person was bound to meet at least once in a life according to the difference of sex. Overlap was inevitable, and so what he had weighted in the scoring was how small that common ground proved to be. With the grading ordered thus, the highest marks went to the five who had subdivided their work even by trade. And among those, the ones that drew his eye of their own accord...
Lizzie. Laura.
The two had set down what they gathered more densely than any of the other students, as if they were competing. It was not dummy stuffing meant only to swell the volume. Read through, it was made of nothing but things that left him thinking, yes — that could well be so.
A knock broke the stillness outside the office.
"Enter."
He lifted his head and admitted the maid.
"Master, a letter has arrived from the imperial household."
"Give it here and withdraw. Ah — and have the carriage waiting."
"Yes, my lord."
She bowed and went out, and he broke the letter stamped with the imperial seal and read it. The contents were as he had expected: a wish to invite him to the banquet on the seventh of May, dressed up in formal courtesy.
Come to think of it...
At this point, the fact that Euphemia was not with child might rather be a mercy. The shock of Ciel Midford's death was not without the power to bring on a miscarriage.
This imperial banquet...
It would have to be an unmistakable end. For him. For Euphemia as well.
With that thought finished, he rose and left the office.
"I am going out."
"Yes. Go safely, my lord."
The madam had said that the dress for the banquet might take a little time, but that the wedding dress would be enough in two days — several base frames had already been set, and it was only a matter of putting flesh upon them. And so today, two days on, he climbed into the carriage and set out for Azelia to collect it.
"......"
Neither Lee Seojin nor Perzen had ever held a wedding, and there was not a shred of the flutter such a thing ought to bring. It felt profoundly strange. Truly — a body, needlessly cold and dispassionate.
"Mmm..."
Letting a faint murmur slip, Euphemia was committing to memory the students' basic particulars that Perzen had given her. Her days had always turned in boredom and idleness, but now that the routine held something she must do, she showed a resolve that was, in its own way, spirited.
Only fourteen of them. It isn't difficult...
The names she had memorized long since, and as she turned over in her mind what she knew of each student's house, a thought came of a sudden.
Should I take that along as well.
From the small drawer beside the desk in the bedroom, she drew out the paper that held the problems Perzen had once set her. The second and the third, never solved in the end, locked away in a labyrinth. The promise that he would give her a reward if only she solved them carried no proper term. So once she grew a little familiar with the professors and the students there, she might quietly show them these problems and ask for help. If she succeeded in obtaining the answers, she would ask, as the price, that he set up a small shop for her. After that, with the money she earned working as an assistant, she could furnish the interior, and when she needed something she would not have to hold out her hand to Perzen.
Would it be better to begin as a café? The start might be meager, but if she grew it little by little, it might settle into a famous place for tea parties. The first floor would remain somewhere anyone might spend an hour; once she had saved enough, she would add a second floor and a third, and restrict who might enter. Nobles, by nature, liked that sort of discrimination. Commoners spread beneath their feet, and they themselves reigning above, trading talk they judged reasonably refined and proper — such a scene would satisfy an arrogant self-regard without fail.
"......"
She folded away the wings of fancy she had been spreading and turned her head to the window. This, too, was nothing more than moving inside the situation she had been given, inside the box Perzen had made. Still, she wanted at least to dress that box so it would not look unhappy to other eyes. In truth she already knew that, to those other eyes, the box that held her looked as happy as a beautiful castle...
Ciel...
To one person alone, it would not. So that he would not be needlessly bound to her. So that he would not live on carrying a thing like guilt...
"What are you thinking so deeply about."
Euphemia flinched, her shoulders jumping. When had he come in? She had not even heard the door, and already he stood behind her, reaching for her waist and drawing her gently into his arms.
"Nothing... I was only thinking of this and that..."
She answered calmly, without stumbling, and quietly accepted Perzen's hands as they touched her body in that suggestive way. Her mind still offered a trace of resistance to the touch, but her trained body felt a comfort like a dog wagging its tail. And if his hands grew rough, she would know fear and terror, and take up a posture of abject submission.
The bed frame creaked as he carried her over and laid her neatly within his embrace. Did he never tire of it? Even if he did not grope and fondle her this way every time, her body, trained as far as a body could be trained, already remembered with perfect clarity how it was meant to respond.
"Ah, um... the sun, the sun is still up..."
Unlike other times, he slipped both hands inside her loosely undone clothes, took her breasts gently, and kneaded them. He had not done this before, and Euphemia tried, faintly, to catch his forearm — then gave it up at once. By instinct she understood that this had passed the distance she was permitted to move while the collar was on her. The moment the leash drew taut, Perzen, displeased, would yank it hard and educate her all over again.
"How admirable. You have grown quick to learn."
The single line, whispered as if in mockery, raked without mercy what little self-respect she had left.
"Yes..."
"Ah... mm..."
And so, for a while, Euphemia was played with as his toy — a doll that made sounds — and met a night in which the stars poured down with unusual beauty.
"Why... here..."
Dinner finished and her bath done, Euphemia meant to return to the bedroom, but the maids leading her toward the dressing room would not allow it.
"Ah..."
There, finding the beautiful wedding dress fitted upon a mannequin, she lost herself for a moment. Would the clothes worn by those beings called angels, who attend the gods, be like that?
"Let us have you change."
"Me...?"
"It is a dress for my lady. If not my lady, who would wear it?"
She closed her mouth and stood still. The maids who came to her slowly stripped what she wore and dressed her in the wedding gown, then sat her before the mirror and began to adorn her with a care more devoted than ever. It was like magic. Watching her own face change from moment to moment beyond the glass, Euphemia felt even a strangeness.
Afterward she came down the stairs of the hall and out into the mansion's flower garden, and there — unsuited to the early night — Perzen stood in a neat formal suit and held out his hand.
"What on earth... are you thinking?"
So why, now. She had a great many questions she wanted to throw at him, but her eyes went to the hand still extended, and she took it weakly in return. She remembered having said she did not envy the wedding of House Claudia and House Alfred...
"Like this... you mean to walk all the way to the cathedral?"
Seeing that not even a carriage had been prepared, she wore a reluctant look, but Perzen shook his head with indifference.
"Even a noble cannot, should a reservation already be set, cancel it and hold a ceremony in the great cathedral as they please. Their motto is that the power each holds — god upon man, and man upon god — does not reach across."
One was free to believe in and follow whichever god one wished, but the moment such people gathered and proposed a religion, they were put to death for treason regardless of station or calling.
"Then, here..."
"Yes. Do not worry. I shall not make it a shabby thing."
He had already committed it to memory, but even so, just in case, Perzen drew a blueprint from his breast. Then he brought Isabel's corpse, held under Enslavement, forward to the center of the garden and spent his mana at full strength.
Magic was not a thing used only to kill. Elemental Magicians in particular — those who could transmute mana into ice — would sometimes take a fee and, with a building's plans as their axis, show the form of it already complete.
A long crack split the air.
The magic of this world was not a method of freezing the moisture in the atmosphere, but of transmuting mana itself into ice. Countless frosts spread outward like vines climbing a wall. Through a painstaking knitting that bound them one to another, they began to create being out of nothing.
"......"
Even Euphemia, a stranger to the knowledge of magic, could faintly grasp how tremendous this hazy, rapturous sight was. It took in the whole of the mansion's vast garden, so that people passing outside stopped where they stood and quietly drank the scene in.
A little more...
Had he concerned himself only with the exterior, it would not have been difficult. The trouble was the interior, and so Perzen concentrated to the utmost. What he meant to imitate was not a castle, but a sanctuary — and not, of course, the great cathedral that stood in the capital. Precisely, it was the one that stood in Lee Seojin's memory. The Las Lajas Sanctuary, called holy ground because an image of the Virgin Mary had appeared there and worked a miracle. He had thought that carrying it over into a plan would not be easy, for what remained in his mind was not the real thing seen with his own eyes, but only a landscape through photographs. A specialist in a given field, however, was not a specialist for nothing.
Crack—!
At last the frosts that had gone on knitting for so long came to a halt, and before their eyes stood a splendid, magnificent sanctuary made of ice. Its exterior, though, was stuck all over with countless snow-blossoms, like the surface of wood that had never been sanded — moisture in the air, frozen fine and clinging in the sudden birth of bitter cold. Through Isabel, then, Perzen interfered with the atmosphere, raised a fairly rough wind, and blew them all away.
A rush of air.
Snow-blossoms clumped from crystals of ice were caught by the wind and began to fall to the ground. The moonlight was unusually bright tonight, and those crystals made a sight as if stars were pouring down.
"It's beautiful..."
Outside the mansion, a child holding a mother's hand reached out a small hand toward jewels that could never be touched.
It lasted only a moment. Once every snow-blossom had been shaken off, almost as a creature sheds its skin, and the true form stood revealed — a grand sanctuary of ice, breathing a faint blue — the child, without knowing it, pressed both hands tightly together and offered up a prayer.