Perzen von Schweik Brutein
"Ah..."
Euphemia had been holding her breath beneath the crimson eyes that looked down on her in silence out of the dark. When Perzen at last reached toward her, she squeezed her eyes shut.
Her fear proved a wasted thing. He only locked the door, then hauled his staggering body onto the bed.
"Don't just stand there. Come here."
She would sooner have stretched out on the floor and slept apart from him, but she did not believe the man would allow it. Slowly she went to his side and lay down with her back turned.
"Euphemia El Lorraine Ruerug."
"Why..."
"Get up."
So he had never meant to let her sleep in peace after all.
At the sound of his voice Euphemia curled in on herself, small hands twisting the sheet tight.
"Ah!"
As if to show her how meaningless that resistance was, Perzen reached out, forced her upper body upright, and spoke in a voice thick with irritation.
"You will sleep with the pillow set properly beneath your head."
With the aid of Quantification he straightened the tilted pillow, and only then, his face easing, did he lie down with an arm wrapped about Euphemia's waist.
"I—I don't...!"
She could endure the forearm, several times thicker than her own, cinching around her body. But when the large hand that had pinned her head so lightly on the night he forced their wedding bed slipped inside her clothes, Euphemia gasped and twisted.
"Be still."
"Ah—ngh...!"
Tears sprang of their own accord. At the hand that seized her breast with brute carelessness, she trembled and caught his wrist as if in plea.
"Do you have any notion of the trouble I took, feeding you until you were full? You will bear this much."
She did not understand what he meant. The sense of the words was beyond her, and she had no idea what answer she was supposed to give.
Perzen, who had not wanted understanding, buried his face against the nape of her neck. Hot breath spilled over her skin as he drew his hand along her body the way one might caress a piece of costly porcelain.
People generally find comfort, a settling of body and mind, when they look upon fresh green. For Perzen, Euphemia was precisely that. The drunkenness soaking him, the fatigue of spent mana, the mental strain of having forced down an obsessive fit—all of it loosened slowly because of her. He did not resist the drowsiness crowding in, and entrusted himself to sleep with ease.
The urge to slip away flickered through her for a moment, but the thought of this sensitive man opening his eyes through the fog of a hangover frightened her more. Euphemia kept still and let out only a faint breath.
"Nn..."
His hand, resting on the stomach that rose and fell with her breathing, stirred faintly and passed across her navel. The sensation crawled over her skin and she flinched, then clenched her teeth and forced her eyes shut, ashamed of answering, one by one, to a touch that held no will at all.
And so, the next morning, when rustling opened her eyes, what met them was Perzen—brow pinched with a hangover, and yet setting every line of his dress to rights without a single thing awry.
"You're awake."
They were not close enough to trade morning greetings. She answered with a nod.
"I told them to bring breakfast here. Once we have eaten and bathed, we leave at once."
"All right..."
She gave the listless reply and turned her head. Something had felt faintly unpleasant, and outside a dreary rain was falling. She was gazing out the window with no particular thought when a soft knock announced breakfast, and a feast spread itself before her eyes.
"What is it?"
"It seems... a little much..."
"You appeared to have a healthy appetite, so I gave special instructions."
She was a woman, and the remark did not please her. But thinking back on yesterday, she could see how he might have mistaken her, so she offered no protest and quietly began to eat.
After she had filled her stomach in simple fashion and finished her bath, she exchanged greetings with Baron Roberon and climbed into the carriage after Perzen, who had already turned his back.
"When we arrive in Brutein, I shall introduce you to a tailor of skill. Until then, wear that unsightly dress. The North's sense of beauty fixes itself far too narrowly upon mere utility, and so—"
"It isn't unsightly...!"
She had cut in before he finished. Perzen looked her over with a blank face, then spoke.
"It is unsightly. Someone seems to have tried not to let it show, yet the mended seams are visible, and the color—white, supposedly—has muddied past any generous reading."
"This is...!"
"Yes. It was for want of money, I suppose. I understand that well enough. But Euphemia—if you truly do not feel this dress to be unsightly, I believe I shall be disappointed."
The dreary rain laid a quiet rhythm inside the carriage, and mingling with Perzen's voice it slipped, syllable by syllable, into Euphemia's ear.
She had been certain she had lived a life without a single point of shame. Why, then, must that life fall so wretchedly beneath a trampling foot, without even the chance to resist? She clenched her teeth and lifted her chin.
She would not deny that she was base. She would accept it, and turn it back upon him—if you took a woman like me to wife, is there not a flaw in your own cultivation and discernment? She meant to say it. But—
"Do not be petty. Clutching at a misplaced pride against a just rebuke only makes you uglier."
As if he had read the retort before it formed, his words set a period upon her. In the end Euphemia let her head fall.
What a miserable headache.
Matters had resolved toward Lee Seojin's self mixing with Perzen's...
No. Honestly, by now it would be a misuse of words even to say that Lee Seojin's self held the upper hand. At the beginning he had certainly thought so. But even a self that had lived three years longer, if it was not a fierce one—Lee Seojin's self, paved with nothing but idle, tedious, exhausting days turning over and over like a wheel, had failed to press Perzen's self down completely.
More precisely, it was truer to say that Perzen's self had been dyeing Lee Seojin's, little by little. Of course, being a modern man, Lee Seojin's self had wrought a certain change where ethics were concerned. In every other respect, he could feel Perzen's self holding the overwhelming share. In truth, even the measure by which the two selves might be divided and called by separate names seemed, by now, to be growing vague.
He did feel the need to apologize to Euphemia in some fashion for the exchange just past, and so mend things between them. He simply was not sorry. He had only admonished her for failing to possess the decorum in which she was lacking as a noble. Why should that require an apology? I found the thought altogether obvious. A contrived apology, forced out only to soothe her mood, would only let some unfortunate word escape or make matters worse. Believing that, I kept my mouth shut.
The rain roared down. Passing through it, the carriage went quietly on.
People called this place the womb of ore. So many mines had been found here, asleep with every kind of ore, and the iron mines alone numbered six; if the price of Brutein's iron rose, one might as well say the clouds of war were gathering. In metallurgy it stood truly first-class. A smithy of name in Brutein could earn enough from six or seven commissions alone to shutter its doors for a month.
"You cannot look away. Does it strike you as marvelous?"
"N-not really..."
In the time it took to pass through the North and reach Brutein, Euphemia seemed to have grown considerably used to the existence called me. More precisely, she had resigned herself. And so, after what passed when we left Baron Roberon's domain, nothing particular occurred.
"I have business in the morning, so in the afternoon I will show you Brutein myself. You have been shut in a carriage all this while; it must have been stifling."
"If you have business... just assign me an attendant. I can look around on my own. You don't have to be considerate."
"The only time you may refuse my consideration is when you are ill. If I am to overlook it once, then after my business we can simply remain in one room. This is Brutein, so there is no need to mind anyone's eyes, and—"
"N-no!"
"Say what you mean."
It would have been fine if she had not made her dislike of his company so blatant. Whether she was simply too unskilled at hiding what she felt, or this body of Perzen's was too sharp-eyed...
"I... I want to see this place... with you..."
"Well done."
As if praising a pet that had carried out a command, I reached out and stroked Euphemia's green hair. We had not lain together on the way, but I had pawed over the whole of her to excess, and her wariness of being touched seemed to have crumbled a fair amount. The sight was like looking at an object used so long it bore the marks of hands, and a quiet satisfaction rose in me.
With a creak, the carriage slowed to a stop. A moment later the door burst open from outside, and Chris, butler of House Brutein, welcomed us with a pleasant smile.
Chris was a man for whom Perzen held considerable fondness.
"Welcome home."
Because he was bald, and a bald head left no symmetry to fuss over.
"Is my elder brother in?"
"Yes. The head of the house is in his office."
"Then I leave Euphemia to you."
"Understood."
I stepped into the mansion first, went straight to the office, knocked twice, and waited quietly. Before departing for the North on Euphemia's account, Perzen had left a special request with his elder brother, the current head of Brutein. Soon a voice both strange and familiar answered from within.
"You may come in."
I turned the handle and stepped inside.
"It has been a long time, little brother."
"You still look well."
They were exchanging ordinary words, yet Jeremiah—Perzen's brother, and the present head of Brutein—had his back turned. Because he was the one Perzen, as a child, had nearly murdered, driven by an obsession with symmetry.
"I know you are all right now. But only like this do I find the courage to face you. Please understand."
"You need not ask my understanding."
Jeremiah was odd-eyed. As a child, Perzen had tried again and again to cut the eye out with a knife, and for that he had been confined for nearly half a year. That there was no trouble now was because, during those six months, the blue pigment of Jeremiah's right eye had deepened enough to harmonize with the red of the left. Even if he had succeeded in cutting out that pale blue eye—the one that failed to harmonize and produced the imbalance—a man like Perzen would surely have gone on to gouge the other as well, displeased that only one remained.
"Isabel Ron Pierre Genova's corpse..."
"Of course the bid succeeded. There is no house whose wealth can crush ours."
Isabel Ron Pierre Genova. A pleasure-killer of towering infamy, and an elemental magician of the highest sphere—Apollyon. Exactly twenty-six years ago, before Perzen was born, she had been captured and lost her life, and her corpse was kept in the Imperial Palace. House Genova, a count's house, had been cleanly exterminated for the sole crime of bringing the witch Isabel into the world. It no longer existed.
"That is fortunate."
The imperial house had put that corpse up for auction, and the timing overlapped with his stay in the North, so he had no choice but to entrust the bidding to Jeremiah, head of the house. An Apollyon-rank elemental magician was valuable enough on that fact alone, but what Perzen had coveted still more was that she could convert the nature of mana into electric current.
Magic, as a rule, could be broken. The speed of light was something no human, however they might soar or crawl, could defy. To break it required interference, yet there existed no time in which to interfere, and so the best course was to prepare beforehand. For an elemental magician, then, the power to transmute mana into current was a blessing bestowed by heaven.
"However..."
"Was there a problem?"
"It is ambiguous to call it a problem. The youngest daughter of Viscount Rosenberg's house merely offered to pay twice the winning bid if I would sell it to her."
"They can hardly be so rotten with gold."
Rosenberg. The holy land of culture and art. The place that had cast Brutein's craftsmanship down into the second rank. Not a land short of money, yet not one whose wealth could stand beside Brutein's. From the start they must have bought the corpse at a price swollen with froth, after recruiting other noble houses as shills for the sake of looking well before the imperial house.
"Of course, she said the payment would be made in installments."
"I have no interest."
"And... should you refuse, she asked that I convey this as well."
"...?"
"On equal terms, I will challenge your black magic."
What kind of unheard-of bullshit was that? So I thought—and then a memory from four years ago surfaced. At the time, seeking fame as a black mage, Perzen had accepted challenges to contests of manifestation under equal conditions. Naturally, possessed as he was of the talents called Corpse Comprehension and Corpse Affinity, no one emerged who could surpass him even when the terms looked equal on the surface. And so the Perzen of those days had declared that if anyone could defeat him, he would grant a single request in the name of House Brutein. She must mean that.
"How impudent."
Barring something unusual, the youngest daughter of House Rosenberg would enter the Imperial Academy, and there she would attend the lectures of the man who was to become professor of black magic: me.
"Is she in Brutein now?"
A prospective student I had not yet so much as seen had already declared the adorable ambition of surpassing the one who would teach her. I found myself wanting to look upon that face at once.
