Needless Worry
On the way back to the mansion with a basket brimming with herbs for an antidote, I sat among Unit 3's branches and studied the summon I had only just obtained, Hell's Dreadflame, resting in my palm.
A blue flame with no fixed shape. It did not strike me as something alive, and yet there was a corner of it that felt somehow creature-like—a strange, unsettled form. Watch it a while, and the thing had a quiet way of stealing your gaze. I was beginning to understand why people made such a fuss over camping and fire-gazing. The waver of the flame, the way its burning shape kept changing: stare long enough and it was more entertaining than you would expect. Not that I could keep staring forever. My eyes would probably give out.
Then I happened to glance aside and caught Unit 1 looking as if she wanted a turn, so I passed Hell's Dreadflame over to her and turned my head. There sat Unit 2-1, peeled off my shoulder and turned the other way.
Unit 2-1, it seemed, was not particularly fond of the new summon. Too bright, maybe. The Unit 2s, true to their dark and gloomy looks, preferred what was filthy and dim over anything clean and bright, so shying away from something as luminous as Hell's Dreadflame was easy enough to understand.
Or was it sulking because it had failed to spot the wolves in the flower field earlier?
I casually scooped the little one up. It startled and thrashed, then turned a tearful face up at me.
"Eeng-ee..."
"What's wrong? Is this about the wolves?"
"Eeng..."
"It's fine. What's there to be upset about? That wasn't your fault. The problem was the other Unit 2s letting their attention wander."
When I later looked into why we had not sensed the wolves coming, the cause turned out to be the Unit 2s' lack of focus. At first they had concentrated and played the part of scouts admirably, but that stretch of time did not last. It was their first time away from the mansion, and given how the Unit 2s loved filthy things the way they loved dust, there had been no shortage of distractions. The drive to see the mission through had run dry almost at once.
What could I do? It was my fault for never thinking up any motivation or reward ahead of time. Even the army trains its people with PX privileges and leave, and I had simply given orders with none of that. Then again, was a summoner supposed to worry about this sort of thing in the first place? There was no way to compel obedience the way you could in a game, and having to puzzle over it was proving anything but easy.
"Eeeng-ee...!"
I was turning those thoughts over in a vague sort of way when Unit 2-1 suddenly rallied, sprang up, and hopped onto my shoulder. Had the comfort put the spirit back on its feet? Well, if so, that was a relief.
And so we headed for the mansion in a mood that had grown noticeably warmer—until, without warning, Hell's Dreadflame snuffed its light and leapt into my arms.
What's gotten into this one all of a sudden?
I was still flustered when someone I had never expected appeared, and the shock nearly sent me tumbling off Unit 3.
"Ira, where have you been?"
"Kyaaaaa—!"
It was Evelyn. She stood in the middle of the forest path with a dagger of vicious, gleaming edge gripped in one hand.
"E-Evelyn? How...?"
Hadn't she passed out from the poison? How is she even here? Don't tell me she died. And came back as a ghost—!
"And just what delightful thing are you imagining this time...?"
After we returned to the mansion, the confident, lively Ira from the moment she had presented her cooking was nowhere to be seen. She had slipped back into her old stiff, cowed self. The responsibility for this mess lay with her, so perhaps the reaction was only natural.
"It's my fault I was out for so long. I'll admit that. There have been tiring things lately. I think I made you worry for nothing."
In truth, that poisoned dish had not been a lethal dose for me. What had kept me collapsed until now was nothing more than accumulated fatigue; I simply had not woken. And so Ira was fidgeting, staring down at the herbs she had brought back a full basket of—herbs that were now useless.
If I had known it would turn out like this, I should have gotten up sooner.
What filled the basket were, without question, herbs that could serve as ingredients for an antidote. The trouble was that any herb can also be used as a poison, depending on how you use it.
"Did someone tell you that you had to dig these up?"
At that, Ira fumbled a botanical dictionary out of her arms. The cover told me it was one of the reference books the Elysia family had set aside twenty years ago, when they were making a cure for the plague. So it had not been entirely without grounds, the way her foraging for cooking ingredients once had. She had said she ought to study poisons, and it seemed she truly had.
But when I looked it over, the book was so old that parts of it no longer sat well with current imperial law. This particular gathering had been fine, yet turn only a few pages and you could find herbs whose cultivation and distribution were forbidden, still described as legal. It needed updating.
I closed the book, handed it back, and looked down at the basket of herbs. Even so, to have gathered this much in a single outing... Tree spirit or not, locating a colony of one specific plant on the spot was astonishing. Most tree spirits have no capacity to understand human wishes and desires. Most spirits, in fact, are like that—beings with nothing they want, who simply exist as the current carries them. The ability to find precisely what another person desires was a special quality belonging to Ira's summons alone.
Come to think of it, most of Ira's summons seemed to appear already bearing that kind of distinction. Could this, then, be considered something special about Ira herself?
This outing, though, had unquestionably been dangerous. Not only for Ira, but for the villagers as well. Of course I was glad of the heart behind it—that she had come out into the outside world she so disliked, all to make an antidote and bring back herbs. Even so.
"You said you dug these up where the pink flowers were in bloom, didn't you?"
A nod.
The clearing of pink flowers Ira had found was, in truth, a place bordering the village. There had been a real chance of someone seeing her together with Unit 1. It was fortunate she had not run into anyone else, but if she had been caught in the company of a skeleton, matters would certainly have grown complicated.
"You went too far. The villagers nearly found you out."
"I'm sorry..."
Ira let the words out in a voice that had all but crawled back down her throat. I had not meant to blame her, so I laid a hand on that drooping head and stroked it. Still, I had not realized the wolves had drawn in that close.
"You must have been startled, meeting wolves out there."
A nod.
It was certainly about time I did something about the wild animals as well. Until now I had focused on scouting, trying to pin down the exact cause, and the festival would be upon us before long.
The festival. The festival...
"Ira. Have you any thought of going to the festival?"
"The festival?"
Doubt gathered in Ira's voice. Well, perhaps that was fair. Only a moment ago she had been scolded for going too near the village, and now I was asking whether she wanted to come to the festival. It might well sound like a strange proposal.
But it was precisely because it was the festival that she could go into the village. On an ordinary day, outsiders coming and going was something special and strange; during the festival, such outsiders became ordinary and commonplace. If Ira wanted to watch the festival, it was entirely possible.
Her reaction, though, still seemed muddled. She probably did not yet know whether she was even allowed to go down into the village. And yet the Ira of when she was alive had loved festivals like this one. It was her influence that had turned the village's modest gathering—people simply meeting at the village hall for a meal—into the lively bustle it was now.
Back then I had been a child the same as Ira, and the thought that now only I had grown up left a faintly bitter taste. In Evelyn's memory, Ira was still the girl who waved and said, "Let's play together again."
I wanted to show her that even after the Elysia family disappeared, this festival at least had remained, and had become an event the whole village enjoyed. But if she did not want that, it was not something I could force.
"If you don't want to, you don't have to push yourself. Choose whatever you won't regret."
She had not refused outright, so for the moment I encouraged her to think it over. And just then, a blue light suddenly spilled from within Ira's arms.
"Oh my. That's a splendid will-o'-the-wisp. Is that a new summon?"
"A will-o'-the-wisp?"
The moment the talk turned to summons, Ira's voice brightened in a way you could not miss. She really was easy to read. Even in the old days, she had loved stories of the spirits in fairy tales, and of wondrous creatures.
"A will-o'-the-wisp is a spirit of the forest that appears to people lost in the woods, or to people in danger. If it showed up when those wolves had you surrounded, it may have come to help you."
At the explanation, Ira's eyes sparkled. Watching the wisp sway playfully above her hand, Evelyn went on.
"But a will-o'-the-wisp is usually closer to a light, or a haze of glow. I've never seen one this close to an actual flame."
Perhaps this one, too, like Ira's other summons, possessed a special quality of its own. Anyway.
"So what are we supposed to call that one? Would Unit 4 do?"
"No. This one is Hell's Dreadflame."
"...Ah. Um. R-right."
At Ira's answer, Evelyn lost the words she had been about to say and closed her mouth.
Hell's Dreadflame, for a wisp with a legend of helping people...
So it really was true, what they said about her being terrible at names.