The Blade
“Just a moment. I’m coming in.”
The uninvited guest spoke as naturally as if she had arrived somewhere she had been expected.
Fortunately the window was shut. Like any grand mansion, it was built so that it could not be opened from the outside, a precaution against intruders. But when Giselle brushed her fingers lightly over the window’s cross-frame, the glass trembled and a hairline gap appeared between the pane and the sill. I felt a current of air, finely tuned by mana, slip inside. Her long fingers slid into that crack and pushed the window up.
What the fucking hell is she doing.
The hem of her night-black dress began to seep into the half-dark room. Through every one of those motions, Giselle’s red eyes never left me. She crossed the floor with unhurried steps until she stood opposite the bed where I lay, and then she spoke.
“Hello, Ain. I missed you.”
“Get lost.”
The surge of feeling that used to hit me whenever I looked at her face was far weaker than in my previous life. The shock, though, was unavoidable.
“You don’t look well, Ain. Have you fallen ill?”
She had come earlier than usual this time, and after the regression we had never once crossed paths in the square. More than anything, I still could not get used to that kind of bullshit no matter how often I heard it. My polite reception did nothing to dim her composure.
“It seems the misunderstanding still hasn’t cleared.”
“How the hell did you know I was here, and why did you break in?”
The way she had once surveyed my own room, Giselle began to take a slow look around Iris’s. After a moment she leaned against the desk where a lamp still burned.
“Lady Iris has taken a leave of absence. The decision was sudden and without any particular reason. Your house was empty and left in complete disarray.”
So she had visited my place again. Judging by how well she knew the chaos inside, she had even gone in.
Giselle’s finger pointed past the window toward the cluster of lights gathered on the ridge.
“And I watched the light in Lady Iris’s room stay on for days without ever going out. I only stopped by to check. Who would have thought it would lead to such a happy reunion. Do you remember, Ain? Even from your room we could see our manor in the distance. We used to make signals for each other every night. One blink meant ‘good night,’ two blinks meant—”
“I get it. You’re a creepy stalker. I’ll say it again. Get lost, Giselle.”
The mouth that had been chattering with such delight closed. Just as she had said, the Evergreen manor stood next door to ours—close enough to see from my window, two rooms down from Iris’s.
“I came because I wanted to talk with you. Because you’re misunderstanding me…”
“Let me guess. You want to tell me you have nothing going on with that dumb bastard who showed up from the north?”
A small smile touched the lips of the woman who had kept her face blank until then.
“I knew you would understand, Ain. I’m glad.”
Still that same monstrous brain. What chain of thought could possibly lead anyone to that conclusion? Hard to believe this idiot, who looked like she couldn’t even read her own name, had once been my entire world.
“Are you still keeping our ring safe?”
“Sold it. Needed the money for booze.”
“That hurts to hear. But it’s all right, Ain. The time we spent together is still carved right here.”
As she spoke she pressed her clasped hands against her chest in a little gesture. The heart inside that chest would be colder than any shard of ice Iris had ever made.
Unlike our last reunion, this time I aimed carefully and hurled the ashtray that sat beside me straight at Giselle.
Crash!
The ashtray smashed into the wall a short distance from her and shattered. My arm, shaking worse than a willow branch, had thrown the shot wide. Her gaze never left me for the glass shards.
“It seems your anger hasn’t cooled yet, Ain. I won’t go anywhere. I’ll sit right here and wait…”
“Giselle. I loathe you.”
The smile vanished from her face again. Blades I had never prepared yet had been stacking themselves inside me all this time now turned toward her.
“I loathe that clueless-young-lady way you talk and the bright-red lips the words come out of. No love you recite to me can move me anymore. I want to rip out the vocal cords that carry your flat voice. The memory of our mouths pressed together, wet with each other’s spit, makes me want to vomit. That blank, half-wit way of thinking that used to feel mysterious now just feels like a maze I can’t stand. Maybe what I called love was never more than the kind of lust a man mistakes for love after his first time with a whore. Hell, a whore might even be better than you. Fuck, there was a time I wanted nothing more than to open those expensive legs of yours, and I never even got to once. I hate you, Giselle. The wounds you dug into me still throb. But it isn’t the pure ache of a wisdom tooth. It isn’t some bittersweet growing pain I’ll look back on fondly someday. It’s the kind of revulsion you feel when you find a corpse crawling with maggots—a pain I never want to go through again.”
Not a single drop of real liquor had touched my tongue, yet the words poured out as if a dam had burst. Resentment and rage toward Giselle had piled flesh on flesh until they birthed this misshapen thing of speech. Some of it was probably aimed at myself as well. If there was any lie mixed into what I had said, it was only the claim that I had wanted to fuck her and never managed it.
When I was living as “Ain,” I had never hungered that badly for a physical relationship with Giselle. Simply having her near had been enough. For Ain, at least.
I had talked too long with a dry mouth; my throat was burning. Driven by a destructive urge to make the thirst worse, I stuck the cigar that lay beside me between my teeth. I was holding the cigar cutter when it happened.
At some point Giselle had come close. An orange flame bloomed in her hand the way it always did. She looked down at me, waiting only for me to cut the cigar, and not a trace of confusion showed on her face. The corner of her mouth had lifted again, just a little.
“You’ve gotten good at lying, Ain. There’s no way you could hate me. Our souls are bound together, so I can tell. Your love for me is every bit as solid and beyond doubt as mine for you.”
I could not stand it any longer. If I drove my fist into that doll-smooth face right now, could I finally crack the blank expression? How satisfying would it feel to grab her by the hair, roar, and slash at her with the cigar cutter in my hand?
…It would only multiply the disgust.
If even the words I had spat left her unmoved, violence would never put a crack in Giselle’s autistic certainty either. Worse—remembering the possibility that she might actually say something like You’re doing this for me. I’m glad, Ain made my skin crawl.
“For the record, I love someone else. Not you.”
“That’s an even more transparent lie, Ain. There’s no way you could love anyone but me.”
Fucking hell. Not even a nibble. I no longer felt like smoking, so I spat the cigar onto the floor. The love was already water under the bridge, years gone, but it had been real at the time.
…Wait.
“…And if I did?”
“What do you mean, Ain?”
“If I loved someone else. Not you.”
“What could be more pointless than imagining something that can never happen, Ain?”
I remembered.
An insult to Ain is an insult to me. Take back what you just said. Right now.
I only did it because the one who insulted Ain refused to take the words back.
I remembered Giselle turning the pack of students who used to bully the powerless, talentless version of me at the Academy into something halfway to corpses. I remembered her casually explaining herself after she had seared one of them with the flame from her hand until his whole body was charred. That childish cruelty. That sealed-off attitude toward anyone who was not Ain.
“Did you kill her?”
“Who are you talking about, Ain?”
“Mace. The nun. The sacred-studies teacher. You killed her, Giselle.”
The petty schoolyard bullying Mace had suffered at the Academy suddenly overlapped with the woman standing in front of me. I thought of the chain of misfortunes that had fallen on her one after another as if they had been prepared especially for her. I recalled the thick, source-less malice I had felt back then. Even someone as sunny as Mace would never have cheerfully accepted a mysterious liquid from a complete stranger—would she? If a beggar had really given it to her as a gift, she would have drunk it on the spot, not brought it all the way to my house.
If the string of disasters I had once written off as bad luck had actually been planned by someone carrying the malice I had sensed… and if that someone was the Giselle standing in front of me now… the same Giselle who had never hesitated to commit any violence so long as she could claim it was for my sake…
I seized her pale throat and dragged her close. Strength gradually returned to my shaking hand. Giselle answered in the same calm tone as always.
“You know better than anyone that I have no religion, Ain. I’ve never once had anything to do with people who serve the cloth.”
She could talk about souls all day long and still say something like that with a straight face. The question itself was wrong. Even if the Giselle of my previous life had done it, the one standing here now would have no memory of it. In her own words, I would have to “imagine something that can never happen.”
“If I loved someone other than you—what would you do?”
“I already told you, Ain. That could never—”
“Fuck it. Fine. Let’s pretend it can’t. But if it did, then what? I’m begging you, just try to imagine it. What would you do to the person I loved?”
Giselle’s face remained frozen, not a flicker of movement. Her body offered no resistance as I pulled her in. The throat I held was suddenly much closer—
Smack.
I flung away whatever I had been gripping without realizing it. Giselle, red fingerprints still blooming on her neck, ran her tongue over her lips as if tasting the place where she had just pressed them to my cheek. Looking down at what must have been my stunned face, she murmured in the same blank voice:
“I would simply wait. For the rest of my life. Even if there was no promise of an end, I wouldn’t mind at all.”