I Am Cursed
“Planning to leave, I take it?”
There was hardly any packing to be done. He could simply take the man's words and walk out the door.
As if he had anticipated exactly that, Ludhi was already stationed in front of the stable, and he spoke the moment Cariel stepped through the entrance.
“……”
“If that is what you want, we'll remember you only as Ruel. Should anyone in the capital ever ask about it, we'll speak on that basis as well.”
If neither of them had brought the subject up during the entire carriage ride here, there was a reason for it.
...Call it consideration, if you like.
“Thank you.”
“The night roads are dark. Wouldn't it have been wiser to rest until sunrise?”
“...I'm more used to moving at hours like these.”
It wasn't that his night eyes were particularly sharp. But he had spent plenty of nights lying awake until dawn.
Still, it was different now. Unlike in those days, he no longer had to dread the rising sun on pure blind instinct.
“You're not going to ask?”
“...I imagine you have your reasons. If it were a problem we could actually solve just by hearing it, that would be another matter.”
“……”
“Thank you. It seems the whole affair came to a good end thanks to you.”
“Think nothing of it.”
He had said the same to Baron Roia, and to Luke as well—speak casually with me. That was only yesterday, and yet Ludhi had begun speaking comfortably just moments ago.
Noticing that his master had come looking for him, Cariel spent a while stroking the gray horse that offered up its head.
“If anyone comes looking for me, please send them along after me. If no one does, then when I leave, I'd like you to pass this on to Lady Alesia as a gift. She'll take better care of it than I would.”
“You mean to leave with nothing at all?”
“I have to cross the mountains.”
He could certainly go by horse—but that would narrow the routes available to him. Fewer possibilities meant an easier trail to follow. What had been safe until now was no guarantee of safety later.
It was, indeed, about time he started erasing his traces.
“Will you not bid the Saintess farewell?”
“……”
He was still deliberating. Perhaps—just perhaps—it would be right to simply leave like this.
“If my presence ever puts you in a difficult position, you don't need to defend me on my behalf.”
“That I cannot do.”
“It would put my mind at ease. Please don't trouble yourself over it.”
So spoke Cariel, in a tone stripped of all sentiment.
“Then, I'll be on my way.”
“Right. Luke will sulk a little, but... he can blame his own slow wits for that.”
“Please give the Baron my regards as well.”
“He already knows everything, so don't hold your breath.”
Ludhi extended his hand.
Cariel hesitated for a beat, then exhaled softly and clasped it.
“If you lack the makings of a knight, then at least be good at desk work!”
“Look at Luke! See how he has already grown into himself?! Then why are you still in this wretched state?!”
“Trading with the demonkin?! Do you have any idea who your father bled and nearly died fighting?! It was them! The demonkin! The very creatures you now deal with!”
As though being sucked under.
In a single instant, everything came pouring in.
The Baron raging, bellowing his displeasure without end. And then—
“But Father! The world has changed! Am I doing this for my own sake alone?!”
“Luke. I can't do what you do. I was a ruined thing from the start.”
“Father never expected anything of me. If this is how it was to be, why was I ever born to this land at all?”
...
Ludhi's self-recrimination carried on and on. And as if to console him in his ruin—
Luke spoke.
“Brother. Try trusting yourself a little more. You're quick with numbers, and your mind turns fast enough, isn't it?”
“And besides—I'm the one leaving, and you're the one staying here. So what is all this giving up supposed to accomplish, hm? That's it! Managing the territory is a bother anyway, so why don't you take it? I'll be crisscrossing this whole wide continent, so you just stay here and settle in nicely.”
“Every time Father raised his voice, weren't you the one who bore that fury in my place? I still remember those days. And a man who remembers them could never betray his brother over something as small as a seat or an inheritance. It wouldn't be knightly at all.”
And so the years turned.
The young man pressed his work forward, estranged from his own father. Those years were, for him, truly a stretch of time in which every single day felt like despair.
But then lavender fields bloomed at the far edge of the territory. He endorsed the crown's policies and threw himself into absorbing slaves of foreign blood as his own subjects. He reshaped the villages, laid and paved the roads, gathered the merchants together and negotiated their taxes—
“Yes. You were right.”
The little barony had grown into something that could be called a modest city.
It could have swelled further—but when even the heart of the Empire bred its own destitute, what difference would Varonens Territory make? He curbed his own ambition instead, attended thoroughly to the people he had taken in, and built up the land's substance from within.
In wartime, such an unguarded landscape would have been perilously exposed. But with no city walls to confine them, expanding the city had posed little difficulty either.
“The age of knights has not ended. And yet... yes. I see now that in times of peace, I never once knew what to do with myself.”
Baron Roia admitted it aloud.
And then, taking the meat from his servant's hands with his own, he carved it piece by piece and set it, himself, into his eldest son's bowl.
“Eat well.”
“...Yes, Father.”
The words exchanged were very few.
To an ear, they might have sounded cold, indifferent.
But Ludhi, at that voice, fought down the swell in his chest. And then, slowly, he chewed the meat in his mouth—carefully, bit by bit—before swallowing.
Because if he did not, something in him knew the tears would break through like a burst dam.
...
“??”
Perhaps it was because he had stood dazed in the middle of the handshake. Cariel, catching Ludhi's faint puzzlement, looked up at him again and broke the awkward silence first.
“If the chance arises, I'll see you again.”
“Come visit whenever you like. So long as Varonens stands, you will always be welcome here. Those words, I relay from my father's own mouth. And naturally, I think the same.”
Cariel nodded, shouldered his pack, and left the stable behind.
Even after lightening what the horse had carried and sifting through it once more for only the barest necessities, the load alone made each step weigh heavy.
He slipped between the trees, Springing up over their crowns, intending to leap his way clear of the area—
Nei-i-igh!
A horse's cry rang out from the distance, and the heavy wheels of a grand carriage came grinding over the earth, emerging at the side of the road.
“Hold on! Wait! Stop right there, if you please!”
Even in the dark, that pale complexion was unmistakable. Those red eyes gave off their own light, like a nocturnal beast's, and made him easy to pick out.
“Another moment of dawdling and I'd have missed you entirely!”
Cariel had considered simply ignoring him and moving on... but the man had chased all this way out of earnestness, so he stopped.
“Well then, in you get.”
“……”
“There are things I need to ask, aren't there? You went quiet when they came up last time, so I'd assumed you'd circle back to them later. Ah—that's right, the Saintess did mention something, didn't she?”
...Come to think of it.
A memory surfaced unbidden—the occasion on which he had followed Alesia and Luke on precisely such a pretext.
“You're surely off to claim the Crown Breaker, I take it?”
“...Crown Breaker?”
“You don't know it? It was Lord Grandeus's beloved hound, of course. Ah, yes—Elbart, that was its name, I believe?”
He had heard of Elbart from the Demon King. But the name Crown Breaker was new to him.
“Why is it called that?”
“It's said the title came about because Lord Grandeus visited every manner of despair upon the candidates for Demon King. The meaning being that any who wished to be king would have their crown split apart, crown and all, by that blade.”
In other words—it had shattered the potential of all who might have become the Demon King. Hence, Crown Breaker.
“What do you say? Beyond that, I have quite a few fascinating stories to share. There are also areas where I'd beg your cooperation, as material for my writing, you understand. Simply borrowing a great name outright would be its own problem, wouldn't it? And I confess I have questions of my own about Saint Cariel, so...”
“……”
Cariel let out a sigh, and with no better recourse, climbed into the carriage through the open door.
Before long, he felt the faint tremor of the wheels beginning to roll.
“His successor, you say? I never imagined there could be one—and even if there were, I'd assumed they'd be in the Demon Realm, or else emerge from the Relief Knights here in the Middle Realm. Quite the surprise, this.”
“I find myself at just as much of a loss.”
Such a being had only ever been rumor to him—a thing glimpsed once or twice in passing.
He had thought it nothing more than a story people used to disparage his father, and even that he had forgotten almost at once.
“If you'll pardon the intrusion—how exactly did you come to carry on Lord Grandeus's legacy?”
“……”
What expression would the man make, I wonder, if he answered that the Demon King had told him?
“I learned it in dreams.”
“Dreams? Ah—then there must have been some magical arrangement, or some catalyst, some turning point of a kind...”
He took it surprisingly seriously. Watching him think it over for a moment, Cariel asked:
“So—you're headed to see Lady Alesia, then?”
“Ah... was I found out?”
“Just a hunch.”
It made no difference to him. Leaving without a farewell, or even leaving with one—
...what did any of it matter.
“In any case. Beyond my report on Saint Cariel, I've been thinking of writing a novel inspired by the whole affair. I'll recite the plot for you—how would you feel about giving it a listen?”
“……”
Cariel nodded.
To summarize: Filbar, inspired by Cariel's alias—though the name would change—would write of someone who set out on pilgrimage after Saint Cariel's death. That someone, it turned out, was his distant descendant, who by chance came into contact with a sacred relic, received his memories of the past, sought out his grave, and reunited with him—thereafter carrying on his legacy. And so this person became a Hero, and so on. Hearing it laid out like that, it didn't sound particularly remarkable.
“That's not bad, but... how about this instead?”
Cariel, without a shred of shame, recited his own circumstances—lightly fictionalized.
A failed knight-candidate, on pilgrimage, in search of the birthplace and holy ground of a saint whose name resembled his own. Following the traces the old saint had left there, he touches his spirit and lives through the whole of the life the man once endured. And at last, as a final trial, he takes up the sword the saint wielded in life—
“Oh! Now that's good!”
An ordinary blade becomes a sacred relic—or a Holy Sword itself. And then, as it turns out, the failed knight was his distant descendant all along. He overcomes every trial and tribulation through an unbreakable will, and at the last becomes a great knight—a Hero—who delivers the world from evil.
“...It's well suited to a fairy tale.”
“That depends on the writing, doesn't it? Listening to it, this version is far more romantic. Heir to an old saint, yet a man who is nothing in himself—what a delicious void! More than enough to draw a reader into the protagonist. Genre-wise it'd be a knight or Hero tale, but... that's fine, surely. And as a twist, if at the very end he turns out to have been the old saint's descendant all along... wouldn't that double the emotional payoff?”
“...I couldn't say. But if that's how it strikes you, write it.”
Saint Cariel had no children of his own.
But the children who carried his name were as many as the stars above.
“Speaking of which, the alias Ruel did surprise me. Come to think of it, Lord Rueld also... ah, forgive me.”
“……”
His father, connected to the boy Saint Cariel once cared for?
What were the odds of that, truly?
Cariel gave a bitter smile.
“If that were really so... then it was no ordinary bond, I suppose.”
And so they traded idle talk and pleasant conversation for some while—until the carriage came to a halt.
“……”
“Step out, and she'll likely be waiting. Her instincts are good, you see. No need to rush—take your time and talk things through. Ah, and I'll wait here and set down the conversation we just had. After all, if your next destination is what I think it is... we can travel as far as the capital together.”
Cariel nodded and opened the carriage door.