I Am Under a Curse (3)
The scent of lavender wrapped around them long before they reached the city.
Perhaps it was because they had been steeping in it for the whole journey — drunk on fragrance before they ever arrived.
Some travelers had surely entered the city before the festival began, but it seemed a fair number had arrived late, on the very day it opened, for a long line stretched all the way back from the town gate.
The festival would continue for several days yet.
In truth, Patina had reached the town long ago — but worried she might run into Cariel, she had spent her days drifting about the outskirts instead.
The lands around Varonens Territory were relatively safe, and there was no shortage of sights worth wandering to see. Besides, this was the season when outsiders came and went freely, so the usual watchfulness of the locals was thinner than normal.
That was likely how she came to strike up a conversation with a young demon-race man who was painting a landscape with the lavender fields spread out behind him — one small chance among many.
"At first, the criticism never stopped. How dare they join hands with demon-folk? That sort of thing. But now it stands as one of the region's greatest successes, and thanks to it, relations between us and our neighboring territories have warmed as well. I'd say it turned out well for everyone."
The rumor that Varonens Territory had joined hands with the demon race to develop its lands had been a blazing topic of gossip even back then.
And in the end, within five years, the place had grown to a scale that bore no comparison to its former self.
It was a barony in name only; measured purely by size, it wouldn't be unreasonable to call it something far greater.
Moreover, its close ties with the imperial capital meant that its pro-Emperor political leanings had drawn support rather than suspicion from the center.
As for the Verdenberg family — whose relations with the crown had been poor back when Berg was still a kingdom — ever since their reconciliation through Saint Cariel, it was said that Varonens had been the one to lower its head first. That connection had endured to this day; it could hardly be anything but a bond of remarkable pedigree.
Besides, the Verdenberg family counted among the founding contributors of the Berg Empire, which the Enzul family led.
"Thank you for the conversation."
"The pleasure was mine. Speaking with a person of standing in a place like this — it brightened my day."
It was only by the time she returned to the city that Patina finally received the report: Cariel had already departed.
Along with it came word of where the person she sought could be found.
The church was crowded with visitors and worshippers who never seemed to thin. She passed through its doors and pressed deeper still into the interior. Once she had declared her identity and stated her purpose, she was granted passage with ease, even into the quarters closed to outsiders.
The one she had come to see was holed up in a guest chamber, pouring wine for herself, alone.
Fiery red hair that caught the eye at once, and a body so solidly built that most men would have stepped aside before her. The fourth of the Saintesses, known to the world as the Guardian Saintess — Alesia.
"Sister. It's been far too long."
"A festival season, they say — though I suppose it's only my imagination that finds the timing suspicious?"
Alesia cast a sidelong glance at Patina, her red eyes hazy with drink.
"You've probably guessed right."
"…I thought so."
Rather than reaching for a bottle, she tilted a wooden cask to fill her cup. Then, fishing out a second empty cup, Alesia tipped the cask again and filled that one too.
"Drink. It was getting awkward, carousing alone in the Lord's courtyard — now I've got an excuse."
"…I'll drink gladly."
Patina sat down across from her and calmly raised the cup to her lips.
For a while, an unnatural silence stretched between them.
"You could be proud of him."
Alesia broke the quiet first.
"He was a remarkable boy."
"……"
"I never quite understood how he turned so dark, so gloomy."
No — she could guess.
"The crushing expectations, everyone's eyes on him — whatever it was, all of it must have weighed on him from every direction."
"……"
"Peace came, so to the old powers and the entrenched factions, the Hero — rootless blood, no pedigree — must have been an eternal thorn in their side."
He hadn't been born a noble, after all.
As always, blue-bloods simply could not stomach, not within their precious sanctified worldview, the sight of those they deemed backward and inferior rising to prominence —
…Though she supposed not everyone thought that way.
And those who did would have wielded even such foolishness with a deft hand — building their own factions with it, smearing him with it, swelling their power on the foundation it made.
"It's not as though the Empire is uniquely cursed in that respect."
"…You even know that much."
"I don't know it. It just seems like that's how it would be."
Whether she had learned the details late mattered little — though late it certainly was. Even if she had learned the truth a little sooner, would anything have changed?
The one who meant to leave had already gone.
"In your eyes, Sister — what was he like?"
"A remarkable boy. Looks I like, a personality that's thoughtful and careful… I didn't merely take a liking to him, I fell head over heels. It felt like living through a good dream and a bad dream in turns. I've been kicked around plenty of times before, but… this one actually hurts."
"Sister…"
"I never understood what sort of crushing expectations people place on the Hero's blood."
Even so.
"…I don't see how any of it could be reason enough for that boy to grow up so dark."
"That's…"
Patina, at a loss for words, simply kept tipping her cup for a while.
"You know what, though?"
"…Please, tell me."
"About Cariel."
Alesia then fell silent for a long, long moment.
As if weighing whether this was something she ought to drag into the light at all.
…As if deliberating it with the utmost care.
Patina grew uneasy.
What truth had she uncovered, that she would hesitate like this?
No matter how deeply Cariel might resent his father or the others, she knew — of course she knew — he would never readily speak such things aloud to anyone.
They had known each other that long.
To the point of being called dour, morbid, he had always been strikingly reluctant to engage with anyone at all.
"……"
As a child, he had been the very opposite of that.
Had he changed?
Or had the world around him changed instead?
The Imperial Princess had floated the possibility of some outside pressure she couldn't see, some magical influence, some malicious scheme at work. But surely it couldn't be something so vague as that…
"He says he's been cursed by the Demon King."
And so —
The instant those words left her mouth,
Patina surfaced from her thoughts — and then, half-convinced she had misheard,
she simply stared, eyes wide and blank, for a long while.
"…Pardon?"
"You didn't hear me?"
"No — wait, just a moment. My mind was somewhere else… I must have misheard something."
"Then you heard me right the first time."
That couldn't be.
"He says he's cursed by the Demon King. And then he says, bitter as you please, that he's colluded with the Demon King. I thought I'd misheard too, the first time."
And with that, Alesia let out a laugh — haha — a sound that seemed to have the soul drained out of it.
"He told me that getting entangled with him brings misfortune, so I shouldn't do it. That's the curse, apparently. For something meant to convince me, isn't it a remarkably unhelpful explanation? Eh?"
"Th-that can't… be. You must have — you must have misheard… something…"
"Patina."
Alesia spoke with the air of someone resigned.
"If you and the Heroes truly didn't know… then I'd say this was a very serious problem indeed."
"……"
"Family, you said? Like a little brother, you said?"
Then why…
"Why did no one do anything, until he was driven out like that?"
"……"
Her head was spinning.
What had she just heard?
Had she misheard?
Was she caught in some nightmare?
Why, out of every possibility in the world, why—
why did the Demon King's existence have to surface?
Hadn't that matter ended long ago?
Could it be.
Just as the Imperial Princess had suggested —
if every injustice that befell Cariel had, in truth, been tied to the Demon King's curse—?
"……"
Then when had Cariel learned of it?
The mere thought turned her blood to ice.
Her back was soaked through before she even noticed.
"You didn't know? Truly? And why am I the first to hear this — ah. I see. I'm the first person that boy ever told with his own mouth."
Of all things…
"……I'm dumbfounded."
Alesia realized that something capable of leaving her more exasperated, more aghast, more flabbergasted than this could still happen to her — and her strength left her all at once.
She didn't even have the will to drink. That was a novel one, that was.
"If this reaches the capital, it'll be chaos, won't it?"
"……"
"Cariel had no intention of broadcasting it to the four winds either, so he simply left quietly. He never did seem the type to bare his heart to just anyone."
But still — even so, this was too much.
"…Am I late yet again."
"It isn't your fault, Sister… No. Never."
"Then whose is it?"
How lamentable.
A sigh escaped her unbidden.
"It's mine. I did wrong."
She should have tried harder to understand him.
Even if the Demon King's curse had, in truth, warped his mind and his judgment—
…he should never have been swept up in it. They should have shielded him from it.
So that someone would watch over Cariel a little more closely, try to understand him a little better.
…They should have tried, at least a little harder.
"I don't know all the details myself. I've only told you what I heard."
Even as she spoke her resignation aloud, Alesia seemed to be grinding something down — a fury held in check, constant and taut.
"I respect Lady Ermina and Lord Rueld. The other Heroes too, of course."
Because it was a plain, undeniable fact that they had saved her.
Come to think of it, the fact that she received every manner of training and became a Saintess was itself part of that same thread.
"But if I happen to see their faces next time, I'm afraid I'll curse them out without meaning to. And I can't even tell, anymore, whether that would be right or wrong."
"…Sister."
"You and I were lucky — we fought shoulder to shoulder through several sectors, covered each other's backs."
But you see.
"…You're nothing like the person you bragged about back then, all mouths and pride. And thinking on it — wasn't everything you boasted of just stories of a past you remembered?"
I should have noticed how strange that was. Careless of me, truly.
"You heard every nasty rumor the capital could brew up. In a past I know nothing about, maybe that boy really was vile. I don't know the past, don't know the truth of it — so I can't say for certain. But no matter how I turn it over… I just can't picture him doing it."
So let me ask the one who knows him best.
"Cariel — recently, I mean. Not the old days you remember. What was he like lately? Did he commit sins vile enough to earn that kind of condemnation?"
"I…"
She didn't know, not precisely.
And yet — the children and heirs of Heroes were always swept up in every manner of slander. That was the way of things.
She herself, under the pretext of being the Hero's ward, had been buried under abuse of every kind.
Worse, the world praised you to your face and spat on the very word Hero behind your back — that was the sort of people they were.
She didn't believe everyone seethed with such malice.
But she knew full well that humanity was never made of nothing but goodness.
To embrace even that malice and press forward; to bring even such people along, patiently, into understanding —
that was righteous guidance, that was true leadership, that was virtue.
…Hadn't they said as much, again and again?
In the end, everyone would come to accept it.
That was how great goodwill was achieved; that was how justice was made.
The words Rueld and Ermina had spoken were plain, proven truth.
Wasn't Patina herself, now the pride and glory of the Empire, the very proof and demonstration of it?
So then — Cariel could have been, too.
……Had I not been lost in a hollow delusion, all this time?
He and I — we were surely different, he and I.
She suddenly remembered the boy who had looked at her with lonely eyes — and then turned his back.
Now that she thought of it, truly, that boy—
at some point, he had stopped sparing her even a glance.
And it had been her who reached out first.
And even that had been one-sided expectation —
something rather one-sided, indeed……
"He knew you'd come after him."
"……"
"Handle it as you see fit. I'm done. I'm past the point of a troubled heart — I feel like I'll come apart… I need to swallow it here — the rage? The grief? Whatever it is, I need to let it settle… before I can go on living."
So — anything else you want to ask?
"……"
There was so much she wanted to ask.
But looking into those hollow eyes, that drained, spiritless face —
she couldn't bring herself to ask anything, blunt and direct as she'd meant to be.
And besides.
Patina herself felt as though something sharp were driving into her chest, again and again.
A sudden, unwarranted pain.
As if through the wounds those barbs had opened, something was draining out of her, thread by thread.
Her strength left her all at once.
As if her heart had been scooped hollow.
"…You're in a bad way too."
By now Alesia couldn't even muster resentment, couldn't even work up the will to be angry.
She was a lost lamb.
A young lamb who had believed she was running hard and true — never even knowing she was wandering — had only just realized she'd lost her way.
Perhaps that was why.
…She looked so utterly bewildered.
It was hard to unload a tirade on someone in that state, wasn't it?
"Forget it. Just drink."
Wine was a fine thing.
Drink enough and everything grew peaceful, everything was forgotten, a smile crept up on you without cause.
Of course.
It wasn't so, every time.
When grief and fury swelled so vast, so monstrously huge that words failed to hold them—
drink only made her uglier than usual.
She had thought she could pour it out and wash it away with wine. Not at all.
It turned out that was nothing more than cramming every manner of filth and refuse, tight and tidier, into some cramped warehouse of the inner self — the soul, the unconscious — piling debts upon debts.
"Haah."
Times like this, she ought to at least sleep.
Yet even drunk into a haze—
why did that scene rise before her so vividly, as if it had happened moments ago?
Her mind was far too clear. There'd be no sleeping.
Was it really such a shock?
She lifted the cask and tipped it, but only drops of water fell, one by one. She kept it tilted for a long while, and still the amount fell endlessly short.
Alesia nearly hurled the cask across the room — but in the end, she set it down gently.
It seemed that she had liked him — more than she'd thought. More, and more, and still more……
I think I loved him.