True Feelings
Chicken soup.
In his previous life it had been the traditional, classic cold remedy of the Western nations, and Europa was much the same—similar ingredients, similar climate. First impressions and old prejudices had led Karem astray, but chicken soup really was the counterpart of samgyetang or chicken porridge. Boil a whole chicken on the bone with vegetables until the meat falls off, then eat the flesh with the broth; throw in ginseng and a few medicinal herbs while it simmers and you essentially have samgyetang. Without realizing it, the man who had once looked down on the dish had been following the proper recipe all along.
“Heh—atchoo!”
“Are you feeling any better, my lady?”
“Ahem. It’s only the early stages. Focus on your work.”
“Your sneezes are getting louder.”
Karem set down the knife he had been using to chop vegetables. Chicken soup and mulled wine. He had meant to serve them together, but the mulled wine was clearly needed first. Catherine’s curse would force him to keep darting in and out of the kitchen, yet that was no problem. Unlike samgyetang, chicken soup was easy to make, and Mary had already prepared nearly all the ingredients.
He paused the vegetable prep, set another pot on a burner, and poured in an entire bottle of wine.
Glug-glug-glug—
Then he halved every piece of fruit he had ready, mercilessly hacking peel and flesh into rough chunks.
“Hey, kid. You don’t need to put that much work into the fruit for mulled wine.”
“I’m trying to finish it faster.”
The usual recipe called for a long steep after the soup was done. This was a shortcut. Whether food or drink, the smaller the pieces, the quicker they cooked.
“It’ll look a little rough.”
“I can tell just by looking. You’ve butchered them.”
Karem ignored Catherine’s sniffling rebuke and dumped the mangled fruit, its juice, cinnamon sticks, and a generous extra measure of sugar straight into the pot.
Whew. That’s better.
As the pot began to simmer, Catherine’s expression eased. The dry, chilly sensation in her nose warmed under the tart fragrance rising from the wine. Satisfied, Karem picked up his knife again.
“Ugh. Maybe because my body suddenly got bigger…”
He worked the vegetables with careful strokes. Thock-thock-thock-thock—
Nothing flashy, yet far slower than the crisp pace he had shown before.
His knife work sounds sluggish. Still not used to the new body?
Catherine studied his back and nodded at her own conclusion. She was not far wrong. Hands half the size of before, weaker strength, shorter reach, a completely different balance—adult memories intact or not, he had once adapted to a child’s body after reincarnation and now needed time to adapt again.
Thock—tap-tap-tap, shhk-shhk-shhk-shhk—
Still, having done it once made the second adjustment quick. In no time he was flying through the vegetables at his old speed.
Mulled wine, a drink he had enjoyed almost as often as ordinary wine, tasted unusually precious tonight—the cold weather and the first hints of illness made all the difference. Fragrance travels farther and deeper when warm.
Slurp—
The gentle perfume of orange, the bright lift of lemon, the sharp punch of lime teased her gently warmed nose while the mulled wine filled her mouth. Extra sugar pushed a deep sweetness through the grape notes at first sip. Too much of that and the tongue would tire, yet just as it threatened to cloy, the citrus pulp tumbled across her palate, bursting with a brief, vivid insistence. Then the dry wine rose late, the cinnamon struck cleanly, and together they wrapped her chilled, dry mouth and tongue in heat.
Hoooooo—
Catherine’s throat worked in silence until she finally lifted her lips from the cup and exhaled a long, contented breath.
“Hooo… not bad at all.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Though it looks dreadful.”
She lowered her gaze. The mulled wine in the silver cup Karem held was a pitiful wreck, utterly at odds with the remarkable flavor. A Sargasso of ruthlessly butchered fruit floated in the purple liquid; orange, lime, and lemon peels and flesh stained beyond recognition, a bare cinnamon stick jutting up like a mast.
“Th-the appearance is just because I wanted it ready as fast as possible—”
“Which is why I’m eating it without complaint.”
Taste mattered, of course, but so did looks. Wealthy Romans of old had hired sculptors at great expense for pure show-pieces meant only to dazzle a banquet; people still declared such beautiful dishes delicious simply because they looked the part. Pretty food looked tasty. By that measure Karem’s mulled wine resembled someone chewing up a rainbow and soaking the mess in purple liquid.
“Sluuurp. By the way, is that chicken soup on the burner all right left like that?”
“All that’s left is waiting for the meat to cook through. I’ve turned the flame down low—nothing will boil over or scorch.”
Karem answered with easy confidence. Proper heat control alone kept most disasters at bay.
“Fair enough. You’re the cook; if you say so, it must be true. Incidentally, how did your visit with Elder Iona go?”
Karem promptly recounted everything except the “advice” Iona had given him. Catherine listened while sipping the mulled wine he kept offering, eyes on the burner, until her face suddenly twisted.
“What? A priestly invitation? From whom?”
“Elder Iona, my lady.”
“For whom?”
“For me.”
“Just because you awakened holy power? Well—holy power isn’t exactly ‘just,’ but still.”
“He said it had been a long time since he’d seen someone my age with this much of it. Went on about capacity and residual echoes and such.”
“Ah.”
Catherine mentally kicked herself. Karem’s body had grown, yet originally he was still an eleven-year-old boy years away from his coming-of-age. The age of holy-power awakening varied wildly; even she knew that much, but she had never heard of anyone this young awakening at all. Feeling oddly self-conscious, she started to look at him—then, just before their eyes met, fixed her gaze firmly back on the pot. That face was still impossible to get used to.
While Catherine wrestled with her own conflict, Karem was locked in a similar one.
Ah, this is a disaster.
Iona’s advice, step one: create the right atmosphere through natural conversation. Karem understood atmosphere mattered—he even knew the classic “shaky-bridge effect.” Yet they had grown so comfortable talking that he had somehow drifted into the usual time-killing chatter. And the real problem was that every piece of Iona’s counsel began with establishing that atmosphere. He brooded hard. Theory was one thing; he had zero experience actually building a mood. He could not even find the opening move.
“Got something you want to say?”
“…You were looking the other way. How did you notice?”
“When someone’s face cycles through five expressions in three seconds, it would be stranger not to notice.”
So she had seen everything. He had thought her attention was elsewhere. Karem set the mulled wine down and buried his face in both hands. Catherine rapped the table with her knuckles.
“I’m still your employer. Let’s hear just how earth-shattering this worry of yours is.”
“I like you.”
So he simply threw it out there—raw and unfiltered.
“Right, you l… haa?”
He lifted his face to find Catherine frozen like a cat startled by thunder.
“Th… ha?”
“Yes. Exactly what you heard. Not preference, not fondness—affection. I like you.”
And just like that the dam cracked; words that had been jammed behind a complicated tangle of thoughts poured free.
“Until I met Lady Athanitas, my life was pure misery. Violence and neglect every single day. Unlike the other serf kids I never even got proper meals—I ate rats and bugs. And the perfect memories of a plentiful previous life only made the suffering stretch without end. Someone with perfect recall once said forgetfulness is humanity’s greatest blessing. I never understood it in my last life; I do now.”
“When the village was attacked, I ran not only because I hated the place, but because I figured dying alone on the road would be better than living like that. And—”
He had clung to the baseless hope that death might send him back to the old world. That was how desperately he had wanted out.
Though it was pretty funny that hunger still hurt the worst.
Wandering the forest, barely staving off starvation, he had met Catherine and Gordon.
“Back then my head was so full of ‘jackpot’ I didn’t have room to think, but looking back I’m certain it was love at first sight. No—I am certain.”
“W-what.”
By this point Iona’s carefully staged advice had vanished without a trace. Karem knew he had jumped the rails, yet it was far too late. The moment Catherine opened her mouth he was sure he would seize up again. So the answer was simple: dump everything before the words dried up.
“Yes, I know I’ve completely ruined the mood. But now that I’ve started, I’m going to say it all!”
“Heh—atchoo! Wait a secon—”
“Honestly, wouldn’t it be stranger not to fall for you? You gave a runaway kid who’d been persecuted a place to stay. You paid him. You even poured out every resource so he could do the work he loved. What man wouldn’t fall for that?”
The more he spoke the freer he felt—and the larger the fear of rejection grew. Wasn’t that only natural? Atmosphere? Zero. He had just steamrolled through his monologue while Catherine was already fighting a cold. His only excuse was this: if he did not spill everything right now, he would keep waiting for the “right moment” until the day he died.
So he did it.
So he went through with it.
The mulled wine in the center of the table cooled to lukewarm. Meanwhile Catherine—exhausted, blindsided by an emotional flood—felt her mind begin to spin like a top. The intellect that had reached archmage rank by pure personal effort; the reason that sought the essence of things; the experience of one who had achieved agelessness. All those accumulated years told her that every word she had just been hit with was pure fact, the unvarnished truth of Karem’s heart.
The kid… likes me?
She opened and closed her mouth without managing question or answer. Normally she would have snapped out a yes, a no, or a deft change of subject. She could not. The reason was simple: Catherine had never experienced this. She had never even received a confession.
Anyone hearing that would scoff—with her looks and the centuries she had lived?—yet for her it was only natural. Decades of training under Olivier. More than twice that spent in research to become an archmage. Another century-plus climbing to sagehood after achieving agelessness. Roughly three hundred years in total. Even someone as gifted as she liked to claim herself had poured over a hundred pure years into nothing but magic. Imagine blasting straight through undergrad, master’s, doctorate, and independent research without pause—when exactly was there time for romance? The scraps of free time she did have had to be spent carefully stacking experience, skill, and budget, then used for the briefest rest.
While her heart floundered over how on earth to answer, her reason kept spinning, clinically dissecting the situation. Put bluntly: she felt goodwill. The endless parade of dishes she had never seen before constantly satisfied both her tongue and a mage’s curiosity. Poke him and he always snapped back—entertaining. And the face that had suddenly grown up under the Curse of Aging… not a beauty that drew gasps, no. But just as strongly flavored food quickly cloyed, that exotic face balanced right on the edge of handsome made her want to keep looking, even while her head kept turning away of its own accord.
Fatigue, the first fog of illness, a completely new experience of being confessed to—her heart heaved while her cool mage-reason continued analyzing every surrounding factor and possible outcome. Catherine felt her head growing physically hotter. No good. Thinking was starting to fail.
Ah, no—first I have to answer something, anything—
A mind that would not turn, a body heavy with weariness, a heart in chaos, reason wound tight as a spring, and an experience she had never lived through.
“You…”
By the time the mulled wine had gone cold, Catherine’s lips parted.
“You…”
“You insolent little brat! Even if your body’s grown, your head is still the same—do you really think I could accept a confession from you?”
Karem’s eyes flashed. Age was the problem?
“What if I’m not actually an eleven-year-old kid, the way you’ve seen me all this time?”
“What do you mean, ‘what if’—wait. What?”
“Yes. I have memories of a previous life.”
“What? Previous li—”
Clatter!
Both heads whipped toward the sudden noise. Beyond the kitchen doorway stood a shabby robed figure, the long pointed hood of a weary-looking elf. Narke stammered in a mix of panic and excitement. The mug that had caused the sound rolled at the feet of the worn robe.
“I-I-I-I only heard you were making mulled wine and thought I’d, uh, cadge a cup—”
“…How much did you hear?”
“Weeell… Karem and Lady Athanitas, um…”
Thud! Karem squeezed his eyes shut and slammed his forehead onto the table. Stinging shame crawled over his skin like ants. Catherine felt exactly the same. A mind that refused to work yet was forced to keep spinning; a heart in turmoil; reason analyzing the newly added complication; and now shame and humiliation on top of it all. Starting from her fingertips, a flush of scarlet soaked upward like white paper drinking ink—arms, shoulders, neck, face—until she looked ready to explode.
Then the critical point broke.
Thump!
“W-wait! Lady Athanitas?!”
“Sh-she collapsed—!? We have to m-move her first—!”
Catherine’s mind, pushed past its limit, short-circuited.
*** Attachment ***
— Mulled Wine or Vin Chaud —
A picture drawn for me by ChatGPT.