I Did Nothing - 5
How had those words — I did nothing — sounded to her? Whether she believed them or not was Theresia's to decide.
If she could claw free of the doubt and accept it as the truth, then it would end with her brother's death and nothing more. But if that doubt kept growing... well, she would never live anything resembling a normal life again.
I knew all too well how terrifying a growing suspicion could be. No matter how sound a person's mind, once it slipped its moorings, they could no longer see what stood right in front of them.
I watched Theresia a while where she had sunk to the ground, sobbing blankly into nothing, before letting out a small sigh.
"It's time for you to go. The sun is setting."
The sky was dimming by degrees. Even the last thin strand of light had been smothered by cloud, and nothing but a murky red glow lit the garden now.
How pitiful it was. A woman collapsed on the ground could not have looked more wretched.
Theresia, who had not answered despite being called time and again, finally dragged herself upright, swaying. For an instant the moon was reflected in her eyes; then that light guttered out, leaving nothing behind but hollow, emptied pupils.
Resentment was written plainly across the face she turned toward me. And why shouldn't it be? After everything I had done, it would have been cause for suspicion had she felt anything else.
"...I am going to curse you."
"By all means."
"I will pray harder than anyone has ever prayed for you to die more wretchedly than anyone alive. Your family, the people you love — I will see to it that every one of them comes to hate you."
Resentment streamed down from her widened eyes, then fell as rain — a downpour that drenched her and her alone. It was raining on her beneath this moon, a rain that would follow her for the rest of her days.
"I will curse you, Robert Taylor."
"Will you, now."
"...Do you know you're insufferable right down to the very end? I never loved a man like you. Not once, not from the beginning."
"I know. I courted you knowing it all the same."
I hadn't understood at first. I do now. Even the meaning of those words would remain forever beyond her.
Receiving curses like these was no longer a once-or-twice affair. I had heard them by the tens and hundreds, until they could no longer cut.
And so my face gave nothing away. If she truly wanted to wound me, she would do better to take up a knife and drive it in herself; a few worthless words posed no threat to me at all.
Watching Theresia stagger away, I realized how profoundly refreshed I felt. The look she'd given me was one of a person confronting something she could not comprehend — resentment and hatred churning through it all the same.
It was a face that ought to have left me feeling grimy, yet here I was, savoring euphoria at the sight of it. What, exactly, had I become?
Well. I had been broken for a long time now. How many souls could die dozens of deaths and keep their wits about them?
If ever the day came when every spring wound into my mind let loose at once, I too would surely collapse, just as Theresia had moments ago. I could only pray that day would also be the day my eternal rest finally arrived.
If I were made to repeat the regression one more time, I might truly lose my mind and kill everything that crossed my sight. Even now, I hung by a thread.
My goal was simply to live this life well, in whatever way I could manage — so that the thread I clutched would not snap.
"...That should keep Theresia quiet for a good while."
Calling Arthur's death "soon" would be close enough to the truth, but in the state she was in, she would rage for months yet. Even if she did set her sights on my life, it would not be at once.
It scarcely mattered whether assassins came. I was hardly fool enough to leave myself unprepared — and I had been poisoned and hunted and knifed enough times to grow sick of it. Come, by all means. It might prove a fine opportunity to demonstrate precisely how House Taylor answers such callers.
By the time I noticed, the garden lay under perfect darkness, and turning my head I found I was standing alone. Theresia had vanished somewhere along the way; apparently I had been standing there, blank and by myself, for some time.
Well over a fortnight had passed since my regression into this hundred-and-first life began. In all that time, the only person I had sent off was Theresia — hardly breakneck progress, was it?
But this lightness in my chest was the truest thing I had felt in a long while. Severing the chains of bonds I had strained so hard to hold together was enough. I was certain now that I could look upon her face without the past rising up behind it.
Hadn't she once said she regretted ever loving me? When she had never loved me at all — to think such words had left her lips so freely.
Tsk.
At the sudden flare of irritation I lifted my head, and there in the sky hung the full moon, clean and unsullied. Its pale light clove the darkness, swallowed the lesser starlight around it, and breathed out a chill radiance of its own.
The shadow it cast could manage to sketch one figure and no more — mine — and unbidden, I thought how shabby that seemed.
I had turned time back more than a hundred times, yet that moon alone had not changed an iota. Such was reality. And how much had I changed in the meanwhile? I closed my eyes briefly and drew in a breath.
Unlike the light, the air itself was astonishingly warm. I let that warmth settle over me, and it wiped even the tangled noise of my thoughts away, clean as a slate.
Changed or not, I was still me, in the end. Why spin it all into such complexity? There was only ever one thing to do: my part, and do it properly.
I gave my cheek a single sharp slap — crack — and set off. On this night of the full moon, my footsteps trailing the moonlight felt lighter than they had in years.
"You've been gazing at the moon a great deal lately. Is something troubling you?"
To the woman staring vacantly at the night sky alone, a man who looked every inch her adjutant had spoken first. His tone was roguish by nature, and it always sounded as though he were teasing her.
Adele clicked her tongue briefly, then turned to her adjutant, Lotos.
"Nonsense. Use the time to sleep instead."
"If I sleep now, I'll miss my moment entirely. Hm. If we mean to arrive in time for the Full Moon Festival, we ought to be departing a little later, shouldn't we?"
What puzzled Lotos was her reason for attending the Full Moon Festival at all. The festival she had waved off as a tiresome obligation every single year — why join it now, of all years?
There was nothing to suggest business with anyone there. The barbarian incursions had not increased, and even the Emperor took no interest in such festivities.
Unable to fathom what had prompted this sudden declaration, Lotos could only widen his eyes and wait for her answer.
Adele had a fair idea of what he wanted to ask. Why go to the Full Moon Festival? — no doubt that was it.
But the answer was simple enough to be laughable, even to her. She wanted to go. That was all there was to it.
The reason she had never gone was that she didn't feel like it; the reason she was going now was that, quite suddenly, she did.
Didn't such moods come over everyone now and then? The thing you always do turns tiresome — and the thing you've always avoided, you find yourself wanting to try, just once.
Calling it a whim was a hard word to attach to a Grand Duke, so her subordinates had all quietly concluded that some plan of her own must lie behind it. Though of course, one as close to her as Lotos had a fair inkling of her true motive.
"Surely you are not going simply because the mood strikes you?"
"That's right, it struck me. And there's someone I need to find while I'm there."
"Someone to find? There's been no dangerous criminal fled to the capital lately, so far as I'm aware."
"...Do I look to you like a woman who does nothing but chase down criminals? I'm telling you I'm going to find one man. There's something I need to say to him — I couldn't finish saying it, last time."
At the word man, Lotos's eyes flew wide open. The subordinates lurking in hiding around the room reacted just the same, and from beneath a draped tiger pelt, Zeke's head popped out.
"Hold on — a man?"
"A man!"
"She said a man! The Grand Duke said a man!"
The room erupted in an instant, and Adele could only press her fingers to her brow and shake her head.
She had assumed they would at least try to stay hidden — but with more than ten of them crowded about like that, could the charade honestly be called hiding? She had deliberately played along, pretended not to notice, and their reward was to pop out into plain view. Her head throbbed.
"So now you hide in plain sight. Am I truly not frightening to you?"
"You are frightening. Which is why — that sword, if you would. Yes. Might you kindly put the sword away?"
Lotos nudged the blade at his throat aside by a careful inch, then answered with a strained grin.
Adele's face was always expressionless. On rare occasion something would catch her interest and she might even smile — but when that blank face came at you holding a blade... well, it was a touch frightening, no denying it.
The moment Adele put the sword away, Lotos and the others huddled into a tight cluster and waited for her to speak. A man. For a woman who looked fated to grow old and die swinging nothing but a sword, wasn't that a thoroughly entertaining word to let slip?
The North was starved for gossip at the best of times, and every pair of eyes fixed on Adele had begun to glitter in unison.
"It seems I misspoke. Forget everything you just heard."
"I definitely heard the 'man' part, though—"
"The Grand Duke is embarrassed, can't you tell? Just keep it down."
"But doesn't that amount to a tacit confession? That there really is a man she's seeing?"
However flatly she replied, a dozen voices piled onto every word. They were a rowdy lot on any given day, but in the end, wasn't it her own doing? She should have watched her mouth.
She should have mulled this over while she was alone — regretting it as she was, Adele's eyes narrowed.
Quick-witted as ever, Lotos caught the shift in the air and drove a boot into Zeke's shin.
"Ow!"
"Quiet, you. Can't you see the Grand Duke glaring at you?"
"The one I'm glaring at right now is you, Lotos."
Shameless to the last, Adele's adjutant simply kept on smiling pleasantly. One can hardly press a sword to a smiling face, after all.
Adele swallowed her temper, finished a slow, deep breath, and finally spoke with something closer to composure.
"...Before now, there was someone I told to come north and find me."
A person — not a man. Her tone laid weight on the distinction, and the subordinates nodded. These were, in truth, companions who had served beside her since the days before she was Grand Duke, back when she led her own mercenary company. No one alive understood what she meant to say better than the people gathered in this room.
"I even gave him my handkerchief."
Someone gulped audibly, and Lotos's gaze flicked sideways in search of the culprit. In truth, alarm bells were ringing in his own skull as well.
Pushing his glasses up his nose and sorting through one thought after another, Lotos opened his mouth carefully. Not many men had come north of late. Far fewer still had come seeking Adele Igrit.
Which meant, by process of elimination, that the man had ignored her summons. That made him remarkable in his own right — to possess the nerve to refuse the Grand Duke of the North... Did his house perhaps hold a duchy? Turning the question over and over, Lotos finally asked:
"Don't tell me you intend to go looking for that man?"
"Near enough. One way or another, I'm getting my handkerchief back."
"...And the festival — surely going to the Full Moon Festival isn't also for...?"
"The festival is because I want to go. It suddenly came to me that I ought to."
Well, if that was all... things were still salvageable. Lotos exhaled in relief and mopped his brow.
If this journey to the capital were truly happening for the sake of one man, the entire Northern Defense Force would have to be thrown onto emergency footing. He could see it all too vividly: alarms blaring across the ranks over some absurd order — Seize the disgraceful man who accepted a lady's handkerchief and never once came to return it— In fact, hadn't it happened a time or two before?
The Grand Duke Adele occupied a singular place in the North. She had climbed to the seat of Grand Duke in a woman's body, and her temperament — that blunt, unyielding streak of hers — shared a great deal, in one way or another, with the disposition of the people who had settled these lands.
A wolf, they said she resembled. Recalling the words of some elder of the northern tribes, Lotos frowned.
If word spread that the Grand Duke — loved and backed as she was by every soul in the North — had taken a man? He could feel cold sweat prickling out at the mere thought of what would unfold.
As long as it isn't that, we'll manage. Everything else can be handled.
Just as Lotos was reassuring himself that he need only dodge that one catastrophe, Adele added:
"And while I'm at it, I'll be bringing someone back with me."
"Someone you'll be bringing back, you say?"
"I told him to come, and he didn't. So this time, I'll go collect him myself. I took a liking to that man."
Adele's voice was utterly serious. What startled Lotos, however, was that she had smiled — faintly, but there all the same. It meant the words I took a liking to him were no lie.
Yet he couldn't begin to guess where she had met such a person. Adele's stopover in the capital had lasted less than a single day — and in that sliver of time, she had supposedly found someone to her liking?
...He would know soon enough, once he met the man. Whether the fellow liked it or not, once Adele had set her mind on something, she would likely stay in the capital until she ran him to ground.
Light from the full moon slipped through the gap in the office window and pooled across the room. Not a single cloud marred it; the moon poured out its mysterious glow undiminished.
What thread of fate would this full moon drag in with it? Lotos kneaded his furrowed brow and sighed. He could only pray she wouldn't actually try hauling the man back by force.
And if she truly did? Then he would be the one sent tumbling along behind her, rolling like a dung beetle all the way to the capital. The Grand Duke did the deed while he carried the worry — he could only curse a reality so unjust.