Nothing Goes Smoothly - 4
We had talked long enough that the sky beyond the window had gone yellow.
Evening.
Victoria asked if I would have dinner with her, but I had somewhere I needed to be, so I shook my head. The dormitory where she lived served an evening meal, so at least she would not go hungry. Easy in my mind on that account, I told her I would see her tomorrow and left the student dorms.
Just to the left of the main gate stood a large building. That was where I was to live.
The moment I stepped inside, someone came out to receive me. Not a caretaker — a genuine butler. King Hypion had arranged the place for me; it would have been stranger if no one of that sort were here.
What I did once I was inside was simple.
Wash, change, eat, and be left alone.
If there was a trouble in how little of my own will I showed, it was this: I had no money at all.
No one explained why I had been placed in the Royal Academy. Having to infer every part of it was a little stifling. My head was never very good to begin with. Making sense of things I had already lived through was one matter; predicting what would happen next, or what a person I had never seen might be thinking, was far too difficult.
Even so, it was not so unbearable that I had to ask.
Hypion would age in time, and an aging body wears out and sickens. Then, in the end, he would use that chance at treatment called the Harvest. I could not know when he would spend his single opportunity, but there was no chance he would leave it unused. They had praised the Harvest to the skies as a good thing, had they not?
When that time came, I would receive memories already set in order as memory, so it was better to wait for then.
Once the Harvest begins, what follows is not the reading of memory. I watch alongside him, and remember. The difference is a subtle one. A memory carries its owner's own view of things; if I am watching with him, mine enters instead.
Of course, that is not only a drawback.
I simply cannot move that flesh. What I feel is the same — no, I feel more. Even the movements of the body that might be called unconscious, I feel every one of them, from the surface of the skin all the way down to the organs.
That was how I passed the day.
The next day.
The flesh was asleep, but I myself do not sleep, so I rose with the morning.
A woman whose occupation was that of maid came in, saw me sit up at once, and made a face as if her skin had crawled.
Was it so strange? The shape of me was based on Soo from before she grew tall, with a faint trace of Choseol stirred through it, so perhaps it did look that way. The skin is white enough to seem bloodless.
When I got out of bed, the maid came over. I washed as she led me to wash, and put on the clothes as she dressed me in them.
While I was eating breakfast, the butler — I still did not know his name — asked whether he should ready a carriage. I shook my head and refused. If I did not at least walk this far, there would be far too little movement in the day. So I greeted the butler who saw me off at the door and went straight on to the Royal Academy.
Carriages came and went along the avenue that ran from the main gate to the building at the center of the school. Beside them, students were coming out of the dormitories on their way to class. Some lived outside, as I did. Others, of course, lived in the dorms.
The buildings had been raised in a thoroughly classical style. Stairs climbed to the entrance, and great columns stood in a row, like a temple. Within lay a wide hall, and on either side of it staircases led upward, spiraling from left and right in opposite turns.
I would have no cause to climb them until next year. Year and floor were matched, and I had come in as a first-year, so I made for a classroom on the ground floor.
It was not like the classrooms in my faded memories, desks and chairs jammed tight together. It was very wide. The room opened in a fan, and at the point of the fan stood a dais where the teacher taught, like a stage, with tables and chairs rising around it in tiers. Considering how few people there were, it was open enough that one might wonder whether it was too thin to be called a classroom at all.
Several students were already inside, boys and girls both. Standing in the doorway and looking the class over, I could make out about four groups. Five, strictly speaking. The last was the group that was no group, and Victoria and I belonged to it.
Victoria had not arrived. She was often late to rise, and today was the same. She was running hard even now; I hoped she would not be late. Thinking that, I headed for the seat I had taken yesterday.
I climbed the steps, and someone was already there.
"Eek!"
The moment she saw me, the girl sprang up in fright, blurted that she was sorry, and fled. She had been in this class yesterday. Run as she might, there was nowhere she could really run to — so why run? She was far off before I had any chance to speak.
It felt awkward to move somewhere else, so I went to the seat I had used yesterday. Just in case, I looked it over. It was clean. If she had been up to something, there would have been a trace of it. Nothing stood out, which meant she had simply sat down and bolted in surprise when I arrived.
I ought to have taken an empty seat. Yesterday's place had been vacant, so I had thought I might always sit there. Surely the seats did not change from one day to the next?
Not long after, Victoria came in. The teacher followed almost at once, so she had escaped being marked late by a hair. She sat beside me, as she had yesterday. She must have run the whole way; the heat coming off her reached me even here.
She really ought to get up a little earlier.
Fortunate, if one cared to call it that — or else a truly useless place to spend a power. The sweat evaporated the instant it formed, so her clothes were not wet in the least. At first I had wondered why her breathing was so ragged. Then the sweat vanished the moment it appeared, and I knew she was using her ability.
A small thing, and then the day's first class ended, and lunchtime came.
"I'm exhausted, Bell..."
While the others were getting up and filing out, Victoria whispered it to me. It was not her body that was tired. The weariness on her face was in the mind. Many of the people here stood somewhere other than the ones she usually met, so simply being in this place was hard on her. Victoria was never a particularly social person. She took after her father more than her mother, perhaps; she was happiest with her hands on clockwork. Set someone like that down where every relationship had to be watched, and of course she would wear out.
"You'll feel better once you've eaten."
"I'm not that simple, you know."
Even so, a smile came to her mouth. I remembered how she had eaten a tremendous amount yesterday, declaring the food delicious. It seemed it had not only tasted good. It had been letting the stress out as well.
By unspoken custom the higher-ranked left first, so Victoria, who was not of the noble class, and I were still waiting in our seats when a girl came up to me all at once.
"You're Bell, aren't you? Come with me."
She offered no introduction, and her manner was imperious. I nodded anyway. When I nodded without a word, anger crossed her face, but she said nothing to me. She wanted to speak. Something stronger was holding it down. Someone had used this girl to summon me. Bringing me was the order, so she was forcing herself to endure.
"Bell, you don't have to go with her, do you?"
"Eat first."
Victoria asked it out of worry for me. And which of us, exactly, was worrying about which.
I followed the girl who had called me. She did not go to the dining hall. She led me away from the classroom, deep into the building, and then turned once at a right angle and went in farther still.
The smell changed as we entered. If the outer halls had smelled of a school, the scent in here was thick. Not a scent so much as a heavy smell of grass.
"Lady Theodore. I have brought her."
"Well done. You may withdraw."
A very sharp-looking girl was seated inside. What set her apart was that, though it was summer, she wore a considerably long dress, unlike the rest. The students in class had been in relatively short clothes, so this one was either behind the times or someone obliged to mind tradition. The latter seemed the more likely.
"Lady Theodore. She is an outsider of unknown origin."
"It is quite all right. Or must I make it an order?"
At that, the girl who had brought me bowed her head, then whispered as she brushed past me.
"See that you conduct yourself with courtesy toward Lady Theodore."
And she left the room. She was utterly devoted — not flattery, or anything of that sort. From the inside, she held the other girl important. This Theodore had people's regard.
"Come. Sit here."
I could not tell whether the name was a house or a person. She indicated the place before her. A table stood there, and tea had been set at the empty seat, so I sat.
"For one the royal house has raised so high, you are remarkably quiet. When I saw you on the broadcast, you seemed a sharper person."
She said it while looking at me. Anyone who did not know better might have mistaken that face for a glare, but there was no particular feeling in it. Only curiosity.
"I am Canna Tamerlane Theodore. You are Bell?"
House Theodore. A considerably high rank — a name that lived in Aurora's memory.
"Yes. The name I am using now is Bell."
So I told her the truth.
"You say that strangely. As if you had some original name."
Her face was full of questions, and her manner of speech had shifted, just slightly. The stiff tone from a moment ago had been a pose. This was how she actually spoke. She seemed to be spending thought on it — but was she not especially clever?
"Most people use the name they started with. This body never had one."
An artificially made piece of meat. Hence, no name.
The girl before me thought for a long while after hearing that.
"Ah. Is it that the owner of the body and the owner of the mind are different?"
I did not remember that ever being said on a broadcast, or in a newspaper. Had she drawn it from my words alone?
"Yes. How did you know?"
It was the one who had spoken who startled worse, and drew back. Fear, disgust, doubt, and curiosity — her face was a muddle of all of them.
"I just thought... maybe. That it might be so. What you said was similar to what I'd imagined."
I did not quite understand. It sounded as though she had once imagined something whose body and mind were not the same, and I had said the sort of thing that person would say.
"You are a curious person."
She blinked at that.
"You aren't going to do anything to me?"
"Why would I?"
"If the body's owner is someone else — no. Oh. I see. The body was empty from the start. That's it. You said it had no name, so you didn't steal it. That's why you can be so brazen about it?"
She reached the truth even while she was still speaking, and then she asked it. She was clever. I had been wrong to think she might be foolish merely because her manner of speech changed so easily.
"Yes."
She had a good head. Daegon had been like that, and so had Yuanshi Tianzun. I might hold the memories, but I cannot do as they did.
"You don't say much. Does it bother you?"
"No. I am not much of one for talking."
Speak too much, and mistakes come easily. Even in those faded days, I had never been someone who talked a great deal. And across a lifetime I had already said enough that my way of speaking would never go back to what it had been. I had begged, and begged, and begged again.
In any case.
"What is it you want of me?"
She had some purpose, or she would not have called me. I looked straight at her and asked her business. She turned my words over, and then she said this.
"This time, to greet you. And if anything happens from now on, say that the ducal daughter of House Theodore sent for you, and come find me."
She said it as if she already knew that something would.
I drank what had been set in front of me. It was very bland. No — in this case one ought to call it clear. It was not to my taste. At that, she smiled wryly.
"Careless of you. What were you going to do if that had been poison?"
Closer to advice than to a joke. I could not tell what she wanted, but I guessed she had called me in order to take my measure from one angle and another. In that case, I ought to give her the point. I do try, in my own way, to say only what is true, so I answered like this.
Then I rose, bowed to her, and left the room.