Don't Cry. Don't Cry. — 14
Nothing had happened to the people in the capital. There didn't seem to be any move to crack down on the Harvesters themselves, either. Thinking of Berne City, it wouldn't have been strange if someone had already acted.
In Berne City, the protesters' fury was curdling into despair. A fight may begin in anger, but let it drag on long enough and people simply wear out. Once the feeling settles, you start to see what the violence of emotion had kept hidden.
Perhaps that was why those who had marched in Berne City—the Purple Twilight Society—were now tearing into one another, split between the ones who said they ought to surrender and the ones who said surrendering now would only get them killed. Division is never a good sign. Of course, however it all rolls, I'm perfectly content so long as I can gather plenty of warmth along the way!
More pressing than that, I needed to say that a witch named Maleficent had attacked me. If I was granted an audience with the king, I meant to needle him over it. There had been an assault, and he hadn't protected me—what, exactly, had he been doing?
Tell my escort I'd been attacked, and the king would hear of it too. With that in mind, I waited for the day at the Royal Academy to end. It was hardly the sort of subject one ought to raise inside the academy.
Nothing particular happened in the classroom in the meantime. No—there was one thing. Near the end of class, the teacher told us to prepare for the midterm examinations, and most of the students stirred at that. It wasn't anything I needed to concern myself with.
Victoria's face going pale was a little funny. She has twice as much to study as an ordinary person, doesn't she? I cheered her on in my head, finished the afternoon classes, and stepped outside. Then I went to the front gate and called for Merryweather.
“Merryweather.”
“What? You called?”
“A witch attacked me.”
The moment I said it, Merryweather looked utterly astonished. She was supposed to be my guard—was it because she hadn't noticed a thing?
“And?”
And? What did she mean, and? Ah. Because I possess special powers, did she assume I could handle it myself?
It wouldn't be strange to see it that way. Still, if the thing could be done, it was better to let them resolve it with their own hands. To be able to deal with a witch would mean I was someone more powerful than the witch, wouldn't it? And there was every chance I couldn't deal with her at all. If she never formed a contract, and never attacked me, I would have no way to reach her. On top of that, having one's warmth taken away doesn't necessarily mean death…
A witch stripped of her warmth might become a monster as vicious as I am, so I meant to approach that part carefully. Of course, taking the failure of the second world as my lesson, I intended to move more boldly this time. Even so, the memory of the beast in that world—the one that had mocked me and taken its own life—rose up, and I found I couldn't readily steal the witch's warmth.
“You're my escort, aren't you? Aren't you going to report this to the king?”
“To the king, huh. Hmm…”
Merryweather turned a suspicious look on me. Saying out of nowhere that a witch had attacked me must have struck her as suspect. She was wary of me the way one watches a frightening monster.
When I'd been struck in the head yesterday, I suppose I ought to have regenerated quickly enough that the wound wouldn't show. My sense of pain is duller than it was back when I inhabited a living person's body, so it had slipped down my list of priorities—but looking back, it had been a rather horrific sight.
Hmm.
“First, how about you tell me what you know?”
That was what Merryweather said.
Ah. Right. For a proper report, simply announcing that a witch had attacked Bell would be a bit thin.
“Yesterday I was caught in an illusion, like a nightmare.”
While I was passing through that black space, the two witches had been talking behind me. I hadn't caught all of it, but partway through they said they had lost control somewhere. Say that the initiative of a spell was seized from them and it sounds like nothing much, yet when I retraced what I had been put through, it really had been extraordinary. From that morning until afternoon, I hadn't even been able to recognize that I was under an illusion. It was an immensely powerful magic.
“And it wasn't just an ordinary nightmare?”
Ah. Of course. She doesn't know that even when my body falls asleep, the consciousness that is me stays awake the whole time. Would it be better to say so? I'm uneasy about too much of myself becoming known, but if I mean to convince the king I was attacked, I have to give him a reason. I'll just bend the words a little. Not that I have the ability and choose not to use it—but that I lack the ability, and so I can't.
“It's impossible for me to sleep.”
“What? You can't sleep? But you—you've been sleeping just fine all this time.”
“The body falls asleep, but the mind stays awake. From my own point of view, there is no point at which my consciousness cuts out.”
And in the intervals I pass the time watching other Harvesters, so the hours given over to sleep vanish quickly enough.
“So you know about everything that happened while you were asleep.”
“No. I told you, didn't I? The body is asleep. Even I can't see a thing directly unless I see it with my eyes.”
Sounds and smells I can pick up, but I tucked that quietly out of sight.
“All right. I understand. But what do you think of the witch?”
“What do you mean, what do I think?”
“She attacked you. You don't hate her? Nothing like that?”
A strange question. I had already known I would be attacked—what was there about my feelings that needed considering?
“A witch is a witch. And her name is Maleficent. Do you know it?”
At that, Merryweather's face went very strange—angry, and yet thick with suspicion. What about what I'd said was odd? I had explained everything that needed explaining.
“I know it. It's a name I know very well.”
“She didn't seem like a particularly famous witch.”
Among the Harvesters, not one person had known of any witch. Set the poor aside, and even Victoria, who amounted to something like the middle class, hadn't known—nor had Kanna, upper crust even among the upper class. Even Aurora had known nothing of a witch.
All at once, Merryweather's mood soured in a way you couldn't miss.
“So, once you've made it known that a witch attacked you, what is Bell going to do? Catch the witch?”
Merryweather asked it through clenched teeth, as if she were swallowing a rage on the boil. True to the royal intelligence service, digging for information on me to the very end—she really was a woman who did her work well. But there I shook my head.
“Why would I be the one to catch something like that?”
A powerful ability to regenerate, and the ability to make Harvesters. Those were the only two things I had shown anyone. Catching a witch with them would be difficult. In practice, unless the witch attacked me, I couldn't catch her at all. It wasn't completely impossible, of course. If I simply broke this world, the warmth would come to me on its own. But that was never going to happen, so it was fair to say I couldn't.
“Right. I understand.”
Merryweather said it with her head lowered, then turned away. The royal household would understand now that I had no intention of offering any help beyond serving as bait.
But could the people in the palace actually catch the witch?
I watched Merryweather heading for the royal castle, then returned to my lodgings. From now on she would have to watch me and hunt a witch besides. Merryweather was going to be busy.
That evening, a crowd appeared in front of Victoria as she made her way back from the Clockwork Knight school to the dormitory at the Royal Academy. They leveled nail-studded clubs and heavy tools at her and threatened her. Give us a blessing too, they said. Everyone else was receiving a blessing—why were they the only ones left in such a state? They already knew the blessings were given for free, they told her, so she ought to give one to them as well, laying it on so thick it was almost comical.
Victoria shouted that there was no chance she would bless people like them. Whether she meant to call for help, her eyes darted quickly over the surroundings as she said it. But it wasn't only the ones standing before her with weapons. Everyone around them was glaring at Victoria with eyes full of hunger.
This was no handful of people lashing out on impulse. They had planned the ambush thoroughly, so that she could not run.
Victoria told them she had no such ability. They had the wrong person; they ought to look for someone else. The people there seemed to know already. They sneered at her words and answered. They knew the one who gave the blessings was a person small as a child, and that she almost never came outside—so they would take, as a hostage, the one who had stayed glued to her side.
Me. I had been going out quite often lately, hadn't I?
I had been going out often, yes, but I kept to roads people rarely used, so they hadn't noticed. And of all people, they had chosen Victoria.
They bore her no grudge, they said, but if someone had to be the hostage—and the would-be Harvesters rushed in.
Their weapons never reached her. A clear sphere of water stopped them, and when Victoria swept out a hand, the ones who had charged were flung back the way they had come, caught up in currents dragged in from every direction and sent tumbling through the air. A few among them must have learned magic; fire and lightning lanced out from the press. Not one of them pierced the water Victoria had drawn around herself. The one who had thrown lightning was electrocuted by that same water instead, and collapsed.
I was sitting on the bed, watching that one-sided rout through Victoria's eyes, when someone knocked at the door of the room I was in. I went out, and several armed soldiers were standing there. Merryweather must have spoken to the palace. Reinforcements had come.
Seeing me, the one who looked to be their commander approached. The man introduced himself as a member of the royal guard, and asked this:
“Lady Bell. Until now, a person by the name of Merryweather Olcutt has been serving as your escort, has she not?”
Hm? I had expected them to say they would shield me from the witch's reach, or send me off somewhere to serve as bait for catching her. This was strange.
“Yes. Has something happened to Merryweather?”
To my question, he said this:
“Merryweather Olcutt has been found dead.”
What? In the space of only these few hours? The witch really must have been lying in wait. Still, it was a legitimate tactic. Cutting off reinforcements is basic. If only she had still been alive, I could have made her a Harvester. What a waste.
“We recovered only part of the body, but the autopsy estimates she was killed at least some twenty days ago.”
But what the commander said was deeply strange. Merryweather Olcutt, he told me, had been murdered three weeks ago.
“Then who is the escort who has been with me all this time?”
“Someone took her place and deceived everyone. And there is only one party capable of such a thing.”
The commander said it while holding his anger in check.
“A witch. A witch had been hiding.”
“Maleficent?”
“So you knew that ill-omened name as well, Lady Bell. Yes. That is correct. A powerful witch who, on the day of Princess Aurora's birth, arrived uninvited and laid a curse as she pleased.”
So the person I had believed, all this time, to be royal intelligence was the witch?
Now that I thought of it, Mally was a slightly odd nickname for Merryweather. I had assumed it was only one of those cases where the sound gets bent a little for the sake of the rhythm—but if it was a nickname for Maleficent, it made sense. And the way she had reacted when we spoke of the witch was simple to understand, too.
I had been fooled completely. As expected, I'm not very bright. If I were, I would have seen through her in an instant.
“Then, now—”
I was just about to ask what they meant to do.
Rumble.
The sound of something collapsing rose from every side. The commander ran to the window in a hurry. The soldiers who had come with him went to the windows as well and turned their eyes toward the noise.
I, meanwhile, looked through the Harvesters' eyes at what was happening in the capital now.
Black brambles were growing up to enclose the capital, spreading outward from the royal castle at their center. Like a tidal wave, they tore to pieces everyone who stood in their way as they reached. For a long while an earthquake went on, as if the world itself were shaking, and then the brambles stopped.
Countless Harvesters who had been out in the streets were ripped apart and died. Those who survived dropped straight into sleep the moment a thorn pierced them. The great trunks had ceased to move, but the lesser branches did not; slowly, without stopping, they crept on and worked their way into the buildings.
Gather what the Harvesters had seen, and the brambles were wrapping the whole of the capital.
Maleficent was an extraordinary witch.