Chapter 177
Through Victoria's eyes, Maleficent's expression changes with theatrical force. She looks a breath from bursting into rage, then seems to remember something and forces a look of endurance onto her face. In the end she cannot hold it all. The fury breaks free, turns to killing intent, and explodes.
"Who!"
Mm. Her reason has flown completely. I do wonder where so much of it went, but this is hardly the moment to dwell on the question.
"Who would ever fear the likes of you!"
The far end of the staff, opposite the yellow jewel — the sharp end — punches clean through where my heart sits. Then she lifts me off my feet.
Victoria is staring up at me, her face stark with horror, and I smile at her, trying to put don't worry into it. Long fingers cross one side of my sight. An instant later, Maleficent's fingers drive into my face.
"I don't know what you are. And what of it? I am the Queen of All Evil! I am Maleficent!"
The staff rises. Maleficent hauls upward on the shaft buried in my chest, and my legs leave the ground entirely. Small and light as I am for a person, the balance of my weight ought to make me difficult to lift — and yet she is stronger than I expected.
"No monster can defeat me! Now die."
She puts her strength into the hand clamped around my face and wrenches.
Crack.
My head spins a full turn. The bones of my neck are crushed to nothing, and the vessels running from throat to skull seal shut. An ordinary person would have died on the spot. Pain is pain, but with no oxygen left for the head, survival is next to impossible.
If one were a person, that is.
Well done.
I say it with my head lolling loose. My lips work, opening and closing. I mean to speak, but no sound comes. Right — to make a voice, the lungs have to push air up through the throat. That path is blocked, so nothing emerges. If I want to talk, I only have to set my neck back beneath my head.
Oh?
Once the neck has turned and the head has dropped, it is hard to stand it upright again. So with the hand that isn't gripping the branch, I catch my own head and set it straight.
"Well done. This isn't all of it, surely?"
If you can, then do everything.
Maleficent can see that I am still able to move with my head ruined. I thought she wouldn't startle even if it regenerated — so why is she staring at me with the revulsion of someone who has just seen a loathsome insect?
"Yes, of course! If this won't kill you, let's see whether you can come back even as ash!"
Fwoosh.
Black flame takes my body. Is the faint green cast to the light the phosphorus in me burning? I meant to watch her final thrashing, but however well I can regenerate, if the whole of my body burns I might be ejected outside.
Before I am burned away entirely, I steal the warmth from the witch's light.
Heh.
Hehe. It's warm.
This is not mere warmth. It isn't hot enough to call heat, and yet there is a softness in it, the kind that lets the body melt away. A witch is a witch, after all!
Feeling warmth for the first time in a long while, I seize the light. There is a reason I have let her have her way until now. I have no intention of stopping at the taking of warmth. Once is enough — once, to watch something that mocked me stand before me stripped of it.
I press down on reality and fold it. I seize the witch in front of me and make her a single mass of meat. I have already done this in the second world. Then I drive the white branch in my hand into the center of it.
Maleficent cannot even scream. In an instant she becomes a pitch-black crown, and pure white thorns close around it. I don't know what standard decides the shape. In the second world the monster became a lantern, and the person a pouch. I expected something similar this time. It became a crown.
Thinking that if I make enough of them I will understand the measure someday, I set it on my head. It hurts rather a lot. It truly is a crown of thorns: the moment it is on me, its weight sinks it slowly down, and the thorns bite into my scalp. I will be all right, but an ordinary person would lose every hair they had.
I'm not certain, but this thing — if you pad the head with a hat and wear it over that, it doesn't work. That is the feel of it. A tool that calls for blood. Truly dreadful.
Before it stabs so deep that blood begins to run, I sweep a hand through the air. In an instant the black thorn-trees wrapping everything draw outward, as if time has been turned backward, and at the line from which they first erupted they vanish as though they had never been.
When the black thorn-trees are gone, the Harvesters open their eyes, one and then another. Yes. Just as I thought — a tool that can undo what the witch did. I can't tell whether it only copies her final act, or whether it can follow everything she did, but it has erased the black thorn-trees completely. And before the white thorns can drive deep into the skin, I take the black crown off.
"Bell...?"
Victoria calls to me from behind, cautious. I turn, and she flinches back in fear. Am I that frightening?
"Yes. It's Bell. This is difficult to get off."
Maleficent has tangled herself in the hair on my head. As if that vicious temper transferred straight into the device, my hair knots in the strangest way, and I have to grunt and struggle with it for quite a while.
"And Mally?"
"This."
I hold up the crown I have barely worked free. White thorn is woven over the black circlet, so the thing looks like a crown of thorns. It isn't true thorn-wood, though. It has the cold texture of metal.
"Is she dead?"
"It would be hard to call this alive."
Victoria, who has been staring at it, collapses to the floor without warning. They have been fighting here for quite a long time; losing consciousness is only to be expected. I catch her arms and legs, roll once against the ground, and hoist her onto my back — the way a firefighter moves a person. Then I kick the crown up off the floor, settle it on top, and start toward the dormitory where Victoria lives.
Walking with her over my shoulder, I look around. People shaken out of sleep have come out of their houses to take in their surroundings. Not all of them. Among them are some scored with scratches head to toe, clutching scraps of thoroughly crushed meat and weeping. Those who were on the wide roads were struck as the thorn-trees grew, and ground apart where they stood.
The already dead cannot be brought back. I carry Victoria home, powerless to do anything but watch the warmth drain out of the dead. The damage is great. It really is.
Every district I pass through looks much the same. The buildings still bear the traces of something that bored into them, and long streaks of blood run down the roads. From every side comes the raw stink of blood and meat, and, faintly, the smell of rot. But the trail of blood breaks off in front of the Royal Academy. Judging by the marks where the thorn-trees struck an invisible wall and were flung back, the Academy raised a barrier, just as my lodgings did. Perhaps for that reason, no blood stains the road from the main gate to the classrooms. Victoria's heart will be wounded a little less for it.
I bring her to the room where she lives. The moment I am inside I set the girl down, catch her cheeks in my hands, and pull.
"Mmph— mmph!"
Victoria jolts and opens her eyes.
"Get up."
"Bell? Huh? Wait — this is... my room?"
She stares at me in blank astonishment, looks around, and pushes herself unsteadily to her feet.
"Yes. That's right. Go and shower this instant. Here's a towel."
I shove the dumbfounded Victoria into the bathroom, take a fresh change of clothes from the wardrobe, and open the bathroom door.
"Kyaaaah!"
Caught halfway out of her clothes, Victoria startles and covers herself. Are all girls this age like that? For what it's worth, a naked man or a naked woman looks to me now like nothing but a vessel for carrying warmth, so I don't particularly mind.
"What are you so surprised about? Underwear to change into. I know your arms and legs are scraped, but wash properly."
"Since when are you my mother!"
"You're simply far too careless, Victoria."
I gather the ruined clothes from inside, bundle them in a corner, and look over the room. Whether the thorn-trees forced their way in or not, it is a wreck. I leave what is broken more or less alone, and clear away what can be cleared.
Around the time the tidying is more or less finished, Victoria opens the bathroom door and comes out, soaked through, with only a towel thrown roughly around her.
"Victoria. Dry off."
"I'm hungry. I don't have the strength..."
Now that I think of it, she lost a great deal of blood, and she used her power for a long while. Once someone becomes a Harvester the body grows sturdy — sturdy enough that what would lay an ordinary person out sick leaves her, aside from a little fatigue, quite all right. I learned the line between hurting and being fine by watching Soo with my own eyes, so Victoria ought to be much the same.
I sit her down and dry her hair with the towel.
"Your hands are so careful. Have you dried someone's hair before?"
I am toweling gently when Victoria turns her head to look at me and asks. I turn it forward again with my hand, then answer.
"Yes. I have."
"Who? Your kid? Wait a second, Bell. Don't tell me you were a married woman?"
"Have you lost your mind, humanity?"
At that, Victoria swings her feet and grumbles.
"Even so, sometimes you're just like an auntie. Like right now."
Am I?
"I'm four months old."
"I mean the person inside."
Put that way, I have aged a fair amount. But this is what I say.
"There is no person inside. Victoria. Trying to learn the red pill is forbidden."
"The red pill?"
"Ah. That isn't an expression from this world. It means a secret is more beautiful left as a secret."
The blue pill was for gazing on a beautiful lie, and the red pill for gazing on a sordid truth. Some trace of yesterday must still be on me — of hauling those faded memories up.
I settle Victoria into a state where she can rest at ease, and point at the door.
"The ointment and the meal, you can see to yourself."
"Yes, Mom—"
I leave Victoria wearing a face that says she wants none of the scolding, and pick up Maleficent, whom I had jammed against one side of the entrance.
"I'll see you tomorrow."
I bid Victoria goodbye and step out of the room.
Now it is time for me to return to my lodgings as well.