The Bread Witch (1)
The bell signaling that Iskil’s time with me had run out rang with a clear, metallic chime. Each room supposedly held a clockwork device reinforced with magic to measure its durability.
Iskil was still asleep, perhaps from exhaustion. I looked down at his face for a moment, a face that had not yet had its future decided. He was not strikingly handsome, but…
‘He’s rather cute.’
…It seemed the scales had fallen from my eyes as well. Whether it was the influence of my previous life or not, even while attending the magic academy I had never taken much interest in men. Yet here I was.
A faint, bitter smile touched my lips. After destroying the Demon King, I had endured nothing but such things; perhaps it was only natural that the very roots of my heart had become feminized. I had been forced to suffer countless acts that only women could suffer.
I shook myself free of the thought. Before the strict gatekeepers of the brothel dragged Iskil away, I had to wake him.
“Iskil, it’s time to wake up.”
I shook him several times, but only sleepy murmurs answered me.
“Haa…”
He slept so soundly that waking him felt almost cruel.
When I glanced aside, I saw the clothes we had torn off in our frenzy the moment we entered the room. Iskil’s shirt, trousers, and vest lay scattered across the floor.
I slipped from the bed and gathered the three garments. The vest rustled faintly, as though something were tucked inside. Iskil’s clothes were filthy with dirt from rolling on the ground while dealing with that brute of a man, and they were worn far beyond repair.
The fabric had never been fine to begin with, so even when new they could not have been well made. Still, for clothes this tattered… there was something only I, and no one else in the world, could do.
I went to the wardrobe for the first time in a while and searched the pockets of my robe. The clock, now restored to new, sat quietly where it belonged. In my left hand I held the precious timepiece; in my right, Iskil’s three garments stacked together.
Ever since I had rewound the clock’s time and made it new again, I had begun to sense something others could not. The history of any object that touched my hand—the story of when that object had first come into being as a single, recognized entity.
Perhaps because the ability had bloomed while I was repairing the clock, I still needed to hold it to read an object’s past. It probably served as a kind of mental medium. Once I grew accustomed to it, I suspected I would be able to feel the same without the clock.
And so I rewound Iskil’s clothes—the three garments—to the moment each had first been made.
‘We’re not yet at the point where I can wash his clothes for him, so this will have to do.’
I was a little surprised to find myself thinking “yet.” Did that mean I had unconsciously imagined some future in which I lived with this man? Even though I had scolded him so firmly before we went out.
We had already done things that only lovers would do, so there was no excuse left to offer.
Unfortunately, Iskil never noticed that his clothes had become as good as new. He dressed in frantic haste and had to leave at once.
The surly man guarding the second-floor landing had finally flung the door open to chase out the penniless guest who had overstayed his time.
We could not even exchange a promise to meet again; we managed only a single, fleeting glance.
Iskil came to find me the very next morning.
Fortunately, no clients seeking a virgin had visited the night before.
I had taken four more customers after Iskil and was a little tired. When I saw the morning light seeping through the window, I rewound my body’s time as usual—to the state it had been in while working at the magic-item shop.
If I read the moment of rewinding with delicate precision while holding the clock, I could even return to the exact instant I had just woken. It meant I no longer needed proper sleep. Because of the diary’s usage limit I still had to sleep once every three days or so, and since the brothel often sent clients looking for virgins, sleeping every night was better for recovering my magic anyway.
I restored my body, straightened the bedding, and opened a book to practice the spells I had not yet mastered without chanting. Just then the door burst open. I turned with my usual business smile and greeted the familiar face with genuine pleasure.
“Welcome, Iskil.”
Yet even after yesterday’s passion, he had returned after only half a day. As a woman who still possessed some sense of reason, it was time to warn the young playwright before he ruined his own future by becoming too attached to someone like me.
“But Iskil, you said you were preparing to become a playwright for the imperial theater. Coming to see a woman like me so often is—”
“Hngh?”
Iskil approached without greeting or a single word. His head was slightly lowered, so I could not read his expression, but the air around him felt wrong.
Startled, I asked the playwright who had stopped right in front of me, “Iskil…? Um, you’re scaring me a little…”
He seized my shoulders with both hands, hard enough to break the bones. Though he was thin, he was still a man. I winced and cried out.
“A-ah… it hurts…!”
“What did you do?”
Only then did he lift his head and look at me. His eyes were bloodshot, as though he had not slept at all. The sight made me flinch first.
“What…? I-I don’t… understand what you’re saying…”
“The manuscript that was in my pocket. What did you do to it, Karin?”
“Manuscript…? I don’t… know anything about…”
At that moment something flashed through my mind. When I had cleaned Iskil’s clothes, something inside the vest or trouser pocket had rustled. That texture—it had been paper…
The very same rustling sound came from right in front of me. Iskil pulled something out with the noise and flung it at my face. Dozens of small, notebook-sized sheets—white, thin, and looking as though they had just come from the papermaker’s, the kind rarely seen even in the finest magic books—fluttered before my eyes.
“Miss Karin… You said you used magic that fixes things to restore your body. I didn’t notice yesterday, but when I got home I realized. My clothes were completely new, as if a tailor had finished them only an hour ago.”
Iskil muttered through clenched teeth, still gripping my shoulders. I could not answer.
“And the paper had become new as well. The manuscript and notes that held the climax of the play I had written day and night.”
Yet I could not say, “But you still remember the contents, so you can just write it again.” I knew perfectly well that one could not recreate dozens of pages of interwoven thoughts and revisions exactly as before. Back on Earth I had, after all, made my living writing academic papers.
“You know this too, Miss Karin, but I’m poor. I don’t even have money to buy plenty of paper. So I crammed what others would write in a hundred pages into twenty, and I carried it with me everywhere for fear of losing it. I thought it was like a talisman that drew you to me…”
I could have denied it, but I could not. I must not.
“Iskil…”
My lips trembled as I forced the next words out.
“I’m sorry…”
The strength drained from the hands that had held my shoulders. Iskil’s arms fell limply to his sides.
“It’s fine. It’s over now…”
That was all he had done—gripped my shoulders and shown restrained anger. He did nothing more.
“It’s morning, so you should sleep, Miss Karin…? I’m sorry for disturbing you.”
With those final words he turned away on unsteady legs. At that moment the second-floor gatekeeper appeared with Alber. The two of them beat Iskil just short of killing him, and dragged his bruised body away.
I could not stop the playwright—who had done nothing wrong—from being assaulted. All I could do was secretly cast Veltara’s Transparent Shield on him from behind the two brutes, hoping to ease his pain even a little.
Selfishly, I waited for several days, hoping he would come back—whether to forgive me or to strike me—so that our relationship could at least reach some kind of ending. Shamelessly, after having ruined one man’s life, I occasionally glanced at the red glass brooch pinned to my robe.
Iskil never came to find me again.
Whether he had been blacklisted for barging into a working girl’s room without permission and banned from Arto’s brothel, or whether he had simply been disgusted by the woman who had so neatly erased the precious manuscript that held his life, I had no way of knowing.
Until that evening, when I met the eyes of a mouse—the very same kind I had seen the night Iskil and I had embraced.
The mouse was carrying a small scrap of parchment. The moment our gazes met, it darted under the bed. I looked down, but the mouse had already vanished, perhaps into some hole beside the bed.
While I was fussing with the mouse, Iskil’s face rose unbidden in my mind. It had been more than ten days since I last saw him. Shamelessly missing him, I absentmindedly picked up the scrap the mouse had dropped and read it.
It was the suicide note Iskil had left behind.