The Blackened Mark
The man gripped the edge of his glove and hesitated for a long moment before reluctantly beginning to tug it down. After dragging the process out to the point of suffocation, he finally removed only the left glove and immediately covered it with the palm of his opposite hand.
It was impossible to tell whether he truly intended to let himself be examined or not.
His Grace is simply unaccustomed to showing his bare skin. There is no need to read too much into it.
Desidero spoke on his behalf, the way a parent might defend the overly sensitive behavior of a pubescent son. Then, as if handing over a leash to a stubborn dog, he rolled up his brother’s sleeve and pressed him onward.
“It’s all right. Examine him at your leisure.”
The Duke of Paeroa had grown markedly quiet. His hand trembled faintly, like a prisoner who had steeled himself for the wrenching out of his fingernails.
Lanlam approached calmly and studied the hand resting on the armrest. Wanting a closer look, she knelt. The moment her fingertips brushed his, the man flinched violently and clenched his fist. Lanlam soon understood exactly why he was being so defensive.
The back of his hand was only one small facet of the pain that covered his entire body, yet even that alone was severe.
Red blotches and rashes. Clusters of tiny blisters. The stony skin had cracked open in places like drought-stricken earth, and it was riddled with scars where flesh had torn and healed. Most striking of all, however, were the blackened, charred tips.
“Forgive me, but I will need you to open your fingers.”
Lanlam coaxed the man’s tightly clenched fist open the way one might draw a turtle’s leg from its shell. Once the thick, rigid fingers lost their tension, she lifted the hand gently from beneath, cradling it as though it were something precious. The man’s hand was so large that she had to examine it finger by finger.
The tips of his fingers were dyed pitch black, as if he had accidentally grasped death itself. At first glance, the symptoms resembled gangrene.
She was not unfamiliar with this lesion. Still, there were parts she could not be certain of, and the urge to remove his shoes and check whether his toes were in the same condition surged through her.
“This is…”
When the woman frowned and muttered, the man’s heart sank.
Like a cat that had run out of patience, he snatched his hand back with swift, sharp movements. He even turned his head away and began kneading his own hand anxiously.
Lanlam was taken aback but did not insist on seeing more. In truth, she had already observed enough.
“What do you think? Can it be cured?”
Desidero asked, his voice full of expectation. It was far too naïve a hope.
“If you are asking for my opinion on the cause, I can give it. However, if you are asking whether I can treat this…”
Lanlam answered with visible discomfort, then swallowed the rest of her words.
How could I possibly dare say that far from being treatable, he will soon die?
The words were too terrifying to utter aloud. The mere thought that an enraged noble might have her beaten for delivering such news made her head spin.
Between saying she did not know and saying there was no hope, Lanlam weighed which would anger them more. In the end, she chose to speak the truth.
“I apologize, but… is this not a mark left by oil being poured? With symptoms this advanced, the disease has already progressed significantly. At best, I fear he may only have a few weeks left before…”
“Hahaha!”
Just as the woman bowed her head and continued her tense explanation, Desidero suddenly burst into laughter.
“So you do know what it is? You recognized it clearly. See, brother? I told you this time would be different.”
Was it some kind of riddle? When Lanlam correctly identified the problem, Desidero looked enormously pleased.
“Correct. It is the damned mark left by the Sun God’s Oil. You are the first person to pinpoint the cause without being told. That is why it is only natural for us to hope.”
Desidero gazed at her with sparkling eyes, as though her insight justified every expectation.
It was strange to see him laughing so cheerfully in front of his brother, who stood at death’s door. When Lanlam’s expression twisted, the young man finally explained the full story.
“His Grace was doused with that oil across his entire body. It happened more than ten years ago.”
He said the man had contracted the affliction while held captive in enemy territory. In other words, it was the scar of brutal torture endured there.
Lanlam parted her lips in disbelief. The Sun God’s Oil was a lethal weapon made by melting lava-like substances harvested from one of the islands in the Tilamin archipelago. It was primarily used to inflict long, agonizing deaths upon enemy soldiers or condemned prisoners.
“A single drop is enough to cause fatal injury. If it touches the mucous membranes, both internal and external tissues rot from infection. Even in the best cases, the victim does not survive a year…”
“That is the common understanding, yes.”
Desidero interjected with interest. Though he already knew the facts, hearing them from the dark-haired woman somehow felt fresh.
He shrugged and continued.
“Yet as you can see, His Grace is still alive. Though perhaps calling him ‘perfectly fine’ would be a stretch… In any case, the important thing is that he continues to breathe. His Grace is… remarkably healthy.”
“That is correct. From a young age, Young Master Nyx has never suffered from even the slightest illness. He was born with a robust constitution.”
Freed, who had been listening silently, spoke up as well. Having served the Paeroa family for many years, he remembered far more about their childhood than the brothers themselves.
“Even now, he never catches so much as a common cold.”
While others discussed his health so freely, the subject of their conversation—the Duke of Paeroa—sat alone, submerged in silence.
The man, who had been sitting there fiddling with his glove, whether lost in thought or merely pretending, suddenly opened his mouth.
“It is thanks to the Goddess’s protection. She chose me as the vanguard warrior to stand at the forefront of the holy war and drive out the heretics from sacred land. That is why She still wishes to keep my life anchored to this earth.”
He spoke in a gloomy voice, as though he could not have endured without clinging to such a belief.
Desidero nodded in agreement.
“It is proof that the true son of the Moon Mother does not die from the curse of some filthy heathen deity.”
The young man seemed immensely proud of that fact. It was one of the reasons he praised his brother so fiercely.
Followers of the Sunset Religion constantly invoked “the will of the gods.” It seemed his faith ran deep after all; for all his wild, beast-like demeanor, the man’s ideology was surprisingly old-fashioned.
That very contrast struck Lanlam as quite unexpected.
She took care never to utter the words “Sun God” even by mistake. The same phrase carried entirely different weight and implication depending on who spoke it. She had seen far too many Tilamin executed as heretics for a single careless remark.
“If that is true, it is truly astonishing. I had always taken it as fact that the oil of death drags every single victim to the grave…”
The woman readily yielded her previous opinion. If a counterexample to long-held belief had appeared, it was certainly worth studying.
The problem was that the owner of that body was far too exalted a person.
It was easy to imagine stepping forward boldly only to fail completely and incur their wrath. In this world, the death of a lowly woman who had displeased a noble—whether by drowning or burning—would not even become a topic of conversation.
“However, I have only ever known this to be an incurable, fatal disease. I know nothing at all about methods of treatment.”
It might have been an opportunity for an advancement far beyond her station, yet Lanlam had no desire to entrust herself to such an uncertain future. In that case, it was wiser not to make promises she could not keep and to refuse from the very beginning.
“Therefore, regrettably, there is nothing I can do to help—”
“Of course we did not expect some miraculous cure to appear overnight. We simply hope that you will mobilize every scrap of medical knowledge you possess to find even the smallest clue toward overcoming this illness. Surely you can at least attempt it?”