Reconciliation (4)
I had been far too complacent.
After all, no matter how much of Tia's bodily fluids I licked and swallowed, all it did was neutralize her regeneration—so apparently I'd never felt any particular alarm about it.
But this incident made one thing crystal clear.
Tia's venom could kill a person with the barest trace.
"You mustn't share food with anyone but Mommy. And of course no kisses, either."
"Mm······."
"Did you? A kiss? With who?"
"Irina Imo. On the cheek······."
"She kissed you? Not the other way around?"
"Mm-muh······."
"Then I'll have to tell her not to do it again."
"······."
So it seemed I'd simply been lucky all this time.
When I was busy, Irina was the one who watched Tia the most.
Thinking that at any one of those moments, Tia could have dropped dead on the spot sent a chill down my spine.
Tia was a human weapon, capable of killing at a touch.
Confirming it again made me shiver anew.
"So I can't pway with Imo anymore······?"
"No, you can still play. You just have to keep some distance, that's all."
"······."
It was a bit of wordplay, changing only the words.
From now on, no one would be touching Tia carelessly ever again.
Because I was going to make sure of it.
For Tia's sake, and everyone else's, that was the best answer.
"Come here."
"Mmuh······."
I gently wiped the tear-streaked face until it was clean.
Every now and then, I'd lick my fingers.
It tasted salty.
I was the only one in the whole world allowed to taste Tia's tears.
I was the only one who could be this close to her, too.
When that thought settled in, pity stirred in my chest.
Because for the rest of her life, Tia would never be able to form a deep bond with anyone.
"Bring me a hair tie. I'll do your hair."
"Mme! Here!"
No sooner had the words left my mouth than Tia darted off in a flash, grunted the drawer open, and came back with an armful of hair ties.
She'd begged me to buy a whole mountain of them, every color, every kind, a while back.
Sitting cross-legged, I slapped my thighs twice, and Tia flopped herself down onto my legs—and I very nearly screamed. Ow.
Does she have thorns growing out of her butt or something······.
"Which color do you want?"
"Blue one!"
"You like blue? Then how about this one? No? You want the skinny string?"
Ah. I should have just bought one hair tie.
Finding the tie that satisfied Tia alone had taken an eternity.
And now I'd be doing this every single morning.
Dizzying.
The winner—a thin blue string with two jewel-like stones—went around my wrist, and Tia, humming to herself for reasons only she knew, waited while I set to work arranging her hair.
Compared to mine it was definitely wavy, but not the wildly untamable kind.
Now that her hair had grown long enough to reach the nape of her neck, I felt it all the more.
So she really did take after my genes after all.
"What if we just cut it all off?"
"No. Wanna gwow it wong wike Mommy."
"Hmm······."
I'd been planning to trim my own hair soon out of sheer annoyance, but I hadn't realized Tia loved my hair this much.
Well, now I could never cut it.
But wait—how do I actually tie this······.
I gathered her hair the way I'd vaguely seen somewhere, and there my hands stopped.
A sloppy little ponytail I could manage all day, but I wanted to do it properly, at least once.
Unfortunately, I'd never once tied my hair in my entire life, so I had no idea how it was done.
No way around it, then.
Trial and error it was.
I simply hauled Tia's hair together and started tying.
My movements felt far more natural than they had with the first attempt.
"Ow-ow!"
"Ah—sorry."
There were some minor issues during the two-times-around-the-tie portion of the operation, but I did, in fact, succeed.
Examining it from every angle, I found it slightly lopsided, but there was no mistaking it: that was a ponytail.
One success in, and my competitive streak woke up.
Plenty of ties to spare, after all—might as well try the rest.
"Do I gather it over this way like so?"
"Mommy, it huwrts······."
"One second. Sorry. Bear with me just a little?"
"Mmuh······."
"There! Piggytails!"
I got hooked fast.
Twin tails, half-up pigtails, buns, even braids—I tried them all.
My clumsy hands turned most of them into monstrosities, but a few came out looking rather nice.
That said, I was only now beginning to understand why little girls went mad for dressing up their dolls.
When you could fuss over the head of a creature this adorable to your heart's content, how could it not be fun?
"Hmm······."
One thing I noticed while tying: the horns kept getting in the way.
They didn't grow straight up but curved slightly back, so if I wasn't careful, her hair snagged on them.
I hated them, honestly.
Every time I saw them, I thought of that thing's father.
If it were possible, I wanted to snap them clean off.
Dragon horn—wouldn't that fetch a fortune, more precious than antler velvet?
"Muhehehehe. Tickles, Mommy."
"You can feel things with your horns?"
"Mmuh. Don' fink so. But when you touch 'em I go 'eeeek,' so my head gets tickwy······."
I see.
So the horns themselves couldn't feel anything.
But watching Tia shudder all over as I kept scraping at them kept stirring up a strange sadistic glee.
I held it in, of course.
"Shall we do it like this today? Well? Do you like it?"
"Mmuh! Wike it! Wuv it!"
After a long while of fussing with her hair, I'd produced a fairly respectable pair of twintails.
It was a vast improvement over those first piggytails, which had been nothing but hair haphazardly dragged to either side into two sad little nubs.
She could hold her own through a first day of elementary school with hair like that.
School······?
School, hm.
Come to think of it, when exactly was Tia supposed to start school?
I had her stand still and looked her over from head to toe.
I hadn't been around many children, but a body this size seemed roughly five years old.
Elementary school started at six or seven, which meant she was closing in on school age.
In body, at least.
What am I going to do about this.
There was no such thing as a public school in this world.
At best, a cramped classroom inside an orphanage.
"School" meant private academies attended by noble children and no one else.
If all she needed was knowledge itself, we could hire a private tutor, but that would hardly do for building social skills.
How wonderful it would be if I could send Tia to school.
In just two months her body had swelled at an insane rate and she spoke fluently, but her actual experience of the world was hopelessly thin.
She seemed to wield difficult words with ease, but underneath she was a hollow shell.
A darling daughter for whom Mommy was the whole world, the best thing in the world, the only thing she leaned on—of course that was lovely too.
But when I thought of how, after I died, Tia would be accepted nowhere and wander from place to place like a vagabond, school really was the better choice.
Society-less gypsies always end up beaten to death.
Of course, that was all assuming we could afford it.
We could barely feed ourselves as it was—private school tuition was utterly out of the question.
Or should I consider a false enrollment at an orphanage?
It wasn't a decision for today, so I resolved to mull it over a while longer.
"Uuugh. My legs are asleep. Up you get."
"Muhehe."
"Are you seriously sure you don't have horns on your butt too? How is it this pointy?"
I playfully flipped up Tia's skirt.
She shrieked with giggles and tried to bolt, so I caught her by the waist and poked my head under the hem. I was just going to give her rear a playful swat and let her go.
Then I saw it—something jutting up above her panties.
"Huh······?"
Above her tailbone.
A single black horn was beginning to grow.
No—wait. This wasn't quite the feel of a horn.
It was hard, certainly, but closer to tough, thickened leather than to horn.
And given that it was sprouting right at the base of her spine······.
"Mommy? What's wonggg. Tickles! Muhihihi!"
"What in the world is thiiis······."
That's a tail.
She could have taken after her father a little more moderately.
Suddenly, I wanted to cry.
I hugged Tia's waist and quietly sobbed.
"What is the meaning of this?"
"Hm?"
Deep in a dark underground prison, Alexander, who had stepped inside to face the Hero, could not help but sigh.
He knew it was discourteous toward his venerable senior, the champion of humanity—but there was nothing to be done.
The pool of blood soaking the far side of the bars was more than enough to horrify him.
"Say it again."
"My apologies······. Might I ask what, exactly, this situation is."
"Sure. Nothing stopping you."
Screech.
Leopard the Hero wiped his hands briskly with a handkerchief and pushed through the barred door.
The idler who'd spent fifty years drifting from tavern to tavern, drowning himself in drink, was nowhere to be found.
In his place remained only a beast brimming with murderous intent.
He apparently hadn't finished settling his excitement, because the Hero's breath still came ragged and heavy.
"Here. Take this."
"······."
The handkerchief thumped against the priest's chest. Holding the blood-soaked cloth in a daze, Alexander quietly stared into the cell.
A corpse sat slumped against the wall, skull caved in, dead.
It was now beyond even guessing what kind of man he had once been.
Only the neat black clothing suggested he had been a priest in life.
"Hero. Why did you kill him?"
"The bastard wouldn't shut his goddamn mouth. He annoyed me, so I killed him."
"Being behind bars does not make him guilty. We confined him only because he might flee. You cannot simply murder him like this."
"So what? You got a complaint?"
"If you had told us, we would have put him on the executioner's block ourselves."
"Well, well. You've really grown, Alexander. Talking back to the Hero himself."
"······."
Leopard turned with a smile still on his face, strode over, and seized Alexander by the crown of his head.
He had succeeded in getting under his skin.
It was a trick Alexander occasionally used when he wanted to rouse the Hero from his habitual apathy toward everything.
The caveat: use it too often, and you might end up like that corpse in the cell over there.
"He is the only person alive who knows the Saintess's name and face. I made special arrangements so that you could interrogate him first, and now you've gone and killed him. This puts us in a very difficult position."
"Not my problem. The little shit was spouting off without a shred of sense in his head—what was I supposed to do about it? If you're sore, go ahead and put me on trial."
"······."
The shove to his head sent Alexander stumbling back a step.
By the time he'd clutched his aching skull and lifted his head, the Hero was already long gone.
The footsteps faded, and soon came the sound of the door to the surface closing.
Only then did Alexander step inside the cell and examine the corpse.
In the crushed, unrecognizable ruin of the skull, he saw it—a faint light still glimmering. Fragments of holy light.
"Kgh······!"
The instant he touched it, unfamiliar memories flashed through Alexander's mind like a life passing before his eyes.
The Hero opens the cell and steps inside.
He asks: do you truly know the Saintess's face and name?
The view lurches violently up and down—and then the Hero's hand reaches for the camera, and the vision cuts off.
As Alexander staggered back, blood trickling from his nose, a smile spread across his lips.
"Haha······. So it's true what they say. There's not a soul in this world you can trust."
Leopard the Hero did not lack the desire to find the Saintess.
He was hiding her.
Now, at last, Alexander could be certain of it.