The Unbending Flower (1)
How.
The words that should have followed never came.
It was probably meant to be "How did you know I was a woman?"
When a joke tossed out carelessly drew a reaction beyond all imagination, it was I who ended up flustered instead.
"Hey. Why's your face turning red?"
"······."
"Hey. It's not true, right? Huh?"
"······."
Leopard turned his head away from me and stayed silent for a while.
Before long, he looked back at me and spoke.
"Something the matter?"
"······."
His face was the picture of composure. The idiotically dumbstruck expression had vanished without a trace, so thoroughly that I almost convinced myself what I'd just seen was a hallucination.
The problem was that his face, flushed crimson all the way to the tips of his ears, looked anything but calm.
So, piecing together everything that had happened so far, there was only one absurd conclusion to be reached: Leopard was a woman.
"Hey. You were a woman this whole time?"
"It's getting dark. Let's head home."
"Answer my question. I said, you were a woman. Since when?"
"······."
Leopard simply pressed his lips shut and walked on ahead of me, refusing to answer at all.
It was, in its own way, an honest reaction.
If it weren't the truth, he'd have flown into a raging tantrum without a second's delay.
Whether he himself realized he was practically confessing, I couldn't say.
"Mom. You didn't know?"
"Know what?"
"That that unnie is a woman."
"Wait, you knew? Then why didn't you tell me?!"
"'Cause you never asked······."
Startled, I grabbed Tia by the shoulders and shook her back and forth.
More shocking than the fact that Leopard was a woman was the fact that Tia had known all along.
No, seriously—how did she even find out?
"H-how did you know?"
"Mmm. Her energy just feels like a woman's energy······."
The answer left much to be desired.
It was exactly the kind of thing you'd hear from a street scammer grabbing passersby and telling them their fortune looked poor. Woman's energy, man's energy—how was I supposed to sense any of that?
Though if anyone could, it might be a dragon's daughter.
Come to think of it······.
At first it had been nothing but shocking and bewildering, but now that I gave it quiet thought, it actually made a certain amount of sense.
How many times had I thought the Hero's manner of speech was like a girl's? Far too many to count.
And that wasn't all—just look at that delicate, hothouse-flower face. I'd figured he'd make a fairly pretty girl if dressed up as one, and it turned out he'd been a genuine woman all along.
Looking again, he was simply rather tall for a woman; the shoulders weren't especially broad, and the frame strained believability as a man's skeleton.
It didn't quite read as feminine either, mind you······.
Ambiguous, to put it mildly. In a word: not what you'd call a natural beauty of either sex.
"Ah, hold on. Leopard—no, Lord Hero—no, Leo? Can you stop for a second?"
"What now. Seriously, aga—EEP?!"
The moment I tried to sneak a feel of Leopard's body, he let out a bizarre shriek and bolted forward.
I never got to check the chest, but at this point it was truly confirmed. No man alive could produce a shriek that pure and pastoral, like a country maiden's.
Not to mention that face, flushing bright red in embarrassment.
"You are a woman, aren't you?"
"That's non······. I'm leaving."
"Leaving where? It's getting dark—how about an escort?"
"Find your own way home."
With that final word, Leopard vanished as if fleeing for his life.
Left alone with Tia, I closed my eyes and slowly replayed the days gone by.
Leopard, throwing lewd jokes my way.
Leopard, roughly seizing my wrist and dragging me along.
And Leopard, pinning me down onto the bed······.
"Mom. You've got a nosebleed."
"Huh······?"
Only after Tia spoke did I notice blood trickling down my philtrum and over my lips.
This is driving me insane. What is wrong with me?
And yet, no matter how I turned it over, if I absolutely had to be ravished, it did seem like it might be better by a lesbian than by a man.
Which was absolutely, under no circumstances, a statement of any desire to be ravished by Leopard.
"Mom, here's a handkerchief······."
"Thank you. Heheheh. How did our Tia get to be so pretty, hmm?"
I dabbed hastily at my nose with the handkerchief, took Tia's hand, and headed home.
It was a pleasant walk back. Having reaped the unexpected harvest of Leopard's most intimate secret, I couldn't have been in a better mood.
.
.
.
"Damn it. Damn it, damn it······!"
Having fled into some deserted back alley, Leopard pounded the wall and spewed curses without restraint.
To think he'd accidentally confessed to being a woman. Looking back on it, what an absurd blunder.
Thanks to it, the plan had collapsed entirely.
The original design had been to slowly dismantle Yulia's defenses so that she would walk to the bed of her own accord and lie down, then reveal that he was a woman and ravish her, shocked and helpless, without mercy.
With that dam broken, irritation was only natural.
"Damn it all······."
Yulia was not a lesbian.
Having met more homosexuals than he could count over fifty-odd years, Leopard could state this with certainty.
Back when she'd believed him to be a man, Yulia had reacted with something like contempt toward him, but that stemmed only from a woman's typical defense mechanism—there was no misandry in it, plainly.
"Plan revision, then."
There was, admittedly, the option of simply going to Yulia now and taking her by force. Socially and physically, she wouldn't be able to resist in the slightest; she would simply be overwhelmed, helpless.
But that would be no fun at all.
So—turn Yulia into a lesbian. Make her fall in love with him.
That was the core of Leopard's new plan.
First, dismantle her defenses until she lay down on the bed of her own will. Then, at the moment she gazed up at him with eyes full of expectation—snap his fingers and let the men waiting on standby into the room.
After that, all that remained was to savor Yulia's screams, drenched in betrayal.
The Saintess's purity had already been sullied; there was no further guilt left to incur.
"That's it."
Only then did Leopard pound the cracked wall again, a satisfied smile curving his lips.
And almost immediately, that smile took on a faintly bitter taste.
"No······. That's not it······."
The truth was, that wasn't what he wanted at all.
How had he come to wallow in such grotesque, twisted delusions? Wasn't it from the day he learned of Ariel's death, when he'd been seized by this compulsion—that he had to make Yulia pay?
Head hanging low, Leopard shuddered with self-loathing.
He had never found himself so repulsive.
***
"Good heavens······."
The newly built Dragonia Villa. Standing before its main gate, Alexander let out a faint sigh.
A sea of humanity crowded before the entrance. One might have thought every noble in the Imperial Capital had gathered here at once.
Which was, of course, only natural.
This was an event the Marquis Dragonia himself would attend.
The Marquis already wielded staggering power on his own, and rumor had it that of late he was seeking to extend his influence into the Imperial Capital as well.
This gathering, then, was a stage where nobles seeking to pledge their loyalty to the Marquis and nobles seeking to check him would converge, each taking the measure of the other's strength.
Still fond of making a spectacle of himself, I see.
He seemed positively itching to shake the entire capital to its foundations.
Alexander straightened his attire and stepped forward. His plan was to exchange a brief greeting with the Marquis and slip quietly away.
The fact that Alexander was the Church's Mad Dog had long since spread openly among the nobility, and he was welcome nowhere. In his heart, he wanted nothing to do with attending this event at all—but having received the Marquis's invitation, he could hardly refuse.
And if someone were to ask why a priest who had traveled from the provinces in pursuit of the Saintess had been invited at all, Alexander had no convincing answer to give.
"Alexander Graham. I've come in response to the invitation."
"Welcome, Father."
Stepping inside, he was met with an opulent mansion. It was a scale impossible to reconcile with the word "villa."
No one would build something like this merely on a whim. It could well be read as a declaration of intent to extend his influence all the way into the capital.
Everywhere he looked, high-ranking nobles. It might as well have been a social gathering hosted by the Emperor himself.
Alexander walked on, ignoring the sharp glances raining down from every side. The Marquis would be making his entrance soon.
"Make way for the Marquis Dragonia."
"······."
At the announcement, the great doors on the second floor swung open, and every eye in the hall converged. Even the nobles who had been chattering and draining their drinks were all staring at the entrance above.
Soon, heavy footfalls that seemed to reverberate through the entire banquet hall drew steadily closer.
The moment the Marquis at last appeared, wearing that icy, expressionless face, Alexander felt as though the air had been punched from his lungs.
The other nobles were no different, and in an instant the hall sank into a cold, dead silence.
"A good evening to you all. My thanks to everyone who has come to celebrate the completion of my villa. Whenever I visited the capital, I was put to the trouble of having nowhere to stay—that inconvenience is now behind me, and I am quite satisfied. Please, all of you, enjoy yourselves thoroughly before you go."
"······."
His brief speech concluded, the Marquis began to descend the stairs slowly toward the first floor.
Grace was woven into his every movement, so much so that simply watching drew admiring sighs. His elegance bore none of the artifice of something learned; rather, it created the illusion that whatever he willed his body to do became, in itself, grace. One might think that if the word "dignity" were ever given human form, it would look exactly like the Marquis Dragonia.
"Ahem. Hmm."
Alexander straightened his clothes once more and cleared his throat.
The Marquis was already surrounded by a dense crowd of nobles gathering to exchange greetings with him. He would have to pay his respects and leave before the line grew any longer.
He was just hurrying to cut in when—
Huh······?
An unexpected situation unfolded. The Marquis, ignoring every noble who had gathered before him, was pushing through the crowd and striding off toward some unknown destination.
Among them were several high-ranking nobles whose standing rivaled his own, which made his course all the more incomprehensible.
"You there, my lady. Might I ask your name?"
"I beg your pardon?"
The place the Marquis had come to was none other than a dim, neglected corner of the hall. When he addressed a woman in modest dress standing alone there, the entire assembly reeled in shock.
Just who was this woman, that the Marquis would behave this way?
Wait—that woman? What's she doing here······?
Alexander's jaw dropped as he recognized her face.
Even in comparatively plain clothes, hers was the most radiant face in the entire banquet hall.
Yulia—the hostess of the Lyuba Tavern.
In an instant, Yulia's face flooded with bewildered panic.