SML Ch 93

Chapter 93

*

No sooner had Arun returned to his room than he collapsed from exhaustion and fell asleep, only to dream of a past he would rather not revisit.

In the dream, Arun was eight years old. He was trapped inside a massive glass vessel filled with water tinged with gold. With his body submerged from head to toe, he should have felt the panic of suffocation, but perhaps because it was a dream, he did not even perceive that he needed to breathe.

With a slightly dazed mind, Arun looked around. The first thing to enter his sight was a young fae asleep with its head resting on his shoulder. Its face was identical to Arun’s, but the transparent wings at its back made clear what it was.

He reached out to shake the fae child, but the child showed no sign of waking. There was nothing else worth looking at inside the glass, so Arun decided to watch what was happening outside it.

A bloody battle was raging outside the vessel.

Guarding the vessel was the King of the Fae, who bore twelve pairs of splendid wings, and the one trying to seize it was a human knight, drenched in blood and clad in tattered armor.

“Sir Reynald.”

His father’s friend, and Arun’s fencing master. At thirty-two, the young knight had been far more youthful, hot-blooded, and forthright than now. The blood covering him was partly fae blood and partly his own. He had lost enough blood to make his head swim, and yet he stood without a hint of faltering, boldly aiming his sword.

The sight was so striking, so radiant, that Arun couldn’t look away. Unaware of how dangerous the situation was, he pressed his hand to the glass wall and peered out.

[Why are you so desperate? If you keep fighting me, you’ll be dead before long.]

The otherworldly being facing the knight—the Fae King—tilted his head slightly and spoke in a baffled tone. Seven of his twelve pairs of wings had been severed and hung useless, his side and chest were pouring blood, and yet his face was so placid that it was hard to believe these words came from someone so gravely wounded.

[Do you think I have a choice, bastard? By my standards, what you’ve done is beyond forgiveness.]

[Well, of course—our kinds are different. But I want to know why. If possible, I want to understand the principle behind your actions. I believed I’d learned much about humans after living for centuries, but it seems you differ from them.]

[…Fine, then listen. I’ve led more than a hundred subjugations, but I have never killed the young of any monster colony.]

Reynald’s answer came readily, without heat or anguish. He spoke to the ignorant as one would to a child—calm and kind—yet with the detached air of someone who did not expect his words to be understood.

[Conflicts with monsters aren’t born solely of the monsters’ faults. Usually it’s a problem of both sides—it’s just that I happen to be on the side of humans.]

[…]

[Even if the monsters are chiefly to blame, the young who were merely born bear no guilt. Being young is reason enough to spare their lives, and I have neither cause nor justification to eradicate their kind. Even if you drive them all out, new monsters will ghost in to take their place. It’s better that the young who have learned to fear humans remain where they are.]

[I understand that as your principle. But, and so?]

[What do you mean, and so? You laid hands on a child, didn’t you? And not just any child—my one and only king’s child, my friend’s child!]

In that instant, when a spark of ferocity seemed to leap in those green eyes, the battered knight once more mustered his strength and swung at the Fae King.

It was a fight a mere human could not possibly win, and yet Reynald hurled himself at his foe without hesitation, harrying him and seeking an opening with relentless focus. Whether through the King’s carelessness—or perhaps the curiosity that defined him—when the slightest gap appeared, the knight sprang like lightning, driving his blade at it. He looked as futile and foolish as a moth flinging itself into a bonfire, and yet so achingly beautiful that one could not look away.

The Fae King, too, must have found the sight beautiful. Why else address again a paltry human whose motives he already understood well enough not to require words?

[So, for such a reason, you wish to let me take your life?]

[Why would I be the one to die? If you value your life before me, return Prince Arun. Seeing it in person, it’s even more absurd. You are the Fae King—you can self-propagate and bear your own offspring, and you’ve done so, producing a perfectly sound child. Why abduct someone else’s young?]

[Not sound. That one is a complete discard.]

At the Fae King’s offhand reply, the fae child sleeping by Arun’s side snapped its eyes open. Ignoring the humans altogether, the child fixed an unblinking stare solely upon the Fae King. There seemed to be a shade of sorrow in those violet eyes, and Arun found himself pitying the child without thinking.

But then—

[That child is not a vessel fit to be King of the Fae, so the only use is to make it the soil from which a new kingly stock may be raised.]

At those words, furious hostility and murderous intent flared in the fae child’s gaze. For some reason, only then did Arun grasp the relationship between himself and the child.

He and the fae child were connected. The child was taking something vital from him, and at the same time, something that should never be his was being forced into him…

“…Hah!”

Arun jolted awake and shot upright. It was spring and not especially hot, yet his body was drenched in sweat—cold sweat, surely.

As he caught his ragged breath and stared into the dark, the person lying beside him sat up and turned on the lamp on the bedside table.

“Want some water, Brother Arun?”

Turning his head, he saw his younger sibling rousing, hair mussed. When Arun nodded, Serna passed him the water bowl from the nightstand. It hadn’t been there before he fell asleep, so Serna must have anticipated this and brought it in advance.

Arun hesitated over what to say, then settled on the principle easiest to apply to the situation.

“…This is not your bed. Return to your room and sleep there.”

“Ah, yes. Sir Reynald did teach me that. But I’m here to nurse you, you know—not to sneak into someone else’s bed to be coddled.”

“Nurse me? I’m not ill.”

“But you had a bad dream, didn’t you? I knew you would.”

“How did you know, and why were you already in my room?”

“After a day like today, wouldn’t it be stranger to sleep soundly without dreaming? Anyway, drink water first.”

Arun sighed, took the bowl, and drank it down. Parched from the nightmare, he found the cool water sweet and delicious. Not sweet like the fae water he’d once been forced to drink long ago, but still.

“Thank you, for the thoughtfulness.”

“Think nothing of it. Are you feeling better?”

“I am now. To think I would set foot again in the fae world in this far-off land… It makes one wonder if this too is fate.”

He recalled a point that had surfaced by chance during Reynald’s exchange with the clockwork doll. You could leave this land even after the Selection, but if you simply left, you would surely regret it—or so it had been said. Perhaps the doll had foreseen this very situation and answered accordingly.

If the Fae King was to visit this land in days to come, and if he intended to exact vengeance for the past upon Reynald, then Arun had to remain here. It was not Reynald, but Arun, who should bear responsibility for that matter—and, more than anything, there was something Arun wished to reclaim from the Fae King.

“Don’t overdo it, brother. Sir Reynald has always said the best policy is to avoid fighting the fae whenever possible.”

“But if they come seeking battle, that is another matter. Besides, the Fae King said he would reclaim what I took from him. If it is something that can be exchanged, perhaps I can also take back what he took from me.”

Arun knew he fell short in many ways compared to ordinary people. Without the family who had warmly welcomed him back into the world when he was half no longer human, and without Reynald, who had driven the rules of being human into him with desperate care, he could never have lived a normal life.

In truth, even now he walked a narrow ledge. Despite all his effort, Arun still had fundamental deficiencies; even after coming to this fief, he had needed Reynald’s help on several occasions.

“This land may be a land of opportunity, Serna. Here, I want to reclaim what I once lost. Perhaps you, too, might find something precious to you in this place.”

“…Mm, I’m not sure about that. Still, I hope things proceed well for you—and for Sir Reynald.”

Serna’s calm words were accompanied by a flicker of unnameable, complicated emotion that surfaced and vanished at once. But Arun, slow to read others’ feelings, only took it as encouragement and smiled.

“Then you may return to your room now. Thank you for earlier.”

“I’ll just sleep here tonight. You might have another nightmare, after all.”

Admitting that this was reasonable, Arun lay back down beside Serna and sought sleep once more. Thankfully, the moment his head touched the pillow, he drifted off and slept soundly until morning, without dreams.