A Narrow Bed And You, So Cute

—Esria Kingdom Calendar, Year 482, Mid-Autumn

Just before the night’s darkness fully lifted, Noi suddenly woke.

Her body felt heavy. She knew perfectly well why.

“Hey—…!”

She shoved at the body coiled around her from behind.

No matter how precious the disciple—or the fiancé—upon waking, all humankind was in a bad mood.

The large body hugging her released her for an instant, then at once wrapped its arms around her again.

“Too cramped!”

Lately, Kardia had slept while holding Noi tight.

Since he wore his usual expression whenever he woke, he apparently wasn’t aware he had been hugging her.

(For someone who got all meek and said he was bad with women and practically cried…)

He hadn’t actually cried, but in Noi’s mind he had.

Noi was, clearly, in a foul mood. If he could hold her so peacefully, that was the same as Kardia treating her as nothing but a child.

As Noi gave up and shut her eyes, Kardia pulled her in with a firm squeeze. In that cramped position she tried once more to push him back—then went still at the strange feeling against her waist.

Suspicious, Noi quietly slid a hand over Kardia’s abdomen.

And drew in a breath.

After that, Noi did not sleep a wink the rest of the night.

Noi crouched, staring at the soil.

Her clothes were smeared with mud and fallen leaves, and the dirt clinging to her fingers had already dried to a crackle.

“Staring won’t make sprouts pop up so fast, you know.”

Leaning his chin on the hoe he had stuck upright, Ornis spoke half in exasperation—but Noi didn’t even seem to hear him.

Noi Galenée, fifteen (twenty-six at heart), was growing vegetables for the first time in her life.

A month had passed since this and that and the other in the capital were resolved and Aidoni returned to Kukuvaya’s Weavers’ Enclave—Noi had been living on the floating isle.

Ever since they came back from the ball, Kardia had disappeared by day even more than before. Ornis stubbornly refused to say where he was, but surely it was the mausoleum.

Without Kardia around, Noi had fallen back into idle days. She had thrown a fit and wrung one trip out of them to the lord’s manor to borrow books, but she had already finished those. For the bored Noi, Kardia—grasping for a distraction—proposed making a field.

Noi got motivated. If it killed time and also grew food, what a marvelous idea—she even praised Kardia’s proposal.

That said, Noi was a born and bred young lady. She knew vegetables grew in soil, but how to sow and how to raise them—she had no clue.

So Noi latched herself to Ornis’s hip.

Ornis spent his days busy—seeing to Kardia, doing house work, and practicing his own magic—so he balked hard, but Noi’s persistence won.

Perhaps realizing he could do nothing with Noi glued to his side, he was now helping her make the field.

“You sure knew a handy spell for turning and tilling the earth.”

Noi gave a start and twitched.

When they tilled the plot, Noi drew a magic circle she had devised and showed it to him. Seeing that it would also serve as practice, Ornis helped.

The circle was of her own devising, but she explained it had been in a book. Ornis seemed not to question it.

Naturally. No one would ever dream that a girl who had not apprenticed to a mage—and moreover had no mana—could develop a magic circle on her own.

“…If you had mana, you would have become a splendid mage.”

“That’s a pity,” he said, and with that Ornis walked toward the house.

Watching his back, Noi wondered whether she was truly “a pity.”

She couldn’t quite weigh her present state. Many things had indeed slipped through her fingers.

And yet, she felt she had grasped something in equal measure.

(…If I hadn’t become who I am now, I likely couldn’t be at Kardia’s side as he is now.)

Kardia, who always seemed seated beside loneliness. As an adult, Noi probably could not have stayed by the side of the man he was a hundred years later.

‘—Everyone is nearly a hundred years younger than me. Whatever they do, it’s just… cute.’

Kardia had confessed to Noi that he had lived a century.

He might have let it slip and forgotten, but Noi remembered—together with the ache she had felt then.

(…So. Why have you lived so long?)

She knew he wouldn’t answer even if she asked. He would dodge and weave, or feed her a lie.

Even so, having brushed against Kardia’s secret at dawn, Noi had a bad feeling in her chest.

(…Kardia’s belly was hardened.)

From what she had touched, from around the navel to just below the pit of the stomach, it had hardened to a degree one could hardly believe was human skin.

Agelessness—and a hardened abdomen.

It was hard to think those two were unrelated.

Magic could not interfere with a person directly. Thus it seemed unlikely to be magical in origin. But if not magic, could something like that—hardening as if a pupa’s shell—really happen?

(To investigate, I want to go to the lord’s manor…)

When they visited the library the other day, Kardia himself had combed the shelves one by one to see if there were traces of anything he could research, but the holdings were so vast he hadn’t gotten through them all.

Lately Kardia spent most of the day outside the house.

If so, there would be chances to slip away.

“…I have to find a way to look into it.”

Noi’s murmur melted into the soft, fluffy soil of the field.

In any case, the floating isle was too small.

To accomplish anything, she would need an accomplice.

Which left very few options.

“Ornis, I need a word.”

Chosen purely by process of elimination, Ornis turned a weary face on her.

“Do you know what I’m doing right now? For your! Snack! I’m baking bread!”

“Bread!”

Right then, with loaves about to be crammed into the kitchen’s oven, Ornis shouted at Noi.

Catching sight of the bread, Noi lit up and hovered around him.

“Could you not take after Master in being hard on your help. Honestly, why do I have to bake bread for your snack on top of everything—”

“Ornis, what’s this!?”

“Ah! Don’t touch that! That’s jam to spread on the bread later! Shoo, shoo!”

For all his grumbling, Ornis was kind to Noi. Ordered by Kardia or no, he not only baked snacks for her sake, he even simmered jam to make the bread more delicious.

No doubt his knack for looking after others had been nurtured in the Weavers’ Enclave. Both he and Aidoni were used to dealing with those younger than themselves.

“I have to watch the flame, so I can’t help with anything else.”

“I only said I needed to talk.”

“So you mean you’ve got something to ask that doesn’t involve helping with anything?”

At Ornis, arms folded and foot tapping, Noi beamed.

“Sorry! It might be the kind of talk where I need your help!”

“I figured as much!”

Smiling back, Ornis began to shepherd Noi out of the kitchen. Apparently he meant to eject her.

“Ornis! Just a moment! It’s really important!”

“When you say you need help, you usually mean ‘make more snacks’ or ‘play with me because I’m bored’—”

“No! It’s about Kardia!”

Hearing Noi cry out as she clung to the dining-room doorframe to avoid being shoved out, Ornis arched a brow.

“About Master? What is it?”

When he finally stopped pushing, Noi turned to him and asked in a low voice:

“Do you know—about Kardia’s body?”

“…Master’s body?”

Ornis looked down at her, puzzled.

“I mean… Kardia’s—skin. On his belly.”

When Noi whispered it, Ornis’s eyes flew wide. He yanked her into the kitchen and hustled her into a corner.

“Where did you see that?”

His voice was as sharp as a honed blade.