A Narrow Bed And You, So Cute (4)

But that night—after she quickly ate dinner and diligently changed into her nightclothes, Noi tilted her head.

No matter how long she waited, Kardia did not return to the room.

“Ornis! Where is Kardia?”

“Dressed like that again—Sensei? He should still be at Kukuvaya-sama’s Weavers’ Enclave.”

Having finished the task he had been assigned as if his life depended on it, Ornis holed up in his attic room and read books on magic.

He looked at Noi as if to say, “Isn’t that obvious?”

Buried in a mountain of books, Ornis made Noi gape, her mouth hanging open.

“—Eh? Don’t tell me… you really didn’t know?”

She had not known. She had not known that Kardia was at Kukuvaya’s Weavers’ Enclave, nor that she alone had been left uninformed—either one.

Noi felt light-headed and sank down on the spot. She planted both hands on the floor and hung her head. She could not hide her agitation.

“…Was he that angry?”

“No, he didn’t storm off angry at you—this is just a routine checkup. When he collapsed the other day, it prompted him to resume the ones he had been skipping.”

Even so, not telling Noi had surely been on purpose. Or else—just like on that previous “date,” she had simply been forgotten.

To Noi, the person called Kardia was enormous.

Partly because she had known him since childhood—but it was also true he had become something more than that.

Yet to Kardia, Noi was surely not there yet.

Even though they lay down together every night, even though he naturally carried her when they walked, even though he tried to meet her eyes when they spoke—his kindness was so deep it made her mistake it for a love worthy of being called “special”—to him, was she still just one more stop along the way?

A heavy sigh fell from her lips.

(…Tonight. Would Kardia be able to sleep properly?)

At the Weavers’ Enclave, waves big and small kept crashing in to target Kardia. Last time, Noi had been there to serve as a breakwater, but not this time.

“There’s travel involved, too. Earliest, I’d say he won’t be back until tomorrow night.”

Ornis spoke to the dejected Noi.

Noi gave a small nod and returned alone to Kardia’s room.

“Why, I never expected you would actually come so promptly.”

Softening the face deeply lined with wrinkles and with rouge on her lips, Kukuvaya welcomed Kardia inside.

Seeing Kardia enter the manor with no pleasantries and the same sullen face, Kukuvaya widened her eyes.

“My, my—what a rare expression.”

“You’re here to check my abdomen, aren’t you? Honestly—no matter who looks at it or what anyone does, nothing changes.”

Shown into Kukuvaya’s private room, Kardia tore off his clothes roughly. The skin he always hid beneath snug undergarments was laid bare.

His skin was clear and white, his build healthy. It was the sort of body that would make anyone sigh in awe—yet parts of it had turned black.

It was dreadfully ominous—repellent, even. Like a black chrysalis shell, it would not budge no matter if one struck it or tried to scrape it off.

Kardia’s skin had begun to pupalize when he was eight years old—when Noi confronted the Demon King and vanished from this world.

Fengalow, who had tended to the battered, exhausted boy, judged it a remnant of that Demon-King transformation.

At the time, both Fengalow and Kardia thought it was only that—the skin had turned black, and that was all. He did not want to show it to others, but he had never considered it something that would change anything else.

However, about sixty years ago, they had been forced to revise that belief.

—Kardia had been nearly fifty then. People had long told him, “You look so young,” but when even he and those around him began to fear that his appearance truly never changed, it happened.

Around then, Kardia suffered a severe injury.

And the wound turned black.

What had first been only skin the size of a fingernail below his navel spread widely, all the way up to his solar plexus where he had been wounded.

The first to notice was Kukuvaya—then Kardia’s disciple and Fengalow’s daughter—Panselinos’s aunt.

Assigned to nurse him, Kukuvaya trembled when she saw Kardia’s body. Anyone could tell at a glance that something truly terrible was happening.

Since then, Kukuvaya had examined Kardia’s body—a body with neither treatment nor cure—without end.

No matter what he drank or what she applied, there had been no progress in sixty years.

Only the black skin on Kardia’s body had slowly spread.

And so he had been forced, whether he liked it or not, to become aware—

—that he himself was not human.

“The one who had Ornis bring me medicine was you, Tsera, wasn’t it. Tell him to stop at once. If he is going to stand by me with that funereal face, it will make my meals taste awful.”

Kardia said it with a look of disgust.

He had noticed there was medicine in the tea Ornis had started serving him “for his health.”

Even though he had said stopping the progression was impossible, Ornis—acting under Kukuvaya’s influence and unable to defy an order from his mother, Tsera—had dosed Kardia anyway.

“As you wish.”

To serve Kardia, Tsera came in with tea and bowed solemnly.

“My, my. So that is why you came with your hackles up today?”

With gentle fingertips, Kukuvaya touched Kardia’s abdomen.

When Kukuvaya finished taking his temperature as usual, checking how dark the black skin was, measuring the pupalized area with a ruler, and applying ointment, Kardia snapped into his clothes without a word.

Even then, he neither spoke of anything nor went anywhere; he only leaned an elbow on the chair’s armrest, his face set in a sulk.

Kukuvaya motioned Tsera to withdraw.

Once only Kukuvaya and Kardia remained in the room, five minutes of silence passed—and at last, Kardia opened his heavy mouth.

“—I don’t understand young girls.”

Kukuvaya drew a slow breath, then smiled kindly.

“I see.”

“She keeps telling me over and over that she loves me, and yet she wants to go out alone with another man—what do you make of that?”

As if he had only been waiting for Kukuvaya’s prompt, Kardia leaned forward from the sofa and rattled on at a quick pace.

“My… with another gentleman?”

Hearing the timbre of her voice, Kardia sensed that distinct friction between women and hastily backpedaled.

“No—that’s not it. Don’t misunderstand me. When that child says she loves me, it isn’t romantic love. So it’s not that she’s… fickle—”

“Oh…”

Seeing Kukuvaya suddenly cloud over with pathos, Kardia cut himself off.

“—Eh? In other words…?”

If Noi did not harbor romantic feelings for Kardia, there was no problem at all. If she wanted to go out just the two of them, then she simply had romantic feelings for Ornis.

When he thought about it, the two were close in age and in station. They even worked the fields together—just the two of them. With Kardia frequently absent, it almost seemed as if he had been tactful.

It would hardly have been strange if their relationship deepened.

—After all, they were young. They were youths with a future.

And now those two were alone together on the floating isle.

Kardia stood up.

“…I’m going back.”

“My, my, my.”

Kneeling at Kukuvaya’s feet as she tried to rise to see him off, Kardia pressed his lips to her fingertips.

“Kuku, forgive the abrupt visit. And I’m borrowing Safi.”

“You only call me like you used to at times like this. Very well. Go on—ride him.”

Not waiting for the end of Kukuvaya’s words, Kardia whooshed out of her room. Safi was the name of the Zephyrai—Kukuvaya’s winged-lion mount.

Tsera, waiting outside the room, stared at Kardia in blank astonishment, then hurried after him.

It fell to Tsera, who effectively managed this enclave, to have the servants ready him for departure.

Kukuvaya stood up slowly and stepped into the corridor. Remembering Kardia running down the hall, she tittered.

“For that Sensei to run…”

When Kukuvaya appeared in the corridor, the waiting attendants approached. Usually they would support her, but today she held out her hands to stop them.

She felt like standing on her own two feet.

“Is it true that Lord Kardia was here!?”

Clattering along, Aidoni came running down the hall. Kukuvaya stopped her rambunctious great-granddaughter with a single open palm and chuckled.

“To see that side of Sensei… it pays to live long.”

From the enclave’s gate, Tsera’s shout calling for Kardia faintly carried in.

Finding it both amusing and delightful, Kukuvaya stayed there standing for a long, long time.