What Are You Doing?

“Thank you.”

“Nothing to thank me for.”

Kalada pressed a slip of paper into her hand. Written on it would be the whereabouts of the eccentric mage. He had passed through Wellerden a few days back, they said, so he could not be far off.

Holed up in some labyrinth, no doubt.

In truth it was plain enough where he would be, but confirmation never hurt.

Kalada stood shoulder to shoulder with Pai, put a cigarette to her lips, and lit it. She blew the smoke far off and let the wind carry it.

“I don’t know what you mean to get out of him, but mark this — the man’s a lunatic. Word has it he’s fallen clean into demonology.”

“That’s a chicken-and-egg question. No one in their right mind would ever lay a hand on demonology.”

“And you’d take that much on the chin?”

“The madness, you mean? That’s not even a thing to take on the chin. I’m the mad one to begin with.”

“Hmph. A pretty madwoman, and the Black Hawk would welcome you with open arms too.”

“…”

“Would you sooner die than touch the Black Hawk?”

“Who’s to say… If Lady Ardine shoots up and grows into an adult, maybe I’ll change my mind. Or if Lord Keith gets sick of me.”

Kalada let a chuckle slip out. Pai’s expression had not moved, and that was enough to tell her the woman was not considering the Black Hawk for so much as a moment.

“Do you always string people along with false hope like this to manage them?”

“It isn’t false hope, it’s called getting on in society.”

“Fine. I’ll take it. Whether the love between you two runs dry or the contract runs out — the day you’re a free woman, come to this Kalada.”

A laugh escaped Pai, more breath than voice. Kalada fixed her with a gaze at once indignant and yearning.

“Be good to that child.”

“The young lady? Well, that goes without saying…”

“I mean Keith.”

“Ah. Him.”

“That boy’s my disciple, you see.”

If there are masters who betray their disciples, there are also masters who prize a disciple above a child of their own blood.

You found yourself a good master, Keith.

Something like envy moved in her. Pai tilted her chin and shrugged off the steady, lingering gaze.

“He’s the man I love — of course I’ll guard him with my life.”

“You talk a good game.”

Kalada shook her head and went into the shop.

“…”

A fierce wind gusted up as though out of spite, and Pai shivered.

If the love runs dry.

There had never been any such thing from the start.

What stood in love’s place was trust. Love could vanish for no reason; trust could not, and that was the fortunate thing. Trust does not break without cause. She had not the slightest intention of breaking the mutual trust between herself and Keith Paragon.

If anything, might it not sooner be Keith who betrayed her?

“Betrayal, is it…”

The thought was laughable enough to tickle her throat. Keith Paragon and the word ‘betrayal’ make an ill-matched pair. He is a man who trusts whoever has shaken his hand. He trusts the man who mended his shoe, the man who lent him a knife, the man who sold him good fish. He trusts his adjutant, trusts the warrior who took him in, trusts the maid who brewed him tea hot enough to scald his throat. He trusts people plainly, and in showing that trust he makes them trust him in return.

Whatever suspicious sign he catches in a person, he buries it and trusts them first regardless. That is the Mercenary King’s method: to be the first to bare his own weakness to another. In a crowded, cutthroat world where one opening shown is one opening seized, there could be nothing harder.

And that hard thing Keith Paragon did every time, as though it were nothing. So this time it was Pai who tried stepping toward him first.

I trust you.

When she held out her hand, Keith snapped up the bait.

Yes. I’ll trust you too.

A fair give and take.

That year’s early winter was bitterly cold.

Even in the dead of winter the blizzards rarely blew without a break, yet that year the snow buried the whole city for days on end.

Keith knew that Elrod was to hear the oracle that day. Elrod had urged him to come along to the temple, but Keith begged off, as ever, with some threadbare excuse.

His elder brother took even that hollow excuse without a word, and never once pressed to know why Keith would not go to the temple. It was not indifference but a form of tenderness.

Elrod knew that before he came to the White Castle, Keith had spent a long stretch of his life as a slave, and that he had lost his mother very young. An orphaned slave boy might well have his reasons for staying away from a temple.

The snow had piled deep enough to bury a man to the knees, so the training ground was out of use, and Keith spent the whole day idling away the tedious hours in the little study off his room. He even nodded off sitting upright for a spell, then woke to the sound of a carriage arriving and the servants moving all at once in brisk order.

Elrod did not come to see him. He took his dinner in his room that evening, and the next morning too, Keith heard, he went straight to the study to begin work and ate there.

A few days later strange rumors started going round the castle, and in a corridor Keith overheard the content of the oracle Elrod had tried so desperately to hide.

‘Black blood’ shall be the ruin of House Paragon!

Keith chewed the oracle over, and over, and over, and over again, until the sentence took on an angry voice. The voice belonged to the master who had abused him in his slave days.

‘Black blood’ shall be the ruin of House Paragon!

Keith woke from sleep. He must have slept with his face tightly furrowed; a faint crease still lingered between his brows. With the dagger he kept beneath his pillow he cut the rope, then gulped lukewarm water straight from the kettle and breathed slowly until the blood came back to his head.

“Black blood…”

In common speech, ‘black blood’ means a child born out of wedlock. But trace the word back to where it first arose…

He spread his fingers wide like a starfish and looked down at his palm. In that instant the bluish veins all turned black at once, like foul water.

“Kh…”

A skull-splitting pain dragged on and on, and he curled his trembling hand into a fist. As though doing so might wring the pain’s neck. As though he might dare to be set free from this agony.

But this was original sin, and he would live bound to the black blood forever, forever.

He would rather someone told him the whole thing was a joke. Or else he needed a joke good enough to turn his eyes from this foreordained misfortune.

‘When the grief is too much, a joke is exactly what is needed.’

This time the voice that filled his head was that woman’s, neither flighty enough to blow away nor tearful with pity.

Strange.

They had not known each other even a fortnight, and yet now and again the feeling struck him that he had known her from long, long ago. Was it the easy intimacy that showed through her whole manner and way of speaking?

“Pai.”

Said aloud, the name tickled.

“Pai…”

He flopped back down onto the bed. A pleasant tickle started at his lower lip and spread slowly through the whole of him.

— Clack-clack. Clack-clack.

Just then the communication artifact on the side table let out a raucous clatter. He shot upright and carefully took hold of the white plaster carved in the shape of a dove.

— Zzt, zzzt…

The connection was poor, and a noise like parchment being torn went on and on.

— Kei— zzt— zzzt— …my lord…

The longer the connection took to catch, the faster his heart beat. Keith waited with his breath held for the static to die away completely, and soon the quiet went smooth, like the surface of a frozen lake glittering under a bright winter sun.

“Miss Pai.”

When he steadied his breath and called softly, a clear voice came from the other side.

“Lord Keith.”

“Yes.”

“Can you hear me all right?”

“I hear you well. And you, Miss Pai?”

“There’s a bit of static mixed in, but not so much that I can’t make you out.”

“I see.”

Imbue anything at all with communication magic and it becomes a communication device, though it is usually carved from stone in the shape of a dove, the bird used to carry letters.

Keith perched on the edge of the bed, the snow-white dove folded in one hand. The eerie chill of the stone floor crept up his bare feet, but he was so fixed on the voice far away that he never noticed it, and his eyelids drifted shut of their own accord.

“What were you doing?”

“Pardon?”

“What — were — you — doing?”

Thinking the connection must be wavering, Pai enunciated each word clearly, one at a time. But there was nothing wrong with the connection. He was simply thrown by the question.

In his slave days a question like that had been meaningless. No, there had been no one to ask him such a thing. The master gave him work to do. Then he did the work. Once the work was done he would collapse into a sleep as sweet as death, and that was all.

Search every corner of the life he had spent at the White Castle or in the Black Hawk, and there was scarcely a question like it to be found. At most, only his elder brother had asked it now and then.

In recompense for the twelve years he had merely endured, day upon day, he was set instead in the master’s place. A master does what he himself wishes, and gives orders to those beneath him when there is need.

What was I doing…

And so, astonishingly, this ordinary question was the first of his whole life. At least, that was how Keith felt.