Unrequited Love

Hamel collapsed beside the entrance like someone who had been waiting for the word. His lips had been a healthy coral; now they were white, as though the color had been stolen out of them. He tipped up the gourd flask slung at his waist and drank straight from the neck, and when half of it had gone down without a pause for breath, some belated sense of manners caught up with him and he held the water out to Pai as well.

“Drink it without putting your mouth to it.”

“You finish it, Hamel.”

“…It would be awkward if my guide dropped from dehydration.”

“Can’t you see I’m perfectly fine?”

She pointed at the nape of her neck, where not a single drop of sweat stood. Her face was dry enough, in fact, that the fine down on it showed.

Hamel drained the water to the last drop, as though the offer had been a formality all along. If it came to it, he could refill enough for her to drink.

Pai rested the back of her head and the small of her back full against the wall, which was shaggy all over with thick grass. She drew one knee up into a triangle, stretched the other leg out straight, and wagged the ankle idly.

Without warning she pulled loose the hair she had bound high in a single tail. A crisp, manufactured sweetness came off it all at once and beat back the stench, if only for a moment.

She raked her fingers roughly through the heavy platinum mass and bound it up tight again. Round cheekbones, a keen jawline, and ears faintly pointed at the top came into view. Like a curtain going up on a stage and the lead stepping out into the light.

“…”

Like someone in the audience, Hamel forgot to speak and fastened his whole attention on her. She must have felt the look, because she turned slowly. Hers was a cold beauty, taken all in all. But let the corners of that mouth pull up in a grin and the coldness turned mischievous in an instant.

“A fairly serviceable guide, aren’t I? Once we’re inside the Great Labyrinth you’ll be thinking you did very well to make a deal with me.”

“…”

“What is it?”

Hamel met her eyes.

“Memory, you said.”

“Sorry?”

“Back at the last fork. You said ‘as I remember it.’”

“…”

“And you denied being a grave robber with your own mouth.”

Short of a professional grave robber or a mage mad for demonology, who would walk in and out of a place like this as though it were his own house?

“Just what are you?”

“It’s rather late to be backing out of the deal.”

Her voice had gone a little sharp.

Hamel let out a scornful ‘Hmph,’ drew the front of his brown robe closed more carefully, and answered,

“Now that I’ve found a genius, it’s this side that has no intention of withdrawing.”

“That’s a relief.”

“We’re going to be seeing a great deal of each other. I’m to be peanut’s magic teacher, and you’re the child’s nanny.”

“I suppose we are.”

“We’ll be running into each other till we’re sick of it in a dinky little castle, so we’d best secure some measure of mutual trust.”

A brief silence settled over them. Hamel scratched his cheek and spoke again.

“When was it you came to the Great Labyrinth before?”

“…”

“Fine. I’ll change the question. Why did you offer me a deal weighted in my favor?”

“…It isn’t weighted only in your favor, Hamel.”

“You never said what you stood to gain.”

“If I answer that, will you call the earlier question square?”

“Bargaining here too? Pure merchant, this one.”

The boy laughed, a clucking sound in his throat, rubbed the back of his head against the thicket, and after chewing it over a while, answered,

“Very well. For the time being at least, I’ll dig at you no further.”

“Keith is ill.”

The answer came without hesitation, and Hamel cocked his head.

“The Regent Duke? He looks as though he could chew steel bars and swallow them.”

“Oh, he does chew them, all right.”

“And?”

“…”

Pai tightened the fist resting on her knee. Her hesitation gave the measure of whatever was about to come out of her mouth.

A dismal wind was sucked in through the mouth of the labyrinth. Her lips, clamped shut until now, opened at last.

“It seems to me that Mr. Keith has demon blood mixed into him.”

The demons that came over from the demon realm trampled the lands of men without mercy and burned them to nothing. The water dried up, the trees burned, and rich soil turned to barren waste. They were driven back into the demon realm, barely, but the ruined land stayed as it was.

Humans labored to work the untamed ground back into somewhere fit to live. Time passed and the labor bore fruit. Clear water welled up again, and forests grew.

But over those hundred years of recovery, something else grew alongside the shoots. The seed the demons had sown put down roots in the barren ground as well, and worked its way into human civilization.

Humans with demon blood running in their bodies. People called those things half-demons.

“Are you telling me, right now, that Keith Paragon is a half-demon?”

“It’s only a guess.”

For someone who had just thrown down a bombshell, it was a tepid answer. That only made Hamel all the more impatient, and he shifted where he sat.

“What led you to guess it? Right — you said he was ill. Does he sleepwalk, or something?”

There was no trembling, none of the ordinary fear. Hamel’s eyes shone instead, like a researcher who had just gotten his hands on the key to a hard problem.

A natural enough reaction.

Hamel was a mage mad for demonology. To him a half-demon was no object of loathing and terror to be put down, but a rare specimen he simply had to get hold of.

I’m sorry to be using him as an excuse without so much as telling him… but it’s certain to help.

Telling him she needed his knowledge to treat her lover’s condition was a great deal more persuasive than explaining that she had regressed ten years in time and recruited him to stop the world from ending.

“That’s right. Keith suffers from sleepwalking.”

“You’re not suspecting demon blood on nothing but that much, surely.”

“He’s often plagued by hallucinations and hearing voices, too. And above all… I happened to overhear him talking with his adjutant.”

Pai dragged Enri into it. By her reckoning, Kalada and Enri both knew Keith’s secret for certain.

“He’s never told me himself, but I understand.”

“Not a matter to be blabbed about carelessly, no.”

The demon blood had thinned in the modern age, and half-demons drifted about now only as a thing out of folktales, but the fear and loathing aimed at them had not thinned with it.

“Still, now that I know, I want to help him, even if only from behind his back.”

“Why go to the trouble?”

Hamel had been following along agreeably enough; now he pulled a sulky face and objected.

“Unrequited love, is it?”

Ah. Come to think of it, this man didn’t know what the two of them were to each other. They had not gone about holding hands conspicuously or making displays of affection, and the staff, for their part, were close-mouthed.

And I never even called him ‘sweetheart’… Ahem.

Pai cleared her throat and said,

“More that it goes both ways.”

“Mutual unrequited love?”

“Is there such a thing in the world?”

“If both of them are cowards, it’s perfectly possible.”

Two people who love each other, and know perfectly well that they do, and still cannot close the distance.

Pai gave a teasing laugh and asked in return,

“Is that from your own experience, Hamel?”

“Tut.”

“Haha. In any case, we’re formally courting. If we weren’t, there’d be no reason for me to be using the room next to his bedchamber.”

“Courting with marriage in mind?”

“Who knows. We’ve never talked as far as that.”

“And how old are you?”

“I’m twenty-something.”

“Both of you?”

“That’s right.”

“Then you’re both of an age for it… why aren’t you married?”

“No, look…”

A sudden glitter came into Hamel’s eyes. He swung his whole body around to face her and settled himself squarely. Pai felt the storm of nagging on its way and edged back.

“W— what’s this about. You’re crowding me.”

“Better to marry while you’re young and pretty and in good health. Is it peanut, is that it? Because he’s a man with a child in tow?”

“That’s not it at all, thank you.”

So there really was an old man sitting inside that doll-like shell. Go on answering him honestly like this and she would be hearing about marriage until the end of time.

She sprang to her feet and beat the dirt off the seat of her trousers.

“Anyway, I answered you.”

“You did not.”

“You asked what I stood to gain from making a deal with you.”

“Ah. That.”

Hamel smacked his lips, the interest visibly gone out of him.

“But will he really open up to me about a secret he hides even from the lover he’s courting?”

“He will.”

“You seem quite certain.”

“…he’s suffering.”

“What was that?”

Because he’s suffering.

Because he must be suffering so badly that he would clutch at any straw.

That was why she had told Hamel to let word of the Elixir slip, as well. Keith had no idea that she knew about him, so steering him was the only thing left to her. Steering him until he went to Hamel of his own accord and asked for help.

“Anyway! They say a labyrinth is a hybrid of the ecosystems of the human world and the demon realm. The decisive ingredient for making the Elixir might just be in here.”

“You’re telling me to make a medicine to save your lover?”

“Oh, come now. You’re interested yourself, really.”

She tightened her boot laces and jerked her chin at the mouth of the labyrinth. Hamel beat the dirt off his own backside and got to his feet as well.

“Even if I do succeed in making it, I’ll be selling it at a hundred million gold a drop.”

“Skinflint.”

Still bickering, the two of them walked on into the labyrinth.