16

That night.

Felix was taking his bath before bed.

Alone, he soaked his body in his usual miserable medicinal herb bath, black and giving off a strange stench.

In the night sky, black like the bathwater, a beautiful full moon had risen.

Because of the harsh training he had undergone lately and the newly compounded potion, his skin condition had become somewhat better, and even if he pulled hard on his hair or eyebrows, it had become rare for his body hair to fall out and bodily fluid to drip down thickly.

It seemed that short lashes had also begun to grow where they had fallen out.

The new potion was a potion compounded by Felix’s own hands, using medicinal herbs raised in Felix’s greenhouse by Noel’s subordinate.

He had heard that the subordinate gardener was a very good gardener, but he had only just learned earlier that she was Noel’s commoner fiancée. The quality of those medicinal herbs and the skill of the potion refiner were so far above anything he had taken before that he had understood the potion’s effect was the best of all the potions so far by the very next day after taking it.

(She has good skill.)

The way the potion had been handled, even accounting for the political danger of Felix’s condition leaking outside, showed not only Noel’s ability as a magician, but also his great ability as a politician and as a ruler. In addition, there was that beauty of his.

Felix had heard that it was an engagement formed at the earnest wish of the queen, who had still been a girl at the time.

(That man would have made a good royal consort for the new queen.)

Although his condition had improved somewhat, if Felix let his guard down even a little, his skin immediately reddened and swelled from even the slightest irritation, and he would scratch it raw. His bedding every night was still a wretched thing, stained with blood and pus.

But the fact that his skin condition had improved even a little had calmed Felix’s heart.

When his heart regained its calm, what rose and vanished in Felix’s mind like bubbles in the bath were the days in the Royal Capital, when he had not even doubted his brilliant future.

His glamorous life in the Royal Capital. Trysts with beautiful girls, sweet as honey peaches. Friendship. His parents. Scholarship. Swordsmanship. Dreams. His future as crown prince. Everything he had believed to be solid, eternal, and never-changing had crumbled like sand and slipped fleetingly from his hands after Felix’s disease appeared.

(Was I standing inside such an ephemeral dream, one that could vanish as fleetingly as a single layer of skin?)

Felix gently scooped the wavering full moon floating in the black bathwater into his hands.

The full moon was distorted in Felix’s hands.

And then Felix remembered the cheerful talk of a bath he had only heard today.

Today, at Noel’s inn, Olivia’s mother was apparently coming to take a bath.

It seemed that Olivia’s mother had neuralgia, and that a girl named Beth, Noel’s fiancée, would prepare the bath for her today.

(Even for a maid’s mother.)

He peered down at the full moon he had scooped up. On the white moon floating on the black surface, Felix’s sore-covered face was dimly reflected.

(Magical Count Saratoga said that because his fiancée still has few acquaintances in this country, she would be very happy if someone came to visit, so they were welcome, but even if they do not mind status, is there not a limit?)

The steward of Felix’s household, his maid, and even the maid’s mother, if it came to that, were all going to the lodging of the magical count and his fiancée to take baths.

Even though this land was a town famous for hot-spring cures, where specialized therapeutic baths could be taken at any time.

Seeing Steward Mason, who should have been suffering from stiff shoulders, raising his arms so lightly, Felix had asked him about it. Mason had smiled and answered.

“It is a wonderful bath. It is a bath where something that had stiffened in the heart, the body, and then the soul seems to melt and flow away, where all of oneself seems to be forgiven and accepted. Just stretching out one’s body and breathing in that bath makes tears somehow well up. That is the kind of bath it is.”

Mason had answered so, but Felix did not really understand what kind of bath it actually was.

What he managed to find out after questioning him was that medicinal herbs were often floated in the bathtub, the bathroom was filled with plants, and it smelled very good. The drink after the bath was exceptional. And Mason had begun to go to that bath quite frequently, apparently because it had become addictive.

Felix picked up the bundle of rare medicinal herbs floating in his own bathtub.

He knew they were rare medicinal herbs, but they were in such a wretched state that he did not even want to touch them.

Noel had originally come from a marquis family, and after dissolving his engagement, he branched off and his status changed to that of a magical count, but he should have lived and been educated in an environment not so different from the one where Felix had been raised.

Naturally, Felix could not imagine that Noel’s way of thinking about differences in status would be very different from his own.

(And yet.)

It seemed that Noel was very cheerfully calling anyone and everyone to his inn and having them take baths, and even Mason, the steward of the crown prince and one of the people most strictly educated in this country about the barriers of status, could not resist the charm of that bath and had frequently begun visiting the bath of a royal guest.

(That girl I met in the forest must be Beth, Magical Count Saratoga’s fiancée.)

He thought about the mysterious girl who had been chasing a turtle in the forest.

Just like Rakka, the blind magician, that girl had shown no reaction at all to Felix’s painful appearance.

And the unidentified, flower-scented plain water she had given him.

Felix remembered the floral scent of that bath, which had given his nose just one peaceful night.

(I want to meet that girl.)