Chapter 126
Rizan, who had been sprawled over Ejekail’s chest checking whether his heart was beating, suddenly jerked upright.
“Your voice……”
“Can you hear it?”
“……Call me again.”
“Ejekail.”
“Again.”
“Ejekail.”
He slowly blinked.
“……Am I dreaming? Or am I hearing things again? Because I wanted to hear your voice so badly.”
“It isn’t a dream. It isn’t an auditory hallucination, or a visual one. This is real. You can keep hearing it. I’ll call you as many times as you want. So just stay conscious.”
She needed to stay conscious, too. Rizan steeled herself. Now that he had regained awareness, there was no more time to delay.
Rizan tore strips from her own clothes and bound them tightly over Ejekail’s wounds to stop the bleeding.
“I’ll find the school somehow and bring people who can help, no matter what…… so please wait here, just a little while.”
With a trace of unease, Rizan emphasized it once more.
“Do not die. No matter what.”
“……Don’t worry. I finally heard you say you’d marry me. I’d be too wronged to die like this.”
Ejekail promised.
Leaving even her shoes behind, her skirt hem torn to shreds and her thighs plainly exposed, Rizan began to run toward the dark mountain path, then looked back.
Ejekail nodded.
That small movement was both comfort and encouragement. The mountain no longer looked dark to her, nor did it feel frightening.
Rizan ran up the mountain path.
It had not been long since she had hurriedly begun retracing the road from memory.
Rizan stopped in her tracks at the sound of someone’s footsteps, thudding steadily from somewhere.
What presence could there be at this hour?
Were there perhaps more surviving spies?
Rizan, gone deathly pale, looked around. If she ran into Davys’s spies again, this time she intended to simply return to Ejekail’s side and die with him. She had not gone that far yet, so fulfilling that last wish would not be difficult.
But the owner of the voice she heard was someone unexpected.
“Ro—no, miss?”
Soldiers whose faces she knew well were standing before her. In particular, the man at the very front was Mongkam, to whom she had sent mail a few times on Ejekail’s behalf.
“How are you here……?”
Because she had encountered such unexpected people, the words would not come out smoothly. Rizan stammered on.
“How is the king’s army here……?”
They were equally dumbfounded, but there was no time just now to exchange detailed accounts of what had happened.
“The major judged that they might try to cross the border, so he dispatched a few men to each location requiring close attention and had them keep watch. Then we kept hearing gunshots from a little while ago, so we were moving toward the sound.”
Mongkam answered in his characteristic solemn tone.
“Why are you here, miss?”
Peder asked. It was framed as a question, but from the sight of Rizan wandering the mountain in the middle of the night looking like a ghost, the men seemed to have already sensed that no ordinary accident had occurred.
“Time—there’s no time to explain. Come this way. We have to get him to a doctor quickly.”
“Is our major here?”
“He was badly injured while fighting the spies.”
The moment they heard Rizan’s first words, the men no longer raised any objections. As Rizan led them, the men ran up the mountain path in perfect order. When she, barefoot and having spent too much of her strength, could not run well, Mongkam asked her pardon and swiftly lifted her onto his back.
Even after Ejekail spotted his subordinates running toward him with Rizan in front, he did not seem particularly surprised. The ones who were surprised were his subordinates.
“Good heavens, what on earth happened to you?”
At Ejekail’s battered state, Peder could not hide his shock.
“We clung to your trouser legs and tried to stop you, but you went and left us behind anyway. What are you doing here, dying all alone?”
“Peder, mind how you speak to the major.”
Mongkam warned him firmly.
“When else are we ever going to get to commit insubordination, if not when he’s taken off his armband?”
Despite his flippant attitude, it was also Peder who hurriedly poured the emergency medicine he had over Ejekail’s stab and bullet wounds.
“So hurry up and come back already. If you do, I’ll gladly accept my punishment.”
“Why would I return now to a place I kicked aside and left with my own two feet?”
“Then you shouldn’t have distinguished yourself, sir. There weren’t just one or two corpses on the way here.”
Mongkam also supported his colleague.
“You know well the intimidation that comes from the illustrious name Ejekail Valdemaera, do you not? After even achieving the feat of annihilating spies single-handedly, what are you saying? All you need to do, Major, is return as though none of this ever happened.”
With lips gone pale from having lost so much blood, Ejekail let out a faint laugh.
“If my wife permits it, I’ll consider it.”
Wife.
Her heart swelled at the title he had chosen.
Rizan forced back the tears that threatened to rise. As if understanding that feeling, Ejekail reached out to find her. Rizan quickly placed her hand over his.
“Right now I’m in no state to propose, but wait just a little. I’ll put a ring on your hand, without fail.”
Feeling the man’s fingers persistently searching along the ring finger of her left hand, Rizan smiled with all her might to reassure him.
“I’ll wait.”
Only then did Ejekail, who had endured and endured, finally lose consciousness.
As she was carried down the mountain on the back of one of Ejekail’s subordinates, Rizan touched the finger he had gripped tightly and refused to let go of until he passed out. Around her fourth finger, Ejekail’s blood had been imprinted in a circle like a ring.
It was the cruelest engagement ring in the world.
❖ ❖ ❖
The subordinates who brought Ejekail and Rizan down to a private home in Sielsa immediately asked around for a doctor and brought one in. The doctor, forcibly awakened at dawn by the soldiers who had barged in, came rushing in a panic upon hearing the urgent news that the patient in need of emergency surgery was Ejekail Valdemaera.
Unlike Rizan, who showed bruises, abrasions, and slight symptoms of hypothermia but had not suffered any serious injuries, Ejekail, a critically wounded patient, underwent surgery in a makeshift treatment room. The doctor slit deep into his forearm and thigh to remove the bullets embedded inside, then crushed yarrow, good for stopping bleeding, and bound it over the wounds, clicking his tongue in disbelief.
“Most people, after being stabbed and shot, would have collapsed and fainted long before they could move their limbs. It would not have been strange if they had died. But Major Ejekail truly fought the spies to the end and won with this body?”
With thick bandages wrapped around every place that had been torn apart by blades and bullets, there was not a single part of Ejekail that was unharmed. He did not regain consciousness either, and despite his subordinates’ attempts to dissuade her, Rizan stayed by his side all night without sleeping.
“On the mountain, he still spoke quite a lot, and he was enduring well. Why does he remain unconscious?”
“From the doctor’s point of view, it seems he overexerted himself by forcibly clinging to consciousness so as not to worry you, miss.”
It seemed the composed appearance he had shown had all been patience wrung out with every last ounce of his strength.
Mongkam offered comfort to Rizan, whose face was growing paler and paler.
“Please do not worry. It is only on days like this that we think, Ah, that man was human too. And to be honest, I suspect the major will recover without fail, if only so he can marry you, miss.”
Even as they comforted Rizan, the soldiers of the 37th Regiment arranged carriages and prepared to transport Ejekail to Cleris. In rural Sielsa, there were clear limits to what treatment could be given, even with a doctor brought in. The situation was similar in Derosa, where the Valdemaera annex was located. Rizan also remembered how much money and how many people Lady Serva had sent out in every direction in order to find a good doctor. The environment was quite different from that of the main Valdemaera house, which had several outstanding doctors within the family.
In addition, Mongkam gave one more reason why Ejekail had to be moved to Cleris.
“If the royal family hears that the major is gravely injured, they cannot remain still, out of regard for Valdemaera’s honor. They will send a royal physician to treat him, but rather than sending word and waiting for the physician to be dispatched, it will shorten the time if we move to Cleris first.”
Since that was the case, Rizan naturally had no choice but to agree with Mongkam’s judgment.
Because one carriage was furnished as Ejekail’s sickroom, three carriages were prepared: the carriage carrying the patient, the carriage Rizan would ride in, and the doctor’s carriage, so he could accompany them to Cleris and monitor Ejekail’s condition. Rizan stated that she wanted to ride in the same carriage as Ejekail and nurse him herself, but because the doctor advised that it might instead hinder the patient’s rest, she had no choice but to withdraw.
Ejekail was loaded into the carriage, still trapped in a world of unconsciousness.
“Wow, seriously, what on earth is in that hand that he won’t unclench his fist even after passing out?”
After carrying Ejekail out bed and all with his comrades, Peder clicked his tongue as he climbed down from the carriage.
Rizan, who had been about to climb into the carriage assigned separately to her, went blank. She knew what was inside his tightly clenched palm.
Sitting alone in the carriage, she cried a little without anyone knowing.
The carriage journey consumed more of her mental strength than her physical strength. She repeatedly implored the doctor and his subordinates to call her, regardless of the hour, if Ejekail showed any sign of waking, and whenever the carriage occasionally stopped, she even went back and forth herself to check on his condition. But the news she hoped for did not come at all.
Would anything change once they entered the main Valdemaera house?
But…… would she even be able to enter that mansion?
In truth, she was not a guest the main Valdemaera house would welcome. Until now, under Ejekail’s protection, she had lived without any trouble, but Rizan was not in a position to be free of responsibility for Ejekail having been gravely wounded twice.
Would she even be able to cross the threshold of the main Valdemaera house?
No matter how she thought about it, it seemed most likely that before she even reached the entrance of the Valdemaera mansion, she and her family—who had been shamelessly depending on Ejekail’s authority and imposing on them—would be chased out on the spot.
As for the family that had been living off the Valdemaera annex, to be honest, it was about time they left that mansion. The ruined house was a concern, and if their poverty and their age, too advanced to easily find new work, were burdens, now that her voice had returned, she could support them somehow.
Only, Ejekail……
If only she could take responsibility and nurse him, even if she had to beg and plead, she would have nothing more to wish for……
Because she was absorbed in worries about the future that would soon come, Rizan belatedly realized that only the carriage she was riding in had deviated from the route midway through the journey and was moving away in a completely different direction.
“Wait. Where is this carriage going right now?”
The three carriages should have been traveling in a line, but when she opened the window and looked around, only her carriage was left all alone.