Episode 14
The reason was simple.
Because she feared Ejekail’s rage and retaliation.
“I have to kill her, but how should I do it? I’ve imagined every method in my head hundreds of times.”
The form of revenge he wanted was perfectly clear: summary execution. If she had status and family to support her, perhaps it might have been different, but for a commoner like her to have harmed a man from a noble house, there was no room for extenuating circumstances, no matter what threats and coaxing had been involved.
If Ejekail had lost an arm or a leg instead of his eyes, and thus had possessed the ability to pick up a rifle and execute her on the spot, would she have been able to come to the mansion now, saying she would help him?
The answer was clear as day.
She would not have. It would have been a path to her own death.
The courage to come to this mansion had arisen from the unconscious judgment that, since he was a man who could not see, there was no way he would recognize her face.
It was the baseness within herself that she could not bear to acknowledge. Truly ugly. Hideously ugly.
Hypocrite.
Coward.
She had never found herself so loathsome.
Rose gently bit the inside of her lip. It was not something to be grateful for, that the tea had gone cold. It would almost have been better if it had been scalding hot.
So that she could feel, at least a little, as though she were being punished.
When Rose left the drawing room for a moment and returned, Ejekail had already gone back to his bedroom and was gulping down wine mixed with opium. Though he often drank it, he would usually stop once he was suitably affected. This was different. One glass, two glasses, three. At the speed with which he poured it down, the bottle emptied in an instant.
Hadn’t they said there was no painkiller more effective than laudanum for dulling pain? The doctors’ repeated examinations were clearly acting as a powerful source of stress for him. After all, the heart had its own sense of pain.
Rose could not bring herself to approach and stood fixed by the doorway, watching only Ejekail.
As the sedative effects of the opium appeared, his tightly furrowed expression gradually eased. He sank deep into the chair and leaned his head back. He looked visibly relaxed. At a glance, he even seemed to have fallen asleep.
For this man, this time was both rest and treatment.
It felt as though she should not disturb him rashly. Rose quietly took a step back. Then she closed the door and turned away.
❖ ❖ ❖
It was after two or three new doctors had visited the mansion that she sensed something strange in Ejekail.
“Major, it’s Rose.”
He was a man who could distinguish her footsteps with astonishing precision, but just in case, she knocked twice before opening the door. It was a habit she had developed while being solely in charge of attending to Ejekail.
“They sent up pillows and blankets from the laundry. I’ll change them now.”
It was a trivial matter he did not necessarily need to know, but in case her small movements around the room might irritate him, Rose deliberately added an explanation.
She quickly tidied the bed. She straightened the freshly washed pillows and blankets, then neatly folded the pillows and blankets imbued with the man’s scent into her arms. On the table beside the bed, the bottles he had habitually emptied in great gulps as soon as he returned from enduring his examination were rolling about in disarray.
I should clear them all at once.
She set down her load for a moment and gathered up the bottles. With a brief sidelong glance to gauge the man’s condition, she moved her hands as quietly as possible so as not to disturb him. Mrs. Serva had told her to attend only to Ejekail, but in a place like this mansion, where there were always too few hands, the boundary between one person’s work and another’s was bound to blur. Rose, too, often helped with small tasks like cleaning the room. Besides, a suitable amount of odd work gave her an excuse to keep wearing a headscarf so that her hair color would not catch anyone’s eye, so it was actually something to welcome.
One, two, three. After counting the empty wine bottles, Rose looked back at Ejekail. He had truly shaken them dry down to the last drop. At this point, she would believe it if someone said alcohol and opium flowed in his veins instead of blood.
After glancing worriedly at the man, whose eyes were lowered in a haze, she was about to return to her work when she suddenly looked at him again.
Just now… what was that?
She had seen her drunken master every day. He had a constitution resistant to intoxication, so even after swallowing a considerable amount of alcohol and medicine, he could move about comparatively well. But that was only comparatively. Naturally, he could not be compared to the time when he had been at his strongest and most whole, and as the days passed, the time he spent languidly disheveled, his eyes unfocused, was growing longer.
The person who now spent most of each day with Ejekail was her. Naturally, she had seen every symptom he displayed when he was drugged and drunk.
And yet this strange sense of incongruity.
It was eerily chilling. Somehow, the atmosphere was different.
Rose rose and cautiously approached him. His pupils, more clouded and contracted than usual, were groping through the air. At times his mind seemed blurred, yet then a sudden gleam would flash in his eyes, as though he were seeing something through some place beyond—or perhaps not.
“Halt the advance, halt.”
At the first words that abruptly spilled out without context, Rose started violently.
“The bushes come up to the waist. It’s terrain well suited for an enemy ambush.”
Because of the alcohol and medicine he had consumed in such a short time, his pronunciation was slurred and muddled, and the content itself was far too sudden. Conversation, too, needed the circumstances before and after to support it in order to flow naturally. Right now, it felt as though she were listening to an unfamiliar foreign language.
“Major?”
“Yes, that place.”
He suddenly glared at one side of the room. Caught off guard, Rose also turned her gaze.
There was nothing there.
Nothing at all.
“…Major, what’s wrong?”
Rose tried to remain calm. Even so, her voice came out somewhat stiff.
“The ground is wet from the rain, so sounds carry loudly. We can’t pass through sticky ground at speed, and the muddy earth and damp fallen leaves will inform the enemy of our position in real time.”
An absurd answer came back.
No. This could not be called an answer.
He was conversing not with Rose, but with some unknown someone. The man who could not see what he ought to see was seeing what could not be seen. The man whose hearing had been honed keenly in place of his lost sight could not hear her voice calling him from right beside him.
“We’ll use their plan against them. We’ll pretend to fall into the trap, then seize them from behind and launch a surprise attack.”
The baseless nonsense continued.
Was he dreaming? Was he possessed by a ghost? Had something gone wrong with his mind?
Fear surged in. Rose stood frozen in place, watching Ejekail for a long while.
To say he was dreaming, his eyes were open, however dimly; to say he was possessed by a ghost, he was merely sitting in a chair, looking around at empty air and rambling nonsense. Ejekail’s symptoms seemed closest to delusion. Only, the delusion was being described so clearly and vividly that it was chilling, as though it were reality to him.
Then was it delirium?
She thought of the asylum where madmen were said to be sent. Madmen whom their families did not care for were dragged to asylums and all but abandoned there. Of course, as long as his status supported him, the possibility of Ejekail being dragged to an asylum was extremely slim, but if word reached Akenaus, one never knew. Every single move Ejekail made could become a pretext to harm him.
Rose first checked whether the bedroom door had been left open. She did not want the other servants to see this unfamiliar side of Ejekail. While she secured the door, Ejekail had returned to being an officer with thorough and meticulous judgment, busy leading ghosts and commanding a battle within his hallucination.
The man, immersed in delusion, calculated with utter seriousness. If his entire unit became mired in the mud, where would be a favorable position for the enemy to surround and attack them? What strategy should they draw up to ambush such an enemy? He looked around the empty bedroom, where there were only a few pieces of furniture and shadows, with the bearing of a born soldier, and gave his orders.
“All forces, prepare to fire. Open fire.”
Even if it was not reality, she felt as though she were glimpsing one aspect of Ejekail, the sort of officer he had once been. On the battlefield, Ejekail must have been a commander with cold, swift judgment. Bold, fierce, and sharp.
Once, his body had been on the battlefield; now, his mind was on the battlefield. Both body and soul were held fast within war, unable to escape no matter what.
Rose reached out to wake him, then stopped. It was because of the expression that had appeared on Ejekail’s face.
There stood an officer brimming with unshakable confidence.
It was a face she had never once seen in his blind reality. Rather, this very moment, when he had entered a false state of hallucination through the power of alcohol and drugs, seemed freer and more comfortable for him. Perhaps this was his true nature.
She could not bring herself to summon him back to the cold, stern reality. Because she knew all too well just how ruinously this man had been broken.
In the end, Rose withdrew her hand. And Ejekail, sunk in the lingering haze of intoxication, never recognized Rose until he fell asleep.