11. Because Every Night Was Like a Nightmare
Episode 71
“Uncle, the soldiers will come here soon. If they ask where I am, give them this address. Don’t get caught in the crossfire by trying to hide me. Tell them you had no idea that girl had committed such a terrible crime before coming to you. That’s the only way you can stay safe.”
“Child, I truly don’t know if this is the right choice. Wouldn’t it be better for you to hide as well?”
“Even if I hide, I won’t last long. On my way here, I missed the stagecoach several times. At every road where people gathered, descriptions of me and my parents were already spread everywhere. I think they did it on purpose. To make people watch one another. Among them, there are surely witnesses who saw me and remembered. Rather than have my entire family dragged away because of me… it’s better that I, the one who committed the gravest crime, get caught.”
“The gravest crime… Child, even if it is a serious crime….”
“It is the gravest crime. The other party is the Valdemaera family.”
“You’ve gotten tangled up with the filthiest place you never should have gone near. Valdemaera, of all families… How in the world are you going to deal with this? What did your parents say? What have you decided to do?”
“They’re going to stay hidden for a while longer, then take the chance to go down to the countryside. The fewer people there are, the slower rumors will spread.”
“How did you persuade them? They aren’t the kind of people who would leave you, the child they raised so dearly, behind alone in danger.”
“I told my parents that, through the principal’s arrangements, I’d gotten a position as a live-in tutor and was going away to work.”
“…….”
“I said it would be hard to contact them for a while because it was a small town, but that meant it would be that much safer. I made up all sorts of excuses, but honestly, I’m not sure how much of my story they believed. Still, at least they’ll hide and be careful for a few months. If I can buy that much time… for now, it’s all right. It will be all right.”
“But if you’re caught like this, what about you? Is there some kind of plan for your sake too? What exactly is all right?”
She simply thought it was all right.
At least, if she were punished first within the family, perhaps a comparatively lenient judgment might be passed on her parents later. Even weighing the severity of their crimes, directly attempting an assassination was surely far worse than laying hands on their master’s valuables.
So.
“She’s not moving… Isn’t she dead?”
“If she’s dead, they should just bury her in the ground….”
Someone rolled her onto her side and hastily snatched away the old blanket wrapped around her body. When the blanket that had at least softened the cold disappeared, the feel of the icy stone floor struck her cheek. Only then did she blearily open her eyes.
Where… am I?
Only after blinking dozens of times until her vision focused did her surroundings begin to register little by little.
Damp air, a stale stench, a patch of light no bigger than a palm cast across the stone floor, people of all ages and genders in equally wretched states, and iron bars stretching vertically across her field of vision….
Still feverish, she breathed out hot, ragged breaths. She had only heard of it in rumors, but she felt she knew where this place was.
It was a detention camp.
A place where those who were not in their right minds, or commoners who had committed great crimes, were locked away while awaiting judgment.
…Because I’m a felon, they threw me into a detention camp.
Only now did she truly feel the might of Valdemaera. She did not know how long she had been unconscious, but by the time she opened her eyes, she had already become a criminal and been imprisoned. And since her crime was harming one of Valdemaera’s bloodline, it would not be strange even if she died here without a trace. Even criminals who had caused a fair bit of trouble outside would click their tongues and call her an insane woman if they heard the reason she had been brought to the camp.
She had done something truly outrageous.
She had known that, but at this moment, it struck her even more vividly.
Perhaps because of the aftereffects of drinking poison, there was no strength in her limbs. Even though she had vomited it all out, it seemed there had still been an effect. Above all, her throat, which had swallowed the poison and then retched it back up, hurt terribly. If she could, she wanted to carve out her insides to rid herself of the pain.
The moment she became aware of the pain, coughs burst from her. As she writhed and coughed, the instant she reflexively swallowed, she felt as though she would rather faint. A horrific agony swept over her, as if every bit of mucous membrane inside her throat had been stripped away. Even the sound of her coughing was hoarse in a way that could not compare to the worst cold.
Suddenly, an ominous premonition came over her.
With difficulty, she dragged one arm up and felt her throat. She tried to vibrate her vocal cords and make a sound, but all that rose was a throbbing pain that brought tears to her eyes. Perhaps the damaged membrane had been irritated, for she tasted the last trace of blood again. She hunched her shoulders and waited for the pain that had overtaken her entire body to recede. That alone drained all her strength.
“Looks like they’ll be clearing out a corpse soon.”
Someone muttered.
Unable to move her head, she slowly rolled only her eyes and looked over the faces of the prisoners locked up with her. The prisoners all merely watched her with hollow eyes half-open like dead fish. Every one of them hung limp like wet paper, lacking even the strength to tend to themselves.
As her gaze moved little by little, her eyes met those of the man who had stolen the blanket from her a moment ago. The man pulled over the filthy blanket, badly soiled with the blood she had vomited, and turned his head away as if he knew nothing.
The soldiers had probably felt reluctant to touch her body, covered in blood and vomit, so they had wrapped her roughly in the blanket and thrown her in. Yet in this detention camp, even such a filthy, worn-out blanket seemed to be a precious resource. After looking for a while at the man, who clearly had no intention of giving it back, she closed her eyes again. In any case, she had no desire to get it back.
There were so many places that hurt, she could no longer tell where the pain was coming from. Her breathing kept growing shallow.
While attending Ejekail, she had believed she had done her best to care for his heart in her own way, yet now that she had experienced the power of poison herself, it was beyond what she had imagined, and she felt guilty.
She keenly understood how he must have felt, forced to burn with hatred toward her every day. Even she, who had no right to resent anyone because she had drunk the poison with her own hands, was suffering this much. Then how much must he have hated her, when he had not only lost his sight by another’s hand but had been made to endure a second and third layer of torment as well?
“We still have a debt left to settle, don’t we?”
Yes, it was only natural that he would say such a thing.
Would this pain fade first, or would she be executed before it could?
Just imagining it frightened her. It even seemed better to have her breath stop on its own while she slipped into unconscious sleep.
Unfortunately, however, no such luck was granted to her. She lost consciousness because of the pain, and because of the pain, she came back to her senses. As symptoms she could not tell were dozing or fainting repeated at short intervals, she found herself thinking that, though it hurt enough to make her want to die, perhaps it was not quite pain enough to kill her.
She buried her face against the cold stone floor and gasped for breath. Since the season happened to be winter, it helped a little. The cold temporarily numbed her senses, slightly calming the pain.
Of course, even that effect did not last long. Once the chill passed, the fireball inside her body slowly raised its head. Her throat was one thing, but strangely, her stomach throbbed terribly.
Why is this happening? Did something go wrong?
At the sudden abdominal pain, she fumbled and pressed her stomach. Then, at the sensation of something squeezing somewhere at the front of her lower abdomen, she was startled and pulled her hand away.
In the end, she wrapped both arms around her stomach and curled up as she lay there.
It’s nothing serious.
She had to think that way. Ejekail had not simply gone blind either; he had suffered pain for a long time. Even if she had vomited the poison back up, there was no way it would end with only her throat injured.
In truth, even if she was sick in a detention camp, there was no other way. What doctor would treat prisoners who had been caught after committing crimes? Moreover, it was hard to say her situation was particularly worse than the other prisoners’.
In her eyes, most of the prisoners here were already ill or injured. There were many who had lost one or two of their limbs, and the elderly with weak strength all looked sickly, as if they were struggling to endure the poor conditions of the detention camp.
“What did a young lady do wrong to get dragged all the way to a detention camp?”
“Isn’t it obvious? She was probably some great household’s mistress. I’ve seen women with decent faces who got carried away playing mistress, then offended someone and were dragged in half-dead.”
She let the whispers freely speculating about her pass in one ear and out the other. It was an absurd misunderstanding, but it was better that way. Rather than it becoming known that she had been arrested for harming a war hero who had protected the nation, would it not be several times more ordinary and safer to be thought a mistress cast out by some powerful figure?
But the silence she wanted did not last long either.
Beyond the iron bars, the steady footsteps approaching—clack, clack—stopped in front of the crown of her head as she lay face down, clutching her stomach. She lifted her head to confirm the face of the visitor who had come for her, then froze in place.
It was Ejekail.