Episode 94
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Rose.
I had imagined meeting you again dozens, hundreds, thousands of times.
Where and in what state we would be reunited, what I would possibly say to you then, what expression you would wear when you looked at me—poor as my imagination had always been, I pictured it over and over.
“I thought it was strange. Why no one remembered that night. I was sure I wasn’t the only one who saw it……”
But I never dreamed of a reunion like this.
“Later, the rumors were different from what I remembered, so I asked the people who’d been there with me if Rose had red hair. And everyone said she must have. That the master, Madam Serva, would know the truth. When everyone said the same thing, I couldn’t insist I was right all on my own. It was easier to think I had seen wrong. I was nothing, just a mere servant……”
In the end, Anna said what she never should have said. In truth, to be precise, they were words Ezekiel should never have heard.
Everything he knew about Rose’s appearance was wrong.
More frightening than the fact that all the effort he had poured in until now had been in vain was the new description of Rose, pieced together from Polina and Anna’s testimonies.
“So, is that all you can testify to regarding Rose?”
Until now, red hair and green eyes had been put forward as Rose’s defining traits because both were rare colors, difficult to find in the world. Even that had brought no end of trouble once the rumor spread far and wide that Ezekiel Valdemaera was searching for such a woman, drawing red-haired women from across the country, women who seemed to have sprung from nowhere.
But now, a condition far more difficult to search for had appeared.
No—was it truly a condition far more difficult to search for?
Or was it one he had already found and simply failed to notice, or had not wanted to notice?
Ezekiel thought of Rijan, who had appeared in his hallucinations with red hair and green eyes and thrown him into confusion. A sharp storm scraped across his solar plexus.
“……Major, would it be all right even if it’s a trait difficult to confirm?”
His expression must have grown too grave to simply leave alone. While everyone furtively watched Ezekiel’s mood, the first to speak was Polina.
“The harder it is to confirm, the better. That means it’s certain.”
The condition she presented first was, rather, something he ought to welcome with open arms. Anything was fine, so long as it proved that Rijan and Rose were not the same person.
The reason he wished the two of them were not the same person was not merely because it would taint his precious memories.
“There is a scar from a blade on her thigh.”
It was because he would have to face his past self, who had believed they were different people and treated Rijan with immeasurable cruelty.
“On the day of your eye surgery, Major, someone struck the operating table, and the surgical instruments spilled. Miss Rose shielded them with her body, and that was the wound she received. The blade sank in deeply, so the scar should be just as clear. But since it would be difficult for you to see a woman’s bare body yourself, I honestly cannot say how much help this testimony will be.”
But in this moment, he could no longer deny it.
A woman with chestnut hair and hazel eyes, who until recently had maintained an intimate relationship with some man, and who bore a clear knife scar on her thigh.
The opium had not brought the wrong woman to him. The effects of the opium had been unmistakably clear. Perhaps some mysterious sixth sense had borrowed the power of opium to leave him a warning in secret.
Because it knew this was a truth he could never accept while sober.
Rose was Rijan.
Rijan was Rose.
Only after he acknowledged it did the uncomfortable clues fall into place.
The reason her behavior had grown increasingly unstable before the surgery, and the reason she had disappeared from the mansion just before he opened his eyes after the operation.
The meaning of that gaze as well, when she returned from Rose to Rijan and, even after facing the soldiers who had come to arrest her, did not try to run but merely stared at him.
The poison Rose had drunk with her own hands had been a judgment she passed upon herself.
Thinking of it now, that was what it had been. It was the sort of resolve someone who knew Ezekiel very well would make.
“I have to take revenge. On Akenaus and that woman who made me like this.”
“I have to kill them, but I imagine every possible way to do it hundreds of times in my head.”
“I’m going to return exactly as much as I suffered.”
Rose, I do not know how you could listen to my hate-filled curses in their entirety and still give me love, unchangingly……
What had he done to such a woman?
“Miscarriage? It must have been Akenaus’s child, I suppose?”
“Your parents have been transported north. How could I imprison them in the same camp as you when I don’t know what schemes you might hatch?”
“The child who went ahead will be waiting, so you won’t be lonely. If you wait just a little, you’ll be able to meet him soon as well. I’ll do my best to send him to your side quickly.”
After driving words like daggers into her again and again, he had finally sent her to the gallows. Rose, whose throat was injured and who could not speak, had crawled toward him, knelt, begged, and pleaded through her tears, until at last the light went out of her eyes and she sat there soullessly. That was the last sight he had seen of her.
The gallows.
His mind snapped back into clarity.
At midnight on New Year’s Day, she was scheduled to be hanged. It was an execution he had signed with his own hand. Less than twenty-four hours remained.
There was no time.
“Major, where are you going!”
“At least receive treatment before you leave!”
It was far too late to explain the whole story.
Leaving the rest of the cleanup for later, Ezekiel ran out of the inn without looking back. Claris was a two-day journey away. He had to shorten it to one day.
Ezekiel immediately ran to the inn’s stables. The horses he had ridden there had not yet rested properly, but the horses ridden by the spies had eaten and rested well at the inn and were in good condition.
He dragged out several of the spies’ horses. Mounting at once onto the back of a bewildered horse being led out by a man who was not its master, he raced toward Claris.
Rose, because you judged yourself before I could, I had skipped over all the torment you must have endured first and found myself at a crossroads where I had to make the simplest choice.
If I hesitate, you die.
If I delay, you die.
There are so many roads leading to your death that I have no room to think of anything else.
Yes. Now was not the time to think too much. Complicated thoughts would only slow the speed of his ride.
Did he not already know the truth?
The you I meet again will not be the Rose I knew.
The you I meet again will no longer love me as you once did.
Even so, before one obvious conclusion, such matters were of no importance at all.
You must live.
“Wait, who is that! Stop right there!”
“Wasn’t that Major Valdemaera just now?”
“What is it this time? Is there a problem at the border? Should we close the checkpoint?”
Whenever the horse showed the slightest sign of slowing, Ezekiel threw himself from one horse’s back onto another and changed mounts. Even at the city checkpoints, where he was required to stop and prove his identity, he passed through without reducing speed.
He had been unable to sleep while preparing for the surprise attack, and he had just fought a battle against Davis’s spies, but the state of his body—sunk in injury and fatigue—did not enter his mind.
Through dawn, through morning, and through noon, Ezekiel did not dismount even once. Gripping the reins, he urged the horses on with all his might.
From time to time, he gauged the hour by the position of the sun and the shadows.
Cruelly, time flowed steadily on. It would have been fine if it stopped for a moment; it would have been fine if the day were a little longer. But no such miracle occurred.
One day.
Ezekiel repeated to himself.
One day is enough. Rose is still alive.
Yes, Rose is alive.
Whenever he needed a brief chance to breathe, he called Rose’s name. As for whether her true name was Rose or Rijan, he intended to hear it from her in person.
Wait for me, Rose. I’m on my way.
We have so much to talk about, don’t we?
When he thought of Rose preparing to be dragged to the gallows, he could not grow tired. With hands slick with blood, he gripped the reins.
By the time Ezekiel barely cleared the checkpoint of Claris, a pale moon already hung in the middle of the dark blue sky. He had ridden without resting for even a moment, but the night was so deep it sent a chill through him.
What time is it?
He had abandoned all his belongings and carried only a single rifle on his back, so there was no way to know the exact time.
It was just as he was urgently looking around for the clock tower.
The bell announcing midnight rang.
His heart plummeted. He hurriedly drove his horse toward the square where the execution was to be carried out.
“Kill the condemned prisoner!”
“Hurry up and hang that woman!”
The closer he drew to the square, the more the shouts of the excited crowd stabbed at his ears. Even at a glance, it was an enormous throng. There did not seem to be the slightest gap to force his way through.
“You bitch, go to hell!”
Someone hurled the insult at Rose at the top of their lungs.
From the higher vantage point afforded by the horse’s back, Ejekail spotted Rose on the gallows.
With the eyes she had restored to him, he saw her final form. Rose’s arms and legs were bound, a cloth was draped over her head, and her slender neck was caught in the noose.
It felt as though his own throat were being strangled.
Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose!
He wanted to scream. He wanted to say no. He wanted to shout for her to come down from there. No—he simply wanted to take her down with his own hands.
If Rose had been within reach, he would have done so at once.
“Kill her already! What are you dawdling for?”
The urging directed at the executioner spread like wildfire.
Ejekail clenched his molars hard. He wanted to sweep away every last spectator who cursed and reviled Rose, but he had no right to do so. To begin with, he was the one who had sent her up onto the gallows to become a spectacle on the first day of the new year.
The executioner said something to Rose. It was likely the procedure of offering her a final prayer just before the execution. Rose silently lowered her head and submitted to the death that had come for her.
No matter how loudly he shouted from the very back for the execution to be stopped, there was no chance his voice would overcome the roar of these excited onlookers.
Then there was only one way.
Today, not a single mistake would be allowed.
Still mounted on his horse, Ejekail took gunpowder and a bullet from his pocket. It was the first time in his life that his hands trembled as he loaded a gun.
Rose, hold on just a little longer. ……Please.
At last, the moment the executioner kicked away the chair, her body dangled in midair.
His only chance had come.
Ejekail aimed at the woman hanging in the air and pulled the trigger.
Bang!
The rough gunshot tore through the night and rang out.