41. A Feeling That Does Not Die Even in Death

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/44/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

Kishiri excelled at covert work.
She had been raised for that purpose from the first. Had her employers not been carelessly destroyed, she would still be killing people in places the sun never reached.
They had received their punishment at the hands of the soldiers Lily led, and Kishiri had been left alone.
The one who had not passed sentence on her, but had asked instead, “Will you fight for the country with us?”, had been Lily, and no one else.
Lily was hopelessly kind. She strained herself until watching her made one uneasy. She was surely not, by nature, the sort of vessel that ought to become captain of the knights.
And so Kishiri had thought:
I want to stay at this person’s side. I want to support her from the shadows.

—I have to tell Lily. Now.

Having witnessed Narkil’s death, she moved at once.
She had already found it suspicious.
The replacement soldiers, all of them women. The plainly abnormal closeness of Ashera and Lalilalai. The strange atmosphere that hung over the castle.
But she had not yet obtained the material for certainty.
That was why she had said she would go to Lily’s room and still had not done it.
Now that she had seen the truth with her own eyes, there was no time left to hesitate.

Her small, thin body raced through the castle without a sound.
At a speed ordinary people could scarcely even catch with their eyes, Kishiri had almost—

“What’s the rush?”

At the last moment, she was found by the people she least wanted to meet.
Ashera and Lalilalai. Already, she judged, fallen into the enemy’s hands.
She thought of ignoring them and passing through. She could not.
Her arms and legs were already caught in something that could only be called “shadows”: black, formless, without temperature.

“We were just looking for you, Kishiri.”

Failure.
I should have moved sooner.
Kishiri regretted, sharply, her own lack of resolve.
If the enemy possessed some means of rewriting them, there was only one thing to do here.
Abandon the conceit that she, of all people, could resist.
Bite through her tongue. Kill herself.

“Ngh—?!”

Before she could move, a mass of that same black stuff was forced into her mouth.

“Don’t go wasting your life, Kishiri. We aren’t gonna eat you. We just want to understand each other, that’s all.”
“Quite so. And besides … Kishiri, you must become my ‘Mother.’”

Conversation was already useless.
She had to escape at any cost—but bound hand and foot, every method was already sealed.
Endure. There will be a chance. She made herself believe it.

“All right. Let’s go to my room.”

Still bound by shadows, Kishiri was taken to Ashera’s chambers.
In the end, the crisis unfolding in the castle never reached Lily.

◇◇◇

 

Meanwhile, knowing nothing of this, Lily sat across from Chigusa—the true architect—in the dining hall.
The subject of their conversation was, of course, memories of Camilla.

“And in the end we clashed in earnest, and settled it.”
“You didn’t wager anything?”
“She demanded, provocatively, that if I lost I give up becoming captain of the knights.”
“Did you take her at her word, Captain?”
“I did. At the time, I did.”

Having spoken with her many times, Chigusa had learned something.
Lily, as a rule, was exceedingly dull.
Judging by her tone just now, she had probably grasped Camilla’s intent at last.
Even so, to be frank, her insight was a little too poor for anyone who claimed the title of captain.

“And so you won, Captain, and parted from Camilla.”

Chigusa knew what had come after: that Camilla had become a vampire and come to see Lily.
She said it with deliberate blankness anyway.
She wanted to draw the words out of her.

“No … that isn’t it. The story still has a continuation. A recent one, at that.”
“Camilla came to see you, then?”
“She did. After she had quit being human.”
“Quit being human—what on earth …”
“She had become a vampire. And, of all things, she was trying to make the princess one of her own.”
“That … !”

Chigusa made a show of extravagant surprise.
Lily, true to form, did not notice that it was a performance.

“Then you realized, Captain, and you slew Camilla after she had become a vampire?!”
“No. She showed herself to me of her own accord. And she asked my permission.”
“Permission for what?”
“Whether she might turn the princess into a vampire and free her from her bonds. I refused, of course. And I cut Camilla down.”
“She didn’t resist? I’ve heard vampires possess considerable physical ability.”
“I wish she had resisted.”

Regret showed in Lily’s face.
The regret of having killed a friend with her own hands.

“I don’t know why, but she was unguarded. If she had quietly turned the princess into a vampire as she was, she needn’t have died. Did she think I would give her permission?”
“Perhaps she wanted you to.”
“… An impossible wish.”

Camilla had surely known as much, and had still chosen to see Lily again.
And she might have been, a little, glad.
The friend she held dearer than anyone, after so long, had not changed.

“If there is someone you wish to save, and you come to know that it is impossible for you, I think most people give up.”
“What’s this, all of a sudden?”
“I am speaking of Camilla’s feelings. Not to give up, in a place like that, is impossible unless you love that person a great deal.”
“Well. Impossible is impossible, no matter how you struggle.”
“And even so … perhaps Camilla had someone she wished to help that badly. Someone, for instance, under a curse that can never be undone so long as they remain human.”
“…”

Lily’s mouth closed in a hard line. She swallowed.
A pulse moved in her throat.
There was no answer. The silence held. So Chigusa went on at once.

“I think Camilla loved the person called Lily Clearlights. Enough to want to save her even if it meant throwing herself away.”
“If that … if that were truly the case. Then why did she lay a hand on the princess?!”
“Resonance, perhaps. I believe Camilla and Her Highness harbored the same feeling.”
“And so she tried to make her a companion?”
“Or she may simply have been seized by nostalgia, and been telling Her Highness old stories of you that the princess didn’t know. Her Highness does seem the type who would want to hear such things, doesn’t she?”

Lily’s eyes widened. She caught her breath.
As if to say the thought had never occurred to her.
And yet, as a possibility, it was more than plausible.
That said—to dispose of a vampire who had stolen into the castle and approached Sara.
As an action, it was surely correct for a captain of knights.
That Lily still wrestled with it meant that, to her, Camilla weighed enough to be set on the scales against the office itself.

“If that’s true, then her failure to resist would fit as well. Then … I, who cut her down … what am I to do? I, who killed someone precious who had only come to see me again …!”
“I don’t think you need to blame yourself so. Her final aim was probably to turn you into a vampire, Captain, and take you out of this cramped country.”
“But at that point she had done nothing!”
“Camilla is no longer in this world. That, at least, cannot be helped. No matter how you regret it, no matter how you cry out, a life will not return.”

Lily, searching too late for a way to atone, was put off coldly by Chigusa.
Camilla was inside her. But the individual called Camilla no longer existed in this world.
Chigusa was Chigusa.
Knowing that, she would not let Lily nurse a useless hope.

“… There is no salvation.”
“For which of you?”

Hearing the question, Lily snorted as if it were foolish.

“I haven’t the nerve to say ‘for me’ in a place like this. If I were capable of that, I surely would not have killed Camilla.”
“But you are not saved either, Captain. Choosing to cut her down only made you both unhappy.”
“The one who made that choice was I.”
“No. It was the office of captain. If you had not been Captain, but only the person Lily Clearlights, I doubt it would have been a choice at all.”
“In other words, I cut down a love that existed for the sake of an honor that does not. How foolish. Powerless, incompetent, ignorant. What can someone like this—someone like me—even do?”
“I still don’t think you are a fool, Captain. Anyone may fail. A true fool is—surely—a person who knows a thing for a mistake and repeats the same mistake over and over.”

She had not meant to lead.
In the end it was an act that served Chigusa’s interest, but as the one who had inherited Camilla, she could not leave it unsaid.
The impulse housed inside her made her do it.

“Is there someone the Captain you are now wishes to save?”
“Someone … for me, now …”

Sara’s figure rose in her mind.
But she was the princess.
Lily was a knight.
The “curse” soaked into her would not let her go.

“There is one thing I wished to tell you, Captain.”
“What?”
“I don’t believe Camilla harbors any grudge against you. The moment she showed herself, she must already have been prepared to be cut down.”
“How can you say that so certainly?”
“Because she was the person who knew you better than anyone, wasn’t she? Then she ought to have been able to predict what you would do if the vampire she had become appeared before you.”
“You’re saying she appeared before me in order to die …?”
“If she could see you again, she was willing to die.”
“… What an idiot. Haha. A complete idiot. If she felt that much for me … why couldn’t she have been more honest while she was still human …!”

Lily crumpled.
Her feeling reached Chigusa with an almost physical ache.
But Camilla was not an idiot.
She had known she would die.
She was not so unplanned as to throw her life away for nothing.

—And that was why she had prepared in advance.
So that even after death, the feeling she could not abandon would not be cut off.
Even if—she lost consciousness, and the name Camilla vanished.

Corpses often lay in the dump of the Discard District.
A corpse was better the more regret it carried; no place was more suitable.
And a vessel was better the stronger its body.
To smash a bluff that would not yield to persuasion alone, “power” was required.

“And to think that closed world of those three was overflowing with love. If people everywhere had been only a little kinder, if everyone had been able to like everyone else only a little more, then surely—there would have been no need for me at all.”

Chigusa murmured it at a volume Lily would not hear.
And she thought again.
Saiji Kazeoka, for example.
Or Sara’s father, the king of this country.
It was incompetents who mistook themselves for capable—men like those—who made so many people unhappy.
And those who suffered their damage most heavily were always the foolishly honest good, like Lily.
To save women so stubbornly sincere, there was, after all—no method but the one Camilla, and that other she, had chosen.