Chapter 46
Chapter 46
IT happened in a blink of an eye. Bright-red blood gushed from the fifteen centimeter-long slash across his left arm. The fog lingering in her brain instantly cleared. Panic mounted at the abrupt appearance of blood.
“Aah! Wh-Wh-What?! What did you just do?!” she spluttered.
“Please stay calm,” Rhad coaxed, while blood ran down his arm and dripped onto the marble floor.
“How do you expect me to stay calm?! How are you so calm?! Doesn’t it hurt?!”
“It hurts.” Rhad held his injured arm out to Yuki with a composed expression.
“What?” She couldn’t look directly at the arm spilling blood all over the mahogany table and squeamishly pleaded with him. “What? What do you want me to do?”
“For starters, will you stop the blood flow?” he said coolly.
“O-Okay!” The chair scraped across the marble as she leapt to her feet and ran over to yank the sheets off her bed. She folded a corner of the sheet several times and applied it to his arm with the right amount of pressure she learned from Vigo. “Wh-Why did you do this?”
Rhad groaned. “Lady Yuki, what do you think about when you are interacting with patients suffering from the Ten Day Fever?”
“Huh?” She took a moment to consider his question. The lodged gears in her brain creaked into jerky action. “…I pray for them to get well soon. I think?”
“Then please pray for me in the same way.”
“Why?!” she was thunderstruck by the Rhad and his Cheshire cat like smile. “Y-You’re the one who cut yourself!”
“Don’t let the small details bother you. Please think of me in the same way as the sick. It might not show on my face, but I am in an astronomical amount of pain.”
“I-I bet…Are you okay?” Blood rapidly absorbed through the folds of the sheet she pressed against his arm, dyeing it a sticky red penetrating all the way to her fingertips.
“Please hurry if you care.”
“O-Okay…”
Urged on by him she prayed to herself, I hope he gets well soon. A frown crossed her face at the dark-red liquid pulsing out of the slash that caused her to cringe just seeing it. Not like anything will change by me praying for him.
“But I hope the blood stops soon,” she encouraged, looking up at his face. Rhad’s eyes were fixated on his left arm. She followed his gaze and dropped her eyes to the painfully red sheet. “…What is this?”
A dull white light radiated from Rhad’s left arm—or rather, from where Yuki’s hands touched the sheet against his arm. Too shocked to move, Rhad yanked the sheet from her hand and his arm. A scab suddenly formed over the fifteen-centimeter slice and started slowly healing from one corner following along the line of the cut. Before their very eyes the scab shrunk in size.
“I’m surprised. I didn’t realize it healed this quickly,” Rhad observed.
“Huuuuh?!” Ten seconds later the scab disappeared leaving fresh skin behind and zero trace of the cut. “…What was that just now?”
“Did this help you to understand, m’lady?” Yuki’s mouth fell open like a fool and her mind stopped working. “This is your power, Lady Yuki.”
“M-My…p-power?”
“So Yuki, if you happen to manifest powers, you mustn’t use them indiscriminately in front of others. Promise me you won’t.” Her father’s words nearly a year ago rung through her head.
Power. Was that the explanation for what just happened?
“Huh? Um…uuhh…wait, whaaaaat?!”
What was that just now? Uh, was that it? Hey! Tell me, Papa, was that it?! Since when? Why? How? Doubts, questions, and confusion swirled through her. As her mind raced to figure out when it started, two large hands reached out and caressed her cheeks. They forced her head up.
“Now do you understand? The importance of your existence. The gravity of who you are. You should also be aware this power of yours seems to take a toll on you physically. We can assume your poor health these past weeks is a direct result of you using your power too much. You visited all the sick today too. Please rest.”
“Mmmph,” she mumbled through her squished cheeks.
Rhad’s ashen eyes wavered. “…Were you not here, one of the few possibilities to wake Prince Luca from his slumber would disappear. Please never forget the value you have there.”
Yuki gave a shuddery nod and Rhad released her cheeks.
“Has it sunk in for you yet? Only a select number of Mages and Witches have the power to heal. If my conjecture is correct, your power is leaps and bounds beyond anything this land has seen in ages. Shall we play a what-if scenario? Say you were kidnapped. Should they take you to a battlefield, you would be squeezed of your ability until you dropped dead. The enemy side would see you as a threat and focus their full force on eliminating you or in turn capturing you for their own side. Both scenarios end horribly for you.”
“Y-Yeah.”
“With that in mind, please do not make light of who you are and what you can do.”
“I-I won’t.”
“Sadly, your current predicament isn’t too far off from those worst-case scenarios,” Rhad muttered more to himself than Yuki.
“What do you mean?”
“Please be at ease. At present, I am protecting you.”
“You are? I’ll trust you then,” Yuki said, vaguely nodding as the budding doubts only grew. Satisfied with her answer, Rhad smiled.
My…power. I still don’t believe it. Yuki stared at her hand where minutes earlier a light cascade of color possessing no semblance to blue, green, or white had emitted. What can I do with this power? Rhad said it’s necessary to wake Luca. Why does he need to be woken up?
Rifaenotis told her Luca was inside a dungeon. And Rhad told her Luca was unconscious.
“Say, Rhad, where is Luca right now?”
“Prince Luca is currently resting in his own chambers. Chambers no one is allowed entry to.”
“No one can go inside his room?”
“Yes. The Queen and Prince Orga are controlling everything related to his chambers. There is no room for us to get near him. I have heard they occasionally allow someone inside to change his position.”
“Change his position…” Luca was asleep in his own room—that offered some solace to Yuki who believed he was locked in a dark, dank dungeon under the castle. They cared enough to change his position to keep bedsores from developing. That was something at least.
Something about what Rhad said bothered her though. “Hey, Rhad, you said there’s no room for you to get near him, right? I’m surprised you were able to discover he’s asleep in his room.”
“Hm? Ah, that… My creed is to use anything usable to accomplish my goals,” Rhad confessed, the corners of his lips turning up in a wicked grin.
For not knowing what his grin meant, it sure gave her gooseflesh. Warning bells sounded in her head not to press him on it. Spotting her take a step back from him, Rhad laughed aloud and patted her head.
“You don’t need to dirty yourself thinking about what I have done, Lady Yuki. Good news should be on the way—please rest and restore your energy until it comes.” Rhad walked over to a different bed than the one Yuki had pulled the sheets off, and rolled down the comforter. “You must be exhausted from my forcing you to use your ability for a trivial reason. Please get some sleep.”
Yuki shook her head, refusing his kind offer and slumped back in another chair. “No, I’m fine. Any more sleep than I’ve already gotten and I’ll forget what it’s like to be awake.”
“Is that so? In that case, I should excuse myself.”
“Okay. Thanks... Thank you for informing me…”
“No need for thanks. If you were to wish for it, your humble servant Rhadal Mende would pluck the moon and sun from the sky and present it to you.”
For a moment, Yuki was taken aback by the slick way he offered something so grand to her. She giggled when she realized he was joking.
“Ahaha. Don’t do that. I don’t need the sun or the moon.”
“Too bad. I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to put my skills on display for you too,” Rhad joked. And then his expression suddenly turned grim. Yuki blinked owlishly at the sudden change. “Very well, allow me to offer you a word of warning instead, Lady Yuki. Do not put your trust in those two.”
“What? Who—”
Before she could ask who he was referring to, he spoke over her. “They knew of your power and its price and kept it from you… Keep that in mind.”
Those words hit her like a bucket of ice.
…Why?
Yuki looked at the palm of her hand, stained red by Rhad’s blood. The hand had grown a little larger than when she was stuck in a ten-year-old’s body. Rhad bowed and left the room, leaving her to her thoughts. She heard the door quietly close. Silence consumed the room.
“They knew…?”
Thinking back, there were plenty of situations where their actions would be weird had they not known. For all they spoke about not wanting Yuki to catch the Ten Day Fever, they constantly had her interact up-close and personal with the sick. And then there was the time Yuki ran to the half-dead bandit to look at his wounds and was stopped by Vigo’s harsh yelling. Then it hit her—what happened at the orphanage.
“…Chiruka.”
Chiruka was her first time encountering someone afflicted with the Ten Day Fever so she wasn’t aware at the time, but after traveling around Rvydom dealing with the infected she knew better—it was implausible for someone in such a critical state as being covered in pustules as she had been to make a full recovery in a short time. Most people couldn’t recover at all.
“Was that…the result of my power?”
Raucous cackling started once again in the back of her mind. Pushing the fear away, she focused on Vigo and Selena.
They noticed my power? Since when? Had they made Yuki administer medicine to all the patients in Fol every day because of it?
The cackling returned even louder, gradually clawing away at the inside of her head and bringing forth a raging headache and incessant ringing. Chills froze the back of her neck and her head felt like lead. The world pitched forward.
“Do not put your trust in those two.”
How can I do that? They had always looked out for her. They prioritized her above all else.
“Do not put your trust in those two.”
Rhad’s words played and replayed in her mind like a broken record.
Why didn’t they tell me? Why didn’t they say anything when they knew? Why? Why? Why? Questions with no end or answer raced through her mind—her temples throbbed.
“I! Will trust in others in order to be trusted!” she shouted amid the spinning. She no longer knew which way was left or right or where up and down were. She fought not to lose consciousness. She fought not to lose herself.
What should I do? What can I trust? Who do I even want to ask these questions?
Someone cackled. Shivers ran across Yuki’s body, the incessant laughter almost sounded as if someone was watching the funniest soap opera in the world from inside her head.