Chapter 17
She knew exactly who the woman he was searching for was.
“Miss Olson.”
Aaron took a step toward her.
But before he could ask anything, Olson spoke first. The kitchen was deafeningly noisy, yet her voice carried clearly to Aaron’s ears.
“I don’t want you to hurt her. She’s a very timid woman.”
A woman who was easily frightened. A woman who was afraid of being hurt.
What kind of man had he been in her eyes? Had she naturally seen him as nothing more than the sort of scoundrel who would wound her?
If so, then why had she wanted him enough to entrust him with her maidenhood?
Why? Why someone like him?
All at once, Aaron remembered asking himself a similar question before.
It was the same question that had come to him while looking at the mage who had quietly criticized his behavior, yet had still chosen to help him.
Why is the Grand Archmage helping him? Why had she gone through all that trouble for him when there was nothing in it for her? Why?
The same question—Why?—rose in his mind once more. And once again, he found no answer.
Aaron did not ask Olson for the woman’s name. Instead, he asked something else.
“If I asked her to give me a chance… would she?”
At Aaron’s question, Olson nodded without the slightest hesitation.
“Of course. On the condition that you’ll be faithful to her alone.”
“If I promised to be faithful, would she believe me?”
It might have sounded ridiculous to anyone else, making such a promise without even knowing who she was. But Aaron had never been more serious.
“She’s been watching you for a very long time. You, and only you.”
Olson smiled softly.
“From somewhere high above?”
At Aaron’s cryptic question, Olson simply smiled and nodded instead of answering.
Then she placed the frying pan back over the stove and said:
“I’m busy. I have to fry potatoes for everyone in the royal palace.”
With that, she turned away. There was nothing more Aaron needed to learn from Olson.
A woman who had watched him for a long time. A woman who had watched him from somewhere high above. The familiar scent of wildflowers. Faded blonde hair. Kindness without any reason. And running away without any reason.
A woman whose face alone he could not remember, as though by magic.
Strangely enough, only her face.
Aaron bolted up the stairs.
He raced upward without stopping, climbing the seemingly endless staircase that disappeared into the heavens. Anyone who saw him would have thought he’d lost his mind.
About halfway up—
“Ah.”
A realization suddenly struck Aaron, and he stopped in his tracks.
Then, like a man truly possessed, he turned around and sprinted all the way back down the staircase he had struggled so hard to climb.
When he reached the courtyard, he leaped onto the horse he had left tethered there, gasping for breath, and galloped away like a madman.
◇ ◆ ◇
“…”
Daisy stared blankly into the cauldron.
She was in the middle of brewing a medicine effective against contagious livestock diseases. Autumn would soon give way to the harvest, and winter would follow not long after. The transition from autumn to winter was the season when livestock most often fell ill.
For two years now, she had been working to create a remedy for the epidemic that returned every year, but she had yet to produce anything she could truly call a miracle cure. Still, ever since she had become the Grand Archmage, outbreaks among livestock and diseases affecting crops had become far less common than they once were.
But “far less common” wasn’t enough for Daisy. She wanted them gone entirely.
Of course, eliminating one disease would only allow another to emerge. Such illnesses would always continue to appear, one after another. But whenever they did, she intended to create another remedy for them. She regarded it as her calling.
Preparing medicines wasn’t the Grand Archmage’s only duty. If a monstrous beast appeared in a forest, she had to investigate it. If some strange phenomenon occurred within a noble’s territory, that too fell under her responsibility.
There was always more work to be done. Yet lately, she found herself increasingly distracted.
It always happened when autumn approached.
Discussion
0 CommentsNo comments yet.