Drawing water that had already soaked into something back out and gathering it into a single point was a top-tier technique.
And obviously, there was no way Dear could do anything like that.
So Dear fetched her own blanket, left it at Kyle’s spot, carried the soaked one back, and kept a fire burning all night to dry it. Which meant she spent the night huddled in a corner under a thick cloak, shivering herself to sleep, and woke in the morning with a great hearty sneeze. She was still trembling with a chill that had sunk into her bones, rubbing her arms with her hands as she stepped out of the tent, when something came flying at her out of nowhere.
Fwump.
She threw out a hand on reflex and caught it, and felt the soft weight of a blanket.
Rudeness this early in the morning. She snapped her head toward wherever the blanket had come from, and there was Kyle’s obnoxiously handsome face, screwed up with irritation.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
That was exactly what she wanted to ask him. But Kyle threw his tantrum with absolute, righteous confidence.
“When did I ever ask for yours? Can’t you even go to the quartermaster and ask for a new blanket?”
“I did. They said there weren’t any left, so...”
“It stank so damn bad I couldn’t even sleep.”
Dear’s mouth fell open.
“It stank?”
“That’s right.”
“And what exactly do you think it smelled like?”
“Do you just wear that nose for decoration?”
“...”
Dear pulled her blanket right up under her nose. She sniffed at it, but she couldn’t smell a thing.
“It doesn’t smell like anything?”
“It does.”
“Of what?”
“Of you.”
Dear froze mid-motion.
“...Of me?”
“That’s right.”
Kyle’s brows drew together as if just remembering it disgusted him.
“It was reeking right under my nose all night. I thought I was going to die.”
Dear’s face went red in an instant. Spirit summoners had to keep themselves immaculate, so she washed every single day even in the middle of a war, and water summoners in particular barely had any natural scent to begin with. And he couldn’t sleep because of her smell? Of all the ways to pick a fight, this one took the prize. But he looked genuinely revolted as he collected his own dry blanket from beside the brazier and shoved his scowling face toward hers.
“Don’t tell me you got your smell on this one too.”
“I did not!”
“Fine, then.”
Kyle slung the blanket he’d gone to all that trouble to reclaim over one shoulder. And then, as though that had genuinely been the whole of his business, he turned his back without a second thought.
“...”
Dear stared after his retreating figure, speechless.
That’s it? I shivered all night with nothing over me because I was drying that blanket.
The guy isn’t even human.
A normal person would at least have asked, with some trace of concern, whether she’d really slept bare in cold like this. But no, he’d marched up, announced out of the blue that she smelled, and left. Dear buried her nose in her blanket again and sniffed, and when she still couldn’t smell anything at all, her brows knit together.
“Lunatic.”
She was never getting tangled up with him again. That’s what she thought — forgetting, as usual, that her life had never once gone the way she wanted it to.
Exactly three hours later, Dear ran into Kyle again.
“A request has come in for one Elma to be attached to the securing of the Third Supply Route.”
The commander spread a map out across the table. Dear stood in front of it with a tense face. He glanced up at her, then delivered his verdict in a low voice.
“You’re going.”
By all rights it was news she should have been glad to hear. It was the first assignment she’d been given that actually befitted a spirit summoner. How many days had she spent dodging everyone to train in secret, all for a moment like this?
But maybe because she had no confidence in herself, the commander’s words didn’t feel welcome in the slightest.
His face was just as rigid as hers.
“And this is your last chance.”
He tapped the desk with his fingertips, then lifted his chin as if in warning.
“I can’t let a high-ranking spirit summoner rot on drinking-water duty indefinitely. The only reason we’ve waited this long is because you hold a contract with Endairon. If today’s operation shows me you can’t be deployed in combat, I’ll report it up the chain.”
Her heart dropped straight through her.
“Wait, please. If you could just give me a little more time...”
“On a battlefield?”
Dear shut her mouth.
“This isn’t a school, Elma Dear. And the enemy isn’t going to wait around until you’re ready.”
Every word of it was right. She couldn’t even argue. When she just stood there, white-faced and silent, the commander raised an eyebrow and looked her dead in the eye.
“I looked at the paperwork you submitted when you signed your contract. You’re sending most of your pay home to your family.”
Dear’s fingertips went stiff.
“If you come off the spirit summoner roster, the special wartime allowance gets adjusted accordingly. Naturally.”
“...”
“So you’d better pull this off like your life depends on it.”
The commander closed the file.
“For your own sake, and your family’s.”
Dear couldn’t answer. Even after she’d stepped out of the tent, she stood rooted to the spot for a long while.
Her body, which had shivered through the cold all night, started trembling again — but this time the cold wasn’t the only reason.
The special wartime allowance. That could not be cut off.
Dear’s family was a baronetcy. More precisely, a debt-ridden baronetcy that was barely clinging to the title itself. Half of everything the estate harvested went to servicing the debt, and the other half had to feed the tenants and the household. For the past few years even that hadn’t been enough, and her mother’s jewelry had been sold off piece by piece.
And out of a house like that came a daughter who had contracted a high-ranking spirit. There was no need to describe how overjoyed her family had been.
“Our Dear has saved the family.”
That was what her father had said, eyes brimming. That day, for the first time in years, Dear had laughed with an easy heart.
And now she was going to be thrown off the spirit summoner roster?
Dear bit her lip.
No.
Anything but that. Absolutely anything but that.
Even when she’d heard the news that war had broken out, Dear hadn’t simply despaired the way everyone else did. In one corner of all that fear, a very small part of her had been glad. Wartime contract pay was triple the peacetime rate. On top of that, if you earned a commendation, there were rewards that came down from the royal family. If she could just handle Endairon properly, she could earn in one stroke what would otherwise take years of grinding to repay.
That was the thinking that had carried her all the way here.
And the reality was...
Dead weight.
“...”
And of all the voices that could have surfaced in her head, it had to be his.
“Expensive dead weight, at that.”
Dear’s brows crumpled together.
“I am not.”
A soldier passing by flinched and stared at her. Dear couldn’t have cared less; she brought both hands up and smacked herself across the cheeks.
“I can do this.”
She had to.
By whatever means necessary.
But she’d never imagined she’d run into that face again here, of all places. The instant she spotted that familiar ash-grey hair in the distance, Dear’s expression soured. He wasn’t even wearing a proper uniform, just a leather vest, his head tipped at a cocky angle as he stood mixed in among the knights, checking the edge of his sword.
Dear turned on her heel on reflex and headed for the officer running the operation. The call for everyone to assemble came just in time.
“Squad One crosses first. Confirm there are no enemies on the far bank, then signal. Squad Two escorts the engineers. The Elma waits at the crossing point and takes hold of the current the moment the signal comes.”
The Third Supply Route was a road that ran northeast from the front line. It had originally been wide enough for two wagons to run side by side, but a few days earlier a downpour had washed out one of the bridges, and that was the problem.
The river flowing beneath it wasn’t deep. The trouble was the current. The rain had swollen the water level, and silt and debris washed down from upstream churned through it, making it too dangerous for horses or wagons to cross as it was.
The mission was simple.
The advance party would cross the river first and secure the far side. In the meantime, the water Elma would slow the current to make a temporary crossing, and the engineer corps would repair the broken bridge.
What was being asked of Dear was exactly one thing. Move the water. The thing Endairon did better than anything else. Which meant if she failed at this too, there really wouldn’t be a single excuse left.
Her hands were trembling, so Dear rubbed her palms pointlessly against her cloak. The air carried that fishy river smell, blood and mud stirred through it. When she slid a hand into the water, she felt finicky Endairon bristle with irritation. But Dear pressed his resistance down and coughed a little.
The officer asked the question with his eyes.
Can you do it? Dear nodded, calm as she could manage. At that the officer raised his eyebrows as if to say good, then threw his gaze off into the distance and called out a familiar name.
“Kyle.”
“...”
“You’re on escort duty for the Elma.”
“Don’t want to.”
The answer came instantly. More than the fact that she’d been saddled with him, what shocked Dear was Kyle’s boorishness in spitting out casual speech at a superior officer.
The officer’s temple twitched right along with her.
“That’s an order.”
“You want me stuck here babysitting one woman?”
“She holds a contract with a high-ranking spirit. If the enemy so much as catches sight of her, she becomes their top-priority target.”
Kyle looked at Dear. It was written across his face in plain letters.
Her?
Dear’s face going red was the natural next step in the sequence. She spoke up as if in rebellion.
“I’ll be fine on my own.”
“You won’t be.”
The officer said it flatly.
“Once an Elma enters a casting, it’s hard for her to track what’s happening around her. Kyle. Stay close to her.”
At that, Kyle clicked his tongue in annoyance.
“Yeah, fine. Whatever.”
And then his eyes met Dear’s. What? he mouthed, and there was nothing in this world more insufferable than that attitude of his. Dear turned her head away.
“It’s nothing.”
Honestly, this worked out perfectly. Today, she fully intended to prove it right in front of that man’s eyes. Exactly who the dead weight was.
