Her treatment was finished, but Dear didn’t leave the medical tent. A little while later the flap lifted and Kyle came walking out. His expression said he found it thoroughly unpleasant to have shrugged back into those soaked, filthy clothes. His face was downright savage.
His injured arm, on the other hand, barely had anything left you could call a sleeve, probably because the medic had hacked the cloth to ribbons. Through the tattered strips, the stark white bandage wound around his forearm showed plainly.
Dear’s gaze settled there of its own accord. Well, after the way the blood had been pouring out of him earlier, that was only natural.
Even with a person loitering right there in front of the tent, Kyle didn’t so much as look in her direction. He simply walked past. Which meant Dear had to run after him, practically gasping, just to catch him.
“Hey, excuse me!”
Only then did he turn, his face mixed half and half with distaste and annoyance, as if to ask why she was still hanging around.
“What. What is it now.”
Dear quickly held out the ointment in her hand.
“This.”
Kyle stared blankly down at her hand.
“And what am I supposed to do with that. I’ve got my own.”
It was the sort of response that killed any warm feeling stone dead. Dear swallowed a curse and spoke in a low voice.
“You got hurt because of me. And they said they’d give me a better ointment, since I’m an Elma. You’re hurt a lot worse than I am, too, so I’m saying let’s trade.”
Kyle didn’t take it. Instead he looked back and forth between the offered ointment and Dear’s face. All at once something cold settled over his features.
“You. Seems like you’ve got the wrong idea about something.”
Kyle’s voice came out low.
“Me saving you today, there wasn’t one single other thing behind it. It was just my duty. They stuck me there to guard you, so I did it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have cared whether you drowned in that river or not. You following?”
Why is he suddenly getting all serious? Dear blinked. Had she made some kind of strange proposition? All she’d said was let’s swap ointments.
“I don’t have anything else behind it either.”
Dear’s lips jutted out in a sulk as she drew her brows together, the picture of someone wronged. Kyle flicked an eyebrow.
“Then we’re fine.”
“Fine how?”
“Neither of us has anything behind it, so we’re fine. You got a problem with that?”
“No!”
“Then rub it on properly. Yours.”
And with that, he was gone. Dear stood there seething for a good while, partly out of sheer disbelief and partly because her pride stung at having looked like she was coming on to a man like that.
Who does he think he is! So he’s got a big chest and broad shoulders and some abs, is that everything? With a face like a born punk!
Dear balled her hands into fists. On top of everything, the rumors about Kyle were filthy beyond words. That he wasn’t picky so long as it was a woman. That he was tangled up with a different one every night. There was even talk that in any tavern or pleasure house, there wasn’t a woman alive who didn’t know Kyle.
The crowning piece had come last week.
Some woman had suddenly turned up at the unit itself and made an enormous scene, claiming she was carrying Kyle’s child. She’d shrieked so loudly that even Dear, hauling water buckets at the time, had heard every word.
Kyle, of course, had reportedly driven her off, insisting the child wasn’t his. Without so much as looking at her face! Still, if someone says she’s carrying your child, shouldn’t you at least look at her and make sure?
He had no mercy in him for anyone, and sure enough, it was exactly the same when it came to women.
So he plays around like that and then wants nothing to do with the responsibility.
Dear shook her head back and forth.
Granted, there was no way of knowing whether the child was really Kyle’s. But if the woman had come all the way to the unit to shout that the father of the baby in her belly was Kyle, then surely there’d been something between the two of them, at the very least.
Because a baby doesn’t just appear out of nowhere between two people who are nothing to each other.
At least, not as far as Dear’s common sense went.
And a man like that treats me like some woman trailing after him, lovestruck, all because I brought him one measly ointment?
“As if. Look who’s talking.”
Dear snorted in irritation. Whether that arm festered or rotted clean off was no concern of hers now. The hand that had held out the ointment, moved for a brief moment by gratitude and guilt, swung pointlessly through the empty air. Where does he get an idea like that?
“Dear?”
Just then a comparatively pleasant voice called her to a stop. She lifted her head and saw a familiar face coming toward her.
Beneath neatly combed brown hair sat clean, well-ordered features. It wasn’t a striking face, nothing that jumped out at you, but the lines were tidy and the impression gentle, the kind of face you liked more the longer you looked at it.
Above all, he was always exemplary.
Even on a battlefield you’d be hard-pressed to catch him looking disheveled, and there was nothing superfluous in the way he spoke or moved. Which is to say, he was the complete opposite of a certain someone she’d been facing just moments ago.
“Oh, Sir Aiden.”
Dear flushed faintly as she greeted him. She’d heard he’d been away these past few days on an assignment, and he was still in his armor, as though he’d only just gotten back. He hurried over, concern written across his face.
“I heard what happened. They said you were hurt. Are you all right? Where, is it your arm?”
Aiden’s hand moved reflexively toward Dear’s arm. But it stopped just short of touching her.
“...Ah.”
Only then, it seemed, did he realize he’d been about to lay a hand on a lady without her leave. Looking a little flustered, Aiden drew his hand back.
“Forgive me. That was out of line.”
“No. It’s fine.”
Dear answered quickly. How different he was from a certain someone who, even with his whole body pressed flush against hers, had treated her less like a lady than like a leech.
...Isn’t this how a person’s supposed to live, after all?
Dear let out a sigh and shook her head where he couldn’t see. Then, so Aiden wouldn’t worry, she hurried to explain her injuries.
“My finger got bent back a little. And I hurt my wrist a bit too.”
“That doesn’t look like ‘a little’ to me.”
Aiden frowned as he studied her bandaged hand.
“I’m really fine. It didn’t even bleed.”
“Blood isn’t the point, is it?”
Aiden clicked his tongue as though she were talking nonsense. But from where Dear stood, it wasn’t nonsense at all. For a spirit summoner, bleeding was the worst injury there was.
Spill blood, and the bond linking you to your spirit took serious damage. Getting that close to the spirit again meant training and training and training some more. But none of that was something to explain to Aiden. Dear only smiled, a little bitterly, and shrugged.
Aiden, it seemed, had taken that look on her face for something the rumors had put there.
“Dear. If it’s Command you’re worried about, don’t be. Whatever else is true, you’re a summoner bonded to Endairon, and there’s no chance Command throws someone like that away so easily.”
“But I’ve been useless for such a long time.”
“It’s been three months. That’s all.”
“Three months is a long time on a battlefield.”
Unable to argue with that, Aiden’s face darkened. And then Dear brightened her own expression, as if to steer the mood somewhere else, and asked:
“Aiden, could I ask you for a favor again tonight?”
The moment he heard it, Aiden’s brows drew together and he bent toward her.
“You can’t seriously mean to go out tonight too?”
“My bond with my spirit broke during the mission. I need to go check that Endairon’s all right.”
Aiden’s face went stiff at once.
“Your bond broke?”
“It didn’t vanish completely. The spirit stone’s responding again now, too. Still, I don’t think I’ll be able to relax until I’ve checked for myself.”
“...”
Aiden didn’t answer right away.
Which was fair enough.
He knew better than anyone exactly what Dear meant by a ‘favor.’
Dear had started slipping out of the encampment at night to train her spirit arts a month ago.
By the book, it was absolutely not allowed.
Manifesting a spirit without authorization during wartime was forbidden. There was the chance the energy a spirit gave off would be picked up by the enemy, and more than that, if a summoner too green to control her power caused an accident while training alone, there’d be no one around to clean it up.
Dear knew all that. But she simply couldn’t sit still. Hauling water buckets all day was never going to get her to the point where she could handle Endairon. So she went out to train in secret.
And the first person to notice was Aiden.
That first night, she’d truly thought she was finished.
Of all the luck, she’d walked straight into Aiden on his night patrol. But Aiden hadn’t reported her.
Instead, from that day on, whenever Dear went out to train, he’d shift the route through the sector he was patrolling a little at a time. He’d tell her the times that would keep her from running into the other knights, and when she came back late, he’d be waiting near the guard post to wave her through as if nothing had happened at all.
