Past the western sentry post, she finally spotted a familiar face.
Just as promised, Aiden was standing a little way off from the post. He’d been scanning the area as though making his night rounds, and the moment he caught sight of Dear he came straight over.
“You’re not late.”
“Nope. Right on the dot, wasn’t I?”
“Cutting it that fine is nothing to brag about.”
“I still wasn’t late.”
“The problem starts with an injured person sneaking out of camp and back in at all, don’t you think?”
“...Nag, nag.”
She muttered it as quietly as she possibly could, but he wasn’t a senior knight for nothing. Aiden narrowed his brows and answered in complete seriousness.
“I heard every word.”
In the end Dear just pouted at him without a sound. Aiden let out a short laugh where she couldn’t see it, then swept a look around them and closed the distance between them a little more.
“Was Endairon all right?”
“Yes. Perfectly fine.”
“That’s a relief.”
He said it with a soft smile, like a weight had come off him. It was only a few words, but they moved her. Everything she’d heard all day long had been some variation on reckless, stupid, incapable of seeing herself clearly.
And on top of that, Aiden didn’t pry any further.
“Then go in and rest. And truly, don’t do a single thing more today.”
“Got it.”
“Really?”
“...Probably?”
Aiden’s eyes narrowed.
“I’m joking.”
Dear answered quickly. Then, just as she was about to pass him by, her feet came to a sudden stop.
“...”
A uniform fastened neatly to the throat. A collar without a single thing out of place.
A man who had waited up this late for her after she’d snuck out, and hadn’t said one careless word about it.
Dear’s gaze traveled slowly upward.
A clean jaw, a straight nose, calm eyes. And Aiden had never once been the subject of gossip over women. Which meant that, as far as Dear knew, he was ‘clean.’
Dear’s eyes narrowed. Then she whipped her head from side to side.
“I said no.”
“Dear?”
“Yes?”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing at all!”
Dear blurted it out in a fluster. At the reaction, so unlike her usual self, Aiden’s brow creased faintly.
“Does something hurt?”
“No.”
“Your face looks strange.”
“This is just how my face looks.”
“...That isn’t what I meant.”
Dear dodged his eyes at once.
I must be out of my mind. For the first time in her life she had looked at a man and wondered whether he was a virgin. And of all people, the man who’d been helping her for a whole month.
If she had any conscience at all, she couldn’t do this.
‘It’s an absurd guess to begin with.’
A pure desire. Just look how lofty it sounded, right down to the name. There was no way the truth of it was nothing more than some man’s virginity. Spirit arts had thousands of years of history behind them; they couldn’t possibly be that vulgar. And if something like that actually worked, would the elemental masters have sat quietly on their hands?
The things she’d overheard earlier had just lined up a little too neatly, and her head had gone off on a pointless tangent for a moment. That was all.
“Okay, I’m really going now.”
“Yes. Rest well.”
Dear walked past Aiden at a brisk pace. Then, before she’d gone more than a few steps, she stopped again.
“Um... Sir Aiden.”
“Yes?”
“Are you, by any chance...”
Aiden raised his eyebrows, as if asking what she wanted to know. Dear’s lips parted.
‘Are you a virgin, by any chance?’
“...”
‘Have you lost your mind?’
Dear barely managed to pull herself together. Then she spat out the first harmless thing that came to her, awkwardly.
“Are you on patrol tomorrow too?”
“No. I have training.”
“Ah. I see.”
“Why do you ask?”
“No reason.”
Dear spun around on the spot.
“Good night!”
And then she bolted without waiting for an answer. She could feel Aiden watching her back as she went, like he couldn’t make sense of her. Dear ran at full speed all the way to her quarters without looking back even once.
And the instant she dropped onto her cot, she pulled the blanket right over her head.
No. It is absolutely not virginity. But she still had to find out what a pure desire actually was.
Under the blanket, Dear’s eyes snapped open.
Luckily, digging up things she didn’t know was something she’d always been rather confident about.
It had been the same back in school.
She’d read the books the professors told her not to read, read ancient volumes that were a step away from being discarded, and slipped in and out of the off-limits archives day and night, earning herself warning after warning.
“...”
Dear’s eyes narrowed.
Hold on, now that she thought about it, there had been one. A very old book on spirit arts. A collection of nothing but formulas that were forbidden now.
Somewhere in it she had definitely seen a formula for finding out what a person wanted. She couldn’t recall the exact contents, but one of the components had been strange enough that it stuck with her.
The caster’s tears. Tears were the water closest to the soul, so they served as the medium binding the caster’s soul to the thing she sought — wasn’t that how it went?
“...”
Dear sat there blankly for a while. Then she slowly touched her own cheek. There might really be a way to check after all.
Dear used a magic stone to request a connection to the Imperial Palace Library. She meant to track down the book she’d read all those years ago, but all that came back was an answer that no such book had ever existed in the world.
Dear stared down at the magic stone, now gone dark, for a long time.
“There’s no way it doesn’t exist.”
She had definitely read it. In the school library, no less. The title was hazy, but she remembered parts of the contents and the author. The unusually strong smell of old paper, too, and the yellowed binding that felt like it would crumble at a touch. Even the scribbles someone had left in ink in the corner of a page.
And yet it had never existed in the world?
“...Did I read it in a dream?”
There was no chance of that. Dear had a good memory. Especially where knowledge that smelled like money was concerned.
It binds the caster to the thing she seeks.
What a line that was, positively reeking of money. At first she’d assumed it was a formula for finding treasure. Could it find ore veins? Could it be put to use finding missing persons? Could it find patches of herbs worth good coin?
She’d read on happily with thoughts like those, then given up when the conditions turned out to be fussier than she’d expected.
“It was there. I know it was.”
Dear muttered it under her breath. If she couldn’t find the book, there was nothing for it.
She’d just have to remember.
Dear pulled out a sheet of paper. Then she started writing down whatever she could remember, one line at a time.
Create a temporary path between the caster and the target. Through that path, bring the target’s energy into contact with the caster’s soul.
Tears.
Evening primrose.
Dried sage.
...and what came after that?
Dear buried her head in her hands.
“Ugh, this is going to drive me insane.”
If I’d known it would come to this, I’d have memorized the whole thing properly back then. But who could possibly have guessed? That years later she’d be stuck in a war zone, trying to revive her spirit vein by linking herself to some man’s virginity.
“No.”
Dear tapped herself on the head with her pen.
“It hasn’t been confirmed as virginity yet.”
That was exactly what she meant to find out. Whether a pure desire really had anything to do with virginity.
That was all.
And please, if there was any mercy in the world, let it have nothing to do with it at all. Dear prayed that with her whole heart and went back to groping through her memory.
When she’d finished ransacking her musty old memories, she had ten ingredients in total. Luckily, maybe because she was in the thick of a war, getting hold of medicinal herbs wasn’t difficult in itself.
Smear it on a cut, bind it to a break, boil it down when a fever climbed.
With dozens of wounded pouring in every single day, most ordinary herbs sat stacked by the crate in the medical tent. Dear wheedled a little of each of the common ones out of them.
The problem was the rest.
“Evening primrose root, silver moss...”
Dear wrote the ingredients she remembered onto the paper, one after another.
“Blue sage.”
Those three were the trouble. Meaning they were the kind of herbs you’d only maybe turn up after combing the forest from end to end.
So in the end, Dear snuck out at night and, instead of training, squatted in the middle of the forest and started clawing up the dirt.
“I definitely saw it here.”
Herb list in one hand. A stick in the other.
Dear stirred through the undergrowth, narrowing her eyes.
“It was somewhere around here. I’m sure of it.”
Doing this with her injured hand of all things, she thought, what on earth am I even doing? But there was no helping it. She might be thrown out of her post as an Elma any day now, so was this really the time to be picky? If she had to climb a cliff, she’d climb a cliff.
“Oh.”
Just then a familiar leaf showed itself under the brush. Dear’s face lit right up.
“Found you.”
She darted over and grabbed the stem. The problem was...
“Hup.”
It wouldn’t come out.
“...”
Dear put more muscle into it.
“Hnnngh.”
It didn’t so much as twitch. And of course the part that went into the medicine was the root. With a bandaged hand it clearly wasn’t going to shift an inch. But it was far too early to give up here, wasn’t it?
“...you stupid little weed.”
Sheer stubbornness kicking in now, Dear gritted her teeth and clamped both hands around the stem. That was the moment.
“What the hell are you doing?”
