GRP Chapter 18

Oze, who had been suffering under the mermaid's shriek, pulled himself upright, still unsteady. His eyes were still closed. He had been the first to detect the attack, and his reaction to the mermaid's song was the most acute of anyone's—by all evidence, Oze possessed exceptional hearing.

"Huh—doesn't seem like there are any more."

Snow mermaids were a species that traveled in groups. Find one, and you should assume a dozen or more nearby. For the queen of a group to appear alone was stranger still—an entirely anomalous situation.

People clustered around the snow mermaid's remains. At the center of the group, crouching over the body, were Garthe and Samthyeon. They sorted through the remains without hesitation.

"Judging by the gem in her chest, she's the queen."

"A distinguished visitor, then."

Garthe lifted one of the arms that grew from the mermaid's wing-bones.

"Unlikely to be decorative. A regressor, then?"

"Body size exceeds the norm, there's the physical aberration, and she had aggression rare in snow mermaids... The probability is high."

On one side of the room, a calm conversation. On the other, someone quietly tilting a cup. The peaceful atmosphere made the combat of a few minutes ago feel like something that had happened somewhere else entirely.

Garthe rose and perched on the edge of the table, sweeping the disorder the intruder had left behind with a sharp gaze. Mariaeks, standing alone in the uncertain nowhere between states—neither composed nor collapsed—was precisely what that gaze found.

"Mariaeks."

A cold voice poured over her clouded mind. Mariaeks, who had drifted for a moment, felt something return to her eyes. The living Garthe was twice as threatening and frightening as the dead mermaid. She pressed her trembling body down into steady steps and walked toward him.

When she stood before him, his gaze dropped. It seemed to settle on the places where the mermaid's tongue had been.

Garthe's rough, long-fingered hand closed around Mariaeks's chin. She was on the verge of flinching at the force of his grip when his face came to within inches of hers. He studied her white cheek for a moment, then tilted his head slightly.

First a tickling breath, then a hot tongue grazing her cheek.

Mariaeks stood rigid and only blinked.

Which was to say—the man had just licked the wound on her cheek, out of nowhere.

His prominent throat moved in a large swallow.

Gulp.

The hand released her chin without a trace of lingering, having accomplished whatever it had set out to accomplish.

"......"

Dozens of pairs of eyes moved back and forth between Mariaeks and Garthe. He smacked his lips a few times, like someone who couldn't feel the stares at all.

"Tastes like blood."

"Well. Would it taste like wine."

Salenoke—the man who had just cut the mermaid's neck—replied as though genuinely at a loss for words.

The banquet ended early. On account of the regressor's appearance, a prohibition on alcohol was issued for everyone present. The people robbed of their drink wept openly. Samthyeon, for his part, appeared satisfied to have acquired the mermaid queen's remains.

Leaving the shambles behind, Mariaeks followed Garthe out of the banquet hall.

A wooden bathtub waited in the room. From the warm water that filled it, white steam rose in gentle wisps. She had assumed it was prepared for Garthe, but he simply sat down on the sofa as though the bathtub had nothing to do with him.

After a long stretch of silence, a voice fell into it—flat and mildly bored.

"Surely I'm not expected to wash you as well."

The man leaning back against the sofa tipped his chin toward the bathtub. That much seemed clear. She was meant to bathe.

It was the most welcome thing she had heard from him since their meeting. The white cloak she had been given, the shoes he had put on her feet himself—all of it was filthy with food, blood, and things she did not want to name. Her body had soaked through with cold sweat more than once and dried again, and the feeling left behind was thoroughly unpleasant.

Mariaeks slowly removed the cloak and let it fall to the floor. Then she removed the shoes, the cloth wrapping her feet, and the loose tunic—one by one. Cool air pressed against her bare skin without a gap. Her body shivered.

She felt a gaze.

Mariaeks turned her head toward it. Garthe, seated on the sofa, was looking at her with an expression she rarely saw on him. The even line of his brow had distorted, and his mouth—which always carried the faint trace of some private amusement—hung open in a way she couldn't categorize.

The unfamiliar expression put her on edge.

A moment later, Garthe erased the unfamiliar look and smiled—coldly.

"First time I knew a privacy screen was decorative."

At the reproachful tone, Mariaeks hesitated, then gathered the clothes from the floor and draped them over the privacy screen. One of Garthe's eyebrows rose. Thinking she might have gotten it wrong, she set the leather shoes neatly beside it and watched his face—but the man had already lost interest and turned his attention to a book.

A remarkably capricious human.

"Go and bathe."

Mariaeks made her way to the bathtub on the other side of the screen. The room was cold, but the space behind it was quite warm. Once she confirmed that Garthe was entirely out of sight, she scooped up water without a sound and drank.

After about eight handfuls, the thirst left her completely. The snow mermaid's attack had been distressing, but it had produced an opportunity to drink water—so it was not entirely a bad thing, it seemed. Good fortune and bad fortune come together, as they say.

Mariaeks simply buried her face and drank—gulp, gulp, gulp—until her stomach was round and full with water.

About the time the sloshing of liquid inside her began to make her feel ill, Mariaeks stepped into the bathtub. The water was warm enough that she could feel the accumulated tension of everything that had happened dissolving in a single moment. Ullri and Baen had prepared bathwater for her occasionally, but water this warm was something she had never experienced. In Heimdrykze, firewood was difficult to come by—at best, the water had been lukewarm; otherwise, merely cold enough not to have frozen.

When she submerged herself to just below her nose, warmth spread through her entire body. A sigh escaped her before she knew it.

A sudden sting grazed her skin. Looking below the surface, she saw blood spreading from the wound. Mariaeks scrubbed vigorously at the places where the mermaid's tongue had been. The slow, crawling memory of the sticky, slick sensation still seemed to linger on her legs. The hands washing them were trembling.

Hweeee—outside the window, the blizzard howled.

Mariaeks thought of the mermaid's face—how she had rushed blindly toward her without sparing so much as a glance at any of the humans in the room. If it had been simple killing intent, that might have been comprehensible. But the emotion woven into the mermaid's song and her eyes was closer to feverish desire. The mermaid had wanted her desperately. When she licked the blood, she had trembled with ecstasy—as if pain and death had ceased to exist for her entirely.

'What on earth...'

What... what in the world was that? What was it? How did this even happen? And why—why her blood?

A drop of water sliding from her forehead gathered in the wound on her cheek. The sting of it had her carefully touching her cheek. A faint trace of blood came away on her fingertips. Mariaeks licked her reddened fingertip.

'Tastes like blood.'

Though naturally, it was never going to taste like wine.

She had been born in Heimdrykze—the place most creatures regarded with the greatest wariness—and had lived there all her life, but she had rarely felt in genuine danger. Because she had always been under the protection of the greatest and most powerful being in existence. The threats she had faced amounted to Rhaevydie's malice, avalanches, killing cold, blizzards, and hunger—that was the extent of it.

Perhaps it was the consequence of having spent over a century in safety. She had not anticipated, not even slightly, that the world outside Heimdrykze would be this dangerous. The number of times she had nearly died already was more than she could count. Several times at Garthe's hands. Once to the mermaid. Less than two days had passed, and already it had come to this.

A year. How was she supposed to endure a year?

Mariaeks thought of the small, worn temple. The safest place in all the world. The place that did not change, and was eternal. She longed desperately to return to it. Mariaeks drew both knees to her chest and buried her head between them.

Garthe had been reading a book—moderately boring, moderately useful—when he looked up.

'...Some time has passed.'

There had been no sign of the woman who had gone in to bathe. Looking toward the privacy screen, he could see that not even steam was rising anymore. More time had passed than he'd thought.

"Mariaeks?"

No answer.

She communicated by nodding and shaking her head as a matter of course, but the absence of any sound of water moving was somewhat odd. Garthe set down the book and rose. He didn't even need to go around the screen. His height was such that simply standing made everything on the other side entirely visible.

His eyebrow slanted upward.

He let out a short breath and stepped around the privacy screen.

Hrrmm... hrrmm.

A weary sound. It was coming from a woman sitting in the bathtub—knees drawn to her chest, head bowed forward over them. She had fallen asleep.

'Leave her as she is?'

The first plan that occurred to him was immediately discarded. He still carried the evidence of the fight in various places. He would not be able to wash—or not wash—himself until he had extracted her from the tub.

"She requires an unreasonable amount of effort across multiple fronts," he muttered to himself. Then rolled his sleeves up to the elbows and lifted the sleeping Mariaeks out in one motion. "And I’m not exactly the charitable sort, am I?"

Her small head fell against his chest.

Fshh... fshh. The regular sound of her breathing resonated from within his arms.

Through drying her and laying her down in the bed, she showed no sign of waking. At this rate, he thought, it was hard to tell whether she was sleeping or had simply lost consciousness. How such an obtuse, utterly feeble god had survived in Heimdrykze was beyond his understanding.

The woman's white, bare form gathered the candlelight and gave it back, glowing faintly. Like freshly fallen snow reflecting moonlight from a distance.

Garthe was a hero who had made his name known across the continent long ago. As was generally the case for those who were powerful and celebrated, he had received more than his share of seduction attempts. He had encountered more than a hundred women each declared "the greatest beauty on the continent."

An interesting property that "greatest" had, to attach itself to that many people.

Some had adorned themselves with glittering gold and jewels; others had offered what they were born with. Soft, full bodies, hair as smooth as silk, eyes that gleamed with moisture, lips full as ripe fruit, fragrances that reached all five senses—the combination would move any human.