MHHC Chapter 127

Marguerite

On the way back to the carriage, Adelheid carefully took Valentin's hand.

He stiffened, startled — but he didn't pull away. He closed his fingers around hers and held on.

The sensation of being swallowed whole by a large, warm hand brought with it a deep, settling satisfaction.

Languid as a cat in a patch of sunlight, Adelheid leaned against him as they walked. With a consideration she was still learning to accept, he matched his stride to hers — and then his thumb moved, tracing the line of her cheek with a gentleness that had no business existing in a being like him.

"You look tired."

"Ah — I suppose I haven't been sleeping well lately. But at least I can manage a few hours in the moving carriage now. I couldn't before, no matter how exhausted I was."

"You don't have to push yourself. Please. In anything."

He held the carriage door for her, his voice carrying a gravity that made the word feel less like a request and more like a plea. Adelheid climbed in and settled deep against the inner seat to make room for him across from her.

"It's difficult, but I'm still managing. And the work is practice for me as well — once I'm attached to the army, I'll be thrown directly into real combat medicine." She folded her hands in her lap. "I want to gain as much experience as I can before then."

"You do seem noticeably more skilled with healing than you were even recently."

"Ah — actually, there was something I wanted to ask you."

"Go ahead."

Adelheid reached over and pulled the carriage door fully shut. What she was about to say was not for other ears.

"Lately, I've been getting the feeling that my... that my power has been growing, somehow. If it's still all right to call it that."

"Call it whatever you like. Sacred power, magic — it's yours now, regardless."

"Mine?"

"It's been merging with your own essence and becoming something independent. The same way Morig absorbed mine and changed its nature by making it his own."

Of course, that one had to resort to trickery — no divine origin of his own to work with.

The murmured addition was quiet enough that it could have gone unaddressed, but Adelheid understood it immediately. The immovable faith of humanity — their absolute certainty that Morig was divine. That was the trickery. Belief, leveraged as a tool.

"But I'm still human..."

"To possess a 'divine origin' is to have the power to make the impossible possible. It's not for nothing that miracles are counted among a god's abilities."

Miracles. However many times she heard the word, it still sounded like something glimpsed in a dream and forgotten by morning. She turned his words over in her mind — and then something crystallized.

If she could wield miracles freely — truly freely — could she not save anything? Anyone? Even, perhaps, a god who was losing his power and dying?

The moment the formless hope took shape, her body betrayed her with urgency. She wet her dry lips with her tongue.

"If I became more skilled — could I wish for any miracle?"

"......"

He looked down at her hand, still clasped inside his, with eyes gone dark and very still.

The gaze was the sort that seemed to be wondering what she was after — and, simultaneously, as though he had already deduced the full answer and was simply deciding what to do with it.

"Even a small miracle requires becoming, however crudely, something closer to a god. The more complete the divine power one possesses, the greater the scale of miracle one can perform."

"Without limitation?"

Valentin lowered his eyelids, as though refusing to meet the naked want in her eyes.

"It cannot be used to harm humans."

"And other than that?"

"You cannot reverse time. And you cannot restore an equivalent entity."

An equivalent entity.

Her breath caught. She pushed forward anyway.

"But—"

"Adele. Don't even think about it."

The temperature in Valentin's voice was something she had never heard from him before. Cold and final as a door being shut.

Stunned by his abruptness, Adelheid looked at him in bewilderment. He offered her nothing in return — not a glance, not a softening. The discussion, as far as he was concerned, was already closed.

The most awkward silence she had known since learning who he was settled over the interior of the carriage like sediment.

"Why..."

The hands folded obediently in her lap trembled with a surge of emotion that rarely broke through her careful composure.

Adelheid pressed her fingers into a fist and straightened her spine, fighting the tremor. She had wanted to ask the question calmly, as if none of this mattered — but her voice shook.

"Why am I not even allowed to think about it?"

Only then did Valentin raise his head. His gaze landed somewhere near her lips.

Golden eyes — luminous even in the dim interior — stirred with something dense and shifting, before they dropped again. The faint warmth that usually lived at the corners of his expression had been replaced by something edged and raw.

"There are conditions under which an origin can be transferred to another entity. This falls under those conditions, and for that reason it is impossible. I think it would be best to end this conversation here."

"......"

"Rest now. It's been a long day."

"W-wait."

She caught the sleeve of his coat, sudden and desperate. They had not been together like this in a long time.

She didn't want to part with this unresolved thing still turning between them — this subtle wrongness she couldn't name. But Valentin only looked down at his sleeve, crushed inside her grip, with eyes that gave away nothing.

His composure in this moment — this particular, unfamiliar composure — felt like the floor dropping out beneath her chest.

Adelheid gathered what remained of her courage.

"Could you... stay a little longer before you go?"

"......"

"I don't want to part like this. Not while something's still wrong between us."

She heard herself and prayed she didn't sound as desperate as she felt. But Valentin looked at her then — with the expression of a man hearing something he had never expected to hear.

"Something's wrong with you?"

"Not me. With you. You were upset."

"No. I—"

Whatever he had been about to say, his mouth closed over it. He frowned — the faint expression of a man taking inventory of his own interior — and was quiet for a long moment.

"It is because you, Adele, entertain dangerous thoughts."

"You're still angry with me. You haven't looked at me properly since we got in the carriage."

She hesitated — then, carefully, reached toward the cheek he had turned away from her.

Her fingertips were a breath from his jaw when her wrist was caught.

The gaze that had been subtly avoiding her ever since they'd stepped into the carriage swung back, and what it held when it finally met hers—

"......"

The eyes that had looked at her with such banked restraint were now open. And underneath the frustration and the furrowed brow, something was pooling there — dark and undisguised and very, very intent.

Adelheid understood, with a lurch, that he had been enduring her this entire time.

Perhaps from the very moment she had reached across him to close the carriage door herself.

"......"

The burning gaze moved across her — the line of her throat, the unguarded bow of her lips, the white curve of her shoulder, the hair that had fallen down over it — with a hunger that was barely contained.

In the darkness, the wet gleam of his tongue as it moved across dry lips drew the eye like a brand.

For a moment she had the bizarre impression that the interior of the carriage had grown darker — that everything had been swallowed by shadow, save for the gold of his eyes.

"If I intended to be angry, I would have been angry long ago." Slowly, with a deliberateness that seemed to cost him something, he pushed himself upright from where he had been pressed against the far corner of the seat. His upper body tilted forward. "In terms of danger — this moment is likely the most dangerous of your entire life."

The words arrived at her ear from very close. The warm scent of him, suddenly intimate and immediate, made her breath come faster without her permission.

And then — all at once — the memory arrived.

What had happened in this carriage, just a few days ago.

How had she managed to forget all of it so completely.

Her expression in the dim light must have made the confusion perfectly legible, because he smiled — and it was not a kind smile.

"I wonder where my warnings ever end up going."

His low voice, deep enough to resonate in her ribs, dragged warm and unhurried against her eardrum. The sensation ran all the way to her fingertips.

"Even if you call it... dangerous," she managed, "I know you won't — that is — you wouldn't do — anything. I know it."

"You are sitting across from someone with less self-control than a beast in rut, and you still call yourself safe." The smile sharpened. "You just felt it, moments ago, with your own body. And you still believe that?"

"......"

"There is not a single lie among the things I have said about you. And yet you always, always step right over the line, with an effortless cruelty. You have no idea what it costs me to stay where I am. You never will."

She could hear both things in his voice at once — the laboring patience, and the accusation woven underneath it.

She hadn't ignored his warnings. She hadn't — not deliberately. But she had, little by little, read his indulgence as permission, had let herself inch closer because she missed him, because she wanted to stay near him, because of small and selfish reasons she had used like a blindfold over her eyes. She had not thought about what she was asking of him to endure. It had been a selfish thing to do.

"...I'm sorry."

The deflated sound of her voice made something in his sharp expression flinch.

"I've been too... willful..."

A long, slow breath moved through him, and the tension he'd been holding began, with visible effort, to subside.

The face of a man forcing something down. Even Valentin, in this moment, looked tired.

The heat of him, which had pressed close enough to overwhelm, receded at last — inch by careful inch. In the silence that followed, only the whisper of cloth shifting as he composed himself.

"I did not do that to receive an apology. I only wanted you to understand that you are more dangerous than even you realize. That is all."

"......"

"Adele. I want you to live a satisfying life."

"......"

"So please — master your will as quickly as you can. When you do, I will give you the whole world, if that is what you want."

Adelheid startled awake to the clatter and sway of the carriage.

She must have fallen asleep near dawn with Valentin's hand in hers — but now, opening her eyes, she found herself alone in the carriage.

His scent still lingered in the air like a memory that hadn't quite finished leaving, and that made the solitude easier to bear.

Looking around, Adelheid noticed that a full armful of white wildflowers had been left on the seat across from her.

Oh.

They were dewy — picked at the hour when the morning's moisture would be deepest, it seemed — each one fresh-looking and unspoiled.

She leaned forward and pressed her face gently into the bouquet. A familiar spring flower. The same kind Valentin had coaxed into bloom in the back garden of Ansgar Castle last winter, with nothing but his magic and what she suspected had been a mood she'd never been told about.

It seemed a shame to let them wither.

She selected a few of the blossoms and slipped them between the pages of the heavy herbal compendium she kept at her bedside. She would press them. Keep them for as long as they held their shape.

And then — clunk — the carriage lurched to an abrupt stop.

"My lady. Are you all right?"

A knight's quick footsteps, and then a knock at the window.

Adelheid drew back the curtain and found his face waiting outside.

"What's happened?"