PDCOO Chapter 36

Clang, clang, clang.

From far away, the bell.

At the sound, Anna's face went entirely slack, and she sank to the ground.

"Miss Anna?"

"That rings when thieves break into the communal farm. The militia will have all rushed over."

No matter how loudly they called now, no one would come.

Their location: the far corner of a dry valley, where they'd slid down together. Above them, the shadows of tilted trees stretched across the sky and shifted.

Anna looked at Bertram's broken ankle.

"It must hurt terribly? ...Surely—you can't be without even this sensation?"

"I know it's broken. There's no pain."

"That's dangerous! People need to feel pain so they know to stop doing dangerous things!"

Correct.

Pain was the body's message: keep this up and you will die. How many soldiers had walked back onto the field, too deadened by medicine to feel their bodies failing, and come back as corpses.

But Bertram was different.

"Would you look elsewhere for a moment? It isn't a sight suited to a lady."

The word lady landed on Anna and something in her head went briefly offline. Bertram, apparently having asked her permission first—which her ears had not quite registered—pressed one finger to her cheek, tk, and turned her head gently aside. Then he took hold of his own ankle, which was bent at something close to a right angle.

Grrk.

The sound of bone grinding against itself.

Anna seized her own skirts in both fists.

"That sound...Bertram. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

Set the bone and wait. That was all.

The mage's curse had not been limited to emotion alone. Wounds healed faster than they should. He had been made to be useful—a weapon to be deployed when needed, maintained between deployments.

He had not imagined, all those years of being a weapon, that it would end up being used to save people.

"Are you hurt, Miss Anna? From the fall?"

"I thought my heart had dropped." She paused. "Not from the fall itself. It was what you said."

"Ah. I said I hoped you——"

"You don't have to say it again! Don't!"

Anna shouted at him, face bright red, not bothering to hide it anymore.

"What does that even mean—you hoped I liked you? You don't even know if you feel it yourself! Or is that what this is—are you one of those people who just enjoy being loved?"

"I'm not foolish enough to follow Sir Franz's example while watching exactly what Sir Franz does. Allow me to explain. Would you come here?"

He cleared small stones from the ground beside him. Scattered fallen leaves for padding. Made a seat. Then gestured.

"My ankle needs roughly an hour of rest to mend. Please don't strain yourself either, Miss Anna. Sit."

She didn't have a good reason to refuse, so she crouched beside him.

And immediately wished she'd given herself a moment first.

The distance was very close.

The face she'd glimpsed in moonlight at the ruins—that face that had seemed unreal, something from the edge of an old story—was now, literally, right in front of her.

Made of rough lines, and yet suited, more than anything else, to the word beautiful. He was watching the moonlit ridge with a slight frown. On guard for any large animal that might approach, perhaps. But his mouth moved for her.

"Animals—humans included—feel less pain in a crisis than they ordinarily would. If you've twisted your leg while fleeing, the pain might make you stop—and stopping might get you eaten. So nature, briefly, offers mercy. You were the same just now, Miss Anna. Don't push yourself. Watch how you feel."

"...You know about such things?"

"I do. People who are 'ordinary,' unlike me, experience it as well. I've watched men laugh through danger and then collapse in terror the moment they reached safety."

He had learned this at war.

Several times, Bertram had mistaken men who'd lost their minds to fear for men who'd been inspired by it, and ordered them to charge. But the coating that panic had laid over them dissolved at a single comrade's cry.

He had learned.

No training, no encouragement, no tragedy turned human beings into weapons. The only resource he could wield like a sword was himself, alone.

"Even in war, reading the emotions of others was necessary. I learned what I could. To judge whether this man would flee in fear—or whether his fear would make him turn and put a knife in my back."

"Weren't there any good emotions in what you learned?"

"Those were difficult. After the war, few people showed me such things. Observing others from a distance had its limits." A pause. "At first I tried to use Sir Franz as a model——"

He shook his head slowly.

"——I came to understand that there are people in this world who must never, under any circumstances, become anyone's teacher—people, I mean."

"What on earth has he done——"

"But if I couldn't learn from the present, I could learn from the past."

He turned to look at her.

Moonlight on a carved face. Anna held her breath. The soft movement of his lips was the only proof he was alive.

"As my mother and father were."

The two who had loved each other from beginning to end.

"I remember how their eyes used to shine when they looked at each other. I remember how my mother would scold my father, and in the end always—always—burst out laughing."

He stopped.

"I took those memories as my reference. And I judged the signs you've shown me to be the feeling of caring for someone."

A pause.

"And I hoped I was right. Because I truly worked to learn something I can never experience for myself."

"Oh," Anna said.

"But it doesn't matter if you tell me I was wrong. I'll learn from this too. That I foolishly misread it. That the hands that feed me and the smiles I'm given cannot all be made to mean one single thing."

By now his hand had come to rest on her shoulder. Warm.

"Rest for now. Whatever feeling you share with me in time—I will receive it gladly." The words came quietly. "It will surely be...the first gift since the war that I'll receive that belongs to me alone."

And so Anna could no longer speak carelessly.

A gift, once given, cannot be taken back. Having heard that word, she owed him something real—the most honest feeling she could find in herself.

The problem was that Anna had never been practiced at pulling her feelings fully out.

In this small village, it hadn't mattered much. Whether a misplaced "I hate you" slipped out in embarrassment, or a hollow "I like you" got mixed in along the way—everyone already knew everyone's true mind. All the people were always still here. Even a quarrel-strained friendship would mend, eventually.

But Bertram——

Depending on what she said, he might wait a little longer.

Or he might go far away.

While Anna was still hesitating——

Bertram's hand patted her shoulder. Steady. Patient.

"I'll wait. There is time."

"...Really?"

"Really. Rest now."

Liar. You're leaving with that insufferable blond.

Franz's self-satisfied smile drifted into her thoughts. Anna shook her head as if shooing a mosquito. Bertram, apparently concluding there was an insect nearby, covered her face with his large hand. The moonlight went dark. Her eyelids sank.

She hadn't meant to sit for long.

How could she rest with someone beside her who had a broken ankle? There was still plenty she could do.

But when she leaned against his arm, she realized her clothes were soaked through with cold sweat.

He'd been right. Her body had hidden the fear of the fall from her—and now that they were safe, it was announcing, at considerable length, that it had been very frightened indeed.

Gradually she tilted sideways toward warmth. Like leaning against a very large ox.

True to his soldier's nature, his heart beat with the even rhythm of a march. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Would a day come when that heart, faced with a woman, would stumble and fumble like a novice musician's lute? Now that would be worth seeing——

Heavier-eyed by the moment, Anna sank sideways and fell asleep pressed into his side.

Her breathing had gone fully regular.

Bertram checked the stars. Three, four hours until sunrise. He could afford a little sleep.

There was one problem.

If I fall asleep like this, I might crush her.

He considered keeping watch through the night——

But Anna's heart, quick and light as a sparrow's. Her small, slow breathing, the breathing of a sleeping dog. These had, without his noticing when, taken hold of his attention entirely. Matching his own rhythm to her slow breath, Bertram felt his eyelids grow heavy.

In the end, he drew her close and resettled her upper body against his chest. It left the shape of someone lying face-down on a large pile of straw—in this arrangement, there was no chance of Anna being crushed beneath him.

Her breathing grew more distant now.

...But her ear was near his heart.

Whatever she was dreaming, Anna laughed softly in her sleep.

Anna opened her eyes to cold morning mist. Her mind was still gray and cottony. She wanted to sink back into the blanket a little longer.

Then the unfamiliar height of the view chased sleep away entirely.

The gooseberry trees that would normally brush against her chest were passing below her feet.

"Wha—?"

"Good morning, Anna."

Bertram, who had her cradled in one arm, answered. He'd apparently been waiting for her to stir—he brought a small bowl woven from leaves to her lips. Her dry mouth swallowed it gratefully.

"—pfuh! Cold. That's good. When did you—actually, what is happening right now?"

One mouthful of water and Anna's head cleared. She took stock of her surroundings.

She remembered the night before: the ravine's sheltered corner, falling asleep leaning against Bertram. That much she had.

What she'd woken to was Bertram carrying her down the mountain in long, unhurried strides. The right hand that had tilted the leaf-bowl to her lips had discarded it now and was moving through the nearby brush, searching for something ripe among the branches.

He found a berry—tart, just soft enough—and pressed it to her lips. Then he spoke.

"I was on my way down to the village."

"But why didn't you wake me—why are you carrying me?"