Chapter 41: Goodbye
The banquet faded more than it ended.
Guests left in small increments, quieter footsteps and quieter excuses, until the hall held only the staff still moving through it. I stayed until the last carriage had gone through the outer gate.
Then I went to find Iris.
She was in the side corridor along the east wing, near the window that looked out at the training grounds. A cup resting loosely in her hand.
"The banquet went as expected," she said.
"Yes."
I stopped beside her. The mountains sat in the dark beyond the perimeter wall, steady and enormous, lit at the upper ridgelines by a moon that had risen without anyone noticing.
"I am leaving tomorrow," I said.
She turned slightly.
"Your ice Domain," I said. "During the duel. You were using it to support, to hold ground against the Hell’s Fire, to maintain position. That is not what it is for."
She was quiet.
"Ice at that rank is an offensive instrument. It does not support other techniques well because it was not built for that. When you set it up defensively it fights itself. You pour reserves into maintaining shape against external pressure instead of generating pressure of your own."
She turned it over.
"I was using it as a foundation," she said. "Because the gravitation field needed something to work against, and the ice gave it a surface."
"And when Hell’s Fire appeared you had committed it to the wrong function."
She nodded once. "Lead with it. From the opening. Don’t let anything else establish itself first."
"Yes."
"How do you know that," she said.
"I have been paying attention."
She looked back at the window.
"I will consider it," she said.
"That is all I am asking."
A pause. The torches outside moved slightly in a wind that hadn’t reached the window yet.
"There is something else," I said.
She waited.
"Tessira," I said. "The girl I brought to the estate."
"I remember her."
"Her memories have been coming back in pieces. When they come back fully I want you to look after her while I am at the academy. Help her get there for the entrance examination. She has the ability to qualify."
"She has more than the ability." Iris said it without looking at me. "But she is going to need someone with the standing to put her name forward."
"And you cannot do this yourself," she said.
"I will be there. But the path I am taking does not allow for passengers."
She looked at me then, the look she used when she was deciding whether to ask the question she was actually thinking.
"Why do you care what happens to her," she said.
I stopped.
Because she was never supposed to matter. She was a side character in a story I helped build, someone who existed to serve the plot and then disappear from it. I arrived in this world and she found me in a forest with no name and no memory and decided, without asking anyone, that I was hers to follow.
I did not like what that meant about me.
"She called me Mister," I said. "In front of every significant noble family in the northern region."
A pause.
"I noticed that," Iris said.
"She will be all right if she has support. She will be a problem if she does not."
Iris was quiet for a moment.
"I will look after her," she said. "And I will see that she reaches the academy."
"Thank you."
She looked at me for one more moment.
"Itsuki," she said.
I waited.
She looked at the window.
"Lead with it," she said. Quietly. Returning the words directly back to me.
I stood with that for a moment.
Then I nodded once and walked away.
Akari was in the receiving room, sitting with the particular stillness of someone who had been waiting.
She looked up when I came in.
I sat down across from her without being invited to. She was my mother in this body and in this world and I had stopped performing formal distance sometime in the last two months without entirely deciding to.
"You are leaving tomorrow," she said.
"Yes."
"The cave," she said. Without a question in it.
I looked at her.
"I knew you were going somewhere in the forest," she said. "You leave before the household is awake and come back with a kind of focus that does not come from a training ground."
"It is a place I found," I said. "It has something I need."
She looked at me the way she looked at things when she was deciding whether to ask or whether to let it be.
She let it be.
"Itsuki," she said.
"Yes."
"Whatever you are looking for." She paused. "I hope you find it."
I looked at her.
"Tessira," I said. "Iris has agreed to help, but she will need your support as well."
"I already like that girl," Akari said. "She called you Mister in front of the Marquess of Valdren."
"I am aware."
"I liked her immediately after that."
I stood.
She stood as well and crossed the small distance between us and put her hand briefly against the side of my face. Something she was doing rather than something she had always done.
"Come back," she said.
I did not tell her what coming back actually meant from my position. That it was the thing I was working toward, the thing I ran every plan and every decision against, the goal that made everything else matter.
I did not tell her about the hospital room, the chair, the ten years I had spent sitting in it alone, the sister who did not know I was here.
"I will do what I can," I said.
It was the most honest answer I had.
The carriage left before the sun was fully up.
Selene Ashford’s carriage was in the process of departing when mine passed through the outer gate, her timing suggesting, as it always did, that she had been aware of mine before she set her own.
Her window was open.
She looked out as the carriages drew level on the estate road, moving at the same pace for a moment with nothing between us but the morning air and the width of the road.
"Young heir," she said.
"Your Highness."
"You are returning to the secondary estate."
"For now."
"And then the academy."
"Eventually."
She looked at me with the expression she had worn in the corridor. The one that arrived when she encountered something that had not behaved the way she had predicted.
"You are careful," she said.
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