Chapter 45
THEY promised Yuki she would see Luca in the near future. Several more days had passed since then.
Yuki’s life took a complete change since their conversation over tea. Servants were dispatched from Rhadal Mende’s manor in the capital to serve Yuki. They assisted her with everything from waking up in the morning to pulling down her covers and fluffing her pillows at night. When she woke, they dressed her, combed her long hair, served her breakfast in her room, and cleaned.
Instructed not to leave her room at any time, she stayed inside the spacious quarters until she was summoned to administer medicine to patients. Once she finished making her rounds through all the sickrooms in Fol Castle, she was escorted back to her room, served dinner, and ordered not to leave again. Thus every day came and went following the same pattern.
Whether it was the abundance of free time she suddenly had on her hands or the rapid deterioration in her health, Yuki found most hours of her day were spent sleeping. Energy pulsed through her during the time bustling among patients outside her quarters, but she quickly fell asleep once she was left alone in the stillness of her fancy chambers. The majority of her downtime was spent under the blankets.
Either Selena was worried about Yuki or just had a lot of spare time, because she frequently dropped by and chatted over tea with her. She often had to rouse Yuki out of sleep when she came. On more than one occasion, Yuki had fallen back to sleep on the table while they were in the middle of a conversation. Selena usually couldn’t wake her again and would carry her back to bed.
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A little past noon, Yuki finished administering the medicine and the sole time she was allowed outside her chambers came to an end. She returned to her bed and flopped onto it. The rustling of clothing dragged her from the recesses of sleep that had claimed her once again.
“Oh, did I accidentally wake you?” Rhad whispered apologetically, sweetness lacing his tone.
Yuki answered him, her voice still hoarse from sleep, “It’s okay. I wasn’t trying to sleep…”
I fell asleep again. The sluggish gears in her brain moved at a snail’s speed as the abyss of sleep tickled at her consciousness, inviting her back to its tender embrace. Blinking repeatedly, she shook her head and pinched her cheek to ward off the drowsiness.
“If I sleep much more I won’t be able to sleep at night.”
A lie. As things stood, she could sleep all day and all night, but her old lifestyle and customs brought the words to her tongue faster than reality.
“You look sleepy still, Lady Yuki. I will have something brought to help you wake up and focus,” Rhad said and glanced at a servant waiting beside the door. The servant nodded, bowed, and left the room.
“…Thank you.” Yuki forced her heavy eyelids to remain open—despite her desire to be awake they wanted sleep—and offered Rhad a tired smile.
Convinced she would fall back to sleep if she stayed, she rolled down the blankets and slid out of bed. Guessing what she wanted, Rhad pulled a plush chair out from the table for her and waited like a gentleman for her to arrive.
“Thank you.” She accepted his generous offer and sat. Rhad pushed the chair in for her. She sat perfectly still on the cushion waiting for her slowly turning brain to spark back to alertness.
“Sit with me, Rhad,” she instructed as he stood at attention beside her chair. He wore a professional smile, the kind that puts a distance between a subordinate and his superior. “You could have just sat down without my permission…”
Since the day they talked in the tavern and even more since the conversation over tea, Rhad began treating her with the utmost formality and reserve. He requested she drop all formality with him, while he himself stopped joking around and speaking casually. There was an unduly stiff and formal edge to everything he said and did around her. Constant appeals from her to stop calling her Lady, M’lady, and other formalities had no effect.
“You honor me with your invitation. I humbly accept.” He bowed and sat in the seat across from her.
Like Selena, Rhad frequently stopped by Yuki’s chambers to check on her. When she asked him the reason for his visits, he turned it on her and said, “Because you are far too defenseless, m’lady.”
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“THE people with you are just as guilty, but you also have absolutely no sense of the danger you are in, Lady Yuki.”
“What danger…?”
“Pay attention to what I am about to tell you. Prince Orga has his sights set on you. You may be all right with your current disguise, but Maruk is also targeting you.”
“But the world believes Maruk already executed me—”
“A naïve outlook. Word spreading about you being successfully executed in Maruk is the work of careful information suppression and manipulation. Someone who knows the truth unquestionably exists and went through the effort of concealing it. Furthermore, they have taken steps to eliminate people who know the truth or try to learn it. That is the person or people you are dealing with.”
Yuki hung her head. She didn’t possess the right words to answer him.
“You need to think more about how important you are.”
“My importance?”
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YUKI sneered at herself when she remembered the conversation with Rhad a few days earlier. Importance. Did she have value? Much less importance? What would make her important?
Caring for those infected with the Ten Day Fever. Not even a doctor herself, anyone who wanted to put in the effort could replace her as a doctor’s assistant.
Luca’s Master. As long as she died, he could obtain a new Master.
There’s nothing…important about me.
As it was, Yuki didn’t do much of anything aside from sleeping away the day. Before now, she had worked herself to death running around taking and giving orders to be of some use. Yet they easily removed her from the role she thought was uniquely hers and set her aside in some room like an unwanted toy.
There really isn’t anything.
“I wonder what my importance is,” she inadvertently blurted a rhetorical question. Rhad quizzically watched her. “I never thought about it before now. Not even when I was in Japan.”
Yuki simply lived every day as it came. Contemplating the purpose of her existence wasn’t even a factor for her.
“I thought I would attend university, study for four years, go job hunting, get a job, and work as a member of society like everyone else.”
She would occasionally hang out with her friends, go on trips, and be satisfied as long as something fun and unique occasionally colored a normal life. Never did she stop to think about what value her life held.
The fact I didn’t think about it means I had no reason to. It’s only now I realize how fortunate I was.
“What are you talking about?”
“Hmm?”
Yuki forgot Rhad was sitting across from her. Worried her drowsiness was making her drift out of reality, she slapped her cheek with her right hand. Rhad’s ashen eyes studied her face.
“I do not know anything about this university, Japan, or job hunting you speak of, but…do you not understand your grave importance, Lady Yuki?”
“Weren’t you listening? I have no such…thing.”
Why does he keep bringing it up? She already felt down in the dumps about her lack of value, why did he relentlessly dig it up? Yuki glared at him.
Rhad heaved a sad, audible sigh. “I have little doubt Fol would have been destroyed by the Ten Day Fever by now had you not been here.”
“You don’t have to flatter me, Rhad. I’m sure you would have done something about it.”
Knives wiggled their way into her heart. She didn’t want to say such things, but cynicism spilled from her.
Rhad smiled wistfully and continued, “Well, I would have come up with some sort of plan. But for all I could plan and scheme, I can’t save the sick.”
“I can’t do that either… The most I can do is mix the medicinal ingredients together, offer my condolences to the sick, and do the wash.”
The more she devalued herself with her words, the deeper her feelings sunk. She hadn’t paid it much thought until then, but now she thought about how little meaning and value what she worked so hard for held.
That’s not even the problem here either.
“…Lady Yuki, is it possible you do not know?”
“…Know what?” she looked at Rhad with glazed over eyes. Surprised by her expression, his right eyebrow arched.
“I see. I was under the impression they just hadn’t filled you in on the details. Now I see you don’t know anything.”
“Anything about what?” she snapped, annoyed by his roundabout comments.
Rhad stood, a grin tugging the corners of his lips. “To a certain level, it is impressive you haven’t realized it yourself yet. Please look.”
Faster than she could ask what he was doing, Rhad pulled an unsheathed dagger from his boot. Not even giving her a chance to get a word in edgewise, he sliced his left arm with the dagger.