“You mean Cururunelvia? She’s off today,” I replied.
“Oh.” The student nodded, disappointed, and left the room.
After that, Cururunelvia started taking off work with some regularity. At first I thought she just had a cold. “Feeling better?” I asked when she returned, and she just smiled and said, “Yeah, doing fine!”
It was months before I realized that this was no ordinary illness.
I knocked on the door to her office, wanting to ask about some work. “Cururunelvia, do you have a moment?”
Normally, I would have expected her to call back, “Sure, c’mon in!” But that day there was no response.
I suddenly felt very strange. My heart started racing. I flung the door open and was shocked by what I saw.
“Cururunelvia!” I cried. She had collapsed face down on her desk in a pile of papers.
This wasn’t just some illness. Blood dribbled from the corner of her mouth, spreading across the desk.
This wasn’t a new problem, something that had just started—whatever it was, it had been eating away at her body for a long time now.
We took Cururunelvia to the hospital, and when she finally came around, she told me herself: “They say that at this rate, I’ve got about a year left.”
She apologized for not saying anything, but she said it with that same lighthearted smile.
Finally, she told me that she had one more wish she had never spoken of, one other reason for traveling the world alone and for bringing me into her fold and studying my physiology. Another reason besides the desire to create a country of peace.
She continued facing the illness that was devastating her even as she was always smiling at us.
“I told you, right? Sometimes you tell a little white lie when you’re researching.”
After that first collapse, Cururunelvia rapidly got weaker. She spent more and more of her days in bed. And me, I kept trying to think of ways to save her.
I suggested that maybe my body, nigh immortal and able to cure any injury or illness, might hold some way to treat her, but she shook her head. “I don’t think it works that way,” she said.
Realistically, any panicked solutions we might have offered after we learned about the situation, someone as wise as Cururunelvia would certainly have already thought of. She told me that when we had been traveling, the disease had already been at work in her body, and that by the time she’d met me, she’d been practically assured that she would be dead within a few years.
I, Cururunelvia’s student, and all the people of the country wished fervently for her not to go, trying to come up with ways to extend her life—but she only smiled calmly.
Some people suggested that she should leave this land and go somewhere she could heal herself with magic, but she rejected that idea, too. I could see in her eyes that she knew it was much too late. She looked like a person resigned—and ready—to face the end.
The days went inordinately quickly after that.
“Mistress…please don’t leave us!” Her student wept by her bedside.
“Ha-ha-ha! Don’t you worry, I’m not going anywhere yet!” Cururunelvia laughed and patted the young woman’s head—but her arms were thinner than they used to be.
Some made it their business to pretend that everything was as it had always been. They would bring work to the bed and say, “Mistress Cururunelvia, could I get your opinion on these papers?”
“Yep, all looks pretty good, I think,” she would say with a nod. She often looked just a little more energized at work than at other times.
Even my relationship with her was more or less unchanged. “Hey, Riviere? Fill out these papers for me,” she said. She still had an office; it was just that now, it was her sickroom. Otherwise, I continued to work by her side just as I always had.
“At least do your own paperwork,” I joked, even as I took the papers from her. While I worked quietly on them, she busied herself with something else.
So the days went by. Spring came and went.
“Come to think of it, have you decided who your successor will be?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Let me guess. Your student?”
“Good guess.”
“You think she can do the work?
“She’ll be fine. She’s not the most approachable person in the world, but she’s a good kid.”
The leaves bobbing outside had turned green. Cururunelvia had told me how sorry she was that the cherry blossoms had to fall—so I left her a branch. A sancta I had named the Eternal Cherry Blossom. The flowers remained in bloom all through spring and even in summer.
“That’s beautiful,” Cururunelvia said.
“Isn’t it? I prayed that, unlike us, this branch at least might remain in spring, time never passing.”
“Speaking of which…Riviere, have you gotten a little taller?”
“Hoo-hoo-hoo, you noticed? Seems I’m going through a growth spurt.”
“I’m glad you’ve got a future ahead of you.”
“That’s not funny.”
“But I know you, Riviere, can at least give me a wry smile for it.”
Summer gave way to autumn, and although a clinging heat remained, you could feel a chill in the air. I would open the window, then shut it later, just like I did every day. We were always together.
“Could I tell you about my dream?” Cururunelvia asked.
“You already did, once.”
“I mean the rest.”
“Sure. What is it?”
Cururunelvia was quiet for a moment.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m trying to remember how it went… I think I forgot.”
We could see snow piling up outside the window, which was shut tight. Cururunelvia gazed out at the white scenery, but she didn’t seem interested in it. I took her hand, and she knitted her brow and said, “Why, that’s a full-grown adult’s hand now.” She laughed.
In truth, it was simply that she had wasted away enough for it to seem large to her. But I smiled back and said, “I’m having a growth spurt.”
“It’s a bit chilly, isn’t it?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Maybe I should go get you another blanket.”
“No, don’t.”
“But aren’t you cold?”
“Stay here. Please.”
“Yes… All right.”
The snow-whitened town gradually regained its colors, and people’s interrupted work could begin again. I could open the window to let the rich sunlight and the aroma of flowers into Cururunelvia’s sickroom. We heard birds twittering, celebrating the arrival of a new season.
Spring had come.
“Look, Cururunelvia. The cherry blossoms have bloomed again.”
She didn’t say anything.