Soon she arrived at the great cathedral.
The Cururunelvia statue loomed at the country’s very center, as it always had. For this, Carredura’s mistress had laid down her life. For this, the people continually agitated.
An anger rose in her chest that she could hardly bear.
So she prayed.
“Please,” she said, “let all those involved with sancta come to grief.”
With this malediction on all things, Carredura abdicated the throne. No one ever again spoke of her as queen.
Once she was no longer the ruler but simply another citizen, Carredura hid herself away on the island’s outskirts. Her dwelling was very plain. Now that her mistress was gone, she had no attachment whatsoever to this little rock in the sea. She had every intention of boarding the ship when it made its annual departure and leaving this country behind.
If there was one thing she had during these days, it was time, and she found that fulfilling in its own way. Jeering voices no longer came from outside her window, and her friends among the former mages sometimes visited her. Amid the laughter and small talk, they whispered that someone in town was even now attacking people using the name of Carredura. Was there an imposter about, or was it simply an elaborate rumor? Carredura no longer cared either way.
Then spring returned, and the ship arrived in port. With her bags ready and her ticket in hand, Carredura put her house behind her.
She would never go back there.
Yet at the same time, she never left the island.
No sooner had she stepped out of her house than a voice said, “Good day to you.” A woman was standing in front of her.
“Hrm?” Carredura was flummoxed when she saw how the visitor was dressed—for she was clad all in black, as if she were in mourning. Her hair was black, as were her eyes. Carredura felt as if she were standing in front of a mirror.
But her face—Carredura couldn’t quite parse the woman’s face. Her eyes seemed hazy, her mouth hard to pin down. Her entire silhouette seemed imprecise, like several portraits painted one on top of the other.
“Who…are you?” Carredura asked this strange presence.
The thing in front of her smiled—and then it reached out toward her. “I am Carredura,” it said.
Lovely pale fingers brushed Carredura’s cheek. They were cold as ice. Somewhere beyond them, countless eyes stared at her.
Carredura had made two miscalculations.
One was that it was not true that the many, many wishes the people had offered up to unseat her from the throne had gone unanswered.
The other was that the Carredura who went furtively through town, bringing people to grief, was neither a rumor nor an imposter.
The eerie thing in front of her spoke again.
I am Carredura.
“The Carredura brought forth by the townspeople, and you.”
Some had prayed that Carredura would be alone. Others had wished that she would lose her position. Still others, that she would lose her very life. All of them had contributed to this uncanny thing in Carredura’s form, had helped to shape it.
“Allow me to grant their wishes, and yours.”
Dozens of overlapping black eyes peered at Carredura. She almost took a step back, afraid. She almost cried out. But she couldn’t do either. The hands on her cheeks had—when?—slid down to her neck and wrapped around it. Her feet were dangling in the air. Gasping and struggling, Carredura glared at the thing that claimed her name. The thing gazed back up at her, and slowly, gradually, its form solidified. Those eyes were dark, dark as the lightless depths of the sea. The skin was pale, and the lips curled in the slightest of smiles. The hazy silhouette sharpened and defined until it was Carredura’s spitting image.
And then one wish—someone’s wish—was granted.
“Carredura is lurking around town?” I asked.
The rumor found me at my newly opened shop, Riviere Antiques, shortly after Carredura had shut herself in her office and stopped coming out.
At the time, I was the only person with a store that bought and sold sancta, and since the restrictions on sancta had just been imposed, I had plenty of customers in those first days. Naturally, all the rumors roiling the town reached my ears.
Yet many of them left me doubting what I heard, no matter how many times I heard it.
“The queen herself sold me a sancta!” said one customer who sold her prize to me—a sancta that would have destroyed her had she kept using it.
“Yeah, same with my friend,” said a man with a sancta that was highly addictive.
I went to Carredura in hopes of finding out the truth of the rumors. The controls on sancta had just gotten stricter.
She was in her office, as always, working away. Even the people who knew her best told me that she largely left her room only to eat, use the toilet, and maybe take a bath. She hardly ever went into town, they said. And yet eyewitness sightings of what people claimed was Carredura went on unabated.
“It’s not just the selling of sancta,” said a policeman who occasionally visited my shop. “She seems to have been behind several dangerous incidents as well.” A number of citizens claimed that Carredura had stabbed them. Was it an act by demonstrators hoping to unseat her, or were these real reports? There was no way to be sure, and my police acquaintance was at the end of his rope.
I went to Carredura’s office several more times after that, but she always declined to see me. In spite of her refusal to cooperate, I suspected that the Carredura in town was an imposter, and with that as my working theory, I began to investigate. I followed this person’s trail as best I could, but it was like chasing smoke; she was gone almost as soon as she appeared. She would present herself to someone, work her ill, and then vanish again.
“The victim had recently been agonizing over a breakup with her boyfriend,” the policeman told me. He was standing in front of a dead body. According to witness testimony, Carredura had appeared to the victim and presented her with a pair of rings, telling her, “I have a sancta here that will join together that which has been put asunder.” As promised, the rings made the two of them into one—but having become one creature, they were no longer human, and they died.
“She was suffering from terrible insomnia,” a student told me tearfully. Carredura had approached her best friend several days earlier; the friend had told this student, “The queen gave me sheets that she says will help me sleep soundly!” In the end, she never woke up again.
The sancta this fake Carredura was distributing were profoundly dangerous, not things people should be using.
And most of them were not ordinary sancta.
“What is this thing?” I mumbled. Deciding that the sancta involved in this particular incident was too dangerous to be allowed in this world, I touched it with my bare hand, breaking its curse. The moment I touched it, the sancta took on a whitish cast and then melted into a viscous pool.