[16] Chapter 3. To Not Love (3)
“Oh…”
“Did the wound reopen?”
Fernciana awkwardly put down the fork, and Ilyas raised his eyes. Fernciana wrapped her hand with a napkin and shook her head.
“No, it’s not that…”
“Oh my. The skin must be sensitive to metal utensils.”
Fernciana widened her eyes and looked at the store owner. The store owner clicked his tongue and started rummaging through the drawer inside the bar. Ilyas, who was hearing this for the first time, also had his eyes wide open. The owner held out an ointment in a unique container.
“This ointment works wonders for such wounds.”
Fernciana carefully opened the lid of the ointment with the side that wasn’t injured. The ointment had a peculiar floral scent. Fernciana glanced at the store owner. The owner had a face that said why she wasn’t applying it already.
“Oh…”
“Are you okay?”
When Fernciana let out a feeble sound while applying the ointment, Ilyas leaned in, startled. Fernciana blinked a few times and nodded.
“Oh, I’m really okay…”
Fernciana spread out her hand.
The skin that had been completely scraped off when holding the sword a few days ago had improved a lot, but there was still a vivid hint of blood where it had been scratched again while eating just now. However, she could feel the pain subsiding in real-time.
Fernciana couldn’t hide her surprised expression as she looked at the store owner. The owner, who had initially been talking with a worried face, tried to put on a smug expression.
“This neighborhood strangely has a lot of customers like you who get injured by metal utensils, so I specially got this.”
“Oh? Really?”
Fernciana’s eyes lit up. The owner flinched at that radiance and nodded. Ilyas, who had been listening to the conversation silently, furrowed his brows.
“You get injured when metal utensils touch you?”
“There are people like that. So they can’t use metal knives or hold forks… I’ll bring you a wooden fork.”
The store owner stepped away for a moment, and while Fernciana was entranced by the amazing effect of the ointment she had applied for the first time, Ilyas looked straight at her.
“It’s the first time I’m hearing about this. Touching metal utensils causes this?”
“Oh? Ah, uh… To be exact, it’s not utensils but when I touch something made of metal…”
“So that’s why you asked for a wooden sword? Because you can’t hold a real sword?”
“It’s not that I can’t hold it, I can hold it…”
“And your hands become covered in blood?”
“That’s right?”
Ilyas made an exasperated expression and sighed deeply while making a dry face.
“No, then you should have said something. Like, it’s a bit difficult to hold this or something. Then I would have either replaced it or prepared for it.”
“I thought I would adapt and be fine if I kept using it…”
“Hey, if you put a person in water, do you think they’ll adapt and learn to breathe? They’ll just die!”
Fernciana pouted her lips.
“That may be true, but this might be a bit different…”
“…”
“Do you have to look at me like I’m some inferior animal lacking intelligence?”
“If you’re not that stupid, how can you say you might adapt someday while turning your hands into rags?”
Ilyas sarcastically remarked in an unfamiliar way. He was about to say something more, but the store owner returned with a wooden fork just in time.
“How’s the ointment? Is it okay?”
“Yes, it’s really good…”
Fernciana glared at Ilyas once and nodded. The store owner rummaged through the shelves and took out a new, unopened ointment and handed it to her.
“I heard it’s very difficult, so take this with you.”
The store owner seemed to be on the verge of shedding tears, saying that his daughter, who had gone to the capital to study, was exactly her age, so he felt concerned. And at the word “daughter,” Ilyas flinched again.
“Where did you buy this?”
“I didn’t buy it either. The customers who come here often always carry this with them. But sometimes they forget, so they left it for me to lend it to those people.”
“Ah…”
“They all seem to be from the same village. Where was it… If you go a bit southwest from here, there’s a place called Desidiera, and it’s a village a bit further south from there.”
“Are all the people in that village similar to me?”
“Hmm…”
The store owner scrutinized Fernciana’s face and shrugged.
“Well, I don’t know. But I’ve only seen people from that village get injuries on their hands just from holding utensils.”
“I’ve only seen myself…”
The store owner smiled wryly as if he had heard a heartbreaking joke. Meanwhile, Fernciana was repeating the place name the store owner had told her.
Desidiera, Desidiera.
The village where people with the same injury as hers lived.
*
Fernciana sat cross-legged on the bed and looked at the items laid out. A longsword that one of the black-clad bandits had dropped, wrapped in a shabby cloth, a wooden sword, her luggage, and next to it, a small case containing the ointment she had received from the store yesterday.
Fernciana spread out her hand. The healing skin was vividly pink and looked like it would bleed if scratched, but it was visibly improving.
‘People with the same injury as me…’
When traveling with her mother Elfi, this had never happened. So she didn’t know that touching metal utensils would injure her. It was something she learned while living to take revenge on the Emperor after Elfi disappeared and Seollim died.
A person whose skin gets injured and bleeds as if burned when touching iron, Fernciana had never seen anyone like that other than herself.
However, the fact that people with the same qualities had formed a village had a different meaning to her.
‘Maybe…’
She thought of Seollim as a father figure, but she had never called him father despite that. She had been doing that all along, so she didn’t question it, and Seollim was just Ser, Seollim.
What if there was another reason she didn’t call Seollim father? And that’s why Seollim didn’t ask her to call him father? In other words, if she had an unknown biological father? And even if that wasn’t the case, if Elfi, her mother who had no family other than herself, had another family somewhere, for example, Elfi’s own mother…
She tried to convince herself that it was a nonsensical, forced connection, but she couldn’t stop her heart from leaning in that direction.
There are people who get injured by the same thing. She was strongly captivated by the feeling that they might be connected to her in some way. Didn’t the store owner say something like that too? That the only people who came with such injuries were from that village.
“…Peirun? You’re up early?”
At that moment, Ilyas woke up. The reddish light of the dawn softly colored Ilyas’s cream-colored hair as well.
Ilyas, who had been looking in her direction with a husky voice right after waking up, reached for the water bottle on the side table as if his throat was dry. His voice, saying that the food there was all delicious but a bit salty, was slightly muffled and low.
Ilyas took a few sips of water and slowly regained the light in his eyes, realizing that the atmosphere was different from what he had expected. Fernciana, who was sitting on the bed across from him, had a slightly somber and serious expression.
“Peirun…?”
Fernciana quietly looked at Ilyas. It had been a short journey, but she felt greatly attached to him. Well, of course, Fernciana muttered self-deprecatingly.
Before going back to the past, she thought she had lost everything and was on a journey to get it back. The meaning was completely different now, but the fact that she had lost everything was the same.
Then she met Ilyas. Starting with an absurd first encounter, they ended up traveling together, having meaningless conversations, and he even worried about her when she got hurt…
To her, who was starting over from the beginning, he came as a new connection.
The fact that I find his existence precious is because I have nothing left now, Fernciana repeated to herself. Because I have nothing, I keep wanting to cling to the one connection I have.
So if it becomes different. If I realize that I’m not left with absolutely nothing, this desperate feeling of wanting to ask him to go with me will also subside…
“The request I made… I’ll postpone it to another time.”
Fernciana spoke, hoping her voice didn’t sound too resolute. Ilyas was quietly looking at her with an expressionless face.