Chapter Three Hundred and Forty-Six: Empty Vessel 2
“Hey, hey, hey! What happened!?”
Karen hurried out in a flurry, and Lena immediately lifted her face and thrust her fist toward her.
“This.”
“What? What is it? …A sachet?”
In the hand Lena held out to Karen was a sachet.
“That scent… is this a sleep sachet?”
“I want to put it inside.”
With a firm tug, Lena ripped open the stuffed animal’s belly. The threads of the stuffed animal, pried apart with her fingers, came loose in a pitiful mess. Inside the stuffed animal, which was packed with scraps instead of cotton stuffing, Lena pushed the sachet farther and farther in.
“This helps me sleep, but I like this one more.”
“So the sachet helps you sleep, but you like your stuffed animal better—so you were putting the sachet inside the stuffed animal?”
“Mm. I want this one too. …It smells like Lily.”
Lena hugged the stuffed animal with the sachet now tucked inside its belly and buried her face in it, her voice thick with tears.
“Lily smells like Mama.”
“I know what you mean. Mrs. Lily does smell like a mother, doesn’t she? I’ve never met my own mother, though.”
“You haven’t?”
Lena looked up at Karen with wide eyes. Karen sat down on the edge of the bed where Lena lay and nodded in a way she hoped was easy for Lena to understand.
“My father told me a long time ago that my mother had died—but then later he came home with a younger brother, so I always wondered if maybe he’s my half-brother. Ah, I mean, maybe we have different mothers.”
When she had heard it from her father at the time, Karen had asked nothing more. She never found out, and she didn’t particularly want to know now.
“…Hm.”
Lena let out a breath of a reply, giving away nothing about whether she cared or not. Watching Lena clutch her stuffed animal in that small body of hers, Karen felt a flicker of guilt and said:
“Even without parents, you can get by well enough. We’ll take care of you here until you’re an adult.”
“Lena has Mama and Papa.”
“Well…”
Lena rejected Karen’s comfort outright, even now. Did she not yet understand the situation she was in? Karen was puzzling over that when Lena slowly looked up at her.
“They’re… still there.”
The eyes that looked up at Karen were dry—the tears all gone, clear and still.
“I don’t know yet if they’ll hate me like Teresa’s parents, or hug me like Michael’s sister.”
Karen’s eyes went wide. She had assumed Lena was crushed by the premonition that her parents had come to resent her, the way Teresa’s had. She had even thought that Lena might be despairing after being confronted with the fact that she did not have an older sister like Ottilie. Not just Karen but Harald and Ottilie had likely thought the same. But Lena, it seemed, had been holding on to a possibility.
“…If that’s what you were thinking, why couldn’t you sleep?”
“Because I keep having bad dreams… but I still don’t know yet.”
The mere fact that Lena was here was answer enough, Karen thought. Lena probably knew that somewhere inside herself too. That was why she was having nightmares.
However, there was still a possibility that she had been sent away from the territory not because of her parents’ wishes, but because of the lord’s order. Michael had witnessed what he had—yet there remained a possibility, however small, that Lena’s parents loved her in their hearts but couldn’t show it in front of others, too concerned with appearances.
“…If Lena becomes an alchemist—”
Lena held her stuffed animal tighter and tighter as she spoke.
“I’m sure Mama and Papa will hug me… absolutely.”
If only she could prove that she was valuable. Karen kept her mouth shut and swallowed the tactless question of whether love could truly be pure if it came with conditions.
Even if Lena managed to become an alchemist. Karen could not rule out the possibility that seeing their daughter return after all that hard work might awaken some real affection in her parents.
Would she end up like Teresa, or like Michael? Apparently, Lena had made up her mind in order to increase her chances of being loved like Michael.
“Lena wants to become an alchemist.”
She spoke it with her eyes wide open, clutching her stuffed animal with a grip that might have crushed a living thing. Karen nodded quietly.
“I will support that goal of yours… That is why I took all of you in.”
Honestly, Karen had nothing but a bad feeling about it. Lena’s parents, in all likelihood, would not accept her in the way Lena imagined.
“A long time ago, I was a commoner—and I had far less magical power, and I was still very inexperienced as an alchemist, and someone I had a promise of marriage with abandoned me—”
“I don’t need that.”
Karen had been trying to use her own experience as a way to warn Lena about the future that might await her—and Lena cut her off with a sulky look.
“Don’t need it. Won’t listen.”
“Is that so?”
“Going to sleep now.”
Lena turned her back to Karen and lay down on the bed. This clever child had understood exactly what Karen had been about to say—and had refused to hear it. Karen smiled wryly.
“If Mrs. Lily sees her stuffed animal like that, she’ll get a shock, so let me sew up the belly before she wakes up.”
“…Mm.”
Still facing away, Lena held the stuffed animal out behind her.
Karen took it and sewed up its belly.
The sachet tucked inside had probably lost some of its potency as a sleep aid—but Lena, hugging it close, let the tension drain from her body almost at once and drifted off to sleep.
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