Until It Is Safe

"He's not just famous—he's enormously famous! The hero of the air war who kept Fala safe from the Köbel bombers that turned Millick and Ron to scorched earth! The savior of Léandre, the Hellish Peninsula! The greatest pilot of this age in name and in fact, a man who shot down four hundred and eighty-seven aircraft in the Second Three Nations War alone and was never shot down himself! Someone who will be remembered for as long as history lasts, I tell you!"

Thomas's mouth fell open. Luke thrust out his chest, triumphant, as if the glory were his own.

"So you ought to read a newspaper now and then, mister. The captain's face is in them all the time. How can anyone these days not know the captain? I cut out every article about him and save them."

"And why would you be collecting those?"

"B-because we're from the same hometown...!"

"Same hometown, he says. How long has the boy even lived here?" Elliot let Thomas's teasing voice pass him by and quietly turned his gaze aside.

A sigh threaded with cigarette smoke escaped him before he knew it. He followed the trail of it as it scattered, staring into the empty air, when a heavy, dull ache began to throb outward from his temple.

Damn it.

He swallowed the curse and pressed his fingers hard between his brows. A bad sign. As if his body had already caught wind of the nightmare about to come down on him, it had gone cold and rigid.

The boy's chattering voice receded into a far distance, and his mind felt as though a blade were raking through it. The acrid cigarette smoke had become, before he knew it, the lingering reek of an explosion. Detonations pounded at his ears. From between his trembling lips, the half-smoked cigarette dropped.

"Elliot?"

Someone seized his shoulder. He flinched and turned his head, and there was Thomas, studying him with a worried face.

"You sick? Your color's awful."

Elliot stared at him blankly. His parched lips parted with an effort.

"...No."

"You sure? Look at you. You're in a cold sweat."

"I'm fine."

Elliot ground out the cigarette that still held a spark and muttered, somewhat irritably.

"I should get going."

"Already? The wife'll be here any minute. At least stay and eat."

He gathered his things without a word. Thomas, flustered, caught him as he made to leave and asked carefully.

"Elliot. How long are you going to stay here?"

The silence stretched, unanswered. A wan smile rose to his tightly closed lips.

"That's the question."

He got home around eleven in the morning, with noon still ahead of him.

Both arms full of what he had bought in the village, Elliot looked around the house, where the sunlight lay quiet. Down the hill the village brimmed with life, but this place alone was profoundly still, as if it had not yet woken.

Anna, who had not shown herself even while he noisily went back and forth to the cellar under the pretext of shifting the luggage, appeared only when the meal was nearly ready. Elliot, turning at the sense of someone behind him, stopped short in the middle of cooking. The pitch-black raincoat she had kept pulled over herself since the day they met was finally gone.

"Haaahm."

As if she had only just got up, Anna stretched, languid as a cat. He watched for a while the pale face still thickly plastered with sleep. In the pan over the fire, pasta crackled and seethed in oil.

Anna took her plate and peered closely at the food, then soon broke into a grin, as if it pleased her. He was thinking it a relief that he would not have to endure a noble young lady's fussiness when Anna, who had looked ready to chew through the plate itself, quietly folded her hands beneath her chin.

It was the posture of prayer.

Giving thanks to God in heaven, and asking grace. He had seen it often enough in his life. In churches mid-hymn, at his mother's funeral where there had been no body, on battlefields where the bullets came down like rain.

But where did a believing heart come from, for nothing more than one humble meal? Long since grown distant from God, he found it simply wondrous, and watched her pray in silence.

Hands clasped tight, faded silver hair shimmering in the sunlight, a slender neck, lips gently closed. As his gaze traveled slowly over her, a belated understanding arrived in spite of him. He was seeing her bare face, the raincoat shed, for the first time.

She opened her eyes, slowly.

As the lids rose, the pale eyes that had been hidden were revealed. When he had first seen them they had seemed like a dark night sky, but under the bright sun they were endlessly soft and blue. A beautiful color. If even he thought so, how mysterious they must look to southerners accustomed to stronger hues.

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

Anna picked up her fork and asked, perfectly even. He drew his gaze back, feigning indifference.

"Stay in the house for the time being."

"And how long is 'the time being'?"

Anna caught the pasta on her fork and twirled it.

"Until it's safe."

"And when is that?"

"Hard to say. Wouldn't you know better than I do?"

Anna popped the forkful into her mouth. She chewed while staring straight at him, and only after she had swallowed did she answer.

"Mr. Olivier. Do you want to end up like my grandfather?"

"Call me Elliot."

"If you call me Anna."

"...All right, Anna."

Elliot let out a thin sigh.

"The time I was asked to look after you is six months at the longest. Once the necessary arrangements are finished, Fredrick will come and take you. My part is only to keep you safe until then. Anything beyond that is no business of mine."

"You do want to know, though?"

Anna, chin propped on one hand, idly spinning her fork, glanced at him. Elliot met her eyes for a moment, then quietly looked away.

"From what I hear, the marquis means to come after you, but I don't know much about the marquis either. The one who knows him is you, Anna."

"Grandfather will never give me up. He'll want me back, no matter what it takes."

"Then you understand perfectly well why you shouldn't leave the house."

Elliot picked up his fork.

"It's a small village. If a stranger starts wandering about, the rumors will spread in no time."

"For my sake?"

"I don't happen to share a certain person's hobby of locking children away."

Elliot carefully opened a shell and picked out the meat. Anna, who had been pushing her lips out in a sulk, prattled in a young voice.

"I've never once walked down a street. When I escaped Grandfather's mansion, I used the underground waterway. It was so dark and musty. Horrible."

Elliot said nothing.

"Do you think, someday, I'll be able to walk a street in the moonlight?"

Anna asked it with clear eyes. Caught off guard, Elliot was momentarily at a loss for words.

He had never invested any particular romance in moonlit streets at night. Lamps throwing their light over dark cobbles, the hush of an empty lane—scenery he had always let pass him by.

His lips moved soundlessly for a moment before he managed a nod. Cheered by it, Anna began to hum, twirling her pasta round and round.

"Oh, and I'm not a child."

A faint smile hanging on her lips, Anna spoke as if she were singing, her eyes fixed on her plate.

"I can guess what Fredrick Dickens told you. That I won't come of age until my birthday passes in the summer, right? It isn't wrong, but I'm not a child anyway."

Children are always saying that sort of thing.

Elliot gazed at her steadily, then let his eyes drift away without a word. He had no wish to prod a temper that already looked anything but ordinary.

Whatever she made of his silence, Anna declared it with a face gone a little stiff.

"I'm really not a child."

He still said nothing.

"Elliot."

"I know."

When he answered readily, the stiffness eased at last. Anna hummed some nameless tune under her breath and tipped her head in small nods to the beat.

Elliot dipped his head slightly and held his breath. Somehow, a laugh nearly rose in him.

The house, untouched by a human hand for a full fifteen years, became at least fit to look at four days later.

He changed the bulbs, borrowed tools from Thomas the butcher and mended the leaking pipes, repaired the roof, and drove nails into the groaning table and chairs.

Elliot ran all over the place as if the twenty-four hours of a day were not enough. Behind him, Anna lay idle on the sofa and did nothing but swing her calves.

"I like yellow."

Come to think of it, when he was painting the walls whose color had peeled away, she had, for once, offered an opinion.

"What?"

Elliot turned around blankly, a brush shedding paint in his hand. Anna, who until a moment ago had been lying on her stomach with a book, was sitting upright on the sofa.

"I said I like yellow. Paint it yellow."

At the firm voice, Elliot looked down at the white paint. That morning he had climbed the hill pouring sweat under two cans of it, and now she wanted yellow?

The deliberation, of course, did not last long.

The white paint landed on the wall with a wet slap. Anna was aghast.

"Yellow!"

"White."

"I said I like yellow!"

"Then go and buy some."

At the unruffled answer, Anna came toward him, huffing. She held out her hand.

"Give me money."

So she does know you need money to buy things. Elliot twitched a brow and readily passed her several bills.

"And return that."

He said it to the back of Anna, who was marching out in high spirits. When she turned, he indicated with his eyes the can of white paint whose lid was still unopened.

"You know what a return is, don't you?"

Her lips twitching, Anna shot him a fierce look and came stomping over. Then she bent and tried to pick up the can with one hand. Tried to.

"Ugh."

At the unexpected weight, Anna's eyes flew wide as a rabbit's. She gathered herself and tried to lift it with both hands, but the can still would not budge.

Elliot, who had been watching from a little distance as if he had known how it would go, went back to painting. Anna's shoulders trembled with wounded pride.

"You think I can't lift it?"

"You can't."

"A thing like this...!"

Anna, who had looked ready to explode, suddenly clamped her mouth shut and glared at the can in silence. After gnawing at her lip for a long while, she swept into her room like a gust of wind. His eyes lingered a moment on the door as it slammed.

Still a child.

As if in place of a shake of the head, the brush wandered ceaselessly over the wall. The unsightly, flaking surface was slowly turning white.

The next day.

In his hands, back from the village since the crack of dawn, was a can of yellow paint. Anna's room was painted yellow, just as she had insisted.

Anna Mulligan.

According to the forged identity Fredrick had constructed, she was a distant relative of Elliot Olivier, a girl who had turned nineteen this year. She had suffered from consumption for a long time and never properly attended school—a pitiable life spent always sitting up in bed, looking out the window.

In that she had lived her whole life imprisoned and abused at her grandfather's hands, the life of Anna Mulligan overlapped in places with Anna's real one. Fredrick had surely designed the false life with that in mind.

But she was, without question, a long way from an innocent, frail girl who knew nothing of the world. His impression, upon seeing her doze like a sick chicken and thinking what a quiet child she was, had collapsed in a mere two days.

"What's that?"

It was a day when Anna, who spent all her time shut in her room or else rolling about on the sofa, for once crept into the kitchen.

Elliot, in the middle of preparing dinner, looked at what he held in each hand.

A kitchen knife in the right. A potato in the left.

"...A knife."

"I know that."