The Perfect Knight and the Illusionist (BL)

LEO

"Marius!"

I yelled in joy as Marius entered the room. And he was flanked by—

"Thomas! Isabelle!"

All three of them froze.

Thomas and Isabelle looked at each other, then at Marius, then back at me.

"How have you been?" I asked my friends.

There was a pause, as if they were trying to think of some funny joke to tell me.

In the end, though, Thomas simply greeted me cheerfully, which was perfectly fine.

"Aye, we’re alright. How are you?" he asked.

"I’m fine. This place is wonderful, don’t you think?" I asked, spreading my arms to point at every corner of the room.

"It does look comfortable here, Leo," Isabelle agreed. "We brought you something."

Only then did I notice that Marius was holding a birdcage, inside which there was a—

"Canary!"

Marius didn’t say anything. He simply brought the cage over and set it on a desk a few steps away from my bed.

"Where did you catch that?" I asked.

"Well, we were given it on the way," Thomas answered.

"By who?" I asked again.

"Some well-dressed gentleman in the hallway. He said you’d like it," Thomas said with a shrug.

"You mean Ma—"

Then my eyes met Marius’s, and he gave the faintest shake of his head, as if telling me we should keep it a secret.

I didn’t quite hate the idea of having a secret between us, so I simply smiled and stopped myself.

"I bet it’s been really boring here all alone, eh?" Thomas asked as he stepped closer to the bed.

"Not at all. Big Sis Sally was here before, and even Blabber Becky came to visit this morning," I told everyone, thinking it was a pity they had left just before my friends arrived.

"Big Sis Sally...?" Isabelle asked, looking very confused.

"Not now, Isabelle," Marius said.

"Who is Big Sis Sally?" Thomas asked.

"Oh, it’s someone Leo told us about during the mission. I suppose we’ll meet her some other time, Thomas," Isabelle explained.

I was glad she remembered Sally from our chat around the campfire.

Thomas looked at me, then Isabelle, then Marius, blinked a few times, and plopped himself onto my bed, which hardly made any sound because it was so wonderfully soft.

"Man! This bed is amazing!" he exclaimed.

"It is, right?" I said.

Then Thomas lay down, rolled onto his side to face me, and propped up his head with one hand.

"So what do you do in this room when you’re alone? Don’t you get bored?"

"I... hm, let me think. Yeah, I eat a lot of good food. Then I talk to Sally—except this morning, when Becky was here—and I take naps. I take a LOT of naps. I’ve been sleeping so much here. I eat until I’m full, which makes me sleepy. Then I wake up hungry because I’ve slept for so many hours without eating. Haha!"

"Sounds like a good life," Thomas said.

He looked over at Marius, who had remained silent the whole time.

I wanted him to say something, but he simply stood by the desk, quietly watching.

"We brought something for you. Although if you’re not bored here, maybe it wasn’t necessary," Isabelle said, taking something out of the bag she was carrying.

"Oh, it’s fine! What is it?"

Then she handed me the book.

I read its title and instantly smiled.

’Tales of Witches and Folk Magic.’

"Thanks, Isabelle," I said.

"Isabelle! That’s Marius’s book!" Thomas reprimanded her.

Isabelle looked at Marius, a little embarrassed, but he brushed it off.

"It’s fine."

Marius being so stiff was making the mood a little awkward, I felt, so I thought I’d change the topic.

"Thomas, how was your camping trip?" I asked.

"Man, Leo. It wasn’t a camping trip. It was a mission," Thomas corrected me.

But his smile told me he thought it was funny.

"So who was in your group?" I asked again.

"Me, Briant, Alexis, Janice, and Courtney."

"Sounds like a fun bunch!"

"Yeah. We found a decent place to camp pretty early on—a cave that was big enough for all of us."

"Oh, not fair! We had to build all our shelters! But... it was fun, right, Marius?"

I looked at him, hoping he would answer this time.

But when I looked over, he seemed to be in great pain.

Not the kind of pain from dropping a hammer on your toe.

The kind I felt when Indi passed away.

I didn’t know if that was really what Marius was feeling, and I didn’t know what might have happened to him, but I felt sorry for him and wanted to comfort him.

Before I could ask him anything else, though, Marius finally spoke.

"It was, Skylark. I thought... it really was."

He made it sound not fun at all, and that made me laugh a little inside.

Marius really wasn’t good at expressing these things.

Just as I was thinking that, Thomas got off the bed and walked over to the desk where Marius was.

He looked at the canary inside the cage and asked me,

"When do they sing? Can you make him sing? I don’t think I’ve ever heard a canary sing before. Well, I probably have—I just didn’t know it was a canary."

"Oh, you can’t just make them sing," I told Thomas.

"Eh? Then why do people keep them?" Thomas asked.

"Because they sing so beautifully," I answered.

"But you just said you can’t make them sing...?"

Thomas was looking a little confused now.

"They sing when they’re well taken care of, Thomas. You let them have plenty of light each day, feed them well, and don’t stress them out. Basically, keep them happy. And when they’re happy, they’ll sing beautiful songs for you."

Then silence settled over the room.

As if everyone were waiting to see whether the canary would start singing.

But, of course, it didn’t work like that.

"Heh. Sounds like a lot of trouble," Thomas said.

Then he ran back to my bed and threw himself onto the mattress.

It made me bounce to one side, which made everyone laugh—

Everyone except Marius.

’Marius, I hope you’d be happy enough to sing too, sometimes,’

I thought to myself.

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