Elliot caught the brief flicker of something passing through Silos's eyes.
"And your mother?"
"She passed away some time ago."
"I am sorry to hear it."
"Please do not be. It has been a long time now."
But the longing in him seemed far too strong for something he had made his peace with.
Hmm.
It might have been different for anything else, but Elliot had taken a real liking to this boar soup.
"All right. I disturbed something I should not have, so by way of apology, I will paint a portrait for you."
"Pardon?"
There was still time before sleep. For Elliot, painting a single picture was no great undertaking. But for the person receiving it, especially a commoner, it was a gift of considerable worth.
"Leave your other duties for tonight to the other soldiers and come with me."
"Yes, sir!"
Elliot reached into his pack and brought out the brush and drawing paper he had packed as a precaution.
"Tell me a little about yourself."
"Sir?"
"About your mother. Anything at all."
"Yes, of course. My mother was... well."
Silos's eyes took on a distant look as he spoke.
"She was a little strict, but she was a good person. She was skilled enough in the kitchen to have served as head chef at a large restaurant at one point."
It was a story one might hear from almost anyone. And from there, Silos began to talk, without particular order, about one thing and another.
"I feel a little odd saying this, but she was also very beautiful, and people talked about it throughout the neighborhood. When I was ill, she would stay up through the night nursing me. She also volunteered at the temple on a regular basis."
The family had been comfortable enough that Silos had harbored dreams of becoming a knight during his childhood.
"When I was young, my mother hired a retired knight to teach me swordsmanship. I had been training for perhaps a month or two when I fell seriously ill one day."
The boar soup his mother had made him during that illness had been so moving, so deeply good, that it had stayed with him ever since.
"So I told her I wanted to be a cook instead of a knight. I can still see the expression on her face when I said it."
She had been upset at first, but when Silos spoke seriously about it, she had hesitated and then, in the end, agreed.
"If I am being honest, I was also simply tired of the harsh training at that age."
Cooking was demanding in its own way, but not as brutal as knight training, he said.
"I studied cooking continuously after that. I wanted to open a restaurant with my mother someday."
But unfortunately, his father had not been a good man, or rather had not stayed one.
"To be more precise, he was a good man who became otherwise. It reflects poorly on me to say it."
Once gambling took hold of him, the change had been swift.
"At some point he was taking out moneylender loans to feed the habit. The family fell apart, and I nearly died along with it."
What had mattered to him became gambling and nothing else.
"Gambling is a frightening thing. When my mother fell ill, he took the money set aside for her medicine."
His father eventually took his own life under pressure from the moneylenders. His mother, unable to afford treatment, faded away slowly and died.
"I tried everything I could think of, but there was nothing to be done. At that age, what I earned was very little, and the debt made it impossible to borrow from anyone. After both my father and mother were gone, I was in the depths of despair when the moneylender appeared."
The moneylender intended to sell Silos to recover what he could. Human trafficking.
"The person who saved me then was Commander Robera."
Moneylending was legal within the kingdom, but human trafficking was a clear violation of the law. It had been, in truth, a matter of luck.
"It is not a lie that good things follow bad ones. I was saved by that luck, and on Commander Robera's recommendation I became a soldier of the Nert household."
Through determined effort after that, he had risen to become an elite cavalryman.
"This is my own boast, but among the cavalrymen I rank within the top three in ability."
As Silos spoke, Elliot listened to not just the story of his mother but the story of Silos himself, and painted all the while. A portrait was a matter of objective accuracy, but personal sensibility entered into it as well, and to understand someone's sensibility, one had to understand the person.
With a noble, one could simply ask. But how often does a common soldier get the chance to look at paintings.
If he was going to paint something for someone, Elliot believed it ought to speak to that person regardless of their station.
"And her eyebrows?"
"A little full. Her lips were slightly full as well. And..."
The likeness itself, being a portrait, needed to stay as faithful as possible to Silos's memories. But the background and clothing were a different matter.
Those are where interpretation comes in.
From what Elliot could tell, Silos's sensibility ran toward brightness and softness.
In that case...
Beyond that, Elliot wanted to capture the feeling Silos was carrying inside him.
Longing, of course.
Silos himself did not seem fully aware of it yet, but to Elliot's eyes, the longing in him was almost unbearable in its intensity.
And so the portrait Elliot completed with great care held within it both the mother and the longing. It was not quite at the level of the elf painting, but it was still something remarkable the kind of work that could fetch a handsome price anywhere.
"How is it? Did I get it right?"
The moment Elliot placed the finished painting in Silos's hands, tears began falling from the soldier's eyes, one after another. The face of his mother, seen for the first time in so long, was exactly as she had lived in his memory.
Mother...
He had thought he was all right now. But perhaps he had not been, after all. The longing was overwhelming. To want to see her and be unable to. Perhaps if he died someday, he might see her then.
"Ngh..."
Silos swallowed hard against the tears and managed to speak.
"Th... thank you, young master. Truly, thank you."
"Thank you for sharing your story with me. Though I worry I may have reopened something that was better left alone."
Painting was a pursuit of the nobility. Even a well-regarded cavalryman like Silos could not have dreamed of commissioning something like this. For him, it was the finest gift imaginable.
"No, no. Thank you, truly, young master. She looks exactly as I remember her. I do not know how I could ever repay this."
In that sense, what Elliot had painted was something genuinely precious. Even if Silos had emptied every coin he had saved, acquiring a painting of this quality would have been beyond reach.
"Your repayment is to keep making delicious food. That is more than enough."
"I will cook with everything I have from now on!"
Elliot gave Silos a mildly teasing look.
"Then does that mean you were not giving everything today?"
"What? I..."
"I am joking. Why the alarm?"
"Ah, yes sir."
"In any case, I look forward to your cooking going forward."
"Yes, sir!"
Elliot exchanged a little more light conversation with Silos before rising to leave.
[You poured emotion into a painting born from a story sincerely shared, and produced a remarkable work.]
Hm?
An unexpected system message appeared before his eyes.
[A substantial amount of experience has accumulated in Painting (B+).]
Experience?
What was that supposed to mean?
No matter how much he had played the piano, there had never been any mention of experience accumulating. Yet one painting had produced this?
[Painting (B+)][45% to next rank]