A Knight Begins Anew (1)
It was a morning like any other, and yet the palace was in an uproar.
"Is this real...?!"
"Heaven-damned bastards, the lot of them!"
"Hah... I can't begin to guess what becomes of the empire now."
"There's going to be a war...."
Raising one's voice in the palace was certainly grounds for a flogging, but for the time being she had decided to let it pass. She was a generous woman, after all. Besides, hers was hardly likely to be the only palace in an uproar, and her heart was not so narrow that she would refuse to understand even this.
"The kingdom—the whole of the South—must be in tumult."
The South alone? The West, the East, even the North would be beside themselves. The blow that had just struck the continent was that shocking. The papers had already spent three full days leading with the incident in the Central Continent, and it was no exaggeration to say the whole land had gone mad over it. Small wonder.
The Magic Tower had collapsed, and the Ten-Year Winter that had smothered the Central Continent had finally come to an end. How was anyone meant to endure that without an uproar?
With hands as fair and clean as white jade—slender jade fingers, if ever the phrase had fit anyone—Isis Irene de Pendragon covered the newspaper and took a sip of tea. Of late she reached for herbal tea more often than black. It freshened the mouth and loosened, if only a little, the fatigue of too little sleep.
And yet.
A soft clink.
"...Hah. I am still a wanting woman, aren't I."
Isis felt the tremor in her fingertips and pressed at the space between her brows. To anyone watching, it would have looked like some great worry, and the shaking might even have suggested she was frozen with fear. The reason her fingers trembled, the reason she dug them into her brow, was nothing of the sort.
She was only trying to hide the excitement, and the thrill running through her. Faced with what two knights alone had accomplished, she simply could not master her heart.
People had awakened to the truth. To everything that had happened over the past ten years—no, over four hundred.
One might ask how every fact could come to light when not even three days had passed. But—
"That wasn't us. We never cursed you."
—when a fairy's own voice was speaking, how could anyone refuse to believe?
The Spring Fairy. People heard, clear as day, the beautiful voice of a woman holy beyond measure. In the instant of hearing it they felt a rapture as if a god's grace had fallen on them, and by some mystery every last one of them came to know the truth. Was it the fairy's Mystery?
For ten years—no, for the four hundred years that monster Tur had sat as Tower Lord—every evil the mages of the Magic Tower had committed flashed through the people's minds, and the empire's subjects burned with rage.
Some, who had long taken those people for a necessary evil of the empire, understood at last that they had never been any such thing—only a hideous, revolting mass of plague.
Those who grasped the truth of the calamities of the last four hundred years were furious.
Draw your swords, brothers! Every one of those monsters wearing human shape must be wiped out...!
Unable to contain that fury, they gathered at last and drew steel against the mages.
The cold winter had gone, and spring, the warm season of life, had come. And yet across the whole of the empire a cruel hunt was about to begin—to tear the mages' throats, and their blood, out of them while they still lived.
Nor was that all. There was the imperial house itself, which had looked the other way at the Magic Tower's evils and at last built a symbiosis with it. Until now the warlords and vassal kings scattered through the empire had lacked a proper cause. Now they declared a punitive war on the imperial house in the name of this one. The clouds of war were gathering. Countless powers meant to fight for the chance to become the new emperor. And yet—
"Thanks to the fairy, this really will be a peaceful war."
Fortunately, there would be no war of forced levies and plunder against the common people. The Spring Fairy was even now stretching awake over the Central Continent, which meant she would linger for a while. Anyone who ground the people down or spilled their blood in the midst of that might fall out of her favor. So this war had to be peaceful even if peace had to be forced on it, and it would not sink into the wretched slaughter of other wars.
And so the war would probably—
Proceed very much like a War Game. Heh. Hardly different from a comedy.
It would not reach the 3,650 Days of Debate, called the most peaceful war in the history of the continent, but the fighting was likely to unfold in a way that spilled as little blood as possible. With everyone wary of the fairy's gaze, the matter might even be settled by duels between the great champions who stood for each faction.
And the existing imperial house would probably—
Be assassinated.
Cause or no cause, assassination was tacitly forbidden in a war against an imperial house. This time, though, the imperial house's sins were far too great. They had done the same things as the Magic Tower. What subject would revere them and go on serving? By now every official and vassal of that house had surely abandoned the imperial family and fled to save their own skins, so wiping out the entire bloodline would not take long. Even a clan that had ruled the Central Continent for a thousand years, once it betrayed its people and lost their trust completely, would be treated as something lower than a monster.
...It was nothing if not the emptiness of power.
Of course.
A soft tap.
"All of this is nothing but expectation, though. Hah."
Isis set the teacup down with a thin little laugh. Looked at one way, every bit of it was only her own forecast, and events might refuse to follow it. However clever she was, human desire was the one thing she could not calculate. What would happen in the empire from here, only the gods and the fairies would know.
...Still, one thing was certain.
Pendragon stood to gain.
The more the center fell into chaos, the more the people would lose faith in the empire, and a fair number of them would leave. If the South could absorb those people, it could solve at a stroke the population problem that had already been a headache. They had beaten Britannia and unified the whole of the South, and still the shortage of hands was an endless pain...!
If they could take even a small share of the empire's overflowing manpower...
Of course, accepting immigrants on that scale could create problems of its own. But for royalty who lived as those who governed, one had to weigh the gain more heavily than the trouble that might arise. A moment of crisis was, put the other way, a stage on which a ruler's measure was tested. If she could stitch up any problem at all and leave the people satisfied, that in itself—
—would become the achievement that fixed her place beyond challenge.
The way of a king. An achievement of her own, the first to step even a little out from the Military God's shadow. If through it she could win recognition even from the elder nobles who still longed for the Military God, so much the better.
"Haa... I still have a long way to go. Nothing is settled, and here I am drinking nothing but the sweet of it...."
Isis admitted she had let herself get carried away. Even so, she could not help the heat that rose in her at the knowledge that she was drawing closer to the throne. At the same time, the knights who had made this situation—no, her sworn younger brother—were unbearably dear.
"—It really is amusing. He wouldn't spare a thought for politics, and yet he goes and produces the finest possible result."
That was why she could not let him go. Isis thought of the impious sworn younger brother who, even after returning from the empire, still had not come to the palace, and she ended up smiling. Call him impious if you liked. Just now, everything about him looked lovely.
"Heh. If he were standing in front of me, I might have thrown my arms around him with everything I had."
It was no exaggeration to say that in her entire life she had never once been free with her laughter, nor shown affection to anyone else. Today, though, she found herself wanting to pour out all her feeling for her sworn younger brother.
And then, to her—
"—When things are going well, that is precisely when you must raise your guard the highest, Princess."
"......"
"That your mood is good cannot be helped, of course. Heh heh."
"...Albert."
There was a butler, offering counsel as if he had dashed cold water over her. ...How long had he been standing there?
"If you have come, then make yourself known, Albert."
"Heh heh. Force of habit."
"Hah. A truly impious butler, if ever there was one."
He was her man, and yet one of the few people she could not bend to her will. The high spirits she had only just worked up sank the moment she looked at that butler.
"When one grows as old as I have, one comes to worry first, whatever the matter. I must ask you to understand, Princess."
"Is there anything in this world that actually frightens you?"
"Of course there is. I am only a frail human being."
"...The worst joke I have ever heard. Do not attempt jokes anywhere else. You have no gift for them."
"Heh heh."
That ever-smiling face only soured her mood the longer she looked at it. There was something teasing in the expression. Being with him made her feel endlessly young, and Isis could only send him a sullen look.
Honestly.
Vexing old man.
Isis frowned.
"Heh heh. Please do not glare at me so. It is nothing to compare with Sir Lee Han, but I have brought news good enough."
"...Good news, you say?"
"See for yourself."
"......"
A soft rustle. Accepting the document Albert offered, Isis slowly read the first page.
"...Oh."
Interest pricked her at once, and the speed of her reading climbed. At some point a page was turning every second. One might have mistaken it for skimming, but from the age of three Isis had been able to memorize even the thickest, densest book whole merely by glancing over it. It was the same now. A single look at a page was enough to commit it entirely to memory, and in less than three minutes she had carved a document of more than three hundred pages into her mind.
"......"
She turned the contents over, setting what she had read in order, and then—
"...You have brought me a truly troublesome gift, Albert."
Her gaze alone was cold enough to freeze a person where they stood.
"Heh heh. Well? Is it to your liking?"
"To my liking, he says."
Only a moment ago she had been spreading the wings of a happy fancy. Now, reading the document Albert had brought, her head was beginning to ache. The heretic taken from the Tunnels, the one supposed to be the Fourth Apostle; Sultan Salah; and the mages captured of late. Albert had interrogated them and wrung the information out at last, and as Isis read what he had extracted, the color left her face. Her skin was white to begin with. With the blood gone from it, she looked like nothing so much as a sick patient. She was not afraid. Most of it was simply the sort of thing that drained the strength out of you merely by being read.
...To say it again, she was brilliant. She had been called a genius since childhood, and she was one in truth. Even from fragmentary information she could draw out as much more as she pleased. Now a great mass of information had been laid before such a woman, and through it Isis came to know, roughly, where the fanatics who had meant to strike at Pendragon had built their nests.
...And so her head ached. With good reason. Among the places these cuckoos had laid their eggs—
"......Damn that Temple. If they meant to hide, they might at least have hidden properly...."
It was a powder keg, the sort of place one must not touch. Isis had the feeling she would suffer another night short of sleep, and she was seized by a sudden wish to see her sworn younger brother. That dear sworn younger brother of hers.
THOOM!
THOOOOM!
"...Instructor. Kunta begs. Please do not leave the way of humans."
"The hell are you talking about? I'm just doing ordinary construction."
"......Ordinary is not this."
Lee Han stared at him.
"...There is no answer. This."
Kunta shook his head, insisting that even a barbarian would not do a thing like this, and Lee Han shrugged. He was only—
"I'm just digging a tunnel, aren't I?"
—digging a tunnel, and he could not for the life of him understand why he had to hear talk like that.
"......"
Kunta found that reaction even more absurd. And why wouldn't he? What kind of human—
"Digs a tunnel with bare hands...?"
Who wouldn't be horrified to see someone boring a tunnel without a single tool? And yet, against even this protest, Lee Han was perfectly at ease.
"It's faster with my hands than with a shovel or a pick, isn't it?"
"......"
"Look. I've already gone five hundred meters."
"......"
...Surely that was not the point.