A Certain Moonlit Night (2)
Count Rodin Paulet's head ached.
The reasons numbered well past several dozen, but the ones pounding at his skull just then were these.
"Darling! We have to have this out properly! Someone laid a hand on our boy, and that man still hasn't been thrown out? We must take it straight to the knight order!"
His wife, who had raised their youngest as if the boy could do no wrong, was shrieking that the knight must be punished. A daughter of a wealthy marquis house, she spoke like a fool who had never understood what politics was. Did she truly not grasp what it meant to demand an accounting from the knight order—no, to pick a fight with the Silver Lion?
He had married her for the single reason that she was pretty. He should have listened when his late mother tried to stop him.
Even so, a wife's whining was something he could half-hear and let pass. He could soothe her later.
The problems that came before it were far more serious.
"His life is not in danger. Knights are a hardy breed, after all. Recovery, however, will take a full year at the least. …If there were fresh troll living blood, eighty percent pure, it might be shortened."
The vice-captain who was meant to lead the domain's knights in place of a captain on the eve of retirement was recovering far too slowly. That, too, was a problem.
House Paulet was a house of knights. Free knights and mercenaries hungry for fame came nearly every day to demand a duel; it was ordinary life, and receiving those challenges was a point of their pride. And yet, of all people, one of the domain's vital knights had collapsed like that—a knight they called the domain's Champion. It was only natural that the count should feel as if something had lodged in his gut.
Living blood of a troll. And where, exactly, am I supposed to find that?
They said blood of eighty percent purity would hasten the recovery, but was such a thing easy to come by? Trolls seldom left the deep forest, and even if a hunt succeeded, the blood clotted or turned foul the instant the beast died. Thirty percent purity was already spoken of as a fine catch. To secure living blood at eighty percent, one would have to bring an Aura User along. In other words, it was impossible.
My head aches. It aches.
This alone was enough to split his skull, and yet—
"My lord, if you wish it, I will bring you that man's head this very moment."
"Father! I'll go myself!"
"…And why must the rest of you be like this as well?"
The knight order that ought to guard the domain, and even the eldest son who was to inherit it—both were so incensed they looked ready to draw steel at any moment. Watching them, the count felt faint.
Do these people not think at all?
His wife, ignorant of knighthood and politics, he could set aside. But were these not the men who would one day have to protect the house—no, Pendragon itself? Had they forgotten, to begin with, that House Paulet was royalist? If they truly did not understand what it meant to touch the Silver Lion, then he ought to take their heads this instant. Otherwise they would ruin the house.
…This is my fault.
After the three-year war with Britannia he had stayed out of the house's affairs for a time, and that neglect was returning as so great a wrong. That nothing but such pathetic creatures surrounded him meant he had governed his children and his house poorly. He should have ruled them more strictly. Then they would not be swaggering like this.
Where do I even begin to set this in order?
The count's worries sank deeper.
And then—
"You seem deep in thought, Count."
"……"
"Heheh. Well, governing a house is no easy thing. I understand."
"……"
"Will you not answer me at all? Was this old man so unpleasant to look upon? How embarrassing."
"……"
Count Rodin could not even breathe properly. He could offer no reply at all; his hands and feet simply shook where he stood.
Since when had the man been there?
An old man was stepping softly out of a shadow thick with shade, the bright moon at his back. To the eye he was nothing more than a kindly old butler. But Rodin would never be deceived—not by that gentle voice, and not by that benevolent face. He could never forget the massacre that old man had wrought. How could he be fooled?
In a trembling voice, Rodin dared to speak his name.
"A-Albert, sir…"
"Heheh. That a count should remember an old man such as I—what an honor that is."
"…Lord Albert! W-we haven't done anything. Our house has no thought of defying the royal house, I tell you!"
He made his excuses as if he were screaming them, and excuses without reason kept spilling out. That was how much Rodin feared him.
Because he was one of only three Aura Users in the kingdom?
No.
His martial power was immense, yes, but that alone was not why Rodin feared him so. The true reason was this: he remembered how terrifying the man's former office had been.
"Rest easy. I have not come to conduct an inquisition. How long has it been since I retired? Heh-heh."
Inquisitor John Ray Albert. The slaughterer who had once exterminated ninety houses.
And Rodin still remembered. He remembered how that old man had carried a cross upon his back, and how many people he had run through on stakes.
But the man laughed, as if it were nothing more than a phantom of time already gone.
"All of it is only the past. I have washed my hands of it, so nothing the count need fear will come to pass. The past is only the past, is it not?"
Nonsense—!
"…The elders who remember those days piss themselves at the mere sound of your name, and scratch their scalps bloody from terror. And you call it only the past?!"
"The folly of youth. Everyone has a field they throw themselves into when they are young, and this old man's was nothing more than the teachings of God. In those days it was the whole of my life. Well. Now I am only an old man who has burned away his youth and has nothing left but bone."
"……"
"Heheh. Smile, Count. This is the moment when one ought to smile. Heheh! With so little sense, how do you mean to get along with the young?"
Albert laid a hand upon his face.
One might ask whether a baron daring to touch a count's face could ever be tolerated—but before this old man, there was no one who could bring himself to say it. Before Rodin knew it, Albert had forced the corners of his mouth upward into a smile, and Rodin's eyes grew so wet it seemed dew might gather there. Every time those fingers touched him, cold sweat soaked his whole body, and he trembled as if from a chill.
And when the line of his mouth had been drawn into a forced half-moon—
"Mm. A fine smile."
Albert, satisfied, slowly took his hand away.
"…W-why have you come?"
The count asked, though he shook with fear. He had to know what wrong he had committed, or that old man would appear again.
"Heheh."
Had that been the right answer? The old man looked pleased. It was, after all, the shrewd judgment befitting the master of a house. And so, deciding to change his original purpose, he spoke.
"Ah, nothing of consequence. There is a young man this old fellow has his eye on, and I happened to hear he had recently become entangled with the count's house. So I came."
"S-surely not!"
"……"
"Heheh. I shall take that as your answer."
A soft rustle.
In the next instant, just as he had appeared without warning, he was gone.
"……"
Rodin was silent. He felt as if a ghost had bewitched him, yet the warmth left on his face, and the mouth still forced into a smile, told him that what he had seen was no ghost. It was real.
And there was further proof that the meeting had happened.
"…Blood?"
It was blood. Blood that had not even dried. It was not his own, and he did not think it was Albert's either. If he had to name it, this was surely—
Other people's blood. The blood of others.
A chill went through him. He realized a fact he did not want to know: before coming to him, that old man had already been stained with blood. The blood of people who were not him.
Understanding this, Rodin slowly bowed his head, his shoulders trembling faintly. He understood what would have become of them had he not bowed first. A thing too dreadful even to put into words.
The door crashed open.
"Darling, I'm telling you again, this matter must be taken to the royal house at once—…darling?"
"……"
"D-darling? W-what's wrong with you? Darling…?"
"……"
"A-are you crying?"
The count was weeping, and his wife was at a loss. In all their married life she had never once seen that unbending man cry. But how could she possibly know? How relieved he was that he—no, that his whole family—had come back from the edge of death. How grateful he was simply to be breathing still.
And so the count wept, and his wife, flustered, could only draw nearer, little by little, to comfort him.
The next morning, word came that more than six newspapers, and one trading company that had funded them, had been swallowed by flame overnight and burned to ash. The count took up a wooden sword in silence and went to find his son.
It was the end of a trifling incident that had taken place on a certain moonlit night.