Prologue
The man called Harad had talent. If he hadn't, how else could he have made it this far?
Fateful encounters and sheer coincidence, bonds and brothers-in-arms — he had gained a great deal, and there were many times he had survived precisely because he had lost. But in the end, what had held him up was talent. Thanks to it, Harad had lived. And he regretted seizing that thread called talent far too late. Had he accepted it sooner, things would never have come to this.
...A useless lament.
"Are you deceiving me?"
That came from the one who had drawn the lament out of him. Though in truth, he was hardly someone who deserved to be called a "he."
"You're the one who told me to say whatever I wanted."
"Not me — your lord."
"My superior. I'm nobody's slave."
He was the Grand Duke who had commanded the North, and Harad had been his bodyguard knight.
"Go on, then."
"You told me not to."
"When did I ever."
...Ever since we met? Harad only thought it.
And yet the Grand Duke's brow scrunched up magnificently.
"I believe that's everything, then. Anything from you, Your Excellency?"
"There are a few things."
As if he had only been waiting for this, the Grand Duke went on.
"We should have driven out the Enberks. That bloodline was incompetent — so wretchedly incompetent that I half suspect they were threatened: grow capable, and you die."
"The Enberks are the imperial family."
"I know."
A chilling regret spilled out — all the more chilling because it had not been impossible.
"The Order was trash as well. To think they were fools who strutted about so proudly, only to lose their divine power."
Magic belonged to the Outer Realm. A magician was a heretic with Outer Realm blood in his veins. The Order killed magicians on sight. It scorned magic and classed magicians as demons and cripples. Demons, yes. Cripples, no. The Empire and the Order were defeated by the Outer Realm.
"We should have rejected the Outer Realm alone, not magic itself. There were certainly magicians of the continent — good ones, helpful ones. We should never have put blind faith in an Order that couldn't even tell them apart."
Harad's regrets were personal ones; the Grand Duke's were sweeping — thoroughly political, thoroughly strategic. A matter of station, no doubt. Grand Duke of the North: power second only to the Emperor of the Empire. For such a man, a private life was as good as no life at all.
"Is that all?"
Harad turned his head and looked at the world.
Glaciers drifted across a sea that had torn open in the heart of the continent. Trees the size of castles towered skyward; typhoons churned; in the south, iron fell like rain. The landscape changed with every turn of his head — but one thing was the same wherever he looked. Corpses, ranked in their thousands. It was a battlefield. Barely two days ago this had been the Empire's capital; as of today, it was finished. The Order of the Sun and Moon, which had scorned magicians so thoroughly, had crumbled just as hollowly. And the calamities that had descended on this battlefield were no work of nature, but the Outer Realm's.
"A sight to bring the North to mind."
It was a scene of annihilation. The Grand Duke, looking at him, was thinking of his homeland.
The North. The Empire's frontmost line against the Outer Realm. The Great Wall — great in name alone — had failed to hold back the Outer Realm's host, and it had broken.
"I knew. I knew the Outer Realm could invade at any moment and no one would have called it strange."
Invasion had been a scheduled future. As the continent loathed the Outer Realm, the Outer Realm loathed the continent. It had watched the North's Wall day and night, waiting for its chance, and the North knew that better than anyone. So they could have stopped it. If things had gone as they should have.
"...I loved it — yet I could not give myself to it. My regret is that I never learned the Outer Realm had hidden itself inside the North."
The Wall should have known attack only from without — but there had been an enemy within, too. The war had broken out five years ago; the Outer Realm had been working in the North's shadows far longer. And of that, the Grand Duke had known nothing.
"The chances to make amends were there. I seized not one. I was the one who fell short. I should have lived fiercely."
Should have tried harder.
The Grand Duke's regret was trite. But the Grand Duke was not trite. He was an extraordinary man.
"If I returned to the past, I would not be."
The past. As the Grand Duke rolled the word around, his eyes went soft in a way that was nothing like him.
"You go."
"Go where?"
"To the past."
"Are you insane?"
Harad eyed him with open irreverence.
"I am not insane."
Slumped against the wall and gasping, the Grand Duke drew something out. To Harad's eye it looked like a round pebble — whoever had shaped it had carved it very prettily.
"This is a relic passed down in the North. A relic that can carry one back to the past."
"...."
"I told you I am not insane."
Was he really sane, though? He was a man about to die, true. So was Harad. Both had fallen to the Outer Realm's magic — a curse that drained every drop of blood through every hole in the body, one that ended in death without fail.
"Let's say it's real. Nothing is left to us but dying anyway."
Harad chose to believe. Believing and dying, disbelieving and dying — six of one.
"Then why should I be the one to use it?"
It was neither loyalty nor flattery. It was honesty.
"If it's real, hurry back to the past and go fix your laziness."
If the Grand Duke had not been lazy, the wall that was the North would never have come down so easily.
"Did you not say you had regrets?"
"And doesn't Your Excellency have your own?"
If Harad's regret was embracing his talent too late, the Grand Duke's was the idleness that talent had bred. And yet the Grand Duke's name had carried far beyond the vast North. First to face the Outer Realm; the most magicians slain; the longest to survive — his name could have resounded far sooner. The lazy Grand Duke had become a hero too late. So if that pebble was genuine, its owner should have been the Grand Duke.
"If we both have talent, then it belongs to whoever has more than that."
Talent was all Harad had. But the Grand Duke had the North itself behind his name.
"Still, no. Harad — you go."
"Why?"
Harad's brows knit. The Grand Duke he remembered had always been a reasonable man — yet the one before him was being petulant.
"If I go, you will forget it all, will you not?"
"If I go, it's you who forgets."
"Perhaps not."
The Grand Duke pointed at his own blood, dripping in slow threads from the holes all over his body.
"Divine power or magic, no such strength lasts long on its own. It needs a medium — and the medium of this power is the blood of the ducal house."
The pebble the Grand Duke had treasured all these years had drunk its fill of ducal blood.
"If you wield this power, its reach will extend to me as well — for my blood is what this power has gorged on most."
It had become so through this war. No — through today's defeat.
"I will likely dream. I will see this soon-to-vanish future again in my dreams, each time you — steeped in that treasure — stir me. That is the feeling, at least."
The Grand Duke's answer was vague. And Harad realized the pebble's origin was magic — for vagueness, in its very nature, was what magic symbolized.
"So it is right that you go. I have a way of reclaiming my memories."
It made sense. Two were better than one — even if one of the two would be missing his memories.
"And what if I write the whole thing off as a dream, start to finish?"
"Then you will tell me my secret."
A secret? Harad cocked his head. He was the Grand Duke's bodyguard knight. Ten years guarding his side, and there was nothing you could call a secret between them.
Then the Grand Duke's hand moved. The man who, moments ago, could barely curl his fingers around a pebble abruptly tore his own shirt off.
...Two full mounds sprang free. Beneath them, a stomach both slender and firm traced a suggestive curve down to the hips.
"I am a woman."
The voice had changed too. Until a moment ago it had been a man among men speaking — now it was some woman.
"...?"
Am I seeing things? The Grand Duke he had served all this while had been the manliest of men. With the strength he might have spent swinging his last sword, Harad scrubbed at his eyes.
That was the mistake. He never caught the flash in the Grand Duke's eyes. Her hand snatched Harad by the skull and drove it into the ground.
"...What are you doing?"
His face was mashed into the dirt. The mouth that complained tasted blood and soil.
"I said, what are you doing?"
It wasn't an attack. Right beside Harad's mouth lay the pebble. The pebble that returned a man to the past. And the Grand Duke was trying to feed it to him.
"I find myself curious. What sort of havoc the present you would wreak, if sent back."
"Let go."
He wanted to thrash, but there was no strength for it. Such was the curse laid on them both. What was strange was the Grand Duke, who had subdued Harad by main force.
"Anything is fine. Do as you please. The North will not punish you. Strength is what we revere, is it not?"
"Let go, I said."
"Torment is only possible with strength. Like this, precisely."
The hand at the back of Harad's head moved. His face scraped along the ground — and then touched something. The pebble.
"You ignorant bastard."
"Yes. You will need exactly that kind of gall. The you of the past, I mean."
He heard low chuckles. Rolling only his eyes upward as far as they would go, he saw the Grand Duke laughing like a woman — and despite years spent playing the man, there was nothing awkward about the sight at all.
"Fall for me again this time, won't you?"
"...."
"And while you're at it, let's have you fall for me too."
Something entered his mouth. The size of the pebble. With the hand that had pinned the back of his skull, the Grand Duke sealed Harad's nose and lips.
...Gulp.
...His throat heaved. Words hardly fit it, but it brought to mind the magic-beast meat dumplings he'd been fed the first time he was hauled off to the North.
"Come on, eat the damn thing."
Yes — that thing. A dumpling of raw meat. The very thing he had first eaten at twenty sat before Harad's eyes.
"Eat it."
The man holding out the raw-meat dumpling repeated himself. Looking up, Harad found wormlike scars wriggling across his face. The mug looked somehow familiar. Is this my life flashing before my eyes?
"I said, eat it!"
Smack! A blow landed. His cheek went hot and numb, and the pain cracked the delusion apart.
No life-flash. This was not the land of the dead but the North, and that hulking bastard was no phantom — he was real. That raw meat dumpling was one Harad had truly eaten.
"Still think you're some highborn young master?"
Once. Twenty years ago.
"You are a hostage. A hostage who survived on the mercy of His Excellency the Grand Duke of Serzilla, sovereign of the great North!"
At twenty, Harad had been dragged to the North as a hostage.