A Circle Beside the Barrier
Kirill laid Nina on the examination table she had scoured with strong liquor, and the infirmary door opened as someone stepped inside.
“Ah. Young Master.”
Nina managed an awkward smile.
Adrian’s shadowed eyes and long, slender fingers betrayed a delicate, high-strung nature, yet a gentle smile almost always rested on his face. Today it did not. He took in the state of her, ground his teeth, and let out a long breath.
“What did I tell you?”
His voice was low and quiet. Nina hunched her shoulders.
“Not to go out alone.”
“You really are…”
He pressed a hand to his brow.
Ten years had passed since he had taken Nina into his keeping. He liked to think he knew her as well as anyone could, and still an impulse like this left him utterly at a loss.
“But I—”
Nina had barely opened her mouth before a scream tore out of her.
“Quit the theatrics.”
Kirill, the physician pressing down on the wound, said it without a flicker of expression. Nina’s whole body shuddered with the pain. Words would not come. It hurt so badly that her lungs gave up nothing but a ragged leak of air.
“No good. Hold her down.”
Kirill jerked her chin and brought out scissors and a knife.
The examination table was, thoughtfully enough, fitted with restraints, but Jin pinned Nina’s arms with his own hands. When she looked up at him, eyes swimming with tears, he let out a heavy sigh.
Vice-captain Louis, who had followed Adrian in, moved to take her legs. Adrian caught them himself instead.
Kirill sheared the trousers and boots away in a few clean strokes, and an ankle swollen taut came into view. Jin’s face crumpled at the sight of the wound.
“This is bad. The bone in there’s likely crushed to pieces. It’s going to hurt like hell. Why don’t you just bite down on a gag?”
At that, Jin fetched a wooden bit padded with leather and held it out to Nina.
“Ugh. I hate that thing.”
“You want to bite your tongue in half instead?”
Jin glared. Nina set her teeth on the gag and squeezed her eyes shut.
Only Kirill sounded perfectly at ease.
“A break is a break, but the real problem is the poison. …All right. Hold her tight.”
While Kirill worked in silence, Nina’s body flopped like a landed fish, once and then again, before going slack.
“She has fainted.”
Vice-captain Louis said it quietly.
As vice-captain, he counted among the older members of the order. Only just into his thirties, he kept his long, light-brown hair neatly tied back, and his eyes were always closed. Even shut, they left him no different from a man who could see.
No one in the Black Knights came without a past, and so they did not pry into one another’s. Only once had Nina asked Louis whether it was not a bother, going about with his eyes closed. He had answered that he saw too well—so well that even with his eyes shut, he could see perfectly.
“Better that she fainted.”
Kirill clicked her tongue as she said it.
Vice-captain Louis looked at Adrian, then at Nina.
When the young Adrian became captain of the knights, everyone had known what he was. A card the ducal house had chosen to throw away. A bastard sent here to die. Above all, Adrian himself had known it. A subtle, awkward current had hung about him, and through it the duchess’s words, spoken without shame: leave him to die, or lend a hand in the killing.
And then Nina had joined them, out of that very current, and called to him brightly—“Young Master!”—and the look on his face. It was a face that said, plain as speech, What are you doing here?
In the half year since he had taken command, Louis had never once seen him look so utterly dumbstruck.
After that, Adrian overhauled the Black Knights from the ground up. The death rate fell sharply, and once everything began to run as it should, the way people looked at him changed. Even if the duchess promised riches, such a promise was never worth as much as the life a man was living now. In the years that followed, knight after knight died and was replaced, and still Nina and Adrian survived.
Three years had passed since then. The captain, now nineteen, carried a strength and a hard-won authority that would not have shamed him in any company.
Nina was strong in her own right, but her way of speaking and the manner in which she carried herself—Louis still could not forget the shock of hearing her announce, entirely of her own accord, that she was “the cutest Nina in the world”—did not inspire the same awe Adrian did.
If Adrian drew loyalty out of people, Nina drew affection. Her brightness and her warmth, chattering on in a clear, lively voice, gathered people to her. That sunny nature sank deep into the bodies and hearts of the exhausted souls who lived here. There was something in Nina that made even her willfulness feel charming.
So anyone could see how precious she was to Adrian. The knights, of course, included.
Stay long enough in a place like this, and ordinary life had a way of slipping from you. Nina fought not to forget it, and she held the small things dear. How precious it was, a sense of the world that had not been bent out of true. Newcomers ignored a girl like that and cursed her besides. Given time, they came to understand how rare she was.
A glass bottle of wildflowers, changed with every turning of the season. White sheets snapping in the wind. Jam boiled down from a great gathering of fruit off the trees. A chipped teacup, a tea with no name, and the small ceremony of drinking it. Warm meals taken side by side. Those things had made a family of them. She had made a family of them.
“Finished.”
Kirill said it as she set down the hand she had wrapped in bandages.
“Will she be all right?”
At Adrian’s question, Kirill lit her pipe and nodded.
“Nothing that needs cutting off.”
“And the poison?”
“That, we’ll have to leave to Nina’s own strength. I drew out as much as I could, but…”
Kirill glanced at Adrian and shrugged.
“Even so, Spirit Contractors tend to resist poison well, and Nina is contracted to a spirit of the cold. It won’t take her down without a fight.”
She added, “Same as that time.”
That time. Adrian made to protest the words, then simply lowered his head again.
Jin asked, anxious.
“So she won’t be left a cripple. That’s what you’re saying?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
The assurance took the strength out of him. Jin sighed hard, let go of her arms, and drew the gag free. Adrian released her legs as well.
“…It really hurts. Kirill was mean…”
At the mumbled complaint, Kirill let out a short, sharp laugh.
“Awake already? If you can talk like that, you’re fine.”
Her powers of recovery were monstrous, Kirill clicked her tongue to say. Nina, her face a mess of tears, looked at Jin. Pity sat on his face, and anger with it, and his voice came out sharp.
“This is what you get for going off alone. You understand? We shouldn’t be forbidding the recruits to act on their own. We should be forbidding you first.”
“I’m hurt, and you’re going to scold me?”
“Scold? This sounds like scolding to you? You really—!”
Before Jin could raise his voice, Nina hurriedly lifted hers.
“Young Master, I have something to say!”
Adrian answered low, in a voice pressed flat over his anger.
“What.”
He sounded cold, as if his voice had sunk underwater, and Nina swallowed.
“Someone drew a magic circle near the barrier.”
For a moment, silence bore down on the treatment room. Vice-captain Louis asked,
“A magic circle? Can you describe it?”
“Yes.”
When Nina tried to rise, Jin lifted her upright. Her head spun, and heat clung to her as if she were running a fever. She swallowed against a dry throat and explained in brief.
“Right beside the barrier, on the ground, there’s a magic circle anyone could see was drawn with stones. I don’t know whether it belongs to some sage, to the cult, or to the Temple.”
“We will have to report this to the ducal house.”
Louis’s face hardened.
Jin snorted.
“Besides restocking the men they spend, what has the ducal house ever been good at? These days they can’t even manage that. Tell them, and we already know how it’ll go.”
“We ought to tell the Temple, too… Huh?”
Mid-sentence, blood streamed from Nina’s nose, and she wiped it away.
The blood is black?
Nina lost consciousness where she sat.