Our Territory Is Poor
"Huh? Me? I did?"
What did I even do?
"Didn't you seal the broken barrier with a spirit? Thanks to that, the corruption cleared, and all we had to do was hunt down the Bellac still running wild."
"Oh. So that's what it was."
Nina thought back to the seal engraved upon the barrier. It must have formed in the instant she brought about the Sun's Descent. She really did look after me, in more ways than one.
"The Bellac wouldn't come near that barrier, so we made it our base and knocked them down one by one."
Louis said it as he swept his low-tied hair back over his shoulder.
"We came within a breath of death more than once. It was like the knight order in the days before Your Grace arrived."
"I'm just glad all of you survived."
Nina let out a sigh, and Jin reached over to muss her hair without a shred of mercy.
"Same goes for you. What is this? Why is your hair so soft?"
"There's a story behind that, too. But first—so? What happened after?"
Adrian explained the rest in a few blunt words.
"A plague broke out."
"A plague?"
Wait. This is something I don't know.
Because the tale only began once its heroine, Fiona, stepped onto the page, far more of Adrian's past had been left in the dark. Aside from the great events that bent the original novel, Nina had never truly known what had happened to him.
"It swept the whole empire. The old and the weak took the worst of it."
Funnily enough, the Black Knights—cut off from the world by their war against the Bellac, and kept under Kirill's exacting care—did not lose a single soul to the plague. It fell instead upon the ducal house of Rubuaene, and both the duke and the young lord died of it. Adrian was the only rightful successor left. Bastard though he was, his name stood in the duke's family register, and that gave him the right to inherit.
"And then?"
When Nina pressed for the rest, Jin scratched at his jaw.
"Well, all hell broke loose. The funeral wasn't even finished before the duchess joined hands with the duke's younger brother and claimed Your Grace had poisoned the two of them."
"Getting out of the manor was a headache from the very first step."
Louis recalled it with a bitter smile. Adrian alone stayed calm, as if he had known all along. He had already summoned the Black Knights to wait nearby, and thanks to that the party escaped unharmed.
Then the ducal house tore itself apart. Adrian and the duke's younger brother each claimed the succession and went to war, and most of the vassals sided with the younger brother, the man the duchess backed. Adrian's forces were far smaller. It looked like a fight he could not win.
But he never lost once. Unless retreat itself served the strategy, he always won. As easily as lifting captured stones from a board, Adrian put the rebels down the way other men drew breath—cruelly, and to the last. The mere sight of his banner set hands shaking too hard to hold a spear or a blade.
Half a year.
In only half a year he crushed the civil war and rose to the ducal seat. Louis, in those days, had felt awe and terror at once. It was like climbing onto the back of a tiger that would not be stopped—a tiger that would run without end, all the way to the moment of its own ruin.
But...
Louis glanced at Nina. Perhaps now he could ease his heart, just a little.
Nina sighed, deep and heavy.
"So much really did happen while I was gone."
She felt oddly sorry that she had not been there with him. Even so, she was glad it had not been by his own hand that his family died, and it cheered her to know the future she meant to change was already changing.
That was what she was thinking—until they turned onto a road crowded with people, and the rutted ground caught her eye.
Huh.
Oh no.
Their clothes were shabby, too. A sudden unease sent Nina's gaze darting this way and that.
Don't tell me my vegetable garden is finished.
She and Adrian had talked at such length about how they would tend that plot...
No. There was a civil war. It wasn't the time to fuss over a garden.
So she told herself—and then she saw Black Shield Castle, and covered her face with both hands.
Our territory is poor.
Rubuaene Territory held two castles. One was Black Shield Castle, close by the Purple Forest; the other was Silver Lake Castle, at the heart of the domain. The latter was the ducal house's true seat, so few lords lingered at Black Shield Castle the way Adrian did. The first Duke of Rubuaene, perhaps, and little besides.
Black Shield Castle was nearer a fortress built for war. Its windows were small, and age had worked old grime into it in patches—the sort of stain that would never lift, not if you scrubbed it raw with a hog-bristle brush—and those marks crowded every surface. The window frames were filthy too. Wipe all you liked; a stickiness remained, or else a slick film that would not go.
Inside, the place was simply hollow. No people, no furniture, nothing at all. It felt like cave-dwellers living on bare stone, and Nina was thrown.
"Was it always this empty?"
"Having things around only makes more of a fuss."
Watching the crease in Adrian's brow, Nina understood what he meant.
The interior didn't suit him... Right. Adrian's standards sit high.
Better to tear out everything he disliked and shut it away in a storeroom than to look at it. He had put the civil war down in half a year, but the aftermath must have taken longer still. There would have been neither the time, nor the money, nor the leisure for fussing over the rooms.
"Good heavens! Nina!"
Physician Kirill's mouth fell open at the sight of her. Nina grinned.
"You don't get to dissect me."
"Now that is a terrible shame."
Kirill strode right up to her.
"Examination first. Let's have a look."
When it was done, Kirill's verdict was perfectly healthy, and Nina barely escaped her hands.
By then the drinks had been laid, and the company drew together for a close, quiet round. Far too unceremonious to call a banquet, it was a drinking party and nothing more. Nina used the interval to take in the castle and the servants at their work.
Hardly any servants, and the place is bleak. There really is nothing.
She felt it most sharply at the table.
Why is everything that comes with the drink mostly potatoes? Mostly potatoes.
There was meat, yes, but the potatoes outnumbered it. Potatoes were what peasants ate, not nobles, and for that reason they were a precious crop, one the tax did not touch. When Nina was small, she and her sister had often grown them while their brother was buried in the wheat.
So why are potatoes coming out at a ducal drinking party? They're tasty, I'll grant that, but...
Eating something like a pancake of shredded potato, Nina told them what she had been through. At the part where she met the spirits, every eye went wide, and when she said they had restored her body, Kirill declared she would be running a thorough examination all over again.
Jin wore a peculiar look.
"So that's why you were so strangely light."
"Was I?"
"Yeah. You're weirdly light. Not like a person. But if a spirit mended your body, that makes sense."
"Am I light?"
When Nina asked Adrian, seated beside her, he reached out, caught her by both sides, and lifted. She rose so easily that even she was startled.
"H-hey?"
"Light."
He said it, then set her down. Somehow aggrieved, Nina shot to her feet.
"But I got stronger, you know! I split firewood with my bare hands! Here—I'll pick you up, Young Master."
"I'll pass."
His refusal crumpled her face, and then she spotted the side table beside her: an old, heavy-looking piece, a marble top on bronze legs.
"Look!"
She hoisted it one-handed, and the others exclaimed. Jin sounded distinctly unimpressed.
"You could take that show on the road."
"I can swing it this lightly. Like this. And like this."
She whirled the table through the air, and people slid neatly out of the way. Then she set it down.
"The catch is, the efficiency's terrible. I get insanely hungry. Use my strength once, and..."
With that, she demolished a boiled potato in a blink. Kirill tilted her head, fascinated.
"So the stronger you are, the more you have to eat? Now that is curious."
She reached out and patted Nina's head.
"You had a hard time of it, kid."
Nina sighed.
"I think the rest of you suffered more than I did."
She had only just begun on the civil war when Jin shuddered outright.
"I'd rather fight Bellac than deal with those people."