A Seed of Five Colors
The short rest had worked a wonder. Adrian found his mind clear to the point of cold, and the four days that remained passed in that same clarity. Nina lent herself to his work with the diligence of a civil aide at his elbow, and everything moved smoothly.
The papers lay sorted by kind, and the wastebasket was always clean. The nibs had been wiped free of even a flake of dried ink, and the rims of the ink bottles were spotless.
When her leave ended, he came near to regretting it. He had not granted the holiday so she could be set to chores like these, but his body was easier for it. That much was true.
Now and then the two of them still climbed the watchtower, and they always went up so that no one would catch them. With the North Wind's help, they reached it without ever meeting a soul. That, too, was finished now.
Nina opened the door of the captain's office. The room newly given to her sat on the ground floor, built against the training yard—broad, and not badly lit.
All right, then.
She rolled up her sleeves.
Cleaning first.
A waiting room for guests opened off the captain's office, and she began there. She set Jin, the vice-captain, to the mop and took the broom herself. The servants had already been through, after a fashion, but not to any standard she would accept, so she swept the place and wiped it down again.
As they worked, Nina asked,
"What do you think, Jin? You figure a lot of candidates will show?"
"They said they'd take ability, no matter the birth, so of course a lot will come. Where else in the world is there an order like this?"
"True enough."
Nina nodded. Jin had not missed a single dawn training, though that was only possible because she watched him with her eyes wide open. He did not have to do the work. He did have to train, or the body went dull. She told him so, and every dawn she trained beside him.
She had given up fivefold gravity. It did nothing but drain them, and if they could not answer when something went wrong, the loss would only be worse.
I hope we get enough people to fill the yard.
The budget Sir Louis had shown her was a larger sum than she had expected. Even so, she spent the least she could on furniture.
Once we're making real money, we'll swap it all for good pieces!
That was the sort of least she meant.
When the cleaning was done, the furniture carried in, and the order's banner hung on the wall, the settling-in was finished. The room served as her office as well, and from it she sent a letter to Blue Stone Island.
She set the samples Kirill had given her into glass bottles and packed them with care. Sealed tight in a large wooden crate together with the report, they were ready to go. The island kept a post of its own, so sending them on was no great trouble.
In the midst of this, the head of the Gota house—the house now entrusted with the unicorns—came up to see her. To her astonishment, the head of the house was a boy of only sixteen.
She asked Sir Louis aside, and he told her that after the rebellion, most of the houses still standing were young in just this way.
You really did kill every one of them, Young Master…….
A boy of a collateral line inheriting the headship—she had wondered what sort of child that would make. He was a good deal more grown than she had expected.
"I am grateful, once again, that our house has been given the chance to serve."
Tura, head of the house, brown-haired and lightly freckled, said it with a tense face and a hard-set will. He had heard the rumors. He knew them.
The only human contracted to a spirit of the highest grade. The spirit knight who returned from death.
In the flesh she was beautiful enough to be a fairy of the snow. Dressed in the black uniform peculiar to the Black Knights, though, she carried a pressure that was difficult to name.
And so tall, too…….
"I was told the Gota house keeps a pasture."
"Yes. There are hardly any horses left now, but……."
"The unicorns don't have to live only on flat ground. A mountain or a valley will do, so please take a wide stretch for them."
"Are they truly unicorns?"
"Of course. Come and see for yourself."
Nina had been the one to bring the unicorns, so the showing of them fell to her. In the temporary pasture roped off for the purpose, a unicorn was eating bean porridge with a look of perfect contentment, and Tura's mouth fell open.
It really is a unicorn!
The pitch-black beast looked as if it had stepped out of an illustration. No—the unicorns in the pictures had been white as snow, but a black unicorn belonged to the ducal house of Rubuaene as if the place had been made for it.
Aside from the herd leader and two or three others, the rest were to go with them, and Tura and the Gota kin poured out cry after cry of wonder.
She smiled.
"The Gota house has been a worthy vassal of Rubuaene for a very long time. From here on, I think we can build a bond unlike the old one. I'm looking forward to it."
"Yes! Yes!"
Tura said it, glanced around, and then spoke more quietly.
"A few of our house have stepped forward, saying they mean to challenge the Black Knights. Unworthy as they are—that is……."
He had gone a little pale, and his voice dropped further still.
"I beg you to show us the mercy of sparing their lives, and sending them back."
He added, perfectly serious, that they were prepared to lose an arm or a leg. Nina nodded all the same, though what ran through her was, Young Master, honestly?
"Of course. If they are of the Gota house, they ought to be sent home with all four limbs intact. Don't worry."
Only when he heard her answer did Tura's face brighten.
The young head of the house would not even stay the night they offered him. He wanted the unicorns home as soon as could be, and he vanished with his kin, driving the beasts ahead of him.
When she returned to the captain's office, a roster of recommended trading agents lay waiting, sent by Louis. True to him, the profiles were meticulous, set down in a hand that flowed like water.
Most were masters of small trading houses, or peddlers only now adding carts to their strings. Nina ran her eyes down the names first.
There's a name I know.
She grinned.
Lorocomo!
The name was strange enough that it had stayed with her. The Ebensel Empire held any number of minority peoples, and Lorocomo was a peddler out of one of them, the Bleka. Dark skin, and odd eyes whose irises did not match, were the mark of that people. As conspicuous as they were, they were shut out just as often, and Lorocomo had scraped by on the road.
Even so, he had a knack for the work. By the time he met the heroine of the original novel, the Saintess Fiona, he had become a respectable peddler with three carts behind him. After that meeting, of course, he grew in a rush and turned into a great merchant.
But right now he only has the one cart, doesn't he? Recommending a man like that—Sir Louis has some eye……. And he's strong enough with a spear to stand as vice-captain, besides. Why was he ever vice-captain in a place like this??
The question nagged at her even as she circled the name.
She wrote, besides, to every capable person she knew. It was almost funny. She took the list to Adrian, and in less than a week he handed back their particulars, down to where they lived and a short profile of each.
"How do you know people like this?"
"How did you look into them so quickly, Young Master?"
Each as startled as the other, they finished the work that remained to them.
In those same days she went twice more into the Purple Forest with Jin.
The two of them were long since hardened to camping, and their hands and feet fell together without a wasted motion. Now that they brought a unicorn along, the road out and back was faster, and they could haul far more, which made the whole business easier.
"This is a tree I haven't seen before."
From a distance, Nina threw a stone at the fruit. It struck with a dull smack, and a bright red fruit dropped to the ground. It had not burst, so the thing must be hard. Even so, she meant to be careful. The forest was full of grotesque plants that looked perfectly sound and then exploded at a prick, or tore their mouths wide of a sudden and tried to swallow whoever stood before them.
"A red fruit ought to look worth eating. That's the usual way of it……."
Jin tipped his head back at the enormous tree, unconvinced. Black wood, purple leaves, and plump scarlet fruit hanging in heavy clusters—the sight was grotesque in its own way.
Nina crept in beside the fallen fruit. She was drawing her scabbard along it when—
"Huh?"
Something glittered in five colors. She bent and drew a seed from the fruit, split open like a tomato.