Nothing to Regret
After Adrian left for the knight order, Nina turned out every last coin he had given her and scraped together the price of her own release. The kitchen maids wished her well and saw her on her way. What she did next was volunteer for the Black Knights.
Deaths ran so high there that anyone who offered themselves—riffraff included—was taken in. They would most likely be carried back out as corpses within a day or so. Even so, joining the order put money in your hand. Ten small gold coins: that was the price of her life. They had enough conscience left to balk at accepting a child, so Nina showed them her wrist.
The mark of a spirit contractor. When they saw the spirit crest banded about her wrist like a bracelet, they stamped her papers and let her through.
They called it a knight order, but for six months she received the training of a soldier rather than a knight. Nina had a genuine gift for it, and her instructor hated to see that gift thrown away. In secret he offered to pay whatever it took to buy her out. She refused him with perfect courtesy.
Everyone took her for a boy, and Nina did not trouble herself to correct them.
Six months after that, she joined the Black Knights in earnest. In the meantime she had heard every rumor there was about the Purple Forest—a wood stained purple in every direction. The talk ran, more or less, like this.
Deep in the purple forest, so violet it seems it would ruin the eyes, there stands a building white as new snow, a perfect cube.
A jewel is set into every face, and each jewel is a spirit relic.
No one knows who raised it, or when. The building itself is a barrier.
According to the old story, when God entrusted the world to the Great Spirit and crossed the Glass Sea, one of the Spirit Lords rose against the Great Spirit.
The other Spirit Lords put the rebellion down, and the Corrupted Spirit Lord shattered and fell to the earth.
From then on, corrupted living things—Bellac—came into being upon the ground.
The white building is the barrier that proves the tale is no mere legend.
A fragment of the Corrupted Spirit Lord lies within that barrier, and the forest, they say, was stained purple by the miasma that seeped from him.
A few snorted that they would like to see this purple forest for themselves, bold as anything. Nina knew better. Every word of it was true.
To Meet Again. Setting aside the fact that the title had nothing whatsoever to do with what was inside, the book she had read confirmed that the account was fact. That was why she had believed in spirits, and why she had contracted with them.
Belief was the only thing a contract required. You believed they existed, and you believed they would lend you their power. The trouble was that believing was the hard part. Who, meaning to contract a spirit of the wind and trusting that it would answer, would actually step off a cliff? Spirit users were precious rare because of it.
Only after her older sister and brother died did Nina understand that this was the same world as To Meet Again, and though the hour was late, she managed a contract at last. North Wind and Frost were her spirits. Adrian, for his part, had contracted with the spirit of Shadow and Darkness.
Like a flock driven on by a shepherd, the new Black Knights came at last to the Purple Forest. Fear and a restless murmuring ran through the recruits who stood before that violet wood. The veterans snickered among themselves and laid bets on how many of the newcomers would die.
Amid the disorder the recruits were drawn up in ranks. When a boy captain mounted the platform, they broke into a louder buzz. Nina, though, had seen his face. She shot her hand into the air.
"Young Master!"
Of all faces, it was Adrian's. Cracking that smile of his was no easy feat, and Nina took a private pride in holding every record for it. This moment, she thought, deserved a place among the very best.
Why are you here?
Adrian stared at her with a look of perfect, stunned blankness. Vice-Captain Louis, standing at his side, only just managed to keep the scene from coming apart, and Nina was hauled straight to the captain's office.
She had never seen Adrian so angry. Nina, however, was entirely unashamed. If I'm not here, who will be? At the sight of her bold grin, Adrian dragged both hands down his face.
"So. You don't mean to go back."
"I don't."
"You mean to stay at my side."
"Of course."
"Those were your words."
"They were."
"Regretting it won't help you."
"I won't have anything to regret."
She said it with her shoulders squared, and Adrian looked at her with a face full of complications. A long while passed. Then he sighed, and at last he was himself again.
"Nina."
He called her so gently that tears surged up all at once.
"I missed you."
The words slipped out in a shaking voice. Adrian gave a hollow little laugh and let his answer go with it.
"So did I."
From that day the Black Knights changed quickly. Adrian tore up every formation and built them anew, while Nina scurried from one end of the order to the other, trying to draw them into a single whole. Nothing dire was likely to happen for a while, but it was still wiser to do everything that could be done.
Well—as the older girls in the kitchen used to say, most of the people in the Black Knights were not entirely in their right minds. Even so, Nina's sincerity reached them, and so did Adrian's strategy. What mattered most was making this a place where people could actually live.
If I had to live like this, I'd be hoping to die tomorrow too.
Filthy bedding. The worst food imaginable. A place, and people in it, that seemed to hold no hope at all. That had to change.
It bore the name Purple Forest, but not every part of the wood was purple. Around the barrier at the center the color ran to a purple near black, then thinned as one moved outward, until most of it was, in truth, an ordinary forest. The trouble was simply that Bellac came pouring out of it.
Nina and Adrian agreed on one thing before all the rest: cleanliness and order. Wash everything. Scrub it. Make rules, and make people keep them.
"Good food matters."
So Nina said, and so she set about cooking hot meals. The ducal house sent nothing but the poorest rations, but the forest was a storehouse. Stew made from deer and rabbit was delicious, and it was popular. Good food makes a person simply happy, and a full stomach lends a person ease. Neglect what you were told to do, and there would be no supper. Once that rule took hold, people grumbled and still got moving, for the sake of a good evening meal.
The rules Adrian laid down were reasonable, and there was nothing wasted in them. Whether it was thanks to his efforts or not, over two years the Black Knights grew until they shone. The death rate fell to a single digit. A proper order of things took shape.
Those who had volunteered for a body's price, as Nina had, were free to leave once that price was paid in full. Anyone could see it was closer to hiring mercenaries than to keeping knights. Most walked out the moment their debt was cleared. A very few, though, began to stay.
They were deeply satisfying days, and happy ones. Best of all, she could talk with Adrian at her ease. There was no more need to hide. How happy it was to meet face to face and speak freely, whenever they wished.
Now and then the two of them slipped away to play in the forest alone, like any children their age. Of course it was Nina who took his hand and led him out. She even built a secret fort up in a tree, and was bitterly disappointed when the Bellac smashed it to pieces.
Nina was as unreserved in speech and manner as any boy, and everyone, quite naturally, took her for a boy knight. When the Black Knights later learned she was a girl, they were thrown into an uproar—and then looked from one of them to the other with faces that said, Ah. Of course.
Nina stuck out her lip. "It's friendship. Kindly don't misunderstand."
They only grinned.
The knights respected Adrian, and they loved Nina. If days like these could simply go on, she thought she might one day stand before the Glass Sea and confess that hers had been a peaceful life.
It was then that word of Gerald's death came flying in.