A Surprise Gift for Two Women (1)
Cleaning up after a lord's madness was a burden that fell to us alone.
It had come to light that, driven by nothing but personal greed and desire, a lord under the Cumul banner had wielded the forbidden arts to butcher his subjects — everyone in his territory — in the most horrific fashion. Worse still, by the very end, the corruption of those arts had carried him halfway to demonhood. And so the whole affair settled onto Ellie's shoulders as her blunder, and her responsibility to bear.
Before leaving Haizi Territory, we threw ourselves into tying up every loose end, gathering the full account of events and every scrap of physical evidence, and we agreed that anything else the investigation turned up — evidence or survivors alike — would be brought back with us to Cumul Territory.
A mountain of duties awaited Ellie at home, and Lord Humid, mindful of that, had graciously sent us on our way. By rights, when the lord of one's superior house sets foot in the territory one governs, it is one's duty to welcome her with grand ceremony — but Ellie declined that honor as tactfully as she could, offering instead to reward Lord Humid for the aid she had come to lend.
"No, please. On a battlefield, it is only natural for a subordinate commander to shield her superior. And no one expects a reward for doing what comes naturally."
With those words, and a bright, blooming smile, she refused the reward outright. They say excellent superiors draw excellent subordinates, and the woman before me was living proof of it. Of course, refusal or not, Ellie would doubtless find some way to press a reward into her hands all the same.
Back in Cumul Territory, Ellie and I had no chance to rest. We had barely reached the manor when Edgar reported that the ones who had leaked the information had been caught — and we headed straight for the underground dungeon.
Held below were one man and two women.
At first I took them for tax evaders, but it was nothing of the sort: there were simply no residents of Haizi left to pay taxes, and so they had been in no position to pay even had they wished to. Armed with that knowledge, they had leaked what went on within Cumul Territory and passed it straight to Moss, lord of Heiji, smoothing the way for his schemes. One misstep, and that information could have spread far enough to expose the fact that Cumul's lord was absent from her lands — an open invitation for the demons to descend on us in a massive assault.
From where she stood as lord, it went without saying that she had no intention of forgiving them. Ellie fixed them with a look one gives something less than human, and calmly decided their fate.
With that, Ellie turned her back and walked out of the cell where they were held. Edgar bowed his head at her decision, nodding his understanding.
They were not the only ones languishing below. In that damp, foul place sat the imperial auditor as well — the man whose duty it had been to record Haizi's condition in full and send the report home.
From outside the bars, Ellie spoke slowly.
"Do you understand your crime?"
"...I... I couldn't do anything... All I could do was stand by and watch people die... They told me that if I didn't help, my family might be in danger..."
"Your family in danger, is it? And how, exactly, would the lord of some provincial city get his hands on your family, living safe inside Cumul Territory?"
"B-but! That lord had power enough to do it..!"
Cutting him off mid-sentence, Ellie laid out his crimes one by one.
"The crime of forgetting your office as imperial auditor and feeding false information to the lord and her vassals."
"And the crime of abetting them — hiring mercenaries in an attempt to assassinate me, the lord of this territory."
"Two crimes. Both are capital offenses beyond forgiveness."
"That said — in light of the fact that you came forward with what you knew of Haizi's lord of your own accord, and confessed your crimes, I will reduce the sentence you receive."
"I... I never knew! The person visiting that city — I didn't know she was the lord...!"
He flailed his hands and feet, pleading with Ellie for mercy.
"And if the ones who visited that city had been true adventurers instead of me — what do you imagine would have become of them?"
Fwoosh—!
White flames roared up in Ellie's hand as she seized the bars.
"You say the lord threatened you even before I ever visited... but that does not lessen one whit what you did."
"Say that to the adventurers who died in my place — how do you think they would react?! Be grateful the one passing judgment on you now is not one of them."
"Had they been the victims, they would never have weighed your sins as gently as I do."
And so Ellie left the dungeon behind and threw herself into everything at once — so buried in Haizi's affairs that whole nights passed without her once coming to the bedroom.
So I rolled up my sleeves and started shouldering her work myself. Ellie tried to refuse my help, but what could she do? Dark circles had settled beneath her eyes, and those black shadows were testimony to just how little sleep she was getting.
In the end, she and I burned through several nights working through the endless tasks, and the question of Haizi Territory's allegiance was decided: it would pass into the domain of Lord Humid, who had marched to our support. That was her reward for trusting the word of a young boy — Leon — and moving her soldiers on our behalf.
The work moved quickly, yet even so Ellie remained too swamped to move. She had to draft the official documents reporting all of this to the Emperor, and going by my testimony, if an unknown party had sold that grimoire, then the old man behind it had to be found.
All I could do for her was play host to our guest Yeon-i and help carry her workload.
Yeon-i, lodged at the Cumul manor, would now and then ask to cross swords with me. She was a comrade who had fought the lord at our side — and the benefactor who had saved our lives. Ellie, deeply grateful, insisted that she accept proper hospitality; Yeon-i, flustered, gave in. And so she took up residence in our manor, and my sparring matches with her grew more and more frequent.
Yeon-i refused to simply idle away her stay living off our goodwill. She drilled the soldiers and knights, and when reports came in of demons appearing, she rode out in our stead. The help she gave was enormous. For a guest, she understood our position remarkably well, taking care of everything we had no time for — how could I possibly refuse her requests?
After one such sparring session, I asked a maid where Ellie was.
"The Family Head is with Lord Louis at the moment."
"Louis...?"
The name of the Haizi lord's son. When I asked to be shown there, the maid answered, "At once, my lord," and set off ahead of me.
In a plain, unadorned room, Ellie and Louis sat across a desk, Louis slowly offering his answers to her questions. When I stepped inside, Ellie sensed it was me, gave me a single smile, and turned back to the interrogation. I took a seat in the corner, smothered my presence, and settled in to watch.
"Louis Haizi, was it?"
At her question, the man called Louis — his upper body bound in rope — looked up at her. Then he opened his mouth, his voice small and hollowed out.
"Yes..."
By Ellie's account, he was a man of such responsibility and martial talent that he had once gone to war in his father's stead. But the figure before us now was nothing more than a young walking corpse.
Ellie addressed him.
"I know you held this territory together in the lord's stead. But tell me — did you truly never see your father using the forbidden arts to prey upon his people?"
In answer, Louis said,
"I saw it..."
At that admission, Ellie's expression twisted for an instant.
Ellie rarely let emotion show. To show emotion was to risk betraying a weakness. And yet, right now, the furrow in her brow made her fury unmistakable.
"You saw it...? And it never occurred to you to stop him — or to tell us?"
"...Every attempt I made, my father blocked... I even bided my time and tried to strike him down when the chance came, but..."
"What was left to me was..."
The man called Louis raised the sleeve along his arm.
"A permanent injury, dealt so that I could never hold a sword again. Beyond that, he forbade me from leaving — and from eating."
Across his arm ran an enormously long gash. One look was enough to read the malice in it — a wound made to keep a sword from his grip for the rest of his life.
Ellie could not hide her dismay.
"I'm sorry. I had no idea..."
"It's quite all right. Thanks to that, that 'evil' could be rooted out at last."
Louis did not call Moss his father. He named him evil, and condemned him outright.
Before him, Ellie could not lift her head. She had taken the world's malice head-on with her whole body, been ground down by stress until she collapsed — and still she had resisted to the very end. And now, in front of me, was the moment she was slowly coming apart.
Had she been alone... the stress and the overwork might well have laid Ellie low for good. But I was at her side.
"Louis, was it?"
Letting the presence I had kept leashed surge free, I called his name. Louis's eyes flew wide, and he bowed his head.
Paying his bowed head no mind, I spoke.
"There's no need for that. What you did was an utterly right decision. And yet for all the right things you did, the only thing left to you was that permanent wound."
"Did you never come to hate the world? Your father so detested the tedium of living that he turned to the forbidden arts to amuse himself. You never felt that way?"
At my question, Louis said,
"I'm human too. Of course I felt that way. But I never wanted to become a monster like that. Desire, put another way, is the dream that carries us forward. My dream was to become a Sword Master. It still is. If my right arm is ruined — then I'll use my left, won't I!"
An upright man, through and through. In the game, a man like this must have been reduced to a sacrificial lamb of the Cumul domain, swallowed whole by the dark. The kind of man who, even when shown the wrong road, believes the one under his own feet is the right one — and pushes everything else aside.
"Thank you. For working so hard you were willing to throw yourself away for our territory. I don't have much to offer in return, but."
I kindled the Authority of Life in my palm and poured it, concentrated, into his right arm. The horrific scar that marred it began to melt away.
"Wh-...? Ah...!"
"Try gripping something. How does it feel?"
At my question, Louis nodded hurriedly, words tumbling out.
"Here's the thing — the Family Head seems utterly worn out from handling so many affairs. We'll resume the interrogation tomorrow. Will that be all right?"
At my words, Louis nodded and left the room.
What remained was her — still unable to raise her head — and me, watching her.
Quietly, I gathered Ellie into my arms, sat down in the chair, and settled her so that she sat curled on my lap.
"Ellie. It's hard, isn't it?"
At those words, Ellie broke.
"I... I'm... it's hard... it's all too much...! If I'd known this would happen...! If I'd only known...! I would have come straight back to Cumul Territory... why... why am I the kind of person who...!"
I simply patted her back, softly, over and over. Telling someone who admits she's struggling that "it's okay" only backfires. The stress a person feels is hers alone to know; an "it's okay" squeezed out by someone who doesn't understand is worse than silence. So I said nothing at all — just kept patting her back, so that she could pour out every last thing she felt.
Ellie had done nothing wrong. The Tide of Corruption had struck while she was delivering her report at the imperial capital, and the demon assault had made her return to Cumul unavoidably late. On top of that, Florence's villainy had plunged Crystal Territory into crisis, and shielding it had delayed her further still. Even there, at Crystal Territory, she had given her utmost for her own lands, directing her vassals — Edgar among them.
In time, Ellie drifted quietly asleep in my arms. The fatigue of all those piled-up days, and the fury and tears that had burst out of her — born of the stress of interrogating Louis — had been the spark, and everything had surged up past her control. But perhaps having me there made it bearable; that, I think, was why she managed to sleep.
Taking care not to wake her, I lifted her gently and laid her down in the bedroom. And then I found myself recalling the plan I had put to bed the moment we returned from Crystal Territory — wiped clean from my mind by everything that had happened with Haizi Territory.
In this game world, the accessory called a ring had exactly one purpose: a proposal of marriage. Here too, the custom ran the same way — you offered a ring to the one you loved, and if they slipped it onto their finger, the proposal succeeded. On Earth, though, lovers put rings on each other's fingers without any proposal at all. A kind of display, really — the surest way of telling the whole world, I am this woman's — or this man's — beloved.
Besides, the diamonds Lord Gerald and his wife had given us were still sitting there anyway. I decided to put them to use... The problem was who would cut and craft them into rings.
I was still sunk in that worry when—
"Oh? A blacksmith...? Hold on."
The perfect man to take the commission came to mind. Closing the bedroom door softly so Ellie wouldn't wake, I struck out for the smithy at a quick pace.
The survivors of Haizi Territory had lost their land and their homes all at once, so Cumul had agreed to shelter them temporarily. I made for their camp — and there he was, exactly the man I had in mind. The blacksmith who had been the very first to tell us of the territory's plight, and who, knowing full well it would put him in danger, had given us that information gladly all the same.
When the old man first caught sight of us by the wagons carrying the survivors, he had thanked us over and over, saying he now owed us a debt he could never repay. And when he learned who we actually were, he'd very nearly fainted on the spot — but he'd pulled himself together just enough to beg us, please, to let him settle that debt.
I set my steps toward him, and lost in fretting over the ring's design, before I knew it I was standing at the forge where the old man worked. He was hammering iron with everything he had, entirely unaware of my arrival.
Clang!
Clang!
Clang!
He was forging weapons for the knights and soldiers, plying his trade as briskly as ever — though I distinctly remembered him telling us he'd set his hammer down for years... Clearly, a master's touch never rusts.
The trouble was that no matter how many times I called out to him, my voice kept drowning beneath the thunder of his hammer. Which left exactly one option: spreading my presence. But to some people, my presence lands as pure, instinctive dread, so I hesitated a little. Well — nothing for it but to try.
I let my presence unfurl around the forge so the man would know I had come looking for him.
"Hm? Someone there...? Oh! If it isn't the Lord Successor!"
What a relief. He had sensed my presence without feeling much fear at all, it seemed.
"Have you been keeping well?"
At my words, the man threw back his head and laughed.
"Course I have! Thanks to the Family Head and our Lord Successor here, I'm swinging a hammer again when I never thought I would. Feels grand!"
"Glad to hear it."
"So what brings you to this shabby little place? Nothing gone wrong, I hope?"
"Nothing's wrong, exactly..."
So I gave him a brief account of the situation and told him about the accessory I wanted made. Stroking his beard, the man said,
"I can manage that. Back in my younger days, I did jewelcraft too, you know."
"You did?"
I'd been racking my brain over where to even find a craftsman. What a relief.
"Though that trinket you're describing, folk mostly use for proposing... You getting married, are you?"
"Ah — no, that's not it."
"Eh? You're giving her a ring, but you're not marrying her??"
Past bafflement now — the look of a man wondering what manner of nonsense he was hearing.
"It's not that I won't marry. I intend to marry Ellie one day — but neither she nor I is in any position for a wedding yet."
For a wedding to even be worth considering, the demons would have to be all but extinct. Anything sooner was simply out of the question. I'd sooner die than let those demon bastards lay eyes on a child of ours.
"It's just that Ellie's beautiful enough that more and more men keep sending proposal letters and making eyes at her, you see."
He wasn't wrong. Another proposal letter had come flying in just last month. Within Cumul Territory, our relationship was well enough known that hardly a vassal dared make advances anymore — but the letters still arrived from other regions, along with the occasional flirt. Ellie turned every one of them down, of course, by pointedly looping her arm through mine where they could see. Still, I hated the whole business itself, and the cleanest answer was to root those advances out altogether. Besides — I hoped this might lift Ellie's spirits a little, too.
As if he'd read every one of those thoughts, the man accepted my commission with a hearty grin.
"Good! I owe you a debt besides, so I'll take the job."
"Then how shall we settle the fee?"
At my words, the man pushed away the hand I held out with gold coins in it.
"Oh, come off it! Honestly! I'm the one repaying a debt here — why are you pressing money on me?! Put that away this instant!"
"But..."
"Put it away, I said! I mean it, truly."
In the end, I yielded to his insistence — hid the coins, and saw to it that he was paid properly without his ever knowing.
I was on my way out of the smithy when one particular sword caught my eye.
A golden guard that wrapped the hilt and shielded the wielder's hand. A blade with less surface than an ordinary sword — less even than my Sword of the Azure Sky. And yet it radiated tremendous cutting power. On Earth, its name meant a sword with an edge on one side alone. A sidesword had caught my eye.
"This one..."
"Ah — is it the warrior in you? You've a fine eye for a famed blade!"
"Sorry?"
"I ground my very soul into that steel, back in my prime. A famed blade, I'd say, with nothing to be ashamed of. Go on — draw it."
"C-can I really?"
"If not for you, this sword would never have seen the light of day. It's quite all right."
I took the sidesword's hilt and drew — silver light burst forth, and the blade held itself aloft with unmistakable pride.
"A fine piece, isn't it?"
"It really is..."
Dazzled by the sword's beauty, I found my gaze well and truly stolen.
"That sword is one I made to give my wife. I even worked enchantments into it so she could wield it. But my wife never came home from the war."
A famed blade prepared for a beloved wife — enchanted, no less — had lost its mistress, then its purpose, and been left to gather dust. A shame, that. A sword of this caliber would have been worthy even of Yeon-i. But I could hardly do something as mad as walking off with a blade forged for another man's wife.
The man went on with his wife's story.
"She fell in the campaign against the Great Demon. Thankfully, we were able to bring her body home."
"That's why, when I see folk like you — people who stake their lives to protect others the way you do — all I feel is gratitude. Which is why I say this:"
"Take that sword with you."
"I'm sorry?"
For a moment I was sure I'd misheard.
"My wife would never want a sword made for her to sit rusting away alone like this. If anything, she'd want it used — want the world made peaceful by it."
"..."
"I'll give you this sword. Mind, I was young in those days, and my enchanting was clumsy — it'll be a rough piece of work."
"So give me a little more time. I'll gift you a far more perfect blade."
"Th-thank you."
"In return, there is one condition."
Right — I'd settled the debt earlier, so now a proper price had to be paid. My thoughts halted dead at his next words.
At the old man's heartfelt plea, I could do nothing but nod.
And so, within one small smithy, began the work that would give birth to the ring Ellie would one day wear on her left ring finger — and the famed blade destined for Yeon-i's hands.