The North
What waited for us after we reached the North and stepped off the airship was the cold, and the tribal warriors sent to guide us.
Every breath we let out unraveled into a long white plume, and a single gust was enough to leave our cheeks stinging. The warriors waiting there looked entirely at home in weather like that. Every one of them was built large, with at least one old scar across a face or an arm—men who, to anyone's eye, could only have been of the North.
A few of them changed, just for an instant, the moment they saw me. They'd recognized me. Some of them had likely met me face to face on the battlefield, so there was nothing to be done about it. But not one of them called my name, or acted as if he knew me. The moment our eyes met, they only inclined their heads in a brief, silent bow.
It struck me as a little unexpected, though I guessed the reason soon enough. The Headmaster must have had a private word with the Great Chieftain. He would have told him that I had no wish to be addressed here as the Pathfinder or anything of the sort, and that I had no intention of letting the students hear about my past. Knowing the Great Chieftain, he had almost certainly passed that along to his own men in advance.
Sure enough, when the warriors pointed the students toward the campsite they spoke in the rough, unpolished manner of northerners—yet the moment their eyes met mine, they were polite to an almost unnatural degree. Men people called barbarians, with better manners than your average noble. A curious thing.
"We'll see to guiding the students."
The warrior at the front said it shortly.
"Yes. Thank you."
When I answered, he dipped his head once more, and the warriors behind him began leading the students off toward the camp. Sienna kept turning her head this way and that, fascinated by northerners and a landscape she had never seen, while Erin stood beside her with a slightly tense face, taking in their surroundings.
I watched until I was sure the students were following properly, then turned my gaze to the largest tent on the far side. If I remembered right, that was where they had said the Great Chieftain would be waiting. The students were in the guides' hands now. I had business of my own.
I walked to the tent, lifted the flap, and stepped inside, and a familiar face met me at once. It had been a few months since the war's end. The moment the Great Chieftain caught sight of me, he rose slowly from his seat and broke into a broad, delighted laugh.
"Well now! About time I saw that face of yours!"
"Yes. It's been a while."
I lowered my head as a matter of course. It was a gesture I wouldn't so much as consider in front of the Headmaster, and yet with this man the courtesy came of itself, without my having to think about it. To look at him, he was a rough northern warrior and nothing else, but his manner was more refined than most nobles'. Even during the war, I had never once seen him treat people carelessly, or humiliate a soldier for a mistake in front of others. Easygoing as he was, he knew how to respect the person across from him, and when it mattered he was more serious than anyone. It was only right that I answer him in kind.
"Journey treat you all right?"
"Yes. Nothing worth mentioning."
"Must've been a chore, hauling students all the way out here. Sit yourself down."
"Thank you."
He offered me the seat first, and I sat across from him. Only after he had poured the tea himself and set it in front of me did he return to his own place.
"Heard from the Headmaster."
"Heard what?"
"That you've no wish to go digging up the old days in front of the students."
"…"
That old man, of course. Watching the things he usually got up to, you could be forgiven for wondering where his conscience had gone—but in matters like this, he looked after people with a care that was almost excessive.
"So I told the lads as well. Recognize you or not, they're not to go calling you Pathfinder or any such thing."
"Thank you."
"Don't mention it."
He lifted his cup as if it were nothing at all.
"You don't want it. What reason have I to go around shooting my mouth off?"
Hearing that eased me a little. In this, at least, he was a far better man than the Headmaster. I took a sip of the tea he had poured and set the cup down.
I could more or less guess what the Headmaster had been thinking, sending the students all the way out here—but in the end, the one who would actually be grinding them was the man in front of me. About time I asked what mattered.
"So how are you thinking of working the kids?"
"Working them, is it…"
The Great Chieftain stroked his beard, thought for a moment, then smiled at his leisure.
"Well. We ought to make proper people of them before we send them back, wouldn't you say?"
"I like the sound of that."
The answer slipped out of me at once. Rough to the ear, maybe, but he wasn't wrong. Letting students who had spent their days at the Academy wrapped in fine gear, learning nothing but orthodox swordsmanship, live the life of the North for themselves—that alone would leave them with plenty. Of course, in my own head, it was being translated into slightly different words.
Mm. Work the hell out of them. That'll do.
"And why's your face gone all pleasant of a sudden?"
"Just thought it would make for a fine education."
"…"
The Great Chieftain studied me for a moment.
"Starting to see why the Headmaster attached you to them."
"What do you mean?"
"It's nothing."
He shook his head, smiling.
"The evaluation itself isn't difficult. I've heard roughly what the students can do, and I've no mind to set them anything that might get them killed. I mean for them to learn with their own bodies what it takes to live in the North."
"Specifically?"
"Starting with how to endure the cold—camping, hunting, travel, finding the way. Having them cross blades with our warriors a few times wouldn't hurt, either."
"That's a pretty full program."
"Field evaluation or not, they're still students. A little fear is all to the good. I've no intention of sending them home with wounds they'll carry the rest of their lives."
The Great Chieftain, through and through. He had spoken of working them hard, but only ever within what the students could bear, so they would leave having learned something.
After that we talked a little more about the evaluation, and then the conversation drifted, naturally, to things that had nothing to do with it—how the North had changed since the war, how the Tribal Coalition was faring, which of the people we had fought beside were doing what, and where. I answered in kind, mixing in how I had come to the Academy and how being a professor, now that I was doing it, wasn't as bad as I had expected. We went on catching up like that until the tea he had first poured was nearly gone.
"Come to think of it."
Pouring fresh tea, the Great Chieftain spoke as if something had just occurred to him.
"Seen the Saintess again, have you?"
"Pardon?"
The name came out of nowhere, and the hand lifting my cup paused.
"Ah. Yes. Well… I did see her again."
"Did you now."
He nodded slowly. Then the face that had been smiling a moment ago turned suddenly grave.
"…"
What now. Thinking he might be about to say something important, I straightened a little without meaning to. He stared at his teacup in silence for a while, then spoke in a heavy voice.
"You."
"Yes."
"I say this because you don't feel like some stranger to me."
"…Yes."
"Put marriage off. As far back as you can."
"…"
For a moment I didn't understand.
"What in the—"
When I looked at him as if to ask what on earth he was talking about, he pointed at his own chest with a finger, as if he had been waiting for it.
"Look at me."
"At what."
"At me, I said."
He let out a deep sigh.
"Those sisters I grew up close with, ever since we were little—I took them on as they were, and now I've three wives. Three."
"…"
I was a damn fool for having listened so solemnly a moment ago.
"And what does that have to do with me?"
"How could it not?"
His face was quite serious.
"At first I didn't know either. Thought we were only close. Then I came to my senses and one of them had caught me, and somehow the second sank her teeth in as well, and by the end the third had let herself right in."
"Is 'sank her teeth in' really something you say about your own wife?"
"Not where they can hear me."
"…"
This man, once you got to know him, wasn't entirely right in the head either. Paying no attention to whatever I might be thinking, he held up three fingers.
"Three."
"I heard you the first time."
"Three when I open my eyes in the morning. Three when I come home at night."
"How lovely for you."
"Lovely, my ass."
For the first time, he spat a curse worthy of a northerner.
"Getting torn into by one of them is hard enough. The day those three become of one mind, I'm not the Great Chieftain of the Tribal Coalition—I'm a gourd that scrapes if you so much as look at it. A gourd."
"…"
"I tell you, stepping into my own house sets me more on edge than stepping onto a battlefield ever did."
A laugh nearly got away from me, so I rubbed a hand over my mouth.
"Isn't that because you've given them cause, Great Chieftain?"
"I have not."
"Your three wives are furious with you at the same time."
"…There might be a little."
Of course there was. He cleared his throat once and put the serious face back on.
"At any rate, do not take what I'm saying lightly."
"Yes, well…"
"And as for the Saintess."
He set his cup down and stared straight at me.
"I'm hardly a stranger to that young lady. Years running with the same Hero Party—I know her character through and through."
"…"
"Meek enough on the outside, and she smiles plenty, but once she's set her heart on something, she isn't the sort to bend just because the people around her have a word to say. You know that."
He wasn't wrong. I hadn't known the Saintess only briefly, either. Above all, I had known since the battlefield that she had feelings for me. She had never once said outright that she liked me, but there were things you could feel without them ever leaving her mouth, and I had simply gone on pretending not to notice.
"Which is why I say it."
He scratched his chin and looked me up and down.
"You don't much look like a man listening to a tale that isn't his."
"…Since when is this suddenly my affair?"
"Well, now."
He smiled a strange little smile.
"I can't say what you think of the Saintess. But how she looks at you—that showed clear enough, even on the battlefield."
"I'm aware of that myself."
"Aware, and you wear that face?"
"What is supposed to change because I know?"
"That is the most dangerous thought of all."
"…"
He shook his head slowly, as if he were looking at his past self.
"I thought I knew everything, too. I had a fair idea that all three of them had feelings for me, and I thought if I just drew the line properly, nothing would come of it."
"And then?"
Without a word, he held up three fingers again.
"…Kindly put those fingers down."
"This is the result."
"Didn't you simply fail to draw the line?"
"That could be."
"Not 'could be.' It seems exactly that."
"That isn't the important part."
He brushed my words aside as if they were nothing and set his cup down.
"Point is, the Saintess isn't a woman who'll spend her whole life waiting in the same place just because you keep pretending not to see."
At that, the Saintess as she had been of late came back to me. How she had come all the way to my lodgings first thing in the morning, offering to buy me a meal. How her face had turned oddly venomous over nothing more than the fact that I had been drinking with Dorothy. Come to think of it, not long ago the two of us had even shared a drink. She had told me her name.
"…"
Even so, there was nothing to be newly surprised about now. I already knew how the Saintess thought of me. If there was a problem, it was only that those feelings had begun to show a little more openly than before. I glanced down at my cup, then looked at the Great Chieftain.
"Even so, the Saintess and I are not that sort of pair."
"Is that so?"
"Yes."
He looked at me with a meaningful expression.
"So was I, at the start."
"I am genuinely asking you to stop with the three-wives story."
"Hahaha!"
Unable to hold it in any longer, the Great Chieftain burst out laughing, and I, at a complete loss, lifted my cup and drank what tea remained.