Those Who Stand at the Edge (5)
"Am I someone special to you?"
Vesta's words caught in his throat. When he failed to answer right away, Ashtien closed the distance between them, poking him sharply in the side.
"Ugh."
"Well?"
"Th-that is..."
Vesta edged his body away bit by bit. Not that it would do him any good. He was facing the finest hunter on the steppe, after all.
"Tell me, Vesta."
She looked different somehow. It was as if he were seeing Ashtien with her crown set aside — not the Khan, but a woman named Ashtien.
Vesta hesitated over his answer. Ordinarily, Ashtien would have backed off by now.
I won't tease you any further.
That was what she would have said, and let the matter pass. But this time, apparently determined to hear his answer, she refused to take her eyes off him.
He looked into her eyes.
He sensed something like impatience in her. It was an emotion that truly did not suit her. The Ashtien Vesta knew had always been composed, a woman of effortless poise.
No. Was that only what I chose to believe?
Autumn would soon be upon them.
A summer crammed with far too much — and yet, at the same time, far too short — was drawing to a close. The bargain Ashtien had struck with him was racing toward its end.
Half left, is it.
No. Not even half remained, not by Vesta's own design.
Perhaps Ashtien has caught on to my plan.
Perhaps that was why she couldn't contain her unease. It was entirely possible.
"If it's a difficult question to answer..."
Ashtien let her words trail off. Once again, she was trying to put him first instead of herself. The wisest person he knew, and yet she kept insisting on getting the short end of the stick.
What kind of person do you take me for? You, of all people, shouldn't have to suffer.
"No. It's not difficult. What could possibly be difficult about it?"
Vesta's words caught Ashtien just as she was about to retreat.
Am I someone special to you?
"Of course you are."
As if trying to divine whether his words were true, Ashtien's eyes searched his face. Vesta allowed it.
"I see."
Ashtien exhaled the words with a quiet puff. Her tone was reaching for its usual dignified bearing again — hardening itself, tucking what lay beneath away from view.
"Yes."
And if I am special — what kind of special would that be?
Ashtien felt the urge to ask.
No.
I won't ask. Not here, not now.
It wasn't that she couldn't. It wasn't fear holding her back, nor was it bad timing.
Call it a woman's pride. Call it a single, small wish.
Specialness doesn't necessarily mean tenderness. But I...
She couldn't read Vesta's heart. But she had no wish to force her way inside and pry it open for confirmation.
If you hold the same thoughts I do,
she wanted him to offer them of his own accord — carrying every ounce of tenderness and affection within them.
That much, she was entitled to want.
Will we welcome the spring together, Vesta?
And if so — let the autumn winds not test us. Let neither of us waver, but stand firm. And let this winter not stretch on too long.
Let spring come.
That is all I will wish for, Vesta.
"Ashtien...?"
Her silence had begun to gnaw at him, so Vesta called her name.
She did not answer. She only drew him into her arms.
"Mm."
Vesta was flustered, but he was no fool. It seemed he must not pull away from Ashtien here.
He carefully rested his hands against her back and shoulders.
He could feel the lines of her. Unlike his own body, hers was smooth, finely wrought.
And I can hear her heartbeat.
It was somehow terribly ticklish, and at the same time, utterly wondrous.
Rain was pouring down outside the tent, but the water could not intrude upon the two of them. Even that sound, soaking the whole world gray, could do no more than circle round and round the canvas walls.
The rain was far away, and the two of them were closer than they had ever been.
There was a man cutting a path through the rain with no destination in mind.
The man was an orc with a black mane.
An orc, not a blue wolf. He was one who did not know his own blood. He had never known his parents' faces, and thus had never once known the shelter of another's protection.
And yet he had survived. He was surviving still.
The world called such a one a masterless blade.
A masterless blade — Karakh was pushing through the pale, watery mist without a single companion at his side.
The fog had stolen his sense of direction. Even an orc's night eyes found it hard to make out shapes.
A sky shrouded in rain clouds never hangs its stars. The pale night sky offered the man no bearing, and the wind, raging wherever it pleased, offered none either.
Then what was he relying on to find his way?
He was walking with his eyes fixed on the rain-soaked ground.
The earth of Ainuwail was hard. It rarely gave up a footprint. The only exceptions were when snow fell, or rain.
And it happened to be raining, and the rain had turned the ground to mud. The slope of the terrain kept the water from pooling, which meant the footprints held.
Every beast was writing out its destination in the dirt.
They would be erased within the hour, but for now they kept their shape. Karakh made those footprints his thread.
Karakh was a superb hunter — and hunters are craftsmen of reading the past through the clue of a footprint, tracing it backward along its course.
And only a hunter can hunt down another hunter. The tracks he was following belonged to an orc.
The footprints had been left deliberately, as a marker.
When orcs needed to meet in secret, this was how they found one another.
Karakh, following the trail back, came to a halt.
"Old man."
"You came."
An orc with faded, silver-gray fur emerged from the mist. In a society where orcs grew fast and died young, Silver Wolf was a rarity few ever saw.
An orc cannot lay down the hunter's craft until the day he dies, for the horde provides for none of its elders. The lives of orc males, especially, were harsh in the extreme.
By that measure, Silver Wolf's life deserved to be honored.
He had endured a life of hardship longer than the whole span of three orcs born and three orcs dead.
Karakh showed Silver Wolf respect as well. But the look in his eyes was anything but welcoming. He behaved like a man bristling with wariness.
"So. Did the elves treat you well?"
"Well enough."
Silver Wolf gave a crooked smile.
"And that's all 'well enough' amounts to?"
"...Tch."
So there's a loose tongue in the horde.
Who could it be? Who had met Silver Wolf before even he had? He turned it over briefly, but it was not a question that yielded an answer.
The taste in his mouth went bitter.
"Don't sneer at me."
A beast's growl bled into Karakh's voice. The displeasure of a young, powerful animal carried real weight behind it — the kind of force that froze a man where he stood.
But his opposite was a seasoned beast who had weathered every storm. He took Karakh's threat in stride and shrugged it off.
"Waste your strength where it matters, not here. You are not my leader."
There were more important things at stake than posturing.
"You haven't forgotten your role, have you?"
Someone was humming a song. A melody with a mystical, otherworldly timbre — a folk song that the steppe elves loved to sing.
We followed the tail of the wind to come unto this land.
It was pure elvish, and the pronunciation was superb. A song born of the open steppe, carried on now within the cramped confines of a rocky cave.
Rhea, who had been listening, scrunched up her face.
"...You can sing in elvish too?"
The wind circles round, and the stars shine at our pillow. And so every song is the wind's song, and every dream the dream of stars...
"You've got a person sitting right in front of you, and all you do is sing."
At her annoyance, the werewolf curled in her arms pricked up its ears and lifted its head.
Grrrr.
The way it scrunched its muzzle and growled was intimidating in the extreme. It had grown enormous.
A wolf is born in spring and, by autumn, has grown large enough to join the hunt. Werewolves were no different. The beast now had the strength to bite a man dead.
And because he knew that fact all too well, the singer hiccupped and stopped.
He was, at heart, the sort who was strong against the weak and weak against the strong.
"...Honestly."
Rhea let out a sigh and smoothed down the werewolf's fur. His temper settled, and the beast laid his head back in her lap.
He listens to people better than some mongrel off the street.
She grumbled, if only to herself.
"How are you holding up, Master Ahak?"
Rhea spoke the man's name aloud.
Ahak. In elvish, a name meaning reunion.
Though he bore an elvish name, the man himself was no elf, but pure human stock.
He simply knew elves well enough to sing their songs. By Vesta's assessment, Ahak was the Empire's foremost scholar of elvish studies.
He was also the master who had taught Vesta the elvish tongue.
"You think there's any chance I'm fine? These orc sons of bitches."
He spat out a thick stream of curses.
"Would you kindly get these chains off me?"
Trying to speak the human tongue and the words keep snagging.
"I'd love to, but I don't have the key."
[Useless, that.]
"There you go with elvish again. What did you just say?"
"Nothing."
He was currently being held captive in the orcs' rocky cave.
The charge: defying the horde's orders.