A Holy Site? A Pilgrimage?
"Eh? Whazzat ye say? The betrothal thingy, they called it off, did they? That's why I'm makin' the trip."
"Er, um… you speak the Imperial tongue with a rather… distinctive accent."
The man thought to himself.
Going by appearances, she looked fifteen or sixteen at most. Skin white as fresh snow, and silver hair that threw off a light bright enough to make even that pallor seem dull by comparison. And those eyes — emeralds set in a face, gleaming with a sunny radiance — tilted her head in a quizzical tilt atop which sat a pair of ears, pointed as only hers could be.
…Would they prick me if I touched them?
"Yer not answerin' me?!"
"Master."
At that, the blonde, green-eyed girl in the next seat called out to her and, arm extended, jabbed her sharply in the side.
So it was true that elves' ears came in every shape imaginable. If one pair looked ready to draw blood, the other was a modest, unremarkable length.
"Hah?"
"Might I suggest you simply use magic?"
"What, if I cannae split a word wi' the locals, am I a hypnotist or summat?"
"…If it's that bad, no one can understand you. Even within the capital, that degree of it goes well past being written off as a provincial dialect."
"Yeh think? Then what about you?"
"I'm perfect. Speaking it, listening to it — no problems whatsoever."
"Show-off! That's how it always goes wi' the good things… tch! Hate it! Won't do it!"
"Suit yourself."
Haaah….
Stagecoaches carried everyone — young and old, men and women, and now and then every manner of race besides — but these two elves, who seemed for all the world to be master and disciple, were singularly odd even among them. One was unmistakably a mage at a glance; the other was outfitted so thoroughly she could have passed for a seasoned adventurer without a hint of pretense.
And yet none of that was what actually caught the eye.
Beautiful enough to make your eyes fall out? Gorgeous, even? Fine — that much could be chalked up to the traits of their kind. But still…
High elves, I'd wager.
The man's guess had grounds of its own. Elves had their ranks, and while the gossip of the world was content to let merely pretty pass without comment, the saying went that if one look made you think this is no person, this is a goddess — then nine times out of ten, it was a high elf.
And sure enough, every passenger aboard that coach, young and old alike, kept stealing glances at the pair. The imperial capital brimmed with beauties so striking they could widen your eyes, but narrow the standard down to faces people actually claimed the gods had sculpted, and the number would shrink to a handful you could count on one hand.
"Makin' a fuss over nothin'. Hmph!"
Coaches came in many varieties, but the kind anyone could board regardless of station — like this one — was typically drawn by five horses. Naturally, the passenger compartment could seat a good ten people besides the driver, so long as there was no luggage; excess baggage meant an added fare, or, if the contents were reasonable, a loose compromise.
"Please, go on."
"Er, um. Well…"
At the request from the girl who appeared to be her disciple, the middle-aged man reddened and cleared his throat.
Damn, but she's pretty.
If that face kept flickering behind his eyelids, he'd be losing sleep for days. And that wasn't the half of it. In his imagination, he already had six children with her.
"Ahem! So — it's not that the engagement was broken off, more that it's been postponed. She set out on a pilgrimage to the holy site, they say — to take time reflecting on herself. Lord Rueld's son, that is."
"But what of the banquet, an' the betrothal ceremony, eh? Whazzat become of 'em?"
"That's why the tongues are wagging. Though… that's only what the rumor says. Whether she actually departed on a holy pilgrimage is anyone's guess."
As though sharing a secret, he raised a hand to his mouth — and every passenger's ears leaned in along with it.
"They say he acted out rather violently."
"Violence, ye say? What kind?"
"Assaulting royalty inside the Academy, and his fellow students besides — then turning his hand against the instructors there, defying them outright, wrecking school property… they say it was enormous. I don't know the details myself, but…"
"If ye don't know it proper, ye oughtn't go blabbin' it about, ought ye?"
"Um…"
"She says that peddling inaccurate rumors for the sake of amusement is not a proper attitude."
That's not what I said. I'm fairly sure that's not how I put it.
"There's no way I said that. Never saw it, never said it, yeh hear?"
Delivered in a voice like silver bells, from a face like a painting — that uncanny tongue spilling out of it created a dissonance potent enough to make a man swoon. And yet it wasn't entirely beyond comprehension, either.
Which made it all the more baffling.
"……."
Please, Master. The translation spell. The translation spell, please…
She'd gone to all the trouble of developing it, and now she wouldn't use it? What a thing to say! And before that — why was the embarrassment always her share to bear?
Hameln, one among that woman's countless disciples, sighed faintly as she tugged her gray cloak closer over the leather vest and the chest that rose demurely above it.
"Hey. Yeh, whatchacallit — go gather all that information stuff, quicklike."
"Must you insist on using that baseless language of ours, between ourselves?"
"Course I must! Ye only get fluent by usin' it! Don't yeh know a good thing when yeh see it? An elder's speakin' to yeh! Hup!"
"……."
For all that, it seemed as though she kept doing it deliberately.
What is this? Is she telling me to eat a poisonous mushroom right now — is that supposed to be some roundabout insult?
"Yeh know where we're off to, aye?"
"The Imperial Palace?"
"Say my name. Show 'em the crest. If they still balk, cuss 'em out a bit — that's fine too."
"……."
That would blossom straight into a diplomatic incident.
"They're all! The Emperor too, the Empress too! All my disciples, the lot of 'em! When that happens, yeh play the power game, aye? Shall we give it a go?"
"…Understood, so please, let's hurry."
Keep listening to that grotesque language and my blood pressure's going to burst something and drop me flat.
And so, once that woman melted into the crowd and vanished from sight—
"Speaking of which."
The silver-haired elf swept her gaze slowly across the capital that unfolded before her as she walked.
"Murky in every way imaginable."
"Still, at least the reek of sewage doesn't hang in the air here."
"I find that particular stench rather homey, myself."
"……."
"And that's how it always goes wi' the good things! Tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk-tss!"
So she was doing it on purpose, in front of me. Noted. "In any case, Master — as your disciple, I shall move ahead to carry out your instructions."
Surely not. However fond of her jokes she was, she wouldn't clown around in front of the Emperor and Empress the way she had with me… would she?
…She wasn't that far beyond common sense. Hameln believed it firmly.
No — she wanted to believe it.
Humans, if you called it a racial trait, were all more or less the same. To put it kindly, ordinary; to put it unkindly, there wasn't a single thing about them that stood out.
The other races, by contrast — within a single species, their traits tended to differ wildly from individual to individual, and the odd ones out made up the majority.
Elves and beastkin were no exceptions to this. Some were nocturnal creatures, at home in the dark, while others preferred, as though it were only natural, to live beneath the sun. The majority felt the forest like a second skin, yes — but not all of them loved it. There were those who buried themselves in the desert, and those who lived out on the plains and the open fields, rubbing shoulders with the beasts.
The stereotype of elves as a forest people had taken hold simply because most of their kind happened to lean that way. It was the Forest Clan who had first established a nation where crown and faith were one, and it was they whose privilege of enshrining and tending the World Tree had been formally recognized. Naturally, they had prospered the most; their arts and their civilization had advanced the furthest; and they were no exception to the rule of carrying forward — and preserving — the oldest of traditions.
And above all—
"Whoa…"
Even glimpsed only in passing, that radiant beauty had left a young man utterly transfixed.
That beauty itself — and the fact that those features had won over humanity, the race that had come to dominate the continent — was a crucial turning point, an engine of history, the very thing that carried them into the center of the continent's story. That was why, in the great majority of nations, one invariably found a high elf somewhere among the distant branches of the family tree. Some kings were half-elves, others quarter-blooded, their elven blood thinned but their traits still faintly visible.
However.
…The Empire was not among them.
Countless nations had perished in the Demon King's invasion, and among the nations born in its aftermath, quite a few had no ties whatsoever to elven blood.
…Not that this was a matter worth fretting over just now.
For they believed, unshakably, that a beauty like hers could bring anyone at all to their knees.
And of course, as any story would have it—
once things reached that point, the lawless and the shameless, those who coveted such beauty, inevitably came prowling. And they possessed ample ability to ward off such dangers and stand in their way.
…Within their own territory, that is.
In that sense, the Empire was a rather comfortable place for their kind to walk about with nothing but their own two hands, compared to other lands. Slavery was recognized — but only for serfs, and even those called slaves were closer to legal professions in practice. Far better treated than in other realms, where slavery meant nothing but despair.
And with sufficient ability, one could well throw off the shackles of slavery altogether. That was the real reason slaves from foreign lands desperately fled their homelands under the banners of immigration and asylum — why they risked everything to run to the Empire. Every one of those reasons had solid ground beneath it.
One step further: the Empire spared no effort even in the practice of legally admitting such slaves through its great merchant houses, working to melt them into the fabric of its citizenry.
Ever since the Demon King's invasion, the world had sunk into turmoil. And the vile things that sought to exploit that turmoil as their opportunity had set about draining the lifeblood of the weak and the destitute with methodical relish.
Viewed one way, the Empire was simply continuing its own remedies, within the bounds of not provoking diplomatic friction with its neighbors. Whoever wished to belong to the Empire was embraced — outsider or native, regardless of race, no exceptions made.
So long as they were not criminals of the most heinous stripe.
Thus the Empire was exerting what strength it had, extending its own brand of relief to the powerless both within its borders and beyond.
…But to other nations, this felt not merely sour — it felt like a shaking of their very foundations. Had it not been for the toleration and cooperation of the Church, the Empire would likely have struggled to bear that burden alone.
'Even so, with different cultures and different races, the strife would never end.'
In truth, even in the Imperial Capital — the largest of all the royal seats and capitals on the continent — the shadows fell thick. The slaughter district on the capital's outskirts, for one, was awash in a stench beyond imagination.
And those wretched places seemed, as a rule, to be borne by those who had not originally been citizens of the Empire. The beastkin, and those whose skin ran unnaturally red or black — those who had once been of the demon race, only to betray their own kind and take the side of the human alliance.
Yet even within that faction, there were those who were turned away, or simply ignored — so it was not as though such people were entirely absent.
"A cauldron of chaos, indeed."
Hameln swept her gaze nimbly across the district, awash in one impression after another. She had not, of course, forgotten the purpose her Master had set her.
"Hameln? It's been ages. How long has it been — twenty years?"
"…Not even six."
"Oh, only that?"
A red-haired elf popped up without warning, dropping down beside Hameln atop the red-tiled roof with a thump. From the apron she wore, she'd evidently been busy carving something somewhere — in fact, the brown apron was smeared with stains of every description.
"An elf, slicing meat. How novel."
"It's fun once you try it. Skinning, parting hide from flesh, sectioning bone — try it once and it's addictive, I promise."
"Last time, it was hammering iron that did it for you."
"That was then."
That the Forest Clan did not wholly abstain from flesh was no secret — there were elves who pursued a carnivore's diet outright. It was simply that high elves, for religious reasons, had to forgo cooked meat; they served and attended the gods, and set aside artificial energies in pursuit of their own higher attainment — for these and other reasons they abstained. In practice, eating it so often worsened the body's condition that abstention had simply become the natural course.
"So? What did you want to know?"
"Cariel. I want to know about his reputation — in as much detail as you can give. And, the betrothal between Cariel and Princess Elhermina was announced, wasn't it? That's been called off?"
"I figured you'd ask, so I've had my ear to the ground since long ago. But fair warning — you'll find plenty to be disappointed in, once you hear it."
"Disappointed in whom? The Empire? Or Cariel? The hero's family?"
"Judge for yourself."
Presently, she laid out the information she'd gathered, plainly and briefly. It took no great length of time — but the expression flickering across Hameln's face went past mere complexity into something unmistakably bewildered. At last her features hardened, then settled into a countenance so grim it looked fit to strangle a man or drive one to the noose by expression alone, and she murmured, low:
"There's going to be hell."
"Why?"
"Because Lady Geornia is at the Imperial Palace right now."
"Er… why is she here?"
"Some time ago, the Princess discovered that Cariel had broken into the Imperial Treasury, and she couldn't make head or tail of it — so she called for someone to look into the matter for her."
"…She came under some pretext about congratulating the betrothal, presumably?"
"Yep."
Hameln did not deny it.
"But the one who ordered me to investigate all this — that was her."
"Er… might I suggest arriving as late as humanly possible?"
"And get force-teleported until my stomach turns inside out?"
"Then there's nothing for it!" In for a penny— "Come right out and confess, cheerfully!"
"…I would ask that you at least advise her to hear it when the two of us are alone."
"Knowing her temperament, she'll haul in the Emperor, the Empress, Lord Rueld, and a whole handful of others besides, and have you confess it all at once. She absolutely loathes doing the same job twice, you know?"
"Haaaah~!"
A sigh perilously close to a lament.
Hameln rose from the red-tiled roof.
"Will you be staying here long?"
"Probably?"
"…Right. If I'm lucky, we'll meet again in a few years."
"You'll be here a good while, won't you? Do come visit often."
"…A few months at most, I'd wager."
"Oh, months is plenty long, actually? Speaking of which — how many months?"
"Slip of the tongue. Weeks? Days? That's up to the Master's whims."
Hameln shook her head, wearily.
"I'd stake our honored ancestor's name on it: she'll linger a while, if only for the magical theories that have come in from abroad."
"What an undutiful descendant you are."
"And when have I ever been otherwise?"
The two of them laughed themselves silly over pure nonsense. A few idle exchanges, and an hour or two had slipped clean away.
"The rest can wait."
Presently, guided by the wind, she went bounding across the rooftops, leap after leap, until—
"You there! Stop, please!"
"……?"
Someone was ordering her to halt, so she stopped, reluctantly. Judging by the outfit, a city guard. He'd evidently spotted her in the middle of his patrol and, after some manner of pursuit, caught up.
"Really, what do you think you're doing, running across rooftops like that?! Er, I know you elves are light as feathers, but if you break something, then what?"
"Um…"
"Let's see your identification, then. I take it you're not an Imperial citizen…"
But since when does a mere city guard chase me down? Is this the caliber of the capital?
Still, after explaining the circumstances one way and another, she managed to avoid being detained. The price: she had to ride a carriage along the public roads to the palace, guard and all.
And so it was only just before the sun touched the horizon that Hameln at last arrived before the Imperial Palace.
"……"
Even here, if I have to follow protocol all the way to the Emperor and my Master, it'll take an eternity.
Cold sweat beaded down her back.
Please — I'm begging you — anything but a forced teleport. Anything but that!