The Trail of Ash and Blood
“You really are impossible to talk to!”
Vaila shouted, her face flushed dark with anger. Of course, she was already drowning in shame at every moment of this debacle—being bound like a criminal, locked in this shabby prison cell. But those things, at least, she could accept, because she understood the gravity of the situation. What she could not accept was the man sitting in front of her.
“So now this is my fault? I’ve told you again and again—I knew nothing. I was the victim here. How am I supposed to know where that damned Courtney Merino ran off to?”
Weary of the endless questioning, Vaila slammed her shackled hands down on the desk. The flimsy wooden tabletop buckled under the iron cuffs, and a splinter flew off, grazing the man’s cheek.
“……”
Heston touched the thin line of blood beading on his face, his expression unchanged, then let out a quiet sigh and sat down again.
“I do understand that this situation must be frustrating for you.”
“You call that understanding—!”
“But what else can be done? The matter has already come to this.”
At his shameless tone, Vaila let out a derisive breath. Heston straightened in his chair, then removed the sword that had been bothering him and set it upright against the side of the table.
“Truthfully, I’m not pleased to be doing this either. But as I said, Miss Merino was your subordinate, and when one has a subordinate, the superior naturally bears responsibility as well. For example, if my own subordinate—the gentleman standing over there, Sir Hamal—were to kill someone, then I would have to take responsibility for failing to notice what sort of bastard Sir Hamal was capable of killing in the first place.”
“Stop talking nonsense. That sort of common sense applies only among knights. You know perfectly well that it doesn’t work that way for mages operating independently.”
Which meant they could not possibly keep her here forever. That was precisely why Vaila had not been afraid, even though she was humiliated by the situation. But as Heston kept pressing her with that nonsense about shared responsibility, she was starting to grow sick of his ineptitude.
Heston folded his hands, then seemed to shift tactics and began talking about a friend, as though trying to tug at whatever sympathy she might have left.
“My friend has been left behind because of this incident.”
“That is regrettable, certainly…”
“And that is why I do not have the luxury of avoiding unpleasant matters right now. So if you truly feel sympathy, then I ask that you cast aside a little more of your comfort and think carefully. What was Miss Merino’s usual range of activity? Where did she say she was taking leave to go, and who did she normally have contact with?”
“How would I know that…!”
“People have said that you and Miss Merino were quite close. They also said there was no separate form for leave requests, so only you would know about it.”
“Ha…”
Just as Vaila shifted in frustration, the table moved and Heston’s sword tilted to the side. He caught it, set it upright again, and resumed speaking as if nothing had happened. His neat profile and those eyes masked in official politeness flicked briefly toward the sword before slowly pinning her again.
“……Must I really bring up the money you received from Miss Merino?”
He paused, then continued in that measured voice.
“I know that you nearly formed a family tie with her—that Miss Merino was on the verge of marrying your nephew. Of course, you objected strongly on account of her background. Still, you received money, your nephew’s marriage was being arranged, and I’m told you even resorted to threats to cover up the fact that you had taken it.”
“What did you just say…?”
“I have no fondness for being insolent. But I would like to let you know that the facts I’ve uncovered can be used quite selectively. I could argue that you paid Miss Merino to arrange the matter, or that the fact you nearly became in-laws means you were involved as an accomplice.”
Vaila’s hands began to tremble violently. Shock and confusion had driven every other thought from her mind. This…
“Are you threatening me?”
“Coincidentally, yes. Does it come back to you now?”
“You’re insane. So this is the level of the Lockwood ducal house… manufacturing crimes over something as trivial as this…”
As her words dragged on, Heston let out a short breath and rose from his seat. When he turned without hesitation to leave, Vaila’s composure finally cracked and she hurriedly raised a hand.
“All right! I’ll talk. I’ll talk, so sit back down.”
It was humiliating to change her tone so completely and beg a man young enough to be her son, but she had no choice. The instant Heston turned away, she knew he was truly prepared to walk out and use the methods he had described to drag her into this.
“I’ll be honest. Hmm? So sit down again.”
Vaila begged once more at his stopped back, and Heston gave a slight nod before sitting back down.
Watching the sharp line of his jaw and those eyes disguised by businesslike courtesy, Vaila clicked her tongue and silently offered her condolences to Princess Catherine for having chosen such a thoroughly rotten piece of firewood.
“Courtney Merino seemed to go to Harboreast quite often. I ran into her there a few times. As you know, Harboreast is a place where mages trade with one another all the time. I only stopped by there on Duke Araspé’s errand, but as far as I know, Merino had no reason to go there.”
Vaila kept talking after that, her answers coming longer and longer. Whenever Heston needed a location confirmed, he raised a hand to signal behind him. Sir Hamal, his adjutant, knew Heston well enough to understand that the gesture meant someone should be sent out immediately to verify it.
Hamal hurriedly turned and gave orders to the men under him, and before long the area around Harboreast, the house of the fiancé Merino had once been promised to, and the restaurant she had frequented were all overrun by clusters of knights. Three hours later, Courtney Merino’s body was found in the mountains behind Harboreast.
“Nothing here!”
“Nothing on our side either.”
The knights rummaging through the collapsed pile of stone had only bad news to report. Catherine could not decide whether it was better or worse that there was no body in the rubble. She had wanted, if possible, for Merino to be found unconscious among the stones even if she had lost a limb somewhere along the way.
“Any signal?”
“Still nothing.”
“Have we found any trace of Sir Summers?”
“None of that either. Since that section appears to have been artificially lifted, it seems he managed to escape safely, fortunately.”
“There was nothing on the road here?”
“None. Nothing unusual. If he had died along the way today, the monsters would never have left it alone.”
At those words, ugly expressions rippled across several faces. Everyone had seen the horrible things monsters did to corpses—black swarms clinging to dead flesh, as though absorbing it, the bodies swelling grotesquely with each inhale and exhale before sinking back down. The memory was enough to twist stomachs.
If Miss Appleton and Sir Summers had been found in that state, I think I would have wanted to die.
Agilss stared at the pile of stones that had been dug apart, where Summers and Appleton had likely been, and noticed a dark red stain that had fallen there by chance.
Blood?
It didn’t look like there had been much bleeding, but Agilss hoped, more than anything, that it was proof Summers had only been wounded. Thinking of Sylvia, who had sacrificed herself without hesitation and sworn she would save them the moment the tower collapsed, still made his chest feel heavy.
He remembered how he had complained to hurry up and go, completely forgetting the simple fact that an activation mage had to remain behind. His face still burned with embarrassment.
Sir Summers was there, so of course he must be alive.
Lost in that thought, he turned his head, and then he saw smoke rising from far away along the mountain ridge.
“Uh… over there, isn’t that smoke?”
Under the clear sky, the thick plume climbing upward was unmistakably smoke. Agilss seized onto hope once more, thinking that Owen and Sylvia must be there, and gripped it as if he had almost lost it.
* * *
Meanwhile, the smoke Agilss had seen on the ridge was, as expected, indeed a trace of Owen and Sylvia—but not in the hopeful way he imagined.
A house was blazing fiercely, heavy choking smoke billowing in every direction. Owen and Sylvia were trapped inside it.
“Cough, cough.”
The fire and smoke made them cough and sting their eyes. Sylvia worked her hands furiously with the small knife she had hidden away, cutting through the rope binding her. Her careless motions left her hand a mess, slick with blood in an instant, but she never stopped.
“Cough—Owen, are you okay?”
The blood that had spilled from the chair across from her was far worse. The sight of all that blood soaking the floor made her feel dizzy. After finally succeeding in cutting through the rope, Sylvia found her legs too weak to hold her and tumbled out of the chair.
“Owen. Owen.”
But Owen was slumped over, coughing no more and looking almost unconscious.
If I hadn’t been so stubborn earlier.
Knowing that all of this was her fault, despair and guilt surged through her in waves, so painful that her chest hurt. Or maybe it was just the smoke flooding in, making her cough so violently that her lungs ached.
“Don’t die. You can’t die.”
She muttered the words, then stamped out a large blanket that had just begun to catch fire and snatched it up. Draping the blanket over herself, she grabbed the chair she had been sitting on and rushed to the burning door, beating at it with all her strength.
The door had been locked from the outside, and every time she shoved against it, it rattled and groaned, sounding as though it might open or come apart at any moment. Her nerves frayed with each miserable jolt.
Whenever the blanket caught fire again, she backed away to extinguish it, then rushed back with the chair and slammed the door again. Soon, the weakened wood gave way with a cracking shriek, and Sylvia dragged Owen out along with the chair, staggering into the open at last.
“Hah… ha… cough.”
Gasping for breath in ragged, broken pulls of air, Sylvia finally let out a sob that came from somewhere deep inside her.
What now? What was she supposed to do now? She was clutching Owen’s clothes like a child, and then, like a miracle, the sound of hooves pounding the earth reached her from far away.
Someone was coming to save them.
Don’t worry. You won’t die.
Just as Owen had said. At last, flooded with relief, Sylvia collapsed on top of him.
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