Let Not Man Put Asunder (5)

"To the happy married life of these two!"

Something uncanny had occurred in the course of the opening, but the reception, in the end, got underway in a reasonably pleasant atmosphere. Chiyo, who had taken on the emceeing, gave the lead, and the guests answered by lifting their flutes.

Han Seoyeon, too, touched the rim of her glass to Hitomi's beside her and offered a faint smile. Inside the tall flute, bubbles rose in a soft, steady fizz.

"It feels nice, having everyone congratulate us like this."

"Yes. It does."

Hitomi said it with a bright smile, and Seoyeon nodded. The guests might have been few, but they still numbered in the dozens, and every one of them had gathered in this room to bless the days ahead. There was no way that didn't gladden the heart.

Seoyeon tilted her glass, took a sip of the wine, and made a suggestion, extending one gloved hand toward Hitomi as if to escort her.

"Then shall we take a turn about the room and offer our greetings? Before the meal is served."

"Yes. I'd like that."

Every small gesture of the kind delighted her beyond all reason, and yet the thought of forever being the one who was led gave Hitomi pause, even as she took that hand in hers.

"Let's go. ...Darling."

"—!"

She had only murmured it, and quietly, having screwed up her courage—but Han Seoyeon, a half step ahead, gave a violent start, as if she had never once expected to hear such a word.

It was a rare sight, and Hitomi smiled, rather pleased with herself. Seoyeon wasn't turned toward her, but the flush that had climbed all the way to her ears, set against clothes so unlike her usual ones, carried a fresh sort of charm. Presently Hitomi came up beside her, smiling still. Whether from the pleasure of having landed a blow, her step looked unusually light.

"Congratulations on your marriage, Miss Ninomae, Miss Shion."

"I congratulate you!"

"Thank you."

The first place they made for was the table where Gyokichi, president of Anathema Production, sat. His being the company president was not entirely beside the point, but the greater factor was simply that his was the foremost seat. If Giacomo Marchisio, as Han Seoyeon's mentor, had taken the guest of honor's part on her side, Gyokichi had been chosen as Hitomi's.

Senjoji Chihaya was, of course, seated there as well. They had half considered placing her with the Anathema staff outright, but however approachable Gyokichi might be, sharing a table with the president seemed likely to sit poorly in the employees' stomachs, and so they had let the idea go. Which left, as company for him, only the Senjoji sisters, acquainted with him since childhood. And since Chiyo had agreed to emcee, a seat at the front suited her.

The trouble was that once Chiyo stepped out to host, the two of them would be left with the table to themselves. That was awkward in its own right, and so they had seated with them one more person—someone whose place in the gathering was, on the whole, a little adrift. Han Seoyeon's gaze turned to her before long.

Beautiful golden hair, and irises like amethyst set in place. A woman from whom, somehow, a peculiar dignity seemed to emanate, beginning with the very air around her.

It was not the ordinary sort of thing, a refinement one reads from posture and gesture. It was as if some aura wound about her. One look, and you simply knew: here was someone precious. To put a name to the resemblance, she was a presence of a similar grain to Hyakurenno Yuri.

"It's been a long time."

"Yes, it has. Congratulations, Seoyeon."

"Thank you."

"I—I'm meeting you for the first time, too...!"

"Yes. A pleasure to meet you."

No matter the angle, she looked nothing but foreign, and yet what came from her mouth was remarkably fluent Japanese—so much so that one might almost have thought her pronunciation finer than an ordinary Japanese person's. After a few light words with her, Seoyeon turned her gaze back to Hitomi.

"Hitomi, this is Miss Frederica. Most people call her Mr. F."

"Mr. F... Ah. You don't mean—of the Seven Sisters?"

A strange sense of familiarity sent Hitomi digging back through her memory, and then her eyes went round. The image was, it seemed, considerably different from the one she had pictured.

"With the 'Mister,' I never thought she'd be a woman."

"But they are also the Seven 'Sisters,' are they not?"

"But that's used as an idiom, too."

The etymology of the Seven Sisters was, of course, the seven princesses of the Pleiades, and a literal reading did mean seven sisters. But the expression was by no means limited to women. The seven great sights, the seven corporations of global standing—in practice, most things called the Seven Sisters could be renamed the Big Seven or the Grand Seven without any trouble at all. So Hitomi had assumed this was a similar case. That was a large part of why she had let the contradictory pairing of Mister and Sisters pass without a second thought.

"Well... strictly speaking, it isn't an entirely mistaken notion. Originally, the name Seven Sisters wasn't given with gender in mind."

The Necromancer, who had hopped from body to body, was example enough. Even now, with the subjugation over, its original identity remained unknown.

"Hm? Wait a moment. 'Originally'?"

Hitomi had caught something off in the phrasing, and she asked again. If one simply said the name had been conferred without particular regard for gender, that would have been that. What reason was there to set an originally in front of it?

"That is... because Mr. F here went and reconstructed her body, on the grounds that if they were to be the Seven Sisters, this was the proper form."

"Uh... wait, so that means..."

"It means I was originally a man."

"What?"

Mr. F cut in, tipping her flute. The words had been tossed off quite lightly, but the content was anything but, and Hitomi's mouth fell open.

"Th-then, did you have surgery, or..."

"Something a little more magical and anomalous than that. Conceptual, if you like."

She said it with an air that suggested it was truly nothing worth remarking. At that, Han Seoyeon smiled wryly and supplied the rest.

"You know well by now, Hitomi, that anomalies often arise from the shared perception of many people?"

"Ah, yes. I became a True Ancestor that way myself, to begin with..."

"The idea drawn from that is precisely Project Missionary. More concretely, it may be easier to understand as guiding people's perceptions in order to produce artificial anomalies."

A Scenario was a state of affairs with the potential to grow into a crisis of worldwide scale. Such Scenarios were, of course, resolved one after another by an Apostle or by someone else, and that was why the world kept turning—but better by far was to keep a Scenario from arising in the first place.

Take Project Doggy Style, of which the Secrecy Protocol was the representative face. It was one of the two Scenario-prevention projects into which the Church poured its greatest effort. The other was Project Missionary. Where the Secrecy Protocol guided perception by suppressing elements of risk, this one manipulated perception in a form that led toward the birth of anomalies. In the direction the Church desired, that is.

"The foremost expert in that field is Mr. F, here."

She swayed public opinion and manufactured trends. She combined anomalies and faiths scattered across the world and produced from them things useful to the Church. That was her work. A person for whom even the art of changing one's sex was something she could wield with ease.

"Whether being able to do it meant there was any real need to go through with it is a separate question, I'll grant..."

"A dear friend persuaded me. And I'd more or less exhausted every experiment a male body could still offer, so it served both ends."

Even so, one had to wonder at changing one's sex on a reason like that. She herself, at least, looked entirely unruffled. If anything, she seemed firmly convinced that this was simply how things ought to be.

Frederica wet her lips with the sparkling wine and glanced up, for a moment, at the lights along the ceiling. Speaking of it had brought that old business back after a long while. Yes... what was it that fellow had said?

Looking back on it now, it hadn't been especially persuasive, had it? The thought rose unbidden, and Frederica shut her mouth and tilted her head. At any rate, there was no point entertaining other possibilities now. She had been in a woman's body for quite some time already.

"So. How have you been, of late?"

"Oh, the same as ever. Ah—the prototype of what I was developing has come out. The clinical trials aren't entirely finished, though."

"I'm glad to hear it. It ought to be a great help in managing the Secrecy Protocol."

After a few more words with her, Seoyeon took Hitomi's hand again and left the table. Circulating once the meal had begun would be awkward in any number of ways, and so it was better to finish the rounds now, while the moment allowed.

"Miss Yuri! Thank you for the wedding song."

"Oh, don't thank me. I sang because I wanted to."

The table they reached around the middle of their circuit was the one where Hyakurenno Yuri sat.

"Heheh~"

"Well now, congratulations to you both."

In the seat beside her, Momomomo Chisa was beaming, flute in hand. What set her apart from usual was that she was, unmistakably, not drunk. On the opposite side sat a woman with one eye hidden beneath an eyepatch. Little skin was showing, and even that bore considerable scarring. It was Ryuumai Fuu, once a unit commander of the Triage Team.

"Ms. Wei, thank you for coming as well."

"It's our Seoyeon's wedding. Of course I had to come."

Wei Chen was seated at the same table. When Han Seoyeon bowed her head in greeting, she smiled, gentle and easy. It should be added that she had ended up beside Yuri for the sake of the other guests. From an ordinary person's point of view, to sit next to either of them was to die of sheer mortification.

No—in Wei's case, the problem was of a worse grade than Yuri. Measured in corporate wealth, the Hyakurenno Group won in a landslide, of course, but set a youngest daughter nowhere near the succession beside the head of the house herself, and the latter was bound to oppress. Either way it was overkill by a commoner's measure, and so the comparison was meaningless. In any case, this table might be described as the place where heaven's own had been quarantined together, for the good of every other stomach in the room.

"...But why is Lady Ohirume here as well?"

"That is what I have been saying...!"

And so, upon finding a figure wedged in among these quarantined giants of capitalism, Han Seoyeon could not help but wonder. A woman with fox ears pricked alert atop her head. It was Ohirume, head of Japan's Onmyoryo. The moment she heard the question, she all but threw herself at it, face nearly in tears, as if to cry that this was her very point.

"S-so the anger has not yet wholly passed, has it?! And that is why you assigned me this seat on purpose?!"

"Hmm. Hitomi? As I recall, it was you who made the final decisions on the seating."

"Ah, yes. That's true, but..."

Hitomi nodded, and yet she looked at Ohirume in puzzlement. She was the head of the Onmyoryo, wasn't she? However much of a dinosaur the Hyakurenno Group might be, there was no call for her to shrink like this. Hitomi had thought so herself, which was why she had assigned the seat in the first place—this one won't grow nervous sitting here. Whether she had caught the question, Seoyeon smiled wryly.

"It isn't on account of Miss Yuri or Ms. Wei. She can hardly be said to be on good terms with the other two."

"The other two..."

Name the other two here, and by process of elimination there was no one left but Chisa and Fuu. Hitomi's eyes flicked that way. Now that she looked, both of them were keeping up a smiling air in front of the newlyweds, but their eyes were not smiling at all. More than that, they were watching Ohirume as if they might chew her alive at any moment.

"...Are they mortal enemies, or something of the sort?"

"Are you aware that the two of them left the onmyoji after the Onmyoryo's civil war?"

"U-umm..."

Hitomi had asked it in a whisper, uneasy that she might have arranged the seats poorly, and Han Seoyeon had answered just as softly. Only then could Hitomi see her own mistake. She didn't know the details, but the odds that those two had walked out on their posts over something good were exceedingly low. And there was no way the cause of that walking-out had nothing to do with the head of the Onmyoryo. Having guessed as much, she could only smile, embarrassed.

"Please don't worry, Miss Ninomae. I came today to enjoy Bonaventura's masterpiece, so I have absolutely no intention of causing trouble before that. And of course, as it is the day of your wedding, I'll stay quiet afterward as well."

Whether she had noticed that look, the maid, Chisa, said it with a smile. Honestly, Hitomi was less sure of the latter. The former, she privately judged, could be believed. Where else would one find a person for whom I'll behave until I've had the finest drink sounded so entirely trustworthy?

"Huh? But if it's a masterpiece made by Shion's teacher, isn't this it?"

Struck, all at once, by the sense that something was odd, she asked it while giving her champagne glass a swirl. She had heard that a masterpiece would be brought out at the reception, but she had naturally assumed it meant this sparkling wine.

"Ah. I see... This may indeed have been under-explained."

Han Seoyeon, too, soon grasped the shape ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of the question, and let out a short laugh.

"This is a wine that's hard to come by for any ordinary sum, granted... but the real thing is something you couldn't obtain even if you paid."

"The real thing? What on earth is it, then... I never even heard that a wine like that had been brought in."

"That would be because it hasn't. We're going to make it from here."

"...Make it?"

Hitomi tilted her head. Giacomo Marchisio, Han Seoyeon's mentor—she knew he could brew wine by miracle, but hadn't they said that this wine was what he had made in earnest with that power? They had called it terribly expensive, a thing for which the environment had been prepared and the aging properly seen to. If something cobbled together on the spot, here and now, was meant to surpass that, she could not help feeling that something was amiss.

But Han Seoyeon, in place of an answer, only smiled.

"—E-excuse me."

It was at that moment that a woman addressed them from behind. They turned, and there stood a woman with her reddish hair done up in a braid, dressed for all the world like a chef. A face ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Hitomi remembered.

"Ah, come to think of it, you said Miss Nisroc would be handling the cooking today—"

"The ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠thing is, the wine has all run out."

"...What?"

She had been about to greet a face she hadn't seen since their last trip to Korea, but in that very instant Nisroc cut her off and simply went on with what she had come to say.

"It's all right. Go to my mentor, explain the situation, and do as he instructs."

"Yes. Understood."

Han Seoyeon matched her. She answered in a peculiar tone, as if she were in a play, and sent Nisroc on her way. Then, seeing Hitomi standing there dazed and wondering what any of this was for, she chuckled softly.

"Do you remember my saying that this wine had to be finished before the meal began?"

"Yes? Ah, yes. You did say that was the rule... Does that have something to do with what's happening now?"

"The conditions under which my mentor's masterpiece is born are a little complicated... but to put it as simply as I can, it comes to this: the wine runs out before the wedding feast is over."

"A wedding... wine...? ...Ah!"

Something came to Hitomi then, and her eyes went wide.

She did not know the verse of scripture with any exactness, but a famous poet's anecdote had fixed the line in her memory. And in that same span, men in peculiar dress were carrying six rough-hewn stone jars into the banquet hall. Hitomi was not so slow that, having seen even that much, she could fail to foresee what was about to unfold.

"I'll help fill them with water, too! All I ask in return is a single jar's worth!"

"You alcoholic bastard... Miss Yuri? In the meantime, I can cover the guard, temporarily..."

"What are you talking about? Obviously Miss Yuri's coming with me! The more hands, the better!"

"Have you actually lost it, you crazy bitch?! Making the young lady of the Hyakurenno draw water..."

"That sounds like fun! Let's do it right now!"

"Miss?!"

Well. Even so, that much she had not seen coming.

"...Miss Yuri truly never changes."

"Well. That she is faithful to whatever she wishes to do—on that, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠I agree."

Leaving behind a scene that had grown rowdy in a heartbeat, Hitomi and Han Seoyeon chose their words with all the care they could muster, and smiled wry smiles.