A Plea for Rescue — 4
If one were to divide the North into regions, it fell broadly into three parts. There was the greater portion of the territory — unified under the banner of Adele's mercenary company — the land people meant when they simply said "the North." Then there were the unexplored wilds where no person could set foot, and the last of the three: the outlanders' territory, the very ground we had come to subjugate now.
"Their territory is on the small side, but there's a reason I could never subjugate them all myself."
As Adele spoke, Bunta nodded his hearty agreement.
The land the outlanders called home was harsh country even by the standards of harsh country — ground no ordinary person could easily set foot on, where a man without a wolf beneath him could not so much as move. Gazing down at the stronghold the outlanders had built at the foot of the range, Adele murmured in a low voice.
"This time, I intend to deal with every last one of them. The North, at least, has to be territory we can hold with our own strength."
Dealing with them meant the outlanders' surrender. In the old days it had amounted to little short of slaughter, but what Adele led now was a proper army — there was no need to cut down every last soul by force. Deal with the outlander warriors alone, and the rest could be absorbed and put to use as resources.
The North was not a place that could ever be wholly unified. For now it only looked as though Adele was patching the leaks and holding things together, but with this many small clans in the mix, the region would never fuse into one. People, after all, were the one thing that refused to melt together like ore in a crucible. Look no further than Adele's own adjutants — not one of them resembled another — and binding everything into a single whole to rule over could hardly be anything but immensely difficult.
So the course Adele had chosen was to acknowledge all of it and move forward. Not to pen them behind a fence and hammer them into one shape, but to tolerate whatever they did, so long as they kept their activities within the stage that was the North. The outlanders we had come to subjugate, however, had refused even that much — which made them a faction to be erased as swiftly as possible.
"In my opinion, we could storm them tonight and be finished in one go."
"They'll sense a night raid coming. Daylight might actually serve us better."
When Adele answered Lotos's suggestion, Lotos — who had been idly adjusting his glasses — opened his mouth again. His gaze came to rest on me, and it seemed all too plainly to be hoping for a display of my prowess.
"I'd favor striking right now. It's not as though our mobility is lacking — even a small force could sweep everything up, barring the outlander elites, wouldn't you say?"
"And if I'm the one dealing with the elites, who exactly is supposed to catch the Great Chieftain?"
"We do have one shiny new adjutant. This is precisely the sort of occasion he was made for."
Goodness, he said it with a perfectly straight face. I had come half-expecting exactly this situation, but hearing Lotos say it out loud soured my mood all the same. Then as now, the man's gift for getting under my skin hadn't dulled one bit.
Perhaps he read the storm in my expression, because Lotos followed up with an awkward smile.
"Come now, you're more than capable, aren't you? I'd call you our finest asset for exactly this kind of work."
"You're not wrong, but I think I'd better take the vanguard myself. If I get hurt again this time, there won't be a handkerchief left for anyone to lend me."
"...Didn't you cut that one yourself?"
When I shot back a retort, Adele dodged my gaze and swept the conversation along as though she knew nothing of the matter. Well — I had already received my apology over that, hadn't I. Remembering how Adele had come to find me the night I first arrived in the North, just before I drifted off to sleep, I let a faint smile steal across my face. I'd assumed the whole affair would end with the handkerchief, but it must have gnawed at her far more than I'd imagined. I'd come to think of it as a rather novel experience. After all, watching her apologize of her own accord was not a sight one saw every day.
Smiling to myself a moment longer, I turned to follow the others' eyes down toward the base of the mountains. There, among wolves baring their teeth and rumbling low in their throats, the first battle of the subjugation would soon — very soon — be joined.
In the subjugation of the outlanders, the single most decisive factor was speed. Even a poor swordsman could deliver devastating force so long as he rode the mobility of a wolf — and to catch the outlanders, who moved through this treacherous terrain as though it were their own yard, keeping pace with them was everything.
Shluk—
An outlander warrior cut down by the blade crumpled to the ground. Another fell to the seamless chain of combined strikes flowing like water, and the wolves — which looked to be rampaging every which way — were in fact moving with remarkable precision. And none of it was the work of any of the seasoned adjutants, nor of Adele herself. It was Robert, a man for whom today was almost certainly his very first battle.
The adjutants, each absorbed in their own fights, could do nothing but stare blankly at the sight. That this was his first time taking the field was beyond doubt — so what in the world was this effortless command of the wolves? Even for them, raised alongside the animals from birth, it was no easy feat. In the central provinces they rode horses, not wolves — so why did Robert look so... at home in this kind of fighting?
"Isn't it remarkable?"
As Adele watched Robert while casually mopping up the remaining outlanders, Lotos came up beside her and asked. He had been observing Robert since the battle began. His own role here was rear support and cleanup anyway, so he alone had the leisure for it.
The Robert Taylor Lotos knew was a rather strange man. Judged by rumor alone, he deserved to be cast aside without a second thought — yet the man he'd met in person had proven principled and capable instead. Look at him even now, clearing out outlanders at nearly the same pace as Adele. And the way he bent mana to his will as though it were an extension of his own body — that was not a sight easily witnessed even among the knights of the capital.
"He fights as though working alongside us were second nature. And this is surely his first battle."
"Talent, I suppose. Such people do turn up now and then."
Adele replied as though it were nothing of consequence. In her mind, watching Robert fight like that was, if anything, deeply satisfying. She hadn't taken him on as an adjutant for nothing. She had intended to keep him at her side by any means necessary if he proved satisfactory — and everything she had observed so far had met that benchmark splendidly. ...And, well, vaguer thoughts kept surfacing here and there besides. For now, she wanted to watch him a while longer.
It had been Adele's own judgment that if Robert failed to mesh with the adjutants, she would have to cut him loose without hesitation. The cohesion of the group mattered more than her personal interest — that was why she'd thought so — but Robert had been doing quite well for himself so far.
"Talent it may be, but it's astonishing all the same. He's a completely different man from the one I had imagined. Is that why you've taken such a liking to him?"
"What I saw was something else. But close enough."
Adele's interest in Robert had, from the very beginning, been rooted in something else entirely. That oddly detached air of his; the calm he had kept even with her blade at his throat. But what had grated on her most was that composure — unshaken even with death standing right in front of him. It wasn't fearlessness. It was the bearing of a man trying to accept death. Eyes that would not have cared if he died then and there — eyes that seemed almost ready to welcome the end gladly. And those hollow eyes had not changed one bit, even now, with time having passed.
What had he seen, that his eyes held no emotion at all? What had he lived through, that he could stand so detached before murderous intent? Even Adele, who had grown up in brutal places, had never seen such a bearing — and so she could hardly help but take an interest in the man called Robert Taylor. And as luck would have it, a point of contact arose. They met at the Full Moon Festival and spent time together, and now he had even come all the way to the North.
And somewhere within that string of meetings, a feeling had been quietly taking root. Something a shade deeper than interest, though she could not have named it. He was on her mind.
That flicker of unease she felt whenever she looked at Robert still lingered with Adele. He stood right in front of her, perfectly sound — and yet his gaze always seemed fixed not on her, but on some far-off place beyond. As if, unless she seized hold of him now, he would simply slip away. So Adele had gone out of her way to give him a room near her own quarters, ensuring their paths would cross often.
He wouldn't disappear. It wasn't as though Adele didn't know that. A person was not wind or dust; no one simply evaporates in an instant. She repeated it to herself over and over, willing her heart still. She had no idea why she was acting this way. He was, at most, a guest who had come north — so why was her head in such a tangle over him? Tying her hair up far more often than she used to, just because he'd said the style suited her; clicking her tongue at him for fussing over the Princess. Confusion began to bloom at how unlike her usual self she was behaving. What, in the end... what was it she wanted to hear from Robert?
He gnawed at her. Even now, mid-swing against the outlanders, her eyes kept drifting — what if he had taken a wound somewhere? No matter how firmly she resolved to focus on nothing but the kill, some moment later she would look up to find her gaze on Robert. Out of unease. Out of worry. No — it wasn't for any such reason. Then what in the world was it?
She knew Lotos was staring at her, but Adele only let out a wry laugh at the feelings welling up inside her. Whether Robert's interests lay with the Princess or the Saintess was no business of hers. And yet she had been needlessly stung, and told him — to his face — to stop concerning himself on her account. The mortifying memory surfacing unbidden made heat climb toward her cheeks. What sort of unseemly display was this? Adele's mind was nothing but a swirl of confusion. An emotion she had never once felt in her life had swept over her — so thoroughly that she didn't even notice Robert approaching.
"It's all cleared up. If we keep pushing forward from here—"
Adele flinched.
The instant Robert's voice reached her, her whole body gave a violent jolt. Startled by her own reaction, she barely smothered the sound that had been pushing at her lips and screwed her eyes tightly shut. She had been thinking about him not two breaths ago — what was she supposed to do if he popped up out of nowhere like that? Fortunately, composure was Adele's specialty. When she opened her eyes again, her expression smoothed back into impassivity, Robert was regarding her with a puzzled look.
It was a fine face, every inch the young nobleman's — so fine it was hard to believe he had just single-handedly dispatched the outlanders just beyond. This couldn't be his first time killing a man... no, hadn't he already done the bloody work last time? Just what kind of life had he lived? He was on an entirely different track from the ordinary nobles of the capital. That composure of his, the calm he maintained even in a moment like this. Having watched Robert a beat longer, Adele slowly parted her lips.
"There's no way it's all cleared. The outlanders in the west don't number so few."
"I'm aware of that, but this is everything that was here."
Robert, for his part, felt the same wrongness. Temuchin was nowhere to be seen. By any reasonable expectation, they should have collided with him long before now. And yet the man hadn't shown himself even after every last outlander warrior had been put down — which was why Robert had just asked Toby to scout. A sweep of the surroundings turned up no living outlanders either. Why, then, had Temuchin — a man who thought nothing of grinding his own warriors underfoot — still not appeared? He had assumed the chieftain was lying in wait to cross blades with him. Could he have moved faster than anticipated and thrown their paths out of alignment? ...No. That was unlikely. They had proclaimed the subjugation first and marched only afterward precisely to bait out Temuchin's reaction. He had been certain the man would offer battle here in the west — and as Robert puzzled over where he could have vanished to, Lotos muttered something under his breath, his expression grave.
"The northwest."
The air changed at that single word. Bunta, who had still been crowing over their successful purge, and Adele, who had been faintly bewildered, alike turned to stare at him, their expressions frozen hard as ice. The odds of his heading for the northwest were vanishingly slim. From this western front, the routes open to him were many — and if he meant to cross blades with him, Robert had judged he would push further west and force a fight in the rugged country, not here.
"There is a possibility he has gone to the northwest."
"A proud creature like him would go there? I don't rate the odds highly."
He was the sort who came on with gritted teeth even in a fight he couldn't win. If he wanted to fight, fine — but what reason could he possibly have to fight so desperately as to take the Imperial family hostage? To Adele's rejoinder, Lotos pressed on, his expression turning somber.
"...It is winter, is it not? Their food must be running short. It may well have been a rather desperate war."
"So you're saying he abandoned his pride? Far enough to strike the northwest, where Imperial troops are garrisoned?"
"The Imperial presence there is all but negligible. Did Her Highness the Princess not come on something like an undercover inspection?"
Lotos himself thought the likelihood low. Temuchin bore no grudge against the throne; he was simply accounting for the worst-case scenario. If it came to pass, they would have to turn around at once. Counting the time already squandered here, there was a real chance Temuchin had already reached the northwest. Soldiers had been stationed there, but if Temuchin hurled his full strength at them, surely the line would break.
Clatter—
The dread began to swell. It was only a possibility — but if it proved true, the situation would careen straight into the worst. When Adele spotted Toby tearing toward them from the distance and her face darkened, Lotos clicked his tongue and began barking orders to the army. There was only ever one situation that put that look on Toby's face.
"We must change course at once."
"...The reason?"
At Adele's question, Toby answered in a low voice.