Someone Sending a Carrier Pigeon at 3 AM
Someone Sending a Carrier Pigeon at 3 AM
The gentle touch of morning sunlight, 8 AM.
A time when the original Rosaria would have still been off in dreamland.
But today, at least, was different — I had gotten up early.
"...What the hell."
Something was hammering violently against the window.
From the sound of it, it was a bird pecking with its beak.
Who in the world sent a messenger pigeon at this hour of the morning?
In modern terms, it was like getting a wake-up call in the middle of a good sleep.
"Ah, maybe it's word back about the cards I had made."
I had stayed up with Isabella putting together a rough draft and sent it off. Could this be the print shop owner's revenge — laced to the brim with personal resentment — for me having sent a messenger pigeon at 3 AM?
If so, I would gladly accept it.
With that thought, I rubbed my eyes and flung the curtains open.
A cooing, coo-ing pigeon — white, with gold-colored eyes — sat there.
"...A letter from the Holy Kingdom."
Who had sent it, and why? That was the correct answer — the one I would have reached immediately if my head were screwed on straight. But since I wasn't in my right mind just then, it took me a solid ten seconds of deep thought before I recalled: it was a letter from the Saintess.
The instant I realized that, I snatched the letter from the pigeon's leg with impressive speed, unfolded it at once, and began to read.
-My beloved Rosaria. It makes me so terribly sad to be apart from you right after we became lovers. Fortunately, though, I was able to finish the pilgrimage business quickly. However, a bit of a diplomatic problem has come up, and it seems I won't be able to arrive until three days from now. I'm sorry. I'm going mad with wanting to see you, but I'll try my best to endure it somehow. Since there isn't enough space on this slip to write at length, I can't say my words of love as fully as I'd like. Even so, I'll bring you lots of souvenirs when I come!
Given the nature of messenger pigeons, there was only a tiny slip of paper, so the Saintess's densely penned handwritten letter wasn't particularly long.
But several things about it nagged at me.
For starters, the part about a diplomatic problem was missing a subject.
'What is this? Did she go and piss off the leader of some nation or something?'
There was no known cause for anything like that, but it was unsettling all the same. From my end, I couldn't begin to grasp what sort of diplomatic problem could possibly arise because of the Saintess.
'She didn't go start a religious war or something, did she?'
I suddenly had a lot more to look into whenever I found the time — what exactly a pilgrimage entailed, just what kind of trouble the Saintess had managed to stir up to make her late, what the souvenirs she was bringing back might be, and so on.
*
For about two hours, I read through the Sacred Scripture as if I were hunting down mice.
What I realized once I was done was that the Saintess was engaged in something far more dangerous than I had thought.
'This crazy scripture — why not just call it a war? Why write it as pilgrimage and confuse people?'
I'd thought a pilgrimage was something like a prayer journey. I'd assumed it was along the lines of that pilgrims' route in Spain — a ten-day walk, and then back home. But no: a pilgrimage meant going off to a blood-spattered battlefield.
And I had no idea who in the world could head off to war sounding so relaxed. Who talks about going to a battlefield like it's a stroll through the back garden?
Was this the dignity of the world's most powerful being? Or had she deliberately made it sound that way so I wouldn't worry about her going to war?
'...Probably the former. The latter might be in there too, but maybe only about twenty percent of it?'
Because no matter how hard I thought about it, I couldn't picture her losing. When you thought about it, the Saintess was the living reincarnation of a god — would mere humans dare lay a finger on her? In fact, reading the Sacred Scripture closely, it even said that a saint was not permitted to intervene directly in war.
The saint's role, according to that impressively strict scripture, was limited to providing healing from the rear. Given her position, nothing too serious was likely to happen to the Saintess, so I wasn't all that worried.
'...If I said that, I'd be lying, though.'
My head might think that way. But my heart kept insisting otherwise. No matter what, it was still a war. What if some unforeseen variable came into play?
A letter in her own handwriting had arrived, yes — but what if the Saintess's condition was critical, and in that state, she had asked someone else to write it for her?
If that were the case, it would be the worst.
Of course, that possibility was slim, but all the same, anxious, fretful feelings began to squirm and bloom inside my chest.
"...Now I really can't live without her."
I picked up the stuffed doll she had given me before leaving for the war and murmured to myself, trying to imagine what I had just said.
Just imagining it made my chest ache as if it were being wrung out. If that hypothetical ever became reality, it would surely hurt enough to tear me apart.
"...So, without a doubt, nothing will happen."
I lay back down on the bed, staring blankly upward, and raised my hand. The ring she had given me as a present the night before she left for the battlefield came into view.
The moment I saw it, the memories of that day replayed like a tape. That night, when we had kissed each other's ring fingers, bitten down, and carved our own private marks there.
'...Let's not think about this.'
If I kept thinking about it, I'd die of embarrassment. Either that, or my heart would finally give out from exceeding its limits. One way or another, I suspected my corpse would end up in a rosy shade of pink.
And so, partly to change the subject in my mind,
I straightened my posture and prayed, just in case.
Crude as it might be compared to the Saintess's, I offered up the sincerest prayer I had learned by watching her, for the Saintess who was probably racking her brains over some diplomatic mess right about now.
"...Please, let Canaria return safe and sound."
Of course, there wouldn't be a single scratch on her. Even so, hoping she wouldn't get into some kind of trouble over that diplomatic problem, I could only offer this somewhat clumsy prayer, its purpose and intended recipient both rather vague.
"...Just in case, should I try writing a letter too?"
I saw the messenger pigeon still there, cooing away with no sign of leaving. So first, I brought the pigeon inside, and before the poor thing could even feel sad, I decided to tie a letter to it to carry before it was deployed back to the front.
*
There are three things required to persuade an opponent.
The first is outstanding eloquence.
The second is immense financial power.
And the last is overwhelming physical force.
The effectiveness of these increases as you go from first to last.
And at present, the Holy Kingdom possessed the third and most overwhelming means of persuasion, while the Empire that had lost its leader, the Sultan, possessed everything except physical force. So it was a fight between a Holy Kingdom that had one, and an Empire that had two — yet for some reason, that one was so overwhelmingly potent that it was single-handedly beating the other two.
Struggling to overcome that disadvantage, the Empire's diplomat wielded the weapon at his disposal — eloquence — prattling on with this and that.
Starting with the death of the Sultan, he tallied up the resulting market upheavals and national losses, striving to pin the blame on the Holy Kingdom through sheer logic and somehow recoup the damage heading their way.
"So what. You want to go to war over it?"
But the one in need right now was the Empire, not the Holy Kingdom.
Mutual courtesy was a conditional show of basic decency — something you maintained only when both sides stood to gain something and a certain degree of lingering resentment had been resolved.
"You do know this war we're fighting right now isn't even a crusade, right?"
The roles of superior and subordinate were clearly divided, and the resentment built up over the crusade that had dragged on far too long remained unresolved — so the Holy Kingdom was unable to activate the skill: Mutual Courtesy.
On top of that, the Holy Kingdom's diplomat was a thoroughbred Empire-hater who had lost a childhood friend of twenty years to the crusade. He might have been an unsuitable choice for a diplomatic panel, but the Holy Kingdom had placed him on that very panel precisely because of that.
"...We're not saying we want a war."
From the Holy Kingdom's perspective, it made no difference whether there was a war or not. With the crusade's restrictions that had once shackled the Saintess now gone, and with the Sultan — their brain and their sword both — now dead, the one that had to avoid war was the Empire, having already suffered grievous losses. They had no choice but to bow their heads, or else draw their swords and vanish beyond the pages of history.
And so the diplomatic panel proceeded smoothly: the Holy Kingdom struck, the Empire blocked as best it could before inevitably collapsing, and the Holy Kingdom stomped the fallen Empire underfoot.
'...There's no need to watch any further.'
The Saintess had been observing from far away, just in case some trouble might arise. But as expected, there was no sign of any incident or accident occurring. Besides, the diplomatic panel was increasingly turning into a chaotic mess, and she had no desire to watch it anyway, so she took her leave.
Even without the Saintess, at this point, the combat priests, the Holy Knight Order, and their incompetent commander stationed here under the pretext of escort would be more than capable of subduing things without incident.
And so the Saintess quietly slipped away from that place, turning her steps to find things that might serve as the souvenirs she had promised Rosaria, and perhaps to hunt down any fangs the Empire might still have hidden away.
*
Mornings in the city's commercial district were exceedingly fast-paced and bustling. Unlike some noble young lady who would be sleeping oblivious to the world at 7 AM, the people here were already clocking in by 6:30, and by 7, it was time to be either ready to start work or already working.
Speed was life itself, and keeping promised deadlines was everything in a medieval shop. And the same held true for the print shop.
News posters had to be made quickly — whoever posted theirs first claimed the audience — and when printing a book promised to a client, missing the deadline meant credibility plummeted. So they had already begun cycling through their routines at 7 in the morning.
And the owner of one such print shop,
Lint, was currently in a foul temper.
'Who in the world sends a messenger pigeon at 3 in the morning?!'
Thanks to that, his entire carefully ordered routine had been smashed to pieces. Lint was a man with a compulsion-ridden routine as meticulously aligned as printed letters, which made him all the more ill-tempered about it.
And so at first, he'd thought about writing a reply at dawn out of sheer spite. But in consideration of the seal on the stationery — something he hadn't seen in a long while — and the fact that the other party was a noble, he exercised superhuman patience.
'That aside... Kal, what kind of sudden fit made you pull this?'
The image of Kal leaving the commercial district was still vivid in his mind. The best blacksmith in the district, walking away with disillusioned eyes, saying he just wanted to live quietly and heading off to the countryside. So why, all of a sudden, had he connected this person to him, going so far as to give a letter of recommendation to some no-name country noble's daughter?
'Should I trust your eye again this time, or could you at least give me a word of explanation?'
Was he supposed to trust that bastard again this time? The man's eye for people had admittedly been sharp... but a fair amount of time had passed since then. Had his instincts perhaps dulled a little? Such thoughts crossed his mind.
'...But well, the material itself isn't bad.'
First, Lint set about forming his own judgment. When he had looked it over at dawn, he'd been too irritated and had just tossed it onto his desk without reading it, so he hadn't known — but now, examining it in a somewhat more composed state, it presented a different picture.
He himself was not unfamiliar with board games.
After all, he was making a tidy profit printing playing cards; for business reasons, he had once looked into other games.
Chess, dice-throwing, racing games, and the like. He had personally tried various board games that existed in this world, and had even approached them from multiple angles to assess their commercial value.
And aside from chess, most of them were simple. The majority were close to semi-gambling, relying heavily on luck — probably because they seemed designed around the happiness you felt when you won.
He hadn't held a particularly high opinion of board games themselves. Even the playing cards Lint himself produced, after all, mostly sold for use in gambling dens.
'But this game is a bit different.'
Aside from the fact that he didn't like the name, it had a different form from all the other board games. Of course, the balance between the cards didn't seem perfect, but that too could be written off as part of the fun of drawing them.
If he had to make a comparison, it was a trinity of fun: the strategy of chess, the numerical battle of poker, and the element of luck found in other board games.
It was still crude, of course, but couldn't that be adjusted as they refined it going forward?
"Rosaria Bersian... is it."
He found himself thinking that — aside from the matter of sending messenger pigeons at 3 AM — she might just turn out to be a good investor and contractual partner.
Crude though it was, she was someone who had a novel idea and the ability to put it into action without hesitation, trusting in it.
Not that the 3 AM messenger pigeon allowed him to view her flawlessly or favorably, of course.
'Well, if it doesn't sell, I can just go find Kal.'
It would be a chance to take a long-overdue vacation and go see that bastard friend's face. If things went well, he'd make money; if they went to ruin, he could just go confront Kal about it.
Besides, the sum on the enclosed check was quite substantial. That meant this was not just some game the investor was making on a whim — it was a game being made with a reasonably systematic plan and vision.
And Lint liked people who harbored that kind of ambition.
If Rosaria just hadn't sent that messenger pigeon at 3 in the morning, his evaluation of her in his heart might have risen a little higher.
"Hey, card guys. Today, we've got a new job."
For now, he'd try making this card game with the strange name — trusting in the vision of an investor vouched for by Kal.
And then, when the first sample was complete, he planned to send it off to Rosaria's house at his convenience — timed precisely for 3 AM.
After all, as the saying goes, the revenge of a gentleman may wait even ten years and still not be too late.