There Is No Country for Gods (1)
"Yes. If you leave it to me, I will give it everything I have."
Silvia said it with her blue eyes flashing sharp and bright, so plainly delighted that their father had even asked her about the position of head of the house.
"Haa… I'm speaking as your father, not as the head. If a woman takes that seat, she may go through experiences that are… less than pleasant. Do you still want it?"
"The unpleasant things you're referring to, Father, would be being ignored at the Round Table, or having my fiancé forcibly torn away from me so someone can swallow the Farsion house while I'm head. Am I right?"
"…"
"Father. I am capable. Capable of shutting the mouths of every mongrel who tries to climb over me, and of raising the marquisate of Farsion higher still. Think of the things I've already accomplished when I was nothing more than a marquis's daughter."
Those accomplishments meant this: after the war, when the high nobles had fought tooth and nail to stop the emperor from elevating the Farsion house to a marquisate and tried to leave them as a mere "honorary" one, little more than a child, Silvia herself had walked into the Round Table and overturned the decision. Or the time she had single-handedly identified a foreign kingdom's spy who had slipped into the empire.
Work only someone like Silvia could do—someone whose blood ran thicker with the scholar than the warrior, my polar opposite.
Which was why Father could only groan now, unable to find a rebuttal.
"Then… what about succession? If the eldest son refuses to marry in as a son-in-law and take the house, how do you, as someone who will one day marry, intend to continue the line?"
"Simple. I take a son-in-law myself."
"Do you honestly think that makes sense? Your fiancé is from a marquisate equal to ours. They'll push back hard."
Silvia's fiancé belonged to the Dacus house, a marquisate like Farsion.
The Dacus line had no bloodline ability the way Farsion did, so bringing him in as a son-in-law would indeed solve the succession problem. But as Father said, for a man of equal rank to marry into a woman's house was generally considered a humiliation.
So how to silence the Dacus family's discontent and still bring a son-in-law into Farsion?
The answer was simple.
"I will raise the Farsion house to a dukedom."
"Hah…"
If equal rank was the problem, crushing them under a higher one left the Dacus house with nothing to say.
The real issue was that the five current dukes had all been founding pillars of the kingdom since before the war, while Farsion had only climbed to marquis through wartime merit. Naturally, the moment Farsion showed any move toward a dukedom, the five would immediately check them to protect their own rice bowls.
Silvia would have to shake off every one of those checks and seat Farsion on a duke's chair.
"A plan… do you have a plan? To shove the five dukes aside and climb to a sixth?"
"If I didn't have a plan, I wouldn't have opened my mouth, Father."
"Honestly… neither the son nor the daughter listens to a word I say. Silvia. Prepare that plan properly and show it to me. If it doesn't satisfy me, you'll start from scratch."
"Yes, Head of House."
"Both of you, out. The acting head of Lailia arrives the day after tomorrow. There's a great deal to prepare."
At Father's dismissal, the two of us stepped out of the study.
I glanced sideways at Silvia. This was the first time Father had ever listened to her so long and so seriously, and she looked thoroughly elated.
If a stranger saw that sharp-featured face of hers grinning so foolishly, they might fall for her on the spot. To me, though, she was just cute.
"Oppa."
"What."
"You have to marry into the Lailia house. Understood?"
"Why."
"Because it raises even a little the chance of Farsion reaching a dukedom. One fewer enemy to check us would be nice, wouldn't it? Marrying the princess would be better, of course, but…"
"Stop. We're done with this conversation."
My room was closer to Father's study than Silvia's, so I reached for my door first.
Silvia caught my collar and stopped me.
"…Oppa, are you angry?"
She looked up at me with eyes thick with apology—the finishing-move gaze she always pulled out whenever she thought I was mad.
She looked strong on the outside, but inside she was delicate; if I turned my back on her now she would go back to her room and cry all night.
"Haa… Silvia."
So I stopped opening the door, turned around, and set my hand on my little sister's head, stroking her hair.
Soft, with a clear texture to every strand—it soothed the irritation that had almost flared up.
"I'm not angry. Just… sulking a little."
"Really…? Then it's fine. Good night."
"Silvia. Aren't you going to do 'that'?"
"Ugh… do I have to?"
"Who was it that begged me first every night because she was scared to go to her room alone?"
"Fine… fine."
Her not-exactly-small frame pressed into me. Ever since we were little, whenever the dark of night made her afraid to enter her room alone, she had asked me to hold her; my own stubbornness had kept the habit alive until now.
"Ugh… you're hugging too tight…"
"Heh. Sorry. You can go now."
"…Good night."
"Yeah. You sleep well too, Silvia."
With that she pattered off toward her own room.
Truth be told, a grown brother and sister hugging every evening was a little ridiculous. To me, though, it wasn't only ridiculous.
During the war I had never felt a family's warmth—couldn't even afford to remember it.
Mother had been gone a long time. Father and I had never so much as hugged; I could barely recall shaking his hand. Silvia was the single person who still let me feel that warmth.
Well… I'll have to graduate from it someday.
Carrying the wounds of the battlefield forever wasn't healthy either.
In that sense, tonight I probably wouldn't have nightmares.
"Ahem… Marquis Evan?"
"You called, Your Highness."
As always, the princess had her reddish-gold hair twisted up and those eyes that looked ready to swallow a man whole. Today, though, mischief sparkled thickly at their corners.
"Have you received today's schedule?"
"Now that you mention it, I never got Your Highness's timetable today."
"Of course not. Today you and I are patrolling the city."
"City… patrol?"
Before I explain just how little sense that makes—
What is a princess?
The direct descendants of the emperor, who sits above every man and beneath none, are called princes or princesses.
Each of them builds their own faction with the goal of becoming emperor.
Princess Rio is the exception, but she is exactly that—an exception.
So a princess ought to be frantically expanding her power and dragging political initiative toward herself.
And yet this morning that same princess was setting out, with only a single knight order as escort, on a patrol she had no need to perform, into places where any number of dangers might wait.
"…Why a city patrol all of a sudden?"
"First, the atmosphere in the capital has been strange lately. So the empire sent out its intelligence agents, and the result is this: today, a 'god' is supposed to descend in the plaza."
"A god? The one I'm thinking of right now?"
"Yes. Omnipotent, merciful, and at the same time cruel. One of the creators of this world. He is said to appear in the plaza today."
"Just a baseless rumor, surely."
The empire is called an empire for a reason; its capital is enormous. To travel from one end to the other by carriage you would have to leave at dawn and still stop for a night. In a capital that size, the baseless rumors and nonsense that spring up every day are beyond counting, and the empire does not move for such things.
"Apparently the empire doesn't see it that way. Looking at the recent climate anomalies, the strange phenomena, the abnormal behavior of the fanatics, and the prophetic texts seized from them, they judged that something is seriously wrong."
"Then why not mobilize the peacekeepers or the army? Why us?"
"If a god actually descends and finds an army standing in front of him with spears and swords, what do you think happens? We'd be lucky if the empire simply isn't destroyed."
In truth, this would not be the first time a god has descended. Countless gods exist in this world; when watching us grows dull, they come down.
I myself had seen gods twice during the war. Not that they could do much—reshape the terrain or rewrite history on a whim and the other gods immediately yanked them back up—so they moved cautiously.
Putting it all together: the capital had been stirring strangely, the empire had sent agents to investigate, they had been frightened by the conclusion that a god would descend, and now they wanted us to assess the situation under the pretext of a "patrol."
There simply wasn't solid enough grounds to stage an official event in the plaza over a floating rumor of divine descent, and if no god appeared the empire would only earn the disgrace of being light-assed. Hence this passive approach.
"Haa… so have they at least identified the true name of the descending god?"
"Yes. Livia, I believe."