Volume 1, Episode 6
With winter gone and no snow falling, the epidemics that struck in spring had begun to run rampant.
It had been more than a hundred years since the last snowfall, so naturally people had never been able to gather the flowers that bloomed only in winter ahead of time.
Seherbian, who had been pretending to be a priest before the girl, quickly grasped the situation and pressed a hand to his forehead.
“The villagers keep getting sicker. My mother couldn’t even walk this year. The healers say she might manage a few more years, but if we don’t keep treating her, her life’s in danger…….”
Kisha, who had no idea what he was feeling, drooped gloomily and let her shoulders sag.
“Kisha. Do you really think Winter Bell will make the flowers bloom?”
“Of course!”
At his casual question, Kisha’s face lit up again as she answered.
“The dragon is the gods’ representative. They love humans, so if you pray earnestly, they’re sure to answer.”
“Not every dragon loves humans.”
At that blunt remark, Kisha’s mouth fell open.
“Some dragons don’t care at all. They don’t give a damn how anyone else lives.”
She tried to tell whether he was joking, but Seherbian, in his priestly robes, had not smiled once since the moment she’d first seen him.
For a moment, silence settled inside the temple. No one spoke, save for the white tassel staff making its displeased little clinks.
At last, Kisha managed to break the awkward stillness.
“Ah…… well, people kept hating winter, so Winter Bell must be angry with us. I came to make that anger go away.”
“No, I’m telling you, he isn’t angry.”
“H-how would the priest know that? Maybe the dragon’s planning revenge!”
“Haah. Revenge because someone was petty enough to hate him? Please…….”
Seherbian let out a long sigh and adjusted his robe’s hood. Seeing the priestly pendant dangling against his chest, Kisha clasped her hands together as if in prayer and begged him.
“Please, priest of the Dragon God Temple. Tell the dragon to return winter to us.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Huh?”
“You’ve managed fine without winter all this time, haven’t you?”
The answer was so cold that in the end Kisha lowered her head, eyes brimming, to stare at the floor. Her tightly pressed lips looked heartbreakingly forlorn.
[Kisha Hartney has been greatly disappointed.]
At the same time, a stiff, matter-of-fact narration burst out of the tassel staff in Seherbian’s hand.
What is this now?
Startled by Mimir’s abrupt behavior, Seherbian narrowed his eyes, but once the explanation began, it showed no sign of stopping.
[Kisha Hartney is beginning to believe that the villagers’ illness, and her mother’s inability to recover, are her fault.]
“Enough already…….”
“Y-yes?”
“No. I wasn’t talking to you, miss.”
In the shocked light-green eyes of the girl, the tears she had been holding back finally spilled down her cheeks.
“If the dragon doesn’t let go of his anger, winter won’t come. Then we can’t get medicine…….”
Seherbian stared at the sniffling Kisha, unable to make sense of her. Strange, he thought. Most people, once they heard that a dragon was angry, ran away. It wasn’t only humans, either; animals did the same. Up until now, he had never once seen a living thing stroll up to an enraged dragon of its own free will.
Is she just young?
Perhaps because all he had known for so long were elderly priests, he found it difficult to follow a child’s way of thinking.
While he watched her with fascinated eyes, Kisha, who had been bawling, suddenly lifted her head.
“Ah!”
As if she had realized something, color rushed back into her tear-streaked face all at once.
“The dragon’s lair is all snowfields, right? That flower might have bloomed here. We should go look!”
“……You want to find flowers in Blanconia?”
“Yes!”
She answered with spirit, but after a moment she cautiously gauged his reaction.
“I-Is that not okay?”
It was a wasteland buried under cold, merciless frost, but even so, the snowy expanse of Blanconia was the lair of the silver dragon Winter Bell. Even young Kisha knew enough common sense to understand that any uninvited person wandering through a dragon’s domain was asking for trouble.
Seherbian gave her a look of belated realization.
“You came in here knowing it wasn’t allowed, didn’t you?”
“Th-that’s…… true, but.”
Blanconia was already virtually forbidden territory to the villages nestled beneath its snows. And yet Kisha had slipped out after the adults told her not to go, secretly packed her things, and run off. Embarrassed, she worried at her lip while Seherbian rested his head against his staff and spoke lazily.
“Even if it blooms in winter, the winter moth tree is still a plant. It needs sunlight, water, soil to take root in, and enough nourishment to grow.”
Just then, a hard gust of wind slammed through, rattling the temple windows. Seherbian looked straight at the girl, who hunched her shoulders, and smiled faintly.
“There isn’t a single place for a flower to bloom in this land, where even warmth has been stolen away.”
Listening to his cold voice, Kisha held her cup in both hands and turned her gaze to the window.
“Still, if you want to look, go ahead and look all you like.”
The snow whipped endlessly across the frozen expanse, making it seem as though no living thing could survive there.
“I won’t stop you.”
By then, her drink had gone cold.
Like the earth stripped bare of warmth by the dragon of winter.
* * *
Having won permission, Kisha dragged herself out of the temple the very next day as soon as she’d recovered enough to move. Even standing still felt as though the blizzard biting at her cheeks might suffocate her, but the girl paid it no mind. Pulling her fur hat down firmly, Kisha lifted her chin and set off with fierce determination.
A brown-haired girl plowing through snow that sank up to her ankles. And far behind her, a boy with his arms crossed, strolling along as he followed at an easy pace.
“Ma-master.”
“Yeah?”
“Wouldn’t it be okay not to help?”
Seherbian was still dressed in his neatly tailored priest’s robes.
If I reveal my identity in front of humans, it’ll be a pain.
Since they were at the temple anyway, priestly robes were the most appropriate choice for the circumstances.
Seherbian continued after Kisha, giving a light glance in her direction.
“She said she’d find it herself.”
The white crow Liliana looked back and forth anxiously between Kisha, who was trudging ahead, and Seherbian’s unhurried expression. The young, innocent child had not even begun to suspect Seherbian’s true identity. More than that, she didn’t know he had already seen the winter moth tree, and she hadn’t even asked him to look for it with her.
“Maybe she said that on purpose?”
“How so?”
“Mm. She already owes you her life. After that, she might feel like asking for more would just be a burden.”
Ten years old. An age where the fear of getting scolded outweighed the urge to be spoiled. It was also the age when the satisfaction of solving something on one’s own mattered most.
Even after hearing Liliana’s guess, Seherbian showed little interest.
“Maybe.”
The girl, with her coat buttoned all the way up, was taking each step with difficulty and had no idea they were following behind her.
“She’d be a burden, yes. Annoying too.”
If circumstances were different, this would have been the time for him to sprawl out and enjoy a nap. Seherbian lazily followed the girl’s tiny footprints as he spoke.
“How exactly am I supposed to help? Should I bring winter back to the village just so I can make a flower bloom that may not even come up?”
Winter was a hated season. Seherbian, who had spent ages watching the image humans held of winter, could easily predict that if he did that, prayers to make winter disappear again would pour forth once more.
Seeing the seriousness on Seherbian’s face, Liliana accepted his reasoning—then immediately found herself puzzled again.
“Then why are you following her right now?”
“That’s…….”
“Gah!”
Crack—bang!
With a loud crash, Kisha’s small figure vanished from sight.
At that, Seherbian let out a breath that sounded almost like a laugh.
“Because I don’t want to watch another person die in my territory.”
* * *
Kisha had plunged down along a slope that suddenly broke away, and now she was buried deep in a drift of snow.
It was fortunate, at least, that the snow had not frozen solid. Kisha had not been badly hurt, but she was so startled that tears gathered in her eyes as she staggered to her feet.
Yet she couldn’t take another step. She had to stop.
“Ah.”
The slope was too steep to climb back up easily. Staring blankly at the place where she had slipped, Kisha was hit by a cutting winter wind from behind.
Whoooosh—
The wind shook loose her brown hair once before rushing past. Even then, grains of ice remained, brushing coldly against the nape of her neck. Kisha tightly clasped her red, frozen hands together.
“It’s okay. I have to keep going. I still haven’t found the flower.”
Her frosty breath blurred out along the endless snowfield. Kisha spoke aloud on purpose, steadying herself with her own voice.
“I only have to remember which way I came from. I still need to keep looking anyway…….”
It was a foolish thought. In a snowfield with no trees or landmarks to use as reference, there was no way she could find her way back by remembering the direction alone. Kisha turned around and began to walk, leaving a line of tiny footprints in the untouched snow.
But as the cold took deeper hold, her body began to shake harder and harder with each passing minute. She had been the child who collapsed just the day before, unable to endure the freezing air.
Even if Winter Bell’s blessing had healed the frostbitten parts of her body and restored her strength, she had barely woken up before wandering the snowy wastes all day again; by now, her stamina had already reached its limit.
No amount of blowing warm air into her reddened hands could keep the skin from already splitting white and dry. Kisha wanted to cry, but she forced herself to swallow it down, terrified even the tear tracks might freeze, and moved her heavy legs onward.
How long had she been wandering?
By the time darkness had settled over the world and even the breath escaping from her lungs felt cold, something finally entered Kisha’s field of vision.
“Oh?”
The dimmed snowfield had begun to look less white and more blue. Blanconia, buried in blue-white drifts, resembled a gemstone mine. In its midst, Kisha spotted a familiar shape standing upright, and joy flooded her eyes.
“A tree!”
It was a little small, but the thing that stretched its bare branches toward the sky was unmistakably a tree.
As far as Kisha knew, there was only one tree that grew in a winter snowfield.
The winter moth tree.
It was the precious plant that bore the flower she had been searching for so desperately. At the thought that she might now be able to obtain medicine to cure her mother and the villagers, Kisha, despite her exhausted body, ran toward the tree as fast as she could.
But the closer she got, the more the smile faded from her face.
“What do I do?”
At last, when she stopped before it, Kisha covered her mouth with one hand and whispered.
“It’s d-dead…….”
Tears she had not even shed when she tumbled through the snow pit now welled up all at once. The tree she had finally found was dead—blackened and dried up beyond saving, with not a single flower in sight.
Even its brittle branches, which looked ready to snap if touched, were plainly beyond hope even to a child’s eyes.