Beginning

[1.]

I’m thrilled.

I’m absolutely thrilled.

Such were the sentiments of Aspara, witnessing for the first time in her life a desolate landscape where the midday temperature had plunged below minus ten degrees.

Ah, what a wonderful day this is!

Her heart rattled in rhythm with the jolting carriage as it clattered down the stone road, swelling with the joy of having finally escaped that wretched household. For the record, the carriage was rattling at a remarkably fast and violent pace.

“How wonderful it is to be somewhere with no meddlesome relatives.”

“My lady, you are not here on vacation.”

Her escort knight, seated across from Aspara, spoke up.

To transcribe his pronunciation precisely, it would have been:

‘M-m-m-my L-l-l-lady, y-y-you’re n-not, on va-a-a-acation r-r-right now-w-w.’

He hailed from the same southeastern island nation as Aspara and was equally unaccustomed to the cold.

However, unlike his mistress, who was bundled in layer upon layer of thick coats, the knight wore nothing but a set of iron armor over a tunic of coarse cloth.

Aspara worried that her one and only confidant might accidentally bite his tongue off and die from all that teeth-chattering.

“What can I do? No matter how god-awful the weather, it’s still better than the chill back at home, so I can’t help but be impressed.”

“Perhaps it’s because I’m lowborn, but I found the castle back home warmer, my lady.”

Aspara considered giving the knight a gentle scolding, but he looked like he was genuinely about to keel over, so she let it go.

“I’d appreciate it if you could ask the coachman in a bit more detail how much farther we have to go.”

“He’ll just say ‘soon’ again anyway. And even if I tried to press him, it’s not like I was hired for my tongue, was I? The interpreter’s out cold on your orders, after all.”

The one driving the carriage was a brown-haired barbarian man who spoke nothing but the northern tongue.

No, wait. There had definitely been an interpreter on their side until the day they departed.

But roughly four days after leaving home, Aspara had seen it. That wretch had been writing reports to send back to the family castle.

He had been a spy for the second son, the brother who had been especially keen on keeping her in check.

Ugh, they already sent me all the way to the edge of the north. How paranoid can you be, Second Brother?

Aspara recalled the day her escort knight Jack had lopped the interpreter’s head clean off.

It was the right call. Considering that all my communication would have been in that interpreter’s hands, who knows what kind of distortions there might have been.

No matter how much of an outcast she was, sending her off to be married at the far end of the north with a grand total of two attendants was absurd to begin with.

Thanks to that, Aspara was now surrounded on all sides by nothing but northern retainers and the coachman, all sent by her northern husband-to-be as a welcoming party.

“—, —— —!”

The front window of the carriage slid open with a rattle, and the coachman began calling out something in the northern language.

To Aspara’s ears it was nothing but an unfamiliar string of sounds with no discernible meaning, but fortunately she could at least follow where the coachman’s finger was pointing. Her gaze drifted slowly upward.

“So that’s my new home.”

The top of the castle had come into view.

Unlike back home, where the outer walls were coated in white plaster, this castle was clad in dark, bluish-black stone. The roofs were not flat but steep and jagged, and the cluster of towers looked like the maw of some beast.

“It doesn’t look particularly warm inside, either.”

“Then you can live here in the carriage.”

“I was joking.”

After a few more minutes of galloping, the horses gradually slowed.

“—, — — —!”

Right on cue, the coachman’s voice rang out once more, calling something in that slow, low cadence of the northern tongue. This time, it sounded almost welcoming.

The next moment, the carriage curtain was flung aside, the heavy door swung open, and there, lined up in two rows before the castle, stood a formation of knights.

Unlike her escort knight Jack, who wore chain mail woven from twisted iron plates, these knights wore armor layered with thick leather.

At the center stood a man of particularly imposing build and an angry-looking face. His cloak alone was extravagantly ornate compared to the rest, making it obvious at a glance that he was the lord of this castle.

…

…

What? Why is he just standing there?

Aspara thought. Surely, since the invited guest was the honored party, it was only proper for the host to approach the carriage and escort the guest out.

Even if she had given up on her family and been sold off, this was a pride-wounding reception. Cold wind gusted freely through the wide-open carriage door.

The castle lord, Gus, was troubled.

Bitter cold and famine were nothing new in these parts, but this year had been truly dire.

In his country, it was an annual ritual to send letters to every wealthy southern nation they could reach just before winter arrived, scrambling to procure supplies. But this year, something was different.

A man from somewhere in the south, whose name Gus couldn’t quite remember, had proposed a marriage alliance, offering to send a dowry along with a woman.

Why?

His country had been racking up a modest winning streak in recent wars, gaining some renown, but at the end of the day it was barbarians fighting barbarians.

They had always pinched their noses and looked down on them as savages, so what on earth were they thinking, offering someone precious? His closest advisor had spent the whole day fuming, insisting it was clearly a political ploy to devour them from the inside.

This place could barely even be called a country. As the southerners were so fond of saying, it was a city built stone by stone, wall by wall, by wandering barbarians and drifting exiles.

Because of this, even now, few among his retainers, the lord himself included, had any talent for politics. In fact, forget diplomacy; there wasn’t a single person who could even speak the southern kingdoms’ language. In the eyes of the southerners, they were nothing more than savages.

After scrounging what little connections and resources he had to investigate, Gus concluded that the noblewoman named ‘Aspara,’ with whom the marriage had been arranged, did not appear to be an ambitious schemer capable of wielding significant influence.

If anything, she was a person her own family had half-abandoned.

According to his sources’ best assessment, she had most likely been half-forced out, sold off as a casualty of a power struggle within her family.

How wretched!

Gus thought.

To think that he was the villain in some stranger’s story. And a terribly cliched villain at that.

Yet when he thought of his suffering people, he had neither the ability nor the luxury to rescue that small, pitiful young lady.

Gripping his wretched heart, Gus pressed his reluctant hand to the seal on the marriage proposal.

That had been a fortnight ago, when he took on a spouse he had never even seen through paperwork alone.

And now, the bride who had finally arrived today could not seem to bring herself to leave the carriage.

When the honored guest greets you first, the host bows to welcome them in return — isn’t that proper etiquette?

It was rude of him, but Gus had grown fearful that the southern bride might have hanged herself in grief inside the carriage, so he carefully peered in.

He folded his large frame and craned to see through the carriage door.

Spirits of the snow.

The bride was buried in an enormous cloak, trembling like a field mouse in early autumn.

When the northern lord approached as though drawn in by some spell, she snapped her small eyes up at him, and those eyes were brimming with venom.

In that moment, Gus felt his heart pierced clean through.

And he made a vow.

The moment he signed that marriage contract, he had committed a mortal sin, and he must atone by offering this person everything this barren snowfield could give.

Aspara was irritated.

She had barely managed to warm the inside of the trembling carriage with the meager body heat of herself and her escort knight, and had just gotten to the point where she could breathe again, when someone flung the carriage door open, letting a rush of cold air flood in. And then the very person who had opened it just stood there, slack-jawed, without even greeting her.

How long does he intend to keep me waiting?

Barbarians, the lot of them. Did they think their own lord ranked higher than someone else’s youngest child, even one cast out by her family? This power play, reminding her of home from the very start, instantly cooled the excitement Aspara had felt just moments ago about leaving that very castle behind.

The man, who had been standing still for what felt like an eternity, finally approached as though conceding defeat. Aspara looked up at the large man with a glare, thinking, Finally.

The people of the north, as was typical, had pale skin and a rough, thick complexion.

His grey eyes met Aspara’s. His irises contracted sharply for a moment before returning to normal.

Hmm, the face isn’t bad.

From Aspara’s perspective, he was no beauty. Every part of his body was a full span larger than necessary in length, width, and thickness. His hair was coarse and wiry. His fingers were long, but every single nail looked like it had been broken at least once and grown back at odd angles. One index finger had no nail at all, and the pinky on the opposite hand was missing entirely.

Still, Aspara felt relieved. She had been worried about whether the man whose face she had never seen would turn out to be elderly, bald, three-eyed, or one-eyed.

Just about what I deserve.

Aspara was a deadbeat.

She was technically the daughter of a house that wore a crown, however small, but she was a born good-for-nothing with zero claim to succession. Her mind was certainly not dull, but luck had never been on her side. And beyond her lack of luck, she had no appetite for struggle. And beyond that, she had no talent for flattery.

Aspara herself took pride in having pursued a quiet life. But as the saying goes, a sailboat that sits perfectly still on a storm-tossed sea is the one that gets tossed the most violently. By the time she came to her senses, the sea had turned pitch-black, and when she looked around, she found herself run aground on an unfamiliar shore.