Fig.

Fig.

“Lady Aspara!”

Stepping into the inner courtyard alone, Aspara was met with a cheerful greeting from a chestnut-haired woman.

She was bundled in a thick purple cloak and waving; on closer inspection, she was standing on top of something pink laid beneath her feet.

Drawing nearer, Aspara saw it was a large slab of meat. The visitor seemed to have pulled it from the food compartment of her carriage and laid it down so her shoes wouldn’t get soaked in the snow.

“You must have had a difficult journey. It must have been cold.”

“Not at all!”

The woman’s bright smile was evidently not a mere pleasantry. Then again, one look at that enormous, heavy carriage, built from three different hardwoods and upholstered in satin, and one could see why.

“I’m glad you’ve come, if a little surprised. I hadn’t received any word.”

“They told me passage into the north takes a lifetime, so I set out in a bit of a hurry — and, rather shamelessly, I arrived ahead of my own letter.”

“This border isn’t an easy one to get through.”

“Oh no, the gentlemen there were very kind! They were working so hard out in the cold that I gave them a little tip, and you should have seen how grateful they were.”

So that’s how she waltzed through without processing. Just how much of a tip did she give.

The long-named young lady gave a bright smile. It was the same gentle, lovely smile her ex-husband had praised until his mouth ran dry.

“…I see.”

Seeing the bright smile of a woman her own age called up an old memory: the day she first came to know Sebinya Gobir.

Back when Aspara was still Flower’s wife.

What had that day even been? An after-party for a hunting game, somebody’s anniversary, some trivial occasion in any case for which they were throwing a banquet at Seven’s estate.

Slap. Cutting through the music that had just filled the hall, the sharp, loud sound of leather striking leather rang out. The lady of the house had slapped the head attendant across the face.

Barely restraining a shout, she reproached the head attendant and ordered him to prepare for dismissal. The guests murmured but looked on as though enjoying the spectacle.

And then, like a single ray of hope, Sebinya stepped forward. Tears brimming in her eyes, she pleaded with her furious mother for mercy, her voice trembling so finely with such genuine sympathy that she sounded like an angel.

Seven told her mother that the head attendant had a newborn daughter and a pregnant wife, and begged her not to dismiss him.

That she would grieve so sincerely for one lowly commoner was a sight in itself, and the fact that the young lady of the estate kept track of the household circumstances of each and every one of her workers was a genuinely refreshing shock.

Aspara was hardly the only one who felt that way. The gentlemen, who only moments earlier had been watching for entertainment, began chiming in one by one that the attendant ought to be forgiven. Flower in particular had taken Sebinya’s side in an especially loud voice.

When the flustered lady of the house finally rescinded the dismissal, applause broke out as though a splendid performance had just ended.

…But that head attendant had been slapped for getting caught groping another household’s servant’s backside at the banquet.

Aspara remembered. That head attendant had been dismissed only after being caught four more times over the next six months for similar offenses, and even then, Seven worried about the man’s family and made sure he received a very generous severance.

For the record, the reason Aspara knew all of this was that part of that severance had come out of her own — out of House Bel’s — ledgers. When she pressed Flower about the expenditure, he had gotten angry: “What’s wrong with putting money toward a good cause?”

Still, whatever the outcomes, it was hard to deny that Sebinya was a person overflowing with goodwill. Her doctrine, as it were: better an aggressive good person than a timid wicked one.

Returning from the memory to the present, Aspara spoke.

“…Perhaps because I’ve grown so accustomed to the northerners’ way of speaking, I can’t quite manage the preliminary niceties anymore. May I get straight to the point?”

“Of course.”

“Have you come to retrieve Volmo?”

“Who?”

Aspara had assumed Seven had come after hearing from Volmo’s stepmother. Her eyes were fixed on the enormous second carriage Sebinya had brought in tow.

“You haven’t come to take the boy home? There are two carriages, after all.”

“Oh, one of them is a gift. I heard fresh fruit is hard to come by here, so I brought a whole carriage-load of fresh figs.”

“Then what have you come for?”

Sebinya tilted her head like a puppy and smiled brightly, as if she’d just been asked the most obvious question in the world.

“To visit! We’re the best of friends, aren’t we.”

The two young men walked down the corridor at a pace just short of a power-walk. Jack had tied half his hair back to hide the unattractive waves that had set into the side of his head, while Volmo had borrowed his friend’s finest cloak and belt.

“Hehe, heheheh.”

“Good for you. It’s a little disappointing, though.”

“I’ll write you regularly, so don’t worry too much. Given the travel times, swapping letters back and forth won’t be easy.”

Volmo answered in a smug tone. His voice already carried the certainty that he was headed back south.

Certainly, from his perspective, this was an enormous stroke of fortune. It was wretched enough to have been packed off to his mutually-unenthusiastic birth mother’s household; on top of that, he’d been kidnapped by the barbarian king, and as a direct consequence, the young lady he revered had come in person to see him. This would surely be the turning point at which she would finally understand the unjust treatment he had suffered at his father’s household. Ah, and perhaps in recognition of his bravery in this whole affair, he might even be given some kind of post.

He hadn’t lived with the man for terribly long, but he had spent that time alongside “the South’s finest escort knight” and had learned a great deal. Volmo was proud to believe he would surely make an excellent knight himself.

Since he might be sent straight back the moment he reached the courtyard, just in case, he had tucked Alexandrine — Gangster — Squeaky into the breast of his coat in secret. What a well-prepared man he was! He let out a silly, self-satisfied little laugh.

“Letters, huh… Yeah, they’ll take a really long time.”

Jack spoke in a tone tinged faintly with melancholy.

“You all right?”

“You know, I send letters to my older sisters back home sometimes. Apparently they take an awfully long time to arrive.”

“How long are we talking?”

“Well, I don’t know for sure. I’ve been writing since pretty much the day I got here, and I still haven’t gotten a single reply.”

The man who moments ago had been floating on clouds caught his friend’s gloom, and his smile died.

“Not even once?”

“I wonder if their addresses changed. But I haven’t gotten a letter telling me they changed addresses either.”

“That’s awful of them.”

“…My sisters aren’t awful. They’re good people.”

A short, awkward silence followed.

One because he avoided uncomfortable subjects to the utmost degree, the other because his own feelings were too inflated just now to spare any room for someone else’s, the conversation soon turned to “foods I want to eat once I’m back in the south.”

The two of them stepped out into the inner courtyard and were each startled for their own reasons. A single horse was galloping through the yard; it wore no saddle, and the rein-rings were fixed behind its head, which suggested someone had unhitched the horse that had pulled the carriage in and let it loose.

Astride it and guiding it deftly without a saddle was Aspara. The one clinging to her back, laughing alongside her, was—

“Sebinya Lady Gobir! What — what are you doing—!”

“Oh, what’s she doing here.”

In the north, where nothing was in abundance except land, “inner courtyard” meant something rather broader. In the south, a proper inner courtyard was an elegant space that made efficient use of the gap between two buildings, a small, safe spot for parasols and picnic blankets.

But in the north, where the razor wind was more fearsome than the measles, any space walled in on all sides was a thing of rare value. For that reason, the locals tended to make their inner courtyards as large as possible.

Even the poorest households had made it fashionable for their inner courtyards to measure at least one majigi of farmland, and the courtyard’s size scaled in proportion to the height of the house.

For instance, the inner courtyard of the largest building in the north, Fang Castle, was wide enough for a big horse bearing two women to gallop across to its heart’s content.

“We have to stop them!”

“Whoa, careful.”

Just as his friend was about to fling himself into the horse’s path, Jack grabbed him by the scruff of the neck like a dog. Outmuscled and outweighed, Jack only ended up being dragged forward and tumbling down alongside him; in the end, though, the stopping did happen.

“What are you doing! It’s dangerous!”

“You’re the one — what are you doing!”

Star, who had been sitting on the raised wooden ledge watching the two women ride, came trotting over and helped the sprawled men up. Bits of straw were stuck to the soles of her shoes; she had evidently been called over on a riding-boots errand.

“A lady… ladies are riding a horse, we have to stop them.”

“Huh? Oh… right. There was that.”

《What — are — you — doing—!》

Star, it seemed, was rather annoyed at the two newcomers who had just burst in.

Volmo, face flushed, shouted back angrily at the young maid while Jack rattled off a sentence no one could make sense of. He appeared to be explaining why the two of them had to be stopped.