Sold.

Sold.

“This time, the responsibility is mine. I should have thought of defence before commerce, but I didn’t. No — I did think on it, but… I never imagined this sort of thing would happen so quickly, while construction is still unfinished. I’d thought it would be after completion, at the earliest, once word had spread.”

“How is that your responsibility, when you don’t even properly have the right of suffrage…”

“Do you really think the people of this country will be so generous about it?”

The hostage could give no answer.

“This battle is, by its very occurrence, a defeat. To me, at any rate. The moment a thing of this kind has happened, win or lose, I am already a sinner.”

The hostage wanted to say, no, that isn’t so. But he couldn’t bring himself to lie.

“…You’re overreacting. This battle truly is nothing of consequence. Only… only that, just…”

“I know that.”

Aspara, her face still stiff with cold, smirked. The smile looked deliberately fashioned to come off a little base.

“Putting it plainly, this is just a play for sympathy. At the very least, with the castle lord absent from his seat, I’m crouching down low so as not to take a slap to the cheek. It’s my speciality, you know — heh heh.”

“Pardon?”

“It isn’t that I’m truly sorry, you see — only that I’m scheming to take as little public abuse as possible. There’s no need for you to pity me, so off you go inside.”

“But…”

The hostage, realising he could not persuade this woman any further, hesitated and turned back. He asked whether he might at least bring her a cheek-wrap, but Aspara only refused with, “If I bundle myself up too snugly, I’ll only get cursed at all the more.”

His footsteps hesitant as he stepped inside the castle, he found himself recalling Aspara’s mocking smile, the lilt in her voice as she played the cunning woman. The face that had boasted it was, in truth, only a manipulation of public opinion — that she absolutely was not doing this because she was actually sorry.

‘But… and yet, if it really is only a show put on for the sake of public opinion…’

The hostage knocked the snow off his shoes and turned his footsteps toward his room.

‘Then why is it she has such sad eyes.’

Time continued to flow.

The great gate of Fang Castle was made of iron bars that rose up black, like the lower fangs of a wild beast’s gaping jaw. The mass of iron had drawn the cold from the air into itself and breathed it back out twice as strong; directly in front of it, Aspara stood.

A small woman, standing perfectly upright in the middle of a winter landscape. Her skirt revealed a sliver of her ankles each time the wind blew, and the skin of her cheeks, eaten by the cold, had gone as red as a tomato.

Yet the woman did not tremble. She only stood there, perfectly still, perfectly steady, like an ice statue, quietly watching as wind and frost erased the hoofprints of the company that had ridden out hours ago.

“She’s been like that a few times before.”

Pressed up close against the window facing the front gate, Jack spoke. The glass fogged white with the breath from his mouth.

“What you said earlier was right, hostage. Even when she puts on that cunning act, it’s because she really, really is sorry. When she’s truly, truly sorry about something, she actually has trouble saying she’s sorry. She’s terribly bad at it…”

“It’s more than bad.”

“Should I go set fire to the mountain in front for her?”

“What on earth are the problem-solving parameters of your clan, exactly.”

Jack, with his friend and roommate the hostage beside him, gazed forlornly at the lady out beyond the window.

“Shouldn’t you go and stop her? She might listen if it’s coming from you.”

“She told me not to.”

“But still…”

“It’s an order.”

The knight answered with a curiously even voice that didn’t suit his worried expression.

The hostage himself could not very well stop her either. Crude and dangerous as the act was, he understood well enough that, from a political standpoint, it was not a bad gesture.

There were many in the castle who hated Aspara. Now they had been given proper grounds to curse her openly. This was being done to lay those grounds to rest as much as possible. He respected that. But still…

“Hey, listen…”

“Mm.”

“Why do we have to turn off the heat in our room as well…?”

The hostage spoke with lips gone blue.

“You’d have us sitting in some warm room while the lady is out there like that?”

“It seems a bit of a crude thing to do.”

“Chivalry is, by nature, just slightly crude.”

“I don’t think so.”

The two young men, shaking and shivering for entirely different reasons, each in his own way waited for the castle lord’s company to return as soon as humanly possible.

Outside, small grains of snow had begun to fall. Aspara was still standing in that spot, tracing the now-utterly-vanished faint trail of hoofprints.

It was then. From behind Aspara, crunch, crunch, the sound of snow being trodden upon came across the silent snowfield.

《My Lady.》

“Oh my.”

Aspara looked round at the unexpected visitor. A young woman. Sturdily built, but a little short for someone from the north. She looked barely twenty, perhaps. Aspara had a vague memory of having passed her once or twice in the corridors.

《Here.》

The young woman spoke with a firm, slow pronunciation, easy to make out. In her hand was a fluffy scrap of cloth with long ties attached. Aspara raised her eyebrows slightly, as if to ask what on earth this was.

《Here. Like this.》

The young woman reached toward Aspara’s face. Aspara reflexively lowered her gaze and bent her head a little for her.

《Like this… there.》

It was warm. Her ice-cold cheeks suddenly turned as warm as spring.

Lifting her head, Aspara groped at her own cheek with a hand gone numb.

《— — —, they say. Like this — — —.》

Aspara looked into the eyes of the woman who was busily prattling out some explanation. Was it a worried face, a hesitant one, perhaps a faintly annoyed one. The young woman lifted her chin and tapped at her own cheek to show — there, on the young woman’s cheek too, was a similar scrap of cloth.

I see. It was a cold-weather accessory for protecting the cheeks. To Aspara, who was from the south and rarely went out, an unfamiliar thing.

‘I don’t need this sort of thing.’

My purpose, after all, is only to win the people’s sympathy and to put down what discontent I can of the public opinion that has risen up against me. I don’t need this, so Aspara thought. If she were bundled up too snugly to look warm, the shape of the sympathetic-public-opinion play wouldn’t carry. What she needed now was not physical warmth but cold punishment.

‘In order to be forgiven, one must first be punished, surely.’

In order to be forgiven, one must be punished.

That had been a belief lodged deep within Aspara since her earliest childhood. A belief that had taken root all the more strongly as she grew.

Forgiveness and lenience are not free. If one has done wrong, must one not endure suffering equal to it before one is forgiven at last? The child who spills food is whipped; the dog who fails to perform ‘sit’ is scolded; the daughter who was born when she should never have been born sleeps in the cold. Unless the other party’s anger and resentment are dissolved that way, love cannot even begin.

Was that not simply how things were?

Why this child was interfering with her efforts to be forgiven by the people, Aspara could not understand.

“Listen, I’m grateful, but I don’t need this sort of thing.”

《Grateful?》

“Yes, I’m grate— no, but I don’t need it.”

《— —. Grateful! Grateful, it’s all right.》

Aspara reached out a hand to undo this nameless cold-weather garment and hand it back, but the knot was tied so firmly and finely that it would not undo easily. Her cold-numbed fingers were no help either. While she fumbled for a moment, the young woman, with skipping, hopping steps, had already disappeared off into the distance.

“Wait! Oh, for goodness’…”

Aspara lowered her outstretched hand and pondered. She’s gone. Having given her gift, having waited for no answer at all, the young woman had vanished in a flash like a weasel.

’…It would hardly be becoming to throw away a gift she went to the trouble of leaving, would it.’

The woman who had been sighing suddenly noticed something.

“Ah.”

Aspara cupped her two hands over her cheeks, over the scrap of cloth the young woman had brought her, more precisely, like the calyx of a flower.

“…It’s piping warm.”

The soft cloth was very, very warm. As though it had been cradled in two hands and warmed thoroughly before being brought to her.

Gus and his company’s horses began gradually to slow their pace. They were now drawing close to the area from which the dispatch-runner had come, and they meant to spare the horses’ strength and to deaden the sound and the kicked-up snow-dust.

This is no battle of any great danger.

The opponents were, as always, nothing more than a rabble of defectors. The same old thing. And yet, at the same time, never had a battle so weighed on him with worry.

Gus prayed. That he might wrest, so far as possible, a complete victory. That there would be, so far as possible, no casualties — no, not a single one wounded.

That this battle should not be a stain upon my wife’s choice.

《Castle Lord.》

《Ah, yes.》

An older woman drove her horse up alongside Gus. She was a senior soldier serving in the role of battle-staff officer.

《What seem to be the opponents’ horses are beginning to come into sight. Shall we strike first?》

《This is no great battle. Inform everyone, but only stay alert. The first objective is to return swiftly without a single casualty among us. That is all.》

The staff officer nodded.

The elderly woman. She was the very same person who had most strongly opposed the construction of the tunnel at the recent council. And yet there was no discontent or resentment in her two eyes.

《Castle Lord.》

The woman lifted the face-cover of her helmet a little, then went on.

《Rather, this is for the best.》

《What?》