Loyalty

The voice rang out as strong as a cleric proclaiming an oracle, as though thunder had swept through the inside of the temple. The silence that followed the din felt all the stiller and colder for it.

“You all know well enough what black blood means, I take it.”

Black blood had its origin in demons, but the sense of it thinned once the Demon War drew to a formal close and the Empire’s ‘erasing of demons’ began. By the present day the term had turned into a more everyday expression of contempt.

“Do you mean to go on with this futile business of being a ‘Paragon’ in law, pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes? Is there a single soul here who does not know you are a filthy bastard!”

Just so. As the words stood now, black blood was used to insult a bastard.

And so, when Elrod received the oracle seven years ago, everyone but him and the duchess took Keith for the disaster it had foretold. With one voice they said Keith should never have been called into the White Castle in the first place. A senile old man’s decision was one thing; Elrod, who came after him, of all people ought to have cut Keith loose.

That was the root of the claim Luigi Husslix was shouting.

“I will give you one last chance, Keith. Step down of your own accord. If you truly care for Elrod, you must not line your own pockets while pretending to be caught up in his mistake.”

He shouted it with spittle flying, and Keith murmured back with a sneer.

“A mistake.”

“Precisely. Elrod’s making you Regent Duke was plainly a mistake. Deep in your own heart you must feel it too. Listen to the voice of your conscience. That is the road by which you may atone.”

“…You are quite right.”

Luigi’s face brightened at the meek agreement, and his tone went soft and coaxing.

“That’s it! Greed simply clouded your reason for a moment. That too is a mistake of yours. Every man alive makes mistakes, Keith. Late or not, it is enough that you set it right.”

“Yes. My brother did make a mistake, and so did I.”

Keith’s voice landed hard, a solid bead dropped onto marble and left to roll. He still stood on the dais. Huge to begin with, he bore down on the room like a religious painting filling a whole wall. Then a cold sneer ran across his face.

A smile that felt almost contemptuous!

“Trying to the very last to shelter even a thing like you, because you were blood.”

“…”

“That was our mistake.”

He came down off the dais, and Luigi and the soldiers reached for their weapons.

“Fawning to our faces and filling your filthy pockets behind our backs — you must have been busy indeed, in public and in private. Poaching snow wolves is child’s play. Do you register and raise your private soldiers by the proper channels? And the mining rights my brother granted you out of pity — what amusement was it you got out of those, again?”

“Y— you wretch…!”

Keith did not waver so much as a hair at the growled roar. When he spoke, his voice was as uncannily empty of feeling as a golem made of steel.

“I am not so benevolent as my brother.”

Matters had come this far, and Luigi too had nothing left to lose.

— Shing. Shhhing.

The sound of swords scraping free of their scabbards ran together into a single strain of music and rang through the temple. There was nowhere left to retreat to.

— Shing.

Enri drew his own sword without bothering to read the room. The preamble had run long, but he had known it would come to blows.

— Shhhing.

And Keith as well. He stood the sword used in the rite against the altar and drew his own. He had put out no sword energy, and yet a thick aura already seemed to be flowing along the silver blade.

“…”

At that, the knights and soldiers ranged along either side of the velvet carpet drew their swords as well. The trouble was… a split had opened up among them.

“Where do you think you are pointing that sword?”

“The Count is right. The Mercenary King has no claim to it.”

“We are knights of Paragon! Do you mean not to carry out Lord Elrod’s last wish?”

“A knight chooses the lord he will serve. To take black blood for a master is an insult to a knight.”

Sword points that had once been turned on the same enemy now turned on one another.

“Khuh… kha-ha-ha!”

Luigi watched the sight and burst into a laugh of victory. He was the one who had planted the seed of that split, after all. If the knights kept each other occupied, his soldiers had a mere two men to bring down.

They said a man who handled sword energy was a match for a hundred, but Luigi snorted at it.

An exaggeration. How is one man supposed to hold off a hundred?

Tamed by a long peace, he knew nothing of war. The same went for his soldiers; most of them had never fought in one. To them the title of Mercenary King was a vague sort of thing. The worth of that name was known only to those who caught the smell of blood as keenly as a starving predator.

“Strike them down!”

At Luigi’s thunderous command the soldiers faltered, then rushed forward in a mass. A thoroughly reluctant air clung to the movement, though. Rather than fling themselves at Keith and Enri, they formed a ring around the two of them.

Enri clicked his tongue, dumbfounded at the half-hearted performance.

“Even a rabble would make a better showing than that. I could manage this on my own, couldn’t I?”

“They are all mouth and nothing else! Strike, and be quick!”

“Gramps. D’you know me?”

“Gra— wh-what did you say?!”

“You’ve no way of knowing whether I’m a punk who’s all mouth, or whether I’m carrying on like this because I’ve got grounds for it.”

The needling voice sank into something cool. Keith, trusting his back to Enri, glared at the soldiers.

“I have no intention of going easy. Anyone who means to leave, leave now.”

— Hic! Someone hiccupped.

A snort of air escaped the crooked line of Keith’s mouth. Luigi felt as though steam were rising off the crown of his head.

“D— do not fall for their trickery! It is bluster! To the man who takes that head I will give gold and silver enough to idle on for the rest of his life!”

“…”

“Jenkins! You have your family to think of.”

Luigi singled out the soldier in the front rank. That order, with its mention of family, sounded like a threat delivered sideways.

The soldier called Jenkins screwed both eyes shut, opened them again, and kicked off the floor with a shout.

“Nng— aaaah!”

The rest followed after Jenkins.

— Clang!

“Gwaah!”

I have no intention of going easy.

Keith had certainly given that warning, and yet he did not drive his blade into a throat or take a wrist off. He struck at the weak points of their armor instead. The sharp point of his sword cut shallowly into flesh, and the soldiers went straight over onto their backs.

They caught on that this was a chance Keith was handing them. So, without so much as trying to get up and come at him again, they writhed and shrieked as though in agony.

“Good grief. Anyone watching would think the Captain had smeared poison on his sword point.”

Enri snorted and swung his sword. Whatever the matter at hand, the Captain was his measure, so he too worked his blade briskly, keeping to the places where a cut was unlikely to kill.

“What is this, some children’s game?”

“Don’t insult children, Enri.”

“Oho. You’ve grown quite close to the young lady, I take it?”

“…Quite.”

“You do know we’d have to hear the young lady’s opinion on that, don’t you?”

Things had reached the point where the two of them were trading idle conversation.

Luigi glared at the soldiers crawling on the floor like caterpillars. Their thin loyalty made him so furious he thought he would go out of his mind.

“Wretches! Stand and fight to the last! That is what I fed you and clothed you for!”

“That is a very one-dimensional way of drawing loyalty out of people.”

Just then a clear, ringing voice came flying from the hall entrance Luigi and his rabble had stormed through, light as a butterfly on the air.

“Food, a roof… Fine things, and worth being grateful for. But those are things you can give a dog you keep, too.”

A tall woman, firm-bodied and beautiful.

It was not as though they were being pressed, and yet relief spread softly through Keith’s chest.

“Pai…”

His dry lips made a sound like leaves rustling. One by one he looked over the people who had come into the hall with Pai. Ardine, with good color in her face, and the escort knight he had assigned her, and a boy with a violet bob.

“…Who?”