Blood And Water

No one disputed that Elrod Paragon had been a good lord. Through vital public works, greenhouse cultivation and road-building among them, he had lifted the living standards of the Northern people, and above all he had hunted down without mercy the beasts that came down into the villages each winter. Every December, the send-off as he led the Frost Rose Knights out toward the Nuwa Mountains was one of the great pleasures in the monotony of Northern life.

But what of him as a father?

He had worn himself down day and night to build a domain worth living in, which meant he passed most of his waking hours shut away in his study, and was gone from the castle for a month at a stretch every time he rode out on a hunt.

“So was Elrod Paragon really a good father?”

The words spilled out of Pai in a rush. The girl had lost her mother in infancy and been left in a nanny’s hands; if her father was a man she could scarcely get a look at, then wasn’t it the nanny, really, who had raised her?

“Isn’t this… speaking ill of the dead?”

They were bound for the stables now, at Pai’s insistence. When Enri dropped his voice and breathed the question right into his ear, Keith’s shoulders gave a violent shudder.

“Get off. It’s revolting.”

“Captain, you only ever hate me, don’t you? No. I’m handsome, I’m good at what I do, I can even cook. There’s nothing lacking, so what on earth is the problem?”

“This. Right now. This.”

“Gentlemen, shall we stop the whispering and get a move on?”

Pai flung the stable doors wide. The stablehand looked bewildered, but the moment he saw Keith stride in, he cleared the way.

“This fellow, and this one here, are the fastest.”

Pai stroked a brown horse whose coat had a glossy sheen. As if it had caught the compliment, the horse let out a snort, pfrrr, and pushed its muzzle into her palm.

“You have an eye for horses?”

Keith rubbed the neck of the other horse, the one she’d said was fast, its body pitch-black all over but for a white patch over one eye.

Pai swung herself lightly up onto the brown horse. Enri’s eyes went round at the practiced ease of it.

“What, what? You can ride, too?”

“I can ride, so of course I can judge. That fellow will suit the gentleman.”

“Whoa… Don’t tell me you’re really an assassin who got close with a honey trap?”

Keith felt thoroughly refreshed to hear Enri come out with the very thing he had swallowed for the sake of appearances.

“A honey trap! Has the world run clean out of beauties? Still, it’s nice to hear.”

Pai giggled like a mischievous child, then dug the edge of her foot into the horse’s flank. A shrill whinny, and her horse was away.

A wind that spoke of the coming spring set her long platinum hair rippling like a shimmer of heat haze.

Pai’s reasoning ran like this. Ardine would have made for the last village inside the inner walls, where the carriage stop stayed busy from morning to night. There were long-distance coaches too, of course, but setting one moving meant either gathering a party bound the same way or paying a great deal of money.

“She may be the young lady, but she’s still a seven-year-old child. She won’t have much cash on her.”

“She could pay the fare with jewelry.”

“Jewelry of uncertain provenance is very likely to be refused.”

“But Ardine is…”

Pai shook her head as though she knew exactly what Keith was about to say.

“Nobody knows that the young lady is the young lady.”

“…”

She had the right of it. Shattered by the loss of his beloved wife, Elrod Paragon had smothered his only daughter in protection: by the staff’s account, the furthest Ardine had ever been allowed to go was the inner walls, and even that permission she had scarcely used, almost never setting foot beyond the White Castle. Which meant, in effect, that not a commoner alive could have recognized her as Lady Ardine.

“But would she really have gone to see her nanny? In the middle of the funeral, of all things.”

Enri stayed skeptical of Pai’s theory to the very last.

She went looking for her because she missed her nanny? With her father dead?

It was Keith, not Pai, who spoke up in answer.

“Enri, before you joined the mercenary company, you were raised by the older girl next door.”

“Huh? Yes, that’s right. A lovely woman, she was. Argh, if I’d only been ten years older, I’d have made a pass at her.”

“And your father was busy paying off debts.”

“Well…”

“Blood is not always thicker than water.”

“That example’s cheating…”

How many ties of blood in this world were worth less than a stranger? What mattered was not the bond blood handed you but the one you built for yourself.

So when Pai had marshalled her several reasons and put it to him that Ardine had run off to find the nanny who’d gone home to her village, Keith had judged the theory a sound one. Enri had knocked it down with his “in the middle of the funeral, of all things,” but Keith’s own guess ran the other way: it was ‘because it was the middle of the funeral’ that Ardine had made the choice she had.

That did not mean her father’s death was nothing to her. On the contrary: might Elrod Paragon’s death not have been the very thing that drove her to it? Torn all at once from a nanny closer to her than any blood kin, and floundering in the loss, she might well have reached a point where the grief and the longing were simply more than she could hold…

“There — the carriage stop!”

Pai drew the reins and slowed. Narrowing her eyes, she took the measure of the touts and porters working the stop, of the passengers just down from a coach and the ones about to board. That was when a coat of fierce purple caught her eye amid all the drab, gloomy colors.

“Ardine…!”

Keith, it seemed, had spotted his niece as well.

Ardine wore a deep-purple cape coat and a shaggy grey fur hat. The hair spilling out from under it was a red-tinged gold; the girl must have thought the color gaudy herself, for she’d tried to cram it all up inside the hat, and loose strands stuck out every which way.

“Ardine! …Ari!”

He hauled his horse to a sudden halt and, letting his body go with the momentum, swung down and landed clean. Then he broke into a run toward the child toddling her way up into a carriage.

“Ari! Ardine!”

The desperate shouting reached the child, too. The young lady turned her head and saw a huge man charging straight at her. A stranger. He might be crying her name in anguish, but a stranger was a stranger.

With the driver’s help she slipped neatly inside the carriage, an utterly ordinary four-seater, and a passenger laden with luggage climbed up onto the mounting board after her.

“Wait, please!”

Pai shouted as she leapt down from the brown horse. Fishing a silver coin from her pocket, she explained, calm as anything.

“I’m the mother of the child who just got on. She vanished without a word and we’ve been searching for her…”

“The little one told me she was meeting her mother, though?”

The driver looked puzzled, and leaned his face in through the carriage door.

“That’s what you told me, wasn’t it, little one?”

“She’s my stepmother!” Ardine put in.

Pai begged the passengers’ pardon once more and went on.

“We haven’t been remarried long… The child still finds me strange.”

As she cast her eyes down and whispered it, right on the verge of tears, the driver, and the passenger behind him too, gave her looks of sympathy.

“You get on first. You’ll be needing a good long talk with the child. And the girl’s father…”

“That would be me.”

Keith cut in. From behind, he slid an arm around Pai’s shoulders as though nothing in the world could be more natural, and she felt the hand come to rest there, barely touching, not quite settling.

Quicker on the uptake than I expected.

Impressed that the blunt man was playing along, she pressed herself close against her ‘husband’ and flashed her killer smile. A smile that said: We love each other, the two of us—

“But Dad’s dead.”

Just then Ardine poked her face out of the carriage. Her pink lips pushed out like a duck’s bill, she folded her arms tight and looked the swindling pair up and down.

Pai signaled hard with her eyes. They had known each other only a week, but the two of them shared ‘a certain secret’.

“…”

“…”

But at the child’s announcement that ‘Dad is dead’, the driver and the passenger turned suspicious eyes on the two of them. Keith scrambled for an excuse.

“You thought I was d-dead, didn’t you? Dad’s alive and well, see.”

“It was in the middle of the funeral, though.”

“That was — I was… resurrected. Th-this morning.”

“…”

“…”

“C-congratulations! Congratulations on your resurrection! Ahaha!”

Enri, who had been watching from a step away, broke into applause. He whistled, and drew the crowd around them into it too.

— Clap… clap clap.

— Clap clap clap…

“Oh my, isn’t that wonderful.”

“Resurrection, that ain’t something just anybody can pull off, y’know. Congratulations! May you live long and happy together from here on!”

And so, to a great swell of applause and cheering, they boarded the carriage.

— Clack.

The carriage door swung shut, and the driver’s voice could be heard calling out, ‘Departing!’

Ardine, arms still folded, looked at the man and woman sitting awkwardly opposite her.

“Ari’s not going home.”