The Eve (2)

The wind blew. Rodrik Barther furrowed his brow.

“The weather’s been dreary these past few days.”

The night the downpour came, the day two corpses and a mad defense army commander sank into the dark far side of that savage river.

A week on from that night, Siltrein still lay covered in the smell of salt. There was no coast anywhere near, and yet the wind came mixed with salt.

Whether the defense army commander’s mad cries had in the end loaded seawater onto the city’s wind, or whether my own mind had gone strange and I was smelling a sea that does not exist. I could not tell.

One thing at least was certain. Since that day Siltrein had been thrown into complete upheaval.

“So you finished dealing with it in a week. You’re in a hurry.”
“I’ve no choice but to hurry. We’ve come to the stage where it really can start any time now.”

The war between Siltrein and Esmartin, the seat of the Barther house, was right on our doorstep.

“Friend, I’ll need your hand one last time.”
“I had my suspicions, but I didn’t think you would come out and ask for a hand in the war itself. Didn’t you refuse Lilian’s help?”
“There’s no comparing one capable fighter with a great army of undead. All the more so when what Siltrein needs is soldiers, not an outsider who can overturn the whole board.”

And here I had thought I would be able to rest from now on. It was news Lilian would not like.

“Well, anyway. When do you mean to start?”
“Moving rashly is going to be difficult. Better to think of a mage as something closer to a natural disaster than a human being.”

Once a mage is part of a large-scale battle, an army is meaningless. Victory and defeat are decided by how well you answer the magic.

“So I guess we’d need to raise a real natural disaster of our own before the odds are worth anything.”
“Raise a natural disaster?”
“A record downpour fell a week ago. Enough to raise the water level by about the height of two grown men. Friend, Esmartin is a city that depends on this river just as Siltrein does. It lies south of Siltrein, downstream.”

The swollen river, and Esmartin lying south of Siltrein. I was beginning to get a sense of what natural disaster Rodrik meant to raise.

“…You mean to send an entire city to the bottom?”

“I have mercenaries putting up a makeshift dam to the south. The day that dam is finished is the day the war begins.”

Block the river deliberately, then send it all down on Esmartin at once. In ordinary times he could never have used the strategy, but the downpour of a few days ago had set the water level for him, and so it was possible.

Put a city under water. How many residents would die, how many people would be hurt?

It was a good thing Lilian would not be following as far as Esmartin.

“When does that dam go up?”
“Tomorrow.”

A day from now the flooding river strikes Esmartin, and an army made up of mercenaries and Siltrein’s regular soldiers marches south.

There was no telling how much hatred and how much tragedy it would shape. And that war was on the very point of breaking out.

As expected, the army made no move to investigate the killings on the wall a week ago. Far too many people had watched the defense army commander go under the river along with the corpses, and being possessed by a ghost and turned into a lunatic was common enough in Siltrein. With the circumstances laid out that plainly, they could hardly conclude anything but that all of it had been the work of a commander gone mad.

“Roan.”
“Lilian. Is the practice with holy power going well?”
“I haven’t been able to lately. It’s a real war now.”

Lilian shut the door. She dragged a chair over in front of me and sat down on it with her legs crossed. She had only just arrived, called in at my summons.

“So? What did you want to say?”

Where do human beings go when they die? Do they fall into an afterlife, or are they born again, as I was?

“Lilian. You said you read the thoughts of beasts.”
“Mm.”

Where on earth do people go when they die, that every ghost should wander, screaming out its madness?

“Then do you read the thoughts of ghosts as well?”

“…Roan.”

Most of the witnesses had heard the cries of the commander Leo possessed from a good way off, nothing more, and they had come away complaining of headaches. Nor did I have to look further than myself. Had I not seen a hallucination that day? There was no telling what a ghost like Leo might do to Lilian, who could share a communion far deeper than that.

“I know what Roan’s worried about. As it happens, I’d been wondering why you hadn’t nagged me about it yet.”
“It’s true that it had little effect on me, so I paid it no mind. But it seems that is a different matter once it comes to a ghost that was a mage in life. And if it goes this far even with me, how much worse must it be for you?”

Lilian let out a sigh. She had one arm hooked over the chair back and her cheek laid on top of it.

“It’s fine. Anything that could do me harm gets filtered out.”
“Then I’m glad to hear it.”
“If you’re that worried, I won’t use ghosts from now on.”
“No. If you say it’s fine, then it’s fine.”

Beasts cannot hurt Lilian. It was a fact I already knew, but there was no harm in being careful.

“So is that what you called me for?”

Lilian’s hands caught my eye. Hands with far more small cuts on them than on the day we first met.

“…No.”

“Then what?”

The war begins tomorrow.

She was not showing it on the surface, but the weight she must be carrying was past imagining.

“You said you were resting from the practice.”
“Mm. Why?”
“Shall we go out for some air a while?”

If not today, no day will come when I can talk with Lilian at leisure. I had that feeling.

“…Where are we going?”

“Well.”

It had come to me on the spur of the moment, so naturally I had settled on no place at all. Was there anything in Siltrein worth seeing in the first place?

“Is there anywhere you want to go?”
“No. But I do want the air.”

Lilian stood and took my arm. The streets I followed her out into were as full of river mist as ever.

“You’ve grown a little taller.”
“Have I?”

A great deal had changed since we met beneath Oskalt. She no longer looked around her, no longer asked about this and that. Set against her I seemed to have changed nothing at all, and the thought left me feeling strange.

“Have you eaten?”
“Even if I said I hadn’t, you’d only mean to take me to the sandwich shop.”
“That place is shut. Things have been unsettled lately.”

Only then did I notice that there was hardly a person to be seen in the street. The mood had turned grim and everyone had barred their doors.

The sandwich shop Lilian liked had closed. The price she had to pay for her choice was showing itself slowly, starting from the very smallest things.

“That must be a disappointment.”
“It’s a shame, but it can’t be helped. It isn’t as if that’s the only place a person can eat a sandwich.”

Lilian’s steps did not stop. She kept hold of my arm and went on heading somewhere, and a little later we came out at the foot of the nearby wall.

“What can I do for you?”
“Open the gate.”
“Right away!”

At Lilian’s word the soldier guarding the gate scrambled to obey. Somewhere along the way she had become a mercenary most of the residents respected, if not all of them. A few months ago such a change would have been unimaginable.

“Where are we going?”
“You said we were getting air. It’s stifling inside the city. Shall I call Pormel? Or one of the other children?”

“…Call Pormel.”

Pormel came running at once at my call and crouched low. Even in an Erbern full of undead it had evidently managed well enough at catching birds for itself; there was no particular sign of hunger about it.

Lilian stroked Pormel’s head.

“It’s been a while, Pormel.”

I climbed up onto Pormel and put out a hand to pull Lilian up. I waited a moment, but she only put her arms around my waist and said nothing.

“Aren’t you going to tell me where we’re going?”

“…South. Let’s go south.”

What lay south of Siltrein was obvious. I began to worry that she had finally lost her grip.

“…Are you really all right with that?”

“Mm. I want to see what kind of city Esmartin is.”

Lilian was sitting behind me, so I could not see her face. Nor was it easy to picture the expression on the face she had buried against my back.

Pormel started off at a slow walk.

The weather is growing colder and colder. Erbern had always run chilly, but now it was truly the season to prepare in earnest for wintering.

“Roan.”

Perhaps because the wind was blowing from behind, I could see Lilian’s breath scattering past my shoulder.

“Yes.”

Across a landscape full of gray, a pure white breath spreads and thins away. Perhaps winter had already begun.

“If I hadn’t been here, would Esmartin not have been attacked?”

If Lilian had not been there, would the war have failed to come about? It would have. Rodrik Barther had his army thanks to her.

“If I hadn’t stepped up and said I would help Rodrik back then, if I’d turned away and pretended not to see the people of this domain, would nobody have had to bleed?”

So in practical terms Lilian was the one who had set this whole thing off. She had put power into the hands of the man who would be most dangerous holding it.

“Am I overstepping myself?”

It is a strange thing. Her face was still not visible to me, and yet this once the expression on it came clear in my mind’s eye.

“Lilian.”

Was that wrong? Was she in the wrong for putting power into a hand and bringing about a war?

“A caterpillar passes through the chrysalis and becomes a butterfly.”

At least I do not think so. Even if the whole of this world should call her wrong, even if she should think herself in the wrong.

I, at least—

“Breaking out of the chrysalis is hard work, certainly, but isn’t it a necessary process if it is to become a butterfly?”

—do not think she is wrong.

“Perhaps in that process the wings may tear. Even so, isn’t a butterfly with torn wings better than a chrysalis that cannot so much as move? Lilian, what you gave the chrysalis was the strength to break its own shell and come out.”

Erbern stands at a turning point, moving on to its next stage. If Lilian brought the war about, could it not just as well be said that she laid the foundation for that starting point?

“Thank you.”

The warmth of her came through, her arms around me from behind. The weather was cool enough to make breath show white, and yet I felt no chill.

Pormel walked the Erbern plateau for some while and only halted on reaching the top of a hill. From there the outline of Esmartin showed faintly.

Esmartin’s walls stood alone in the middle of the plateau, with no idea what would fall on them tomorrow.

“…Roan.”

“Yes.”
“Roan said he’s leaving Siltrein tomorrow too.”
“It looks as though I’ll have to. Every mercenary but you has to take the field.”
“You said last time was the last, and then you lied.”
“I’m sorry. Still, I did rest a week, didn’t I?”

Lilian’s hair blew loose in the wind. The tip of her nose and her earlobes had flushed red.

“Do you have to go?”

I have to leave Lilian in Siltrein and go out to a large-scale battle. To say it sat easy with me would have been a lie.

“It’s more or less finished. Handling holy power, I mean. I don’t need anyone beside me to teach me now.”

“…Is that so.”

“Let’s run. Let’s not go back to Siltrein at all, let’s leave Erbern just like this. I’ve already told the undead not to go near Siltrein. With that much, Roan and I have both done as much as anyone could ask.”

When had she changed like this? She had grown taller, and something in the air about her had shifted; Lilian was growing in a way that all at once made her strange to me.

“That would be good too.”
“Then we can just do that. Can’t we?”
“Still, having once agreed to help, I ought to see it to the end. This too is a commission, and a promise.”

A commission once taken on cannot be abandoned. The moment I stop keeping so much as a single promise, there will be nothing left that I am able to keep.

“…Is a commission such an important thing?”

Lilian took hold of my hand. Whether she was trying to feel my warmth through the gauntlet or to pass her own warmth into me, she gripped it hard, as though she meant never to let it slip.

“Then I’ll make a commission too.”
“No. There’s no need for that.”

I too put strength into my hand and gripped hers in return.

“Because I will be back soon, without any commission from you.”