Chapter 174 - The Iron Duke's City (1)

Only silence filled the mayor's office in Soara.

Rutiger, who had been sitting quietly in the mayor's seat, gave a hollow laugh at the report he had just heard, as if he found it absurd.

"You just let the dwarves go? And without any promise at all?"

"I am sorry, Lord Rutiger."

Rutiger had an open, hearty impression no matter who looked at him, but the sharp energy dwelling in his black eyes was something he had been born with.

The mayor of Soara did not dare meet that gaze and ended up lowering his head.

"I tried my best to hold them here, but..."

"But?"

They had sent back the dwarves they had gone to such effort to summon without accomplishing anything.

It was a report that went beyond incompetence and came close to irresponsibility, but the mayor had his own explanation.

"They insisted on speaking only with Sir Vlad or Lord Joseph, so there was truly nothing I could do."

Perhaps because they were born with the temperament of craftsmen, every last one of the dwarves had a stubborn streak.

Even when the mayor begged them to wait, they merely turned away, saying they could not speak with anyone but those two.

"On top of that, the river was starting to freeze over, so it was difficult to ask them to wait any longer. I am sorry, Lord Rutiger."

"... I understand. You may leave."

It could certainly be called incompetence, but saying so would not change anything now.

Rutiger, who did not particularly feel like rebuking him, sent the mayor out and looked toward the scarred man sitting at the guest table.

"The Count wishes to bring the dwarves over to our side by any means."

"I know."

But Marcus did not meet Rutiger's eyes.

He merely held his teacup and said what he had to say.

"Have you persuaded Sir Vlad, by any chance?"

"... No. Not yet."

"That is troubling."

The black crow sitting before Rutiger now was a messenger bird.

Therefore, everything he said now was also the words of Peter, the Family Head.

"Please hurry. Even now, people everywhere are moving to win Sir Vlad over."

"I will keep that in mind."

After hearing Marcus's words, Rutiger quietly rose from his seat and began looking out the window at the scenery of Soara.

A city with no particular point of contact with him.

Yet to someone born in this city, it must also be a place not easily abandoned.

"What happened with Baroness Alicia?"

"Our little lady seems to have managed to fend her off."

"That is good."

At Rutiger's words that it was good, Marcus quietly set down the teacup he was holding.

"Not particularly."

Rutiger, who had been looking out the window, turned around with a puzzled expression at Marcus's words.

"What do you mean?"

"She said she would accept nothing anymore."

A woman named Zemina, to whom Bayezid had extended favor in order to bind Vlad.

"She said she would accept nothing at all if it had anything to do with Sir Vlad. It seems she realized what the favor we offered her meant."

"... Did she?"

But she had said she did not want to become a shackle binding Vlad.

She said that if she had known this was the intention, she would never have accepted it in the first place.

"Maybe it is because this is a place Joseph had his hands on. Nothing ever works out properly here."

Why was it so difficult to gain even one masterless knight?

A city that would not listen to its rightful mayor or to the words of the next Family Head.

Rutiger could only look at the scenery outside the window and give a bitter smile.

* * *

BRRRR!

The inn's stable, specially made for a single horse.

There, Noir quietly closed his eyes as he felt Zemina's touch for the first time in a truly long while.

"I don't know why everyone finds him so hard to deal with. He listens so well."

"... Really?"

Vlad and Got stared in wonder at Noir, who showed not a single complaint despite Zemina's clumsy brushing.

Noir's tightly shut eyes, as if savoring the touch, did not look as though they would open easily anytime soon.

"... That guy's not usually like that."

"Maybe they're compatible."

Got, who was also a stableman, scratched the back of his head as he watched a scene that was hard to explain.

Got had taken pride in the fact that he could at least handle Noir, but before Zemina, even that pride always seemed to shrink.

"Is your mother doing well?"

"Not just Mom. My younger sibling and their spouse are doing well too. It's a little colder than where we used to be, though."

Got, who had come as a refugee with his mother to escape the aftermath of war, had now firmly settled down in Soara.

Though the former mayor who had hired him as a stableman had left, perhaps because of the weight of Vlad's name, Got was still able to work as the stableman at city hall.

"By the way, I heard the dwarves took the forge furnace from the smithy?"

"Yeah. They say they carried it off like they were escorting some precious treasure."

But even though he had a respectable job, Got's nature of poking around here and there had not changed much.

That was true not only at his workplace, city hall, but also in the back alleys where Rose's Smiles stood.

"They begged Madam so hard to give them that furnace. Even when she said the boss had to come and decide, they pleaded with her to hand it over. So what could Madam do? They were precious guests, so she had no choice but to give it to them."

"Hm. Is that so?"

Got, who had been gathering all kinds of rumors with ears that could hear even what his eyes could not see firsthand, was telling him in detail about everything that had happened in Soara.

"And it seems Lord Joseph's health has gotten much worse. I heard the Countess is asking around everywhere for doctors right now."

"..."

As news of Joseph's current state flowed from Got's mouth, Vlad's expression began to turn serious.

"They say it's that bad?"

"How would I know? He was always sickly to begin with."

Though their contract had ended with Joseph's failure in the competition for Family Head, the trust the two of them had built had not ended.

Vlad still believed that, morally at least, there was something he had to repay him for, so there was no way he would welcome bad rumors about Joseph.

"Got. Change the water bucket here."

"Hm? It looks clean."

"It doesn't look that way at all to me."

Beside Noir, who bared his gums as if disappointed, Zemina stood with both hands on her hips and looked at Got.

"What will you do? Should I change it?"

"No. Madam should not do such work."

The person known as Zemina may have been a comfortable childhood friend to Vlad, but to Got, she was one of the powerful figures of the back alleys who was difficult to deal with.

Having that Zemina carry a water bucket was, in many ways, an unsettling thing for Got.

"Actually, I was waiting to see when you would call me."

Got did not complain at all about Zemina's instruction.

He simply smiled good-naturedly and hurried to move.

Because he knew very well that in order to cling close to Vlad, who had now risen all the way to the rank of noble, he needed Zemina's permission.

"Why did you send Got away?"

"Because I have something to tell only you."

After Got left to draw water, only one horse and two people remained before the stable.

Vlad, realizing that Zemina had deliberately separated Got from them, looked puzzled.

"What do you have to tell me?"

"It's a message from the dwarves. You've been so busy there was never time to give it to you."

With those words, Zemina took a coin from her breast and handed it to Vlad.

The way she glanced around as if worried someone might see somehow made it look as though she was enjoying this situation.

"This is..."

"They asked me to give it to you."

Though the dwarves had left without any promise at all as far as the mayor of Soara was concerned, to Zemina, at least, they had left behind a way to contact them.

"They said to meet them in Nassau. They said you can contact them at the tavern where you first met."

"... The tavern where we first met."

And Zemina passed the dwarves' message to Vlad, just as they had wanted.

'I've seen this coin somewhere before.'

But Vlad's attention was drawn more to the coin they had handed over than to the dwarves' message to meet in Nassau.

"Hm? There were more like that?"

"... They look the same to you too, don't they?"

After checking the coin the dwarves had sent, Vlad took out the two coins he had been keeping deep inside until now.

One from Lamund, and one from Auguste.

As Vlad compared those with the dwarves' coin, his eyes began to narrow.

Coins so rusted they looked shabby.

The places he had received them were all different, but the way they looked lying on his palm, all three coins seemed exactly the same.

* * *

Everyone in the North was shrinking from the cold that seeped all the way into their bones, but the people of Deirmar were different.

Even now, warmth lingered throughout Deirmar, enough that green grass could still be seen here and there.

Some of the elderly, seeing Deirmar warmer than ever before, would recall old memories and offer thanks toward the lemon tree on the hill.

This act of gratitude, which they said had only been practiced when the old people were young, was also a sight that had been difficult to find when the fearsome Vatican church had stood here.

"... It grows larger by the day."

Varadis, captain of the rangers, looked up at Heinal's tree standing on the hill and measured the height of the very top branch.

"It has not even been half a year."

Heinal's tree seemed twice as large as when he had first seen it.

Even by the common sense of elves, who were deeply knowledgeable about plants, its rate of growth was hard to understand.

And the difficult thing to understand was not simply the size of the tree.

"Lord Varadis. It seems one more child has begun to recognize spirits."

"That makes four."

"... Yes. We confirmed the child recognizing young spirits."

With today, it was the fourth.

The number of children who could recognize spirits.

After hearing his subordinate's report, Varadis quietly began engraving a pentagram into his left eye.

Then there was a world of spirits that began to show itself clearly.

"Is all this because of this spirit?"

In the world seen through the eyes of elves alone, there was a white snake now coiled upon a branch.

An ancient spirit said to have originated not from the World Tree of Aushrina, but from the Mother World Tree.

It was quiet, as if taking a midday nap, but even now, young spirits could be seen running and playing atop the white snake.

"Lord Varadis. A messenger bird is flying in from Aushrina."

"A messenger bird?"

Before his subordinate could even point out where, Varadis saw the white snake stretch its neck long toward the sky.

Its eyes were half-lidded as if it had just woken, but from the direction the white snake was looking, a hawk said to live only in Aushrina was flying in.

"That's it. Good."

GURGLE.

The hawk, which had flown in with its eyes rolling around, quietly settled on Varadis's wrist as if exhausted from flying all the way from a distant place.

As Varadis carefully stroked the one that had flown from his faraway homeland, he could feel the white snake's gaze fixed intently on the messenger bird above his head.

As if it were asking to look together, Varadis deliberately unfolded the message he had received wide.

"... It is a revelation."

The message flown from Aushrina bore a seal only the elders could use.

And behind that seal was a crooked drawing that made it perfectly clear who must have drawn it.

"Upon a blue sea... a silver dragon."

It was a drawing that seemed to have been made by a child, yet perhaps because of that, there was a feeling it conveyed all the more clearly.

A single small boat drifting over paint so vividly blue it seemed as if the sea had been poured out.

And in the revelation sent to them, a silver dragon was drawn lunging toward that boat.

"... Everyone, make preparations. We must move at once."

But even in the midst of the entirely blue drawing, Varadis was able to discover one small point that felt out of place.

The small boat floating on the sea.

In the crow's nest of that boat, a single golden light had been marked like a dot.

"Where are we moving?"

"Where we are going is..."

A revelation comes to the one who receives it like intuition.

It was only a tiny dot, but upon seeing that dot, Varadis could be certain it was Vlad.

"North."

Varadis did not know for certain where Vlad would be, but when a huge shadow soon fell over him, he was able to decide the direction.

The white snake's gesture of its head seemed to be telling him, over there.

"Most likely Soara."

Indeed, as Varadis said, the place the white snake was pointing toward was the direction where Soara lay.