IYTTEPAAK Chapter 35

Regen, for his part, didn't bother pressing her for the hidden meaning.

"Today I've brought Sir Regen to see the convent. We'll take a short look around, just the two of us—you needn't assign us an escort."

"Understood. Send for me at any time, should you need anything."

Before she withdrew, the Mother Superior leaned toward the novice behind her—still gripping her broom—and said something low.

"Go and tell the children their Godmother has come."

"Yes, Mother Superior!"

The novice hurrying toward the door had a face gone pink with color, excited to deliver the good news.

"Come, Sir Regen."

Sasha led Regen in the very direction the novice had vanished.

His thoughts had multiplied. This place she'd suddenly brought him to—no ordinary convent, surely.

And Sasha wasn't the sort of person who chose her confidants carelessly, not for anything of real depth.

Without even trying, Regen's mind worked out the natural shape of the relationship between Sasha and the Mother Superior.

At the very least, an informant. At most, someone with whom she pursued a shared cause.

Walking the corridor of the shabby stone building, Sasha spoke.

"You must have a great many questions, Sir Regen."

"I'm waiting for you to tell me."

"I think seeing will serve better than hearing."

Rooms lined both sides of the corridor, packed close together. Inside, the younger girls and the older girls gathered in twos and threes, reading picture books—or playing with wooden toys—or making the things that kept the convent's household running.

They noticed Sasha and stopped what they were doing to greet her warmly.

"It's Godmother!"

"Hello!"

Sasha waved a simple hand and passed through.

They watched, a little wistful, until she vanished from sight, but soon turned back to whatever they'd been doing.

They came out the far side of the building into a back garden and a farm plot. Here too, the welcome for Sasha continued.

The girls feeding the goats and the girls working the vineyard straightened their backs and greeted her warmly.

"Hello, Godmother!"

"Thank you, as always, Godmother!"

Round and round the convent, it was the same thing, over and over.

At a glance it looked like the ordinary response of subjects humoring a dignitary come to inspect. And in fact, given the patron-and-ward relationship between them, there was nothing strange in that.

But Regen's expression grew steadily more serious. Once the number of girls, young and old, who had greeted them passed ten, his eyes took on a look of genuine disbelief.

At last the tour ended, and Sasha and Regen stood on a hill overlooking the whole convent.

It was a scenic spot, a single magnificent oak grown tall and lovely.

"Has enough been explained?"

"Yes."

Regen parted his lips without a sound, then closed them again. From sheer bewilderment, he'd nearly choked down a disbelieving huff of laughter.

"The girls here—every one of them can handle mana."

"That's right. My patronage isn't purely goodwill."

"Is training taking place as well, by any chance?"

"There's a training facility beneath the convent."

Meaning: the princess was raising a private army. Behind the Mad Emperor's back.

And what could be seen was surely not all there was. Regen judged it at once and found the necessary question.

"How many places like this are there?"

"Three, including this one, near the imperial capital. More scattered across the empire. And two more at what used to be the border. It's an age with a great many war orphans, after all."

The information connected with something that had once come from Archbishop Grehmol's own mouth.

'The number of children born with the ability to handle mana has been declining lately. It's no trouble now, but at this rate, in ten years, twenty years, maintaining a knight corps to serve His Majesty will run into serious difficulty.'

Archbishop Grehmol had blamed the birth rate for the shortage of mana-users. He'd been entirely wrong.

Sasha had been quietly siphoning them away and raising them here, at the convent.

"How many children are there, in total?"

"Three hundred fifty-two."

The Mad Emperor's personal guard numbered a little over two hundred knights.

If every one of these girls was safely trained and turned into fighting strength, and Sasha bound all of them—

it would create an overwhelming, absolute knight corps.

'Brand them all…….'

Just as Regen let his gaze fall quiet, Sasha confessed the whole of her conduct so far.

"All this time, I've been quietly obstructing Archbishop Grehmol so he can't seize real power. As long as he's absorbed in political fighting, he won't turn his attention to the convent. Claws, after all—they're harder to hide than they are to bare."

"......"

Sasha's pale sky-blue eyes were, in this moment, darker than the deep blue overhead.

Her granted title was the Silver Bird Princess. If she was a bird, her species would be the silver hawk—and Regen's eyes had not been wrong to think so.

Her voice came on, unhurried.

"What I need now is time. The youngest of them is only just twelve."

"That truly will be a long-term plan."

"Yes. I'm looking ten years ahead. But that doesn't mean the waiting will be dull. There's a great deal to be done inside the palace, too."

She didn't mean only surviving the Imperial Trial. She meant, surely, dealing with collaborators like Archbishop Grehmol.

As if sifting the words for what mattered, Regen echoed one part of it back.

"You said ten years."

"Yes."

"Does that ten years include my own strength as well?"

"No. That was a plan made before I ever met you."

"Then if you recalculate with me included, what does it come to?"

"I couldn't say. How much stronger do you intend to become?"

For a moment, a thought rose in Regen at once.

'Enough that you could never brand anyone else.'

The binding seemed, once again, to be steering his feelings, stoking a kind of possessiveness in him.

Fortunately Regen swallowed the words with good sense, and Sasha didn't ask a second time. It hadn't been a question she'd asked expecting an answer in the first place—she'd assumed from the start that it couldn't be predicted.

Sasha stepped forward and stood close to Regen. Looking up at him, her blue eyes held something provoking, maybe from how close the distance between them had come to intruding.

"How does it feel? A princess preparing to rebel against her own father."

"......"

"Is she worth protecting?"

To bring their eyes level, Regen lowered himself onto one knee.

"Of course."

"Then I suppose you're worth living for as well."

So long as their two goals aligned, his staying quietly by her side was never mere complacency. If anything, he was following the very best path available to him.

Only then did Regen fully understand the purpose of this excursion.

It was to plant in him, eaten through with disgrace as he was, a reason worth staying alive for.

Sasha hadn't offered him only a great cause and revenge. She was also the sort of lady who did a knight honor.

The one who'd healed not only his right heart but his left as well. Regen willingly pressed his lips to the back of her hand and said:

"As you command, Your Highness."

There are people in this world who live on faith and honor alone. Regenhart Lohengrin was one of them.

Taking that short excursion with him had been a good choice. Since that day, Regen looked like a man who'd found his footing and stood up straight.

More than just the unsteady wavering in him vanishing—the air about him had hardened. Watching his straight, upright back, it felt like the solidity of a guardian's rampart.

I felt that the excursion had made Regen considerably stronger. It was a sense only those of imperial blood—only those who held dominion—could perceive. And that sense was telling me: he had.

But a week had now passed, and his oak tree remained almost exactly as it had been.

"His mana core treatment doesn't seem to be making much real progress. More dominion has come to be spent on Sir Regen—I wonder what's behind that."

Consulting with Regen produced an answer at once.

"It's probably a matter of mindset. The mind is, in the end, mental fortitude."

"Ah, of course. Willpower."

The dominion spent to sustain a binding grows in proportion to the mana and mental fortitude a knight possesses.

There was no sudden event that would have given him some awakening to strengthen his will. It was more reasonable to think that his mind, badly worn down by the storms of fate he'd weathered, had simply recovered.

Sure enough—the hero of Lohengrin, exceptional in willpower too.