MHHC Chapter 141

An Age That Demands Faith

Adelheid resolved to accept Miriam's kindness with gratitude.

She had recognized, of course, that the offer of curtains was a form of privilege—but if she refused even this, Miriam would simply find some other means to refuse her proposal in return. That much was inevitable.

Lena, learning of the arrangement only after the fact, grumbled that her mistress was going out of her way to invite hardship upon herself—yet she gathered her bags all the same and followed Adelheid down to the priests' quarters.

The room had been reasonably spacious. With two additional cots crowded in, there was barely space to draw breath.

By the time they had mostly finished settling in, Miriam dusted off her hands.

"Where have the supplies and medicines been stored?"

"I'll show you."

Adelheid stepped forward eagerly, taking the lead.

They worked through the supply crates one by one, accounting for each item, tallying quantities, and recording what would need to be requisitioned at the next delivery. The work was relentless enough that they managed little more than a few spoonfuls of soup between them—but that, Adelheid thought, was for the better.

The moment she was left to stillness, even briefly, unwanted thoughts rose to the surface. Thoughts of Valentin. Of Father Padre. Those kinds of thoughts.

"Bandages may run short," Miriam said, straightening up and pressing a hand to her lower back. "The stretchers aren't sufficient either. Even so, this much should hold us for a month."

A month.

Adelheid bit down on her thumbnail before she realized she was doing it.

Each time she grasped the true scale of this campaign, a helplessness settled over her that she couldn't shake. More than once throughout the day she had caught herself wishing there were other skilled healers here beside her.

'Mobilizing healers into war requires an enormous sum, true enough—but Denburg is hardly too poor a country to spare even a handful of them...'

As her anxiety climbed toward its peak, the resentment that had no other target found its way to the Emperor. There was something deeply wrong with this campaign—too many things that refused to sit right.

Miriam finished her inspection of the final supply crate, rolled her stiff back with a slow stretch, and said, "The medicinal herbs are well-stocked, all things considered—good quality throughout. The mallet root for pain relief is more than adequate. The fresh herbs are a little scarce, but given how brief their preservation window is, that's to be expected. We should add them to the next requisition list."

"……"

"Your Ladyship?"

Miriam glanced at Adelheid—who stood with a clouded expression, her thoughts somewhere else entirely—and cleared her throat.

Only then did Adelheid realize she had let the silence stretch far too long with Miriam standing right before her. Flustered, she reached for her notebook and promptly dropped it.

"S-sorry. I'll note it down at once."

"There's no rush."

Miriam bent and retrieved the notebook for her.

"You look rather tired, come to think of it. I heard you were ambushed by monsters just before reaching Nassau Castle. Have you had any proper rest since then?"

"Of course. I'm quite all right, physically."

"Ah. I'm not pressing you. It's only—I was told the wounded soldiers were in serious condition, and that Your Ladyship treated all of them."

Adelheid's eyes widened slightly to learn that Miriam already knew. She shook her head quickly.

"My skills were so inadequate—it wasn't proper treatment, not really. All I managed was to stop the bleeding. To plug the wounds."

"I was told that without Your Ladyship, most of them would not have survived. That the injuries were that severe." Miriam's voice was measured, almost matter-of-fact. "They all said the same thing—that the treatment was admirable. That it was a stroke of luck for the wounded that you were there."

"But I—"

"There will always be shortcomings. They'll be remedied quickly with experience. If this is where you begin, you'll soon be doing the work of three or four priests. The same as any other healer."

At that moment, a great horn-blast shook the walls of the fortress.

A new company arriving? Adelheid moved quickly to the nearest window and peered down.

As she had expected, rows of knights and soldiers were crossing the drawbridge in orderly formation—their numbers, even at a rough count, easily exceeding twenty thousand.

"...The subjugation force keeps growing larger," Adelheid murmured, watching them with uneasy eyes. The quiet words were clear enough for Miriam, who gave a slow nod.

"I've heard the situation has been shifting rapidly of late. The high command seems to believe the monster numbers may exceed our projections."

"Do you think that's truly possible?"

"No one knows yet. But..."

Miriam glanced around as if afraid of being overheard, then lowered her voice to just above a whisper.

"I've been told they're constructing a second defense line behind us, in preparation for the northern wall falling."

"The northern wall falling—"

Adelheid turned her gaze toward where the wall stood, her face drawn with quiet dread.

From this position, she could see the vast barrier rising above the darkened tree line—a thing of enormous, stone-cold permanence. Together with Ingrid's Wall, it had stood as humanity's first line of defense for as long as memory reached. That it might fall was something she could not even bring herself to imagine fully.

"……"

A foreboding had settled in her, and she could not name its source.

Had it begun when they arrived at Nassau Castle? Her instincts had been straining at the edges ever since—dangerous, they insisted, flee—a signal that would not quiet itself no matter how firmly she pressed it down.

She gripped the windowsill to steady the tremor inside her. And then, from among the soldiers gathered below, a tremendous roar rose up.

"For the glory of Friedeburg!"

"Brauchitsch! Brauchitsch!"

She looked down. The standard-bearers of each noble house were raising their banners high into the grey air. Each time a banner caught the wind, the soldiers who served beneath it thrust their fists upward and shouted as if competing.

Miriam leaned forward beside her, peering down at the spectacle with a slow, appraising expression.

"Friedeburg, Brauchitsch, Blomberg..." she said. "Three of the five great southern houses have arrived."

"Four," Adelheid answered, composed, watching the Reichenau banner pass through the drawbridge at the very end of the column.

Miriam seemed to reconsider the precise nature of Adelheid's relationship to that name—something shifting briefly in her expression—before she gave a short, quiet sound and nodded.

Then she added, as though something had just come into view, "I had heard that the young lady of Reichenau was participating as her family's heir. It seems it's true, then. There have been rumors circulating that she may have lost her ability—that she hasn't demonstrated her healing powers in quite some time."

"……"

"Well. Given that she's come all this way, those rumors appear to have been entirely groundless."

Adelheid turned in the direction Miriam was looking, but search as she might, she could not make out Charlotte in the procession below.

No matter. Even one additional pair of hands was something to be welcomed.

"It's good news for us. We're desperately short on healers. For the scale of this subjugation force, we may as well have none at all."

"Well—they've always been that way since that incident, haven't they?" Miriam said, dry and unsentimental. "They may be holding their heads high for now, but once the gravity of the situation becomes clear to them, the Tower will come around. They're just a sluggish lot by nature."

The incident Miriam referred to was one Adelheid had never witnessed herself—it had unfolded long before her birth—but it was famous enough that no one was ignorant of it. Healers mobilized into a subjugation campaign had been left stranded, abandoned by both the Grand Cathedral and the imperial court, and the bitterness had never fully healed.

After that, the Tower of Solaris had maintained a firm position: no compensation, no treatment. Despite every pressure from the court and the Cathedral, they had kept to their own course.

"In any case—Your Ladyship is right. Now is the time to borrow any hands we can. The Church is combing through its own ranks for every knight with the ability to wield sacred power. And they're drawing out as many experienced combat priests as possible. I would not be surprised if the Pope declares this campaign a holy war."

"A holy war?"

"It is an age that demands faith."

Miriam turned her gaze toward the northern wall as she answered, quietly.

Rumors of cracks forming in the wall that had protected humanity for centuries. Rumors that Morig no longer answered prayers. Rumors that sacred power was dimming across the land. Monsters piercing the holy barriers, attacking priests, threatening the very authority of the Grand Cathedral—

There was only one way for the Cathedral to silence all of this. If they could claim victory in a holy war fought in Morig's name, it would stand as proof that God had not yet abandoned them.

Miriam must have interpreted Adelheid's silence in some fashion, for she took Adelheid's hand in both of hers and made the sign of the cross.

"Don't be afraid. Morig will surely give us the courage to drive back the army of the wicked dragon."

"……"

The next day, the remaining reinforcements arrived one after another in a steady stream.

Command meetings stretched on without end. As the number of attendants required multiplied sharply, the servants ran themselves ragged without a moment to spare—clearing out the eastern wing of the fortress for additional quarters, pitching tents, hauling fresh water to where supplies had run dry. More and more people were turning up injured, caught off guard by monsters that had slipped inside the walls.

"You have to be especially careful when handling a wound like this."

Miriam held the writhing man down with both hands and gave Adelheid a nod.

Following her lead, Adelheid gripped the man's arm and pinned it firmly so the wound faced upward. Where a monster had bitten into the flesh—no more than ten minutes ago—the wound had already swollen into something grotesque, ballooning with pale fluid like an enormous abscess.

"A scratch is manageable enough, but when something with a mouth like an insect's gets hold of you, early treatment is everything. It comes with severe fever and abdominal pain, and in serious cases, death within two days. In that situation, you do this—"

Miriam lifted the blade she had been heating over the coals. The servant's thrashing immediately grew more violent.

Seeing them struggle, another young priestess nearby rushed over and threw her weight onto the man's shoulder.

"You need to lance the abscess with the heated blade and drain enough blood to clear it."

With practiced efficiency, Miriam pressed the blade to the swollen mass and opened it. A sharp, acrid odor—sour and deeply unpleasant—flooded the room in an instant.