MHHC Chapter 143

Face to Face

"In any case, please try not to stray from your position for the time being, Your Grace. We'll maintain as close an escort as we can, but should a dangerous situation arise suddenly, our response may not be as flexible as we'd like."

"Is the situation truly that serious?"

"It isn't only the monsters—it's that everything is shifting far more abruptly than we initially anticipated. Even among those lot wearing plate armor and playing at being knights, half of them are itinerant mercenaries."

Adelheid nodded with the expression of someone who had begun to understand exactly how things had unraveled.

The noble houses that had thrown their support behind the Crown Prince had never looked kindly upon this subjugation campaign. They seemed to believe the Emperor's mobilization order was nothing more than a pretext to forcibly conscript their private armies.

"We'd count ourselves lucky if at least some of them have swung a blade before. Nine times out of ten, they were tenant farmers with callused hands still shaped around a plow haft until a few weeks ago. Bribed with just enough coin to impersonate elite soldiers and fill out the headcount."

"Surely not—that can't be right. That would mean most of them have almost no combat experience at all."

"Look at how they're getting themselves wounded by one or two monsters that slipped in under cover. Anyone watching would think they'd already survived three or four full engagements."

"......"

"Either way, this is exactly the kind of time when it's easy to get tangled up in trouble you didn't go looking for. When you go anywhere, please try not to walk alone if you can help it."

"Thank you for the warning. I'll bear it in mind."

"Then I'll wait outside. Take your time with the horse."

Donovan tossed the remaining carrot to his own horse and vanished through the stable doors. Adelheid watched the back of his head for a long moment, her eyes slightly narrowed.

The atmosphere of the castle began to shift sharply from the afternoon onward.

The cause was a rumor—that the days-long deadlock among the commanding officers had finally broken, the fractured opinions converging at last into one.

From that moment on, people gathered in clusters wherever two faces happened to meet, and the speculation that spilled between them was always the same: when, precisely, would the subjugation begin in earnest?

"Word is it'll be at dawn tomorrow."

"Isn't that too soon? Half the preparations aren't done yet."

"What preparations? When are yours ever going to be done?"

"They've already sent scouts toward the northern barrier—three hours ago, I watched them leave myself."

The anxiety spread like contagion, moving from body to body until the whole castle hummed with it.

Had their unease infected her as well? Adelheid found she could not keep still—pacing the perimeter of her room until the walls seemed to press inward—and at last she returned of her own accord to the patients' ward, where she could make herself useful and keep her hands occupied.

While she was lancing abscesses and changing dressings, the complicated thoughts could not find purchase in her mind. There was only the work.

She was straightening up after a final careful examination of the last patient's wound when a large, rough hand closed around her arm, and the soldier's voice came out in a ragged plea.

"Water—water, please..."

Adelheid glanced around and found a tin cup and a pitcher sitting on a nearby ledge.

She filled the cup quickly and held it out; the soldier seized it with both hands and drank in great desperate swallows, as though someone might take it from him if he paused—and in his urgency, he spilled half of it down the front of his shirt.

"Slowly. I'll give you more."

She spoke in a steadying tone and tipped the pitcher again, but only a few drops trickled out.

That had been the last cup. She turned to find Lena, but Lena had already been called away on some other errand.

Adelheid hesitated, then allowed the patient's imploring gaze to decide for her. She picked up the pitcher and rose.

'I'll be back quickly. The water station isn't even far from here.'

Donovan had warned her not to walk alone, but by his own account there was an escort keeping watch nearby... The greater danger, of course, was not people but monsters. That very morning, two creatures with vestigial, withered wings had infiltrated the castle walls.

Still no one had determined through which passage they were entering. The knights had been combing the castle day and night searching for it, and still nothing.

"Adelheid."

She had been walking with her thoughts elsewhere. She lifted her head at the sound of her name.

"What a thing, to meet you again like this."

For a fraction of a moment she thought—hoped—it might be Valentin, but the man standing before her was not Valentin.

Crown Prince Mikhail. The moment she recognized him, the color drained from Adelheid's face in a single, involuntary breath.

She said nothing. She turned on her heel and walked back the way she had come, quickly.

From behind her came the sound of a scoff—the particular note of someone thoroughly unimpressed.

"You're going to run away without even a greeting?"

"......"

"Adele."

Adelheid covered her ears and broke into something close to a run.

But it was strange. The voice that should have been falling away behind her kept pace—at a steady, unvarying distance—as though the corridor itself were conspiring to hold them at precisely this interval.

No footsteps. And yet the distance was shrinking.

The voice sounded as though it was directly behind her now, she thought—and in the instant she thought it, a hand closed around her forearm, and her whole body was wrenched around roughly.

"Did you think you'd actually get away like that?"

She was panting, breath ragged. Mikhail looked as though he had not moved at all. There was no sign of exertion on him—no flushed cheek, no hurried breath. He might have crossed the space between them by some other means entirely—by folding the air, by stepping through a door that existed only for him. There were eyes enough in this corridor to make that impossible. And yet.

"Have you given it any thought?"

The bluntness of the question made her flinch backward.

"Given what thought."

"The proposal I made you. About surrendering your origin to me. Surely you haven't forgotten."

Mikhail raised an eyebrow as though he could not fathom how forgetting was even possible. Then he studied her with the unhurried appraisal of a merchant evaluating something laid out on a counter, and continued.

"You've accumulated quite a bit of power since we last spoke. You don't seem to have mastered its use yet—but still."

It was the particular kind of observation that lodged itself under the skin. Adelheid shoved hard against the chest pressed too close to her and stepped back, putting distance between them.

"I gave you my answer on that proposal some time ago. I neither know the method for surrendering one's origin, nor the terms."

"And if you knew the method?"

"......"

"That sounds like you'd be willing, if it were possible."

He closed the distance she had won in a few unhurried steps.

Adelheid looked around with anxious eyes.

Mikhail was behaving with an intimacy that shattered every boundary society would sanction—pressing close enough that anyone passing who didn't know better would find the scene deeply suspicious.

"Please, at least step back a little while we—"

"Answer first."

She retreated, one step, then another, until there was nowhere left to retreat to. The floor behind her heels dropped away into a steep staircase.

She scrabbled backward with her feet, testing for an escape route—and the motion had the desperate, precarious quality of someone about to lose their footing entirely.

"Hmm? Adelheid."

She was on the verge of descending one step to avoid him when he pressed close again.

Her foot found nothing. She understood something was wrong in the same instant that correcting it became impossible.

Adelheid wrapped both hands around her own head and squeezed her eyes shut, bracing herself for the impact.

"...!"

But there was no impact.

Instead, solid arms caught her from behind, receiving her weight against a firm chest.

When the pain she'd been waiting for didn't come—when it kept not coming—Adelheid carefully opened her eyes.

Before her heartbeat had finished its lurch of terror, a familiar warmth reached her—that particular scent, that particular presence—rolling over her like something arriving from very far away.

"What business do you have with my wife?"

The voice was deep and polished to a terrible smoothness, the kind of quality that made the skin prickle. But Adelheid knew immediately that Valentin was in the grip of a fury unlike anything ordinary.

He was standing at her back, both hands gripping her shoulders, so she couldn't see his face—but she could read the shape of his anger in the way the color had quietly leached from Mikhail's lips.

"...Grand Duke."

Mikhail clearly could not bear to acknowledge, even to himself, that he had been momentarily shaken. He curved his mouth into a slanted, cutting line and spoke with deliberate sharpness.

"I do hope you'll come to understand your position. If you're truly intending to live out your days mixed in among the flock."

"Before that. Morig."

Morig. The name in Valentin's mouth sounded like the beginning of a growl.

"......"

The silence that followed was the kind that makes breathing difficult. Adelheid realized that Valentin was conveying something to him through pure will, the way he sometimes did—carrying words without sound.

The gaze that had locked between them like opposing blades held, and held, until at last Mikhail was the one to look away.

Adelheid noticed that Mikhail's hand was trembling faintly.

The same way she herself had trembled, in the early days, whenever Valentin's will struck her with its full force.

"...So. Did I lay a single finger on her?"

"......"

"And you would do well not to forget this, either—that our wager is still in progress."

Mikhail spoke the words with cold, chewed precision, and in the same moment Adelheid felt Valentin's grip on her shoulders tighten—just slightly, just enough for her to feel it.

Without thinking, she laid her hand over his.

Over the back of his hand where it rested on her shoulder.

The instinct behind it was simple: she could not let him grow any angrier than this. Not here.

"......"

She felt it—the taut wire of Valentin's tension easing, fractionally, beneath her touch.

Mikhail observed this with an expression that made no effort to conceal its contempt. The emotions burning inside him were each so vivid and undisguised that even Adelheid—who understood so little of what lay between these two—found them simply horrifying to witness.

Which made it all the more disorienting when Mikhail smiled.

"Go ahead, be as triumphant as you like. That authority of yours has precious little time remaining."

"......"

"When suppressing it is already the full extent of what you can manage."

He poured the words out like something corrosive—a hatred without clear referent—then fixed Valentin with one final look and turned and walked away and was gone.

Adelheid remained huddled and tense until he had completely disappeared from view. Only then did she allow herself to exhale.

And it seemed the same was true for Valentin.

"......"

The hands holding her shoulders released their grip, slowly, with great deliberateness.

Adelheid moved to step out of his hold and face him—but before she could, he pulled her back against him, his arms wrapping around her waist with sudden and unmistakable force.