MHHC Chapter 147

Omen

Adelheid's slender hands, which had been searching the empty air, finally found his back and pulled it close.

She curved her fingers, pressing her nails against him as though to say she would not let go. Ah. The breath she drew in was too full for her lungs to contain, and with it came the scent of him—flooding through her nose, her mouth, soaking into her completely.

Fat tears gathered at the soft corners of her eyes, then fell in a sudden rush. Drip, drip.

How strange.

She feared the separation, yes. But there was nothing to grieve. Nothing at all.

Adelheid loosened her grip on Valentin's back.

She pulled inward—the way a body gathers itself before leaping for greater distance—then rose on her heels in a single motion and draped both arms over his shoulders, hanging there with all the desperate weight of someone who has decided to hold on with everything they have.

The force of it made Valentin's upper body stagger, bending forward into her. Where their cheeks met, where her cheek pressed against his neck, their warmth bled together in a manner that observed no boundary.

"I want you to come back safe."

She had opened her mouth at last, and her voice came out ruined with it—her throat closing around the words like a hand around a wound.

"Soul or body—return everything that belongs to you to me, whole and unbroken."

"……"

"Bring victory. Bring glory more radiant than anything."

So that nothing can test you any further. So that you need never be bound by any bargain or convention again.

And if you must have an end, then I will spend whatever life I am given standing beside you—

He heard it all. Even the hope she had only breathed inward, in the silence where words did not reach. The hand at her spine pressed harder, fingers tightening with a force that felt like it might leave its shape in her bones.

She could feel his lips—warm against her temple.

"……"

Very slowly, Valentin drew her away from himself.

His expression was a complicated thing. He seemed, even now, incapable of noticing anyone around them. His clean clothes were entirely creased; his hair had come loose in disarray. People at a distance were already murmuring, watching them—and still he could not seem to care.

His gaze went nowhere but to her. Those gold eyes, dimly luminous—as though in relief, or in pain, or in some emotion that could not decide which of those it was.

Adelheid looked back at him with uncertain eyes and caught his sleeve again.

"Valentin?"

Her call returned him to himself. He let out a breath that was long and long—the slow exhale of a man who has been held underwater and only now been pulled clear. He looked like someone who had only found the capacity to breathe again upon hearing her voice.

The smile that settled on his lips struck Adelheid as wrong, though she could not say precisely how.

"……Yes."

He answered one beat too late, then bent at the waist. The hand he extended was courteous. The wrongness she felt from him had not left.

Something inside him—two emotions that had no business coexisting—was colliding with tremendous force.

He bowed. He took her hand and raised it, and the kiss he pressed to it was so careful, so precise, that it felt like a vow made to something other than the present moment.

His eyelids cast a long shadow across his cheek. Adelheid watched him, almost entranced—and then those gold eyes tilted upward at an angle, finding hers from below. When their gazes met, the world tilted slightly on its axis.

As though he were not a man at all, but one of those creatures said to dissolve human reason at a touch—

"Everything as you wish."

He straightened. Uung—and at the same moment, the horn sounded once more, brief and final.

The last signal to assemble.

Valentin closed his hand around hers one final time, hard, then let go.

"Don't get hurt."

"I understand."

"And don't do anything reckless. If time allows before departure, I'll come back to see you once more."

Adelheid knew instinctively that he would not come.

Because they were each other's weakness. Because seeing her again would only make him softer, when he could not afford to be.

She pretended not to know this, dragging her fingers across her cheek to wipe the tears away, and nodded.

"I'll be waiting."

Valentin nodded in return and turned to gesture at the escort.

This time, he did not wait for her to leave first.

She stood exactly where she was, unmoving, and watched him go.

"……"

In every parting they had shared, it was always Valentin who watched someone's back disappear. The standing and watching had always belonged to him.

Was that why? Watching him leave felt strange in a way she had no name for.

And the strangeness brought unease with it, in equal measure. That wrongness she had felt in him earlier—what had it been? A simple trick of perception? Or—

She was still weighing whether to run after him and ask when he reached the far end of the staircase.

Passing knights noticed him and snapped to salute.

"……"

Valentin. She breathed his name against the inside of her lips.

And she thought—she was almost certain—that his footsteps faltered for a single instant.

But he did not look back.

Late winter sunlight descended brilliantly over his shoulders as he walked down the stairs. It was as though the light received him. As though he were disappearing into it.

Ten days later, the first word of victory reached her.

What had been a stalled, grinding campaign began to move swiftly in the aftermath of that first win.

Victory fires rose several times a day, and with them the soldiers' morale climbed to heights it had not reached before.

The Ansgar forces under Valentin's command, in particular, distinguished themselves in every engagement they entered. Even here at Nassau Castle, far behind the lines, one could feel the weight of his name—the reach of his glory and presence.

"I heard before I was sent back, five days ago." The wounded knight shifted against his pillow. "There's an old ruin beyond the northern wall, and the monsters' stronghold is somewhere past it. Gh——"

"I'm sorry. Did that hurt?"

Adelheid pulled her hands back quickly from where she had been pressing the splint firm. The knight winced, but made an effort to smile.

"It's—it's fine."

"Then please, go on."

"In front of the ruins there's a collapsed tower. The monsters have been using it as a surveillance point—we've taken to calling it the 'watchtower' among ourselves. It may have collapsed, but in practice it's closer to a massive fortress."

Adelheid listened with careful attention to everything the injured knight said.

Once the wounded understood that she was the Grand Duke of Ansgar's wife, they had taken to competing with each other to bring her news of Valentin. The reason was simple: the Grand Duke had saved their lives, more than once, and they carried that debt like a lantern.

"When I was still at the front, there were rumors of assembling an elite unit to strike the watchtower. If they can deal that place a real blow, what comes after should be straightforward."

She subsisted on these fragments—listening intently for any mention of Valentin in the scattered intelligence the wounded brought her, enduring each day in a state that had come to resemble continuous prayer.

The Valentin who appeared in their accounts sounded like something that had stepped out of legend. To ride alongside him was considered a considerable honor; the morale of any battle he entered rose three or four times over what it would otherwise have been.

Victory and glory. Each time she heard these words on the lips of the wounded soldiers, Adelheid understood something clearly: he was trying, as hard as he could, to keep his promise to her.

"The Grand Duke will return safely, Your Grace."

Had she let the exhausted worry show too plainly on her face? The unsolicited reassurance came from nowhere, and Adelheid found herself smiling at it despite herself.

"Thank you for saying so. Now please—no more exerting yourself. Rest."

She lifted the brass basin of cooling water and rose from the knight's bedside.

Her hands and feet had swollen from a full day of relentless work, but there was no time to rest.

Wounded soldiers arrived by carriage every single day. On average, five carriages every two days. On the worst days, seven.

The ward, already cramped beyond all comfort, was now at the point of splitting apart at its seams. Even for the fortunate ones who survived long enough to reach the castle, there was barely enough floor space to lie down.

"Adele! Come over here and help me!"

She was pouring water from the brass basin into the frozen garden bed when someone called out to her at volume.

Miriam.

Adelheid hurried back into the ward.

Miriam was struggling with a patient in the grip of convulsions, barely holding on.

Even in the brief moment Adelheid watched, Miriam nearly caught an elbow to the eye. She threw Adelheid a sharp, urgent look.

"Grab that arm, tight—careful not to touch the wound—yes, exactly, that's it——"

Adelheid seized the patient's limbs according to Miriam's instructions. She had done this enough times now that what had once frightened her had become something she could simply do.

After a long spell of thrashing—head snapping back and forth, sounds rising from the patient's throat that had no intelligible shape—the wounded man went limp at last, spent.

Following Miriam's direction, Adelheid pried the patient's lips apart and slowly introduced medicine, a spoonful at a time.

Most of it came back up in coughing. But with stubborn patience, she worked through the whole bowl.

Adelheid gave the wound a final meticulous examination and poured in what healing ability she had left to offer. Then she sank down beside Miriam, entirely drained.

"……You've worked hard. Aren't you tired?"

Miriam curved her mouth at her, the question carrying something almost fond in its weariness. Adelheid looked at her with genuine admiration.

How could she still find the latitude to smile, looking the way she did? Worse, if anything, than Adelheid herself.

"The circles under your eyes are absolutely black, Adele."

"I didn't sleep well last night."

"I think my sisters and I can manage the afternoon shifts. Go wash up, sleep two hours, then come back. The last thing we need is for you to drop in the middle of a ward."

It had been since Adelheid had told her she needn't address her by title every time, that Miriam could simply use her name. The wall between them had grown paper-thin. And now, after weeks of running side by side through the ward at all hours, something had grown between them that felt almost like the peculiar camaraderie of soldiers.

Because she was tired enough to faint—Miriam was right about that—Adelheid accepted the gesture gratefully.

"Don't come back down before supper."

Miriam waved one hand in farewell as Adelheid left.

Adelheid stripped off her blood-smeared apron and stepped out of the ward. The moment she was alone, the knight's words pressed back into the space behind her eyes.

'Take the watchtower, and everything gets easier. The Grand Duke will be fine.'

How she wished she could accept that comfortable forecast and mean it. The situation was genuinely improving day by day—the toil of the subjugation force was showing real results. The number of monsters drawing near to the castle had fallen off noticeably, which was proof enough of that.

And yet the unease would not leave her.

'It's too quiet. Like the stillness that comes before a storm.'

She had drifted into thought, standing quite still, when a rush of movement near her shoulder snapped her back. Several knights she recognized by face moved quickly past, followed by a cluster of soldiers—moving with the particular urgency of people who have been given a task they cannot delay.

Adelheid stepped aside in bewilderment. Then a second group of knights came running past in the same direction, and her eyes went wide. Had something happened?

"Your Grace. I found you here."

Someone gripped her shoulder, and Adelheid startled hard and looked up.

Donovan stood there, looking at her with a face set into stone.

"You'll need to come with me."