MHHC Chapter 149

Possibility

"You cannot."

Adelheid ignored Donovan as though he were neither visible nor audible to her—as though he were simply a shadow cast against the doorframe, nothing more.

Her hands moved quickly, pressing and folding, tucking clothes into the bag spread wide open across the bed. A few changes of clothes she could wear at once, a towel, the herb pouch and bandages—she had taken only what was strictly necessary, and yet the bag was already so taut it seemed on the verge of splitting at its seams.

She was making her final inspection, checking that nothing had been overlooked, when her gaze snagged on the dagger resting atop the bedside table.

The one Valentin had always told her to keep on her person...

The sudden swell of emotion that surged into her throat was barely—barely—beaten back. Adelheid snatched up the dagger and dropped it last into the bag.

She wrestled the near-bursting bag shut, managed to heave it upright, and swayed beneath its weight. She set her teeth and held on. Stubbornness, she had discovered, was a kind of strength.

She moved toward the door—and Donovan, who had been leaning at an idle angle against the frame, straightened and stepped fully into her path.

"...Why are you doing this?"

"I might ask you the very same thing. Move aside."

"I understand that you are alarmed by the news of His Grace. I understand, too, that you wish to be of use in any way you can."

"..."

"But what cannot be done cannot be done. I gave His Grace my word that I would place Her Ladyship's safety above all else. No doubt he anticipated exactly this. Please—allow me to honor my lord's wishes."

Each sentence carried, beneath its measured surface, the weight of a sigh.

In truth, this standoff had begun the moment Adelheid declared she would follow the search party, and had not stopped since.

She turned away from him, fingers fidgeting around the bag's handle. Drawn-out arguments, once begun, showed no signs of ever reaching their end, and whatever conviction she'd had to persuade him had worn itself down to nothing over the course of several exchanges.

Neither of them had moved so much as an inch toward the other's position.

It doesn't matter. She didn't need Donovan's permission. The decision over where she went belonged not to him but to Count Qüehiller—and the Count had already granted his approval for her to join the search party.

Adelheid let that knowledge settle into her resolve like mortar setting between stones.

She lifted her chin slightly, her expression cool and still.

"The Count has already approved this. Step aside, Donovan. Otherwise, I'll call the guard."

"...How far do you intend to put me in an impossible position?"

"You could simply choose not to stop me. His Grace will know it was my stubbornness regardless..."

"And so? If you go, what is it you think you can actually do, Your Ladyship?"

Adelheid held his gaze without flinching.

The knight before her—a man of middle age, the lines on his face multiplying slowly year by year—possessed the kind of deliberate, unhurried wisdom that always made her feel she was being read rather than spoken to. That was precisely why she found it so maddening. Not because he dismissed her, but because his doubt was sincere. He genuinely believed she could not do anything, and he was offering his refusal as counsel rather than cruelty.

"...I believe there is something I can do."

"This is not a matter that can be settled by belief."

Donovan's manner was unyielding. He would not move a single step back until he was persuaded—that much was plain.

Adelheid weighed how far she could afford to be honest with him.

"I can't explain it in detail. But I... what I'm capable of—"

"I'm aware that Her Ladyship possesses certain unusual abilities. What I don't know is whether those abilities are sufficient to protect you in a crisis."

"It's different."

"What do you mean?"

"I can sense where His Grace is. Using my... power."

Adelheid decided, in that moment, to be brazen about it.

She had not yet achieved perfect command over divine authority and resonance—that much was true. But if there existed even the faintest thread of possibility, it lay precisely here.

Her words landed, and something uncertain moved across Donovan's face.

"Wait just a moment... sense him? What does that mean, exactly?"

"It's difficult to explain. No matter how I described it, I doubt you'd find it easy to believe—and it doesn't work reliably, not all the time. But if, by some chance, the search drags on—the only person with any possibility of helping is me."

"..."

"I want him back safely more than anyone else in the world."

Donovan was silent for a long moment, watching her.

Adelheid held his gaze and kept her expression as open and unguarded as she could manage. Would he believe her? Would he believe she meant every word?

She had already decided she would not be disappointed if he chose not to. It would, in truth, have been the more sensible response. Magic had all but vanished from the world—reduced to a thin thread of survival running only through the healing arts and the Grand Cathedral's miracles. In an age such as this, a woman claiming to sense someone through some unnamed power was easy to regard as peculiar, or worse.

Especially a man with Donovan's temperament. Conservative. Careful. Not given to leaps of faith.

The faintest glimmer of defiance surfaced in Adelheid's green eyes. If he continued to refuse her, the only remaining path would be—

"Hand it over."

She blinked, pulled abruptly from her thoughts. I beg your pardon?

"I'll carry it. Whatever you intend to do, you'll need an escort."

He reached out and extracted the bag from her hands as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

The moment the weight left her arms—the dull, dragging heaviness that had been pulling her body sideways—reality seemed to arrive in its absence. Donovan settled the bag over one shoulder and walked, just like that. Walked ahead of her.

Adelheid stood blinking at the space he had occupied a moment before. He was... coming with her, then.

"Are you not coming?"

He had already covered half the corridor, and he glanced back at her with an air of perfect casualness.

"I—yes. Coming."

She scrambled after him.

What the main force had requested was reinforcements for the search and fresh supplies.

Count Qüehiller, as the castle's commanding officer, agreed to dispatch two companies of knights and half the castle's stores. Preparations moved smoothly—barely half a day's work—and by around noon, all checks were complete and the column was ready to move.

Adelheid sat perched at the edge of a moving supply wagon, watching the bleak and desolate landscape scroll past without expression.

Once, she had stood in Valentin's arms and looked out at a field of ash, black as this. The scorched plains had looked the same.

The acrid smell of char drifting through the air caught at something buried deep in her memory.

If she closed her eyes, she thought she might be pulled straight back to that moment. That day. That specific quality of ruin.

"She doesn't seem to like me very much."

Donovan sat astride Hazel, tugging the reins firmly as he grumbled. Hazel, who had been tossing her head with considerable feeling, affecting deep displeasure at the unfamiliar rider on her back, now lowered her head with an expression of complete innocence.

Adelheid smiled and reached out, scratching gently at the chestnut mare's neck.

"She's so gentle, though. I can't imagine it."

"She evidently disagrees with you on that. One thing's clear—she's a clever creature."

The insistence on bringing Hazel despite not being able to ride her herself came from necessity: she needed something to practice her divine authority on. Since leaving the castle, she had made a point of reaching out to Hazel through will in whatever spare moments the march afforded her—but so far, there was little to show for it. Perhaps it was the restlessness that lived behind her breastbone lately...

The more she tried, the more she felt herself pulling away from the thing she was reaching for.

'The more anxious I am, the more I need to steady myself. There's still time...'

The march continued through the night at full pace.

The roads had been cleared, but the moment the column passed beyond the northern wall, they were in the territory of monsters. The sense of imminent crisis—that anything might happen at any moment—leached sleep from everyone.

Adelheid had been dozing against the rattle and sway of the wagon when a great shout of voices snapped her upright. Something had happened? She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and fumbled the carriage window open—and bright morning light poured through directly, without mercy.

"You're awake, Your Ladyship?"

As she squinted against the glare, Donovan greeted her from horseback with the composed manner of a man who had been awake the entire time.

He extended something toward her without preamble. She took it reflexively—an apple.

"Th-thank you. But... is something wrong?"

"Hm? Nothing at all. Those idiots just bellowed loud enough to wake the dead because they spotted the main camp."

"The main camp?"

"Yes. Have a look."

Adelheid leaned out from the wagon and raised a hand to shade her eyes in the direction Donovan indicated.

Far ahead, against the pale sky, she could make out the dense cluster of the main force's encampment.

"The gods must have helped us through the night. Not a single attack, and here we are."

Adelheid agreed quietly.

To pass through monster-infested land without so much as a scratch was something approaching the impossible. Even the wagons that regularly transported the wounded had been ambushed as a matter of routine.

Was Valentin's influence still reaching this far? Whatever the reason, it was a mercy she was grateful to receive.

The relief that moved through her brought hunger in its wake. She polished the apple Donovan had given her against her sleeve and bit into it—crunch—crisp and cold and sweet.

The sparse meal was nearly finished by the time they reached the camp's main gate.

The guards waved them through without ceremony, barely pausing to verify anything, as though the formality of procedure had grown too heavy to bother with.

Perhaps it was the effect of the days since Valentin's disappearance—stagnant, unresolved, no advance and no retreat. The mood inside the camp was visible in everything: the loose clusters of soldiers talking in low voices, passing cigarettes between them, their faces marked by a defeat they had not yet named aloud.

"Adelheid. I trust the journey was not too difficult?"

Father Padre was waiting at the wagon as it came to a stop, moving toward her the moment she dropped to the ground.

Adelheid watched him approach with watchful eyes. This was the first time they had spoken since that strange, unsettling encounter—the one that had left her standing in a doorway with her pulse in her throat.

"About what happened at the tribunal... I regret it, for my part as well. I hope your maidservant has made a full recovery."

"...I beg your pardon?"

"Ah—of course, this isn't the moment for such things. They tell me you've volunteered for the search party. The acting commander is waiting for you. Allow me to show you the way."

Something about him was different, and Adelheid could not immediately name what.

If she were charitable, she might say he seemed exactly as he always had. If she were precise, she would say he seemed ordinary—the word landing with a strange weight.

As though whatever had spoken through him that day—the thing that had called itself an echo, a fractured shard—had only borrowed him for a moment. And left.