Chapter 1

Translator: Willia

Far away on the pitch-black horizon, dawn began to spread.

When the last star, exhaling its faint breath into the cold air, flickered out, Valery opened his eyes.

It was not that he had jolted awake from a nightmare, nor that he had pried his eyes open against a weariness he could not shake off. Very naturally, as though newly born, he opened those starlit eyes.

Yet for all the composure of his waking, his heart was pounding hard enough to burst.

By the time that violent heartbeat from the brink of death began to settle, Valery's eyes, too, slowly drew in their light, like the last star fading at the break of dawn.

What came next was the uncomfortable feel of the coarse blanket and bed. That discomfort was at once familiar and unfamiliar. A true contradiction, yet that was how it was.

The familiarity came from having felt it every day in the past; the unfamiliarity, from the thought that this could not possibly be happening. He had distinctly felt, after all, the foreign sensation of a sharp blade driving through his throat.

Be that as it may, the sensations of his body were so vivid, so overpowering, that in an instant they reduced the past decade or so to the stuff of a dream.

In a daze, Valery pushed himself upright. The freezing dawn air beyond the blanket slipped into his clothes and swept over his body, and an unfamiliar sensation registered in his left hand.

To be precise, it was not unfamiliar so much as a sensation long forgotten.

When he raised his left hand and gazed at it absently, two fingers that ought not to have been there were attached as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The pinky and the ring finger.

He gave the fingers a tentative wiggle, and contrary to what he felt, they moved quite naturally. He clenched and unclenched his fist again and again, but the hollow feeling from when the fingers had been missing was gone.

"......"

For a long while, Valery's mind went blank. Having lost all sense of time, he simply sat there, vacant.

When he at last gathered himself and looked around the dim room, it was the single chamber in House Winsloe that he had once used. One hard bed, a small table and chair, an oil lantern, documents stacked in neat order.

One plain fact crossed Valery's mind, but among all the magic he had ever picked up word of, there was nothing that could turn back time.

Even so, the sense of being alive grew sharper, and the fact that he had returned to the past grew ever more undeniable.

And with that came a question. What is the meaning of all this? Do I have to die all over again?

Knock, knock.

Through the confusion came the sound of a knock. Then, from beyond the door, a boy's voice.

"Wid, still asleep?"

Wid was the name Valery had been called while living as a Bastard in the comital house.

Valery recognized the voice at once, but, wanting to confirm for himself whether this was truly reality, he rose and opened the door.

There stood a blond boy already dressed for going out, despite the early hour. The same age as Valery, smaller in build, yet the only son of House Winsloe and its Legitimate Firstborn Heir, Harold.

The sight of him made Valery's heart feel as though it had stopped. He had been the last person Valery had killed, right before Count Aethelred's eyes. And it had not been a simple killing. He had cut off both ears, sliced off the nose, seared out the eyes......

'Is there really any need to go this far......?'

The dying boy had groaned the words out. Valery had expected him to beg for his life.

"Want to go hunting?"

Present-day Harold's question cut through thoughts of the past. Or rather, was it past Harold's question cutting through thoughts of the future?

He seemed, somehow, to be gauging Valery's reaction, and Valery flinched and snapped out of it. Harold took it to mean that he was still half asleep.

"How old are we?"

Valery, still disoriented, asked.

"My birthday hasn't come around yet, but today's yours. So I'm still thirteen, and you're fourteen now."

"......"

A birthday...... Valery had regarded such things as worthless and had never given them any thought.

But then what had that heart-stopping feeling been? 'Guilt? Me?' He could not tell.

The day came back to him faintly. In all likelihood, he had turned down the invitation to go hunting and gone off to work.

Valery handled the bookkeeping at House Winsloe. The direct handling of coin could not be entrusted to just anyone, yet at the same time it was considered menial work, and therefore suited to a Bastard.

In a noble house, the existence of a Bastard was an awkward and uneasy thing. Neither commoner nor nobility, an in-between creature. To the Countess in particular, he was little more than a thorn in her side.

Valery had grasped his position early, and so he had done little but work, keeping himself out of others' paths as much as he possibly could.

Harold, by contrast, had retained an almost childlike innocence despite his age, and Valery had always thought him painfully naive.

"Are you coming? Let's go."

Harold urged him again.

In the still-dim dawn, Valery gazed quietly into his dark blue eyes and then answered.

"I'll come."

Valery washed up briefly, put on his going-out clothes, and stepped from the room. "Going-out clothes" was generous; it was merely a thin tunic, with no cloak.

He had separate work attire, but that was a one-piece robe that wrapped everything from his face down to his legs, little better than a jester's getup.

And so, on this early dawn of early spring when the biting chill had yet to relent, it was very cold.

When he left the castle and reached the gate, he saw Harold and an older boy, Gidwin. Gidwin was the son of one of the knights of House Winsloe; he was the Count's squire as well as Harold's friend and bodyguard.

"Well, look at that. You actually came out."

Gidwin said, eyeing Valery.

"No cloak?"

Harold asked.

"Don't have one."

"Huh? Why not?"

"'Why not,' he says. Honestly......"

Gidwin quietly chided Harold for his ignorance of how the world worked.

A cloak made of good leather or fur came dear. Even if Count Aethelred covered the matter of food and shelter, no further comforts were extended to a Bastard.

Gidwin pulled off his own cloak and handed it to Valery. At seventeen, his shoulders had broadened, and his build already rivaled that of a full-grown man.

A solid build didn't mean one didn't feel the cold, but looking at the sheer size of him, it did seem he might feel it less.

A little awkwardly, Valery accepted the kindness. When he drew the cloak, with its collar trimmed in fur, around him, it wasn't overly large, just slightly so. Valery's own frame, after all, was far from small.

And whether it fit him or not, the softness of fox fur brushing against his neck, the feel of a cloak warding off the cold and holding in warmth, was not at all unpleasant.

"Let's go."

Harold said, and set off ahead. Gidwin fell naturally into step beside him, but Valery walked a little way behind. Because he was a Bastard.

Wait, a Bastard? Me? I'm not, though. Valery felt a faint cognitive dissonance at the behavior ingrained in his body.

And that it should be so ingrained was strange in itself. He had spent over a decade neck-deep in politics and plots and war. Now, of all times?

But declaring his standing as a Prince wouldn't enable him to do anything at the moment anyway. For the time being, he resolved to drift with the current and keep quiet.

"What're you doing? Come up here."

Gidwin, walking ahead, jerked his chin in invitation.

In the old days, meaning the Valery of this age before his return to the past, he would have refused out of reserve, but not now.

Going with the flow, Valery stepped up and fell in beside Gidwin.

"What's the occasion? You, of all people, coming outside."

Gidwin asked. It seemed mostly out of curiosity, though there was no denying a faint note of surveillance in it. Unlike the purely innocent Harold, he was not wholly ignorant of adult affairs.

If, in his judgment, anything seemed out of the ordinary, he would report it to Count Aethelred. The Count, in turn, would decide for himself whether any action was needed.

"No reason."

"Yeah? So you're becoming a man, huh? Starting to notice women?"

With today's birthday, Valery was now fourteen, but as a boy approached fifteen, the age of adulthood, shifts of heart and a growing interest in women were the norm.

"No."

"Shame, with a face like that. The maids and village girls are off limits, so what about later, when we head to the city?"

Even for nobility, laying hands on a maid was a deeply dishonorable matter. And carelessly meddling with women from the villages near the castle could invite all manner of talk.

In a world where reputation was the measure of a man's worth, even the nobility did best to keep themselves in order.

Of course, the world held all sorts, and somewhere no doubt there were scoundrels who'd take their pleasure with any maid or village girl they pleased, but not here, at least.

On top of which, among the Nordics there was a superstition of sorts: that if a man came to know women before turning fifteen, before coming of age, his strength in battle would weaken.

Gidwin, for his part, had known women before coming of age, and yet he was still the best fighter among his peers.

"Don't go putting weird ideas in his head. Wid isn't that kind of kid."

Harold scolded Gidwin.

"How would you know what kind of kid he is? You talk like you've been close with him all this time."

"I don't have to be close to know. You can tell just from watching him work all day, every day."

"You never know what's inside a person. What if he's been bottling it up? Look, he's out here today, isn't he?"

"So are you going? To the city."

Harold asked, looking at Valery.

"No."

"See?"

"Damn, that's a waste. Then how about you just tag along? If you're gonna let a face like that go to rot, let me put it to use."

"What are you talking about?"

"With you standing next to me, picking up women would go a hell of a lot smoother."

As if the question weren't worth an answer, Valery kept his mouth shut and only shook his head. At that, Gidwin smacked his lips in disappointment.

The truth was, Valery possessed an uncommonly handsome face. Not in a clean, upright way, but with a decadent beauty that verged on the unsettling. Like a dark crimson rose.

Were it not for the somewhat heavy lines of his features and the thickness of his brows, he would have been more beautiful than most women.

His sharp nose and chiseled jawline alone were enough to arrest another's gaze, but what truly made Valery extraordinary in appearance were his eyes.

His pale sky-blue irises, perhaps because of the strange fracturing within them, called to mind the eternally frozen lakes of the far north.

And without his putting any particular force behind it, there was something in his gaze, when he looked a person full in the face, that made it hard to meet. Something piercingly intense.

That intense gaze either doubled Valery's charm or halved it. Like a double-edged sword, some were captivated by it, while others were simply overwhelmed.

"By the way, don't we need any hunting gear?"

For the first time, Valery himself was the one to ask. Gidwin shook his head and answered.

"At our level, you think we're running a proper drive hunt? We just roast up whatever squirrel or rabbit got caught in a trap."

Meat was dear, and commoners seldom ate it. The nobility and knights ate it near enough every day, but the meat eaten day after day was hardly ever in good condition.

Which was to say, to eat freshly caught, fresh meat was a rare treat indeed. And to eat game taken from the Lord's own hunting grounds, more so still.

Everything within those grounds belonged to the Lord, and to help oneself to any of it constituted a crime on a par with stealing from the Lord himself.

Of course, for the Lord's only son, the matter was different. Harold in particular, as the Legitimate Firstborn Heir, was the coming Family Head of House Winsloe and the future Count who would one day rule the lands of Winsloe.

"Do you often go to the hunting grounds, then?"

Valery asked. Harold shook his head and answered.

"No. I told you. It's your birthday today. We're going because it's your birthday."

Valery placed no value on the notion of a birthday, and so, unable to grasp it easily, he paused a moment to wonder whether there was some deeper meaning behind it. Still, he couldn't make it out.

Harold went on, as if to explain further.

"Birthdays are meant to celebrate the day you were born. You can give gifts and all."

"First I've heard of it."

"It's just how nobility does things."

At his hopelessly naive words, Valery let out a small, scornful laugh and answered in a cutting tone.

"So what, you're going to treat me as nobility?"

"Hey."

At Valery's somewhat sharp retort, Gidwin frowned in warning.

But Harold, without the faintest trace of offense, answered.

"Poor choice of words on my part. Nobility or not, that isn't what matters. What matters is that we're brothers."

At the word "brothers," Valery's thoughts seemed to lock up for an instant. This, from me? The one who killed every brother I had, slaughtered every blood-tied nephew along with them, and became king.

Needless to say, Valery and Harold did not share a single drop of blood. And yet, as things stood at present, they were half-brothers. At least that was how Harold saw it, and he seemed, moreover, to regard it as a matter of real weight.

"Are you serious?"

Valery, with Gidwin between them, turned to look at Harold. Even meeting that emotionless gaze, Harold smiled brightly and replied.

"Of course. I don't lie."

"......"

Valery thought in silence for a moment, then answered.

"Don't speak your true feelings so lightly. They can become a weakness."

"Huh? What do you mean by that?"

"......"

Valery did not answer. He knew well enough himself what the words meant; but the intent behind the meaning was something even he could not easily discern.

Perhaps he had said it as a token of thanks for being treated with sincerity, but something in it was badly out of joint. For now.

In the east, the sun was slowly climbing. Its light cut across the deep blue morning and fell upon the three of them walking the lone path toward the forest.

When that light touched Valery's face, his platinum blond hair caught its glow, and it was truly as if a flower bud were slowly unfurling its petals, beginning to bloom.

And yet, that detached gaze peculiar to Valery still lingered in the deep of the night just past.