Before the actual operation began, Sherin demanded a level of cleanliness bordering on obsession. First, she had the room where the surgery would take place, along with all the surrounding furniture and every tool, wiped down with boiled water. When she then demanded enough boiled water for everyone involved in the operation, herself included, to bathe, one village woman timidly complained.

“Um, it's winter, and if we boil that much water, we won't have enough firewood...”

She dared say this even with Shan standing right beside her because their supply of firewood was a matter of survival. There was no sense freezing to death just to avoid being killed with a sword.

It was Tata, the Wievers family's butler, who resolved the issue. In Kalion's absence, he had the authority to spend the family's money wherever necessary.

“Here you are. This should be enough, I trust?”

“Ah, certainly! Oh my...”

Once he handed over more than enough money to buy an even larger supply of firewood from another nearby village, the villagers became positively eager to sell theirs. Times might be hard, but surely some village nearby had firewood to spare.

With all the preparations finally complete, the operation began.

“You need to cut from here to here. Can you do it?”

“Of course.”

One of Sherin's arms was badly injured, and even without that, she was hardly skilled with a blade. Shan therefore took up the dagger himself and followed her instructions.

The keenly sharpened dagger skimmed lightly over the scalp, then sank in as smoothly as though cutting into cheese. His determination to cut through everything in its path distorted reality, supplying the force he lacked and allowing him to slice through a skull he otherwise could not have cut.

“Good...” Sherin murmured, watching from behind him.

Cutting open a skull was normally difficult, and the bone's toughness meant subjecting the body to considerable jarring. With a knight this skilled doing the work, however, things became much easier.

Once he had cut away a piece of skull to make an opening, Sherin took over. Murmuring an ominous incantation, she slipped her index finger into Kalion's head and withdrew it with a clump of blood trailing after it. Had an outsider witnessed the scene, they would probably have taken it for some evil spell that pulled out human brains.

“Hmm...”

The elderly priest watching from behind gave a disapproving groan. But that was all. Rather than rise and leave, he gritted his teeth and remained seated.

After a while, Sherin finished drawing out the blood and turned her head.

“Now!”

“O Goddess, here lies a sick and pitiable soul.”

As the priest recited his prayer, sacred light rose from his hands and enveloped Kalion's head.

They repeated the process of extracting clots and healing several more times. Then Sherin checked his condition with a spell that let her see inside him and nodded.

“That's it. All we need to do now is put the skull back and heal that part.”

When all the treatment was finished, Shan looked down at Kalion, whose head was wrapped in bandages. The old man had yet to regain consciousness, but his face looked far more peaceful than before.

“It went well, right?”

“Yes. He'll probably wake within a few hours at most. It was a success. That priest is even better than I expected.”

“Whew...”

Relieved, Shan said he could now face Roden without shame, and expressed his thanks by patting Sherin on the shoulder. In contrast to their warm exchange, the elderly priest sat lamenting with his face in his hands.

“I shall go to hell... I have betrayed the Goddess and helped someone wield the devil's power...”

“And you saved someone's life doing it. If she can't show even that much tolerance, isn't she a little too petty to call herself a goddess?”

The old priest glared at Shan's muttered remark, then sighed as though all his strength had drained away.

“May I leave now?”

“Thank you for your hard work, Father.”

Since the priest had helped them, whatever the circumstances, Shan saw him off politely. Apparently finding that even more appalling, the priest shook his head as he left.

A little later, Shan emerged from the operating room and announced Kalion's recovery. Everyone in the Wievers household cheered with delight.

“Thank you so much, Younger Master! Miss Rin!”

“If anything had happened to the master...”

Those gathered here were the most loyal of servants, people who had stayed even as their master's house fell into ruin. To them, Kalion's recovery was like seeing the collapsing heavens knit themselves back together.

After they had been celebrating for some time, a village woman approached cautiously.

“The chief asked us to prepare a meal for our guests. Would you like to eat?”

Only upon hearing that did hunger suddenly come rushing in. Naturally so: their last meal had been the previous evening, and now the sun was already high overhead.

Soon a simple meal was served in the village hall: meat and vegetable stew, coarse bread, cheese, and other fare commonly eaten by Pendia's ordinary people.

Before everyone could pray to the Goddess and begin eating, Sherin raised a hand to stop them.

“I'll taste it first. Someone might have put something in it.”

“What? Surely not...”

“Who knows what people will do when their lives have been threatened?”

She did have a point. Everyone had heard Shan threaten the priest with the villagers' lives, so someone might well be nursing a grudge.

“But what if something happens to you after you taste it, big sister Rin?”

“I'm resistant to mild poisons. They probably couldn't make anything strong enough to affect me in a village like this.”

Sherin sampled a little of every dish, then nodded to indicate it was safe. As everyone dug in to satisfy their hunger, Shan asked her a question through a mouthful of bread.

“How do you build up resistance to poison?”

“By taking poison together with a special antidote. Are you interested?”

“Yes.”

“I'll help you later if we get the chance. It won't work against deadly poisons, but it comes in handy in all sorts of little ways.”

While she was explaining how to build poison resistance, a groan came from beside them. Kalion, who had been brought to the hall after his operation, was regaining consciousness.

“Ugh...”

“Master!”

“The master's awake!”

Kalion turned his head with a grimace, perhaps in pain where his skull had been cut open. After lying unconscious for days, he could barely hold his head steady, let alone sit up.

“Master, are you awake?”

“Where... am I...?”

“Wheat Bran Village. It's a small village east of Hasra.”

“Why...?”

Perhaps because the blow to his head had damaged his brain, Kalion remembered little of recent events. He could not even properly grasp that Shan had left on the expedition to slay the ogre. Only after further explanation did he finally manage to understand their situation.

“I see...”

“Yes. Thanks to the Younger Master here... Sir Shan, and Miss Rin, we barely managed to escape and get you treated.”

“Miss Rin?”

Kalion's eyes widened in shock and finally turned toward Sherin, who was standing behind them.

“Your Highness!”

* * *

Once her identity was revealed, an uproar broke out in the village hall. The Wievers servants, who had treated her as merely a young woman skilled in magic, bowed so low their heads might have burrowed into the earth, apologizing for their disrespect.

“No, it's quite all right. None of you need worry.”

Even after Sherin repeated this several times, their unease around her did not readily fade.

Shan and Roden were the unusual ones, after all. This was the normal way for commoners to behave before royalty.

Fortunately, none of the villagers were inside the hall, so word did not spread. If it had, they would have needed to leave immediately. Knowing Sherin was here might prompt Conrad to send troops, even at some risk.

“Ah, this is exhausting... It was so much easier being just Rin the mage.”

Once things had settled somewhat, Sherin went outside the village hall with Shan. Her mere presence was making the servants uncomfortable.

“They'll get used to you with time.”

“I hope so.”

Sherin nodded in agreement. For the Wievers servants to grow accustomed to her would mean Shan had accepted her proposal and they would be moving forward together.

“Speaking of which, when do you think Roden will arrive? There are probably people coming from the north by now, too. We don't want to miss each other.”

“Can't you see where he is if you've put a spider on him?”

Sherin shook her head.

“The magic isn't that convenient. Its range is quite limited. It wouldn't even reach the capital from here. And I can only see through one pair of eyes at a time.”

Shan had thought it some transcendent ability that let her watch all of Pendia through countless spiders, but apparently it did have limitations. Otherwise, she would never have been caught without a way to escape.

“Oh, that reminds me. I've been meaning to ask... Could you keep the spider magic secret, even from Roden?”

As though expecting Shan to refuse, Sherin hastily added,

“This really is a secret I've never told anyone. Not Kagon or Aran, not my uncle, not even the head of the Society. If possible, I'd like it to stay between us.”

“You really haven't told anyone.”

“An ability like this loses its power the moment people learn it exists. If Conrad or Elvin had known about this magic, they would have held every important discussion in the middle of a wide-open corridor, keeping watch to ensure no spiders came near. I wouldn't have been able to get the information I needed.”

Her face was utterly serious as she murmured that her life truly depended on it. After a long silence, Shan nodded.

“All right. I won't tell anyone. Not even Roden.”

He did not believe Roden would spread the secret around if told, but this still felt like the right answer. It was her own private secret, after all, just as Shan wanted to keep his possession of A Thousand Forms hidden.

Sherin let out a deep sigh of relief at his answer.

“Thank goodness...”

“But if you come to stay with Roden and me, big sister Sherin, please don't secretly put spiders on us. If there's something we want to know, we can just ask each other, can't we?”

It was unfair for one side to peer into the other's life when the other did not even know such a means of spying existed. At his perfectly reasonable request, Sherin bit her lip hard, then nodded with difficulty.

“All right. Honestly, just imagining it makes me so anxious I could go mad... But you're right.”

“Anxious?”

“Yes. Unless I put spiders on the people around me and watch what they do, I can't feel safe. I never know when they might try to hurt me behind my back.”

It was strange seeing Sherin gnaw at her nails, exposing an anxiety that bordered on paranoia. Perhaps this was her true self, hidden beneath that perpetually unruffled exterior.

“Is there a reason you feel that anxious?”

It might simply have been her nature, but his instincts told him otherwise.

After a brief silence, Sherin spoke in a slightly cracked voice.

“I had a nurse. She was practically a mother to me, since my own died just after giving birth.”

That was common enough among the high nobility. Hadn't Shan heard that nurses sometimes formed closer bonds with their charges than their own mothers did, and even became the powers behind noble or royal figures?

“I trusted her enough to share everything with her. I thought that if I could have a mother, I'd want someone like her.”

Yet Sherin had kept one thing from her nurse: the development of the spell that synchronized her consciousness with spiders, completed on her twelfth birthday. At an age when adolescence was beginning, she had at least enough awareness to know that secretly watching other people was wrong.

“Even then, I intended to tell her about this magic, too. After taking just one peek at what everyone was doing.”

Through her spiders' eyes, Sherin could look wherever she pleased throughout the palace. Neither the royal knights and guards maintaining their ironclad watch nor the magical traps scattered everywhere stopped a mere spider.

Enthralled by the pleasure of secretly spying on others, she had sought out her nurse last. She wanted to know what the woman did when she periodically left her side, claiming to have personal business to attend to.

Before long, she discovered that her nurse was in the king's chambers. It was a terrible stroke of misfortune for the nurse, and a heaven-sent blessing for Sherin.

“She was telling Father everything about me. How clever I was, what I could do and intended to do, even what I liked and disliked.”

Sherin was deeply shocked by the actions of the nurse she had believed wholly her own, but she tried to understand and let it pass. After all, the woman's employer was the king, not Sherin. What the king said next, however, went beyond anything she could accept.

“Father gave her an order. He said I had talent, so he'd watch for the time being, but if I tried to meddle with anything too dangerous, she was to dispose of me as she saw fit and report afterward. Using the drug he'd given her before. And she said she understood.”

It was an instruction so cold-blooded that one could scarcely imagine a father giving it to his young daughter's nurse. Giselle III must have seen even the young Sherin as that great a threat. Then again, she had developed magic of this caliber at twelve.

“When she came back, I asked her over and over, in roundabout ways. Where she'd been, whether anyone had given her anything strange... I begged silently for her to tell me the truth. But she just smiled warmly, the way she always did, and said nothing had happened.”

That night, Sherin gave her nurse a sleeping drug and pushed her off a terrace. Her death was ruled a drunken accident.

“After that, I put spiders on everyone around me, including Father, and disposed of every spy he sent. Eventually, he gave up. Though it earned me the name Witch of Pendia, and none of the palace maids would agree to attend me.”

Having told the whole story, Sherin looked as though a weight had lifted from her. Apparently, she had wanted to tell someone—anyone—what she had kept bottled up all this time.

After hearing everything, Shan could not call her suspicions excessive. The revelation that the nurse she had trusted and relied upon most had been an assassin was that devastating.

After a brief silence, he deliberately changed the subject to lighten the mood.

“Is the spider magic difficult?”

“Yes. Magic that helps you befriend animals exists, like in storybooks, but borrowing their eyes and ears is an entirely different matter. I happened to be spiritually compatible with spiders, but even so, I had to improve my synchronization with them in various ways.”

“What ways?”

“All sorts. First, I raised spiders and handled them to build familiarity. Later, I even ate them raw. Do you happen to know what spiders taste like?”

“Bitter. Depending on the species, the little ones can taste more sour, too.”

“... How in the world do you know that?”

“I used to eat them a lot.”

Shan recalled his days in Willow Village. Back then, the scraps left over by the chief's family had never been enough to fill his stomach. The various bugs crawling around the barn had been a good source of food. Ants, cockroaches, grasshoppers, even fleas...

Sherin sighed upon hearing his story.

“I was going to boast about how hard I'd worked to acquire this magic, but now I just look ridiculous.”

“I wasn't trying to say what you did was nothing, big sister Sherin.”

“I know. Of course you weren't.”

After their banter had eased the mood a little, Shan broached what he had meant to say.

“Big sister Sherin.”

“Yes?”

“I'll keep it secret for now, but if we do end up working together, I hope you'll be able to tell Roden someday. He's a truly trustworthy friend.”

To Sherin, his words sounded like more than a simple assurance that Roden could be trusted. It felt as though he were telling her she could open her heart a little more and try trusting people.

“... I'll try.”

For now, that was the best she could do.

* * *

Rather than move farther east, Shan's party remained in Wheat Bran Village for several days. Kalion had only just regained consciousness, and Sherin had an injured arm; neither was fit to travel yet. The servants, too, had been thoroughly frightened by Pendia's dreadful wilderness and had no desire to venture out again.

While the others rested, Shan inspected the equipment he had taken from Kamad and tested its capabilities. With Sherin's help, he was able to learn its functions in considerable detail.

“This lance is called the Lance of Blazing Fire.”

“I suppose that's because its tip explodes.”

“Yes. It's a magical device discovered quite a long time ago. To use it, channel spirit into it with the desire for an explosion.”

Following Sherin's explanation, Shan rode Arwin at an easy pace and aimed the lance at a boulder ahead.

'Explode...'

Spirit generally acted only in ways inherently possible for the object imbued with it. A blunt sword or a club could cut or pierce something, but magical feats such as making a target burst into flame or freeze as it was cut were impossible.

The Lance of Blazing Fire, however, made precisely such a feat possible. The instant he imbued it with his will to make it explode in the form of spirit, the lance shone brightly, just as it had when Kamad wielded it. The boulder before its tip exploded with a boom, sending shards of stone flying in every direction.

“Good heavens!”

“What on earth...?”

There was the minor matter of several nearby villagers being scared out of their wits, but at least he now knew exactly how to use the weapon. As Shan smiled in satisfaction, Sherin warned him,

“That lance doesn't repair itself like the magical devices I made you. It's tougher, so it won't break easily, but if it does, consider it finished.”

“Yes.”

Its shape made it somewhat cumbersome to grip and wield freely, but having a more powerful, useful weapon for a straightforward mounted charge was certainly no bad thing.

Kamad's sword and shield were magical devices as well as his lance. Or rather, strictly speaking, the shield was not a magical device.

“It's a holy relic.”

“A holy... relic?”

“Yes. Sometimes simply called a sacred object. They're usually made from the remains of renowned priests after they die. Only the Holy See knows exactly how they're made.”

The Holy See was a sacred site for followers of the Old Faith in Libert's capital, home to the pope, the spiritual leader of all its faithful. As a mage hostile to the Old Faith, Sherin added that it was a place they ought to burn down someday.

At any rate, the sword delivered an electric shock to enemies it touched. Apparently, that had gone unnoticed because Guardian of the East was a magic sword containing trueiron. The shield, meanwhile, invigorated its wielder.

“Then I'll use this shield from now on. My old one is ruined.”

Of course, he would first need to remove Kamad's emblem from its face—unless he intended it as a provocation.

Finally, Kamad's armor was nothing particularly extraordinary. Made by a skilled craftsman and consecrated by priests, it was effectively under a stronger, longer-lasting enchantment. Since Shan's blade had already damaged it in various places, even repaired it would probably be worth no more than ordinary plate armor.

“I'd like to give this to Roden. Though he can't wear plate armor, since he isn't a knight.”

“Shall I knight him?”

Shan hummed thoughtfully at Sherin's question, then shook his head.

“Thank you, but Roden says he can't accept it until he's proved himself worthy.”

“With a bladed weapon?”

“Yes.”

His expression said, So you were eavesdropping after all. Sherin met it with a smile. Admitting that she knew because she had listened in was her own gesture of goodwill.

“Oh, I've been meaning to ask. Would you let me work on your armor later?”

“My armor?”

“You said you have the ogre's magic stone. Turning your armor into a magical device with that should be effective. I need to examine your body, too.”

Something had changed in Shan's body after he slew the ogre, but they had yet to determine exactly what. All the magical instruments needed for the examination had been confiscated when Elvin captured Sherin. She would have to contact the Magic Society again and bring its members into her service, or make new instruments, before she could examine him.

“Just to be clear, I'm not saying I'll only help you if you help me. This is what I owe you for saving my life.”

Without Shan's help, Sherin would still be starving to death in the Blue Palace tower. Perhaps she would already be dead. As she added that clarification to prevent any misunderstanding, Shan smiled and nodded.

“Thank you, big sister Sherin. I won't forget it.”

While the two were talking and showing each other various magical devices, the personal attendant came running toward them. First bowing deeply to Sherin, he addressed Shan.

“Younger Master! The Elder Master has arrived from the east!”

“Oh, really? You're sure you haven't mistaken someone else for him?”

“Quite sure!”

They had already mistaken groups of passing peddlers for Roden several times, so Shan hurriedly rode Arwin toward the village's eastern side. Climbing onto the palisade, he saw a column of people outside, with Roden at its head.

“Roden! You're... here?”

Shan had been about to wave an enthusiastic greeting, but the smile faded from his face. The Altoans lined up behind Roden numbered far more than the twenty-eight who had originally set out—roughly five times as many.