Friendly to Oneself

It rained for the whole night and half of the following day. In the end, even the ground beneath the big tree's branches grew wet. Breakfast was a leaf of bread each. Around midday, when the sun poked through the clouds and made the water on the plants sparkle like diamonds, some warmth finally returned to the traveling group. That was also the moment Lady Brandon opened her mouth for the first time.

"Where exactly are we going, actually?"

Seeing that Nathaniel was about to set out again, she felt like she had to ask now. While resting, her gaze had wandered to the path they were coming from once in a while as if expecting something. Yet, nobody had come after them. Since she herself had noticed the lack of manpower, she wondered if they had not even enough to follow after them or expected them to find their deaths by themselves.

Curious herself, Katherine gazed at her husband. Knowing that he had planned to stay on the border for a while after convincing the General, the attack at the wall must have disturbed his preparations.

"We should inspect the walls of the Dragsa kingdom", Nathaniel answered with an unassuming face. "I need to check something."

"Will we return to the Icelands afterwards?" Somehow, Lady Brandon was unwilling to go too far from the Icelands despite it being her golden cage for so long. "There are so few soldiers left. Maybe we can slip them by."

Katherine gazed at her with knitted brows. Yes, she wasn't fond of Dragsa as well but shouldn't Lady Brandon be more inclined to Dragsa, that wasn't involved in her life as a hostage, compared to the Icelands?

Regardless, Nathaniel's answer remained short and unsatisfying. "Not yet."

Under the gray sky, the three of them rode along the broad belt of the unfathomable Dimgard, the river that was the natural partition between the countries. Beside the black dot-like crows, nothing moved on the stone wall shielding the Dragsa kingdom. Maybe it was because of the brighter background, but there seemed to be a great many crows.

"Kind of ominous", Katherine muttered to herself. The wall she remembered from her first passage was a place of security and warmth compared to the icelandic one. Now, both seemed like the nemesis of any innocent traveler.

In the distance, a drawbridge came in sight. It was down, but everything else seemed empty. Nathaniel gestured for a halt and took out a binocular to inspect the surroundings. Soon, he spotted a sole rider now making his way over the bridge. His clothes were dark, maybe caused by rain. In no time at all, the bridge was pulled up again.

With a face darker than the clouds, Nathaniel lowered the binocular. "What bullshit."

"What?" Katherine perked up at the unexpected curse. Since her childhood, everyone told her that curses made people unsightly. Yet, for Nathaniel, combined with the anger smoldering in his eyes, he unexpectedly seemed even more attractive.

"I said it's bullshit", he repeated without batting an eye. "I'd rather believe my mother is a saint than the ploy Dragsa and the Icelands are trying to pull. There is no way they are starting a war with each other. No way at all."

"That's..." for a few seconds, Katherine didn't know what to say. Every information she got about Dragsa and the Icelands was turned over in her head. There were some indications, but... "Why are they gathering their armies then? What exactly did you see over there?"

She pointed in the direction of the drawbridge. Somehow, she felt that the glimpse through the binoculars had put the last nail in the coffin. And she was right.

"There was a rider in wet attire. A soldier from either nation would have worn an armor or uniform, and it would have been dry had he come from the Dragsean side. Only someone who was outside for hours like us could be this drenched. This and his direction of travel prove that he came from the Icelandic side. But if he did, and he was not a soldier, then he can only be an envoy. The dragsean soldiers wouldn't have let any stranger pass.

Still, even an envoy from another nation would usually stay before the gate or at least be inspected before entering if the two nations were about to start a war. How else would they know if he was sent to destroy their wall with an explosive or poison their soldiers?

Summed up with the lack of soldiers on both walls, my conclusion is that the Icelands and Dragsa are just feigning to be hostile to each other. In reality, they are working together to gather their armies against a third party."

Hearing the explanation, Katherine could only nod along. From this perspective, it all made sense. With the puzzle pieces falling into place, she could even guess who the unsuspecting third party was. There was only one behemoth that needed the cooperation of both Dragsa and the Icelands to bring it to fall. "Falumor!"

"It makes sense", Lady Brandon confirmed as well, and her bearing seemed to regain some liveliness. Maybe she was assuming that she could return home more easily if all attention was swept to the frontlines between the three nations. At least said frontline was now far away from her way of travel, regardless if she was in Dragsa or the Icelands.

"But how come the nations are suddenly so friendly with each other? It's strange. Didn't they used to be enemies for more than fifteen generations?", Katherine asked, but soon answered her own question. "Wait! It's the organization, isn't it? We know that it has its hand in the coronation of your brother, and you said that it's strong in Dragsa as well. It even rivals the king! So, in the end, the one reigning is... wait... if it's the organization, it makes even more sense that Dragsa and the Icelands are working together. After all, why would it attack itself? Assuming that both are already under its control, it just wants to gobble up the biggest nation on the continent before the latter notices anything strange. Then it would be easy to overthrow the whole continent. This... this is just unbelievable."

Somehow, Katherine felt that everything she'd learned in her youth was for naught. She never even thought that Dragsa and the Icelands could become friendly with each other. And yet, there was someone who dared to imagine that the nations that had been at war from the start of humanity's memory could be brought together and reigned as one. Reigned by an organization so elusive that nobody had even seen the leader's face. It was hard to tell if this was madness or genius. If Katherine didn't know about the experiments that had been done by the same organization, she would even think that there was some goodness in this plan. Now, she rather wondered how a continent reigned by the organization would look like. Most likely, the citizens would all be stuck in containers and connected to tubes to extract as much data as possible. It was a rather cruel picture painted in her head, one that had no future.

It was at this moment that the Katherine, Lady Brandon, and Nathaniel saw the drawbridge lower again. Soon after, riders in glittering armor gushed out of the gate.