In the middle of the Ninth Period, Queen Marguerite laid the foundations for the unification of Santeneri under the rule of House Leroy.
Among those who followed the Queen across the battlefield was a woman named Marie. Probably born a commoner, she became a lady-in-waiting who commanded the Queen’s unofficial personal guard. She was later granted the land of Barois, and in the roughly eight hundred years since, House Barois has always stood beside the king as the sword of the Royal House.
That nameless personal guard expanded again and again over the centuries as its usefulness became apparent, eventually taking the name Royal Guard that it bears today.
It is the king’s own army, entirely separate from the Army of the Kingdom of Santeneri.
The Royal Guard has a wide range of duties. Its foremost responsibility is protecting the king and his family, but it also serves as a ceremonial guard at occasions such as coronations. At times it arrests nobles who refuse the king’s authority; at others it suppresses nobles who raise troops in their own territories.
It is the king’s bodyguard, the king’s police, and the king’s army.
As the nobility was gradually absorbed into the Leroy court and came to live as bureaucrats, suppressing rebellions all but ceased to be one of the Guard’s duties.
Foreign wars took its place.
Whenever the king personally took the field, part of the Royal Guard fought at the very front. They were expected to face the strongest enemies on the most difficult battlefields.
Appropriately enough, their equipment and treatment far surpassed those of the regular army. They were admired by the common people and could fairly be called the symbol of Santeneri’s strength on land.
House Barois had commanded the Royal Guard for generations, and within the family, military service was considered natural not only for men but for women as well.
After all, their house had been founded by a woman who won distinction on the battlefield. Of course the women of Barois entered military service.
That was how House Barois explained it both within the family and without, and society accepted the custom without much objection.
But that was merely the official story.
In practice, the women of House Barois did not go to actual battlefields.
They traditionally remained close to the king and protected him. They assisted the Inspector General of the Royal Guard, who was also the head of House Barois, and guarded the king’s person.
That was supposedly their true role.
Yet even that explanation missed the heart of the matter.
Despite being destined to serve as future protectors of the king, the women were never seriously trained in martial arts from childhood.
Which meant they could not truly protect him.
That practical duty belonged to carefully selected members of the Royal Guard.
Then what role were these women actually expected to fulfill?
In short, they existed to be the women closest to the king.
Their rank as a count’s family prevented them from supplying a principal queen, but House Barois had produced many secondary consorts. History even recorded kings born to women of Barois.
The arrangement benefited both the Royal House and House Barois.
The Royal House had little need to fear betrayal by the Royal Guard, while the Royal Guard had no reason to turn against the Royal House.
The strong bonds of blood between them underpinned the Guard’s very existence.
Mary en Barois had been born the eldest daughter of that family.
She had an older brother, and beneath her, a younger brother and sister. Her elder brother would inherit the house and the post of Inspector General of the Royal Guard. Her younger brother would become a general in the Guard.
Her younger sister would marry into another family.
And Mary?
In modern Santeneri, the old name Marie was pronounced Mary.
Bearing the name of her house’s founder, Mary wanted to race across battlefields just as Marie had.
No one forced her to do it. She voluntarily took part in military training and studied military science.
Her results were exceptional, to the point that her father regretted that she was a woman.
But whether by fortune or misfortune, in the six years since Mary joined the military at eighteen, no war large enough to involve the Royal Guard had occurred.
Conflict still continued in the New Continent colonies, but the Central Continent had remained at peace.
Mary therefore served as her father’s adjutant.
With her sharp mind, she understood perfectly well what was expected of her.
Understanding it and accepting it, however, were two very different things.
She had pride in her own abilities.
If she were ever given troops to command beneath the banner of the Royal House, she was certain she could distinguish herself.
Seeing her elder brother, her younger brother, and the officers of the Army of the Kingdom of Santeneri—men who were plainly less capable than she was—only strengthened that conviction.
Then she met the Crown Prince.
Mary was twenty.
The Crown Prince was sixteen.
Even then, the prince already displayed a belligerent streak.
He idolized the great kings among his ancestors and loudly declared that he, too, would sweep across the Central Continent. As it happened, there was a contemporary king who served perfectly as a young boy’s model of martial glory.
Fleisch III of Prozan.
Grois VII, the ancestral king he idealized.
And Fleisch III, the living king before his eyes.
The Crown Prince wanted to become like them.
Mary liked him for that.
She even imagined herself one day leading the Royal Guard into battle beneath his command.
Two years after they first met, the Crown Prince secretly visited the Royal Guard barracks one day and drank with her father and elder brother until he was thoroughly pleased with himself.
Noticing Mary approaching, Grois called out to her.
“Ah, Mary! You have come at just the right time! When the day comes for me to rise, I shall take the entire Royal Guard with me and settle matters with the Empire once and for all. I shall ride beside Fleisch himself and bring Estburg down!”
He shouted the declaration while raising his wine cup high in a theatrical gesture.
Under Prince Grois—though by then he would surely be king—I too could...
“When that day comes, please entrust the vanguard to me, Mary en Barois!”
Mary never forgot the prince’s reply.
He stared at her with an expression of genuine bewilderment.
Her father and brother both looked away, visibly uncomfortable.
“What are you talking about, Mary? You will remain at the palace. War is men’s work. I shall protect you.”
For the next two years, Mary struggled to forget those words.
◆
Admitting that something was impossible was what losers did.
You could never know until you tried.
She was not some candidate to become the prince’s secondary consort.
She would become a general and lead a force of the Royal Guard into battle.
She had the ability for it.
That was what Mary kept telling herself.
Yet another part of her knew it was impossible.
She was sharp enough to understand why.
Soldiers would not follow a woman’s command.
Mary had taken command at the front during exercises several times before.
The soldiers and officers had all been kind enough to treat her like a general.
During one exercise, Mary led a charge with a gun in hand, caught her foot on a small stone, and fell.
It was the sort of thing that happened constantly on a battlefield.
She had only scraped her knee.
The exercise was halted immediately.
A physician was summoned.
She was carried away on a stretcher.
With nothing more than a faint graze on her knee, Mary was all but forced into bed and subjected to an examination and treatment.
Naturally.
The young lady of the house had been injured.
She was not a glorious general of the Royal Guard.
She was Lady Mary of the ancient and distinguished House Barois.
Even so, Mary refused to face reality.
People who carry wounds of their own are often quick to notice wounds in others.
As Grois continued boasting about his future conquest of Estburg, Mary began to regard him with increasingly cold eyes.
Anyone could see that the prince’s plans were impossible.
Santeneri was already bleeding itself dry in the quagmire of the New Continent conflicts. It had no resources left for a major military campaign.
Mary knew the treasury stood on the brink of collapse.
Everyone knew it could not be done.
So why did the Crown Prince insist on talking about nothing but dreams?
Her feelings for him cooled faster and faster.
The king died, and the Crown Prince ascended the throne.
He became Grois XIII.
He spent the first year of his reign preparing for the conquest of Estburg.
More accurately, he simply ordered his retainers to make the conquest of Estburg possible.
The Royal Guard, he declared, was to be expanded yet again.
As her father’s adjutant, Mary also dealt with the Guard’s accounts.
To her, the order was absurd.
The budget would remain exactly the same.
But the number of troops was to double.
At first, as she watched the pained expression deepen on her father’s face, Mary experienced a certain grim satisfaction.
The Royal Guard had excluded her.
Seeing the organization suffer gave her a sense of vindication.
But that feeling soon evaporated.
Watching her father negotiate again and again with the Comptroller, the Steward, and the Lord of the Army, Mary realized something.
Her father, too, was suffering because he was trying to accomplish the impossible.
He was a reflection of Mary herself.
◆
The king collapsed.
Then he recovered.
And from that point onward, the wind changed.
The change in the king was easy to see.
He stopped referring to himself in the old royal fashion and began saying “I.” His manner became polite.
And he never again spoke of the ambition to conquer the continent that he had repeated like a mantra since boyhood.
Put simply, he had become quieter.
At first Mary assumed his illness had simply left him depressed.
Yet there was something she could not quite explain.
A persistent discomfort, like a tiny fish bone caught in her throat.
Perhaps Mary was only able to identify it because she had known Grois for relatively long.
Since his recovery, the king did not distinguish between people.
From servants to the Steward, he treated everyone as fundamentally the same.
And he treated Mary the same way—not as a woman who might become his secondary consort, but as one of his subordinates.
King Grois spoke to her as he would a servant.
Or as he would the Steward.
In other words, he made no unnecessary allowances for her.
Realizing that came as a shock.
The king was treating her as an officer of the Royal Guard.
Who would ask a prospective secondary consort for her opinion on military administration?
That would be like asking a butcher how to prepare fish.
If Mary was being asked to advise him on military administration, then he effectively regarded her as a senior military officer.
He recognized her.
Once she truly felt that, there was no longer any need to keep her guard up.
She even stopped resisting the bright, feminine clothes she had stubbornly refused to wear until then.
The king acknowledged her for what she was.
If that was true, what did it matter what she wore?
Mary reveled in the sensation of a weight lifting from her body.
She liked attending Grois XIII once again.
And being treated as an officer did not mean she disliked being shown consideration as a woman.
That merely reflected reality.
Men and women had different bodies.
Naturally, people sometimes treated them differently because of that.
But what lay inside those bodies—her ability, her pride—was treated exactly the same as anyone else’s.
Such a simple thing was enough to make her almost giddy.
It was what she had always wanted.
And what she had never been able to obtain.
◆
The reduction of the Royal Guard and its eventual integration into the state army.
When Mary first heard the proposal from her father, she felt betrayed.
His Majesty placed no value on them.
She confronted her father in a heated voice and told him exactly that.
Her father listened silently until she was finished, then murmured,
“Who does the Royal Guard exist for?”
“To protect His Majesty, of course. And yet—”
“Then why would His Majesty choose to give up the sword and shield that protect him? Mary, why?”
“Because... His Majesty does not trust us. He must intend to rely on the state army instead!”
“No. That is not it. The state army will be reduced just as we are.”
He then calmly began explaining the full scope of the plans currently being finalized—the peace treaty with Estburg and the reduction in military expenditure.
Mary found it difficult to believe.
Estburg was their ancestral enemy, something the king had openly described as “prey” since his days as Crown Prince.
And Prozan, the country they now intended to contain by joining forces with Estburg, was ruled by Fleisch III, the very man Grois had admired beyond measure.
Everything was moving in the exact opposite direction.
“Mary. What kind of superior do you think soldiers consider ideal?”
The abrupt question left her unable to answer.
Her father looked at her gently.
It was a calm expression she had not seen from him in years.
“I went to many battlefields beneath the previous king’s banner. When I was young, I carried a gun and stood at the head of my men myself. Soldiers are not so easily moved. On a battlefield, a title like ‘young lord of House Barois’ means nothing. Shouting at them from behind will not make them advance. There is only one way to move them.”
He paused.
“You stand at the head of the line for victory and run forward yourself. I was terrified. It felt as though countless gun barrels were all pointed directly at me.”
Mary’s father—and commanding officer, the Inspector General of the Royal Guard—almost never spoke of his own military career.
Mary had never heard this story before.
A real story of the battlefield.
“I was fortunate enough to survive. I barely remember what I actually did. I raised my sword, shouted the order, gripped my gun, and ran like a madman. After that, the soldiers accepted me.”
Her father placed a hand on Mary’s shoulder.
It was large and knotted, nothing like her own.
“Listen to me, Mary. If you order soldiers to die, you must show them that you are prepared to die as well. I do not mean dreaming about it. You must understand that death is right there in front of you—and act despite that.”
Mary began, vaguely, to understand what her father was trying to say.
Recognizing reality, and then choosing to act anyway.
Grois came to mind.
What had King Grois recognized?
Probably the desperate condition of Santeneri.
This was not something that could be repaired by changing one thing.
The structure of the state itself was approaching its limit.
And one part of that failing structure was surely the coexistence of the state army and the Royal Guard.
Grois had deliberately abandoned the dream he had cherished since childhood.
Why?
To keep the country alive.
But no matter what he said, people would not simply follow him.
If he wanted to drive others to act, he would first have to make a sacrifice himself.
“His Majesty said, ‘Create no sacred cows.’ Under ordinary circumstances, it would be enough to make cuts only to the state army. It is far larger than the Royal Guard. There are far more people and expenses to cut. But if His Majesty refuses to touch us—the sacred cow—and shrinks only the state army, it will never work. By giving up the Royal Guard, His Majesty will make the state army follow him.”
“What... does His Majesty Grois intend to accomplish? Why go this far?”
Grois’s dream had been to dominate the continent.
What remained once he abandoned it?
“I do not know His Majesty’s heart. I do not. But I suspect it is something great. His Majesty is attempting what sounds obvious and is yet the most difficult thing of all—to keep Santeneri alive. That is what I felt when I met with him.”
Her father looked at her.
“Mary, people change. His Majesty is no longer His Highness the Crown Prince.”
He paused.
“He is His Majesty Grois XIII, King of Santeneri.”
Something great.
Yet it was the sort of quiet work no one would notice.
No one would praise it.
Future history books would never write about it.
An era in which “nothing happened.”
“Mary, the Royal Guard will not vanish tomorrow. It will take years to combine us with the state army. The name will probably survive as one of its formations. Our house will also come beneath the state army’s umbrella.”
“Under House Delroise, then?”
“Yes. There are rumors that the Lord of the Navy may move sideways into the position, but even if he does, it will only be temporary. The young duke has safely succeeded to the headship of his house. He is a fine young man. In a few years, the post of Lord of the Army will likely pass to him as it traditionally has.”
House Gaillure stood at the summit of the kingdom’s great lords whose power originated outside the royal line, while House Delroise ranked first among the great houses related to the Royal House.
Since the days of the Santeneri Unification War, which had long since passed into history, Delroise troops had formed the core of the royal army. The modern Army of the Kingdom of Santeneri had begun as a union between the Delroise forces and part of the king’s army.
The heads of House Delroise had traditionally retained the title of Marshal of the Kingdom of Santeneri.
Sometimes the title carried real authority, and sometimes it was little more than a name, but the house had produced many renowned commanders over the course of its history.
“So, Mary, clever as you are, I imagine you understand now. The chains binding you are gone. What do you want to do? If you wish to remain in the military, I will force a place open for you.”
Her father paused.
“Or... would you rather marry?”
If the Royal Guard was dismantled and lost its traditional meaning, Mary herself would no longer be necessary.
There would be no further need for a “woman who tied the king to the Guard.”
There were no women in the Army of the Kingdom of Santeneri.
But if Mary wished it, her father was willing to secure her a place in the Royal Guard even after it became a unit of the state army.
Marriage.
That did not sound so bad either.
The Mary of a few years ago might have maintained a pleasant expression while seething inside.
But after experiencing what it felt like to simply be herself, becoming a wife and having children no longer seemed like something she needed to reject.
Still, if she had the choice, she wanted to remain a woman while also remaining herself.
“Father. The Royal Guard will not be dissolved immediately, correct?”
“No. For the next year or two, things will remain much as they are.”
“Then I will postpone that decision.”
Someone who saw her as a woman.
And someone who saw her as a capable person.
If she ever married, she wanted to marry a man who could see both.
That was what Mary thought.
◆
Understanding.
To be understood.
To have someone realize that she had spent years fighting not to become “just a woman” while everyone around her expected exactly that of her.
That was what Mary had wanted.
After the royal council at which the peace treaty was approved, Grois invited her to tea.
Her father’s words echoed in her mind.
His Majesty is no longer His Highness the Crown Prince. He is His Majesty Grois XIII, King of Santeneri.
Mary went to the tea gathering intending to confirm that for herself.
And there she caught a glimpse of what “Grois XIII, King of Santeneri” had become.
He understood what he was trying to do.
He understood the value of what he intended to give up, and he understood the fear and anguish of the people being asked to surrender it.
And he told her.
He regarded her as someone worth telling.
You will remain at the palace. War is men’s work. I shall protect you.
The man in front of her was the same boy who had said those words to her two years ago.
And now that same man was undoing the curse those words had placed on her.
Men really can grow in ways that astonish you sometimes. Or is His Majesty the exception?
There was something refreshing about watching King Grois listen with genuine interest as she talked about the needlework she enjoyed in her spare time.
They had never spoken about anything like that in the past.
Looking back, Mary supposed that to the Crown Prince, she had merely been the symbol of “a woman.”
A symbol was only a symbol.
What hobbies could a symbol possibly have that mattered?
As long as there was “a woman of Barois,” that was enough.
It did not have to be Mary.
There were any number of women who could have taken her place.
But to the king, she was a real woman named Mary.
Mary surprised herself when she indirectly refused to show him the stuffed toy she had not yet finished.
In the past, she would probably have shown it to him without emotion, almost automatically.
But now she was embarrassed by the thought of the king seeing it.
It had nothing to do with whether it was well made.
The king, too, was no longer a symbol to her.
He had become a real man named Grois Ene en Leroy.
Mary realized it.
Marriage.
Perhaps that choice would not be so bad after all.