"I'll consult with the others, so wait here a moment."
Not exactly polite, but not hostile, either.
The fact that he hadn't turned me away on the spot meant the bluff was already half-successful.
'Not that it's entirely a lie.'
A paladin formally ordained by a religious order received treatment comparable to a regular knight of the central army.
Becoming a paladin was the only path to knighthood for those not born noble, and I had been knighted through ordination by the Eladin Order.
I had both conducted and received the ordination myself, but it still made me a knight, didn't it?
No matter how laughably absurd the whole affair had been.
'How entertaining. You have quite the talent for theater, Roan.'
'......I'm never doing this again. I only did it because you told me to.'
'And with this, you are my knight. It means I can properly support you as your patron.'
'I don't think "patron" is the usual word for the bond between a god and her paladin.'
'What does it matter if I say I will? If you do not like it, go be a god yourself.'
There had been a time when I'd played at bishop and paladin for an audience of just one, her.
Looking back, it must have been a ridiculous sight, but even that, once swept away by the overwhelming tide of years, remained only as a luminous memory.
While the mercenary's errand left me wallowing in unexpected nostalgia, the merchants were bustling about.
A little more time passed before the same mercenary came back out.
"What sort of deal did you have in mind?"
"As you can see, my squire is ill. I'd like something to bring his fever down."
After that, they huddled together and whispered among themselves for a good while.
It was some time before the mercenary returned.
"Come inside."
The mercenary led me to a wagon near the back.
Following him, I found a merchant.
He was holding a bottle of murky yellowish-brown liquid.
"It's a decoction of willow bark."
Fortunately, it was a remedy with proven efficacy for reducing fevers.
Given how many crude and dubious treatments passed for medicine in this world, I could only relax after examining the medicine myself.
"The price?"
"That depends on the state of your coin purse."
Refined willow bark typically sold for two to three silver coins.
Since I was the one in a pinch, I naturally expected the merchant to gouge me.
"Three silver."
"Done."
Surprisingly, the merchant charged only market price and handed over the medicine without fuss.
The reason became clear with what he said next.
"In exchange, I'd like you to escort us to Pirberg."
A free knight was, when you got down to it, closer to a mercenary than to a proper knight.
Without land, they wandered the continent, scraping by on whatever commissions came their way.
The merchant was trying to hire a high-grade mercenary for the cheap price of some willow bark.
I mulled it over briefly, then accepted the bottle he offered.
It wasn't a losing deal.
"You have yourself an escort."
"Much obliged. This wagon is spices, that one's fabric. Both are mine, so I'll leave them in your hands."
A merchant of considerable wealth, even among his peers.
While the procession that had halted on my account began moving again, I climbed onto the rear of the wagon.
I tilted Kallen's head back and poured the liquid in. Even in his barely conscious state, Kallen swallowed the medicine earnestly.
As a result, little of it spilled, which pleased me.
I laid Kallen down in the wagon and walked alongside it.
Just as I was sending Formel a mental command to approach slowly, as a precaution against any unforeseen trouble, someone came up beside me.
One of the merchant's mercenaries.
"Sir knight, you certainly dote on your squire."
He wore a sword at his hip and leather armor, like any other mercenary.
Without a helm, his brown hair swayed in the wind.
"If they're within arm's reach, I tend to keep them alive. Whoever they are."
"Interesting fellow. So even if it were the vilest scoundrel alive, you'd save them?"
"If they need saving, I save them. If they need killing, I kill them."
"......Strange way to put it."
Save some, kill others.
Not neither good nor evil, but good and evil at once.
"What it comes down to is my whim."
"I'll say this much: you're the most peculiar human I've met in my entire life."
"Every human is unique. No two are the same."
The mercenary, who'd been standing with his arms crossed, smirked.
"That so? My name is Drik Roban."
"Roan Belgard."
By the time the sun had set and the campfire was lit, Kallen had recovered enough to sit up.
I brought him a ration and bit into my own share beneath my helm.
The dried jerky was hard and salty.
"......."
I could feel Kallen's gaze from where he'd already finished his portion.
In the end, I handed him the jerky I'd only taken one bite of and stood up.
"Brother, aren't you going to rest?"
"I'm fine."
Drik greeted me as I took up the night watch.
We'd barely met, and he was already calling me Brother.
"The night shift has a rotation among us. You should go back in, Brother."
"Nothing to go back to. Nowhere to rest."
I wasn't the type to slack off once I'd accepted a commission.
"Tch. Suit yourself, then."
After clicking his tongue, Drik came and stood beside me.
The night air was cool.
"And you? Why aren't you going in?"
"I'm on duty tonight."
Before long, people drifted off to sleep one by one, and only the crackling of the campfire tapped against the quiet night.
That was when Drik began to talk.
"You're a curious one, Brother. You don't seem like a knight."
"And you don't look much like a mercenary."
Free knight or not, a knight was a noble, and treating one so casually was certainly unusual.
A merchant might drop formalities due to the employer-employee dynamic, but a mercenary had no such excuse.
"Sharp eye. I wasn't born into the mercenary trade."
"I see."
"Lower than that. I came from the back alleys."
The moon was unusually bright that night.
Not a cloud was in the sky, and it was not dark.
"What's a back-alley brat supposed to do? I ate whatever scraps the ladies at the brothel tossed me, mopped their floors, and that was my life."
"It wasn't bad, in its way. Not happy, but at least I could get by."
"But listen, I must've been about fifteen. Some drunk bastard tried to rape me without even paying."
Drik stopped abruptly.
Whether he was reliving the memory or simply catching his breath, I couldn't tell.
The brief silence bored me, so I prodded him along.
"And then?"
"And then what? I stabbed him. Kept stabbing until the bastard croaked."
I heard him let out a sigh.
Drik ground a clump of weeds flat under his boot for no reason.
"The thing is, I still don't know what's different between then and now."
"I left the brothel and became a human butcher, but in the end I'm living the same life as when I was crawling around on those floors."
"Brother Knight, you said every human is unique, didn't you? I don't see it that way. You have any idea how many people in this world live the same life as me? Well, just the ones I've seen number more than a few dozen."
A back-alley orphan is unhappy.
A mercenary who picked up a sword to survive is unhappy.
Can you distinguish between these miseries?
Can you dare to declare that one weighs more than the other?
"I've got an eye for people. Anyone who doesn't has been beaten to death in the back alleys long ago. And the way I see it, Brother, you're living a life not so different from mine."
The shape of misery may differ. The way hope is crushed may differ. But the essence doesn't change.
One person is born a brothel orphan and made miserable. Another is bound by shackles called love and revenge, living centuries in misery.
Comparing who has it worse is meaningless.
This was the medieval era, where unhappy lives outnumbered happy ones, and in the end, we were all living the same life, one called misery.
"Maybe so."
Then could we truly call ourselves different?
What was the difference between Roan Belgard and Drik Roban?
"I am living the same life as you."
But.
"That doesn't mean you have to keep living the same life as me."
Being miserable doesn't mean you can't find happiness.
Living the same life doesn't mean it can never change.
"Drik, come find me when we reach Pirberg."
A life's allotment of misery isn't decided at birth.
Having been miserable until now doesn't mean you have to stay miserable.
You can't change a past that was as unhappy as everyone else's, but you can at least choose not to live the same life as everyone else from here on.
"I'll get you in as a paladin of the Talios Order."
Then could we truly call ourselves the same?
Once he had cut off the misery he'd seen and lived through, would he truly be the same person he'd been in his brothel days?
"......You're serious?"
"Yeah."
I had at least that much pull.
How the Talios Order would treat someone I'd personally brought in was obvious.
"How would you, Brother...... No. Never mind."
Drik swallowed the rest and smirked.
He'd stopped trampling the weeds.
"I want to know why."
The jerky I'd given Kallen suddenly came to mind.
It had been nice and salty, that jerky.
"Didn't I tell you? If someone's within arm's reach, I save them when I can."
Drik scratched his head.
"So in the end, it's a whim."
"Yeah. A whim."
The moonlight was bright.
Bright enough to clearly see Drik extending his hand.
In it was a piece of jerky.
***
Several days had passed since joining the merchant caravan.
With our numbers, most beasts didn't dare come near, and though we did run into bandits once, we dealt with them without incident.
Kallen had made a full recovery and was back to his energetic self.
He must have been naturally sociable, for he made friends with people in no time and was soon coming back with all sorts of food.
"Sir knight, they say this is herb butter."
"......What are you going to do with butter right now?"
"I don't know, but isn't butter one of those things that's always better to have than not?"
I was watching Kallen place a lump of butter on his sour bread and eat it when someone approached the rear of the wagon.
It was Drik.
"Brother, we're almost there."
"Got it."
His furtive glances drifted toward Kallen's butter-laden bread.
Kallen, noticing, held out the bread he'd been eating.
"Have some. It's herb butter."
"Oh, herb butter? Don't mind if I do."
Drik took Kallen's bread and promptly vanished.
Kallen was now left eating butter on its own, no bread.
"......Isn't that greasy?"
"It does."
Kallen grinned and offered me the butter as well.
I shook my head.
"You should still finish what you got."
While he polished off the butter, I hopped off the wagon and walked up beside the merchant driving the lead horse.
Far ahead, the outline of a city wall that even Brüs couldn't compare to came into view.
"Here at last. Good work, sir knight."
"Not at all."
Pirberg, a city of the Darvar March and of the Talios Order.
A fortnight's journey, and we'd only just arrived.