“I hate being lied to, but I wish you could have at least pretended you were marrying me off for my own happiness, Father.”
After Yae left, Kadaru sighed.
“Oh, Yae, how unfair of you to choose now to finally call me Father…”
The chiefs had made their arrangements, but they weren’t able to convince the women to leave right away. Gentle Natures instinctively avoided rough Wild Natures.
Oshiro immediately rejected the marriage. Her family convinced her in the end, but she still insisted that she needed time to adjust to the idea. Miya Province was stressed about the deformation problem and pressed for the women to be sent within a few weeks, but Oshiro’s stubborn protests led to the marriages being delayed to the seventh moon. Oshiro likely would have been called selfish and pressured to back down if she had been the only one making this demand, but the other women besides Yae firmly added their voices to hers. Ignoring all of them would have led to resistance from the people.
Oshiro and the other women were surprised when they learned that Yae was one of the ten to be married off, and they even consoled her.
“Why did you go along with it, Yae? You should have refused even if you had to tear him a new one to do it,” Oshiro told her. She could be surprisingly belligerent for a Gentle Nature. “Good grief, why does Father think he can treat you this way? It’s as if all the kindness was expelled from his brain to make room for his intelligence.”
Yae burst out laughing at Oshiro’s tirade. Kadaru considered Oshiro to be ignorant of the ways of the world. He wasn’t wrong in the sense that she knew nothing of life outside Kaki Province, but she was no fool. She inferred the reason that Yae was chosen as one of the brides and felt sorry for her. While Yae doubted she knew divorce and a return to Kaki Province were in the equation, the kindness of Oshiro and the other women made her feel truly happy.
Not everyone was so nice to her, though; she was greatly resented by those villagers chosen as new envoys for the ceremonies. The ceremony rites were terrifying, and envoys risked death to perform them. Now that Yae was stepping down, the pressure had shifted to the remaining villagers.
Living your life without anyone hating you is unrealistic. That was what Yae told herself. Even if she wasn’t personally at fault, being resented didn’t feel good.
The bridal furniture was sent to Miya Province ahead of time, and Miya Province did the same for the grooms. The women would bring nothing with them, and no family would be allowed to come. Their future husbands were going to ride to Kaki Province on horseback and escort them to their new home.
The women would wear colorful veils that covered their faces down to their waists until they arrived in Miya Province. That was so the men wouldn’t reject their brides on the spot if they didn’t like how they looked. If they voiced such complaints after reaching their village, they would be ridiculed as narrow-minded. In Yae’s case, however, there was a high chance that no one would blame the man for rejecting her.
When the day of the trip arrived, Yae was put onto the back of a red horse by a brawny man with thick arms. The future husbands from Miya Province were also wearing full-body veils of long black fabric that showed only their eyes, but it was impossible to hide their muscular physiques. Their upper and lower clothes were white, and the cuffs and hems of their robes had bold geometric patterns.
Even the Natureless Yae could feel the incredible aura the Wild-Natured men projected. It had a violence to it, almost like it could crumple Yae’s soul like paper just by proximity. It was like she was being assaulted by billows of hot air. She didn’t actually feel any heat, but she couldn’t help but be intimidated. The other women could feel the auras of the men more keenly, and they all looked to be on the verge of fainting from fear. Yae was worried about them.
The brawny husbands-to-be all wore weapons on their shoulders and backs as if to demonstrate that they were warriors and hunters. Yae saw bow cases, spears, and swords, some of which were themselves curved like bows.
The women sat on the horses alone, and the men led them by foot. Ten women were being married off at once, so it made for quite a procession.
“Miya Province is located in the valley of Mount Mebiro, on the other side of Mount Yagi.”
The man leading the procession spoke calmly, as if trying to console the trembling women. His voice was calm, but it was much deeper than that of the elegant men of Kaki Province. There were Wild-Natured men in Kaki Province as well, but they had adapted to the Gentle Natures around them, and none of them had auras as violent as these men. Pure Wild Natures are unbelievable, Yae thought to herself timidly.
“…You may be scared of us, but we wouldn’t hurt a woman for no reason. You have no need to worry,” he added kindly, but the women on the horses did not stop shaking.
Yae was intimidated for a different reason. Does “we wouldn’t hurt a woman for no reason” mean they would if they did have a reason?
The man leading her horse had been darting his eyes at her curiously for some time. Despite being Natureless, Yae could sense someone else’s Nature. Naturally, the men could sense the Natures of the women as well. The man couldn’t sense anything from Yae, and he was bewildered by it. Natureless people were so rare that there might not even be one in an entire village, so it probably wouldn’t occur to him right away what she was.
A chill ran down Yae’s back. He was probably going to ask her about her Nature before they arrived at the village. She could handle him being disappointed, but what if he flew into a rage because Kaki Province sent a Natureless woman, even though it was common knowledge that Wild-Natured men liked Gentle-Natured women?
Maybe I should’ve taken that sword for self-protection, Yae thought with regret. She had been hesitant to take the vibrating black sword with her out of Kaki Province given the identity of its original owner, so she had decided to wrap it securely in cloth and leave it in the Whiskey House. No one would be using the place while she was gone, and she asked Kadaru not to let anyone enter her house. She figured she would be back in a few years, or even a few days.
But she had been naive. It seemed like Yae wasn’t one to speak about being ignorant of the world. She had judged all Wild Natures by those living in Kaki Province without a second thought and had been totally unprepared for the violent auras of these pure Wild-Natured men.
Yae had resigned herself sometime after her conversation with Kadaru to only living in Miya Province temporarily in order to control the deformation outbreak. She was sure her husband wasn’t going to accept her. As such, she had been treating this as an extended business trip. She still thought that was the right mindset, but she wished she had more seriously considered the danger of her husband doing more than just rejecting her.
Yae and the procession circled around the foot of Mount Yagi as they headed for Mount Mebiro. Traveling across the mountainside would have shortened the trip, but there were many cliffs on the back side of Mount Yagi, making the road somewhat precipitous, not to mention the dangerous animals they might encounter there. The women from Kaki Province almost never ventured that way, and the men were likely being considerate of them. Walking around the foot of the mountain was a bit of a detour, but it was the safer route.