"Yanan?"
At Earl Hall's home in Empress Borough, Audrey sat before the drawing room's floor-to-ceiling windows in a loose, comfortable house dress, repeating the slightly awkward name in puzzlement.
"Yes. Before that day, I'd never heard of the place either."
Her brother Alfred, who had recently become an army major general and returned from the Southern Continent, nodded.
Instead of the general's dress uniform that testified to his years of military achievements, he wore a shirt, waistcoat, and casual trousers, hoping not to make his sister, who had only just come of age, feel pressured. His adjutant and Audrey's personal maid had tactfully left the room to stand guard outside, leaving the siblings undisturbed during their reunion after years apart.
Even Susie, Audrey's beloved dog who almost never left her side, had been sent outside for a walk.
"So what sort of place was it?"
Audrey took a sip of black tea and prompted Alfred to continue.
"The army's main forces won't rotate out until early next year, and the naval fleet was bound for Desi Bay, so I took a passenger ship back to Pritz Harbor ahead of them with some civil officials," Alfred said slowly, leaning back in his chair and relaxing. "But while we were passing through that dangerous route across the Berserk Sea, the ship lost its way and ran into a storm."
"To escape the wind and waves, we sought shelter at the harbor of a small island south of the Rorsted Archipelago. But the captain and navigator got the location wrong, and the ship docked at an unfamiliar pier. It belonged to a small city of just five thousand people—Yanan."
"Was there anything special about it?"
Audrey tilted her head, expressing her curiosity at just the right moment so that her brother could recount