Gazing Up At The River Of Stars (3)

“Hey there, Dias.”

Heading for the square’s general store, a middle-aged shopkeeper spotted Kardia and greeted him cheerfully. From the look of it, Kardia must have been a frequent customer.

“Hello—sorry to barge in.”

“Have a look at anything you like. ’Course, we ain’t sellin’ the Galenée statues.”

The shopkeeper must have seen them lingering by the statue. If those had been set up across the country fifty years ago, everyone would be used to them by now. Noi, who had stared so intently, must have stood out.

“No, I was just thinking—after fifty years, it’s been kept remarkably clean.”

Not wanting Kardia—posing as a traveler—to draw the wrong kind of attention, Noi hurried to make an excuse, though it happened to be the truth.

Despite being as tall as a grown adult, the statue had barely weathered, though it had stood through wind and rain.

The shopkeeper raised his brows at Noi cradled in Kardia’s arms and scratched his head.

“Well now… Folks in the village all pitch in to tend it. You take good care of the Galenée statue too, little miss. Our generation, we got an earful from the geezers—‘Don’t you treat it rough now,’ that’s what they’d say.”

Taking his eyes off Noi, the shopkeeper gazed up at the blue sky, streaked with cloud.

“It’s a tale from a hundred years back, so sky-turnin’ black sounds like a fairytale now…”

Drawn by him, Noi looked up as well. She shivered, realizing even a place this far from the royal capital had been shrouded in that darkness back then. Perhaps, in answer to the Demon King’s hatching, the sky had gone black over the whole country—no, the whole world.

“So then. Didn’t know you had a little sister.”

At the shopkeeper’s light remark, Kardia turned toward him.

“What are you saying? Obviously—”

“W—hey, you—!”

“She’s my adorable bride.”

Sensing trouble, Noi tried to cut him off, but it was too late.

The shopkeeper, however, unlike the group of women before, just laughed it off.

“Oho, that so? My mistake then. Little miss, you’ve snagged yourself quite the looker, eh? Every woman in the village’ll be jealous, that’s for sure.”

Given she’d just been pitied—jealousy was the last thing—Noi could only laugh weakly and go along.

—No one took it seriously at all.

(So there was nothing to worry about…)

With the earlier women, the flow of the conversation had put them off, but this was surely the normal reaction in general.

Even without being introduced as twelve, with how young she looked, no one would take Noi for the bride of a worldly man like Kardia.

Relief came—and with it, for some reason, a little tightening in her chest.

“Ah—Lord Dias!”

A shout so loud Noi flinched.

She looked over in a hurry. Two or three young villagers in easy-to-move light gear were there, all mud-stained from toes to crown.

“My missus heard Lord Dias was in town and kicked up a fuss, so we looked—and here you are! C’mon, over here! Please!”

The men strode straight toward wide-eyed Noi and Kardia.

“Just now the ground turned to muck all of a sudden… A bunch of our cattle are stuck in the mire and can’t get out—we’re in a panic.”

“You’re a mage, right? Help us! This way!”

As the men approached, Noi quickly hopped down from Kardia’s arm. The instant she did, they grabbed Kardia by the arm.

“Whoa—h-h—hold on, you lot—!”

“Hurry!”

“Whoaa—! All right, all right! Bride—stay right here!”

Dragged along, Kardia shouted back to Noi. She blinked, then nodded briskly.

Cattle were precious assets to the village. Judging by the villagers’ faces, every moment counted.

“…Shopkeeper, excuse us.”

“Don’t mind me… but little miss, you talk a peculiar sort of talk.”

Since coming a hundred years into the future, people often remarked on her speech. A hundred years ago, few had spoken their minds to Noi—who had rank, money, and magic—face to face. That was the difference.

“It rubbed off from my grandfather’s way of speaking.”

“I see.”

Offered the honest reason, the shopkeeper accepted it easily.

“Still—and again, huh.”

“Again?”

“Not long back—see that eatery over there? Road out front flooded.”

The shopkeeper pointed to the place across the way.

“Lucky for us, the ground ’round here’s packed firm, so it didn’t turn to a total bog… but we had to heap fresh soil from up top and all—bit of a job.”

“Is this area prone to flooding?”

“Nah, never heard that. In my granddad’s day, they say it rained a lot… but that’s decades ago.”

“Hmmm…”

“See that island?”

As Noi offered short replies, the shopkeeper pointed outside. There lay the floating islet where they’d been earlier.

“Word is it rose up back when my granddad was a young man, but ever since the lord moved up there, the rain just… stopped.”

Noi’s eyes went round.

“When your granddad was young…?! Then how many years has it been floating?!”

“Dunno. At least eighty.”

“Eighty years…?”

—(He’s kept an island afloat for eighty years?)

Noi was dumbstruck.

To create magic, it took time to weave a magic circle. The larger it was, the more time it required.

Once the circle was woven, though, maintaining it was easy enough—so long as you kept magic flowing into it. Even so, there were limits.

(To keep an island that large suspended without cease—just how much magic would that take…?)

No ordinary person’s reserves would cover it.

As Noi began to think it through, more villagers arrived.

“Hey! Lord Dias around?”

“This thing busted—can you get it fixed?”

All told, eight villagers came, each holding some kind of magic tool.

They ranged from costly devices you’d never expect to find in the sticks, to more common second-hand items that circulated widely.

Noi now understood why Kardia had complained “what a hassle” that morning.

If every trip to the surface meant an endless line of customers, it had to be exhausting.

“Dias stepped out just now.”

“Seriously? We slipped out from work the moment we heard he was here.”

One villager sighed—and the other seven all began to speak at once.

“He’s got time for young gals, but not for the likes of us, huh?”

“Well, the one who does the least work is the lord.”

“Holes up on that floating islet, never comes down. Word is domain management’s all on Butler Geiko.”

“If the lord kept it together, we wouldn’t have to lean on Lord Dias.”

“No point countin’ on some shut-in old geezer who never shows his face.”

At first Noi listened quietly, but at last she couldn’t hold back.

“Isn’t the lord doing what he can, in his own way, to value this village?”

Otherwise, Kardia wouldn’t have stopped by the square just to cheer her up—nor rushed off to save the cattle just because someone took his hand. As his bride, Noi had learned firsthand that he could be cold enough to leave her to her fate, had she not been his “bride.”

“Oh? And whose child are you, little miss?”

“Fine-made clothes you’ve got there…”

“Girls that age got no business shootin’ off know-it-all talk.”

“We’re the fools for expectin’ anything from a lord who ain’t come down in decades.”

“For all we know, he mighta keeled over up there already.”

“Sky gods’ll be glad to fetch him sooner rather than later.”

“Wahaha,” the villagers laughed.

(Kardia—I don’t know all the reasons you went up into the sky.)

But at least one of them surely wasn’t far off the mark.

Because his body had stopped aging, he could no longer live within the rules of human society.

-“‘Master says I’m human, but… I’m already different from everyone after all.’”

-“‘Everyone but Master… feels fragile.’”

-“‘There’s the church where I grew up. I hate it when anything happens to them…’”

He wanted to live among people—and yet he feared the Demon King within would hurt them.

And though at long last the Demon King was gone, he still could not live among people; he lived apart—choosing to be the only one apart.

(Indeed, as you are now, you’re terribly suspect. Shady, and at times hard to approach.)

But none of that changed how dearly Noi loved Kardia.

“—You’ve got broken magic tools, yes? Tell me. If I can fix them, then you will stop badmouthing the lord—forever.”

Noi thrust both hands toward the man clutching a magic device.