The Promise He Could Not Keep

The Duke’s Frost Rose Knights had training facilities to match their towering reputation. Ardine and her guardians gathered on the Third Drill Ground, smallest of the three inside the ducal castle.

Keith Paragon was there too, naturally. Once the test was over he would return to the study and conclude an exclusive contract with the mage.

“Haaaaawm.”

Hamel gave a long, sagging yawn. He wore a one-piece nightshirt with a pair of slippers flung on and nothing else besides.

“Just looking at him makes me feel a cold coming on.”

Pai leaned in and whispered to Keith. Before he could react at all, Hamel took issue with it.

“Seriously, how do non-mages live in the North?”

“They don’t.”

Pai answered as though it were nothing much.

“They freeze to death every night and get resurrected together with the dawn. Though I couldn’t tell you how it goes for mages.”

“Hah. Funny.”

Hamel let out a dismissive snort of a laugh. Keith smiled along with him and asked.

“Does it not take a fair amount of magic power to keep yourself from the cold?”

“Scooping one cup out of the sea doesn’t dry the water up.”

All bluster. When really he just hates the cold and is letting his magic power run out of him in streams.

Pai kept her swaggering strictly on the inside.

“Right, then. Are you ready, peanut?”

“Preparations complete!”

Ardine sprang up as though she had been waiting for it, her voice filled to the brim with fighting spirit. She did not so much as object to ‘peanut’, a sure sign she was nervous.

“The answer at least I like. Now, hold out your hand.”

She turned her palm up to face the sky. A deep light bloomed at Hamel’s fingertip, writhed into a shape as sharp as a needle, then darted at the child’s plump thumb and pricked the very tip of it.

— Tap.

“Ah, that stings!”

Ardine let out a short shriek, and Keith flinched as though he had been pricked himself. Worry came crowding into his face like a bank of storm cloud. Pai touched the back of his hand lightly.

“You trust me, don’t you?”

“Sorry?”

“It’s all going to be fine.”

“…Yes.”

They watched a bead of red blood well softly up out of Ardine’s thumb. A film as thin and clear as a soap bubble wrapped itself around the drop, and presently the bead shuddered, vibrating ever so faintly.

Hamel gave his verdict in a flat tone.

“Her mana sensitivity isn’t bad.”

“Ooh! Ari passed? Ari’s a mage?!”

“Aren’t we impatient.”

Hamel looked at Ardine, blinking hard in her excitement, and snorted as though he found her endearing.

“Decent mana sensitivity turns up often enough among non-mages too. What matters is the intracorporeal… that is to say, the mana inside your body.”

He cleared his throat and rose to his student’s eagerness.

“Inside every mage’s body there is a mana heart and mana circuits. You can compare them to the heart and the blood vessels, respectively.”

“A heart…”

“That’s right. Just as the heart matters to a human being, this thing called the mana heart is what matters most to a mage. If it is destroyed, you may take it that his life as a mage is over as well. And conversely, the mana heart is also the starting point. To make a mana heart… they say the minimum standard is a quantity of mana sufficient to generate one… and its density and its stability have to be watched as well… and there are cases where the generation fails even when every condition has been met…”

“This isn’t a lecture in magic theory, so let’s leave it about there.”

Pai cut in and broke him off mid-sentence, and Hamel bristled.

“This is common knowledge!”

“Not for a seven-year-old child, it isn’t. Though of course, if she’s judged to be a mage, she’ll have to study it properly.”

“Eugh, Ari has to study?”

Ardine was aghast. Hamel cackled at her on purpose, like some fearsome demon.

“Become a mage and you’ll have your studies with you for the rest of your life. Peanut!”

“Th— the rest of Ari’s life!”

“That’s right, the rest of your life. Until that pretty golden hair of yours has gone white!”

“Hic.”

“Don’t frighten her.”

Pai knelt down on the bare earth and brought her eyes level with Ardine’s.

“My lady, don’t listen to that mage and his swollen ego. Studying is a thing you have to keep at whatever sort of person you turn out to be and whatever work you end up doing.”

— Nod-nod.

“Take a swordsman: to become a Sword Master he has to train. But does becoming a Master mean ‘I’m free!’? No, it doesn’t. If a person doesn’t learn he falls behind, and in the end he goes stagnant right where he is. And what happens to stagnant water?”

“It rots.”

“That’s right.”

Pai stroked the round crown of Ardine’s head, slowly, and as she did it she let her own aura seep quietly in. Only a very little, not enough for Hamel to catch.

“…Stop touching Ari.”

“Sorry?”

“It’ll wreck Ari’s hair!”

Ardine said it primly, then planted herself squarely in front of Hamel.

“Come at Ari, mage!”

Hamel was about to make contact with Ardine, just as Pai had a moment ago; he was going to stretch his own magic power out like tentacles and search out every last corner of her body. The child’s body was already faintly stimulated by Pai’s powerful aura. And with Hamel’s magic power added on top of that?

Aura and magic power share one root, mana; what differs is the shape and expression each takes, according to how it is refined and how it is handled. When two such energies, both honed to real attainment, collide inside one body, trouble usually follows. A born genius is a different story.

In the previous life too, Ardine awakened by much the same method.

Ardine Paragon at seventeen.

A band scheming to resurrect Simon kidnapped her and forced demonic energy from a demon into her, and magic power besides. She awakened as a mage in the process, but the violence of the injection turned her into a living corpse.

…It is different now.

Both Pai and Hamel were letting through only the smallest trace of energy, and if anything went wrong they could step in at once.

“It’s going to feel strange.”

Hamel said, and stretched out an arm to set his fingertips against Ardine’s forehead.

At first she felt nothing at all. She was only surprised that the mage’s fingertips against her forehead were warmer than she had expected.

“Hold still…”

Pai had said that Hamel would teach her a great many things, and that however young he looked on the outside, he was in fact a mage with a good many years on him.

Teacher.

Until then, Mareni had been her teacher. She knew the names of trees and wildflowers, of insects and birds, and whenever Ardine liked she would tell her about this world’s creation myth, about the wicked demons, about the old history of the Empire.

Once she had learned her letters, she read every last children’s book in the White Castle. She loved hide-and-seek and tag and hopping about like a frog and barking like a dog, but she was every bit as deep in the stories inside the books.

When she had conquered the White Castle’s children’s shelves and asked to have new books bought for her, Papa said, ‘When you turn eight, I’ll get you a private tutor.’

That Papa could not keep his promise is a story everyone knows.

Instead, Papa sent mister to her. Perhaps mister would get her a teacher. A mage who went whoosh! and then bang!

And to manage that, she had to pass this test.

“Concentrate on the energy inside your body.”

Hamel said, “Eyes closed. And stop jiggling your leg.”

“Nngh.”

“Don’t groan, and don’t laugh either. Now, now — don’t twitch your nose.”

“…”

“You have to breathe.”

“Pwah!”

“…Breathe smaller. Slowly, naturally… yes, like that. Deep breaths, just as you’re doing now.”

“Sssp… haaah…”

“There’s mana, at any rate. Though only at about the level of a drop falling from a tap that hasn’t been shut off properly.”

“Nnngh.”

She felt something inside her body sway. If there were a bowl of water in her belly, the tremor was on the level of a water strider nudging at its surface, lightly, lightly.

“It sways, but the stability isn’t bad. It’s only that the quantity itself is small… hm?”

Hamel opened his all but closed eyes into a bleary squint. Two whole creases appeared between his brows. His expression had turned grave, and Keith, making no attempt to hide his unease, asked in haste.

“Is something the matter?”