Published at 24th of February 2024 10:33 am

Chapter 57

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Walking with Karad to do the nightly charging for the ward stone was annoying mostly because my legs were much, much shorter than his. I had to practically jog to keep up with him, which looked entirely ridiculous. From a practical standpoint, it also wasted mana, which was what ultimately made me put my foot down about the issue after a few days. Karad had just grunted and slowed down a bit every time I fell behind.

At least he hadn’t offered to carry me. More than a few people had thought nothing of reaching down and picking me up like they would any other child. One of the Arborists who had a son the same age as me was especially bad about that, to the point where I’d had to give her a mild shock on three separate occasions now.

There were spells to speed up growth, and if possible, I’d take advantage of them later. Reaching stage two took priority, and besides, it was a huge mana investment to essentially shave a year off each decade. I was still going to be a child for far longer than I wanted, but there was no escaping that. It would have been far more tolerable if I’d had access to an unlimited amount of mana to make up for my physiological deficiencies.

Near the end of the second week, as we walked through the arbor towards the village, he asked me, “How are the candidates coming along?”

“Not as well as I’d like, but they’re still making progress. I’m hopeful that Vhan will be ready in the next two weeks. Shel probably won’t be far behind.”

“And the other two?”

“Talik is catching up. He hit a few stumbling blocks at the beginning, but now that he’s figured things out, he’s doing fine. Ayaka will probably be ready about the same time Shel is, but… politics.”

“Because Melmir insisted he have someone in the initial class,” Karad said. “You don’t want her to have a blessing?”

“I don’t much care one way or another,” I told the captain of the Garrison. “I’m just expecting interference before she reaches that point. Despite my best efforts to retain control of my class, politics always has to have its say.”

Karad chuckled and said, “It does. Sometimes I think it would be easier to just run a sword through anyone who disagrees with me, but no. We’re civilized. We don’t do that kind of thing here.”

“I have been strongly tempted to set Shel’s hair on fire more than once,” I admitted.

“Hah! I would like to see that! She can be insufferable at times.”

“I imagine we’ll be having a group meeting soon to determine which spells will be approved for general use,” I said. “I’m sure you don’t want the average farmer learning spells like sleep or flame lance.”

Karad paused mid-stride and glanced down at me. “No, that would not be ideal,” he said after a moment. “If you are close to the point where your students are ready to start learning things like that, we should probably discuss what spells you are teaching. I had not considered this, but I will get back with you about a council meeting time.”

“We’re a council now?” I asked, surprised. Nobody had told me that.

“Not you. With Noctra’s death and nobody to replace him as governor, it seemed like the best way to proceed for the time being,” Karad said. His brow furrowed and he added, “At least, it did two weeks ago. I am regretting the decision now.”

Finding out that I had severely overestimated Karad’s political savviness initially had been a happy surprise. He was by no means stupid, but he also wasn’t accustomed to considering the hidden agendas of his peers and that they might make alliances against him. I’d initially suspected he was going to be the most difficult of the four to handle. Melmir was more hostile towards me, but Karad had more power in the community. I was starting to think I’d been mistaken about that assumption.

That, or Karad was a devious mastermind who was playing us all for suckers. What were the chances of that, though?

“You should come to the arbor tomorrow afternoon after lunch,” I said, changing the subject.

“Why’s that?”

“I’m almost ready to remove the subjugation spell from Nermet. I’ll do the final preparations tomorrow morning, and then after class, I’ll remove the spell.” That had only taken about a month thanks to the ample mana I was siphoning out of the storage crystals each night.

At first, I didn’t think Karad would reply, but after a few more steps, he said, “Thank you. I will be there.”

“I feel like I should warn you that there’s no guarantee that he’ll be able to think and act like a normal person once I’m done,” I said. “My understanding is that he’d had some sort of accident as a child, long before Noctra took over his mind.”

“Yes, when he was a boy. Nermet was climbing a cliff face. He slipped and fell, hit his head. Lord Emeto was able to heal him enough to keep him alive, but… he was never the same after. It was my fault. I was teaching him to climb. I should have stopped him when he snuck off. I knew he was going to practice to impress me. I didn’t think that he’d go so high.”

Human beings, young or old, were delicate, fragile creatures. A simple accident could leave someone dead or maimed, to say nothing of what happened to those who fell prey to the many monsters lurking in the hidden corners of the world. Magic was the great equalizer, the tool we wielded that put us on the same level as the greatest of monsters. I would never understand those who sought power, yet shunned the arcane arts.

“He’ll likely still be that way after I’m done,” I said. “I’m only trying to reverse the damage Noctra did.”

Karad nodded along with my words. “Still,” he said. “Thank you.”

I wasn’t a very altruistic person. I looked out for my family, avoided using people for petty gain, and otherwise ignored the problems of others. If not for my father’s intervention, I would have put Nermet out of his misery all those weeks ago. Perhaps it was for the best that Nermet continued to live.

Well, it was still a net loss with all the time and mana I’d spent working on him, but it certainly helped my position with Karad. So it turned out better than it otherwise could have. And I supposed it righted one of Noctra’s many wrongs. The types of mages who used magic like that were inevitably people the world was better off without.

“Yes, well, as I said, you should be able to take him home tomorrow afternoon,” I said.

“I’ll be there,” Karad promised.

***

After I finished my nightly ward stone duty, I detoured to my family’s hut to check up on them. Karad assigned someone from the Garrison to watch me, but otherwise ignored me except to remind me that I needed to return to my new home in the arbor soon.

They’d replaced the curtain I’d used as a sail during our escape from the village all those weeks ago, though the new one was somewhat more frayed and patchier than the original. It did the job, but it didn’t match the window curtains. That must have bothered Mother to no end.

“Hello,” I called out from in front of the curtain. A few moments later, a hand reached out and pulled it aside. Mother grabbed me with both arms and pulled me into a hug that lifted me off the ground.

“My little boy! I’ve missed you,” she said, still holding me tightly.

I put up with it for another moment before squirming my way loose. Reluctantly, my mother let me go and ushered me inside. The interior was pretty much what I remembered except for the missing pallet and a few chairs. There was only one by the table now. All of our visits over the last month had been them coming to me, so this was the first chance I’d gotten to see the hut I’d lived in again since returning to the village.

Mother saw me looking and said, “Some of our neighbors decided we weren’t coming back and it was better to take what they wanted now. Only one returned a chair after we got home.”

The only surprising part of that was that even a single person brought anything back. At least they’d left the bedding alone. I supposed nobody wanted a used bed, but plenty of people had no problem taking an extra chair. Though I would have thought it would be easy to track everything down. Perhaps our return home wasn’t as welcoming as it could have been.

“Are people giving you problems?” I asked. “Treating you differently?”

“We knew it was going to be different. As soon as Noctra singled your father out, it didn’t matter what we did. Nothing was ever going to be the same.”

“Treating you poorly,” I clarified.

Mother shrugged and said, “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me.”

She gestured to where Senica was sleeping and said, “Not where it counts. I made sure no one’s trying to take anything out on her. If some people want to be jerks to your father and me, well, it’s nothing we haven’t dealt with before.”

“Speaking of Father, where is he?” I asked.

“Out doing some late work,” she said unhappily. “They’re trying to push the limits of his new core, and tonight’s experiment is how well he can work after a tithe.”

Considering that Father could generate as much mana in thirty minutes as he used to with a full night’s sleep, I imagined just the time he spent walking back to the field from the village square was enough to recover. I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of them taking advantage of him to do more work like that, though.

“Is this voluntary?”

“He could have refused the work,” Mother said.

“Without consequence?”

“Probably not.”

I sighed. “Maybe we would have been better off not returning here after all.”

My ears picked up the sound of the Garrison escort shifting in place outside the hut. He was clearly listening to the conversation and ready to report anything I said back to Karad. That had been part of the point of coming here, though. I wanted to check up on my family and make sure they were being treated properly, and I wanted Karad to know I was doing that. If there was a problem like this field work thing, I was going to put pressure on him to fix it.

By the time Karad came around for Nermet’s recovery tomorrow, I suspected an overseer or two would have been spoken to about this. If not, I’d make sure it happened before the end of the day. It might not be possible to make everyone act like nothing had ever happened—not without resorting to some fairly nefarious mental manipulations—but I could at least keep people from taking advantage of Father’s ignited mana core.

“This is our home,” Mother said. “Where else would we go?”

“Anywhere we wanted,” I told her. “We still could. There are plenty of other villages and towns out there. It’s a big world.”

“Maybe,” Mother said, but she shook her head. “But after disposing of Noctra, we’d be leaving the village in a lurch if you didn’t stay to help them.”

“I only help because it’s mutually beneficial. If things are growing worse for you instead of better, why should I waste my time helping these people?” I asked bluntly. The guard outside shifted in place again.

“Because it’s the right thing to do,” Mother told me.

“And I’m happy to do it, as long as they do right by us as well.”

“Life’s not always fair like that.”

“If life’s not fair, it’s going to be unfair in my favor,” I told her bluntly. “Otherwise what’s the point of having power to begin with?”

The conversation died off there, both of us sitting in silence for a bit. After a few minutes, I made my excuses, promised to visit again another night, and left. There was no sign of Father coming home and it was well after dark. I wondered how many more hours he’d spend working under the light of the moons.

***

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