The Girl Who Knew the Word
He had left nothing behind on Earth. At most, his parents' grave, and a handful of memories from childhood.
Perhaps it was only because that was the place where he had been born and raised. Or perhaps the desperate daily work of learning a strange language had worn him thin without his ever noticing.
The moment a familiar tongue reached his ear, his heart jumped. Before he knew it, Juhwan was staring at the girl.
She had the sort of face one saw everywhere in this world. Only the unusual pallor of her skin and the clarity of her eyes invited a second look.
And yet, if he looked longer, she was not quite what that first glance had suggested. Ordinary at a distance, she carried, up close, an air just slightly apart from everyone else.
What was different?
Her clothes were not different. Her features were not different. Nothing about her stood far from the people around her. She simply looked her age—ah. That was it. All at once Juhwan saw the strange thing.
Even Dorothy, the first time he met her, had worn a face somehow used up by living.
This girl showed no weariness of life at all. She looked like a child who had grown up inside a fairy tale, and that was what set her apart from the rest of the world.
She tilted her head once more and asked.
He nearly answered before he could stop himself. No. Don't. The language of Earth felt nothing like the speech of this world.
He had been careless at the beginning, but he knew now how exotic Korean sounded here.
Words from Earth struck the ear more strangely than any foreign tongue of this world. Answer her, and every eye in the room would find him at once.
The people nearby were already murmuring over what she had said. Someone blurted it out.
"What was that? What country talks like that? I've met folk from all over, and I've never heard a word of it."
Just as he thought. Earth's language drew notice.
Juhwan swallowed what little moisture remained in his dry mouth and let his gaze fall a fraction away from the girl.
"An unusual language."
As he spoke, Lizzie pressed in close and clung to him, tucking herself against his side as if she meant to burrow there. She almost never did such a thing out of doors.
He glanced at her face. She looked anxious. Now and then she had heard him speak Korean, and so she knew the girl was using the same tongue.
The way she watched the girl seemed faintly frightened. He set a hand on her shoulder and gave it a light, steadying squeeze. It's all right.
The Guild Master flapped both hands and drove the onlookers off.
"What are you all gawking at? Get back to your work. The guild's about to close. Drag your feet and I'll throw the lot of you out."
Grumbling, they formed a line again in front of the reception desk. The same at the purchase counter. Almost no one remained around Juhwan.
The Guild Master looked at him.
"Have you got a moment? There are a few things I'd like to talk over."
Juhwan did not answer at once.
"I asked around about magical beasts. Horned rabbits. You still don't know much about them, so some of it ought to be worth hearing."
He had already been thinking he needed to learn about magical beasts. The offer suited him perfectly. Only the girl who knew Earth's language still snagged at his mind.
While the Guild Master talked, she studied Oz, cradled in Dorothy's arms, with close attention.
Oz looked back at her with black eyes. The fur along his small body seemed slightly on end.
Seeing that, Juhwan deliberately let a thread of mana seep from his body. If something sudden happened, he would be able to answer it in an instant. Insurance, nothing more.
Oz twitched the ears laid flat. The openings turned a little this way and that, gathering sound, and the nose moved in small pulses at the same time, as if testing the girl's voice and her scent together.
Juhwan watched her without moving. She might be hiding ill will. She looked like an ordinary human, but she might in truth be a mage of terrible skill.
Every breath seemed to dry the air. Tension followed the air in, prickling over his skin like static, and his mouth went bone-dry.
Perhaps he was wound too tight. Tiny sparks crackled at his fingertips, the way a lighter catches.
As if the tension had passed into them, Lizzie and Dorothy went rigid.
"Hehe."
The girl laughed all at once. For an instant her eyes looked transparent as glass beads. It might only have been a trick of the light.
"This is the one."
She murmured it.
In that moment Oz's wariness vanished. The raised fur lay smooth, and the tightness in that small body eased.
To Juhwan she looked no different than before. Did Oz see something else?
As if interest had already fled, Oz crawled into the pocket at the front of Dorothy's clothes.
"Oz, sleepy?"
Whatever was squirming in there must have tickled. Dorothy twisted and laughed.
The Guild Master, as if the girl's words had set his mind at ease, turned back to Juhwan.
"Let's go up to the second floor first. I've got things to say."
Juhwan nodded. The Guild Master led, the girl followed, and Juhwan and Lizzie came after them.
Red Sword stayed below. When the Purchase Clerk asked what was to be done with the payment, Karin's voice drifted up behind them, saying she would leave it on deposit. She sounded thoroughly pleased. Juhwan's own mood lightened a little.
But his feet were heavy on the stairs. Who was this girl the Guild Master had brought? Why did she know the language of Earth? Not knowing what she was left him badly unsettled.
The guild's second floor seemed to be a storehouse for the goods they bought. Partitions broke the wide room into sections, and each one appeared to serve a different purpose.
Several clerks were busy hauling things about and setting them in order. Sweat beaded on them even in winter; the work must have been heavy. More people labored for the guild than he had expected.
The Guild Master took them to the place farthest from the stairs.
They walked a narrow aisle stacked with goods and came at last to a corner where a long rectangular table stood with a few chairs around it.
Perhaps this was where guests were received. It was a little shabby for that, but a reception room in the guild of a small country village was probably nothing grander. Crates were piled nearby, and the place looked somewhat cluttered.
"First, everyone sit."
At his word, Juhwan sat beside Lizzie. The girl took the place next to the Guild Master.
"There's one thing I need to ask you before anything else. Have you ever met Santa? Or heard the word Rudolph?"
Juhwan held his tongue. He had expected Santa. Rudolph was another matter. Surely Santa Village itself was not in this world.
He thought he had kept his face blank, but the Guild Master seemed to read an answer there anyway, and grinned.
"You didn't seem to know much about magical beasts, so I'll tell you what I managed to learn. Nothing so remarkable, but it'll help."
The greatest difference between a magical beast and an ordinary animal was mana. A magical beast was called a magical beast because it possessed mana.
They were omnivores. They ate whatever came to hand. Oz made that plain enough: shaped like a rabbit, and yet eating not only grass but meat, rice, and bread.
They absorbed mana as well. Some drew it from nature, or from mana-laden creatures such as screaming carrots. When humans raised them, they sometimes took it from their masters.
"They say a magical beast dies if it can't absorb any mana at all. It can hold out for quite a long while, but in the end it dies. Mind you, they take mana from the wild too, so that hardly ever comes to pass."
Among magical beasts, horned rabbits were the kind people saw most often, and the kind hunters killed most often. Catching one was still no easy thing. They were simply too fast, and they could not be taken in traps the way ordinary rabbits could.
As he talked through this and that, the Guild Master's eyes went to the bulge in the front of Dorothy's clothes.
"Even if horned rabbits are the ones most often caught, there aren't many of them. They're only the most commonly seen among the magical beasts that don't stand out. So their habits aren't well known. But I asked a man who knows, and he told me that once a horned rabbit is fully grown, the horn begins to come in and grows larger as time passes."
"Ah."
Lizzie startled, then clapped a hand over her mouth. Oz still looked young, and yet a horn had already come in.
"Right. That horned rabbit of yours is a little strange. So I looked into it, and it seems the creature is something called a Rudolph."
Listening, Juhwan watched the girl.
For some time she had been working her nose in small movements, smelling the air. She seemed especially intent on his scent. She was trying not to let the others notice, but a twitching nose was difficult to hide.
The Guild Master must have seen it. The child had apparently been doing the same thing all along, and he pretended not to notice as he went on.
"A Rudolph is a magical beast made by Santa's contractor. Ordinary folk don't know about them. Well, hardly anyone has even seen a magical beast."
Juhwan let out a small sigh. From the way the talk had gone, the Guild Master already seemed to know a good deal. There was no help for it.
"What is Santa's contractor?"
"Ah. Starting from there, are we."
The Guild Master laughed and scratched at the hair Juhwan had left so smooth.
"There's the hero, and there's Santa's contractor. A hero, as plenty of people know, is a being the royal house calls through a summoning circle. That's widely known. Hmm. From the look on your face, you don't seem to know it."
Santa's contractor, by contrast, was known to very few. A contract was made when someone met Santa, spoke a wish, and received Santa's gift—but meeting Santa almost never happened. Those who knew of it were royalty, or nobles of high rank.
The Guild Master seemed convinced that Juhwan was Santa's contractor. He did not bother to ask. He only glanced at the girl.
"This child is the granddaughter of a man who used to hunt magical beasts for this guild, a long time ago. I went looking to learn about Rudolphs, and the man was already dead. She was alone in the house."
Asked to tell what she knew, she had shaken her head. She could not speak of it to anyone who was not a Rudolph's master.
"Honestly, I was worn out. This one. Says she won't talk, then comes right up and sniffs me like a dog, and tells me to let her meet the Rudolph's master."
The Guild Master sighed.
"And after that she stuck to my side the whole day. All twenty-four hours of it. Sniffing like a dog the entire time. I thought I'd lose my mind. Even when I went to the privy. Even when I slept. She followed me and smelled me. At this point, truly..."
He breathed out and looked at the ceiling.
"People would think it strange, wouldn't they? A man glued to a little child like this for twenty-four hours."
Watching him name that as the worst of his troubles, Juhwan smiled a little. Inwardly he was thinking, Just as I thought. This girl is a little strange.
Words she did not know kept coming. Santa. Contractor. Rudolph.
Her husband did not seem ever to have met the girl, and yet the two of them clearly shared something. The language the girl had spoken—Lizzie did not know its meaning, but it was surely the same tongue Juhwan sometimes muttered under his breath.
She had thought he might be a noble of some other country. For reasons she could not grasp he had become a criminal, but she had guessed that he was nobly born to begin with. In any case, he was no ordinary man.
He might be someone far more important than she had imagined. Santa was a being close to a god. If a man had made a contract with such a being, wouldn't his station stand above that of some middling noble? From now on he would be surrounded by splendid people, and he might forget a shabby commoner woman entirely.
Fear took her. It felt as if her husband might lift away somewhere in a breath. Some great person would come, declare that a man like this had no place here, and take him off. She felt as if the girl might say he was not someone who belonged beside a worthless woman like her.
She might have gripped his arm too hard without meaning to. Her husband bent his head and looked into her face.
"Lizzie, it's all right."
He did not even know what she feared, and still he patted her shoulder, light and gentle.
Lizzie steadied her breath. Only when she saw that kind face did her heart finally settle. This man would not cast her off because he had grown rich, or because his station had grown high. It was all right. She could stay beside him.
It's all right. I can stay beside him.
Only after she had told herself that could she manage a smile at all. So she would not be abandoned, so she would not become a burdensome woman, Lizzie lifted the corners of her mouth as high as they would go.
The girl did not seem very good at reading the air around her. She leaned out across the table, nearly climbing onto it, and put her mouth to Juhwan's ear.
"A Rudolph is a zentangle."
"Zentangle?"
He asked before he could stop himself. The girl met his eyes and smiled, bright and sudden.
"I knew it. You know that word. It's a word left behind by someone who was Santa's contractor."
That contractor, she said, had been her grandfather's grandmother.
"She complained every single day. That rotten Santa. How she wouldn't let him off if she ever met him."
That Santa seemed to have kept his promises with everyone in much the same way he had kept them with Juhwan. All at once he wondered what wish the girl's great-great-grandmother had made. At the question, she giggled.
"She said it was a being that would stay beside her always, and protect her."
"And did such a being come?"
"Yes. It certainly did."
The girl grinned.
"Santa does keep a promise. Even if the way of it is a bit of a problem."
The talk itself was perfectly ordinary, but she had begun to work her nose again. Between sentences she wrinkled it and sniffed, mostly trying for Juhwan's scent. A strange child.
"So what is a zentangle?"
At that she tilted her head.
"A zentangle is a zentangle, isn't it?"
"I mean, in what sense is a Rudolph a zentangle?"
"Oh."
She opened her eyes round, as if mildly surprised.
"What does zentangle mean?"
This time she was the one asking.
The zentangle Juhwan knew was a drawing made by repeating the same pattern again and again until it covered the page.
When he explained it that way, her face lit up.
"What—it was only talking about a picture? I thought it had some grand meaning."
She muttered that, then sprang to her feet. She turned to go without so much as a goodbye, then, as if remembering, bent toward him again and brought her mouth close to his ear.
"Did a red mark appear?"
"Yes."
"That's it. That's a Rudolph's ability. See it a few times and you'll understand right away. The stronger a Rudolph's power grows, the more those marks increase. Like a zentangle. My grandfather used that ability to hunt magical beasts."
She whispered without using her throat. The sound came only from her mouth, so small that even Lizzie likely had not caught it. It was almost too faint for Juhwan himself.
Then she straightened in a rush and laughed, pleased, a soft huhu.
"I ought to go now. I'll come see you again later."
Learning the word seemed to have delighted her. With a face as merry as if she were singing, she dashed off down the corridor.
The Guild Master shot to his feet and shouted after her.
"Hey! Kid! Have you got somewhere to go? Your house is a long way off. Hey!"
"It's fine. No problem."
She waved and ran. The tap of her shoes on the wooden floor faded away.
"No, it really is far."
The Guild Master muttered it, sounding worried.