The Princess's Curse
There wasn't much to put in the pack. A change of clothes, some jerky, flint for starting fires, and a handful of herbs. Fifteen years in one place, and I'd never accumulated much to begin with. Most of what cluttered the house I could replace easily enough once I came down off the mountain.
Last of all, I pulled a small leather pouch from the cupboard. It clinked. Gold coins.
Ten years ago, maybe. I'd saved a merchant caravan dying in the mountains, and they'd insisted on leaving the money as thanks. I'd stuffed it away with nowhere to spend it. Now I finally had a use for it.
"Alright."
I slung the pack over my shoulder. That was it. For abandoning a house I'd lived in for fifteen years, it was astonishingly simple. I hadn't been all that attached to it in the first place.
I could build another house somewhere else. Valleys existed wherever there were mountains, and herbs I could gather again. The problem was people. Especially the most dangerous person in the world: the protagonist of the original novel.
"Where are you going?"
I opened the door, and Adelia was standing right there.
I closed it without a word. Opened it again. She was still there.
"Why are you here?"
"I was waiting for you."
"I asked why you were waiting."
"Because I never received an answer."
"You did. I said no."
"The reply came so quickly I find it difficult to believe it was the product of genuine deliberation."
"I deliberated plenty."
"For how long?"
"About a second."
Adelia's eyebrow twitched.
I walked past her. The Black Crown Bear lying in front of the house spotted me and lifted all three heads at once.
"Blackie."
Grr?
"We're leaving."
It sprang to its feet.
"Not you. Just me."
It dropped back down, three pairs of ears drooping. I decided to ignore that.
If I hauled that bulk down the mountain, any hope of a quiet life would be dead before I started. Nobody dragging around a high-tier magic beast—the so-called ruler of the range—was going to look ordinary.
"Please wait a moment."
Adelia followed.
"No."
"I haven't said anything yet."
"You want me to take you as a disciple."
"That's correct."
"I said no."
"Could you at least tell me why?"
I stopped and looked back.
"Because it's a hassle."
Adelia was silent for a moment.
"...That's all?"
"Do you have any idea how much of a hassle being a master is? You have to feed them, house them, teach them, and if they screw up, you have to clean up after them too."
"I can provide my own food and lodging."
"Then teaching is the hassle."
"Even just two hours a day."
"It's a hassle."
"One hour."
"I'm not bargaining with you."
Adelia pressed her lips together. I really wished she'd take the hint and give up already.
I genuinely did not want a disciple. Part of it was that I had no interest in teaching anyone. The bigger problem was that the anyone in question happened to be Adelia.
In the original novel, incidents followed that woman wherever she went. Assassins stormed in when she was at the palace. Dark mages appeared when she went to a city. Sealed ancient magic beasts woke when she traveled. Of course they did—it was a novel. If nothing ever happened to the protagonist, the story wouldn't go anywhere. But I had no intention of becoming a character and living through any of it myself. That was why I'd spent fifteen years buried in these mountains.
"Hold on."
I stopped walking. Something was off. I turned and looked at Adelia.
"How old are you?"
She blinked at the sudden question.
"Twenty-three."
"Twenty-three..."
I searched my memory. The original story properly began the year Adelia turned twenty-four. So at most a year from now. The timing checked out. The location, though...
"Why are you here?"
"You already asked that."
"No, that's not what I mean."
If this was just before the original story started, Adelia should have been in the Imperial Capital. She was supposed to attend the Empire's founding anniversary celebration with the Crown Prince, meet the Successor of the Southern Archduke there for the first time, and that was how the story began. At least, that was how I remembered it.
So why was this woman being chased by a magic beast in a mountain range hundreds of miles from the Imperial Capital?
"Why did you come into the Greyhorn Mountains?"
Adelia was silent for a moment. Then she glanced back at the middle-aged knight standing behind her. The knight looked equally uncomfortable.
"Forget it if you can't say."
I turned away again. I hadn't wanted to know in the first place. The more you learned about someone's circumstances, the more likely you were to get tangled up in them. Stay ignorant, stay uninvolved.
Then Adelia spoke.
"To keep from dying."
My feet stopped.
"...What?"
"That's why I came to this mountain."
She continued, her voice even.
"I am going to die soon."
I turned around slowly. She didn't look like she was joking.
"Are you sick?"
"No."
"Then?"
She pointed to the nape of her neck. I didn't see it at first. But when she swept her hair aside, something black showed against her skin—a pattern like veins. The dark lines began at the nape of her neck and ran down past her collarbone.
I narrowed my eyes. I had no memory of anything like that in the original.
"A curse?"
"That's what it's known as."
Known as? That was a pretty vague way of putting it.
I stepped closer to Adelia.
"Hold still."
I brought my fingers to the nape of her neck. She flinched but didn't pull away. I set my fingertips against her skin and slowly let mana flow through—then immediately frowned.
"This isn't a curse."
"...Excuse me?"
Not just Adelia—the middle-aged knight was staring at me in shock too. I pulled my fingers away.
"At least, it's not any curse I know."
You run into all kinds of things living in the mountains. Magic beasts that spat poison. Flowers that addled the mind. Parasites that laid eggs inside a body. I'd even come across people wandering the mountains under a curse a few times, and those people usually had mana clinging to them in a distinct, consistent pattern.
What had risen to the surface of Adelia's skin was different. This wasn't something that had come from outside. If anything...
"This isn't a curse."
"...Excuse me?"
"It's your own mana."
Adelia's expression hardened.
"My mana?"
"More precisely, your mana is twisted in a weird way. Whether someone did this to you or you were born like this, I don't know."
I tapped the black pattern with a fingertip.
"If you keep using magic like this, it might start tearing itself apart from the inside."
Adelia's face went rigid.
"That's impossible."
This time the middle-aged knight cut in.
"Her Highness received the curse three months ago. The imperial mages and the temple priests all diagnosed it as such."
"It appeared suddenly three months ago?"
"Yes."
I watched the mana flowing along the black pattern for a moment. It wasn't normal. What should have been a single current was warped at intervals, each segment shoving the others away.
"Your chest hurts every time you use mana, doesn't it?"
Adelia's eyes went wide.
"...It does."
"And when it's bad, you've blacked out a few times."
"How did you..."
"I can see it."
I tapped the black pattern again.
"Your mana is fighting itself."
I didn't know the cause. But I could guess at the symptoms. The mana inside her body and that black something were colliding—pretty violently, too.
"You've been using magic in this condition?"
"Yes."
"And wrapping mana around your sword?"
"Yes."
"Are you out of your mind?"
For the first time, Adelia's expression cracked wide open.
"...What?"
"There's a fire burning inside you and you've been throwing more wood on it."
I sighed. Come to think of it, something had been off. Her wounds had been bad when we first met, but her complexion had been especially poor. I'd just figured it was from losing so much blood.
"How long did they give you?"
"The imperial physician said six months at most."
"So you came looking for a mountain hermit?"
Adelia nodded.
"I found records in the imperial archives of a sage living in seclusion in the Greyhorn Mountains."
"Hermit, then sage. The title keeps changing."
"The title differed from record to record."
"Who even wrote that stuff down?"
"Some of the records were a hundred years old."
"...A hundred years?"
I repeated it, incredulous. I'd only come here fifteen years ago.
"That wasn't me."
"It may not have been."
"Huh?"
"I didn't assume it was you from the start."
Adelia looked deeper into the Greyhorn Mountains.
"It's said that people who have cut all ties with the world have come to live in these mountains for a very long time. Alchemists, mages, knights who trained their swordsmanship to the extreme. According to the records, one or two existed in every era."
If the rumors about me had gotten mixed up with old records, that would explain it.
"So you went looking for one of them and ran into me."
"Precisely."
Just my luck.
"And that's why you want me to take you as a disciple?"
"That's half of it."
"And the other half?"
Adelia hesitated.
"Because I want to live."
This time I didn't have an answer right away. I looked at her.
The Adelia of the original novel had always been a strong woman. Arrogant, as befit an imperial princess, and cold toward her enemies. That woman had gone so far as to kneel before a stranger she'd just met in the mountains—all from a single-minded desire not to die.
Well. That's just how people are. They wouldn't hold chasing honor past death as the highest glory of knighthood if just anyone could do it. Anyway, hearing she'd knelt because she didn't want to die put a different color on things than a moment ago.
Of course.
"Still not taking you as a disciple."
She looked openly disappointed.
"But."
I sighed. If I sent her off looking like that, she'd probably collapse within a few days. And more than that, one thing was bothering me.
The idea that Adelia was going to die. I didn't know anything about a setting like that. The Adelia of the original never died. She was still alive and well at least through the middle of the story. Which meant either this was a setting I didn't remember, or something had changed from the original I knew.
"Stay for three days."
Adelia looked at me.
"I'll take a look at that thing in the meantime."
Her eyes widened.
"You'll treat me?"
"No. I said I'd take a look."
"Thank you."
"I didn't say I could treat it."
"Thank you."
There was no getting through to her. I shook my head and headed back to the house. Leaving today was clearly off the table. At the very least, I wanted to figure out what that black thing was before I could send her away with a clear conscience.
"By the way."
A thought occurred to me, and I looked back.
"What were you fighting on the mountain earlier?"
Adelia and the middle-aged knight's expressions hardened at the same time.
"It wasn't a magic beast?"
Silence hung for a moment. The middle-aged knight spoke first.
"It was people."
"People?"
"Assassins who followed us here."
I slowly closed my eyes. Of course. When the protagonist moves, incidents follow.
And as if to prove the point—
BOOM!
Another explosion roared from down the mountain, closer this time than the last. Blackie lurched to its feet. All three heads turned toward the forest at once.
And a moment later, a low growl rolled from its throat.
Grrrrrrr.
Adelia gripped her broken sword.
"They're already this close..."
I sighed. Three days? I wasn't going to get three quiet hours.