Rain in Lindenburg
The distance from our house to the nearest city was a little over ten kilometers. A round trip on foot was hardly worth the attempt; if you were going at all, you took a horse.
And today, I set out in the carriage my father was driving.
For the record, the seat beside me belonged to a neatly dressed Half-Dragon girl.
"You can teleport. Did you really need to come all the way to our house? You could have gone straight into the city."
At my question, Sylvia shook her head from side to side.
"I don't know where the city is. To move somewhere precisely, I have to remember it for certain."
"Fair enough. You only appeared on the mountainside by pure chance."
In fantasy stories where teleportation showed up, that was a fairly common rule. I accepted it and nodded.
"Then you'll be fine from next time. Once you've been there, you'll remember it clearly, won't you?"
For an instant Sylvia puffed out her cheeks, then thumped my shoulder with her fist.
She had inherited half the blood of the strongest living creatures on earth, and yet in looks and strength she was an ordinary human through and through. Far from hurting, the blows only tickled. Whether every Pureblood Dragon was like that while polymorphed, or whether it was only because this one was a Half-Dragon, I couldn't say.
"At your age, even riding in a carriage like this is supposed to be fun."
Father, seated on the driver's bench up front, cut into the conversation without warning, and Sylvia nodded hard, as if he had said exactly the right thing.
"Honestly, I'm bored. It's the same scenery I see every time."
"That's because you're a strange one."
I had brought the memories of my previous life with me intact, so there was nothing to be done about it. Even so, if I added the years of that life to this one, I still wouldn't catch up to Father or Mother.
In my past life I had died while I was still in the full bloom of youth, so my mental age now was the early-to-mid twenties at best. Set beside Father, already into his thirties, I was positively fresh. So there.
"Emil. Over there—a family of ducks on the lake."
"Those ones get bored sometimes and spin a full circle on the water. They flip over, then pop right back up."
Sylvia, by contrast, seemed purely delighted by every view beyond the carriage. Given her age, that was how it ought to be.
By her own account, Sylvia was seven this year as well. She had been born a few months later than I, but by the year's reckoning we were the same age.
She was the child of dragons that lived for centuries without the slightest strain, yet perhaps because human blood ran in her, aside from the two horns on her head she was no different from a human of exactly that age.
We had been on the road for about an hour when traces of people coming and going began to show on the ground, and before long we reached the city gate.
Father halted the carriage at once, jumped down from the driver's seat, and approached the checkpoint guard.
"Thank you for your service."
"Ah, Mr. Weber. Emil's with you... and who is the child beside him?"
"The child of an acquaintance I met not long ago."
My father, Paul Weber, was a rather well-known apothecary in these parts. Thanks to that, I was known as the son of Apothecary Weber.
"A beastfolk child? I've never seen horns of that shape around here."
"Yes, well. Close enough. She does live quite a long way off, you see. A frien— an acquaintance."
Mr. Weber had been about to let "friend" slip out without thinking, then swallowed the word in a hurry. He had seemed to unburden himself completely, yet his fear of dragons was plainly still with him.
Sylvia, who had only been watching the two of them, leaned in and whispered at my ear.
"I'm not beastfolk."
"If people find out you're actually a dragon, everyone around here will be frightened and run."
I gave her a brief explanation of why Father had let the guard's remark pass with a vague agreement.
In truth, I didn't think the whole city would truly fly into a panic. Even so, mixed blood or not, the mere fact that a dragon had appeared was bound to stir up some kind of uproar.
"I have a delivery to make as well, and I thought I might show the child a bit of the city. She says this area is entirely new to her."
"That's a fine idea. Children ought to see all sorts of places as they grow, don't they? Our daughter, for some reason, only likes holing up at home with her books."
"Our Emil is much the same. Just now he was grumbling that it's the scenery he sees every day, and that he's bored."
"Hahaha. Peculiar children, yours and mine both. In any case, you may pass."
With leave to enter, we passed the checkpoint and went inside, and the very scene people picture when they think of a city in a fantasy world spread out before my eyes.
"First we'll see to Father's business. After that, let's buy all sorts of things to eat until the sun goes down."
"Food would be nice, but if I can, I'd rather look at some books."
Since we had come all this way, I had decided to look for books on dragons and other dangerous creatures. The volumes in Father's study were, by the nature of his trade, mostly about plants.
"Hm. That's fine too. Sylvia, what would you like to do?"
He had simply announced the plan to me, yet with Sylvia he began by asking what she wanted—favoritism, plain and simple. He was clearly cherishing her as someone else's precious child, to be waited on.
"I... I'll just come along with you."
At Father's question, Sylvia answered while tugging at the hem of my shirt.
"If you go around with me, you might find it awfully dull, you know? I'll fill my stomach and head straight for the bookshop."
"I don't mind."
The carriage, stopped for a short while, began to move again, and we made first for the shop that was Father's main client for his potion deliveries.
Up on a carriage, the eyes of the people passing by naturally caught your own: a baby staring straight at us from its mother's arms; an old man who, simply walking along, spotted the carriage, glanced over, and went on; a man who frowned faintly and shot us a sidelong glare, as if a carriage blocking the way annoyed him.
"This city's name is Lindenburg, and more people live here than anywhere else nearby. The castle where the lord lives is in this city too."
"The lord?"
"The person who governs this whole region—Lindenburg and the other villages included. Just as our father holds our family's land, the lord owns land far broader than that."
"Then isn't Uncle Paul's land the lord's as well?"
"Strictly speaking, the king granted the lord a great stretch of land, and the lord gave part of that great stretch to our father. Our family has lived on that land for generations, making all sorts of medicines from medicinal herbs."
While Father gathered the potions he had unloaded and went into the shop, I stayed in my seat and told Sylvia about the city.
Waiting with my mouth shut was dull, and more than anything, I wanted to teach even a little more common sense to a girl who knew less about the human world than I did.
We talked for a little over thirty minutes. Then Father, his business finished and his hands noticeably lighter, came back and climbed onto the driver's seat.
"Good. Next, let's stop at the jeweler's."
There was no reason an apothecary should go out of his way to a goldsmith's shop. Except for one.
"So you've finally made up your mind."
"Yes. I talked it over with your mother while we were sweeping the yard."
The gold bars Sylvia's mother had left the day before, as a token of thanks.
They were simply too large to spend at an ordinary shop, so taking them to a jeweler and disposing of them was the sensible course.
In truth, our household was not particularly pressed for money. He would probably turn them into cash and leave the whole sum with the bank.
This time, too, Father went into the shop alone, and Sylvia and I passed the time sitting together in the carriage bed.
"Where did we leave off?"
"We were talking about the fruit that grows in the mountains. That Ruby Berries are fine to pick and eat just as they are, but the unripe ones have no sweetness at all and are incredibly sour."
"Y-you remember that in a lot of detail."
Sylvia looked at me and offered a shy smile.
Had my story really been that interesting? Or was her memory simply that good?
"I don't forget a single thing. I remember everything Emil says."
"I-is that so."
"Mm."
Sylvia's eyes shone as she nodded again and again. She even wore a look that seemed to ask, I did well, didn't I?—and I found it more than a little unsettling.
Honestly, this was a little frightening. No—heavy. And somehow I had the feeling that the air around us had sunk cold and grown damp—
Plip.
"Ack—what was that?"
It had not been my imagination. At some point the sky had filled with dark clouds, and raindrops had begun to fall.
The carriage we had ridden in had nothing like a roof, neither over the driver's seat nor over the cargo bed. I had no choice but to take Sylvia down and shelter beneath the eaves of the jeweler's Father had just entered.
The poor horse was left to the pouring rain, but there was nothing to be done about that. Once we got home, I would wipe it down properly with a cloth.
Before long the rain grew fierce, and a small puddle gathered directly beneath the eaves.
"Emil. Look at this."
"Oh. Yeah."
Seven years old—the age when everything in the world feels wondrous and new. Sure enough, Sylvia crouched down on the spot and studied the puddle intently. The hem of her skirt, touching the ground, was quickly soiled with muddy water, but she didn't seem to mind in the least.
…
Honestly, I had grown a little interested myself. Wasn't it fairly entertaining just to watch the ripples that rose each time a raindrop struck that shallow surface?
We gazed at the puddle together for a long while. Then, all at once, something's shadow fell over my head.
Whump.
An instant later a dull impact shot through the crown of my head, and I lost consciousness where I stood.