The Blanket
Nothing in this world is given for free.
In the days I lived beneath the bridge, I believed I had proved that proposition true by induction. A single coin. A loaf of bread. One true friend. Warmth no greater than a candle flame. A single embrace, and a single grain of affection. To obtain the things others are born already holding, as if they were nothing at all, I had always needed a price—great or small.
And then I met a counterexample.
The Oslo family.
They gave affection away for nothing, as casually as if it cost them not a thought. For a time I assumed that affection was meant only for a gifted child. Once I learned that Benjamin's hobby and his daily round were one and the same—the bizarre philanthropy of hiding books all over the city—I quietly accepted the counterexample.
Back to the present.
"Lena's trouble is that she cherishes her family too much."
Watching Susan shape a bitter smile, I told myself that a counterexample was only a counterexample. The world still did not give anything away for free. Trust, surely, belonged among those things.
I let my eyes fall softly shut, then opened them again.
Nineteen.
I carved it into my mind that I had reached the age when trust had to be proved.
While I was still setting my thoughts in order, Susan propped her chin on her hand and began to fret.
"Anyway, Eugene. Would you go upstairs for now?"
"Pardon?"
"We never got an empty room ready. Our eldest, Luise, is taking her room and board at the university because of her professorship. It used to be a girl's room, and Lena's is right next door, so it won't be comfortable—but I think you'll have to stay there for the time being."
"Is... is this Luise a university professor?"
"Mm. She'll be an older sister to you, Eugene."
A household of professors, then. I had already thought Lena no ordinary person, yet only now did I truly grasp that the nickname I had half-heard from Dorothy—the collector of geniuses—was no empty title.
That aside.
I glanced up the stairs.
A presence.
Susan showed no sign of noticing, but she could not fool senses honed by a rough life. The flinch I had felt a moment earlier must have come because she meant to send me upstairs.
A thin smile crossed my face. What Lena feared would not happen in any case. I had already seen to that.
"Susan. What sort of room is that small one over there?"
"Ah. A storeroom, dear. There are two—one is in use, and the other is empty. Why do you ask?"
"Rather than upstairs, I'd like to use the empty storeroom."
Worry rose on Susan's face.
"Are you serious? It's cramped, and it won't hold the heat."
"It's all right."
I answered with a bright smile.
"I like small rooms."
Nothing could have been more sincere. A small storeroom. There was no better place to take the first step of the trust I meant to build from here.
Trouble found me at the very start.
"Hold on."
It was not a problem with the room. Aside from a little dust, the storeroom was exactly the right size to live in. With the money I had earned in the coal mine I bought a small bed and a desk and moved them in, and the place was reborn as a room cozy enough to call up the house in Lehman.
The reason I was clutching my head was a problem of a rather larger scale.
Why had I come to Fraussen?
Stopping by the Oslo family home had been only a secondary purpose. Had there not been a true goal besides?
Fraussen Federal Magic University.
To enroll in the magic university and spend my days in devoted study with my peers—that was the very reason I had secretly crossed the sea and traveled a thousand leagues by train to reach Fraussen. Was admission to Fraussen Federal Magic University not the beginning of the dream I had so long awaited?
The moment I finished setting the room in order, the first thing I sought was the university's admissions guide.
"The magic university admissions guide, you mean?"
"Yes. Where would I go to find one?"
"Come to think of it, the letter did say you'd crossed over to learn magic... If it's the admissions guide, there's no need to look for it outside. There should be copies lying about in his bedroom, or in Luise's room."
One of them had been cast down from his post, but it was a professor's household all the same. Susan soon found a printed copy of the guide and placed it in my hands.
"Do your best, dear."
With that word of encouragement I returned to the storeroom and opened the guide.
"This is rather a problem."
And that was how I came to my present state. The problems were, broadly, two.
First: tuition.
There is no point in stating the exact figure. I cannot pay it. A month of bone-grinding labor in the coal mine had earned me a little over eight hundred pounds—a considerable sum in its own right, and still nowhere near enough to cover a single semester at Fraussen Federal Magic University.
Fortunately, a full scholarship seemed to be granted to anyone who earned outstanding marks on the written examination. I had only to aim for that.
Second: the examination was two months away.
In truth, this was the greater problem.
To enter the Federal Magic University, I—who had built my foundations in mathematics and the rest through Benjamin's rough-and-ready lessons plus my own self-study—would have to wage a cutthroat contest against students raised under the Federation's systematic education, and take first place, or a mark very near it, on the university's notoriously brutal written examination.
In a mere two months.
"......"
My mind went blank.
At times like this, one habit always surfaced.
Whirr.
Without thinking, I spun a pen that had not yet touched ink back and forth over the fingers of my right hand. An idle trick learned across three years nailed to a desk. Pen-spinning.
A memory of days past rose unbidden. Once, for no particular reason, I had set Dorothy to it, thinking that someone who boasted such astonishing strength, flexibility, and reflexes would manage the thing with ease.
"This is hard."
She watched my demonstration again and again and tried to follow, but in the end Dorothy never could. Just as I could not imitate her specialty, the sword strike, Dorothy could not reproduce the spinning of a pen.
A trick possible only for one who has held a pen a very long time.
I understood it anew. This trifling pen-spinning was showing me just how hard I had worked these past three years.
"...Hahaha."
The laugh came of its own accord.
Right. As if I couldn't manage a thing like this.
I made up my mind. The boy from beneath the bridge had spent a full eight years to reach Fraussen. Disciple of the theoretical magic scholar Benjamin Oslo, and the Empire's foremost diehard. Until the name Eugene Oslo was carved at the very top of the Federal Magic University's list of the admitted, I would not leave this desk.
"Nnngh—"
Lena's eyes flew open. She stretched and pushed herself upright.
Lena's mornings came early. Eighteen years old, a student who had not even graduated, and yet the responsibility resting on those modest shoulders was immense.
Heedless of her heavy lids, she sat at the desk and began to spread the papers.
"Mr. Lovelace, two hundred pounds. Mr. Pauli, four hundred and fifty. Split each in half and put it into the shipping company and the mana-lamp firm..."
A master of clerical work, accounts, and investment. Through ruthless command of her hours, Lena Oslo had even secured the post of youngest advisor at the telegraph office, and of late she had begun a new business brokering investments. By her own account it was only practice—turning over small sums against the day she came of age—but it was work that demanded labor all the same.
Between her studies, her duties as advisor to the telegraph office, and investing on top of both, she had to pare even her sleep to the bone and throw herself into the work.
It was not entirely a bad thing. In all her life she had never found anyone who worked harder than she did, and that fact played a large part in the making of Lena's pride. Having recently thrown over her advisory post at the debate society and gained hours she could spend elsewhere, her mood was not so poor, even rising at this hour.
It ought not to have been poor.
"I don't like it."
But it was.
All of it was because of one gray-haired man.
Eugene Oslo. Ash-gray hair. Tall, with a gigolo's face. An outsider folded into the Oslo family out of nowhere, who had taken up a corner of the house.
The twins Ellie and Sally, pure bundles of curiosity, seemed ready to go mad wanting to know what this never-before-seen creature called an older brother actually was. Lena was the exact opposite.
He grated on her.
To her eyes he was no different from an intruder who had stomped, muddy-footed, into the paradise called the Oslo house. That Eugene was from the Empire did not concern her. Every child of the Oslo family had tasted hatred and persecution without cause.
The problem was trust.
Trust comes from ability. If one lacks ability, one must at least put in the effort.
Five days had already passed since Eugene began living with the Oslos. In that time Lena had not gone downstairs except to wash or to eat, and every time she saw him he looked half out of his mind.
Shut up in that storeroom—what on earth was he doing?
The aspiring magic scholars of the age were always the same. They rode the fashion of the times and put on airs, but in practice they made no effort at all.
"...Flower magic. That, at least, was truly impressive."
She was the fool for having expected anything. Try as she might, Lena could not conjure the image of accepting Eugene as one of the family.
Too many stray thoughts. She set her pen down for a moment.
"I should check the post."
The weather was overcast. It was still early morning, and with no sunlight the house was a little chilly. At an hour when everyone else slept, Lena wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and went quietly downstairs.
Before opening the front door she shot a glance toward the storeroom. Her hair was still a mess, and she wore nothing but a blanket over her nightclothes. To meet Eugene in this undone state would be a disaster.
And then she froze, hand still on the handle.
The storeroom door stood slightly ajar. From within, a faint light was leaking out.
"...Eep!"
Clapping a hand over her mouth to stop the strange sound from escaping, Lena looked around with trembling eyes.
Quiet. No human presence stirred in the house; only the stillness of dawn hung in the air.
Had he simply fallen asleep with the door left open?
Letting out a sigh of relief, Lena hurriedly swept the letters addressed to her from the mailbox and quietly shut the door again. She was about to return to her own room.
"......"
The curiosity of dawn set her moving. What, exactly, did Eugene do with his life? He would be asleep in any case. A quick look through the crack of the open door would not give her away.
Reaching the storeroom like a ghost, Lena stole a glance inside through the gap.
The interior was exceedingly plain. Neatly kept bedding, and a wavering candle flame. A traveling bag set beside the bed, and books that slightly disordered the desktop—these seemed to be the whole of his possessions.
And Eugene himself, the most important part, slept slumped over the desk with a pen still in his hand.
"......"
Pathetic.
Was he actually preparing for the Federal Magic University examination? It was the Federation's foremost school, and the students who applied pulled all-nighters as casually as they ate their meals. Falling asleep facedown at a desk meant he was sorely lacking the ferocity required to pass.
Then, all at once, Lena noticed something strange.
The bedding was too neat. Not merely tidied. Quilt and sheet, pillow—none of them showed the slightest sign of use.
Surely not.
"He hasn't lain down once in five days?"
Five days running, studying at the desk until he was spent, then collapsing asleep where he sat—over and over?
Lena was aghast. That was not something a person did.
"......"
Very slowly she opened the door and slipped inside. Setting everything else aside, she looked at Eugene's hands. A person's life is carved into the hands.
And Eugene's hands were a sight.
Skin swollen taut. Beneath the back of a hand etched with countless scars lay a palm packed with calluses that anyone could see had come from gripping a pen. To make matters worse, the whole of the hand was strangely darkened—what manner of work had he come from?
Effort.
Traces of effort that could not be hidden were painted across those large hands entire.
"...I don't like it."
She blew out the candle and was about to step from the room when Eugene, shivering with the cold, caught in her eyes.
Morning.
Realizing I had fallen asleep, I jerked upright at the desk—and found a blanket I did not recognize slipping from my shoulders.