Directionality
A bird is singing.
Some nameless bird, in a clear, bright voice, announces that dawn has broken.
When I lived beneath the bridge, it was the cold that woke me. In the two-story house, it was a rooster's crow and the sounds of breakfast being made. Since I came to the Federation, ship horns and train whistles had taken to heralding the morning.
Of late, what I had to thank for my rising was none other than that lucid birdsong.
Once, curious what the bird was called, I asked Susan and Lena, but neither of them knew. So, half in jest, I tried Ellie as well.
"Oriolus oriolus."
"What?"
"The cheeping yellow one, right? Oriolus oriolus!"
"Doesn't it have an ordinary name?"
"I only know the scientific name!"
I remember the answer coming back in a form that, for some reason, felt as though it absolutely had to be set in italics. It was like catching a glimpse of the shadowed underside of a bright, innocent child, and I brought the conversation to a hasty end.
At any rate, I raked my hair into some rough order and got up. My body clock sounded the alarm, insisting I hadn't slept enough—that it was still early, and I ought to go back to bed.
But I couldn't. Today was April 12th: the first day of the summer semester at Fraussen Federal Magic University. More than that, I was a top entrant, which meant I had to stand on the ceremony platform for the awarding of scholarships. I would need to be dressed smartly, of course, and my bearing would have to be every bit as proper.
I drove off the drowsiness, sat down at my desk, and only then realized there was no mirror in my room. Come to think of it, I had never really done much with my hair. A hat had always solved the problem. And I remembered, with unpleasant clarity, being told by a member of the staff—when I had visited the university in March to register for courses—that hats would not be permitted at the entrance ceremony.
I needed help. One face came to mind at once.
"...Should I call Lena?"
But the hour was far too early, and Lena was presently on the "forbidden second floor"—a place I was tacitly barred from entering. I gave the idea up at once and combed my hair roughly with my fingers.
"Well. It'll be fine."
I left it half-done, dressed myself neatly in a suit, and set about preparing breakfast.
"...You said this was the entrance ceremony. What on earth have you done to your hair?"
There was a small incident of hearing exactly that from Lena. In the end, though, her help saw me through the preparations perfectly, so it hardly mattered.
Half a year since I had arrived in Fraussen. The air was cool, the weather clear. Today, I would become an undergraduate of the magic university.
Fraussen Federal Magic University. Unlike the November landscape, steeped in silence and solemn gravity, what opened before my eyes now was a campus brimming with life.
Green lawns, deep-green trees, and the Gate of Knowledge standing tall. The view itself was no different, and yet the vitality packed into it had rewritten the character of the scene entirely. Hard to say how—only that it felt, at last, like a school. Not that someone with no schooling to his name had any business judging what a school ought to feel like.
Anyway, I walked on, taking in the surroundings, and passed lightly through the Gate of Knowledge. On the day of the ceremony itself I even stopped to look at the statue of Jean-Pierre Ochelimet, which I had only ever walked past before, and at the stone plinth of uncertain purpose beside it.
Then a familiar back came into view, and I raised my voice.
"Werner!"
"Oh. Eugene."
Werner, like me, had been required to arrive earlier than the other students for the scholarship rehearsal. He looked drained, eyes fighting to stay open. Sleepy, without a doubt.
"Were you waiting?"
"No."
"Then what were you doing, just standing there?"
Werner quietly pointed toward the main athletic field. It was a broad plaza in the midst of preparations for the entrance ceremony, and his expression was slowly turning dangerous.
"Don't you think an explosives experiment over there would be fun?"
"...You'd better not."
"Tch. Typical theorist."
Having talked the mad dog of the Fourth School out of adding once more to his infamy, I followed the avenue between the lawns toward the field. It was called an athletic field, yet it hardly seemed a place for sport alone; along one side an old-fashioned platform had already been raised. With the neat decorations added to it, the air of an entrance ceremony hung over the place even though no one had filled it yet.
By the time we arrived, the staff looked busy welcoming distinguished guests. One after another, figures who at a glance carried themselves like professors or high officers of state began appearing by carriage, and each time a carriage halted the staff swarmed it, all but falling over themselves to bow.
Watching, Werner let out a low sound.
"That's insane."
"The staff do look rather pitiful."
"Not them. Look at the professors. Those people are the magic scholars leading the field as it stands."
I had learned my magic from across the sea. I knew the professors' names well enough, more or less, but their faces were another matter. For Werner, who had lived in Fraussen all his life, the sight seemed to strike differently. So this really was the fountainhead of magic.
There was nothing to do before the ceremony in any case. My own interest stirred, and I began studying the faces of the people stepping down from the carriages.
That was when it happened. A creak—and among carriages already luxurious as a rule, one unusually large, worked with exceptionally fine craftsmanship, entered the field. My eyes went wide.
"The university president?"
"Doubt it. The president's carriage would come from inside the campus, not through the main gate."
There was no need to press the question. With a clack, the coachman opened the door, and a figure slowly emerged from within.
"...?"
"Oh."
A new student, about my age. And strikingly lovely. Beneath chestnut hair, features gathered small and fine were more than enough to draw every eye, and the fluid grace peculiar to a child of wealth only bore that beauty out. Put in a single line, it was the sort of impression that could startle even a brief sound of admiration out of Werner.
But that was not the only reason my gaze fixed on her. She was leaning on a cane—not an ornamental one, like Benjamin's, but a cane truly meant for someone who had trouble walking. As if to confirm it, the coachman who had opened the door hastily brought forward something like a chair on wheels.
"Nnh—there."
She had been trembling head to toe like an aspen. The moment she sank into the wheelchair as if collapsing, our eyes met. I said nothing. Werner, shameless, grinned and waved.
"Oh. How do you do."
She stayed still for a while, then looked our way and smiled, bright and neat.
As an aside, I had found myself tangled up with beautiful people more often than one might expect. Dorothy, for one. Lena as well, young as she still was. Recently, Director Lovelace had joined that number. And so what came through to my eyes more clearly than her looks was the expression underneath. I caught my breath. It was a counterfeit smile so perfect it could wring a gasp of admiration from a man. A chill climbed my spine, and I turned my head. Of course. Who would want it known that their body was failing them?
And so, once every distinguished guest was in attendance, the entrance ceremony finally began.
"—And so, this land and these buildings were raised with devoted care, decades ago, by the Father of Magic Theory himself, that he might bestow upon all of you, on this very day, the finest education! You are—"
The president, genial of face. A speech to which neither students nor guests were listening came to its end after twenty minutes or so, and at last the scholarship ceremony began.
Nearly seven hundred entrants. If each of them so much as opened their mouth, that was seven hundred remarks. The moment Werner's name was called, a flood of jeers that were not quite jeers poured down.
"Hey, mad dog! Don't burn down the university labs!"
"Never seen him. Who is that? Fourth School?"
From Werner's point of view, they were all things he had heard often enough to grow calluses on his ears. Wearing a leisurely smile, he climbed the platform, received his scholarship certificate at his ease, and exchanged greetings with the president.
And then it was the next name.
My turn. I set my foot on the stairs along the side of the dais, and with every step I climbed I could feel the assembly gradually closing its mouth. If Werner had drawn jeers, I drew silence—a silence loaded with hundreds of meanings, settling over the whole of the field.
Let it. I stood before the president and offered a full, formal bow. He handed me the scholarship certificate together with that genial smile of his.
"Student Eugene Oslo. I leave the future of magic scholarship in your hands."
"...Thank you."
I wanted to step down then and there, but I couldn't. Reporters with cameras stood on every side, and so the president and I had to hold still for a dozen seconds or more, certificates in hand.
"Taking the picture—!"
And thus, entirely against my will, I met the eyes of seven hundred new students. Savage. But the one on the platform was me. I refused to shrink, and devoted myself to the proper virtues of a photographic subject. A flawless smile rose across my face.
"...Is this the place?"
Into a lecture hall that might have been called antique—or, more fittingly, simply old—nearly seventy new students, myself among them, made their way. My first lecture at the magic university: Type 2 Magic Practicum. It was also one I had very much wanted to take. Unlike Type 1 Magic, which I had already learned back in the Empire, I had never managed the same with Type 2 Magic, and so I had put in for it first—partly for the chance to feel, firsthand, the standard of instruction at the Federal Magic University.
A lecture at the university I had longed for. I was waiting with a restless heart for the professor to arrive when the front door of the hall burst open.
"This the lecture hall? Suppose it is."
A hearty voice. My first impression of the professor in charge of Type 2 Magic Practicum was red. A woman with very long red hair bound tight into a ponytail came to the lectern before the blackboard in an unhesitating stride.
"Good to meet you, new students. I'm Professor Luise Ehrlich. I'll be taking Section 4 of this semester's Type 2 Magic Practicum."
Luise? I had just begun to tilt my head at a déjà vu I couldn't place when Luise Ehrlich went on.
"I'll ask you straight. What is magic?"
A question flung out without preamble. Naturally, no answer came back. She scratched her head, then picked out a single student—one who had been glaring my way with unusual intensity for some time.
"You. What do you think magic is?"
"Uh—um. Innovation, maybe?"
"Zero."
The student looked crushed.
The questioning went on. Progress. History. The Federation itself. Magic is magic, so what else could it be—answers of every sort came back.
"Zero."
The score did not change.
The question, meanwhile, was a familiar one to me. My unforgettable first day in the two-story house: a question none other than Benjamin had put to me. And the answer that followed was one I could not forget if I tried.
At last my turn came.
"You there. What do you think magic is?"
I answered with perfect confidence.
"Magic is scholarship."
"Hoh. Fifty points."
Fifty points. Was I meant to be pleased? It was an ambiguous score for the confidence with which I had opened my mouth, and a stir ran through the class—but they were hardly in a position to tear me down, seeing as they themselves had zeroes. In the end, not a single person broke fifty.
"And this is how you behave, and you still call yourselves new students of the Federal Magic University?"
Luise's disappointment was plain to see. Being dressed down from the very first hour of the very first lecture after admission is not a pleasant thing, and most of the class endured her rebuke in silence, looking uncomfortable. Just what was this vaunted correct answer, that she carried on so?
A moment later she took up a piece of chalk.
"Listen well, you idiots."
"Magic is a vector."