The Tail End of Spring
Misfortune struck like a bolt from a clear sky.
"You're fired."
"Pardon?"
Someone must have framed me. I hadn't done a single thing wrong, and yet one day I was dismissed without warning.
The Eastern Telegraph Office.
As on any other day, I had come in after class and was tapping out telegrams. The arrangement that let me balance coursework and employment had come about roughly like this: my lecture hours made a fixed shift impossible, so Lena had suggested I make the most of the one real advantage of being an auxiliary telegraph operator and come in on a flexible schedule instead.
I was in the middle of another tidy day's earnings when word arrived that I was wanted in the director's office.
I went without protest. This was the result.
"Didn't you hear me? Fired. I said you're fired."
Director Lovelace, lounging in a thoroughly languid and alluring pose, drew a long pull on her pipe. On any other day the sight might have flushed my face, but the situation was so sudden that I felt nothing of the sort.
I shot up from the chair.
"Fired? Just like that?"
"The decision's already made. Starting tomorrow, you don't have to come in. No—don't come in."
"Won't you at least tell me the reason?"
The director closed her eyes and let out a deep sigh. Perhaps the smoke had not yet cleared; though the weather already hinted that spring was nearing its end, it looked as if her breath were fogging in the cold.
She met my gaze.
"You. How long has it been since you looked in a mirror?"
"I don't make a habit of looking in mirrors."
"……Anyway. Here."
So saying, she held out her hand mirror.
It must have been a treasured thing; the scent of burned tobacco leaf had soaked deep into it. I angled it toward my face with an awkward motion. No matter how many times I checked, the conclusion was the same. It was my usual bare face.
"Is there something wrong with my face?"
"There is. I thought it had filled out a little over the winter, and the moment the semester started you went right back to looking worn to the bone."
Was that so. It was a change I would never have noticed myself.
"From the look of your temperament, you're staking your life on your studies at the university as well. Make one mistake in that state and you'll drag the Eastern Telegraph Office's good name through the mud. That's the sort of work a telegraph operator does."
"……"
"So you're fired."
When Director Lovelace finished, I was struck dumb. Every word of it was true.
These days I really was staking my life on my studies.
A direction.
I had begun in earnest to search for the direction of my own that Luise had spoken of, and the method, as it always had been, was to look for the answer in books. At the same time, a businessman's instinct—more precisely, an obsession akin to sheer inertia where money was concerned—meant I had not the slightest intention of quitting the job.
The toll of carrying both at once was apparently beginning to show on the surface.
A strange weakness was running through my whole body when—
"—is what Lena told me to say. Honestly."
"……?"
"She said absolutely not to tell you, but that's none of my concern."
Director Lovelace smiled with shameless ease.
The next moment I grasped the situation as well, and a short, incredulous breath of laughter escaped me. No wonder I had been running into her face every time I came to the telegraph office lately.
"Was she worried about me?"
"Probably. Lena's an old soul who figured out far too young how hard it is to work yourself sick. What kind of advisor in the world is too embarrassed to say 'look after your health,' and dumps the job on the director instead?"
She muttered something to the effect of I'm not some go-between for you siblings, grumbling all the while.
"Anyway, that's how it stands. The decision's made, and on paper, you're fired."
"How much severance are you planning to give me?"
"This brat. I didn't take you for the type, but you've got a surprising greed for money."
"Promise you'll keep my seat open, and I won't take it."
"……Fine, fine. Reinstatement is always welcome, and I'll pad the severance nicely, so get out of here. I'm the fool, handing a gift to a disaster of an employee like this."
Her words were rough, but Director Lovelace's face was drawn into a faint smile.
Nearly a month had passed since the summer semester began.
And just like that, I was unemployed.
The Federal Magic University.
Judging by the name alone, one might expect nothing but lectures of magic, by magic, and for magic, but the reality was a little different. For first-year undergraduates, it was all the more so.
As Benjamin had insisted to me years ago, if one means to raise a taller tower of learning, the foundation must first be laid solid. So even when I sat through lectures that seemed, at a glance, to have nothing to do with magic, I never felt the time was wasted.
One thing, however, was certain.
Nothing is as tedious, or as difficult, as tamping down the earth before the tower can rise.
"Let's take a look at the next formula. The integral of sec³x. I'll derive it for you. Now then—"
The devil had returned.
In a form one degree more vicious.
I drove my pencil like a madman, copying down the board.
"—and when you work it through, this is what you get. (sec x tan x + ln|sec x + tan x|)/2 + C. Don't forget the constant of integration. The integrals of secant and of secant cubed show up often on the exam, so memorize them. Why am I telling you to memorize them? Because you won't be able to compute this during the test."
From the mouth of a potbellied, easygoing old professor came a stream of terrifying words, flowing as smoothly as water. At the same time I turned another page of my notebook.
I distinctly remembered that notebooks meant for taking notes were precious things. When I had studied alone in the Empire, I had used them sparingly, and then more sparingly still. And yet barely a month had passed since I enrolled, and already two notebooks were black with ink.
"Huuu…"
I let out a hot breath.
It wasn't easy.
The strengths I credited myself with were an intuition for magic and the ability to sit still for a long time—not quick comprehension. In that sense, Calculus I was a lecture poorly matched to me. The one mercy was that quitting work had given me more time. If I failed to understand something, I had only to shut myself in the library.
Deeeng—
Only after a stretch of time long enough to drive a person mad did the bell ring to mark the lecture's end.
"Haaaaah…"
"Come on. How many formulas is that, anyway? Did you memorize all of them?"
The students spilled a remark apiece and bolted from the hall.
There was one thing worth noting.
"……"
Students stuck together in pairs caught my eye with strange frequency. A couple of pairs in a single hall, and I might have let it pass—but when the number climbed toward five or six, even I couldn't help feeling how out of place it was. And as varied as the specimens were, so were the degrees. Some went no further than halting conversation, hesitating with each other. Others, few though they were, had already slipped their hands together and were grinning like fools.
"The aftereffects of spring, I suppose."
With that murmur I stepped quietly out of the lecture hall.
A green field opened right before the building. True to a season that could hardly be mistaken for anything but spring, trees and thickets were flushed with color, and against that backdrop the students were busy with lively exchange. It went without saying, of course, that the exchange was not entirely innocent.
In any case, it had little to do with me.
Ordinarily I would have put it out of mind and gone straight to the library, but there was one reason I couldn't. I leaned against the outer wall of the lecture building and waited a moment, and a person of interest emerged.
Quietly, I listened in on the conversation of a young man and woman who had just come out of the neighboring hall.
"Um… would you maybe like to get a meal together?"
"Sorry. Too much trouble."
"Th-then next time!"
"My apologies."
A man cutting off a woman's plea without hesitation. Whether her feelings were hurt at being refused for so trifling a reason as too much trouble, the girl hurried past me and was gone.
I spoke to the young man left standing alone.
"Werner."
"Oh. Eugene."
Werner Ross Diemann, both hands shoved deep in his pockets, spotted me and waved. He came over with a brazen grin. The sight felt newly awkward.
The reason was simple. This Werner, a mass of pure arrogance, currently stood at the center of every rumor of romance running wild across the green spring campus.
I smiled awkwardly and asked.
"Was it really all right to answer her that carelessly?"
I wasn't imagining things. I had already watched scenes like this with my own eyes five times, and if I added up every rumor I'd heard, both hands wouldn't be enough to count them. Notoriety though it was, Werner's name was widely known, and judged by looks alone he belonged among the rather handsome—so students were using the spring weather as an excuse to approach him.
I found it hard to understand. I was already overwhelmed just trying to make the lectures my own.
To my question, Werner answered without a care.
"It's fine."
"Even so, isn't it rude?"
"It's fine. This is a fact I've proved by induction. My reputation has already hit bottom, so there's nowhere left for it to fall."
"Good lord."
I was at a loss for words.
Well, I wasn't particularly worried. Given Werner's capacity for action, if he ever met the one fate intended for him, he would probably be the first to step forward. More pressing were my own affairs, already piled past my nose.
The end of spring was drawing near.
Which meant the midterms were drawing near.
Romantic rumors were not confined to the men.
If Werner was the person of interest among the male students, there was someone in a similar position on the women's side. I knew her.
Julia Müller.
The chestnut-haired girl who shared Understanding Literary Genres with me.
The reason I mention it is that a girl I took to be her was, at this very moment, collapsed before my eyes.