Purging the Orphanage Director (2)
My father was the Emperor, my mother a prostitute.
As for the second part, fine. But how could I possibly be sure about the first?
Even if my mother had truly believed it, wasn’t it entirely possible that the man had just been an audacious fraud who’d sold the Imperial family’s name?
The proof lay in my body. More precisely, in one inherited feature.
But that didn’t matter right now.
After washing up and putting on one of the clean sets of clothes I got to wear only once or twice a year, I waited in the orphanage’s front yard.
At last, a carriage approached.
“Wow…”
“Amazing…”
The children gasped around me.
To kids who had spent their lives seeing nothing but black-painted wood, the decorations on the carriage, and the two white horses pulling it, the whole thing must have looked like something from another world.
And me?
“…”
I simply waited for the right moment.
The carriage stopped.
As the coachman climbed down and opened the door, Doloria bowed deeply.
“Welcome, everyone from the Cryford family!”
A hand holding a staff appeared from inside the carriage.
Staff.
A long rod of wood or metal, with one end decorated with jewels or other ornaments where it was held.
One of the two symbols that defined a magelicalia, a mark of a mage’s authority.
And following that came a wide-brimmed wizard’s hat with a pointed crown. The other half of a magelicalia.
The crest drawn right at the center was unmistakably that of the Cryford count family.
At last, a mage stepped down onto the ground.
Red, red. Her hair and eyes were both red.
Doloria, still bent almost double, called out with ingratiating cheer.
“You must have had a hard journey coming all this way! Thanks to the support funds His Excellency the Count has sent us, the children are healthy and happy every single day!”
Every child here swallowed a curse in their hearts, but if they said it out loud, they knew they’d be beaten until the day they died. Not figuratively. Literally.
“…Hmph.”
Even after all that eager flattery from Doloria, the count’s gaze remained cold; he didn’t look especially impressed.
His eyes swept over the grounds, then settled on me.
Or perhaps I only thought they had.
So this is the famous afterimage?
There was nothing particularly remarkable about me now.
My hair and eyes were both black, plain and ordinary, and my bangs hung down to cover my forehead and the corners of my eyes.
“W-We’ve prepared a small tea service inside for Your Excellency and your party. Please, right this way—”
Doloria bowed again, but the count only gave another slight “Hm” and said,
“I’ve seen enough. We’ll be going back now.”
“Th-that is… if you’d let the children host you just a little bit—”
With a curt motion of his chin, the count’s coachman reached into his coat, pulled out a purse, and tossed it at Doloria’s feet.
“That should be sufficient.”
As she scrambled to pick up the money, the count gave her a cold look and was just about to climb back into the carriage when I shouted,
“His Excellency, the Count of Cryford!”
Silence, thick with shock, fell over the yard.
It took the coachman, Doloria, even the children a moment to understand what had just happened.
This was my only chance.
Once they recovered from the shock, Doloria would come straight for me and clamp a hand over my mouth.
“With all due disrespect, I humbly beg you—would you show us even the smallest hint of magic!?”
The shock only deepened. Show magic?
Even in ordinary circumstances, asking a professional to demonstrate their craft on the spot was rude.
Telling a singer to sing a song, a lawyer to recite criminal code, or a butcher to butcher the chickens in the yard would be obnoxious at best—and you’d be lucky if all you got was a slap for it.
How much worse, then, if the person in question was both a mage and a noble?
“Y-You little b—have you completely lost your mind!!”
Just before Doloria, her eyes fully showing white, lunged at me—
“Quiet.”
The count swept his staff and froze her in place.
He hadn’t used magic.
He had merely crushed her with authority.
“…Little one. Your name?”
“It’s Elia, Your Excellency.”
The coachman’s eyes widened belatedly.
“…Hmph.”
The corners of the count’s mouth lifted just a fraction.
“I wouldn’t have expected anyone in a place like this to know the proper honorific for a court count.”
The rank system in this world was similar to the one in my original world, though there were a few differences.
The honorific Jeolha was one of them, a form of address that didn’t exist in my old world.
A court count was a title that had begun as an office, one responsible for governing a lord’s detached palace and the lands around it. In ancient times, the insignia of office, the jade tally, had been bestowed upon vassals entrusted with important duties.
By now, of course, it had long since become a hereditary title rather than an actual post, and the tally was no longer granted. Still, it remained proper etiquette in this world to address a court count as Jeolha, rather than using the standard Gakha reserved for other counts.
The count’s eyes passed over Doloria, then over me.
“And not by someone who should be teaching, but by the one receiving the lesson.”
A few sharp children immediately understood what he meant: that I had been correct, and Doloria wrong.
Murmurs rippled through the children.
Bulging veins stood out on Doloria’s face, and thick cords of muscle twitched at her neck, but with the count’s eyes still on me, she couldn’t open her mouth.
“You said you wanted to see magic. Very well, I’ll show you.”
The coachman’s eyes went wide.
“However, the mage is not me, but another.”
“Wh-what? But I’m already overwhelmed and deeply honored by such generosity.”
“...Heh.”
With a short laugh, the count said toward the carriage,
“Come out, Philia.”
Philia?
Judging by the name, a girl. The count’s maid?
But when the woman slowly emerged, I realized how lucky I was not to have actually said that out loud.
She had the same red hair and red eyes as the count.
She wore no hat and carried no staff.
But the short rod hanging at her waist like a dagger was a wand, something no one was permitted to wear unless they were a proper mage.
Which meant—
“Yes, Father.”
The Cryford count’s daughter was a beautiful girl with sharp eyes that closely resembled her father’s.
Her straight hair fell neatly down her back like a quiet red river, and her pink lips held a tender, lyrical grace.
To the children in the orphanage, she must have looked like a goddess.
Even I, who carried memories from another world and another life, lost my composure for a moment.
“What kind of magic should I show them?”
“Indeed. Since you said even the smallest thing would do, how about that?”
Philia’s eyes flicked toward me for an instant.
“Understood, Father.”
Her pale fingers closed around the wand.
Pink lips parted.
“Ra, Plasia.”
In that instant, I felt it.
It’s a flow.
She connected to the energy filling the world, as if reaching up to pluck a star from the Milky Way and swallow it whole.
And the energy that poured into Philia’s body changed its nature, becoming her own—
“Vilatonia.”
—and then blossomed.
Energy burst forth from her.
At the tip of the wand, a flower of flame.
The children stared, dazed and shining, as if they had witnessed a miracle.
And I—
I get it.
I’d achieved my goal.
I’ve found the right way to use magic.
I’d finally obtained a way to smash the cage that had held me for so long and escape, cage and all.
**
Inside the carriage as it moved away from the orphanage, the count spoke.
“So it really does exist.”
“What do you mean?”
At his daughter’s question, he turned his gaze to her.
“Have you never heard stories like this, Philia? A swan raised among ducks, or a jewel sunk in a filthy lake.”
“...Father saw that girl as a swan, or as a jewel?”
“Yes, I did.”
The count suddenly laughed.
“Perhaps she’ll even end up entering as your junior.”
“The Academy? That seems... difficult, no matter how you look at it.”
Philia’s response was the sensible one.
It was true that sometimes people were born with a sense for mana even if they weren’t from mage families—mutants, or perhaps descendants of some ancient bloodline surfacing after many generations.
Some of them even became fairly decent mages.
But the Academy was not a place you could enter merely because you had a sensitivity to mana.
It was a place for taking someone who would already have become an excellent mage through family education and shaping them into someone even better.
Not lower into middle, or middle into upper, but upper into the highest of the high.
That was the Academy.
As such, there was only one practical way to get in.
Be born to a great house, inherit extraordinary talent from mage parents, and learn magic from the moment you learned to walk.
There were other ways in, technically speaking.
At least, technically.
Because no student who had entered through those methods had ever actually appeared in the Academy’s thirty-year history.
“Hm, well.”
The count had clearly just been speaking offhandedly, and he nodded at his daughter’s answer.
“I suppose someone like Richeon or Scollara might be able to get in.”
They were both magical institutions that aimed to train middle-grade mages up to upper-grade, or low-grade mages up to middle-grade.
“Maybe Scollara, but Richeon... Do you really think that girl has such extraordinary talent, Father?”
“Well, even if she did somehow manage to get in, she’d have no reason to be entangled with you.”
The count snorted.
“Anything lacking for enrollment?”
“No, Father.”
“There are only ten days left until the term starts.”
Their carriage was heading for the Imperial Capital, because the Academy stood nearby.
“When your attendants arrive, I’ll return to my territory at once. If there’s anything you want, tell me before then.”
“Thank you, Father. Though I don’t think there’s any need for you to worry.”
In both their minds, the rough stone they had casually encountered at the orphanage had already been pushed into some far corner of memory.
And exactly ten days later, Philia would come to regret that with all her heart.
If only, while still together with her father—who stood so far above the realm she had reached—she had thought about that rough stone, worried over it, analyzed it.
If only she had remembered that girl properly.
Then perhaps she would never have suffered that humiliation at the entrance ceremony.
**
“E-el-li!!”
Doloria came at me.
“How dare you make me a laughingstock in front of a noble!?”
Foam gathered at the corners of her mouth, and the whites of her eyes were laced with bloodshot veins, turning them a furious red.
“I’m going to kill you. No, I’m going to make you beg me to kill you!”
In one hand she held a rusty saw.
In the other, a rolling pin used for flattening dough. Except she wasn’t holding it like a cooking tool; she gripped it like something she meant to shove into someone.
It was so disgusting that a bitter smile slipped onto my face.
“What a truly revolting monster.”
And if it was a monster, then I supposed I’d have to purge it.