Founding the Order (3)
It had been five years ago, on the day he came home from his debut party. Laszlo was beaten savagely by his father the moment he stepped through the door — his crime was defying the order to keep himself hidden and out of sight, all because he had exchanged words with Prince Iden.
Count Abaro screamed at his son to choose, right then and there: manifest an Awoken Ability on the spot, or vanish from his sight forever.
Laszlo clasped his hands together and prayed with everything he had for the grace of Solitas, but the god, as He always had, turned His face away.
He failed to manifest anything, and his father dragged him by the collar all the way to the stable.
"From this moment on, you are not my son — you are a horse. Crawl out of here without permission, and know that you will be beaten until the day you die!"
From that day forward, Laszlo became the horse of House Abaro.
At first, he resented Iden. If Iden had never struck up that conversation, his life would have gone on exactly as it was.
But blaming someone else changed nothing about his reality. It was his fault alone — his failure to live up to his father's expectations, and nothing more. Just once, even one single time, he wanted to stand before his father as a son worthy of pride.
"Have you ever considered learning the sword?"
One day, a knight who could no longer bear to watch urged him to take up swordsmanship. Laszlo silently accepted the wooden sword the man held out.
Even without an Awoken Ability, he thought, if he could just master something — anything — then perhaps he could still be of use to his father.
The swordwork he picked up piecemeal in a cramped stable was hardly proper training. Even so, Laszlo gave it his all. With horse dung still clinging to his hands, he practiced the path of the sword the knight taught him, night and day.
"You are a diligent young man, my lord."
Hearing the knight's praise, he nearly leapt for joy. Having his efforts acknowledged was, truly, a wonderful thing. If he just kept this up, surely the day would come when he could hold his own in front of his father too.
Then one day, he looked up to find his father standing in front of the stable.
"What is this nonsense?"
"I, um, was practicing a little swordsmanship..."
His father did not wait to hear the rest. He unbuckled his belt, wound it once around his right hand, and drew it back.
"Since when! has a horse! been strutting around swinging a sword!"
His father rained blows down on him from head to toe without rhyme or reason. And Laszlo felt something inside him shatter.
The one-sided love he had borne for his father vanished, and in the hollow it left behind settled a strange new emotion called rage.
And before he knew it, he had turned twelve.
"Sounds like Prince Iden is founding a knight order."
"I read the notice — apparently even people without Awoken Abilities can apply."
"Well, of course it does. Lady Mabel and Lord Chris made off with every useful awakened talent worth having. He's scraping together bodies however he can. You can hardly call that a proper knight order."
Laszlo secretly drank in the soldiers' chatter. Prince Iden was founding a knight order — and it would accept even the unawakened into its ranks.
In that instant, an absurd thought seized Laszlo.
The thought that the notice might as well have been written for him and him alone.
"If it ever becomes too much, reach out to me anytime. I'll help you however I can."
Hadn't the words Iden spoke five years ago been meant for this very moment?
I have to go to Lord Iden.
Laszlo's withered body was seized by a burning yearning. Never once in his life had he wanted anything so desperately.
He crawled out of the stable on trembling limbs and, dragging his legs behind him, slipped out through the estate's gates. Countless servants watched him turn his back on the manor, yet not one of them moved to stop him.
Laszlo set off with no plan whatsoever, simply putting one foot in front of the other.
Finding his direction was easy. Countless others gripped by the same dream of knighthood had woven themselves into a ribbon of humanity stretching down the road.
When his throat grew dry, he drank from streams; when hunger gnawed, he picked fruit by the roadside. When even that failed him, he did not refuse to beg. Not a soul would ever have taken this filthy, scrawny, stinking boy for the eldest son of Count Abaro.
Whenever he stopped to rest, he would snap off a tree branch and practice his swordwork. Sweating buckets as he swung that branch with utter solemnity, he drew sneers from every passerby.
Only on the feast day of Saint Boros — the very day of the interviews — did Laszlo finally reach Esterji Fortress City. A colossal crowd had massed from well beyond the city walls.
Every one of these people had come to become Prince Iden's knight.
Laszlo's chest swelled until it felt ready to burst.
He wanted to prove, and quickly, that he was not a useless person. He wanted to tell the world that he was worth more than a horse.
Even if he never became a knight, that would be fine.
If he could win only the smallest shred of recognition from Iden, Laszlo was certain he could burn it as fuel for the rest of his life.
"Stop pushing!"
"I said quit shoving!"
Swept along like a leaf in a current, Laszlo was carried through the crowd. He matched his steps to those around him so as not to be trampled to death. He was a single dry leaf riding an enormous tide.
By the time he came back to himself, he had been swept all the way into the headquarters where the enlistment trials were being held.
"Glad you made it, you rascals!"
A broad-shouldered man with red hair swept back and tied behind his head bellowed at the top of his lungs.
"I am Vitten, First Squad Leader of the order. Whether you lot become knights today rests entirely in my hands, so you had best keep those ears of yours wide open!"
"That's him — Vitten, the 'Crimson Wolf.'"
"Never dreamed I'd lay eyes on the Crimson Wolf myself..."
"Well, there's one thing I can brag about to the folks back home."
The crowd murmured among themselves. Laszlo rose onto his tiptoes and craned his neck upward.
There on the platform stood the man called the Crimson Wolf. He seemed the very incarnation of the 'true knight' Laszlo had dreamed of all his life.
A beast's presence, and a body honed to its very limit.
Vitten's entrance alone reduced every aspirant gathered there to something as trivial as stalks of grain. Laszlo, spellbound, drank in the sight of him.
"Awakened applicants to the left, unawakened applicants to the right! Think hard about which line you belong in!"
"...Unawakened applicants, no less. Live long enough and you hear everything."
"So he really does mean to recruit dimwits with no Awoken Ability?"
"He must be hiring them as odd-jobbers. He can't possibly be serious."
As mocking laughter seeped out of the awakened applicants' line, the unawakened bristled back at once.
"Don't make me laugh, you bastards."
"Strutting around just because luck happened to hand you an Awoken Ability — is the difference in our experience that funny to you?"
"That's right — Lord Iden himself is administering the unawakened trial personally. Doesn't that tell you how much hope he's pinning on us?"
Lord Iden... testing the unawakened with his own hands?
Laszlo's ears shot up. A fierce flame was kindled in his small chest.
Before long, he was led with roughly thirty others into the spacious testing ground inside the order's headquarters.
"What is that smell...?"
The candidates wrinkled their faces and clamped their noses shut.
"What on earth is that?"
"Isn't that horse dung?"
"Which lunatic came here smeared in horse shit?"
Laszlo's face burned. With only the one set of clothes he owned, there was nothing to be done now about a stench that had steeped into it over years.
"What kind of addle-brained fool shows up to meet His Highness the Prince and become a knight with horse dung all over his clothes?!"
"Shouldn't they be turning people like that away at the gate?"
Cold sweat ran in streams down his spine. Laszlo bowed to his fellow examinees over and over.
"I'm sorry! I'm so sorry!"
Then—
"All candidates, fall in!"
The examiner called out in crisp, disciplined tones. In that instant, all twenty-nine examinees shut their mouths at once and snapped to attention.
A moment later, a young man walked into the testing ground, escorted by his retinue of guards.
Laszlo froze mid-bow, stuck in an awkward half-crouch.
It was Prince Iden Esterji.
Iden was many times more magnificent than the figure Laszlo had turned over in his mind hundreds of times. And Laszlo could feel, with startling clarity, the grace of Solitas raining down over his head.
"A pleasure to meet you. I am Iden Esterji."
Iden's clear, lilting voice rolled out across the testing ground.
"I'll explain the test briefly."
At Iden's gesture, a giant of a man in steel armor stepped forward bearing two wooden swords.
"You see the wooden swords my bodyguard has brought. Pick one up each, and all you need do is spar until I tell you to stop."
Iden indicated the examiner with a jerk of his chin.
"Begin the test!"
The trial was finally underway. Two examinees were called and stepped into the center of the arena. Laszlo watched them cross wooden swords, his palms slick with sweat.
He had always practiced in hiding to escape his father's eyes, so he had never once had the chance to measure himself against anyone else.
But watching these people put their bodies to work, he began to think this might actually be within his reach. Their movements weren't particularly fast, and their form seemed sloppy.
I can do this. I can do this.
Laszlo repeated the words like a charm — so that the negativity his father had planted in him might not leave a single trace.
"Next!"
The test moved swiftly. One examinee after another was judged and failed, barely managing a few exchanges each.
"Next!"
The examiner's scowl turned ugly.
"Hey, you there, runt! Were your ears painted on?!"
Laszlo jolted up from the bench in fright.
"I'm sorry!"
He hurried to the center of the arena. His opponent was a seasoned adventurer three times his size, his face full of hard-won experience.
"Oh, it's the smelly little brat from earlier."
The man smirked.
"This hardly seems like much of a match at all."
"Isn't the size gap a bit much?"
Pessimistic murmurs drifted from the waiting benches.
"Salute His Highness Prince Iden Esterji!"
The man knelt before Iden. Laszlo bowed alongside him. Iden said nothing, only watching the two of them.
And in that moment, Laszlo knew for certain: Iden had forgotten him.
It stood to reason. Five years ago he had been nothing but a scrawny brat, and five years of hardship had only turned him into a plainer, shabbier boy.
But Laszlo was not disheartened. The future was his to begin rewriting from this very moment.
"Begin!"
At the examiner's shout, Laszlo bent down and picked up the wooden sword lying in the dirt. The moment his palms closed around the hilt, the familiar weight brought a wave of calm over his heart.
I can do this.
Laszlo repeated the charm once more and raised his head. But something was wrong with his opponent.
"This sword's too heavy...?"
The man was straining so hard to hold up a single wooden sword that he looked ready to burst a blood vessel.
"Examiner, sir, something's wrong here! The sword is way too heavy!"
Heavy? What about it could possibly be heavy?
The sword the man held was a wooden sword identical to Laszlo's own. Even if it had been forged of metal instead, a weapon of that size could never weigh enough to matter.
"Get on with it!"
As the examiner urged them on,
"HYAAAAGH!"
the man swung his sword with every scrap of strength he had. Laszlo slipped aside from the blow without effort. The man's movements were as sluggish and ragged as the other examinees' had been — he was being thrown about by the weight of his own practice sword.
Then Laszlo began his counterattack. Where the man's feet dragged, his own felt feather-light — as if a wind had risen beneath him to bear up his legs.
"Give your body to the flow."
A voice reached his ears — warm and kind, nothing at all like his father's. Laszlo surrendered himself to the stream of his consciousness. As if dancing, as if dreaming, he followed where the voice led.
"Come on, just land one!"
The man's swing cut wildly through empty air. Laszlo saw the naked opening at his unguarded flank. And the yearning nested deep in his chest cried out to him, taking the shape of a voice.
Thrust!
Laszlo stepped in and drove his wooden sword forward with all his might. With an impact that felt as though his wrist had snapped, the man's body left the ground and went sailing backward through the air.
The examinees stared, eyes ready to pop from their sockets. Even Laszlo could not believe what his own hands had done.
Then came something even harder to believe.
"His Highness...!"
Iden, who had not stirred from his seat once in the entire test, rose to his feet and began walking toward him.
Laszlo gasped for breath like a fish tossed out of water. The brief span of time it took Iden to stand before him stretched out like a thousand years.
What am I supposed to say? Should I tell him how glad I am to see him again? Or greet him as a stranger? Or maybe...
"Laszlo Avaro."
The moment Iden spoke his name, Laszlo's mind went blindingly, utterly white.
"Welcome to my order."
Laszlo doubted his own ears. One impossibly surreal scene had followed another for so long now that if someone told him all of this was a dream, he would have struggled to believe otherwise.
The examinees watched Iden's every move with bated breath. Not one of them had imagined that the first passer of the unawakened trial would be such a small boy.
"I... I passed?"
"You did."
Iden smiled and rested a hand on Laszlo's shoulder.
"What took you so long?"
Laszlo felt his emotions burst out beyond all restraint. He could not stop the tears.