Dreams Lost — 10

And so I finished my conversation with Kanna and stepped outside. After that I went back to standing perfectly still, like a doll set out on display.

Come to think of it, Sorindiges and Kanna are the year just below mine, while Polaris and I share a year. If Aurora comes to the Royal Academy next ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠year as things stand, she would be a second-year by age, though I couldn't say which year they would actually place her in. It was just after the new year turned that Maleficent's curse dropped her into a sleep from which she could not wake — more than half a year before her eyes opened again. A great deal of studying piled up in that span, but she is learning it now, inside the palace.

Sorindiges says she ought not to go to the Royal Academy, where there are boys, and should simply be educated at the royal castle instead. Hypion refused, flatly. He did it in front of Aurora, so I imagine the whole exchange was theater. Anyone actually thinking would never have said it where she could hear.

If you ask why I have suddenly started watching the royals, it is only because a gathering of children happened to catch my eye. Children, of course, only in the sense of students old enough to attend the Royal Academy. By age they are what you would call high schoolers, but their actual standing is closer to that of university students.

This world has no compulsory education yet. Most children not yet ten leave home ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to go to work, and past fifteen they bear children of their own and raise them. The concept of child abuse does not exist. There is an idea, leaning on old-fashioned morality, that one ought to look after a child — but it does not apply to every child.

In some regions, I am told, when a child is left an orphan they kill them, so that the child will not have to be unhappy. No. It is the other way around. If the child comes from a family with some property, one that has kept up good relations with its neighbors, then the neighbors are the ones who do the killing. A poor family's child, with none of that, is spent like a bullet. Dangerous monsters come often to the provinces, and so the children are made into sacrifices — whether as fuel for the working of magic, thrown out as food in someone else's place, or handed a weapon and sent charging in.

Not every village is like that, of course. Most are not. The nearer you come to a great city, the more that custom vanishes. Even by the standards of this world, those are considerably barbaric villages. I do not think of them, though, as places harboring a vice that must be reformed at all costs. I only note that such a culture exists.

At any rate, they would not be children in ordinary society, and yet here were people still treated as children in any society of the middle class and above, all gathered in one place. They seemed to be laughing — ha ha, ho ho — but girls and boys alike were talking with their faces crowded full of discomfort toward one another.

It was terribly funny.

Polaris stood in the middle of it, ringed by people of similar rank or higher, and now and then she glanced my way with envy on her face. And Kanna? Her presence is so fierce that no one comes near. If someone does approach, she looks down from above and flattens them with sheer pressure, and not a soul pushes through it. Add to that the rank of a ducal house, and who would ever walk up to her?

Aurora was looking back and forth between that Polaris and that Kanna. Her gaze kept falling, in particular, on skin and hair, so I suppose she takes them for Harvesters in a plight like her own. Similar looks breed a sense of kinship.

Will she make contact with someone?

I watched, and Aurora chose between the two. Not Polaris, caught up and busy talking among several people, but Kanna, standing alone and unbowed. She started toward her.

Oh. Contact?

I waited with interest, but the contact unfortunately came to nothing, because Sorindiges caught Aurora and held her back. He told her not to go over — Kanna seemed to be in a foul mood — and I wonder if he noticed that, hearing it, Kanna's expression only rotted further.

Kanna and Sorindiges. According to Kanna's memories, she dislikes him. From the outside they look perfectly ordinary. No — if one looks only at Polaris's memories, Kanna is one of the girls who gets along well with him. But out of a very private grudge, she has disliked Sorindiges since the two of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠them were not yet ten. He mocked her once, calling her a cripple. And in the end he never apologized for it.

Honestly, when I dig through the memories, Sorindiges did apologize. The trouble is that it was not a proper apology — not one that could satisfy Kanna's heart. Dealings between people are complicated. It is not a matter of giving ten and receiving ten. You give ten and sometimes get twenty back; you give ten and sometimes get five. Emotion is subjective.

That is why I can make Harvesters with an easy heart. When those private measures fail to match, a fight breaks out, and a person with a strong self scatters the mismatch in every direction, always toward whichever side suits them. So I want to watch them strike against each other, and the drama that comes of it. If it could be managed that Kanna married Sorindiges, the place would be carpeted in contractors even if I never made a separate Harvester.

I would like that…….

But I was not to see any more drama than this today. It ended halfway. Perhaps because I was standing somewhere far too conspicuous, not a single foreigner approached me. Hypion may have been managing that, for all I know. Only when midnight came did the banquet finally reach its end, and I was able to return to my lodgings.

The office the king uses, in the royal castle.

Late as the hour was, the lamps were still burning, and Hypion leaned back in his chair. The international conference on sanctions against the corporations had ended. The Outer God had mistakenly believed that the banquet came after the conference was over. In truth, the banquet had been part of the same single event. The Outer God paid it no mind, taking it for a repetition of what had already been said, but King Hypion, contrary to what the Outer God supposed, had not spent the banquet merely circulating and trading greetings.

King Hypion had called the nobles together and declared his will. Those in attendance that day were not every noble — only, to put it crudely, the ones whose rank counted. Not the hangers-on, but nobles with the power to exert influence over the regions around them. What he laid out before them was not simply the sanctioning of three corporations. It was advance notice that he meant to build the means of controlling every corporation yet to come. In another age, one might have called it notice of forthcoming legislation. It was a chance to adapt to the changes ahead, and at the same time a warning aimed at those nobles who held great enterprises. It was also a test of how far Sorindiges could control the noble society that would follow. And beyond that, it was an occasion for introducing the girl called Bell. It was, of course, just as the Outer God had thought, a chance to set Aurora out into the world and see whether she would be all right.

Hypion was not so incompetent a king as to handle only one matter at a time, and so he advanced several at once. Most of them flowed within the bounds he had anticipated. His relations with the nobility were not poor, and the negotiations concluded without any great complaint. His son, Sorindiges, was leading the children well enough, and Aurora beside him — changed so far that her skin had gone blue — had not warped or gone crooked, and carried herself as well as she ever had. Nearly all of it lay inside the range of his expectations.

If there was a single exception, it was the girl called Bell. The girl who worked miracles. Most people assume the word is used because she heals, but King Hypion calls her a miracle for a different reason.

There had been a witch the mages concluded, from the very start, it was impossible to defeat. So powerful that no search, however far it reached, could stop the curse foretold at Aurora's birth. Waking her, once the curse had laid her down to sleep, had been impossible as well. A daughter who could not rise, wasting thinner by the day, dying. They said that unless holes were bored into her body and tubes of every kind inserted, forcing her to stay alive, she would neither die nor live — only wither until her life ran out. Around the time he had begun to think that killing her would be the kinder mercy, a miracle arrived.

A power that could restore any dying person to sound health, though the outward form would change severely. Brought in haste and put to the test, those who returned proved, if anything, stronger than before. Human rights had been ignored in the experiments along the way, true — but when an accident occurred, he buried the disgrace along with it. And so his daughter was restored to health, and the witch herself was even brought in.

Strange.

However much the girl's head might be a garden of flowers, was this not far too contrived? To give an irresistible gift before taking something more important is a very common method. And so the king suspected the Outer God. He placed her where she could be investigated, and investigated her thoroughly. All he learned in the course of it was that she was, simply, a good person. She kept still in the mansion given over as her lodgings because she was afraid of getting in the way of the people who worked there. If someone was suffering, she went to them, no matter where they were. Even in Berne City, which had nearly grown into a catastrophe, the path she walked never varied. She moved in order to save people. The only piece of information one might call a weakness was that she disliked being called a god.

And the girl called Bell boasts of nothing she has done. Honestly, that puts him in a foul mood. But it can be used. No — it would be strange not to use it. He uses her because he is the king, and yet he has enough goodwill ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠that he would refrain if she refused. She simply never says a word, and so he prepared a setting that a good person could not help but find unpleasant. He carries on as if her power were his own, as if he were her master. He boasts of her power as he pleases, and sells it to other countries.

Hypion holds the girl called Bell's academic record as well, and he knows she is not foolish enough to fail to grasp what is happening now. So he built a situation in which Bell would have no choice but to move, and watched for how she would answer. To an astonishing degree, there was no answer at all. Without the slightest show of displeasure, she followed Hypion's word without protest. Had she said anything, he had meant to begin from there and map what Bell disliked — but there was nothing of the sort, and so he had no choice but to go all the way to the end. Thus the only thing that slipped free of Hypion's plans was Bell.

Even so, she brimmed with far too much humanity to be handled as nothing more than a strange and convenient tool.

Get married, she says…….

As a father with a son and a daughter, it was a thing he was coming to feel in his own flesh. A king, properly speaking, ought to treat his children as political instruments and marry them off to be used. But he had grown fond of them. There was his second daughter, whom he had treated kindly because somewhere in his heart he had already counted her as one who would die of the curse. And he knows it was the same with Sorindiges and Lunasi. Since she was going to die anyway, he was kind without holding anything back. It began as pity, but Aurora returned it in full. A child born to be loved gives love back larger than what she received, adding her own to it. And so he grew fond of her. Fond, in spite of himself — fond enough that when the time came to part, he went searching everywhere for some way, any way.

The witch's curse came true, exactly as it was spoken.

King Hypion — whose queen had died of illness not long after bearing Aurora, and who had not kept so much as a concubine since. He had always been a man of deep feeling, and it was the same with his children. And so the wish is there: to repay, if he can, the benefactor who undid it all.

Hypion decided he would take the somehow grotesque girl into this country just as she was.