The Royal Mage and the Winter Village
The mage who heard the knight’s report looked thoroughly displeased. He vented a string of complaints—about how he had been made to come all the way to some filthy land plagued by disease, about how the higher-ups clearly had no idea how to make use of talent—before he finally managed to calm down.
The knight charged with protecting him stood at attention, listening with a bitter look on his face, and kept his silence.
“What, has the whole place already been wiped out by that damned plague or whatever?”
At the mage’s overbearing words, the knight frowned.
It was a royal order to escort him, yes, but he is not exactly someone I’m eager to protect.
Still, he was his superior for the time being. The knight racked his brain, trying to think of a way to shut the mage up effectively. But before he could come up with an answer, a small shadow cut in ahead of him.
“Hello.”
It was a girl with calm brown hair braided neatly down on either side of her head, wearing a placid skirt that fell below her knees. Her gentle eyes, reminiscent of a fawn, trembled faintly as she looked at them.
“I’m Kisha Hartney. I’ve been waiting for you, Royal Mage.”
“...Hartney? Hey, kid, you the lord here?”
The mage’s gaze finally turned to Kisha. Even as he looked down on her with open contempt, Kisha answered clearly.
“My mother is the head of House Hartney. Since she is currently bedridden, I, her daughter, am standing in for her however I can.”
“Hah.”
“I’ve been sent to receive our guest on behalf of the domain. Please, I ask your indulgence.”
Realizing he would have to deal with a tiny girl not even half his height as a stand-in for the lord, the mage let out a dry laugh. After several more meaningless sounds—“Hah,” “Well now,” “Ha”—slipping from his lips, he finally introduced himself with an irritated expression.
“Oze Lobern. Elite royal mage of Alferios.”
At the word elite, Kisha’s eyes widened.
So that was why he had begun carping about hospitality and family lineage the moment he arrived.
Royal mage. An elite royal mage, no less.
Not all royal mages were the same.
A mage who had just obtained a license was called an apprentice. From there, each time they passed a trial, their rank would rise. Most found the regular examinations themselves tremendously difficult. There were plenty of royal mages who boasted they had spent ten years just barely scraping through the standard curriculum.
And an elite mage was a master who had passed the advancement exam three times over. As he complained himself, Oze Lobern was clearly a man of exceptional ability—one whose talents were such that no one could quite understand why he had been sent on an expedition to some outlying backwater. Kisha felt a little intimidated all at once.
“Uh... Mage, first please come inside and have a warm meal...”
“You expect me to get food down in this filthy place?”
“S-Sorry?”
“Hurry up and give your report. Damn it, I may not like this place, but I still have work to do.”
Elite Royal Mage Oze’s tone remained as rough as ever. He made no effort to hide his disgust as he looked down at Kisha with a cold expression.
“I heard winter suddenly returned to this village.”
A world where winter had vanished.
It had been a disaster ongoing for more than a hundred years already. Oze glanced around and muttered,
“Well... I suppose I didn’t need to ask to know it was true.”
Even now, tiny flakes of snow were drifting down from the sky. Snow piled along the stone road, breath frosted white in the air, and little snowmen stood at every bend in the lane, as though someone had made them and left them there.
It was the picture of deep winter.
Oze slowly curved the corner of his mouth.
“So the rumor was true—that the Silver Dragon, Winter Bell, has awakened from sleep.”
Since the dragonkind had chosen to abandon the world and left in great numbers, only the representatives of each lineage remained to carry on the duty of guardianship.
Earth Dragon Sidbell.
Blue Dragon Asubell.
Gold Dragon Akibell.
And finally, Silver Dragon Winter Bell.
Unlike the others, who had formed contracts with particular nations and maintained active ties with them, Winter Bell alone remained hidden in the snowy wastes and never revealed himself.
“That’s why the King has taken an interest in this village. Do you understand what that means, little girl?”
Kisha, already tense, widened her eyes further at the mention of the King.
Seeing that, Oze Lobern looked at the young stand-in lord with amusement and declared grandly,
“This region will now develop under the full support and protection of the royal family. Yes, that is—if we succeed in contracting with the Silver Dragon!”
Contract with the dragon?
The memory of Winter Bell rose in Kisha’s mind. He was a beautiful being she had met not long ago.
A kind dragon who had saved her when she was in trouble, watched over her to the very end, and finally restored winter to Hartney.
But still.
Don’t go resenting me again later, Kisha Hartney.
Why had his sunset-colored eyes looked so weary when they parted?
While Kisha stood there lost in thought, the royal mage continued to ramble on without pause.
“Take it as an honor that I, under the King’s direct order, have personally come all the way down to this dirty little backwater. Now then—where exactly did you see the dragon? If there’s a lair nearby, we can use detection magic to scout from there...!”
“Um, Mage?”
“What is it?”
Having been interrupted by a child, despite her role as acting lord, Oze failed to hide his irritation.
“If it’s the royal command, I’ll cooperate with all my strength in anything you ask of me. But before that, I actually have one request for you.”
“A request?”
“Yes. I humbly ask that you use your power to examine the illness spreading through the village!”
At the request to look in on the sick, Oze’s brow furrowed.
Honestly. This is why dealing with ignorant children is such a pain. A mage isn’t a priest or a doctor, so what exactly am I supposed to do about a disease?
Unlike ordinary people imagined, the magic mages handled was no miracle. Mages were medical laymen who couldn’t even diagnose a patient’s illness, let alone make a cure.
But Oze Lobern was not naïve enough to expose that fact and weaken his own position. He smoothed his brow quickly, then grinned, baring his teeth.
“Well now, this is a village where the great me can make his mark. A filthy plague has no business remaining here, of course. Very well—I’ll lend you my hand.”
“...! Th-thank you, Mage!”
And the innocent girl, believing in the kindness that had been so prettily dressed up, was truly delighted.
“Still, the royal order comes first, so I’ll have to check the snowy field where the dragon was said to appear. Lead the way.”
The mage boldly thrust Kisha forward. When Kisha saw the staff in his hand and the knight’s sword at his side, she hesitated slightly, then gave a small nod.
Blanconia is open to everyone.
They weren’t coming to oppose the dragon; they simply wanted to meet him.
Just as Kisha had entered the snowfields to wish for winter’s return.
* * *
That day, Oze Lobern spent the entire day striking out.
The dragon did not appear.
The search was made all the more difficult by the searing cold and the snow that sank knee-deep with every step. They returned to House Hartney’s manor exhausted, having found neither the Dragon Temple nor even a single dragon’s footprint.
The escort comforted the mage, who was grumbling that the bath only had lukewarm water.
“If you get frostbite, they say this temperature helps loosen the fatigue better than water that’s too hot.”
“Frostbite? Froooostbite? Hah, this is ridiculous. I may have been burned plenty in my life, but this is my first time getting frostbite!”
“It is winter, after all.”
“What an absolutely miserable village.”
Oze’s complaints never ended. He had completely forgotten the promise he’d made to Kisha.
He had no interest in the plague whatsoever. All he could think about was finding the dragon as quickly as possible and making a name for himself.
But the next day, and the day after that, nothing changed.
Blanconia was vast. At the same time, its scenery never changed at all, so that no matter how far they went, the same snowy expanse stretched on and on.
It was so tedious that now, simply seeing a white field of snow was enough to make irritation flare in Oze’s chest. He even ended up tumbling down a slippery slope.
“Damn it!”
Oze yanked off his glove, snow packed inside it, and limped forward. He no longer had the energy to make it back to the manor, so he walked straight into a tavern by the road.
Seeing the soldiers trailing in after him in a crowd, the villagers hurriedly gave up the good seats. As he watched laborers carrying firewood back and forth in a flurry, Oze dropped heavily into a seat beside the brazier.
He had sensed the sky growing overcast, and by the time he looked outside the window, snowflakes were already drifting down again. Signs of a blizzard.
“Ugh, it’s cold. Don’t they even have any warm-enchantment equipment here?”
“...It seems the only heating is a fireplace where you have to add the wood and light it yourself. Most of them are said to be seeing a mage for the first time, in any case.”
“What? How do people live without magical equipment?”
Born to a noble family and raised in comfort, Oze simply could not understand the customs of commoners. But complaining changed nothing. In the end, he had to warm himself by relying on the heat from the hearth and force down cheap wine that did not suit his taste. Otherwise, he would never have managed to endure the bitter cold.
As he kept tipping back glass after glass without so much as an accompaniment, the people who had been watching Oze Lobern with wary eyes slowly began to gather around him.
“Excuse me, sir. Are you perhaps...?”
“Hmm?”
“A-are you the mage?”
They were village residents dressed in shabby clothes.
The soldiers tried to stop them, but Oze, half-drunk by then, waved a hand and brushed the obstruction aside.
“Yes. I am Oze Lobern, royal mage of the kingdom.”
Oh!
At his hearty answer, the people cheered. One villager, eyes shining with life, clasped both hands together and dropped to his knees before him.
“Mage!”
Oze Lobern was a man hungry for power. That was why he had become a royal mage, and why he enjoyed the praise and adoration that came with it.
He lifted his wineglass with arrogant composure and nodded slightly, as if to say: go on.
“W-well, we heard that an illness is spreading through our village, you see...”
“Of course I heard.”
He had already been feeling uncomfortable about staying too long in a village where the word plague was being thrown around.
Oze frowned in annoyance, and the resident, though hesitating, continued speaking.
“By some mercy, Lord Winter Bell returned winter to us this year, so we were able to plant winter butterfly trees in all our flowerbeds. But the flowers haven’t bloomed yet, so we can’t make medicine.”
“And?”
“We’re worried the critically ill may not be able to hold out until the medicine can be made...”
The face of the speaker and of everyone gathered around them darkened. The people suffering from the illness were their neighbors, their childhood friends, their family.
There was no way it could feel good to watch loved ones struggle under disease.
“Mage. Could you please take a look at my father’s illness?”
“Mage! Please, show us mercy.”
“Please look at my wife and daughter too, will you?”
They had all come in search of the great mage sent from the royal capital, carrying the thinnest thread of hope.
“This isn’t much, but we gathered these in the hope that they might help you, Mage.”
The man who seemed to be their spokesman hesitated, then untied the bundle he had brought on his back.
Clink.
Along with the sound of coins striking one another, the villagers’ collected donation was laid before Oze Lobern. There were wines made from grapes they had harvested with their own sweat, handicrafts including handkerchiefs, and a modest sum of money.
“P-please, just accept it.”
“...”
The guards standing behind Oze exchanged troubled looks among themselves. Royal mages were expensive to hire in the first place. The bundle the villagers offered now was no more than pocket change, so the aftermath was easy enough to predict.
“Help?”
Oze let out a snort of a laugh.
Then he tipped the wineglass upside down toward the village man, who had foolishly begun to smile along with him.
Splash!
As the wine poured down, the tavern fell silent as a grave. While the villager stood there dazed, drenched from head to toe, Oze rose roughly to his feet.
“You are criminals who dared to make an unauthorized petition to an official carrying out the royal command. Cut them down.”
The same words could mean very different things depending on how they were spoken.
For a populace suffering under plague, it was a reasonable request to make of an official. But by principle, for a royal direct appointee such as the Royal Knight Order or a royal mage, taking money to be hired for private purposes was illegal. “Royal direct appointee” meant exactly what it sounded like: a position that only the King himself could command.
So if a simple request were interpreted as an attempt to overstep royal authority, then that would be...
treason.
“But Lord Lobern, that’s far too...”
As the guards hesitated, Oze flared up.
“You dare question my orders? Do you want to become traitors too?”
“...!”
At the word traitors, the startled soldiers drew their blades without another moment’s hesitation.