Lunchtime in the Temple
Lunch began at fourth bell. After seeing the apprentice back to her director chambers, I returned to Lord Ferdinand’s room. He allowed me to join him for lunch whenever I was in the temple. At first I had found it incredibly nerve-racking to eat with Lord Ferdinand—so much so that I could hardly even taste the food—but after a whole season of having lunch together, I now had enough composure to actually look forward to our meals.
Because, I mean, every day he serves the kind of food that we laynobles would only eat on special occasions.
“Thank you for having me, Lord Ferdinand.”
One of his gray priest attendants let me inside, and I found Lord Ferdinand continuing his work while our meal was being prepared. He acknowledged my entrance with nothing more than a quick glance. The first time I had eaten here I assumed I had interrupted him at a serious moment, but now I knew this was just business as usual.
I headed to Lord Ferdinand’s desk, taking care not to get in the way of his attendants as they prepared the food.
“Damuel, what is that board?” Lord Ferdinand asked.
“A list of questions from the apprentice. She said she would like you to answer them when you have the time.”
Lord Ferdinand took the board and looked it over, then shook his head and murmured in an exasperated tone, “It seems she has begun reading a fairly old bible...” Then, he immediately started writing his answers.
The apprentice’s questions were about unfamiliar words and phrases she had encountered while reading books. The other day she had started reading a copy of a bible written in a dialect of our language so old that not even I could read it—and I graduated from the Royal Academy. No matter how you looked at it, that just wasn’t the kind of book a kid who had just finished their baptism would normally want to read. And yet, the apprentice breezed through the pages with a smile on her face, trying to decipher the text by comparing it to a bible that had been written in more modern language.
“She said that it was fun to compare to a modern bible, and just having new words to read was enough to make her happy,” I said.
“That girl is always happy when she has a book in her hands.”
“I know. The thing that surprised me most after coming to the temple was how obsessed the apprentice is with books.”
The first thing she had done when I was assigned to guard her and she could leave her room was head straight to the book room, which was usually freezing because it didn’t even have a furnace. She was sickly enough that she could fall ill in the blink of an eye, and yet nothing thrilled her more than the idea of spending hours reading in a room that most people would be itching to leave as soon as possible.
In the end, Fran and I had to request that Lord Ferdinand let her bring books back to the director chambers, thereby allowing her to read in front of a fireplace. But if not for that, the apprentice no doubt would have spent hour upon hour cooped up in the freezing book room, and I would have been forced to accompany her. That was too close of a call.
“She even brings books to bed when she’s sick and bedridden. Despite the fact she needs to rest, she just keeps crying while begging for books until Fran ultimately caves in and lets her have one.”
“I would expect nothing less from that single-minded maniac,” replied Lord Ferdinand as he continued writing down answers to questions about language so archaic that it wasn’t even taught at the Royal Academy.
I watched his hands with awe—the rumors my older brother had told me about Lord Ferdinand being on another level were all true. I myself wanted to use this opportunity to learn more about ancient languages, given that I hadn’t been able to answer any of the apprentice’s questions.
...It would be shameful for a noble like me—a laynoble, sure, but a noble nonetheless—to be less knowledgeable than a commoner apprentice shrine maiden.
It felt somewhat strange that, despite going to the temple as part of my punishment, I was now studying at a higher level than when I was attending the Royal Academy.
“High Priest, Sir Damuel. The food is ready,” announced an attendant, which was my sign to leave his desk.
The table was lined with delicious, beautifully prepared appetizers, already much more extravagant than what I usually ate at the knight barracks and back at home. I sat down, doing my best to keep my stomach from grumbling. It would be a little embarrassing for me to make a noise like that in front of Lord Ferdinand, someone unfathomably above me in every way.
Today’s menu seemed to be taschnitz, a bird that had been thoroughly stewed. It only took a glance to see how well cooked it was, and it looked tender enough to melt the second it touched your tongue.
“How was yesterday?” Lord Ferdinand asked as he started eating the food served to him.
It had become a daily routine for me to report what the apprentice had done since our previous lunch. Fran was giving similar reports as the apprentice’s attendant, but Lord Ferdinand liked to gather information from multiple sources and perspectives. And, for the record, this routine was quite important to me; it was unbearable to eat in silence with Lord Ferdinand sitting right across the table.
“Tuuli came to visit yesterday afternoon with some people from the Gilberta Company. They discussed how to keep the workshop running while the apprentice is gone for Spring Prayer,” I replied, slicing off a large piece of the tenderly boiled vargel and slathering it with cream sauce before forking it into my mouth. The smooth flavor of cream mixed with a hint of butter spread through my mouth, and the soft vargel broke apart on my tongue.
Aaaah... Nothing makes me feel the spring quite like vargel with cream sauce.
I was glad to be experiencing spring flavors again, but at the same time it hurt to say goodbye to the parue cakes I had discovered in the orphanage. They were sweets for commoners never seen in the Noble’s Quarter, but their gentle sweetness had truly been delicious. The apprentice had said that they were something to look forward to next year, though she probably hadn’t realized that, by that time, my guard duty in the temple would be over.
...And it would be a little too much for me to mingle with commoners to go hunting for parues. What a shame.
As I thought back to how good the parue cakes tasted, Lord Ferdinand said, “Oh yes,” having seemingly just remembered something. “I have been hearing the name ‘Tuuli’ quite often, but what exactly is it that she does here? Unlike the Gilberta Company, I do not believe there is much for her to do.”
Although Tuuli’s name often came up in reports, she would usually just arrive with the Gilberta Company before leaving almost immediately for the orphanage. It struck me that I never really talked much about her, since it was always those from the Gilberta Company who had important things to say.
Tuuli was apparently the apprentice’s older sister, but she was a normal commoner through and through. They hardly even looked like sisters when you put them side by side. They were obviously close with one another, but their conduct and manner of speaking couldn’t have been more different. It was hard to believe they had grown up together.
“Tuuli practices math and reading in the orphanage, and in return teaches the orphans about sewing and cooking. Now that it’s spring, her work has resumed and she can only visit every other day, but the regular visits from a family member seem to be helping the apprentice stay quite calm.”
“Excellent. No news could be better than that.”
When the blizzards had gotten so bad that the apprentice’s family couldn’t visit her, she had become so unstable that she started following Lord Ferdinand wherever he went, like a duckling following its parent. When things were especially bad, Lord Ferdinand would have to take the apprentice into his own workshop. He did so with enormous reluctance, but anything that calmed her down was more than welcome.
This workshop was Lord Ferdinand’s hidden room. Hidden rooms were the most personal space a noble had—a place where they could relax and calm themselves down—so, under normal circumstances, they wouldn’t allow other people inside. Very young nobles would register their mana along with their parents so that they could enter too, but after their baptism they would reset the seals to make it a completely personal place that only they could enter. With this in mind, I was really shocked to see Lord Ferdinand letting a complete stranger like the apprentice into his hidden room.
That said, it made sense when he explained that he was letting her use his hidden room since she as a non-noble lacked the ability to make one of her own, and so had no place to safely expel her pent-up feelings. It was one facet of her training on the path to becoming the daughter of a noble, who should show no emotion on the outside.
“Damuel, you have spent one season with Myne now. What do you think about her becoming Karstedt’s adopted daughter?” Lord Ferdinand asked.
I put my knife down for a moment and thought back to how the apprentice had acted over the winter.
“...When I see how much fun she has with her family and the Gilberta Company, then how sad she looks when they leave, it strikes me that separating a girl as young as her from her family would be a tragedy. But considering her enormous supply of mana, the technical expertise she has displayed in managing an increasingly profitable workshop, her acute economic sense, and even her shocking weakness, I don’t think she would be able to survive as a commoner.”
“You think so as well, then,” Lord Ferdinand murmured while bringing his fork to his mouth.
“When I watch her manage the orphanage and workshop up close, it is hard to ignore how abnormal the apprentice is. This is not just the difference between a noble and a commoner; it is as though she is in an entire league of her own.”
Nobles and commoners were strictly delineated by their mana, or lack thereof, so it was natural that there would be differences between them. But the apprentice was different from both nobles and commoners. It wasn’t as simple as asking whether she had mana or not; everything she did, everything she said, and even her very way of thinking was strange. The difference between the apprentice and other commoners was clear when you compared her to her family or those in the Gilberta Company.
“What really surprised me was the apprentice saying that she ran the orphanage’s workshop purely out of personal interest. It is unthinkable that a poor commoner would act not for the purpose of survival, but to satisfy a hobby. And on top of that, she is earning an obscene amount of money. Honestly. Even after seeing it myself, I still find it hard to believe.”
While guarding the apprentice in her chambers, I had overheard numerous conversations between her and the merchants of the Gilberta Company, and had observed her going through financial ledgers for the workshop with Fran and Gil to calculate profits. Despite not even a year having passed since her baptism, she was earning much more a year than me, a laynoble.
“The apprentice is abnormal in more ways than one and I believe that, if she wants even a little peace in her life, she will need to be put under Lord Karstedt’s protection,” I concluded.
There wasn’t much more you could ask for than the protection of the commander of the Knight’s Order, especially given his blood relation to the archduke. I was certain that she would be much happier with him than with some violent and cruel mednoble like Shikza. Not to mention that, if the apprentice became Lord Karstedt’s daughter and entered noble society as an archnoble, she could show me her favor and make life easier for me again—like how it was before the blunder I had made. Serving the apprentice wholeheartedly now would certainly make my future brighter, and I couldn’t deny the element of self-interest motivating me.
“...That you would advocate for Myne so strongly shows that you have grown quite accustomed to her and the temple. You have a different look in your eyes now than you used to,” observed Lord Ferdinand.
I gave a half-smile while eating my taschnitz. The feeling of the meat falling apart in my mouth reminded me of how, at the end of last autumn, it had felt as though my whole life was falling apart. Everything changed for me during that trombe extermination mission.
“I was excited for my first trombe extermination mission, after having to sit out on so many of them before coming of age. I’m just a layknight, but I worked hard to memorize the long prayer for Darkness weapons so that I could help as much as possible.”
“I do recall the rookies getting excited about the first time they are permitted to use Darkness weapons on an extermination mission,” said Lord Ferdinand with a slight smile. It seemed that even he had been excited for his first true mission as a knight, and could sympathize with how I felt. That made me feel really warm for some reason.
“It made sense that Lord Karstedt would pick me as a guard. I had just finished my time as an apprentice; I had never exterminated a trombe before; and, as a laynoble, I didn’t have much mana. But to this day, I still wish he hadn’t paired me with Shikza.”
Shikza had been a mednoble, but he was one of those who had returned from the temple after the Sovereignty’s political upheaval. As a former priest without much mana, noble society treated him with scorn and derision, and so his one solace was lording power over those below him in status—laynobles. No matter how much I hated it, no matter how much it frustrated me, a laynoble like me could never defy a mednoble.
“Shikza treated his status as a shield—something that would allow him to get away with harming the apprentice. Even though I was only demoted rather than executed for allowing that to happen, my life still hit rock bottom. I was forced to go into debt to my older brother to cover my share of the apprentice’s robes; my fiancée from another duchy ended our engagement due to me being reduced to the rank of an apprentice; and, on top of everything, my new assignment was to serve a commoner apprentice in the temple where those without mana went. It was so terrible that not even my knight comrades could laugh about it.”
My position as a noble truly had collapsed overnight. Everyone offered me their sympathy given that I had only ended up in this position because of Shikza, but that didn’t help my situation. My name would be forever stained as the knight who messed up on the job and was sent to the temple.
After I finished telling my sorrowful tale as interestingly as I could, Lord Ferdinand set down his cutlery and gave me a serious look.
“I do think that you were unfortunate, and that the disaster that befell you was unwarranted. But I do not think it is accurate to say that you were punished purely because of Shikza’s actions. You have your own sins, and it seems to me that you are not very aware of them.”
...My own sins? From my perspective, I had just gotten wrapped up in somebody else’s mess. My comrades had said that I was unlucky and the like, but they never said I was at fault.
“What would you have a layknight such as myself do to an angry medknight like Shikza?” I asked, sullen confusion slipping into my voice, “Laynobles have no choice but to obey those above them in status. What else could I have done?”
Lord Ferdinand raised an eyebrow. “Damuel, you should have used rott as soon as you realized you couldn’t stop Shikza.”
“Rott” was the red light one summoned from their schtappe to call for aid. Lord Ferdinand said that I should have used it to call over the knights fighting the trombe to protect the apprentice, but if it was between protecting a commoner shrine maiden and exterminating a large, deadly trombe, it seemed to me that the trombe was the greater priority.
“...I didn’t even consider using rott.”
“I believe you would have used rott if you were guarding an archnoble or the daughter of another duchy’s archduke. Am I wrong?”
He wasn’t. Had I been guarding an archnoble’s daughter, I would have thrown myself upon Shikza’s blade to stop it, and if physical force failed I would have used rott. In other words, a part of me had been looking down on the apprentice for being a commoner just like Shikza had. A chill ran down my spine.
“You would do well to always treat the subjects you’re guarding as being above yourself. When put in a situation beyond your control, you should first use rott. Before submitting to the domineering of a mednoble, call for the aid of those higher in status to yourself. You did neither. You timidly submitted rather than fulfilling your duty, and you are now bemoaning your situation as nothing more than the product of poor fortune. Those are your sins.”
Despite Lord Ferdinand’s harsh expression, his voice was surprisingly gentle. He was confirming that he would come to help me if I ever called for aid. My eyes widened. An archnoble had never offered to help me before.
“...Your services will likely be in great need during the Spring Prayer three days from now. There are many unsettling rumors stirring around. Know well that unnecessary pride and cowardice will prove to be of no use during missions.”
“Yes, sir! This time for sure, I will protect the apprentice.”
We finished lunch, and as I prepared to return to the director chambers, Lord Ferdinand stopped me.
“Before you go, I remember you saying that you were forced to borrow money from your older brother. Is everything quite alright?”
...No, not at all.
Being demoted to an apprentice meant that, naturally, my pay was back down to the rate of an apprentice as well, and I had already spent all of my savings on bridewealth back when I was engaged. I asked whether they could give some of it back, but my older brother had said that they probably wouldn’t since the engagement was annulled due to my own failings. And even if they had, it probably wouldn’t have been of much use in paying off my debt.
“To be honest, I’m even worse off financially than when I was a student at the Royal Academy, since now I can’t even get extra money from copying books or selling the study guides I wrote.”
“Copying books and selling study guides...? Why was a knight such as yourself doing the work of a scholar-official?” Lord Ferdinand asked, the surprise in his tone making me lower my gaze to the floor.
Most knights earned their money by hunting fey beings—feybeasts, feyplants, and the like—and then selling the feystones and materials gained by doing so. But we layknights lacked the wealth of mana that archnobles enjoyed, which made it hard for us to kill the stronger feybeasts. In turn, that made it hard for us to get good materials, and the low-quality materials we could get weren’t worth much at all.
“It was much more efficient for me to write a study guide for the knight course than for me to hunt for materials.”
“Interesting... If people are willing to pay good money for one of your study guides, then am I right to assume you are capable of doing the work of a scholar?” Lord Ferdinand asked.
I nodded. I had earned a small amount of money whenever I returned home by helping my older brother with his work. It wasn’t as though I had any qualms about doing scholarly work; after discussing my future with my scholar-official older brother, I simply decided to be a knight to differentiate myself from him and expand the reach of our family.
Ferdinand blinked his light-gold eyes in surprise, then gave a small grin. “Damuel, what say you assist me alongside Myne once you return from Spring Prayer? I will pay you a fair wage.”
...Ngh!
The words “fair wage” stirred my heart, but I couldn’t allow myself to falter here. He may have been setting a trap, and I wasn’t a scholar, I was a knight.
“Lord Ferdinand, I appreciate the offer, but I am not a scholar.”
“Do you not think it important to efficiently earn money by utilizing your talents?”
“It is, but I am the apprentice’s bodyguard. I couldn’t take on more work while I’m in the middle of serving my punishment...”
I could feel myself being torn between my pride as a knight and the harshness of my current reality. I was dying for more money; my financial situation really couldn’t have been worse.
Lord Ferdinand’s eyes narrowed with amusement, as though he could see right through my internal struggle. “Naturally, you would only be working as a scholar while Myne is in my room. I think it is safe to say that I would be able to protect her from any danger myself while she is here.”
I fell silent, unable to argue even when he flat-out stated that he was stronger than me. Lord Ferdinand used the opportunity to start scratching some numbers onto a board.
“You know how busy I am with work by now, I imagine. I could use all the skilled help I can get. Hm... What say you to this wage, for working from third to fourth bell? A raise is not out of the question if you perform well.”
The wage he showed me was roughly equivalent to how much an adult layknight earned, assuming I worked for a month straight. It was more money than I could earn doing anything else while imprisoned as a bodyguard within the temple. The wages of an apprentice truly were sparse; nothing could be better than doing another job on the side of my guarding.
I swallowed hard. “...I-I think I’ll take you up on that offer.”
I chose reality over my pride as a knight, and Lord Ferdinand nodded without mocking me in the least.
“Use this opportunity well. If you do not repay your debt soon, I imagine you will be unable to find a new fiancée even after returning to noble society, no?”
Hearing that hurt, but I knew Lord Ferdinand was just trying to cheer me up. But even then, finding a new fiancée wasn’t just a question of how much money I had.
...What kind of girl will want to marry a guy who only just left the temple?!
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