Lily Village, on the bank of a little river that never stopped running.
The village chief sat on a large rock, stroking his beard as he looked at the blonde, blue-eyed Saintess standing before him, and sighed.
"Your Holiness, this is the last girl in the village with no family to speak of. Her foster parents found her in the horse shed, so they simply named her Marilou."
"She has only foster parents?"
There was not a trace of warmth in the young Saintess Viya's sapphire eyes. She asked coldly, the way one asks for an object.
"Yes. She gets on well enough with them, and she's an honest sort, so she shouldn't cause any trouble."
The chief's meaning was plain enough: she was the only one left in the village who could be sent to the Temple.
The others might not know it, but the chief did. Lives like theirs were worth no more than dead leaves. When the great men wore one out, they buried it wherever was convenient, and before long it was just another patch of rotted soil.
Viya took out a handkerchief, wiped the dust from her hands, and followed the chief into the village, where she met a Marilou who had woken up to the world, though not all the way.
Marilou, for her part, was grumbling inwardly. She was a transmigrator. Back on Blue Star she had been a pure, innocent male undergrad, and after crossing over she had somehow ended up a stray child someone had picked up.
She had meant to make something of herself, but she'd had to swallow it and wait. She was only twelve, after all, and in another world, standing out from ordinary people was the fastest way to get carried off by someone powerful.
So she had no choice but to spend her days doing very childish things.
What she hadn't counted on was that one day her innocence stat would be exactly what caught the eye of the Temple's Saintess...
In the dim yellow dusk, black-haired, brown-eyed Marilou rolled a little ball back and forth in front of the meowmeow, and the kitty's eyes rolled along after it.
"So, Grampuss. You're probably the only one in this whole Temple who knows what I'm suffering."
It had been several years now since she entered the Temple, and Marilou had gone from a little girl to a small adult in what felt like no time at all.
She wasn't much taller than she'd been on Blue Star, but she qualified as a young lady now. Her legs were longer than when she was small, and her voice carried better. The sky overhead, though, had not changed at all.
She had assumed it would go the way it did in the novels she'd read: into the palace, life as a caged canary, perfectly safe as long as she didn't run. What she hadn't expected was to rank below a canary.
She was a f**king contract beast. Put crudely: a dog Viya kept.
"Grampuss, you think there's an old master hiding inside you? Teach me a few moves. Once I make it big, the two of us go free."
The round-headed orange cat shook his head, spotted a kitten in the distance, and fled from beside Marilou's leg.
When Marilou looked up again, Viya was standing there with frost on her face.
"What a coincidence. Are you finished for the day, Your Holiness?"
From the day she entered the Temple, Viya had required Marilou never to use her given name. Outside, she was to be addressed by her office.
"Mm. You spend every day chasing butterflies and walking the cat, and the lessons and homework I set you are unfinished again."
Marilou listened with half an ear. She had heard this lecture plenty of times.
When she first arrived, Viya had told her the real purpose of bringing her here.
A contract marriage. Marilou was to be a child bride, because Temple law required every Saintess to take a spouse before the Temple would acknowledge her and pass down its magic.
Saintesses and Holy Sons of past generations would gladly have dragged in an entire harem to swear the vow with, but Viya wanted no marriage at all, and was the first Saintess in history to swear hers with another woman.
Unlike an ordinary marriage, the vow was a formality and nothing more. Many contract partners were sent home again after a few years.
The holy were set apart; how could a mortal lay a hand on a Saintess enthroned so far above them? Marilou was no exception, and the contract she had signed with Viya had barely a few months left to run.
Which was precisely why Marilou only half listened, and nodded the way she always did.
"I'll be more careful from now on."
And the words went in one ear and straight out the other.
Viya sighed. Her contract partner was obedient to the absolute limit: she wouldn't hit back if struck, wouldn't answer back if scolded. And that was exactly the fatal problem.
Overriding everyone to keep Marilou had already cost her the goodwill of no few powerful ministers, and breaking the rules of the contract outright would likely draw down the old ones in the sky as well. So she had settled, reluctantly, for giving Marilou a so-called contract term.
Not one girl brought into the Temple didn't want to go home. Running away was an everyday occurrence.
If Marilou ran, she would have every legitimate reason to drag her back and keep her at her side for good. But Marilou was obedient past all reason. More than once, Viya had manufactured an opening for her to escape through.
And the girl, whether she was genuinely dim or only playing at it, never took a single one.
So when the contract ended, would Marilou simply stay on as before?
The answer to that question haunted Viya like a nightmare.
She had turned it over more than once, and it was why she had come today.
"Our contract term is almost up."
"Mm."
Marilou looked down and played with her hands, snow-white fingers rising and falling. She had given every one of them a name.
"If you go out into the world like this, you'll shame the Temple. If I remember correctly, you don't even qualify as a novice mage yet."
Marilou looked up and took in that frost-carved face. There was little paint on features lovely enough to topple a kingdom, and her long golden hair had been dressed with great care.
It matched Marilou's own hair ornament closely enough that people called them a matching couple's set. Why not quietly change her hairstyle now and then? Marilou only shrugged at that. Someone else did her hair for her; she was delighted.
Besides, when the contract term ended, Viya had promised her more money than she could ever spend.
With a deal that good, Marilou was dead set on lying flat on the imperialists' welfare and sucking it dry.
"I'm on the slow side. Why don't you teach me?"
"It isn't that I haven't taught you. Have you practiced even once?"
Viya drew Marilou over to a bench and sat down. Looking at the hands of a girl she had raised herself, bit by bit, something in her stirred a little.
"You've forgotten the manners I taught you, too. And you've got your hands filthy again."
"I haven't."
Marilou hummed a soft incantation. Bubbles appeared in the air a moment later and scrubbed the grime from her hands.
"Your magic is at novice-mage level at the very least. So why do you keep dodging the examination?"
"You said it yourself. I'm just a possession of yours. Do possessions need to learn magic?"
Marilou blinked at her, nothing readable in her face at all.
Viya hesitated. She could feel that Marilou was growing exactly along the route she had planned for her. But could the girl not... bend just a little off-true?
A few years ago she would have thought herself mad for it. For a long while, in fact, she had found Marilou immensely easy on the eye, not like the great lords and ladies who tried a thousand times over to get close to her and compete for her favor.
She did her own quiet thing, and she never crossed the line.
Still less did she ever touch her. Viya simply watched Marilou grow prettier under her care, that small face going from the faintly sallow thing she had brought home to something soft and pink.
When she pinched Marilou's cheek, the girl didn't dodge either. Clearly that wasn't enough for her. She cleared her throat.
"I came to find you today because my mother is coming."
"Oh. Then I'll go back to my room."
Every time Viya's mother visited, Marilou was chased back indoors.
Viya shook her head. "No. This time I want to introduce her to you."
Huh?
For once, Marilou lifted her head, her face slipping into open astonishment.
After acting this long, was the whole thing finally about to come apart?