The room, noisy a moment ago, was left with nothing but the clean clink of knives and forks against plates.
Marilou swallowed. Realizing she seemed to have said the wrong thing, she set about forcing herself to look calm.
"I heard it from some of the older students at the academy. If it's something dangerous, I won't ask."
Viya narrowed her eyes and studied her for a good while, then speared a piece of meat and put it in her mouth.
"Try not to discuss that subject outside. These days the Church's authority to interpret a great deal of knowledge is absolute, and rumors of that sort, true or false, very easily bring danger down on the person repeating them."
"Oh..."
Clearly Viya knew something and wasn't willing to tell her, and Marilou didn't press. The crow had deliberately told her about the witches in the first place.
That was presumably bait, laid to draw her along step by step.
Which meant that if she agreed to attend that Witches' Assembly, there was a good chance she'd get some information on these subjects.
Marilou couldn't help wondering who she actually was. All she knew was what her parents had told her: that she'd been found beside a manger.
She hadn't cried at the time, only crawled about on the ground by herself. There had been nothing else on her, just a simple set of white clothes, her hair hanging loose and tangled against the floor.
If anything, the couple had later found one extra horse in the stable. They'd had someone look it over: an ordinary horse, nothing special about it.
"Who am I, really..."
"What is it?"
Viya noticed Marilou talking to herself and asked. Perhaps affected by her, Viya found herself remembering the day she took Marilou away.
The girl had been calmer than any of the other children, not at all like someone about to leave her mother and father.
That had made Viya think more highly of Marilou, and after it came endless disappointment: gifted, and addicted to coasting.
"It's nothing, Your Holiness. I've finished. I'll take my leave."
Marilou stood and was pulled back down by Viya.
"Don't rush off. I'm taking you out today to get some air."
Marilou was surprised. Generally speaking, there was no getting out without Viya's permission.
Why had the sun come up in the west today?
"The family banquet is almost here. You need a few more things."
"Isn't that the servants' work?"
"It is, which is why there's another matter. You need a staff. I'm going to have one of the Kingdom's designers help pick one out for you. If you don't pass the novice mage examination this month, your magic tutor becomes me, and I will chisel it into you by force."
Viya swept a look over Marilou, and the look was fierce.
For anyone else, being hand-picked by the Saintess would have been an unqualified stroke of luck, but Marilou understood that Viya's "chisel" contained no exaggeration whatsoever.
"Can't I just not be a mage? Swordsman, assassin, apothecary, they all sound interesting. And besides, my lady, our contract is nearly over. I don't want to study."
Marilou bit down harder on that last clause. She owed the Temple nothing; she had been hauled in by force to fill someone's place. She'd grant that Viya was genuinely not bad to her sometimes, and gave her money to spend.
But by the same token, she hadn't done Viya any harm either.
Seeing a flicker of rebellion in Marilou, Viya wasn't in any hurry. She sipped her milk. "Self-preservation. You live free of care in here. What will you do outside? I'll be taking you out on assignments after this.
"You need to acclimatize to the outside world. Sending you off rashly would be no different from sending you to your death. Or you could stay with me a while longer, learn something, and leave then."
Viya didn't push Marilou to go in so many words; some hope had to be left dangling, after all. She had spent these last few days taking stock of her earlier attempts.
Forcing Marilou out constantly was no long-term plan. If she could file that will down instead and get the girl to stay at her side, then being a bit useless was no great matter.
As long as she herself wasn't dead, she could at least guarantee Marilou's safety.
Marilou bit her lip, her mind racing through the advice. In all fairness, it was a very reasonable thing to say.
She had been in the greenhouse a long time. If she went out with a pile of money and no ability, she'd be a lamb laid out for slaughter.
"All right. I'll work hard at magic."
Marilou stopped resisting, and began, too, to think about the end of the contract and about leaving.
That afternoon Viya put on a coat and took Marilou out of the Temple. Watching the winding passages go by, Marilou noticed that this time the carriage didn't race along as it usually did, but lingered deliberately.
As though leaving her enough time to learn the way.
In the past there had been no such opportunity at all.
Viya quietly watched Marilou's face. How she hoped Marilou would wake up and run, or else give up entirely and decide to stay at her side.
In which case, shouldn't she simply indulge Marilou's coasting? Out there, running into walls at every turn, the girl might come back on her own.
It was the other question she could never face—what if, when they met again, they were parted between the living and the dead?
What if she was abducted?
What if some other shameless woman stole her away?
For reasons she couldn't explain, Viya suspected she had something of a cleanliness obsession. She wanted Marilou to carry her scent and no one else's...
Viya's thoughts were in such disorder that she never noticed when Marilou's gaze came to rest on her.
Marilou watched her and thought Viya had been weighed down lately, to the point of seeming split in two.
One moment she was full of tenderness toward her, the next in an absolute fury.
Marilou sighed softly and turned her eyes to the street. She rarely went out, and taking in the sheer variety of people on it, she was like a country grandmother let loose in a palace.
"Out of the way, out of the way!"
"Wounded needing urgent treatment. Don't block the road."
The urgent scream of horses, together with the sound of people weeping, came closer.
Several fine horses pulled a long carriage at a gallop down the flagstone street, and a woman's crying could be heard from inside it.
Marilou pushed a corner of the curtain aside with a soft pink hand and saw the carriage tearing past. It differed very little from the ambulances she knew of.
In this world people were used to calling them medical carriages.
"What's happening out there?"
Viya came back to herself and heard the weeping outside as well.
"It's a medical carriage. On the way here, a lot of similar ones went racing past."
Viya frowned and thought for a moment, guessing it was connected to the recent surge in magic-beast attacks. Someone in the know had let slip that a band of fanatics devoted to a false god were trying to enslave magic beasts and set them on the city-states.
"How many carriages have gone past just now? Have you been keeping count?"
Marilou counted on her fingers. "About five."
Five...
Viya was startled. This stretch of road hardly counted as a busy district, and in that short span five carriages had passed. There was no telling what the casualties at the front must be.
Even so, Viya didn't get down to treat these people. For one thing, the moment she did, she'd draw a crowd begging for help and lose the rest of her day.
For another, in the middle of treating them she might have no attention to spare for Marilou's safety.
For these wounded, the safer course was to send word for the sisters to handle it.
Viya held her breath and gathered herself. Before long the carriage stopped in front of a tall, mushroom-shaped building with a good number of bent blades scattered outside it. An old man came slowly out of the house and saw the Holy Church emblem on the carriage.
He hurriedly knelt in salute.
"This old man, Vien, greets Your Holiness!"
Viya lifted the curtain. Vien raised his head and noticed that today there was more than one person behind it. Who was that girl?