This... this wasn't right, surely?
At first she hadn't registered the softness against her shoulder. In the past she would almost certainly have been pushed away by now, but a moment later the feel of it sent a jolt through her.
She opened her eyes and realized Viya had an arm around her waist, and that her own face was pillowed on Viya's bewbs. Most frightening of all, the woman wasn't angry.
"Your Holiness, I... I didn't mean to."
Marilou backed off hurriedly, afraid that one more look would make her explode.
Viya cleared her throat. Recalling what Marilou had just said, her feelings were complicated, and she resolved to conduct a proper interrogation shortly.
"It's nothing. I won't pursue today's matter. However..."
Marilou retreated another half step, and sure enough, her outer coat was stripped off in the next second, leaving her in her underdress.
"You've put me in a very poor mood today. Come here."
Marilou swallowed. So there was a second round after all.
Considering that she couldn't beat Viya in a fight, Marilou dragged her feet forward, lifted a pitifully sweet little face, and asked, "I'm sorry..."
"If apologies worked, what would we need you being this good-looking for?"
Viya cast her mind back over the plots she'd read in the book. If the caged bird did something wrong, there were any number of grounds for making things difficult, and chances like this didn't come often.
Nor had she forgotten the business of driving Marilou into running. She had a hundred ways to drag her back; all she lacked was an occasion on which Marilou broke the contract. So today she was going to bully Marilou properly.
She had barely sat down before Marilou felt herself being looked over. Viya snuffed out the mage-ore lamp in the room and laid a hand on Marilou's arm.
Scalding breath was soon beating against her forehead. Marilou swallowed, and only then noticed that Viya had been watching her the entire time.
"You're my wife. Why be so nervous about a thing like this?" Viya turned Marilou straight. "Turn your head this way. Look at me."
Marilou obeyed meekly and was made to look at her. Dimly she made out that Viya's pale forehead carried the faint crystalline glow from outside the window, a few fine strands hanging over it, the long line of her eyes curving up at a subtle angle.
Even Marilou had not often seen Viya wear an expression like this. Most days she was busy with official work and paid her hardly any attention at all.
"Your Holiness, you're leaning in a bit too close. I don't understand what you mean."
"Genuinely don't understand, or pretending not to? Never mind your hiding your magical aptitude from me; I'll allow that everyone has small secrets. But you eat my food and sleep in my bed, and now you want to fudge your way out of it. Where in the world is there a bargain that good?"
Viya stroked the side of Marilou's face with one hand. The skin was so fine a breath might break it, and it felt unexpectedly good, though something always seemed to be missing. Seizing all of her right now would certainly be satisfying, but she longed more for the ultimate pleasures the books described, and so she showed no impatience.
Today's punishment was all about stopping at a touch.
Marilou clutched the hem of her dress. "I'm only a house servant. I can't give you anything. And you're the Saintess, while I'm just an ordinary person."
"An ordinary magical genius, you mean? Marilou, let me put the ugly part first. Do you know what a magical genius means to a great house?"
"Promotion? Being given real responsibility?"
Viya laughed softly. "On what grounds? A great house raises you up, and then your standing is level with theirs. That's a liability.
"The best course for a great house is to find a way to take the mana. Marilou, I don't object to your leaving in a few months.
"But if ability like yours gets noticed, having your bones cracked and your marrow sucked out is the mild version. Take care you don't meet some deviant who drains your blood dry, purely to gain mana like yours."
Marilou's stomach dropped. She accepted Viya's account entirely. A great house would have long since worked her into a puppet.
"Then is there a way to get rid of the mana in me? Didn't you say the great houses have methods? I only want to be an ordinary person."
Marilou genuinely wanted no part of fighting and killing. Getting money she couldn't spend and dying peacefully of old age would be the best outcome imaginable.
"It isn't as easy as you think. If another's mana could truly be taken so easily, the Kingdom's power structure would by now be a handful of super-clans taking in endless outside offspring, and the Kingdom forbids that sort of thing severely.
"Those mana-taking arts are all built around killing. Kill you, and they've removed a threat at no cost to themselves. If they can take your mana on top of that, they've made a killing."
"That's horrible."
"Horrible? It's only interest at work. You don't want to grow stronger now, but I can't stay with you for a lifetime."
Viya reached out and stroked Marilou's head, gazing off at a sky that was not the same as the one others saw.
A Saintess could see the maimed sun up there, and the light and heat of this moment came from an illusory disc of radiance condensed at the top of the Temple.
Without it, the whole world would go pitch dark.
Viya sighed without letting it show, and some of the frost-power on her left hand dispersed.
Perhaps catching it from Viya, Marilou's expression turned rather bleak, though she forced her spirits up and spoke.
"I'll do my best, then."
Marilou didn't promise too much. Her present strength amounted to barely a trace of talent, and besides, she still couldn't get that card the crow woman had given her out of her head: that extinguished setting sun, whose meaning she didn't yet know.
That night Marilou didn't keep Viya. The two of them exchanged pleasantries for a while, agreed that she would study properly from now on, and Viya left her bedroom.
Back in her own room, Viya pulled off her gloves and looked at her left hand, close to withering. She breathed out and in, gathered her focus again, and the frostbite on it dispersed entirely; the shriveled flesh returned to its former paleness.
She smoothed her hair, pulled out a few white strands, and sat back down at the desk.
Gazing at the report on Marilou's abilities, Viya turned over the matter of ancient mana. Over the years, from what she had read in the Temple, she had come to understand that Ancient Magic was in fact the sorcery that could be cast back when nothing had yet gone wrong with the sun.
Known for short as — Elder Magic!
That line of magic had been severed long ago...
Very few people of the new age could grasp Elder Magic any longer. If one had to name someone, it would be the Witches' Assembly, which held part of its inheritance.
Viya struck Ancient Magic off the page and reckoned up the days. It was about time for the family banquet, and this would be the first time she brought Marilou to one.
Her eldest sister was coming back too. There was no telling whether the other, more distant sisters who had gone abroad would return.
Viya counted as the youngest in the family. Most of the other sisters knocked about in the Kingdom, or in the army; Viya alone had won the Temple's recognition as a child.
Before the eldest sisters went off to the front, they had teased her: so House Howell has turned out a paper-pusher?
Viya had smiled and said nothing. A Saintess's duties hardly counted as paperwork. Accepting the Temple's inheritance meant carrying the fate of the whole Temple, along with the complaints that came in from the Church side every so often.
And an endless stream of petitions to revise.
Viya opened the drawer and pulled out the work she hadn't finished. The contents of one long, narrow letter caught her attention.
Frequent monster activity in the Silent Ridge; a Tier 5 monster suspected, a Moonlight Wolf!
The reason this letter caught Viya's eye was simple enough: that was the road she had to take to get home.