“See anything you like?”
The question was accompanied by a slap on my back, and my suspicion turned to certainty as I turned to see who spoke.
As expected, it was my unofficial partner, Zinia. We first met when I started doing tasks at the Workman’s Society near the academy. I still had plenty of pocket money to spend, thanks to my tight budgeting the year before, but I needed something to do on weekends that wasn’t schoolwork. With the social circles of nobles effectively closed off to me, and the other commoner students engrossed in their studies, socializing wasn’t an option either.
“Nothing special.” I replied casually, returning her slap with one of my own. She took it in stride as we scrutinized the board for a suitable task or two.
While I was accustomed to waking up early in Khobadaar so I could take the ‘good’ tasks, I wasn’t used to having company, aside from the Society employees there. But ever since the first time I came to the Jyvra City branch of the Society, I was no longer the only workman there at that hour.
Zinia, the skinny tramp, always fought with me over the good tasks, and we often alternated snatching them up before the other person could get their hands on it. Eventually, we came to an agreement to just do them together and split the pay evenly.
As a result, we became friends…or at least, close to friends. Enough for us to exchange our life stories (I naturally withheld my true origins) and realize we had basically the same trajectory, except that while I was rushing to get money to join the academy, she needed to make sure her family could eat every day.
The orphanage where she grew up was underfunded and overcrowded, a common plight of welfare institutions everywhere. And to my surprise, its effects weren’t caused by another corrupt noble, as the city lord himself made regular visits to inspect the various public works around his city. Zinia even claimed she had spoken to the man on more than one occasion when he stopped by the orphanage and held miniature feasts, and according to him, he paid for them out of his own coffers.
A noble like that truly put to shame the embezzler I accused, but that was only to be expected of someone whose last name was Jyvra. Yep, the city lord and his noble house were descendants of one of the original academy’s founders. Well, technically speaking, they were only an offshoot of the main line, but delving any further than that became politics, something I vehemently wished to avoid. The house was held in high regard by nearly everyone, local or otherwise, as throughout the centuries, they had rigidly adhered to the ideals of their honored ancestor: integrity, diligence, compassion.
Of course, compassion had very little to do with the task we found ourselves doing that morning.
“Push it towards the corner!” I yelled.
“I’m trying, but it keeps…running…around…me!” She shouted in between blows.
A group of rats somehow managed to make a nest in the shared wall between a bakery and a tavern, and Zinia and I decided to face them together. It took the better part of the morning just to get the supplies needed, but we were on the verge of completion. The only rat we hadn’t dealt with was scurrying on the tavern floor, weaving and dodging between us and the furniture.
“On the right, box it in!” I shouted at her.
“My right is not your right!” She hurriedly screamed back at me, dashing around the floor.
“Cover your area!”
“You cover yours!”
“Haa! Yes! Got it! Finally!”
We stood there triumphantly covered in sweat, cages filled with rats surrounding us, while we were thanked by the elderly tavern owners before we were promptly kicked out for being too loud.
With the last rat safely caged, we could finally turn in our tasks, yes, tasks. Plural.
In addition to the rat extermination task, Zinia noticed another task that could be completed in tandem: capture a group of animals for research purposes.
A small part of me was worried that the rats would be used for painful vivisection or something similar to that, but I saw another task that put my thoughts into perspective: capture live animals to be fed to tamed pets.
All things being equal, I’d rather the rats be researched on than chewed and spit out. Spending some time at the pet store to buy cages that could hold the rats felt a little dishonest, but I never committed to the other task, and the whole issue was mostly me guilt-tripping myself for no reason.
By noon, Zinia and I had a grand total of eight squares each, the fruits of our labors.
“So, do you want to keep going, or…?” I asked her. On weekends, she preferred not to overwork herself, just so she had a bit more energy to deal with the kids at home, as well as all the chores that needed to be done in a building housing nearly thirty people.
“I should probably head home. You know, you don’t need to – “ she managed to say before I interrupted her.
“We’ve had this talk a hundred times. I don’t mind, and you shouldn’t either. Now come on, let’s see if Ed managed to finally climb that tree without Lady Pell finding out.” I turned around and started walking in the direction of the orphanage, shutting down the conversation, and making Zin chuckle at the thought of her little brother.
For some reason, Zin got it into her head that she was taking advantage of me when I first offered to help with some of the chores around the orphanage. I honestly didn’t mind, as I’d much prefer the company of orphans to that of snooty nobles or book-centric commoners. At worst, the kids would ask questions with brutal honesty, which I knew how to handle from months of dealing with Gillen.
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While the work itself wasn’t much to talk about, it was a small price to pay for something approaching normal social interaction, something I grew to see the value of.
We were just turning the corner as a small park came into sight: trees ten feet tall surrounding a grassy field, with rows of flowers on the edges of the walkways, and benches placed in each corner. A small child was nearly at the top of one of the trees when a shrill voice shouted out, “Young man, come down from there this instant! Edward! Come down at once!”
A small sigh escaped Zinia’s mouth as she turned to me with a wry smile. “I think you’ve been spending too much time here if you know my brother that well.”
A few minutes later, Ed was on the ground, clothes dirtied, and enduring a lecture from Lady Penelope, who had previously insisted I call her Pell. The young noblewoman had graduated from the academy a few years prior and was performing community service as part of her family’s obligations to the city.
Once the lecture was over, Lady Pell quickly returned to the orphanage, mercifully located only a few steps away from the park’s edge. Zinia and I stood to the side while Ed was being lectured, but now we stepped in to take over.
“Are you alright?” Zin asked.
With a couple small nods and a sniffle, he responded, “Yeah. She’s always yelling at me. It’s not fair.” He wiped away a couple tears before they could fall.
“She’s just scared you’ll hurt yourself. She doesn’t want anything to happen to you. What if you broke your neck and died? What if your legs cracked and you couldn’t walk anymore?” Zin said quietly while she wiped the dirt off his hands and clothes.
His small face frowned as he said, “That won’t happen. I've fallen plenty of times and nothing ever happened.”
“Zin, why don’t you go inside and check on the others? Let me talk to him.” I offered.
She nervously looked between the both of us, finally deciding to nod in assent and turning toward the orphanage.
I sat on the ground, cross-legged as I looked at Ed’s small face, that frown still on it.
What would I do if this was Gill? Honestly, I’d just rat him out to his mom, but that isn’t exactly an option here…
“Ed. Let me ask you something. Do you know what you want to be when you grow up?” I asked him.
He turned to me, the frown replaced by a look of joy. “Yeah! I want to be a mage! Making rock walls whenever I want, or sending that Lady woman up high in a wind storm! Or maybe a fire mage, so the rooms are always warm at night, or a water mage so we don’t have to keep dragging our clothes to the water house to wash them…” He started muttering as he kept talking, getting quieter until I could only hear whispered mumbles like ‘enough food’ or ‘sheets’.
“So, a mage, huh? You know, I’m something of a mage myself. In fact…can you keep a secret?” I asked him, as an absolutely reckless and poorly-conceived idea took hold of me. He nodded so much, I thought he was in danger of his head falling off. I turned around, looking for any witnesses, then dragged Ed off to the small alley between the orphanage and the adjacent building.
“I’m about to show you something, but you have to promise you won’t tell anyone, okay?” I whispered to him.
He nodded again, an eager gleam in his eyes, and a wide smile plastered on his face, any trace of the earlier contrition from the lecture completely gone.
With a tiny amount of effort, I summoned the green deer to my side. For the most part, it slept while it stayed in my beast space, as there was really nothing else for it to do. I only had the opportunity to let it get fresh air whenever a task took me out of the city, which wasn’t often enough, according to the deer. As the beast appeared from out of nowhere, the boy covered his mouth with his little hands before his eyes widened to the size of plates and he started jumping up and down, doing a little dance. Finally, he ran up to the magical beast and started petting it.
I was about to mentally ask the deer if it was alright being touched by the kid, but a green tongue licking Ed’s face and eliciting giggles answered that question for me. The boy was starstruck by the beast, as he kept petting it and letting out small exclamations every few seconds. “Wow,” and “So cool” were the most common.
“He’s awesome, huh?” I asked Ed.
“He’s awesome,” Ed parroted back to me mindlessly, still petting the deer’s legs, the highest part of it he could reach.
“The first time I met him, he was almost dead.”
“What? Dead? No! Why?” Ed shouted in outrage, stopping his petting motions long enough to turn and yell at me.
I got up close to his face as I made eye contact and said one word, “Monsters.”
His face paled, and he looked terrified before I kept talking. “This cool deer, that you think is awesome, almost died to monsters. It wasn’t hurting anyone or anything. It was just peacefully living in the forest until a monster decided to attack it.”
“NOO!” The little boy’s shout was loud enough to draw attention, but nobody passed by our spot. He clung to the deer as if the act could protect it somehow.
“Ed. I want you to listen to me. Really listen. This deer is stronger than you, and it still almost died to a monster. You care about your brothers and sisters, right?”
He nodded in response like his life depended on it.
“You love them with all your heart?”
Another rapid series of nods.
“Would you do anything to keep them safe?”
He kept nodding, enough that some sweat started beading on his forehead and falling down.
“That is how people feel when you do things like climb tall trees or play with stray animals in the street. They don’t want you to die or get hurt.”
He looked at my face, and tears started falling from his reddened eyes, though he wasn’t wailing or bawling. He was listening to me, even if the meaning was somewhat lost on him.
“No matter how you feel, Lady Pell truly doesn’t want anything bad to happen to you. Neither does Zinia or your other siblings, or even me. We all just want you to be safe. If you want to climb trees or wrestle with animals, you can do it when you’re a grown up. Look at Zinia. She does all kinds of things while she’s working, climbing, running, jumping.”
He nodded in response, a single sniffle accompanying the movement.
“Me, and your sister Zinia and even Lady Pell, we want you to be safe and happy. That is the truth. But safety comes before happiness. If you wanted to stick your head in the fire because you’re cold and it looks fun, should we let you?”
A single shake of the head and a small, “No.” came in response.
“And if you’re climbing a tree because Lady Pell was being stupid, and you wanted to run away, should we let you?”
A frown and an even smaller, “No,” came out of him, as his eyes were glued to the ground.
“Ed, we all want you to be happy. But you can only be happy if you’re alive. And to be alive, you need to be safe. And being safe means that, no matter how much you might hate it, listening to the grown-ups.”
A couple nods were all I got as he kept sniffling, wiping his face with his dirtied sleeves. I took the moment he was distracted to send the deer back to my beast space, a feeling of disappointment entering my thoughts.
“Oh, yeah, I forgot about something while I – you know what, it’s been a long day for you. How about we go inside and get some lunch, okay?” I asked him, a small and tentative smile on my face.
“Okay.”
With that, I picked him up and held him on my hip as I walked through the doors of the orphanage, wiping my feet as I did so.
One meal of thin watery soup and a couple hours of cleaning later, I was on my way out of the orphanage when Zin walked me to the doors, as she always did.
“I might have gone a bit hard on Ed while I was talking to him,” I confessed to her.
“What did you say to him?” she asked me, her tone curious instead of the judgment I was expecting.
“Something along the lines of the world is a dangerous place and we don’t want you to die just yet?” I offered awkwardly.
“Mother’s mercy, Rhaaj. He’s not even six!” She half-shouted at me.
I raised my hands in capitulation as I said, “I know, I know, I may have crossed a line or two. You should probably talk to him later.”
She shook her head as we reached the threshold. “Next time, leave the talking bits to me. Just stick to cleaning and chores.”
“As you wish, my lady.” I said.
All I got was a roll of her eyes as she waved me off, my attempt at playing noble having lost its ability to fluster her long ago.
What was I thinking, making a speech like that? Was I even thinking?
Well, if there was ever any doubt about my parenting skills, there sure wasn’t anymore.
I headed back to the Society, eager to distract myself from thinking too much yet again with the promise of work.