“Your Majesty, the Velgein ambassador is requesting an audience.”
“Leiren wants to talk?” I asked, looking up from my paperwork. “Sure. See her in.”
I had not seen Leiren too often in recent years, as the Kingdom’s relationship with the north had largely stabilized. Trade was proceeding smoothly, and as far as I was aware most of the issues with Velgein-Horuthian citizenship had been solved. Thanks to Seranedra ensuring that fairness and egalitarianism remained the status quo, the Church was accepting of them, and with the Adventurers Guild there were no issues with the teenagers getting apprenticeships and finding work in adulthood.
The doors to my office were opened again and I stood as Leiren walked in. I motioned to the couches, and we settled opposite one another.
“Good to see you,” I said. “Tea? Nikopi?”
“Good to see you too. Nikopi… that’s the southern drink that’s growing in popularity in the capital of late? I haven’t tried it yet.”
“I’ll have some brought in. Try it sweetened and whitened to start, since that helps with the natural bitterness,” I said, pausing and shaking my head. “But you aren’t here for beverages. What’s the problem?”
“Some of our children are becoming ill,” Leiren said with a frown. “And they aren’t getting better.”
“Is the Church not treating them? I thought Sera had that sorted out.”
“They are,” Leiren said hesitantly. “At least, they’re claiming to. Their healing is not working, though.”
“You think there’s some sort of intentional malpractice at play?”
Leiren shrugged. “I couldn’t say.”
“Could you summon Sera and Nodel for me, please?” I said, looking toward a guard at the door. I turned back at Leiren. “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
While we waited for my wife and my top ambassador to join us, some nikopi and small pastries were served. I made up a cup for Leiren, who tried it and enjoyed it.
“It’s actually a bit too sweet for my tastes,” she said halfway into the first cup.
“Well, I drink it without alteration, if you want to try it that way. Or you can just add a dash of milk.”
Leiren settled on adding a large amount of milk to her second cup, but no sugar, finding that suited her best. I was musing about using heated, steamed, or frothed milk for something like a latte or cappuccino when Sera and Nodel finally arrived and I pivoted back to the problem at hand, filling them in.
“I can’t see it being intentional from the Church’s side,” Sera said from the seat next to me, setting down a much more thoroughly sweetened cup of nikopi. “I personally vetted the priests who do most of the work in that district.”
“Actually,” Nodel said, frowning. “There have been reports of a rise in sick children all across the capital. Not just Velgein children. We’ve been monitoring it to make sure it did not escalate into a rapid spread across the city, but there has been no spike in the rest of the adult population. With the cold season approaching, seeing some sickness is not unusual, but resistance to healing is… new.”
“I don’t love the sound of that,” I said, leaning forward in my seat. “Let’s go take a look at these kids.”
* * *
The embassy had been turned into a makeshift hospital for the Velgein children suffering from the mystery illness and for their families to be close by and help care for them. I stepped into the building with Sera, Nodel, and Leiren, leaving the guard that had escorted us to wait for us outside.
Looking at the children, I could immediately see the common symptoms: fever, pain, and weakness. Their faces were flushed, which stood out against all the white hair in the room. Mostly, it was young children under the age of five, with only a few older children, but mostly those who still had a low level when I appraised them. I quickly noticed something else.
“Leiren… are all the patients children of a Horuthian parent? No pure Velgeins?”
“Um,” Leiren said, frowning. She glanced around the room with fresh eyes. “I suppose so.”
A sickness that disproportionately affected children who had partial parentage from the north—where time away from magic had changed the natives to no longer absorb magic—and also did not affect those who had full northern parentage while only affecting some Horuthian children had a fairly obvious cause to me.
I glanced at Nodel and saw my advisor was coming to a similar conclusion. “Is this…”
Nodding, I saw a look of confusion on Sera’s face, so I explained. “This isn’t a sickness, per se. With the increase in magic after the ringfall storm, some children are absorbing more magic than their young bodies are able to process. In Horuthians, it happens to children who passively absorb magic too well in areas of rich magic, which Nodel actually suffered from back in Mirut.”
“Healers won’t help,” Nodel added. “They can alleviate the damage to the body, but they cannot treat the issue itself.”
Turning back to the children, I looked them over once more. “If I can make some assumptions, I would say that these children with one Velgein parent and one Horuthian parent are the biggest risk. They have magic restored to them from one parent, but their body is still partially prepared to survive in a low magic environment from their Velgein half. Now that magic is elevated, it’s overwhelming them. It may have even been an issue if they had moved to Mirut or Haklan, closer to the south and the sea, even if ringfall hadn’t happened.”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“So how do we fix it?” Leiren asked. She looked at Nodel. “How did you fix it?”
“Pilus taught me magic,” Nodel said. “If the children can learn to expel the excess, they can self-regulate.”
“In retrospect, that was… incredibly dangerous,” I added. “I was a kid playing with forces that I barely understood, and teaching Nodel could have killed her. But then, I didn’t have the resources I have now.”
I pulled my trusty light enchantment artifact out of my pocket, from my inventory, and glanced around the room for an older child. Walking over to him, I squatted next to his bed and got his attention.
“Hi. My name’s Pilus. What’s yours?”
“Gevar,” the child said weakly.
“Nice to meet you, Gevar. How are you feeling?”
“Not good.”
“Well, I think I can help with that. May I place something on you?”
The child nodded, and I looked him over. My inclination was to place the artifact on his chest, but I did not want to start stripping a child, and we would need to treat young girls as well. With a shrug, I placed it on his forehead.
“This is a simple light artifact,” I explained. “Have you ever used an artifact before?”
Gevar shook his head no, knocking the artifact to the side. He began trying to apologize, but I shushed him and set it back in place.
“It’s not too hard to do, and right now, your body is actually really full of magic. All you have to do is let it out, and send it to the enchantment.”
Teaching children how to infuse magic into tamer treats and artifacts was something I had become pretty good at over the years, but one of the techniques I used involved trying to push magic into them so they could get a feel for it. That was how I taught Atlessoa all those years ago. With the children being sick with magic fever, pushing more magic into them seemed like a bad idea.
Fortunately, their bodies were primed to release all the built up magic, it just needed an outlet. Like a release valve, the artifact was the perfect target for the magic to drain. With no difficulty at all, Gevar soon had a bright light shining from his forehead, his eyes closed first in concentration, then in relaxation as the magical pressure in his body eased off.
I stood and turned back to the three women. Nodel and Sera watched with interest, but Leiren had a look of relief on her face. “Nodel, get our crafters making more simple light enchantments. They’re a safe training tool, and a good measure for healers to ensure the children are outputting excess magic. See to it that Leiren is given enough to treat these children and any future cases which may arise. Sera, get in touch with the Church and explain the situation. For children too young to be explained how to use the artifacts, try placing them on their foreheads, over their hearts, or on their bellies. Hopefully their body’s inherent desire to expel the magic will latch on to the artifact naturally, and if so, find out what placement works best for that.
“For now, Leiren, you can hold on to that one and shuffle it around the room to help manage the worst cases until you get enough to keep them on the kids. If you reach out to someone in the Tamers Guild or a magic user from the Adventurers Guild, they should be able to help train the children who are struggling on how to better control their magic and expel it through artifacts or infusion.” I glanced around the room. “I’d wager you won’t see any kids who are already training to be tamers in here, since they’re already able to push magic out into the treats they feed their beasts.”
As people jumped to act, I did not speak to the longer-term implications of this, though I was sure Nodel and I would be discussing it later. She was too bright to have missed it.
The children who deal with this sickness would have the potential to become some of the best magic users in the Kingdom. For the Horuthian children, it was the same forced-education track that Nodel had been put on. With the elevated levels of magic for the foreseeable future, those children would need to continuously use magic as they grew, and would likely display the same preposterously large magic pools as Nodel.
The Velgein-Horuthian mixed children were in a slightly different situation. It remained to be seen if their magic pools would grow with the same leaps and bounds as Nodel’s had, since the reason they were suffering this ailment was practically the inverse situation. Rather than their bodies being too greedy to absorb the local magic and becoming overstuffed that way, the local magical pressure was simply overwhelming their bodies’ limits.
Whether or not their MP grew beyond the norm, they would still require training through their entire lives to expel, and ultimately use, the magic within them. That meant that they would all likely grow to be powerful magic users in the same way that I had, just from training from a very young age. It was effectively the same program I had set my own children on.
The difference was, it appeared as though it might be the case for every half-Velgein child. That meant that by the time the next generation was grown, there would be a lot of powerful, and therefore wealthy, half-Velgein citizens in the Kingdom. While I personally had no issue with that, I was not sure how the average Horuthian citizen would react once that became too obvious to ignore.
That’s a future problem, I thought. No point borrowing more problems from the future when I have enough to deal with in the present.
By the time these children were grown, a whole new generation of Horuthians will have grown as well, and hopefully with better views on diversity. With the elevated levels of magic, there was no reason Horuthian children could not also grow to be powerful mages so long as they were put on that track, and I made a mental note to sit down with some Church leaders and discuss artifact-based general magic training with children ages five to ten in addition to literacy and what other minimal education the Churches provided to youths. I knew the Adventurers Guild could provide that service in part, but many children in other parts of the capital or in other cities did not have access to it.
In fact, it might just be time to start a formal education system. As much as I personally enjoyed my freedom from ages five to ten, that was in part because there was no way for me to train otherwise.
A school system that gave all children a beginner education in literacy and mathematics would obviously be a boon to the Kingdom, but also teaching stuff like history may help to ensure mistakes like the war in the north were not repeated generation after generation. Giving all children a beginner's education in magic, at least through artifacts, would help level the playing field, and bringing kids of different cultures together would help normalize diversity.
There may be issues of bullying, but that was already the case, only happening out in the streets without teacher supervision. Regularly scheduled school would also help ensure there were times where children were not out in the streets, which could help various adult businesses operate more safely. Schools would also create jobs for teachers and administration, and potentially help children with getting better job placement when they became apprenticeship age.
The more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion that it was the right decision. I had always believed education was a worthwhile investment for society, but I was not sure if it was right for this world with its differences from Earth.
A well-educated populace might eventually lead to a shift from monarchy to democracy, but I was fine with that, as I was not inherently interested in the power of the crown beyond how I could improve the world around me, and I hoped to instill that in my children as they grew. Even if the Kingdom moved towards democracy, it could remain a parliamentary democracy with a constitutional monarchy. In fact, guiding that transition with purpose could ensure that my children remained in the good graces of the people.
There was a lot to consider, still, but I would sit down with Sera and my advisors once this current crisis was over and discuss it then.