Chapter 62 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 62: Harvest and Hibernation 06
The rain intensified, showing no sign of easing.
There was no moon in the sky, no stars, only the curtain of rain falling onto the earth, the mist and spray it raised cloaking the distant mountains and the forest on every side.
The sturgeon-eye lamps feared water; every lamp along the town street had been doused. Fortunately, the shop fronts on either side had tacitly left their lights burning, and a soft glow came through the glass windows one by one, lighting up the pebbled street sheeted with rain.
The heavy sound of rain covered every cricket's cry and every nightingale's song.
Lucita pressed her rain hat down, pulled her cape tighter, waded across the main street, and turned to the farm gate.
The farm entrance had been changed a few days earlier, from a picket gate to a pair of solid wooden doors, with a brass bell hanging in front. A knock sent the sound ringing clearly through the night.
She knocked a few unhurried times. Violet's muffled voice came drifting closer: "Coming."
The gate opened and closed again. Lucita hurried under the eaves and left the dripping rain cape and hat on the covered walkway by the door. The recently built walkway proved its worth tonight.
She wrung the water from her hair and clothing and stepped into the living room.
Passing by the flower vase on the long table, she pulled out the wilting lily and replaced it with the pink wild rose she had found on the path.
The rose was damp, a few raindrops still clinging to the petals, cool to the touch.
She took a comfortable hot bath, changed into a slightly crumpled cotton nightgown, shuffled in slippers to the study.
Everything in order, she took the letter from her space.
The letter came from Viktori, the capital of Kenting. The sender's name at the bottom was the professor she had written to: Astrid.
The envelope was a handsome piece of parchment. The dark green sealing wax at the flap was pressed into the shape of a bird with a twig in its beak.
She opened it with a small knife and drew out the contents: a substantial brown formal document, a ruby badge, and a sheet of snow-white paper dusted with gold.
Lucita ran her fingers over the fine gold flakes pressed into the paper's surface, smoothing it out thoughtfully.
What sort of place used gold on its writing paper?
The Spring Tower... whether it was as formidable as rumour had it was one thing, its extravagance could at least be glimpsed from this single page.
That place was one of the centres of power across the entire continent.
“To the courageous Madam Callen Anastasia:
Greetings.
I am honoured to receive your correspondence. Given that you have not been heard from in over a decade, I nearly mistook you for a fraudster who had forged the Callen family signet ring — had you not mentioned a certain friendship from my youth during my travels in Eaton that very few people know of.
Let me see. This letter comes from Tirol. You have apparently settled among those independent city-states in the south.
This is quite astonishing. As you must know, those southern city-states, long secluded in the mountains, are closed, primitive, and undeveloped. Every kingdom's campaigns have always skirted around them, seeking to expand on the more resource-rich plains. A place like that — one imagines only the adventurers and bards of the pre-industrial age would go to explore it! Such an unusual course of action is quite rare nowadays; I truly admire your courage.
Of course, beyond this, I still sincerely urge you, on behalf of your sister, that there is no quarrel between siblings that cannot be resolved. I passed through Heberley some years ago when I was travelling for inspiration, and met your sister. She appeared to miss you very much.”
Measured, diplomatically rounded phrasing.
What a pity, Lucita thought, that this letter never reached Stasia. She probably wouldn't have been particularly interested in the pleasantries either. When she gave Lucita the recommendation letter, she had no intention of reading any reply.
She read on.
“Now allow me to speak of your cousin — the young lady who applied to study at the Spring Tower. We of course all understand what this is about; the Callen family has no relative named Cameron.
But her application was completed to an extraordinarily high standard. I am quite curious where you found such a talent. If you are investing in this young Cameron on the Callen family's behalf, what singular discernment.
The Spring Tower does not ordinarily accept commoners, but we held a vote on Miss Cameron's behalf as an exception. The votes in favour carried by a comfortable margin.
The Spring Tower will accept Cameron Lucita as a new student for the year 577, and she will be required to arrive and register at the Spring Tower before February of next spring.
Enclosed herewith: one letter of admission, one Spring Tower fire-division badge.”
She was not surprised.
Lucita's application letter had primarily set out an analysis of several release principles of fire-element magic and their respective applications, including a practical report from her own experiments. Out of consideration for the sensibilities of those noble reviewers, she had set aside some of her thoughts on industrial applications, and focused her main analysis on combat techniques.
Since she wasn't certain how far human magic had developed in the current era, or how it differed from the prehistoric magic books preserved in Irttat, she had tentatively presented a few relatively skillful simple spells as her own "accidental discoveries," to see how the tower responded.
From what the tower had written back, human magical tradition had indeed undergone certain breaks in transmission. Of the spell concepts she had put forward, some were affirmed as having some similarity to techniques currently in common use; others drew effusive praise and wonder, and were called "inspired innovations", for instance, the technique of controlling fire within a confined space to generate rapid temperature increases and explosions.
If theoretical proposals alone were armchair speculation, her practical data report both strengthened her arguments and proved something more important to the tower: that she was a person who had awakened a magical gift and even created and used magic without any teacher.
Even in the talent-rich Spring Tower, an ability like this was extraordinarily rare.
For Lucita personally, the perceptual school of magic, manipulating elemental forces, was not something she particularly needed to study in depth.
Unlike humans, who had to practice continuously to strengthen their elemental sensitivity, her five senses could already penetrate every layer of the world, and she could feel every particle of magical element drifting in the air with precision.
In this domain, she needed to practice almost nothing beyond learning how to grasp and manipulate the elements. However strong her mental power, that was how much magical element she could wield, a ceiling that was practically invisible.
What Lucita wanted to go to the magical tower to learn, therefore, was not perceptual magic, but another kind, one that had nearly vanished: the research school of magic.
Especially temporal-spatial magic and spirit magic.
These forms of magic, which transformed an extreme depth of knowledge into power, had left behind many books of enduring learning precisely because of that knowledge-dependent nature.
Unfortunately, most of those books had been lost in the prehistoric catastrophe.
Irttat's collection held a small portion. The magical tower probably had some as well. And some were likely tucked away in the private libraries of nobles. Even though most nobles understood nothing of magic and had even less interest in learning it, a library of rare books remained one way to display depth and lineage.
Those were precisely what interested Lucita most.
Relieved that her application had been accepted, she picked up the brown formal invitation with its gold-dusted lettering.
It was a thick, heavy card, its surface fine and smooth, the best quality paper she had seen since coming to this world.
The four edges of the invitation were framed with cherrywood binding. All the text within was written in deep blue ink mixed with gold powder. In the upper left corner, a gold-foil impression of the bird-with-twig emblem; in the lower left, a deep red circular seal inscribed in Gothic lettering: April Magical Tower · The Capital.
As an aside, the script used here was not the cursive or rounded hand common in letters between nobles, but a typeface that was both mysterious and ornate, somewhat like the Gothic script that had once been fashionable in prehistoric times.
She skimmed through it. The gist was that after review, the Spring Tower had decided to accept Lucita as a new student in the fire division for the coming year.
Then the ruby badge.
The main body of the badge was solid gold, the gemstone seat carved with intricate intertwining floral patterns, and the gemstone at the top, clear and transparent, had been cut with only a few simple facets. Yet even by the light of the oil lamp, it threw off a glittering brightness.
Lucita admired it with satisfaction for a while, then put everything away neatly in the drawer.
Outside the window, the rain had still not relented. Thunder rolled distantly. Occasional lightning illuminated the dense, rain-drenched luo flower tree beyond the glass.
Lucita checked the latch on the wooden window to make sure it was fastened, then cupped her hand around the study's wall lamp and blew it out, lifted a small copper-framed glass night lamp, and made her way back to her bedroom.
This was the last rain of summer.
After that, the temperature dropped sharply. August arrived, late and unhurried.
By August the chestnut blossoms had long since fallen, leaving small unripe chestnuts in their place. The forest was a wash of red. Sweet gum leaves and Japanese maple had fallen in drifts across the ground, joined by the yellow-green paulownia leaves knocked down by the final storm. Everything was damp, with a smell that might have been rain, or might already have been the early autumn morning dew. Hard to say.
The sea wind turned brisk and faintly dry.
The flower boxes outside the shops had been changed over to bright yellow cosmos and soft-pink begonias. Come morning, a layer of white frost still clung to the leaves.
At the first cockcrow, the shop doors began opening one by one. Fresh wheat fragrance drifted from Teresa's bakery. Cooking smoke rose in sequence from chimneys of red brick and grey tile.
The street gradually filled with voices.
The town stirred slowly awake.
At this time of year, Aurora's millstone was always busiest.
This was the season for the spring wheat harvest. The fields had turned a sea of gold, and people moved bent-backed through the rows, harvesting the year's grain. Some child's little daughter stood to one side with a paintbrush, gravely working on a sketch.
Lean over and look. The mother's straw hat had been painted to look like the sun. The uncle's sickle looked like the moon. The elder sister's flower wreath had swallowed her whole head. The older brother's round red cheeks looked like two smears of tomato sauce.
People burst out laughing, then scattered like water flowing outward.
People harvested their grain. Lucita's storage space business surged again, sparing everyone countless trips of hauling wheat.
They went to Aurora's mill empty-handed and came out empty-handed. Meanwhile, countless loads of wheat had been ground into fine flour, and the millstone's waterwheel turned without rest, night and day. The spring-fed water running down from the mountains splashed onto their faces as the wheel turned. Wipe it away with a finger, and the cold seeped straight in.
The autumn pears and cherries in the orchards had ripened, and wild red apples had fallen in the forest, gathered up by some child going past. The first autumn fruits went up in Aurora's shop. Lucita, out to buy breakfast ingredients, seized the moment and picked up the freshest, came home in the morning light carrying her basket.
The freshest and most beautiful yellow lemons. Not to bake a few tarts with them would be doing autumn a disservice.
While she kept watch over the oven, Linnea came running back with a bundle of golden wheat stalks, and put them in the flower vase by the hallway window.
Step through the front gate, and the first thing you saw was the vase there on the windowsill by the living room door: a single lonely stalk of wheat bending gently to one side, as though bowed under the weight of a full and heavy harvest.
Autumn had arrived.
Comments
Post a Comment