LP 1.6 The Most Glorious Knight

Breaking the silence that had settled over the gathering, Bastian opened his mouth haltingly. But his face was also ashen. The servant was foaming at the mouth and cowering, while Lucian casually smiled and tapped the back of his head with his palm, tap, tap.

“I think he doesn’t quite know how to bow.”

“……”

“He bows well now.”

Crimson blood was slowly spreading across the table, but Lucian’s hand, pressing down on the servant’s head, was as clean and pretty as ever. Soon after, he rose from his seat.

“Then, Your Highness. I have a headache for various reasons. I’ll take my leave first.”

Ah, even thinking about it again, it was a nightmarish moment.

In any case, that incident convinced me that something was truly ‘wrong’ with Lucian. It took a day to figure out that it was a ‘magical’ problem, and in the meantime, Lucian caused another incident.

He had beaten a day laborer half to death with a shovel for blabbing about what had happened at the small banquet the night before….

“A shovel? You should have just beheaded him! And where did you even get a shovel!”

Mylotte screamed. Yes, it was a regrettable thing to say to the victim, but it would have been cleaner in the eyes of others if a knight had simply beheaded the underling with a single stroke. It would seem like a just punishment. People would assume there was a good reason for it.

But beating someone half to death with a shovel was a different story. It was not a just punishment, nor was it a knightly thing to do. It was excessively barbaric. It was something that would cause gossip, and the witnesses and the victim had to be silenced separately.

“He said… the shovel was just lying there.”

Eydrick, the aide who had barely managed to calm Lucian down that day, shook his head miserably.

A man who had learned how to skillfully hide his somewhat difficult original personality was suddenly acting on whatever came to his mind as soon as he got angry. It was like seeing him from over a decade ago. No, at least back then, he was young and could be overpowered by force. There was no way to handle Lucian now.

To prevent further accidents, Lucian voluntarily placed himself under house arrest. He wasn’t particularly pleased, but he agreed nonetheless. It was fortunate that he could still understand what was being said, even if he couldn’t control his temper right away.

In the end, he had to stay cooped up in his room while his subordinates cleaned up the mess and searched for the Mage who was the cause of it all. Considering his usual level of activity, this confinement must have been quite a hardship for him.

So, I thought that if we caught the Mage who made that ‘potion’ that caused this situation, Lucian, who had been accumulating his anger, might actually beat him to death….

Mylotte laughed again, devoid of emotion.

“Of course. Beating him a little and strangling him would be included in sending him back ‘nicely.’”

“He must have been acting pretty pathetic.”

Lucian made excuses gently. This time, everyone in the room agreed.

“That’s true. I was worried because he seemed a bit lacking.”

Pellon chimed in. He was one of the people who had distrusted the Mage the most from the beginning.

A bit lacking…. I’ve thought that before, but. Gosrick opened his mouth.

“I don’t know about that, but he seemed to be misunderstanding something.”

“Misunderstanding?”

Mylotte asked back. Lucian’s gaze also returned. Gosrick instinctively felt that he had been watching him very sharply since earlier, though he didn’t say anything. Had he offended his sensitive nerves by defending the Mage a little?

If suspicion were an illness, Lucian would be a seriously ill patient who couldn’t get out of bed. He had been like that since he was very young.

“He believed that Your Highness was naturally kind and good.”

“……”

“He seemed to believe that the potion he made had made the kind Your Highness… violent. He thought that was why he was beaten.”

Silence fell in the room. No one dared to speak easily, and Lucian, with an inscrutable expression, brought his wine glass to his lips.

“Ahem.”

Mylotte made a pointless diversion. Lucian’s pretense of being neat and upright was a carefully crafted image created under the plans of his advisors, but facing the result often gave them a instinctive sense of rejection.

In any case, they knew Lucian too well….

“…That’s possible. That’s a relief. But why did he give such a good person such a potion in the first place?”

How would we know what’s in the twisted minds of Mages? Mylotte changed the subject, pretending not to know. Gosrick glanced at Lucian’s expression for a moment and shook his head.

“In my opinion, he really seemed to have no idea. Rather….”

And he chose his words carefully for a moment. He was worried that he might be adding too much of his own opinion, but the judgment was not his to make anyway.

“He was very sorry, to Your Highness. Um, he seemed to have a great liking… for Your Highness.”

Again, silence lingered because no one could quickly find a suitable response. Mylotte pursed his lips, and Pellon stared at the ceiling without meaning.

At the end of that silence, a chuckling laugh was heard.

Lucian, leaning diagonally against the desk, lightly emptied the remaining wine in his glass. Even a sneer looks quite handsome when placed on his smooth face.

He twirled the empty glass between his fingers and said as if joking.

“He’s a lacking bastard, alright.”

---

The geese were in better condition than I had worried.

No, they even seemed a bit plump. For some reason, I had an ominous feeling and checked, and the warehouse was a mess. A grain sack was torn open. Two of them, in fact.

They seemed to have enjoyed a feast while their owner was away. The owner had been satisfying his hunger with thin soup and scrawny sardines for days. No, but how did they open the latch and get in?

Whether Kosha glared at them or not, they flapped their wings and ran to greet their owner, whom they hadn’t seen in a long time. They might have thought that their servant, who gave them food and cleaned up their poop, had finally returned.

Kosha’s food supply was empty because the geese had enjoyed a feast, but he wasn’t that angry. Was it because the money he had received from Gosrick was quite substantial?

He added dried vegetables to his oatmeal porridge and cracked a goose egg into it, filling his stomach. By the time he cleaned up the messy house, almost the entire afternoon had passed.

…Should I take a bath?

Lucian’s critical voice, saying that I was dirty and smelly, came to mind. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to wash, but I felt embarrassed for no reason, and my face flushed. If I were a slightly more proper Mage, I would have been able to maintain some level of cleanliness.

The temperature drops quickly after sunset. I had to move diligently to finish bathing before that.

Kosha hurriedly lit a fire and drew water. Since I had to buy firewood with money, a hot bath was a luxury. I only boiled one bucket of water and mixed it with cold water, but it was still lukewarm enough not to catch a cold.

The old bathtub was cramped. It fit Kosha just right when he sat with his knees up, as he wasn’t very tall. Still, it felt good to wash after a long time. Kosha, who had sat down in the bathtub to warm his body while the water was still warm, splashed the water for a moment.

…But how did Lucian end up drinking ‘that potion’ in the first place?

---

Kosha had started making magic potions since last winter.

It was an unusually harsh winter. Humidity was more of a problem than the cold. Sleet fell frequently, and the hay laid in the barn became damp. There was a limit to how much I could heat the place.

Livestock get sick easily in weather like this. It was truly terrible when an epidemic broke out a few years ago. I had decided not to use magic if possible, but…. I had no choice. I really didn’t want to see the geese I had worked so hard to raise die one after another.

Protective magic focused on disease prevention. I added only a little bit of warming and dehumidifying functions and mixed it into the feed to give to the geese. It was nothing special, even though it sounded grand. Kosha’s mana was terrible because he wasn’t in good health that winter either. It was just something I made haphazardly, relying on my instincts as if grasping at straws.

And unexpectedly, the warming and dehumidifying magic worked. The geese became very warm and dry! The barn, which never dried no matter how much I heated it, quickly became fluffy due to the heat emitted by the geese. The effect was so good that Kosha eventually abandoned his house and spent the winter hugging the geese in the barn.

It would have been perfect if it had ended there.

Osterwick is a small village. Everyone in the village knows each other, and everyone knows each other’s circumstances. The same was true for Kosha, who had settled in the village at the age of fourteen and still felt subtly out of place.

The first person to suspect that Kosha’s geese had survived the winter without a single death during that harsh winter was the neighboring pig farmer.

‘What, huh? What the hell did you do?’

He was really persistent. There was a limit to how much I could avoid his gaze and brush it off by saying, ‘I was just lucky….’ In fact, Kosha had given the geese magic potions a couple more times during the winter, and for some reason, the geese’s condition was suspiciously good.

I heard that the pig farmer had lost half of his pigs during the winter. Even the surviving young pigs were sick, and their survival was not guaranteed. I felt uncomfortable ignoring those wriggling, pink little ones.

Besides, Kosha also owed him a debt of gratitude. It was that pig farmer’s wife who had force-fed Kosha gruel and saved his life when he was starving to death after his nanny died and he was left alone at the age of sixteen.

Although she had passed away the following year while giving birth to her fourth child…. Kosha couldn’t turn a blind eye to the pig farmer who was raising her children alone.

It was just a potion with weak protective magic to help them overcome diseases. It was something that was so mild that you couldn’t even tell if it was just a potion or a magic potion. Still, I was worried, so I repeatedly asked him to keep it a secret from others.

Of course, things didn’t go as planned.

‘What are you really? Are you an apothecary?’

The pig farmer, who had saved the other half of his pigs thanks to Kosha, persistently pressed him. An apothecary? If I had such skills, I would have made a living as an apothecary instead of raising geese. It would be less physically demanding and I would earn more money.

An apothecary’s potions and a Mage’s potions are completely different. An apothecary understands the ingredients of herbs and makes potions accordingly. Mages also use herbs, but the ingredients don’t matter much. It’s just a medium for containing power.

The reason why they use herbs is simply because they are readily available and easy to handle. If you have the ability, you can make potions using animals, minerals, or even humans as ingredients.

Kosha, who was born as a Mage but was ignorant of pharmacology, couldn’t pretend to be an apothecary. So I just tried to shut my mouth and endure, but the pig farmer’s mouth was light.

Rumors spread quickly in a small village. Before I knew it, Kosha had become an apothecary who could treat animals. I tried to fix it later, saying that it wasn’t true, but it didn’t work at all. No, far from fixing it.

‘I’ll give you money, huh? Can’t you cure people?’

‘I’m really not an apothecary…. I really don’t know. Really. I’ve never cured anyone before….’

‘What’s so different between animals and people? I’ll give you money! A person is dying, are you just going to stand by and watch? This young child is dying!’

Before a few months had passed, I was grabbed by the collar.

Kosha was born as a Mage but did not receive the necessary education. So he didn’t know how desperately and greedily that power, which seemed infinitely close to a miracle, made humans.

‘You bastard, you can do it but you’re not doing it. If anything happens to my child, I won’t let you get away with it. I won’t let you get away with it!’

The blacksmith, who ran in the middle of the night holding his youngest son who had a high fever, was a prominent figure in the village. It wouldn’t be difficult to kick Kosha out of the village.

I was afraid. I didn’t have the confidence to leave this place and settle in a new place again, and I was scared of the thick hand that was shaking my collar.

There was no choice. I ended up using magic to treat people, and fortunately, the child’s consciousness returned overnight after I somehow brought down the fever. It was fortunate that it wasn’t a serious illness.

I made excuses that it was just luck, and that was partly true, but people didn’t believe it.

The people in the small village didn’t even think that it was ‘magic,’ but they were certain that Kosha was not just a simple goose herder.

Of course, there were changes for Kosha as well. The blacksmith was violent but not a bad person, and he gave me the money he had promised when his child got better. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough to shake Kosha’s heart, who was always struggling to make ends meet by collecting and selling goose eggs and feathers.

So, that’s when it started.

I started making and selling magic potions little by little. There aren’t many things that require magic in a small village anyway.

Just, very trivially. Only to the extent that Kosha’s erratic mana and clumsy skills could handle.

Helping livestock breed a little better, making an old man’s knees hurt less on rainy days, or getting rid of a hangover for someone who had a hangover, just that much.

That was until Merda, the blacksmith’s eldest daughter, came to visit.

‘Hey, goose herder.’

Merda, who had long, curly black hair down to her waist, was about the same age as Kosha and was more beautiful than her father. She had a bold personality and was well-connected, so she had a passing acquaintance with Kosha, but they weren’t very close. So her visit was completely unexpected….

‘Have you ever heard of a Love Potion?’

And the word she suddenly brought up was even more unexpected than her visit.

‘……?’

Kosha couldn’t answer and just blinked. Of course, I had ‘heard’ of it, in old stories.

That magical potion that makes you fall in love with the first person you see when you open your eyes after taking the potion, and the story of lovers who met a tragic end because they took the potion by mistake. But well, Merda wouldn’t have come to talk about such stories.

‘Sorry, I don’t know….’

Kosha shook his head slowly. Merda frowned right away.

‘You don’t know? I’m talking about that potion that makes you fall in love with the first person you see when you drink it.’

As if she couldn’t possibly not know, she urged him on. Kosha answered awkwardly.

‘…That’s just something that comes out in old stories.’

‘No! It’s trending in the castle these days.’

That was even more nonsense.

Kosha only went to the castle to see Lucian and to sell things. He didn’t have good speaking skills and wasn’t sociable, so he didn’t have any close friends. It was natural that he didn’t know what was trending these days.

Merda goes out and about and is quick with news, so she would know more about trends….

‘How?’

‘What do you mean how? Of course, they can’t sell it openly, but all the pharmacies are secretly dealing with it.’

Merda snapped. Just pharmacies sell that kind of thing? I still didn’t understand. If you had to classify it, wouldn’t that be a magic potion?

Besides, the distribution of magic potions is strictly restricted in Izeland. Not that I should be saying this, since I’m secretly making and selling magic potions.

But even if my magic potions are so insignificant that they can be easily distinguished from an apothecary’s potions, something like a Love Potion….

…That shouldn’t be allowed?

‘I want to have it too, but it’s a bit expensive. There are so many people who want to buy it that they’re charging whatever they want.’

Merda continued, fiddling with her hair. Kosha smiled awkwardly. Even though things had gotten a little better by selling magic potions, he was still barely making ends meet.

‘Well, I’m not in a good situation right now either….’

‘You idiot, who’s asking for money?’

Merda was annoyed. Then, perhaps feeling a little embarrassed, she spoke again in a softer voice.

‘I mean, I want you to make a Love Potion.’

‘…Me?’

‘Yeah, you.’

Her black eyes were firm and full of conviction. To the point of being disconcerting.