“Her opinion matters too.”
He couldn’t ask a vessel built for greatness to make itself small.
“…Yes, Your Grace.”
It was directly after this that Knox went to Aisha’s bedchamber with that stiff expression on his face.
And now, in the present.
Having been led to the study by Knox and given a rough outline of the situation, I—
“I’ll go. I want to go. I want to gooo!”
Hop hop hop hop.
—was darting around my father in circles like an overexcited rabbit.
“……”
Calypse stared at me as though the soul had vacated his body.
But that was beside the point.
Yes! Something to do at last!
My body had been itching for action. The timing couldn’t be better!
Shush shush—swoosh. Shush.
I pulled my most determined squinting eyes and bounced on my heels, practicing a series of sharp defensive steps.
“I don’t know who the opponent is yet, but this is a perfect chance to beat them decisively and wipe that smug look right off King Argen’s face—”
“You don’t think you might be the one who ends up humiliated?”
A long, straight finger tapped the tip of my nose.
Father had bent his knees to be at my level while I wasn’t paying attention, and was now looking up at me with a distinctly unamused expression.
“Going into that duel without your Ice Affinity will already give King Argen ammunition to talk down to you and mock you in front of everyone. Doesn’t that worry you?”
“If I win without the Affinity, isn’t that better?”
Even so, I fired back without hesitation.
Calypse exhaled, as though he had expected exactly that, and pressed on.
“No matter how capable you are, the opponent King Argen has chosen will be skilled as well. One wrong step and you could come out badly hurt.”
Oh.
I stopped mid-punch, eyes widening.
“Does that mean I can’t lose?”
After all, wasn’t this just a ceremonial event at its core?
Win or lose—did it really matter?
“Losing isn’t a problem. Of course it’s not. But if you were to get hurt—”
He was murmuring the last part softly, and let the sentence trail away.
He lowered his head.
“Never mind. It’s true that children are supposed to get a few bumps growing up—”
He seemed about to change his answer entirely—
“—but is it really all right?”
“Pardon?”
He lifted his gaze slowly to meet mine.
I saw it in that instant. His calm eyes had gone sharp and pointed at the corners, like a triangle.
“Do you want to get hurt? Why are you always so eager to throw yourself into fights?”
I beg your pardon?
Why was he suddenly like this…
“Give me your hand, Aisha.”
“Pardon?”
I was staring at him in bewilderment.
“Your hand. I need to take you somewhere.”
Still wearing that intensely serious expression, Father had risen to his feet and was extending his hand toward me out of nowhere.
Gulp—
Our father wasn’t particularly soft-hearted to begin with—but had the stress done something strange to his personality?
I glanced over at Knox with uneasy eyes, but he only shrugged, making it abundantly clear he had no intention of intervening between the two of us.
In the end, there was no alternative.
The moment I placed my hand in his, Calypse walked out of the study and began leading me somewhere.
We descended swiftly from the third floor to the first.
Are we heading outside the estate?
I thought—but then Calypse walked to the end of a corridor and opened an old door. With a long, groaning creak, a staircase appeared, leading down into the earth.
It felt like the entrance to an entirely different world.
With each step I took, the stone floor beneath me was unmistakably solid—but before long, even through the soles of my boots, a chill began seeping upward, sharp enough to reach the marrow of my bones.
From that point on, Father carried me in his arms for the rest of the descent.
The deeper we went, the more the cold pressed in—a cold that could raise the fine hairs away from skin. Loose strands of my hair brushed across my cheeks in the faint, biting draft.
And at the end of that descent—
“…Father?”
“The probability of failure is high, since your body hasn’t been conditioned from birth. But we have to at least try.”
—was a vast, domed ice cavern.
No ceiling in the ordinary sense. No horizon.
Everywhere the eye could see: the shimmering dance of ice crystals.
I stood in a space that felt entirely unreal, mouth falling open in a soft, breathy heh—and then something cold grazed my lower lip.
A flake of snow, drifting through the air.
“Under normal circumstances, you would have spent your earliest days here, acclimatizing. Since that didn’t happen—”
Calypse turned to me suddenly and asked.
“Do you think you can endure it?”
“Endure what?”
“Ice Affinity training. If you can last a week, there’s at least a chance.”
“…Pardon?”
I turned to look at him, wondering if I had heard wrong.
But the look on his face—like he was fighting every instinct that was screaming at him to scoop me up and run straight back out—told me I had heard correctly.
And so my Affinity training began.
At first, I thought I would be fine.
When the Affinity conditioning training was announced, Mai dressed me in a thick fur coat and hat. Father, insisting I needed a full stomach, had pressed sandwich after sandwich into my mouth until my cheeks were stuffed.
Lucas, who came running the moment he heard, slipped a pair of leather gloves onto my hands.
And Kyle, who had followed Lucas in, transformed into a cat and tried to stay attached to my side.
“Kyaang—!”
He was removed, of course—carried out by the scruff of his neck by Father.
And Guide, who had come along with the others, said:
‘Y—Young Lady. You’re really staying here for a whole week? You—you can definitely do it. I know you can.’
He cheered me on in words—but something in his face looked distinctly anxious.
It wasn’t his usual kind of fear, though.
As he spoke to me, Guide kept glancing around the cavern—as though searching for something. Like someone looking for something very specific.
It was a little strange. But never mind that for now.
The one fortunate thing was that the ice cavern was not as cold as I had feared.
It felt like stepping into the kind of cave that might appear in a fairy-tale winter kingdom, and I was almost enchanted. I felt soft and dreamy inside, as though I had stepped into the pages of a storybook.
“Now I’m shivering.”
I take that back.
I was taking it back within ten minutes.
“Urgh.”
From my perch on an ice bench, I swayed on increasingly feeble legs and toppled sideways.
That snapped me back to awareness. The moment my skin made contact with the cold surface, it felt as though the cold went straight through flesh and found bone.
The cavern had not been aggressively freezing from the start—but before I had noticed, the cold had been creeping steadily inward, inch by inch, settling deep into marrow.
Now my entire body felt like a solid block of ice.
“What am I going to do? It’s only been ten minutes. And I’m supposed to be here for a week?”
I thought very hard.
Should I be the bear that ate nothing but garlic and wild chives for a hundred days and became human? Or the tiger that gave up halfway and ran away to live as a beast?
Bear or tiger.
…Tigers are incredible creatures too, aren’t they? Perhaps not so bad?
Smack!
“Pull yourself together!”
I slapped my own cheeks with both palms, and that shocked me back into clarity.
I had almost given up on Ice Affinity entirely.
“Still—I’m here alone for a week? It’s already this cold, but won’t the boredom be just as hard to bear?”
The other problem was how exactly I was supposed to get through seven days alone in this cavern.
Under ordinary circumstances, Ice Affinity conditioning was done when a baby was still an infant—so the child would enter the cavern with a nursemaid. Of course, the nursemaid didn’t develop Ice Affinity as a result—not being Krost blood.
What I’m trying to say is: infants don’t get bored.
But I was a very worldly five-year-old who was going to go absolutely out of her mind without something to do.
“One, two.”
The only thing I could manage was counting the snowflakes drifting through the air.
I was staring blankly into the middle distance when it happened.
“Three, four, fi—”
I was just about to murmur five.
“……?”
I noticed it. Right there on the floor beside me—a snowflake that was, for a snowflake, rather large.
Odd that I had only just noticed it now. It stood out in a way that was almost unreasonably obvious.
And unlike the ordinary snow crystals floating around me, this one was not shaped like an ice formation.
It was fluffy.
Just like Kyle when he transforms into a cat…
A possibility occurred to me, and the blood drained from my face.
Carefully, I reached for the most natural explanation that had come to mind.
“…Kyle?”
Had Kyle been caught and removed so quietly only because he had managed to sneak back in by hiding?
If he transforms into a cat, he becomes a tiny little kitten—he can’t survive this!
Dreading exactly that, I called out his name softly—but the white fluff ball remained motionless.
In that instant, the image of Kyle in the Ahili Circus, dying, came back to me.
“Kyle!”
I lurched to my feet and reached out to scoop up the fluff ball—
—when it suddenly shuddered violently and vanished from in front of me, only to—
“Ahhhh!”
—launch itself directly at my face.
My vision went dark, and then: soft, squishy, warm belly fat pressing against my skin.
Belly fat?
That texture. I felt like I had experienced it somewhere before…
