V
After Felix and the others left, Lassara spent a week painstakingly examining all of the corpses. Reaching the final body, she let out an involuntary groan.
“This is wrong. This wasn’t raised with magecraft...” Where magecraft had been involved, it always left traces of its constituent particles, known as spell motes. It was an unwritten law of magecraft. But Lassara could find no spell motes on the corpses. Felix had told her once that he could use Odic force to detect the interference of magecraft, but in this area, Lassara’s analytic abilities were vastly superior. If she could not find any spell motes, that meant this was not the work of a mage. With no other conclusion left to her, Lassara called over to Silky, who was sound asleep in the branches of a tree.
Silky yawned broadly. “Are you done, then, Lady Lassara? Your humble servant here did think you were spending too long on it...”
“A poor investigation will never get you any more than poor results. That’s why when I investigate, I do it thoroughly. That’s my way,” Lassara told the fairy. Even if you turned up nothing, you could move on knowing nothing would come back to bite you later. Lassara’s many years of life had taught her that while at first it might seem like a roundabout method, this was the shortest path to finding an answer.
“So was it a mage, my lady?”
“No, not a mage, it would seem.”
“Wait, really? My lady?”
“Are you doubting me?”
“Yes, I very humbly am,” Silky replied at once, grinning. Lassara turned up her nose.
“Then check them yourself. You’re always boasting that fairy magecraft is so much better than human magecraft. I’m sure you can see for yourself.”
“Eww, no way am I getting any closer to those gross things...” Silky said. “I humbly decline,” she added for good measure.
“Well, if you doubt yourself, I won’t make you.”
“Huh? What did you say to me? Like I would ever!” Setting her sights on a comparatively presentable corpse, Silky went over and began to flutter busily around it. Scarce moments later, she returned, sticking her tongue out in disgust. Not that it mattered, but Lassara noted that her well-mannered act was starting to slip.
“Well?” she asked.
“It was suuuper gross.”
“I’m not interested in that,” Lassara said dismissively. Silky turned her back on her. Apparently, the fairy thought she was being subtle, but the “Bleeeh!” she let out was perfectly audible, so Lassara had no trouble working out what she was doing.
Silky turned back as though nothing had happened, then said, “I didn’t smell any magecraft at all. My lady.”
“You mean to say that you detected no signs of magecraft? Well, if the great fairy Silky Breeze can confidently state as much, there can be no more room for doubt.” Just for the fun of it, Lassara switched to flattery. Unexpectedly, however, Silky frowned, turning her head from side to side as though puzzled. Usually, she would have been helpless to that sort of flattery, and she couldn’t have failed to hear the comment. As such, Lassara’s curiosity was suddenly piqued.
“Something on your mind?” she inquired.
“I didn’t smell magecraft, but I did get a whiff of something else.”
“Something else? You’d better not mean the smell of rotting flesh.” This was Silky, after all. The likelihood of her fooling around was high.
“Are you an actual moron, or just acting like one?” Silky demanded. “Of course I don’t. It’s more like, you know. Oh, you don’t get it.” Silky ran her fingers through her hair, kicking her legs up and down. The only thing Lassara got from this was the remarkable deficiency of Silky’s verbalization abilities.
“Seems I don’t,” was all she said.
“I wonder why...” Silky mused. “I guess even though you talk yourself up as a great mage, you’re nothing special after all.” She threw the insult out casually, taking advantage of the general confusion. With absolute conviction, Lassara thought that if she had a flyswatter in hand in that moment she would have swatted the fairy without hesitation.
“I never smelled it before, at any rate,” Silky went on.
“How did it compare to how magecraft smells to you?”
“Hmmm...” Silky considered. “Oh! It had elegance. Yeah, elegance. Like how I’m so elegant. At last, a way to explain it that even the likes of you can understand.” She nodded, looking pleased with herself.
Lassara gave her an icy look. “By the way, given up on being well-mannered, have we?”
For a second, Silky gaped. Then, she said primly, “I haven’t the faintest idea what you mean, Lady Lassara.” She covered her hand with her mouth and tittered.
In the end, all Lassara had learned was that no mage had been involved in this incident with the dead. Still, in a stroke of good luck, what Silky had brought up seemed as though it might hold a clue to the answer.
“Now then,” Silky said in a singsong voice, hopping up and down in midair, “why don’t we depart this creepy place as fast as possible and go to see Felix?”
There was no new information to be gained by lingering here any longer. Lassara had no reason to reject Silky’s suggestion. But instead, she said, “As I have told you time and time again, I’m not about to see you exposed to humans.”
“What?” Silky cried. “No way! You did not seriously bring me all this way only to not even let me see Felix? Don’t even try to tell me that.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions. What I’m saying is if we’re to meet with him, we have to choose the right time and place.” Indeed, this was true not only for Silky, but for Lassara herself. Time had stopped for Lassara when she had inherited the Heavenly Orb mage circle at the age of six. The best a little girl showing up out of the blue to see Felix could hope for was to be turned away by the guards at the gate. Even if the young girl in question was stunningly pretty.
“Honestly, don’t scare me like that...” Silky sighed, relieved. When Lassara fixed her with a penetrating look, however, she backed away dubiously.
“Wh-What’re you looking at?”
“Where’s the youngster now?”
“Huh?”
“I asked you where he is.”
Silky looked blank for a moment, then her lips slowly curved into a smile. “Felix’s location, is it? Oh, I can find that out right away. After all, unlike your cheap excuse for detection magecraft, Lassara, mine is the best of the best.”
The fairy’s words rankled, but she spoke the truth. Lassara’s detection spells only gave her a rough location. Silky’s, on the other hand, could pinpoint a target exactly. Lassara could locate a target accurately if she marked it by touching it directly, but then she had to keep the spell going continuously. It was, in other words, extremely inconvenient.
“Would you get on with it, then?”
“Oh, I can’t say no to you.” Silky gave Lassara a smug, sidelong glance, then, making a show of it, she raised her left hand high. After a long, teasing pause, she snapped her fingers. There was, incidentally, no purpose to all of this. Lassara knew full well it was nothing but a tiresome performance.
As pale blue light blossomed around Silky, Lassara pulled a map, folded into six, from her pocket. She had made it herself over the course of the journeys she had taken around the continent to fill her spare time, and there was no other map like it.
“I know where Felix is!” Silky said at last. For a while she stared hard at the map, which Lassara had spread out on the ground for ease of viewing, then pointed to a place marked Fort Zaxxon. It was so far from anywhere Lassara had expected to find Felix that she couldn’t help but eye the triumphant fairy with suspicion.
“You’re sure, are you?”
“Don’t ask stupid questions! I won’t stand for any insult to my magecraft!” She flew at Lassara’s head with a barrage of kicks.
Deflecting these with the back of her hand, Lassara said, “All right, all right. I’m sorry. I just didn’t think he’d be so close...”
“Then let’s be off,” Silky said cheerfully, her ladylike voice back. Lassara cloaked them both once more in a spell of concealment, then pushed her hands into the pockets of her shimmering vermilion coat. She set off walking northeast, toward Fort Zaxxon, Silky humming a tune beside her. Dead leaves, fallen from the trees, whispered coldly as the wind picked them up and carried them away to who-knows-where. Lassara’s breath clouded as it had back in the White Forest. Yet it seemed to her there was a murkiness to it, and at the thought, a grim look settled over her face.
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