The next morning Kai woke up with the first light of dawn. He slept wonderfully, the bed felt like a cloud, and he didn’t have to share it with anybody else.
I hope I’m not getting spoiled, if they throw me out, I’m gonna miss this bed.
He was excited about what he would learn that day. No one told him what he should do or where he should go, so Kai put on the only clothes he had and headed outside. The smell of salt and the sound of waves welcomed him.
He walked the short distance that separated him from the sandy beach and sat down to meditate facing the rising sun. With such a perfect atmosphere it would be a crime not to.
Kai closed his eyes and lost himself in the rhythmic crashing of the waves.
It must have been less than an hour later when something obscured the sun.
Opening his eyes, he noticed Elijah was standing in front of him. Without saying anything, he tossed him a bundle. Kai took a second to realize they were two sets of clothes.
“Put those on, yours are falling apart.”
“Ehm… Thank you.” He was not going to refuse free gifts.
“It’s nothing, we can't have a naked child run around the property every time he needs to wash his clothes.”
Kai blushed a little, of course they had seen him. He walked back to his house to change and maintain a bit of his dignity.
The new clothes were a simple pair of beige trousers and a white shirt. They weren’t anything special, but the material was different from the typical cheap linen he was used to. They felt softer on his skin and fit his size perfectly.
“Do you have clothes of all sizes hanging around?”
“No, I made some adjustments to an old pair.” Elijah looked at him as if daring him to say something.
“That’s very kind of you.” The butler gave him a nod of the head and turned to look away.
Is he embarrassed? Someone doesn’t know how to receive compliments. I can use that.
Kai’s smile didn’t last very long.
“As I said, it’s nothing. Now start running.”
Kai got a bad feeling. “What do you mean?”
“You have a Running skill, right? Run to the north edge of the bay and then back. Since it’s your first day, one lap will be enough. If you cheat or stop, I’ll know.”
Kai thought he was here to learn about magic, but he wanted to make a good impression and he did have a Running skill.
With the first light of day on the horizon, Kai started running. The bay looked deceptively small, but not when he had to run its 3 kilometers of beach.
By the time he got to the north end, he was already heaving and sweating buckets.
“Damn. My. Short. Legs.” Kai had to take pauses to breathe between each word.
He miscalculated and pushed too hard in the beginning, making the way back much more difficult, but he tried to maintain a slow jog. He didn’t doubt Elijah would know if he stopped to rest or walked.
He had not seen the strange butler while he ran, but as soon as he made it back, he was casually standing in front of him.
Such a showoff.
Kai thought he made a good impression. He ran about 5 kilometers—since he didn’t start from the very south of the bay—and completed it in about half an hour. Spending most of his time outside, he wasn’t in bad shape, a bit on the thin side since food wasn’t abundant.
Elijah didn’t give him any gratification for his efforts.
“You can rest 5 minutes then start swimming.”
“What do y—.”
“You have a Swimming skill, don’t you?” He pointed in the distance, “Stay close to the shore and swim to that red marker. You can rest for 15 minutes when you reach it, then run the way back.”
Kai would bet the butler was struggling to suppress a smirk from his face.
He shielded his eyes from the sun with one hand to look for the red marker in the distance, but he couldn't find even a red dot.
“You’ll see it when you get closer, now get swimming, your 5 minutes are up.”
That was likely more than a kilometer away. He stopped a witty remark in his throat and tried to act confident, “One lap?”
“Yes.”
He was already exhausted, but he stoically took off his clothes and jumped in the water without complaining. After the heat of running, the chill water felt nice around his body.
The distance was shorter, but swimming was way harder than running. This time he made sure to pace himself, determined to impress them.
A few hundred meters later, his brave facade was crumbling. By the time he was halfway there, his arm and leg muscles were burning, his lungs screaming for oxygen. He had slowed down. Each paddle and stroke were like lifting his weight up a mountain. The waves pushed him back and forth, making swimming straight even harder.
Just a bit more, hold on a bit more…
His eyes desperately looked for the red marker on the shore with increasing frequency as he grew exhausted. The water started to feel like dense syrup. He had long stopped trying to fight the waves, opting to change direction when he was too off-course.
Finally, he spotted a red pole planted in the sand not far ahead.
Kai almost couldn’t feel his limbs, but he pushed them one last stretch, wanting this hell to be over.
A few meters…
He dragged his body out of the water crawling and laid heaving in the sand.
“Your 15 minutes are up.” Elijah's apathetic voice coldly stated. He must have appeared again, but Kai didn’t have the strength, nor the wish, to turn his head to look.
It felt no more than a couple minutes. He wanted to curse him, but he didn’t have the strength to think about anything witty.
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“Wasn’t I supposed to learn about magic?”
The butler didn’t answer immediately, considering if he should allow this obvious attempt to take more time.
“Lady Virya decided to give you a chance. Don’t ask me why, I can’t see what she saw in you. Everything we give you is a gift. You could not afford to pay for her time or mine if you worked all your life. If you can’t even take this, it means you don’t want it hard enough.”
“So, it’s all a test,” Kai said.
How original!
“You can see it that way, but you should ask yourself how you are going to learn about magic with no skill slots open or the ability to discard the skills you have. You can either come back when you’re seven or reach Orange and get more skill slots.”
Kai hated to admit it, but that made a lot of sense. Swimming and Running were by far the easiest and most reliable skills to train. The fastest way to Orange.
“Now, if you don’t get up and start running, you’ll skip breakfast.”
At those words, Kai could only get up and start racing.
I must applaud your deviousness. You are able to both threaten and encourage me using breakfast.
He was going to add this to his book.
* * *
After a quick shower, he changed into his second pair of clothes and had a nice breakfast. Kai massaged his full tummy in satisfaction. At least they weren’t stingy with food. He was almost able to forget the pains of the run back.
“Get up, it’s still morning and you have much to do.” Elijah denied him a moment more of peace.
Kai let out a groan as he stood up.
“If you don’t keep up, you can always go home to your mommy when she comes back.” The pale man taunted him.
That was the only motivation Kai needed to rush after him. He was not going to let him win. He knew he was playing him, but it worked.
Elijah walked towards the southern edge of the property. This entire side of the estate was covered by a huge, lush garden with a large greenhouse farther up. With a glance, he noticed numerous plants he had never seen before. He wished he could get a better look, but they entered a two-story edifice in the same style as the main one. The two buildings seemed connected, but they had walked on a promenade.
What are they hiding in there? Dark secrets and a pile of gold? Are they worried I’m gonna try to steal something? Or am I overthinking things, and this was the shortest path? I bet Elijah is just a dick, who doesn’t want to show me inside. That’s the most likely possibility.
As soon as they entered the building, a smell of fresh and dried plants washed over him. Two walls were covered from top to bottom by a huge wooden cabinet with hundreds of small square drawers. Piles of harvested plants filled the room in organized bundles of all sizes, many larger than him. Not even the ceiling was spared with many herbs and flowers hanging to dry.
Elijah walked straight for the only other door in the room, zigzagging through the maze of plants with ease.
Kai wasn’t as graceful, but being smaller had its perks. After the butler opened the door, he heard a slow humming coming from inside.
He almost crashed against Elijah’s back when he stopped on the threshold.
“Theodora, I told you I was going to bring the child here.” He said with a note of exasperation in his tone.
Peeking from behind the larger man, Kai saw something reminding him of Mr. Denule’s herbalist shop in Whiteshore. Lou’s parents would have died to have such a well-stocked store. If the plants in the other room seemed chaotically laid around, here everything was arranged and packaged in its own cabinet or glass container.
His attention was captured by the large work desk on the right side. It hosted a legion of weird glass and metal contraptions with unknown purposes. A plump woman with curly red hair tied behind her head was running between a boiling cauldron and what looked like three alembics, casually juggling a variety of test tubes and herbs.
“Don’t be a killjoy, Elijah. This batch of mudwort was losing potency and my echinaceas finally decided to bloom this morning. I must have miscalculated the influence of the lunar cycle on mana density. I’m almost done brewing anyway.”
She donned a leather apron spotted in colorful stains and a few corroded patches. She turned around lifting a pair of large goggles from her yellow eyes that stood out even more on her dark skin.
“As I told you, I’m ready.” She moved her gaze onto him. “You must be the child, how are you dear? Is Elly treating you all right? Tell aunty Dora. I cook every plate in this house, no one will notice if I slip a few sazelia leaves into his morning tea.”
The butler threw her a death stare, “My name is Elijah and you told me it had been an accident.”
“Sure, it was Elly, but what about next time? Will it be a mistake or not? Who knows…” Dora laughed aloud. “Now you can leave. I have everything well in hand.”
A slew of different expressions blinked on the pale man's face, several more than all he had shown since he met him. In the end, he closed his mouth in a thin line and marched away.
“Don’t pout Elly, it ruins your pretty face. I’ll cook your favorite dish tonight.” Dora said out loud after his disappearing figure, then turned to whisper at him. “Don’t mind him, he is a bit moody in the morning.”
“I can still hear you!” Elijah’s voice resounded from afar. Dora put on a whoops expression and closed the door behind him.
Kai stared at her in awe with starry eyes.
I must learn how to make him flip with a few words too.
“So, what is your name sweetheart?” Dora asked him.
“Kai—.”
Right at that moment the goop inside the cauldron began loudly bubbling again, spilling its content all around.
“I guess those mudworts were truly a bit old.” In the blink of an eye, she was again busying around. A couple minutes later she proudly raised a glass full of a liquid the color of dried mud.
She then walked back to him and offered him the glass, “Nice to meet you, Kai. Now shut your nose and drink this, it will do you good.”
Kai hesitatingly took the glass, “Weren’t you saying the mudwort was expired or something?” He didn’t want to get any closer to that brown goop.
“What an attentive little fellow you are. That is true, but at most it will have lost a bit of potency. It just means you’ll have to drink more. It will help you recover from Elijah’s training session.” Dora smiled at him encouragingly.
Kai took a deep breath and brought the glass closer to his lips. He should have listened and shut his nose. A whiff of the liquid almost made him gag.
They would not try to kill him in such a convoluted way, would they?
With no more hesitation, Kai swallowed the whole glass. The taste wasn’t as bad as the smell, but its slimy texture sent shivers down his spine.
“I don’t feel any different,” he commented.
“Choosing a fast effect when it’s not necessary means wasting the effectiveness of a potion. You might feel a slight tingling in your extremities, but that’s perfectly normal.” Dora explained.
She turned to her workbench again, muttering almost as an afterthought. “Only if you start feeling a strange itch in your chest, should you start to worry and run straight to me. That mudwort was indeed a bit old.”
Before Kai could say anything, Dora had already taken what she needed and was walking out the door. “Come, we have much to do.”
* * *
For the rest of the day, Kai followed Theodora around the garden as she harvested, sowed and replanted all sorts of different plants. From mushrooms and delicate herbs that didn’t reach his ankles, to small trees and shrubbery. With a touch of her hand, an almost wilted flower would gain new life.
As for his task, it was mostly uprooting infesting weeds and digging holes, followed by more weed cutting. It was tedious work, but he liked being surrounded by exotic plants and he would never get bored with Dora around.
The woman was a total chatterbox, going on long tangents about each plant. She explained to him the many ways to use all of them—who knew blue tanglebells had seventeen different uses, which was still nothing compared to the thirty-seven of the turmeric roots.
They took a break for lunch when he accompanied her to the kitchen. Dora never stopped talking, switching the subject to food. Kai wouldn’t tell anyone, but she might be a better cook than Alana.
After eating they went back into the garden.
Even if they were working dozens of meters apart, her voice never stopped once. She had a pleasant cadence to her words. It felt like listening to a podcast while working. About halfway through the afternoon, a new stray thought popped into his mind. It was clear Theodora loved to talk, but he doubted she was giving him a speed course on botany for fun.
Please tell me she doesn’t expect me to remember everything.
Kai tried his best to memorize the most interesting facts, but he was overwhelmed by the amount of information.
About three hours before dusk, Elijah reappeared and took him for another round of ‘practice’ along the shore. It was as grueling as in the morning, but Dora’s concoction must have worked. His muscles had regained some strength and he was able to push through, though more slowly.
From then on, he was going to eat all his meals in the kitchen at Theodora's place. It was the same building he went to this morning, but her living quarters were on the opposite side, facing the jungle rather than the sea.
When she started quizzing him about plants at dinner, he would have yelled ‘I knew it’, if he was not on the verge of falling asleep on his plate. He answered the best he could.
Dora kept smiling encouragingly, but as he failed to answer question after question, the smile grew more strained. Her thoughts were much more transparent than the other two residents.
He must have looked a bit down because she added, “That was good for our first day, dear. I’m sure tomorrow you’ll do even better.”
Kai nodded his head, almost too tired to feel upset about it. Almost. Her disappointment hit him much more than Elijah’s snarky remarks.
Did I not try hard enough? Am I not smart enough?
Those were the thoughts that accompanied him to bed. Thankfully he was so tired he fell asleep as soon as his head crashed into his soft pillow.