How to Raise a Dumb Wolf - Chapter 23

“Eric Green,” Tina Killott said.

Aisha paused and repeated, “Eric Green?”

“Yes.” Tina nodded, confirming she had pronounced it correctly. “He is the only person capable of teaching gifted mages.”

Two weeks had passed since the victory ball. Aisha had successfully received the graduation certificate Philray sent ahead of schedule as a special accommodation. Her plan to pursue higher magical education on Wold could now formally begin.

At present, mother and daughter sat in the study. Aisha was reviewing admissions information from Wold’s institutions of higher education, while Tina explained the island in detail. Having graduated from Wold Military Academy more than twenty years earlier, she naturally knew it well.

Eric Green.

This was the first time Aisha had heard the name. She blinked, committed it silently to memory, then looked at her mother and waited.

Tina paused.

“You didn’t know about your circumstances before, so you probably never paid attention. In fact, he is famous among mages. He qualified as an advanced mage at sixteen—the youngest in history—and was celebrated as a prodigy. No one has broken the record. He currently ranks second in the Wold Tower of Magic and serves both as a senior administrator of the tower and a member of the Heart of the World Council.

“He is not a gifted mage himself, but he has taught six students with innate magic. He is the only person known to have enabled gifted mages to use general magic as ordinary mages do.”

Tina delivered all the information in one breath, then looked steadily at Aisha.

Aisha was utterly astonished.

At the sight of her daughter’s wonder, a complicated expression flashed across Tina’s face.

Of course, Aisha could not be blamed. Anyone hearing about that man for the first time reacted the same way.

To mages, the Tower of Magic in Wold—the Heart of the World—was sacred ground. Since ancient times, it had stood at the center of magic. Nearly every advanced magical art had been created within its walls. The tower possessed the richest, most sophisticated magical resources in the world. It was almost as old as the island city of Wold itself, and its ranking of mages was the single most authoritative measure of magical ability.

During the era of great chaos, ten exceptional mages followed a group calling for peace and fled the war-torn continent for Wold at the center of the Divine Sea. There, they built a thirteen-story tower.

The ten mages occupied one floor each, arranged from highest ability at the top to lowest below. The bottom three floors remained open to every mage.

The tradition survived.

Each year, the Tower of Magic held a public competition. Ordinary mages fought ranking matches. The winner earned the right to challenge the mage on the lowest private floor—the magician ranked tenth. Mages who already possessed a private floor could challenge the person one place above them, with no limit on attempts during the challenge period.

The resulting rankings contained no padding or favoritism. The system was brutally simple and perfectly fair.

For convenience, the tower counted its floors differently from other buildings. The three public floors at the bottom were conventionally called the first, second, and third floors. But the numbering began again with the fourth physical floor, where the advanced mages lived. From that point, the private floors were counted from one to ten.

Thus, the tower was divided into a lower public section of three floors and an upper private section of ten.

Under such a system, anyone holding one of the ten private floors could easily be displaced without consistently overwhelming power. Yet Eric Green had held the ninth floor of the upper section for ten full years—a clear testament to his dominance.

His teaching of gifted mages had nearly overturned everything people thought they knew.

Nothing in the world was perfect. Anyone blessed with an extraordinary gift inevitably paid a price for it.

Everyone knew that gifted mages possessed extraordinary advantages in their own innate magic. Each was a rare sort of genius. But when casting general magic, they all encountered obstacles to some degree.

It was not that they were entirely incapable. General spells were simply harder for them to learn, or weaker than the same magic cast by ordinary mages. The reason was said to be a fundamental difference in how gifted mages circulated magical power. It could not be avoided.

Expecting a gifted mage to master general magic while fully realizing an innate gift was like demanding that a penguin excel at swimming and fly as well.

Eric Green had accomplished exactly that.

And accomplished it perfectly.

More astonishing still…

He was only thirty-nine years old.

Eric had kept an extremely low profile since graduation. With gifted mages so rare, few people followed the subject. Tina herself learned only through investigation that he was acknowledged as capable of guiding such students.

His talent was beyond description.

…Tina herself had once been praised as the woman with the greatest military talent. Even so, the knowledge that Eric was six months younger than she was left her with complicated feelings.

Tina pressed her lips together.

Why, all those years ago, had that man…?

“Mama?”

Noticing Tina’s distraction, Aisha called carefully.

Tina came back to herself. “…I’m sorry, Aisha. What is it?”

“This person hasn’t accepted a student in three years.”

Aisha turned the admissions booklet to Eric Green’s page and handed it over. Compared with the profiles of other advanced mages in the Tower of Magic, his information was pitifully sparse.

No photograph. No listed magical specialty. A long string of zeroes in his admissions history, with a single lonely one four years earlier. His description consisted of one line:

Advanced mage, ninth floor of the Tower of Magic’s upper section.

The page practically radiated reclusiveness and arrogance.

Aisha had studied a considerable amount of material recently. She knew that the Tower of Magic used mutual selection. Students could list several preferred teachers, while teachers decided whether to accept them. A teacher who encountered no interesting candidates might indeed admit zero students in a given year.

Eric Green’s record, however, contained too many zeroes.

According to the booklet, either he had no desire to teach at all, or he was so confident in his ninth-floor position that he knew he could choose any student he wanted.

But if his name appeared on the admissions list, the former possibility seemed unlikely.

Aisha looked thoroughly puzzled. At her words, Tina paused and accepted the booklet.

If your children ever have magical talent, entrust them to me.

For some reason, the sentence surfaced in Tina’s mind.

Could Eric have continued listing himself for admissions while refusing every student all these years because he was waiting for…

Her and Hock’s child?

The instant the thought arose, Tina rejected it. Given the awkward circumstances in which Eric had spoken those words, she could not even be certain he had meant them rather than merely speaking out of courtesy. Taking them seriously would be far too conceited.

Yet she had never imagined that her daughter with Hock would one day truly need his help.

“He rarely accepts students. Including the six gifted mages who graduated under him, he has taken only seven in total.”

Tina steadied herself and recalled the information she had gathered.

“He originally sought gifted mages as students because he wanted to study the common principles of innate and general magic. After the last of those gifted students graduated, his ranking climbed from fifth to second, and he moved up to the ninth floor of the upper section. In recent years, he seems to have focused on claiming the top floor as quickly as possible, which is why he has accepted almost no one.

“But don’t worry, Aisha. Whether or not he chooses you, the Tower of Magic is still the finest place for a mage’s education. If not Eric Green, there are other good teachers.”

Her mother’s reassurance eased Aisha somewhat.

“Never mind. Let’s stop thinking about it for now.”

Tina abruptly dropped her serious expression and laughed with her usual boldness.

“Did you know, Aisha? Every school and educational institution on Wold, including the Tower of Magic, allows students to keep pets. In the old days, nearly every girl’s room contained some little animal. And I still haven’t really given you a gift… Is there a pet you’d like? A cat? A dog? A parrot?”

Tina watched her daughter eagerly, plainly ready to purchase one.

Aisha paused.

Then…

A wolf.

The word that appeared in her mind startled even her.

It was not an animal most girls associated with pets, and Aisha herself would never have thought of one before. It was not that she truly regarded the giant wolf as a possession.

She simply…

Missed him.

Sharing her days with a wolf and becoming his friend was unquestionably the most extraordinary experience of Aisha’s life. And that wolf had carried her from the darkfolk queen’s castle…

Where was he now? Had he returned to the forest? Was he well? Had he encountered hunters again? What if he was injured? He…

“Aisha?” Tina leaned closer when her daughter fell silent. “What is it?”

“Oh, sorry.”

Aisha came sharply back to herself and realized that once she began thinking about the wolf, she could not stop. She felt a little embarrassed.

She pressed her lips together.

“Um… Mama, may I think for a while? Actually, I… kept a few things while I lived in Philray…”

“Of course.” Tina answered easily. It was a trivial request. “Tell me whenever you decide.”

Aisha nodded absently and looked out the window in the direction of Philray. Her thoughts drifted away.

She first encountered the wolf in the forest north of town. Plainly, that was his home. But she would soon leave for Wold. If she passed the examination, she might study there for years. Even if she failed, she was unlikely to return to Philray.

Besides, the last time she visited the forest, she had not seen the giant wolf.

Would she and that wolf…

Ever meet again?

Aisha wondered in a daze.

…

…

…

Yes.

She learned the answer very soon.

Sometimes, the world worked in ways beyond anyone’s imagination.

When Aisha woke the following morning, she looked outside her window and saw…

A giant gray wolf standing there in silence.