“My, arrived already! One hardly sees the time go by, when the ride is so pleasant!” Abbé Beauvran exclaimed, as he allowed himself to be helped down from the carriage by a fellow passenger.

Hopping down to the ground himself, Zephyrin marveled at the unflappability of his guardian. Abbé Beauvran had insisted on riding atop the diligence’s roof (“Join me, my boy! No? You’re quite sure?”) along with several of the other travelers, an impetuous decision that he and their little group almost had great cause to regret. At about the midway point of their journey, when they were approximately two leagues from their destination, a wild boar had barreled out of the woods onto the road, startling and bringing the alarmed, whinnying horses to an abrupt halt—and with them, the carriage. Abbé Beauvran had been flung from the roof and would have undoubtedly broken his neck, had it not been for Zephyrin’s split-second reaction and quick casting of an unobtrusive protective layer of mana.

Thanks to his intervention, when the other passengers had anxiously streamed out of the vehicle to assist the priest, he had simply sprung back up to his feet, quipping, “Never mind, never mind—twas the horses brought to a dead stop, not I!”. Yet after that close call, he had reluctantly acceded to the persuasion of his traveling companions, that he undertake the rest of the journey in the carriage’s safer interior. Though of short acquaintanceship, the company had begun to grow quite fond of the elderly man, and would have been sorry to see the diligence serve the double purpose of hearse as it entered Kalonis.

Now, more or less unscathed, Abbé Beauvran and his young ward were in the bowels of that great city.

Kalonis! City of seventy and five thousand souls, and full-many a dream besides, above which airships compete with the birds of the air for sovereignty of the boundless blue expanse, aureoled by the unstinting rays of the ardent, virile sun. Jewel of the South, and Mistress of the Vineyards; into her hands comes the flour of the fertile farmlands, and from them bread to nourish the great and small alike. Resplendent meeting place of earth and sky, wise administrator of nature’s bounty, O city glad to endow wings to man’s fondest aspirations!

At least, such was the enthusiastic description Zephyrin recalled reading in a travelogue during his first life. In this era the only avians were of the decidedly organic variety, and frequent reminders of this they left on the streets. He was sorry to observe that the streets in question were in a filthy, deplorable state, and that nonwithstanding the much reduced number of inhabitants, which couldn’t exceed more than fifteen thousand. For the development of mana-based engines was still in its infancy, and did not yet allow the city to enjoy the same status of prosperous hub she had attained by the time of Zephyrin’s death in his original life.

Yes, the great airships were still hazy, incipient shadows in men’s minds, and several decades needed to elapse before they would see the light of day. Zephyrin certainly considered the possibility of trying to accelerate technological progress for the benefit of Gaulyria, but his lack of technical knowledge made such an initiative implausible. At best he would be able to suggest general concepts to leading scientists and inventors, when he became an adult and the circumstances allowed for this.

As Zephyrin and Abbé Beauvran made their way to the address of the priest’s old acquaintance, Zephyrin looked every which way and that, taking in the sights (and unfortunately often enough, the smells) of the city. Contrary to the deplorable roads, the habitations were on the whole rather elegant; white, multi-storied buildings predominated, composed of the curious, crumbly stone of the region, a drawback which necessitated frequent maintenance and wholesale replacements. ‘Fool’s stone’, he remembered it was called; but, though unreliable, the designs of the houses themselves were charming enough, displaying clean, straight-lined façades and sky-blue shutters.

As for the inhabitants, though the rarely seen noblemen and ladies were dressed superbly, and the mercantile class well enough, few of the tradesmen’s faces were well-rounded, and in the features of high and low alike there was a certain strain, a latent tension in the air reminding Zephyrin of the consecutive poor harvests. It was clear that the region was not exempt from the hard times that had fallen on the rest of the country, and without exception all its inhabitants bore traces of this hardship on their brows.

And yet, just as he was thinking this…

“Tsk. An abbé…”

Hearing a townsman’s resentful mutter, Zephyrin looked up. Indeed, advancing in their direction was a purple-clad figure, his shoulders draped with a white ermine cloak, his silver shoe buckles glinting in the sunlight. Bluebloods and baseblood tradesmen alike stepped aside, allowing the sententiously smiling worthy to pass. Soon he was almost upon them…but, to Zephyrin’s consternated amusement, Abbé Beauvran made no indication of moving, electing instead to obstinately hold his ground.

Resting his palms on his cane, he appraised the plump, smooth-skinned secular with an openly hostile eye, as though he wanted nothing better than to throw down his glove and challenge him to a duel. The richly dressed figure stared at him confusedly for a moment, then nervously averted his gaze and quickly passed by. The old priest watched him depart out of the corner of his eye, then snorted. “Hmph! Not as foolish as he looks.”

“Do you know him?” Zephyrin asked, wondering what could have inspired such animosity in the acerbically tongued but ordinarily good-natured cleric. The priest’s answer did nothing to illuminate him. “Know him? He’s as much a stranger to me as I am to our lovely Queen Adelaide.”

“But surely, as your fellow abbé—”

The priest spluttered. “What! Lad, what are you saying? You must be blinder than a one-eyed toad going down a heron’s gullet, as the quaint expression goes, if you can’t differentiate between us. That oily, bewigged creature is a secular; I, on the other hand, am the genuine article.” He drew himself up proudly.

“Oh. So you hold an actual abbotric, Father?”

“Did you really think His Excellency would have assigned me to Estrelti without first sweetening the bitter pill of rural exile with an honor to tickle my vanity?”

Zephyrin thought back to his countryside wanderings, and the curious, dilapidated heap of stones he had come across in his seventh summer. “Are you referring to the monastery ruins four miles or so outside Estrelti’s boundaries?”

The priest nodded. “I am indeed. The monastery was founded seven hundred years ago under Rudolf IV, then pulled down within the last two hundred, or thereabouts. But the Nebularian order is not totally extinct in the south; the female branch still numbers a half dozen pious women residing in a small house in Kalonis—amiable creatures—and of the male, depopulated branch, I am the current abbot.”

“Ah. So, it’s a purely symbolic title.”

“Impudent whelp! Keep that up, and I’ll regret lending you my illustrious name. I take good care of those ruins, if you must know. Now, instead of flapping your tongue, how about you make use of those young eyes of yours and read out that sign for me, so we can get a move on? These carriages will cake our traveling cloaks with half the mud in the city, if we’re of a mind to let them.”

Zephyrin identified the sought-after street before too long, and they resumed walking, he struggling a little to keep up with the priest’s surprisingly brisk pace—to the point that Zephyrin suspected his cane for show rather than utility. Still, he was able to take in the sights and people. His people, he thought to himself. In truth, it was a little difficult to believe, down here in the south. In this region the men of Gaulyria tended toward short statures and tanned coloring, with dark eyes and even darker hair. Even urbanity did not succeed much in expunging their speech of its abrasive rusticisms. Just as in Estrelti, Zephyrin found that he still did not feel quite at his ease around these squat, loud-voiced men and women. That would change once he arrived in the north, he consoled himself.

Presently he realized that Abbé Beauvran’s shrewd eye was on him. “I say, it’s curious how you haven’t batted an eye even once since our arrival,” he remarked.

Zephyrin belatedly realized that though his gaze had wandered to take in the sights readily enough, it had been with a cool, appraising air—far removed from the wide-eyed look more appropriate for a country bumpkin leaving his backwater village for the first time. Unable to explain the reason for his composure, he simply stayed silent. To his relief, Abbé Beauvran made no further comment, transitioning to another subject of his own accord.

“It’s a shame Monseigneur Puch is absent inspecting the minor seminary,” the priest commented. “He’d take a liking to you, my boy.”

“What is His Excellency like?”

“Tremendously fat. But his generosity vies with his girth in a ceaseless contest; both continue to accrue with the passage of years,” said the priest casually; then, closing his eyes as a long-forgotten incident rose up from the cloudy depths of memory, he continued, “Do you know, I have always had corpulent superiors. It is a recurrent theme in my ecclesiastical career. It almost proved my undoing, back in the days when I was but a fresh-faced deacon. I recall it like it was yesterday. It was near the conclusion of the Fyth’noèsa—the final fasting day of the liturgical season, in fact. I and all the other seminarians were on a spiritual retreat prior to our ordination, and I had the singular misfortune of being assigned a reading from the Book of Consolation to explicate. Monseigneur Gallatze—may he rest in peace—Monseigneur Gallatze of Orla was the celebrant of the liturgy; the provincial of the Gaëlian order was also present, as was the rector, and several visiting notables.”

“I preached well. Too well, I daresay. After conquering my initial trepidation, I got entirely too carried away and overextended the sermon by a good fifteen minutes. Disaster soon struck. Just as I reached the poignant verse, ‘Thou hast heard the plaint of my bowels,’ there was an earthquake. An earthquake emanating from the most illustrious of the assembled dignitaries, pale-faced from the long and grueling wait for breakfast. I leave you to imagine my state of confusion as I stood at the pulpit, while His Excellency turned a most delicate shade of pink and my treacherous confreres tittered away, safely sequestered in their stalls. I thought that was my time in the seminary over and done with, a mere half a year before my ordination. Fortunately, the good bishop was of a merciful bent, making a point of seeking me out after the liturgy and solemnly assuring me, in that guileless manner of his: ‘It was a weighty sermon. You will make a fine priest.’”

“I was consoled, though for the remaining six months of my formation was the object of some anonymous wag’s poetic mockery: ‘Sing, muse, of the preacher logorrhoeic / Whose strain sired the plaint borborygmic’, ran the first two lines—thankfully the passage of years has consigned memory of the rest to oblivion, and the unhappy author to the grave. But child, why bring up all this ancient history?”

“I didn’t.”

“Hm? But there must be some reason why this sordid incident recurred to my mind… Ah! It’s this: know that our Goddess is, like all women, fond of seeing her champions jump through hoops—Non est ad astra mollis e terris via, as the saying goes. There’s a lesson in that for you.”

“To avoid preaching overly long sermons during fasting seasons?” Zephyrin asked, politely baffled.

“No! Well, yes. But principally I refer to the Great Lady. Though she wields lightning over our heads, and tries us mortals sorely, be sure that as she does so, a smile graces her lips.”

“…I’ll keep that in mind,” said Zephyrin, thinking that despite whatever hopes the abbé might entertain of his one day receiving the tonsure, in the end he would face trials of an altogether different nature—on the battlefield, namely.

“Good!” said the priest, suspecting nothing of his young charge’s thoughts. And then, he suddenly exclaimed: “Ah! Here we are!”

Zephyrin looked up and saw, emblazoned on a dull green wooden plaque, and in a garish yellow script curling at the edges like tendrils of smoke:

APOLINARY’S APOTHECARY

The shop-front was embedded in a discreet, rundown two story building, and as he saw it Zephyrin told himself that he wouldn’t be surprised in the least if the ground floor were the shop proper, and the second story the proprietor’s shabby lodgings. It was a far cry from the respectable establishment Zephyrin had conjured in his mind’s eye when the priest had told him of, ‘an old family connection’; what manner of business could a Valensi have here, regardless of his station in life?

Nonetheless, the priest entered, as did Zephyrin after a moment’s hesitation.