Chapter 11

Contrary to Kosha’s fears, his geese remained in excellent condition. If anything, the flock looked even plumper than before.

A dreadful suspicion sank into his stomach. He hurried to investigate the storehouse, only to find it in utter chaos. The birds had torn two full sacks of grain wide open.

While their master had spent days surviving on thin soup and a few bony sardines, the geese had clearly enjoyed a magnificent feast.

Kosha stared at the ruined sacks. “How the hell did they even get the bolt open?”

Oblivious to his glare, the flock flapped their wings and rushed over to welcome him as though they had not seen him in years. Then again, perhaps they were merely delighted that the servant who fed them and cleaned up their shit had finally returned.

Their gluttony had stripped his larder bare, yet Kosha could not bring himself to feel any genuine anger. The money Gosrick had paid him provided enough security to take the sting out of the loss.

After making do with a meager bowl of oatmeal porridge mixed with dried vegetables and a single goose egg, Kosha spent most of the afternoon clearing away the wreckage inside the house.

Maybe I should wash.

The memory of Lucien’s scathing voice surfaced unbidden, condemning him as filthy and foul-smelling. Kosha had never avoided bathing out of sheer laziness, but his face still burned with lingering embarrassment.

A proper mage should at least be capable of keeping himself clean.

The temperature would plunge as soon as the sun disappeared, so he had to finish bathing before the cold settled in. He quickly built a fire and drew water from the well. Since firewood cost good money, a hot bath was a rare luxury he seldom allowed himself. He boiled a single bucket of water, then mixed it with enough cold water to make it lukewarm, just warm enough to keep the chill at bay.

Slender as he was, Kosha could fit inside the cramped old wooden tub only by drawing his knees tightly against his chest. Even so, the rare pleasure of washing lifted his spirits. He eased himself into the water while it still retained some warmth and playfully stirred the surface with one hand.

But how exactly did Lucien end up taking that medicine?

Kosha had first begun making what the villagers called magic potions during the exceptionally brutal winter of the previous year.

The bitter cold had been terrible enough, but the damp was the true enemy. Relentless sleet battered the walls without respite, soaking the hay in the shed until it remained perpetually sodden. Even the hearth fire could do only so much to hold back the chill.

In such wretched conditions, livestock fell ill with frightening ease. Memories of the horrific epidemic from several years earlier still haunted Kosha, and he had sworn to avoid using magic whenever possible. In the end, however, he had no choice. He could not bear to watch his beloved geese die one by one again.

He devised a protective spell intended solely to ward off disease, added traces of warming and dehumidifying magic, mixed the result into their feed, and allowed the flock to eat it. The process sounded far grander than it truly was. Kosha had been ill himself, and his mana reserves had fallen to pitiful levels that winter, forcing him to cobble the spell together entirely by instinct while grasping at whatever fleeting possibilities he could find.

To his utter astonishment, the warming and dehumidifying magic worked.

The geese became astonishingly warm and dry. Heat radiating from their small bodies transformed the perpetually damp shed into a cozy, moisture-free haven. The effect proved so overwhelmingly successful that Kosha eventually abandoned his house altogether and spent the winter sleeping in the shed, clutching his geese for warmth.

Everything would have remained perfect if he had simply stopped there. Osterbeek, however, was a small village where everyone knew everyone else, and no one’s affairs remained private for long. Kosha’s circumstances were no exception. Although the villagers had regarded him as an outsider ever since he settled there at fourteen, they had never hesitated to take a deep interest in his business.

During that savage winter, the pig keeper next door became the first person to grow suspicious after realizing that not a single one of Kosha’s geese had died.

The man refused to let the matter rest. “What the hell? Tell me, what the hell did you do?”

Kosha lowered his gaze. “I just got lucky.”

Vague excuses could carry him only so far. In truth, Kosha had fed the geese the magic potion several more times over the course of the winter, leaving the birds unnaturally healthy.

According to local gossip, the pig keeper lost half his animals that season. Even the surviving piglets fell sick, their fragile lives hanging by a thread. Kosha’s heart grew heavy whenever he saw the small pink creatures writhing miserably in their bedding.

Moreover, he owed the family a debt he could never forget.

During the winter he turned sixteen, shortly after his nanny died and left him utterly alone, Kosha had gone three days without a scrap of food. The pig keeper’s wife saved his life by forcing warm porridge down his throat. She died the following year while giving birth to their fourth child, making it impossible for Kosha to turn his back on the widower now struggling to raise all her children alone.

What he prepared for the pigs was nothing more than a medicinal concoction infused with a weak protective spell, just enough to help their bodies overcome the illness. At such a rudimentary level, it was nearly impossible to determine whether the mixture qualified as actual medicine or a true magic potion. Even so, Kosha remained deeply uneasy and sternly warned the man to keep the treatment secret from everyone else.

Naturally, nothing went according to plan.

After Kosha’s potion successfully saved the remaining pigs, their owner began hounding him with questions. “What the hell are you? Are you some kind of apothecary?”

An apothecary?

If Kosha had possessed that level of training, he would have earned his living preparing medicine instead of tending a flock of geese. The work would have been infinitely easier on his fragile body, and the pay would certainly have been better.

A mage’s potion and an apothecary’s medicine were entirely different things. Apothecaries understood the specific properties of herbs and combined them accordingly. Mages used herbs as well, but their natural properties mattered far less. They served primarily as vessels capable of holding magical power.

Kosha used herbs simply because they grew everywhere and were remarkably easy to handle. A mage of sufficient ability could just as easily craft potions using animals, minerals, or even human beings as the core ingredients.

Although Kosha could wield magic instinctively by virtue of having been born a mage, he knew next to nothing about pharmacy and could not bring himself to pretend otherwise. He fully intended to keep his mouth shut and endure the man’s questions, but the pig keeper’s tongue proved far too loose.

Word swept through the tiny village in the blink of an eye.

Before Kosha understood what was happening, the villagers had transformed him into an apothecary with the power to heal animals. He desperately tried to correct the misunderstanding, insisting that it was nothing like that, but no one listened. If anything, his frantic denials only made matters worse.

A desperate villager cornered him. “I’ll pay you, all right? Can’t you heal people too?”

“I’m really not an apothecary.” Kosha shook his head frantically. “I don’t know how. I swear. I’ve never treated a person, and…”

“What’s so different about people and beasts?” The villager cut him off. “I said I’d pay you! People are dying, and you’re just going to stand there and watch? Look at him. That little boy is dying!”

Only a few months passed before someone physically seized Kosha by the collar.

He had been born with magic, yet he had never received a proper education in how to use it. Because of that profound ignorance, he failed to understand how desperate and greedy ordinary people could become when confronted with a power that seemed so close to a miracle.

The blacksmith, easily one of the most influential men in the village, arrived in the dead of night with his feverish young son clutched tightly in his massive arms. To a man of his stature, driving a mere gooseherd like Kosha out of Osterbeek would have been a trivial matter.

“You little shit.”

Grief and fury twisted the blacksmith’s face as his crushing grip tightened around Kosha’s collar. “You can do it, but you’re refusing, aren’t you? If anything happens to my boy, I’m not letting you walk away from this. I’m telling you right now, I won’t stand by and do nothing!”

Fear closed a tight fist around Kosha’s throat. He lacked the confidence to leave Osterbeek and begin his life again in some unfamiliar place, and the blacksmith’s thick, calloused hands terrified him.

He had no choice.

Kosha used magic to treat the boy, and by some miracle, the child’s fever broke overnight. His eyes fluttered open, and his awareness returned fully to the waking world. Fortunately, the illness had not been particularly severe to begin with.

Kosha vehemently insisted that the recovery had been nothing more than luck. In its own peculiar way, that was true, but the villagers remained entirely unconvinced. The people of that remote hamlet could not fully comprehend that he had used magic, yet one fact became undeniable: Kosha was no ordinary gooseherd.

Naturally, his entire life began to change.

Despite his gruff manner, the blacksmith was not a bad man. The moment his son recovered, he promptly paid Kosha the promised reward. It was hardly a king’s fortune, but to someone whose heart had always been pinched by the meager earnings from goose eggs and feathers, the sum felt unsettlingly substantial.

That was exactly how it began.

Kosha started making and selling small magic potions, knowing there was little demand for anything grand in such a tiny, isolated village. He crafted only trivial things, the sort of basic concoctions he could manage even with his jagged mana and clumsy control.

He brewed a mixture that helped livestock breed a little more successfully, a tonic that eased an elder’s aching knees on a rainy afternoon, and a remedy for the local fool who had drunk himself senseless the night before. He attempted nothing more complicated than that.

Things continued peacefully until the blacksmith’s eldest daughter, Melda, came to see him.

“Hey, Gooseherd.”

Melda stood in his doorway, a mass of curly black hair cascading all the way to her waist. Around Kosha’s age and widely acknowledged as a striking beauty, she was completely unlike her father. Bold, highly sociable, and exceptionally well connected, she and Kosha knew each other, though they had never been particularly close.

Her visit was unexpected.

What she asked was even more so.

“Have you ever heard of a love potion?”