Chapter 12

Kosha merely stared at her, blinking in silence.

He had heard of such things, of course, but only in fairy tales. There were stories of magical potions that compelled a person to fall in love with the first face they saw upon opening their eyes, along with tragic romances in which someone swallowed the wrong concoction and met a thoroughly miserable end. Surely Melda had not come all this way merely to gossip about ridiculous children’s stories.

Slowly shaking his head, he answered, “Sorry, but I don’t know anything about them.”

Melda’s expression soured at once. “You don’t? You know exactly what I mean. The kind that makes you fall in love with the first person you see after drinking it.”

Her biting tone suggested that he could not possibly be so ignorant, and a spark of irritation pricked at him.

“That sort of thing only exists in fairy tales.”

“No, it doesn’t,” she shot back. “They’re all the rage at the castle these days.”

That made even less sense.

Kosha entered the castle only when he wanted to steal a fleeting glimpse of Lucien or needed to sell his goods to the kitchen staff. He possessed neither the silver tongue nor the easy sociability required to make friends, so his complete ignorance of the latest royal fashions was hardly surprising. Melda, on the other hand, went everywhere and seemed to hear absolutely everything.

“How?” he asked.

She looked at him as though he were being deliberately obtuse. “What do you mean, how? Obviously, no one sells them openly, but every apothecary deals in them under the table.”

Apothecaries sold things like that?

The claim still made no logical sense. Categorically speaking, was a love potion not a distinct form of magic?

Furthermore, the distribution of magical potions in Izeland was strictly restricted by law. Admittedly, Kosha was in no position to condemn anyone too harshly for selling them in secret, considering he did exactly the same thing. His own potions, however, were so trivial that they scarcely differed from ordinary herbal remedies. Something like a love potion was another matter entirely.

That shouldn’t be allowed, should it?

“I want one too, but they’re ridiculously expensive.” Melda twirled a lock of dark hair around her finger. “So many people are trying to buy them right now that the sellers can charge whatever they please.”

Kosha let out an awkward laugh and rubbed the back of his neck. Selling a few minor potions had improved his circumstances slightly, but he still lived from hand to mouth, scraping through one day after another.

“I’m not exactly well-off myself, so…”

“You idiot. Who asked you for money?” Melda snapped.

Perhaps embarrassed by her own sudden outburst, she quickly lowered her voice.

“I’m asking you to make one for me.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

Her dark eyes remained steady, filled with an absolute certainty that Kosha found deeply unsettling. He refused at once.

“I can’t do that. I already told you, I don’t even know what a love potion is.”

Melda refused to accept his answer. “What do you mean, you don’t know? Are you pretending to be coy? You told my brother you couldn’t heal him at first, too.”

She was unquestionably made of sterner stuff than Kosha, with a terrifyingly natural talent for threatening people.

Planting her hands on her hips, she demanded, “Are you really going to act like this? Fine. Then I won’t help you anymore when Veorn bullies you.”

Veorn was the blacksmith’s eldest son and Melda’s older brother. He frequently picked physical fights with Kosha for no reason whatsoever, and perhaps once or twice out of every ten violent encounters, Melda actually stepped in to stop him.

Did that even count as helping?

While Kosha hesitated, she abruptly changed tactics.

Her expression softened. “I’m not going to use it for anything strange. It’s because of my lover.”

It was a widely known secret that Melda was seeing a man who lived in the castle.

Everyone knew except her gruff father.

Kosha did not know the mystery man’s identity, but persistent rumors claimed that he held a highly respectable position and possessed considerable wealth. As the most beautiful woman in the village, it was hardly surprising that Melda had caught the eye of someone of exceptional standing.

“I want to get married now, too, but he hasn’t shown any sign of proposing.” She released a dramatic sigh. “What else am I supposed to do? Lately, he’s been acting so uncertain.”

Then, as though words alone were not enough to sway him, genuine tears welled in her eyes, bright and glittering.

She intends to drug her lover into proposing? Isn’t that fundamentally wrong?

A host of ethical objections swept through Kosha’s mind, but Melda was utterly relentless. For three grueling days and three sleepless nights, she followed him throughout the village, veering wildly between vicious threats and honeyed cajolery until she wore him down completely.

At last, he raised both hands in surrender. “All right, I understand. I’ll try, but I can’t promise anything.”

It was the most guarded concession he could make, though Melda appeared to ignore the part about there being no promises whatsoever. At the very least, she stopped hounding him the following day, allowing him a much-needed breath of relief.

The only remaining problem was figuring out how he was supposed to make the damned potion.

A potion that makes someone fall in love with the first person they see after waking. How could that possibly work?

More importantly, what actually was love?

Love was hardly a suitable subject for a single, fixed spell. It possessed neither physical substance nor any clear, measurable criteria. If a hundred people were asked to define it, Kosha suspected they would offer a hundred entirely different answers.

Perhaps two hundred.

Perhaps a thousand.

During the short course of his life, he had encountered far more things that were decidedly not love than things that truly were. Most of his dealings with other people had been its very opposite. He had never courted anyone, never taken a lover, and remained entirely ignorant of love’s authentic nature.

After a long and agonizing period of reflection, the first person who came to mind was Lucien.

Ever since the day Lucien had stooped to retrieve an apple Kosha had dropped, he had desperately pursued every scrap of news he could find about the man.

How many years had passed since that brief encounter?

He had never grown tired of it. If anything, his quiet affection had deepened with every passing year.

Lucien was a noble, radiant figure who seemed endlessly brilliant, untouched by even the faintest blemish.

The mere thought of him sent Kosha’s heart fluttering wildly. On those exceptionally rare days when he managed to glimpse Lucien in person, every mundane task somehow went more smoothly afterward. The cheap meals he threw together merely to silence his growling stomach tasted a little better. His geese behaved more obediently. Even the painful wounds he suffered while working hurt less and seemed to heal faster.

Wasn’t love something like that?

He considered the complicated question as logically as he could.

What separated loving someone from simply liking them more than anyone else? Was love the rush of happiness that filled your chest whenever you thought of them? Was it that sudden surge of energy, the feeling that even the worst parts of life were worth enduring, accompanied by a burning desire to try a little harder simply because that one person existed?

In the end, Kosha used those precise feelings as the potion’s core ingredients.

There were several minor complications.

What conditions should trigger the spell when the drinker wakes and sees the first person? What if they somehow drink it with their eyes open? What does drinking even mean in exact magical terms? Does the spell activate when the liquid touches the tongue, when it passes down the throat, or only after it settles fully in the stomach?

Eventually, despite wrestling with each of those questions, he managed to produce something.

He infused it with the finest emotions he understood, along with the faintest trace of impulse and unyielding certainty. Since his potions were never particularly powerful, he sincerely doubted the resulting concoction could be dangerous.

It was only a mild, amateur potion.

Although he could not guarantee that it would somehow lead to a marriage proposal, it should not, at the very least, seriously disrupt Melda’s existing romance.

“Thank you. Thank you so much!”

Melda was ecstatic. Seizing Kosha by the head, she planted a firm kiss directly on his cheek.

His long-neglected hair was badly tangled, and his unruly bangs nearly reached the bridge of his nose, so her eager lips landed mostly against his unwashed hair. Even so, Kosha recoiled in absolute horror and scrubbed frantically at his face.

“Wh-what are you doing?” he stammered. “You have a lover!”

Melda burst into bright laughter at his panicked expression. “What does my lover have to do with anything? It was only a kiss. You’re hilarious.”

Still chuckling, she tilted her head.

“Is that why Veorn keeps picking on you?”

The question came so abruptly that it made no sense to him.

Melda carefully tucked the potion away, then lifted her chin with supreme satisfaction. “Once I become a noblewoman and move into the castle, I won’t forget what you did for me.”

Kosha had begged her frantically not to do anything of the sort. More importantly, he pleaded with her to keep his involvement an absolute secret.

She did not appear to listen very closely to either warning.

By then, however, Kosha had grown somewhat numb to people disregarding his advice completely. Nothing disastrous had happened so far, so he foolishly convinced himself that this time would be no different.

That was the end of the matter.

He had no particular reason to see Melda afterward, and before long, the suffocating daily struggle to earn a living swallowed him whole once more.

The entire incident quickly faded from his thoughts.

“How on earth did Lucien end up with that…?”

Kosha released a heavy sigh and scrubbed his face with his wet hands. He needed to find Melda first thing tomorrow morning. Although he had successfully reversed the magical effects this time, the entire situation could easily have ended in disaster.

Then there was the far more dangerous problem looming over him.

Several high-ranking people inside the castle now knew that Kosha was a mage. They had released him for the moment, but what would happen next? Lucien might have shown him an unexpected measure of mercy, but could Kosha truly expect the same treatment from everyone around him?

He already knew all too well how persistently cruel powerful people could be.

I should never use magic again. I would rather starve to death.

A moment later, crushing doubt followed.

But what if I have no choice? What if the blacksmith’s youngest child develops another terrible fever?

A hard knot of anxiety weighed beneath his ribs like a bout of vicious indigestion. Hoping to wash away the tension and recover some fragment of his shattered composure, Kosha splashed lukewarm water over his face.

Then something felt distinctly wrong.

His hands stopped against his face. Slowly, his wet fingertips traced the curve of his cheek.

A mage’s skin was far more fragile than an ordinary human’s. The cheek that had been struck so violently, without the protection of a magical barrier, should still have been badly swollen. Contact with the bathwater should have made the bruised flesh sting.

Pushing his wet hair away from his face, Kosha stared down at his reflection in the still surface of the tub.

The cheek that should have been an ugly, swollen red was perfectly smooth.

“Uh…”

Bewildered, he lowered his gaze to his hands.

Water pooled in his cupped palms, shimmering with a strange, pulsing green light. With careful fingers, he peeled the soiled bandage away from his fingertips. The nail that had been brutally torn loose, leaving the flesh beneath it ragged, had been entirely replaced. A smooth new nail sat firmly in its rightful place, perfectly formed.

“Huh?”

He quickly examined his shins beneath the water. Every patch of skin that should have been deeply mottled with purple bruises was flawless.

“Why… Why is this happening?”

Why is it leaking out like this?

Instinctively, Kosha curled tightly in on himself and wrapped both arms around his naked body. He was not a cracked gourd, however, and no matter how firmly he held himself, there was no way to stop the raw magic pouring violently from him with his bare hands.

The bathwater rapidly filled with the blinding light streaming from his body until the entire wooden tub glowed with brilliant radiance.

Within that intense light, his body continued to mend itself.

The dark bruises and scrapes vanished from his skin. The angry inflammation beneath them subsided, followed closely by the painful swelling in his ankles and knees. The lingering pain in his neck and back gradually loosened its stubborn grip until it disappeared entirely.

Kosha had never once used magic to heal his own body.

Compared with the immense effort it demanded, healing magic did little more than accelerate the body’s natural recovery. He had never possessed enough raw mana to waste merely for the sake of recovering a few days sooner.

Mana was only power.

In principle, it could not act independently of its owner’s will.

Yet the dense mana now surrounding Kosha behaved exactly like a living, breathing creature. It flowed around him with fluid purpose, repeatedly repairing his broken body before sinking seamlessly back into his core of its own accord.

It felt no different from suddenly discovering that his arms and legs had begun moving without his permission.

“Why is this happening all of a sudden?”

No one answered.

Kosha thrashed wildly in the glowing bathtub, seized by blind panic and utterly unable to comprehend what was happening to him or how to make the terrifying light stop.

***