Guardians of the Prince

The misty forest felt comfortable.

Or at least, that was my first carefree thought.

The letter said to follow Morio, so I’d blithely followed him, but we’d been walking for a good while now. I didn’t know the way, so it really felt long. How much longer was this going to take?

The prince was getting tired and whining for cuddles, so I picked him up, and a certain nose-twitching smell suddenly brushed past us.

The wind was blowing from the direction in which we were headed, and the aroma on that breeze…

At last, light spilled through the gaps between the trees. There was a wide clearing…

We came out of the woods, and my eyes went wide. I held the prince tight.

“Prince… It’s the ocean!”

This was the tip of a headland. The place I was standing seemed to be some sort of wide ledge, several meters up along a sheer cliff. Below us was a calm sea. The aroma I’d smelled earlier was the smell of seawater.

So this was an island? Or a peninsula? I could faintly see the other shore, but I still had no clue what was going on.

When I turned around, I could see a large tree – the giant one that had become host to the treehouse – towering above the forest. There was a rainbow over it, and for a minute it looked like a scene from a children’s fairy tale.

Suddenly, Morio touched my left hand. The hard pads of his paws were pink with black spots, kind of charming. To be honest, I’m a cat person. I couldn’t take it how cute his paws were.

He gently lifted my arm. I let him do it, and when my left arm was up in front of me, I could see the line of faint green letters around my wrist. This was the same tattoo I looked at every day, but suddenly it lit up and unraveled, and separated from my arm.

“Wha- What?”

The unraveled characters danced in a winding spiral, like I was a rhythmic gymnast in a ribbon competition, and traced a circle on the ground.

One end stayed connected to my wrist, and there was a sensation of something tugging me, and I stumbled forward into the circle.

This feeling of being pulled– was this the same thing I felt the day of Koaya’s wedding!?

My world filled with a bright light, like being too close to a camera flash, and I scrunched my eyes closed.

I waited until the light behind my eyelids disappeared to open them again, and found I had sunk down on top of a carpet in a large room, with the prince still in my arms.

There was a huge window that reached from floor to ceiling. White curtains had been gathered at either edge, and the room was bright. One wall was taken up with a line of large bookcases.

And then right in front of me was a transparent globe. It was at least three meters in diameter, and was that… water? The globe was made of floating water?

Something about it felt familiar… Like I could almost remember a couple of human silhouettes swaying in the water.

I got a bit dizzy, and looked away from the water globe, directing my eyes towards the window…

…Where a man was changing his clothes.

Or rather, he’d been completely naked, and was just putting on his clothes, turned away from me and pulling up his pants. Safe. Wait, what?

He stood back up, and I realized he was at least a head taller than me, with relatively thin arms, and a firm, muscular back. He was wearing a rough-textured jacket with a stand-up collar directly over that back… He didn’t even have a shirt on under it, that was a little sexy.

No, that is not what I meant! Why am I staring at him so intently!

I realized my cheeks were burning, and quickly averted my gaze. Eventually, he must have finished changing, because I heard him walk over and come to a stop near me.

The prince, still in my arms, pointed a finger over my shoulder at the man.

“Mo-oh!”

“Huh?”

I turned back around myself, in shock.

I could see the man wasn’t remotely Japanese. He might have been about my age… He had sharp cheekbones, and a stoic air about him.

His short hair was the color of dried grass, and his eyes were a calm, dark green color. Those eyes did look familiar…

“Morio?” I asked hesitantly.

He silently, slowly, nodded. The crispness about his eyes softened as he smiled.

Suddenly, I heard someone clear their throat.

“You must be quite exhausted.”

I turned at the sound of the voice to find another man standing in front of the open double doors.

He was even taller than Morio – I guess it was Morio? – and the word lanky fit him to a T.

He was probably a little older than me. His long, bluish-grey hair was tied casually at the base of his skull, and his golden-brown eyes looked directly at me through silver-framed glasses. He was wearing a white coat, something more akin to a chef’s outfit than a doctor’s.

“Come this way for now. We’ve prepared a light meal.”

His words were polite, but something about his gestures felt a little sloppy.

Follow this person and it’ll all be okay? Well, I’d followed him this far already. And the prince had his fingers in his mouth and was drooling all over them, so he was clearly hungry.

We left the room, walked down a hall of well-polished planks, and went into the room next door. There was a stone fireplace, and a long, thin coffee table in front of an upholstered sofa. Judging by the size of the room and the length of the hallway, this had to be some kind of mansion, but it felt like the furnishings were all for practical use, rather than decoration. Actually, it made a good impression on me.

The coffee table was set up with tea supplies, and plates of something that looked like muffins.

“Manmah!”

The prince immediately toddled over. Ah crap, his hands must be a mess from touching every little thing as we walked through the forest.

“Um, we’d like to wash our hands?”

Something about the words I’d just said felt uncomfortable, and I reflexively put my hand to my lips.

What language had I spoken just now?

“Ah, hearing my words must have turned on the switch,” the long-haired man said. “It seems we can listen and speak to one another.” He acted as if it was all perfectly natural. What part was I even supposed to ask about first?

Besides, even as it was happening, I had the feeling that the words this man was speaking weren’t Japanese either.

Half in shock, I followed him into some sort of galley area that was attached to the room, and washed our hands in the ceramic sink.

We returned to the other room and I took the seat I was offered on the sofa. The prince sat himself down right next to me and started in on a muffin. They’d even given him some juice. He was making himself right at home.

Morio – I guess – got down on one knee beside the prince. It was the perfect image of a knight, but the posture stretched his back muscles taught, which was quite a sight to see.

Meeting other people, and suddenly being at least some distance from the prince… I was a bit scared, but things seemed to be okay for the moment, so I was relieved.

Even so, the fact that everyone else was a man did make me nervous. So, I caught the wedding bouquet, and came to another world to meet someone new? I mean, I wasn’t bored with the guys on Earth yet.

What am I even saying, how old do I think I am? Well, not that age has anything to do with it.

“Well then, I suppose I’ll give you the general outline of things.”

The man in the glasses had a cool, refreshing voice, and my wandering thoughts came back to reality. It had been just under six months since I’d come to this world, at least by my notion of time. Finally, I was going to get an explanation.

“My name is Lahzt, and this man you’ve been calling Morio is Kahzam.”

Morio– No, Mr Kahzam nodded his hello.

So, he transformed somehow into that panda-creature? Was it magic or something?

“Lahzt, Sir, Kahzam, Sir…”

“There’s no need to be so formal. There are no hierarchical relationships between us.”

So he said, but it was basically impossible for me to be that informal with people I’d just met.

I wasn’t sure what to do, so I looked at Mr Lahzt… Man, when long-legged people sit down, it really accentuates how long their legs are. Seeing his knee up so high like that really brings it home how irrationally long his legs are.

“What should we call you?” Mr Lahzt asked, and I thought about it a minute before I answered.

“Call me Mami, please. The little one calls me that already, Mami-chan– well, Maa-tan, I supposed, but…”

Actually, that was just a coincidence, but oh well.

I’d taught the prince the name Mami, rather than my actual name, Koume. Nanao had called me Mommy-chan when she was little.

So I made a spur of the moment decision. I didn’t know how much these people already knew about me, but they wouldn’t get anything out of me, not if I could help it.

This was the era of personal data protection after all, it was only natural. There was no telling what they would do with it. I was normally a pretty easygoing person, but as an adult woman, I took this area of my life seriously.

Besides, this wasn’t the world I had lived in. I didn’t really know if just giving someone your name was okay.

I’d read a certain world-famous fantasy novel a long time ago, where people usually called each other by nicknames, since if you gave someone your true name they could control you. 1

Yeah, I’d better not tell them my real name… At least until I could learn a little bit more about this world.

“Firstly, this kingdom is called Vio Rizonna,” Mr Lahzt continued. I listened silently. “I imagine it’s not on any map you would recognize. We believe you’ve crossed space and time on your journey here, Mami.”

He just said it out plain. I had vaguely imagined that to be the case, but to hear it so clearly, and so early in the conversation was something else.

I’d thought the prince was a foreign baby when I’d first seen him, but I was the foreigner here… Or rather, the other-worlder maybe…

“Shall we talk about the child first? It’s not an uncommon story…”

And with that introduction, Mr Lahzt related an extremely brief tale, the contents of which are as follows:

The king of Vio Rizonna had two wives.

The first bore him a daughter, but wasn’t blessed with any other children. The tradition in this kingdom is that a male inherits the throne, so the king then married his second wife, a young woman whom they expected would give birth to a boy.

But this second wife also had but one child, also a daughter. And so, when the first wife’s daughter came of age, she was married to a man from inside the royal family, and that man was named the crown prince.

But just about that same time, the king’s second wife became pregnant again.

And so began a complicated courtly intrigue. The Crown Prince’s household was terrified – what would happen if the king’s second wife gave birth to a boy, would he take over as crown prince? The king stepped in to repeatedly assure them that he had no intention of taking the current crown prince’s position away from him, but they wouldn’t listen.

The king’s second wife had come from an ordinary family, rather than royalty, so she didn’t have many supporters. Eventually it got to the point where there were whispers she was in danger of being assassinated.

And of course, even if she was able to safely give birth, the child’s life would be in danger. In fact, the villains had even gone so far as to put in their own candidate up for the new baby’s nursemaid, and even after careful screening, she’d managed to get her name on a shortlist, so when she was discovered, the candidate search had to start over from scratch right before the baby was due.

The second wife never had any such ambitions. She’d always been in the first wife’s camp, and felt that the throne rightfully belonged to the daughter’s husband, but the king’s first wife refused to believe her. If the second wife’s child was safely born and grew up healthy, he wouldn’t have any need of the throne, and yet everyone was still afraid of him.

As the second wife grew nearer and nearer to giving birth, she started to feel driven into a corner.

“I think you’ve realized this already, but the child the king’s second wife gave birth to is this child, the one you call Prince,” Mr Lahzt said.

Perhaps surprised to suddenly find all the adults eyes on him, the prince moved those deep blue eyes from one to the other of us, the remnants of the muffin still stuck to his face, and suddenly grinned.

“Yum!”

“So, he really is a prince then,” I muttered, and the other two shifted their gaze to me, questioning looks on both their faces.

I explained that the word ‘prince’ meant just what he’d turned out to be– ‘the son of a king.’ Both of them were of course surprised.

I explained that I really hadn’t had any idea that he was actually of royal blood, and that in my country the word didn’t necessarily have to refer to someone of the king’s family, it just implied that the boy in question was of noble birth, and that doting parents often adopted it as a term of address for their sons. They indicated they understood, but they still seemed confused.

“I don’t mean to change the subject, but while all this was going on, I’d been researching an epidemic.”

Mr Lahzt was gradually losing his crisp way of speaking as the explanations went on. Ah, I thought, this is where I get mixed up in it.

“I was searching for a medicine that would be effective against a disease that affects some of our livestock. We used to extract a certain ingredient from a flower that grows here, and it was effective, but it’s become less so lately. So, I put out some investigatory threads, using those flowers as an intermediary.”

“Investigatory threads?”

“Right. These.”

Mr Lahzt held up the back of his left hand and put it in front of me. He rolled up his sleeve to reveal a line of letters wrapped around his wrist like a tattoo. Their color was a little stronger than the ones on my arm.

His muscles lit up with the letters, and when he flexed them, something that reminded me of a blood vessel ran up the back of his hand. It continued out into the open air, and kept going.

“Wow…”

I looked around. The tip of the glowing thread was melting away in the open air, the fact that I couldn’t see where they ended made it feel like the threads were somehow spreading out over the whole wide area.

So Mr Lahzt was some kind of physician? Or a mage? A scholar?

He certainly did project a professorial air. The glasses suited him perfectly, and he did seem like he’d be the popular brainiac type if he’d lived in my world. Maybe he was a married man, that would make him even cooler.

“It appears that while I was looking for a more effective flower, my threads found a flower in the world where you live. Your world and this one must be near one another, spatially speaking.”

I had indeed finally come into the story, so I leaned forward a little. Mr Lazzt then leaned back a little.

“Maa-tan!”

The prince must not have liked how engrossed I was in the conversation, because he tugged on my hand.

“Sorry, we’re talking about something really important. Go play with Morio for a while?”

I passed the prince off to Morio. Well, to Mr Kahzam… I just automatically thought of him as Morio. Well, it was fine, this conversation was more important right now.

Mr Kahzam turned his attention to the prince without any hesitation, and the two of them started playing with the cloth ball I’d made in the tree house.

Mr Lahzt cleared his throat and then dove back in. “All this is to say, that when I pulled my thread back to get that flower, you ended up coming with it, since the bouquet was in your hands.”

He was after the flower!? The bouquet from my sister’s wedding? And I just happened to get stuck in the net when he reeled it in?

I mean, I certainly did recall gripping that bouquet quite tightly. It was important to me.

“Some cut flowers huh… You couldn’t just take some out of the ground somewhere?”

It didn’t really matter either way, but maybe because it was the first real question I’d asked, Mr Lahzt gave me a proper answer anyway.

“Analyzing the cut flowers should serve my purpose. And besides, you were… engaged in some sort of ceremony, weren’t you? The flowers were being used as part of that? My abilities are easier to use under ceremonial circumstances.”

“Is that right…”

I mostly felt weak, but somewhere in a corner of my heart, I was kind of relieved too.

Thank god it hadn’t been my sister. Koaya had just gotten married, she was on her way to being properly happy, if she’d been yanked into another world, alone, as a literal hanger-on to a bouquet, that would just be too much.

And thank god it hadn’t been Nanao! An elementary school student getting sucked into a whole other world and made to care for a baby for six months by herself, that would have been beyond harsh. Honestly, I’m glad it was me.

To be thinking along those lines, to find a little bit of happiness inside one giant unhappiness, I really am a bit of a Pollyanna.

I wondered if it really was alright to be so optimistic, but Mr Lahzt kept talking.

“You were weak from your journey through space and time, and you remained unconscious for a while. So I put you in the Shu-ii that you saw in the other room. So you could adjust to this world through the water in that globe. It was through that process that the local language… shall we say, moved into your head.” Mr Lahzt was choosing his words carefully.

“So in short, I learned them in my sleep, these words,” I summarized. So I did have the general gist of this language.

I’d seen the term occasionally in newspaper adverts, hymnopedia, and had always wondered if it could really work. Of course, when someone said they learned something in their sleep in my world, they usually meant something a little different. The equipment, if I could call it that, in this world was seriously advanced… What had he called that globe of water, a Shu-ii?

Wait, though. How had I read the letters in that note? I felt like if it was even remotely possible to learn kanji in your sleep, I would have seen something about it in Japan of all places, but I never had. I’d have to ask next time.

“Getting back to the topic at hand, though… This child.”

Mr Lahzt lifted his hand a bit, and casually pointed at the prince.

Mm? Was that a ring on Mr Lahzt’s left ring finger? Oh, I hadn’t noticed before, but Mr Kahzam had one too. Were they both married?

Wait wait, this was a totally other world. They were bound to have different customs.

“His Highness and his second wife consulted me before the birth, and I recommended you as the child’s nurse, in order to protect him.”

My attention snapped back to the conversation.

“Nurse? Like a wetnurse, like someone who offers their breasts to the baby?”

“No…”

“Yeah, absolutely not.”

Silence. A little bit of awkward silence.

Although, hold on. There had been milk at the tree house, of course they weren’t looking for a wetnurse, what was I just blurting out the word breasts for…

I cleared my throat. “Ah, you mean as in, someone to raise the child, in place of the mother, yes. But, uh, why me?”

“For one thing, you’re a completely separate third party, with no connection to the fight over the succession. There’s really no one in this world who doesn’t have some stake in it.”

Maybe because I’d asked so directly, Mr Lahzt answered me unreservedly, adjusting his glasses.

“So then, why wouldn’t you have explained the whole situation before… Ah…”

The reason suddenly came to mind, and I had to agree.

“If you made the whole explanation beforehand, maybe I would have insisted it had nothing to do with me and I didn’t want to get wrapped up in it, so you threw us together without any explanation at all, and encouraged me to take care of him out of some maternal instinct, is that it?”

Mr Lahzt lifted an eyebrow slightly, and nodded. “Thank you for coming to that conclusion so quickly. We don’t have anyone else, so if you had refused it would have caused us some trouble,” he said, and for the first time, looked away.

“Even if it was an accident, I was the one who brought you here, and against your will too. And then I proceeded to take advantage of you, and coerce you into the task without a shred of explanation. I do truly apologize.”

He bowed his head a little. “I can’t imagine you’ll forgive me, but I am honestly sorry.”

I heaved a single massive sigh. “I see. Well, it’s fine already, I guess.”

Mr Lahzt and Mr Kahzam both looked at me with their eyes wide.

“Well– I mean, not forgiving you isn’t really going to solve anything. Holding a grudge against someone is just pointless anyway. And I didn’t really think of it as forced labor to begin with. So, I forgive you already.”

“That’s a rather long view of the situation.”

“I guess so.”

An adult woman goes through all kinds of things. Bearing grudges against people, and having grudges born against them. That was precisely why having feelings for someone and then hating myself for it was just…

Unpleasant memories swam to the surface of my mind, and I rushed to move the conversation forward.

“Is it possible to get me back to my original world?”

“There are no previous examples of this happening, so I honestly don’t know. Of course, I have been looking for a way.”

Mr Lahzt didn’t sugar coat his words. He spoke very plainly, and maybe a little coldly. Maybe that was just his personality though, I guess. He’d apologized properly, so I knew he was sincere.

Still though, he really didn’t know? Of course, considering the circumstances surrounding my coming here at all, the possibilities didn’t look great.

I bit my lip, and sure enough, Mr Lahzt said the same thing I’d been thinking. “The one thing for sure is that we can’t use the same method that brought you here.”

“You reeled me in easily enough.”

That was a bit nasty of me. Mr Lahzt swallowed hard. Forgive me this much, at least.

At any rate, with no one in my world to reel me back, there was no way I could get home by the same method. And there was always the possibility I’d lose consciousness again if I crossed space and time.

At this rate, I might never get home, I thought, and the instant I did, I felt a tight pain in my chest.

I kept it in check and got back to the conversation.

“You said this was one reason, so was there some other reason to make me his nurse?” I asked.

Mr Lahzt continued. “The other reason lies in where you’ve been living. It’s called the Garden of Stars, and it’s said that it overflows with spiritual energy, that it lends power to living creatures.”

“Power?”

“Yeah. For example, the power to speed up a being’s growth. If a child goes there, like this one did, they develop more quickly than normal.”

Ah, okay. So not every baby in this world develops so quickly then.

“Not long after the king’s second wife gave birth, we declared that the child had been stillborn, and he was secretly moved to the Garden of Stars. With you as his nurse, of course. And so, we hoped that if he lived there for a while, he would develop quickly, and when he eventually returned…”

“Even if anybody did get suspicious and wonder if you’d just hidden the prince away somewhere, they’d see how much bigger he was than he was supposed to be and figure it couldn’t be him.”

After all, in Japan anyway, it wasn’t until a kid was maybe six months old that you finally started him on baby food.

Mr Lahzt once again raised an eyebrow in response to my words, and nodded.

“But if anyone knew that he’d been raised in a place where he would develop quickly, wouldn’t they just be suspicious anyway? Once they guessed that he’d been taken to the Garden of Stars and raised there?” I countered. If the prince was to remain safe, clearly he would have to stay here.

“Certainly anyone with any intelligence knows about that place. But adults of this world aren’t allowed in there. When they try to enter, they’re repelled.”

“Wait, but I went in there. How did you know someone from another world would be able to get in?”

“The fact that I was able to reel you in… or rather, summon you? At any rate, it was because of the Garden of Stars.”

What was with that question mark? He didn’t need to go out of his way to use such spectacular words.

“I thought you just said you wouldn’t be able to go in there.”

“Not in human form, no. What’s why… Like Kahzam, he turned into a different kind of creature and was able to travel there. The Garden also amplifies certain powers, such as my investigatory threads. I was granted permission to enter the Garden of Stars, to use it to search for the flowers I mentioned.”

It tarnished my idea of him as an intelligent pretty boy a bit, but I suddenly had this image of Mr Lahzt walking around as a massive panda-thing, like Morio. With the glasses still on, of course.

I could feel the corners of my lips turning up, and hurriedly took a sip of tea to cover myself. Ahem.

“Once the child gets to a certain age, and starts speaking human language, that would discount any lingering suspicions of his being raised by people who’d transformed into animals to get into the Garden of Stars. So, we waited until he’d started speaking to bring you out of the Garden.”

Wow, they’d even considered extended scenarios like that, huh. How meticulous. There certainly were stories of kids raised by wolves, even in my world. The prince couldn’t say anything except people’s names yet, but as long as it was just the two of us, he was learning nothing but Japanese. You might say it was exquisite timing.

Mr Lahzt continued. “He’ll be treated as an adopted child, without any place in the line of succession, but still, we’ve made it this far, so I’m hoping we’ll be able to return him to his mother’s side before too much longer.”

The instant I heard those words, my chest started to hurt.

It was true, though. Eventually, the prince would be going home to his true mother.

Seeing how quiet I suddenly was, Mr Lahzt sort of sighed.

“That’s enough for now, you must be exhausted. I’m sure you have more questions, but we’ll stop here for the moment. For now, I’m just glad we made it in time.”

Made it in time?

While the question still rang in my head, Mr Lahzt took an envelope from the seam of his jacket and offered it to me.

“From the king’s second wife, Lady Solamire. Her Highness isn’t able to meet with you right away, so she entrusted me with this letter. She repeatedly asked me to convey her appreciation, and her gratitude for meeting with us directly.”

I meekly accepted the envelope, opened it, and took out the letter.

The letters there looked like an assemblage of hieroglyphs. But just by looking at them, a series of images spread out in my mind.

First, the sensation of a burst of gratitude. And then a mist of apology.

The heartbreak and torture of the moment she’d had to hand the prince off to someone else immediately after giving birth to him.

Her joy when she’d learned through Mr Lahzt that Mr Kahzam was watching over the prince as he developed, that her son was doing fine. Her impatience in wanting to meet the price as soon as possible. And then, again, layer upon layer of her gratitude towards me.

When I came back to myself, I realized I was crying.

I noticed that Mr Kahzam, who was supposed to be playing with the prince, had stiffened up, and I quickly wiped my tears, embarrassed.

Mr Lahzt spoke quietly. “You should rest a little. If there’s anything you’d like to know right away, I can tell you, but…”

Hm. There was just one thing I’d always wondered when we were in the tree house, but I figured there wasn’t much I could do about it at the time.

Balling my hands in my lap, I screwed up my courage and asked.

“Um… What happened to our kitchen waste?”

“Your what?”

“When we were staying in the treehouse, our kitchen waste. I figured I could use it as compost at first, so I went a little ways into the forest and dug a hole and buried it, but was that alright? I’m just kind of worried, since that turns out to be some kind of sacred place. I just didn’t know what else to do with it… I didn’t want to put it down the toilet and clog it up.”

“I’m sure that was fine.”

I sagged with relief. Thank goodness!

Footnotes

i believe she’s referring to Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series.