The Blacksmith and the Mage, Birds of a Feather (5)

Some time after we began living this way—me teaching Kaushuman smithing and him teaching me magic—a letter and a package arrived for me.

The letter had been delivered by a traveling adventurer, and its sender was Irena, an elf I knew.

It was a report on her current situation.

First, as for the situation in the Kingdom of Rudoria, the royal family had apparently executed all the nobles responsible, declaring that the cause of the turmoil lay with the nobles who had enslaved the elves.

They must have thought that otherwise, they wouldn't be able to quell the criticism from the people, who were frightened by the earth tremors.

However, since the nobles had acted on their own and the incident had nothing to do with the kingdom, no apology was offered to the elves.

Well, the Kingdom of Rudoria had its dignity, so I had expected them to be unable to bow their heads and apologize.

The royal family had probably realized that the elves had disappeared from the country, but they likely had no idea what the consequences would be.

The change would probably come in three to five years.

By then, the elves who had emigrated would have grown accustomed to life in their new homes, so not all of them would want to return to the forest that had changed.

In other words, it was already an unavoidable future that the forests of the Kingdom of Rudoria would become monster lairs.

It was a very unfortunate situation, but it had already been decided that the elves would not act without a formal apology from the royal family.

If the history of the Kingdom of Rudoria did not clearly record that the matter had become serious enough to warrant an apology from the royal family, a similar incident could happen again.

That was why it would probably be nearly ten years, or perhaps even longer, before I could go and visit my sword master, Kaeha.

But setting aside that enormous matter, which was beyond my control, what mattered to me was what came next.

Among the elves who had been rescued from slavery, there was one—and only one—who had become pregnant.

Though I didn't know whether that was really the right way to put it.

Whether to regard the child as a blessing or to see it as a misfortune in light of how it had come to be wasn't something I had any right to weigh in on.

The possibility of a child being born between a human and an elf was apparently quite low, so if possible, I wanted them to regard it as a blessing. But I knew that was a naïve, idealistic notion divorced from reality.

Elves, like high elves, raise their children as children of the settlement.

Consequently, the affection between parents and children was inevitably weaker than it was among humans.

And a half-elf raised as a child of the settlement would inevitably stand out from those around them.

Why? Because half-elves differed from ordinary elves not only in their lifespans, but also in how quickly they matured.

I believe I've mentioned before that I, as a high elf, live for more than a thousand years, but ordinary elves are said to live for around five to seven hundred.

Half-elves, however, lived for two to three hundred years, making their lifespans hardly different from those of dwarves.

High elves took more than ten times as long as humans to mature, and it took me thirty years before I developed self-awareness.

Ordinary elves were not quite so slow-paced, but they still took nearly twenty years to develop self-awareness.

Yet half-elves apparently reached that point in only six or seven years... Though this was not well known, since most of them were returned to the earth while still infants.

Could the elves truly accept a child who grew at such an unusual speed within the settlement as one of their own? The answer would surely be no.

Even if I said that the custom of treating half-elves as cursed children was wrong, prejudice would not disappear so easily.

And if the human blood in a half-elf showed itself strongly enough that they could not see spirits and make friends with them, there would be no place for them in the settlement at all.

So, once the nursing stage was over and the child neared the age when they would develop self-awareness, the pregnant elf and the settlement chief wanted me to take the child in and raise them from an early age, regardless of whether they would eventually be able to befriend spirits.

Before attachments formed, before love and hate became entangled and things grew complicated.

If I refused this request, would Irena take the child in?

No, of course I wouldn't refuse.

I was the one who had said that the half-elf about to be born should not be returned to the earth.

I was the one who had to bear responsibility for those words.

But yes, the feeling I had toward the child right now was pity.

The child had not even been born, yet people were already agonizing over what should be done with them. For that child, I could feel nothing but pity at present.

But being pitied was precisely what would be most pitiful for that child.

Would I truly be able to feel affection for them?

I folded the letter, closed my eyes, and pondered the matter deeply.

I must have thought about it for around ten minutes.

Then, suddenly, it occurred to me.

...Ah, yeah. I could totally handle this.

If anything, perhaps I should be the one apologizing to the child?

I didn't know, but somehow, I was starting to look forward to it.

If the child was a boy, we'd go catch bugs together.

Well, I'm a high elf, but I don't actually like bugs all that much. Ah, fishing would work too.

If it was a girl, I'd dote on her.

I'd bawl my eyes out when she got married.

It would be fine even if they couldn't befriend spirits.

I was friends with spirits, but it was only natural that a foster parent's friends needn't be the child's friends.

As for the path they chose in life, if they wanted to become a blacksmith or swordsman—or perhaps a mage, once a little more time had passed—I would teach them all sorts of things.

If they wanted to choose some other path, I would walk it with them.

Whether it was tanning hides, dyeing and weaving, embroidery, or becoming a poet, farmer, or merchant, it would surely be fun if we did it together.

Even if I lived longer and they died first, I was sure I would still love them.

I had never even met them, but I was certain of that.

I probably wasn't an admirable enough person to be a parent, nor did I have the qualifications for it; I was a carefree—or rather, downright selfish—damn elf.

But surely, I could become their guardian and their closest friend.

So I wrote the following in my reply.

I told them that I was looking forward to the day the child was born, and to the day I could go and pick them up.

Though, of course, that was still quite a long way off.

As for the package, it contained tanned Greed Boar hide that an adventurer had carried over from the village of Parnor.

There wasn't much else to say about it.

I had no complaints about the quality, and I was happy to receive it, but compared to a small friend I had not even met yet, well, it made less of an impression.

I'll take my time deciding what to make from it.