“AND there you have it…we’ll be summoning a saint.”
A collective sigh arose at the pontiff’s announcement. The high-ranking clergy members gathered in the room in the Temple wore identical gloomy expressions. For whatever reason, Prince Linus was also attending, so they refrained from saying anything out loud, but their attitudes made their dissatisfaction evident.
“His Majesty is almost always reasonable, a wise ruler who takes his subjects’ opinions into consideration. Aside from occasions like these, that is, when…well, when he’s intoxicated by his whimsies.”
When one of the priests tried and failed to frame his thoughts respectfully, Linus, who sat next to Fiona, chuckled ruefully.
“Don’t mind me. Just pretend I’m not here.” As he spoke, Linus scooped up a lock of Fiona’s black hair and grinned cheerfully.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but what exactly are you doing here, Your Highness? Are you surveilling us under His Majesty’s orders or something?” Fiona questioned the gorgeous crown prince’s intentions. He said nothing for some time and simply played with her hair. Then, his indigo eyes, glittering like jewels, narrowed.
“Of course not,” he insisted. “You wound me by even thinking so. Personally, I see no need to summon a saint anyway.”
The clergy members sighed in relief. But the situation remained unchanged.
“It’s easy for His Majesty to demand the summoning, but we’ll need a vast amount of time just to construct the necessary magical framework. What an absolute thorn in our side.”
The others followed suit when the pontiff exhaled deeply. Even with the crown prince on their side, they couldn’t overturn the king’s decree.
“What about the attempted summoning a decade ago? Shouldn’t there be records of those preparations to help guide you?” Linus asked.
“Yes, but they’re not particularly useful, Your Highness. Fiona, tell him.”
Fiona spoke at the pontiff’s urging, batting away the hand fiddling with her hair even as she locked her eyes with his indigo-colored ones. “To perform a saint’s summoning, first, we must connect the space between this world and another by anchoring a door there. Next, we need to find and trace the magic of an individual suitable to be a saint, then pull her in.”
Linus listened attentively to her explanation of the protocols outlined in the documents from ten years ago. When he sat there silently like this, he was so beautiful he could easily pass for a finely crafted doll, and a small part of her couldn’t help but admire that.
“Since other worlds are always on the move as well,” she continued, “there’s simply no way a saint is in the same place she was ten years ago.”
After all, a saint was still a person. So it was a given that as long as she had a life, she would be living it, which necessitated tracking her down.
“The magic to connect to the space will need to be crafted from scratch, meaning a suspension of almost all duties of the Temple’s priests. Next, to secure the path to the door, we’ll need magic knights in large numbers to act as a source of magical power.”
Accomplishing anything required energy, but in this case, magical power was the necessary driver. The priests didn’t have the magical energy to spare to link the path to another world, fix the door in place, and search for the saint while maintaining the door itself to achieve all that. And the magical energy to do all that was not a small amount.
Fiona wasn’t well acquainted with the magic knights, but based on what she’d gleaned from the record of ten years ago, none of this would work without a full mobilization of their order.
“As there’s no guarantee of completing this in a matter of hours, we’ll need to implement a shift system,” she explained. “Priests will have to stay overnight either in the Temple or the royal palace, in which case special allowances will have to be made vis a vis clothing, shelter, and food.”
“We truly need that much energy to pull it off?” Linus sounded more appalled than astonished.
The pontiff responded with a long, drawn-out sigh. “If we try to cut corners by saving energy, the whole thing will come apart at the seams… For example, there would be no point in only summoning the saint’s arm.”
“That…is a fair point.”
The pontiff’s statement convinced Linus. Seeing that, Fiona presented the documents from the saint summoning a decade ago to the prince. The thickness of the sheaf of papers attested to the labors of the priests back then.
“These records make it clear that besides priests and magic knights, a great many other components were also involved, such as magic stones,” she said. “Simply gathering everything we need will cost us tremendous time, effort, and money.”
Linus quickly rifled through the documents and then placed them back on top of the table. This time, he whipped out a comb from heaven knows where and started running it through Fiona’s hair. She couldn’t tell whether or not he grasped the gravity of the situation. So she glared sharply at the beautiful prince, who seemed to be enjoying himself as he tended to her tresses.
“Let me ask you this, Your Highness. Knowing the lengths we need to go to in order to perform the summoning, will we still be forced to go through with it?” Fiona knew it was too late to ask Linus that, but she simply could not find it within her to go along with a project she just didn’t agree with.
“My father loves fish, which is why the priests ten years ago carried out the summoning for a Saint of Sea Bounty,” Linus said.
“Wasting money is the downside of a peaceful and prosperous country, isn’t it?” Fiona sighed.
Normally, speaking like that to the crown prince would be the height of disrespect. But they’d known each other for years, and that fact always made her relaxed in his company, albeit against her will. Besides, Fiona was well aware that Linus wasn’t the sort of person to take offense at every little thing she said and punish her. Though she was ambivalent about the man’s obsession with her hair, he was fundamentally kind.
“True…but I have to admit, I’m feeling a bit grateful to Father for handing down this decree,” Linus said.
“Why? Do you enjoy fish as well, Your Highness?” Fiona raised an eyebrow.
“That’s not it. I won’t deny he’s probably envious of our neighbor’s recent abundant harvest, so he thinks a saint will be in our country’s best interest, too.”
The king’s envy over abundant yields was understandable, as was his desire to use a method guaranteed to make it a reality. However, Fiona needed their liege to look at not just the results but the process. Because the ones who ultimately did all the work were always the folks lower in the hierarchy.
“Frankly, the price-to-performance ratio is terrible,” she stated.
“In simpler terms?” Linus asked.
“It isn’t cost-effective. In short, it isn’t worth the time, effort, or money.”
Though Linus listened to Fiona’s argument, his hand continued sifting through her hair with no signs of stopping anytime soon. The other clergy members held their tongues, but judging by their occasional pointed glances, they seemed concerned about her.
“There are plenty of other methods to produce bountiful crop yields, such as improving farmland and irrigation practices or research into improving seeds and seedlings,” Fiona said. “I don’t know the effective range or duration of a saint’s power, but considering what comes after, it would be better to find a way that doesn’t rely on one.”
If all it took for bountiful harvests to continue forever were a single visit by a saint, then Fiona, too, would enthusiastically participate in the invocation efforts. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out so well in reality. In the past, other countries had conducted their own summonings of saints, yet no records existed of any such long-lasting effect, so she suspected a saint’s powers didn’t last indefinitely.
“Besides, generally speaking, isn’t a saint summoned to offer a ray of hope when a country is in crisis?” Fiona asked.