“I’m sure you’ve got a lot going on right now, so thanks for taking the time to meet me. How’ve you been?”
When I arrived at the small café, Mimosa—Dan’s aunt and president of the Calmwinds shipbuilding company—was already waiting. As always, she looked every bit the capable, sophisticated businesswoman, with her style—vaguely reminiscent of the clothing (allegedly) worn on the Baerent Islands—reminding me of traditional Japanese attire.
“Long time no see, Mimosa. What do you need?” I replied, getting straight to the point, much to Mimosa’s obvious displeasure.
“You know, when you see a woman again after a long time apart, you shouldn’t skip right to the main act, okay? First, you need to order some tea, spend a little time catching up—that’s the gentlemanly way to do things.”
“Stop making it sound like we’re former lovers...” Sighing, I called over the waiter.
✦ ✦ ✦
Skipping right to the main act, Mimosa was apparently planning to open a new branch of Calmwinds in the capital and wanted me to introduce her to a backer of sorts.
Quite a while had passed since Dan and I had founded the Royal Academy’s Sailing Club, but we were still the only two members. I wasn’t particularly surprised by the club’s lack of popularity. In this day and age, with magically powered vessels becoming more and more prominent, sailing ships were widely considered to be outdated relics. That wasn’t the only reason, however.
When we’d formed the Sailing Club—with Dan as the captain, of course—he’d stepped down as vice captain of the Hill Path Club to focus on his new role. The Hill Path Club had then transitioned to a new management structure, with Stella as the captain and Leo as her second-in-command—which in reality was something I’d already been planning for a while. However, this structural change had been widely interpreted as Dan being ousted due to incompetence, and that being the case, people weren’t particularly keen to jump on board with his new club. The fact that Royal Academy students were generally rather busy was another factor; the naval docks at which our ship was moored were a fair trek from the school, and our fellow students weren’t eager to spend the time traveling there for practice.
However, the most significant reason for our minimal (aka nonexistent) enrollment numbers was simply that neither Dan nor I wanted to recruit any more members for the Sailing Club. With only one training ship available, adding more aspiring sailors would only serve to drastically cut into my own practice time, so I was selfishly throwing Dan to the metaphorical wolves, weaponizing his ever-worsening reputation as a sort of shield to deter new applicants.
That being said, I hadn’t prohibited him from denying the rumors or anything himself. Dan, for his part, didn’t want to start recruiting new members until he was satisfied that he could master our newly discovered sailing technique, which relied on a combination of wind magic and Bernoulli’s principle. According to him, it would be pointless to welcome new recruits without first making sure that I wasn’t the only person in all of Yugria who could sail our custom-made ship. His opinion was a fairly reasonable one. I wouldn’t want to be in a position where I felt like I was responsible for wasting months—if not years—of our fellow students’ time for nothing either.
Luckily, I wasn’t in that position. Being the captain, Dan was ultimately responsible for the development (or lack thereof) of our future club members, and so I’d left the ball in his court. When it came to things like this, I trusted his judgment completely. A few hopeful applicants had approached Dan over the course of the past few months, but he’d gently turned them down. Instead, he’d redirected all of them to the Emissive Magic Club to focus on learning wind magic instead first, given that knowing wind magic was essentially a prerequisite for sailing our ship. Unfortunately, the mere words “wind magic” acted as a kind of repellent, and ultimately, our Sailing Club’s membership still remained at just two. Of course, if those students had merely watched us at practice, it would have alleviated most of their fears. Nevertheless, a series of unsolicited events had resulted in our Sailing Club being given the seal of approval by King Patrick himself, the benefit of which was being given permission to train within the restricted section of the Great River Rune near the Royal Palace. Since access to the naval docks and the adjacent riverbanks was naturally closely controlled, it wasn’t really possible for curious students to take a peek at our club practice sessions.
Even with the reputation of both our club and its captain in tatters, we’d simply shrugged our shoulders and carried on enjoying our time on the open water—until now, that was. Such was the gist of what I’d just heard from Mimosa, anyway. It seemed that Dan’s father, Count Sardos, had started to meddle in the affairs of Calmwinds, our club’s sponsor.
When Dan and I had started the Sailing Club, the count was initially thrilled, per Mimosa’s explanation. But unlike the other clubs I’d been involved in the founding of, the Sailing Club’s reputation obviously hadn’t taken off. In fact, with almost zero members and no achievements to our name, it was fair to say that our reputation was actually plummeting. Even the Magicar Club, which I (ostensibly) hadn’t been involved in the founding of, had gradually gained a decent reputation under Tudeo’s leadership, and had seen a significant increase in membership around the time I’d officially joined.
Then there was the Hill Path Club. Godolphen had apparently publicly declared it to be the reason behind the unprecedented scores at this year’s Royal Academy school camp, and now everyone in Yugria was talking about it. As the Hill Path Club’s reputation had skyrocketed, so had Stella, the captain’s. It was only natural, really. She was ranked third in our year among the knight course students—a fact fairly impressive in its own right—and furthermore, had been selected as captain of the club over the prodigious Leo Seizinger himself.
Count Sardos was not amused. According to Dan, his father had stopped mentioning him entirely during social gatherings—a sharp contrast from the way he’d flaunted Dan’s name at every opportunity just a few months prior. No, the topic of Dan had become a sort of taboo. Count Sardos wasn’t immune to his son’s spiraling reputation either. Some of his peers awkwardly averted their eyes or steered clear of the crestfallen count, while the more self-important members of his social circle saw fit to offer condescending advice about keeping one’s progeny in line. Count Sardos had summoned Dan time and time again, demanding he resign from the Sailing Club (and the Emissive Magic Club) and beg his good friend Allen Rovene to allow him to return to the Hill Path Club as a vice captain, or commanding him to at least abandon the old-fashioned sailing ship in favor of a magically powered vessel. Knowing that revealing even a fraction of our new sailing ship’s true potential to his father would inevitably lead to exaggerated rumors, Dan had explained that our club activities were merely helping him develop the endurance and strength expected of a knight. For a time, Count Sardos had reluctantly accepted this explanation, growing more and more frustrated all the while—until he’d found out that Calmwinds (aka Dan’s aunt’s business, and one he’d forbidden Dan from having anything to do with) had supplied our sailing ship.
His rage had reportedly been terrifying to behold.