I was reputedly accountable for the destruction of the exorcist-stone excavation sites, and for the avalanche that shook the mines shut. But given my average body size, how could I have demolished a stone mountain? With a bulldozer?

I had tried to wrestle this information out of both Conrad and Wolfram, but both of them just retreated into a deep silence. Probably, I had pulled off another totally embarra.s.sing display of magic in front of everyone. My G.o.d, I hope it didn"t involve a striptease.

We wanted to set out before Suberera"s army could mobilize against us. The troop heading back towards the sand dunes at the border was twice as big as it had been on the prior journey.

Some of the women had decided to risk an escape attempt with us; they wanted to start new lives. Most of our soldiers marched on foot, since it was decided that the horses should be a.s.signed to the women. The king himself traveled comfortably, naturally, which did not please me at all.

"I have a guilty conscience, riding in this silly carriage," I said to Conrad.

"That"s not a carriage; it"s a sleigh, Your Majesty. A horse-drawn sleigh."

Fine, whatever, then Nicola, Wolfram, and I were sitting in a horse-drawn sleigh, which didn"t make it any better at all. It felt like a luxury trip on the Orient Express. At first, they"d also thundered at Gwendal to ride in the sleigh, but since he, unlike me, knew how to a.s.sert himself, he was now riding upright in his saddle. And that too with two broken ribs.

As if that weren"t enough, I had to lay down across two seats, my head softly cus.h.i.+oned on the thigh of Lord Bielefeld!

"Does my pillow have to be a man"s lap, of all things?!" I wailed.

"Every time you do some huge magic, you sleep for two to three days," declared Wolfram, unmoved. "This time you only slept two hours. And after such a formidable performance, too. Please be so kind as to stay right where you are. You need your rest."

"All right, all right! But why the heck does it have to be with you as my pillow?!"

"Doesn"t it make you happy?"

"Do I look like I"m happy?!"

"Oh, you two are truly one heart and one soul," sighed Nicola with s.h.i.+ning eyes.

When she found out that we hadn"t been able to locate Hube, she"d cried very intensely again. But her mood improved quickly when we offered her the opportunity to live in her lover"s homeland. Nicola was a refres.h.i.+ngly positive thinker, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with optimism. Her smile was getting brighter all the time, and you couldn"t help laughing along with her.

"Yuuri, which of the two are you actually in love with? The older or the younger brother?" she asked.

"In love...? Neither, of course!"

"You"re not? But then why did you elope?"

"I never eloped!" I groaned.

Conrad, who had ridden up next to us, pushed the sleigh"s curtain open from the outside. "We"ll be arriving soon at the border city.Your Majesty? Oh, there you are! I didn"t see you down there at first."

"Conrad, help me! Please let me ride normally, just let me ride behind you on your horse!"

"Unfortunately I can"t grant your request, Your Majesty. After all, you"re cla.s.sified as injured."

"But I"m feeling sick from riding in here. I need to breathe some fresh air, so please get me out of here!"

Finally Conrad arranged it so that I was able to get off the sleigh. I took my place behind him. The morning sun was so dazzling that it was hard to even look forward. I clung to Conrad"s hips and used him as a s.h.i.+eld against the sun. In the shadow of his back, the journey pa.s.sed in a rhythmic sway. I gradually became sleepy. Voices drifted quietly and pleasantly past my ears.

"Gwendal scolded me," Conrad said out of the blue.

"Scolded?What for?"

"Because of your hands."

My hands? But why? My left hand was free again, and it caused me no problems. The handcuffs had only left me with a light abrasion. Gwendal, on the other hand, didn"t get off so lightly. Because of his strong magical abilities, the exorcist-handcuffs really affected him. The wounds weren"t dangerous, but his skin was pretty well burned, and his jailbreak had left him with two broken ribs. His entire body was covered in wounds, actually. In his place, I"d have been a wailing pile of misery.

"Why, what"s wrong with my hands?" I asked.

"He has probably noticed the calluses on your right hand, when he touched it. At first, he was pleased; he thought they were the result of daily sword training. Until he realized that they weren"t normal sword calluses."

"Sword calluses?" I grumbled. "Where would I get sword calluses? The only thing I swing is a baseball bat."

Every evening, one hundred practice swings! Recently, I"d even traded up to a wooden bat.

For someone who"d quit the team in middle school, that wasn"t a bad accomplishment!

"He accused me of doing a bad job of teaching you," Conrad continued. "The correct way to hold a sword is the first thing every beginner must learn."

"But why should that be a problem? Just tell him it"s not your fault."

"You try telling him that."

Well, yeah, when you put it that way. Like I, just a kid, was going to convince the great Gwendal to change his opinions. It"ll never happen!

"You two seem to be understanding each other better now."

"You think so? I"m not so sure."

I gazed toward the older brother, who"d ridden pretty far ahead of us. He sat steadily with perfect posture on the horse. No one would ever have guessed that he was injured. The guy was pretty determined, you had to give him that.

"Well, I no longer think Gwendal hates me, anyway."

"But I"ve been telling you that the whole time, Yuuri! It is not remotely possible for my brother to not like you."

Well, our first meeting was disastrous. And our personalities aren"t that easy to reconcile, either. No one could expect me to just accept that as fact.

"Who knows, maybe my stock took a nose-dive," I said. "It"s because I absolutely had to get my own pigheaded way that Gwendal ended up with all those wounds."

It had been important to Conrad to convince me that Gwendal was really a stand-up guy. So it was only fair to bring him up to date. My opinion of the oldest brother had changed. If I were to get along with Gwendal better in the future, then Conrad was surely the one who would be most pleased by it.

"It"s always a good thing, when you can get to know someone better. And our adventure was perfect for that. Now I know that even Gwendal has his weaknesses and can become emotional. He can even laugh -- even if it"s not very often."

Conrad sullenly muttered something to himself.

"What was that?" I pressed.

He turned around to face me. "I said, dammit, now you"re a step ahead of me." Then he smiled again as always.

"Nonsense. You two are brothers, you"ve had much more time to get to know each other. You should try talking one night out under the stars, that would definitely work."

When Conrad looked back, his face darkened. In the distance he"d noticed clouds of sand rising up.

"We are being pursued. That was fast."

Conrad gave orders to some of the soldiers at the head of the troop, then he tried to deliver me back to the sleigh.

"If they shoot with arrows, the cover could save your life," he tried to persuade me.

"Then it would be better to let as many of the women as possible take shelter on the sleigh!"

"When are you finally going to understand what this is all about? How often do I need to repeat it? Your Majesty"s life is the top priority."

"But..."

I didn"t get any further, because I suddenly spotted something very unpleasant. Further in front of us, I saw a cute figure wriggling around in the sand dunes. Its arms were spread out, and waving up and down, like a drowning person grasping out with their last strength. What a masterly achievement of stagecraft! However, we already had enough experience from our previous journey to know that this animal really wasn"t about to drown in the sand.

"There"s a sandbear over there again," I moaned.

"Where, Your Majesty?!"

Just like in our previous encounter, no one but me could see the bear. Gwendal had said that it was probably a trap that the exorcist-magicians laid over the area.

The situation became quite tricky. We couldn"t turn back, because we"d run right into the arms of the soldiers from Svererra. We also were afraid the women would panic, if they realized how much danger we were in.

In front of us, a murderous panda, behind us, an Iroquois army. We stood under red alert.

"If we could at least delay those soldiers chasing us," said Conrad with agitation in his voice, and placed his hand on the hilt of his sword. My hand went instinctively to my hip as well, but there was naturally no sword there. But there was something else -- the flute. I grasped at it.

Could this object actually be good for something? I doubted it, but it was worth a try.

Attention please! Here the Master Flautist!Taaaaaaaaaaaaaae!

The first note sounded like an old woman screaming, and every face turned towards me. The sand dunes remained hot and dry; there was no sign of rain.

But what kind of wimp throws in the towel after his very first strike? I faced the challenge again and tried a piece I had practiced many times before: the famous song "The brown bottle," the one almost all elementary and middle school students in j.a.pan could play. I had received full mark for this piece in my music cla.s.s. The soldiers gave me a little courtesy applause.

I was unstoppable. I played the anthem of the Seibu Lions, the anthem of the new club, then the anthem of the baseball team, followed by the theme song of "Kimba - The White Lion."

Everyone around me was busy taking the battle formation in preparation for the attack. The audience of my inept solo concert was getting thinner and thinner. My bag of tricks was exhausted. Now I had only a very short piece I knew by heart until the last note.

"Ryan...?« Conrad suddenly muttered in surprise.

A great human shadow was running towards us from the direction of the sandbear.

Ryan? I"ve heard this name before. Ryan, who was that again?While racking my brain trying to remember the name, I played the Tsutomu-Ito march. I could hear some rumbling sound mixed in the music from below.

"Drat!"

My stomach had protested loudly. Embarra.s.sing, embarra.s.sing, as if I could only think about food.

"A thunderstorm!" shouted someone, and an upheaval erupted.

"That was just my stomach, sorry!"

The yellow sand was turning gray. The sun that had scorched my neck disappeared. When I looked up, the sky was covered by black clouds. The first drops splashed on my face. Shortly afterward, the rain already became a downpour. Thunder roared and lightning crisscrossed the sky. That was a true-storm!

"Ryan took less than five days to tame the wild sandbear?" cried our tutor, his eyebrows shot up in an exaggerated way.

He had wrapped the Magic Flute in a cloth to protect it from fingerprints. If Gunther had known that it had been buried in a tomb instead of a corpse, he would probably be whining all over the castle halls.

"Yes, I was surprised too," replied Conrad.

"And so was I," I confirmed.

The downpour had caught the enemy troops by surprise. This gave us the necessary time to follow Ryan"s lead to the hide-out built by the tamed sandbear. The rain beat down on Suberera"s sand dunes as if the eternal suns.h.i.+ne had become but a dream. The rest of our trip was pretty pleasant and uneventful.

When I finally arrived at the royal capital, we found Gunther completely frightened for some unknown reasons. Apparently a cruel demon had abused the poor fellow as a Guinea pig. Since we took the shortcut route to the Royal Palace instead of traveling through the Kavernikov area, that I did not get to know Lady Anissina, the terror of all men. Well, thank to my luck!

As we could not find out the whereabouts of Gegenhuber, Nicola kept alternating between crying and laughing. Fortunately, his family accepted her as their daughter-in-law and provided a home for herself and her child. Since Huber, their heir, hadn"t returned for almost twenty years, the Grieselas were very happy to have a new family member. And the child would even be named after me!

I was also surprised to find out that Gunter"s taste in clothes had changed radically. He now had his iron-gray hair tied neatly at the back of his head, and while he still wore his narrow, elegant gla.s.ses, he was not wrapped in a creamy white monk"s robes as usual, but sporting an exact copy of my T-s.h.i.+rts.

"As an emotional attachment to Your Majesty, to come closer to you, I have taken the liberty to have this garment prepared. Even if we are apart, our hearts remain one. I can always be with you! Isn"t that fantastic?"

"Um, to be honest... Isn"t your s.h.i.+rt too tight? "

Gunter had imitated not only the design but also the size of my s.h.i.+rt. The fabric on his chest and shoulders was tightly stretched. One wrong move and you could clearly see his navel. In addition, the letter >E< printed="" on="" the="" front="" was="" upside="" down.="">

Murata Ken always said my fas.h.i.+on sense was the worst. Imagine the consequences if this sort of fas.h.i.+on spread all over the country!

"Your Majesty, I am impressed!" Gunter sang his song of praise. "Although you played The Magic Flute for the first time, you have already mastered it, by all measures. Even in the musical field, you are blessed with an exceptional talent!"

"Almost all children in j.a.pan can do that."

"What a fine music lesson!"

Yes, exactly.

Gwendal had gone to see the Grisela"s as Nicola"s sponsor. In his name, I was presented with a knitted stuffed animal about 30 centimeters long. Maybe it was a thank-you gift for the dolphin keychain.

"Aw, what a cute white pig!" I said.

Conrad tried to suppress his smile.

"Your Majesty, actually I believe that what you"ve got there is a white lion."

"Oh! "Oh! But then where is its mane? Or maybe it"s a female? Then I"ll name it Leonie."

By no stretch of the imagination did Leonie look like a white lion. But after all, it"s the thought that counts.

(This translation was originally posted here. Please do not repost elsewhere.)