Chương 448: Chapter 443 - Future wagers

"A wager?" Scarlett studied The Other's face closely as he offered Yamina a proposal similar to the one he had once offered her. It was always these wagers with him. Her attention returned to the younger Yamina. Yamina pulled her eyes from the spellbook. She reminded herself where her attention ought to be, even as it kept dragging her back. She looked straight at the man across from her, at the calm smile resting on his face.

"A wager of…what?" she asked. He tilted his head, turning a hand over idly.

"Of odds. Of stakes. What are wagers ever of, if not the beautiful collision of chance and certainty? That is what makes them so compelling. The point where the ineffable becomes tangible." He touched a finger to the bridge of his nose, something quietly pleased in the gesture.

"Few other things in this world produce a moment where the foresight of a man who knows what is coming is so roundly condemned by those who lost, and so readily celebrated by those who didn't."

"I am not keen on condemning or celebrating anyone," Yamina said.

"No, and why would you be? Is there a wager you have ever lost?" The man chuckled softly.

"Ah, but you said you have never bet once in your life."

"I haven't."

"Those are the words of someone who wagers and never loses, young miss." The corners of Yamina's mouth tightened slightly. She wasn't fond of that framing, but she couldn't honestly say there was nothing to it. She shook her head, setting it aside.

"It doesn't matter. I have no interest in making a wager with you."

"Not even for the spellbook?"

"…What would I stand to lose if I did?"

"That depends. What are you willing to put forward?" Yamina reconsidered it, then reached into her robes and produced a small coin pouch, its dull weight shifting as she set it on the table.

"We are in the empire, so — five hundred solars. That is all I have on me." The man looked at the pouch with an expression of mild, almost fond amusement, clicking his tongue once.

"No, no, no. I'm afraid that simply wouldn't do."

"Then I'm not interested." Yamina retrieved the pouch and made to stand. She wasn't certain whether she actually should leave — whether leaving was even an option here. In her search for The Gentleman, she had prepared several contingencies, but this man was something else entirely, something she had very little framework for. Walking into the traps of such an entity, even unintentionally, was not a risk she was eager to take.

The man watched her rise with patience, the gold coin having found its way back into his hand and moving over his knuckles in that same unhurried roll.

"Suspicion and caution. These are not qualities I am unaccustomed to. But were I the sort to deserve them, you would never have had the chance to feel them in the first place." Yamina paused, glancing at him.

"Is that a threat?" He offered her a mild smile.

"No. I don't particularly enjoy threats, so I make a point of not issuing them. Hurts business. But I would appreciate it if you reserved your wariness of me until after I have actually earned it." Yamina studied him for a long moment. Then her gaze dropped to the spellbook. He tapped the cover lightly.

"I think you'll find there is very little about this book to be wary of. I am a man of my word, and my word is my bond — and you have my word that this book offers you nothing but benefit."

"You wouldn't be here if you did not want something from me," Yamina said slowly.

"Which means either the book is the danger, or what you intend to take from me is."

"Is that what you believe?"

"Yes."

"Then tell me — had you found The Gentleman here today instead of me, did you intend to corner him into a position where he had nothing to gain and everything to lose?" She hesitated.

"No…" The man crossed his arms.

"Then why assume that my intentions towards you are any different? Rather uncharitable, don't you think?" Yamina said nothing. He leaned back.

"Since you remain so uncertain, I will extend you a courtesy I rarely offer. I will tell you plainly what it is I want from you, and why." He gestured towards her vacant seat.

"If you would sit back down, that is." Yamina considered him. She turned his words over, letting her gaze drift across the crowded tavern — the still faces, the frozen mid-gestures, the suspended moment of a whole room caught between one breath and the next. Her eyes passed over the barmaid leaning against the counter with a sidelong look in their direction, and the youth being thumped on the back by his elders while sneaking a glance of his own at that same barmaid. These were such very ordinary lives.

Ordinary lives held, without the faintest awareness of it, in the presence of something they couldn't have begun to perceive, let alone comprehend. Yamina felt… lonely among these people. As she had since she was young enough to start understanding her place in the world.

And the spellbook sitting on that table—for some reason she couldn't quite name, for some reason that had very little to do with the teachings of magic and the arcane she so often relied on to make sense of this world—felt as though it might hold an answer to not feeling that way any longer.

"Baroness, can you still hear us?" a voice broke in, nearly pulling Scarlett out of the quiet she had sunk into alongside the younger Yamina. Scarlett looked between The Other and the girl across from him.

"I can," she said.

"Though earlier, I was not talking to you." A few seconds passed before the older Yamina responded.

"I see. Then there is something I need to tell you before this continues."

"And what is that?"

"Tails."

"…Tails?" Scarlett frowned. What was that supposed to mean?

"That should be enough," Yamina continued.

"Now, don't let me distract you further. Oh, and I do apologise for my younger self's theatrics. I was always told that I matured rather late."

"Wait—" Scarlett began, but before she could finish, movement beside her drew her back into the scene. When Yamina settled back into her seat, the small mole above the man's lip shifted as his mouth curved upward.

"Thank you," he said. He placed both hands on the table, lacing his fingers together, the gold coin resting beside them with the scholar face-up.

"I find that you're a compelling person, young miss. Do you know why that is?"

"I don't."

"Come now. I'm sure that you do." Yamina was quiet for a moment.

"Perhaps. But I don't know that you do find me compelling." This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

"That is fair. It's a lie, but it's at least a fair lie." The man nodded.

"I say that you are a compelling person, young miss, because you are one of a kind. Unique in a way that belongs solely and irreducibly to you — and this would hold true even if you searched every corner of all the realms. What is perhaps most fascinating about this is that you are, despite all of it, remarkably ordinary." Yamina raised both eyebrows.

"Would you disagree?" he asked. She dipped her head just slightly.

"If you could point me to another who is as 'ordinary' as me, I would be very interested to meet them." The man let out a short laugh.

"Don't fret. I'm sure the time will come. But in case you take issue with my choice of words, I don't mean to say that you are not extraordinary. A mortal child who was never meant to exist, shaped by Fate and burdened with a task that not even gods would shoulder. They have built myths around far lesser things." Yamina did not want to show it, but her hands had curled together in her lap beneath the table, and something moved through her that she didn't have a name for.

It was no surprise at this point that this man knew her. But she had never before met someone who seemed to understand her.

"But that is precisely what also makes you so thoroughly, so stubbornly, ordinary — don't you think?" the man asked.

"I can tell you with certainty that there are many, many existences in this world with far greater power, far greater reach, far greater consequence. Many more yet to come. Maybe you'll even meet some of them in your lifetime, and then you will understand what I mean when I say that you are, at your core, a very ordinary person." He paused.

"And despite that, you are special in ways they could only dream of." Yamina kept her voice level.

"What is the purpose of saying all this?" He considered her, then gestured idly.

"Consider it a digressive preface. I'll spare you the rest of it. Perhaps one day you'll grow to appreciate that particular rhetorical habit." He knocked once on the wood in front of him, and, like a current passing through the room, the tavern came back to life all at once. The youth flushed as the barmaid caught him looking, the minstrel shifted into a new tune as the mood of their small audience turned, and the general noise and press of the place resumed as though it had never stopped.

The return was so abrupt—so jarring against the eerie stillness that had held the room moments before—that Yamina needed a moment just to reorient herself.

"The reason I sought you out is as simple as genuine interest," the man said.

"I cultivate interests in things far and wide, and while many of those are ones I observe without any particular investment—out of habit, or patience, or simple curiosity—people and their stories may be the ones I will never truly tire of. And among these, there will always be those rare few who catch my attention beyond the ordinary. Those rare few who embody the ineffable, the genuinely unpredictable, the kind of emergence that cannot be planned for or anticipated.

The ones who may not occupy the climax of a narrative, or even its main body, but who would make for a remarkable foreword." Yamina's brow furrowed slightly.

"Do you object to being described in such terms?" he asked. She was silent at first, then shook her head.

"No." It wasn't wrong.

"Well then," he went on, "that is the why of my being here. Next comes what I want from you." He pushed the spellbook slightly across the table, closer to Yamina. She glanced at it, then stilled at his next words.

"I do not want your success in your aim to kill Fate." Her eyes snapped back up to him. He met them evenly.

"In fact," he said, "your success would work directly against certain interests of mine." That cold, crawling sensation threatened to return — but then the man paused, and his gaze dropped briefly to the coin on the table, to the face of a scholar looking up from it. The cold faded. The man looked back at Yamina.

"However, I recognise that certain emerging processes ought not to be interfered with. Sometimes they should even be encouraged, even when they chafe against one's preferences. Chance placed you where you are today, young miss, and I have found myself wanting to see exactly where that chance leads. To see whether it ends in the release of an old friend of mine, or in a fate far worse. Whatever the outcome, I will remain as I am." There was something very particular about his gaze.

Something Yamina recognised only now. His eyes didn't peer into you the way powerful things often did. It was more akin to looking into a pair of windows that opened onto somewhere very far away. But she found nothing in either his expression or his bearing to tell her whether his words were true or false. She did not know whether the bindings and trappings of divinity could be applied to the man before her, but among both divine beings and Idols, the weight of one's given word was a boundary not easily crossed.

And the workings of Fate—its framework and the fracture that lay at its heart—spoke of a similar rigidity, one where the ordinary rules of mortals didn't apply, yet something even more unyielding sat in their place. Paradoxically, all that she had learned seemed to suggest that the more powerful an entity became, the more restricted it tended to be. There was a possibility that the being before her was a liar.

An entity whose nature was woven entirely from misdirection, whose every word and gesture served some deeper act of manipulation. Were that the case, she had no confidence she could see through it, regardless of her methods. But she also did not believe she would genuinely be allowed to leave this tavern, if so.

"Let me revisit my earlier question," the man said, tapping the spellbook.

"What do you say to making a small wager with me? If you find it difficult to settle on what you ought to offer, let me make a suggestion. Were you to win, you would take this spellbook. Were I to win, I would take…let's say the memory of your first lesson."

"My…first lesson?"

"Yes. Hardly something you need at this point, is it? An unfortunate loss, perhaps, but of roughly commensurate value to the book. Something to make you want to win, and something to ensure I don't walk away from this meeting entirely empty-handed, even if you do." She studied him carefully.

"One might assume from everything you've said up until now that you intend for me to win regardless."

"One would nearly be right. But not completely. The integrity of a wager is not something to be quietly arranged away. That would rather defeat the point." Yamina turned the offer over. She couldn't have said when her first lesson even was, or what losing the memory of it would truly mean. But old tales of carelessly forged pacts nagged at her.

"Would the memory of the first disputation I attended be acceptable instead?" she asked. It had been Grand Wizard Blakeshaw's lecture on the phenomenological grounding of transmutative theory. Hardly worth preserving, in her opinion. In fact, despite having been only eleven at the time, Yamina had spent years quietly hoping that she and everyone else present might collectively forget some of her more fervently argued declarations during that session. The man regarded her with an amused tilt of his head.

"That would be acceptable as well." His hand moved across the table and smoothly picked the gold coin back up, running it over his knuckles before letting it come to rest in his open palm.

"If you're curious about the nature of the wager itself, I was thinking something simple. It should involve this coin, but I'll let you devise the specific rules." Yamina blinked.

"I can decide whatever rules I want?"

"We are conducting a wager, so I expect it to be as fair as a wager ought to be," he said.

"If you think you can give yourself a slight edge, I won't stop you — but overreach has a way of becoming its own undoing. Sometimes it is simply best to go with a straightforward heads or tails." Yamina eyed the coin. She touched the rim of her glasses, activating a light analytic divination spell, but found that the results offered her nothing of use. So she couldn't rely on magic here. Her father had once told her that only fools gambled. The careless trusted their luck.

And the smart made sure the odds were stacked in their favour. There was a classical application of Arch Wizard Penric's Paradox that fit this situation neatly. If she were free to set the rules as she pleased and stipulate that victory be determined by a freely chosen sequence of outcomes across multiple flips, she could push her probability of winning arbitrarily close to certainty while still technically preserving the structure of a fair wager.

It was a trivial construction, and the obvious move for any self-respecting wizard. But that assumed this would actually function as a game of chance. Against this entity, there was no such guarantee. This was something that already seemed to know her path, the people she hadn't yet met, and where she might eventually end up. … She loathed setting her father's wisdom aside, but this felt like one of those rare occasions where the smarter play was to stop being smart about it and carelessly trust her luck.

Not the luck of a coin flip, though.

"I suggest a single condition," she said.

"You will flip the coin, and if either of us already knows the result before it is revealed, the other person wins." It didn't matter how cleverly the rules were structured. If she were sitting across from something that could see what was coming, she would lose. The only winning move was to gamble properly, or make foreknowledge itself the liability. The man looked at her for a long, measured moment.

"Are you sure those are the rules you want?"

"Yes." Something shifted in his expression, and a laugh escaped him. His head tipped back slightly as he briefly closed his eyes.

"That is funny. It'll take some time before you fully appreciate exactly how funny. But I accept." He settled, then leaned forward at once, the gold coin poised on his thumb.

"The scholar is heads. The jester is tails. Shall we?"

"Go ahead." The coin spun into the air, catching the hearthlight as it turned over and over.

"I wonder what it'll land on," he remarked, watching it rise." It will land on tails," Scarlett declared. The coin came down and struck the table, skipping once before rolling into a short, wobbling spin and going still. The jester's face looked up. Something lurched in Yamina's chest. Even if she hadn't wagered anything of real significance, she realised that she did not want to lose. Her eyes rose to the man across from her. He met her eyes. A slow smile settled across his face.

"Congratulations. You win." Yamina paused, then relief broke through her. She had been right—"One of your assumptions was wrong, however," the man added.

"I can't tell whether a coin will land heads or tails before it lands." Yamina frowned.

"Then how—""It's much more interesting if you don't know," he cut her off. And then, for some reason, his gaze drifted from her and settled on the empty space just beside the table. Scarlett held The Other's gaze, her own frown deepening.

"You are very lucky, Yamina," she said.

"I'm well aware," came the older Yamina's voice.

"Was it worth it?"

"I would argue that it was."

"Hmm." Scarlett glanced back towards the girl sitting across from the man, taking in the spellbook on the table and the coin resting between them.

"How long until your younger self leaves? I want to speak with The Other regarding that book of yours."