TRHK Chapter 11

He was a young man with a pleasant face. Even the slight mustache he'd grown suited him reasonably well. I studied his face until the memory clicked into place—a merchant who had come to the castle to sell goods some time back.

"To think we'd meet like this by chance. It can only be fate!"

He went on enthusiastically about exactly why we were fated to meet, stringing reasons together at considerable length. The sort of talk that, for the most part, didn't require close attention.

I pulled my captured arm with some force. But the hand wrapped around it showed no intention of letting go graciously, clinging without any thought of releasing.

Had the original Maylin experienced this sort of thing every time she went somewhere? Since I'd woken up in this body alone, it felt like I'd already been through it dozens of times.

"……"

I stared at the hand gripping my arm. Unpleasant didn't begin to cover it.

'But what is it about Kahron that makes it feel so different?'

When he'd pushed his tongue deep into my throat as though to pierce it, something had prickled low in my body and I'd been swept into an odd sensation. When he'd grabbed my backside it had been stranger still.

Unpleasant... wasn't quite the right word. Strange and peculiar might be closer—something difficult to name. As though layered beneath it all was a fear of some unknown territory I hadn't yet mapped.

But the feeling of this man's hands on me now? That I could name without difficulty. I didn't want it.

"Let go."

"If you're not otherwise occupied, won't you come to my shop for a cup of tea?"

He deliberately ignored my words. The grip on my arm tightened. He seemed intent on dragging me along.

Thwack.

I drove my fist into the man's side without warning.

"Hrgh!"

I'd worried my slight frame wouldn't do much damage, but fortunately the man pitched forward in an exaggerated display of suffering and collapsed to the ground.

"Wh—what do you think you're doing?!"

"I told you to let go. And don't speak to me."

I was already tired from the trip to the forest, and now this kind of person had wrung out whatever remained. To make things worse, this fool had made me think carefully about why exactly I treated Kahron as something apart.

Was it simply because he was the 'red-haired knight' who could help me? Or was it because he kissed me like that, handled my body that way, and yet seemed to have no particular interest in me otherwise?

"You—you—a mere maid's presumption!"

What is a maid supposed to have done wrong, exactly. Compared to barely being able to leave the forest, it was a thoroughly respectable occupation. In this world too, it wasn't something that warranted that kind of contempt to begin with.

There was nothing worth adding. I simply curled my fist and looked down at him, and the man flinched visibly. That seemed sufficient to ensure he wouldn't make himself a nuisance again, so I turned on my heel.

"Ha! Look at that pitiful sight!"

"You can't blame a man for not wanting to let go of a woman that beautiful."

"Got thoroughly humiliated going after a woman who said no!"

Of all the places to make this kind of scene, it had been the town square—which meant I'd apparently become entertainment.

I turned my back on the raucous mockery and resumed walking, when Kahron was there unexpectedly, waiting for me.

"Sorry for making you wait."

The red hair that fell softly across his forehead looked as though it had never once been tangled in its existence. I lost my thoughts for what must have been the hundredth time.

'Was it really just the face? Am I genuinely that susceptible to appearances?'

Even standing there doing nothing, he looked like a painstakingly carved work of art. Was that why I treated him differently? Which would make me someone who was... alarmingly shallow about a pretty face.

"Stop right there!"

Apparently it wasn't over yet. The man, face flushed red from his public humiliation, came striding toward us with heat in every step. Even his gait alone made it clear this wasn't going to resolve peacefully.

I tensed, ready to bolt if it came to that. Still, with this many people around, fleeing shouldn't be difficult.

"Want to see something interesting?"

I turned at the voice from beside me. Kahron's mouth had curved at one corner—a smile that was beautiful and, simultaneously, deeply wicked. My chest gave a sharp, inexplicable pull. 'What's the matter with me.' I pressed my palm over my left chest and hesitated over what to say.

Kahron stepped forward without waiting for an answer. He was the kind of person who gave every impression of never having hesitated in his life.

"Wh—what—who are you? Step as—AAAAAHHH!"

Crack-crack-crack. The sound of bones breaking carried clearly. Or—given how the onlookers had gone rigid with collective horror—it had definitely been real.

Kahron had tripped the man, dropped him, and ground his foot down on the arm hard enough to break it. All in the span of a breath.

"AAAAAHHH! AAAAAAHHHH!"

An ordinary adult stepping down firmly would already hurt. A knight—a Sword Master, no less—doing it with deliberate intent would be, conservatively, agonizing. The man pinned beneath his boot wailed with something close to inconsolable grief.

"Sorry. Didn't see you there."

"Hah—hk, hnngh—!"

"Are you alright?"

"AAAAAHHH!"

He asked if you were alright, and then ground down once more. My shoulder trembled at the sheer wickedness of him.

The man's unending screaming threw the surrounding crowd into mounting disorder. Someone's voice rose above the rest, calling for a guard. I startled badly and grabbed Kahron's arm.

"Let's go! Now!"

Without waiting I seized his arm and pulled, and he didn't move at first—not an inch—but in the end he came along. I dragged him by the arm and ran for the castle gate with every scrap of strength I had left.

"Hah—hah—I'm Maylin, a maid of the castle returning from an outing. Hah—this is—hah—a knight who resides in the castle. Hah."

The gatekeepers watched me pant like some kind of deviant and waved us through. They seemed to have recognized Kahron rather than me.

Only once we were inside the castle walls did I breathe properly. The guards wouldn't chase us in here, would they?

Though after making that much of a scene in the square, finding us didn't seem particularly unlikely. And Kahron's red hair was rare—Seyron existed, but Kahron's appearance was conspicuous in its own right.

"Are we... going to be alright?"

I asked him, who looked entirely unruffled compared to my current wheezing state.

"If that man comes back later—"

"Hey."

He cut my words off cleanly.

"Get any closer and I'll pick up where we left off."

In the effort to whisper something like a confidential concern, I had at some point pressed myself right up against his arm. Most relevantly, my chest was making direct contact with it.

Pick up where we left off—! This time I understood the implication immediately, and I startled away like someone had yanked me from behind. Even as I did, my mouth produced a complaint of its own accord.

"'Hey' isn't right—you should be calling me Maylin..."

"Fine. Maylin."

The easy compliance silenced me. Kahron tapped my cheek twice with his index finger.

"Don't make more trouble. Go in for today."

He wasn't smiling, which meant he was serious. I called after his back as he headed toward the knights' lodgings.

"What about tomorrow?"

He ignored that too.

Hm-hmm.

I hummed to myself as I cleaned the elderly noblewoman's room with some care. After that came serving her meal, and then supporting her arm to walk slow circuits of the room to aid her digestion. A noble's quarters were spacious enough to run laps in. The cleaning that came with them was proportionally more brutal, but I had no real complaints yet.

"My Lady, which book shall I read to you today?"

I'd learned only recently that literate commoners were rare in this world. The head maid—who had come to check, I suspected, whether I was shirking—had looked visibly startled when she saw me reading aloud to the noblewoman. Eifel had been the one to explain afterward, and she too had seemed surprised I could read. Of course she had.

"...And yet, as though by a trick of fate, Ellin and Brenta crossed paths again at the Marquis' party. Ellin immediately slapped Brenta across the face and told her to come to her senses..."

In the midst of an especially gripping passage, the noblewoman drifted soundly off to sleep. I quietly gathered the books, tucked the blanket around her, and slipped out of the room.

It was genuinely strange, even to me, that I could understand this world's language and read and write in it without obstacle. The letters were visibly different from my previous life's, yet when I used them there was no difficulty at all.

And the original Maylin must have been literate too, without question.

A few days ago, Eifel and I had found letters hidden deep in the dresser drawer of our shared room. Cheap paper, careless scrawl. Every single one demanding money by some date, in some amount, or instructing her to seduce a wealthy man at the castle. One had said: did the mother you killed teach you to be such a failure. There was no sender's name, but there was no need to check.

Had the original Maylin learned to read from that father of hers? I had learned from my mother.

When I arrived at the maids' room to be formally dismissed for rest, I found Eifel and several other maids already settled there in chairs.

"Maylin, you're back?"

Eifel no longer hesitated to greet me. Seeing her do it openly, in front of others, gave me that strange pull in my chest again.

"Yeah. Eifel."

As I came close, the other maids—the ones I'd expected to ignore me—greeted me with uncertain, tentative warmth.

"Hello. Maylin."

It was so unexpected that I didn't respond immediately, then scrambled to catch up.

"Hello."

"I'd wanted to talk to you for a while, but there was never an opening. You seem so different lately... Eifel says the same."

These weren't the maids who'd thrown brooms at me or spoken ill of me openly. More like Eifel's approach—deliberate indifference. I asked, genuinely at a loss:

"Have I changed that much?"

"Hm? Yes, definitely. Before, you used to go out of your way to talk to the mansion's servants and the knights. You're so beautiful that most of them fell for it, too. And you'd lie to the head maid and sneak off to enjoy yourself, or spend a whole day showing off a new piece of jewelry you'd bought. You were really insuffer—oh, sorry."

I'd already heard all of it. And it was apparently worse than what Eifel had told me. The original Maylin really, truly had no social sense whatsoever. Whether that was something inherent to 'Maylin' as a type, I couldn't say.

"Still, lately you work hard, and the head maid sees you differently now."

The praise that followed made both my cheeks warm. I sat in a chair on some vague pretext and listened, slightly flustered, until the speaker exhausted genuine compliments and began inventing them. Eifel burst out laughing.

"You really are a strange one."

Strange. The word conjured Kahron immediately, which wasn't actually surprising. When I thought of Kahron, strange was what filled my head entirely.

As though she'd read it in my face, Eifel asked:

"How are things going with the red-haired knight?"