TRHK Chapter 11

He was a young man with a pleasant face. A slight mustache suited him rather well. I studied his features and quickly remembered who he was—a merchant who'd come to the castle before, selling goods.

"Fancy meeting you like this. It can only be fate!"

He rattled on, moved, listing out why exactly this was fate. Mostly things I didn't need to bother listening to.

I pulled my captured arm hard, trying to free it. But his hand had no intention of letting go quietly—it stayed stuck to my arm.

Was this the sort of thing that happened to the original Maylin every time she went somewhere? Counting just the times since I'd woken up in this body, it already felt like dozens.

"……."

I looked down at where he had my arm gripped tight. It was disgusting, plain and simple—nothing else came close.

Then what was it, exactly, that made Kahron so different that it had felt different?

When his tongue had pushed in deep enough to nearly stab the back of my throat, my groin went tingling and strange. When he'd grabbed my ass, it had been even stranger.

Not unpleasant, exactly—just strange, in a way hard to put into words. Layered over it, a kind of fear at an unfamiliar world.

But how I felt about this man's hands on me now, I could name with complete confidence. I hated it.

"Let go."

"If you're not busy, won't you come by my shop for some tea?"

He ignored me on purpose. The grip on my arm tightens, harder. He seemed to be planning to drag me off.

Thump.

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

"Guh—!"

I'd worried my weak body wouldn't have any effect, but thankfully the man went down flailing like a fool, crumpling to the ground.

"Wh—what was that! What do you think you're—"

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

I was already worn out from the forest, and now I had to deal with some jackass like this on top of it. In fact, thanks to this bastard, I found myself thinking hard about exactly why I treated Kahron differently from everyone else.

Was it simply because he was the "red-haired knight" who could help me? Or was it because, even after all that kissing, all that groping, he still didn't seem to want anything else from me at all?

"You—you……. Nothing but a maid!"

So what if I was a maid. Compared to the years I'd barely set foot outside a forest, it was a perfectly respectable job. There was no reason to be looked down on for it, not even in this world.

I said nothing more, only clenched my fist and looked down at him, and he flinched hard. It seemed like enough to keep him from bothering me further, so I turned on my heel and walked away.

"Ha ha ha! Look at that pathetic bastard!"

"Hard to blame him for not wanting to let go of a beauty like that."

"Pushed himself on a woman who said no, and got royally humiliated for it!"

Of all the places for this scene to happen, it had to be right in the middle of the square, and I seemed to have become entertainment for the crowd.

I put the noisy mockery behind me and picked my walk back up, only to find, unexpectedly, that Kahron had been waiting for me.

"Sorry to keep you waiting."

The red hair falling softly across his forehead looked like it had never once been tangled in its life. I lost count of how many times I'd gone blank looking at him.

Even standing there quietly, waiting, he looked like a piece of art carefully sculpted—was that why I fussed over him so much, more than made sense? So just how weak was I for a face…….

"You, stop right there!"

It wasn't over yet, apparently. The man, his face red from being mocked, came stomping this way, huffing with rage. His hurried gait alone made it clear the mood wasn't good.

I tensed my body, ready to run if it came to that. Still, with this many people around, running shouldn't be too hard.

"Want to see something fun?"

Then a voice beside me pulled my attention. Kahron pulled up one corner of his mouth into a smile, beautiful and vicious, and my chest rang out with something. Why is this happening to me……. I pressed a palm to my left side, right over my heart, and hesitated over what to say.

Kahron didn't wait for an answer. He stepped forward. He looked like a person who had never once hesitated over anything in his life.

"Wh—what is this? You—get out of my——Aaagh!"

Crack-crunch. It sounded like a bone breaking. No—from how the onlookers recoiled in horror, it really had.

Kahron hooked a foot behind the man's ankle and dropped him, then stomped down hard on the man's arm and snapped it. It happened in an instant.

"Aaagh! Aaaaaaagh!"

An ordinary man would already be in agony from a full-force stomp. From a knight—a Sword Master, no less—stomping down with intent, the pain had to be beyond anything. The man pinned under his foot howled like he was mourning the dead.

"Sorry. Didn't know he was there."

"Hh—hh, hhk!"

"You all right?"

"Aaaaaaagh!"

He asks if the man's all right while grinding his boot down once more. I shuddered at Kahron's cruelty.

The man's screaming didn't let up, and the crowd around them grew more and more chaotic. Someone shouted for the guards. Startled, I grabbed Kahron's arm.

"Let's go, quickly!"

Without a word, I pulled his arm, and at first he didn't budge at all, but he eventually let himself be pulled along. I hauled Kahron along by the arm and ran for the castle gate with everything left in me, down to the last scrap of strength.

"Huff. Huff. Castle maid, Maylin, back from an outing. Huff. This one, huff, is a knight staying at the castle. Huff."

The gatekeepers eyed me strangely as I panted like some kind of pervert, but they let us through. It seemed they'd recognized Kahron more than they had me.

Only once we were inside the castle did I finally relax. Surely the guards wouldn't chase us all the way in here?

But after making such a scene in the square, it seemed unlikely they wouldn't find us. And wasn't Kahron's red hair rare enough on its own? Seylon existed, sure, but Kahron's whole appearance stood out either way.

"Do you think we'll be all right?"

I asked Kahron, whose breathing hadn't so much as caught, unlike mine.

"If that man comes looking for us later……."

"Hey."

He cut me off.

"Step any closer and I'll finish what we started earlier."

I'd only meant to whisper for privacy, and somewhere along the way I'd ended up pressed close against his arm. My chest, notably, was flattened against it.

Finish what he started……! This time I got exactly what he meant, and flinched back like startled off my feet, like someone had yanked me from behind. Even so, my mouth still muttered a complaint.

"Not 'hey'—you should call me Maylin……."

"Fine. Maylin."

The fact that he obediently used my name made me go quiet, meek. Kahron tapped my cheek twice with his index finger and said,

"Don't be a nuisance. Go on in for the night."

He wasn't smiling, so it seemed he meant it. I called out to his retreating back as he headed toward the knights' quarters.

"What about tomorrow, then?"

Blown off again. Figures.

Hm-hm.

I hummed under my breath while cleaning the Dowager Countess's room. Afterward I helped with her meal, then supported her arm and walked her around the room to aid digestion. A noble's chambers were so vast I could've gone jogging in them, but the cleaning took proportionally longer too. Still, I had no real complaints so far.

"My lady. Which book shall I read you today?"

I'd recently learned that literate commoners were rare in this world. I found this out when the housekeeper—who'd apparently come to check whether I was slacking off—happened to witness me reading aloud to the Dowager Countess and looked genuinely startled. Eifel was the one who explained it to me, though even she'd seemed surprised that I could read at all.

"But as if fate meant to play a cruel trick, Ellin and Brenta were reunited at the Marquis's family party. Ellin promptly slapped Brenta across the face, telling him to come to his senses……."

Halfway through the exciting scene, the Dowager Countess drifted into peaceful sleep. I quietly put the books away, tucked the blanket over her, and slipped out of the room.

Honestly, it still surprised even me that I could understand this world's language, and read and write in it. The characters looked nothing like the ones from my previous life, and yet I never ran into any trouble using them.

And the original Maylin, without question, had also known how to read.

A few days ago, Eifel and I had found letters hidden deep in a drawer in our room. Cheap paper, scrawled in a careless hand. Every one of them was demands—send money by such and such a date, send this much, go seduce some rich sucker—and one even said, is this how your dead mother raised you. There was no name on the sender, but I didn't need to check to know it was Maylin's father.

Had the original Maylin learned her letters from that man? I'd learned mine from my mother…….

After finishing my duties, I went to the maids' room to ask permission for a break, and found Eifel and a few other maids already sitting there in chairs.

"Maylin, you're here?"

Eifel no longer hesitated to greet me. Seeing her do it so easily, even in front of others, made something ring warm in my chest again.

"Yeah. Eifel."

As I approached, the other maids—the ones I'd expected to ignore me—greeted me, awkward and fidgety about it.

"Hi, Maylin."

It caught me so off guard I couldn't respond right away, and I scrambled to return the greeting.

"Hi."

"We've been wanting to talk to you for a while, just never had the chance. You've changed a lot lately……. Eifel's said the same thing."

They weren't the ones who used to throw brooms at me or bad-mouth me openly. More like they'd done the same thing Eifel used to—pretend not to notice me. I asked, dazed.

"Have I really changed that much?"

"Hm? Of course. Before, you used to go out of your way to flirt with the house servants and the knights, remember? You're really pretty, so most of them fell for it too. And you'd lie to the housekeeper and go off playing around behind everyone's back, or buy one piece of jewelry and brag about it all day. You were seriously a pain to be around—oh, sorry."

"Still, lately you work hard, and the housekeeper looks at you differently now too."

The compliment that follows makes my cheeks warm a little. I sat there in the chair for no real reason, playing along, listening until the girl, flustered, started inventing compliments out of thin air. Eifel burst out laughing.

"You really are a strange one."

Hearing the word "strange" made Kahron come to mind, out of nowhere. Not really out of nowhere, actually. Thinking about Kahron meant thinking "strange"—it filled up my head every time.

And as if she'd noticed exactly that, Eifel asked,

"So how are things going with the red-haired knight?"