Thirst

If she was going to talk Keith around, now was the moment. A good chance didn’t come along every day, and the thing was to seize it the instant it did. Pai laid the banter on thick, deliberately, to cover how tense she was.

“For Lord Keith I could spare not just a moment but the whole day. The funeral’s over, so I’m out of work now, you know.”

“No. The talk itself won’t take long.”

There was something oddly weighted about that answer. Pai tilted her head and followed him into the drawing room. Keith had been away from the White Castle a full seven years, and yet everything in the way he walked said he still knew the place as home.

“Please, make yourself comfortable.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

In fact, as things stood, the White Castle was as good as his. That was how the regency worked: the moment a man was appointed, its power took hold at once.

“So… this thing you wanted to say.”

“…”

They sat facing each other on the sofas before the fireplace. Above the mantel hung a crossbow, the emblem of the men of the North, and beside it an ulu, the emblem of the women. Small and fan-shaped, it looked at a glance like an ornament, though the women of the North used it to strip the hides from beasts. Pai was fond of the ulu. Like any warrior, she loved a good blade.

When her gaze lingered a moment toward the fireplace, Keith asked.

“Are you cold, perhaps?”

“Ah, no. I was looking at the ulu.”

“Ah, the ulu. I have one of my own.”

Keith said it as though it were nothing much. Pai gathered both hands on her knees, her eyes lighting up.

“They say anyone from the North has an ulu of their own, don’t they? And that a man gives one to a woman when he proposes marriage. Is that true?”

“You’re better versed in the customs of the North than I would have thought, Miss Pai.”

“This much is common knowledge.”

She dragged out the same excuse she’d used the last time. Sure enough, Keith’s eyes narrowed to a sharp line.

“Your standard of common knowledge is remarkably high.”

“Oh my. Thank you for the compliment.”

When she brazenly went so far as to bow her head in thanks, the set of Keith’s mouth slackened into something lazy and roguish. With the strength gone out of it, his face was somehow sensual. He spoke, the laughter still caught at his mouth.

“You’d be better off with the excuse that you happened to read it in a book.”

“I read it in a book.”

“…”

“See? It doesn’t work.”

“…”

The red eyes fixed straight on her carried a strange weight, the look of a man gazing quietly at a riddle he could not solve. That watchful, challenging stare was, somehow, not unwelcome to Pai.

At last Keith opened his mouth.

“Who are you.”

“…”

“Miss Pai, who knows how to tie a knot that will never come undone.”

This time it was Pai’s mouth that curled at the corner. All through the week they’d traveled together she had wondered when he would put the question to her, and that he should ask only now, with the short journey already behind them, was, one might say, very like him.

“Why? Are you thinking of hiring me on as a knot-tier?”

“Yes.”

“So fearsome, all of a sudden… I’m sorry?”

“I want to hire you.”

Keith laced his fingers and set them on his thighs as he spoke.

“As my niece’s nanny.”

“…”

“As a jester.”

“…”

“And as a knot-tier.”

“…”

Pai let out a small “Wow,” and then asked the thing that mattered most.

“So that’s triple the pay, then?”

On the road back to the White Castle, Keith Paragon had calmly turned over in his mind everything that had to be done.

First, clear away the pack of jackals. The investiture would be well enough if it went off smoothly, but his uncle, Count Luigi Husslix, would obviously be frothing at the mouth against it. Keith’s weak points were plain. Turn it around, though, and that same weakness meant he knew in advance where his opponent would bite, and could brace himself for it.

In any case, I’ll have to go and call on the guild.

That Keith had made it into the Black Hawk, the finest company in the mercenary guild North Wind, was down to the captain of the day taking him in. For the past three years he had held that captaincy himself.

I’ll send Enri ahead to let them know how things stand. I can’t lead a mercenary company and serve as Regent at the same time.

Above all, he had to find Ardine a new nanny. Someone to keep the child from wearing herself thin over a thousand nights of waiting. Someone who, when the day came and she learned the truth, would keep the blow from landing too hard. Fortunately, he knew exactly one person who fit.

“Ardine agreed with the idea as well.”

“When did the two of you have a secret talk on your own?”

“While you were asleep in the carriage, snoring.”

“I snore?! Is it l-loud?”

This was, in its way, a kind of job interview, and Keith had two things to hide: that he had taken a liking to his interviewee, and that he was, in truth, in no position to do anything but plead with her.

When he drew his brows together to make a stern, authoritative face, Pai muttered in a crestfallen voice.

“To snore badly enough that Lord Keith pulls a face like he’s bitten into something rotten.”

“…That isn’t it.”

Embarrassed, he let the tension out from between his brows.

“A week is admittedly a short time in which to judge a person.”

“It is, at that.”

“Even if I put out a new notice for a nanny and took applicants, the shortage of time to look them over would be just the same. A few minutes of interview would be the whole of it.”

“Mm-hm. That’s true enough.”

“Over the course of a week, eating and talking and sleeping with you, Miss Pai…”

In that instant Keith realized how his own words could be taken. Wrenching the subject around like a carriage on a hard turn, he hurriedly added.

“Th-that is, not ‘that’ kind of sleeping. I only meant sleeping.”

“The snoring kind.”

“Just so.”

“Though we’ve never done the snoring kind together, either.”

“…”

“Goodness, I’m teasing. Please go on.”

At this rate, it seemed, the employer and the interviewee had traded places.

Whenever he dealt with the woman across from him, his mouth went bone-dry and his throat drew tight. A thirst even rose in him. He knew its source was something in his mind, and still he could barely stop himself from draining the tea a servant had brought as though it were water. He emptied the cup, and spoke.

“At the very least, you did not seem to me a bad person.”

“Is that Lord Keith’s conclusion?”

“Just so. Nor do you appear to be an assassin whose specialty is the honey trap, as Enri feared.”

“So what you’re saying is, my looks didn’t work on you.”

“…”

“This is the moment for an empty compliment, you know.”

“…At any rate.”

He was the sort whose pointless lies showed plainly on his face, so, awkward as it was, he steered the talk aside instead.

“I have decided to try trusting you.”

Had the woman come near him with some foul intent hidden away, he would surely have felt the ominous edge of it. An animal sixth sense, grounded in experience piled up in blood, told him she carried none.

“As you know, a nanny has almost no occasion to leave the castle.”

“Yes.”

“And, inferring cautiously… you are a free-spirited sort of person.”

“I do lean that way.”

“How much do you need.”

“Sorry?”

“Time to think it over, I mean.”

It meant fastening a shackle around the ankle of someone for whom freedom mattered more than anything. He spoke in a tone that seemed to feel its way forward.

“Would three days or so be enough?”

“No.”

He was neither surprised nor flustered; from the start he had reckoned on as much as a fortnight.

“A week, then?”

“Three…”

“Three weeks? Very well. In the meantime—”

“Two… one…”

“?”

“I meant it’s the kind of deliberating that’s over in three seconds.”

When the woman smiled softly, her cat-tilted eyes curved into a charming smile of their own.

“I’ll do it. Nanny.”

“Ah.”

The aquamarine eyes seemed to be speaking to him directly. The eyes are the windows of the soul, or so they say; and if that were true, were the two of them sharing some communion of spirit just now? Keith let himself sink into the moment. Her eyes were as clear as a lake on a day without a breath of wind, and in them stood a man grinning like an idiot, weak-kneed with relief.

Is that slack-jawed fool really supposed to be me?

That man was, in fact, him. Unbelievable as it was.