The Man's Terms

Ah, I should have let it hang a moment at least.

Pai regretted it for a moment, wondering whether she hadn’t looked as if she’d been waiting all along for him to ask. Keith, for his part, looked genuinely startled.

“Wouldn’t it be better to think it over a while longer? The next several years of your life are going to change entirely.”

“It’s fine.”

But what if a show of hesitation set his resolve wavering? She had no idea by what logic he’d arrived at the decision, but she needed to hold the needle of the man’s inner compass steady.

“If I may say so out of an excess of caution, I didn’t decide on a whim. I’d already been wondering whether I ought to go and beg Miss Bishe for whatever spare position might be going.”

“Beg… you say.”

“Yes. I’m good at that sort of thing.”

“And what sort of thing would that be?”

“Throwing my pride away.”

“I don’t see why you’d have been willing to go that far.”

“Because, as it happens, I’d had enough of it all.”

Pai stretched, long and lazy, got to her feet, and ambled over to the fireplace. Standing before the red, crackling flames, she had the bearing of a warrior who had seen life all the way through.

“I’ve seen as much of the world as there is to see. I’m sick of worrying about where I’ll sleep, sick of stew with god-knows-what scraps of meat ground into it, and sick of thrashing the louts who slobber around a woman traveling alone, out to fleece her one way or another.”

“…”

“And right in the middle of all that, I went and got a taste of the other thing. A clean, dry bed, fresh eggs and vegetables, kind and sociable people…”

“…”

“And on top of that, a steady, long-term position where nobody cheats me out of my wages?! There’s no reason on earth to refuse.”

For an answer thrown together on quick reflexes, it was a surprisingly candid glimpse inside her. She was certain the practical outpouring would strike a chord with Keith; mercenary companies are poor by nature. Even when they land one big score, mercenaries are the sort to squander it in the most outlandish ways imaginable, and the Black Hawk would hardly have been any exception.

“Very well. Bishe will help you with the particulars of the contract.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you for agreeing so readily to be Ardine’s nanny.”

“Not at all. I’m the one who’s grateful, Lord Keith. I’ll do my very best.”

She made a show of lifting the hem of her skirt in a curtsy, and Keith answered by drawing his chin in a fraction.

Phew… is that it, then?

The weight off her shoulders, Pai stole a sidelong glance to gauge his mood. But a faint anguish still hung about the young man’s face.

“Is there something more you wanted to say?”

At the careful question he let out a low groan under his breath, then rose from his seat with a look of resolve. He crossed to the fireplace and reached a long arm up toward the wall above, where the crossbow and the ulu were mounted.

It hung high, but he plucked the ulu down without the slightest effort. So diligent was the White Castle’s staff that the blade gleamed, not a speck of dust on it.

“…”

Pai watched the whole sequence with curious eyes, her gaze catching everything, down to the line of the man’s throat drawing taut with tension.

As a man of the North does for a woman of the North, he cupped the ulu’s crescent blade between his two palms, pressed flat together, and held the handle out to her.

“This is your first duty.”

“…”

“Will you be my lover?”

Pai lay on a soft, downy bed. In place of a pitch-black sky and the tens of thousands of stars that always seemed ready to spill down at any moment, her view was filled now by a grey-white ceiling and the wavering shadows of firelight.

She stretched an arm straight up and studied the ulu. Keen-edged and curved like a crescent moon, it was exactly the size of her palm and carried a fair weight.

Has this ever really been put to use? Or is it a knife made only for show after all?

She put herself in the ulu’s place.

I am a swordswoman. But from now on I am a nanny.

If it was a blade for stripping the hide from a beast, then she would use it to cut through the hides of the jackals circling the young lady.

Then this ulu will be stained with blood.

But until the day of vengeance and slaughter came, she had to keep her killing intent hidden, no more remarkable than an ornament hung on a wall.

It struck her as strange that the ulu, a thing so near to the smell of blood, should ever have become a token of love.

Keith had gripped the cruelly keen edge in both hands and turned the handle toward her. As though he meant to offer his life up to you. As though, even if you turned the blade on him, he would hold still and stretch out his neck.

‘Will you be my lover?’

Just turning the man’s low, submissive voice over in her mind again set her heart hammering. Then again, where was the woman who could stay unmoved when a man that beautiful asked to see her, even once…

“Lover, is it.”

That, as Keith Paragon had said, was her first duty. Playing the part of a lover. It was a plausible enough task for a jester, and a likely enough one for a knot-tier besides.

When she’d teased him back, asking which of the two duties it fell under, she had got a serious answer.

‘From now on you must tie me every night. If you come and go from my room without missing a single day, it cannot fail to be noticed, and however discreet and proper the White Castle’s staff may be, there will certainly be talk.’

The most sensible arrangement would be for Pai to take the room adjoining his bedchamber; the trouble was that the room next to a Duke’s bedchamber had long been fixed in people’s minds as the place kept for his betrothed or his lover. Natural enough. It was laid out so the master of the castle could slip in and out unseen each night, heedless of any watching eyes.

‘If you are going to be the object of an unseemly misunderstanding either way, it will do more for your reputation to make it the truth instead.’

I see. So a secret can be hidden by putting it out in the open.

Pai nodded along, won over by the rather outlandish notion. It was not a bad plan.

If she took that room as his lover, no one would think it strange that she came to Keith every night.

If anything, they’ll just laugh and call me a passionate lover with plenty of stamina.

And in the unlikely event someone caught sight of her binding Keith to the bed, the worst of it would be a rumor spreading far and wide that indecent tastes were involved. Better that than have people whisper that the Regent Duke suffered from some grave affliction and call his fitness for the office into question.

Well, honestly, she wasn’t sure it was any better, but that was surely how Keith would see it.

“Still, I didn’t expect him to say he’d take the regency.”

For her, the journey south with the young lady had been a gamble. And since it had changed the first event of her previous life that absolutely had to change, it was a gamble that had paid off.

“Good. The first button’s through the right hole.”

She gripped the ulu’s handle tight, then set it down on the side table.

— Thunk.

The dull sound shivered through the silver moonlight.

“Wh— huh? What d’you… You’ve gone and become lovers with that woman? You have, Captain?”

Enri, who had been tying the knot with practiced movements, gave a violent start. He had frozen as though a stasis spell had caught him, and when Keith gave the rope bound to his wrist a shake, his shoulders shuddered once.

He tied off the knot as he spoke.

“You’re making fun of me right now, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Then this must be a dream.”

Enri gave his own cheek a long pull, then muttered with the look of a man wandering somewhere in a dream.

“It isn’t a nightmare…?”

“Does my starting a romance count as a nightmare?”

“Well, it’s no sweet dream either, is it? More to the point, Captain — there wasn’t an accident, was there? The carriage rolling over, say, and you banging your head while it did.”

“Enri.”

“But it makes no sense!”

He let out a shrill screech, like a child mid-tantrum.

Keith had expected Enri to make a scene, but not in this direction. At worst he’d braced for a run of filthy jokes about ‘popping his cherry.’

“She’s a beautiful, entertaining woman. She was a great help in finding Ardine, too. If a man traveled a week in the company of an attractive woman and came away with no private feeling for her at all, wouldn’t that be the stranger thing?”

It was the tone of a man briefing an operation, but neither he nor Enri caught anything so fine as that.

“It’s not as if I don’t know that!”

“Then what’s the problem.”

“Well, that’s…”