Erased Time

Pai pointed at herself without a trace of shyness.

“And a dependable nanny who knows no fewer than eighty-seven ways to tie a knot!”

“Yip!”

Reni, which had been panting and scratching at the bed frame, gave a resounding bark. All three of them gave the baby snow wolf a look, then shushed it at once, ‘Shh!’

“Whiiine, whine.”

Pai crouched down and gave Reni’s little red tongue a tap. Its triangular ears twitched.

“I nearly left out the finest snow wolf in all the world.”

“A snow wolf? Not a mongrel?”

“It’s a snow wolf no matter how you look at it, thank you.”

“Either way, they’re the same dog family.”

Pai covered Reni’s ears with both hands and whispered.

“Don’t listen, Reni. You’re the best snow wolf there is.”

She scooped up the whimpering puppy and sat down in the chair beside the bed.

“I think the rest of you can go on ahead.”

“No.”

Keith gave the bell rope by the bed a tug.

“I’ll call someone. Miss Pai should get some rest as well.”

“A nanny is of one body and one mind with her honored child, you know. I’ll stay a while longer and then swap with Anna.”

“Quite the sense of responsibility, eh?”

Hamel muttered it while he rubbed at eyes gone red from yawning. Pai gave a small snort.

“Didn’t you know? Diligent and dutiful. It’s stuck right there on my forehead.”

“Odd. All I can see written there is ‘brazen-faced.’”

“Lord Keith.”

“Yes?”

Singled out with no warning, Keith went tense.

“You can see it, can’t you, Lord Keith?”

Pai widened her eyes for no good reason. The whole thing was nothing, and her competitive streak had caught fire over it anyway.

“Well…”

Keith wet his dry lower lip with his tongue. He stared at her face, hard, as though there really were letters written on it.

“…”

There was something dogged in his gaze, though she could not have put her finger on what: slow and hot, like lava that had held itself in a long while and then erupted, melting everything to stickiness as it swept down across the land.

Her mouth had gone dry somehow, and Pai swallowed before she asked,

“Well? What does it say?”

“Bold. That’s what it says.”

“Bold…?”

“Hah!”

Hamel burst out in an insufferable laugh, as though he had known all along it would go this way.

“Even when the noble gentleman tells a girl she has no manners, he does it so very elegantly.”

“N— no. That is not what I meant…”

“I am going to bed. Shaking a man awake at the crack of dawn. This is elder abuse.”

Cutting Keith off, Hamel snapped his fingers and vanished in a puff of deep violet smoke.

“That is not it…!”

Keith protested urgently, then checked himself. His voice had come out louder than he meant it to, and he glanced over to see whether Ardine had woken.

“I absolutely did not mean that you have no manners.”

“I see.”

“You won’t take my word for it?”

Underneath the injured tone lay a ‘But I trusted you, didn’t I,’ and it left Pai feeling proud and bashful at once.

Yes. You did trust me. But you’d trust anyone else too. Anyone who was setting out to do the right thing.

Drop the idea that you’re the only special one.

Chiding herself, she answered.

“I do believe you. It’s only that my own conscience pricked me first.”

The difference between cheek and bad manners was paper-thin. She did not treat Keith with the deference of an ordinary maid. Outwardly they were lovers, so that much might pass; but it was the same when the two of them were alone like this, and standing on ceremony felt embarrassing somehow.

But I’m glad to see him, that’s the thing.

The problem, so to speak, was that their senses of distance did not match. Keith felt familiar to her.

At the end of the Demon War, in which eight-tenths of humanity was wiped out, the two of them had stood back to back against Simon, each staking their own life again and again to save the other.

Once her thoughts had drifted that far, the strength went out of her.

…And he won’t even remember me.

Was this the price of the regression? That a precious person she had traded jokes with, entrusted her back to, and opened up to about the things buried deepest in her heart should remember none of it.

Pai had taken the history of a world that had reached its final chapter and made it a thing that never happened, and in the same stroke she had deleted a private, particular history of her own. For a while after the regression it had been fun to be the only one who knew a future he did not; it had made her feel omnipotent, and she had liked that. Now it only made her lonely.

She was the only person who remembered the erased time.

They had met a full ten years earlier than in the previous life, so from here on they could build that much more in the way of memories, and perhaps those would be more peaceful and more beautiful than the time they had already passed through…

To her, the time after the regression was no different from paint laid over an old picture. Only, she had liked the old picture, and she never wanted to forget the impression it had left. As much as she looked forward to the time that would be painted over the top, the time being buried under it was precious to her beyond words.

Only when a hot knot surged up in her chest did she realize she had come too far. She cleared a throat bound tight with sorrow and went on.

“If there’s been anything rude in the way I’ve behaved, I apologize.”

“For instance?”

“Sorry?”

“On what month, what day, at what hour and what minute is Miss Pai supposed to have treated me rudely?”

…The way he presses the point is exactly like a child.

She did not need long to think about it.

“Well, if we’re picking things out, it starts with my calling you ‘Lord Keith’ instead of ‘Your Grace,’ doesn’t it.”

“Why should that be a problem? Miss Pai and I are lovers.”

Keith’s face was less unruffled than it was matter-of-fact.

“Calling a lover ‘Your Grace’ would be stranger still. There is nothing whatever wrong with the form of address. If anything — call me Keith.”

“Drop the honorific, you mean?”

“If the name by itself is too much for you, then Mr. Keith.”

Pai thought about it for a moment and then nodded. The manner mattered more than the form of address, to her mind.

“All right. Well, it’s not as though you’re suddenly going to come out with ‘sweetheart.’”

“…”

Oh? Was ‘sweetheart’ as unwelcome as all that? Pai saw the set of Keith’s mouth go stiff, and added, awkwardly,

“There’ll be no occasion for me to call you that, so rest easy.”

“No.”

“No to what?”

“The form of address, ‘sweetheart.’ It isn’t bad.”

“…”

Was it, now. Pai cocked her head.

Northerners were famously stingy with expressions of feeling, or so the prejudice went. From what she had been through herself, it was closer to fact than to prejudice. These were people who, even after marrying, expressed their hearts by sharpening the ulu instead of saying ‘I love you.’ What was there to expect?

“But Lord Keith—”

“Keith.”

“…Mr. Keith calling me ‘sweetheart’ is… mm, rather out of character, isn’t it? You’re a decorous, blunt sort of man by nature.”

“I wonder. In other people’s eyes I am a man who fell head over heels for a maid he had known a week and made her his niece’s nanny in order to install her in the castle.”

“Ah…”

Hearing it laid out so objectively in someone else’s mouth was blatant enough to set her face burning.

Word must have got round that he’s a tremendous romantic. Is that quite all right?

While she sank into her belated worry, Keith went on, enunciating each word.

“So my calling Miss Pai ‘sweetheart’ can be said to suit the character of a man in love.”

“Th— that’s true.”

“So shouldn’t Miss Pai be applying herself a little harder as well?”

“Me…?”

The arrow that had been flying so nicely swerved all at once and came at her.

“I’m doing my best in my own way, you know.”

“But at the moment I feel a certain distance.”

“Between us?”

“Yes.”

“A distance…”

She repeated it under her breath.

Right up until a moment ago she had been in the middle of reproaching herself for being far too familiar. And now the man himself was letting on that it was nothing to him, that he would in fact like the distance adjusted closer still, and it flustered her.

“Then how is it Mr. Keith wants me to apply myself?”

“Sweetheart.”

“…”

He led by example, murmuring it again, ‘Sweetheart.’ Then he took a step toward her and closed the physical distance as well.

She was sitting in the chair, so to meet Keith’s eyes she had to lift her head. Just looking at each other, neither of them moving, made it seem as though their breaths were mixing. She let her gaze slide away, awkward, and murmured, abashed,

“…Every time is too much, but once in a while…”

“Very well.”

Keith wore a satisfied smile and nodded. And since he went on looking at her even then, like a child hoping for a sweet, she swallowed a groan.

“Then I’ll see you this evening.”

“…”

“S— sweetheart.”

— Phew.

I’m going to need some practice.