Only She Called Him Young Master
The fortress lay quiet in the night.
Adrian sat beside the bed and listened to Nina's fevered breathing. It came thin and rasping, a wheeze at the edge of each breath. Her cheeks were flushed with heat, and the sight of them sat heavy in his chest. He soaked a cloth afresh and laid it across her brow.
He had first met her when he was nine. By then he had already let go of most of his life. Young as he was, he knew there were not many days left to him.
A little kitchen maid, new to the house, had turned a bright smile on him and said:
"Hello, Young Master."
He had been thrown by it, though he took it for a slip. In that mansion, not one servant called him Young Master. Every one of them watched the new Duchess's temper, and every one of them had seen the Duke's indifference. The title was not a bastard's to hold. Only the first child the Duchess bore was Young Master.
Nina, though, would not stop. She called him Young Master and would not quit, and she stood on his side.
She was so strange that he even wondered whether she might be some new breed of assassin, sent by the Duchess to kill him.
She wasn't. Strange, yes—but she wasn't that.
Nina was the only one who called him Young Master, and so she was the only one he was bound to protect.
And then the shock of the day she called him Adrian. The release in it.
Adrian let out a breath and carefully lifted the hair plastered to her face.
Whenever she was in pain, something in his chest drew tight. His mouth went dry. It was hard to breathe.
"……Young Master……?"
The mumble was badly frayed. Adrian gently set a straw cut from reed against her lips.
She managed a few swallows, sighed, and with her eyes already closing murmured:
"I'm remembering the old days……"
He thought he knew which memory. The thing that ought never to have come twice in a life—the night he had prayed until morning that Nina would not die. The night she drank, in his place, the tea the Duchess had given him.
The tea the Duchess poured had been clear, bright with the lovely crimson-gold of black tea. He had not needed to taste it to know it was poisoned, and still the hand that lifted the cup did not hesitate. By then he had a fair tolerance for poison, and he had already weighed the bargain: drink it here, and fix himself past all doubt as the victim. That would not have been the worst of outcomes.
Then Nina snatched the cup from his hand and drained it in a single swallow, and the whole story changed.
"Nina!"
It was the first time he had called her name like that.
Scarlet blood threaded out between the fingers she had pressed over her mouth. He lifted his head to beg for help, and that was when it struck him all over again. There was no one on his side.
The attendants stood in their neat row, faces perfectly ordinary, silent, as if nothing at all had happened. A maid gathered the fallen cup off the floor and set it back in its place. The Duchess smiled mildly and filled it again—an elegant smile, fit for a noble. She was smiling the way he always smiled.
He caught Nina up, already going cold, and fled the mansion. He hauled a horse from the stable, mounted, and rode hard for the knights.
In the black of the night he called his spirit. Darkness opened him a swift road, and through that deep shadow he leapt a great distance and came out among them.
It was the first time he had ever been grateful to be a Spirit Contractor.
There hadn't even been room, then, to look back and think of it.
Nina, held against him, brought up blood in broken bursts, and then even that motion ceased. The harsh sound of her breathing thinned until it was small and frail, and all he could do was plead with her.
When he reached the order and laid her down before Kirill, Kirill's face was dark. She could not promise the girl would live.
He prayed for days.
By a mercy, Nina recovered, and Kirill said it was the spirit's doing.
And yet. This, again.
He swallowed a sigh.
It seemed to him that Nina was hurt for no reason but that she stayed at his side. He knew he ought to set her far away. Selfishness would not let him. Not that Nina was the sort to stay put merely because he tried to push her off.
Childhood friends. That was what Nina called the two of them, perfectly at ease, as if it were nothing. Adrian did not particularly deny it.
It wasn't wrong. It simply wasn't enough.
Adrian changed the cloth once more and bent close to whisper.
"Go back to sleep."
At that she smiled, small and sweet. He smiled back before he knew he was doing it, and Nina, good as a child, soon sank again into a deep sleep.
Adrian leaned back in the chair.
A magic circle. He rubbed the spot between his brows. Trouble was stirring, inside the house and out.
The Duke of Rubuaene had three sons in all. Himself, the bastard, and the two the Duchess had borne.
Three years ago the eldest had died, and Adrian had survived an attempt to poison him. They could hardly be pleased that a force like the Black Knights sat in his hands. Even so, he had thought the Duchess gone quiet after that.
Are they trying to break the barrier?
If the barrier shattered and the corruption came pouring through, he could not begin to imagine how many Bellac would spill out with it.
Best to tell the Temple. Better the Temple, which kept the barrier, than the ducal house.
So thinking, Adrian closed his eyes.
The voice spoke as if it were a vow. Tender, and soft.
Nina opened her eyes.
The kindness of it was still so clear that tears rose. And yet—
I can't remember the dream.
Only those last words remained. The tears would not stop. Had it been a sad one, then?
Even so, it was a kind voice.
The fever?
She laid a hand to her own brow. No heat. The fever had broken, though the ache still lived in her muscles.
Nina spoke.
"My whole body hurts."
"If you can say it hurts, you're alive."
Kirill said it through a drift of pipe smoke.
Nina turned her head. Kirill sat in the chair as she always did, the white coat on her shoulders. Now and then she wore a monocle, though she claimed her eyes were excellent without one. Rough as the Black Knights she kept, Kirill was rough herself—in the hands that treated a body, and in the words that came with them.
"Kirill, do you never think a patient might need a warm word of comfort now and then? A gentle hand?"
"Am I a doctor?"
"You're not a doctor?"
"No. A researcher."
With a look that asked what nonsense this was, Kirill knocked her pipe clean against the window in one sharp tap.
"I can't believe it. All this time I trusted, absolutely, that Kirill was a doctor. I can't believe it. To think I've been examined by someone who isn't even a doctor."
Nina muttered it in pure disbelief, and Kirill's mouth crooked in a brief grin.
"Better than your average quack."
She shoved her hands into her pockets.
"Anyway, lucky you're hard to poison. Some other poor wretch would've been buried over there ages ago."
She jerked her chin toward the graveyard. Nina nodded. She felt just the same.
Kirill nearly told her that the captain had sat the night through at her side, nursing her, and then gone out. She let it go, and offered advice instead.
"Even so, we watch you two weeks at the least. Don't go moving if you don't have to. You woke up after three days."
"Three days? Heavens."
Nina blinked, startled, and then her head snapped up.
It was a rabbit's motion, the kind that comes of sensing something near. So like a wild thing that Kirill flinched before she meant to.
"It's quiet."
Nina said it low. Kirill nodded.
"Fortress is empty today."
"Don't tell me they moved out and left only me. Without even taking you."
She eased her tightly bound ankle down off the bed, careful, then clutched at her side and let out a groan.
"No. Most of the company's out surveying the barrier today."
"What?"
"That magic circle you reported. People came from the Temple. They went to look it over together."
"People from the Temple?"
"Outsiders on the grounds. So they took every one of the Elite along as escort."
Nina said nothing. Her breath caught.
The annihilation of the knight order.
She knew it in her head, and still something was wrong. The Young Master was cautious by nature. He always split his people.
Is this it?!
And the Temple, of all things. The Temple.
Wasn't the final boss of the story someone from the Temple?