I Am Not Nina
Nina was born in the countryside, in a poor village that did not even have a proper name. Looking back, it was the sort of hamlet where people burned the woods to clear a field.
The memories of another world came into her when she was five, and to a child of five they were no different from a highwayman come to steal her very self. Feeling her way back through them with a little mind, Nina howled.
"I'm not Nina!"
"This isn't my home!"
"You aren't my family!"
People thought she had gone mad after witnessing her parents' accident.
Nina was a late child. The only family left to her were her older brother, Allen, and her older sister, Berry, both of them at least ten years older than she was. When their youngest burned and raved nonsense, the two of them nursed her with devoted care. Even so, Nina was lost.
She would scream, burst out of the house, and run, and the neighbors who saw it clicked their tongues.
"Look at her, look at her. The mad fit's on her again, aigoo."
"That wench is back."
Her sister always glared such people down, and her brother was forever out searching for Nina. Even after he had bent his back to the fields from the moment the sun rose until it set, all through the busiest stretch of the farming year, he still went looking for her.
"Nina, let's go home."
"Nina, where are you."
"Nina, it's all right."
Our youngest, the prettiest in the world.
The cutest Nina in all the world.
Nina, Nina, Nina, Nina, Nina.
That tender calling.
Even through the chaos sweeping her mind, her family held Nina's hand and would not let go, and Nina won. To say she had fought her memories and been victorious might sound a little absurd, but a victory is a victory all the same.
The memories of the other world became a part of Nina, and as she grew they became wholly one with her. One tile in the mosaic that made her was a memory from another world. Memory cannot overcome reality, and the dead cannot overcome the living.
Once she had endured the anguish, those memories of another world made Nina a cleverer child than anyone. She learned her numbers and her letters far faster than the rest, and Allen and Berry were proud of her.
Berry always tied Nina's brown hair into neat twin tails. The children of the village went about shaggy-headed, so a glance at Nina's hair alone was enough to show that someone at home took pains over her. The cord that bound it was one Allen had dyed red, specially, for her.
Nina would take her sister's hand and her brother's and chatter on and on, the scarlet ribbon streaming out behind her.
She was happy.
Until the Bellac appeared and took everything.
A memory burst, bright as a bubble popping.
Nina knew she was dreaming.
Or is this my life, flashing before my eyes?
The first to arrive in the village the Bellac had smashed to pieces were bandits. The Nina who was still alive was dragged off by them and sold to a trafficker.
A dream.
Yes. She had dreamed, back then.
A voice that stroked her hair with tenderness, and whispered.
It is all right.
Words you speak with a true heart will sound true to anyone. And anyone will easily find your loveliness, and your light.
For in your soul, there is…….
She had dreamed a dream like that.
She could remember no further, but when she opened her eyes the next day, there was strength in her. She had thought it was her sister or her brother who had come into the dream…….
Had it not been?
The house that purchased her was the ducal house of Rubuaene.
The name was familiar. Only after her sister and her brother were dead did Nina understand that this place shared its world with a book she had read in that other one.
So when she was sold in as a scullery maid, there was only one thing she wanted to know.
Was Adrian, the second male lead, here, or was he not? Was this the same stretch of time as the book she had read, or was it not?
Astonishingly, Adrian was here. The only difference was that the Adrian of the book was in his twenties, while the Adrian of this place was a mere nine years old—only a year apart from her.
Adrian had come into the ducal house at five and reached eight without incident. The year he turned eight, the Duke married, and the new Duchess began to shut Adrian out. That was the turning point. By the time he was nine, the Duchess's first son, Gerald, had been born, and the Duchess set about a plan in earnest to be rid of him. The Duke upheld that plan by the simple means of not caring.
The maid who had attended Adrian, the other maids, the wet nurse—every one of them vanished. Only Nina, newly arrived, called him "Young Master."
Finding Adrian, she was glad. She had thought every light in her life had gone out, and then she discovered a new hope. At last the time had come for these memories, which had tormented her so viciously, to be of use. She had wanted to be not a wretched, pitiable girl who had lost all her family, but someone who could help another person—and that, she found, she could become.
Nina made up her mind, and gladly, to stand on his side.
There was no one who called Adrian "Young Master." Young Master meant Young Master Gerald, and no one else.
The book, as she remembered it, went roughly like this. A villain summons the Corrupted Spirit Lord into the world to bring that world to ruin, and the Saintess heroine, the archmage hero, and the knight who is the second male lead strike him down together.
Yes. That second male lead, over there—that was the part her Young Master had been given.
Well. The second-male-lead part, that much I can live with.
Does love always have to succeed? Live long enough, and sometimes a person gets left. The problem was not that. The problem was the way the Young Master grew up, and the future waiting at the end of it.
1. Abused until his whole body is one bruise.
2. By the Duchess's scheme, made captain of the knight order and posted to the front lines against the Bellac.
3. The Duchess's attempt to poison him—and, because of it, his health in ruins.
4. The knight order annihilated by the villain's design—and a wound of the heart that can never be undone.
5. Kills every one of his family and rises as Duke.
6. Leaves a domain rotting poorer by the day, and does nothing but hunt Bellac.
Now look.
The heroine had not even appeared yet. Wasn't this already too much?
Still, it got a little better once she did. The original heroine arrived, tended the domain, even turned up a local specialty, and brought the land back to life. And just like that it shot from the poorest domain of all to the richest!
Haah. The applause simply starts itself, doesn't it.
But here's the thing.
The second male lead, his health ruined by the poison his stepmother fed him, goes and dies not long after the final battle is over, leaving everything he has to the Saintess heroine as his inheritance.
Well, now.
Isn't this one tremendous story? Does a side character really have to be wrung dry of every last drop?
Nina had no wish at all to leave her Young Master to a life like that, and even less wish to be dragged into it herself. She was about to die right now. Protect the original? Don't make her laugh.
This life I'm living is the original.
First, she had to grow close to Adrian.
Nina called him Young Master and pressed in on him, warm and familiar, but Adrian would not so much as look at her. However she called, he ignored her and behaved as if she were not there.
In the end, Nina used her last resort.
Lure him with food!
In truth, it was the only thing she could do. She made use of the one advantage a scullery maid had and scraped food together, hid it carefully in the garden, and opened the window of Adrian's bedroom.
She climbed over the sill as quietly as a thief and called to him.
"Adrian."
To say "Young Master" while climbing through a bedroom window in the middle of the night would have been strange.
A maid had to keep to a maid's proper place. So who, then, was shouting "Let's play!" through a window at midnight?
A friend.
A friend does not call the other person Young Master. Inside, Nina was drawn tight as wire, but she did her best to look natural.
He was not asleep.
The boy only looked at her, indifferent, and Nina—though her fist was clenched in her skirt with nerves—smiled at him, wide.
"Let's go on a picnic!"
She had been certain he would turn her away. Instead Adrian rose without a word of protest and followed after her, and the two of them shared the food.