You Still Don't Know Me
The cake had only been the beginning. Nina went on to tell Adrian about the New Year's gathering the servants were holding among themselves—how much the duchess had spent on this year's banquet, how much of that money the butler had skimmed away, how much food had been left over once the feast was done. At the last she confessed that she rather liked the post of kitchen maid, and Adrian could only nod.
"Because Nina gets to eat."
"Excuse me? You'd say a thing like that? Not that I can deny it."
Nina owned it readily, and Adrian laughed again. When her stories ran out, he spoke of a book he had just finished and of his worry that his swordsmanship was not improving as it should.
It was a pleasant evening, the sort a New Year's night ought to be. When the hour grew late, Nina rose with regret.
"I'll see you next time."
"Sleep well."
"You too, Young Master."
In high spirits, Nina gathered the dishes and stepped out into the corridor. She was humming to herself as she rounded the corner—and walked straight into someone.
"Ah. So the little rat was you."
The voice was elegant and smooth, unmistakably a noble's. Nina stared blankly at the woman in resplendent green velvet, then startled and dropped to the floor in a bow.
"I greet you, my lady."
The duchess looked down at her, smiling brightly as a girl.
"There was a rat in my house. Oh, how filthy."
She said it in a voice like a child's, and then she added,
A chill ran down Nina's spine. Even so, she had no thought of screaming or making a scene. Adrian would hear.
"The well would be the place for it."
With that, the duchess turned and glided lightly back the way she had come.
What followed was brutally hard. It was January, and Nina survived only because she was a Spirit Contractor. For a girl of twelve, the shame and the pain were more than she could bear.
Perhaps the duchess had never believed Nina would live. Once the order was given, she forgot the girl existed. The servants who were fond of Nina did not strip her naked to pour the water; they left her her underclothes. Wet cloth would only steal her warmth faster, but it was better than standing bare while every soul in the manor looked on. To have well water, broken through January ice, emptied over her in her underclothes before a crowd of spectators—that was not an ordeal a person lived through twice.
Adrian did not know what had been done to her. When several days passed and Nina did not come, he went at last to the kitchen to find her. The sight of her stopped his tongue: a towel over a scalp shaved to the skin, her whole body shaking with fever.
The kitchen maids who cherished her pleaded with him. Please, stay away from Nina.
Adrian returned to his room without a word. By the time Nina came back to herself, his mind was already set. He would not speak to her. He ignored her. Now and then he threw something sharp.
In the end, she had no choice but to slip into his bedroom in the dead of night.
"Adrian!"
She sprang up onto the bed and all but climbed on top of him, and Adrian was thrown into confusion.
Nina said, "I know you're doing this because you don't want to lose me. But if you keep on this way, you'll lose me in the worst way there is."
Adrian said nothing, and Nina only looked into his beautiful eyes, the color of rose quartz.
The standoff did not last long. In the end it was Adrian who surrendered. He squeezed his eyes shut.
"But, Nina. But..."
Seeing how he struggled, Nina offered a compromise.
"If that's how it has to be, then we'll pretend not to know each other where anyone can see. But I'll come at night, like this. This much is all right, isn't it?"
Adrian was still uneasy. He agreed all the same.
From that day on they feigned indifference in the open and met when night fell. Once the bond had nearly shattered for good; instead it held, and grew firmer.
The days of pretending not to know each other went on and on. They did not so much as trade a glance. And yet they spoke—through a brush of fingertips, a flower left on a windowsill, a walk that always passed the same stretch of ground. Then, on nights when the watch grew careless, Nina stole into Adrian's room, and they could look each other in the face and talk properly.
Someone might have pitied them. If Nina had said, We're happy even so, someone would have answered that it was nothing but a victory declared inside her own head—a wretched life in which they could neither eat nor drink as they ought. But Nina had not the slightest intention of leaving her happiness in anyone else's hands. She held the reins of her own joy, and she would not let others take their measure of it.
She chose the road on which she was happy over the road other people called happiness. Life was forever a chain of hardship and sorrow; finding joy and pleasure in it was work that belonged wholly to oneself. She had no wish to submit the gladness she had salvaged to anyone's judgment, nor to set it beside anyone else's.
Nina was a master at finding the joys of living, and whenever she did, Adrian smiled—faintly.
Two years later.
In the year Adrian turned fifteen, the thing Nina had braced for—and Adrian had told himself would never come—finally broke. The duke appointed him captain of the Black Knights. He had decided to set a boy of fifteen on the foremost line.
No one was ignorant of the Purple Forest's infamy. The Black Knights' death rate approached fifty percent. Anyone could see that Adrian was being sent to that post to die.
Adrian summoned Nina. At noon. Openly.
Her hair had grown back, still short. Every day she wished it would come in faster; it remained stubbornly slow. The maids said it was because she did not eat well enough, and Nina thought they were probably right.
Adrian told her, without inflection, that he had been made captain of the Black Knights. Then he opened a box. His entire fortune lay inside: two large gold coins, five large silver coins, and a single silver brooch. That was all the wealth the eldest son of a ducal house possessed.
"Leave the ducal house, Nina."
He said it with a gentle smile.
"This should be enough to buy out your bond. I won't be here anymore. Maybe things will even be easier without me—but just in case."
"Young Master!"
"I'll be all right. Leaving this place may be for the best. At least I'll have fewer other worries."
He looked at Nina.
"Adrian."
Nina reached out and cupped his cheeks in both hands. She brought her face in close, and his eyes went round.
"You don't have to smile like that for me, too."
"Nina..."
"Not for me, Adrian."
"Nina."
He clenched his teeth. Both his hands seized her arms, hard, and in her embrace he came apart. The boy of fifteen sobbed.
Nina held him tight and said nothing.
Tell me to run? Not a chance.
Adrian. You still don't know me.