High Enough to Touch the Ceiling
Baden had naturally assumed that Sirca and Sabrina would assign him a role as well. He was mistaken.
What, you? Figure it out yourself. This isn't a hunting game, and I'm stuck on meal duty? Hunting is exactly what I'm best at.
Sabrina was too busy seething over being denied the hunting game to spare Baden a single thought.
I'm sorry. I have to go find toys to play with the little one. Father, you'll manage just fine on your own.
Even the son he had counted on abandoned him, all for the sake of winning the child's favor.
Fortunately, his turn had been pushed to the very last, which at least bought him time to think. What am I supposed to do......? Regrettably, he failed to come up with a single plan before Bariya came looking for him—and that was why he found himself locked in a breathless standoff with her in his office.
"......Little one, is there something else you'd like to do?"
In the end, Baden handed the choice to Bariya.
"No."
She had already burned with her vengeance against the hyenas and filled her stomach besides, and there was nothing in particular she wanted. Most of her life had been spent locked away in the hyena household, and the rest of it on the run, so she no more knew what she was supposed to want than he did.
"What do ordinary ten-year-old girls like?"
Baden turned to his aide, Silva, for help. Bariya looked at Silva too.
"......Yes?"
Suddenly caught beneath both their gazes, Silva broke into a cold sweat. Baden's face was expressionless, and Bariya's was no different. They weren't even related by blood—so why did they look so alike? Anyone seeing them would have taken her for his own daughter.
"I don't have children either, so......"
"Tsk."
Baden clicked his tongue. Under a look that seemed to dismiss him as a useless nuisance, Silva felt deeply wronged. And the lord doesn't have a daughter either.
"......Ah. Right."
Baden lowered himself and carefully held out a hand.
"Little one, there's somewhere I'd like us to go."
Worried she might refuse, he added one more line.
"It might not be fun...... Go and see it first, then decide."
The words struck Bariya as terribly strange. And no wonder. While she lived with the Mariners, her mother was the only person who had ever asked what she wanted. Every other adult had only ever looked down on her. Not one of them had bent like this to meet her eyes.
Bariya looked at Baden's hand. It was the first time a grown man's hand—hands that had only ever been sharp, and only ever hurt—did not frighten her.
He's enormous. And yet I'm not scared. How strange.
He was the largest beastkin she had ever seen, and still she felt neither fear nor dread. He seemed far more dependable than Darius Mariner, the man she couldn't even stand to call Father.
"I'll go."
Bariya seized his hand. The tiny hand resting on his thick palm left Baden feeling strangely unsettled.
"All right. Let's go."
Careful not to startle her, he drew her in—and then simply lifted her and set her on the back of his neck.
"Huh?"
"My lord?"
Bariya, suddenly astride his shoulders, was startled. So was Silva. Baden paid them no mind. He rose slowly from his seat so the child would not fall, and in an instant Bariya's view climbed more than six feet. Her mouth fell open.
"My lord! For such a young lady, that's still dangerous......!"
Silva cried out in horror, and in that very instant—
"It's high!"
Bariya shouted, her voice bright with delight.
"It's so high! Wow! If I stretch my arms, I think I can touch the ceiling!"
She burst into bubbling laughter and reached both arms high overhead, and a helpless laugh escaped Silva. Right—Bariya was a cat beastkin. She liked high places, and even if she fell, a height like this would never hurt her.
"Are you all right?"
"Yes!"
"Hold on to my hair so you don't fall."
Bariya seized Baden's hair firmly in both hands. Watching that golden hair come undone in a child's grip, Silva rubbed his eyes again and again. The hair was more astonishing than the shoulder ride.
"Then let's go."
Baden opened the office door. Tiger beastkin were large to begin with, and the doors had been built high enough that Bariya was in no danger of bumping her head. Even so, he seemed worried. He bent his knees and eased carefully through.
"Hah—!"
"Hrk—!"
"Ack—!"
Knights and servants passing near the office caught sight of them, and their mouths dropped open. Baden, the largest man in all of Caliph, with Bariya perched on his shoulders and clutching his hair. Am I dreaming with my eyes wide open?
"Where are we going?"
"You'll know when we get there."
Baden and Bariya themselves paid not the slightest mind to anyone's stare. Until the two of them vanished from sight, everyone stood frozen where they were, mouths hanging open.
Someone else was just as stunned by Baden's shocking behavior.
"Father?"
Passing by with his right hand, Jake, Sirca spotted the pair and doubted his own eyes.
"Something's wrong with my eyes. I'm seeing things that aren't there."
Jake denied reality outright, scrubbing at his eyes.
"You said you had no idea what to do. Was the answer to give her a shoulder ride?"
"No. I only thought that since the little one is a cat, she might like being up high."
"I weeeally like it."
Giggling, Bariya caught Baden's golden hair in both fists and shook it. Hair that had only ever come undone in front of Sabrina was turning into a bird's nest beneath a ten-year-old girl's hands.
"We're going."
"Let's go!"
Baden and Bariya brushed past the two of them.
"Did the lord give you shoulder rides as well, when you were little, Young Lord?"
Only after rubbing his eyes until they were bloodshot did Jake finally accept reality, and he asked in a daze.
"Hardly. When I was young, Father was in no position to leisurely give anyone shoulder rides."
And that was true. Sirca was not the sort to act spoiled, and in those days neither Baden nor Sabrina had the presence of mind to indulge him.
"In the first place, Father isn't a man who would give his own son a shoulder ride."
"That's true. I always thought the lady of the house was the only one who would ever ride on the lord's shoulders."
"......"
The image of Sabrina astride Baden's shoulders sent a shudder through Sirca's whole body.
"If that had ever happened, Mother would have wrung Father's neck on the spot."
Even Baden was no match for Sabrina's strength.
"Anyway, I'm glad Father and the little one seem to be getting along."
Baden, who cared for nothing beyond his wife Sabrina and the safety of the tiger beastkin. Sirca had expected him to keep an awkward distance from Bariya, so this unexpected sight was a pleasure. He was truly glad they had not simply left her behind, and had brought her with them.
Leaving every manner of scream behind them, the place Baden brought Bariya was none other than the library, the pride of Caliph.
"Whoa... whoaaa......"
No gaudy ornament—only neat and clean, and for that very reason deeply elegant and refined. Bariya could not close her mouth.
"If you've been on the run, I doubt you've had time to read. I don't know whether you'll like it."
She didn't even hear him. The smell of books, the first she had caught in so long; shelves packed from the floor all the way to the high ceiling; and the subjects, astonishingly varied.
"Little one?"
Bariya, standing there slack-jawed, came back to herself only after Baden set her down. He bent and crouched in front of her.
"You don't like it? Then we'll find something else......"
"No!"
She caught the hem of his clothes at once.
"Weally, weally weally, I like it! I love it so much!"
She had rushed the words for fear he would misunderstand, and her pronunciation slipped worse than usual. That was how desperate she was.
"I like weading books, but I couldn't wead them much in the hyena house, and I was sad. But you bwought me here, so thank you, weally."
Still clutching him tight, Bariya's eyes shone. She hungered for knowledge. Under her mother Claire's influence, she was clever beyond any comparison with children her age, her intelligence remarkably high. But Darius had not merely refused to let her learn—he had wanted Bariya to live as an ignorant fool who knew nothing. If her mother had not secretly taught her every night, trying to pass on as much knowledge as she could, Bariya would have lived at a wretched level of learning despite the brilliant mind she possessed. And so this moment filled her with more gratitude than she knew how to hold.
"I'm glad. I don't really know what children like."
"But you've got Sirca."
He was eighteen now, but surely he had been a child once.
"......You're right. If I'd paid a little more attention back then, maybe I'd know more than I do now."
Baden smiled bitterly. For the first time, he was sorry he had never properly looked after Sirca's childhood. It couldn't be helped. Those words were no absolution.
"You may read anything here. The books you aren't meant to read are stored separately, so don't worry. Look at all of them."
"All of these?!"
"There should be plenty of interesting ones. Carnivores get called ignorant and stupid because we don't read, and it rankled us so much we went and bought every kind of book there is."
"What?"
Bariya—a proud carnivore, and a leopard cat beastkin—narrowed her eyes.
"What ignorant jerks said that?!"
"Birdbrains. Ahem. The avian lot."
So that's how it is. I absolutely will not let this go. Just wait until I meet them. She would show them, in person, exactly why people said that if your body was good enough, you never had to use your head!
"Ah. Right."
From a cabinet at the center of the library, Baden drew out a thin booklet and held it out to her.
"You only have to tell me which book you want, and I can find every one of them. But there will be books you want to read in secret, too."
Caught out, Bariya flinched. How did he know?
"So keep this. It's a list of where everything is, arranged by subject."
There was even a map of the library at the very front.
"Thank you......"
"And if you truly can't tell where a book is, ask me, or Sabrina, or Sirca. We won't ask why you want it, and we won't even be curious, so don't worry."
They would ask her nothing about herself. Baden smiled, as if promising to keep that term of their contract. At the gentle smile, Bariya clutched the booklet tight.
Only after coming to the tiger estate, where she had not a single family member, did she finally receive true consideration. Her heart tingled.