The Maid With a Child - Chapter 4

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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4. The Bright Blue Cyanide Lake
The Head Butler stared at the door, murmuring like a man in prayer.
Given the nature of the house and the master’s profession, assassination and ambush were daily occurrences. The servants below knew nothing of it, but he—as Head Butler—had witnessed bloodshed countless times.
That did not make it easier to bear.
The two frozen figures stood motionless, their terror rendering them mute as ice.
A moment passed.
“Come in.”
The sounds from within ceased, and the master’s command fell sharp and clear.
Adlen drew a sharp breath. Only then did she realize she’d been holding it all along.
Just before opening the door, the Head Butler’s eyes met hers.
‘Are you ready?’
For what, she didn’t know—but the Head Butler, who had devoted half his life to Sigelion, would not ask such a thing lightly.
Adlen steadied herself, prepared not to cry out or drop the baby no matter what she might witness.
“Y-yes, I’m ready……”
The Head Butler inhaled deeply, just as Adlen had, and pushed open the door.
The heavy door to the master’s chambers swung slowly inward.
“Hah!”
The stench of blood rushed out like a living thing.
Adlen flinched and stumbled backward.
Blood.
It was blood.
The master’s chamber was a sea of it.
“It seems I’ve given you work, Head Butler.”
And standing in that crimson tide, sword dripping gore, was the master.
Drenched in blood from crown to heel, he looked less like a man than like a living clot wearing human shape.
Corpses lay scattered around him like fallen debris.
“Hgh!”
Adlen’s vision swam—black fading to white, white fading to red, red bleeding into blue, every color spinning at once.
Crimson blood. Corpses. Steel.
The objects in her sight jumped and receded, swam and sharpened, over and over without anchor.
She did not notice her own legs trembling like aspen leaves.
“A-Adlen.”
The Head Butler’s voice reached her from beside, but she could not answer.
Adlen staggered backward, her legs giving way beneath her. Her own ragged breathing echoed in her ears.
Then, through the gathering haze, she saw the master turn toward her—and raise his blade.
‘Why……?’
He was not merely looking. He lifted the sword he had lowered, and rushed straight at her.
“!”
She had no time even to scream.
Lacalte bore down on the rigid, helpless Adlen and swung his sword.
The blade sang through the air, its edge grazing the tips of her hair.
In the same motion, a large, calloused hand seized her stiffened form and pulled her forward.
“……!”
He drew her into his embrace.
Despite the reek of blood, his arms were impossibly warm.
Even before the copper stench could fully reach her lungs, she felt the wet spray of something striking her back—blood pouring down her body.
She did not need to look to know what it was.
Blood.
Adlen had reached her limit. Her consciousness wavered and began to slip.
“Daring to crawl into my house. I cannot resurrect them just to kill them again.”
The master’s furious growl reverberated through her, transmitted through his very body.
A sea of blood, corpses strewn about, the master’s murderous aura.
There were too many reasons to faint, each as compelling as the last.
Adlen could resist no longer. Darkness claimed her.
* * *
Adlen had an exceptional fear of blood.
According to the staff at the Orphanage, it had been so since she arrived as an infant. Among the war orphans they received, such cases were not uncommon.
Whether a parent or anyone else—witnessing death at close hand could scar anyone. Even for an infant who would later have no memory of it, the horror etched itself into the very marrow of instinct.
So the teachers at the Orphanage had concluded that Adlen, too, must be a survivor of war—given how her mind fractured at the sight of blood.
Instinctive fear could not be cured by understanding its cause.
Her own blood she could manage, but anyone else’s—she couldn’t even bear it when a mosquito burst at a slap—she’d run. Let alone this.
This wasn’t the blood from scraped knees after a tumble, or nosebleeds from exhaustion, or spray from filleted fish. This was real blood. Real killing. She’d fainted for good reason.
“Are you with us, Adlen?”
At the Head Butler’s voice, her eyes fluttered open.
Her vision swam. Adlen forced focus into her gaze.
Through the haze, the Head Butler’s worried face came clear, and then—the master’s expression, ice-cold and cutting.
‘The master?!’
The moment his face entered her field of vision, sensation crashed down on her like a diver breaking the surface—all at once, overwhelming.
“I—”
“Any fool careless enough to let assassins trail you all the way here gets out of Sigelion. Now.”
Before Adlen could speak, Lacalte’s voice cut through the air like a blade, and her blood ran cold. When words came through the body itself like that, they carried a different weight entirely.
She swallowed hard, her throat dry, but a sharp commanding voice rang out across the room.
“We’ll correct it at once, sir!”
Adlen spun to find knights standing at attention, their faces marked on one side by vivid red—bruises that looked like they’d each taken a fist to the jaw.
The room had been cleaned in the meantime.
Slowly, the situation resolved in her mind.
While she’d been unconscious, the knights must have come running, cleared up the mess, and were now receiving a dressing-down from the master.
At least the danger was over. But Adlen’s body remained frozen. The scene she’d glimpsed before losing consciousness had been too shocking—her body still wouldn’t obey, even now that she’d woken.
“You’re awake. Get up.”
The command snapped Adlen from her daze, and her eyes lifted.
What she saw of her own state made her catch her breath. Covered in blood—cradled in her blood-soaked master’s arms.
“…….”
For a moment she couldn’t decide what should horrify her more: the blood, or the fact that she was being held.
Seeing with her own eyes but unable to believe it, Adlen looked up at her holder’s face.
The impossibly pale blue eyes she’d only heard rumors of looked down at her.
Not the soft blue of a lake where birds played, but like the legendary Cyanide Lake—waters said to dissolve even stone.
“……hiccup.”
Cradled in the master’s embrace, Adlen went rigid as a doe frozen before a predator.
“Waaah! Waah!”
If the baby hadn’t then raised its voice to reclaim attention, Adlen might have spent another moment paralyzed by indecision until her head split open again.
“Oh—oh no, Baby!”
Because Adlen had collapsed, the baby cradled in the Head Butler’s arms was decidedly displeased, shrieking almost convulsively.
Adlen lurched to her feet. Or tried to.
Her body was more startled than her mind. In the motion of standing, she crumpled back into the master’s arms.
“Waaaaah!”
“Oh goodness! The baby!”
“Waaaaah! Screeeech!”
“Calm down, please! Calm yourself, yes?”
Even as the baby kicked and bit and clawed with every tool at its disposal, shoving against the Head Butler, Adlen watched in a daze.
She’d never seen a baby so relentlessly vicious.
“Ow! Adlen! Help me!”
When the baby’s grip began to visibly thin the Head Butler’s hair, his scream jolted Adlen back to action. She moved.
This was a rescue. It was the decent thing to do.
“Here—here, give…give them to me.”
“Yes. All right.”
“There now, baby. I’m here. Shall we stop? Stop?”
Once Adlen had the baby, she bounced it rhythmically, her whole body moving. The crying was fierce; she’d never heard a sibling wail quite so loud. But Adlen did her best.
In this moment, there was only the goal of soothing the baby. The blood, the master, everything else—gone from her mind.
“Mm, mm……”
“Stop?”
Stop.
“……?”
And then, impossibly simply, the baby’s crying ceased.
This…works?
Adlen stared blankly between the baby and the Head Butler.
Even the Head Butler, his hands still trembling as he smoothed his disheveled hair, had stopped to stare at the sight.
“……You have a gift for children, Adlen.”
The Head Butler released a sound somewhere between astonishment and awe.
“A gift like this, and you’ve ended up in Sigelion, of all places—where there are no children to show it. What a waste of talent……”
In a Sigelion without children, such a gift could never shine.
Until now.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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