Chapter 10
New Emotions
"I'll be going now. The child looks tired."
"Yes? But the gifts still need to be organized..."
As Gillianna replied with a troubled expression, Heath, sensing the atmosphere, quickly used magic to stack the boxes to the ceiling, creating a passable path.
"...Then let's organize the rest tomorrow, Gillianna. Let's go."
Vernon, who had been watching, dragged the clueless Gillianna and quickly left the accommodation.
As they left, Lucia looked at Nia, who was clutching her clothes with anxious eyes, and said,
"Nia, everything gets dirty eventually."
"...No. Nuh-uh. If I touch it, can't use it."
Lucia was taken aback and chuckled at the fact that the child who would one day become the Saintess was saying such things.
"That's not true. There is nothing in this world that becomes unusable because you touched it."
'If anything, you'd revive it.'
Nia, who had been avoiding eye contact with Lucia's words, raised her head.
However, as if remembering something, she mumbled in a very small voice.
"...Gloves. Gloves dirty."
"Gloves?"
"Dirty... Can't use them..."
Lucia raised an eyebrow at Nia's incomprehensible words.
The child in front of her had a dark face again, as if she had done something terribly wrong.
After staring at that face for a while, the look in the child's eyes as she looked at the gloves on the day she first came here flashed through her mind.
'...Ah, that's it.'
First the bathroom and the floor, now the gloves.
What does she keep so much in that little head? What other scars are engraved on her?
Unconsciously, she stroked the child's head, which had been filled with more painful scars before her regression.
Then, Nia flinched back at Lucia's touch.
Watching the child's rejection, she blankly withdrew her hand.
Then she thought.
Lucia had no idea exactly how to make the child not think of herself as dirty.
But clearly, if she kept the child like this with just empty words, she could see how it would end.
It seems like she is simply blaming herself now, but if this feeling grows, it will turn into a feeling of not being able to trust anyone, and the end will surely be loneliness.
Just like Lucia.
She knew best that a life lived that way was not happy because she had walked that path herself. So she decided.
Even if the child went back to the orphanage because of her overbearing attitude, there was something she wanted to tell her.
"Nia. Bring the gloves."
Nia flinched at her firm tone and her small shoulders trembled.
Then, with listless steps, she found the gloves, which even their owner didn't know where they were, and carefully handed them to her.
The gloves were covered with small feathers tangled and matted with bird droppings, reminding her of Nia's appearance at that time.
Lucia stared at the gloves for a moment, then headed to the bathroom and filled the sink with warm water.
Then, she threw a whole bar of luxury soap into the water and stirred it around.
But it only became cloudy, and the bubbles in the laundry pile where the maids gathered, which she had seen somewhere, did not rise at all.
'Is it a different kind of soap...? Or is it because there aren't enough people?'
"Can you come here and lend me a hand?"
Nia, who was standing far away, hesitated at her request, then slowly approached.
"Come up and stir it a bit. No matter how much I stir, it doesn't bubble."
Nia, perhaps wanting to repay Lucia's troubled tone, closed her eyes tightly and slowly reached out to the sink.
And together, they stirred the sink filled with soap.
Then, not as much as she remembered, but a little bit of foam began to appear in the sink.
"...Bubbles!"
"That's right. Then shall we try together now?"
As Lucia handed her the gloves, Nia blinked her round eyes and accepted them.
Then, as if following her actions, she put the gloves in the soapy water and wiggled her hands.
After rubbing them a few times, the foreign substances quickly fell off the stained gloves.
'...Not bad.'
She had never done housework in her life, but she was surprised that this work could give her satisfaction.
As she straightened her bent back, feeling proud as she watched the gloves gradually regain their color, Nia's gloves came into view.
'...What is it?'
She was taken aback.
How focused was she? Nia was clenching her small mouth and rubbing hard, and as a result, she was already revealing all of her color.
Lucia, who had a different competitive spirit than a mere 5-year-old, began to rub delicately with a face as serious as when she wielded a sword.
As their passionate time passed,
"...This. This!"
Nia handed Lucia the clean gloves with a radiant smile on her energetic cheeks.
"..."
She lost.
Lucia nodded in response to the excited child, but was a little frustrated to see Nia's gloves cleaner than her own.
But that's not important now.
She composed herself and recalled her original purpose.
"Smell it, Nia."
At Lucia's words, Nia tilted her head and carefully put her nose to the wet gloves.
"What does it smell like?"
"Smells like water, smells like flowers. I like it...!"
There was no way it wouldn't smell good. It was the imperial family's soap, after all.
They didn't know it, but they had thrown a commoner's week's worth of food into the water.
Lucia, who didn't know that, brought her face close to Nia's bright face.
The child was startled by her sudden approach and almost fell off the footstool, but she caught her and said,
"You smell good too."
Even at Lucia's words, the child pulled the wrist she had been holding behind her back and shook her head, saying that couldn't be true.
She turned her gaze away from the child and calmly removed the last stain from the gloves, continuing,
"If it were me, I wouldn't want you to avoid me even if I smelled bad."
Lucia couldn't bring herself to say the right thing to a child who believed she was dirty, that it was okay for her to be the way she was, even if she was dirty.
So this was the best she could do, and it was her comfort.
As Lucia took the gloves away from Nia's surprised eyes, the child looked down at the gloves in her hand for a long time, and her small mouth twitched.
"...Then Nia washed today, so you don't have to avoid me."
Could it be that sincerity gets through?
Nia's soliloquy echoed in the quiet bathroom.
Then, as if wanting the person next to her to acknowledge her, she glanced at Lucia with clear golden eyes.
When she met Lucia's nodding eyes, her small mouth wriggled shyly, and her bashful cheeks moved back and forth.
She looked at the child and was a little surprised by the warmth that suddenly sank heavily into her heart, as if it had fallen.
The awkward feeling was like a fluffy and ticklish energy, an emotion that was a little too good to call painful.
Perhaps for Lucia, it was the first time she had experienced what it truly meant to be with the Saintess, rather than just protecting her from nearby.
Beyond the two of them, Heath watched all of this.
With a subtle expression, he turned around and disappeared out of the accommodation without anyone noticing.
*
-Chirp chirp
Before she knew it, dawn broke and the sound of mountain birds echoed clearly.
Lucia frowned at the incoming dawn light and woke up early.
The familiar but unfamiliar mural on the ceiling that she saw as soon as she opened her eyes was painted with the beautiful Goddess Asir, as if to tell her that this was still the training camp accommodation.
The broken part caused by the sword she threw was a little annoying, but it was a scene that hadn't changed for days.
'It's really not a dream.'
Lucia reached out while lying down, as if it were a habit.
But she couldn't grab the sword.
'Ah, that's right.'
Originally, her sword should have been there, but since there was a child in this place with only one bedroom, she had put it far away.
Now, she had the inconvenience of having to go to the training ground to warm up, but suddenly. She wondered if this was what a normal life was like.
Perhaps just having a child had turned this place into an ordinary home, not a training camp.
And that thought spread to the idea that in order to be with her, Lucia herself had to become ordinary, even though she had simply aimed to raise the young Saintess as an ordinary child.
But that was only for a moment,
'Me, ordinary, that's funny.'
Lucia recalled the word her father had called her when she first met him as an adult.
Monster.
It had been decades, so it was now a faint memory, but that word was engraved in her bones and would not be erased.
After a deflated sigh, she tried to get up, but suddenly turned her head at the unfamiliar warmth of something touching her shoulder.
"......?"
Lucia saw a lump of black fur.
'Is it too long......'
Even before, she had felt it, but the child's face was always covered in hair, as if her small body couldn't handle the long locks.
Just then, Nia stirred with a small movement.
A fair, white cheek, revealed from between the strands of hair, rubbed against her shoulder, tickling her.
Lucia's body stiffened.
Lucia, the renowned commander who never felt fear, whose body never froze, no matter the enemy.
But now, she was cautiously rolling her eyes, checking on the child, afraid that her movements might wake her.
And so, Lucia lay there unintentionally trapped, thinking about the laundry she had done with the child last night.
'Turns out housework isn't for just anyone. I thought they didn't sleep much at this age.'
It was quite early to think that the child didn't sleep in.
But it wasn't unreasonable to think so.
Because most of the time, the child was awake before she woke her.
A small back turned, curled up in sleep, and a tearful face.
She would occasionally smile, but in those moments, she always lowered her head as if hiding her emotions.
But the way she looked now, asleep, was so peaceful that the expression "a sleeping child is an angel" suddenly came to mind.
'Well, the Saintess is certainly close to an angel, so she might be the closest to an angel among her peers.'
Just as she was becoming a hopeless fool, with or without foundation,
-Knock knock.
Someone knocked on the bedroom door.
"Commander. Are you awake?"
It was Vernon.
She wanted to see the child open her eyes, but with regret, she carefully got up and opened the door.
"Quiet. Nia isn't awake yet."
"I apologize. There was a letter that you haven't replied to yet, so I had no choice..."
Vernon whispered and handed her a silver envelope.
Lately, since she was on childcare leave, many invitations and letters had been arriving at her residence, perhaps to torment her, but Lucia had never been interested in such things and it had been too long since she had paid attention to them.
But if Vernon had brought it himself and was asking for a reply, it seemed to be quite important news.
Lucia opened the letter she received.
Inside the luxurious envelope were the high-grade seals of the four royal guards, symbolizing black, white, yellow, and red.
"Oh dear, it seems to be the royal guard's general assembly. It seems you'll have to attend in person this year."
Vernon smirked and put his hands together with a face that wished her good luck.
The Black Knights are a unique royal guard that extremely dislikes revealing their presence at any event.
Among them, the person with the strongest tendency to do so was the commander, Lucia.
Because of that, the vice-commander Berl, who was at least somewhat interactive, had attended the meeting in her place for five years, but this year, she couldn't even make the excuse of training.
"...Damn it."
Lucia ended up cursing and roughly signed the letter.
