Chapter 276

Nerys and Rhiannon’s pen-pal correspondence continued for some time.

Talfrin kept copying the letters the two girls exchanged, and Cledwyn read them. He knew it was ridiculous to pry into his wife’s childhood secrets, but he wanted to know what Rhiannon was up to.

Nerys’s letters were filled with happy dreams and overflowing affection for her secret friend, “Nona.” Every adjective she used to describe beauty covered the cheap stationery in neat handwriting. Some letters told stories of “an elf with gray eyes glimpsed in the lake,” while others were about how the protagonist of her favorite novel swore a vow of friendship with her friend.

Even though he was a snoop rather than the intended recipient, Cledwyn laughed every time he read Nerys’s letters. He found her lovely. The sharp freshman he remembered, the woman who had become his wife, and this clumsy, dreamy girl were all different, yet their core was the same—especially their ability to love without reservation.

She might have been clumsy when it came to noble customs and etiquette, but she was certainly bright. Most young noble ladies educated by tutors from childhood didn’t write with spelling this accurate or vocabulary this rich, and the difference was even more pronounced in the reasoning behind her words.

So Cledwyn wasn’t surprised when he discovered jealousy on Rhiannon Berta’s face as she trampled Nerys’s secret place.

“Why don’t you keep it to yourself?”

It was already too late to save Nerys’s precious flowers, but Cledwyn said it anyway. Rhiannon, her face red from digging up and ruining the secret place Nerys had confided to her in letters, looked up at him with wary eyes.

“Senior?”

Rhiannon was too shy to brazenly ask what he was doing here, or how much he had seen. She reacted the way a wary child would when a handsome upperclassman spoke to her. In other words, she shut her mouth.

The garden was a place where sunlight rarely reached and few people came. There, a few flowers that Nerys had diligently tended with her small hands had bloomed—and Rhiannon, abandoning the dignity of a noble lady, had stepped on and crushed them herself. It was malice, pure and simple.

Cledwyn picked up one of the flowers that was still relatively intact. Then he pulled out the small fairy-tale book he’d been carrying around lately and slipped the flower between its pages as a bookmark.

Rhiannon stared at the scene as if she were seeing something incomprehensible. The maid attending her hurried over, tugged Rhiannon into her skirts, and tried to leave quickly.

“Rhiannon Berta.”

Cledwyn called out before she could run. Rhiannon froze, fear flashing across her face. She thought the upperclassman rumored to be frightening was about to bully her.

“Y-yes?”

“I will pay this debt, no matter what.”

Rhiannon and her maid both widened their eyes. They ran off at once, faces full of bafflement over what they had done wrong. Cledwyn didn’t stop them.

[You’re so mean, Daddy! Mom worked so hard to grow them! They were pretty!]

“I see… I understand why Nellusion Elandria sent a fake letter in Rhiannon Berta’s name.”

A quarrel between children, contemptuous gazes, lies, and betrayal. It was childish bullying an adult with enough self-assurance might dismiss as nothing, but to someone that age, it must have felt like being pricked by needles. In fact, Nerys had grown gloomy day by day.

How would she feel when she saw the ruined secret place? Cledwyn felt bitter and angry. He could have his subordinates clean this up and make a new flower bed. But if this place had been ruined in Nerys’s memory, then no matter what he did, it would greet her exactly as it was now.

“So that’s why she was looking for a place others wouldn’t notice.”

Recalling their first meeting in that hidden spot in the library, Cledwyn pieced it together. His heart ached. He regretted, to the point of bitterness, how coercive he’d been back then.

She only needed a place where she could feel safe, and cherish what was hers.

At that moment, Cledwyn’s body moved on its own, defying its owner’s will. He knew what that meant, so he waited quietly. Sure enough, just as his body was completely hidden in the building’s shadow, Nerys appeared, hurrying along.

Her expression was bright—just as it always was when she received a letter from “Nona.”

Cledwyn watched with dark eyes as that innocent face turned pale and hardened the moment she saw the ruined secret place.

After she left, Cledwyn gestured with a cold face. Talfrin appeared, looking crestfallen.

“I’m sorry, Master. It might sound like an excuse, but…”

“I know. There must have been unavoidable circumstances.”

Talfrin looked even more dejected, as if Cledwyn’s words stung worse. As a perfectionist with strong pride, it must have hurt to repeatedly fail his mission to protect and help Nerys.

No matter how hard Talfrin tried to protect her, what was meant to happen to her still had to happen. This world worked by laws like that.

Only then did Cledwyn accept it. He sighed and said, “From now on, you don’t need to watch Nerys Truydd directly. There’s something you need to do first.”

“Yes, what is it?”

“I need to tighten the noose around Marquis Tipion’s neck.”

“Pardon?”

“Not just him. I need to clean things up. I’m going to scrape out every tumorous mass I left alone when I was immature—so I don’t waste time on unnecessary things.”

Talfrin could guess where his young master meant to use the time he carved out. To consolidate his control, so he wouldn’t be inconvenienced when he chose to follow that little lady around.

Talfrin still couldn’t understand what it was about the insignificant Nerys Truydd that had caught his master’s eye. She seemed smart and kind, but wasn’t she just a child with nothing?

But his master often made choices others couldn’t understand—and those choices were always right. So Talfrin bowed his head.

“Understood.”

❖ ❖ ❖

Fighting with knowledge of the future was both easy and difficult.

By cutting down those who had secretly joined hands with the imperial family and striking at the weaknesses of treacherous elders, Cledwyn quickly expanded his position. He protected the subordinates he hadn’t been able to protect before, and he secured what he had lost to immaturity. For someone who had originally had much—and who now had experience—it wasn’t difficult.

Yet some of his actions overturned obvious expectations and led to strange results. Someone who should have died under certain conditions lived, and something everyone assumed would succeed collapsed from the start for absurd reasons.

Cledwyn guessed those were fixed points in Nerys’s memory, and he learned to plan with such variables in mind.

Even so, it seemed that getting caught in Marquis Tipion’s scheme and suffering a near-fatal wound was one of those “predetermined” events.

As he endured the pain he remembered, Cledwyn looked up at the night sky. Beneath the stars, he had once resigned himself to dying here alone. But this time, a mass of light floated around him, weeping bitterly.

[Daddy! Daddy! Does it hurt a lot? Don’t die!]

He wanted, uncharacteristically, to say, ‘I won’t die. Don’t worry.’ But his lips wouldn’t open. As always, whenever he appeared in Nerys’s memory—even as a minor character who passed by for only a brief moment.

Could it be that he had died here in Nerys’s previous life? Or been nearly dead. If so, it would explain why his body—one she couldn’t even see—wouldn’t move as he pleased.

And he wasn’t sure. In his memory, Nerys had chased away his two trusted knights, Joseph and Ralph, and taken him to Ren Fayel that night. But would Nerys in this life have been capable of doing that?

What had Nerys’s attitude been like whenever she spoke of the past? She hadn’t clearly said whether Cledwyn was alive or dead. Was it because she wanted to hide that he had died, or because it was so obvious he lived?

Normally, her manner was unreserved, so the latter seemed more likely. But in this situation, Cledwyn suspected the former. Fever made his head swim.

He heard Joseph and Ralph moving beyond the pitch-black thicket. Cledwyn’s body automatically held its breath. Right now, he could barely take even a single step on his own, and collapsing in the thicket was less a disguise than a desperate measure. If they looked this way, it would be over.

“Where did he go?”

[Bad guys! I’m going to beat you all up!]

At Joseph’s voice, the mass of light kept trying to rush forward, sobbing—though she knew she couldn’t see the people in this memory, and couldn’t affect them in any way.

Cledwyn waited for death to come.

But what came instead was a girl’s frightened voice.

“U-um, s-seniors. Is this Remnant Hall?”

A voice that had clearly gathered courage after long hesitation. The approaching footsteps stopped. Joseph asked back, flustered.

“Are you asking me?”

“Y-yes… Um, I’m a freshman, and I have to go to a social studies supplementary class, but the classroom is different than usual, so I got lost…”

Abelus’s knight, Ralph, snapped bluntly, as if annoyed.

“This building is for upperclassmen. Get lost. You’re bothering me when I’m busy.”

“Wait, Ralph.”

Joseph quickly whispered something to Ralph, using words like “our family,” “Nellusion-nim,” and “Violet Eyes.” After a brief argument, Ralph spat out a dissatisfied sound, and Joseph said kindly, in his own way.

“Remnant Hall? I’ll take you there.”

The footsteps of two boys and one girl slowly faded away. After a while, Cledwyn felt freedom return to his body.

As if his role in Nerys’s memory for today was over.

Enduring terrible pain and a mind that kept slipping into blur, Cledwyn somehow made it back to his dormitory. Aidan, eyes swollen from crying, and Talfrin, pale as a dead man, greeted him.

Cledwyn thought, ‘There’s no way Nerys at that time could have known I was in the thicket.’ The place he occupied in her life was so small it hardly seemed worth noticing. He had realized that painfully, while spending most of his time acting freely.

Maybe she really had been lost. He’d already seen her—always absorbed in books—come back to herself in a completely different place from where she meant to go, more than once. She probably couldn’t even imagine she had accidentally saved someone’s life.

But it still hurt. Half of him was happy their relationship had continued that way, and the other half was frustrated that he hadn’t been able to save himself from unhappiness in this time.

“I-I’ll call a healer. What is this?”

Talfrin said, wiping at wet eyes. Lying on the dormitory sofa, Cledwyn replied quietly.

“Bring Ren Fayel. Anyone less than him won’t be able to heal this wound.”

“Ren Fayel? What use does that useless guy have?”

“Stop talking and drag him here. Tell him I’ll buy him Pejalcho as much as he wants if he heals me.”

He didn’t actually intend to buy it for him, but Cledwyn said that much—and fainted. He couldn’t endure it any longer.

(T/N: I wonder what their dyanamics would be since they dont have any connection at all in this timeline.)