SIWALL Ch 22

Elliot almost spat out a curse like a sneeze without realizing it, but summoning the ultimate restraint, he bit down hard on his teeth and showed the inside of the basket.

The basket was packed full of clean straw. He had gotten it from Bill, the stable boy. Bill, who hadn’t even grown facial hair yet at the age of fourteen, was particularly fond of Elliot. He would occasionally say things like he wanted to become a coachman later and drive Elliot’s very own private carriage.

Elliot had planned to use his free time tonight—though whether a time watched over by one’s boss could really be called free time was debatable—to braid the straw given as a gift by cute little brother Bill into a straw rope. And his plan was to wrap every single pillar inside the room with that straw rope.

Since Camembert kept scratching the sofa, the idea had popped into his head that he needed to make something else for the cat to scratch.

However, Arzen’s reaction was strange.

“You’re my bedtime attendant, so you shouldn’t have to do chores like this. Who told you to do it?”

An unpleasant tint clouded Arzen’s voice.

Elliot found this utterly absurd.

I can’t remember doing anything other than chores since I became your bedtime attendant, so what on earth are you talking about right now?

However, looking as though he might immediately drag in whoever ordered the straw-rope braiding and chop off yet another part of their body, Elliot desperately shook his head.

“…Then why on earth are you braiding a straw rope?”

At Arzen’s question, Elliot pondered for a moment, then shaped both hands into sharp points and placed them on top of his head. It was the shape of cat ears. It meant, ‘I’m going to give it to a cat.’

However, perhaps this gesture wasn’t conveyed well, as Arzen made a strange expression. Judging by the way his neat, beautiful brow was gracefully wrinkled, it seemed he didn’t understand at all.

Elliot tried a different gesture. This time, he clenched his fists, brought them up beside both cheeks, and mimicked a back-and-forth ‘neko-neko’ punch. It meant, ‘It’s a cat, a cat. Do you understand, Mister Nightmare?’ At that, Arzen’s face twisted even further.

“I said… stop. A grown man, having no sense of shame.”

You told me to explain.

Flicked with irritation, Elliot lowered both hands. Then he pulled straw from the basket and began to braid the rope. Arzen stopped whatever else he was about to say and crossed his arms.

Under Arzen’s scorching gaze, Elliot zealously braided the straw rope.

One, two, one, two with three strands….

To avoid showing how pressured he felt, he deliberately focused solely on shaping the straw, and as time went on, Arzen truly stopped bothering him. Since simple labor was something he’d been doing since middle school, he was completely used to this kind of work. The more his knack for it grew, the faster his hands got, and the firmer and denser the straw rope lengthened.

When he had braided a little over a meter of straw rope, Elliot raised his head to loosen his stiff neck.

“What….”

Elliot put down the straw rope with an absurd expression on his face.

Arzen was lying crookedly on the sofa, literally sound asleep.

“You can sleep even without someone reading you a book….”

∞ ∞ ∞

“It seems magic or anything of the sort hasn’t been cast on you after all.”

The next night, Arzen calmly acknowledged the truth.

Finally!

With the most genuine attitude he had ever shown Arzen so far, Elliot nodded his head with all his might.

“That’s what I’ve been saying. I’m an honest, law-abiding citizen who wouldn’t drop a speck of dust even if shaken out.”

“It doesn’t seem to be medicine or magic, but rather that you were just born exceptionally boring.”

“Um…?”

“You’re so boring that sleep has no choice but to come even without doing anything special.”

“….”

“I will now cast aside my doubts and entrust you with my sleeping quarters.”

Should I be happy about this, or not?

As Elliot stood there awkwardly, Arzen fastened the waist tie of the robe he had loosely draped over himself.

“Follow me.”

With that, Arzen picked up a small candlestick and walked out of the room first. He couldn’t help wondering if he followed him out like this, he might end up dead without anyone knowing or hearing a peep, but since he couldn’t disregard the boss’s instructions either, Elliot followed behind Arzen with his guard up to the maximum in his heart.

Arzen strode straight through the dark hallway without hesitation. A faint, round candlelight illuminated the front of Arzen.

Terrified of losing that candlelight, Elliot agilely stuck close to Arzen’s back. He could feel Arzen glancing back down over his shoulder at him, but Elliot pretended not to notice and pressed his body tight against the man’s thick, solid arm.

In the middle, briefly, for a tiny second, a flash of a thought passed through—’What is this guy? Why is his arm so rock-hard?’—along with swallowing his saliva far too loudly, but Arzen didn’t scold him much despite hearing the sound of his gulping.

Walking through the winding, sprawling mansion for quite a while, they arrived in front of a giant door. Elliot knew very well where this was. Because Elliot came here every day, too.

“The kitchen…?”

Arzen lightly pushed open one of the doors.

The kitchen, with all its lights out, exuded a somewhat gloomy atmosphere. The kitchen knives lined up in a row on the counter-top glowing with a particularly bluish tint under the moonlight was surely not just Elliot’s imagination. The rolling pin placed next to them also looked like an excellent club.

“Go in.”

And what was most terrifying was Arzen’s face, cast in an eerie shadow from the candlelight shining upward from beneath his chin.

…Ah, I don’t want to go in.

However, there was no way Elliot could refuse. He meekly stepped into the kitchen.

Arzen followed him in, closed the kitchen door, and started by stoking the small embers remaining in the hearth. As he familiarly poked at the firewood and rubbed his fingertips together to create a draft—there was no telling how on earth he had done that—fires began to blaze furiously. Elliot also carried the candlelight Arzen had brought and lit candles all around the kitchen.

Once the inside of the kitchen was brightened to a certain extent, Arzen sat down on a small wooden chair near the kitchen door.

“If you lift the cloth over the basket on that side, there will be fruit. Bring one of them and make a fruit pie.”

“…Pardon?”

“Don’t make me say it twice.”

“Um, I’m sorry, but I don’t bake. Making a pie seems a bit much. I’m sorry, Your Grace.”

“It doesn’t matter. Make it. I feel like I need to eat a fruit pie today to be able to sleep.”

I really, I ought to smack that guy.

Elliot tightly clenched his hands, which had been politely clasped together, and took a deep breath. Instead of talking back, he bowed deeply and walked toward the fruit basket.

Lifting the cloth, sure enough, fruits of different varieties were piled high. Elliot hesitated for a moment, then turned back to look at Arzen.

“There are apples, lemons, and peaches—which fruit would be best to make it with~?”

“Anything.”

“Haha, but since this is for Your Grace to eat, can I just pick whatever I want? Between apples, lemons, and peaches, what do you like best?”

At that, Arzen stared at Elliot with one eyebrow raised and said distinctly.

“A. ny. thing.”

“….”

Dear departed mother, please take pity on me, and father who abandoned me, please share your shamelessness.

And the author who wrote this original novel, in a BL—Boys’ Love—novel of all people, do you not know that someone who answers “anything” when asked what they want to eat on a date is completely unpopular? Not that I am on a date with this nightmare of a man, though.

Pouring out his inner lamentations like rapping due to rising anger, Elliot decided to just take whatever fruit he actually wanted to eat.

He picked up a few peaches. If Arzen didn’t like these, he would undoubtedly tell him to bring something else anyway, even if he had said “anything”—this was a distinct trait of nightmares—so Elliot emptied his mind.

Elliot placed four peaches on the counter-top near Arzen. For a moment, Arzen seemed to inspect Elliot with cold eyes, but since he had received cold gazes so frequently, he had built up an immunity and felt nothing at all.

However, Arzen, who looked like he was about to file a complaint, simply nodded.

“Yes, yes, Your Grace. I’ll proceed.”

Elliot creakily turned back toward the counter-top.

To bake a pie… what did he need to do…?

He was quite good at making Korean food. He also boiled instant ramen frighteningly well. His father had always said that Lim Seongsik’s culinary touch resembled his mother’s. That his mother had been good at cooking, too. Buoyed by those few words, he had excitedly looked up internet recipes and cooked diligently.

However, baking was a complete foreign territory to him. First of all, baking required a lot of tools, and ingredients he had never heard of went into it. In other words, it cost money. So he hadn’t even given it a thought.

Besides, there was no internet here right now to look up recipes. He probably needed to figure out how to turn flour into dough, dump in sugar roughly, um… um….

“Hmm….”

“Don’t make weird noises. If you search the cupboards, there should be a book where the chef wrote down recipes.”

Did I make a sound out loud?

It was a rookie mistake he didn’t usually make. Pulling his neck in slightly, Elliot scurried over to the cupboard. Only after opening and closing the cupboard door several times was he able to find the chef’s recipe book.

Inside the recipe book, various menus were carefully written down along with illustrations. Fortunately, there was a recipe for making an apple pie, so it seemed he could just substitute the apples with peaches. However, there was a fatal problem: the chef had terrible handwriting, making it hard to figure out what the letters actually said.

Elliot narrowed his eyes and clumsily started reading from step 1.

“To the flour… add a little sho-gyo? Sho-gyo?”

“…It’s probably salt.”