You Say This Child Isn't Yours!? - Chapter 6

Roderick’s voice trembled as he came to say goodbye. Was it from the cold, or from sorrow? Or perhaps…

“If I become a great swordsman and return as a much wealthier and more noble man than now, then…”

It sounded like childish boasting for his age, and very unlike Roderick. He left without finishing that sentence.

‘If I were you, I would have spat on this filthy village and never looked back.’

But Roderick came back casually. To this village where no one welcomed him.

Why did he come back here?

He doesn’t have family here. This shouldn’t even be a place he could call home.

‘Then did he come to show off his success to the villagers?’

That seemed like the most plausible answer.

The night had deepened. As the music started, the village girls began dancing around the giant birch pole erected in the center of the square. Erica was among them.

‘Again.’

Every time she turned her head while dancing, her eyes met Roderick’s. No matter where she was, their eyes would inevitably meet. His deep blue eyes followed her like the moon in the night sky.

Was the alcohol finally taking effect?

As a tingling sensation like heat crept into her heart, a thought suddenly occurred to her.

Maybe Roderick didn’t come to show something.

He came to see someone.

***

“To give such a fine item for free. I’m so grateful and sorry.”

Her father exclaimed while skinning the wolf hide in Erica’s backyard. His eyes, full of admiration, were fixed on Roderick, who was helping with the wolf’s processing, saying he had nothing else to do.

“Since you caught it, this is yours.”

While her father’s eyes were soft and gentle, her mother’s gaze, standing not far away with arms crossed, was as sharp and th*rny as it had been in the past.

“How strange.”

Her grandmother, sitting in the rocking chair in the corner of the yard, kept muttering while staring at the wolf.

“Wolves don’t eat humans.”

“It must have been very hungry.”

Even as her mother dismissed it as nothing significant, her grandmother continued muttering.

“The beasts are trembling and the earth spirits are disturbed. A sign of trouble in the kingdom…”

“Again with the nonsense.”

Erica’s mother clicked her tongue and went into the kitchen.

“This won’t be enough.”

In the kitchen, preparations were in full swing for the final feast of tonight’s festival.

“Erica, go to the storage and bring another sack of potatoes. And a jar of lingonberry jam too. The big one.”

Erica wiped her hands on her apron, leaving the potatoes she was peeling, and headed toward the barn across the yard. Just as she was walking to the cellar door in the corner of the barn…

“Wait.”

Roderick suddenly appeared, passed by her, and opened the door. Like a knight escorting a noble lady.

“I’ll get it. What do you need?”

“Um…”

What was it again? She had forgotten already. Erica stared at him blankly for a moment before finally remembering and answering.

“A sack of potatoes and a jar of jam. The big one. Ah, but you won’t know which one is the lingonberry jam.”

Just as she was about to go down to the cellar with him without thinking,

“I asked Erica to do it.”

A sharp voice came from behind, and when they turned around, her mother was standing at the barn door with her hands on her hips.

“It looks heavy, so I’ll carry it.”

“Erica can carry that much herself.”

“Dear, why are you being like this? Let him help.”

Her father, who was passing by with the cleanly skinned hide, chimed in.

“You’re going to let a grown man and woman enter a space alone?”

“It’s just our storage cellar. You think they’ll make a baby in that brief moment going in and out?”

“What are you saying!”

It was the kind of statement that made the listeners blush while the speaker remained unashamed. Roderick and Erica’s faces turned bright red as they quickly separated.

“Here.”

“Thanks.”

In the end, Erica went in alone to get the items, and Roderick stood at the top of the stairs to receive them. Meanwhile, they could faintly hear her parents bickering about them in the yard.

“Dear, aren’t you being too much?”

“Too much? What will the villagers say seeing kids of marriageable age hanging around together? Have you already forgotten how it was in the old days?”

They had received more than enough teasing and sideways glances about a boy and girl being together since they were young.

“We should marry them when they’re older.”

When village elders would say this, Erica’s mother would jump up in protest.

“Anyone but an outsider!”

Though her father didn’t openly show his dislike like her mother, he shared the same opinion, but…

“Did he say he works at the palace?”

His thoughts seemed to have completely changed the moment he heard he was a swordsman in the palace guard. Add to that the valuable wolf hide he had given them, and her father seemed ready to sell his daughter to Roderick in gratitude.

‘No wonder mother kept giving me errands to keep us from staying in one place.’

Her mother had noticed her father’s change in attitude and was preventing Erica from being alone with Roderick. It seems mother had won the argument in the end. By the time Erica had mindlessly peeled half a sack of potatoes in the kitchen with its doors and windows tightly shut,

“Erica!”

Someone urgently called her from outside. When she opened the window, it was the forest keeper who lived in the woods between the village and the lord’s castle.

“What’s wrong?”

“Hilda’s gone into labor.”

“Already?”

The forest keeper’s wife, Hilda, was eight months pregnant.

“Is she alone right now?”

“She’s with the children…”

“Go back right away. I’ll prepare and follow soon.”

“Thank you!”

The keeper disappeared, running back the way he came. Erica left her work and headed back to the cellar.

When she came out, she was carrying a large, heavy leather bag and a basket full of liquor bottles and medicine. When she was about to load them onto a donkey for the long journey, Roderick came over and took them.

“I’ll go with you.”

“Huh?”

“The forest is dangerous.”

Just as her mother was about to intervene with a ladle raised like a sword at Roderick’s offer to accompany her, her father beat her to it.

“Then I’ll entrust my daughter to you.”

At this statement, worthy of a wedding ceremony where a father hands over his daughter to his son-in-law, her mother jumped up.

“What are you saying?”

“There might be another hungry wolf prowling around.”

Her father tried to slip away with the excuse that he was merely entrusting his daughter to a mercenary who made a living as a guard because the forest was dangerous, but it wasn’t going to work.

“You, come to the barn right now!”

Erica and Roderick pretended not to hear her parents arguing in whispers in the barn as they set out.

The forest keeper’s cabin was across a stream after crossing through the village and following a winding forest path for quite a while.

“What about Grandma Greta?”

Roderick asked when the cabin’s roof came into view.

“She passed away two years ago.”

“Ah…”