"I'm back." Shirou said as he returned to his villa after speaking with Sylvester in the castle.
"Welcome home!" Myne declared as she, Tuuli and Effa were gathered around a table covered in a mound of threads. They seemed to be in the process of making more of their cloth flowers and were attaching them to a formal dress, likely one meant for Elvira.
Well, Effa and Tuuli were working. Myne was just advising and Freida was looking over a report about the profits of their store with a dreamy look in her eyes that Shirou was choosing to ignore.
Despite having moved to the noble district and becoming either a noble or a commoner servant, they were still connected to that lower city clothing store and owed them a debt of gratitude. So they were trying to use Elvira as a walking billboard for the store's specialty products, which would basically make it an instant trend inside of the Duchy.
Standing nearby was Brigitte, a Medknight and the only knight Sylvester could find who would willingly enter the Temple, besides Eckhart, who would have followed Ferdinand into the depths of hell if he was allowed.
This was because Brigitte's perceived honor couldn't get any lower anyways, not after a bad break up with her fiance right before her marriage. According to Brigitte, the man had been trying to take advantage of her parents death and her older brother's young age to steal her brother's title and take their territory away from him. But when Brigitte refused to marry him, it had become a stain on her honor instead of his due to the rumors that the man had circulated in the central district.
Now she was finding it hard to find work and was attaching herself to Ferdinand through his daughters in hopes that he would protect her brother and help with their territory, as they had fallen on seriously dark times. That was a pretty desperate move, given how much political flak he received from Veronica, with Myne being chronically ill, and with the known commoner birth of Tuuli and Freida.
Shirou didn't mind her, as the woman's hometown of Illgner was one where commoners and their Lord's family were fairly close, so she didn't raise any sort of stink about Tuuli and Myne being so close to their commoner parents. Nor would she talk behind their back if they dropped the noble act while behind closed doors, since she did too.
Elvira didn't like her though, telling Shirou that the woman's loyalties were entirely with her territory and as soon as her family was in the clear, she would leave. Since Elvira was the one saying it, it was probably the case. She didn't become the head of one of Ehrenfest's three main factions by chance. But Shirou didn't see the need to cut her off yet.
The girls didn't really understand the need for a Guard Knight, but Myne was interested in Illgner's lumber industry, which was likely the lucky break that Brigitte was looking for.
Not that the woman could understand any of it. She just thought that Myne was weird.
Shirou relieved her of duty after his return, so that she could eat and relax.
"The first showing of the new books was a huge success. Though we still need to make different kinds of bindings for them." Myne announced. "Lady Elvira liked the knights stories, but thinks that I should think about publishing books about our own Duchy's history instead of another's."
Myne had spent a few weeks translating the stories in Dunkelfelger's history book into a newer dialect in order to make it a friendlier read, and had started to print the stories individually as part of a series. But selling books on Dunkelfelger's history before that of Ehrenfest, or that of the country in general, felt odd to the other nobles.
Myne told them that she simply didn't have any book on Ehrenfest history, and got a book lent to her by Elvira. She didn't want to tell Shirou about that though, or that she fainted at a tea party from excitement because of it.
"I see." Shirou said, only half listening as he looked over Tuuli and Effa's work.
The dress they were fixing up was mostly yellow, since it was one they were preparing for the Autumn season and that was considered the seasonal color.
Normally, nobles didn't work on dresses beyond adding defensive magic circles, so the use of magic to blend colors and improve the quality of threads and stitches was not well practiced, which made the clothes that Tuuli was preparing very unique.
"You are doing a good job." Shirou told them, nodding his head in approval.
"Thank you." Tuuli said, blushing slightly. "I'm nervous about making something for someone as great as Lady Elvira, but I'm glad she has been helping me."
After realizing that Tuuli didn't know anything about fashion, Elvira took her and the other girls to a clothing store to give them lessons. Tuuli had been embarrassed at the beginning, since Myne and Freida seemed to have a rough idea of how everything worked already, despite her being the one trained as a seamstress, but she studied hard to close the gap.
"Welcome back, Lord Ferdinand." Lasfam said as he entered the room with a platter of snacks and tea. Lasfam was a Leynoble attendant who served Ferdinand since he was young. To the best of Shirou's understanding, he was assigned to Ferdinand as an insult, because of how low his status was, but Ferdinand ended up accepting the man's loyalty.
Lasfam now worked to maintain Ferdinand's villa as Shirou's only attendant.
Shirou was lending Lasfam to the children to act as their attendant at Elvira's tea parties, as while Sylvester and Karstedt had suggested adult attendants who could see to the girls while they were out of the Temple, Shirou wanted them to be advised by someone he trusted.
"Lord Ferdinand, while I was going through some of your old things, I found one of your old harspiels and started to wonder if you have started to teach the young ladies how to play yet?" Lasfam asked as a way of saying that Shirou had been ignoring an aspect of the girls' noble education… something that left Shirou baffled.
"A harspiel? What's that?" Shirou asked, searching Ferdinand's memories for what exactly that was.
To his credit, Lasfam's reaction was almost undetectable. "I see. So Milord's memories of the harspiel have yet to come back. That would explain why I have not seen him practicing as of late." Lasfam said, before explaining himself. "The harspiel is a key instrument that is often played by the nobility. As musical culture is considered so important for a noble to have, everyone learns some form of musical instrument."
"Is that so? I haven't seen any nobles playing music before." Shirou said, scratching his chin in thought. Thinking back, he remembered music being written on the school curriculum, but he never really looked into that, the way he had with the other classes. He'd kind of assumed that it was optional.
"Normally, every child is made to play a song on the harspiel during their winter debut when they are seven. For a child of an Archnoble family, one must be able to perform a standard song for the crowd with a satisfactory level of skill. With both Lady Elfreida and Lady Tuulisa being introduced a year late, it would look poorly on them if they could not perform." Lasfam informed them.
"So you are saying that the children have four months to learn how to play." Shirou said, glancing at the girls. "It looks like we will be starting harspiel lessons now."
"I'll do my best." "I am looking forward to expanding my horizons." "As long as it doesn't cut into my reading time." Tuuli, Freida and Myne responded.
"Lasfam, can you arrange for us to get some of these harspiels in the children's sizes?" Shirou asked the man.
"We received them this morning." Lasfam replied with a slight smile. "I set out the request the moment you announce the children's adoption."
"Then bring them here." Shirou said, not about to question the man further.
Lasfam brought back four items that looked a lot like a cross between a harp and a guitar to the room, three of them children sized and one sized for Shirou himself, one that was well worn from a lot of playing.
"I suppose you wish for me to practice as well." Shirou said as he took the instrument.
"It would be good if you could set a good example for the young ladies." Lasfam replied.
"It would, wouldn't it." Shirou said as he plucked at a few of the strings while the girls watched him. Then, he used Structural Analysis to analyze the item's entire history. He gained an understanding of the instrument and a few of the songs that had been played on it before starting to play one of them for the children.
It felt pretty natural to him, with muscle memory seeming to take over at some point, though he felt a slight awkwardness due to the calluses that were on his fingers that hadn't been on Ferdinand's. Even so, it was a skillful performance and left the girls and Effa absolutely shocked, while Lasfam was beaming.
"I see that even if your memory is gone, you are still one of the best players in the entire country." Lasfam said with delight.
"Was I now? Well, even if I remember how to play the songs, I can't recall their names or the words that accompany them. Is that something they will be expected to know?" Shirou said.
"Yes, it is." Lasfam informed him, but didn't seem at all put off. In his mind, Lord Ferdinand was so great that nothing was more than an inconvenience to him.
"Then I will see to getting the children an instructor for that back at the Temple." Shirou said as he put down the instrument and looked at the three children. "Now, how about you all try imitating my hand placement and movements a bit."
The girls tried their own harspiels, with Freida playing a short tone that she had learned before, when she was being trained to be a noble's mistress. It was a basic song for beginners, but she still played it well.
Tuuli then imitated Freida's movements perfectly, letting her play the same thing on the first try, without a noticeable difference in quality. The differences lay mostly in how well the two harspiels were toned, rather than any changes in technique.
"As expected of a student of Lord Ferdinand." Lasfam said, brimming with cheer at Tuuli's success on her very first attempt.
"It really was nothing." Tuuli said, not seeing what the big deal was.
Their training with magic control had improved their reflexes, and once they learned to use magic to compartmentalize information properly, their memory improved to levels that some would believe were inhuman. Simply mimicking the motions was trivial to them. They had learned much more difficult things under Shirou's tutelage.
The girls didn't realize how different their training had been in comparison to other nobles.
Myne then copied the motions herself, nearly as well Tuuli did, though her hand eye coordination wasn't quite as good as her older sister's. Though as she did so, she hummed the individual notes to herself, figuring out how the harspiel's strings sounded.
She got the basic idea of which strings were what notes, with each neighboring string differing by only a half note.
After that, she started to play a different, but still basic, song. The song that would be the first song of every child back in Japan. It was just a moment of nostalgia to Myne, remembering her old life as Urano Motosu, which she didn't think anything of.
Not until she heard Lasfam's reaction to it. "Incredible." The loyal attendant said in dumbstruck awe. "To compose an original song, even a basic one, the very first time holding an instrument. Truly you are the daughter of our Lord."
"Huh? What?" Myne said, embarrassed as she took her hands away from the cords.
"That's our little sister." Freida chuckled as Myne got flustered. "She can make recipes with ingredients he has never seen before, and write music for an instrument she's never touched."
"That's just how Myne is." Tuuli said with a mixture of exasperation and pride.
"Please don't talk about me like that!" Myne said, embarrassed by their praise, until Shirou asked her a question.
"Myne, where did you hear that song before?" Shirou asked her with a puzzled expression.
"Well… I heard it in my dreams." Myne said, not meeting Shirou's eyes.
"In your dreams?" Shirou said, his puzzled look turning to one of astonishment, though not disbelief.
"That's what Myne always says. Her ideas for recipes, her weaving designs, and her inventions always come to her in her dreams." Freida explained.
"Is that so?" Shirou hummed, looking down at his 'daughter'.
"Is something wrong?" Myne asked uncomfortably.
"Not really. The Dream Cycle is rare, and I won't say it doesn't have its effects on the personality of the person who experiences it, but it isn't dangerous." Shirou told her, surprising Myne.
"Wait, you mean that is something normal!?" Myne asked in shock.
"I won't say normal, but it isn't unheard of. Like you know, your memories are contained within your magic energy. If you know how to manipulate it, you can preserve and re-experience your memories almost perfectly. There are also magic tools that can let you experience the memories of someone else as well, if you have a good compatibility with them." Shirou explained to the children. The kids all nodded, having been taught how to use their Od to save a memory to be re-experienced at a later date. Something that made studying a breeze. "The Dream Cycle is what they call it when you are absorbing a foreign source of mana in your sleep and are synchronizing with it, letting you experience another's memories in your dreams, as if they were your own. Usually, this requires some sort of magic contract, but it is possible for it to happen without. Lasfam must have experienced a weak version of it after he had given me his name."
"That is the case. After I gave my name to Lord Ferdinand, I would occasionally dream about his memories. Though they were usually vague and shrouded in symbolism." Lasfam confirmed, despite never having heard the term 'Dream Cycle' before.
"The only question is, where and when is the magic energy coming from?" Shirou pondered before shrugging it off. "I suppose this is just another consequence of your unique disposition. Tell me if the dreams start to trouble you and we can make a magic tool to isolate you from foreign mana while you sleep. And if you ever want to talk about what you see, I am more than ready to listen."
"But the things that Myne dreams about don't exist yet. How could they be memories?" Tuuli asked, confused.
"Mana is weird like that. Time and space don't necessarily have the same meaning to it as it does for us. The mana in the air round us right now could have once existed in an entirely different world." Shirou explained, as if it was no big deal.
Shirou's own existence was proof enough of that, as his magic power had somehow ended up in Ferdinand as the man was dying, slipping in to fill the gaps as his own magic power was leaving his body for good. Ferdinand's memories had been getting destroyed as his magic power crystalized and Shirou's took their place.
This might technically mean that he actually was Ferdinand, only with Shirou's memories, but the philosophy of identity was a confusing one, and not one that Shirou was going to dwell on. He did wonder if Myne was also receiving some kind of memories from his old world, or at least a version of Japan, since she played what was a children's tone. It would certainly explain a lot, like why a girl who had never seen a real book before had already been so obsessed with them, but it wouldn't really matter too much to him.
Obsession was also a trait common among those who had experienced a Dream Cycle from a higher power that embodied a certain principle or legend while on their deathbed. That was Rin's theory as to why Shirou was so messed up.
Shirou himself has experienced a full Dream Cycle with five such higher existences, including Avalon, Saber, Archer, Rider and Avenger. He'd also experienced some of Rin and Sakura's memories on the nights they would spend together, having exchanged Od with one another.
In the end, he'd already accepted Myne as family, and that was that. If she wanted to talk about it, he would listen. If not, he'd wait.
Myne however was dumbfounded, finding out the reason she has the memories of Urano Motosu could be because she had somehow absorbed the dead girl's magic power. The new information opened up an entire world of questions for her.
Is she a reincarnation of Motosu, or is their relationship something completely different? Motosu could even be alive and her memories could have just been telegraphed to Myne somehow. How does something like this even happen?
"Well, let's get started learning how to read music." Shirou said, ready to move on.
"Can't I be given a moment to process this life changing revelation first!?"
So far, the road trip has proven to have three of the things I hate the most.
Snow, relatives and cars.
Why do I do this every year?
I'd like to think that Shirou always just shrugs his shoulders and accepts everything that comes his way. So while the subject of reincarnation and the nature of memories might be at least slightly engaging to Myne, having gone through it, Shirou barely cares.
He'll be open to talking about it if she wants him to, but unless she asks he won't press.