Chapter 105
We bought fruit juice made from crushed berries and sugar candies, and I even picked out a little ornament made from flower petals set in sap.
After standing in the shower of petals for so long, the tiny purple blossoms had caught all over my hair, making me look almost like some kind of flower fairy. When Devi asked if she could tidy it for me, I told her to leave it as it was — it would be a nice keepsake of the day. So with every step I took, a few petals fluttered down through the air behind me.
Humming to myself, I picked out simple wooden trinkets carved from tree bark — one for each of us — and insisted that everyone keep theirs as a memento. Even when it was time to return, and the sun had long begun to sink, I still smiled brightly and waved.
By the time we climbed into the carriage and arrived back at the Castraine family villa, I was still all smiles — cheeks flushed from excitement as I said cheerfully, “Thank you for today! Sleep well, everyone!” Then I went straight up to my room without once looking back.
Raymond, after saying goodnight as well, remained standing there for a long while, staring at the place where Titania had disappeared. On the polished marble floor, a few petals lay scattered.
He hesitated a moment, then stooped down and picked them up. The fragile blossoms crumpled easily in his palm, yet he couldn’t bring himself either to crush them completely or to throw them away.
“Brother,” said Lysianthus quietly.
His tone wasn’t playful like before. Maybe it was the darkness around them, but the easy grin he’d worn earlier — joking about Titania’s purchases — was gone.
Compared to Raymond, who had simply followed Titania in silence, Lysianthus’s red eyes gleamed like embers as he met his brother’s golden gaze.
“It was fun, wasn’t it?” he said softly. “Honestly, if Vivi had come down today, I think it still would’ve been fine. I get why she shouldn’t get involved in big matters, but still.”
“I’m glad you enjoyed yourself,” Raymond replied evenly.
“The princess smiled a lot today,” Lysianthus added.
It seemed like an odd comment, but Raymond didn’t answer. Lysianthus moved closer, shrugging one shoulder.
“She’s smiled before, sure. But today… I realized something. All the times she smiled before, they were fake. When she really smiled this time — I couldn’t even breathe for a moment.”
“…”
“She looked genuinely happy. Buying things, laughing, teasing us a little. She’s always so careful not to show what she’s feeling, but today… she laughed like any other girl her age.”
As he spoke, Lysianthus began to feel a strange unease.
Right — now that he thought about it, he had never once seen Titania simply laugh like a normal girl before.
It was strange.
She’d always seemed bright — energetic even — when she asked him to light a branch on fire, laughing with a kind of wild energy that masked everything else. But she never threw tantrums. Never complained, not even after spending entire days smiling and waving to crowds beside the High Priest. She just endured, wordlessly.
In that way, she was a lot like Raymond.
Lysianthus thought about how obsessively his brother had acted since Titania’s near-death. The attack by the beasts had been a crisis for everyone — of course the Castraine family took it seriously. Even on the day of the offering festival, Raymond had been on edge the entire time. And though Titania had boldly fought to save herself — declaring, “I’ll handle it!” — it had clearly shaken him.
“You okay, brother?”
Titania always carried an invisible wall around her.
Today, though, that wall had seemed thinner — fragile. She’d smiled with a face that looked like she might break down crying any moment.
Lysianthus remembered seeing Raymond frozen, like he wouldn’t even be able to react if someone attacked him then.
He’d suspected as much ever since Raymond started combing the whole region, hunting every last trace of those beasts. No, even before that — he’d noticed.
“If I’m not okay,” Raymond finally said, “then what else can I do?”
The words were rough, like they’d been swallowed and ground down before he let them out.
“Is there another answer?”
“…”
Lysianthus thought of the wooden trinket tucked neatly inside Raymond’s coat. His own was the same — a crude little charm with a clumsy carving of a flower or animal, painted in childish colors. Barely the size of two fingers.
Not something a princess raised in the palace would normally treasure — yet she had smiled so brightly when handing them over, saying, “Let’s each keep one!”
No one there had been able to refuse.
So Lysianthus could only reply quietly, voice bitter as ash:
“No. There isn’t. Not right now.”
The room was loud — clinking glasses, drunken laughter, shouts. It was the kind of place where you had to yell to be heard, and no one cared to listen anyway: a cheap tavern on the first floor of an inn.
“Borrow some people from me? I don’t even have anyone to lend,” said Adrian, laughing.
Though he was a legitimate prince, the second-born, he had long fallen out of the emperor’s favor — and he was using that to his advantage.
Attending banquets and charming nobles hadn’t been enough to gain real power. Even with the empress as his mother and a few high-ranking nobles quietly supporting him for the sake of “legitimacy,” the emperor’s blatant favoritism toward Brian and Empress Cleo had made everyone else cautious.
So Adrian had decided that if he couldn’t gain influence openly, he might as well seek power in the shadows.
He disguised himself as a commoner and frequented taverns where mercenaries gathered. The emperor had no idea that Adrian’s swordsmanship — which rivaled the royal knights — had been honed through these secret outings. Many of his tavern friends would probably faint if they ever learned who he truly was.
Still, even a powerless empress wasn’t completely blind. If Cleo had ever realized he was sneaking out, she would’ve seized the chance to eliminate him.
So while Adrian slipped away, a servant who looked nearly identical to him stood in for him at the palace, ensuring no one noticed. On the surface, neither the empress nor the prince ever left the palace grounds, so there was no reason for suspicion.
Tonight, he had just sat down in his favorite tavern, ordering beer with a grin — when a girl appeared across from him, asking, “Lend me some people.”
Had it not been for her, he would’ve already finished his drink in one gulp.
“Your fake name could use some work,” she said tartly. “Lian? Really? Everyone knows that’s short for Adrian.”
He blinked, taken aback, studying her face.
It was the Castraine family’s youngest daughter — the one Titania had risked her life to save. A clever girl, far too sharp for her age, who’d apparently charmed even that cold, iron-blooded household. He’d seen her briefly while Titania was recovering in the empress’s wing — they’d spoken a few times.
But he hadn’t expected to meet her here.
“The name Lian seems to have gotten quite popular,” she said with a sly smile. “I didn’t know your swordsmanship was that good. I didn’t realize being the Second Prince left you enough free time to moonlight as a top-class mercenary.”
Her cute, squirrel-like face curved into a grin. Adrian was momentarily speechless.
Now that he looked around, none of the usual patrons were here. The tables were full, the drinks were poured — but every face was unfamiliar. Too clean, too deliberate.
A smokescreen.
What kind of trick is this? he thought. She really arranged all this, just to talk to me?
“Well, my lady,” he said finally, raising his hands in mock surrender, “I don’t mind you mocking my fake name or outing my secret identity. But this business about borrowing people — that part, I really don’t get.”
He sighed. The glint in her brown eyes told him he might be in over his head.
For all his cunning, even Adrian had to admit — he was outmatched.
