Chapter 13

Kaius was bored out of his mind. With even the friends he was close to absent, listening to the forced flattery dragging on made him feel as though he himself were growing stupid.

But there was nothing to be done.

He was the only son of the Ruventain Grand Duke, and one day he would be the master of the north. In the end, these were people he had to look after properly.

To simply throw down his napkin and storm out because he was bored or displeased was the behavior of a thoughtless child.

“That’s her, isn’t it?”

Just then, the son of Baron Kont pointed toward the window. Kaius turned his head with an expressionless face.

There, he saw a small child running busily.

“Why is she running so hard?”

“My father said he doesn’t know where she rolled in from, and look at her really rolling along.”

“Ha ha. Hey, that’s too much.”

Kaius closed his eyes and let out a deep sigh at the ceiling. Countless thoughts swept through his mind. Frankly speaking, it was undeniable that he did not like that little brat.

Currently, the traditionalist retainers had even dragged the new faction into the Grand Ducal Castle. Their intent was obvious: to settle the matter of Ailien’s lodging once and for all and to pile up justification for driving her out.

The two factions, who opposed each other at every turn, would surely agree on this one point. Keeping a child of even unclear origins in the Grand Ducal residence was, by common sense, absurd.

He knew that.

He knew it perfectly well in his head.

And yet Kaius found this entire situation utterly intolerable.

It was revolting that the traditionalists, who usually looked down on the new faction, would drag them in and pad their numbers just to expel a single child. He was angry at the new faction too, for being used by them without even knowing their own position.

‘Yes, it’s simply that I don’t like it.’

Kaius nailed it to himself: his resistance was by no means sympathy for that little brat.

‘But what on earth is she trying to do?’

Judging by the direction she was moving, her destination seemed to be the garden. A child taking a walk with a flying squirrel and a cat was hardly an unusual sight, but in Kaius’s eyes, everything was suspicious.

Above all, the gazes sharply sweeping over that child within the Grand Ducal Castle grated on him terribly. The sight of people freely evaluating and surveilling someone in another’s courtyard felt presumptuous.

‘I should follow her.’

This was, after all, a legitimate act of a homeowner tracking the movements of an uninvited guest.

If he was lucky, he might even catch a decisive clue to unearthing the secret that child was hiding.

***

The garden of the Ruventain Grand Ducal House was as vast and splendid as its reputation. Along paths ordered as neatly as if measured with a ruler, rare flowers that never wilted through all four seasons displayed their colors.

In the air, the fragrances of nameless flowers mingled and lingered sweetly.

“Whoa…….”

Ailien was briefly dazed by the overwhelming scale of the garden. It was incomparably larger and more beautiful than the small flower bed around the cabin.

But Ailien, commendably, soon came to her senses and recalled her original purpose.

“Lili didn’t come here to play.”

With a solemn expression, Ailien clenched her fist and muttered.

“I came to carry out a very important mission.”

“Meow…….”

Kiki let out a languid sound and swished her tail.

“Squeak!”

Didi, on Ailien’s shoulder, flashed her small front paws and cheered her on.

Ailien recalled Marilyn’s teaching.

‘Lili, truly precious and good things are always hard to spot.’

Mari always said that. The most splendid flower might harbor the strongest poison, and the most insignificant blade of grass might be a cure for all illnesses.

“Mari’s treasure might be here too!”

Ailien left the well-swept path and headed toward the densely grown bushes. A corner of the garden that seemed untouched by human hands.

That was precisely the place where real treasure would be hidden.

“Hey, what are you doing here?”

Just then, she heard a mocking voice. Turning her head, she saw Kaius standing with boys she had never seen before.

“She’s really tiny.”

“Looks like she’d roll if you tapped her.”

Countless jeers poured down on her, but Ailien merely stood there blinking her large, clear eyes. Watching her, Kaius felt as though his insides might burst a little.

She narrowed her eyes at me and talked back so stubbornly, so why was she standing there with her mouth clamped shut like this?

“Lili…….”

“Oh, it talks, it talks.”

“I have to go.”

“Go where? Huh? She really goes around as she pleases. Does she even know where she is?”

“She seems to have no sense of her place.”

The level of the conversation surrounding the child began to rise little by little.

The thoughtless boys treating Ailien so rudely was partly due to their shallow desire to look good in front of Kaius, but it was also because beneath it all lay the base psychology of bullying someone weaker and younger than themselves.

But the expression of Kaius, standing at the center, was gradually turning cold.

“Could you move aside?”

“She says, could you move aside.”

“Hey, try some magic, magic.”

“Right, didn’t the great Zeronias raise you?”

Just then, someone lightly shoved Ailien’s shoulder. The five-year-old, caught off guard, lost her balance and truly went rolling head over heels.

“……!”

Startled, Kaius roughly shoved the boy who had pushed Ailien and was about to rush to her, that was the moment.

Ailien, who had been rolling on the ground, sprang to her feet.

“Are you all right……?”

Ailien’s white cheeks were flushed bright red, and her hair was hopelessly tangled in every direction.

She looked slightly dazed and blank, so Kaius’s heart dropped and he had no choice but to ask cautiously.

“Ha ha ha ha!”

Then Ailien suddenly laughed, clear and bright. It was a radiant laugh as if she had just experienced a very entertaining game.

“Kai, did you see? This is exactly Lili’s muscle, trained through carrot pulling.”

“…….”

“I think you should try pulling carrots too, instead of playing with those little minions.”

Ailien patted Kaius’s waist with a rather dignified air.

Kaius stared down at her with a face caught between speechlessness and absurdity. He felt as though he, who had been worried, had become a fool in an instant.

“What did you say, minions?”

In the midst of that awkward silence, the boy who had made Ailien roll stepped forward, fuming.

It was Beck, the only son of Viscount Zenno, one of the traditionalist retainers of the Ruventain Grand Ducal House.

Whenever Viscount Zenno had business in the Grand Ducal territory, he always brought Beck along to make an impression. Since the north rarely held large-scale banquets, he was desperate to secure the position of the young lord’s companion.

“So we’re minions, then?”

At Ailien’s utterly matter-of-fact question, Beck bit his lip hard.

Beck was a boy just as full of ambition and greed as his father. He wanted, if possible, to become Kaius’s closest and most noble friend.

Kaius was outwardly sociable and kind, but Beck could sense it instinctively. No—every noble scion of the north must already have felt it keenly.

That the young lord of Ruventain never easily opened his heart to just anyone.

“Why am I a minion? You’re the one living off someone else’s house.”