“I do not know where Mr. Lemon usually lives, but what does he eat? Does he feed on bugs or something?”
“Peep, peep, peep, peep.”
Lemon shook his head vigorously, then fluttered lightly through the air to land on a platter of fruit left in the room.
Dalia turned her gaze toward the fruit, and Annie’s eyes followed naturally.
“It seems he eats fruit.”
“What a relief. I was worried we would have to catch bugs for him.”
Annie spoke with a visible sense of comfort, and Dalia nodded vigorously in agreement.
She detested bugs, to say nothing of slippery frogs.
Lemon, who had been pecking at a banana, suddenly raised his head. He flew straight toward Dalia and tugged on her hair with his small beak.
Annie stared in surprise as half of Dalia’s pink locks lifted straight into the air.
“What is it?”
As Lemon tugged on her hair relentlessly, Dalia sat up straight.
Lemon flapped his wings and headed toward the open window, trying to drag her along.
“You want to go out? All right, I understand. Stop pulling.”
Dalia let Lemon fly out of the window first, then turned back to Annie.
“I will take a short walk and come back.”
“I shall accompany you.”
Annie moved to follow her, but Dalia shook her head reassuringly.
“No, Annie. You must be tired. Get some rest.”
“Still…”
Annie hesitated before finishing her thought.
“Yes?”
“Miss Lia… you have a dreadful sense of direction.”
Having spent almost her entire life cloistered in the annex, Dalia managed to lose her way every single time she stepped outside, leaving her mother’s ladies-in-waiting to search for hours.
“Ah… true.”
“Peep, peep, peep, peep. Peep, peep, peep, peep.”
Lemon let out an insistent chirp from outside.
“This time, I will just follow him and come right back.”
“Mr. Lemon, you must bring Miss Lia back here without fail.”
Annie addressed a spot completely different from where Lemon was perched, yet the bird nodded as though he understood every word.
Though their eyes never met, the rapport between human and animal was astonishing.
Lemon flapped his red wings with what he likely considered tremendous vigor, though to Dalia it looked like modest fluttering.
He flew along briskly, pausing now and then to ensure she was still following behind.
Each time, Dalia gave a reassuring wave of her hand to show she was doing fine.
Walking along with her eyes fixed on Lemon, she passed a fountain, then lush garden trees, until she reached a dense, tangled thicket of bushes.
A gentle, fragrant breeze carried the scent of lilacs.
She looked up and saw Lemon flying above the bushes, hovering just around her eye level.
‘Lemon… you are a bird, and I am a human.’
Dalia sighed as she looked up at the tall bushes.
She hesitated, tempted to give up then and there, but realizing she had no way of finding her way back without Lemon, she pressed on behind him.
The moment she poked her head through a gap in the bushes—
Schwing.
Dalia’s eyes widened in horror at the blade resting right against her neck.
“Ah!”
“Who are you?”
A man’s voice chilled the air.
‘Did Lemon act friendly just to lead me straight to my death?’
She imagined Lemon covering his beak with his wings, cackling like a villain.
“I ask you for the last time. Who are you?”
At that very moment, her eyes slid shut, and her head drooped forward, entirely limp.
Amidst the green shrubbery, only the head of a pink-haired woman peeked through, glistening in the light.
With a single green leaf snagged in her pink locks, she looked like a walking flower garden.
Ethan, the Commander of the Imperial Guard, had never anticipated anything of the sort when he drew his sword against her.
Never did he imagine she would let her head fall straight toward the blade, as though actively seeking her own death.
Naturally, as the empire’s greatest knight, Ethan pulled his sword away at the final split second before it nicked her neck.
The woman slumped to the ground and lay there, utterly motionless.
“Is she… dead?”
Emperor Gray stared down at her in astonishment, then looked over at Ethan.
Even across Ethan’s perpetually stoic face, a flash of bewilderment flickered.
As Ethan reached down to check if she was breathing, a faint chewing sound came from her lips.
“Mmm…”
“She is asleep…”
Gray broke off, stunned by a spectacle he had never witnessed in all his life.
“So it seems.”
Ethan stared at her as though observing an alien creature.
Gray privately resolved to pardon the woman this once, whatever her reason for trespassing into his garden.
She was, after all, the first person to ever evoke such a face from Ethan.
Gray set aside the documents he had been reviewing on the table and rose to his feet.
As he drew near, her pink hair resting against the emerald grass looked just like a field of blooming pink blossoms.
Judging by her dress, she seemed to be a noblewoman, yet here she was, sleeping on the bare ground without a care in the world.
“Should we not wake her?”
Ethan asked, his usual stoic composure firmly back in place.
“She cannot simply be left to sleep here.”
“Annie… cold… blanket…”
The sleeping woman’s mumblings cut across their conversation.
Gray and Ethan exchanged a simultaneous look.
‘What is this bizarre woman?’
The thought crossed both of their minds at once.
A woman who had barged into the Emperor’s garden unannounced, fallen asleep on the dirt, and was now asking for a blanket in her sleep.
Gray slipped his black coat from his shoulders and draped it gently over her body.
“Let us see how long she sleeps.”
He spoke with an expressionless face, returning to his seat to take up the unfinished papers.
‘Why does my nose hurt so much?’
Dalia rubbed the tip of her nose and slowly blinked her eyes open.
Vibrant green grass filled her vision.
‘Why is the grass so close?’
She was certain she had been squeezing her way through the bushes.
At that moment, as though a bucket of icy water had been dumped over her head, she snapped fully awake.
A sword.
And a man’s icy voice.
Dalia hurriedly felt along her neck.
Fortunately, there was not a scratch.
‘I should have listened to Annie when she told me to take my medicine… Who could have known I would fall asleep so suddenly?’
Just then—
“Did you sleep well?”
It was a voice entirely different from the icy one she had heard earlier; mellow, and slightly lazy.
A deep, resonant cadence tickled her ear.
That meant there were at least two men watching her.
“Yes…”
Dalia did not dare lift her head, swallowing the end of her words.
“Slept well? You seem quite accustomed to sleeping on the ground.”
He seemed to be teasing her, but she answered honestly:
“Sometimes.”
On rare occasions, her illness would flare up, causing her to collapse and drift off like that.
Her reply apparently caught the speaker off guard, for silence descended at once.
Then the first icy voice rang out again:
“Who are you?”
“Ah, I… I come from the Wyvern Kingdom.”
Suddenly, the ear-tickling voice returned:
“And who might you be within the Wyvern Kingdom?”
Dalia pulled her trembling shoulders together and lifted her head halfway.
“May… may I come out of here first?”
Only her shoulders were poking out of the bushes, and she simply wanted to stand up properly before anything else.
“Very well.”
The moment permission was granted, Dalia crawled out of the bushes.
As she did, a man’s black coat slipped off her back and onto the ground; she had no idea when it had been placed over her.
Dalia scooped up the coat and dusted it off lightly.
‘Whose is this?’
She lowered her head and brushed down the hem of her skirt as well.
The moment she saw how filthy the front of her dress was, her eyes drooped in dismay.
‘Annie is going to scold me for sure.’
“Well? You still have not answered.”
The deep voice tickled her ear again. Dalia’s shoulders flinched, and she raised a hand to cover her ear. Then, at last, she lifted her gaze toward the owner of the voice that kept assailing her senses.
Black hair was swept neatly back.
His skin was fair and pristine.
His eyes were as dark as polished black diamonds, with a tear-shaped beauty mark nestled beneath one of them.
His lips were redder than any woman’s.
A sculpted jawline that looked carved to perfection by a master artisan.
“Wow…”
‘How can anyone be this breathtaking?’
Fortunately, her mind caught the words before they could spill past her lips.
Dalia’s eyes gleamed with unmistakable realization.
She had found him.
The very reason she had traveled to this empire.
Emperor Gray Jean Lucifon.
