Chapter 67
While Sasha’s face was stained with tension, Calyx wore a broad smile on his lips.
The third purpose behind faking his own disappearance had finally begun to bear fruit.
‘I suppose you couldn’t just sit still once you heard I was alive and well, loitering around Dempis. After all, you want me alive more than anyone else.’
Calyx chuckled softly, muttering toward the man whose name and face he did not even know.
Black amber.
Though the color was different, it was identical to the one in his memories. The mysterious gem Catherine had handed him twelve years ago—the one that had turned blood-red upon absorbing a drop of his gore.
“It seems we’ve touched upon a real clue regarding the madness. Continue searching Lake Mofit. We must find the place where this was buried before they do.”
Half a day had already passed since Lottie first leaned back against her plush pillows to flip through a book.
Lottie closed the volume, which was filled with tedious ramblings on ballroom etiquette, and looked toward the white curtains fluttering over the glass doors.
The glass doors leading to the balcony were large enough to occupy an entire wall and were currently left halfway open.
Through the gap, the muggy summer air drifted in along with the distant sounds of maids laughing, the butler shouting orders, and the splashing of water. Come to think of it, she recalled hearing that the mansion was undergoing a deep cleaning today.
‘Not that it matters. No one is going to set foot in this room anyway.’
Following the absurd kidnapping incident, Lottie’s confinement had been strictly reinforced. It wasn’t just a ban on going out anymore; it was full-blown house arrest.
She couldn’t take a single step out of her room without her father’s permission. Naturally, it was impossible to eavesdrop on her father and Hanson in the study, or to dig for information regarding what had happened to Tom Philson.
‘Am I just going to be stuck in this room until I’m forced to marry Padrick? Just like before the regression.’
A shiver ran down her spine at the memory of her married life, lived as nothing more than Padrick’s accessory.
— Take my hand. So that I may become your wings and your shield.
She knew there was a way to avoid repeating that horrific past. If she took Calyx’s hand, he would name the Queen and the Crown Prince as the masterminds behind his assassination attempt, just as he had promised. The kingdom would fall into utter ruin, but she alone would escape the future she so desperately wanted to avoid.
However…
— Je-su-ssi.
Was it possible that the path she chose to avoid the past would lead to repeating a different past she wanted to escape?
She knew that being cooped up in her room was making her overthink everything, but once her thoughts started spiraling, they were hard to break.
As she ruminated on her confinement, her reason for living, and the meaning of existence to the accompaniment of the distant laughter of the maids, Lottie’s mind drifted back to the problem she hadn’t managed to resolve at Lake Mofit.
What exactly lay beyond the line of being friends or contractual partners?
‘Love?’
Lottie laughed out loud. It was ridiculous. The idea of him loving her.
He was simply staying by her side as a friend. There were times his devotion had confused her, but Lottie was certain it couldn’t be love.
The reason he was so good to her was… right. It was because he still felt guilty. He wanted to atone for using her to provoke Padrick last spring.
[Are you sure it’s not just that you hope he doesn’t love you?]
At that moment, an unfamiliar voice rang out. It wasn’t in her ears, but a voice echoing inside her head.
Startled, Lottie looked around. Naturally, there was no one in the room.
‘Did I… mishear?’
Lottie reached out and felt along the bed. Her hand brushed against a thin book that hadn’t fallen to the floor, and she quickly flipped it open without even looking at the cover.
“Ah…”
As the familiar sentences caught her eye, Lottie finally turned the book over to check the cover. It was her favorite fairy tale, .
Lottie gazed at the book, which bore the clear marks of time, with a fresh sense of nostalgia.
The reason Lottie loved this fairy tale wasn’t just because of the princess who inspired the admiration of all young girls.
— Lottie. This is a secret I’m only telling you, but Princess Nuan was actually a time traveler who could move freely between the past and the future. The reason she was the best at hide-and-seek in the kingdom was because she had already traveled to the future to see all the places where the courtiers would look for her.
It was because of the memories of her mother, who had held her young daughter and read this fairy tale to her every single day until she was quarantined and passed away from tuberculosis.
Swept up in a wave of affection, Lottie leafed through the old picture book. Though twelve years had passed since her mother’s death, the voice of her mother reading to her felt as vivid and warm as if it were yesterday.
“…Huh?”
As Lottie flipped through the pages, soaked in memory, she felt a sense of oddity when she realized that the princess’s name didn’t appear anywhere in the book.
It was the same for the other characters. There was no mention of the princess’s coachman, Kayan, or the name Keltam, the man the princess eventually married. She even scanned the book several times but couldn’t find the part about Princess Nuan being a time traveler.
‘Did Mother make up those stories just for me when I was little?’
Recalling her mother’s character during her lifetime, it seemed plausible. Even when her illness worsened and she collapsed, her mother had been a pure soul who never lost her smile or her sense of humor.
Shaking off the brief doubt, Lottie immersed herself in the book again.
The free-spirited princess does not want the constraints of marriage, but the King wishes for her to find a good husband and wed.
‘I did admire Princess Nuan… but I never wished for the day to come where I would actually empathize with her.’
Eventually, unable to turn away the King’s earnest plea, the princess proposes a wager.
Thereafter, the princess sets three difficult tasks for her many suitors and marries the man who passes them all.
‘Did Nuan set this wager knowing that she would eventually become someone’s wife?’
Probably not. Now that she was in a similar position, Lottie understood her heart better than anyone.
‘Nuan at least tried to assert her will by making a wager, but I…’
Soon, someone would arrive from the Royal Palace. Speaking for the Queen, they would demand she hand over Tom Philson and ask about her intent regarding the royal marriage to the Crown Prince.
What if she revealed the truth and refused the marriage?
Lottie squeezed her eyes shut as a bleak future flashed before her.
‘Is there no way? A way to avoid the marriage without anyone getting hurt… No, at the very least, a way to buy time until I can find Tom Philson…’
In her darkened vision, she suddenly imagined herself becoming Nuan, setting tasks for a multitude of suitors. It was a fantasy that any young girl who dreamed of being a fairy-tale princess would have envisioned at least once.
It was a fantasy for a child; for an adult, it was nothing more than a delusion.
Nuan was a woman so magnificent that even storms and rain clouds retreated in awe before her. Not to mention being the only princess of the kingdom, she was so wise that anyone who started a conversation with her would lose track of time until dawn.
Compared to her, the ordinary human named Charlotte Evanshire was…
— Lady. Realize your place. In this world, there are no birds that will roll in the mud for a woman who mistakes herself for the sky.
Immediately after being kicked out of the Royal Palace, a matchmaker had said this to Lottie as she was desperately struggling to remarry. It was right after Lottie had said she didn’t care about status, as long as her new husband was a man of integrity.
She had realized naturally while scouting for a husband on her own—even creating a remarriage list—that her situation was so pathetic that even attaching a basic condition was a luxury.
The matchmaker was right. In this world, there was no man who would roll in the mud for a woman who had already been “discarded” once, possessing nothing but the scarlet letter of an adulteress and a mountain of debt.
Even if she pleaded with those who rejected her marriage proposals, promising to groom her appearance every day, never to talk back, and to change her name to a Matilan style, it wouldn’t cover up her wretched circumstances.
‘To think that someone like me imagined being a princess surrounded by suitors…’
Lottie let her head hang and let out a thin, weak laugh. It was the self-deprecating laugh she used to mask the pain whenever she was rejected for marriage for reasons that bordered on character assassination.
In her lowered gaze, the fairy tale book lay open haphazardly. There, alongside the stiffly printed letters, was a black-and-white illustration. It was a drawing of countless suitors cheering toward the princess out on the castle balcony.
‘Did all these people… really fall in love with the princess at first sight?’
A question she had never considered before arose when Lottie mentally drew Padrick’s face among the suitors in the illustration.
‘That’s impossible. No matter how beautiful the princess is, love and marriage are separate issues.’
Even if the beginning was love, marriage is a family business steeped in utility and calculation.
Even Padrick, the Crown Prince who stood above all, had made a proposal that was nothing more than sugar-coated words to get what he wanted. How much more so for those who lacked far more than they possessed…
“……”
Thoughts took flight, racing through her mind like galloping horses. Finding the speed of her thoughts difficult to manage, Lottie stood up from the bed and paced the room.
The pitiful Charlotte Evanshire of her first life had lacked far more than she possessed. That was why every time she sought a proposal, she was kicked aside like a stone on the road.
But in her second life, she hadn’t even married yet. Therefore, she couldn’t possibly have the label of an adulteress. Furthermore, though it had ended in scandal, she was also the heroine of a legendary romance who had been courted by two princes at once.
While the nobles in the Capital called it a remote, rugged land, there was no denying that the House of Count Ix was a great noble family occupying most of Northern Matila, and they possessed no shortage of honor and wealth.
Those things were slated to be inherited by the Count’s son-in-law after his death.
The sons of powerful families or the eldest sons of ordinary noble houses who were already set to inherit might not even find the position interesting. However, for the second sons of noble families who had to fend for themselves after their eldest brothers inherited the titles, the story was a bit different.
‘And if I include the sons of impoverished noble families, middle-class men whose paths to success are blocked, and even commoners…’
Now, the one receiving the cheers of the many suitors in the illustration was not Nuan, but a princess named Charlotte Evanshire.
