Chapter 5

“You don’t have to be so vigilant. I won’t do anything bad.”

The clothes the man was wearing was a uniform comparable to the extravagant clothes Lulahel wore. He wore clothes with lots of ornaments and it made me wonder how he got up here.

“It’s dangerous, so why don’t you sit down first?”

“………”

“………”

The man advised us to stand close. I couldn’t listen to the suspicious invitation.

“….. You shouldn’t come here without permission….. you can’t.”

As the battle continued, Argen finally opened his mouth.

He pulled my hand tightly, saying to be careful, but it seemed like the situation would only end when I talked to him first.

“Why?”

“….. That.”

I couldn’t come up with anything to say.

I don’t know why he came here in front of us, but he must have made a mistake. Otherwise, it would not be possible to come to an abandoned castle and do this. Argen stopped me, saying it was dangerous, and I also kept my mouth shut at the warning this time.

“Is my question very difficult?”

Whatever the question was, I was just embarrassed by this situation a lot.

‘Is he a lost nobleman?’

‘Is it so?’’

It seemed that the other person didn’t have any hostility towards us, but that was a separate matter. For us, getting out of this situation was our priority.

“Why did you guys come up so high?”

The man changed the question a little more humorously. He said it softly and easily for us to understand if we were considered children. It was a really sweet and kind voice. I had never received such favor, so I kept flinching.

“I, I’m going down.”

This time Argen spoke instead of me. He didn’t forget to stutter, just in case.

“Well, it’s dangerous here for you, so let’s go down first.”

We were rather embarrassed by what we said to avoid the question of why we came up. We looked around frantically as the man slowly raised his body. We had to avoid climbing down the tree ‘together’ with the man. We’ve already gotten used to it, but it would seem strange to others to see a five-year-old kid climbing up and down a tall tree.

Argen had been clenching his teeth and discussing how to avoid it. In the prolonged silence, I wrinkled my nose, grabbed Argen’s sleeve and pulled it.

“I….. I just came up here because I can see the palace of the second prince from up here.”

“…… Yes?”

“I came to see it because it was so beautiful…..”

I avoided going down together and blurted out a belated answer to his question. Thanks to that, the man lowered his eyes for a moment and soon asked in a mysterious voice.

“Beautiful?”

Argen nodded eagerly to see if I could keep answering.

“Very, very much.”

Argen and I spoke desperately to get out of this situation.

“Do you want to go?”

The man who looked down at us for a long time asked us a strange question. Please, if you are a noble, can you stop paying attention to us and find the right people of your status to play with?

I was sweating and struggling hard to talk like a normal child.

“That….. not like that… .. How can we dare…..”

We haven’t learned whether our way of speaking and acting was polite or not, so we don’t know. I replied cautiously, looking at the man’s countenance. I tried my best not to offend the man, but his face was distorted at my last words. The man’s face, which had changed rapidly, thickened the tense atmosphere. It’s the first time in years that I’ve spoken to someone I’ve never seen before.

Our tension didn’t ease easily. We were sensitive to such a delicate expression. Standing on a hard branch, the man kept his eye on us. I knew our sizes were small, but we were only a little over the knee of the man who had been standing. The strange face-to-face situation at the top of the tree continued, so I was parched

“May I ask you what your name is?”

When the topic suddenly changed, I blinked in embarrassment.

‘Do you want me to answer him?’

‘You won’t answer him, then?’

The man was about to take another step closer, but he didn’t move any further,  perhaps because he thought we might fall. Fortunately, he didn’t look like a bad person.

“Ar…… Gen.”

“It’s Arien.”

The two of us answered in one voice. How many people know our names in the first place? I wonder if they would remember the emperor was the one who gave us this name. The man heard our name and laughed in satisfaction.

He laughed happily as if it were a joke in the coldness in the middle of the night.

“It’s cold out there. Did you come out like that?”

Then this time, we paid no attention to our clothes. I decided to answer honestly to the nobleman, wondering if he had ever seen such dirty clothes. I looked down slightly and touched my lips.

“Because I don’t have any clothes…”

It was an honest answer, but the man looked down at both of us, taking off his jacket with a puzzled look on his face.

“You don’t have any clothes?”

“It’s not that I don’t have anything, but I’m so big these days that I don’t have anything to wear.”

When Lulahel was in a good mood, I should ask her to buy it for me. When the wind blew one more time late, he took off his jacket and pushed it toward us as if he had warmed up.

“Cover yourself.”

I captured the texture of the clothes held in Argen’s hand, the painted patterns, and the hanging ornaments in my eyes. No matter how ignorant I was, it looked precious at first sight.

“Wow….. It’s too much.”

As soon as Argen held it in his hand, he almost dropped it because of the weight of the ornaments, so I held the other side as well.

“It’s okay if little kids don’t say that. It’s cold, so you’ll catch a cold.”

It was a worried tone, but it was just really useless.

‘What does he mean by ‘that’ ?’

‘Weren’t we polite?

‘We didn’t talk properly because we were pretending to be trembling. But in the historical drama, everyone said this.’

Recalling the way they spoke in historical dramas, they said things like “I don’t deserve such a thing,” while being as polite as possible.

As we were talking inside just holding the clothes in our hands, the man glanced at us telling us to wear them quickly, and eventually we put on the clothes one by one,

Even though it was divided in half and wrapped around our bodies, there was no shortage. We were buried in the clothes and moved our eyes. My desire to get out of this uncomfortable situation was about to pierce the sky. I was also very curious about the birthday party of the second prince that was in full swing behind the man’s back.

“Wouldn’t you come over here?”

Earlier, he suggested going down with him, and now he invited us to come again. As we leaned silently close to the branch and didn’t move, the man tilted his head and pointed back instead of suggesting it again.

“Is that pretty?”

It was pretty. Very much. However, I replied using a 5-year-old child’s mindset.

“It’s shiny.”

Come to think of it, it occurred to me that maybe the man was suspicious of children wandering around inside the Imperial City in plain clothes.

Argen, who read my thoughts, also sent me a positive message. As the man no longer spoke, we both got colder with tension. Even though I don’t catch a cold easily, I felt like I was going to have a fever.

“Why?”

“…… It shines. It keeps shining until the sun comes up.”

Argen swallowed his saliva and said so.

To sum up, the man was an aristocrat, and we were an abandoned royal family who should not be exposed to water, so I thought it was a wise choice to answer the other persons questions as much as possible and end the situation.

“But why don’t you want to go?”

“Well, how do we–”

And to tell you the truth, our pronunciation was not very good. No matter how hard I tried, the Imperial language was very difficult to speak. Our pronunciation couldn’t have been good, as we had only heard what the servants and Lulahel said. No matter what we said, it still worked, but it would be hard for others to understand what we say, so it was amazing how easily that man understood us.

As we wriggled our hands, the man looked down at us for a long time, so noticeable that we held our breaths tight..

“You sound like you’ve never enjoyed anything like that.”

I nodded at him. I was nervous about how long I should keep this conversation going, and suddenly the man muttered something to himself.

“People……even if you hit them….. jewelry or magic often……had……wouldn’t it be?”

The man’s voice was too small to hear, but some guess was possible when our ears were wide open.

“A person may be like that, but jewelry and magic…..You could have done something…….he said, right?

‘I didn’t hear the end properly either.’

I was curious about the last part that neither of us had heard. I was so curious about the most important piece of the puzzle that I couldn’t hear.

“Argen, Arien.”

At that moment our names were called, both Argen and I stiffened. It’s the first time someone called our names except for the people of the Derolina castle…Moving his eyes and shrugging with a crestfallen face, the man said it as if telling us not to worry.

“I’m afraid I’ve got to get going.”

At the end of the sentence, he passed behind me and Argen as if he didn’t need our answer.

“See you next time.”

And in an instant, he jumped down a tree in the blink of an eye. Surprised and bewildered, I grabbed the tree and looked down. I almost screamed. No matter how different the world is, I didn’t want to see human corpses. But after landing on the floor with a sound body, he walked slowly and disappeared from our sight.

“….. Can we do that when we grow up?”

As I muttered over his magical movements, Argen and I finally took our hands away from each other and released a blocked breath.

“Can you do it?”

“No, I don’t think I can.”

“I don’t think I can either.”

And by the time the two of us were eagerly discussing about the man we were just talking to a while ago, the second prince’s birthday party had already ended and the darkness deepened.