Chapter 27
Froy smiled as he looked at Hermie. His mouth was smiling, but his eyes were not.
Hermie pouted her lips as if displeased, but obediently went into the hiding-hut. The short, unsatisfying outing was over.
Froy was affectionate, but he had a sharp side to him. If you let your guard down and acted spoiled, trusting in his affection and generosity, it felt like you’d get scolded terribly one day out of the blue.
It felt like walking a tightrope. Her precarious peace depended entirely on his mood. The moment she fell, that peace would shatter.
‘Life as a pet fairy isn’t easy either. Life is just hard.’
Hermie, depressed that the outing had ended so quickly, let out a long sigh.
She felt keenly that life as a pet wasn’t easy either. She couldn’t do a single thing as she pleased.
It was a cycle of making requests to Froy, waiting, throwing a tantrum, and giving up. A life where she couldn’t even go outside as she wished was endlessly frustrating.
Having decided to get a grip, Hermie cut down on her tantrums from that day on. Instead, to win Froy’s favor, she acted in ways she thought he would like.
When he came, she happily went to greet him; when he tried to leave, she whined that she didn’t want him to go. When he offered his hand, she clung tightly to his finger, and she ate her food well. She smiled often and chattered sweet nothings.
“Froy.”
“Yeah?”
“Your eyes are so pretty.”
“My eyes?”
“Yeah, they’re like the blue sky.”
At Hermie’s compliment, Froy smiled with a grimace. He didn’t seem to like it very much.
‘He’s so picky.’
Speaking like a fairy was getting boring, too. For some reason, she couldn’t picture herself as an eloquent fairy, so she had been talking like a child. But the thought of communicating only like this from now on was suffocating and driving her crazy.
She wanted to let out a good, loud shout and then logically list 100 reasons why he should let her out of here immediately.
How could he think of keeping a fairy locked up so inhumanly? How fast could a wingless fairy possibly run away that he was such a coward he wouldn’t even open the cage door once?
Why did he only know how to admire her, but not how to play with her properly? By human standards, shouldn’t she at least be taken for a walk once a day?
And why! Didn’t he ever suspect for a second that she might not be a fairy? Was he really that much of a fool, an idiot?!
The complaints she wanted to pour out to Froy piled up high. But she endured and held them all back.
It was because she judged that voicing her complaints might not work to her advantage.
For now, she was determined to keep pretending to be a fairy. She had zero interest in whether that mage bastard lived or died, but she also had to avoid the charge of insulting a noble.
And Froy wasn’t opening the cage door because he was worried she’d run away. To change that, she had to show she had no complaints about this life.
So he could feel at ease and open the cage door.
“Lately, I love that you stay by me for a long, long time.”
“Should I do my work in the room from now on?”
“Can you really?”
“Of course, I can just move the documents to the room.”
"Great!"
Hermie clapped her hands. This time, her joy was genuine, not an act. The time without Froy was unbearably boring, so she was genuinely happy she could be with him constantly.
And the fact that Hermie’s domain was expanding into his private time and space was itself a positive signal.
‘It’s going well. Just a little more effort, and I think he’ll come around.’
Hermie was sure of it—Froy was gradually opening his heart.
***
“What’s this, why are you here? You said you didn’t need my help?”
Jobern greeted Froy, who had barged into the greenhouse without warning, with a grumpy tone.
“Is this a place I’m not allowed to come to?”
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