Chapter 38
Aniella, with her pastels and sketchbook tucked under her arm, continued walking along the path. As if to prove she wasn’t that timid, her steps grew more determined. She intended to just go to the edge of the forest and come back.
The forest was quite larger than it looked from the outside, as she walked for a long time without seeing an exit. But no forest goes on forever. With beads of sweat forming on her forehead, she finally spotted the light of the exit.
As she emerged from the forest with a joyful heart, a man was waiting for her.
“That was quite a long walk.”
Paiki’s voice, his hands clasped behind his back, was hard.
Flustered, Aniella looked at his face and the mansion visible behind him. The path should have been a straight line with no forks, yet she had returned to her starting point. Dark storm clouds gathered overhead, mirroring Paiki’s grim expression. From deep within the forest behind him, an ominous wind blew, as if scolding her.
You could never leave the forest from the very beginning!
Only then did Aniella realize he had been testing her. She had thought only that mansion was a magically created building and that she had escaped it the moment she entered the forest, but that wasn’t the case. She had never once left the space he had created.
“Did you get lost?”
Paiki asked with a bright smile. Aniella felt acutely why Marius had warned her not to trust Paiki’s smile.
She read his anger in his smiling face: ‘I know what you were trying to do, and I won’t let you get away with it.’ A cold sweat trickled down her back, and her mouth felt parched.
“Yes. I, uh, went into the forest to draw and got lost.”
Her stammering sounded suspicious even to her own ears. Feeling dismayed, Aniella gave an awkward smile. She tried her best to smile innocently, but the more she did, the more Paiki’s eyes narrowed.
“I’m curious what you drew. Can you show me?”
Aniella gulped and handed him the sketchbook. Fortunately, she had drawn many trees and flowers, so she could bluff with those. She waited for his judgment with a trembling heart, when she suddenly remembered she hadn’t only drawn trees and flowers.
What do I do? He mustn’t see that!
Aniella’s hand twitched, wanting to snatch the sketchbook back.
Paiki, who had been flipping through the pages expressionlessly, paused. He stared intently at a drawing, then glanced at Aniella. Meeting his eyes, Aniella was certain: he had just discovered the problematic drawing.
“Why did you draw me?”
“Th-there’s no other meaning! I was drawing this and that, I’ve drawn so much, so I thought I’d try drawing something else, like people! I wanted to draw people, but the only person I can meet here is you, Your Grace…!”
Aniella rambled incoherently. Her face burned bright red with embarrassment, feeling like it might burst, while her mind went completely blank.
“So this is what it was, when you said you’d been glancing at me with strange looks lately.”
Aniella, speechless, her mouth opening and closing, apologized in a voice that grew smaller and smaller.
Paiki held the drawing up high with both hands, then lowered it, tilting his head left and right as he scrutinized it. After observing the drawing from various angles for a while, the man asked:
“My impression should be softer; why is the expression so rigid? Do I look like this in your eyes?”
Aniella was at a loss due to his complaint. But he was a cold and sharp person, like a dry winter, not a warm man like the spring sunshine. Especially when he glared at her, his eyes were as frightening as a demon’s.
She couldn’t honestly say, ‘It looks like that because you have a scary face.’ That would be insane.
“My lacking drawing skills must have been insufficient to capture Your Grace’s excellent character.”
“Well, it’s not utterly unbearable.”
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