Chapter 11 Part 12
‘This Harvest Festival, the lords from each region are also putting in a lot of effort.’
Since it was an event suitable for showing off the prestige and power of their families, everyone seemed to have invested a considerable amount of money into decorating their carriages.
What Anais had inspected was the carriages that the Maiden of Abundance and the Knight of Autumn would ride. The other parts had been left to the lords.
Perhaps because of that, everyone had been speaking with pride, saying that she could look forward to it.
‘I’ll have to look carefully at the parade and think of things to praise too.’
If she ended up leaving someone out, that lord could be teased until the next year’s Harvest Festival, so she had to remember everything carefully.
It was troublesome, but it was something she had to do as empress.
Since this was a world lacking in things to see and enjoy, countless people would come out into the streets to watch the parade.
One of those sights would also be the imperial couple and the countless nobles following them.
Thanks to that, the capital was packed with people.
Once today passed and tomorrow came, the tourists would try to leave the capital. Around that time, the dragon’s corpse that would be shown outside would become another spectacle.
“Anais.”
At Rahil, who approached with a bright smile, Anais opened her eyes roundly.
For the Harvest Festival, Rahil was wearing a white ceremonial outfit, and he was truly dazzlingly beautiful.
‘A beauty really is a beauty, I suppose….’
There was a reason he was called the second most handsome man in the empire.
Anais had thought that her brother had been undervalued and therefore had not been included among the two most handsome men in the empire, but Rahil seemed to have been undervalued too.
Rahil looked several times more radiant than Theodore as well.
‘Is it just because of my mood?’
“You’re so pretty. Is this before makeup? Can I touch your face?”
“Yes.”
Why does this person like touching so much?
During bed matters, that was one thing, but even at other times, he always wanted to hold Anais’s hand or touch her cheek.
At Rahil’s action of deliberately coming in between the maids just to touch her cheek, Anais quietly looked at him.
When their eyes met, Rahil smiled, curving the corners of his eyes.
‘This man really is… handsome.’
In Anais’s dictionary, there was no such thing as beauty that cooled one’s anger.
Even so, Rahil was pretty enough to reach that level.
“Step out for a moment.”
When he spoke in a dignified voice, the maids all rushed out of the room.
Seeing Rahil already wrapping his arms around her waist, Anais realized what he was trying to do.
“There’s no time….”
“I’ll just kiss you lightly and end it. You’re too pretty. And once something is applied to your lips, you don’t really allow me to kiss you.”
“You still do it, though.”
At her light complaint, Rahil smiled bashfully.
Every expression Anais made was so pretty that his heart fluttered, and he felt happy.
As if enchanted, he looked into Anais’s blue eyes and said,
“At those times, it has a different taste, so I can’t help doing it.”
Rahil held Anais’s chin and lifted it lightly, then pressed his lips to hers.
He had said he would kiss her lightly, but unlike his words, once their lips touched, he chased after her and, in the end, tangled his tongue with hers.
When they parted with a sticky sound, her complexion was clearly different from before.
Rahil toyed with her cheek and whispered,
“This color is pretty too.”
***
Even reaching the area near the dragon’s lair was a difficult task for Emil.
There were many monsters in the mountain range, and not even a single royal knight had been assigned to Emil, who was practically being sent there to die.
After repeatedly hiding and running away, Emil finally managed to arrive, only to be captured by monsters in the end.
If they had been monsters from the mountain range, they would have killed him at once. But the monsters guarding the dragon’s lair had intelligence.
Perhaps they had reported to the owner of the lair, because soon a human approached to examine him. It was the moment he met the dragon’s lover, whom he had only heard about through rumours.
‘That woman?’
Emil had expected a peerless beauty, since she was said to have captivated a dragon, and he was disappointed.
She was an utterly ordinary woman with a freckled, dark-skinned face. If there was anything special about her, it might have been her black hair with a bluish tint.
By human standards, she was not even close to being called a beauty.
She had an ordinary impression, the kind that one would not remember even after passing her on the street.
But it seemed that was not how she looked in the dragon’s eyes. In the villages and cities below the mountain, stories that the dragon had demanded things for her were not uncommon.
The woman introduced herself as Radiel and apologized. She said the dragon was away right now, and that since this was his chance, he should run away as soon as his injuries healed.
But Emil knew that if he could not persuade the dragon, he would die anyway.
For him, who had lived until now for his family, running away was not something he could do.
For the sake of the family that remained in the kingdom, and for his own sake, he tried hard to persuade Radiel.
When she heard the purpose that had brought Emil all the way here, she looked at him with disgust.
From that attitude, Emil thought she was much smarter than she looked, and that she understood, to some extent, how the world worked.
Even the king, and the knights and retainers who served him, held a small expectation of “perhaps” toward that stupid plan. But she immediately noticed that it was unstable and dangerous.
The woman was not persuaded, and the dragon did not return for quite a long time.
She, Radiel, drove Emil away, but Emil sneaked back into the lair again and again.
Perhaps because she was afraid he might lose his life in the process, Radiel even helped him hide inside.
As they gradually grew closer, Emil came to know that Radiel was not staying here of her own will.
‘If I seduce this woman, won’t she persuade the dragon out of her feelings for me?’
That dangerous thought came to him around three months after he had started staying in the dragon’s lair.
Radiel never showed it openly, but she had feelings for Emil.
That was only natural too.
Inside the dragon’s lair, she was lonely.
The dragon had left servants behind, but all of them were either monsters disguised as humans, or monsters still in their hideous forms.
She needed someone she could properly talk to.
The dragon was a being that could speak the human language, but because of the way he thought, Radiel said she hated talking to him.
She explained that this was also why she had deliberately said she wanted something hard to obtain, sending Kirthalros far away.
“That dragon burned down the village I lived in.”
She said it with a face full of bitterness.
Her pale face seemed to reveal the pain she carried exactly as it was.
“Because I said I missed my village. There…… my family, my relatives… my friends all lived there.”
She said she would never again have the face to see them.
She said that because of the sin she had committed, she felt she would fall into hell.
Though she did not express it openly, fearing that the dragon’s servants might be eavesdropping, Radiel hated the dragon.
The day when Radiel would love the dragon as he wished would never come.
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