Heil knew Pamona was not asking out of genuine curiosity about the plants’ names. Even if she told her, Pamona would forget by evening. Pamona truly had no interest in them whatsoever.

She had watched from beside her for countless days and yet had never once said, even as an empty pleasantry, ‘Want me to help?’

Well, what would be the point of helping with a hobby she does for her own enjoyment?

“No, never mind. I won’t remember anyway.”

Pamona dropped herself down onto a wide, flat stone that made for a comfortable seat and stretched her legs out in front of her. Looking up, she saw cloudy gray gathering in the sky. Rain seemed close.

She thought, as she often did, that the back of Heil’s head looked awfully small as she crouched and worked busily. Heil had turned eighteen before she knew it, but to Pamona’s eyes she was not much different from fourteen.

She had come all the way out here just to tend the garden, not going anywhere far, and yet she had dressed herself carefully in a gown with delicate embroidery. And when she returned to her own castle she would be in the same clean, spotless state, without a single dirty patch anywhere.

It was the complete opposite of Pamona, who was wandering around in her nightgown with a lace shawl thrown loosely over it. There were days when Pamona did not change out of her nightgown all day.

“What on earth do you find fun about that? I genuinely don’t understand.”

Heil’s shoulders rose and fell, which meant she was smiling.

“When these little ones grow safely and bloom, I feel proud, like I’ve lived another day, another season, well and fully.”

“……You just focus on growing up yourself.”

“I am growing up just fine. If I can’t even tend flowers and plants properly, how am I going to tend my own children someday?”

What……

“You’re a baby. What do you know about tending anything.”

“I’m not a baby anymore, sister.”

The look she threw over her shoulder was quite sharp. Babies never like being called babies. They have no idea how good it is to be one. Pamona thought she would like Heil to stay a baby for a long time. It wouldn’t be so bad if time stopped just like this.

“If you’re not a baby, then you’re an adult?”

“What baby is eighteen years old? Sister, you keep subtly looking down on me now that you’ve come of age, but you’re not truly an adult yet either.”

As Heil said, Heil was no longer a baby. When Pamona had first come to the Twin Castle, Heil had still looked close to a child, but now she had shed quite a bit of that childlike quality. She had grown taller since then, and her hair had grown longer too.

Pamona suddenly felt a passing thought, wondering whether she herself had also been changing little by little, the way Heil had. She wasn’t sure, she thought.

If only Heil and I could stay quietly in this time, just like this.

“I am an adult.”

“But your birthday is still a long way off?”

Heil, answering with reasonable logic, was patting the soil with her hands. Pamona’s birthday fell on the very last day of the year. When she was young she had resented that, eager to grow up quickly, but now she could not say how grateful she felt for it.

It had bought her one more year’s grace before her marriage to Ian Dnie. Masion’s outdated custom of holding that a person only truly came of age after their birthday had helped her in this way.

She would tell herself it didn’t matter when something inevitable happened, but as the day drew closer she felt something tighten in her throat, and it was her honest feeling that she wanted to push it as far away as she could.

A person who had been given the date of their own death must feel exactly this way.

“My birthday hasn’t come yet, but I’m still an adult.”

“That makes no sense.”

Heil was the one among them who observed royal etiquette better than anyone. She treated everyone with careful, thorough courtesy. Looking at that composure alone, Pamona could admit that Heil seemed far more of an adult than she did.

Pamona liked that Heil, at least in front of her, let her feelings and thoughts show and did not stand on ceremony. At those times, Heil and she felt like very close, ordinary sisters who had grown up together from birth. It was a little sad that they hadn’t had that kind of childhood together, but it was all right.

“If I’m a baby then sister is a baby too. We’re only two years apart.”

Four years had been more than enough to become good sisters.

“Have you ever seen a baby who’s engaged?”

Heil turned her head sharply and looked at Pamona. It seemed somewhere between a glare and a nervous glance. Pamona felt a smile spread across her face watching her.

“I hear that baby is getting married next year too?”

Pamona burst out laughing when she saw Heil turn to face her and land flat on her bottom in the dirt. Heil seemed displeased that she had ended up dirtying the dress she had taken such care to put on, because she pulled off her soil-covered gloves and flung them somewhere on the ground. For Heil, it was quite a large display of feeling.

Too timid to throw them at Pamona, the small, endearing sulk. When Pamona kept laughing, the laughter spread to Heil before long. Unable to catch the corners of her mouth as they crept upward, she dropped her head low, and then quickly pressed a hand over her mouth with a muffled sound.

Pamona picked up the gloves Heil had flung and slapped them against the ground, as if to say, look at what you threw. She was practically lying flat on the ground.

“What is even funny about that?”

Even as she said it, Heil found Pamona like that ridiculous and laughed until tears came to her eyes. They clutched their stomachs without even knowing why they were laughing.

When she laughed like this, it felt like being a small child without a worry in the world. The real laughter that only came out when she was with Heil. Over nothing at all, they delighted in each other like this every time.

After rolling around for a good while and barely managing to calm down, Pamona’s nightgown had turned brown from all the time spent on the ground. Heil looked at her with laughter still not gone from her face and shook her head. As Pamona looked at her ruined clothes with satisfaction, a drop of water fell, tap, onto her face.

“It’s raining.”

The sky she looked up at from the ground had already lost its bright light and brought in heavy clouds. Heil looked up at the sky at her words too.

“Sister.”

“Yes.”

“It’s going to be all right.”

Pamona simply looked up at the sky, waiting for the rain to pour.

“I know you didn’t want to get married…… But it’s something you’d have to do someday regardless. If you think of it as just a little early…… isn’t that all right?”

“……Yes. You’re right.”

“And it’s Sir Dnie, on top of that.”

Heil had said something similar on the day of the betrothal ceremony three years ago too.

‘Sister, it’s a little early, but so what. It’s going to be all right. It’s Sir Dnie.’

Heil had been right. It was all right. The betrothal had come a little early, and there had been no problem. Nothing had changed since that day.

“I think it might actually be a good thing. Where would you find someone like Sir Dnie again? If it has to happen, there’s no one better suited than him. His Majesty made this decision out of care for sister.”

It was certainly not a decision His Majesty had made with her in mind, but Pamona let Heil say what she wanted to say. A raindrop fell, tap, onto her forehead.

“He’ll inherit the dukedom in time, and when sister becomes duchess…… what could be better for us than that. And he’s young, honorable, and gentlemanly…… They say no one can match him in swordsmanship. Not just in Masion, but in all eight other nations too. A man that strong…… wouldn’t he make the most dependable husband of anyone?”

But would things be unchanged after the marriage too. Would there be no problems. Pamona thought she didn’t know. She didn’t know. Even if she thought about such things, there was nothing Pamona could do about any of it.

She could imagine countless scenarios, string together endless thoughts on her own, conjure the worst possible outcomes, and still she could change nothing. In any scenario she imagined, there was no other way to respond. It was better not to think at all. It felt like nothing would happen then, either.

“The western duchy he was granted after the war borders the sea, doesn’t it. So maybe right after the wedding you could go see the sea.”

Just as Pamona had a talent for imagining the worst of the worst, Heil had a talent for imagining the best of the best. If Pamona said that being locked inside another pretty castle meant nothing, even if it bordered the sea, even if she could go out one day and see the sea once or twice, what good would any of it do, Heil would surely find some way to pull out something good from within that and tell her about it.

“You never know. He might build you a villa out there if you asked. Then you’d get to live near the sea. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

At first Pamona had wondered whether Heil was forcing herself to look on the bright side, but it wasn’t that at all. It was a genuine, inborn talent. Heil had a considerably more flexible nature than Pamona. She adapted quickly, absorbed easily, and found the good in things. She was nothing like Pamona, who felt as though a solid iron skewer had been driven through her core.

Inside her was something that would not bend or break, something that only grew sharper with each passing day. It had no strength to pierce anyone else, so it stayed hidden, yet it kept honing its edge all the same.