Only then did her eyes turn toward the people around her. The woman blinking her wet lashes quietly was, at a glance, a striking beauty.

Frail and pale, but the beauty she was born with couldn’t be hidden.

“Your Grace, ahem. This is the dancer I mentioned earlier. What shall we do?”

“…Meliciel?”

Duke Dexter let his voice rise at the end, like a groan.

“Pardon?”

Duke Dexter’s voice cracked as he looked at her closely.

“You, you! Are you truly Meliciel?”

Pink hair and emerald eyes. No matter how little attention he paid to his youngest daughter, he couldn’t fail to recognize the face of the daughter whose funeral he was preparing.

“Meliciel!”

He set aside his disbelief and called out loudly.

“Why, why are you here?”

Meliciel dried her tears and looked carefully at the people surrounding her.

The man before her seemed to be the Duke. The man who appeared first in the portraits, Duke Dexter Chloe.

He was an imperial duke, so she at least knew his name.

“Answer me!”

Duke Dexter, looking at his youngest daughter risen from her sickbed, did not look particularly pleased.

His furrowed brow was tangled with confusion and displeasure.

“How did you survive? Didn’t they say you were dead?”

Duke Dexter pressed her again, and it was clear he found Meliciel’s revival an inconvenience.

Meliciel clenched her cold fist and answered calmly.

“There must be a reason.”

“What?”

“There must be a reason I… desperately… woke up and opened my eyes.”

When her clear eyes reflected Duke Dexter, he let out an involuntary cough.

“Ahem, that’s an impertinent thing to say. Meliciel.”

“There will be a reason.”

Her eyes were sharp in a way that didn’t look like someone who just rose from a sickbed.

Duke Dexter sighed, feeling like he only gained more headaches. He pressed his aching temple and waved his hand.

“Idiot that she is, what was she thinking coming here of all places. Tsk, tsk.”

Meliciel was little more than an unwanted burden to Duke Dexter.

A bastard born of a dancer whose face he couldn’t even remember. Meliciel’s mother died right after giving birth to her.

Meliciel herself was born sickly and never left her bed her entire life.

Even now, she must have briefly risen in a miraculous moment before death. She would die soon enough anyway.

“Call the doctor. We’ll need to get a new date for when she’ll die.”

He shoved the knight’s shoulder aside and Duke Dexter left first.

Duke Dexter felt a gaze on his back, but chose not to turn around.

He simply thought, without much consideration, that it was none of his concern.

***

When Meliciel opened her eyes again, she was back in the bedroom where she first woke.

“Ah…”

A faint memory surfaced of collapsing right after meeting Duke Dexter.

Around her bed stood maids, a doctor, and Duke Dexter.

Surrounded by the crowd, Meliciel felt a wave of bewilderment.

“Look, sir. The young lady has woken.”

The doctor came forward, examined Meliciel’s eyes, and checked her pulse.

“There doesn’t appear to be anything wrong.”

“Nothing wrong. Does that mean she’s healthy?”

Duke Dexter asked back as though he couldn’t believe it, and the doctor clenched his fist and cleared his throat with an awkward look.

The doctor was the very one who confidently diagnosed that Meliciel would not survive the day, so he had no way to explain Meliciel’s condition after she suddenly opened her eyes and walked through the garden.

But he felt wronged too. Meliciel’s life force was nearly spent and her breathing clearly stopped.

By now, Meliciel should have had a cloth draped over her face and been in the middle of funeral rites, not opening her eyes.

Yet somehow, in half a day, Meliciel went from a walking corpse to an ordinary person who was simply a little weak.

As a doctor, he felt a complicated mix of emotions, including genuine joy that a life was saved.

He glanced warily at Duke Dexter, who looked ready to take his head off at any moment.

“Her breathing and pulse are normal, and there are no signs of illness.”

Even the doctor saying it found it hard to believe, but it was the truth.

“Does that make any sense?”

Duke Dexter clicked his tongue with a hollow exhale.

“I apologize. However.”

“However?”

“I detect divine power in the young lady’s body that was not there before.”

The Chloe Ducal House produced divine singers generation after generation. The divine power the ancestors possessed passed down through the bloodline, and currently twenty percent of Duke Dexter’s household members were divine singers.

Divine power sometimes manifested late, but ability usually appeared around age ten.

“Miss Meliciel is a divine singer.”

“…What? This child is truly a divine singer?”

Meliciel already received a diagnosis that she had no divine power, so this was sudden. The Duke’s jaw slowly dropped.

“Yes.”

The doctor had no doubt in his own diagnosis.

A doctor serving the Chloe Ducal House needed to be capable of detecting divine power and treating divine singers alike.

Though he failed to predict Meliciel’s death date, he would stake his life on the fact that the power flowing through her body like a red river was real.

It was also the most powerful divine energy he ever encountered in his life, so he was in a state of mild excitement.

“I am certain. The young lady is a divine singer. And a genius-level one at that.”

The doctor clenched both fists without realizing it.

“Ha, hahaha. A genius? Hahahaha.”

Duke Dexter laughed loudly, as though he heard something very entertaining.

It was a strange, almost unhinged sight, but the attendants knew his fiery temper and only bowed their heads in silence.

“Excuse me…”

The one who made herself known through that laughter was Meliciel, sitting up in bed with her back against the headboard, supported by a maid.

She opened her mouth in a fairly soft voice.

“Is my sister Viviana doing well?”

The sudden question seemed to startle everyone. A strangely eerie silence fell, and in the middle of it Duke Dexter gave a low rumble in his throat.

“A genius, they say, yet her memory seems quite unsound.”

The doctor tilted his head at Duke Dexter’s words, then gave an affirmative answer.

“Yes, Your Grace. The young lady suffered from high fever these past few days, so there may be some issue with her memory. But it should be temporary.”

“Tsk. Even so, forgetting about Viviana. I wonder if she’ll be of any use.”

“It is a miracle the young lady is alive at all. Please be generous in your forgiveness.”

“We’ll see. I can only hope she’s not a half-wit who can barely breathe.”

Duke Dexter turned away as he spoke, seemingly no longer interested in Meliciel, who watched her father in silence.

“Assign a divine singer teacher to that one.”

After Duke Dexter left. Meliciel tried to gather her crumbling thoughts and voiced the question still left unanswered.

“My sister Viviana, is it not possible to see her right now?”

The doctor, who was checking Meliciel’s temperature, let his expression crease slightly. He answered on behalf of the maids, who turned their faces away pretending not to know.

“She passed away.”

“…Pardon?”

Meliciel’s eyes wavered widely.

“It would have been around this time last year.”

“V-Viviana died?”

“Yes. Miss Viviana perished in a landslide that occurred in the Diozart Grand Duchy.”

Meliciel felt the back of her neck go numb, like she was struck by a stone hammer.

Viviana died? How?

It was a greater shock than when she learned she shared Viviana’s bloodline.

“A landslide…”

She died and left me in this hell.

Her death didn’t erase the sin of harming an innocent child.

The child was the one and only being who became Meliciel’s true family for the first time.

She still could not forgive Viviana.

“The body was barely recovered. It was a terrible death, unrecognizable.”

Viviana died.

The woman who drove me and my child to our deaths, died.

Then where was she supposed to pour all this resentment?

***

That night, Meliciel could not sleep.

She sat by the moonlit window and cried endlessly.

“Baby, my baby.”

She placed her hand on her flat belly and called to the child like a song.

She needed time to fully accept the loss of the child who was gone.

“I need time to send you off, so I won’t force myself to hold back the grief.”

My dear one, my star.

Could you be the second life you gave me?

If so, I will try to live it well.

If fate exists, perhaps I will find my way back to Grand Duke Kahar.

Then could you come back to me?

Could you give me one more chance to protect you?

Meliciel knew it was a foolish wish, yet she hoped and prayed it might somehow come true.

Grand Duke Kahar de Diozart.

How are you doing?

Are you mourning Lady Viviana, the woman you loved?

Or, true to your reputation as a womanizer, are you drifting from one light encounter to the next, unbothered and carefree?

The moonlight was dim. Within it, only white sorrow was visible.

***

The borderlands of the territory wore a coat of white snow and let out a wind that howled like a ghost’s scream.

Over the past month, the hoofprints of warhorses stamped chaotically across the white snowfield as the barbarians who ran wild beyond the Grand Duke’s sight were purged.

Weather that changed its mind regardless of season was common in Sheldon, the Grand Duchy in the north of the empire of Ferriland.

The frozen land rich with resources was mostly below freezing even in midsummer, and the Diozart family’s territory was a vast domain that made up two-tenths of the empire.

The lord of this place, Kahar de Diozart, had a temper no less fierce than the savage weather.