Annabella managed to haul herself out of the mud, but her dress and hair were already caked with it. The man, meanwhile, was moving briskly ahead, leaving her behind.
“W-wait!”
Mercifully, he stopped and turned.
“Could you not walk just a little more slowly?”
“Why?”
“I…… truly don’t know the way out.”
“And yet you came in anyway. Quite the courageous young lady.”
She dearly wanted to strike that sardonic mouth of his — but Annabella swallowed it down and spoke.
“I’m asking you. Please, at least walk slowly enough that I can keep up.”
“And why, exactly, should I?”
Annabella bit her lip.
“If you escort me back to the inn, I’ll give you every drop of beer they have. No one in our party drinks, so it would all go to waste otherwise.”
“Now that’s the first thing you’ve said worth listening to.”
Only then did he begin to move at a pace she could match. His stride was still quick — but whenever he sensed her breath beginning to labor, he slowed himself a fraction more.
And so they walked on, and before long the two of them were moving side by side. Annabella, however, was limping — the ankle she had twisted in her fall.
Then the man stopped short.
“Stay here and don’t move.”
He said it like a command, and then he was gone. Annabella stood there, deeply uneasy — but he returned quickly, carrying a stone and grinding some sort of plant against it.
“Put this on the injury.”
“As long as it isn’t broken, it should help considerably.”
“Oh…… yes, thank you……”
Annabella sat on a large rock and tried to apply the crushed herb to her aching ankle, but having never done such a thing before, she was thoroughly clumsy about it.
“Tch.”
The man clicked his tongue as though her helplessness was more than he could bear, nudged her aside, tore a long strip from his sleeve, laid the herb against the injury, and bound it firmly. As if this sort of thing were second nature to him.
“Oh…… thank you.”
“Don’t bother. I did it because at the rate you were going, we’d never reach the inn by morning.”
“Yes……”
The herb worked well. The cool compress around her sprained ankle made walking considerably easier.
They fell into step beside each other again, and silence settled between them. A strange, indefinable atmosphere drifted in the space between them.
After a moment, it was the man who broke the quiet first.
“Why is a lady of quality out traveling? From what I understand, young ladies of your sort spend their days tucked away in their estates until a suitable age, then profit from an arranged marriage.”
Annabella glanced at him sidelong. Moonlight fell across the planes of his impassive face.
Once, she might have argued. But he wasn’t wrong.
“You’re right. That’s all we amount to.”
He seemed quietly surprised that she had agreed so readily.
“This journey…… is because I don’t want to be that.”
“And what is waiting at the end of it?”
“I don’t know yet…… I don’t know what’s waiting at the end, or what will become of me.”
“I see.”
As they talked and walked, the lights of the inn came into view. Every lamp in the place was blazing, and Hilda and the knights were in an absolute uproar trying to find Annabella.
“Hilda……!”
Annabella ran to her, showing her she was unharmed.
“Good heavens, my lady! How did you end up in this state — no, where on earth did you go?”
“Well, I went into the forest and…… Oh! There’s someone I need to thank. Right over——”
Annabella turned to look back. But the man had already vanished without a trace.
“Oh……?”
She looked around in bewilderment, searching in every direction, but he was nowhere to be found. Hilda watched her with a puzzled, searching look.
“……Hilda, ask the innkeeper to send every bit of beer they have over to the inn across the road. Tell them we’ll pay for it.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Go on!”
“Yes……”
It was a strange order, but Hilda carried it out faithfully — and Annabella felt, at last, as though she had repaid a small part of what she owed.
“Just who on earth was that man……”
She murmured it quietly to herself, alone.
***
When Cedric returned to the inn, everyone was in high spirits over the news that the inn across the road had sent over their beer.
“My lord — no, Cedric, sir.”
Rohan, Cedric’s loyal knight, caught him by the arm.
“They sent it over from that inn — said they were sorry for taking the whole place to themselves. And it’s exactly as good as it looks, sir. Won’t you join us?”
“No. I’m not interested.”
He gave Rohan a light pat on the shoulder and climbed the stairs to the second-floor terrace. The air of the forest wrapped around him, familiar and cool.
“Are all young ladies of quality so beautiful?”
His mind was entirely full of the girl he had just met — Annabella. She was unlike anyone he had ever encountered in his life.
Even the sight of her tumbling into the mud had been beautiful — like a moon scattering its gentle light. Judging by that refined face and her delicate bearing, she was likely of considerable standing.
Those blue eyes the full moon had illuminated — calm and bewitching, like the surface of some distant lake.
“Not that someone like her would ever have any business with someone like me.”
Cedric’s hair, a touch long for a man, moved freely in the wind. His eyes were long and deep-set, his nose sharply defined, his jaw unmistakably masculine — the kind of face that made strangers on the road turn back for a second look.
He was especially hard to miss from a distance: well over six feet tall, with proportions that seemed almost too precise to be real, broad shoulders, and muscle packed solidly across every inch of his frame.
The natural air of authority about him, and a certain innate refinement, were more than enough to speak to his distinguished bloodline — though his thoroughly mischievous nature meant he rarely bothered with the formalities such a bloodline demanded.
“If I’d known it would come to this, I should never have settled for something as paltry as beer as my reward.”
Cedric gave his head a small shake, trying to dislodge Annabella from where she had apparently taken up residence in his mind. This was no time to be fixating on some girl.
“I need to reach the Kingdom of Elaise — and soon.”
The King and Queen of the Kingdom of Elaise were steadfast allies to Cedric. Without their aid, he would still be rotting away in rage on a stretch of land where not even a blade of grass grew properly.
By rights, Cedric should not have been wandering the roads like this at all. He should have been reigning as Crown Prince of the Empire, the rightful heir to noble blood. But his father had been robbed of the throne by his own younger brother — and had died trying to pass that truth on to his son.
He could never forget it. That blood-soaked day that had torn his entire life apart.
Since his father’s death, Cedric had lived for one purpose alone: to take revenge on those who had stolen the throne, and to reclaim what was his.
And the time to set his long-laid plans into motion was drawing near.
“Your Highness.”
Just then, Rohan stepped out onto the terrace carrying two cups of beer. He had apparently been more concerned than he let on.
Cedric accepted the drink his subordinate had thought to bring him and took it without a word of refusal.
“By the way, where did you disappear to earlier? We searched for quite a while…….”
“I ran into a little wildcat while taking a walk through the forest.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Never mind.”
Cedric cut the subject short, and Rohan moved on without pressing him.
“Oh, that reminds me — I found out who reserved the entire inn next door. Apparently she’s the young lady of House Lates.”
“A duke’s daughter, no less.”
He had suspected as much from that air of hers, but a duke’s daughter — a rank eligible even for marriage into the imperial family.
“From what I gathered, it seems she’s also heading to the Kingdom of Elaise. Same destination as us.”
“This road leads to Elaise regardless. There’s nothing remarkable about that.”
Cedric chose not to read meaning into the coincidence and tipped back the rest of his beer.
“Go on back down. I’ll follow shortly.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Rohan dipped his head once in deference to his master and stepped off the terrace. Cedric watched him go with a sidelong glance, then sank back into his thoughts.
He was still leaning against the terrace railing, turning things over in his mind, when a small stone suddenly came flying through the air.
“What——”
He looked toward where it had come from — the second-floor window of the inn next door.
Cedric’s hand moved to the scabbard at his side as his eyes swept sharply around him. But a moment later, a short, helpless laugh escaped him.
“Ha, honestly…….”
Tied to the stone was a small note.
“Thank you for saving me. I’ve repaid the debt in full with the beer, so please forget today ever happened.”
Cedric read the note and a quiet laugh escaped him — but by then the woman had retreated inside, her window empty.
He folded the note between his fingers and slipped it into his inner br*ast pocket.
Had he not been bound to a greater purpose, she might have been someone he could have allowed himself to think about.
“Moments like this, I almost envy an ordinary man.”
Cedric fixed his sharp gaze on the inn across the way. But the one he found himself waiting for did not appear again.
***
At that same hour, Annabella had endured a thorough scolding from Hilda and extracted herself only after swearing it would never happen again — after which she was finally permitted to change into her nightgown and lie down.
But sleep refused to come. The man she had met tonight kept rising unbidden to the surface of her mind, no matter how she tried to set him aside.
She tossed and turned, and then, once she was certain Hilda had fallen deeply asleep, she crept to the window and stood there quietly. The inn next door was still alive with light and noise.
And then she saw him — a man standing alone on the second-floor terrace.
She carefully cracked the window open just a sliver.
In the chaos earlier, she hadn’t truly taken him in — but he was a young man with a broad, well-built frame and strikingly handsome features. Perhaps because their first meeting had come at a moment when her life hung by a thread, Annabella found she couldn’t quite put him out of her mind.
And yet, for all his looks, he had the tongue of a scoundrel — contemptuous, dismissive, the sort of man who thought nothing of treating others like dirt beneath his boot. In all her life, Annabella had never met a man who spoke to her so carelessly.
Still, it was thanks to him that she was alive. She wanted to offer some word of thanks, however small. She rummaged through the room for paper and wrote out a message in the neatest hand she could manage.
“Thank you for saving me. I’ve repaid the debt in full with the beer, so please forget today ever happened.”
Such a short little note — and yet she had agonized over every word.
Annabella tied the note firmly to a small stone with a length of thread, hurled it toward where he was staying, then immediately died of embarrassment and dove headfirst into bed. There, she began fidgeting with the scrap of cloth she had hidden under her pillow earlier, tucked away from Hilda’s eyes.
‘Why couldn’t I bring myself to throw this away? It’s little more than a rag now.’
Even after sending her note of thanks, Annabella remained in the grip of a feeling she couldn’t name, and sleep stayed stubbornly out of reach. She couldn’t tell whether the heavy pounding in her chest came from the fear of having nearly lost her life — or from him.
Cedric was unlike any man she had ever encountered. He had an air about him that was unmistakably that of a grown man in the fullest sense — more imposing, more formidably self-contained than anyone she had ever known.
Annabella clutched the strip of cloth Cedric had bound around her ankle and willed herself toward sleep. But in the end, she lay awake until the sky began to lighten, eyes open the whole night through.
……And so, after a night spent adrift in restless thought, she met the next morning having barely slept at all.
“You must be exhausted, my lady. Just hold on a little longer — today we finally reach the royal palace.”
Hilda’s words were enough to rouse her somewhat, and Annabella smiled and gave a small nod. The chest that had been thudding so inexplicably through the night was now racing with something that felt far more like anticipation.
The carriage carrying Annabella arrived at the gates of the Kingdom of Elaise, and once Hilda presented their credentials, they were received with every courtesy.
Annabella opened the carriage window out of curiosity, and fresh air swept in alongside the sight of people going about their lives with cheerful energy. The capital struck her most of all — neatly divided into districts, every corner well-tended and thriving.
“This is where Mother was born and grew up…….”
With that thought, nothing felt ordinary anymore — not the narrow side streets, not the children running and playing in them. Everything carried a quiet tenderness. At the same time, a thread of anxiety wound through her: would her maternal grandparents turn her away without a second thought?
They had never once exchanged letters, and here she was, showing up only now that she was in need. Even by her own reckoning, it was a shameless thing to do.
‘But this is the only hope I have.’
Annabella tried to summon her courage. She knew all too well what fate awaited a woman who lived as passively as a hothouse flower — she had lived that life once before, and she knew exactly how it ended. She could not afford to let this chance slip through her fingers.
Perhaps the Kingdom of Elaise was the one and only inheritance her mother had ever left her.
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
bluemoon238
He helped her and she paid agreed debt. Now he just needs to be dumped in the mud before receiving help and we can let bygones be bygones. I would seriously hold a grudge over that.