A breathtakingly beautiful spring day. The kind of day where even a great love, just as some amateur astrologer might claim, seemed liable to come sweeping in, drunk on the gorgeous scenery—

“Those brothers of mine, I swear I’ll……”

Rose gripped her scabbard tight and ran forward, not sparing a single glance at the lovingly smiling landscape all around her.

❀❀❀

“Rose?”

A familiar voice reached her ears just as she stepped into the garden of Primo Palace, the quarters assigned to the princes’ guests.

……It can’t be.

Rose turned around as though drawn by something she could not name.

Had she heard wrong? It was the voice of someone who had no business being in Hailion.

She looked around slowly and began to walk. True to their design as mirror-image residences for the princes’ and princesses’ respective guests, the garden of Primo Palace looked remarkably like the one belonging to Eldora Palace, where Rose was staying.

All around her, nothing but flowers and trees. Roses in every color, daffodils, lisianthus, violets…… Only the fragrance of flowers and trees blooming together, heedless of season.

Not a soul in sight……

“It’s been a while, Miss Rosemaria.”

A low voice from right beside her made Rose flinch to a halt.

“Jade……?”

The voice had come from a thicket of dense shrubs in the middle of the garden, or more precisely, from a sculpture installed within it.

Standing there was someone Rose had never expected to find. Sprawled across a group sculpture of Hailion’s ancient heroes, using it as a chair, of all things.

“What are you doing here……?”

This man was supposed to be wandering foreign lands. So why……

“Sunbathing and reading, as you can see.”

The man called Jade stretched the corner of his mouth into a faint smile. True to his word, a small book, entirely at odds with his shovel-like hands, was held between them.

“Reading, you say……”

How can anyone be this shameless?

Rose looked him over from head to toe.

Jade had blended so completely into the white marble hero statues in the garden that he was exactly the kind of thing you could walk right past without noticing. He wore a white shirt like the marble heroes, brown trousers close in color to a tree trunk, and his build was so absurdly broad it matched the exaggerated physiques of the statues.

On top of that, he looked strangely unfamiliar.

It’s been five years, after all. Without hearing his voice first, she might not have recognized him at all.

The lines of his body had grown considerably more solid than she remembered, and the sight stirred an irritating flutter in her chest.

“……When did you get back to Hailion?”

He’s just gotten mindlessly bigger. At this rate I might start losing to him on sheer strength……

“Day before yesterday. Did you miss me?”

Jade looked down at her with the drowsy eyes of a cat basking in the sun. He was talking nonsense as though she were a friend he saw every day, yet the gaze searching her face was strangely sharp beneath the lazy surface.

Rose glared right back and tightened her core.

“Why are you sitting here reading?”

She kept her flustered feelings buried and made her voice deliberately pointed.

“Have you ever read Jibril’s Love Songs?”

Jade answered with something completely unrelated.

“What’s that?”

Rose shot back with a deliberately surly look, eyes still fixed on his face rather than the book.

Seeing him again after so long, his appearance was just as irritating as ever.

Chestnut hair tangled as though it hadn’t seen a comb in three days, shoulders spread as absurdly wide as a Physis gorilla, shirt front hanging open to expose a thick chest, the utter thoughtlessness of crossing his long legs and propping mud-caked shoes on a work of art, thighs packed with bulging muscle……

No, scratch that last one.

Regardless, there was no shortage of things about him that grated on her nerves. The Camelot beast, in a word.

Jade Camelot.

Eldest son and heir of House Camelot.

“You have no sense of romance, Rose.”

He was a Camelot.

“Haven’t read Jibril, have you. He’s a prophet who’s been quite popular lately for writing a fantastic romance novel. Want to borrow my copy?”

The next-in-line savage of House Camelot murmured with a smile, as though addressing a lover he saw every day. The green eyes that shared a name with a gemstone glittered with a bewitching light.

Heir to his house, yet plagued by wanderlust and rarely seen in his own domain. A troublemaker who dragged around nothing but rumors like a solitary fighting dog’s travel log: won another duel against someone from some domain, gave some lord a double nosebleed. Then he had crossed the sea entirely, and even his own parents had lost track of him, or so the story went for the past five years……

“Must be nice to have so much free time.”

Rose leaned toward him with a light smirk, then smoothly reached out and snatched the book Jade had been idly flipping with a sharp snap.

Why refuse when he was offering it for free? Books were precious things, after all, even wealthy lords couldn’t buy them freely.

“Did Anton and Piar not come this way?”

She tucked the palm-sized book carefully into the back of her dress sash and asked. The palace was so quiet she wondered if Terra had gotten the wrong idea.

“Ah.”

Jade laced his now-empty hands together and propped them behind his head like a pillow, a sly smile playing at the corners of his eyes. The fabric of his shirt stretched with a strained groan, unable to contain the swelling volume of his forearms.

“So you already knew and came looking. Did Terra tell you?”

His teasing voice hadn’t even finished fading.

“Aaaugh!”

A wild shriek rang out from inside the palace.

Anton? No, that’s definitely Piar’s voice!

“You saw them and didn’t stop them?”

Rose shot Jade a look, then sprinted toward the palace building.

He could have stopped them and just let it happen. What on earth is going on in that man’s head?

She could never understand him, living as though he alone occupied a different world. A fighter who roamed freely inside and outside the country, yet stood by and watched indifferently as his own house and Ordo tore into each other. The contradiction of it.

No. Perhaps it was already a blessing that he hadn’t rolled up those monstrous sleeves and led the charge beating Ordos himself……

“Anton, Piar!”

She couldn’t have expected the son of a Camelot to feel the same way she did, to begin with.

“Hold my hand tight! Don’t let go, no matter what!”

What had happened that day when they were children, taking each other’s hands, had only been possible because they hadn’t known each other’s names.

“Hey, what’s your name? I’m Jade. I’m the son of the Camelot lord.”

“You two, get out here right now!”

Rose charged into the palace with a lioness’s roar, the complicated feelings stirred by her first encounter in years with her same-age rival still unresolved.

She was completely mistaken about the reason for the lingering gaze that followed the back of her head.

❀❀❀

The older brother, Anton, pressed a raw egg against his blackened eye and vented his grievance.

“How could she do this to us, Aunt.”

The younger, Piar, rubbed his palm over the lump on his head and cried out.

“She needs to be punished, Aunt!”

The Ordo family had returned to their domain of Melos after a week away, and a heavy gloom hung over them.

It was an earlier return than planned. A shameful, forced one, at that.

They had left the imperial palace the moment Princess Helen’s birthday celebration ended. They had originally planned to stay two or three days longer, but there was no face left to show after the trouble they had caused.

“Mm……”

Anne slowly rocked her armchair with her eyes gently closed.

Watching her nephews, twenty-three and twenty-six years old respectively, clinging to their old aunt’s bony legs and pleading their case, she felt tears welling up from sheer pity.

The two brothers’ father had been Anne’s younger brother. Her dear little brother Jack, who had always followed her around like a mother……

After Jack died of illness, Anne had taken in his two sons and raised them as her own.

The brothers were the polar opposite of Rose in temperament. Unlike Rose, who had shown neither affection nor petulance from childhood, they had always acted like overgrown children. Whenever the boys, so like the sweet Jack she had loved, clung to her crying Auntie, Auntie, Anne wanted to give them anything they asked for, just like a mother.