The garden where thin wisps of steam rose from the open-air hot spring carried a faint, subtle scent of medicinal herbs.

A pair of amethyst eyes watched in quiet stillness as the dawn light cut through the mist and shimmered in a bluish glow over the surface of the water.

Silver hair fell loose to his chin and tickled the tip of his nose. Louis brushed it aside with mild irritation and settled back into the armchair at a lazy angle.

The hour had just crept past dawn, and the air carried a slight chill. It was a good thing he thought to bring the blanket for his knees.

Louis rested his head back and gazed blankly ahead.

Morning was stirring awake. Each breath he drew came with a faint rasping sound that grated on his ears, and a dull ache spread slowly through his chest, but it was still bearable.

Louis liked the crisp morning air.

Quiet, still, a world at rest.

The loneliness of being alone felt the same as always, but early mornings carried their own particular flutter of anticipation.

A faint hope that today, something might be different.

That hope always ended in disappointment, but he liked the time before it did, when the flutter still lived.

It was just then.

From the stone path beside the hot spring, which looked very much like a pond, came the careful sound of small footsteps.

The light crunch of gravel damp with dew drew closer, crunch by crunch.

Louis turned his head. A little girl stood there, wearing a pink hat.

Loose auburn curls fell to her shoulders, and a large scarf was wrapped up to her chin.

A basket hung from one hand.

“Oh!”

The girl let out a small sound.

Her eyes, wide and round, were a pale reddish-orange.

Her expression made it clear she had no idea anyone would be here.

“W-who are you?”

“……”

Louis stared at the girl with his violet eyes, blank and unhurried.

If she trespassed on private property, she ought to introduce herself. Had she not been taught proper manners?

Her clothing was fine enough to mark her as a noble’s child without question.

That made sense. Pearl Springs, known for its open-air hot springs, was strictly a resort for the nobility. No one of another class could come and go freely.

“U-um?”

The girl blinked, flustered.

Looking more closely, she was a little smaller than Louis.

But the gaze she turned on him was sharp and clear.

“Is this… not the forest?”

Louis said nothing.

He was not much of a talker to begin with, and whenever he tried to speak, a cough came first. Keeping his mouth shut became a habit.

The girl stared at Louis for a moment with a dazed expression, then carefully glanced around.

The basket on her arm held grass and plants.

She seemed to be looking for something growing nearby.

“Have you seen a golden-glowing thistle anywhere around here?”

Louis shook his head.

The small movement must have irritated his throat, because a cough came almost immediately.

Cough, cough. A dry, scraping cough that raked through him, and his slight shoulders shook with it.

“A-are you sick?”

A small weight settled on Louis’s shoulder. The girl had come close without him noticing and was patting his shoulder gently.

A light touch, almost no pressure at all.

Her clear reddish-orange eyes looked into his face, flickering with worry.

Louis drew a sharp breath through the fit of coughing and curled inward. The girl shook out his knee blanket and wrapped it around him.

“Are you all right? Should I call someone?”

Louis shook his head weakly.

After a bout of coughing like that, his chest ached and his stomach pulled tight enough to leave him numb, but this was nothing new.

There was no need to make a fuss.

“Um, do you live here?”

He flinched at the word she used.

Louis’s eyes sharpened, and the girl startled at the change. She looked up at him with eyes that had gone a little watery and moved her pink lips in a small, tentative murmur.

“I-I’m Julia. I’m five. You’re older than me, right?”

Why had she called him that¹In the raws, Julia mistakes Louis for a girl, and she keeps addressing him as 언니 (Unnie), which is the term for an older female. ?

Louis dropped his gaze and turned the question over in his mind.

The chair he sat in was a plush armchair, comfortable and charming in its design.

If he had to categorize it, it was feminine furniture.

And the clothes he wore were thin indoor wear.

Loose indoor wear trimmed with lace and frills, white, entirely his mother’s taste.

A remnant of her wish, since her firstborn was a son, that her second might be a daughter.

The knee blanket, too, was cashmere with delicate embroidery. A thoroughly feminine accessory.

‘…I suppose it can’t be helped.’

A dry, self-deprecating smile touched his lips.

Still, it was too much.

Mistaking a perfectly clear-cut boy for a girl.

His hair was cut short because of his mother’s preference.

His parents were very fond of each other, and his mother found the silver hair he inherited from his father beautiful. She refused to let it be cut short.

That it didn’t hang longer than his neck was entirely his own firm decision.

Still, short hair was common enough among boys his age, so being mistaken for a girl because of it was not something he welcomed.

Perhaps the real cause was his face, which took after his mother.

Louis’s violet eyes and silver hair came from his father’s side. His smooth features and complexion came from his mother’s.

He fixed Julia with a cool, steady look. She flinched, then tucked her hair behind her ear again with a sheepish air and murmured,

“You seem mature. And I think you’re taller than me. You’re a girl, right?”

Louis shook his head firmly. Julia blinked rapidly, visibly startled.

“How old are you?”

Instead of answering, Louis held up his fingers to show the number seven.

“See, you are older.”

She had the wrong thing entirely, but her mind didn’t seem to travel in the direction of the actual mistake.

Louis considered correcting the misunderstanding, then decided it was too much trouble to bother with. He let his eyes go half-lidded and tilted his chin down to bury his nose in the blanket.

“Um. What’s your name? What should I call you?”

“…Lou.”

A short murmur.

No cough, fortunately.

“Lou… so it’s Lou²Again, she says Unnie here, hence Louis thinking, ‘that’s not quite right’.”

Julia repeated it with the look of someone who just figured something out.

That’s not quite right, Louis thought, and let his eyes fall shut.

Whether it was the aftermath of the coughing fit, his eyelids felt heavy and his whole body was sluggish.

If he fell asleep like this, Sione and Sion would come to attend to him.

The two were siblings, his nursemaid and his guard.

Before sleep pulled him under completely, Louis gave a small, lazy wave of his hand to signal that she should go.

Julia looked a little awkward about it, but she seemed to understand. She nodded and stepped back.

***

A few days later. This time it was the afternoon.

As part of his usual course of treatment, Louis was soaking in the open-air bath with medicinal herbs floating around him, staring blankly up at the sky.

Then a shadow fell across his field of vision, and a pair of reddish-orange eyes in a young face lit up with a bright flash.

“Lou!”

Julia waved with a wide smile. She had been wandering somewhere, it seemed. Her white cheeks were flushed pink.

The familiar basket hung from one arm.

It was stuffed full of plants. She must have been in the middle of gathering.

Julia appeared, a stranger, and Sion and Sione, who had been watching over Louis nearby, raised their guard.

Louis stilled them with a short gesture and looked up at Julia without expression.

Julia smiled brightly, apparently unaware of the shift in tension around her.

“Oh, are those medicinal herbs floating in there?”

Julia looked at the leaves drifting across the surface of the small open-air bath, which was about the size of a pond, and blinked with interest.

“I have some too!”

She reached into the basket on her arm, pulled out a large leaf, turned it over in her hands for a while, and set it on the surface of the water.

The crumpled leaf slowly made its way through the steam.

“It’s a boat,” Julia said.

“An herb boat!”

It served no particular purpose, but the paper-boat-shaped leaf bobbed along quite happily.

“Should I load more herbs onto the herb boat?”

Louis shook his head.

If she dropped some questionable weed into the medicinal bath, Sion and Sione, already on alert, might decide to step in.

“Then it’s lonely all by itself. Should I float another one?”

Julia rummaged through the basket on her arm, but there didn’t seem to be another leaf of the same size. She soon looked deflated.

“There isn’t one. That was the only sunflower-petal herb.”

Louis looked at the crumpled leaf drifting in silence for a moment, then let out a short breath.

However much she studied herbs, that was not a sunflower-petal herb.

It was a plain, common broad leaf.

“…What are the other herbs for?”

Julia startled at his voice, her shoulders jumping slightly.

He had been soaking in the hot spring for about half an hour by then, and his airways were in reasonable shape. The warm steam and the prescribed herbs he breathed in had softened his throat, and the coughing fits weren’t coming, so he was capable of some conversation.

“W-well.”

Julia fumbled through the basket in a fluster.

To Louis’s eye, everything in it was useless weeds, but she seemed to have pulled each one up with care from somewhere. She went through them one by one with a look of deep consideration.

“Clearmorning herb, silverbloom herb, shade herb, breathweed, moonfrоst herb, startwine herb, moonsilverweed…”

Wherever she picked up the names of rare alchemical herbs used in legendary elixirs, the names themselves sounded convincing enough.

But the plants stuffed into that basket were not the ultra-rare herbs that royals and nobles across the world would scramble over. They were nothing but ordinary, common weeds.

If Julia truly possessed all those rare herbs, she would have to be not a human child but a legendary dragon or a mystical fairy from a storybook.

Even so, the ignorance particular to small children, and the guileless sincerity behind it, warmed something in Louis’s chest in a way he couldn’t quite explain.

Without meaning to, the corner of his mouth curved slightly, and he murmured in a cool, sardonic tone that had nothing to do with what he actually felt.

“And what are you planning to do with all of that?”

“Mother is worried.”

“……?”

He looked at Julia with a questioning expression. Julia’s cheeks went red as she finished the thought.

“Vincent is sick. He’s my little brother, and he’s very ill, so we came here for him to recover.”

“And you?”

“Me? I’m healthy! Hehe!”

Louis stared at Julia’s beaming smile for a long moment, like someone looking at something too bright, then quickly turned his eyes away.

Something about it made his cheeks feel warm, though he couldn’t say why.