“Ashite.”

Lu Havre was standing by the balcony. He was like a calm predator — a relaxed and elegant king.

During the calm night, yellow stars decorated the sky. The man who was confidently standing under the night sky looked like a drawing with white paint on black paper. His purple hair with a hint of blue was waving in the wind. It felt like a fantasy. It must have been soft.

“Ashite.”

Ashite looked down quickly, as she felt like her innermost feelings were shown. She was embarrassed, yet she could not stop thinking about the hair. It looked soft. She wanted to touch it.

It was not hard to admit it. There was no going back anyway. It was too late.

The strong words were beating her heart. Ashite laughed inside. Her feelings had come too far. She could not control herself. It was all from his smile. And his voice. He must have been heartless to all the ladies even when he was a prince, but how could he smile like that now? It must have been his instinct. She grabbed onto her dress while she was thinking about it — the man’s instinct.

“Ashite?”

He already called her three times. Only then had Ashite finally looked back at him. Lu Havre was smiling.

“It’s okay if you want to do it later.”

No, she did not want that. Ashite closed her lips like a tiny clam. She was hesitating for something that was not so hard. She’d never done it, obviously. But he must have been good at it. She was embarrassed to show him such child-like behavior.

“Ashite.”

The fourth time. It felt weird. No matter how many times he called her, each time it felt different. She could not measure the depth of her emotions. So every day felt new to her. The feelings grew, and the wave in her mind got bigger. It must have been the same for him, too.

Lu Havre stopped putting it off and came towards Ashite. He tapped her shoulder lightly. It was a gesture that could have been either frustration or comfort. They both were confused. Ashite’s eyes were shaking.

It could have been because of the wind; her shoulder was cold. Lu Havre covered her shoulder with his hand. Her soft and gentle skin was cold. He frowned a little. He did not want the lady to feel cold. He moved towards the red curtains. There was light coming between the curtains. He was about to go back to the ball room. “No.” Ashite opened her lips.

“Your Majesty.”

The words came out fast. Lu Havre quickly looked back.

“Yes?”

And the gentle, low voice. It was tickling her ears. She felt dizzy.

“Nothing.”

Lu Havre took a step forward.

“What is it?”

He laughed gently. A calm and low voice opened up her mind.

“I’m going to do it now.”

She thought it must be done now when she heard that voice. So Ashite decided to stop hesitating. He had been waiting this long. She should do something for him. She wanted to.

“Will you do that for me?”

Again, he asked impatiently with that face and voice. She couldn’t clearly tell what was on his mind. It was deep, so deep that she ended up falling in it. And it happened so naturally. He’d been like that from some point — or maybe he was like that since the beginning and had been hiding it.

“Yes.”

So Ashite could not help smiling. Golden bright eyes were looking at the man. Ashite raised her hand and put it on his wrist. Then she grabbed his wrist. Even his wrist was so warm, just like how he was. Now the only thing left is for her to open her lips.

But inevitably, she thought. It would have been nice for her to write the letter a bit earlier. Ashite sighed gently and closed her eyes.

***

The most peaceful dawn. She was wide awake. It’s not that she could not fall asleep. The moment was too good for Ashite to fall asleep right away.

Menang was done in a blink of an eye, really. Looking back at it, every second felt so long, especially at night, when she was with him by the balcony. She felt like she could still feel his soft and warm breath. His eyes, voice, hands, and everything else was palpable, too. Everything seemed different now that she found hope in her love. Just as she went back to her childhood, it felt like she was in her dream.

<<“Ashite, I… you…”>>

It wasn’t a dream. It was such a quiet whisper, but Ashite could hear it. Ashite smiled as she kept thinking about it. Such a happy night. She could not remember the last time she was this happy.

Ashite looked at the lamp. It was bright. It may go dimmer, but it wouldn’t be dark, she thought. Just like a fairy tale.

Though she may have been excited, she quietly put out the lamp. Ashite closed her eyes.

“Princess, it’s time to wake up.”

As usual, the door was knocked in the morning.

Ashite slowly woke up. The morning was not lazy. It knocked the windows noisily. Rays of sunlight hit the bed.

The lady was sitting still, trying to wake herself up. Sunlight got absorbed into her skin.

“Come in.”

The leader of the servants and two other servants greeted her. Ashite yawned like a lazy cat.

“Princess, the king would like to have lunch with you today.”

Her eyes sparkled through her messy hair. There was only one reason why, even though she’s only been awake for a few minutes. Ashite quickly brushed through her hair. Soon she became neat.

“Okay.”

Ashite stretched out. Lucia quietly continued to talk.

“Also, this is a message from the king.”

“Yes?”

“Ashite, I hope you had a good night’s sleep.”

She was wide awake suddenly. Ashite laughed without replying to her. It was warm as sunlight. A happy morning.

***

Every morning in the office at Moinster’s, there was a meeting. There was Moinster’s favorite poem embedded on the door. Inside the room, there were four desks creating a rectangle. In the middle of the four desks, there was a little pit that was lower than the rest of the floor.

Most of the people participating in the meeting were nobles from famous families. Dukes, marquis, counts, and high-class officers. And most importantly, the king. Only the seat dedicated to him was decorated with luxury.

The king was smiling. Duke Moncheta tapped the paper with his pen and left a small circle mark on it. It wasn’t a blank paper, but what was written on it was not that important. It was one of the documents for the meeting, but the situation written on these documents could change at any time. Therefore, it was not important. Duke Moncheta wasn’t the only person who thought so. What was important to them was the agenda that had been changed last night, though it was just a group of opinions from the nobles.

Yesterday was Menang. What happened in that Menang last night? There were a handful of nobles frowning and bothered by recalling what happened last night. Especially the ones who had potential partners ready for the king, or those who thought that they had the potential to do so.

There might have been some noble ladies who still thought they had a chance as no one knew what would happen to the king’s mind. Even for that, only young ladies would be able to have hope.

However, no matter how much noble knowledge they learned and acquired, it was not easy to rationally control their emotions. They were only humans; they couldn’t control what they felt. But the duke did not want to justify his emotions as something useless and shallow. If he did so, it meant that he was accepting the fact that his daughter could not be the one to marry the king either.

There were also few ladies who claimed that their fathers and the previous king made a promise to marry them, as if that could be the way to get to the king’s heart.

Duke Moncheta laughed quietly. It definitely was not something positive. Though it wasn’t towards someone specific, he thought it was funny that some people were having that false hope. His daughter could have been one of them, too. She was one of them. At Terre festival, what she mentioned in front of the princess from Skara was terrifying — just because of her belief in that “promise” that was never made.

Frankly, even then he believed that his daughter’s dream could come true, even when the incident happened with baroness Yerv, or the time when the king said he was not looking for women.

He tried to think of the time when that hope started to fade away. When were people talking about how the king was treating the princess nicely for no reason? When he looked back at it, it wasn’t anything special. The things that he had done for the princess were so small that the duke couldn’t care less. From the beginning, the princess from Skara was not a big deal to the nobles of this country. Yena and the other ladies were worrying about something that they did not have to.

Things were different now. He wondered if those things the king had done for the princess were really nothing. Maybe he couldn’t sense it as a man who considered his wife a servant or someone lower than him. Yena probably was able to sense it through the princess with a sense of a lady.

For a moment, the duke was wondering if he needed to take a look at all the things the princess has done and gave up. It wasn’t necessary. Everything was in the past. What he heard when the king was a prince, Yena’s wish to be a queen, him trying to use Count Guillaume to see what’s on the king’s mind last night — everything was in the past, and things were confirmed. The duke realized this.

As a father, he was not going to make his lovely daughter a concubine. Yena couldn’t stand next to the king. His plans had to stop, as they were for the past. There was no chance, and Yena could not be the queen. It wasn’t just Yena who cannot do it, either. Everyone just needed to accept that. Then there was no need for him and others to talk about this subject in the office at Moinster. They just needed to wait until the king showed his true purpose and what he wanted. Duke Moncheta already knew.

He knew this from last night. No matter how big of a family the daughter is from, she won’t be able to stand next to the king as a queen.

The previous king said just one time that there would be a chance to make his daughter as a future queen. Just that, not more nor less. When the words from someone else are delivered through people, they end up looking bigger than how they’re actually meant. Just like any other young girl, it was possible for his daughter to take it as a marriage promise. That’s where the problem began. If the noble is one of the people who can sit and have meetings together at Moinster’s office, the noble should have easy access to anything going on in politics or the royals. However, if they were not easily giving up on the marriage, it meant that there must have been other reasons, but mostly it meant that they all had high hopes for the royal marriage. More specifically, they were hoping for what they could have by marriage and having a royal kid with their blood.

They were expecting something real from something so vague. From the king who said it to the others who heard it, everyone knew that it was something shallow and vague. Also, the content of it was confusing so that no one could guarantee that the lady would be treated right and get the king’s heart after she became the queen.

Just like that, the problems behind their hope weren’t simple. Yet they are still hoping for what they could get from the marriage putting all of this behind — it was such a shallow and empty wish. It’s not that they could support the current king just for the marriage, either. There were many cases where the family and the royals got closer from the marriage, but things could not be simply decided just for politics, especially in their positions.

So what the previous king said to these people to make them hope for certain things was rather perfunctory than truly meaningful. That did not mean that they didn’t trust the king or degraded what the king said. However, the duke knew best that that’s how it should have been. In fact, the only thing duke had to hear from Lu Havre was simple — that he was a true Nante. There was no way the Moncheta family did not know what that meant.

Therefore, for Duke Moncheta, the king’s queen was not something he cared about. More specifically, he did not care if the princess sat in that position. It would be a lie to say that he could ignore it, but he knew that he could not go against what the king was so sure about. That’s how it was for the coronation, too.

The duke has gotten everything that he could have gotten as a duke from the king, after all. There was no problem in continuing to take care of the family. He’d already been looking for Yena’s marriage with other families. He’s been hearing that she looked good together with Marquis Monhaine’s second son. It sounded like a good enough marriage to him.

That’s why the duke did not make a big deal out of the biggest subject in this meeting.

However, he also knew that there are people whom this mattered a lot to. He could tell that by the atmosphere.

Nobody mentioned what the king said during Terre festival. That wasn’t the problem. What the king had been doing, especially to one specific lady — how he treated her, the way he escorted her for Menang, what Menang meant for him — these did not matter, either. To the nobles in this meeting, what he’d been doing and saying towards them was the problem. It was way different than how he was yesterday.

Just think of what the king had been doing. He had a terrifying smile on his face after he filled the golden room with his siblings’ blood, and he never showed any mercy to the captives. During the war-making, he was called the monster of the war, yet he did not care about what people said. Although he treated his vassals well and politically, he’d been doing great both internally and internationally, they were all public matters; they were something he had to do as a king. Without the public matter that he had to take care of as a king, he never even looked at any ladies for his private matter.

What the king was doing at Menang — not as a king, but as a man — was staying next to the princess at the balcony. And after they spent time together there, the way they looked at each other was different. The king has never smiled the way he smiled at the princess. The man was smiling at someone he loved.

It happened just last night. And what will happen after that was easy to predict. The king and the princess will get married, and the princess would become the queen of this country.

“Your Majesty.”

Lu Havre was smiling. Since he came into this room, he knew the reason why today’s meeting subject changed, the reason why the meeting’s atmosphere wasn’t the brightest, and what the nobles would say to him.

He already prepared what he was going to say. He wanted to give the most to the person, and he didn’t want the person to be in an uncomfortable position. Although it probably wasn’t necessary, if he had to, he was willing to gladly use his emotional factor. “Gladly…” He felt himself changing.

That’s why he couldn’t stop smiling. He was planning to show his private matter in this public meeting, for the political matter. It felt like he was having his own life for the first time.

Everyone probably was able to tell what was going on between him and Ashite. They must have been worrying and thinking about it since last night, though he was sure about that matter. Some of them must have been still thinking that they still had hopes to be with him. It was funny to him. Just the fact that only he knew about his own emotions and what was going on in him was interesting.

However, there was something that he was worried about, too. It wasn’t something from others, but he wanted to know what was going on through her head. She wasn’t someone who wanted to be his queen. It might be an excuse to say that he did not have time to tell her before coming to this meeting at Moinster’s. He could have told her plenty of times.

But last night was so sweet and warm. He’s never done this in his life; just wiping tears off her face was exciting to him. So he thought it might seem like a rush to talk about the marriage already. That meant that he could only tell her after this meeting. And he had no clue how he’s going to do that.

His thoughts went that far. He thought about this numerous times in the morning. Going to the meeting at Moinster’s and talking to the nobles weren’t something he worried about. Rather than the arguments he could have been in with these nobles, what mattered more to him was how she would think about it, but he still wasn’t sure how to tell her….