I Had the Enemy's Baby - Chapter 25

“What are you doing with your mouth open?”

Kaian’s eyebrows furrowed diagonally.

As soon as she saw that, Claudel opened her mouth with an “Ah,” but the piece of meat he offered was too big.

He withdrew the meat he had held out as if to feed her and cut it into smaller pieces with his knife again.

“Here.”

The meat that returned to her mouth was still too big for her to eat.

“It needs to be smaller than this…”

“How troublesome.”

Clicking his tongue, Kaian cut the meat again. Finally, when he pierced a piece of meat that was just one bite-sized for her with his fork, Claudel quickly ate it without complaint.

There’s nothing wrong with the meat.

Even the meat cut by her enemy made Claudel happy as soon as it entered her mouth, with its juices moistening her soul.

“Do you always eat such small amounts?”

“…Pardon?”

As soon as she swallowed the meat, Kaian scooped up some fruit pudding with a spoon and offered it to her.

Claudel quickly ate that too before he could furrow his brow.

‘Small amounts, he says.’

He says that even after seeing me clean my plate?

Is he perhaps sarcastically implying that I eat a lot?

Claudel was confused.

“I asked because you were nibbling on just one bite-sized piece.”

One bite-sized?

She blinked her eyes.

‘Perhaps in Temnes, even women eat more than this?’

The plate she had just cleaned was already more than she used to eat when she was at her healthiest in Valmont.

Since she hadn’t yet seen how other Temnes women ate at Lowen Castle, Claudel thought this way.

“The doctor said you need to eat a lot to fully recover.”

“I’m already much better now.”

“That’s nowhere near enough.”

Kaian scooped up some of the potato dish that she had earlier verbally expressed her enjoyment of and fed it to her.

As she obediently ate it, Claudel thought that he must like feeding her.

[This is the timeline separator]

Kaian was on the verge of being crushed by the piled-up duties of a lord.

Between wasting time traveling to and from Valmont due to the sudden marriage by royal decree, and the grand wedding feast held at Lowen Castle.

Although this wedding feast only lasted for three days, it was as if the butler and the castle’s residents had been working tirelessly for a whole month to prepare for it since the moment the wedding was decided.

It was only possible because Lowen was a land abundant in food. In other territories, it would have taken at least three months just to procure the alcohol and ingredients needed for the feast.

And then, with Claudel falling ill with Herzel, time was taken up searching for medicine, going on a buffalo hunt, and so on, causing all sorts of work to pile up.

The autumn festival was just a month away.

Lowen was a land with mild weather year-round, without winter. So, the meaning of the festival held in the central region of the Oberon Kingdom to celebrate the harvest when seasons changed didn’t apply here.

However, as the customs of the capital area became refined and something to be admired even in regions with different seasons, festivals began to be held throughout the Oberon Kingdom during the ‘autumn’ season, regardless of the actual season.

“I heard that Valmont’s autumn festival is held on ice.”

Suddenly, Claudel wondered what the festival might have looked like in Valmont.

In Valmont, where the ground was frozen for more than half the year, the kingdom’s autumn was when the ground started to freeze.

“Even though she’s the daughter of an enemy family, now that she’s become my wife, my feelings are different from before.”

In the past, when he thought of Valmont, he only pondered how to govern a reclaimed land after occupation from the far end of Temnes, or where to first station occupation forces in the Valmont territory.

Even in the midst of such busyness, Kaian made time to visit Claudel and take care of her.

When Claudel collapsed.

Seeing her think that she would surely die, that there was no chance for her to survive, Kaian engaged in self-deprecating introspection.

He wasn’t unaware that if he ignored and treated Claudel coldly, she would live a short life or something similar, and it was true that he didn’t even want to spare a burial plot within the territory for Vermonté.

What Kaian realized from this incident was that, rather than seeing Claudel as the daughter of an enemy family, he himself was thinking of her as closer to his wife.

Although he couldn’t pinpoint the exact reason.

Just before the wedding night when she first came to the castle, even the sight of Vermonté’s characteristic red hair made him want to vomit, but when dealing with Claudel, the uncomfortable and unpleasant feelings quickly disappeared.

Even thinking about it again, it was difficult to understand why he thought he absolutely had to save Claudel like that.

Although it was a royal decree, he could have sent the corpse of the dead woman back to Duke Vermonté, who had sent his sick niece, in a carriage, then confronted him about sending a sick woman deceitfully and started a territorial war.

Kaian had been preparing for a territorial war to burn Vermonté to the ground for four years.

Since receiving reports from the battlefield that Vermonté was suffering from drought and severe food shortages, he had been controlling the export of food to the north from that time.

There was even an incident where an intermediary who used to broker food exports from Lowen to Valmont committed suicide, caught between Temnes who wouldn’t grant export permits and Vermonté’s people who were starving.

How could he so easily nullify such fiercely and meticulously prepared plans just because one woman might die?

“Well, it’s not like I’m going to get married twice anyway. I’ve already welcomed her as my bride, so I can’t just pretend it never happened.”

The only reason Kaian could convince himself was based on his realistic and rational judgment.

Because Claudel had become his wife.

Now she was Temnes, not Vermonté.

To obtain the heart of a baby buffalo, Kaian dug five deep traps in the vast prairie.

Even female wild buffaloes were over 2 meters in size, but the calves were much smaller.

For the adults, they dug small and deep traps they couldn’t escape from, then archers continuously shot arrows while mounted knights drove them in one direction.

Once they formed a herd of hundreds, they couldn’t turn back once they started running.

Like soldiers marching in formation, even if one tried to stop or look back, the massive horns of their kin behind them, and behind them again, would butt into the body that had stopped moving.

Even if a calf fell into one of the set traps and its mother tried to look back with a sorrowful cry, it was dragged along with the herd, being butted from behind and on the sides.

After the drive was over, luckily two calves were caught in the traps, so Kaian quickly tied ropes to pull them out and loaded them onto a prepared cart before the leader of the buffalo herd could return.

It was such a clean hunt that even the elites who had watched Kaian’s military exploits up close for five years were impressed.

Kaian didn’t think even such a feat was particularly difficult.

There’s always a most important goal in everything.

If blood must be shed in the process, there’s no choice but to break through, but he believed there was no need to risk the lives of elite knights in tasks where only the essence could be extracted through such indirect methods.

Kaian’s undefeated record was due to his outstanding abilities in both civil and military affairs.

And he assured himself that he would never fail in the future.

Just as he had always done.

After being fed the hearts of not one but two wild buffalo calves, Claudel’s symptoms of coughing up blood disappeared within a day, and by the third day, she stopped coughing altogether.

They said her unconsciousness was due to her body being unable to rest after suffering from the deep illness.

However, Kaian wasn’t too worried about her not waking up.

Because he would not fail in saving her either.

It was Kaian’s mental world that was inaccessible to most people.

He could accomplish even bringing a dying person back to life with an ability close to that of a god.

After reviving Claudel, his slightly shaken confidence and identity returned to normal.

It should be up to him to decide whether to save or discard someone’s life in front of Kaian.

He had snatched even a woman everyone said was hopeless from the god of death.

That was precisely who Kaian, the lord of Temnes, was.

Now, as the butler had suggested, he was trying to have meals together in Claudel’s room once a day to establish discipline within the castle, thinking of the heir he would raise in the future.

“In the past, when I was this busy, it was enough to just fill my stomach quickly.”

Having spent five years on the battlefield, he was an extremely rational person.

Before marriage, when he was very busy, he would sometimes devour a sandwich with ham, cheese, and meat between bread all at once in his office.

“To not appreciate such consideration. What an insensitive woman.”

Kaian thus had lunch together every day for Claudel’s dignity and recovery.

Meanwhile, his gaze kept drifting to Claudel’s face.

The woman, whose sickly appearance had faded, was blossoming like a pale green flower bud touched by dawn dew.

Color returned to her once-pale skin, and her cheeks, which had sunken from weight loss, filled out pleasingly.

And above all, what kept catching his eye were her lips.

Her lips, which had been a light pink, turned a vivid scarlet, and he found himself staring at them out of curiosity.

Claudel’s small, pretty lips moved busily throughout the meal.

She ate diligently, cutting into dozens of small pieces what Kaian would eat in three forkfuls, and it seemed so trivial that he found it hard to take his eyes off.

Once, after she cleared her plate, their eyes met, and feeling awkward, he cut some of his own meat for her to eat more, but it was far too big for her small mouth, so he had to cut it again and again before he could finally feed her.

With each meal, Claudel seemed to come back to life more and more, becoming prettier, and Kaian thought that this might be what it feels like to raise a pet.

Although he had never raised one before.

It was true that he felt a sense of accomplishment seeing her eat well and visibly improve.

Knock knock.

The butler entered, knocking on the office door.

“My lord, where would you like to have your meal today?”

When the butler asked whether he would go to Claudel’s room or have a light meal in the office, Kaian stood up.

“I’ll have it with Claudel.”

“Yes, my lord.”

As they walked down the corridor, the butler reported.

“The lady had dance practice this morning.”

“Dance?”

“Yes. The dance instructor you requested earlier came for the first time today. The doctor said that moderate exercise would be more helpful for recovery, so we quickly looked for a suitable person within the territory.”

“Well done.”

However, Kaian’s eyes immediately narrowed when he arrived at Claudel’s room.

“What do you think you’re doing?”