The Shatonile royal family was in a more chaotic mood than ever due to Princess Resilia’s return with the elite knight corps.

“How is the princess’s condition?”

Prince Tessler encountered the court physician coming out after examining Princess Resilia’s bedroom.

“Fortunately, everything else is normal.”

“What are the chances the emperor will notice?”

“It varies from person to person, but if the princess takes the potion I’ll prescribe just before the wedding night, she should be able to avoid suspicion on that day.”

“I’ll give instructions soon, so prepare to make that potion right away.”

“I will do so, Your Highness.”

“Good. Oh, and court physician.”

Prince Tessler was about to open Princess Resilia’s bedroom door but turned back to the physician and asked seriously.

“Yes, Your Highness.”

“Is there perhaps a potion that can make one grow up?”

“What do you mean…?”

As the court physician asked in confusion, Prince Tessler gestured to the princess’s bedroom door and said:

“I mean a medicine that improves judgment and makes one’s head work better, something with that kind of effect.”

“Such a potion… is beyond my abilities.”

The court physician, realizing why Prince Tessler was asking such a question, replied while holding back laughter.

“Can’t be helped. Good work.”

Prince Tessler sighed deeply as he entered the bedroom.

“Everyone, please leave for a moment.”

He sent all of Princess Resilia’s attendants who were in the bedroom outside.

The princess turned to her side, pulling the blanket over her face at her elder brother’s disapproving gaze.

“Resil, sit up.”

Princess Resilia didn’t budge at Prince Tessler’s words.

“Come on.”

“No.”

“We need to talk about that stupid thing you did!”

“La la la, I can’t hear you, can’t hear…”

Princess Resilia mumbled while covering her ears with both hands.

“This is completely insane. How dare you run away when you’re about to have a royal marriage with the Emperor of Raphion! How could you do such a reckless thing!”

“Hmph, why is that something I did? It’s something you did, elder brother?”

Princess Resilia, who had been completely covered by the blanket, sat up angrily at Prince Tessler’s words.

“What?”

“I never said I would marry the Emperor of Raphion!”

“So you disappear with some guy of unknown origin?”

“Watch your words! He may be of humble birth, but he’s smarter than you, elder brother!”

“Resil, have you still not come to your senses? Do you want to take that mercenary’s side now?”

“What?”

“How long were you on the run? You’re the one who abandoned that mercenary guy and followed the royal knights. You know? Ah, let’s not talk about it.”

Prince Tessler sat heavily on the bed and pressed his temples with his hands.

“I’ve lived as a princess all my life, wouldn’t it be hard to suddenly live like a commoner? That’s only natural, isn’t it?”

“If you understood that so well, why did you run away with such a low-born man without even a title in the first place? Did you think it would be as comfortable as royal life?”

“I thought I’d be happy just looking at Norton’s handsome face… Sob, waaah!”

Princess Resilia pouted and whimpered, then finally burst into tears.

“Don’t cry. You’ll age. Your face is already messed up as it is. Tsk.”

“Right, I shouldn’t cry. It’ll give me ugly wrinkles. Wait, what was I going to argue about earlier? Ah, right!”

The princess stopped wailing, gently patted her eyes, then glared at Prince Tessler again.

“And, I had no choice because I was already pregnant!”

Princess Resilia had been pregnant even before she ran away with Norton.

If she had given birth in the royal palace, surely both the child and Norton would not have survived.

“So? See, in the end, neither of them is by your side now! How pathetic.”

Prince Tessler snorted and rose from where he was sitting on the bed.

The princess, who had been looking down, raised her head again.

“Elder brother!”

“What.”

“That day… you just let Norton and the child go, right? The knight commander said he would do that. Right?”

Prince Tessler hesitated for a moment.

There’s no way they would have kindly let go of a mercenary who dared to elope with a princess of the Shatonile Kingdom.

“Yes…”

He couldn’t bring himself to tell his younger sister that Norton had fallen off a cliff during a confrontation with the knights.

The same went for the child the princess had given birth to after 8 months.

[This is the timeline separator]

“Aren’t you getting out?”

I asked, looking at Rinel who showed no signs of getting up from the edge of the bathtub.

“Cold-hearted woman.”

Rinel muttered softly and splashed water on my face.

“Ah!”

He’s really gotten into splashing water at me.

“I was about to leave now.”

“Your clothes are quite wet, would you like to wear my robe as you go? The attendants following you might misunderstand unnecessarily.”

I seriously suggested, worried about his wet bottom.

“Ha, what remarkable consideration.”

He crushed my sincerity in an instant.

“Why? Why not offer to lend me a dress? To keep the cold wind off my legs, you know.”

“Well, the embarrassment would be for the attendants anyway, so that wouldn’t be bad either.”

I finally said with a laugh.

My fearless laughter echoed in the bathroom like an echo.

Rinel’s face seemed to twitch too, but when our eyes met, he quickly changed his expression and forcibly frowned.

“But you know. You’re probably the only person in this world, Zelda, who would send off the emperor without even a greeting, sitting so comfortably.”

Oops, at Rinel’s words, my manners towards the emperor that had momentarily left home returned.

I quickly tried to get up from the bathtub, bending my body forward, then realized my reality and sat back down.

Oh right, I’m naked.

There was a loud sound of water friction in the bathtub.

Because of that, a large amount of water splashed onto him, or more precisely, onto the pants he was wearing, who was still sitting at the edge of the bathtub.

It was already too late to salvage the situation, and he was already too wet.

A great earthquake occurred in Rinel’s pupils.

My pupils looking at him trembled no less.

“Ah? Ah!”

I screamed a single syllable a beat late, reaching out my hands to him before stopping.

“This is… are you telling me to freeze to death on my way?”

Rinel looked down at his wet pants, which now looked properly disrespectful to anyone who saw them.

“Then I’ll see you tomorrow. If I survive.”

He finally lifted his bottom from the edge of the bathtub and stood up.

“Your Majesty… you can’t go far. Please return safely.”

I greeted Rinel in a timid voice.

He turned to look at me with a frown.

“Zelda, are you really going to let me go like this… Whoa?”

His body swayed greatly.

“Be careful!”

In a split second, with a splash, the water in the bathtub shot up like a fountain and then disappeared.

And in front of my eyes.

“Your, Your Majesty…?!”

There he was, looking like a drowned rat.

There probably isn’t such a handsome rat anywhere else in the world though.

“Oof, the floor!”

He shouted, pointing at the floor with his hand.

“Huh? The, the floor?”

“Who left soap on the bathroom floor.”

He said, elegantly wiping his wet face.

I quickly poked my head out of the bathtub and looked down at the floor.

The soap I had used and left on the floor before he entered the bathroom was miserably smashed on the floor.

That’s a really precious soap…

On the day I left Shatonile Palace, Bonnie, who shared a room with me, secretly took one from the royal bathroom supplies storage and put it in my luggage bag.

Speaking of this soap, it was a rare soap that would keep a subtle lavender scent on your body until night even if you used it in the morning.

Sigh, what a waste.

“Even when you fell, you just happened to fall into the bathtub?”

I asked, looking at him who seemed quite intentional.

“I’m sorry about that. It’s because you happened to leave soap on the floor.”

“That’s my fault… right. I’m sorry.”

“And I’m also sorry that I happened to fall safely into the bathtub.”

“…Pardon?”

“I should have slipped on the floor and cracked my head or something. Don’t you think?”

“I was careless. Please forgive me.”

I lowered my eyes, which had been glaring at him, at Rinel’s intimidating voice.

“I didn’t expect to get this wet, but since it’s come to this… I might as well.”

“Might as well what?”

“Take a bath.”

Suddenly, heat surged through my body.

At the same time, the temperature of the water in the bathtub rose.

My blood rushed quickly from my toes to the top of my head at Rinel’s declaration that he would bathe together.

“Did you perhaps put a heat-preserving magic stone in the bathtub? The water seems to be getting hotter and hotter?”

Rinel tapped the bottom of the bathtub with both hands, looking for a non-existent heat-preserving magic stone.

“Rinel? That’s my foot.”

“Oh, is it? Then is this it?”

“That’s my knee.”

“I see.”

“There’s nothing in the bathtub.”

“Really? There’s no heat-preserving magic stone in here? How can that be…”

As he swished his hands around, he accidentally bumped the side of my thigh.

“There’s nothing, I said!”

I replied through gritted teeth.

“Ah, I apologize. No wonder it felt too soft to be a heat-preserving magic stone.”

“You did that on purpose, didn’t you?”

“Would it make you feel a bit better if I said I didn’t?”

Rinel asked with a smirk after properly settling into the bathtub.

“…In the end, your clothes are all wet.”

“Yeah, what should we do about this?”

I sighed, looking at his face which seemed to have some scheme.

“Surely you wouldn’t strip a person with no clothes and drive them out?”

Ah, so that’s what you wanted to say?

“To borrow your robe wouldn’t suit my face with that color, you see.”

He pointed to the deer antler coat hook attached to one side of the bathroom wall.

A pink silk robe was hanging on the coat hook.

“If you order the attendants to bring clothes…”

“It’s late at night. They need some rest too. Don’t you think? Especially with rumors of me being a tyrant running rampant.”

Rinel suddenly spoke in a benevolent tone.

“I may work them hard during the day, but at night, this tyrant wants to let them rest a bit.”

He placed one hand on his chest and smiled languidly.

“By the way, why does the water keep maintaining its temperature?”

He tilted his head, scooping up the steaming bathwater with both hands.

“It even seems to be getting hotter?”

“It was very hot water from the start, so that’s probably why…”

I could only make up an excuse since I couldn’t reveal the truth to him.

But his face changed to an expression of even less understanding.

“Even so, when I get into a bathtub, even hot water cools down quickly. The water temperature drops so much it’s almost like ice.”

“…Ah.”

“So I can’t stay in the bathtub for long…”

He looked curiously at the steam rising above the bathtub and gazed at me sitting in front with a strange look.

“Zelda, could it really be because your heart is so warm?”

He shook his head immediately after asking his own question and corrected himself.

“No, even if that were the case, there’s no way the water could maintain this warmth continuously, it’s really strange.”

Ah, Rinel’s curse would be an advantage in summer.

It would be much cooler to be by his side in the hot summer, wouldn’t it?

We each possessed something the other desperately needed.

Look even now. If he hadn’t fallen into the bathtub earlier, the water might have risen to a temperature that could cause burns by now.

I often used to take advantage of this phenomenon.

When something angering happened, I would soak in the bathtub and when the water temperature started to rise, I would put two raw eggs in the bathtub.

By the time the bath was over, those eggs would become delicious soft-boiled eggs.

The joy of eating boiled eggs after a bath is something only those who have experienced it would understand.

Though with Rinel bathing together, the birth of boiled eggs would be hard to expect.

He closed his eyes tightly and leaned back in the bathtub.

“Ahh… this feels good. I stopped by the training grounds before coming to the Empress’s palace.”

“Did you?”

Hearing that made me want to go to the training grounds too.

I looked down at my two hands.

As I imagined wielding a sword, my hands trembled like withdrawal symptoms.

I should ask Sharon later where the training grounds are inside the imperial palace.

“Yes, it feels like all the muscles that tensed up while practicing swordsmanship are relaxing.”

Rinel’s expression looked truly comfortable as if all fatigue was melting away.

Seeing that, I couldn’t bring myself to ask him to quickly get out of the bathtub.

In the end, I just waited for him to open his eyes again while admiring his moist face that appeared and disappeared through the steam.

But after a while.

I could no longer see him sitting across from me.