CFLBF CH 08

“…….”

“…….”

Their breaths tangled together, their bodies pressed against each other. Even the attendants who had been following behind at a distance were startled enough to turn away.

Ravinia stared at Cedric with wide, surprised eyes, while Cedric stood frozen like a stone, looking down at her.

He had pulled her so tightly toward him that Ravinia’s hand had ended up resting against his chest. The frantic thudding beneath his chest was transmitted directly to her palm. His heartbeat was so fast that it was almost concerning.

“Are you all right?”

Thanks to that, those were the first words to escape Ravinia’s lips.

Cedric’s face flushed bright red. He quickly stepped away, only to realize that she might have hurt her ankle, at which point he immediately crouched down.

“L-Let me see your ankle. You aren’t hurt, are you?”

Without caring in the slightest that his trousers were getting dirty, he dropped to his knees.

“Lean on my shoulder.”

Rarely had his voice sounded so firm. Ravinia obediently placed a hand on Cedric’s shoulder and leaned against him.

“It’s only the heel of my shoe that broke.”

Despite Ravinia’s words, Cedric’s hands did not hesitate.

His large hand slipped beneath the hem of Ravinia’s rain-soaked skirt and grasped her slender ankle. In Varkazar, this would not have mattered at all, but wasn’t behaving like this in Nordiel a breach of etiquette?

Ravinia wondered about it as she glanced over her shoulder, but from the moment their bodies had collided, the attendants seemed to be doing their very best to pretend they saw nothing.

“Ah.”

A quiet moan escaped Ravinia’s lips.

Cedric had removed her shoe and placed the sole of her foot in his palm.

“It’s dirty.”

She frowned and tried to pull back, but Cedric rarely used such a firm tone as he grabbed her ankle.

“You just cried out. You must be hurt.”

“I was startled, that’s all. I’m not going to get hurt over something like this.”

Though she said that, Ravinia held her breath at the warmth traveling up her ankle from his hand. Cedric roughly rolled up the sleeves of his wet shirt, then began wiping the mud splattered across her ankle with the tips of his coarse fingers.

Rather than delicate, his touch was persistent. Under the pretext of examining her ankle, his thumb pressed firmly around her ankle bone, slowly wiping away the dirt. Heat spread distinctly across her thin skin.

Cedric lowered his head a little further. He was looking for any redness or swelling around her ankle.

His breath brushed against Ravinia’s cold instep.

“There’s no swelling, but it may still have been shaken by the impact.”

His large hand wrapped around her entire foot. The sensation of his fingers holding her with neither excessive nor insufficient strength felt strangely intimate.

When she looked down, she saw a man kneeling before her with her foot resting in his hand. His green eyes, clear as a deep forest, stubbornly examined her ankle.

That intense gaze felt as though it were scorching the top of her foot, and Ravinia unconsciously tightened the fingers resting on Cedric’s shoulder.

“I told you I’m fine.”

In the end, Ravinia pushed him away and planted her bare foot on the ground. Cedric made a startled sound of “Ah,” then watched her repeatedly press her foot against the ground without any trouble, wearing an indescribably complicated expression—as though he wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or not.

“See? I’m perfectly fine, right?”

“Then that’s a relief.”

Ravinia straightened after removing her other shoe as well.

“I suppose I have no choice but to display the barbaric sight of walking barefoot in front of Your Grace.”

When she reached for her shoes, Cedric took them from her.

“I’ll carry them.”

He handled the woman’s shoes as naturally as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world. Ravinia merely shrugged and let him have his way.

Meanwhile, Cedric held her tiny shoes in one hand and narrowed his eyes at the ground Ravinia had stepped on.

He had intended not to use magic today, but he had no choice. He couldn’t allow her to step on sharp stones or let her feet grow numb from the cold earth.

Holding her shoes loosely by his fingers and keeping his hands behind his back, Cedric followed behind her, staring intently at the ground directly in front of her feet. Whenever he gave a slight nod, the sharp pebbles lying where she was about to step sank into the earth, while the damp soil beneath her feet filled with a pleasant warmth.

Ravinia tilted her head at the strange warmth rising through the soles of her feet, but she seemed to enjoy it as she strode forward, almost humming a tune.

Seeing her like that filled Cedric with a peculiar sense of satisfaction.

Ravinia was walking safely upon the path created by his magic.

It almost felt as though he possessed her.

“How is it? The land of Nordiel?”

“It does feel nice. It’s soft and warm. Varkazar has a lot of rocks.”

“Then don’t your feet get hurt?”

“Do you think only my feet would get hurt?”

She lifted the corners of her lips, as though Cedric’s innocent question amused her.

“Even if I was considered an inadequate princess in Varkazar, I didn’t live like the ladies here, never touching a drop of water with my hands. I was a warrior in my own way, you know.”

“A warrior……?”

Cedric rolled the unfamiliar word she had uttered around in his mind. Once again, his gaze fell upon Ravinia’s pale ankle as she strode forward, firmly pressing her feet into the soil.

No matter how many times he looked, they were smooth and slender. They hardly seemed capable of harming anyone.

Then, suddenly, he became curious.

About her.

As far as Nordiel knew, she was the abandoned princess.

More than twenty years ago, in order to form an alliance with Varkazar, Nordiel had sent the daughter of a Nordiel marquis to become a concubine to the King of Varkazar.

Ravinia was the princess born from that union.

That was why, rather than inheriting the rough names typical of Varkazarians, Ravinia had been given a Nordiel name and pale skin.

Her vivid red hair, however, was unmistakably a symbol of Varkazar.

During the war, it had become quite a famous story that Ravinia had been discovered inside a prison in the castle. The people there had fled without even realizing that she had been locked away, and Ravinia had survived by eating weeds and ants.

When she was discovered, she was terribly emaciated and nearly on the verge of death.

‘What kind of useless princess must she have been for even the king to forget that he had such a daughter?’

People had whispered those words while looking down on Ravinia.

Cedric suddenly remembered them and asked,

“Why were you locked inside the castle when the war broke out?”

Ravinia answered with a faint smile.

“Because I displeased my father. He was always terribly disappointed that I was an inadequate warrior.”

For someone who had supposedly been so disappointed, wasn’t he simply a heartless father who had locked his own daughter in prison and then forgotten about her?

Cedric couldn’t help wondering whether she had ever received proper affection from him while growing up.

“You must have wanted to become a proper warrior very badly.”

Cedric quietly added the words as he gazed down at her face while she walked energetically ahead.

“My father also disliked me quite a lot when I was young.”

“A great mage like you?”

“When I was young, I was sick all the time and couldn’t do anything properly. I was an invalid.”

Ravinia’s eyes widened as though she had heard something unexpected. Cedric merely shrugged as if it were nothing important.

“I had to spend more than half of every year confined to a dark room. I had forgotten even what color the sunlight outside was. The people in the ducal residence lived in fear, wondering when I would die, and my father treated me as though I didn’t exist at all. Even though there was only a single door between us, I saw my father’s face only a few times a year.”

Cedric slowly adjusted his pace to match Ravinia’s, continuing to warm the ground beneath her feet with invisible magic.

“What I wanted most was to have a meal with him. To share that ordinary meal with him, I took bitter medicine without complaint and endured treatments that made it feel as though my body were burning from the inside. Because someday, I wanted to stand before him as a healthy person and have him acknowledge that I was his proud son.”

He paused for a moment.

Sunlight filtering through the forest caught on the tips of his eyelashes and trembled softly.

“But even when I finally managed to get out of bed and attend a meal, my father never looked at my face even once. As though I were a ghost who didn’t exist at the table, he simply read his documents while the only sound he made was the clinking of his utensils. That was when I realized how meaningless it was to destroy myself yearning for someone’s recognition.”

Cedric turned his head and looked at Ravinia.

“So please, Young Lady, don’t say that you’re inadequate. As long as you did your best, that was enough.”