Chapter 53
At my last words, the prince finally broke that arrogant pride of his and raised the white flag.
It seemed he hadn’t realized that I, who had only recently awakened as a healing mage, knew my own position well enough.
“I won’t tell, so please, just go on your way.”
“Hmm, fine. Looks like the prince wants to lie here a bit longer and do some photosynthesis. Let’s go, Luca.”
I left the boy, trembling with shame and humiliation, unable to lift his head from the floor, and took Luca’s hand to leave the place.
Once we’d put some distance between us, Luca placed both of my hands in his.
“What’s wrong?”
But the answer to my question became immediately clear.
Unconsciously, my hands—clasped with Luca’s—were trembling.
It was a mix of anger, surprise, and even some patience.
I wasn’t calm at all.
“In a little while, I’ll make it so that you can reign from the highest place. No prince will ever dare to challenge you.”
That meant… he was promising to treat me as the crown prince’s closest confidant, giving me the place that, in the original story, Laveria would have deserved if she hadn’t messed up.
At that moment, a giant rainbow appeared behind Luca in my line of sight.
After several days of rain, a bright rainbow stretched across the clear sky.
I spoke to Luca, who had turned to admire it.
“They say a rainbow is a symbol of promises. Don’t forget that.”
I smiled playfully, and Luca finally curved his lips into a faint smile, breaking the tension.
As Luca had said, the annex garden of the crown prince’s palace was more beautifully maintained than any garden I had ever seen.
Not only were rare, unnamed flowers planted in perfect harmony, but even the pavilion over the marble lake looked like a painting.
Since it was a place only Luca could enter, at this hour, this beautiful garden was entirely ours.
The rainbow we had seen earlier had begun to fade.
“This garden… it wasn’t here before, right? They made it recently?”
He nodded. Somehow, the last time I came to the palace, I had been told that this area was under construction and off-limits.
I wondered if Luca had a hobby for horticulture, and I bent down to smell a flower nearby.
A cluster of flowers caught my eye.
“This is…”
Everything in this world seemed new and fresh to me.
New people, new language, new flowers.
Among them, surprisingly, this one flower existed in this world as well.
And it had the same name.
“A sunflower.”
Tall, fresh sunflowers were planted everywhere, reaching my eye level.
Instinctively, they turned their faces toward the sun, blindly loving it.
“Seeing this… it feels so familiar.”
It felt like meeting an old friend.
I heard Luca approaching.
“Luca, did you know? Every flower has a meaning, and the sunflower’s meaning is…”
“‘To worship and wait for the one you love,’ right?”
“…Exactly.”
But “flower meanings” only existed in my previous life; in this world, flowers didn’t carry special symbolism.
Had I ever told him that before?
I started feeling unsure. But if I hadn’t, how could Luca know?
“That’s right, this flower looks up at the sun blindly, just like its name. But when did I ever tell you that?”
“I’m not sure, but I think you did. In a dream…”
A dream? I tilted my head in confusion.
“Isn’t it ironic?” Luca muttered, looking at the sunflowers.
“Rooted in the ground, yet loving the sun floating in the sky.”
It was like waiting for something without any guarantee.
“Ria.”
“Hmm?”
“I’ll wait, just like this flower.”
Wait for what? I opened my mouth to ask but closed it again.
It sounded like he was thinking about the day I would leave.
If that’s the case, I wanted to tell him not to worry. I would leave only after seeing him happy, even without me.
That was why I unconsciously nodded at his face, smiling fresher than the flowers.
I met the empress after strolling a bit further in the garden.
She was lying in bed, as when I first met her.
She probably didn’t want to greet us like that, but it had become increasingly difficult for her to move.
“I heard what happened at the last great nobles’ council… that Gruben again…”
The empress said, her face heavy with sorrow.
I would never forget that. Even though it wasn’t her fault, she probably carried all the guilt herself.
“Marquis Gassen has been sentenced to death and will soon be publicly executed. After that, no one will be able to insult your mother or the late duke again.”
She nodded with difficulty and immediately started coughing violently.
Cough, cough! Cough, ha…
“Mother! Here’s some water…!”
Luca supported the empress and handed her water and medicine.
She had already taken the maximum dose of medicine, so she only drank water and steadied her breath.
It won’t be long.
Her illness was “Brueli,” an incurable disease with no known treatment, just like mine.
Until recently, I thought she had recovered enough to take walks, but perhaps she had been pushing herself too hard.
Trying to compose ourselves, Luca and I watched as the empress forced a smile.
“I’ve prepared some refreshments. There are blueberry cookies you liked last time, so feel free to enjoy them.”
The cookies tasted the same as the recipe she had used herself. Yet, I could tell they weren’t made by her hands.
They don’t feel the warmth of her effort.
It seemed the empress had remembered that I liked the cookies she had baked herself, so she wrote down the recipe for the chef. But to me, her own cookies had been a million times better.
Seeing her lying so frail in bed made my eyes sting.
I wanted her to get up again and go on a picnic with me, putting sandwiches in a basket.
I wanted her to go shopping with Rachel and me, getting dresses as splendid as Madame Jeria’s, instead of old-fashioned ones.
Why did the novel say, “Even healing magic couldn’t cure the empress”?
A tear slipped down, and Luca wrapped his arm around my shoulder.
“Ria.”
“I feel so useless… What’s the point of awakening as a healing mage if it doesn’t work on the people I want to help?”
No, from the start, someone like me couldn’t possibly cure the empress, even though Senia had failed too.
The empress raised her hand and gently patted my knee.
“Ria, don’t ever say you’re useless. Thanks to you, I’m living the happiest days of my life.”
Whenever I visited the imperial palace, she would talk to me like a friend, and on good days, we would stroll in the garden together.
She treated me like a daughter.
“By the way, I once met your mother. Your warm heart must have come from her, the duchess.”
“You met the duchess…?”
The empress nodded, her eyes filled with nostalgia as if recalling the past.
“We were both young girls then. She spoke to me, who couldn’t fit in, and looked at me with warm green eyes, just like yours, Ria.”
I had never heard about my mother before. At the duke’s household, talking about the late duchess was tacitly forbidden.
“The next time I met her was when she came to the New Year’s banquet, already pregnant with her youngest daughter.”
I lifted my head in surprise as the empress smiled.
“Yes, it was Laveria. This time she said it was a girl! She was so happy she couldn’t sleep.”
“Congratulations. I understand the joy; she already had two sons. Did she decide on a name?”
“Laveria! In the old language… it means ‘Blessing of the Fairy.’ Seeing her grow up so well, I think it’s a perfect name.”
Her warm golden eyes looked at me tenderly.
