Chapter 31
Rashid took the meat out of the shell and gave it to Rosetta. Rosetta munched on the clam meat and this time spoke with an extremely ecstatic expression.
“This is delicious, too. I never knew there was so much delicious food in the world!”
“Don’t you think all the food in the world tastes good to you?”
“What do you mean, I know a few chefs who were fired when I was a kid because I couldn’t eat a whole lot of food. I’m more picky than you think.”
Even as she said this, Rosetta was gobbling down everything Rashid offered, and Rashid clicked his tongue as he watched.
“To lie to me about going to negotiate with the seaside merchants when you’ve never even tasted seafood, now that I think about it, that’s pretty ridiculous.”
“Is eating seafood any guarantee that you’ll be able to negotiate with them?”
“The most demanding and ferocious of the merchants are those who trade along the sea and in the desert. Do you know what the first thing is when negotiating with them?”
“What is that?”
“To eat whatever food they give you without refusing.”
“What happens if you refuse the food?”
“Since you’ve refused the favor, you can’t even take the ‘negotiator’ out and have to go back, and if you do it wrong, you’ll incur their wrath and possibly lose your life,” Rashid said as he cut off another piece of food Rosetta pointed to and put it in her mouth.
“No way they would go that far…”
“I told you, they’re the fiercest. They are not to be trifled with by a child like you.”
Rosetta’s brows narrowed at the word child. “But why have you been calling me a child, how old are you?”
From the looks of him, he appeared to be about the same age as her sister and brother. His personality was many times more mature than Arman’s.
Could he be much older than that, she wondered.
Then Rashid replied, “Twenty-three.”
For a moment, Rosetta almost slammed her bandaged hand down on the table.
“Twenty-three? You’re only three years older than me, and you’ve been acting so grown up all this time? I thought you were at least ten years older than me!”
Rashid held a glass to her mouth, this time with water. Rosetta gulped it down, and her anger flared once more.
“Don’t you ever call me a child again, we’re not that much different in age, you and I.”
“You should be glad I see you as a child.”
“Why is that a good thing?”
Rashid let out a small sigh and gestured to the food. He asked, “Is there anything else you want to eat?”
Rosetta shook her head. She was actually full from earlier, but he kept offering her more and more.
“No, I’ve had enough, I’m full now.”
Rashid started eating the rest of the food she had left. Watching him eat the food that had already cooled, she felt a little sorry for him.
“…I heard from Thelma that you know so much about business that you even traveled to the Kingdom of Lysa to sell your wares under the guise of a merchant, but why did you travel all the way to Terra yourself?”
She didn’t think it was common for a chieftain of his stature to travel to Lysa disguised as a merchant. If he was simply selling goods, someone else could have gone.
“Thelma said it was to secure safe trade routes,” she added.
He nodded. “It is imperative that merchants be able to travel freely without fear of monsters, so that many goods can be brought to and from here, as well as advanced civilizations.”
The most advanced civilization was Lysa to the east, and the countries around it were directly influenced by it. But here in the Ardennes, to the west, the land had long remained on the fringes.
Having been here myself, I can honestly say that it’s not as backward as I thought it was, but it’s true that there isn’t much interaction.
“It’s a shame, because the interaction between regions would have been better without the monsters.”
“Yeah, I don’t know why the monsters came out of nowhere, but it would have been better if they hadn’t existed in the first place.”
Rosetta looked at him in confusion. “You mean monsters were created and not just there from the beginning?”
As far as Rosetta knew, monsters had existed since the dawn of time. Just as light and darkness, land and sea, were created in the beginning.
But he shook his head. “If you look at the oldest writings, there’s no mention of them at all. They didn’t exist, they were created later.”
“Well, I’ve read a lot of books, but I’ve never read anything like that.”
Reading books was the only thing a princess who never left the palace could do, and old history books were one of Rosetta’s favorites. What’s more, the library in the Palace of Lysa is filled with ancient texts that are hard to find anywhere else. So Rosetta could not easily accept his words.
“You don’t speak Ardennese,” he said, “so of course you haven’t read anything written in Levantine, and everything I’ve told you is written in Levantine.”
Rosetta was at a loss for words. If he meant the unique script used by the Levantines, then she hadn’t read it. No, she hadn’t learned it, so she couldn’t read it at all.
“Is there a record of such a long time ago?”
“Yes, everything is written down, such as what people did for the day and what they ate for lunch. If you look at records from a very long time ago, the word ‘monster’ doesn’t even exist. Then, at some point, records about monsters suddenly started pouring in.”
“When was that?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say roughly around the time the Kingdom of Lysa came into existence.”
Rosetta’s eyes widened. “You mean they’re related?”
Rashid shook his head. “That’s something I don’t know, whether it’s just a coincidence of timing or there’s something else.”
I’ve learned a lot about things I didn’t know since I’ve been out in the world. I’ve seen a monster for the first time, and I’ve learned about the happenings in the Ardennes.
The things he had just told me were all things I would never have known inside the palace. I was also surprised to find that there were books here that were older than the ones written in Lysa.
Perhaps I was arrogant, secretly thinking that the records here must have lagged behind those in Lysa.
When he had almost finished eating, Rosetta asked a question. Actually, she’d been meaning to ask it for a while.
“What was it like to go to Terra yourself?”
She couldn’t believe he’d ever been to Terra, having been born here and thought he’d lived here all his life. She wondered if he’d been as amazed by it as much as she had.
Terra, the most historic city in the world, she’d heard that everyone who came to it for the first time had one thing to say about it. Some are amazed by the sheer size of the city, while others are mesmerized by the dazzling beauty of the Royal Palace of Lysa.
I wonder which one he was.
However, his answer was completely unexpected.
“I felt like I was watching twilight.”
“Twilight? What do you mean?”
“It means it’s getting dark. Everything.”
Rosetta was speechless. If someone else had said that, she would have dismissed it as an ignorant rant, but this was Rashid. Rashid was not the kind of man who would say anything demeaning.
“Why, why did you think that?”
“Because Lysa was showing so many signs of aging.”
“Aging…?”
“Just as the moon tilts when it’s full, and people grow old and sick when they’re old, Lysa seemed to be going through the process, at least to my eyes.”
He continued, “Without that peculiar ability of the royal family, it might have disappeared long ago, and it was the tyranny of King Laquileo that hastened it.”
Rosetta’s eyes clouded for a moment. Laquileo is the name of her grandfather, the previous king of the Kingdom of Lysa.
She already knew that her grandfather had not been a very good man. It was almost taboo to talk about him in the palace, but in the conversations of light-tongued nobles and handmaidens, Rosetta would occasionally hear stories about him.
They would always talk about how fierce he was, and how lucky they were that he had fallen from his horse and died suddenly.
I have very few memories of my grandfather. And yet, strangely, whenever I thought of him, I always felt creeped out and afraid, and whenever I tried to recall a memory of him, it didn’t feel good. Like a black shadow creeping up my ankles.
I can imagine it now. His deeply wrinkled face as he looked at me, the frightening, cruel expression etched into it, the strangely glazed eyes, and the sickening smell of blood…
“Why?”
Rashid called out to her as Rosetta’s face suddenly hardened, rendering her speechless. His pristine eyes scanned her condition.
“Are you in pain? The doctor said earlier to take more medicine if you feel pain.”
“No, I’m fine….”
He placed his hand on Rosetta’s forehead. Then he wrapped his arms around her and picked her up.