Chapter 9
Ariletti barely tore her eyes away from the plate.
Across from her, Glenn Hezeight had been looking at her meaningfully for some time.
I have more to say!
“Sir.”
“If you don’t call me uncle, I won’t answer.”
“How can you expect to take the princes’ heads without even carrying firewood for the hearth?”
“Take what?”
Glenn looked stunned.
“Who taught the kid to say such wicked things?”
Ignoring him, Ariletti turned her mind over quickly.
Without much thought, information about the Hezeight estate began surfacing one by one.
The Hezeight estate is very poor.
At the northernmost part of the estate, snowstorms regularly sweep through.
During snowstorm season, the residents cannot leave their homes, and outsiders cannot enter, making the entire estate a perfect fortress.However, that same isolation also means the Hezeight estate must remain poor.
It’s already a cold region, and when the roads to the outside are blocked, it is completely isolated and stagnant.So how do they survive? The Hezeights are a family rewarded by the royal court for hunting monsters in the borderlands.
With no fertile lands or trading cities, the estate’s only assets are its skilled knights and soldiers, and they maintain the estate with the pay they receive for managing them.
In short: if their relationship with the crown sours, they starve.
The gold chest the expedition risked their lives to protect was the annual pay granted by the crown.
Yet, the Hezeight family supported the third prince, not the first or second, drawing suspicion and opposition from the others.
They had no money and were stuck in a remote borderland, but their military power could not be ignored. — This was Ariletti’s own conclusion.
Because of this, the Hezeights were always the first target for removal by the princes.
But judging by this recent attack, even without Ariletti’s advice, it was clear the first prince’s side had long been wary of the Hezeights.
“Aril, your drool is falling.”
“Why did you choose the third prince?”
Glenn’s smile faded slightly.
“How did you know that?”
“It’s obvious.”
It wasn’t hard to deduce.
If the Hezeights had taken no action, the empress would have had no reason to send even the captain of the knights to eliminate the minor lord.
There must have been some secret dealings between Glenn Hezeight and the third prince, Rasian Federka, at the royal palace.
It was also around this time that Hezeight first reached out to the third prince in the past.
‘And three years later, they fully sided with Rasian.’
It had been an act of suicidal incomprehension before.
“Is he really a seer who can see the future…? No, but there can’t be two seers with the same power.”
“Eh?”
“No, it’s nothing.”
Mumbling suspiciously, Glenn shrugged.
“Well, to answer simply, it’s probably similar to why I took you in.”
“…”
“If you ignore a child in danger, you’re punished.”
Ariletti stared at the young man, who was wiping her mouth with a napkin.
On the face of the youthful, almost boyish man overlapped the familiar face of someone she knew—a far sturdier and more imposing lord of the borderlands.
My past.
But a future now lost.
“My lord had the same eyes as you. Kids who haven’t even grown hair on their heads… ridiculous.”
“What do you mean? Stop with the nonsense. If you want to kill me, do it now. This is your only chance!”
“Really? Then go, little one.”
“Huh…?”
“Far away, don’t look back, run. Never return to the Bertel royal family. Got it?”
“…”
“Find your own life, Ariletti.”
Recalling the past, she suddenly felt anger.
Every time you saved a child in danger, you had no choice but to be defeated, you foolish man.
Ariletti, forgetting to act like a child, muttered fiercely.
“You didn’t think, didn’t think. That’s why you let me go then, you pathetic uncle.”
If he had killed or at least captured her back then, who knew how things might have gone.
Glenn Hezeight had too much sentiment.
That way, he could never win.
He couldn’t even issue a duel challenge. Just like in his first life.
Even if he somehow stood in the arena, he would collapse helplessly. Just like in his second life.
She didn’t want him to die so futilely.
“If you weren’t there, we would have been wiped out in Gringen Church. I don’t have dependents, so if I die, it ends with me. But Roel has three kids. Tanessa has her grandmother living with her.”
Uncle Duncan said that, right? Everyone has someone to protect.
Ariletti jabbed her fork into the plate.
“This can’t continue. We need a plan.”
“A plan? What kind of plan?”
A plan to prevent extinction, of course!
The root problem of this hopeless estate started with the snowstorm outside.
A natural disaster that blocks every road.
‘If there’s no road, then make one.’
Whatever exists, find it.
Whatever doesn’t, create it.
That was another of Ariletti’s iron rules.
Glenn watched in fascination as the child glared at him with blazing eyes.
The child who had been drooling over her pasta suddenly looked serious, staring deeply at Glenn.
Now she looked at him as if he were the most pathetic being in the world.
‘I thought she was a shy little kitten, but sometimes she’s like an eighty-year-old man.’
The teal eyes held a sorrow no five-year-old should have.
Ariletti chewed her pasta thoroughly, tearing the bread and even eating the bowl’s crust carefully.
Soon, her plump little stomach bouncing, she jumped from the chair.
“Follow me.”
“Where are we going?”
“To earn my meal.”
“I’ll follow if you call me uncle, seer.”
Am I doing this for my own benefit now?
Seeing Ariletti’s scowling face, Glenn laughed cheerfully. Her expression was so transparent it was unbearably cute.
‘At times like this, she seems like a seer, and sometimes not.’
If this child really is a seer of the White Forest, she must be kept in Hezeight.
Until a hundred years ago, seers were harshly exploited and abandoned.
Glenn remembered the child trembling under his questioning, shoulders thin and fragile.
‘Too young to bear the greed of the world.’
Children should be children, Glenn’s rule.
The third prince, shrunk unnaturally for his age, deserved help. He said so.
And the child, with eyes full of melancholy like a dying old man, could not be ignored.
Eyes full of deep loneliness.
Perhaps even the younger sibling he lost long ago—whose face, name, and even gender he didn’t know—had eyes like these.
“You must always remain neutral, Glenn. Step back and watch from the sidelines. Never intervene in matters that could determine fate. Then the cost will surely come…”
‘Well, Mother, even if the cost comes someday, I want to live according to human duty for now.’
So why not play along with this seer?
The young man, quickly collecting his lonely gaze, followed Ariletti, who scampered away.
