My Youngest Keeps Bringing Home Male Leads - Chapter 20

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Episode 20
Silmare must have already known she was approaching, yet turned with a luminous smile as if discovering her only now.
Agnes smiled in return and crouched beside Silmare.
On the ground, a small, delicate seedling newly settled swayed in the breeze.
“I’m planting Marigold.”
“Marigold?”
“Yes. When summer comes, it will shine here with light like the sun itself.”
Oliver quietly rose and disappeared toward the other side.
He seemed distinctly uncomfortable, perhaps because Agnes was his employer.
Watching Oliver’s receding figure, Agnes asked him a question.
“You’re always together with Oliver, aren’t you.”
“Yes. He seems similar to me, so I feel at ease when we’re together.”
“When you were in the Naoupa Forest, did you always plant and tend flowers like this?”
“I did. I plant flowers I like in places I frequent often and care for them.”
“Sometimes I think I see you using Magic.”
“What sort of Magic?”
“You can speak with animals, and when plants pass through your hands, they seem to grow especially well.”
Agnes recalled a flower Silmare had planted some time ago.
In just a few days it had grown sturdy and vigorous—as if Silmare had poured generous nutrients into it.
Even the smallest plant at his side seemed happy enough to sing.
The Marigold seedling just planted was now gleaming with light.
Agnes found herself gazing at Silmare anew.
The man shining beneath the sunlight was dazzling to behold, yet strangely, being near him brought comfort.
It felt as though she had become grass or a tree that he tended.
Because of that, there was one thing that weighed on her mind—a thought she’d held while clearing away overgrown weeds in the Garden.
“When tending flowers, you have to pull out weeds that get in the way. Are you truly all right with that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Last time when we rode in the carriage, you seemed uncomfortable about binding a free horse. So I wondered.”
“Ah, that matter.”
Surprisingly, Silmare answered readily.
“That was because the horse didn’t like it.”
“The horse that was tied to the carriage?”
“Yes. Horses understand the hearts of those who travel with them. Just as Rois was willing to carry me and you, other horses also wish to help willingly those who love them.”
“Even difficult work like pulling a carriage? Won’t they feel hurt if you cut them down like useless weeds without asking?”
“That is true, but—”
Silmare’s fingertip lingered on a nameless wildflower that had to be pulled to plant the Marigold.
“The thing is, in the Naoupa Forest we don’t deliberately pull things up just because we’re planting flowers.”
“That’s what troubled me. I cleared away overgrown weeds while supposedly tending the Garden, but so many grass insects that lived among them must have disappeared too.”
“It seems I troubled you.”
“Yes, a little.”
Silmare’s perspective was novel.
Things humans took for granted seemed to appear differently through his eyes.
What would the world look like for someone who could hear the whispers not just of countless animals, but of trees and flowers on the wind?
Might my own living seem like trampling countless things?
Thinking so, Agnes laughed.
The change that had occurred in her seemed remarkable.
“It seems my heart has become quite at ease.”
“Yes?”
“Long ago I didn’t have the leisure for such thoughts. I was too busy working.”
Silmare watched Agnes, who laughed self-deprecatingly, with quiet eyes.
“I didn’t know you were thinking such things.”
“Is that strange?”
“No. Rather, I’m glad. It means you’re carefully considering how I might feel. For me, it’s nothing but gratitude.”
So he hesitated a moment, as if finding it difficult to speak carelessly, before opening his mouth again.
His voice carried a note as if he were consoling Agnes.
“Agnes, foxes eat rabbits. When eaten, the rabbit cries out. Then what do Fairies do? Do we save the rabbit, or let it be?”
“Ah, … I think you’d let it be.”
“Correct. And grass and flowers wither when winter comes. Sad, isn’t it. But do we Fairies keep flowers warm in greenhouses like humans do?”
“I don’t think you do.”
“And why do you think that?”
“It’s the way of nature. But it’s not easy to turn a blind eye to someone who’s suffering, is it? Don’t you feel sorrow at such things?”
“That’s true, but I don’t love every rabbit equally. Humans do feel sorrow at the deaths of strangers they barely knew, yet that sorrow doesn’t last long, does it?”
“No, I suppose it doesn’t.”
“Much like that, we too understand partiality. We love all living things, but there are certain beings we cherish and love in a special way.”
Silmare dried her hands on the cloth she’d placed beside her.
Dirt clung to the hem of Agnes’s dress as she crouched, and Silmare brushed it away with great care.
It was only a dress hem, yet she touched it as if handling something precious.
Watching this, my heart grew tight.
In that moment, Silmare whispered.
“That’s why I take joy in adorning this Garden beautifully. Because you will gaze upon it with happy eyes.”
The other’s emotion crashed over me like a tide, soft as foam.
Yet at the same time, it ran so deep I could not escape it.
An emotion incomprehensibly profound.
Wondrous, and yet I doubt whether I deserve to receive it.
“Why do you treat me with such regard?”
Even if I’m called the World Tree’s Companion, it’s merely a mark, and I’m just an ordinary person.
At this, Silmare’s eyes tilted down slightly.
Her hand rose as if to reach for Agnes, but then she seemed to realize she had only brushed away dust with the cloth, and lowered it again.
As if reluctant to do so, in a movement deliberately slow.
Though I knew it shouldn’t be so, time seemed to flow unnaturally thick and sluggish.
“When the time comes, you will understand everything.”
“Do you know something more than I do?”
“No, what I know will likely not differ greatly from what you know. But if my manner toward you feels special, it’s probably because the longing we harbor for the World Tree is unlike that of others.”
“We humans didn’t even know the World Tree existed.”
“That’s because humans live far shorter lives than we do. A thousand years is long enough to forget.”
“How long do fairies live?”
“Very long indeed. I’m still young by our standards.”
If two hundred years counted as youth, did fairies live five hundred? A thousand?
Amid these vast feelings, Agnes realized she was missing something crucial.
“Then what exactly is the World Tree?”
That was the core question—what the World Tree itself was.
It must be the reason Silmare and Kesenor both remained at her side.
Silmare’s gaze then left Agnes and drifted toward distant emptiness.
As if something ‘existed’ in that void of nothing but air.
“The World Tree, I’ve heard, is the very principle that governs this world—involved in every process by which wind and water flow, by which life sprouts and draws breath.”
“It doesn’t actually exist?”
“I cannot say for certain. But isn’t it strange? That you are called its Companion, and that someone like me could be called the seed of what the World Tree might become.”
As Agnes nodded, she realized that Silmare had been wrestling with precisely this question for two hundred years.
Yet Silmare had found no answer.
Not even in a life ten times longer than Agnes’s own.
Because nowhere could she find a clue to reach one.
Then Amy appeared.
To tell her that a Companion bearing the World Tree’s Mark truly existed—as Agnes.
Agnes thought she could finally understand the longing Silmare showed her.
It must be the same for Kesenor.
That joy which could not help but bloom when the object of a long, desperate search suddenly stood before you.
Yet the man before her possessed something Kesenor did not.
His eyes held a blind devotion turned wholly toward her.
Even though they’d known each other only days, there was not a shred of hesitation in his certainty that Agnes was a special being—and Agnes did not know what to say.
So she quietly averted her gaze.
Looking down, the half-planted seedlings waited, eager to be set into the earth.
Agnes awkwardly changed the subject.
“Could you show me how to plant a seedling?”
“Are you curious?”
Though Silmare surely understood Agnes’s intention, she willingly showed her the way.
She dug at the right spot, placed the seedling in the shallow hollow, and covered it again with soil.
The soft whisper near her ear felt ticklish.
So did the sunlight brushing the nape of her neck.
While Agnes focused intently on planting, her upper lip slightly pursed, Silmare gazed quietly at her profile.
Thinking that humans were beings who could never truly understand them.
That’s certainly how it sounded when I first learned of it.
‘Why do you keep wondering about us—about me?’
Perhaps that’s precisely why the World Tree chose you.
Because you’re someone who strives to understand and show consideration toward an incomprehensible being you’ve never once encountered before.
The cries of all living things that pour in from every direction have become as familiar to me now as the sound of wind.
Even Silmare found it remarkable, the way she gazed upon the ordinary with fresh eyes.
Not long after, the two of them remained suspended in that distant warmth until Lillia, the maidservant, came to find them.
“Miss!”
“What is it, Lillia?”
“The Duke is calling for you!”

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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