The Villainous Princess Wants to Live in a Gingerbread House - Chapter 36

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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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The Villainous Princess Wants to Live in a Pastry Shop
Chapter 36

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The Noishuetter Family’s estate, established in Jedo, was vast and imposing. It took more than ten minutes by carriage from the entrance before the main residence finally appeared.
Before the main residence, a line of strangely pallid servants stood to receive Kalno. He removed his coat and handed it to the Butler, then looked past the rows of attendants to the two figures standing furthest back. A middle-aged man and woman, their faces ashen as lead, could not even meet his gaze.
In the pale face of the man there was no trace of the sentiment one might expect upon meeting a fifteen-year-old son just returned from the battlefield. The woman beside him felt the same.
“I heard that even after the Victory Ceremony… you remained at the Imperial Heir’s Villa for several days. That the Emperor and the Imperial Heir have been generous with you is something we’ve long known, but still… even so….”
The middle-aged man continued haltingly, in a tone of reproach. Kalno, having returned from the battlefield only recently, had been staying at Alexei’s Villa in Jedo until now, and had only just come to the estate. He answered with indifference, as though it scarcely mattered.
“I thought it best not to arrive at the estate covered in blood fresh from the war. You might have been too startled otherwise.”
There was something gently mocking in his tone. At that, the man’s face went white. Kalno regarded him with an unmoved expression, passing by, and then, as if the thought had only just occurred to him, he glanced back over his shoulder and opened his mouth.
“Ah—Grandmother said that now the war has ended, you should return to the Territory. A formal letter will arrive shortly. If you don’t go, she said she’ll come herself.”
At the mention of his leisurely life in Jedo ending soon, a sound like a groan came from behind, but Kalno did not turn around.
Until he was seven, his parents had been cruel beyond measure. They claimed that the position of Duke of Sedvoyer could be held by any talented member of the family. But their ‘strictness’ might just as well be called ‘brutality’ and ‘cruelty.’
Their harshness toward their only son was not discipline—it was the thrill they derived from not seeing him as a child, but as someone grasping for their position, someone to be subjugated.
Yet his father himself had inherited the family name not through superior talent, but merely by marrying well. His long-festering inferiority complex had sprouted thorns in every direction—even toward his own child.
But all of that ended in the year Kalno turned seven, at the Spirit Ceremony. Since the moment he had contracted with the Death Spirit.
Kalno remembered that Spirit Ceremony day with crystalline clarity. He could see the vague, indistinct shape of a man with a length of fabric as black as pitch draped behind his back like feathers.
The Spirit had never appeared in history before, so at first people could not even identify it. The Duke of Sedvoyer seemed almost pleased that his son had contracted with a Spirit that appeared even more worthless than the Spirit itself.
But that base joy did not last long. The flowers in the flowerbed where Kalno’s hand had touched withered in an instant, then crumbled into black ash and scattered. The entire garden of the Noishuetter Manor had to be replanted that year. Not a single flower had survived.
After that, the cruel ‘education’ that had been carried out within the family vanished as if washed away. The official reason was that the Emperor began instructing him directly alongside the Imperial Heir, but everyone knew the truth.
Kalno’s parents had come to fear the power their son possessed—the power to kill a man with a single gesture. Kalno had never once found this sorrowful or lamentable. He had never been born with any desire for human connection, and that was as true for his own parents as for anyone else.
The power that made everyone fear and shun him was, to him, a stroke of extraordinary fortune. Even the fact that it drove him to live on the battlefield from boyhood onward was something he welcomed.
‘……But.’
As Kalno passed his parents and ascended to his room, he thought of the young girl. He had first seen her at the Victory Ceremony held in Jedo. A small girl standing beside Alexei on that high platform.
Pink hair like peonies in an old storybook garden, her eyes the pale green of a leaf—striking at first sight. But that impression had faded like a mirage, for the girl was the Imperial Heir whom the Emperor had kept at the Imperial Palace during this year’s Spirit Ceremony to be educated alongside Alexei.
And for some reason, whenever Kalno sought out Alexei to speak with him, the girl was there. He would never have imagined finding her in his companion’s presence.
He could not deny that in her childlike, innocent face he could find no evidence of guilt. But even if she harbored no such intent, her very position posed the risk of creating complications.
To Kalno, the girl was nothing more than that—a girl whose very status as Imperial Heir might prove problematic, even if she did nothing at all.
Yet at the victory ball, the girl had stood alone. She stood quietly, occasionally flexing her toes, and cast longing glances at the sweets on a distant table. Alexei and the Emperor were occupied, and though the Emperor had left her at the palace, she had contracted with a Spirit of no particular distinction, so no one paid her any mind.
When he approached her at Alexei’s request, Kalno had entertained the idle thought that since the occasion was Alexei’s, even if he ruined it, it would be acceptable. To put it plainly, he had thought it wouldn’t matter if the girl caught sight of him in the middle of the ballroom and burst into tears.

—Would you like something to eat? They say the spiced roasted chicken sandwich here is delicious.

It had been an age since anyone had privately offered him food, so for a moment he could say nothing at all. After that, he managed to string together a few words, but each of her responses scattered his composure.

—If you’re that worried, wouldn’t it be better if I became your very best friend?

As she said this, she looked up at him with a smile, as though engaged in a familiar, playful jest.

—…… Is that a specialty of yours? A manner of speaking?
—Talking the whole way through until you stop with “yes” or “no.”
—Look here!

Her face and voice were like those of someone in a sulk. Kalno found it nearly impossible to regain his composure in the face of a reaction no one had ever shown him before.
But when the girl grasped his sleeve, he was genuinely startled. His memories before contracting with the Spirit were distant and hazy, but before and since, no one except Alexei had ever come so close. And even Alexei, respecting him as he did, would never act in such a manner.
Even when he came to apologize, the girl had worn what seemed like a sulky expression. Puffing her cheeks and pouting her lips. When she laughed and reached out her arms at his mention of carrying her, Kalno briefly wondered if this were perhaps an illusion woven by the Nocti Elves.
Perhaps the war was still ongoing, perhaps he had never returned to Jedo, perhaps what he was seeing now was……
It was, needless to say, a foolish thought. But even when he dismissed that foolish notion, the question remained. Was she truly unafraid? Did she not know fear at being touched? Could she possibly be unaware of his Spirit?
When he saw her offer to the Head Chef even the sweets his own hand had touched, Kalno concluded that she knew nothing. For if she knew, she could not possibly act so.
Yet the girl had said she already knew. Kalno truly could not understand. And what he understood even less was why she had suddenly pulled him hastily from the Kitchen.
Because he had never once received such a look, it took him a moment to recognize it. The girl had acted as though she were concerned that he might be hurt.
But Kalno could not yet be certain his understanding was correct. He sat there for a long time, merely staring at the packaged sweets that had been placed on the table.

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Lis adjusted the bright floral arrangement in the vase with her fingertips, studying each petal as if trying to decipher some hidden meaning.
Kalno had visited Asha every day while she lay ill. Since she remained unconscious each time, he’d had to leave, yet he brought a different bouquet with him on every visit.
“Lis! Have some of this.”
“What? You’re… giving this to me?”
A small girl, barely reaching Lis’s waist, thrust forward a pastry wrapped neatly in crisp paper. Beneath hair that shimmered in rosy tones like peaches, emerald eyes gleamed with an almost liquid brilliance.
Looking into those eyes, Lis found herself recalling a thought from over a decade ago—that if one were to crush a bright emerald and dissolve it in water, it would glow exactly like this.
“Yes. Truth is, I made sandwiches for you on the day of the Victory Ceremony, but… I lost those.”
One moment she seems impossibly composed, and the next she’s utterly artless; and now again—
“I’m truly grateful, Your Highness. It is both a joy and an honor. But you should be resting.”
Lis tucked the pastries the girl had given her carefully into her apron pockets, then lifted her up and settled her back onto the bed before examining her ankles closely.
“I heard you went out with Kalno.”
When Lis had brought soup for the girl, she was nowhere to be found. A maid had been standing in the hall nearly in tears, babbling on and on: Kalno Noishuetter had come, he’d taken the Imperial Heir out, what could this possibly mean—
Even when Lis asked where the two had gone, the maid couldn’t answer. Lis had resolved to dismiss the stammering maid from Tymir Palace and hurried to find the girl, resentful that Kalno would drag someone in such poor health away, but uncertain of where they’d gone.
According to an attendant, the two had left the palace kitchen not long before, and so Lis, who had been standing restlessly outside the room, was able to see the girl returning in Kalno’s arms. The sight resembled a painting from some master’s brush.
The girl gave Lis no chance to speak, demanding a large box, then swept half of the pastries from the tray into it. Then she thrust the box at Kalno as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

– There! If you take it like this, that’s fine, isn’t it?

The girl seemed perfectly assured, and Lis wondered if she’d imagined things. Because Kalno had drawn a faint smile across his face.
‘That Kalno Noishuetter?’
The very man destined to rule the vast northern territories of Sedvoyer, who ever since contracting with the Spirit of Death had become synonymous with the grim reaper itself?
The one who during the war with the Nocti Elves monopolized every hellish rumor, who had built a tower of military merit so high that no one could even remember his age anymore? He smiled? And that smile faded so quickly with the breeze that it felt all the more unreal.

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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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