Kasser looked at her with an uncertain expression. He had heard the answer he wanted to hear from her, but somehow it wasn’t quite satisfactory. There seemed to be something important that was missing, but he wasn’t able to put a finger on it.
“But whatever my goal for our marriage was, there’s no need for you to fulfill that now. So there’s no need to go to the Sang-je to try to recover my memory for that reason.”
Even if Eugene went to the Sang-je, there was, of course, no hope of recovering her memory. Since the problem wasn’t actually memory loss, it was the fact that she had become a totally different person. And no matter how powerful the Holy One was, there was no way he could come up with an explanation, much less a solution, to this bizarre occurrence.
“So, I’ll decide when I go to the Sang-je. Don’t send out any royal orders to the Holy City.”
Kasser seemed unconvinced. “It’s not just about your memory.” He clarified. “It’s because your Ramita has been strange.”
“But I haven’t had any physical issues.” Eugene pointed.
“I’m also worried you may have overexerted your powers.” He had, at last, come clean of his reason to seek out the Sang-je.
“You mean the water might have run dry?”
Kasser recalled the vision of the water that had filled up the entire bedroom earlier. The foreign and queer feeling it gave, defeating all logic and rationale.
“Although that doesn’t seem likely to be the case.” Somewhere Eugene could connect this to the incident with the Lark, but there was no way she could say with certainty what more convince the man who had been through it. “If you’re that worried, there’s a solution. We can just find out whether it’s run dry or still fine.”
“How?” Kasser looked at her eagerly. If there was a way to bypass the Sang-je, he would merrily jump at it.
“We could test the seed-”
“Eugene!”
At Kasser’s raised voice, Eugene screwed her eyes shut. She knew she had touched the taboo, and how much this man was against that idea. Nonetheless, she had wanted to take a chance, hoping the incident would have influenced him. But it seems somethings remained.
As she opened her gleaming orbs again to look at him, she smiled playfully. “I don’t wanna go … please?”
As if possessed Kasser looked into her sparkling black eyes. His insides seemed to flutter as if something were floating around in there. He felt he would do anything for her.
“Do as you please, then.”
He suddenly felt he had become weak. Having always been stronger than others, it was his first time experiencing such a feeling of powerlessness. But the weirder thing was, he didn’t mind it.
After sunset the second day, Eugene went out of the castle to visit the Lark Tree. She’d had no intention to go undercover at first, but this time Kasser had insisted on it. And once she approached the tree, she realized why.
There was a sea of people gathered around the tree. In order to get through the crowd and closer to the tree, there was no way that she wouldn’t bump into other people. But Eugene was able to go forth easily thanks to Kasser’s protective maneuvers around her.
It’s nice to have someone tall and strong to open up the way.
They were ambling their way forward. Eugene only assumed it was due to the throng, but that wasn’t the only reason. They were slow because Kasser was busy pushing away the people around them who came even a little too close to Eugene. He didn’t like the idea of anyone touching her. It wasn’t just for her safety, he just didn’t like it.
After a lot of tugging and pushing, the pair of royalty finally made it to the fore and. There was a fence around the tree, and soldiers were guarding it. A little further around the first fence, there was also a second fence that had been put up. If the first fence was to protect the tree, the second one was to prevent people from coming near it.
The security is heavy, huh.
Eugene had heard of the rumors that were spreading around, so she understood the reason for the enclosures. But she was still a little sad. It would have been nice if people could have sat in the shade of the tree or just comfortably enjoyed its presence like with the tree in the town square.
Right then, she was brought out of her musings by the murmurings around her.
“This tree is even larger than I had expected from what I heard!”
“It was definitely worth a whole day’s walk to come and see it. Even just looking at it, it seems sanctified.”
“Was this tree really a Lark?”
“They say that as soon as the queen showed up, the Lark trembled on the ground in fear.”
“I heard that all she had to do was say, ‘Become a tree!’ and it did!”
As she listened to all the ramblings around her, Eugene flushed. She had heard of the rumor that a branch of the tree could become a charm to chase away Larks, but here it seemed that rumors far beyond that were already starting to spread.
She felt embarrassed to listen to these people praising her to each other while confidently telling these ridiculous stories as if they had seen it themselves.