Mei Ruan April 18th, 20XX

“Lillian”

The shadow fairy stared at me with a conflicted expression but tightened her lips into a straight line, determined not to say a word. Her heavy-lidded eyes looked at me with a coy look and backed up her meaningful silence.

I didn’t respond to her uncharacteristic playfulness and looked into the distance. We were already a day late. I couldn’t risk extending the time even further.

Jaya had attempted to escape her holding cell earlier, and it had taken me a while to get her back in there. The specialist to remove her magic had yet to arrive, so she was as strong and vicious as ever. I’d hoped that being stripped of her power would make her realize what she’d done so wrong, but if there was one thing she was consistent with, it was letting me down.

My fluttermoth let out a discontent whine as the servants hooked it up to the elegant carriage. In the century I’d had it, I’d only hooked it to a saddle about four times, and it had hated it then too. Thankfully, it was more mature now and didn’t refuse to fly anymore.

I’d gotten it as a gift for finishing my mandatory military service. Since the Ruan clan’s principal claim to fame was our military, I’d started much earlier than my peers.

I’d resented it back then, but at least I was one of the youngest Fluttermoth owners in the queendom. There were only a few hundred of them, and even fewer of them were compatible with being raised in captivity.

Lillian coughed again to draw my attention, and this time her eyes stuck to what I was wearing. Her lips stiffened, and she refused to speak about what her eyes said.

I knew why she didn’t speak, but seeing her act all coy put me in a foul mood.

Why did I have to play these types of games with my caretaker?

Lillian rarely played around, and I usually appreciated the few moments that she did, but this time only put me in an impatient mood.

Aruna had given me a portrait of him the other day, and it had caught me off guard. It was a poorly drawn sketch, but it was enough to draw my attention and interest.

As a general, I spent a lot of time on the battlefield. The few years I spent at home were occupied by training, doing petty tasks for Jaya, and engaging in pointless politics.

I occasionally spent some time with Akseli, but I found little entertainment in soothing him out of whatever fit he’d worked himself into. He tried his best to keep my attention and wasn’t any worse than any other males at his station. But he’d been just as much of a chore as any of my other obligations.

Well, all that was to say that I had spent little time with the fairer sex of the species.

“What is it?”

She only looked at me blankly, but her own eyes betrayed her and lingered on the clothing I had put on for the day. I straightened out my shoulders from the hunched position they had somehow taken on, exchanging embarrassment for bluster.

“This is the one and only chance for the clan to be a part of the Royal line. I understand that, but you can’t deny that the way we’re going about it is shameful.”

Depending on a wartime promise between my other and the prince’s mother?

That was the type of tactic a village folk would use to trap a lower city noble. It was almost humiliating for people at our station to employ such a plan.

“I can put aside my pride and present myself as a bargain deal, but I see no point in dressing myself up like a doll as I do so.”

She stiffened as she remembered I wasn’t just going out ‘courting’. I was going to cheat the royal family and sell myself; it was for an excellent price, but it wasn’t anything noble.

“Mei! MEI!”

Aruna hurtled into me at full speed and, using my instinctual resistance to harming her, both as my little sister and the duchess, she tackled me onto the ground and transferred the gauzy mass of cloth she had in her arms.

“You ABSOLUTELY cannot go to visit the prince wearing your armour! Are you going to propose marriage or war?!”

She shook out the clothes she had brought and revealed it to be a long transparent flowing robe that could comfortably fit over my light armour but somehow made it look... Vulgar.

“Aruna... have you spent so much time in the human world that you forgot where you were?”

Her slight frame shivered, and she looked up at me almost resentfully, as if reproaching me for even coming up with such a notion.

“What nonsense are you spewing? Between learning everything about the dukedom and managing the intelligence network, I haven’t even had time to sleep! That reminds me!”

Using the strength she had gotten from taking Jaya’s magic (as well as my unwillingness to resist), she pulled the robes over me. She then climbed onto Lillian, making the shadow fairy incredibly uncomfortable.

Aruna cheekily buried her face into Lillian’s chest and said in a muffled voice,

“You can’t take Lillian. Seriously, the dukedom will collapse.”

She bounced between speaking formally and childishly, which made her difficult to understand and keep up with. I didn’t scold her since she had a hard enough time learning under our mother, but she’d have to grow out of that soon.

Lillian’s primary job, besides being our caretaker, was to spearhead the intelligence network of the Ruan clan. I hadn’t even considered taking her to the royal family with me, but it looked like Aruna had worried.

The older fairy finally spoke up of her own volition, choosing to throw me under the bus to distract the little beast that was now the duchess of the Ruan clan.

It had been less than a week since we’d successfully unseated Jaya, so I became unused to not having Lillian by my side as a primary subordinate. I’d have to look through my soldiers and pick out an appropriate replacement.

I’d initially resisted having an Aide, but after working with the highly efficient Lillian, I struggled to return to doing things independently.

“The duchess is correct, general. Details aside, you are still going to propose to the royal family. The robe may seem vulgar to you, but out of all the fashion in the capital, this is the one most suited to you.”

I could see that neither of them planned to back down on this.

Reluctantly, I fixed the robe onto my shoulders and grudgingly let Aruna put two heavy bronze orbs into my ears. She then directed the servants she had brought to loosen half my hair from the tight bun I kept it in. They pulled that half over my shoulders and stylishly arranged it around my back while they captured the rest of it in a tight ponytail at the top of my head.

I refused to have my eyesight obstructed simply for fashion. So despite her whining, Aruna could only give up on the bangs that would ‘frame’ my face. She really spent too much time engaging in human content.

Although the style was popular with the politicians and scholars in the capital, I was uncomfortable. The robes were too flamboyant, and all the extra fabrics would make it difficult to keep track of a group of enemies, although that could be a fun training exercise. The hair would be an easy grab for an enemy to immobilize me in combat.

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I preferred my original style, which was a training uniform and some light armour over it. We kept our hair short and/or tied up out of our faces. My hair was pretty long, but the only reason for that was because of Jaya’s hints that I should cut it all off.

“It’s see-through! Why couldn’t I just wear the armour then?”

They ignored me as I tried to protest and hurried me into the carriage as soon as the servants finished my hair and I had met Aruna’s standards.

It was a relatively brief carriage ride and only took a few hours. I hadn’t realized just how close the Ruan family’s lands were to the palace.

Even though I’d acted arrogantly before, I was still nervous about how this would go down. The royal needed the Ruan family almost more than we needed them, but who could tell how things would go.

It lessened some of my worries when the late queen’s personal aide greeted us at the gates to the palace. I couldn’t help but frown a bit as she spoke in an annoying, ingratiating tone that hadn’t changed a bit since the last time we met.

She was many decades older than I was, but we’d done our military services around the same time. I had taken little note of her back then, but the little I remembered didn’t give me the best impression of her.

“Mei Ruan! It’s a pleasure to meet you! It’s been so long! You are still as beautiful as always.”

I scowled as she complimented me on something so insignificant and only went into a worse mood as she continually fawned over me.

“Esmeralda.”

Like a clam, her mouth slammed shut as if protecting a precious pearl, and she quickly led us into an open stadium. There were two expensive couches in the center, and a throne sat a distance away.

The single room was almost larger than my entire building back home and humbled me. I’d only been to the castle once in the past, but I remembered the intense sense of awe I’d felt then. The feeling returned in full as I went to the side wall waited for his highness to arrive.

Golden doors at the other end of the space swung open, and the prince flew into the room with a large and intimidating entourage behind him.

On his left side was the younger of the Gagnon sisters, and on his right was the elder. I’d known that they were royal aides, so it made sense that they’d taken over the roles of guarding the last active member of the royal family.

Despite knowing it on a logical level, it was still amazing to see them in person.

I’d learned about them in the military, and each story I’d heard sounded wilder than the next.

Cambridge was most famous for defeating an entire army without a single casualty on her side. I’d studied her strategies millions of times, but a lot of them went over my head.

The next was Corin. Her legends were much more uncomplicated than her younger sisters. Despite her warm appearance, she was a war demon on the battlefield and supported her sister’s subtle warfare with straightforward carnage when the time came.

The two had retired out of the battlefield after becoming royal aides and had agreed to have their powers sealed by the queen. They were currently weaker than their past selves, but it would be more than foolish to make enemies of them.

Despite their powers being sealed at the moment, I knew I could only win a victory against the two if I could separate them, and even that would come at a high cost.

Aside from their overbearing combat legacies, the two were most known for their loyalty to the queen and their overprotectiveness over the prince.

It was a popular joke that the prince had learned to fly before he could walk because the two had never let his feet touch the ground.

The prince was only seventeen, and we’d been right in the middle of a war when he was born and for a while after.

I looked at the beautiful man in front of me and tried to align the image with the cause of a sizeable interspecies war that had crippled three independent races.

But to be fair, he had also ended the war when his parents had died, and he had disappeared.

The popular narrative was that he spent all of his time in the human world playing around and ignoring his duties as the last remaining member of the royal family. He was still young, so the rumours hadn’t quite become malicious. They were relatively petty for now, but it was only a matter of time. The public hadn’t seen him for more than a decade, and the palace had been silent.

For all anyone knew, they were as good as the truth.

We finished the tedious formalities and walked back to our seats. I tried my best to focus on the inane chatter Esmeralda continuously threw at me, but the prince entranced me.

He had large, mischievous green eyes, short, lightly curled hair that framed his oval face, and long eyelashes that nearly touched his cheekbones when he blinked. Vitality and curiosity rolled off him as he looked around the room in a daze; it was as if each scene that entered his line of vision was a beautiful painting. His gold hair whipped back and forth with every movement he made and worked together with the single ray of sunlight that trickled onto the throne to create a halo around his head.

He didn’t pay attention even as Lillian performed the frankly insulting mockery of a bow.

Although she only did so under my orders, I still flinched in annoyance at the sight. After all, any duchy’s primary loyalty was to the crown, even if it was just a prince.

What a schemer I was, to make a plan that insulted even myself.

Corin and Cambridge tensed, and their hands went to their weapons in a synchronized motion, but they couldn’t spill blood in the throne room without explicit permission. They instead settled for glaring at the both of us with murderous gazes.

We both waited for him to flip out and order to have Lillian killed. I gripped the Royal exemption tablet in hand, prepared to take it out before he could finish the order, but we were rather sorely let down.

“Corin, that thing up there-“

He ignored the space’s tense atmosphere and pointed at a feliora that had made its way into the hall. It was a six-tailed variant, which was rare, and had a bright blue coat.

It must have benefited from growing up around the castle and feeding on the magic enriched plants and vermin.

Corin looked frustrated and tried to redirect his attention to Lillian, but he staunchly refused to look at her and tugged at her sleeve.

“Can you please catch it for me?”

She still looked frustrated but didn’t insist on pursuing the matter. She undocked her crossbow and waved to a worker to fetch the beast.

He gratefully thanked the servant that had fetched the beast for him and beamed a charming smile that made even Lillian soften.

“Why don’t we all take a seat?”

I belatedly realized that he’d purposefully defused the situation as we returned to the luxurious couches in the middle of the room.

But why would he do that?

At first, discreetly, I continued to analyze him, but seeing as he didn’t seem to mind, I continued less covertly even as I conversed with Esmeralda.

His looks overwhelmed half of my impression of him, but the other half was the staggering amount of magic he generated.

I had heard of this effect before, and my mother had spoken about it a million times, yet I hadn’t believed her.

After all, wasn’t it just magic? Even if it felt a little cleaner, it wasn’t like it’s had any direct combat benefits, was my line of thought. It was only after directly experiencing it I realized how wrong I was.

A look to the side showed me that Lillian felt the same effect, but not nearly as potently. Maybe it was because she was less sensitive to magic than I was.

Being in his presence was like coming into a clear field after being surrounded by city smog your entire life. I felt the urge to cast a million spells just to have this magic course through me and replace the remnants of the old, unclean magic I’d been using up till now.

He was half-goblin, so I hadn’t thought the Royal specific ability would show so strongly in him.

Although I’d only directly felt a royal’s magic once before, I could tell that the prince’s ability didn’t pale compared to those before him.

Esmeralda’s actions validated my thoughts. She had been by the previous queen’s side, so she must have been familiar with the last queen’s magic. The fairy had an enthralled expression as she took in the feeling, but the expression fell off her face every time she looked at the prince and remembered the source.

I made a mental note to investigate why she seemed so resentful of him.

Regardless of whatever was going on with her, the prince was currently the only active member of the royal family. As his mother’s personal aide, she should have been more protective than Corin and Cambridge.

And even if she wasn’t the maternal sort, she should at least have had some sense of self-preservation. Mother’s aide or not, once he got married, there would be nothing stopping him from kicking her out of the castle.

Even if she planned on hanging onto the prince’s grandmother when she ascended from ‘rest’, did she really think the old queen would choose her side over that of her grandson?

Lillian took over conversing with Esmeralda and left me at the mercy of my thoughts and emotions. Curiosity and greed overcame me, and I stretched out a thin tube of magic toward the prince. I’d only intended to funnel a bit of the pure magic and save it for later. The task absorbed me so deeply that it came as an intense shock when I felt it snap and disintegrate.

The first emotion I felt was rage, much like an alcoholic who had their second glass of wine snatched from them. But a feeling of amusement followed closely.

Just as I’d thought, he wasn’t a dunce after all.

I waited for him to call attention to my actions and use it to take revenge for the disrespectful bow of earlier, but was even more pleasured when he didn’t.

He returned his attention to the feliora and fed it orb after orb of the magic I’d so desperately tried to funnel away earlier.

My earlier fears of a prince that resembled my elder sister were long gone, and I let myself free to hold a favourable impression of the prince.

As a member of the royal family, a bit of cockiness was to be expected. After all, if a member of the royal family couldn’t exalt themselves, then who could?

No, my fears had been that he would be unconfident in himself and would seek validation by trampling on others, much like my elder sister had.

Lillian and Esmeralda left the room in a grand procession, and soon the prince and I were the only occupants of the giant room.

He looked startled and slightly annoyed, but he said nothing and bounced between ignoring my blatant staring and trying to match it with a frankly adorable attempt to glare at me as well.

“Pleased to meet you, your highness. My name is Mei Ruan.”