The Falcon Princess

Chapter 9

“It’s like you really do understand.”

Normally, she would have gotten angry at Valhyle for being such a suspicious man, but the fact that he kept talking to her was rather comforting in her current condition. Being unsure of whether a bird was understanding human language was a sign that he hadn’t completely lost his mind.

Valhyle took something out of the willow basket on his desk, and Zelly stared at it.

Oh, I know what that is.

It was hardtack. It was made to be very dense so as to provide the maximum amount of energy and dried for a very long time until it was hard enough to break one’s teeth.

Zelly shivered as Valhyle crumbled the rock-hard biscuit in his fingers. That was the hand that had choked her. He dusted off his hands and raised his brow at her.

“Eat.”

Zelly blinked in confusion. Huh? Did he just break that up for me?

The commander stared at her incredulously, as if he thought it was strange that a bird would just stand there in front of food.

W-well, I want to stop him from looking at me like that, so… Zelly pecked at the crumbs on his desk and ate them. Ooh, this is more tasty than I thought.

After making sure she was eating, Valhyle closed the willow basket.

“I told those people to feed you cooked meat. Did you eat cooked meat?”

This man would not stop with the questions! The way he carried on even though he knew there would be no reply made her wonder if he was ridiculing her for being a bird that could understand but not reply.

But wait… What did he just say? He told them to give me cooked meat? That was included in the tiny secret message?!

Now that she thought about it, all the food she’d eaten at the Ropeche base was cooked. Zelly was so shocked that it was in Valhyle’s orders that she nearly choked on the piece of biscuit she was swallowing. What was with this unnecessary attention to detail? Was this the time to be writing stuff like that in secret messages?

She nearly exploded with anger, but that only lasted a moment. It was clear that she would have starved there if he hadn’t told them to feed her cooked meat. Eating raw meat was still too much for her. If she hadn’t eaten, she wouldn’t have been able to return, and if she hadn’t come back… Then she wouldn’t have been able to deliver the secret message to Valhyle.

Whoa. A shiver ran down her spine as she glanced at the commander. He’s smarter and more meticulous than I thought. For the first time ever, she thought it was a good thing that he was an ally.

She was pecking away at the crumbs when Valhyle spoke again.

“I wouldn’t have believed you if you didn’t have scratches on you. I would have killed you on sight,” he continued.

Zelly jerked her head up as he confessed his intention to murder her.

Valhyle brusquely added, “Beasts do not do anything that would cause them harm because all they have is their instinct to survive. But the fact that you have scratches on you…”

The look on his face told her that he hadn’t expected her to prove him wrong.

“It means you were attacked, which was obviously Granor’s doing.”

Zelly stared directly into his eyes as he slowly continued speaking.

“A group of Granorian scouts started sniffing around a week ago. They were probably the ones who attacked you.”

Zelly gasped. A week ago? She left for Ropeche four days ago. Then… She glared at Valhyle. So he knew the scouts would attack me but didn’t tell me?

He ignored her glare and continued, “If Granor knew who you were, they wouldn’t have attacked you. But they did, and because I saw that, I could let go of my suspicions regarding the secret message you brought us before. I’ve decided you are not an enemy bird.”

Zelly trembled from the sense of betrayal. He put my life on the line to make that decision?!

“The secret you delivered this time wasn’t that important,” he said coldly. “But it’ll be different from now on. You flew around the Granorian base and came back alive…”

He paused.

“And we have proof that you’re not on their side.”

Zelly shook her head, getting the crumbs off her beak.

I was complacent. She could feel that her life was in danger around Valhyle. She’d trusted him too much in a difficult situation just because he was from her country. Her senses were alerting her. Danger, danger, danger. Run away. She had to run away from this place.

Zelly pulled on the cord attached to her leg, which made his eyebrows shoot up. Then he grabbed her tightly so she couldn’t fly up. She squeezed her eyes shut in fear as his icy voice crept into her ears.

“If you can express yourself to me, then who says you can’t do that to the enemy? Hundreds, thousands of lives are at stake with every secret. Did you think I’d be able to trust the secret message you brought back last time so easily?”

He gritted his teeth. “Especially when it was about the royal children.”

Zelly tried not to breathe for the longest time and stayed still. As she waited, Valhyle let his grip loosen. He sighed and then let her go, rubbing his face with his hands.

“What am I doing…?”

She had barely taken a breath when he muttered, “I can’t believe I thought a bird might really understand me.”

It seemed like he’d finally realized he was talking to a bird.

Valhyle once again reached out to Zelly, who instinctively flinched and took a step backward. He wasn’t rough when he took hold of her and placed her back in her cage.

“What we decided at this meeting will become your next delivery mission.”

Then, the commander turned and walked back to his desk to start examining the map again.

* * *

A few days passed, and Zeline’s cage was still in Valhyle’s barracks. She had yet to find out why her name had come up during that meeting. But from the large amount of intel she’d picked up while she was getting her wings treated these past few days, she was fairly convinced there was a chance her eldest and second-eldest sisters were still alive.

Of course, Rohaneim was looking for any and all royal children to continue the monarchy, but they would obviously pour more resources into finding the eldest sisters because they supported a continuation of the monarchy. If Rohaneim had been protecting the capital, they most likely would have extracted her sisters themselves when the palace was being taken over. However, Ropeche had taken on that role. After escaping the castle with the Ropeche soldiers, they lost contact.

Zelly puffed up her chest feathers and let them settle again.

If I think about it, I ran away with the Ropeche soldiers too. Sadly, they failed to protect her, and perhaps they failed to protect her sisters as well. Even so, Rohaneim still had hope, and so did Zelly. And when she was hopeful, there was always a reason.

The Granor State didn’t publicly execute her eldest sister, who was the best candidate for the next monarch. If one considered the military history of Granor, that certainly would have happened as soon as they got their hands on her. She also didn’t hear that her second-eldest sister had died. It was noteworthy that Rohaneim hadn’t yet received news of her sister’s death because her second-eldest sister, Demyra, was betrothed to Valhyle. If Demyra died within Roymund’s territory, there was no way Rohaneim wouldn’t know about it.

Of course, there was a negative side to this. If her eldest sisters had gotten away and were alive, they would have tried to contact Ropeche and Rohaneim, but neither army knew anything about them. Zelly tried to analyze the situation, and her guess was that the odds of them being alive were a little more than half. She believed her sisters were alive. If they were, then there was hope for Roymund as well.

Hoot, hoot. An owl hooting outside indicated that it was already late. A chilly wind blew through the thin fabric walls of the barracks. It was a quiet night, one where the wind rustling through the fabric could be heard.

Valhyle studied Granor’s movements deep into the night. He was leaning toward the map, his eyes fixed on it and his face illuminated by the lamp on his desk. His elegant nose, sharp jaw, and that little dip beneath his lips were all shrouded in a shadow that cut straight across his face, revealing both the pain and the beauty in his face. The air was cold around the straight-laced, austere commander and the angular lines of his face.

Zelly gazed at that face from inside her cage. He had black hair and dark gray eyes—there was not a single spot of color on him. Gray could be considered a cloudy color when placed near black and white, but because his eyes were that color, they felt like pools of freezing water on a clear night. Zelly kept looking at his eyes, then thought of her sister again. She’d started thinking of her earlier and couldn’t stop. She was the second princess of Roymund and the fiancée of the man sitting over there—Commander Valhyle.

Demyra.

Zeline was curious to know what Valhyle must be feeling, not knowing the status of his fiancée.

What is feeling? Could it be anxiety? Is he sad? Or…

Zelly ruffled her feathers, relaxing her stiff body.

Is he like me, feeling nothing?

Even if he didn’t have any personal feelings, was he hoping she was alive just for the security of the country?

Demyra’s engagement to Valhyle was not a rash decision. Yes, it was an arranged political marriage, but the two of them had been unofficially engaged for years. After Linbethy married the general of Ropeche, she urged Demyra to make a match with Rohaneim. That meant she would marry one of the sons from a leading family of Rohaneim. And the one family that was their undisputed leader was the Rumares family.

Valhyle Rumares. Zelly ruminated on his name again. A few years ago, when Demyra had gotten engaged to him, his name suddenly became terrifying to her, as if it were a ghost. If she got involved, she would die. Zelly reminded herself of that until it couldn’t be erased.

Valhyle and Demyra weren’t officially engaged, but they weren’t idiots—they knew this marriage would happen. Linbethy was trying to bring the whole of the pro-queen faction to her side through her sister, so who else would be on the other side other than the Rumares family?

Zelly crossed off Valhyle’s name in her mind with red paint and continued to do what she had been doing, which was hiding and running away from him. And those things weren’t easy. In order to not get caught up in his business, she had to know things about him. She couldn’t run into him, not even by chance, so she knew his general routes.

He generally stayed at the Black Barrier and carried out his duties as commander-in-chief of Rohaneim. He did so even when it wasn’t wartime. There were only a few months out of the year when he’d stay in the capital. Most of the time, the reason he came to the capital was to take care of political business as Rohaneim’s general, and if he stayed more than a week, it was to attend whatever unavoidable social event he was required to.

In recent years, Valhyle was Demyra’s escort to these social events—that was probably the reason he couldn’t avoid them in the first place. Either way, Zelly tried her best to avoid him, and thanks to that, she only had a vague idea of what he looked like. Valhyle probably couldn’t remember her, either.

Which was a good thing when I wasn’t a bird…

She wondered if it might have been a good thing for her to make at least one connection. If she had, there’d at least be a chance that someone was looking for her.