Author: Thank you for always reading my chapters! All of your impressions and bookmarks are very encouraging for me. Thank you so much! (´；ω ；｀)
T/N: This comment is referring to people who leave their impressions and bookmarked her work on ncode. If you want to do that, I have listed all the steps to creating an ncode account .
Oh, and a heads up, there were not a lot of description in the raws about who said what, so I put who I thought was saying the dialogue in parentheses.
Broken Engagement and Punishment 5
“Sister, wait a second. Didn"t these ladies pin all of their own crimes on you?”
“Oh? So you do know what happened, Alten Liehct-sama.”
Flora is still oppressively sneering at Liechten, making his face distort once again. You"ll really have to forgive her, her personality has always been like this.
“If that"s the case, then why…..”
Flora and Aisha laugh as Liechten mumbles about our happy and intimate reunion.
I heave a great sigh. For now, I guess I should bring everyone to the guestroom.
“…… so it was like that? In order to break the engagement between my sister and His Highness Elouan, you purposely and very obviously hara.s.sed his lover, and then you blamed it all on my sister?” asks Liechten.
“That"s right. And they never even leaked a word to me about it!” I cried.
“Oh, Cezara! Don"t be angry~!” (T/N: Not sure… Elena maybe? Or Aisha?)
“Isn"t it natural that I would be angry? Just what were you thinking? It"s dangerous to mess around with royal affairs! If anything had gone wrong, you"d be lucky to just be disowned by your family and sent off to a convent.” (T/N: Cezara)
“That"s why we made sure not to make any mistakes. I mean, I was there, after all. What could have possibly gone wrong?
And besides, we only ever did trivial things? It was all stuff like being sarcastic to her or putting bugs in her hair…. though one time we did ‘spill" wine on her dress. It was actually quite amusing watching that shameless ditz causing such an exaggerated fuss over it.” (T/N: Flora)
“Even if it was trivial, if His Highness kept on believing it was your faults, what would you have done? And Aisha! That day, why did you smile?1 If you are going to do something, do it right all the way to the end! If someone else had seen you, I can"t even imagine what sort of pretext you could have made up as an explanation for that.”(T/N: Cezara)
“….Yeah…. I had been like, super nervous.” (T/N: Aisha)
Hearing this, Flora heaves a huge sigh and her eyes lose focus, probably thinking back to that day.
If it had been that dreadful, you guys shouldn"t have done anything in the first place!
“Wa, wait a second please. Why would you purposely put yourselves in the line of fire like that?” (T/N: Liechten)
“Because, we couldn"t bear to watch anymore. Ever since Cezara officially became engaged to His Highness Elouan, she has been becoming more and more expressionless. It had gotten to the point where she continuously wore that awful, fake smile plastered on her face.”
At Flora"s words, Liechten jerks his head to look back at me.
Was I really like that? Thinking back, that hadn"t been my intention at all.
It"s just that with each pa.s.sing day, as I was taught what it means to be the fiancée of a prince, no matter how much I didn"t want to, I was getting closer and closer to the path of becoming a queen.
“It"s easy to imagine the immense pressure one has as the fiancée candidate of a prince: you have to undergo strict training on how to be a queen, and there is always the stress of not being good enough for that position. Not to mention, you are constantly being watched by the people around you and so there is also the strain of having to be perfect at all times. We all have a deep understanding of the burden this brings because we were also fiancée candidates and have gone through the exact same things.” says Elena, calmly.
At these words, Flora begins to tear up but tries to hide it by taking a sip of her black tea.
“Man, and what a h.e.l.lish 10 years that was!”
“Wasn"t that one less year for you?” retorts Flora, but Aisha merely inclines her head to the side says, “Oh. Is that how it was?”
10 years. We met and encouraged each other through 10 years of a Queen"s education. And then after the prince"s fiancée was officially decided, we spent another 3 years together at the academy. We"ve already been friends for 13 years now! Thinking this, Cezara can"t help but feel grateful to have such amazing friends.
She had met the Florence Matrove and Elena Lodette, Marquis"s daughters, when they were all three years old. Their parents had taken them to the royal castle for a tea party without any sort of explanation.
From that day on, the three of them continued going to the castle every day where they earnestly studied and took various lessons.
“We seem to be something called fiancée candidates.”
“Really? Is that why we have to take all these lessons?” (T/N: Cezara)
“You didn"t know, Cezara?”
“No? Whose fiancée? ….Hmm, maybe Father did say something about this?”
“His Highness, Elouan. The second prince.”
“Oh, really?”
“Cezara, aren"t you interested?”
“Well, are you two interested?”
“No,” they both replied.
It"s pretty pitiful that when Flora, Elena, and I had this conversation, we still hadn"t caught even a glimpse of the second prince yet.
It was one year later that Aisha from the Marquis Petigree family joined us.
She was one year younger than us, and full of innocent naivete, so we three ended up treating her like our little sister. She was always making a mess of things, but we still became very affectionate towards her (though Flora was more Spartan than affectionate).
T/N: Sorry about the confusion of who is saying what. For that flashback, I have no way of telling if Elena or Flora were talking! Also, thank you to everyone"s well wishes about my exams!! They are all over for this semester ? I"m FREE! For two weeks, and then summer term starts XD But I"m am hopping to get in a lot of translating for you guys in the meantime!
1In the first chapter, I translated her smile as a sneer, but clearly that wasn"t the case. The word that was used is typically just a smile, but it can be a sneer, and under those circ.u.mstances I a.s.sumed it had to be the latter. I have changed it back to a regular smile now in the first chapter. Sorry for the mistake!!↩