Chapter 1
The courtyard was silent as I pushed the wheelchair with all my strength. The only sounds around us came from the squeaking wheels and me.
He even reminded me, “Keep daydreaming and you’ll run me into the door.”
I snapped back to my senses and realized the Crown Prince’s nose was a hair’s breadth from the door.
“Forgive me, Your Highness!”
Afterward, I poured him a cup of tea, then quietly dropped to my knees before him. “Your Highness, by all means, kill his entire family—but could you spare me? I haven’t even been part of his household for two hours. I can leave at once and tell everyone under heaven I got lost and never made it through the door, so I’m not one of them…”
He watched me in silence. “Tell me. Why did you pretend to be mute?”
Now, that was a long story.
I sat up in a flash and immediately began telling him the whole saga from the beginning.
I had been a chatterbox since infancy. Other babies cried. I babbled and muttered and hummed and gurgled and wailed.
Father thought I had some strange illness and called countless physicians to examine me, but none found anything wrong. At last, a retired imperial physician living back in his hometown came over and held me for ages. I went ee-ee-ee, so he went ee-ee-ee. I went ah-ah-ah, so he went ah-ah-ah. I went oh-oh-oh, and he—
The Crown Prince finally broke in. “Get to the point.”
“Oh, right. Anyway, the old gentleman said there was nothing wrong with me. I merely wanted to talk before I knew how, so all I could manage was ee-ee-ee and oh-oh-oh.
“While he was at it, he read my fortune. He said I would be talkative my whole life—that I would not leave this world until I had said everything I needed to say. But I’m also painfully blunt. I talk too much without thinking, so I was bound to make trouble someday.”
“What sort of trouble did you make?”
“Oh, I learned to talk when I was one. Father flirted a little with a newly hired maid, and she laughed so happily. Seeing that made me happy, so I quickly learned what he’d said and repeated it to cheer Mother up. Then Mother beat Father and threw the maid out. When I was three, I heard Eldest Sister tell Second Sister she liked a certain scholar and ask her to deliver a letter. The moment Second Sister left, Eldest Sister ran crying to Father and Mother and told them to catch her, and then—”
“When I was five, a very important little brat came to our house. Everyone fawned over him, but I saw him secretly devour a mountain of sweets. When I offered him some, he put on a cold face and lectured me that gentlemen did not care for sweets. I got annoyed and called him a fraud with crumbs all over his mouth—”
“…Enough. I understand why you pretended to be mute.”
“I haven’t reached that part yet.”
“You don’t need to! Instead of telling me why you pretended to be mute, tell me how you managed to keep quiet.”
“But I didn’t.”
“…You…didn’t?”
“That is a long story.”
“It had better not be!”
“All right, all right. Later, Father could no longer stand my incessant chatter and habit of blurting out the truth, so he summoned that old imperial physician again to ask what could be done. The old man took off his outer robe, revealing Daoist robes beneath, and said he would draw a talisman for me.”
Judging by the Crown Prince’s expression, he had given up trying to interrupt me. Perhaps he had realized that whenever he cut one story short, another sprang up to take its place. Since he had to listen either way, he might as well save his breath.
“Mother said the talisman would keep me mute until after my sixteenth birthday. Today is my sixteenth birthday.”
When I finished, I looked at him cautiously. He looked back. With those sharp brows and star-bright eyes, he was really quite handsome. Shame he was blind.
“Aren’t you going to ask why I’m pretending to be blind?”
“What? You’re pretending? You aren’t actually blind?”
He stared at me for a good while before realizing I was not mocking him. I truly had not noticed.