“Phew…”
As soon as she closed the door, silence came. She sighed in relief and looked back. Inside the cabin was immersed in peaceful darkness.
‘Are the children surprised? Now I have to act like nothing happened.’
When she took her hand out of her pocket, the children who were holding her fingers one by one dangled out.
“Who were those people? Are they here to catch us again?”
She wanted to say no, but since they had already heard it, lying would be useless.
“Huh… I’m scared.”
Luca rubbed his face against the inside of her knuckles, and the water collected.
“It’s fine. Now that it’s over, good kids should sleep, right? I’ll make you a bed of walnut shells, so just wait patiently here.”
The children, who were shivering, forgot what they had done a little while ago as soon as they were served on the table.
“Wow! Everything has grown so much!”
“It’s not like that, you guys have become smaller.”
“Hazel is getting bigger too! Fresh!”
The two children jumped across the table laughing. Luna put a flower bud the size of her fingernail that had fallen from her vase on her head like a hat and looked at herself in the polished silver jug.
“It’s a cookie!”
Finding cookie crumbs under the teacup saucer, Luca clapped his hands as if he had found a treasure. He was more troubled than holding something small in his hands and eating it.
‘Eating sweets tonight. Should I take it?’
But to do so with just one cookie crumb was a bit of an understatement.
While taking walnuts from the cupboard, splitting them, and rolling cotton and wool softly into the empty peel, the children rode the spout of the silver kettle like a slide and swam through the sugar bowl.
“Eat it!”
“Oh! Don’t eat! That is against the rules.”
She would allow the cookie crumbs, but she wouldn’t watch them eat the sugar while pretending to play. When she carefully picked the children up with her fingertips and shook them, the sugar dripped.
“This is candy, not sugar!”
Luna held up a sugar crystal the size of an eye, and argued.
“Not even candy.”
No was no, the guys laughed as they ate the sugar crystals that had stuck to their bodies with their hands.
“Ugh… Chestnuts, I really can’t take my eyes off of you for a second?”
The walnut shell bed had been made, and now Luca was struggling in an empty teacup.
“Save me Hazel!”
“Wait calmly!”
Luna tried to lift the teaspoon in her teacup like a lever to get Luca out, but she groaned, and it seemed like she couldn’t do it. That’s because the teaspoon was twice as big as Luna’s.
She carefully picked up Luca and placed him on a bed of walnut shells on the kitchen table.
“Wow! A real walnut bed.”
Luca sat on the soft cotton and hugged a piece of wool thicker than his forearm like a doll.
“A petal blanket?”
Luna tipped her walnut shell herself up and she lay down with her hands together like a sleeping princess and asked her. Hazel took two of the thickest and softest petals from the peach-colored roses in the vase and covered them with them.
“It’s soft.”
“Smells good. It feels like sleeping in a flower garden.”
The two held rose petals in their hands smaller than a pea and rubbed their cheeks.
“Now you can sleep here and have a nice dream.”
The children were too small to kiss her or be put on the bed. Instead, the walnut shell was gently rocked like a cradle, and the children who were giggling at first became quieter. She blinked her eyes slowly as if drowsiness had finally set in.
“By the way…”
Luna glanced at Luca on the bed next to her and she whispered to me.
“What if those scary people come again?”
She thought she forgot while playing, but she didn’t. When Luna wondered why she kept rubbing her sleepy eyes and keeping them wide open, she must have been worried that the bad guys would attack again.
“Have the scary guys ever been there before?”
A little while ago, Luna had said that she had come to catch us ‘again’. It was said that this was not the first time.
Luna took one more glance at Luca, who was starting to sniff her as she grabbed a strand of the giant Lulu’s hair, and she whispered:
“Luca… He doen’t remember.”
So, a few years ago, someone tried to harm or abduct the two children. At a southern beach villa, and at her birthday party invited by an aristocratic child…
‘That’s why the grand duke imprisoned the children and raised them.’
It felt like a blow to the head.
‘Why would anyone do something like that?’
No one has the right to do such horrible things to children for any reason.
“And I heard the butler and the head maid say that when I was a baby, the nanny put a pillow over my face on purpose, and she almost choked me to death.”
“What…?”
The words about her near-murder come out of the mouth of a seven-year-old. On the contrary, she couldn’t speak in shock. Now she understood why the children kicked out their nanny, earning notoriety throughout the empire as little devils. She must have been a demon that could never be trusted by Luna.
When they first met, Luna suspected that she would hurt them too, and was wary. But when she didn’t show any signs of that, she opened her heart and even asked the Grand Duke to take Hazel as a babysitter.
When she asked why a child who hated nannies wanted her as a nanny…
‘I needed someone to trust and rely on.’
She held back the tears that were about to spill out and slowly rocked the walnut shell cradle.
“It’s okay, Luna. I’m with you.”
As she whispered tenderly, Luna closed her eyes, pulling a rose petal to the tip of her chin, a smile on her lips. She sent a resolution to Luna as she slowly headed towards her dreamland, like her last night at her cabin.
“Leave the adult work to me and you guys only have good dreams.”
* * *
“Ahh! help me!”
[It’s not enough that you dare intrude into my territory, disturbing my sleep! Make me regret being born…]
[Panking, man! Person! pet me!]
[Hey, you idiot. enemy!]
Seriously, that idiot. She didn’t know how to hide my claws, so she jumped at humans with a sharp object standing. How stupid are the humans who have completely misunderstood Daisy’s inner thoughts. It was shocking to see them making a fuss while screaming that they had been slightly scratched.
‘This… What a mess!’
Meanwhile, Daniel finally breaks through the siege and enters the nanny’s room, dazed. Weren’t the intruders rolling on the floor with sausages?
“Aww!”
One even broke a window and fell into the garden in an attempt to avoid the tuxedo cat’s persistent claws.
The royal guards rushed in, subduing and arresting the intruders in an instant. Daniel tossed the stunned frog he was holding in his hand to the soldier and looked around the room.
“Where have the children gone?”
When he asked the guardsman who had entered the advance alone and confronted the intruders, he shook his head.
“His Highness the Grand Prince and Her Highness the Grand Princess weren’t there from the start.”
Daniel’s heart pounded.
“It couldn’t have been!”
They raided the children’s room. Then they couldn’t find it, so they came to the nanny’s room, but where would they be without the two children who followed the nanny like ducklings?
“And the witch?”
“She’s hiding over there.”
The guard pointed to the closet.
“Ah…”
He never thought it would be used like that.
The soldiers soon became bewildered. When the head of the guard opened the closet door and tried to bring out the babysitter, but instead, he hid in the closet and closed the door.
“…”
“…”
“Hmmmm… To go over there.”
To go into a dark closet alone with a woman. The soldiers blushed.
“What? What are you doing, boss? Why are you going in there?”
But there are always people who are not aware of it. A soldier strode towards the closet and threw the door wide open.
“Hey! You can’t make a mistake now… what?”
The soldiers who looked into the closet were dazed. Because Sir Daniel and the babysitter were nowhere to be found in the empty closet.
As soon as Daniel opened the closet door and entered, the nanny seated at the table in the dark corner of the kitchen asked.
“Are you here? Did you catch all the bad guys, even the frogs?”
“Yes, thanks.”
“Aren’t you hurt?”
“More than that, the children…”
He asked nervously, and his eyes pointed to the nanny who was shaking him with one hand. Daniel’s eyes widened as he approached the table. Inside the walnut shell, Luna and Luca, who were the size of their thumbs, were sleeping soundly, covered with rose petals.
Looking down at the peaceful scene, Daniel let out a sigh of relief.
“It was a fairy tale in which the witch brilliantly prevented Thumbelina and the prince from being kidnapped by frogs.”
Daniel smiled at the witch for the first time and made an unanswerable joke. But there was no joke when he said that the witch had successfully prevented their kidnapping.
“I will definitely tell His Highness the Grand Duke about the achievement Miss Hazel made today.”
Originally, when the Grand Duke returned, he was going to tell a different story. The witch circumvented his rules with her cunning tricks and connected her hut to the Grand Duke’s mansion, so he immediately called someone from the Wizards’ Association to cut it off and cast out the witch.
However, Daniel would no longer have to say such a thing to the Grand Duke.
* * *
Elliot lost his words at the sight in front of him.
The flower beds in front of the main building of the Grand Duke’s residence were broken flowers and shrubs, and scattered windows and broken glass.
The rooms with broken windows were the nanny’s room and Luna’s bedroom.
‘No, please…’
It was a tragedy when an ominous premonition came true.
—————————————————————
Translator Note:
Hello there! This is RJR. Thank you very much for reading! 😀
For chapters in advance please support me on Ko-fi or Patreon 😉
Next post will be released on February, 18. See you then!
Man, those are a lot of murder attempts for children so young. It’s ironic because if they kill the children there is nothing stopping the Duke from killing them. Thank you for the translation.
Yes, it’s a little… Well… Better to kill the Grand Duke first and the children later and not to provoke a revenge of Elliot but it seems that logic is not the strong point of the imperial family.
In my opinion: The imperial family was unable to eliminate the duke with brute force like they did with his parents. So they go and kill the children to destabilize the duke and then they would just wait and the duke would probably would end his own life.