Chapter 40

Chapter 40

As Enya gazed at him with her eyes wide open, Leroi said it was real and jumped up.

Like that, the two of them quarreled like brother and sister for a long time, wondering if a person could be faster than a puma or not. In the end, they finally concluded that no one knew about it and ended the argument.

“Still, I’ve never seen a woman with such long hair. Why didn’t you cut it? Isn’t it cumbersome?”

Leroi was curious about Enya’s waist-length hair. He kept looking at her hair and opening his mouth in admiration.

“You have really long hair. Why don’t the men of Nervana Forest cut their hair?”

When Enya asked a question, he retorted, widening his eyes.

“Cutting their hair? It’s impossible. The men of Nervana Forest cut their hair short when they were defeated in a battle. It is truly a disgrace among disgraces.”

The next moment, a clear whistling sound came from beyond the blazing pyre of the festival. At first, the noise, which she thought might be the sound of an instrument, got louder and louder, and then Leroi put his hand to his face and groaned.

“…D*mn. Yaru is drunk.”

Indeed, just as he had said, on the other side, Yaru was slowly moving her steps somewhere with a barrel full of mead tucked in her side.

Seeing this, Leroi muttered as he looked around her in trouble.

“Yasmin, is she sleeping? Really. How can she be a mother of a child…”

Yaru, who stood at the edge of the forest, soon began to whistle with her fingers in her mouth. Watching her, Lero put his hand on his head and jumped up from her seat, as he couldn’t stand it anymore.

“It’s starting again…”

For a while, Yaru whistled so close to drunkenness that the people around her frowned.

It wasn’t until Enya checked who was in the direction Yaru was heading that she followed Leroi to her feet. The place where Yaru stumbled and reached was in front of Rigata, who was drinking alcohol while leaning against a tree.

“Honey. Are you ready to put a baby inside me today?”

A drunken Yaru raised Rigata’s chin with her fingertips, glanced up at him and uttered. While Enya watched the scene and opened her mouth, Leroi covered his eyes with a heavy sigh.

“D*mn. Anyway, when she’s drunk, she would grab anyone and does that… that lady.”

Whether or not the surroundings were astonished, Yaru started whispering to Rigata with a coquettish gesture.

“You have to do it right this time. Yasmin hadn’t had a younger sibling. A dad’s role is important, don’t you know?”

Enya was shocked to hear what Yaru had to say.

She looked amazing to say such words casually. At the same time, cold sweat began to run down her spine, not knowing how Rigata would react.

On the other hand, Rigata’s reaction was indeed more spectacular. He put down the bottle he was drinking and shot a sharp look at her.

“What do you want? I have no interest in getting involved with a drunk woman.”

At that moment, Yaru’s body was lifted up. A man appeared behind them and snatched her body, which had slumped against Rigata’s body, with one hand.

Enya recognized the man and looked up at Leroi in astonishment. He shrugged his shoulders with a plain expression, showing that they needed to just watch. It was a resolute attitude as if this hadn’t happened once or twice.

“…This is why I always question whether Yasmin is my daughter, Yaru.”

Nihitan bared his fangs and spoke in a slightly annoyed voice to Yaru, who was sitting in his arms. Meanwhile, Yaru, who was held in his arms, opened her mouth with her half-closed eyes wide open.

“Nihitan…!”

Then, as swiftly as a monkey, she slipped from his arms and slipped into his neck.

“Why are you here now…! I kept calling you from earlier!”

Enya was quite shocked to see Yaru throw her little body at Nihitan as if she was climbing the big body like a tree. Still, the other people of Nervana Forest looked at them nonchalantly, perhaps finding it natural.

Rigata also turned his head to them with a frown and brought the bottle he was drinking back to his mouth.

“Is Yasmin sleeping?”

Nihitan murmured in a blunt voice like usual, accepting Yaru’s all-out flirtatiousness.

“Of course. She resembles you, and during the day, she’s so lively like a newborn doe she ran around without being able to catch it.”

Nihitan held Yaru upright and pressed his lips to the back of her nose before he muttered nervously.

“…She resembles me? She doesn’t resemble Inaken?”

The next moment, Yaru smiled a strange smile as she lifted his chin with the tips of her fingers, bringing him into my eyes.

“How many times must I tell you to believe it? You were the only person I slept with at that time. Both then and thereafter.”

After that, Enya hurriedly looked away, embarrassed to see the two of them even looking at each other. She still couldn’t believe that their daughter was Yasmin.

‘No wonder… I thought Yasmin must have looked like someone…’

Enya felt goosebumps on her arm when she realized that that someone was Nihitan. Yasmin’s hair, neatly combed and braided because she had not undergone a coming-of-age ceremony, was long and fluttered behind her back like her father’s whenever she ran around before going to sleep.

“Anyway, after giving birth to Yasmin, Yaru has never laid eyes on another man, and she only does that when she is drunk.”

As soon as the hustle was finished, Leroi grumbled, and he added an explanation for Enya, who was unfamiliar with the rules of Nervana Forest.

“For women like Yaru, who chose to settle down with a single man, they would leave the tribe and wander around alone, living separately for months. Completely with just two people. It’s kind of like a honeymoon. Then, they usually come back when they have children. Pregnancy and childbirth in a forest where the skull spiders run rampant are scary things that only the two people can handle.”

As he added, pointing to Nihitan, who was holding Yaru and walking to the place where Yasmin was lying.

“Because Yasmin was suddenly born without the two of them having a honeymoon period… no, no one could have imagined that Yaru would settle down with one person in the first place, really.”

Then, he scratched his chin, saying that he did not even know about the relationship between men and women.

When Enya heard that, she pondered in a daze.

‘Alone in a place where no one is… months together…”

When she remembered those words, she tried to erase the face of a person who came to mind.

…If Tarhan and her had had their own time like that, would they have had a child like Yasmin by now?

If Enya and Tarhan go on like that for days and months, without experiencing the tension of being hit by the tribal people who hated her and Tarhan being recruited to hunt, with no one noticing, no rules to follow, and no obligations to be responsible for.

If only they could look into each other’s eyes…

‘Still, I wouldn’t have had children.’

She lowered her head, remembering with dark eyes the diagnosis Old Lady Piache had given her.

Her thoughts break as Leroi invites her to sit down again. Enya sat back down and took a sip of the cold water Leroi handed to her.

“That… about the deputy chieftain of Aquilea.”

Perhaps Leroi had something to say, he glanced at Enya, his cheeks slightly flushed.

“If you’ve only been living with that guy’s house for over a dozen years, he must be a very talented guy in Aquilea, right? Well, just by looking at the scar on the nape of his neck, I can guess to some extent…”

Enya immediately blushed at his words.

She had been thinking about it for a while, but why did the people of Nervana Forest treat her as a good woman, second only to Tarhan… no, much better than that? Each time, it was a burden for her, who knew that her true condition was worse than that of Aquilea’s worm.

Still, Leroi didn’t end his questions about Tarhan. He kept asking questions about him.

“When he first brought you to the hut. So, that’s when… you passed your first blood.”

Hesitantly, he brought up the word and immediately apologized in shock.

“Ah. You don’t have to tell me if you’re uncomfortable. Sorry…”

She noticed what he had in mind to ask such a question and blushed with him. She also vaguely understood why he was approaching her and bombarding her with these questions.

Enya asked, biting her lips hard to contain the laughter that leaked out.

“You, do you have a girl you want to spend the ‘season of spring’ with?”

Leroi, who was caught, coughed intentionally. But despite this, she couldn’t hide even the redness on her neck, so Enya ended up giggling.

Leroi seemed to have decided to ask her with a steel plate on his face, as he had already been caught.

As she looked down at Leroi’s question, pretending to ponder it when he innocently asked if he gave her a bunch of black puma skins as a gift, the way the Lehijin tribe did.

After a while, she picked up a twig on the floor and drew a line as if scribbling.

“…Tarhan built me a house.”

When she thought of that, a proud smile naturally leaked from her lips. Nonetheless, Leroi’s reaction to her was not what she expected.

He let out a gasp and stuck out his tongue.

“What…! I mean, you fell for that!”

Enya looked puzzled as Leroi stared at her in disbelief. Realizing the reason, she then quickly jumped up and waved her hand.

“N, no. It’s not the kind of house you think it is! Not a simple house tangled with a few tree branches… but a more proper one…”

For the people of the Nervana Forest, who lead a nomadic life in the vast forest, periodically changing their dwellings according to the flow of the rainy or dry season, they would not understand it. However, in the plains of Aquilea, the value of a house was enormous for a tribe that settled down in one place, cultivated a field, and lived together as a community.

Enya responded pointedly to Leroi.

“Tarhan had worked so hard to build that house for a long time…! For almost dozens of months… he gathered mud, weaved it with straw, kneaded it, molded it into bricks one by one, baked it in a kiln, dried it in the sun, applied glaze one by one, and baked it again…”

She tried tenaciously to explain the value of the house, using her hands and feet.

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