Guardians of the Prince

The early summer sunlight weakened a bit as the day wore into evening, and a refreshing breeze started to blow.

The hotel courtyard had been transformed into a forest, with light snacks and drinks set out on long thin tables in the shade of the trees. Invited guests milled about, waiting with drinks in hand for the new bride and groom to appear.

The Hino family – the bride’s side – chatted happily with one another, and I stood beside a white birch with my aunt, making conversation as we waited for them.

“What a nice ceremony that was. You must be relieved Koaya finally managed to get married.”

My aunt, in full formal kimono, tilted her champagne flute, and flashed a meaningful smile at me. “It might take a bit of the load off of your shoulders too, Koume, since you’ve been basically acting mother? It’s your turn to find happiness now. Is there anyone good on the horizon?”

“Well… I mean, the youngest is still around, and a terror,” I answered, noncommittally. The truth was that we’d lost our mother at a young age, and I still wanted to look after my youngest sister. Well, there were other reasons too, but…

My aunt stared at me, her eyes open a bit wider. “Really? You don’t think you’ll get married until Nanao’s bigger? But she’s still–”

“Hey sis!”

I heard myself being called and turned around to find my youngest sister Nanao running down the hotel hallway. She leapt down into the garden, the sleeves of her polka dot summer dress fluttering.

I excused myself from my aunt’s company and rushed over to Nanao. “Stop running! You’re not recovered yet.”

“I’m fine! It doesn’t hurt at all anymore!”

Nanao hopped up and down a bit to show me. She was in the third grade, and had sprained her ankle during gym class the other day.

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“Well, alright I guess,” I said. “You were gone long enough, was there a line in the bathroom?”

Nanao sighed. “Yeah. Oh good, I’m in time for Sissy Aya to throw the bouquet!”

She grinned. When she smiled, she looked just like our late mother.

Nanao called me, the eldest daughter, “Sis,” and the next eldest, Koaya — today’s new bride — she called “Sissy Aya.” She used to call us other cute little nicknames, but recently, she’d suddenly dropped them.

That wasn’t all she’d dropped… When she’d sprained her ankle, she’d managed to hide it from me for a while, in an effort not to bother me. She was still young enough that she should have been good at getting babied, but after a certain incident she’d suddenly started pushing herself in an attempt to become an adult.

“You want the bouquet? You’re still in elementary school, what are you going to do with it?” I asked, in a deliberately bright voice, but Nanao shook her head.

“No, I want to watch you catch it, sis.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Sissy Aya said she was going to throw it in your direction.”

Koaya was two years younger than me, twenty three. Wasn’t there something a little off about an older sister getting the bouquet from her younger sister?

“You absolutely have to catch it, sis.”

Nanao had her fists clenched, and I suddenly let a bitter smile slip.

I had just gotten over the demise of a painful relationship a few months ago. Koaya and Nanao were no doubt trying to keep my spirits up. Catching the bride’s bouquet means you’ll have a happy marriage, after all.

I was, of course, overjoyed that Koaya was getting married. She’d been captivatingly beautiful in church today, pledging her future to the person she loved with the sounds of the organ in the background.

But seeing her so happy like that did bring back my own bitter memories. My sister’s happiness made me feel drab by comparison, and ill-at-ease in my own sorrow. Honestly, I wanted to give them my blessings without any reservations, like the cloudless blue sky we’d had today, but I just couldn’t.

A noise went up from the crowd, and I came back to myself. When I looked up, the long-awaited bride and groom had finished changing their clothes, and had just made their appearance on the hotel’s second floor balcony.

Koaya was wearing an expensive cocktail dress of black lace layered on a white base. I’d been there when she’d chosen the dress, and the both of us had taken one look at it and said, ‘This is the one!’ It fit her personality perfectly.

Maybe I’m a bit partial as her big sister, but Koaya is a stylish beauty, just like our father, and chic tones suited her perfectly.

Our eyes met, and she tilted her head to one side, and grinned. She looked like someone else entirely. She turned to me and stuck out her chin, like she was telling me to come to the front of the crowd. The sense of purpose in her eyes was incredible.

“Honestly, get up there!” Nanao said, pushing me forward, sassy little thing. “Take the bouquet, and go find yourself a boyfriend already. Even if you have to elope!”

She stood me in line immediately behind friends and colleagues of the bride.

The bride turned around, and got herself into position. She glanced back for a moment, and I knew she was making sure I was there.

“I get it, I get it. I’ve gotta catch the bouquet and find happiness too,” I said, smiling wryly. Nanao screwed a smile to her face like she was worried about something but determined to give it her all nonetheless.

“That’s right. And then next time, I’ll catch your bouquet!”

I nodded to her with a smile of my own, and looked up to the balcony.

Putting up fronts for each other… I had to pull myself out of this quick. Maybe if I caught it, I really could throw off all these heavy emotions and find a new love. And then Nanao would feel better too.

A bouquet of white roses flew through the air. The lace ribbon fluttered. And just as I reached out with both hands…

Suddenly everything went silent.

Wait, what? Am I in the water?

Clear ripples spread over my field of vision, like when you dive into a pool and look up at the surface of the water.

Just as I thought I felt my hand touch the bouquet, something thin and hot suddenly wrapped around my left wrist.

Immediately after that, the sound came back.

The roaring wind– No wait, it was sort of like glowing water coiled into whirlpools– I heard the guests screaming, but only in patches.

I had the sensation of my left arm being yanked hard. When I reflexively tightened my grip on the bouquet, my legs started floating.

My body was caught in a whirlpool and suddenly I didn’t know which way was up.

I felt like I was having the longest, weirdest dream. I felt like I was drifting around in the water, and I could hear voices from a long way off, a higher pitch and a lower pitch.

And then–

“Woah!”

A shock ran up my back and I woke up.

A thin blanket was wrapped around me, and I couldn’t move. I rolled slightly to the right, and bumped into a wooden bed. I must have been tossing and turning in my sleep and fell onto the floor.

“Where… am I?”

I managed to pull my arms out of the blanket and sit up. I moved slowly. For some reason, my head felt incredibly heavy.

Looking around, I was in a room about 6 tatami in size, with light-colored timber on the ceiling, the walls, and the floor.

Light shone in through the curtains, illuminating a chest made of the same wood as the room. The soft light was strangely dazzling, and I squinted.

This wasn’t my room.

I’d been attending my sister’s wedding, so this must be the hotel, right? Was this a hotel room? I must have collapsed and they’d carried me up here, I guessed. But it was a bit shabby for a hotel room… Maybe it was an outbuilding or a cottage or something?

Confused, various thoughts floated through my head one after the other and then disappeared. Still sitting on the floor, I shut my eyes.

Calm down, calm down. Okay, I certainly had gone to the hotel. And I’d attended the ceremony at the church on the grounds there. And after that… Right, Koaya threw the bouquet in the courtyard before the reception.

But as I was catching the bouquet, I felt a yank, like a tuna on a fishing rod…

There was nothing in my memories that could serve as a reference. So in the end, what the heck happened?

I looked down, crestfallen, and my own two hands came into my field of view. There were three pale green bands on my left wrist, right where I’d felt something wrap around me in that moment.

I held my hand out and changed the angle. They glittered when the light hit them, and they were so small I couldn’t really tell, but the rows seemed to be packed with strange, thin characters, and even when I rubbed, they wouldn’t come off.

“I can’t make heads or tails of it, but for the moment, it seems like I missed the reception, at least.”

The reception was scheduled to start in the evening, but judging by the light coming in through the window, it seemed to be morning already.

My stomach gurgled. Thinking I’d better get to a place where I could eat something, I put my hands on the bed and stood myself up, and this time, my eyes caught on something absurd.

Sleeping quietly on the bed… was a naked baby.

Oh, lucky, it was a boy… Wait a minute!!

This time, I really did panic.

Why was I sleeping with a baby!?

“Mmmmmom? Where is this kid’s mom!?”

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I stood up in a hurry and caught my foot on the blanket on the floor and started to take a tumble, but I managed to stay upright by flapping around and landing both hands on the floor, after which I opened the door and ran out of it.

The place I came out into was a small combined dining room and kitchen, with the same planks again on the floor and the walls and the low ceiling. There were two benches at a table made of the same material. And along the wall was a black… was that a wood burning stove!? Also a small workspace and shelf, a porcelain sink, and cupboards built into the walls.

I could see at a glance that no one else was here, so I rushed to yet another door and opened that one.

Woah…

I was enveloped by calming sunlight, and a gentle breeze that smelled of greenery.

I was in a large basin. The wide grasslands formed a clear bowl shape, and flowers bloomed here and there among occasional short bushes. The shallow bowl was about twenty meters in radius. The surrounding area was 360 degrees of forest, the interior of which was so dim I couldn’t see into it.

At the bottom of the bowl, a single giant tree thrust upwards toward the heavens. The trunk was white like a Japanese Birch, and faintly transparent, so from this angle, I could see through to the other side – what a mysterious tree.

At its base, a small spring gurgled, and I could see one part of the tree’s roots sinking into the clear water. Stairs started beside the spring, and bent nearly back on themselves along the trunk, ascending all the way to a very thick branch.

Atop that branch, on the balcony of the treehouse which was built jutting out over top of the spring, stood me.

How stunned could a person get?

Just then, I heard a wailing noise.

Realizing it was the baby crying, I jumped.

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When I ran back into the bedroom, the baby was indeed crying on the bed, his face all crumpled. I cautiously picked him up, and he stopped crying, but I knew if any of the various calls of nature had occurred, he’d start complaining again.

That’s right… I’d been taking care of Nanao since she was born, I knew how to do this. When baby needs help, you don’t hesitate! Looking for mom or dad could wait!

“Don’t cry, don’t cry,” I muttered unreasonably, as I hunted through every box and cupboard in the room. I discovered something that looked like a cloth diaper and some underpants, and put them on him, and that must have calmed him down because he started to fall asleep again on the bed.

Aw, that’s nice… I’d have to use this break to develop some countermeasures.

There were some porcelain jars lined up alongside the baby bottles on top of the kitchen counter. When I opened them, there was a finely ground white powder inside, so I gave it a shot and took a taste, and it turned out to be powdered milk.

A pulley system had been installed on the ceiling in the corner of the kitchen, with ropes and wooden buckets hung from it, and a trapdoor in the floor below. I opened the trapdoor and peeked inside, and it went straight down to the spring. If there was a whole system here to draw water, it was probably potable. And there weren’t any water faucets or anything like that.

I didn’t know who owned this treehouse, but judging from the fact that they seemed to have prepared everything we’d need, and that neither one of us had been harmed, I figured I might as well have faith in what they’d left here.

“Nevermind that, how am I supposed to use this dumb thing!”

Starting to get desperate, I leaned over the stove’s chimney.

So how was I supposed to use this thing? I mean listen, this isn’t some kind of anime where some magical girl with a giant ribbon on her head sets out to use a wood burning stove instead of her broken oven. I wish I could do that.

Logs and matches had been set beside the stove, along with some twigs I could use for kindling, so I set about starting a fire.

Wait, there’s another door, not the door you put the logs in? This isn’t an anime!

I tried some different things later, and realized that the other door was so you could let more air into the fire and scrape out the ashes and stuff, but at the time, I just opened whatever door felt right and started up a sort of tiny bonfire. The ventilation was the only thing I got right, but I ladled some water into a heavy iron pan, set it on the stove, and boiled it.

I grabbed a mug at random from the cupboard, put some of the powdered milk in it, and poured in the hot water. I gave it a taste for myself and… Yeesh that’s sweet. But powdered milk does taste like that, I guess, so a strong flavor would be just about right.

I looked after my own stomach for a while, and just as I was starting to wonder how baby was doing, he started screaming like he was on fire!

“Yes, yes, I hear you, have this!”

The bottle was just a normal glass baby bottle. I sat down on the bench and managed awkwardly to get the baby to drink, and I was finally able to get a careful look at the child.

His hair hadn’t grown much yet, but it was a glittering golden or maybe bright brown color. I still hadn’t seen him open his eyes yet, so I gently pulled an eyelid up – “Excuse me just a sec,” I said to him – and his eyes were a beautiful… deep blue. A foreign baby then, huh? His face was so cute, he could have been a baby model or something.

But he was so tiny. His arms and legs, and that thin neck, he was still wobbly. He couldn’t have been that old at all, how long had it even been since he was born?

“What happened to your mama, little prince?”

I remembered one of my girl friends called her son “Our little prince,” so I decided to call this baby who was gulping down his milk the same for now.

We took a break, and I looked around.

Dried flowers hung above the kitchen window. It was the first time I’d seen anything decorative in this room, and when I looked closer, I realized they were roses.

The lace ribbon around them looked familiar…

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It was the bouquet Koaya had thrown!

How much time had passed since my little sister’s wedding anyway? Long enough for a bouquet to turn to dried flowers?

Now that I looked, my hair was down to my shoulders, which was longer than I remembered it. I’d been wearing a lavender party dress that day, but now I was in a long, khaki-colored cotton apron over a white cotton shirt with three-quarter-sleeves. If there’d been a few more decorations in here, I’d have given off some serious cottagecore vibes. I seemed to be wearing cotton underpants too, of an excessively basic shape.

Had I changed my clothes? I didn’t remember doing so. So, someone changed my clothes for me? I didn’t remember that either.

Had I developed some kind of amnesia, maybe?

That was when an even more astounding idea flashed through my mind.

No way, this baby?

“I didn’t give birth, did I!?”

No no no no! At least, I’d like to believe not, but it wasn’t totally impossible, was it. Depending on how much time had passed.

Okay, so let’s suppose that once I received the bouquet, a nice guy showed up immediately, in what would clearly be a miracle, and he was a foreigner, and then we tied the knot before anybody knew what was going on, and I got pregnant and gave birth, and after that I developed amnesia. So about ten months would have passed?

While I was puzzling all that out, the prince fell asleep drinking his milk. When I gently, carefully lifted the bottle from his mouth, the prince made little sucking motions with his mouth like he was looking for a nipple, but it was just for an instant, and he went limp again without waking, and started to breathe quietly in his sleep.

Oh, he fell asleep before I could burp him. I seemed to recall he’d be okay without it? But I couldn’t really remember. It had been nine years since I helped out with Nanao.

I was a little worried, so when I put him to bed, I turned his face gently to one side, so if he did spit up any milk, it wouldn’t get stuck in his throat.

Alright, now that I’d calmed down, I quickly tucked up the pinafore I was wearing, and the shirt too, and did a careful inspection of my stomach, since no one was around.

And then I sighed in relief. The prince was a newborn no matter how you looked at him, and if I was a new mother who’d just given birth, there’s no way my stomach would have gone flat again like this so soon. My friends all had to go on some kind of postpartum diet or something.

So then where on earth did this kid come from…?