"She couldn't hide her belly swelling until she gave birth to a dead child, and she had no choice but to tell her husband that she had been pregnant. The husband, who was waiting for the baby to be born, found out that he had been deceived when he saw the child born dead five months after he was married. The baby was too perfect for being five months old and none of the parents looked like the child. Both families had no ancestors with brown hair from generation to generation. But the born child had brown hair and brown eyes."

Paulo went on with his words after sweeping his face with his hands to wipe away the tears that had leaked out.

"Her husband loved his wife, and seemed to forgive her. But the next year, when his daughter who was born was declared weak and unable to live long due to the side effects of the tea she had drunk, he was able to endure."

"Did he kill his wife?" Phoebe asked in a sad voice, but Paulo shook his head.

"No. He wasn't one who would ruin his future with vengeance. Instead, he slowly began to study how to kill her without evidence."

"Is that the poison I drank?"

"Yes, that's right. Three years after his daughter's birth, he seemed to have finally found the poison he wanted. That's when she started to get sick."

Paulo paused for a moment and took a deep breath before he went on again. "I still don't know how the poison is made. I just found out that her hair color had gotten lighter while she was drinking it, and it was such a scary poison that when Vicern's priest came and treated her, he never noticed it was poison."

"How did you find out?"

"When I became a doctor, I heard her dying news and I wanted to see her again somehow. So, I started going in and out of the house, asking her doctor to teach me. Of course, she pretended not to know me. I didn't even make eye contact. She seemed to think that our relations.h.i.+p was already finished. But one day, I felt something strange about the maid preparing her tea. She brewed the tea, after mixing laya and blita leaves. As a doctor, I can distinguish tea and herbs by looking at their shapes and smelling them. But they have very strong scents, and they each have sour or salty taste, and never mix together."

Julietta nodded. It tasted good, but the price was so expensive that even the imperial family could not buy it easily; that was a problem, too. Laya tea leaves were also very expensive, but blita tea leaves were one of the finest tea leaves, and only a small amount was produced a year because their cultivation methods were so difficult that there were only a few places it could grow within the continent.

"The poison I drank was so bitter and sour that it paralyzed my tongue," Phoebe answered as if she were supporting his conviction.

"Yes... but as she was sick, she had lost her sense of taste and never felt the tea at all. I felt suspicious of it, I secretly took out the tea she had left after drinking, and I caught a rat and fed it myself."

"Was it dead right away?"

"No, it was clear. I thought I was suspecting uselessly. But I tried to feed it for days just in case, and it started to change its fur color like her hair. A week later, the gray rat's hair turned white, and then another week later it died."

"Did you know the tea was poison and not save her?"

"I frantically began to look at the medical books to find the antidote, and I looked for a handful of therapists who had gone on to private practice. But I never heard of such a poison from anyone, and they didn't know. In the meantime, she died. By the time she died, her hair had turned white. What was even stranger was that when I took those two tea leaves and mixed them up and fed them to another mouse, it had no result."

"Then why did he mix them up and have her drink? There must be a reason."

Dr. Paulo shook his head when asked by Julietta. "I don't know. That's why I haven't found the antidote. But now that she took the poison, her hair color has changed…"

"Ah..." Phoebe let out a groan of fear.

'I thought I was safe now, but if my hair color changed, will I die too?'

"No, Miss Phoebe, I don't know why, but you don't have any symptoms she had back then. Your tongue is bright pink, and your fingertip color is completely intact. You told me you didn't have any symptoms or nausea."

"Can she be really safe? She told you that she drank the poison herself," Julietta said anxiously.

"Miss Phoebe, can you tell me who gave the poison?"