Previously
Theodore and Count Monches discuss Sienna's strange change in personality as the army prepares for departure. Sienna makes a final appearance to see them off, maintaining a facade of royal dignity despite her inner shame.
How to Part with You Completely — Episode 15
The day it all began fell toward the end of spring, shortly before Sienna’s seventh birthday. On an ordinary, peaceful afternoon, armed soldiers burst into the Empress’s private chambers.
The elaborately embroidered carpet was ruined beneath muddy military boots, and the clatter of porcelain shattering in the soldiers’ hands rang out violently.
The inner quarters, nestled in the deepest recess of the imperial palace where the chirping of birds had been the only sound, descended into utter bedlam in an instant.
In the midst of the sudden upheaval, Sienna froze, clutching desperately at the hem of the Empress’s skirt.
The soldiers marched across the room and locked silver restraints around the Empress’s wrists.
‘By order of His Majesty the Emperor, you are under arrest on charges of high treason.’
It was an impossible reality for Sienna to grasp. Sheltered child though she was, she was not ignorant enough to doubt that treason was treated as the empire’s gravest crime.
Yet the idea that her own mother could be guilty of such an atrocious act was absurd.
Standing at the Empress’s side, Sienna cried out in a trembling voice.
‘Treason? That cannot be. Mother would never do such a thing!’
‘Her Highness the Princess. We are merely carrying out His Majesty’s orders.’
The reply was stiff and thoroughly formal.
Her beautiful, tender mother. The most noble woman in the world. To Sienna, she was the foundation of existence itself.
Yet the Empress offered no real protest as both her hands were bound. Instead, she stood composed, as though she had foreseen it all.
‘No matter what happens, you must obey His Majesty. Sasha.’
Not a single emotion flickered across her face as she spoke. Her eyes held only a hollow emptiness. Dazed, she murmured softly.
‘Surely he would not abandon the child borne from me, but….’
A voice that seemed poised between laughter and tears. That was the last voice Sienna ever heard from her mother.
And that was only the beginning.
After the Empress was cast into prison, her maternal family, the Duchy of Ricata, was eradicated overnight on charges of complicity in the treason. It was a vain, sudden fall for an influential house that had commanded power for centuries since the empire’s founding.
Before she could even process the shock, misfortune battered her endlessly. With the collapse of the maternal family that had shielded her, Sienna’s standing in the imperial palace inevitably became precarious.
Once the Empress’s treason was affirmed, her immaculate bloodline turned in an instant into that of a foul traitor.
She was the Emperor’s daughter, and at the same time, the daughter of a criminal.
Days that felt like walking a tightrope dragged on. The Empress readily confessed to the charges, and without exception, the death penalty was demanded.
The moment she heard the news, Sienna ran straight to the Emperor’s quarters, weeping and begging him to spare her mother. Far from taking pity on his daughter, however, the Emperor utterly broke the girl who was already trembling like a candle in a gale.
‘No one who plots treason may live. No matter who they are.’
His face was ruthlessly stern, and the gentle tone he usually carried had grown colder than frost.
Shocked by a demeanor so foreign from the affection she had always known, Sienna understood by instinct. Those words were a warning delivered by the Emperor of a great empire toward a traitor’s daughter.
When the father who once seemed ready to place the world in her hands had thrust a blade into her back himself, there was no need to speak of how the rest of the world would treat her.
After her mother was locked away, the stigma of being a traitor’s daughter and endless whispers dogged Sienna’s name.
Against such indignities, there was no one left to protect her.
* * *
On an early summer day, the Empress was hanged in the center of the square beneath a hail of stones thrown by the throngs.
As the thick cord knotted around her neck hoisted her into the air, two delicate feet that had never known hardship flailed against the empty sky. Cheers erupted from every corner, but Sienna stopped breathing.
A fleeting stretch of a few minutes felt like an eternity. Soon after, when the faint movement of her feet ceased altogether, the roars grew louder still.
The moment the guards confirmed the Empress’s death, a thunderous cheer burst from the crowd. Mingled among them, her young daughter tore out a bloodcurdling shriek, yet it reached no one’s ears.
Under an immaculate, cloudless sky, the weather was warm and fair, yet to Sienna, it was harsher than any bitter winter. Even bathed in the blazing sunlight, she trembled like an aspen leaf, her teeth chattering uncontrollably.
The people began pelting stones indiscriminately at the limp body hanging in the air.
Amid the cheering spectators, Sienna clapped both hands over her ears. Screaming like madmen, the mob hurled rocks at the motionless figure. The thuds of stones striking her mother’s flesh gouged savagely into her heart.
‘Please, stop….’
Helpless, Sienna stood lost in their midst.
Who would imagine that a little girl standing all alone without a single proper guard was an imperial princess? In the boiling crowd, not a soul lent an ear to Sienna.
They merely cheered the demise of a wicked woman and shouted for the eternal glory of the imperial house.
That was the lesson of power learned at a tender age: a cruel, absolute force capable of discarding without a thought the woman one had loved for an entire lifetime.
Deep in her heart sprouted the dread that someday that very power might turn on her. And throughout her life, it only swelled, eating away at her sanity.
After witnessing her mother’s end, Sienna could not sleep at night even at the faint sound of footsteps beyond the wall, distrusting everyone but herself.
Even so, the world surrounding Sienna remained lavish and glittering. Whatever whispers followed behind her back, she was still an exalted imperial princess whom no one dared treat lightly in the open.
Yet the world reflected in her eyes was no longer an innocent fairy tale.
* * *
Time flowed on without pause. In the interim, the world steadily stripped away what had once been bestowed upon her, as though declaring it had never been hers to begin with.
After that day, the Emperor never sought her out. Sienna occasionally loitered near his study, but even on the rare occasion their paths crossed, he did not grant her so much as a glance.
Though wounded time and again by her father’s coldness, Sienna still starved for his affection.
Even on days when the snow drifted or rain poured, she hovered around the Emperor out of habit, but the father who used to greet her with tender warmth was nowhere to be found.
What finally broke that lingering attachment was the birth of a new half-sister. On the day Dahlia was born, Sienna completely abandoned the hope that she might ever be loved by her father again.
Dahlia was not remarkably pretty, but she possessed a gentle nature and smiled easily. Even Marianne and Joseph, who looked upon Sienna like vermin, were genuinely warm toward that child.
The mother, a lowly maid, had desired no undeserved standing despite bearing the Emperor’s child, so Joseph and Marianne had no cause to harbor malice toward the pair.
It also helped that the Emperor, uncharacteristically, settled matters regarding Dahlia’s birth mother with clean finality. As if hammering in the truth that the affair with the maid was nothing more than a single night’s indiscretion, he never sought her out again.
Even after learning of the pregnancy, he merely had the woman registered to a ducal house for the sake of the unborn child, sparing her no further attention.
Within a few years, the maid’s short life ended in the ducal residence, and the Emperor’s illegitimate child was raised by the Duchy of Lowell. Growing up outside the capital, Dahlia held the faintest presence among the Emperor’s children.
Moreover, the Duke of Lowell was not so foolish as to push his young niece into the bloody rivalries of the siblings, so Joseph paid little mind to a youngest sister separated from him by such a large age gap.
In truth, the only reason they had loathed Sienna and the Empress so bitterly was the conviction that those two had robbed them of what should have been theirs.
Yet Sienna was different. She despised the newly born child with all her heart.
Whenever she saw them spending time together like a cheerful, ordinary family while leaving her out, an inexplicable emotion boiled within her.
At times it spread into a deep yearning for her dead mother, and at other times it curdled into resentment toward the father who had ultimately cast her aside.
‘They are nothing more than baseborn bastards anyway.’
Even as she repeated the thought to herself, she would weep quietly alone in the dark on any night she had seen the Emperor spend time with Dahlia.
Following the Empress’s death, she became entirely isolated. The Emperor took no notice of Sienna, and recognizing that imperial favor had faded, nobles and servants alike began looking down on her with growing insolence.
The longer those days continued, the more fiercely Sienna clung to the few things left to her.
Things like her exalted bloodline and her splendid status—things whose luster had faded long ago. Even so, she trembled with fear over whether such meager protections could truly preserve her life.
As the years slipped past and the Emperor’s physical decline became plainly visible, her anxiety only deepened.
Under imperial succession law, the principal rule dictated that titles passed only to sons, regardless of legitimate or illegitimate birth; not even the imperial house was exempt from the rigid statutes established at the founding of the empire.
For instance, though the Emperor had never formally designated a successor, it was taken as an absolute certainty that Joseph, his only son, would inherit the throne.
Sienna, on the other hand, was excluded from the line of succession despite being the Emperor’s only legitimate daughter.
In other words, should the Emperor die as things stood, Sienna was guaranteed nothing. That reality drove her into boundless despair. Whenever she pictured Joseph, who made no secret of his hostility toward her, not a single shred of hope remained for her future.