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Even so, few came to mourn. With the Grand Duchess still unconscious, hardly anyone spared a thought for a lump of flesh far too small to even be called human.
Swallowing down a knot of tangled feelings, Lucas took another swallow of wine.
When the chaos had erupted, his brother had shut himself inside their bedchamber. Only after the Grand Duchess’s bleeding finally ceased did Varkas open the door, stepping out solely to look upon the dead child.
Lucas, who had hurried over only after the news arrived too late, shuddered at the memory of Varkas’s face at that moment.
With sunken, hollow eyes drained of all feeling, his brother had stared silently at the tiny swaddled mass for a very long time. Only when a maid, pale with terror, broke into sobs did he instruct them to see the boy decently buried, turning away without another word.
Though Varkas had appeared unnervingly calm, the sight had sent a chill straight down Lucas’s spine.
There had been a gruesome shadow over his brother’s face—the dead cast seen on a severed head.
Drained as though every drop of blood had left his body, Varkas had retreated into the bedchamber and bolted the door. For the past three days, he had remained at the side of his critically ill wife, guarding her in absolute silence.
A mountain of business demanded the Grand Duke’s sign-off, but no one dared knock upon that door. No one had the stomach to press administrative ledgers on a man who had lost his firstborn so senselessly and now sat on the verge of losing his wife as well.
Yet with the threat of war looming closer by the day, they could not afford to wait indefinitely.
‘If Brother won’t come out by tomorrow… I’ll have to drag him out myself.’
Faced with this miserable duty, Lucas let out a weary sigh and drank deeper from his cup.
Just then, a crisp voice hailed him from the courtyard below.
“What are you doing up there?”
Lucas glanced down and scowled, seeing Raina lead a dapple-gray stallion through the castle gates.
Her hood pulled low, likely fresh from another furtive ride without an escort, Raina halted at the base of the rampart steps and peered up with open disdain.
“Is moping about all you have to do with yourself?”
“What about you?”
Lucas answered coldly, wetting his lips with wine.
“Where have you been riding in this miserable drizzle?”
“I rode out because I couldn’t bear staying inside this castle. I’m sick of watching every servant wander around looking like corpses at a funeral, as if the sky itself had fallen.”
Lucas stiffened at his sister’s callous words.
He knew well enough that Raina hated the Grand Duchess. But he had not expected her to be this vicious in the wake of such a tragedy.
He rebuked her, his voice hardening.
“The Grand Duchess is still confined to her bed without having opened her eyes once. Can’t you spare even an ounce of pity?”
“Did that woman ever show an ounce of pity to Father or to me? Why should I pity her?”
Stung by his reprimand, a faint glint of moisture rose in Raina’s wide hazel eyes.
Glaring up to conceal it, she snapped back sharply.
“Stop being such a hypocrite, Lucas. Aren’t you the one secretly rejoicing most that things ended like this?”
Lucas looked at her in disbelief.
“What nonsense are you babbling now?”
“Don’t play dumb. As matters stand, you are the sole heir to the Grand Ducal seat. And it may very well stay that way forever.”
A twisted smile touched her lips.
“With a frail build like hers, she was never fit to carry a healthy child to term anyway. Unless Brother takes another wife, House Shearkan will fall to you or your sons someday.”
Lucas stared down at his sister as if looking at a stranger.
She had always been headstrong and willful, but he had never thought her heart so utterly frozen.
Had Father’s death warped her this deeply?
He narrowed his eyes, studying her features.
Perhaps because his own duties had begun in earnest immediately after their father’s passing, Raina had felt abandoned and left behind. The sting of losing everyone’s attention had twisted into this ugly malice.
He hesitated for a second, torn.
One side of him wanted to indulge her childish bitterness, but he knew tolerating it would only push her further down a ruinous path.
They were no longer spoiled children whose thoughtless words could be excused and forgotten.
“I have no desire to become Grand Duke, nor do I have the ability.”
Hoping to shake her to her senses, he made his voice intentionally cutting.
“I’m thoroughly disappointed in you, Raina. I dislike that woman just as much… but she still deserves pity. That’s basic human decency. I had no idea you were this heartless.”
“I’m the one who’s disappointed, Lucas. I never realized you were such an idiot.”
Raina spat back, her face venomous.
“Do you imagine I’m the only one thinking this? The vassals are already muttering behind your back. They say if she fails to produce an heir, we’ll have to bring in a new mistress—or pin our hopes on you.”
Lucas went rigid, entirely at a loss for words.
Throwing him a sneer, Raina wrenched the stallion’s reins and turned away.
“Now that I think about it, Daren was looking for you down by the training yard.”
She tossed the remark over her shoulder as an afterthought.
“The Noble Alliance Council is convening soon. He wants you to attend on Brother’s behalf and represent House Shearkan.”
· · ·
“You had better go. It won’t hurt to start making an impression on the Alliance lords.”
Leaving behind those stinging words, Raina strolled unhurriedly toward the stables.
Lucas watched her retreating figure in a daze, then pulled his hood up as the slackening rain began to thicken once more.
Peering out through the stone crenels, his gaze fell upon the sodden burial ground. The weeping maidservants had already left.
He stared down at the cluster of pale lilies strewn across the small mound, then turned away with a bitter exhalation. His mouth tasted of cold ash.
A dull ache pierced through the thick haze of unconsciousness.
Talia forced her eyelids open, heavy and stiff as though sealed with dried glue.
Her sight was blurred as if she were staring through deep water, but gradually the room took shape around her, bathed in dim bluish shadow.
For a fleeting second, she believed she had merely suffered through a long, dreadful dream. But the moment her palm brushed against her sunken, hollow stomach, she understood that the nightmare was her waking reality.
“Talia.”
As she stroked her throbbing belly in a daze, a large hand gently supported her head.
Only then did she realize someone was holding her quietly from behind.
Talia turned her head by instinct, blinking slowly as she made out the face of the man she had yearned for throughout half her life.
She saw those striking eyes that had always made her heart clench with pain just by looking at them.
Yet no feeling rose within her. It was as though she were dead, despite drawing breath.
Perhaps she truly had become a corpse.
“Talia.”
His clear voice drifted near her ear, as if determined to break through her thoughts.
It was a strange, unsettling voice.
Like a child who had only just learned to talk, repeating the same word without thought.
“…Do you know who I am?”
When she did not respond, he tilted his head to search her eyes. The strands of his silver-gray hair, grown noticeably long over the past few months, brushed against her skin.
Talia gazed blankly at the sharp planes of his face, clouded in dark sorrow, before slowly letting her eyelids fall.
“I’m cold…”
Catching her words, thin as escaping air, the man bundled the heavy duvet tightly around her shoulders.
Yet she could not feel the slightest warmth. It was no different from lying buried beneath a mound of frozen earth.
Talia wondered how she knew that feeling so intimately. Then she remembered—she had been crushed under cold rock and soil once before.
An eerie conviction seized her: perhaps she had never left that place at all.
Could it be true? There was no way that marrying Varkas, becoming his wife, growing swollen with his child, and losing that child so pointlessly had ever happened. Perhaps she was only rotting away beneath the rubble, lost in a hollow delusion.
Talia felt a single tear slide down her temple. Yet her chest remained eerily numb.
Her mind and body felt entirely torn apart. Reality and illusion, memory and the present, blurred so thoroughly that she could no longer make sense of anything.
As dizziness washed through her skull, she squeezed her eyes shut.
She felt that if she gave in to sleep now, her next awakening would surely be beneath the dark, freezing earth.
Perhaps that would be for the best.
END