Ch#167
Transparent tears drenched the woman’s face.
He looked down at her with numb eyes before kneeling on one knee before her.
“As you said, I cannot understand even a fraction of Your Majesty’s pain. However, I do remember the vast sense of desolation a child feels when they have nowhere left to lean.”
A light slowly returned to the eyes that had been as hollow as black holes.
He reached inside his coat and pulled out a handkerchief. Then, just as she had once wiped his face, he wiped the tears from her wet cheeks.
“For the sake of the Crown Prince and Her Highness the Princess, please stay strong.”
The Empress’s face was stained with guilt and shame.
The woman, her gaunt shoulders trembling slightly, let her head fall weakly.
“I am sorry. I should not have said such things to you….”
He lightly patted the shoulders of the Empress, who was sobbing like a young girl.
A short while later, he carefully lifted the Empress, who had lost consciousness as if from exhaustion, and laid her on the bed. As he stepped outside, muffling his footsteps, he saw Gares leaning against the wall on one side of the corridor.
“Follow me.”
The boy, his bloodshot eyes gleaming ominously, grabbed him without a word of explanation.
He followed silently behind the Crown Prince.
“Look over there.”
Gares dragged him up to a watchtower connected to the main palace and pointed outside while pressing himself against the railing.
He went and stood beside the boy.
In the garden of the detached palace, which the Emperor used for rest, a man and a woman were having a secret tryst.
He could easily recognize the Emperor’s dark hair and bold features. With his curly hair flowing over his broad shoulders built of bone and muscle, the man leaned back languidly in a chair, his hands roaming over the waist of a woman.
He studied the slender woman leaning against the Emperor. Aside from her long, light-colored hair and a physical form so perfectly balanced it felt uncanny, there was nothing particularly remarkable about her.
What exactly was it about this woman that caused the Emperor of the Empire to break the vows he made before God and abandon his honor?
As he watched with questioning eyes, the woman looked up, as if sensing his gaze.
In an instant, he felt the fine hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. His skin went cold, as if he were facing something extremely dangerous.
The woman, looking straight up at him, narrowed her eyes and gave a mocking smile. Then, she grabbed a handful of the Emperor’s hair and pulled him toward her roughly. Her touch was that of someone handling a trivial possession rather than the most noble being in the Empire.
In those arrogant hands, the ruler who had seemed cast from steel crumbled like a sandcastle. The bodies of the two, bursting with vitality, overlapped under the bright sunlight, and their wet lips met greedily.
“Filthy beasts.”
Gares muttered like a growling animal.
“He brought that woman to the detached palace a week ago and started that business. And that wench even set her dirty feet in the Empress’s garden to insult my mother.”
Veins bulged in the boy’s bloodshot eyes as he glared at the entangled pair.
He gripped the railing tightly with both hands and spat out the words.
“That is why Mother drank the poison. Because of that filthy whore…”
Trembling violently, Gares kicked a cabinet in a fit of rage, toppling it over. Then, he began to indiscriminately trample the various items scattered on the floor.
The outburst, which had started like an explosion, only ended once every object in the room was smashed.
“I will become the Emperor, no matter what. When that day comes, I’ll make that woman kneel before me and pour the same poison my mother drank down her throat.”
Breathing heavily amidst the wreckage, the boy turned his tear-soaked eyes toward him.
“At that time, your role will be to drag that prostitute before me and make her kneel. I will be the Emperor of the Empire, and you will be the ruler of the East and my closest confidant. Let us repay the humiliation our mother suffered.”
He turned his head and looked back down over the railing. Over the image of the two lovers clinging to each other in broad daylight, the image of the wasting Bernadette overlapped.
She was the one who had rescued him from a place no better than a prison and cared for him like her own child for seven years.
Why could he not feel the same intense rage as Gares?
All he could feel was pity for the Empress and disgust for the foul acts they were committing.
Gares suddenly grabbed his collar and pulled.
“You’ll do it, won’t you, Brother?”
Barkas lowered his gaze again to meet Gares’s unstable eyes.
Though he could not sympathize with the boy’s emotions, he clearly recognized that he owed the Empress a debt he could never repay.
He reached out and lightly brushed Gares’s messy curls. Just as he opened his mouth to answer, the image of the young boy suddenly crumbled like sand. The chaotic scenery surrounding him was also covered in dull, blurred colors.
The next moment, he was standing in a dark corridor shrouded in deep shadows.
The sound of faint sobbing drifted from somewhere. Turning his head, he saw maids wiping away tears.
One of them offered him a formal bow.
“You have arrived.”
The maid’s voice was cracked.
“Please go inside. Her Majesty has been waiting for you all this time.”
He immediately walked down the corridor and stepped into the Empress’s bedroom.
Inside the room, brightly lit by candles, sat Marquis Oristein, his relatives, and a high-ranking priest. Their dark eyes flew toward him all at once before returning to the bed in the center of the room.
He observed their faces for a moment before slowly crossing the room.
“Barkas!”
A small girl who had been lying face down on the bed threw herself toward him.
He wrapped one arm around the young Princess and lightly patted her back, just as the Empress had taught him long ago.
The girl hugged his neck with her thin arms and poured out hot, wet tears.
“Barkas, Mother is….”
He looked down at the bed while stroking the hair of the girl who couldn’t finish her sentence.
In just a few months, the Empress had become unrecognizably gaunt, and she sent him a hollow smile. She looked so lifeless it was hard to believe she was a woman of only thirty-one.
She reached out a skeletal hand.
“Come here.”
He set Aila down and knelt on one knee before the bed. The girl immediately ran to her twin brother and hugged him tightly. Gares was desperately holding back his tears while holding his younger sister in his arms.
He glanced at them for a moment before turning his gaze back to the Empress. She stroked his cheek with a hand as cold as ice.
“You’ve grown taller in these past few months. When you are fully grown, you’ll be as big as your father.”
“…….”
“Isn’t it strange? Even though your features are far from those of the Khan people, whenever I look at you, I am reminded of the Eastern plains where I used to ride horses as a child. Perhaps that is why I kept you by my side.”
The woman’s face, which had held a faint smile, suddenly went expressionless.
Gazing at him quietly with eyes so dark they appeared almost black, she slowly lowered her hand.
“I didn’t call you here just to reminisce. I asked for you urgently because there is a favor I wish to ask of you.”
“……Please speak.”
The woman could not easily find the words.
After struggling with her thoughts for a long time, she looked back at her children standing by the bed. Only then, as if she had reached a firm resolution, did she speak in a steady voice.
“Protect my children.”
He furrowed his brow.
He didn’t understand why she would bother making such a request.
She was a member of the Sheikan clan, and the twins were of the family bloodline. He already had an obligation to protect them.
He covered the back of the woman’s hand with his own and replied in a calm tone.
“Even without such a request, I intend to protect them both to the best of my ability. That is also the will of the Grand Ducal house….”
“I am asking for an oath from you. Barkas Raedgo Sheikan.”
She gripped his hand with all her remaining strength.
“Can you swear in the name of God that you will protect Gares and Aila until the day your life ends?”
He looked down silently at the Empress.
What she was demanding went beyond the reasonable duties he would shoulder as the next Grand Duke.
A vow that staked his entire life.
Because he knew the weight of it, he was reluctant to answer hastily.
Yet, that hesitation felt somewhat strange to him. Had his life not been something he merely continued because he was still breathing?
For the past seven years, he had never felt joy, let alone sadness or anger. What value was there in these moments of mechanical eating and sleeping that made him hesitate to answer?
He turned his head to look at Aila and Gares.
The twins were staring at him with frightened eyes. Protecting them didn’t seem like it would be that difficult. Wasn’t it something he had to do anyway?
Having made up his mind, he spoke calmly to the woman who had pulled him out of the abyss only to bind him once more.
“In the name of God, I swear that I will protect them both until the moment my life ends.”
