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The woman’s eyes flashed with a chilling intensity.
Her fingers tightened on the back of his hand with startling force—a grip like iron.
Then the ancient tongue of the East spilled from her cracked lips.
“That oath will become a curse that binds you. You shall be held to your word until your very last breath. Can you still say it holds true?”
Gasps rippled through the room. The onlookers seemed to believe the Empress was working some ancient Khan sorcery.
In truth, he felt it might not be far off. He could feel an unseen force tightening its hold around him.
A sharp question surfaced in his mind.
Why go to such lengths?
Though immense military authority would one day rest in his hands, that day was still a long way off.
At present, the influence he could wield was negligible. Yet the Empress was acting as though the fate of her children rested entirely upon his answer.
The rumors that she possessed the gift of foresight crossed his mind.
Had she glimpsed some future that made her feel compelled to bind him so thoroughly?
As he looked at her with doubt clouded in his eyes, her stern, set expression crumbled.
He could see she was in agony.
Her face, pale as ash, was soaked in cold sweat. It looked as though she might burn through the last embers of her life and wither away at any moment.
He gently placed his other hand over hers, where the veins stood out taut against the skin. Her eyes widened.
Even when resolved to be cruel, she was a woman who could never be entirely heartless. He knew she had shown him her own form of affection. Yet he had never been able to return what he had received. The least he could do for this woman at the end of her life was grant her some measure of peace before she closed her eyes.
After a moment’s hesitation, he answered in the language etched deep into his soul.
“Until my breath ends, the oath will hold.”
At that, relief and guilt flickered through her eyes.
Tears squeezed from beneath her thin eyelids and traced paths down her pallid cheeks.
“I am sorry. I am so sorry. I will not ask for your forgiveness.”
“Do not say that. I am—”
“You do not know what you have surrendered.”
She cut him off.
“You have only just turned thirteen. Even knowing I should never do this to a child like you…”
Her hollow gaze turned toward her children. Her pupils, dilated until they looked as black as ink, slowly regained their natural focus.
After lingering on the young twins with an expression torn between sorrow and regret, she looked back at him.
“Varkas Raedgo Shearkan, you may think life has no meaning… but the day will come when you find something that makes you want to live. When that day comes, you will regret this moment.”
Her dimming eyes slowly closed.
Wheezing through labored breaths, she murmured in a cracked voice.
“Resent me all you wish then.”
Before he could say that such a thing would never happen, a dry cough tore from her chest.
The Grand Priest hurried forward and channeled divine power into her, but her complexion only darkened.
Seeing their mother look as though she might slip away at any second, the twins burst into tears. They threw themselves against the bed, clutching her frail hands.
As he stood a step back from the scene, Marquis Oristein set a hand on his shoulder and guided him out into the corridor.
“Do not take Her Majesty’s words to heart. She has suffered hallucinations ever since her condition worsened.”
The Marquis let out a heavy sigh once they reached a quiet corner.
“Her mind has not been clear of late. She will likely not see the end of the month.”
The Marquis looked as though he had aged years in the span of a few months.
Gazing out the window with a face lined by suppressed grief and bitterness, he continued in a low voice.
“I am truly grateful for what you did today. Thanks to you, Her Majesty can rest with fewer worries.”
A heavy hand, bearing the family’s signet ring, squeezed his shoulder.
To the Marquis, the exchange had been nothing more than a performance staged to comfort a dying woman. He saw no reason to correct him.
The Empress had placed a collar around his neck. He knew that well enough, yet he felt no particular resentment. From the moment he had been born into the Shearkan house, he had been shackled by duty.
What difference did one more yoke make? The ducal house would support the legitimate Crown Prince, and he would carry out his family’s will.
Listening to the sound of weeping down the corridor, he began to walk away.
A pitch-black tunnel seemed to stretch on without end. He walked through that suffocating darkness, like the gullet of a giant serpent, until he found himself standing in the rain.
Spread before him was a garden of black roses.
Every bloom Empress Bernadette had tended had been torn up, replaced by garish flowers whose thick, parting buds resembled severed viscera.
He walked through the damp, heavy air of the garden toward the rear grounds. Beyond the rain-swept darkness, the roof of the Great Cathedral loomed faintly in the distance.
After Empress Bernadette’s passing, he left the quarters she had given him in the Empress’s Palace and moved into the priests’ dormitory at the cathedral. It was a return seven years after she had first taken his hand and led him out of the punishment room.
A few of the priests had been uneasy about taking in the heir to a grand duke, but the high-ranking clergy, including the Grand Priest, received him with gentle smiles. It was as though the unpleasant events of the past had never occurred.
They placed him back under rigorous discipline, as if welcoming a wayward son back into the fold. Once again, he entered a life where every desire was stripped away.
Yet he did not feel the misery he had known as a child. If anything, the rigid control brought him peace.
Only then did he realize he had harbored a lingering guilt for failing to meet the Empress’s hopes.
He felt for the woman who had wished for his senses to return, but he had no desire to feel anything. This state of unmoving stillness was comfortable.
He could even see reason in what the priests preached.
Sensation was a poison that clouded the mind.
The Emperor had been blinded by beauty, forsaking his honor to walk the path of sin.
The Empress, consumed by devotion, had driven herself into ruin despite holding the empire’s power in her grasp.
There was no need for emotions that destroyed everything they touched.
Lifting unfeeling eyes to the black sky, he resumed his pace.
That was when he saw her—a small girl standing in the misting rain.
He did not know why he stopped beside that muddy hollow.
Perhaps to the end of his days, he would never understand what led him to cross paths with her in that spot, on that day, or why he was the first to speak.
The only certainty was that on that day, in that place, he had stumbled across something he had never asked for.
It would be a very long time before he realized that truth.
At thirteen, knowing nothing, he reached a hand down toward the little girl in the mud.
“Take my hand.”
In her small face, striking eyes widened like lanterns.
After hesitating, she took a timid step toward him. Then she looked down at the hands she held curled against her chest and shook her head.
“I can’t. My hands are full.”
He narrowed his eyes, studying those small, pale hands.
“Is it important?”
“No.”
“Then drop it.”
“Even if it isn’t important, I can’t throw it away.”
She scowled, clearly annoyed with him.
Something in those words rubbed him wrong.
He had thrown away everything that did not matter, and his world had become simpler for it. Whatever she held, it could not possibly be worth standing soaked in the mud for.
He almost told her as much, but thought better of arguing with a child who barely reached his shoulder. Instead, he knelt down and scooped up the small, rain-drenched bundle of a girl.
Startled, she squirmed in his arms. He held her still and carried her up the slick, muddy bank in a single stride.
END