Chapter 167
Transparent tears soaked the woman’s face.
He looked down at her with numb eyes, then knelt on one knee before her.
“As you said, I do not understand Your Majesty’s pain in the slightest. However, I do remember the helpless feelings of a child who has lost all place to lean on.”
Light slowly returned to the eyes that had been empty like black holes.
He slipped a hand inside his coat and took out a handkerchief.
Then, just as she had once wiped his face, he wiped the tears from her wet cheeks.
“For the sake of His Highness the Crown Prince and Her Highness the Princess, please gather your resolve.”
The Empress’s face became stained with guilt and shame.
The woman, her bony, wasted shoulders trembling faintly, lowered her head weakly.
“I am sorry. I should not have said such things to you...”
He lightly patted the shoulder of the Empress, who was sobbing like a little girl.
A short while later, he carefully lifted the Empress, who had lost consciousness as if exhausted, and laid her on the bed.
When he muffled his footsteps and went outside, he saw Gareth leaning against one side of the corridor.
“Follow me.”
The boy, whose bloodshot eyes gleamed ominously, grabbed him and dragged him away without warning.
He silently followed behind the Crown Prince.
“Look over there.”
Gareth, who dragged him up to the watchtower connected to the Main Palace, pressed himself against the railing and pointed outside.
He went and stood beside the boy.
In the garden of the detached palace used by the Emperor for rest, a man and a woman were having a secret meeting.
He could easily recognize the Emperor’s dark hair and bold-featured face.
The man, whose curly hair was loose over his broad shoulders made of bone and muscle, was leaning lazily back against a chair while pawing at a woman’s waist.
He carefully examined the slender woman leaning against the Emperor.
Aside from her long, pale hair and the strangely balanced structure of her body, he could not find anything particularly remarkable.
What on earth was it about that woman that made the Emperor of the Empire break the oath he had sworn before God and cast aside his honor?
As he looked at her with doubt, the woman raised her eyes as if she had sensed his gaze.
In that instant, he felt every fine hair on the nape of his neck stand on end.
His skin grew cold, as if he had something extremely dangerous before his eyes.
The woman stared up at him, narrowed her eyes, and smiled mockingly.
Then she grabbed the Emperor’s hair and pulled him roughly toward her.
It was a touch that treated him not as the most noble being in the Empire, but as some worthless possession.
Within that arrogant grip, the ruler who had looked as if he had been cast from steel crumbled like a sandcastle.
The bodies of the two people, bursting with vitality, overlapped beneath the bright sunlight, and their wet lips clung together greedily.
“Filthy beasts.”
Gareth muttered like a growling beast.
“He brought that woman to the detached palace a week ago and started doing that. And that wench even set her dirty feet in the garden of the Empress’s Palace and insulted my mother.”
Blood vessels stood out in the boy’s bloodshot eyes as he glared at the entangled man and woman.
Gripping the railing tightly with both hands, he spat through his teeth,
“That’s why Mother drank poison. Because of that filthy whore...”
Gareth, whose body was trembling violently, kicked over a cabinet as if having a fit.
Then he began trampling wildly on all the miscellaneous objects that spilled across the floor.
The frenzy that had begun like an explosion ended only after everything in the room had been smashed.
“I will become Emperor no matter what. When that time comes, I will make that woman kneel before me and pour the poison my mother drank down her throat.”
The boy, breathing roughly amid the chaos, turned his tear-soaked eyes toward him.
“When that time comes, your role is to drag that prostitute before me and make her kneel. I will become Emperor of the Empire, and you will become the ruler of the East and my closest confidant. Let us repay the humiliation Mother suffered.”
He turned his head and looked down below the railing again.
Over the sight of the man and woman clinging together in broad daylight, the image of Bernadette wasting away overlapped.
She was someone who had rescued him from a place no different from a prison and cared for him like her own child for seven years.
Why could he not feel the same fierce anger as Gareth?
All he could feel was pity for the Empress and disgust toward the sordid act those two were committing.
Gareth suddenly grabbed his clothes and tugged.
“You’ll do that, won’t you, Brother?”
Varkas lowered his gaze again and met Gareth’s unstable eyes.
He could not sympathize with his emotions, but he was clearly aware that he owed the Empress a debt he could never repay.
He reached out and lightly stroked Gareth’s disheveled curly hair.
Then, just as he opened his mouth to answer, the young boy’s form suddenly crumbled like sand.
The chaotic scenery surrounding him was also covered in blurred and dull colors.
The next moment, he was standing in one corner of a dark corridor where thick darkness had settled.
A thin sob came from somewhere.
When he turned his head, he saw maids wiping away tears.
One of them gave him a respectful greeting.
“You have come.”
The maid’s voice was cracked.
“Please go inside. Her Majesty has been waiting for you all this time.”
He immediately crossed the corridor and stepped into the Empress’s bedroom.
Inside the brightly candlelit room were Marquis Oristein, his relatives, and a high-ranking priest.
Their dark eyes flew toward him all at once, then returned to the bed placed at the center of the room.
He briefly examined their faces, then slowly crossed the room.
“Varkas!”
The small girl who had been lying face down on the bed threw herself toward him.
He wrapped one arm around the young Princess’s body and lightly patted her back, just as he had learned from the Empress long ago.
The girl wrapped her thin arms around his neck and poured out hot, wet tears.
“Varkas, Mother...”
He stroked the head of the girl, who could not finish speaking, and looked down at the bed.
The Empress, who had become unrecognizably gaunt in just a few months, gave him an empty smile.
She looked so lifeless that it was hard to believe she was a woman who had only just turned thirty-one.
She extended a bony hand.
“Come here.”
He set Ayla down and knelt on one knee before the bed.
The girl immediately ran to her twin brother and hugged him tightly.
Gareth held his younger sister in both arms and desperately held back his tears.
He looked at that sight briefly, then turned his gaze back to the Empress.
She caressed his cheek with a hand as cold as ice.
“You have grown even taller in just a few months. When you are fully grown, you will be as tall as your father.”
“......”
“Strange, is it not? Though you have features far removed from the Khan people, whenever I looked at you, I thought of the eastern plains where I rode horses and played as a child. Perhaps that is why I kept you by my side.”
The woman’s face, which had held a faint smile on her lips, suddenly became expressionless.
She stared at him silently with eyes so dark they almost looked black, then slowly lowered her hand.
“I did not call you here just to ramble like this. There is one thing I wish to ask of you, so I asked you to come urgently.”
“...Please command me.”
The woman could not easily open her mouth.
After hesitating over something for a long while, she looked back at her children standing beside the bed.
Only then, as if she had made up her mind, she spoke in a firm voice.
“Protect my children.”
He frowned.
He could not understand why she had to make such a request.
She was a member of the Siarkan clan, and the twins were also of the family’s bloodline.
He had a duty to protect the two of them.
He wrapped his hand around the back of the woman’s hand and replied in a calm tone.
“Even if you do not ask me, I intend to protect the two of them to the extent of my power. That is also the will of the grand ducal house...”
“I am asking you for an oath, Varkas Raedgo Siarkan.”
She gripped his hand with all her strength.
“Can you swear in God’s name that you will protect Gareth and Ayla until the day your life ends?”
He silently looked down at the Empress.
What she demanded went beyond the duty he was rightly meant to bear as the future Grand Duke.
An oath staked on his entire life.
Because he knew its weight, he was reluctant to answer rashly.
Yet that hesitation also felt somewhat strange.
Was his life not something he had continued simply because breath remained in him?
For the past seven years, he had not felt joy, let alone sadness or anger.
What value was there in moments he had continued mechanically, eating and sleeping, that he would hesitate to answer?
He turned his head and looked at Ayla and Gareth.
The twins were staring at him with frightened eyes.
Protecting them did not seem particularly difficult.
It was something he had to do anyway.
Having made up his mind, he calmly spoke to the woman who had pulled him out of the abyss only to bind him again.
“In God’s name, I swear that I will protect the two of them until the moment my life ends.”
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