The Sand Bride - Chapter 71

Originally, royal palace servants who attended to the royal family held positions passed down through generations, so they were all raised with strict training to keep their mouths shut. However, even such training couldn’t stop them from looking at Karzhen, who was nursing Esther, with uneasy eyes.

They were the ones who had once directly seen or heard of Hemor nursing her man’s illness.

That man already had a wife and children, but Hemor had killed them all and forcibly dragged him here. That’s why, even after coming to the palace, unlike Hemor’s other men, he desperately denounced her and sometimes even attacked her. Of course, each time, Hemor showed no mercy and punished the man.

But since when? The servants still vividly remembered Hemor nursing the sick man. It was such a shocking scene that they couldn’t forget it even if they tried.

Every time the man vomited blood-tinged bile and convulsed, Hemor would wipe away the vomit with a pained expression and massage his limbs. The blood-foaming vomit splattered even on her cheeks, but Hemor paid no heed, focusing solely on the man’s suffering.

It was a long period of meticulously devoted and agonizing nursing.

So unforgettable, the sight of the sick man and Hemor nursing him left a strong impression on people. Thus, as days passed, the servants began to see Hemor’s shadow reflected in Karzhen’s back, sensing an eerie foreboding.

However, Karzhen had no leisure to listen to their whispers. He had never been interested in the idle chatter of his subordinates, but currently, he had to expend every remaining nerve fiber just dealing with Esther.

In a life governed by simple rules, Karzhen, facing a problem for the first time, couldn’t produce any satisfying solutions like he usually did, but instead fretted like an idiot.

‘Why?’

Holding Esther’s sick hand, Karzhen asked himself.

‘Why do I feel this way?’

He always took what he wanted, and did what he desired. He could do so because he was not weak. If one was weak, it was right to offer oneself and obey. That was the simple rule that governed him and the world around him.

Esther was a weak being. Beyond her body, her personality was fragile, she was easily frightened, and startled by small things. Just as a rabbit is dragged away by a hawk’s talons, or a field mouse is carried off in a fox’s mouth, it was the natural order for her to be offered whatever Karzhen desired, whenever he desired it. And she usually did so.

Indeed, whenever he scared her, Esther always moved as Karzhen commanded, as he wished. So Karzhen had merely done the same thing this time. He believed that if he frightened her greatly, she would never again think of escaping, or leaving his side.

He believed that he had to frighten Esther as much as he disliked her leaving, so that she wouldn’t even think of it, and just as he thought, Esther no longer spoke of leaving and remained quietly by his side.

‘But why do I feel this way?’

He didn’t want to see Esther, yet when he wasn’t seeing her, he couldn’t bear not to.

This plunged him into deep confusion. Until now, Karzhen had believed that the reason he kept Esther was because she pleased him.

There were annoying and infuriating moments, but he had undoubtedly thought that he kept Esther by his side primarily because she brought him pleasure.

In Karzhen’s mind, the subject of emotion was always Karzhen himself; Esther was merely a condition for his amusement. It was a world that revolved around him.

Just as clothes unworn are worthless, Esther, if she brought him no pleasure, ought to be useless. Moreover, wasn’t the current Esther even causing him distress?

“It’s agonizing to look at her, but if I don’t, I’m so afraid I can’t do anything.”

At that moment,

Karzhen remembered Hemor.

He recalled the words of his pitiful younger sister, who clung to a sick man who brought her no benefit.

The image of his sister, wiping her foam-flecked cheek and smiling miserably, began to waver like a mirage, seeming to disappear yet never quite vanishing.

Just as a large dam crumbles through a tiny fissure, just as the movement of a massive flock of migratory birds begins with the flight of a single bird, upon this realization, the phantom of Hemor tore through the past, which Karzhen’s instincts desperately cried out not to remember, and dragged it out.

Karzhen was mercilessly thrown into the midst of that memory, like a fish caught in a fine net.

“I…….”

Blossoming petals like silver scales beneath the moon, stone chairs carved from rock that looked white beneath the pale sky.

Hakan and no one else knew, but Karzhen had once seen Hemor confessing her love to the man. In that very greenhouse where she would eventually die, Hemor, with a serious voice, held both of the man’s hands.

Karzhen being in the greenhouse was purely coincidental. He had finished a banquet celebrating a successful hunt and was returning to the palace when, in his drunken state, he desired to see the Lepiran flower Hakan had mentioned, and so he headed to the greenhouse, a place he had never visited in his life.

However, what captivated Karzhen there was not the Lepiran flower. A small, trembling voice captivated his steps.

“I, you…….”

Karzhen had never before heard Hemor’s voice tremble like that. In no battle, in no fear, had she ever uttered such a sound.

Yes. Karzhen thought that day that Hemor seemed like someone consumed by terror. It was the tone of someone begging for mercy, pleading for their life.

“I think I love you.”

At that moment, Karzhen stiffened on the spot as if struck by lightning. His wide eyes froze like stone, unable to move.

A memory he had pushed into a corner of his mind and refused to look at, at that moment, branched out like a dense tree, rooting itself and seizing him, clutching him.

The words of confession, whose giver and receiver were now but handfuls of dust, their power lost, began to swell within Karzhen’s mind, carried by the weight of reality.

“It’s just.”

“I don’t know when, or why. Or maybe I was the only one who didn’t know from the beginning…….”

“If I had known, I wouldn’t have felt this way.”

The numerous phantoms of Hemor, dragged from the past, scattered like echoes into various branches, eventually becoming a single voice that penetrated and permeated his mind. As the sky reflected on the water’s surface, Karzhen’s trajectory and Hemor’s trace connected.

“I think I love you.”

Only when he reached a certain point did Karzhen realize the horizon had vanished.

That he had realized something that, once known, could never be undone…….