The Sand Bride - Side Story 2.28

Every time, Hemor easily subdued the man, then grabbed the collar of the groaning, fallen man and forced him up. It was because he looked as if he were about to cry. There could not be another sound of crying in her palace.

No matter how much she liked and found his struggle amusing, she could no longer tolerate an act that brought shame to her name. With a bored face, she spoke to the man who was glaring at her with trembling, bruised lips.

“I hate crying very much. The sound I hate most in the world is the sound of crying, and the thing I hate seeing most in the world is tears. So, if you cry in front of me, I will gouge out your eyes.”

“You are…….”

The man, who had been flopping like a fish caught on a hook, gasped and finally spat out a sentence. Hemor couldn’t hear well and had to ask back, “What?”

“Do you… not cry……?”

And when the man said that, Hemor stared at him with her mouth open, a stupid look on her face. But as soon as she understood those words, she soon burst into a loud laugh.

“Me?”

After laughing for a long while, Hemor let go of the man. Looking at his body as it fell helplessly, she wore an arrogant smile.

“The meaning of my name is ‘One Who Does Not Cry.’ Why do you think I hate crying? It’s because I don’t cry.”

Upon hearing those words, the man stared at Hemor with a vacant face before slowly dropping his head. It was a helpless snap, like a wilting flower.

Hemor blinked, thinking she smelled a faint scent of burning from somewhere. It was the scent that always followed when she destroyed something. But the man had only bowed his head; he was not dead. Then, what on earth was dead? What was it that had been destroyed?

This man before my eyes is not dead.

Even after that, Hemor could not find the cause of that smell. Having lived in a place where that smell was already too thick, she couldn’t find it. She couldn’t distinguish between the smell of flowers burning and the smell of other things burning.

She didn’t know. Truly, she could not fathom where this destruction was starting…….

The Crow did not leave the nest after that day.

* * *

It was two months later when Hakan saw Hemor again. Before then, due to many rumors, he had to hear news of Hemor even though he didn’t want to know, but seeing her in person, his impression was different.

When he saw her hugging a flowerpot in front of the royal palace, Hakan couldn’t hide his bewildered face. He had heard that her relationship with the Southern man was terribly bad, but recently the atmosphere seemed to have changed, and Hemor looked to be in a good mood.

Word was that the man, who had been a gardener, had requested flowers. He said they were flowers he often grew in his home country, and their name was Lepiran. It was a plant with broad leaves and pale red petals. These were words Hakan heard directly from Hemor, who was clutching a large flowerpot in her arms.

Adding that it was his favorite flower and that she had gone through a lot of trouble to import it alive to this place, Hemor hurried back to the man with an uncharacteristically boastful face.

Hakan stared blankly at Hemor’s energetic retreating figure.

Looking at Hemor’s mood lately, one might think the fellow had finally given up and become docile, but a lingering unpleasant feeling remained rooted in the center of his chest. It was the very same ill omen he had felt when he first saw that man.

But nothing had happened yet, had it? Hakan gave a short, hollow laugh and shook his head. At any rate, his sister looked happy now, and Hakan didn’t want to break that happiness.

* * *

“Handle them with care! Lord Hemor ordered the greenhouse to be completely filled within today!”

“Within today, sir?”

“Yes!”

By the time four months had passed since the man entered Hemor’s palace, many things had happened. Hemor seemed completely infatuated with the man. Rumors were rife throughout the palace that the eldest daughter of the royal family, Hemor, deeply cherished that pale man with the light blonde hair.

Whether he had resigned himself to fate or given up, or perhaps changed his mind due to the sweetness of the abundance and power Hemor provided, there had been no word recently of the man doing anything insolent to Hemor. Thanks to that, the atmosphere between the two, which used to be full of fists, shouting, and screams, had become dramatically softened.

The problem was that Hemor’s anxious men had begun to swarm and pester Karzhen—who at least held authority as the eldest son—to move him somehow.

Numerous men and their parents—prestigious nobles—sought out Karzhen to petition him to do something about Hemor’s insolent foreign man, and Karzhen grew so irritated that he left for the hunting grounds and reached a point where he hardly entered the royal palace.

By the time it reached that stage, Hakan also began to worry. Hemor was doing something strange. In the first place, the fact that she was giving items within the palace to the man was most strange.

Hakan watched the group of flowerpots being carried in carts toward the greenhouse. That held a different meaning from the gold bars or jewels Hemor occasionally bestowed upon other men. It was because she wasn’t giving them to herself, but to that ‘man.’

Hemor was joyful when she saw that Southerner, but it was because she became joyful seeing the man’s joy. In those Lepiran flowers, there was no joy for Hemor. There was only the man’s joy.

It might seem like a fleeting thought, like the empty gaps between bars, but it wasn’t. The initiative of joy had shifted. It was breaking. It was being destroyed.

Hakan, too, caught the smell of something burning at that moment. Someone was being destroyed—dying—under such clear and tranquil sunlight. Yet he did not know it was his sister.

That the one who was dying was his sister—he did not realize it at that moment.