Winter Bud - Chapter 64

Slan was fairly tall compared to other children his age. They said he took after him by nature, with a rather solid frame.

He’d also been born a big, healthy baby, but his growth wasn’t so rapid that there was any need to control his diet or apply any constitutional therapy, and yet Orestes suddenly thought of when Slan had been a little younger. Back then, when he told him to come closer, it seemed like the child had thrown himself into his arms without being afraid.

Orestes looked at his son, who came into the study hesitantly and was glancing around, not knowing where to put his eyes. He stretched out his arms and opened his mouth.

“Come here.”

Slan turned his head. Even though it was telling him to be held, the child approached with small steps, then stopped. Orestes gently pulled the child’s hand.

“Do you dislike being held in your father’s arms?”

He lightly lifted the child who had toppled against his chest and sat him on his thigh. Slan blinked his rabbit-like eyes at him, then shook his head. He smiled faintly and ruffled his son’s fluffy hair. The fine strands tangled between his fingers.

“When you were little, you liked your father more than you do now.”

He recalled his son when he walked around like a baby bear. Before he’d learned how the palace worked, Slan often clung to him, asking to be held. But instead of treating him affectionately, he’d even avoided running into the child, trying to hide how bothersome he found it.

And yet, whenever Slan saw him, he would stretch out both arms and whine to be held. He found himself wanting to see the child he’d been at that age again. Not as the Duke of Everhardt’s son, but as his son. Since he couldn’t turn Slan back to that age, didn’t that mean he had no choice but to have another child? Of course, that wasn’t why he’d gotten Nanna pregnant, but still.

All of a sudden, Slan lifted his head and looked at him. The child, whom he’d thought had no part of him that took after his mother, strangely did resemble his birth mother a little in the shape of his eyes. The long lashes, and the thin eyelids especially. He stroked the child’s cheek, then pressed his lips to him lightly and held him a little tighter.

“I heard your mother sent a letter.”

Slan looked at him and his plump lips twitched. He calmly stroked his son’s slender back. Slan lowered his gaze for a moment, seeming lost in thought, then looked at him again and opened his mouth.

“She said to take good care of Alexis.”

“And.”

“She told me to get along with Stella.”

“And.”

“She said she misses me a lot. Next time we see each other….”

“Sounds like she wants to return to the main palace.”

“…It’s not like that.”

Slan said in a small voice that seemed to crawl into itself. He stared at his son, who spoke in a voice no bigger than an ant. Slan was a child not even eight years old. And yet, there were many times when it was hard to tell what he was thinking. Unlike Stella, who showed her feelings honestly, Slan would hide his emotions calmly, not like a child.

He belatedly tried to narrow the distance between them. That he could tell his father anything. But Slan didn’t even call him Father, and he didn’t open up either. Even when he asked if he didn’t miss his mother, Slan said he was fine. Likewise, when he asked if it wasn’t difficult to deal with the Empress, he hid his true feelings behind words like, ‘Empress Mother is kind and considerate.’ A seven-year-old child wouldn’t simply like the father’s wife who had appeared one day and pushed out his own mother’s place.

“You don’t have to lie to your father, Slan.”

“I, I really am.”

“Your mother is pregnant with my child right now.”

“….”

“You’ll have a younger sibling.”

Orestes whispered as he calmly stroked his son’s shoulder, his son’s head drooping low. But Slan only blinked with a pale face. To loosen the child’s wariness a little more, he called, “Son.”

Slan looked up at him with dark eyes.

“Do you understand what I am saying?”

“Mom said she likes the Western Palace….”

“That’s a lie,” Orestes said firmly.

For no reason, it felt like he was getting irritated. Did Nanna really have no intention of returning to the palace? Even though she was separated from the three children she’d given birth to…. Should he not have shown Slan and Stella to her? If there had never been times when the children crossed over to the Western Palace, would she have shed tears of longing? A quiet anger rose toward a woman who seemed to have no desperation, no thought at all.

At first, he thought it was an act. But seeing Slan’s reaction, it seemed like it was genuine. That she was shut away in that crumbling palace, copying scriptures all day long, or pretending to be a farm woman and staring into a vegetable patch, and that she seemed to enjoy it.

“Slan.”

“But Mom really….”

“You miss your mother.”

“….”

“Tell her to come back. To your father’s side.”

He felt pathetic for sitting a child who wasn’t even seven down and saying such wretched things. Slan, who had been blinking with his gaze lowered, began to let tears fall in drops. Startled, Orestes cupped the young boy’s cheeks and lifted his face.

“Why are you crying?”

“Hic, hng….”

“Slan.”

The child, who had only been crying quietly, began to sob, his shoulders shaking. Suddenly, from outside the study, he heard a servant’s voice announcing the Empress Dowager’s arrival. He stood while holding his crying son and went to greet his mother. She was holding the young princess’s hand.

“To make a child cry when his mother isn’t even here. You’ve done a terrible thing, Karl.”

The Empress Dowager’s tongue-clicking voice rang in his ears. It didn’t feel good, as if he was a father who had forcibly taken away a mother and neglected his son. But in any case, it wasn’t wrong, so he couldn’t show it.

The Empress Dowager, seated across from him, stretched both arms out toward Slan in his arms. It meant to hand him over. But Orestes didn’t want to pass his son to his mother.

“I’ll soothe him.”

“Weren’t you the one who made him cry?”

His mother asked. Orestes didn’t answer. Holding his young son’s small body, he gently patted him and whispered for him not to cry. Slan held back his sniffles and rubbed his reddened eyes hard. Usually, he was dignified, but seeing him rub his eyes like that, he thought he really was a child his age.

“…What brings you here?”

Time passed while he soothed the child. If she had come as far as his study, there must be something she needed to do. Since she had only drinking tea until now, it seemed like it was something that required caution.

“I have something urgent to say about Nanna’s matter. So I think we should send the children out.”

“If it’s something you can’t say in front of the kids, I don’t really want to hear it.”

“Karl.”

The Empress Dowager looked at him with cold eyes. Orestes set down the son he’d been holding and called for the attendant outside the door. Soon, the attendant came in and led Slan and Stella out by the hand. He took a sip of cool herb tea and leaned back into the chair.

“Go ahead.”

“I’m thinking of having Nanna leave the palace. And finding her a suitable match anew.”

The Empress Dowager’s voice was extremely calm. But the meaning of the words she recited was so absurd it made him wonder if she’d lost her mind.

It wasn’t that she didn’t know Nanna was pregnant. And yet she was saying to send her out of the palace? Find her a new marriage? He couldn’t understand what she was thinking. Orestes stared at his mother with a stunned face, then ended up letting out a laugh.

“Mother. Nanna is carrying my child.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?”

“Then what are you saying right now? Have you gotten heatstroke this late in the season?”

The icy sarcasm was sharp. But Jophie didn’t fall for the sarcasm easily. She only looked at her son with cold eyes.

He thought she couldn’t make rational judgments to begin with when it came to sending her to the Western Palace, and with Nanna in particular, but he didn’t expect her to be this unable to tell right from wrong.

And perhaps because of the two words, ‘leave’ the palace and ‘match,’ he was quite agitated. She looked dimly at her son, whose eyes were flashing like a beast showing its claws, and opened her lips in a low voice.

“Do you think I’m saying something that doesn’t make sense?”

“At the very least, you don’t seem sane.”

“Watch your tongue, Karl.”

Without even a frown, Jophie warned her son. Orestes’s face hardened to a frightening degree. It felt like he was holding shards of glass in his hands.

She had thought he might react like this. But for him to bare his teeth this much….