Winter Bud - Chapter 72

“Madam.”

“I’m fine.”

“But His Majesty….”

“A little, a little later….”

Her voice was damp. The maid thought the woman’s eyes looked like a dying fish’s eyes. She didn’t even thrash fiercely like a fish thrown out of water. In a stagnant puddle, she only reacted if you poked her with a branch. The maid nodded slowly.

She couldn’t dare disobey an imperial order. Still, it wasn’t that she was refusing altogether, so wouldn’t it be fine? She felt a bit sorry for the woman who had once been the Empress Consort. A woman who couldn’t even cling to a single maid’s coattails, who was moved this way and that again at her superiors’ whims, didn’t look much different from their own situation.

Maybe it was even more so because her status was insignificant to begin with. Adopted daughter of Everhardt, the Empress Consort, even if she dressed herself up with all those modifiers, it didn’t hide the essence. As the saying goes, “When whales fight, the shrimp’s back gets broken.” It was pitiful to see a woman who was barely even a handful get battered around like this. It was clear enough that even a young maid like her could see it.

For example, how roughly the woman in front of her was being handled. What did it matter if she was the birth mother of the imperial children? Rather, it was more pitiful because she was the birth mother who bore the imperial children with her own body. Watching the woman, she understood what a miserable life a woman without backing lived at court. Having borne the imperial children hadn’t given her life any value at all.

“I’ll bring water and a meal.”

The maid drew her hand back and spoke softly. The faint sky-blue eyes stared at her blankly, then slowly closed.

***

“It’s just one woman, at most….”

Thea let out a crooked smile. The gaze that met hers was sharp. More than her husband, who’d tangled legs with a maid, it was harder to watch her father, whose mind was caught by that woman until he couldn’t see anything else. They say parents are on their child’s side until they die, but was he not? Thea stared at the father who had always doted on her.

He looked young. In truth, he was still at an age where his vigor was strong. When the relatives tried to persuade her father to remarry, she should’ve listened. They said it would be a benefit for her, and for her father, and for the Everhardt family to have a new mistress of the house. Thea only smiled sharply.

Her father was a young warrior. Saying he wouldn’t have time to care for a wife, Thea rejected the suggestion. In truth, her father spent a lot of time on the battlefield. Thea hated being left alone in the ducal residence with a stepmother.

Every time she parted from him, she thought it might be the last. So if they separated now, it could end like this.

So every time they parted, she prayed. She prayed that she’d be able to meet her father again alive. That he’d return not lying long in a coffin, but holding the reins, coming back in a gallant figure. But that wasn’t something that could be stopped with prayer alone.

So the relatives said even more that a mistress of the house was needed, but Thea refused to listen to the end. Just imagining sitting at the table with a stiff face, having lost her father, facing a woman pregnant with a half-sibling, was horrifying.

But….

“Great-aunt kept saying while she was alive that you had to remarry, Father…. I didn’t know back then that this would be the price for not listening to an elder’s words.”

A faint smile hung at the corner of her mouth. Her father, sitting across from her, looked utterly indifferent. He wasn’t even looking at Thea. It felt like her heart was being sliced off with a rasping scrape. Orestes was fine. At least compared to losing her father….

She thought her father, at least, belonged wholly to her. He and she were father and daughter bound by blood. Nothing was thicker than blood. But Nanna tore them apart. Why did it have to be that girl? She thought of Nanna.

The woman who, like she’d committed a crime worthy of death, didn’t dare look at her and kept groping at the floor the entire time. She thought she should forgive that woman. Like she understood her father. Like she accepted her husband. In truth, the one who couldn’t let go of anything and was clutching everything with both hands was her.

“Say something, at least.”

“….”

“Father.”

“How is it an insult to you that I want that wench?”

“Ha.”

Thea’s face, which had been stiffly frozen, hardened like a sheet of paper. Sermione looked at his daughter’s face, like polished ivory, gleaming. On that white face, the twist that surfaced was like a thorny growth.

He looked at his daughter with indifference. The face glaring at him with flashing eyes was familiar. No matter how her bones had grown and her face had changed, to his eyes she wasn’t all that different from the ten-year-old girl who used to cling to his waist.

And yet he loved Nanna. That woman looked different. When Thea hugged his waist and looked up at him with sparkling eyes, Nanna must’ve clung to her own parents with the same face. So he shouldn’t see her as a woman.

At some point, he tried to empty himself like that. Thinking of Thea’s childhood…. He tried to think of young Nanna as a daughter. But he couldn’t. Instead, only a cruel heart rose up. The more he desired Nanna, the more he thought he wanted to have that woman, the more it felt like he was facing the floor.

What if Thea hadn’t existed? He was the man who, in front of his dead wife’s coffin, vowed he’d protect their daughter for the rest of his life. It wasn’t only passionate love that was love. He thought loyalty carried the same weight. When he inherited his brother’s wife in his place, he tried to stay by her side with respect and loyalty.

Cherishing Thea with utmost devotion was an extension of that loyalty. Rather than his paternal love being deep, it was because he promised his dead wife. But Nanna existed on a different track from that. At some point, the woman who pushed into his life dragged him down every time.

He was sick of it. He thought everything would be fine if he kept that woman somewhere he couldn’t reach. But….

“So, do I have to call a woman who used to be my maid ‘Mother’?”

Thea, staring at him, burst into laughter. It was disgusting and vicious. Even as she laughed in disbelief, a chill ran up her skin and goosebumps rose. Nanna was not a woman who could dare become the duke’s wife. Her original status was lacking like that, and endlessly low.

Was she the daughter of a poor farm family? Her abundant, wavy silver hair and watery eyes were beautiful enough to draw attention, unfitting for that status, but it was only a shell. Nanna truly had nothing. And yet he was keeping that girl in a noble position like that.

Thea turned her gaze away. She was a woman who had nothing, but that woman had once stayed in a place higher than the duke’s wife. So she might think becoming the duchess was nothing. Thea twisted her lips into a smile.

“What are you trying to say?”

“Exactly what you heard. Father wants to have Nanna under that name…. If you achieve everything you want, then Nanna will become the maternal grandmother of the children she gave birth to.”

Each word had a crude ring to it. But she didn’t think she’d done anything wrong. Not a single thing…. Because that was the truth. Slan and Stella would have to call their own birth mother ‘Grandmother.’ Orestes, too, would have to call the woman he once held ‘Mother-in-law.’

What a ridiculous farce. It wasn’t even for political reasons. It was nothing more than what a man crazed over women cooked up. Thea couldn’t believe the man acting as if he couldn’t see anything because he was crazed over that “woman-chasing” was her father.

How could it not be some other man, but “Sermione de Everhardt,” who could be that kind of person? Thea bit down hard on her lip, fighting back the urge to retch right then.

“I’m not going to keep you with Nanna. The same goes for Orestes.”

“Is that possible?”

“Why do you think it’s impossible? Nanna will live with me in Aldermort. I’m not going to let her meet the Crown Prince and the First Princess again.”

“So you’ll really….”

Her father remained indifferent. Even if she screamed and dug in her nails, he didn’t react. With one eyebrow raised, Thea glared at him with blazing eyes.

Sermione parted his lips. “You were the one who asked if I wanted Nanna back.”

“I meant keep her as a mistress.”

Thea’s face twisted. Becoming the duke’s mistress and becoming the duke’s wife were worlds apart. A mistress didn’t need to be called Mother. For Nanna, that was better too. Nanna would also know well that she didn’t suit a position that high.

“If you want her that badly, keep her as a mistress. And whether you go to Aldermort or to Leaxos….”

Thea let her words trail off. She thought of Orestes. With her gaze slanted downward, she slowly traced back that face that had twisted in an instant.

“Take her and disappear.”