Chapter 62 — The Closing
"Ah..."
Euphemia had been sitting like a petal left to dry and wither. Now she stirred from that living-corpse stillness, rose unsteadily, and got to her feet.
The hour was eight in the morning. An operation that had stretched across eleven hours had at last drawn to a close, and from within the operating room, Ferzen was being brought out. The face on the bed was gaunt and ashen, without a trace of color in it.
"The surgery is finished. The anesthesia ought to wear off in about three hours, but returning to consciousness will take longer than that... no. It will take days. He requires absolute rest. Even if he should wake partway through, he must be put back to sleep."
From the many lines joined to his veins, fluid fell drop by drop and entered his body at a slow crawl. Always so noble. Always so dignified. At times frightening, at times overbearing. To think that even he could be made this frail.
Through blurred eyes, Euphemia quietly followed as Ferzen was moved into the sickroom.
"Then we shall take our leave..."
So that he might rest undisturbed, the physicians—dead on their feet—bent at the waist and withdrew. Left alone, Euphemia brought a chair from nearby, sank down beside him, and bowed her head.
She had been this way while the surgery went on, and she was this way still, now that it was over: anxious, bewildered, like a child who had lost the road. The woman she had once been would never have come to such a state. Had she still been the proud, tenacious lady who led Ruerug, she would have set one foot before the other through an ordeal like this and never lost her calm.
But the woman Ferzen had tamed no longer knew how to take a step by herself. All she had learned, shut inside the cage that bore his name, was how to give up, how to obey, and how to yield—and beyond that, only obscene arts for pleasing a man. No. Not a man. It would be truer to call them arts for pleasing Ferzen, her own husband.
Yes. For Euphemia, from whom even the self had been cut away, nothing remained but the time she had lived as the wife of Ferzen von Schweik Brutein. What color had once been hers had thinned until it was nearly gone, then mingled with the color he had laid over her. Not only her body, but her heart, bore his traces in clear strokes—his handprints pressed into every corner. In the plainest words, she was a beloved object belonging to the man named Ferzen.
And so, though the door of the cage that had held her for so long stood faintly open, Euphemia could not run. No—she did not run. Walking after the man who fastened the leash and drew it tight had become so familiar that she only circled his fallen body, wishing he would take that leash in hand again and pull her to him as he always had. She prayed, desperately, that he would rise from the bed soon and bring this moment to an end in any form at all.
For a long while she said nothing. And yet—was it because the surgery had ended well? A body that might have collapsed long before now spilled its drowsiness out all at once, far too late. Euphemia slowly laid her head beside Ferzen and nuzzled her cheek against him like a child. His scent came to her, distinct. His warmth reached her, distinct. Each time it did, a quiet relief settled through her, and she closed her eyes as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and slipped into a deep sleep.
The woman who had once led Ruerug was not here.
What remained was only a woman bound to one man—her wings broken, her wildness tamed, no more than a fledgling.
Jeremiah von Berem Brutein—Ferzen's elder brother, and the present head of House Brutein—made his way to an audience with the Emperor of Ernes, and as he walked he looked up into a sky without a single cloud.
Little brother...
Ferzen von Schweik Brutein had been a peculiar child from the very first. He had been peculiar even before he was weaned from his nurse's milk, and peculiar still when he had only just learned to turn onto his belly and crawl. Looking back, the mistake had begun from the moment he could toddle: his mother, his father, Jeremiah himself, and the retainers besides had all failed to notice the signs Ferzen kept giving them—that something in him was wrong.
In the end, when that child, possessed of a self however unformed, came to the brink of the calamity of gouging out his own two eyes, the house tried to bury the fact and put him at a distance. A freedom by the name of neglect was granted to him. Unlike Jeremiah, he had been born with magic, and had been meant to inherit the seat of house head; that future was revoked. Unloved by mother or father, the child became a stain the house had no choice but to hide.
Jeremiah still remembered it with terrible clarity. Just after the calamity, shut in his room, Ferzen had refused all food and drink and turned his hands upon his own body. And he remembered, too, the day the compulsive fits no longer seized those eyes—the first time the boy smiled brightly, weeping and sobbing that he was glad.
Of course, Jeremiah had been too afraid then, and had turned his face from him. But as he grew, he came to understand that child's solitude, and his loneliness. Yes. By the time the boy had become a man, Jeremiah still could not comprehend the obsessive compulsion itself, yet he could feel, well enough, the pain that followed in its wake. And so, awkwardly, at his own coming-of-age, he had willingly received the heart Ferzen offered him—congratulations, and an apology together.
But the child was swallowed by the compulsion once more, and afterward he went on in wretched, desperate struggle. Jeremiah knew. He could not have failed to know. He knew the sad and accursed habits Ferzen von Schweik Brutein had made while fighting his obsessive compulsion with everything he had. A mental illness cannot be cured. It can only be overcome. That child failed. At the end of it he surrendered, and dragged his life on by means of unhappy compromises. Water already spilled could not be forgiven merely because a sickness of the mind was offered as its cause, and at last it came to a point where neither comfort nor pity could be extended to him.
And yet Jeremiah was that child's only blood. His elder brother. His family. Even after he became head of Brutein, he did not know what he ought to do for a brother who asked for nothing. Then, for the first time, the child sought his help. So that he might take as his wife a woman who did not set the compulsion seizing, he begged, desperately, for a pretext. Jeremiah searched the old ledgers, found the traces of funds that had flowed into Ruerug, and placed them in Ferzen's hands.
Toward Euphemia El Lorraine Ruerug, he was not without regret. Even so, though he was head of Brutein, an arm cannot help but bend inward.
He said nothing for a moment. This incident was surely the extension of that same matter. Jeremiah, too, knew the name Ciel Midford.
"Is His Majesty within?"
"Yes! He is waiting for Your Lordship the Marquess."
At the knight's words, where the man stood guard before the doors of the great hall, Jeremiah drew one short breath, opened the doors, and went in. There, seated upon the throne of the Ernes Empire, he saw the sun.
"Jeremiah von Berem Brutein pays his respects to His Majesty the Emperor."
Perhaps Ferzen, who had attended the banquet under the name of Ruerug, had even been thinking of cutting his tie to Brutein. He would not have been able to bear damaging the traditions of the house.
Ferzen...
The house's unhealed ache, and my only brother in all the world. The memory of those days still holds so much fear that I cannot properly meet your eyes. And yet I, who took for myself everything that ought to have been yours—how could I turn away from you now, when for the first time you are weeping like a child, wretched and unguarded? You, who never once leaned upon house or family. This will be the first love ever placed into your hands.
"You must have a great deal to say. We shall hear your words first."
"House Brutein intends to intervene in this struggle for the throne under the borrowed name of Ruerug. But I ask Your Majesty to understand that this is no more than the picture shown upon the surface."
"You mean the truth within is different..."
"It is. For the sake of settling and strengthening imperial authority, do you not mean to bind the princes to the daughter of Count Asran—head of the northern nobles, who have long wished to advance into the center?"
The emperor did not answer.
"Ruerug will be the foothold that steadies that North. To that end, achievements were needed with which Ruerug might be properly dressed, and so this decision was reached."
A grand cause, for the sake of the way of loyalty. So Jeremiah said. But the emperor knew. To conceal a single transgression, Brutein meant to stop every ear and cover every eye. Not even he, seated upon the throne of this empire, would be an exception.
Even an emperor risen to the throne had to look up at the will of that towering giant. He stopped his ears, closed his eyes, and said nothing.
Yes. The empire fell silent.
"How was it..."
When Jeremiah had left the great hall, the emperor turned a weary face toward his daughter—Elizabeth. The question she had stood in that place to put to Jeremiah was only one. Was there a single speck of falsehood in those words? And Jeremiah's true heart, in answer—
The emperor was silent.
"Such was the inner heart of Jeremiah von Berem Brutein."
"Yes. So that is the way of it..."
With this, it was certain the act had been Ferzen's alone. But Jeremiah, the present head of Brutein, had resolved not to turn away from him, but to take him in. Because of that choice, Brutein would bear a single transgression—and there would be no one left to hear of it, to see it, or to speak it. Even so, one fact alone: that Brutein harbored no other design. One reason alone: that they nursed no ambition to take the empire in hand. On that, the emperor's heart grew easy.
"And with this... is it finished?"
"You must soon receive the elder of House Alfred."
"Ah... yes. Of course."
Thinking he had nearly let it slip his mind, the emperor rose from the throne. Perhaps it was only that he had just faced Brutein—but the magnitude of the name Alfred felt, to him, no greater than a child.