Episode 10
The princess who held me in her arms did not speak.
No, she did more than keep silent. She did nothing at all.
With a faintly languid expression, she merely smoked a cigarette soaked in anesthetic and looked down at me as she held me against her chest.
…She was different from the princes.
The little prince who had come at me with his fists, frantic with fear, and the older prince who, perhaps having learned from his younger brother’s failure, had come to spout his gentle nonsense—they had both said, in their neat clothes and unruffled postures, that they were different from me.
It almost seemed as if words alone were not enough for them; they wanted their whole bodies to declare that they were unlike me.
I was someone who was loved, someone cherished, someone who must not die. And so, since I had been made only because they needed an impregnable pregnancy slave, they might as well have been saying I should live out my life bearing the curse as my rightful burden.
No—as if. That was exactly what they were saying.
For that reason, regardless of how I behaved toward them, speaking to them was never easy.
It wasn’t only that I had no wish to interact with them, either. Even if I had wanted to talk, it would still have been difficult.
Because they were different from me, I knew that no matter what I said, my words would never reach them. And I knew, just as clearly, that I would never be able to understand what they said in return.
But the princess was different.
She revealed everything.
Her gaze and breathing were slightly unfocused from the anesthetic; her hair stuck to her skin with cold sweat; her clothes were disheveled; her lips had lost their moisture; her breath rasped as she exhaled smoke.
She made no effort to conceal what she could easily have hidden with the maids’ help, and because of that, in a strange way, she felt easy.
She was trying to speak with me. She wasn’t flaunting anything I did not have. She made me feel, at least faintly, that there was something in common between us, and though it was difficult, it made me think that if I tried, I might still be able to talk to her somehow.
And yet, the moment I looked at the princess’s face, I found I could not open my mouth.
In my heart, I wanted to pour it all out.
I wanted to ask whether she didn’t find life exhausting—never being able to exercise, never properly eating, having to fast over and over again. I wanted to tempt her with the promise that if she killed herself and took the medicine made from the Blium curse, she could become healthy. That she could live without pain.
But my mouth would not move.
Even though I had been sure she was different from the princes and could be spoken to, I still could not make myself say a word when I looked into her eyes.
I could not sneer at her the way I did at the princes, and I could not offer her a bargain the way I had with the duchess.
I simply couldn’t speak, for no reason I could name.
“You.”
“Yes.”
“Shall we sleep a little? You look tired.”
“That is…”
“If you force yourself to speak now, it won’t change my feelings. And if you don’t speak now, that won’t mean my mind has changed, either. So do as I want for now.”
Speaking calmly, the princess held me tighter.
Then she laid me down by force, looked at my hand, and opened her mouth again.
“Does this not hurt?”
My hands were cracked open and blackened by burns.
The princess clicked her tongue at the sight, muttering that I didn’t even have fingernails, and pressed my arm hard when she saw the red webbing showing between the torn flesh. Blood and serous fluid seeped out, and she let out a nasal breath before looking at me again.
“I can’t feel anything. I do feel it when something touches or rubs against it, but it doesn’t rise beyond that. Even if flesh is torn away, it’s the same. It just feels like something’s being removed.”
“So you can’t feel pain itself?”
“No. Normal areas hurt normally.”
“Is that so?”
As the anesthetic deepened, the princess blinked slowly, as though she could no longer fight off sleep. After mulling over my answer a few times, she suddenly said it was a relief.
I couldn’t understand what was supposed to be relieving about pain, so I only stared at her. The princess hugged me even tighter and said that it was a relief because I wasn’t lying.
“Most people, if they hear you don’t feel pain, can’t hurt you properly.”
“Does Your Highness think so too?”
“Who knows? But if everyone else thinks that way, then they could have lied to me too, couldn’t they? But you didn’t. Which means I can assume you accepted the offer I made you last time, can’t I?”
“……”
Come to think of it, that was true.
If the people of the Blium family didn’t know what would happen when I died, they would undoubtedly have said that I felt nothing at all, and if I begged them to kill me because it was all too horrible, they would have calmly cut my throat and sent me off without pain.
And even if they weren’t Blium, if you told someone who was wavering between killing you or keeping you alive that you couldn’t feel any pain, they would surely swing the knife more easily.
If I had truly wanted to die by any means necessary, I should have said I couldn’t feel pain at all.
But I hadn’t.
Without thinking, I’d said that aside from my arms and legs, I could feel pain—and until the princess pointed it out, I hadn’t felt the slightest suspicion about it.
…Why?
When I looked at the princess with that thought in mind, she gave no answer to that question. Instead, she left me with a strange remark—that if I was going to sleep in someone’s arms, I ought to have a little more flesh on me—before drifting off to sleep, and all I could do was part my lips in silence at her behavior.
“Young lady.”
“……?”
“I’m sorry, but could you keep that position until Her Highness finishes coughing?”
And that absurdity only deepened when the maid spoke.
My body was still leaking blood and serous fluid from my arms and legs.
Leaving aside my arms, which were so badly burned they looked like charcoal, my legs were red and warped, their muscles, bones, and blood vessels twisted every which way. No matter how you looked at them, they did not seem healthy.
To be blunt, I was no different from a leper.
Even if only out of instinctive unease, she would not want such a patient kept nearby.
Much less when that patient was someone she respected and adored.
Yet the maid said this while calculating the merit of a good night’s sleep against the demerit of the curse’s noninfectious filth, and handed me a blanket. I turned my gaze to the blanket covering my body, then looked back at the princess.
Her face was beautiful even with her eyes closed.
She was like an autumn maple leaf losing its life, and yet only made her own beauty all the more blatant as she entranced the living—a wasted… no, a face made more beautiful precisely because it was wasted.
As I studied her face more closely, information from the curse rose up within me.
Information about a certain doctor who had never been able to save people directly, and yet still could not abandon the hope of saving them.
Fatigue from pain and lack of sleep, discoloration of the lips from oxygen deprivation, thinned blood vessels, and a heart beating abnormally fast.
…Simply being alive must be painful.
It must hurt so much that she could not even take anesthetic properly, and instead had to choose the harsh method of inhaling it through smoke, with all its side effects. And every time, that pain must be ruining her life a little more.
Her personality must have changed, and she must have suffered over the changes in herself; she must have struggled with her relationships with others. So how could she stand there so nobly, so entirely herself?
“……Ah.”
My hand rose before I was even aware of it.
But when I saw what was on it, I clenched my fist and moved it away.
A dirty hand.
I must not touch anyone else with a dirty hand.
Remember that again.
I am someone struggling to die, not someone struggling to love another person.
I must think that I want to die for that person’s sake, not pity them.
If I truly wanted to do something for her, then I had to leave behind something that would benefit from my death.
If I let myself cling to life now, then the princess could not be brought back.
“Would you give me a pencil and paper?”
“Understood. But I do need to keep you in that position, so would it be all right if I help you?”
“Yes, thank you.”
The maid held up a wooden board at an awkward angle so I could write.
And there, I began to scrawl out the method for making medicine from the lump of flesh that would remain after I died.
The flesh where my fingernails should have been split open and blood spilled over the paper, staining it, but I paid it no mind and wrote the same thing over and over again.
It was a will.
A confession for failing to die by my own hand and having to borrow someone else’s. Gratitude that the person lending me their hand was more beautiful than anyone I had ever seen. A vow that my death would never be in vain.
A will from one who had been born because she was needed, and who would therefore see that need through to the end.
Once I had written the will in perfect detail, the maid who had been helping me was looking down at me with a face that mixed gratitude and disgust.
At first, I thought it was because of my appearance.
But when she used her hand to wipe the blood from mine, I realized that wasn’t it, and I looked at her wordlessly.
“Young lady…”
Then the maid slowly opened her mouth.
“Do you truly wish for death?”