Yuria Taylor-3
Bitter bonds are not decreed at birth. They take shape only as one lives — as two people share the same roof, and their hearts slowly fall out of accord.
There had been a time when things between Yuria and me were not so bad. But that span was so brief, and so far in the past, that I could scarcely have recalled it if I tried. We had both simply forgotten it ever existed.
The beat of a butterfly's wings can, at times, summon the north wind. Might the same lens not apply to what Yuria and I had become? It began with something so trivial — it would be no exaggeration to say that this was what set my regressions in motion.
My head ached.
It had throbbed ever since I met Arwen, and now it felt fit to split, clamping my reason in a vise. Straining to hold down the bile that threatened to rise at any moment, I squeezed my eyes shut against a world spinning sideways.
Even as I ground my lip between my teeth to endure the pain, part of my mind drifted back to the conversation from earlier. This was probably the first time I had ever said such a thing to Yuria's face. Across every one of my lives, I had never once considered voicing that hostility aloud.
Perhaps I should have said it and died back in an earlier cycle instead. The expression Yuria had worn just now... it was quite funny, really.
Why would it shake her — because I said I hated her? If that was all it took, I found it almost disappointing. If she was a woman who could crumble over so small a reason, why had she ever treated me the way she had?
I knew she had done me no harm in this life. But the things she had done to me since childhood — those, at least, had never changed.
It would not be unfair to say that part of the reason I'd grown as weak as the rumors claimed — the reason I'd cringed and tried to live so wretchedly — lay with Yuria. Not that I wished to blame anyone. I had no intention of making my own choice to cower into someone else's sin. And yet surely it could not be denied that what I suffered in the past had shaped what I became.
The pain in my head still lingered, but I cracked my eyes open to a sliver and gazed out at nothing. This room, too, was one I had chosen for the simple reason that I did not want to run into Yuria. Tucked into a corner of the second floor, it meant I would never be seen passing along the corridor.
I had avoided sharing meals as well. I still remembered being dragged off and beaten whenever I made the smallest slip at the table.
I had lived a great stretch of my life at the mercy of a sister just four years my senior. It was possible only because, after Mother died, it was Yuria who stood in as this house's mistress. Slip up, and I was scolded, struck, cast out to wander, then locked away again.
That it all happened under Father's tacit approval, and that Yuria's own will was behind it, was beyond doubt.
And yet, in the past, I endured it. Worse — I blamed myself, agonizing endlessly over why I could be such an idiot.
"...Stupid bastard."
When in truth there had never been any need for that. I should have raged at the injustice of what was done to me. I should have realized that something about the whole situation was rotten. To be sure, that realization had come quite a long time ago — after my first few deaths, I had already noticed that something in Yuria was warped.
And yet, even then, I had not let go of hope. Because of words I'd heard as a child — words I had meant to carry in my heart for the rest of my days. That if I loved, if I refused to give up, everything would return to the way it was meant to be.
There was a time I believed that. Now I knew it for a lie.
A bitter laugh slipped out of me, and my gaze drifted to a single picture frame. It was a portrait in which her eyes — half her face — were hidden from view. Gazing quietly at the painting of a woman smiling at someone, brushed long ago, I recalled the past I had so thoroughly buried.
The reason I had clung so obsessively to that relationship was a single sentence I kept locked in my chest. If there was a reason I could never, in the end, give up on the house of Taylor — a reason I lived a hundred lives over —
...it was only because I could not forget the one thing my mother left behind when she died.
Ilesia Taylor — the woman once called mistress of the Ducal House of Taylor.
Yuria had known her well, too. Naturally so. How could she claim ignorance of the mother who bore and raised her? And yet Yuria had disliked Ilesia since childhood. Courtesy demanded only gratitude for the gift of life; that ever-gentle, ever-smiling face she had never much cared for.
The Taylors were the Sword of the Empire. Sworn to the Emperor, they were bound to throw the full weight of their strength against any enemy that threatened the state — and so they had to remain coldly composed at all times. That Yuria so rarely smiled was a piece of the doctrine drilled into her from childhood. Laughter was, after all, the mark of a guard let down; therefore one must never relax, must stand ever braced for crisis. And as the Taylors held the grandest, most glorious seat in the Empire, they were obliged to serve as a model for every noble in the land.
"Yuria, have you been tormenting Robert again?"
"I have not. He dropped his fork during dinner, so in Father's stead I simply gave him a lesson in manners."
Robert, who after every punishment would scurry tearfully to their mother's side — she could not stand the sight of it. He was only three, which might have excused the behavior, but Yuria thought it idiotic. At three, she would never have done anything so pathetic. When Robert was first born she had even found him rather endearing, but the more he grew, the more he came to resemble Ilesia, and nothing more.
A child of Taylor must not be undisciplined. Tears were always to be hidden; even laughter was to be hidden. Cold and clear-headed, adapting fluidly to every situation — that was the spirit of Taylor. But her little brother fit none of that creed.
Just how much punishment would it take?
That was what Yuria would wonder as she looked down at Robert. Had he not been her brother, she would never have entertained the question at all. He could have lived as he pleased and ruined himself, for all she cared. Wasn't it some sort of talent in its own right, making her care this much?
Ilesia was staring straight at her. Was what dwelled in those eyes concern? Ludicrous. Worry was for the deficient — and she was no fit object of it. It was better reserved for her foolish little brother, where it would be enough. Yuria gave that gaze no answer and simply turned her back.
And that was the last time she would ever see her mother well.
She remembered it as an illness that had struck without warning. One day her body simply failed her, and she collapsed. She did not last the week. For a woman always in such robust health, it was an unexpectedly quiet death. Physicians and priests had tried; even the Saintess, barely more than a child then, could not heal her. It had been a strange death — only later did Yuria learn it was a disease for which no cure had ever been developed.
"Mom... Mom...!"
She had watched her little brother weep over a body already going cold. What answer could he possibly expect from a corpse that would never open its mouth again? Yuria could not make sense of the scene. She understood full well that her mother was dead, but she felt no grief. People died; it was the most natural thing in the world, and even one's own mother would have to face it someday. It had merely arrived a little early. The girl she'd been then, and the woman she was now — on that much, she had never once changed.
Perhaps, on some level, she had even hoped. That with their mother's death, her weak and foolish brother's ways might be remade. But nothing changed. If anything, his behavior only grew worse. By then she had been appointed Young Matriarch, and so, in the end, she had no choice but to pass judgment. Hoping her brother might improve even slightly, she resolved to refashion him into someone worthy of the name Taylor.
For a noble, nothing mattered more than decorum. And so she had striven to correct him, rod and whip and all. A few years on, that much had been splendidly remedied, and all that remained was to shape him into a man befitting Taylor. And it was right — after all, Father raised no objection to anything she did. She had lived to this very day believing it right. Because anyone who bore the name Taylor surely had to be exactly that.
"...Robert."
She murmured the name to an empty corridor, and nothing answered. He had already left, hadn't he? A brother gone off to his own room would hardly come back to reply. Her reason had already judged it so — and yet Yuria found herself, for the first time in her life, adrift in confusion.
"—I bear no hatred for the house of Taylor. However."
It was a look she had never seen before. Brimming with loathing — with hatred — for someone, so full that the emotion seemed ready to burst into flame and burn everything around it. She could never have imagined such eyes on her brother, always so meek. And what unsettled her most was where that hatred pointed. At her.
"—It's simply that I hate you."
It was an emotion she was feeling for the first time in her life. So this was what they called confusion. That his words had shaken her, there was no doubt. I hate you. Of every word in the language, that one carried the plainest meaning of all.
She had known for days that something about him had changed. He used to flinch the instant their eyes met; now he held her gaze head-on without a tremor. The address he had stubbornly clung to — sister — had, at some point, become Young Matriarch, and when she flew into a rage, he met it with a face gone calm instead. She had sensed the strangeness of it, but that was all. Surely the root of him had not changed; given time, he would revert to his old ways. That was what she'd told herself.
But not a single thing had changed. If anything, with every passing day those eyes grew more level, and colder. The memory of them — showing nothing, not the faintest flicker of feeling — made her vision swim as though for no reason at all.
In that reeling blur, Yuria swayed and caught herself against the wall.
"—You never cared the slightest bit about me anyway, Young Matriarch."
"...That's wrong."
It wasn't like that. Hadn't she cared, she would never even have tried to remake him into someone worthy of Taylor. That wasn't it. That wasn't it, and yet — she only—
Suddenly she realized she could not breathe. Her body curled at the phantom sensation of fingers closing around her throat; she hunched against the wall, heaving for air. Ilesia came back to her — Ilesia dying, her eyes—. There had been nothing else in the gaze that had rested on her. Only pity. The eyes of a woman who looked upon her daughter and found her pitiable.
Why had her mother looked at her that way? She had not felt one shred of shame for anything she had ever done. How could she have, when she had lived by the very principles her father taught her? The Taylors are never wrong — and so she had believed that as long as she acted on that creed, everything would come out right.
And yet — why? Why had Robert told her he hated her? If what he meant to say was that everything she had done had been wrong—
No. Impossible. Had she not been raised on precisely the opposite since childhood? She had lived worthy of the name Taylor. She had not laughed; she had not wept. She had buried her own feelings and strained always to present a composed face to the world. Even to family. To Yuria, the house had simply mattered more than anything else alive.
There was a vow she had sworn in her girlhood. Words engraved in her heart the day she became Young Matriarch — a promise that no matter what came, she would not be shaken. A declaration that, as the one who would one day become the Sword of the Empire, she would follow her convictions in any circumstance whatsoever.
It had been absolute. It had not wavered. Not once, until this night — not until a conviction she could have sworn upon that full moon itself.
But if someone told her it had been wrong — was that not the same as declaring her entire life a waste?
It could not be. Having barely righted her posture, Yuria stared into the vacant corridor. Her eyes still trembled, and her expression remained in ruins. Had anyone witnessed her, they would have been struck dumb. For the face of the woman called Yuria Taylor to break so completely was, without question, the first time since the day she was born.
"...I."
She could not finish the sentence; only that one word, over and over. Words no one would ever hear. On a night in bloom with the full moon, in all that silence, there was not a single soul to listen to the voice that fell from her lips alone.
"I..."
As her voice thinned away, Yuria pressed her lips hard together and closed her eyes. She had been certain. Now she no longer had the confidence to call it certainty. It meant nothing, didn't it? A brother who had never warmed to her had merely said he disliked her. That was the whole of it.
And yet.
Why, then, was her heart in such upheaval?
In the depths of that pre-dawn hour, her soul storming, Yuria stared blankly down the corridor from which Robert had vanished — and so she stayed, until the small hours passed and morning came.
Endlessly. Without end.