Was it sad? That couldn’t be.
Reiner saw this girl for the first time today.
Was he startled because he had seen someone die so close? No way.
Reiner had witnessed his father slashing people countless times since he was very young.
He had once been beaten nearly to death for throwing up at the sight. He had also been scolded for failing to stand straight and look directly, for averting his eyes unmanly, for looking at the floor.
Reiner’s brother, the First Prince Niklas von Reutlingen, grabbed him by the collar so that he could not lower his head, and killed a few more innocent people to show him.
When the stone floor finally turned red, the emperor wore a satisfied smile as he watched his firstborn commit murder. Seeing his father’s face, so much like his own, Niklas smiled back. Then he turned to his weak younger brother and said:
“My beloved half-brother, watch closely. The cost of compassion was high. Look at what your weak heart, your small sympathy, has caused. Don’t cry. Don’t drop a tear. If you even blink, one more person will die.”
At that moment, Reiner’s eyes had been brimming with tears. If he squeezed his eyes shut by mistake, that water would trickle down, and in return, someone else would have to bleed. Reiner couldn’t even swallow.
After that, even when someone died in the imperial palace, he didn’t shed a single tear or even turn his eyes away. He watched everything plainly.
Each time innocent people died, fear seized Reiner’s heart long before sorrow or guilt. It always terrified him that their wrath might soon turn on him.
No one followed the cowardly, spineless Second Prince, who knelt and trembled for his life.
Reiner had no close friends. Only the young page Martin, who stayed by his side, would speak to him.
Even his underlings belittled him, though he was a prince of the empire. The chambermaid who prepared his bed or the wet nurse who watched him sleep gossiped about him as a feeble, fearful boy, hard to manage—and they did so because he was so easy to make light of.
Thus, all the more, Reiner was not sad to see someone die in front of him. He had no one he knew deeply or cared about. He had never once mourned a death with tears. They were just strangers to him.
But why was he crying right now?
Why wouldn’t these tears stop?
He felt the tears rolling down his wounded cheek sting. Unable to wipe off the blood-and-tear-stained mess on his face, Reiner merely clung to the girl in his arms.
The mad emperor, by some whim, did not cut through her slender neck; instead, he slashed from her chest to her belly.
Since the girl’s head was not severed, maybe she could survive?
Could she live even after bleeding this much?
Where did all this blood come from in such a tiny body?
Reiner shook and cried out for help with a cracked voice. He had no strength to form a sentence. A wailing scream poured out of his mouth.
No one responded to that cry. There was no one bold enough to carry off and treat the princess of a hostile nation whom the emperor had just cut down. The princess of Winzerton would likely die here today.
Just then, the dying girl reached out her hand. It was a faint gesture, as if she wished to speak her final words.
Reiner twisted his body so that his ear was close to the girl’s lips. Only a short time earlier, those delicate lips had been chattering with a clear yet muddled voice, and now they moved feebly.
Don’t cry.
…that seemed to be what she said.
He suddenly felt anger surge.
You really lost your mind.
Who was worrying about whom?
If it had been Martin, he would have said there was nothing wrong with giving people trouble.
They would have said that she ended up like this because she acted without thinking.
If she came as a hostage, she should have stayed put and gone back quietly.
Why, why did she say those words for no reason?
Why did she step in when I was the one being beaten?
What did she know?
Was she curious about whether my father would kill me or not?
When did she ever see me?
Yes, perhaps these tears were rooted in guilt.
Reiner knew. That reckless girl had not intruded because she was genuinely curious whether the emperor would kill his child before everyone’s eyes. He also knew that the reason she dared to mock the emperor of an enemy country was not some pointless bravado.
That girl simply could not ignore the sight of Reiner being beaten, out of pity.
His brother’s words were correct. The price of compassion was high. A small sympathy brought about a massive result. Thanks to it, Reiner lived. Because of it, the girl would die.
He felt pathetic and sorry. He wanted to turn his guilt into blame and hurl it at her. He wanted to ask if he had looked so pitiful, rolling on the floor and getting beaten, in the eyes of the precious princess.
He wanted to scoff at the pity in those eyes, which must have been as confident as her voice, eyes he had not had the chance to see. He wanted to get angry, asking if her country did not teach royals not to pity others needlessly, demanding to know why she had done such a thing.
Yet, Reiner himself looked as if he could die at any moment.
His wretched body had been beaten enough to stain the stone floor crimson even before the girl arrived at the palace. Moving his lips or making a sound was taxing for him now. The only thing his trembling lips managed to utter was a single syllable.
“Why….”
How did she interpret that “why”? As though she wanted to answer something, the girl reached out both of her small hands into the air.
Her slender arms soon fell limp. One hand seized his sleeve, which was damp with his own blood. Her sharp fingertips touched Reiner’s wrist. The other arm settled behind his back.
That made the two of them look as though they were embracing. It was so natural that he wondered if she had wanted to hold him from the start. With her body sagging weakly against Reiner’s, the girl opened her mouth.
“A person….”
Her lips released a shallow breath. It was as languid as a candle about to go out.
Even then, the girl whispered in a clear, small, and strained voice.
“A person wasn’t meant to be beaten like that.”
There was no law that a person must be beaten in such a way.
It was a futile thing to say for someone’s final words.
Her head dropped forward. Her lips were parted. Even the hollow light that had lingered in her unclosed eyes quickly disappeared.
She was dead.
When someone died, strength should leave their entire body, but she was still clutching the cuff of his sleeve. The tiny fingernails, so fitting for her small hand, were still trembling near Reiner’s wrist, almost touching it.
His clothes were drenched in hot blood.
Beneath the garment—neither thin nor light—lay the flesh that had been beaten to a pulp.
So that pale corpse, drained of blood and rapidly cooling, would never warm Reiner’s bare skin.
Yet, why did the tips of those small fingers, barely touching him, still feel warm?
That dead girl’s body covering him—would it remain hot without cooling for all that time?
Everything felt confusing. He couldn’t understand anything.
Reiner lost consciousness like that.
He was sick for a few days. It wasn’t anything special. It had always been like that.
However, when he woke up, it felt slightly different. Everything seemed strange, as though he had dropped into an entirely different world.
Martin grumbled as before while taking care of Reiner. Others pretended to bow their heads but made sure he could hear them mocking his weakness and openly ignoring him. The empress left him alone, and his brother and father… fortunately, he could avoid them for a while.
Nothing had changed. He hadn’t lost anything either. He had never owned anything to begin with. But he didn’t know why his heart felt so distressed, as though he had finally grasped something precious only to lose it. He couldn’t figure out why he kept feeling jittery, as if something terrible might happen if he stayed still.
Regardless, life went on. No one spared a thought for the weak Second Prince locked away in a prison-like room, fussing by himself.
He didn’t even feel like looking into the magic book he usually picked up whenever he felt gloomy. Anyway, even if he opened a book, he wouldn’t read its letters, but Reiner possessed a knack for grasping its contents just by the small drawings, the few numbers, or the intricate magic circles inside.
‘Would things change if I said I could decipher all of this? Maybe if I said I could do something without going to the battlefield, without even knowing how to hold a sword, Father would look at me differently.’
He used to carry that wish in his heart whenever he immersed himself in the book. But he no longer did. The hot, red blood splashed over Reiner’s body when that girl died had changed something.
If it didn’t hurt.
If he didn’t turn his head away.
If he didn’t look at the floor.
If he didn’t cry.
If he didn’t feel sad.
If he learned to read.
If he didn’t act foolish.
He would be loved.
Until now, Reiner had strung out that impossible hope toward his father, like drawing a long thread from a ball of yarn.
But his father never noticed that thin line Reiner had barely managed to spin. He had nearly killed Reiner countless times.
No one had ever tried to stop it. Even Reiner’s mother, whenever it happened, threw stones at her own son so as not to incur Father’s wrath herself.
But someone whose name Reiner didn’t even know stood between him and his father. And his father easily killed that sole person. Someone with red, curly hair collapsed onto him.
That bright scarlet blood flowed from her body, stained the stone floor, seeped into Reiner’s white clothes, and soon soaked the slender thread of hope he had been holding, dissolving and making it disappear.
Thus, Reiner finally let go of his lingering desire to be loved.
That was how he found something like composure for the first time in his life. It was indeed a huge change. Reiner no longer whined for attention, no longer snapped about pain, no longer acted out in loneliness, nor clumsily caused trouble everywhere. He just quietly focused on his duties.
No one cared about him anyway, so the only one who noticed that tremendous change was Martin, who always stayed by his side.
Martin waited, thinking he would see how long it would last, but after about a month, he couldn’t hold back from asking,
“Why have you been sitting around so quietly these days? What have you been thinking about?”
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