Chapter 5 – A Broken Pride and the Anguish of a Girl Without a Heart
1
It was two days after the day the Kingdom’s army, and the Order’s, took their great defeat in the Dyrst region.
The traffic through the town had thinned right out, and I was thinking it was about time to lock the church’s outer door when Prince Euris appeared at the church in the middle of the night.
“…Lord Euris?”
“…………”
I caught for a moment at the arrival of someone so unexpected, then lifted my voice a tone and dealt with it.
He did not answer when I said his name. If anything he stayed with his head down, unsteady on his feet as though the life had gone out of him.
“Whatever brings you here so late?”
I spoke again and still he answered nothing. He only walked slowly up the aisle of the night church, coming closer.
With just a few candles lit, the inside of the church was almost entirely dark except for the altar at the far end, and I tilted my head at Prince Euris coming toward me one step at a time. Eventually the candlelight reached his face and I began to see it.
“…?”
The skin around his eyes was red and badly swollen, and there was a little blood at his lips, from biting them hard.
“Lord Euris? There’s blood at your mouth. Are you all…”
“…Ah.”
I was about to ask whether the split lip hurt when Prince Euris put his knees to the floor as though the strength had left him. He was entirely vacant; he did not even blink. Tears running down his cheeks soaked into the carpet, and I touched one of those cheeks gently.
“Why are you crying?”
“…I’m sorry, Reshia. I couldn’t… I couldn’t grant your wish.”
The first thing out of his mouth was a confession made to me.
No. This is beyond my understanding. Why should he apologize to me so hard?
I had thought the Dyrst invasion carried a real possibility of defeat from the moment there were Chosen on the other side with memories of a previous life. And for myself, whether the Kingdom’s army beat the Imperial army or lost to it was a matter of complete indifference; I only wanted it to work as cover for the plan I am advancing.
I did not know what words to give a man weeping on the floor in front of me.
“I couldn’t grant your wish, and it galls me… I’m sorry…”
—At a time like this, what is the correct way to respond?
“…………”
“Hgk…”
I could say nothing at all to a sobbing Prince Euris, because I do not know what shocked him badly enough to break him down like this.
“I’m sorry. I truly am… I’m a useless man. I can’t grant even one wish for the person I love.”
“Prince Euris.”
I tried a response along the lines of being deeply moved. As a way of comforting him, that would surely be the right answer.
I crouched slowly and stroked Prince Euris’s back.
“It’s all right. You have done nothing wrong, Lord Euris. So please stop crying.”
“You’ll still be kind to me… even now?”
“Of course. I care for you more than anyone.”
—A pure lie.
“So please don’t take this failure so heavily. You listened to an unreasonable request of mine, and that alone was quite enough to make me happy.”
“…Reshia.”
Ah. So I have laid down another coat of lies.
With a perfect manufactured smile, I play an innocent Saint. How long will I keep doing this?
I used him, the Second Prince, and erased entirely the Archbishop’s distrust of me. The plan is going well. He has been of use to me. There is no further need to be involved with him.
And yet…
“Reshia! Reshia…!”
—I could not reject him.
He is a man I have used to the end. It should be natural enough to think that I ought simply to cut him loose, so why do I not do it?
I thought about it while looking down at the back of Prince Euris’s head as he wept against my thigh. What, exactly, is the correct thing for me to do?
I lost the thing that mattered most to me in order to grant Lord Svell’s wish, which is why I cannot work out the reason he is crying.
“It’s all right. I will be here always.”
The sweet words. The soft expression. The gentle hands.
Every part of me is nothing but a hollow thing packed hard with pretense. All of it is imitation built out of knowledge picked up somewhere, and there is no warmth anywhere in it.
“I care for you, Lord Euris. You know that?”
—Words with nothing inside them.
When I put that feeling down in the previous timeline by my own choice.
‘…Lord Svell, please take a part of my heart from me. If you will, then I am certain I can bring your dearest wish to pass.’
The heart I forgot, it was love.
The heart that dotes on somebody and holds them precious. I threw away that one most important feeling, because it was necessary to carry out the mission Lord Svell laid on me.
“Lord Euris… I…”
In a voice faint enough to be erased under his weeping, I began to ask, and the words that would have followed can never be let outside.
‘Am I still able to be a person?’
I who called the Archbishop a monster over and over. And in spite of that, I had stopped understanding my own self.
With the person I am supposed to love grieving in front of me, there is no pain where my chest ought to hurt, and I recognize that I feel nothing whatever about him. That makes it emptier still, and now and then I nearly forget the meaning of being alive.
“…When the mission is done, I…”
—What becomes of me?
A foolish girl who threw away the love a Saint must have and was reduced to a puppet obeying the Lord God’s orders. That is what I am now.
Reshia, the Saint with a piece of her heart missing. Hollow inside, and incomplete.
2
For me as I am now, the thing to be put before everything else was Reshia.
I fell in love for the first time in my life. Born the second prince of the Reshfeld Kingdom, the only person I have ever wanted to devote myself to is Reshia. She is special to me.
No matter how useless a man I am, she is kind and she always affirms me, and that felt so good that my heart was taken all the further.
“Reshia. Since I lost that battle I haven’t been able to have any confidence in myself…”
“No confidence, you say… you are a splendid person, Lord Euris. Anyone fails once. Please don’t be downcast.”
—There. Reshia never denies me.
The generosity to accept even the pathetic parts of me. It is because she is like this that I came to want so strongly to devote myself to her.
“Reshia. I want to do something for you. Is there anything you want?”
There are people who point at my back and say I believe too blindly in the Saint, and I find I don’t mind. What I feel for her is real, and I want her to understand how strong the feeling is.
“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you.”
She has the cleanest and kindest heart of anyone. Whatever happens, what I feel toward her does not change.
“Anything… you say?”
“Yes! Next time I will make myself useful to you, without fail!”
Reshia made a small gesture of thinking it over, then put her hands together and said:
“So long as you live a long and healthy life, Lord Euris, that is quite enough for me.”
“…What? That’s all? Surely there’s something more, something you want, something you’d like to do.”
“It is enough. You listened once to an unreasonable request of mine, and that on its own made me happy.”
She asked nothing of me. If anything she turned her eyes away as though sorry and laughed at herself a little.
“…I’m sorry. Lord Euris, the invasion of the Dyrst region, that was something the Archbishop ordered. So it was not what I truly wanted.”
The words hit hard. Why say such a thing now? It felt as though the meaning of what I had done was being taken away, and I did not want to hear what came after it.
“…The Archbishop meant to have me use you, Prince Euris, and provoke a war between the Kingdom and the Empire. I am truly sorry.”
Everything I had built was coming down.
…Then the kindness Reshia turned on me, was every part of it an act?
I had thought that if it was Reshia, I did not mind being used. That so long as I could sit inside her kindness I needed nothing else at all.
“Lord Euris, I believe the Archbishop will try to use you again. But I don’t want you hurt. Because I truly do care for you, I feel it all the more.”
Large tears came down Reshia’s face, and in that instant I pulled her to me.
“I’m sorry. I’ve made you suffer all this time.”
“No. I am the one who is sorry, for behaving as though I were deceiving you…”
That the Archbishop had been using me was of no consequence at all. That Reshia had thought of me and told me the truth was what made me glad, and at the same time it made me hate the Archbishop, who had used his own selfishness to torment a woman whose heart is that clear.
My anger at the Archbishop went past my bitterness at losing to the Imperial army.
“Reshia. If there is some reason you cannot go against the Archbishop’s orders, tell me. I swear I will protect you with everything I have!”
“You mustn’t… for someone like me, for you to set yourself against the Archbishop…”
“I don’t care about that. So long as you are happy, that is enough for me.”
Opposing the Svell Order is not what the Reshfeld Kingdom would want. But my holding hostility toward the Order is a personal matter and permitted as such.
As one man who cares for Reshia, I asked her again.
“Reshia. You want to get away from the Archbishop, don’t you? If that’s so, let me help you do it.”
“—! Lord Euris.”
Reshia dropped her head and closed her eyes for a while. She must be struggling with not wanting to drag me into it. But I want her to take the step and lean on me.
“Reshia. There is nothing I would not do for you. I swear it on my life!”
“…Truly? You won’t regret it?”
“I won’t! Take my hand, Reshia!”
I wrapped both my hands around the hand Reshia held out hesitantly.
I will protect her from the Archbishop’s reach.
“Can you not leave the church?”
“At least, I am not permitted to slip away on my own… if you truly mean to take me out of here, then order me sent to some quiet place on the grounds of convalescence, on a formal document.”
“Understood! That is your wish, Reshia?”
“It is.”
Good. She told me what she honestly felt, plainly.
I will use my position as Second Prince to the utmost and make her happy without fail. I will not bow to the Svell Order. I will keep working from here so that Reshia can take hold of a happy future.
3
Having seen a thoroughly cheerful Prince Euris off, I closed the church door and looked up at the dim ceiling.
Painted on that pointlessly high ceiling is a picture modeled on Lord Svell, and in it there is also a Saint devotedly supporting her god. A great many people are enraptured by the holiness of it. I have always thought I dislike this painting.
“…It’s far away.”
No matter how far I stretch, however far I put out a hand, I cannot so much as touch that painted Saint. It gives me the unpleasant feeling of being pointed at from behind, of being told that I will never be the ideal Saint people worship.
“And I meant to cut him loose.”
I am unfit to be a Saint. And in spite of that, Prince Euris has feelings for me.
I remember the expectation in his eyes.
Let us stop being involved. One sentence and it would have been finished.
I used his position as Second Prince and took part in the Dyrst invasion as the Order’s commander, and as a result I obtained the Archbishop’s trust. From here I ought to move to carry out my mission alone.
That was what I had been thinking, and I used him again.
If the Second Prince and the Archbishop come into conflict, I can move freely without drawing attention. Go somewhere the Order’s people cannot see, under the name of convalescence, and set up a new base of operations where nobody watches. Then I can concentrate on carrying out Lord Svell’s orders and nothing else, rather than on being the Svell Order’s Saint.
“To obtain a place to settle where nothing interferes… that is an attractive thing. Just this once, there was nothing else for it.”
Prince Euris believes in me blindly. If I asked it of him, I am sure he would not balk at killing his own relatives.
Unless I say it, he will not leave. I never wanted anybody to stay close to me. That is how it should be, and yet I could not push him away.
“I wanted to let you go… to have fallen in love with someone like me. Poor Lord Euris.”
He does not know that I have no love in me. He is deceived by the surface kindness I perform, and he will keep being used from here.
A life spent doing as somebody else says. He is the same as hollow me, living not for himself but for somebody else.
But thinking about it is a waste.
“Ff…”
I let out a breath and put out the candles. It is late. Let me put off thinking about what comes next; continuing a debate that reaches no conclusion only tires a person.
It may look like an empty way to live to me, and to him it may be a way of living that means something. People think differently, so I can neither affirm nor deny it.
There is nothing I can do for him. I will use him exactly as much as he can be used, and wear a man who asks nothing in return thoroughly down.
“…So at the very least, let me play his ideal version of me all the way to the end.”
What I can do, having nothing to give, to keep his life from collapsing, is to keep performing the innocent, love-filled ‘Saint Reshia’ he holds as his ideal.
Let him at least be shown a sweet dream to the end.
Because I believe that is what he wishes for.