Chapter 7

Ah, Martinez.

The moment she thought of him, all that filled her heart was an unavoidable, deep longing.

Martinez de Matrain.

He was the sole heir of this empire. The only son of the current Emperor, Matrain II, and her first love, and her last love.

If he had not loved her, perhaps none of those things would have happened.

It was not that she blamed him. Those who had truly driven her into the pit of despair were others.

And yet, at times she would think of the moments when he had kissed her, and resent herself for not having rejected him.

With that radiant blue-black hair and those deep, dark-blue eyes filled wholly with her, he had confessed to her. He had said that he would fill every breath he exhaled with love for her.

And she had been the same. From the moment she heard those words, every breath she exhaled had already been steeped in love for him.

From the time he was very young, he had always smiled only at her, he who had lost his mother at birth and had been a somewhat sensitive and sorrowful little boy. In the delphinium flower garden in the rear garden of the Imperial Palace, they had held onto each other’s sleeves and scattered endless harmless laughter, simply happy without reserve.

She had liked him in those days. She had followed after him. And when he told her that to the boy he had been then, she had been something like a faint shaft of light, she had thought that perhaps he had loved her even back then.

On the day he was born, his mother died, and because of that, his father, His Majesty the Emperor, fell so deeply ill at heart that even his body became sick. Thus Martinez had lived beneath the heavy and dark shadow of death cast over the Imperial Family, unable to fully enjoy the delight, joy, and loving care that should have belonged to a child.

Of course, every attendant belonging to the imperial household treated him with the utmost respect and cared for him without lack…… and yet he had never been able to run noisily down any corridor in the palace, nor even laugh aloud at an amusing story.

His father, Emperor Matrain II, had loved his Empress Yerzenia with his very life. She had been his first love. But she died while giving birth to their son, Martinez.

And people all said that it was the curse. That it was the manifestation of the curse laid upon Matrain II’s father, Martinez’s grandfather, the founder of the Matrain Empire, the first Emperor Philippontian de Matrain, Matrain I. He had lived beyond a hundred years, and made this empire the greatest wealthy nation on all the Ernensia Continent in less than a century, and people spoke with one voice that the curse laid upon him had appeared.

Thanks to Matrain I selling his soul to the devil, he won every war he fought, made every land he trod his own, and every enterprise he touched prospered. But in that process there had been innocent victims. Hundreds, thousands of lives were crushed and broken beneath his command, beneath the hooves of warhorses.

At last Minievar, guardian goddess of the Ernensia Continent, could bear it no more and declared to Matrain I that he must stop the sl*ughter, or else she would lay upon him a curse that would not be lifted for his entire life, no, for generations. Philippontian de Matrain mocked that warning, and in the end he was not forgiven.

The curse laid by Minievar, guardian goddess of the continent and goddess of love, was that he would never be able to achieve a happy life with the person who was his true first love.

Even that great conquering king, Matrain I, did not father even one son until he had nearly reached the age of eighty, and so everyone came to believe in the curse.

The son finally born to him, Matrain II, seemed for a time as though he would live happily after marrying the woman he loved while still young. But that marriage ended at the very moment the child conceived on their first night was born, before even ten full months of married life had passed. After a difficult labor, Matrain II’s wife, Yerzenia, died immediately after giving birth to their son.

After her death, Matrain II could not let go of Yerzenia in his mind for even a single moment, and at times he even suffered from hallucinations and hearing things. And then, when he happened to look at his young son Martinez, he would be tormented by the face of his dead wife in the child’s beautiful features and strike at his own head in anguish.

Martinez, then, could never have received whole and proper love from such a father, whose mind had grown ill. That pitiful man had been her first love.

From the time he was very young, he had felt warmth, happiness, and peace only from her…… if only it had remained no more than a beautiful memory from childhood.

On Pietra Feast Day, the moment they faced each other again in the rear garden of the Imperial Palace after longing for one another, they at once sensed that their fate could only deepen and spread from that point onward.

If, a little earlier, she had not turned the carriage around and returned to the del Tieri residence, and had instead gone on to the Imperial Palace, where the party proclaiming Pietra Feast Day was being held…….

By now she would have encountered him again after several years, he who had stepped outside the tedious imperial party for a little air.

And after exchanging a few words with her, he would soon have brushed a light kiss against her cheek, and she, flustering as she tried to avoid it, would instead have fallen even more fully into his arms……

‘Our breaths have come this close, Irenia. I feel as though my whole heart is about to be drawn into your breath.’

If he embraced her and confessed with the tips of their noses touching, then that night they would exchange a deep, lingering kiss, and become two people who could no longer be separated.

For some reason, merely remembering that night alone like this made a red flush creep over her cheeks and the back of her neck, and her heart filled with a sorrow she could not explain.

Though she had hidden away like this out of cowardice, saying she would avoid him, she still longed for him. No, she had to admit that as she felt once more in her memory his gaze, his breath, every shining moment of him, all the cells of her body and all of her heart still wanted him.

As Lariesa had said, she simply had to get some sleep quickly and shake all these thoughts away.

But at that moment, one small white pebble bounced lightly against the window of her bedroom.