The Forgotten Field - Chapter 13

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————

Chapter 13
The handmaiden’s trembling fingers lifted the spoon, but she found herself unable to bring it to the bowl. Her eyes squeezed shut as though sheer willpower might deliver her from this nightmare.
She seemed to believe that if she simply endured, she might somehow escape—or perhaps she harbored the desperate hope that someone would appear to stop this.
Talia’s hand shot out and seized the knife resting on the table. Her voice turned glacial as she issued her command.
“Pin her hand to the plate. Since she dares show such contempt for my consideration, I’ll need to make an example—I’ll cut off one of her fingers.”
The man immediately seized the woman’s hand and spread it across the silver plate. Talia gripped the tip of the handmaiden’s index finger and raised the carving knife high.
The handmaiden shrieked in terror.
“I’ll eat it! I’ll eat everything! All of it!”
The woman frantically plunged her spoon into the bowl and began devouring the broth containing the bird’s carcass with desperate hunger.
As though believing she could endure it if she didn’t truly taste it, she swallowed the chunks without proper chewing. Yet before she could manage five spoonfuls, she vomited everything back up.
Witnessing this, Talia pressed on relentlessly.
“Eat every last bit. I want to see the bottom of that bowl.”
The handmaiden’s gaze, trembling with revulsion and terror, fixed upon her. It was no longer the look of someone viewing something contemptible—it was the gaze of one confronting something horrifying and dreadful.
Talia signaled with her eyes for the woman not to stop. The handmaiden wept bitterly as she fell into a cycle of eating and retching, eating and retching again.
Unable to stomach the putrefying bird itself, she forced only the broth into her mouth before expelling it—again and again. Her face, smeared with blood, tears, and vomit, turned ashen, and her eyes rolled back into her skull. Her body collapsed onto the carpet with a dull thud.
Talia gazed down at the convulsing handmaiden, foam flecking her lips, then turned to the servants frozen in shock and tilted her chin with arrogant dismissal.
“Clean this up. All of it.”
She hurled the soiled plate at their feet and added coldly:
“And bring me fresh food. This time, bring something that’s actually edible.”
After that day, the servants’ relentless cruelty ceased as though it had never existed.
The handmaidens treated her with the careful wariness one reserves for dangerous objects, and several servants displayed profound fear in her presence. They no longer cast contemptuous glances her way or whispered cruel remarks within earshot. Whenever Talia appeared, they clamped their mouths shut like oyster shells and bowed their heads in haste.
And throughout the Imperial Palace, rumors spread of the Second Princess’s vicious nature. Those who heard how brutally she had tortured an innocent handmaiden who had served the Imperial Family faithfully for over a decade clicked their tongues at the young girl’s cruelty.
The priests muttered that a viper’s spawn had slithered into the Imperial Family, and the Empire’s loyal subjects expressed concern that the savage princess might tarnish the Imperial authority.
Yet there was one who found satisfaction in Talia’s actions.
It was a day when winter loomed near. The Empress, dressed in a gown as deep blue as her own eyes, visited the Separate Palace.
As Talia descended the stairs with a rigid expression to greet her, she found her steps faltering without her consent. The moment she beheld Senevir, her throat constricted with longing—an impossible, unbearable longing.
This was the mother who had turned away so cruelly. Watching her slender back recede with such indifference, her hand brushed aside so coldly, Talia had sworn never to love this woman again.
But when Senevir crossed the vast hall and pressed a kiss to her cheek, that resolve crumbled like a sandcastle before the tide.
“Hello, Talia. You look absolutely beautiful today.”
Senevir’s body exhaled the fragrance of roses and lilacs, mingled with the sweet scent of ripe fruit. The fact that I had yearned so desperately for this dizzying perfume was pitiful.
Senevir gazed down at her daughter’s dark, unyielding expression and offered a tender smile.
“I can see your heart has been wounded by my long absence. Forgive me, won’t you? It took time to prepare something special for you.”
Talia’s expression grew uncertain.
“A gift…?”
“I’ve heard how effectively you’ve trained those ill-mannered servants. Since you’ve pleased your mother so well, you deserve a reward.”
She spoke in a voice like a canary’s song and turned gracefully. Only then did a boy slowly crossing the hall come into view.
Talia’s breath caught. Barcas, now formally appointed as a knight and dressed in the uniform of the Imperial Guard, was approaching.
Sunlight pierced through the windows and shattered across his ash-blonde hair, scattering brilliance in all directions. The sight pierced her retinas like shards of glass.
Senevir moved beside the boy and extended one hand as though displaying a trophy.
“A handsome knight to protect you from now on.”
The boy stopped before her and bowed.
Those eyes that once shone with the brilliance of a crown now flickered with nothing but the sharp edge of fury and a faint shadow of humiliation. Anyone with a shred of sense could tell he had not come here of his own volition.
The boy looked down at her with the gaze one might reserve for an inanimate object and spoke.
“I am Barcas Laedgo Sierkan.”
His voice was so parched and cold it sent shivers down her spine.
“I have been assigned to attend to Your Highness until your coming-of-age ceremony.”
The implication hung in the air—a desperate wish that the day would arrive swiftly, freeing him from this degrading duty.
Talia looked up at his face, which seemed to wear a mask of indifference, her eyes hollow with despair. His frigid gaze, his terse manner, his rigid demeanor—all of it reduced her once more to something trivial and contemptible.
Though she fought with all her might not to shrink away, she could not prevent the shame from burning hot at the nape of her neck.
In that moment, Talia understood with crystalline clarity.
This beautiful boy would not be her hope, but her torment.
A most cruel one at that.
* * *
After days of drizzling rain finally ceased, an intense sun began to pour down, heralding the season of fire.
Aila, crossing the bustling Inner Courtyard in search of her betrothed, wiped away the beads of sweat gathered on her brow and squinted against the blinding light.
The wide clearing normally used for military drills was now packed with dozens of supply wagons, tack merchants, and massive beasts of burden specially bred to haul cargo, along with soldiers transporting the various equipment necessary for travel.
Her frown at the marketplace-like chaos lasted only a moment before Aila spotted Barcas checking the condition of the war horses at the outer edge of the City Walls, and her eyes brightened.
Instead of the white battle garb that symbolized the Roem Knights, he wore a black tunic embroidered with intricate patterns, over which was fastened a breastplate forged from black iron. He looked less like an Imperial Guard knight and more like an Eastern Territories nobleman.
Aila gazed at him with a satisfied smile. Once this mission was complete, Barcas would leave the Imperial Guard and begin the succession procedures to become Grand Duke Sierkan.
And she would study at his side to become the lady of the Grand Duke’s household. It was a future that had been ordained since the day he entered the Empress Palace’s Garden following his mother.
Yet Aila sometimes found herself plagued by doubt as to whether such a day would ever truly come.
Barcas had always been courteous and occasionally even affectionate in his manner, but Aila knew there existed an unbridgeable distance between them. For all the heartache that distance had caused her, the fact that he would become her husband in mere months felt scarcely believable.

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————