CHAPTER~02
The Emotionless Ghost
A heavy silence swept through the corridor.
After staring for a long while at the unmoving lips of her husband, rigid like a statue, Airi spoke again.
“I guess it wasn’t enough.
I thought that if I kept practicing, I’d be able to dance someday.”
No matter how much she practiced, Airi—who had gained legs only a few years ago—could never have the elegant lines of dance that other noblewomen possessed.
Wearing impossibly high heels, she could barely even walk, let alone step in rhythm, and the days when she forced herself into those shoes to practice now felt distant and hazy.
“So in the end, I won’t be able to attend this banquet with you either.
Even though you went this far to consider me…”
At first, it had been Michael’s consideration that kept the Empress from attending banquets.
Unable to speak, Airi was always left isolated no matter what gathering she attended, and the only one who understood her inability to blend into human society was her husband, Michael.
Though her behavior was far too strange and lacking for a princess, he never showed discrimination, nor did he ever voice even a single doubt.
Why a foreign princess could not dance properly, why she was clumsy with dining etiquette, how she had never even tasted common wine or cider and looked as though she possessed the whole world after a single sip.
Her husband never questioned it, and he never found any of it odd.
He simply told her that if she did not want to attend banquets, she did not have to, that as the Emperor’s consort she had no need to mind anyone else’s eyes, and that it was enough if she remained just as she was…
The one who said those words had been Michael.
And yet.
“I’m sorry for breaking my promise.”
The Emperor said nothing to Airi as she murmured her apology.
Whenever she brought up the past, her husband would fall silent like this, as if irritated by it.
Her throat feeling unbearably dry, Airi clenched the hem of her skirt tightly.
“Is that what you came to say?”
After a brief pause, the Emperor added the words, as if asking whether that was all she had to say.
Airi shook her head once, then took out the handkerchief and the child’s clothes she had brought tucked inside her sleeve and held them out.
The Emperor stared at Airi’s hands for a long moment before taking the cloth from her.
As always, there was no word of thanks.
At the fleeting brush of his leather glove, Airi absently rubbed at her calloused fingertips.
His heavily restrained voice echoed through the corridor.
“…I already told you last year, Empress.”
In her husband’s grasp, the child’s clothes and the handkerchief crumpled pale and lifeless.
Unable even to lift her head to look at his face, Airi gathered his words as they fell at her feet.
“You don’t need to bring these anymore.”
As though even receiving a single, insignificant handkerchief had become uncomfortable, Michael said so.
Without lifting her gaze from the floor, Airi murmured a quiet yes.
“That will be the last time.”
The Emperor did not respond.
Staring at the tips of his shoes opposite her, Airi wriggled her bare feet hidden beneath her long skirt.
The days when she forced herself into high heels in an effort to become someone worthy of her husband were now a distant memory.
Even with legs and dressed in fine clothes from head to toe, Airi could never become someone suitable for him.
She and Michael were so utterly different.
Their upbringing, the way they breathed, their gestures and gait, even the tips of their toes.
There are gaps in this world that can never be bridged by effort alone.
“Your Majesty!”
As the two of them stood facing one another in silence, a hurried voice rang out from the other end of the corridor.
It was Dona, the maid.
“You’re here again, I—ah!”
Opening her mouth in her usual scolding tone, Dona immediately bowed deeply the moment she noticed the Emperor.
“I greet the glorious Sun of Histania.”
Seeing Dona hurriedly offer a respectful greeting while clutching the hem of her skirt, the Emperor made a brief hand gesture.
It was a signal that the greeting was sufficient and she should withdraw.
Catching it out of the corner of her eye, Dona sent Airi a desperate look.
“Your Majesty, the meal preparations are finished, so shall we return now?”
Her face clearly pleaded, as if begging her to comply.
Not wanting to trouble Dona any further, Airi turned around without resistance.
As she walked away toward the end of the corridor and rounded the corner, she heard the sound of the Emperor’s study door closing behind her.
“Your Majesty, I told you not to wander around alone like that.
Do you really want to see the last remaining maid lose her head?”
“He wouldn’t do that to you over something so trivial.”
“After seeing that terrifying face so many times, how can you still be so naïve, Your Majesty?
What man in this world makes such a murderous expression in front of his wife?”
“…His expression has always been like that.”
“Please stop saying that he just looks that way and gets misunderstood.
It’s been three years now, so you should have learned something by this point.”
As soon as they returned to the palace, Dona launched into her scolding with an irritated face.
Just recalling that ghostlike face, utterly unreadable in its lack of expression, was enough to chill her to the bone.
After all, the people who had fallen out of the Emperor’s favor and lost their heads were still vivid in memory.
The first thing the Emperor did after returning to the palace and seizing power—an Emperor who was said to have shed not a single tear even at his parents’ and siblings’ funerals—was to execute the former Admiral of the Navy and seat Diego Garcia, his former comrade-at-arms, in that position.
An authoritarian Emperor executing those who opposed his will was not particularly rare, but he—he was different.
Dona could never forget the scene of that day.
‘Please spare me, Your Majesty.
Please, please, I’ll do anything, just spare my life.’
In the entire history of the Empire, there had never been another Emperor like him.
An Emperor who, in the middle of a grand banquet held in the square to celebrate his return, publicly severed the head of the navy’s leader.
That was after all the sailors under the Admiral’s command had been executed.
The man, taciturn his entire life, screamed until his face turned red the moment his head was placed on the block, begging for his life.
The cries were so desperate that even the executioner holding the sword hesitated for a moment, yet the Emperor did not so much as blink and merely gestured, unmoved by the sight of a man old enough to be his father clinging and weeping before him.
The Admiral who mounted the scaffold last that day was given the dullest blade of all.
Dona turned her eyes away in the end and did not see how the man’s head fell to the ground, but the Emperor’s expression that day, standing upon the platform, was still etched clearly in her mind.
While everyone else shut their eyes tight and turned away, unable to bear the sight, the Emperor observed the nauseating scene without blinking, his gaze utterly emotionless, as though watching an uninteresting play.
The image of the Emperor staring down at the scene with a goblet in hand did not look like that of a living man at all.
People doubted why an Admiral who had neither plotted nor even crossed paths with the Emperor until the boy Michael had grown into a young man was suddenly executed, but no one dared voice it aloud.
In the years that followed, countless people died quietly, without sound or rumor.
Their crime was always the same: treason.
No matter how prestigious the noble house or how devout the faith of a clergyman, none escaped his blade.
Whenever Dona passed the stone floor of the square, etched with scratch marks from fingernails, she shuddered.
Anyone who displeased the Emperor would meet the same fate.
And yet, the fact that this woman—who so thoroughly incurred the Emperor’s displeasure—had survived unharmed until now could only be described as a miracle.
“If you’d known him just a little longer, Your Majesty, you’d never be sitting there so calmly.”
“Then what should I be doing instead of sitting?”
“I’m not joking, Your Majesty.
If it were me, I would’ve run away long ago.”
“Why?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know.
How many times do I have to say it?”
Dona let out a sigh.
Unless one was a woman who had lived quietly shut away in her room since coming to this country, ignorant of how the world worked, it was impossible to remain so composed.
“You really could die.”
At the grumbled reply, a faint smile rose to Airi’s lips.
Airi, too, knew well how he was perceived as a ruler, having heard it endlessly since the day she first entered the castle.
A bloodless, tearless Emperor.
An emotionless ghost who removed anything that displeased him.
A man who killed without blinking.
That those rumors, witnessed by countless people, did not feel entirely real was not simply because Airi was his wife.
But Dona, if what you say is true, he would have killed me long ago.
He didn’t.
Everyone in the Empire knew for what purpose he had polished his guns all these years.
He had been called an emotionless ghost ever since his parents and siblings died.
He knew who killed his family, and he knew who I was.
He knew everything, and still he did not drive me away.
For three whole years.
Then why was that.
Swallowing the words that rose to the back of her throat, Airi kept them to herself.
“Honestly, if I only had money, I would’ve…
Anyway, Your Majesty, next time you go somewhere, you must tell me first.”
“…”
“You’re not answering again.”
Lost in thought for a moment, Airi watched as Dona glared at her.
“You’ve been behaving so well lately, and now what is this again?
The more you do this, the more difficult it becomes for me.”
As Dona continued her relentless scolding, Airi looked at her through the mirror.
“Dona, would you like to take some leave?”
At the sudden question, Dona looked utterly bewildered, but Airi paid her no mind.
“You haven’t been back to your hometown in quite a while.”
“Leave, Your Majesty?
Do you know how busy things are going to be with the banquet preparations from now on?”
“I have enough means to send one maid on leave.”
Lifting the jewelry box from the vanity, Airi opened the lid.
Most of the jewels she had received from all directions after becoming Empress remained unused.
“Even if you stay by my side preparing for a banquet I won’t attend, what’s the point?”
“But if there isn’t even a single maid by your side during the banquet, what will people think?”
“It’s not as if there’s any reputation left to lose.”
Removing the ring she had received as a symbol of her marriage, Airi placed it atop the piled ornaments and handed the full jewelry box to Dona.
“You can take it, Dona.”
Dona, who had been about to snap back, blinked once, then again.
“…Why are you giving this to me?”
“I knew you were taking my jewels little by little.”
Dona, who had always acted as though lecturing a child ignorant of the world, finally looked flustered.
