WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Malfoid
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◈ Fragments of Thorns and a Cradle ◈
Chapter 23
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Content Warning: bereavement; child abuse; domestic abuse; explicit sexual content; physical violence; sexual coercion or assault; sexual exploitation and slavery; suicidal thoughts or self-harm; underage sexual exploitation.
By then, their daughter had just begun to babble.
The two, once lovers and now husband and wife, worked hard to escape poverty.
Because they had a daughter.
Their precious daughter resembled them both, white and small as spring snow.
Though thinner than other children her age, she laughed so brightly it made one breathless, like fragments of summer sunlight floating on the sea.
Wavy golden hair. Beautiful eyes like a noblewoman's green jewels. Apple-round cheeks. A smile like white foam rising across her face.
She was why Agnes worked until her hands split.
Even when they could barely afford food, Agnes wanted to give her daughter a pretty satin ribbon.
Like drawing water from a dry well. Like pouring water into a broken jar.
Even if life did not improve...
"Mama!"
It was enough that Marie smiled.
If Marie did not fall ill and grew up healthy, Agnes and Gregory wanted nothing more.
But...
"Pretty. You should have given birth to something like this beneath me, Agnes."
Agnes did not know how long it had been.
Only five years, yet it felt as though she were looking across into another life in a parallel world.
Even when she saw Randolph's face again, even when she met him in the house that must have looked like a barn to him, nothing felt real.
Now, after all this time...
Did it mean anything?
Did it mean anything for him to take back the woman she had become and bind her again?
Agnes did not know.
She looked down at her husband's body.
He could not even rest inside a coffin. She remembered the instant his abdomen had been savagely cut open. Thankfully, perhaps out of consideration for her, the undertaker had cleaned and arranged his remains before bringing him to her.
She had finally come to see him after being confined in Randolph's bedroom and subjected to repeated abuse.
"My love."
Marie's father.
Gregory.
My love. My husband. The shelter of my family.
What more could she call him? What more could she say to express her love?
Agnes did not cry.
Like the day her mother died, not even one dry tear came.
It was not because she could not believe he was dead.
Because she believed it, she no longer wanted to live.
It was more accurate to say that she could think of nothing.
Agnes watched her husband's pale face.
When she first saw his body, she did not recognize him as Gregory. He did not look as he had in life.
How had that face ever smiled so beautifully?
She thought of him lying there, like a stranger.
Then she arrived at a final thought.
Gregory is not here. My husband has gone to another world.
So...
I must follow him to another world.
Gregory is lonely. He is someone who can only sleep at night if he buries his nose against the crown of my head.
The three of us must remain one forever.
Agnes began to long for death.
"Did you know?"
Randolph asked while touching her body.
Randolph had been touching her erect nipple as he spoke. As soon as he dragged Agnes back to San Arzok, he had shut himself in the bedroom and moved his hips over her. She could not count how many times he had climaxed or how many times he had kissed her.
Randolph had seemed somehow mad ever since he recovered her. Agnes did not care how far he had lost his mind. She only swayed limply beneath him.
"I hated your son."
At the mention of Lucian, Agnes's unfocused eyes turned toward him.
Randolph smiled in satisfaction and kissed her forehead.
"Not because he did not resemble me."
"..."
"But because you loved only him. That was why, Agnes."
His grip tightened painfully.
Randolph kissed Agnes again and again as he whispered.
"After he was born, he was the only thing in your world."
If Lucian had lived, he would now have been thirteen, the same age as Endymion.
Randolph thought of the illegitimate son he barely remembered now.
He did not feel sorry for failing to treat Lucian well. It was because Lucian had not been a son to him, but a rival.
Even if the dead child returned alive, Randolph could not love him.
"But strangely, I want that bastard's daughter."
A coldness gathered in Agnes's eyes.
At the words that he wanted her daughter, her branch-thin hand seized his shoulder.
Randolph laughed softly.
"What do you think I would do with that bastard's daughter?"
"You'll kill her. If you touch Marie with your filthy hands, I swear...!"
"You are foolish."
The smile vanished from Randolph's face.
Agnes trembled. She feared what he might do to Marie, feared he might make the child an object of cruelty.
She had nothing left to fear for herself.
"You still do not know that I have only you."
Randolph looked sorrowfully at Agnes, who was gasping for breath.
She heard nothing.
She struck his cheek hard.
Randolph drew back his lips.
Tears rose at his smooth smile.
"Nothing that resembles you is necessary to me. No woman can take your place. So do not worry, Agnes. You are the only woman I have."
"Marie..."
"But revenge is revenge. I cannot let the man who touched what is mine go free. Nor can I let the woman who betrayed me go free."
"What will you do?"
"My son needs a female slave."
"What... what?"
"My son has reached the age to have one. The prettier, the better. She is perfect."
"No! No, please! Marie is still young. She knows nothing..."
"You said life was not worth living if you could not die."
"Master, please..."
Agnes burst into tears.
Randolph wiped them away tenderly.
"Was my love so terrible?"
"Please. Hic..."
"Still, I love you, Agnes."
His whisper felt loud enough to deafen her.
Agnes wept miserably in his arms.
Endymion looked down at the girl.
She resembled a doll.
She was as short as an acorn, thinner than the young maid who attended him, and seemed almost unreal. Like an angel buried with roses in a glass coffin.
"Is she alive?"
She was asleep, which made her seem even less real.
Endymion looked from the pale forehead beneath scattered golden hair to Madam Retman.
The woman had a hooked nose and a hard expression. There was not a trace of gentleness in her face. She looked less like a nursemaid than a slave overseer.
She had raised Endymion. He resembled his mother, not her.
"If she is alive, she must be sleeping."
"When will she wake up?"
"Who knows?"
Endymion sat down heavily beside the girl.
Madam Retman watched him.
His expression as he rested his chin in his hand was interested, as though he were studying a butterfly trapped in a glass box.
He was usually calm. He had never been deeply interested in anything, nor deeply disappointed.
But...
"Do you like her?"
"What?"
"She belongs to you now."
"..."
"The marquess said he would give her to you. She is your girl now."
Endymion did not answer.
He had heard it through his father's servant.
After the woman returned, after she was captured again, his father shut himself away in the bedroom with her and showed no sign of emerging. He said he would give the woman's child to Endymion.
"Young master..."
"I like her."
Madam Retman's face became cold.
She remembered the marquess, who had always remained distant from her mistress, Lucrezia.
The marquess and marchioness had seemed tolerable enough, but after Agnes, the marquess's female slave, disappeared, their relationship reached its worst point.
Neither wished to see the other. They avoided even each other's shadows. They had never had deep conversations, but in the last five years, the occasions on which they faced each other could be counted on one hand.
"What do you like so much?"
Would Endymion become like that?
She did not merely fear that he would have a poor marriage. She feared he might lose reason over the matter of a mere slave, become obsessed as deeply as his father had.
"Everything."
"..."
"I like everything."
Endymion turned toward her.
The smile on his pale face was lonely and beautiful.
Marie first met Endymion by a lakeside.
The lake had been made by his grandfather, who loved garden landscaping. It was also where Agnes and Randolph drowned.
More precisely, Agnes drowned first. Randolph followed her of his own will.
Marie lost her mother at dawn, after meeting Endymion, greeting him, and receiving a kiss from him.
Agnes seemed not entirely sane in that green-blue dawn.
Endymion said she had been completely mad.
But Marie did not think her mother had lost her mind so completely.
But Mother recognized me.
"How could a woman dragging her own daughter into the water possibly be sane?"
When Marie pleaded with him, Endymion held his own son and spoke coldly.
He hated Agnes's choice because she had tried to take Marie from him. Because she had tried to take Marie's life and cut her entirely away from him.
Marie could say nothing to the man who so ruthlessly insulted her mother.
That dawn, Marie had been walking through the garden with her mother.
She did not know how Agnes had slipped past the ominous guards and come for her.
Half asleep, Marie had risen from bed and wandered the corridor with her mother. When they reached the lake, someone grabbed her fiercely and pulled her into an embrace.
Marie did not know who it was.
All she knew was that her mother was being pulled away from her, and that faint smile was growing distant.
"Mama..."
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