* * *
After that uproar, Talia began staying exclusively inside the detached palace.
However, thanks to the maids whispering endlessly as though they had never once pretended to be mute, she learned that the boy who had beaten her was the Empire’s Crown Prince and her half-brother.
And that the black-haired girl she had seen in the birch forest was her half-sister as well......
She also learned that it had not even been six full months since the two of them had lost their mother.
Which meant that she and Senevier had entered the imperial palace barely three weeks after Former Empress Bernadette died.
Senevier had even erased every trace of the former Empress the moment she entered the palace.
Perhaps that small garden behind the main palace was one of the few remnants of Bernadette her mother had failed to destroy.
She looked out the window.
Summer rain poured over the garden her mother had painstakingly cultivated. The plants, heavy with moisture and exhaling the dense scent of wet grass, looked like hideous monsters to her.
She drew the curtains shut over the window.
Then she curled up atop the bed and recalled the Crown Prince’s hatred-filled eyes, along with the face of her half-sister gone deathly pale with fear.
And the blue-eyed boy glaring at her while shielding that girl protectively in his arms......
“Varkas Laedgo Siorcan......”
Staring blankly at the ceiling, she murmured his name.
At last, she knew the boy’s name.
But it did not make her happy in the slightest.
Because she had realized he would never smile at her.
Former Empress Bernadette had come from House Oristein, one of Osiria’s most prestigious marquis families, but her mother had been a noblewoman from House Siorcan.
The late Empress and Varkas had therefore been distant relatives.
More than that, Bernadette had personally cared for Varkas after he entered the imperial palace at a young age to undergo brutal training.
Perhaps he viewed Senevier as an enemy.
‘And me as well.......’
The moment she remembered those ice-cold eyes staring at her, for the first time in her life she resented being Senevier’s daughter.
Even the appearance she had always proudly thought resembled her mother now felt shameful.
Talia did not want to feel that way.
I’m the one who got beaten horribly, so why should I feel guilty?
The one who did something wrong was the Crown Prince.
I truly didn’t know anything. What exactly did I do wrong? I’m not bad. I never did anything wrong.
Talia repeated those words to herself without pause.
But whenever she found herself surrounded by the servants’ cold stares, those thoughts vanished without a trace.
Talia understood perfectly what lay behind their harsh hands whenever they touched her.
Bringing her bathwater cold as ice and scrubbing her skin so roughly it turned red, pricking her flesh with tweezers whenever they changed her clothes, dragging combs through her hair so violently her scalp split open, serving meals gone cold at every meal......
All of it was their own form of punishment.
She knew she was hated.
But it had not been much different while living under House Taren, so she had not paid it much attention.
Whenever she became timid, Senevier would hold her tightly in both arms and whisper that ~Nоvеl𝕚ght~ she was the result of true love, that it did not matter what anyone else said.
Talia had believed those words and always tried to behave proudly.
But now her mother was no longer beside her.
And all around her were whispers about how kind and gentle Former Emress Bernadette had been, and how she had lived in terrible suffering until the day she died.
Talia became visibly dispirited.
The head she had once always carried high gradually shrank down like a frightened turtle’s, and her gaze naturally drifted toward the floor.
And the servants, keenly sensing that change, grew increasingly cruel.
Neither the Emperor nor even Senevier paid much attention to her anymore, and it seemed the servants had stopped fearing punishment altogether.
To begin with, Talia was not an imperial princess in their eyes.
She was merely the existence that had broken the heart of the Empress they had loyally served for years, and living proof of a filthy affair.
Whenever she walked through the corridors, she could hear them whispering about her.
It felt as though her head might split apart.
Every time she heard words condemning her, resentment and indignation surged through her chest.
But since her very birth had supposedly caused so many people suffering, part of her felt this sorrow was only what she deserved to endure.