Chapter 35
Schultz Tugrahan was the last prince of Schultz.
To be more precise, he was the only cowardly prince among the last king’s sons who had survived.
The fall of Schultz had been inevitable.
Once, it had amassed enormous wealth through trade routes with the East, but generations of extravagance and debauchery within the royal family gradually eroded the nation’s strength and military power.
Its monopoly over the trade routes was also slowly taken away by neighboring countries.
The immense wealth it had built as the center of overland trade vanished like grains of sand.
Then Estroa, the continent’s only empire, swallowed Schultz whole.
The people of the Kingdom of Schultz were either reduced to slaves and taken away to the Empire or conscripted into the Empire’s territorial wars.
Simply because they were people of Schultz, they were forced to pay taxes twice as high as those imposed upon the Empire’s own citizens.
The people of Schultz, whose lives had been stolen from them, desperately searched for somewhere to vent their anger.
And that anger was directed toward the Royal Palace of Schultz.
Schultz Ishak.
The last king of Schultz, who had evaporated the already depleted royal treasury down to its final drop through luxury and indulgence.
Which son of his had Schultz Tugrahan been?
After the Imperial Army destroyed the records, no one could uncover the truth.
Not even Schultz Tugrahan himself, Ishak’s own son, knew which son he had been.
That was hardly surprising.
Ernahim, Schultz Tugrahan’s mother, had been Ishak’s twenty-seventh wife.
The Royal Palace of Schultz fell at the hands of the enraged people of the kingdom.
The marble palace, which had stood proudly at the heart of Schultz for three hundred years, was reduced to rubble.
Among the ruins of the collapsed palace, grave robbers looted the few remaining royal treasures.
Whatever was left was burned by the furious people.
Ernahim, the final concubine whom the king, driven mad by luxury and pleasure, had taken.
The people claimed that the king had lost his mind beneath the seductive folds of her skirt.
Filled with mad hatred toward her, they set the palace ablaze while searching for her.
The furious mob eventually found her hiding in stolen kitchen maid’s clothing and dragged her outside.
Then the stones began to fly.
“You whore who destroyed Schultz!”
“You temptress who blinded the King’s eyes!”
The people hurled stones, wishing for her death.
The rocks they seized at random struck her body before falling to the ground.
Some sharp fragments lodged deep into her flesh and refused to come out.
Others struck her head, rolled away, and left blood streaming behind.
Even though their king had already begun losing his judgment long before meeting Ernahim.
Even though the royal treasury had already been emptied before she had ever set foot inside the palace.
The suffering people of Schultz needed someone to blame.
That person became Tugrahan’s mother.
Even though she had been only fifteen years old when she had been dragged before a king who was already sixty.
Twenty-five-year-old Ernahim was stoned to death.
And together with the fallen royal palace—
Five-year-old Schultz Tugrahan, held tightly in the arms of Ernahim’s maid with his mouth covered, watched every moment from beginning to end.
“That is why I could never bring myself to make the place where my mother was stoned to death the capital of my kingdom.”
“And the reason the capital of Shulid lies beside the sea is…”
“…”
“When they threw my mother into the flames, no one bothered to check whether she was still breathing.”
“They simply assumed she was dead because she no longer moved after being struck by the stones.”
“But I saw it clearly.”
“I saw my mother’s arm moving within the fire.”
“…”
“So the most beautiful woman I have ever known died within those flames.”
“I could never bring myself to build my kingdom’s capital in the middle of a scorching desert.”
“So I chose the sea.”
“For no flames can continue burning beneath the sea.”
“…”
Elisa looked up at Schultz Tugrahan.
His expression was hardly any different from when he had begun telling the story.
His blue eyes still held a depth far beyond her ability to read.
They resembled the open ocean concealing a terrifying storm beneath its surface.
No eyes could have been more fitting for a king.
His square jaw, prominent nose, and above all, the heavily muscled physique that even Sepia’s military academy rarely produced all served as reminders that he was Shulid’s pride and pillar.
Yet Elisa knew about the curse-like brands engraved upon that pillar-like body.
Over the left side of his chest, close to his heart, was the honorable mark of Schultz’s royal bloodline.
But on his right arm remained the large slave brand burned into him during the years he had been held hostage by the Estroa Empire.
He had been born a prince.
He had lived as a slave.
Now he was a king.
The only surviving member of Schultz’s royal family.
He had never once tried to hide the slave brand burned into his body.
Because he had never hidden it, it could never become the weakness of the King of Shulid.
And yet the weakness revealed by such a man was merely fire.
He longed for the sea because it could swallow the flames that had devoured his mother.
Could such rage truly be buried so easily?
For a long while, Elisa found herself unable to respond to Schultz Tugrahan’s story.
When she remained silent, Schultz Tugrahan laughed softly, as though he had expected exactly that reaction.
“Didn’t I tell you?”
“It wasn’t much of a reason.”
“Of course, publicly I had more than enough justification.”
“I declared that, by inheriting Schultz—the former center of overland trade—I would restore Shulid as the center of maritime commerce.”
However, Schultz Tugrahan’s words no longer reached Elisa’s ears.
Elisa knew a woman who had thrown herself alive into the sea.
She had not been as tragic nor as noble as the young royal consort of Shulid.
But perhaps she had been just as beautiful.
Impulsively, Elisa opened her mouth.
Before she could even consider whether this story ought to be told from a diplomatic standpoint, the words escaped on their own.
“Some who drown in the sea eventually rise to the surface and are washed back onto land.”
“It’s almost as though they were returning to where they belonged.”
“What do you mean?”
“The most beautiful woman I ever knew believed she had no place on land.”
“So she threw herself into the sea.”
“But even there, she couldn’t find a place to belong.”
“In the end, she was washed back onto land, revealing a terrible sight for others to see.”
Schultz Tugrahan looked at Elisa in surprise.
Only then did his eyes seem a little more human.
They no longer resembled mirrors reflecting the abyss.
“She wouldn’t have wanted the man she loved or her daughter to see the pitiful way she looked after drowning.”
“But in the end, she returned to land just the same.”
“…”
“And so her daughter ended up seeing exactly how her mother had died.”
Elisa finally understood why Schultz Tugrahan had concluded his story by talking about noble causes and maritime trade kingdoms.
“It’s just…”
“Sometimes, that’s how death at sea ends.”
Stories buried too deeply in the past could no longer change the present.
That was why the present itself had to be given meaning.
That was how those who survived had to continue living.
Before they realized it, the sun had disappeared beyond the sea.
A pale moon floated in the violet-tinted sky.
As Elisa calmly recounted her story, she failed to notice that her own expression had become just like Schultz Tugrahan’s had been moments earlier—
Like the unmoving depths of the sea.
Only Schultz Tugrahan realized it.
Schultz Tugrahan, who had founded a kingdom for the very people who had killed his mother.
Elisa, who had chosen to become a naval officer despite losing her own mother to the sea.
To him, Elisa seemed completely different from his own mother.
The woman standing before him was not someone consumed by flames.
She was someone who carried those flames within her heart.
His own mother had ultimately been devoured by fire and reduced to ashes.
But Elisa had overcome the flames that had consumed her own mother.
She had survived.
Perhaps there truly were flames that could never be extinguished, even beneath the sea.
Only after setting foot upon the land of Sepia did Schultz Tugrahan finally understand that.
And those flames could never belong to Schultz Tugrahan.
“Let’s return.”
“I now understand that you are someone who belongs to the sea of Roserica.”
“Thank you for understanding, King of Shulid.”
“In that case, I suppose I should return you to the fiancé who loves you.”
As he said that, Schultz Tugrahan once again offered Elisa his arm.
This time, Elisa accepted instead of refusing.
At last, the King of Shulid completely believed Queen Anne Marie’s words that Elisa Shooter and Adrian Oberon were lovers.
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