Episode 20

Ines Ballestena at the age of six was rather calmer than Ines Ballestena at the age of sixteen. She no longer had to torture herself by banging her shins on the corners of furniture or poking her palms with the tip of a pen to find out whether it was a dream or reality. That only added to the sense of useless reality.

Ines didn't need any more sense of reality. The feeling of being alive was poison. She acted like a six-year-old, as if it were a dream, as if it were natural, but when something suddenly came rushing in, she couldn't bear it.

The child was so small. Emiliano and her own baby… … Sometimes, when she thought about killing that child with her own hands, she couldn't even believe that memory, so she would hold up her trembling little hands and look at them strangely.

My memory stopped at the last twenty years, but my body went back and stopped even earlier. The tiny hands of a six-year-old child now brought relief rather than frustration.

There's no way she could do something like that with such small hands. These hands were just the hands of a child who couldn't do anything... Yes, she was just a child. She couldn't kill anyone with these hands. She couldn't be a wife or a mother with this body.

Such things could not have happened.

Instead of awakening to reality through self-harm, Ines gradually denied the memory.

Maybe it really was a dream. A very bad dream. A horrible, disgusting dream… A dream that made me miss you so much that I cried, and a dream that was sweet for a very short time. Actually, it didn't matter which way it was. Even if it was a dream that I had just before I died, or if everything with Emiliano was just a one-night dream… .

Because in no dream did life with Emiliano exist anymore.

Ines gradually adapted. It was only after twenty days of fever and twenty days of nausea and silence that she was able to do this, but she was already a helpless child and there was nothing she could do to change it.

Reality swallowed her up, even though she refused to accept it. Ines was truly alive. She was not alive, but merely living in the past, but she was breathing and speaking. She was breathing day after day among the people she had loved in the past.

At this time, her mother, who had a fairly good relationship with her father, regarded her children as the treasures of her life. When her mother did not hate Luciano and her, the short happiness of that time came every day. Her father, who had looked at her twenty-year-old like a bug, still loved his daughter, and Luciano, who had pointed a gun at Emiliano, was only a nine-year-old child… … .

What could a child like that do? What could she do with such small hands? Just as she had erased the traces of murder from her own small hands, she had also pushed away the murderer she hated from Luciano's young and kind face. She suppressed the feeling of wanting to strangle Luciano's brightly smiling neck.

They didn't seem like the same people at all. The nine-year-old boy who grins mischievously at his sister and the man who killed Emiliano and spat on him can't be the same person.

Yes. They were completely different people. Maybe Luciano never killed Emiliano… … . That kind of thing never happened in the first place.

'That can't be true.'

Ines stared at herself in the mirror and repeated the same thing as if she was being brainwashed.

It was now the beginning of summer when I was six years old.

The days were terribly long and the nights even longer in Perez, south of Ortega, but she was getting by. The image in the mirror was small, as if it would never grow, but that was getting by, too.

The more Ines felt real about this place, the more distant her memories of Emiliano became.

Sometimes I liked how they felt like distant dreams, like vague dreams so long ago that I couldn't even remember the details, like they had no meaning at all.

That's how she came back to life.

Even if Emiliano appears in a dream one night like a face in a faded memory and I wake up crying like crazy, I see in the mirror that it was all just a ridiculous dream. It can't be. Such things can't have happened... ... If I hold onto it until the tears stop, a peaceful morning will come.

Then everything would be okay. Somewhere, Emiliano would be having the same morning.

Just thinking about it made her able to breathe again.

At least in this moment, Emiliano was alive.

"Ines, are you ready?"

"Yes, Mother."

If you were alive, I would be fine too. That alone would give meaning to this life again.

She got up and followed the Duchess of Ballestena. The Crown Prince was waiting for them.

***

"Perez is even more beautiful in the summer. You are lucky, Ines. You have a hometown like this… … ."

Oscar stared at the vast plains beneath the brilliant sunlight and hills for a long time as if he was amazed, and then he continued to mutter incessantly. The great estate of Ballestena is famous for its warm winters, but it is in the summer, when the life conceived in spring begins to pulse, that the great vitality of the Plain of Perez is revealed, and so on and so on…

Ines nodded, half listening and half turning a deaf ear. Oscar looked at her meaningfully for a moment, then suddenly looked straight at her with his eyes full of sorrow.

"You look worried, Ines."

"There is no such thing, Your Majesty."

"You know. I'm good at reading people."

He had an eye for picking out the most talented women among those he could choose.

Any man could have done that, if he had the choice. But considering her first life, when she had admired him for exactly the same reason, she had nothing to say in that regard.

Oscar was once the most talented man she could have chosen. The man who would make her the greatest woman in the empire.

There was a time when that was enough. Oscar was perfect. Of course, when he was young, he was a little bit arrogant, but as he grew up, he learned to be ashamed and corrected that on his own, so he was a person without any other flaws.

In a few years, every word you say will be humble.

'Then one day, I'll turn into a complete piece of garbage.'

"I know, Ines. What you're thinking right now."

"… … ."

Ines stared at him with her chin held, unable to hide her bewildered expression. Looking into the eyes of an innocent child who clearly knew nothing, she felt discouraged.

Well, what would he know? With his innocent mind and heart that dreams of becoming a saint, who could he possibly imagine what kind of pervert he would become in just 12 years, chasing after such a young girl?

Still, I felt nauseous again.

Just as her father still loved her, and her beloved Luciano had not yet killed Emiliano—just as Oscar had not yet betrayed her.

I knew it in my head, and even in my heart I recognized it. He too was a rather lovable and harmless boy, far removed from the greedy face he had had back then.

Just the sight of her resembling the future made her feel hatred and loathing like a habit, but that wasn't that great. If Emiliano was a distant dream to her, then the ten years with Oscar were nothing more or less than a dirty dream with a bad aftertaste.

He was infinitely lesser than Emiliano. Not because Oscar's actions or his ugly history of prostitution were funny, but because Emiliano was that great.

Her memories of her first life were more vivid than her second, but it was no different from the feeling of remembering someone else's story accurately. She knew in her head that she had once lived beside him.

So, strictly speaking, this was a question of cleanliness.

"The depth of your heart is like a painting."

As Ines twisted her head away from his grasp, thinking that she had somehow picked up the word depth again, Oscar's other hand touched her shoulder. Ines flinched.

"You must have a lot on your mind… You may have felt that my request was too premature. Becoming the crown princess of a country comes with such burdens."

"… … ."

"But you can do it. Ines Ballestena, there is no woman who is more perfect for the job than you."

"… … ."

"It's almost like the position has already been decided for you. You just have to prepare as you are."

These hands are clean now, but twelve years from now, they will be full of all kinds of venereal diseases. These hands will be poking women's anuses and grabbing the hair of male prostitutes who suck their bottoms in brothels...

Ines twisted her head with great effort and pulled her face out of Oscar's hands. It was the moment when she showed the strongest will in the dozens of days since she opened her eyes at the age of six.

Ines inherited a choleric temperament from her father, as well as a severe obsessive-compulsive disorder from her mother.

The dirty hands of the future and the unwillingness to touch them suddenly woke up my head, which had been dead and indifferent to everything in the world.

I must never touch that dirty thing again. It can't go on like this.

"Ines?"

"… Don't touch it. It's dirty."

The moment Oscar tried to grab her arm again, she slapped his arm away as if even touching him was unclean.

He made a bewildered expression without realizing it.

"What if I made a mistake…?"

Will do so. For about eight years, starting about twelve years later. Until she finally lost control of her anger and put a gun to her own throat.

Perhaps it was a mistake to think that it didn't matter. A wave rose in my heart that had been sinking in sadness.

It wasn't that Emiliano was alive. She wasn't the type of person to endure everything with such a selfless spirit. Needless to say, she was extremely weak-willed.

Ines Ballestena was six years old. She was at an age where she couldn't do anything she didn't like even if it meant dying.