Perenike Episode 3
Deucalion’s gentle voice disordered her memories like a nightmare.
With Deucalion’s hand, fallen and rolling upon the ground; with the blood spurting from his neck like a small fountain; with Deucalion’s eyes, which had found her and flown wide in the final instant of his life; with his silver hair.
Blood from the tip of Aktor’s sword, flicked lightly into the air, spattered over those olive eyes that had died hollow.
The First Prince turned away indifferently, as if he had merely done what he had to do. The black hair of that half brother, who resembled Deucalion in nothing at all, receded just like that.
Her breath rose in her throat, sickeningly.
“Kybelaune, it is dangerous. Please do not approach.”
“What is so noble about a wench who lay with a traitor that you call her Kybelaune? It only sullies the goddess’s name.”
“His Highness will hear you. Watch your mouth.”
Without a word, Perenike merely pushed away the sword of the guardsman blocking her path.
Because she had gripped the blade herself and shoved hard, unlike before, a long gash was left across her palm.
But Perenike felt nothing. She could not feel her flesh parting, nor the blood draining away.
She walked only a few steps before collapsing. Even so, she rose again. She walked another few steps and collapsed again. In the end, Perenike crawled on all fours to Deucalion.
Her trembling hand picked up Deucalion’s severed wrist. The ring she had placed on his finger with her own hand caught at her fingertips.
Following the custom of Eudokia, where the ring was worn on the left ring finger during the engagement and moved to the right ring finger after marriage, there was a gold ring on Deucalion’s right hand, and on hers as well.
On them, Deucalion had engraved each of their names. As proof that even in death, they belonged to each other.
Having barely reached Deucalion’s body on her knees, she pressed his wrist against his severed arm as if she had lost her mind.
Perenike had originally been able to reattach severed flesh. Her “Althea” was different from that of any priest. The authority of Althea that the god had shared with her was regeneration beyond healing. And yet Deucalion’s wrist would not join.
Strange. Why. Why won’t it attach? Why is your hand lying apart like this?
I can heal you. I’m sure I can make your hand move again……
Perenike poured out light as if she had gone mad, as if she did not know that Althea was flickering over Deucalion’s hand and being repelled.
“……Kybelaune, he is already dead.”
The adjutant who had remained where Aktor had left spoke quietly.
Ah.
Because Deucalion was dead.
That which had no life could not be regenerated. No pain could be healed. For the pain had already vanished together with the soul.
Because her Deucalion was dead.
The light that continued to rise from her fingertips as she stared blankly into the air vanished without being able to seep into Deucalion.
“What would you do by bringing Deucalion Phaethusa back to life?”
Another man mocked her as he asked.
“A traitor’s wrist is meant to be cut off while he is still alive, when he can feel every pain. Lord Nikandros showed mercy by considering even this man a brother, and you dare resent His Highness?”
“…….”
“Even if you dragged Lord Phaethusa out of the waters of the Styx with that grotesque power of yours, if he came back to life, we would cut off his head; and if you attached his head again, we would take out his heart.”
“…….”
“To return with a filthy body after betraying Lord Nikandros—how shameless.”
“Watch your tongue. And to begin with, it was our Highness who wished to break the engagement.”
“What use is there in keeping a woman lusting after Lord Phaethusa at His Highness’s side? Without the temple’s halo, she is merely the daughter of a fallen general. What is everyone so afraid of that they tremble like this?”
“Yorgos.”
“All the talk that light can be seen from that woman is a lie as well. A wench with light following her all over even when she stays still? I don’t believe in what I cannot see with my own eyes.”
“Enough.”
“Althea, that damned Althea. Making light bloom briefly from the hands is a trick even the temple’s young priests often show. They perform such tricks in front of the sanctuary and collect money. How different could it be?”
“Were you the only one who did not hear His Highness instruct us to treat the Kybelaune with respect?”
“Well, he did tell us the woman must be kept alive. As if we could harm that monster.”
Amid the mockery and the attempts to stop it, Perenike simply sat there as if she had lost her mind, staring at Deucalion.
She knew the only way. It was what she had been thinking of all along as she rode to Lyke.
Yes. She had merely returned to the beginning.
If only she could buy time to be with Deucalion’s body, just for a while, completely undisturbed……
She slowly lifted her head. Aktor was returning this way.
As if he had noticed her gaze, Aktor’s eyes also turned toward Perenike, collapsed on the ground. Their eyes met in midair.
Aktor Nikandros Pelagon.
Staring at him, she slowly sounded out his name.
Unlike Deucalion’s, which had been faint like a dying flame, the sound of his heart beating fiercely rang painfully in Perenike’s head.
Aktor’s life was hateful. The fact that she could not tear out that heart and rip it to shreds was hateful.
“Only a son of Pelagon can kill a son of Pelagon.”
The oracle was no falsehood. All those countless acts of fratricide and patricide in the Pelagon royal family had been passed from hand to hand within that bloodline.
The reason Deucalion, as a child, had been able to survive the king’s grasp was also that the king had not personally taken up a blade against his son. Even if he had been left half dead.
The king had intended merely to keep the Second Prince breathing until the First Prince he loved grew to adulthood and personally executed his one and only half brother.
He wanted his young son to fall ill, to be unable to grow, to grow up frightened in a frail body. So that Aktor could easily bring his younger brother down. So that, in the distant future, it would become one line in a great heroic tale.
How disappointing a son Deucalion, who had grown into a strong man, must have been to the king.
But now Deucalion was dead. The only blood of Pelagon that could kill Aktor was gone as well.
How wonderful it would be if I could kill you with my own hands, the same way you killed Deucalion.
If only I could extinguish your sound.
If I cannot kill you, then I want to strike off even your wrist, as you did to Deucalion. I want to kill you. You. Aktor, you……
“Stand back.”
At Aktor’s command, the subordinates who had been protecting or watching her all moved away at once.
His dry blue-gray eyes, as though the corpse whose wrist he had just cut off was not his brother’s, or as though he had not even killed a man just moments ago, seemed to study her face strangely for a moment.
At length, Aktor lowered himself before Perenike. Then he took Deucalion’s hand from hers.
“You did not keep your promise, Perenike.”
“…….”
“Why did you marry Deucalion?”
Perenike rushed at him to take back Deucalion’s hand, screaming without a sound, but Aktor stopped her lightly and removed the ring from Deucalion’s finger.
He examined the ring with narrowed eyes, as if searching for her name engraved inside it. At length, with a light sigh, he returned Deucalion’s ring to her. As if that had been the only reason he had taken Deucalion’s hand.
Aktor placed Deucalion’s hand neatly upon his chest. Then, gazing silently at the hand Perenike had injured by gripping the blade herself, he continued in a calm voice.
“There was only one condition of the broken engagement that you were to keep. You could marry any man in the world other than me, but not Deucalion.”
“The one who wanted the engagement broken was Your Highness.”
They had been engaged when Perenike was thirteen and Aktor was fifteen. As if the two factions had each handed over a hostage, they met with leashes fastened around each of their necks. The agreement was, in truth, the king’s coercion.
Ever since Perenike manifested the goddess’s Althea at the age of nine and everyone began saying that she would become the next Kybelaune, the king had wanted, by any means, to place her in the hands of his eldest son.
Even though he knew that from the moment Perenike was born, Deucalion had been designated as her mate.
To break one of Deucalion’s wings, divide the families, and with that make Aktor a new wing.
Once, the true Kybelaune called by the goddess had always become the king’s consort. Whether that king was a dying old man or an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes.
It was a country that had made kings of the man the goddess had taken into her bed in the ancient beginning, and of his son. They claimed that a woman bearing the goddess’s mark could not be joined to any man other than the king.
In truth, it was a tale as old and worn as legend. There were hardly any precedents. And unlike those women, Perenike had a powerful father who would not hand over his daughter carelessly.
Thus the king, instead of trying to take Perenike for himself, sought to give her to the son who would inherit his throne.
That was all there was to the whole story of the engagement. Aktor had not welcomed his father’s coercion, had not rejoiced in a marriage stolen from his younger brother, and had even behaved as if he loathed her.
She had loathed him as well. They had always loathed each other’s existence. That was why, as soon as his father the king collapsed, Aktor had broken the engagement.
Surely.
“I opened your cage, Pherenike.”
“…….”
“On the condition that you don’t fly to Deucalion.”
Actor spoke carelessly, as though abruptly addressing that young fiancée from the old days. As if she were neither the woman who had broken her engagement with him, nor anything sacred of the goddess. Truly, it was an utterly nonchalant tone.
Pherenike twisted her lips.
“By the messenger of the goddess and the ash tree, you swore an oath. That is what you said.”
She had, of course, sworn. And scoffed. What are you to me?
Even as you seek your own freedom. Even as you are arbitrarily throwing away what the king painstakingly arranged for you.
As if you are letting me go for my own good.
She had originally been Deucalion’s. The only thing she had wanted was Deucalion.
“I told you because it would come to this in the end. I will inevitably kill Deucalion, and so I shall have you, who belong to no one.”
“How nauseating.”
“You are a Kybelaune. If only you had been cast aside by me and, as one whose honor was stained, married another man, you would have known more peace than this.”
“…….”
“If you want to kill me, you might as well marry me. You know the way.”
It was a bizarre proposal. As if it were some other punishment in place of the penalty of covering her eyes for life.
In that moment, Pherenike saw something in Actor’s eyes. From eyes from which she had always felt nothing but indifference and revulsion.
They were eyes that looked at her as a woman.
Actor desired her. So much so that there was no way to know how long he had hidden it.
Pherenike wanted to burst out laughing in scorn.
He tells me to become his wife if I want to kill him? Is he telling me to bear a son who will kill him?
She briefly looked around at Actor’s men standing a little farther away than in her last memory. And she looked for an opening in Actor’s guard.
Of course she wanted revenge. She wanted to kill Actor Nikandros by any means necessary. She prayed that his end would be more miserable than Deucalion’s.
But to her, Deucalion’s life was more important than anything.
Pherenike decided to glean from Actor’s repulsive desire just enough time, however brief.
“……I don’t care what becomes of me. Please give me time to send Deucalion off.”
Actor, who had been gazing at her with an inscrutable expression, gave a shallow nod and left.
She heard the sound of those who had been watching them from a distance being driven even further away. So far that by the time they noticed something strange, it would already be too late.
Like a beast guarding its territory, she looked around her surroundings one last time, then leaned over Deucalion, who was completely drenched in blood, and quickly kissed his forehead, both cheeks, the tip of his chin, and his pierced throat in turn.
And drawing a dagger from within the folds of her garments, she plunged it beneath her chest in one stroke and began to slowly cut open her belly.
To borrow the goddess’s authority that a Kybelaune could use but once.
With her tongue still tasting Deucalion’s blood, she swore to exchange lives. Her life and Deucalion’s life.
Her remaining years, and the years he had lost.
Driving the shallowly embedded blade deeper with force, Pherenike gritted her teeth in silence so that no one would know of that pain. So that no one could stop her rite.
He would open his eyes again in a safe place. He would forget the agony of death from having his throat pierced by his brother.
She did not know where her own soul would go. But it was fine. If only he could open his eyes again.
Even if she could not see it.
“……I am yours even in death. Just as you are mine, even in death.”
So you will return. To this land.