May Every Wound Be Fatal - Chapter 17.1
Karla opened her eyes after several days of teetering between life and death, having lost so much blood.
She survived, but the difficult childbirth had left her body severely damaged.
They tried to delay telling her about her child’s death for the sake of her recovery, but a mother’s instincts could not be fooled.
Reyna worried that Karla might collapse again from grief and faint once more.
Yet strangely, Karla neither cried nor shouted.
Instead, she stared blankly into the void as if her mind had left her body. She did not respond when called. She appeared barely alive, as if she were already dead.
“Please, wake up. Just a little more, just a little more strength. Alright?”
“……”
“Please…”
Reyna did not know what to do. She felt that she could no longer keep Karla in this world.
All she could do was hold Karla’s frail hands desperately throughout the day.
The gentle Karla seemed unwilling to leave her mistress. When Reyna fed her clumsily, Karla would reluctantly open her mouth and pretend to eat.
In this way, it seemed they might just survive until spring.
Reyna wanted to do something for Karla. She noticed that flowers had bloomed in the front courtyard of the queen’s palace with the arrival of spring.
With the help of the other maids, Reyna brought flowers to Karla.
Karla stared at the delicate flowers for a long while. Seeing that she seemed pleased, Reyna felt relief.
Then it happened.
“The child…”
Reyna thought she must have misheard. She could not believe that Karla had spoken, and her voice was so weak that it barely sounded like her own.
“Where is the child buried?”
For a moment, frozen with surprise, Reyna could not meet Karla’s gaze properly.
“…In the castle cemetery. A very small one…”
The child was buried in a small, modest cemetery for lower-ranked servants. It was the best that could be done. Normally, it would have been difficult to even bury a child born to a queen’s maid who had died in childbirth.
Karla continued calmly, as if stating what she had already anticipated.
“It is late, but we must go see the child.”
Yet Karla’s body showed no signs of recovery. She still could not walk alone, and even while lying down, she frequently complained of pain.
Still, no one could stop a mother determined to see her child.
Lyman and the other knights briefly looked troubled but soon reported that the king had permitted her to leave.
However, it was only Karla.
The queen, said to be pregnant, could not leave the palace due to the high risk of assassination.
Karla was carried on a knight’s back out of the queen’s palace. Reyna watched with anxious eyes.
The cemetery for lower-ranked servants was in a completely secluded corner of the castle grounds.
Karla, having dismounted from the knight’s back, could not take her eyes off the flat dirt patch, which received no sunlight.
There was not even a proper gravestone, so calling it a cemetery seemed almost inappropriate. Recently disturbed soil marked the place where the child was buried.
Sitting down in front of it, Karla touched the earth with a dazed expression.
Spring had come, but the ground was still frozen in patches. When she realized this, a single tear fell without her noticing.
That was the beginning.
Karla collapsed to the cold ground and began to cry. The tears she had somehow held back until now gushed forth like a burst dam, unstoppable.
It was painful to watch. The knights averted their eyes or turned away respectfully.
Then it happened.
A young servant boy, hurrying as if on an errand, changed direction and approached Karla.
The knights, noticing the boy late, reached to stop him, but when they saw him handing a handkerchief to Karla, they let him be.
The boy then quietly squatted next to Karla.
After a while, when Karla lifted her head, the boy rose as if he had been waiting and whispered something into her ear.
“……”
The boy soon stepped away from her ear, and Karla froze as if she had seen a ghost.
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
