[✓]My Fiancé is in Love with My Little Sister

Chapter 42

7 – The Eternity of Kaliarya Ignis – 2

“Rya”

There was only one person who called me like this. I don’t know why she gave me that nickname. I didn’t ask her and she didn’t tell me either. I think there might not be any significant reason. But, I should have asked.

            
… … Our encounter was unexpected. It was dramatic but also very normal. In short, for us it was a very important incident, but for the rest of the world it was a completely inconsequential event. 

            
I picked her up as she had collapsed by the road side.

            
It happened when I was on my carriage, on my way back from a little shopping trip to a slightly distant town. While I was crossing through a forest, I discovered her lying down covered by weed. It was purely by chance that I happened to see her who was rolled up into a ball under the very dim light. Because she was unconscious and didn’t move at all.

            
Some people would call this encounter fate. But at that time, I didn’t think about this at all. Maybe most people would, but I think “fate” is only something you realize afterwards. Actually, if I must describe my mental state when I picked her up, then I could only say that I thought, “Oh, an unconscious person collapsed by the roadside, ignoring her would be inhumane.” So I did what was natural as a person. That was all. It was also why I brought her back to the mansion and took care of that girl who continued to sleep soundly. There was no special meaning behind it…. There shouldn’t have been. I intended to do that no matter who was the other party. No, to begin with, it’s the servants of the mansion who looked after her.

            
And yet, she repeatedly expressed her gratitude to me.

“… I left my hometown with my mother, wanting to go to the royal capital but mother… passed away from a disease.”

After hovering between lethargy and awakening, before long she completely woke up and told me about her circumstances. Her story was a typical reflection of the society at that times and wasn’t unusual at all. The royal capital carried great splendors, but on the other hand, the agricultural villages scattered in various regions were struggling in poverty. It couldn’t be helped that people would abandon their hometown and go to a new land in search of employment, but it didn’t always turn out well. There were many who, like her, would use up all their travelling founds while looking for a better place and would collapse. Even that young girl who had narrated her past must have known about it. Rather than mourning and regretting her mother’s death, she surely felt a sort of resignation toward the fact she was the only one to have survived. I remember how her face was beyond pale and looked ashen. It was my first time seeing a so-called “person on the verge of dying” and that might be why her expression was so clearly etched into my memory.

            
And also, I remember her hand. It was so covered in wounds that it was shocking. Her cracked nails told the severity of her life. Her eyes that seemed exhausted like an old person when she was probably still in her teens were reflecting my own face. I don’t know why but I instinctively averted my gaze. My eyes fell on my own pure-white hands and I unintentionally sighed. Those hands of mine that had never experienced any hardship. There were too different from hers. This difference was that of our environment itself. Even though we had both lost our parents, we didn’t have anything else in common. You could maybe say we weren’t far in age if you were to truly want to find another similarity. Unlike her who had collapsed by the roadside, at that time I was leading a life everyone would envy.

            
My father who obtained a peerage thanks to wedding my mother had passed away and inevitably, I had succeeded him as the family head. But the things a child like me could do were limited and it was actually my mother’s younger brother who took care of all the affairs regarding the management of my territory. According to him, he had been doing that even when father was still in good health, so he wished for me to not worry about anything. That’s how it was. In short, father had obtained a court rank through his wedding with mother, but he didn’t receive anything apart from that. I understood that in this hierarchical society where lineages meant everything, this wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. Whether it was the territory or its population, or the gains that came from them, just about everything belonged to my mother’s side of the family, only the nobility rank was granted to father. That and nothing else. So it was logically the same for his successor, me. I succeeded his peerage, but it was only a document, my name was simply put at the end of the aristocrat register.