Episode 188 Shadow Peace – Winter in Aquitaine (1)
“Congratulations on coming of age, Luis.”
Christine smiled and held out her glass, and Louis responded with a smile and held out his own glass for a toast.
Lewis tasted the wine in the glass and looked a little surprised.
In order not to look like a nobleman on the battlefield, I only used the alcohol I occasionally drank with the soldiers.
“Is it delicious? “It’s so sweet…”
Christine answered with a slight smile.
“I picked something that would suit your taste, and it looks like you made a good choice.”
Lewis somehow felt like he was still a child, so he quietly averted his gaze.
Still, it tastes good.
It was a different, luxurious cocoa from Giselle Darby’s…
…but that cocoa was delicious, too.
“What are you thinking?”
What are you doing in front of your hot sister?
Lewis cleared his throat and answered.
“Oh no. Just a moment of useless thought…”
“Really? “For all that, his expression softened.”
Lewis’ face suddenly heated up.
“Oh no, it’s really nothing.”
Instead of adding to Louis’ embarrassment by asking more questions, Christine smiled lightly and savored the wine as she waited.
Lewis was relieved and wiped his face.
Even though his sister didn’t say anything in particular, it felt like she had caught his emotions and the heat on his face couldn’t subside.
At best, it’s just his one-sided feelings.
In Giselle Darby’s eyes, Louis Dakiten would have been nothing more than a subordinate or a younger brother to be looked after, even if treated well.
In fact, Louise Daquiten is even implicated in her older sister’s death.
Nevertheless, Giselle treated him steadfastly until the moment they parted ways at the capital’s dissolution ceremony.
…as a subordinate to be considerate of and a younger brother to be looked after.
He is not his biological brother or anything, but rather he is a benefactor, but he is still a person who has shown him favor.
Lewis took another sip of wine.
It’s sweet and soft, so it’s very weak compared to the alcohol that soldiers used to drink, but it definitely gets you drunk.
Such a being exists right in front of you.
Half-sister.
Not even my real sister.
Rather, he is the son of his mother’s enemy who tried to kill his sister in order to hand over the earldom and title to his son.
If you hate yourself, you will hate yourself. There is no reason to take care of you.
Among the vassals of Aquitaine, most of those who were friendly to Louis were summarily executed for being implicated in his mother’s treason.
There were some who survived, but they stayed away from him, as if they had never been able to please their mother and favor Louis.
After his mother’s death, Louis was a blob in Aquitaine.
A being that should have been erased, but was saved by the owner’s incomprehensible mercy.
I also know that the vassals of Aquitaine were admonishing their sister that Louis should be eliminated.
In the first place, they made such noises as if they wanted Lewis to hear them, so they couldn’t have known.
I understood it in my head.
He is the child of the mother who did such a thing in the first place.
It is only natural for once-favorable favor to turn away and hostility toward those who pose a threat to the lord.
But even if I understood it intellectually, there was no way it wouldn’t be painful.
Since he was having a hard time, he didn’t even want to pay attention to things like the work his sister wanted at the top of Aquitaine.
It is true that I was interested in magic, but in reality, wanting to study abroad in the Magic Kingdom was closer to wanting to be liberated from Aquitaine.
I don’t think my sister knew either. Nevertheless, she sent Lewis to the Magic Tower.
For that, she had to spend quite a bit of money and risked a lot of resistance from her retainers.
Lewis felt the unique bitterness of alcohol hidden in the sweet and soft taste and aroma.
In hindsight, I should have done it a long time ago.
Maybe I should have said it the day I survived.
It may be too late, but…
Louis bowed his head to Christine, who was still looking at him with a smile, and said what he had to say.
“Thank you, sister.”
“huh?”
“…for protecting me until I came of age. And he listened to my foolish wish to get away from Aquitaine. …and everything else.”
Lewis kept his head down and slowly raised his head when his sister said nothing.
In fact, Christine was frozen with her eyes wide open.
Louis was rather taken aback when he saw his sister literally frozen, losing her natural smile.
…Have you ever seen your sister this surprised?
I think it’s an expression you only see when the Marquis de Lafayette is about to die.
Lewis was dumbfounded at the fact that it had occurred to him so many times already that he immediately remembered it and laughed.
“Now I have to repay the favor, right? So…”
I made that decision quite a long time ago.
I’ve been waiting for the day to say this for quite some time, but I never thought I’d say it when my sister was looking like this.
Lewis said, scratching his head with his hand because the situation was awkward.
“Um… if there’s anything you want from me, please tell me. “If there’s anything I can do, I’ll do my best.”
Christine remained frozen and silent.
Only when Lewis was losing confidence and wondering if he had done something wrong did Christine speak up again.
“…favor?”
“yes?”
Does the problem start from there?
As Lewis was perplexed, Christine let out an even more shocking sound in a slightly trembling voice.
“Don’t you blame me?”
Louis gaped at his sister’s absurd question.
This sister has a truly extraordinary brain, but perhaps that’s why she sometimes has strange and incomprehensible ways of thinking.
“Resentment, resentment….”
Resentment.
It would be a lie to say that I didn’t do it at all.
Even if he did something worthy, an 8-year-old boy whose mother was murdered right before his eyes couldn’t help but think that way.
But isn’t the grace received too great to complain about that alone?
Lewis said with a very resentful expression.
“My sister saw me as such a selfish and ungrateful younger brother.”
“I want your mother…”
“I know. “But even though I acted like I was living because I couldn’t die, I lived on until the end.”
For some reason, his sister was acting so frustrated that Louis, who spoke in a snarky tone without even realizing it, closed his mouth and said, “It’s in vain.”
This wasn’t my intention to create this kind of atmosphere.
However, Christine was actually embarrassed rather than angry at Lewis’s reaction.
“When you become an adult….”
“When you become an adult?”
“…I was going to return Aquitaine.”
“I beg your pardon!?”
This time, Lewis couldn’t help but be astonished.
When she showed him the suspicious details of Aquitaine’s work and taught him secretly, he thought that Christine would help him with the work of the merchant when he grew up.
But what do you give me back?
Lewis drank all the wine left in the glass in one go.
Although it was a sweet and soft high-quality wine, the liquid that heated up the esophagus at once was no different from the cheap hard liquor that soldiers drank.
And it instilled that much heat, courage, and courage into Lewis.
“Are you crazy?”
“I’m not crazy.”
“But how can you think like that?”
Christine was silent for a moment and then opened her mouth.
“Because my father wanted to pass it on to you.”
Lewis was stunned.
“You were the one who saved Sang-san’s life when his father was stuck in the closet? You are the one who has grown the Franzian economy to such a degree that it is now shaking it up. No, if I, who had previously served in the Magic Tower, suddenly decided to take charge of the family and the top, the vassals would say yes! Do you want to do it?”
“…I was trying to help. “If it’s difficult, you can hire me as a manager at the top.”
I can’t do this. I can’t understand what’s going on in this woman’s head.
Lewis sighed deeply and shook his head.
“I don’t. You can’t do it. To begin with, I am the son of a sinner, and you are just a victim. “This is strange to anyone who sees it.”
After a long silence.
Christine took a deep breath and opened her mouth.
“…I knew your mother would poison your father. Even though I knew everything, I pretended not to know and left for Lafayette. That’s why they were able to secure the ledger of your mother’s transactions with Abyss Corporation in advance, and they were trying to turn the trap around to place charges against me when I returned.”
Christine’s words are completely different from her usual elegant and soft tone.
“So, Louis. From the beginning, I was not an innocent victim. “Knowing that your mother targeted me and your father abandoned me, I created the best situation to take control of the family with the support of my vassals while avoiding the stigma of a kin murderer.”
My sister confessed in a thirsty tone, as if she were confessing.
“I’m a sinner too. I was an accomplice who even condoned my father’s death because I didn’t want to die after being betrayed by my family and didn’t want to be stigmatized. … The enemy who took everything from you. So I don’t deserve it.”
After finishing speaking, Christine bowed her head to Lewis and did not raise her head.
Lewis was silent for a moment.
Only then did I get an outline of what my sister had been thinking.
Christine Daquiten did not just protect him out of sheer goodwill.
It seems that for his sister, he was a kind of minimum line of conscience that had to be maintained.
Since the sister thought of herself as a sinner, she came up with the idea to save her innocent younger brother, who had only seen the bloodshed between her and her mother, and restore the rights they should have had in the first place.
Lewis took a deep breath and spoke slowly.
“I didn’t see you like that.”
Lewis couldn’t hide his extreme disappointment.
“You’re dumber than I thought.”
“…what?”
Christine raised her head without realizing it and had a blank expression on her face.
Even to him, who was recognized as a talent in the Magic Tower, his sister is like a monster outside of the standard.
I’ve probably never heard anything like being stupid in my life.
So Lewis spoke even more strongly.
“It’s a waste of time you spent making such a stupid mistake.”
Louis asked emphatically, looking at Christine who was distracted by his verbal abuse.
“Do you really believe that I knew absolutely nothing?”
Lewis did not know the details of Christine’s assassination attempt or her mother’s plot to poison her father and blame Christine.
In the first place, Yvonne was not so shabby as to divulge such a plan to a child who had no idea about the world and just liked his sister.
However, Lewis at least had a clear sense of the omen.
With her mother smiling contentedly as she watched Christine take care of Louise, telling her to get along well with her sister.
After Christine passed away, Louise had a mother who showered her with affection but also whispered to her to never trust her sister.
The strife and friction between the vassals loyal to Christine and the vassals loyal to her mother and Louise were visible even if one did not want to know about it.
When I think about it now, it’s not like I didn’t know anything in the first place. I couldn’t have known. Therefore, Louis Daquiten was excellent enough from a young age.
Even though I can clearly see it, I can feel the uneasy air through my skin.
With the selfishness of a child who hoped that his mother would receive favors from his sister and continue the happiness that was only a shell on the verge of destruction, he ignored everything and turned away.
I didn’t try to think or see.
The result was a tragedy at the Aquitaine mansion in the winter at the age of eight.
If he had made a little more effort to understand the situation, it might not have ended up like that.
At least he could have tried to convince his mother that he did not want his sister to die.
If that were the case, at least Lewis would have been able to be proud in front of his sister by saying that he was innocent.
Maybe my sister wouldn’t have had to suffer from guilt for this long.
Louis Daquiten’s time is tied to that winter day.
The sight of his mother and the vassals who cared for him being slaughtered before his eyes is a burden he must carry with him forever, something he cannot forget for the rest of his life.
However, the feeling that the winter scenery instilled in Louise is not resentment toward her sister, but deep regret at herself for being intoxicated by the apparent favor and ignoring the unrest lurking underneath.
Lewis looked at Christine’s shaking eyes.
The black witch of Aquitaine, a monstrous genius without blood or tears.
How terrible the public opinion is.
Their comments are extremely similar to his past self, who only saw the outward appearance of his sister and mother, who showered him with favor as if nothing had happened.
Nui was clearly a genius who far surpassed ordinary humans, but she did not become a monster without blood or tears.
If it had been that way, at least Christine Dakiten personally would have been a little happier.
Nui is just an ordinary, selfish human being who is endlessly soft on those who are dear to her and can be cruel to others for their sake.
The only tragedy of her sister was that, despite having such ordinary emotions, she had a monster-like brain and the ability to come up with ideas and actions that others could not even think of.
They have ordinary sensibilities and are aware that they are clearly doing evil things, so they think of themselves as evil.
Since he thought he was evil, he considered Lewis innocent and placed all the responsibility on himself, leading to a life filled with guilt.
Was the Marquis de Lafayette aware of his sister’s thoughts?
I think you probably knew.
Nevertheless, the reason I did not stop or stop him was because he was also an accomplice to my sister that winter.
As an accomplice, he cannot relieve the burden on his sister’s heart.
“I could have prevented that tragedy, but I am a sinner for not knowing and not preventing it. “There were no innocent people in that bloody winter in the first place.”
In that case, only he can lift this heavy burden from his sister’s heart.
Lewis recalled the horrific scene of the tragedy that occurred in Aquitaine 10 years ago.
A snow field stained with the blood of my sister, mother, and vassals who were ordered to be executed while wearing blood-stained dresses.
Just as he was, his sister’s time was also caught up in that time.
To my sister who is still wandering in eternal winter, stained with that guilt.
“We all did something wrong, so I will forgive you.”
I asked in hopes that Aquitaine’s endless winter would end.
“Can you please forgive me and my mother?”
