TOWER 2

At the end of the stairs, a single streak of light was visible beyond the darkness where the floor could not be gauged. Carefully adjusting the basin in her arms, Erde pushed the heavy iron door. A chilling light poured in.

“…”

On a winter afternoon just before evening descended, the snow that had been falling since early morning was still continuing. The road, where foot traffic was sparse, had long been covered in snowflakes, and below the open field of vision, the magnificent and elegant Main Palace could be seen, holding dozens of annexes like wings.

Major buildings whose exteriors were wrapped in white marble and bordered with red and blue sandstone; a sophisticated and geometric garden extending in eight directions centered around the central fountain at the bottom of wide stairs; countless statues; the grand outer wall surrounding the entrance of the distant royal castle… All of these were spread out with dignity, covered in pure white snow.

Erde unintentionally took a few steps toward the bottom of the hill. From the time she entered the palace at fifteen until she was nearly fifty, she had lived there. She believed everything that had clawed at her was fate and had no particular wish to return, but it was impossible not to feel a longing for the place where she had spent half her life.

If even she felt this way.

Erde turned her head and looked up at the building she had just stepped out of. While her time spent in the palace was longer, she had a family and a hometown to return to. However, for Seu, who was born in the palace, that place was his hometown, and the palace people he faced every day were his kin. A person who belonged nowhere but had been a palace person since birth. A person who easily became a target because of that lack of a fixed abode.

She walked back, pushing through the snow that had accumulated up to her ankles. When she poured water into a pit near the well and turned around, the shadow of the building touching the forest approached with a renewed sense of intimidation. Even though it was a place she had lived in for four years, it was suddenly unfamiliar and frightening—

—It was a tower.

The Gisha Mountains, a natural fortress protecting the heart of the northern kingdom; a dark red sandstone tower located at the northern tip of the palace, touching the tailbone of those mountains. A place of curses, taboos, and confinement.

Seu was the master of that tower.

He was also the first guest received by the master of the elegant Main Palace situated down below.

As the fever that had been cruelly tormenting his body subsided, this time, his mind began to stir restlessly. It was far from joy or excitement. The old dust settled in his mind rose up in an obstructive way, disturbing his mood.

Old memories burrowed through his body, which had finally found peace. No, they were not specific memories but sensations—longing, wonder, extreme pain, and shapes that had crumbled in vain. While he had become accustomed to them a long time ago, they would suddenly make his heart grow cold. It took some time for that tedious ritual to pass.

Looking up at the sky through the small window, Seu knew that the day was soon waning. Seeing the reddish sky at sunset, his floating heart fluctuated. He turned toward the wall and closed his eyes, but sleep did not come easily, and the thoughts that had opened their floodgates brushed past his eyes without rhyme or reason.

Snow. Erde said it was snowing. Beyond the dimly visible window, snowflakes like fragments of light must have been fluttering all day.

In the kingdom, the snowflakes did not stop throughout the long winter that lasted nearly five months. They regularly cleared the snow to make paths, melted the frozen snow to manage the household, and gathered wisdom, large and small, for insulation and heating. And they gauged the timing of travel and the movement of goods by that ceaseless vitality.

Seu had also grown up always watching the snow since childhood. The snow that began to fall around late autumn kissed the earth tenaciously until the early spring of the following year. Although he was not of noble blood, Seu, who had thankfully grown up gracefully in the embrace of the palace, did not know the fear or the tediousness of snow. Because there were cozy times when he wrapped his body in a warm cloak and gazed at the snowy landscape, he still likes snow, though he cannot see it often.

However, a day like today was an exception.

On days when he had dreams, imagining the snowy world was vaguely sad and bleak. The more he felt that way, the more tenaciously the afterimage of the snow followed him. He had no strength to resist, and the latch on his heart was easily undone.

What came to mind were white petals wrapping around the dark red tower like a dance. Fragments of fluttering snow. However, they were neither petals nor snowflakes; they were the vibrations of a reverent life. Fluttering and fluttering, torn into pieces.

The end of the person who had calmed the angry tower had been truly calm. He had been sending gentle light into the world as always. Like a blessing. Like a gift. Carrying his love for the country of cold snow.

His body, huddled with its back to the world, throbbed and ached, and his heart tightened.

To think he was still breathing in the place that had consumed the most noble person in the world was truly strange and sinful.

When Erde finished the laundry that had piled up for several days and returned to the tower, Seu was exhausted. The face that turned toward the sound of the door opening after lying toward the wall was like a child gasping in fear. Erde knew the point to which Seu repeatedly returned. It was heartbreaking, but she also knew it was a realm she could never reach. Erde silently began to prepare Seu’s medicinal tea.

The Seu that Erde first remembered was a small and quiet apprentice errand boy of the inner palace. She hadn’t watched him constantly, but she had seen him enough to notice him growing as he came and went. Seu had found the version of her from back then difficult—the one who was fully cloaked in dignity as the Queen’s head lady-in-waiting. She had thought that since he was a tight-lipped and bright child, he would become a useful worker if he honed his temperament.

And four years ago, the boy with gentle eyes that closely resembled his mother’s had his entire body torn apart, caught in an unlucky curse of unfathomable depth. The river of winter heading toward adulthood was dark and deep, and when spring came, Seu was confined to the tower with a tattered body. It was then that Erde, who had lost her master and been charged with the sin of negligence, became Seu’s servant. To Seu’s life thread, which had been barely joined back together, a target had been attached—an unbelievable nameplate: the first concubine of the newly enthroned young King.

So, this tower, fully harboring an ominous curse, was the Concubine’s Palace.

One room smaller than the Queen’s dressing room and two side rooms attached to it—it was a wonder to all that this was not an empire given its vastness, and thus it was the private residence of the first concubine of the Kingdom of Maro, which was called the Northern Country. The given monthly budget was less than the money spent on a single meal to treat a foreign envoy, and even that was likely subject to embezzlement; most of the portion actually handed over had to be spent on purchasing medicinal ingredients. Far from having a dedicated chef, the life in this Concubine’s Palace consisted of a single head servant handling all the cooking, laundry, and cleaning.

However, if one forgot the absurd pretext of being a concubine, one could not be dissatisfied with such a life. This was because she, who had failed to properly serve a noble person, and Seu, who was caught in a plot beyond help, were in truth sinners for whom it was a miracle to be alive.

It broke her heart to see Seu weakening day by day, but Erde hoped there would be no change in this life. She hoped everyone in the Main Palace would forget this place and never seek it out. It would likely go according to that wish. Other than the servant who came once a month to distribute food supplies, there was no one who sought the tower that sat on the northern hill and could be seen at a glance from anywhere in the palace.

If there was one more thing she wished for, it was for Seu to regain his health a little and live longer than his own hopes. And for his heart to recover even a little bit.

It wasn’t just loyalty and pity. There was a slightly more selfish reason—it was because she felt she wouldn’t be able to handle the futility that would be left entirely as her share if Seu were to close his eyes one day while staying like this. Because it seemed like she would be endlessly lost as to what meaning she should assign to a life that had withered before it could even bloom properly.

So, please let him become healthy. It would be fine even if it took a long time, so please let him be liberated from that season and be peaceful. Erde composed her parched heart and picked out herbs hanging on the wall. Seu, who had turned his body hesitantly, quietly watched her hands grinding the dried herbs. That gaze, trying to lean his heart toward anything at all, was quite precious.

Four years ago, his mind had turned away throughout the winter from his physical body, where finger joints and ankles were grotesquely twisted and discharge rose endlessly from the tattered flesh. When Seu, who had fainted on the last day of torture without being able to let out a suppressed groan, let alone a desperate scream, opened his eyes, he was inside the tower. Seu did not doubt for a moment that this place would become his grave.

However, the time of the neglected tower flowed tenaciously, and Seu survived. After passing through the long winter, he finally regained his reason. His body and mind were broken beyond description, but the wounds gradually healed, and thus Seu, who welcomed the spring of his nineteenth year as an adult, had become the concubine of the King of the same age, rather than a loyal servant of the Palace Department. Not just a private lover, but a formal concubine—and with the body of a commoner male at that.

In the kingdom where monogamy was the custom regardless of status, the concubine system was a court system introduced strategically to accommodate political interests. It had been nominal for a long time, and instances could not be found in recent times; moreover, even though the Northern Country did not forbid male colors, this was an unprecedented and shocking event in the thousand-year history of the kingdom.

However, Seu was not within the swirling turmoil. The time of Seu, Erde, and the ominous tower stood far aside from all turmoil and never again flowed in entanglement with the Main Palace.

As she poured boiling water over the medicinal ingredients prepared according to the ratio, a bitter fragrance spread through the room. When she approached the bed after letting it cool for a while, Seu sat up. Erde carefully examined his profile as he slowly drank the medicinal tea. It was a tea so bitter and nauseating that any noble youth would have immediately frowned and pushed the cup away.