LMHM 01

Chapter 01

The Person Called You

‘Was I born to live such a pitiful, worthless life?’

At the moment of death, she thought: This is absurd.

Amber was married off at the young age of twenty through a paperwork marriage to a man whose face she didn’t even know.

Her husband was Duke Calix Talesto, the ruler of the barren, useless Eastern Territories.

It was the Emperor’s scheme to keep her father, Viscount Riat, in check.

Outmaneuvered politically, her father could not defy the Emperor’s orders and sent Amber to the East.

Amber traveled by carriage for two months to reach that desolate land.

On the day she arrived in the East, she intended to complete the wedding ceremony by spending her first night with her husband.

The thought of having to be intimate with a stranger was suffocatingly terrifying and repulsive.

Amber trembled in the bridal chamber, waiting for her husband.

But night came, midnight passed, and dawn arrived—her husband did not come.

“He left… outside the castle?”

Only in the morning did Amber hear the news that her husband had left on a campaign, abandoning her.

It was to subjugate monsters.

Every year, the East was attacked by monsters.

Monsters destroyed crops, tormented the residents, and made the East sick.

Amber assumed her husband would return once the monster subjugation was over.

But her husband did not come back.

As soon as the monster threat subsided briefly, he was conscripted into a war with a neighboring kingdom.

“I hear His Majesty, who fears His Grace the Duke’s military might, keeps sending him back to the battlefield.”

A young maid named Xenia, the only one in the East who pitied Amber, whispered to her.

If it weren’t for Xenia, Amber might have never known the reason behind her husband’s constant deployments.

“With His Grace away on campaign, it’s hard to get through the winter.”

Xenia said as she knitted winter clothes for the soldiers alongside Amber.

There was no way a territory without its master could run smoothly.

“The number of residents starving to death keeps increasing…”

By then, Amber realized that the situation in the East was far more serious than she had thought.

“Your entire dowry has been used to run the territory.”

Her mother-in-law, who managed the ducal household’s assets in place of her deployed husband, told her this.

Amber had her entire dowry taken from her and silently nodded in response.

She had no complaints about the dowry being used for the territory.

Still, she wished they had at least told her beforehand.

Even though she had married Duke Talesto and become the lady of the territory, Amber could not shake the feeling that she was still an outsider.

While the East was being run with Amber’s dowry, her husband did not return.

The war with the neighboring kingdom had dragged on.

After enduring two winters, Amber thought that she wouldn’t be surprised if her husband died on the battlefield.

That was how absurd the deployment was.

[Make the Kingdom of Cale a vassal state of the Empire. Do not return until you have obtained their surrender document.]

That was the Emperor’s command given to Duke Talesto.

“I heard the Kingdom of Cale has such rough terrain that it’s called a ‘heaven-given natural fortress.’”

Xenia, who had picked up the information from the knights remaining in the castle, said tearfully.

“And on top of that, there’s a granary region inside the Kingdom of Cale, so they say it’s impossible to win the war.”

The forces conscripted to conquer the Kingdom of Cale were only Duke Talesto’s private soldiers and a handful of mercenaries hired for pocket change.

They were outnumbered, and due to the poor conditions of the East, a stable supply line was impossible.

No one thought the Duke would return alive.

But he did return.

And with a great victory.

It was the year Amber turned twenty-two.

Amber waited in the bridal chamber to spend her first night with her husband who had returned from the war.

She had bathed in warm water scented with fragrant oils prepared by the maids and wore a thin nightgown.

She was still terrified of having to be intimate with a stranger. Even when she steeled her resolve, her shoulders trembled.

Amber drank several glasses of wine and stayed awake all night.

But that day too, her husband did not come.

The Duchess who was slighted on her wedding night.

The ugly rumors spread through the castle like wildfire.

But her husband did not clarify things. Nor did he come belatedly to consummate the marriage.

Their first night together came four years later.

After six years in the East, when it became certain that the marriage could no longer be annulled.

That first night was nothing but pain.

Amber could not understand why this painful, dry act had been described so romantically in countless novels.

“With this, it is irrevocable.”

In the morning, her husband left her with only those cold words.

Amber felt a desolate sorrow, as if drenched in ice water.

Still, now that they had shared bodies, Amber thought her husband’s attitude would soften a little. She thought she would no longer have to tremble alone in a large, cold room through the night.

But even after that, her husband did not seek her out unless absolutely necessary.

When the time came for him to be with Amber, he would show obvious displeasure.

Gradually, Amber became afraid of being with her husband.

The obligatory twice-monthly nights together remained nothing but painful.

The news of her pregnancy came when Amber was twenty-eight.

Women in the East usually had children in their late teens or early twenties.

Amber knew that many had spoken behind her back about her inability to conceive past her twenty-seventh birthday.

They tormented her mercilessly for being childless.

Amber, who had been harshly bullied because of her lack of pregnancy, did not welcome her first pregnancy upon discovering it. Rather, she found it tiresome.

So Amber asked the doctor to keep her pregnancy a secret.

She knew it would be discovered in a few weeks anyway, but she wanted to delay that moment as long as possible.

But as time passed, Amber’s feelings changed.

“My child…”

Amber stroked her belly.

A small affection for the being inside her began to seep into her heart, like water seeping through a crack.

What Amber felt was slightly different from what was commonly called maternal love.

It wasn’t so much maternal love as it was camaraderie.

By that time, Amber was spiritually and physically exhausted.

Communication with her family had been cut off right after the wedding, and Xenia had long since quit her job and left the ducal castle.

Only those who disliked and tormented her remained inside the castle.

Her husband, who should have been on her side, had neglected her.

Amber was utterly alone, exhausted from enduring the endless poverty of the East.

Then, she had her own flesh and blood.

In the East, where there were no relatives, nothing, she finally had a being connected to her.

A sense of relief that she wasn’t alone, a premonition that she could muster noble courage for this small life going forward…

Such things moistened her arid heart.

After a while, she even had the leeway to think about her husband.

‘Wouldn’t he feel the same emotions as me?’

Wouldn’t her husband, who acted like it would kill him to show even a shred of affection, change if he heard about the child?

So, that day, she gathered some courage.

She waited for her husband in the bedroom and delivered the news.

Her husband’s face contorted upon hearing that she was with child.

“Why do you dislike it so much? Didn’t you want an heir?”

Amber asked, flustered.

People had worried over her inability to conceive, saying, ‘What if the Talesto ducal line ends?’ and acted as if an heir would solve all the problems of the duchy.

So she thought her husband would also be happy about the child.

But her husband looked devastated by her pregnancy.

“I never wanted an heir!”

For the first time since their marriage, he raised his voice.

That day, Amber lost all hope.

She endured ten months in despair.

Time passed, and winter arrived. Amber was close to giving birth.

That winter was exceptionally harsh.

The territory had been torn apart by her husband’s frequent deployments.

The only thing left in the East was the Duke of Talesto’s reputation for miraculously achieving great victories every time he went on campaign.

But even that, the Emperor could not tolerate.

“Rebellion? We are? The people of the East?”

The Emperor had accused the Talesto ducal house of treason.

And he began to hunt the East.

There was no way the East, already as devastated as it could be, could resist the Emperor’s conspiracy.

“……Run away.”

Seeing the Emperor’s army gathered outside the castle, her husband gritted his teeth and said this.

Amber, accustomed to despair, simply shook her head.

“Even if I ran away heavily pregnant, how could I survive?”

In the end, the entire Talesto ducal family was captured by the Emperor’s knights.

“Please, spare my wife. My wife knows nothing.”

Her husband, kneeling before the Emperor, said this.

“I will need some time to decide.”

Hearing his plea, the Emperor said he would think about it and locked them both in a dungeon.

“Why did you do that?”

Amber asked as they spent the night in the dungeon.

‘You know as well as I do, don’t you? That this rebellion is a false accusation!’

Although her words came out dryly, inside Amber’s heart, a fierce whirlpool of questions was churning.

In the darkness, she saw the weary face of the Duke of Talesto.

He looked at Amber with eyes filled with an unknown emotion.

Silence flowed between them.

Had they ever faced each other for this long since their marriage?

That day, Amber learned for the first time that her husband’s eyes were a deep navy blue.

Perhaps it was the same for him.

He probably realized for the first time that day that Amber’s eyes were an orange resembling an ember.

“For my child.”

After a long silence, he spoke with a dry smile.

“Because I wanted at least my heir to survive.”

“I… see.”

Amber lowered her head.

‘First he says he never wanted an heir, and now that he’s about to die, he suddenly craves his bloodline like all the other men?’

She felt foolish for thinking that even at the very end, she might share some connection with this man.

The next day, her husband was taken away first.