Night of the Ultimatum (E)
The grand hall had gone cold enough to freeze even death itself.
In the hall Elden had left behind, Lumiang, Deron, and Blund remained.
No.
They had been left behind.
With a wretched face, Lumiang forced herself up from where she had collapsed on the floor. She swayed hard once, then caught herself on the round table in time to keep from falling again.
“….”
Right hand braced on the table, she opened her left and stared down at the palm. It was the hand that had struck Elden’s cheek. The heat still burned there. The sting still burned there. The ruin in her chest still burned there.
That clean hand, which had never once raised violence against another living soul, now carried a sensation both alien and filthy. A hand that had become the very thing she had sworn never to resemble; a hand that had done the very thing that had tormented her for so long—she found it loathsome. She hated it.
She clenched it tight. Nails bit into the soft flesh of her palm until blood welled up between them. The pain of skin tearing registered, and yet somehow it did not hurt. She ground her molars. Veins stood out along her throat. As if flogging herself, she wrapped her right hand over the left and squeezed harder still.
She opened it again. Red juice rose from the crushed skin.
“…Blood.”
Lumiang murmured it blankly. The same thing had beaded along the cut on Elden’s cheek. A slap had not been enough; she had drawn his blood. Of course it was nothing—nothing at all—beside the wounds and the blood she had suffered as Erincia. But when a conviction shatters, even a single scratch leaves a scar that cannot be erased.
She lowered her hand. Her head tipped back, limp. Overhead, the chandelier poured out a brilliant, lavish light.
A dry laugh escaped her.
By now she should have been savoring a moment brighter than that chandelier. By now she should have worn a smile of triumph, not this hollow little laugh. What left her lips was only emptiness, and what she was savoring was nothing but a vicious regret.
How had it come to this?
Where had everything gone wrong?
Why had he left her with the wish that she be happy? Why had he wished that she suffer no more misery because of him? How could he, of all people, hold a hope so far beyond his place? And why—why—did those wishes feel as if they were sincere?
“Happy… he said…”
With a vacant face she turned the word over, then looked down at Deron and Blund. A crooked smile twitched at her mouth. Looking at those sordid faces so like Erincia’s, a hollow laugh rose of its own accord. Their pitiful state seemed to speak for her own, and she found it absurd. Absurd that she had burned down an entire stable chasing one detestable flea. Absurd that she still wanted her wounds acknowledged the way Marien’s once had been. And absurd—truly, wildly absurd—that the proposal she had flung at Elden had held even a faint thread of sincerity. That was why the laugh came out so empty.
Click. Click.
With the bloodied left hand trailing along the table, Lumiang walked toward Deron and Blund.
“You two must be so pleased.”
Her voice rang low through a silence thick enough to knock a man out cold. The closer it came, the more the same despair that had once lived in Erincia’s face settled into theirs.
“Y-yes…?”
“Of course you are. The odds of being forgiven just doubled.”
She stopped in front of the two men still kneeling. Those blue eyes that had once shone like a sunlit sea had lost their light and gone dark and green; they had lost their current and drifted, purposeless, across an endless ocean. In place of the light lay a dim wreckage of loss and regret. Over the lost path a thick sea fog had settled; nothing ahead could be seen. Eyes that had lost everything looked down at the hands those two had planted on the floor—hands filthy from stuffing food into their mouths, hands as ugly as the natures that owned them.
It had always been the same. Please, not the hands. I have to study. I have to research. I have to keep records. She had begged them not to step on her hands—and they had made even that plea into a joke.
Click.
“Let’s see how well you can take it. Whoever lasts longer wins today’s audience.”
One step closer, Lumiang drove the heel of her shoe into the back of Blund’s hand. The pointed heel sank without mercy.
“Ghk—aaagh…!”
Blund twisted like a squid being bent double, writhing in agony. As if whipping herself for turning a clear pond into a mud pit while chasing a single loach, she ground down harder.
“P-please…! It hurts too muuuch—!”
She lifted her foot. A deep dent showed in the back of his hand. She shifted sideways. There was the terror-struck face of the ringleader—the starting point of everything, Deron. Pouring into it all the resentment she held for Elden, who had shaken off the desperate hand she offered at the Academy and who had shaken off the desperate hand she offered even at the marriage tournament and fled, she stamped down hard on the back of Deron’s hand.
“Nngh—!!”
Hard enough to break it. Hard enough to crush it. As if trampling the conviction that she was different from them, the conviction that she would never raise violence the way they did—the conviction a single slap had already shattered—Lumiang ground Deron’s hand without mercy.
And she thought:
Fine. You want me to be happy? Don’t worry. When this revenge is finished, I will be. I’ll be happier than anyone, just to laugh at the wish you made. Go on and run. Wherever you arrive, I’ll watch with my own two eyes whether hope is waiting with open arms—or regret.
“Nngh—!!”
Run as far as you can. Do you really think I’ll let you go?
There is a saying that all history is made at night.
Night, set apart from day by light and dark, closes today by its own rules and opens tomorrow. It is the hour when deeds left undone by daylight are carried out in secret—a time of violence and plunder, and for those who follow superstition, a time of fear. For that reason, some regions enforced an official restraint called curfew, to protect their people from the dangers of the dark.
Rest and unease. Night was the double-edged blade by which tomorrow was planned—and Gelwood was afraid of tomorrow through that unease. The marriage tournament’s plunge toward catastrophe was enough to plant anxiety even in an old man who had weathered every storm and grown numb to crisis.
And when Young Master Elden walked that night to his office, Gelwood felt as though the unease had become real and arrived at his door. What the young man held in his hands, and what was drawn across his cheek, seemed to carry an omen beyond mere anxiety.
Then, one by one, the things in those hands began to take their places on the desk.
A note was unfolded. In answer to a question about concern for a betrothed, it claimed to hold nothing but a wish of support—yet it went far past concern and committed a rules violation by revealing the secrets of the second evaluation.
Gelwood could find nothing to say.
A Mana Record was set down. It held a rules violation: three candidates threatening the person of a fourth.
He lost the power of speech entirely.
Another Mana Record was set down. It held the moment when the very watcher who had voiced concern that a long tail would be stepped on had his own tail stepped on—the ethical breach of removing the official shackles of the judging panel, only to conduct unofficial secret surveillance.
There was nothing left to say.
And last of all—
“This is the wound Her Ladyship left me.”
When the ethical violation of violence inflicted upon a final candidate—upon a human being—reached him, Gelwood had no choice but to bow his head in the name of the Winterfell Grand Duchy. Of course a single slap delivered to a man suspected of harming Erincia was not, by itself, a great matter. But the circumstances Elden held were more than enough to endanger the house’s tradition and the North’s greatest festival, and so he had no choice but to bow.
Moreover, Elden had formally declared his withdrawal before the final evaluation began. There was no clause allowing a withdrawn candidate to be detained, yet the Grand Duke’s daughter’s stubbornness had kept him, and if he had suffered grave harm because of it, there was nothing to do but lower one’s head.
And that meant only one thing: official approval that the remaining three candidates would become two.
“…What is it that you wish for?”
“I wish for only one thing.”
Elden drew a single sheet of paper from his breast. Several articles were written upon it, and at the end was a space for a seal.
“What… is this?”
A faint smile touched Elden’s lips as he looked at the seal of the Grand Duke of Winterfell resting on Gelwood’s desk.
“The ideal we both desire.”
Absolution from an original sin he had never committed. An apology for that original sin, though he had never committed it. Liberation from unjust detention and wrongful oppression. In exchange, the duty to fulfill what had been pledged. The duty a transmigrator who had become a villain overnight had done his utmost to uphold. The right of a human being to live as a human being. The free will of a free man to pursue romance and rest. And a fair escape from the Hupijip.
The paper held all of it—the long-awaited fulfillment of a wish.
The next day, with seven days remaining, the public schedule of the marriage tournament was converted, for personal reasons, into a fully private one.