As of Today, the Contract Ends

"Odelli. As of today, my contract with you is terminated."

The cold voice drove in like a blade.

Ludville Exepsion. A severance as frigid as befitted the ruler of the north.

Odelli looked at the marriage contract lying on the desk. It was still pure white, without a hint of fading, as though it had never once been taken out.

"The compensation we agreed upon. Accept it."

He ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠held out the papers. They were a certificate declaring that Odelli Cardel and House Cardel were to lose every familial and legal tie, and with them came land deeds, an inventory of the manor, a monetary settlement, and the rest. Odelli faltered when she saw the sum.

"You don't need to give me this much. As you know, I……."

Her voice trailed off. She steadied her breath and spoke again.

"……I don't expect to live all that long."

But Ludville cut her off, unyielding.

"You will need it."

Odelli lifted her gaze to him. An expressionless face, clothes cut to a precise line, a posture without a single thing out of place. Flawless, and without a gap, just as he always was. Even if she collapsed before his eyes at this very moment, he would summon the physician without a ripple of feeling and then go out to keep every appointment on his schedule. That was the sort of man her husband on paper was—the man bound to her by a contract marriage. He was not in the habit of spending either time or feeling to no purpose.

So Odelli did not ask why he was giving so freely to a woman soon to die.

In the end, even this will only be something you calculated down to the last.

Ludville ran his warmthless gaze once, briefly, over the contract.

Every article had been kept to the letter. Once he confirmed that the compensation, too, had been paid without fail, he set the sheaf to the candle without a backward glance, as though the pages were nothing now but meaningless scraps. The contract burned away in an instant and left not even ash. Five years, rendered as if they had never been.

The end. So this was how it ended.

"You have my thanks for your service."

At the archduke's words, Odelli's face went blank. Set against a contract in which the hierarchy had always been plain, there could hardly have been a cleaner, plainer farewell. He was the party who held the advantage; she was the one who did not. He the employer, she the employed. And yet they had been bound for a long while by the tie called husband and wife. Could there not have been a parting that sounded a little more like one? The thought rose unbidden, and she knew that this, too, was greed.

"Is there anything further you require?"

He asked it as though he would grant whatever she named. Odelli answered with her feelings pressed down as far as they would go. To the very last, she wanted to leave a good impression on the man who had wanted their ties kept clean.

But.

The last…….

Because she truly believed the last of her life was not far off, she found herself wanting to leave something like a will. Something wretched. Something undignified. In the end, Odelli could not swallow the sick, rising feeling that had climbed all the way to her throat.

"I liked you."

It fell from her, blunt.

"The day I took your hand, it wasn't so that I could live. It was because it was you."

He said nothing.

"Looking back…… that was how it was."

It was not a confession made in hope of anything. She was going to die regardless. She had only wanted, if only for the briefest moment, to remain inside that perfectly calculated mind of his as a variable he could never have foreseen—to cast at him a feeling that had never been part of his plans, and tell him she had carried it all this time. On the chance, the very smallest chance, that he might be startled. Even knowing that he would not.

"It wouldn't have mattered to me who it was."

He said nothing.

"You simply fit the conditions better than anyone else."

She had not expected him to let even a confession like that pass as calmly as a man who had already heard it a hundred times.

Yes. Of course.

So you knew.

Even the feelings she had believed she never once let show had lain inside his calculations.

"Is that all you have to say?"

Odelli bowed her head and let a small laugh escape, because somehow the whole of it had turned absurd. As expected, the man was perfect from the first to the last. Heartless, and without a single crack.

"Yes. There's nothing more. Not now."

The feeling driven into her heart like a wedge stung. But Odelli soon concluded that it was nothing of consequence. A first love. A green, unripe affection. That sort of thing. The feeling most people met once in a life had simply come to her later than it came to others. It was not so grand.

"Thank you. For all of it."

At her words, the man who had been watching her with an empty face answered, slowly.

A clerical answer, with not the slightest room to mistake it for anything else. And so Odelli thought it was just as well that she had shaken off a useless regret before she died.

That was the end of it. Of the contract she had kept with him for five years.

Odelli set out to find a place for her grave, because she could feel how little of her life remained. She settled in a country village she came upon along the way and began a new life there as a healer, waiting quietly for the day of her death as it drew nearer.

And yet…….

……Why am I still alive?

The days were still vivid—days of coughing up blood dark as old iron, in a pain so fierce it seemed her heart would burst. And yet the body that had been losing its life began, little by little, to recover. Nor was that all.

If anything, I seem healthier than I was before…….

It was not merely a feeling. It was as though her body were being remade into the state of health most perfectly suited to it.

How can such a thing be?

It was something like a miracle. She could make no sense of it at all, but she was alive, and so she let herself be carried as ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠water is carried. Ordinary days followed one another. She saw patients, prepared medicinal herbs, walked out to the edge of the village, and now and then wandered the market, passing her life in quiet. Peace. Happiness. Steadiness. She thought she felt something of the kind—for the first time, perhaps, since she had left House Cardel.

It wouldn't be so bad to go on living like this.

Now and then a loneliness sharp enough to ache lifted its head without warning. Then that heart of hers would creep back up, the heart like a wood fire that had burned quietly for five years and then gone out. Lingering. A useless feeling. But she had a tomorrow now, and so she need not let herself be buried in it.

And so a year slipped past in the blink of an eye. It was around the time Odelli had grown used to each living day that the archduke's aide came to her without any warning, dressed in black ceremonial robes.

He had come bearing word of her former husband's death.

"……What?"

"That can't be……."

The archduke, dead, and said so without preamble.

"Only a year ago, he was……."

Had he not been perfectly well? He had not been under a sentence of death, as she was, and he had suffered from no chronic illness. Told such a thing so suddenly, how was she meant to believe it? She hoped he would say something more, but the aide only stood where he was, his face held carefully in check. He offered her a scroll.

With a hand that trembled, faintly, Odelli barely managed to break the seal and unroll it. A notice of inheritance. And a will, holding the archduke's last words.

"Why……."

Thought and feeling tangled together with no order to them. All that remained to Odelli was the question of why.