The Hand That Took the Pain
A headache struck like a hammer brought down on his skull. Ludville pressed his fingers to his temple and fought to steady his breath.
Here it comes again.
Every time he reached for the missing memories, a pain he could not name came surging in.
"You've lost your memory? But I have never once seen you with the Blue-Eyed Woman, my lord. No—you have never kept a woman at your side at all."
"If anything, you kept your distance. Impotent... ahem. In any case, the rumors grew so indecent one could hardly bear to speak them."
"Not a single day have I left your side since you took me into your service—a slave, back when you were still a boy soldier. If I don't know of it, then no one in this empire does."
Whenever he said his memories seemed to have vanished, his subordinates answered with the same bewildered disbelief.
What phantom am I chasing?
Ludville closed his eyes, weary. Every night, blue-eyed women of every shade came to the banquet hall, and not once had he found what he was looking for. Now and then a moment of confusion caught him—are these the eyes?—or perhaps he had only been tired, knowing full well they were not. Deep in his cups, mind gone dull, he would reach out after a longing that ached all the way through him. But the instant a woman tried to come into his arms, a revulsion beyond words rose up, and he cast her aside.
It was a hunger fit to drive him mad: the feeling of chasing, day after day, a mirage that seemed within reach and never was.
"...Ha."
Ludville leaned against the wall and quietly caught his breath, simply enduring until the headache passed. As he always had.
And yet—
In that instant a cool touch met his brow, and the pain vanished with it. His mind cleared. Vision that had been blurred snapped into focus, as if the haze had been a lie.
Ludville's eyes flew open. Only then did he realize that, while the headache held him, someone's shadow had fallen across him. He saw the frayed hem of a worn black hood and looked up.
The woman he had ignored a moment ago was on her toes, one hand resting on his head.
"I would like to continue the matter of the bargain I mentioned."
He said nothing.
"Will this suffice, as a term of negotiation?"
The headache was gone. Utterly, cleanly gone.
For three months that sharp pain had come for him every day—on the battlefield, over matters of governance, through the nights he endured alone and sleepless. The loathsome ache that had clung to him like a shadow was gone now, as if it had never been. Not a trace of it remained.
For a brief moment Ludville stared at Odelli, blank. Then his expression slowly hardened.
"...What are you."
He struck the hand from his brow.
"What did you do to me?"
His voice had gone low and rough, scraping along the floor. Odelli answered without a flicker, perfectly calm.
"I relieved your headache."
"...You think that's what I asked?"
"Then what is it you are referring to?"
Ludville found himself without words. Did she truly know nothing? Or was she brazenly feigning ignorance, answering as if all she had done was take a headache away? What he had felt was not merely the absence of pain.
"You..."
The words that had surged to his throat, he swallowed without meaning to. You felt like the center of the world. For a moment, it was as if everything knocked askew had fallen back into place. To say as much would be no different from admitting her insidious trick had worked.
He seized Odelli roughly by the chin.
"Slipping up on a man when his guard is down, without even giving your name, and working some scheme—do you think you're the first of your kind I've—"
That was the moment their eyes met: his, and the ones hidden beneath the hood.
Sky-blue irises lay beneath lashes white as snow, transparent to a cruel degree. Ludville's heart lurched, violent and sudden.
These eyes...
In that instant, countless memories that had never existed flickered past. A sorrowful gaze hidden beneath faintly trembling lashes. A venomous gaze, sharpened as if she were prepared to lose everything. A tender gaze she tried to conceal by looking away, only for it to show itself in the end. A clear, gentle gaze that watched him through a shy smile. And, at the last, a gaze on the verge of breaking, spilling every feeling she had pressed down along with her tears.
...What is this?
It was a sensation wholly unlike anything he had ever seen. Confusion took him. With a trembling hand, he drew back her hood.
The hair that spilled along the line of her shoulders was like moonlight over a snow-covered field. A woman made entirely of white and of cold. She looked as though she would melt away before his hand could ever reach her—a scene from a dream, standing on the border between the real and the unreal.
Ludville held his breath before he knew he was doing it. It felt like the hands of a broken clock beginning, at last, to turn. In time with each tick of the second hand, the heart that had stood still began to beat one measure faster.
Only for a moment.
"My name is Odelli Cardel."
The words shattered his thoughts to pieces.
Cardel...
Only then did he truly see it: silver-white hair, white as snow, the mark of House Cardel. The fragments of memory that had just flashed through his mind blurred like a view beyond clouded glass. What settled over them instead was nothing but the distasteful name of Cardel, and suspicion.
...The third daughter. The one said to have gone missing not long ago.
There was no mistaking her. By the emperor's command, notices of the disappearance had spread across the whole of the empire, and speculation ran wild—kidnapping, a runaway, an elopement. By now even grim talk had begun to circulate that she might already be dead. Three months had passed since she vanished.
And yet.
"I never thought you would come north."
And looking like a vagrant, no less. Ludville looked her up and down, then twisted his mouth.
"What business brings a hothouse flower of noble House Cardel all the way to this barren land?"
The mockery did not shake her. She neither fled nor flinched. She met his eyes and spoke straight.
"I wish to be bound to Your Grace in marriage."
Silence.
It held for a long while.
...Is this woman in her right mind?
Ludville looked down at her, unblinking. Cardel. No subject of the Luminere Empire could fail to know the house; the historical record left in the open was beyond counting. The Knight of the Azure Flame, who had held back the empire's calamity. The Saintess of Holy Blood, who had purified the emperor's curse. The Sage of the West, who had first revived the ancient barrier. All of them heroes of Cardel blood.
And the young lady born of that noble house, raised in the love of all the world, was proposing to a madman whose birth and past were both unknown?
A short, incredulous breath of laughter escaped him. An ignorant child—or was she, after all, a Cardel?
"...Did you just say husband and wife?"
Laughter clung to the end of the words, but his eyes were not laughing at all. Ludville tilted his head, languid.
"You came all this way concealing who you were. I suppose you even went to the trouble of forging the scar."
She did not answer.
"How very devoted. Noble savior of House Cardel... did your god command you to take this madman in with those pristine hands?"
And if not—
Ludville's voice dropped lower still.
"The seat of Archduchess. You wanted it that badly, did you?"