The Night She Had Been Waiting For
She was an outsider. In a fortnight she would be gone. And even if the Archduke came to suspect that she had taken it, he could hardly question the young lady to her face. The matter would turn political.
He might not even notice.
To Zeke it was a precious jewel his whole life hung upon, but the Archduke had more such stones than a man could trip over. That was why a thing like this had been shoved into a storeroom of a place and left to knock about.
All right. Let's try it.
Zeke decided to sound out the young lady's reaction, beginning with something small. At first it was only supplies that would not catch the eye.
She doesn't know.
No reaction came at all, so next he laid hands on the wormbella root. It was the perfect herb for a careful bit of tampering—valuable enough that the money was sweet, and if he were caught there was still a hole to slip through. He could always say some other servant had made a mistake.
From the corner of his eye he watched her. She was busy idling and chattering with that empty-headed maid.
Doesn't know.
She had not noticed a thing.
Well, of course. I've been cheating House Exepsion itself for ten years. What would a young lady who knows nothing of the world understand?
Certainty settled in him—at last, the certainty that it was time to steal the real thing.
If I can only get my hands on that silver-inlaid box...
A small, elegant casket, a softly luminous white jewel set into its face. Costly at a single glance.
Pry off the stones on the outside and sell them, and I could live idle for years.
Zeke neither knew nor cared what meaning lay hidden in the box. Only one thing mattered: the place where it was kept was, at present, the most carelessly watched spot in the castle. He had already learned the whole of the young lady's day. By now she would be in bed, and the study stood well apart from the bedchamber, so the chance she might sense a presence and wake was vanishingly small.
Now.
Zeke crept to the annex's rear door, drew out a slender needle, and worked it into the latch. A soft click—the lock gave. He eased the door open. He had oiled the hinges beforehand, and the old metal made no groan.
The candles were out. Only faint moonlight traced his silhouette through the dark. With practiced hands he swept the room until he found it: the little chest of drawers beside the study sofa. His heart kicked. It was in there. He reached out and quietly drew the handle.
At last...
A clack. It opened.
In that instant Zeke's eyes jolted.
"...What."
The drawer was empty. Clean past any notion of tidy—not a single mote of dust left inside.
"That can't be... I was sure..."
He knew in his gut that something had gone wrong. But it was already too late. From directly behind him, a cold voice cut the silence.
He thought his heart had stopped.
Slowly he turned, and a shadow took shape beneath the moonlight. It was Odelli. She stood holding the ornamental box he had come to steal. In a room without a single lamp, where only moonlight seeped through the dark, her clear blue eyes burned with a frightening clarity. The look in them was startlingly calm. She regarded him as someone who had waited a long time for this moment.
Zeke spun to flee. But sooner than he could, a voice edged with frost pierced his back.
He seemed to hear his own heart drop.
Damn it. How does she know my name...
Cold sweat slid down his cheek. The air grew heavy enough to choke him.
And in that moment—
So. He came, just as I thought.
Odelli stared at the thief before her—no, the murderer—as if he were filth she would not stoop to touch. In her previous life, too, he had slipped into this room on the day he skimmed the wormbella root, and he had killed Leona. Caught trying to steal and driven into a corner, he had wrung her neck like a beast with nowhere left to run.
She only went to boil water for me, because I was coughing...
A child who never came back, however long she waited. The memory of that night, searching for her through a tremble of dread, was as vivid as yesterday. So she had waited for tonight—before the same tragedy could repeat, before another breath stopped. This vicious circle had to end.
"Ten years of helping yourself ought to be enough, don't you think?"
"How do you know that—!"
At those words the color drained from Zeke's face. A young lady who had barely arrived—she knew?
If this gets out... my life. No. My neck!
And his eyes changed. The thief's face fell away, and the nature of an ugly beast showed through.
"The rumors that you're sickly... I heard they were true."
He muttered it as he took a step closer, bluster and fear snarled into a strange expression. Odelli gave him nothing. Her stillness only made him more uneasy.
"Right. This is the north... it's cold outside... strain that heart and you'll go quick enough..."
He began to mumble at the empty air, as if talking to himself.
"In the north's killing cold, a sudden death is perfectly plausible. No one would think it strange... Found dead in the snow, it'd just be an accident."
Odelli watched him through narrowed eyes. His gaze had gone completely unhinged.
"You only have to disappear quietly. Yes. Then I live, and nothing happens... You just have to die!"
Zeke lunged at her with the face of a man possessed. His trembling hand cut the air and drove for her throat, fear and rage, despair and madness, all snarled together in his eyes. But Odelli did not retreat a single step. She only looked straight at him, her gaze sunk deep and still, and extended one finger—and tapped his brow.
That was all.
But in that instant—
"Graaagh—!!"
Zeke screamed and collapsed where he stood. He thrashed on the floor, tearing at his hair, twisting his whole body as he shrieked.
"So it... really works."
Odelli murmured it.
An offensive ability she had found in Ludville's memories: the backlash of mana, poison never drawn out, the pain of the illness that had crushed her heart, the miasma that warped the senses. The very suffering she endured several times a day, transferred intact into another person's nervous system. Put simply, he would feel exactly the pain she had borne all this while, each time she used her purification.
Ludville had called it Sensation Transfer.
She had never been able to test it directly. For days she had studied alone, calling up the shape of it from his memories, and this had been her first time in earnest. Fortunately, it had succeeded.
Is this about my limit, for now?
She had manifested it only once, and already she felt her strength plunging. It had to be because she had wielded her mana in a way unlike her original purification. Her shoulders trembled, faintly, but she set her core and stood straight, refusing to let her posture break. She could not afford to look undone.
He'll hurt enough to beg for death.
His insides would wrench. His joints would be ground. His nerves would seem to snap, and poison would feel as though it were running the length of his veins. He ought to hurt at least that much.
Leona—that child—had died alone, in the cold and the terror.