His Only Wish
Odelli felt the unfairness of it. She had not been stubborn. She had only made the smallest excuse.
The moment Theodore heard Leona's tattling, he came into the room, and his eyes went at once to Odelli's color. Worry gathered over the face that was always set so hard, drawing the faintest lines there.
"Your color is still poor."
Theodore took out a small box and set it carefully on the table.
"Medicine prepared at the apothecary. They say it restores the strength and eases fatigue."
Once the packet was down, he placed a small glass bottle of digestive tonic beside it. At his gesture, a servant waiting in the doorway brought in a lavishly wrapped box and laid it upon the bed.
"A gift for you, my lady," he said, with his usual quiet propriety.
Puzzled, Odelli undid the ribbon and opened the box. Inside lay a neatly folded coat of deep navy, double-lined so that it would hold a body's warmth steady even through the brutal cold of the north. The lining was elk fur, and the outer cloth carried the soft sheen peculiar to a precious weave.
Leona gasped in admiration.
"Oh, this will be so light and warm. It's so soft... and it looks terribly expensive!"
Odelli looked in silence at everything he had brought, then asked him outright.
"Did you buy this with your own money?"
Theodore regarded her as if briefly startled, then bowed his head.
"I could hardly spend the household's funds without His Grace's leave. But seeing that a guest is properly cared for is also my duty as steward."
At those words, a memory from long ago rose of its own accord.
In her previous life, after Leona died, no one had remained at Odelli's side. Ludville had all but shut her away in the detached palace to keep her alive, so it was true she almost never crossed paths with the retainers. And yet Theodore had come, now and then.
"This winter is unusually bitter. His Grace the Archduke is... not a man for fine attentions."
"Someone ought to remain beside you. So long as you are mistress of House Exepsion, I will attend Your Grace the Archduchess to the very end."
It had been the same then. He was the one who bought her gloves and scarf out of his own pocket, who saw to her medicine, who looked after her in a hundred quiet ways and never said a word about it.
Perhaps it was only to be expected. He had always been a man rich in feeling. He reckoned every matter down to the last detail and could be exacting to a fault, and still he could not pass over a single servant as if they were nothing. It was no different with Odelli. He had cared for her quietly, where no one else would know.
In this life he had drawn back for a time and kept his guard up, merely because she had come among them as the Blue-Eyed Woman. And in the end he had returned, just as before.
Odelli looked at him without a word, then turned and took up the coat. She eased one arm carefully into a sleeve and slid the other through. The fur lining closed softly around her. It was warmer than she had expected. Far warmer.
For the briefest moment her eyes followed the snow beyond the window.
This winter, too, would not be quite so cold.
Alone at last.
Leona would not leave Odelli by herself for even a moment, and getting her out of the annex had cost a sheen of cold sweat. She still seemed unable to let go of the time Odelli had waited alone there for Zeke, all to catch a thief. To the very end she had not put away that suspicious stare, as if certain that the moment she was sent off, Odelli would only attempt some fresh recklessness.
But this time was truly different. It was something she could finish without falling ill or coming to harm. As simple as fitting a key into a lock and turning it.
That simple.
Odelli let out a breath and went deep into the warehouse, to the end of a secret passage forgotten long ago. Once more she stood before the forbidden spell array.
At last.
When she had first resolved to destroy the array, she had felt nothing but urgency. Now that she had come back to this place, her heart was tangled past all reason.
Perhaps because—
...if I erase this, the last bond between Ludville and me will disappear.
Even knowing that this array had taken fully half his life, she might have hesitated. Only a little.
But this is not something I can put off. Not for anything.
Before her, the spell that had drawn Ludville's life into her own lay sleeping in silence. At its center an empty place remained, a space that shimmered as though it were demanding a life. It was the keyhole by which the spell could be started, or canceled. A seat that would accept nothing but the Blood Crystal.
Odelli drew the necklace from her pocket. She parted the crystal, red as blood, from its setting and slowly reached toward the heart of the array.
The Blood Crystal was a key. Once it was set in place, which way it turned belonged entirely to the one who held it: Odelli. If the spell were started, it would drink every last drop of life from its master, Ludville.
...Ludville.
The moment returned to her, the moment he had given his life into her hands without a single hesitation. And with it, another memory, one she had stolen from inside his own. A memory from thousands of years before.
It must have been a day in spring. Smoke rose above a chimney, and through the windows a warm light seeped quietly out into the evening.
"I still can't believe I've left House Cardel, Sir Knight."
In his memory, Odelli was smiling. Hope glittered in those blue eyes, and she looked at him with the blind devotion of a girl in love.
"I wish this moment could last forever."
Ludville gazed at her and said nothing. After a long silence, he answered in a voice sunk low.
"I... I feel the same. I've always wished that time would simply stop, just like this..."
Odelli laughed, not knowing. She had no way to measure how deep that confession went, nor the longing folded inside it, and so she asked.
"Do you have a wish, Sir Knight? Someday I'll grant it for you. I promise!"
Ludville was silent for a long time. His throat worked. His lips parted again and again, as if he feared that the instant the words left him, everything would come down at once.
And at last he said it. A wish worn ragged from being held too long, and still desired with a terrible hunger.
Thirty.
In her previous life, Odelli had reached that age for the first time. After Ludville's funeral. Alone.
It was a futile wish from the very start.
There had never been a single timeline in which the two of them lived on together until she turned thirty. If Ludville lived, Odelli died. When Odelli lived, Ludville was the one who died.
And so his wish, to see her thirtieth birthday at her side...
...I'm sorry.
She could not grant it in this life either. In the end, she had to turn away from the only thing he had ever asked.
Because you have to live.
She closed her eyes and, with an effort, wiped from her mind a memory that had now become something that never was.