The Bait He Bit
And she had gone further than that.
Even if the fortnight ended and she was driven from the castle, she seemed to be laying things by so that he would still have meals set before him. On the surface, at least, that was how it looked.
…A hypocrite.
What was she scheming? That he could not read her at all only scraped at his nerves the more.
Edwin, who had been watching Ludville from the corner of his eye, ventured to speak.
"Does she strike you as suspicious, Your Grace?"
"You ask what ought to be obvious."
"Only that I've never seen you pay another person this much mind."
"…"
"Why not go to her yourself?"
Ludville's gaze cut sharply around.
Edwin shrugged, perfectly at ease, and went on.
"Is there any reason you must wait until the young lady deigns to appear? Where in this castle is there a place Your Grace cannot go?"
"…Who said I was waiting."
"There you go again. Showing interest first isn't the same as losing. Between a man and a woman, pushing isn't the whole of it. Sometimes the important thing is to draw them—"
"Shut up."
"Yes."
Sorry. I did run my mouth, didn't I?
Edwin folded his hands with perfect courtesy and quietly took one step back.
Ludville looked away from him and lifted the teacup, steam rising hot from it. It was a tea that had come trailing explanations—good for sound sleep, calming to the nerves.
So she's heard of insomnia from somewhere.
He swallowed a mouthful without interest, then set the cup slowly down. His sleeplessness was not the sort a single cup of tea could soothe.
A meaningless gesture.
And yet, strangely, the heat of the cup lingering on his fingertips refused to cool. Displeasure on his face, Ludville rubbed at them.
"…Not once did you come to me."
In a room too shabby to call a receiving room, he looked over walls where the paint was peeling and old furniture that creaked. His brow was frankly knotted, the look of a man thinking she had a fine talent for choosing such a place.
"I told you to amuse me for a fortnight. You can hardly have failed to understand that it meant I would allow whatever you did before my eyes…"
Ludville shifted his gaze slowly toward Odelli and added, "Given up already?"
Leona managed, with badly trembling hands, to set a teacup down in front of him, then scurried behind Odelli and hid.
As if.
Instead of answering, Odelli calmly lifted the cup set before her.
Knowing the whole truth as she did, she had never been more sincere than she was now. She had only judged that if she meant to amuse him, it would be better not to catch his eye. Pleading, flattery, seduction, tears—none of it would have worked. He would only have grown sick of her. The man who had lost his memory hunted blue eyes with an obsession, and yet, worn ragged by the fakes who swarmed him, he suspected and shoved away anyone who drew near. A contradiction. So she had made him come to her himself.
"…Having seen hundreds of blue eyes, I rather think I understand how common that color is."
Then, as if to provoke her for giving him nothing, Ludville went on.
"Most of them were not worth my remembering. So merely because you are of Cardel, or because you happened to suit my palate, you are not special in the least."
He might as well have asked whether she could really afford to sit there at her ease.
But—
"And yet you came, in the end."
Odelli returned it calmly, without letting so much as a ripple of feeling show.
The winner of this bout was clear. Ludville was the one who had moved first, and the one now turning emotional, as if that fact displeased him. Curiosity, irritation, interest—whatever name it wore, she had made him feel something. In that, she had held her own.
"You said I might do anything I liked for a fortnight. So I only did what I wanted to do."
At that, one of his brows climbed, displeased.
"…Are you satisfied? That I snapped the bait right up?"
He must have known he was being drawn in, and still, in the end, he had had no choice but to come. He would have been curious. She had struck, exactly, a palate that neither the head chef nor he himself had known.
"So how did you know?"
Odelli gave a light shrug.
…Because I have been your wife thousands of times.
What he liked and what he hated—she could have named most of it with her eyes closed.
And set beside everything you once knew of me, this hardly even ranks.
He had known her tastes, of course, and her smallest habits, the sound of her breath, her footsteps, the shade that clung to the end of her words, even her thoughts. The things he had not known about Odelli could have been counted on one hand. From a single expression crossing her face in an instant he had read what she was thinking, what she would do next, what answer to that action would please her. He had analyzed her nearly by the second. Every time he regressed, he had used any means at all to win her over.
So it was absurd, and a little funny. The man who had once calculated even a glance and a turn of phrase in order to seduce her was now wary, and interrogating her. Of course he had lost his memory. There was nothing to be done about that.
"Instinct."
Odelli brushed it off with that.
Ludville was known as the illegitimate son of House Elbrecht, a line that had fallen decades ago.
That he had once been a slave was a secret of the highest order.
But only his true station had been hidden. That he was a man who had climbed from the very bottom to an archduke's seat remained the same.
"I thought you might have eaten barley porridge before. I wondered if it might call up something of your childhood."
Even supposing he was only the son of a ruined noble without a coin to his name, it was easy enough to guess there had been a time when barley porridge was what they boiled for him.
"It was not the taste of ordinary barley porridge."
"If you set sweet against salt, it generally goes down well. A kind of trick."
At that, Ludville's eyes narrowed, as if he could not accept, to begin with, that a daughter of Cardel—raised on nothing but the rarest delicacies—should know a commoner's way of cooking.
"Then the head chef has simply lacked this 'instinct' all along, and that is why he failed to suit my palate?"
"…"
He would twist it that far?
"A head chef without instinct… Hardly a man fit for the Archducal Castle. I shall drive him out at once and hire another."
"…"
"Hm. Who would like that, I wonder. Shall I buy off even the Imperial Palace's head chef? Or… the cook of House Cardel who taught you this 'special method'?"
Ludville's eyes curved, playful. He spoke as if in jest, but the threat inside it was plain.
Does he mean it?
Inwardly thrown, Odelli looked straight into his eyes. Those eyes, glistening with madness.
…He does.