A Dream Without Tomorrow
Now and then, Ludville dreamed a dream like that—a dream in which tomorrow never came. The sun did not set. Time did not pass. No matter how far he pressed on, he remained standing in the same place, and before his eyes an endless river of rotten water lay pooled and still.
Ludville knew. That water was him. Each day it darkened a little, grew a little murkier, spread its stench a little farther, and still no one noticed. It could not flow anywhere. It could not even dry up and die. It was a dream of rotting exactly as it was.
A dreadful reek of corpse rose from his body, and nothing he did could scour the smell away. Beyond the water, she was always standing. Her silhouette had blurred into a haze, and yet the blue eyes alone were piercingly clear—that woman. Unlike him, she always stood upon earth baked dry.
In the dream he tried to run to her. He reached out his hand, and could not touch her. She broke the same way every time. She coughed blood; her breathing slowly thinned; she looked at him with sorrow gathered in her eyes, and then she collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
He could not move. His water was too deep and too foul, and it seized his ankles like mire and would not let go. Cloaked in the stench, he stood where he was and looked upon the Blue-Eyed Woman—from the nearest possible distance, powerless, able to do nothing at all.
"Lu, save me. Please…."
"I don't want to hurt. I… I can't hold on."
"Take my hand…. I don't want to disappear."
"I can't… breathe right…."
She was always crying. In a frail voice that seemed ready to snap at any moment, she begged him, please, to save her.
The one he had to protect. The one he had to keep alive, no matter what. Yet the harder he struggled, the more the world seemed to mock him, dealing her a death more terrible still.
When he woke from that dream, a thought came to him unbidden. Is this already hell? Am I already dead, and is this nothing but the punishment I am condemned to chew over, without end?
He looked at the clock. Barely an hour had passed. Even so, he felt as if he had been shut inside the dream for eternity and had only just clawed his way free, his breath caught hard in his throat.
Ludville slowly pushed himself upright. His head was heavy. The dregs of the nightmare had not yet cooled; they clung to his shoulders like lingering thoughts.
With familiar ease he opened the nightstand beside the bed, drew a single cigarette from the silver case, and set it between his lips. When the flame touched the tip, smoke drifted out on his dry breath. At the first pull his mind began to sink. The world around him blurred, and the heart that had been hammering itself frantic eased a little. The dulling in his fingertips was an ordinary side effect of norvaline.
"It's enough if you just stay beside me. You don't have to say anything."
"I thought I was all right now. I suppose I wasn't."
"I want to live. With you… I want to stay just a little longer…."
The tear-damp, slender voice of some woman faded as well, little by little. He swept back hair soaked with cold sweat, stared without expression into the empty air beyond the window, and quietly let the smoke out.
He had only begun a day no different from any other. There was, however, one thing unlike the usual.
As on every morning, he was walking the corridor in a haze when he sensed a presence. Whenever he took a step, small footsteps followed after him. She seemed to believe, in her own way, that she was hiding them.
Ludville's brow drew tight. Even through the fog in his head, irritation surged.
What does she think she's doing?
Unable to endure it any longer, he stopped and turned fully around. Odelli, who had failed to conceal herself in time, was half-protruding from behind an ornament in awkward suspension. Realizing she had been caught, she stepped slowly out from beside it. There was not a trace of fluster on her face.
"…Why do you keep following me?"
"You said so yesterday. You told me to prove that you need me."
Odelli answered as if it were nothing at all. The look on her face was shameless, as though to ask whether sticking close and trailing after him were not the obvious way to show him.
Ludville narrowed his eyes. His memory was blurred.
What did I even say to her, the day before?
"Did I say that?"
Odelli did not answer at once. She looked up at him, studying his condition, then rose onto her toes and laid a hand against his brow. It was that thing of hers again. From her hand spread a wash of golden light, as if the sun itself had been scaled small, and the memory the norvaline had briefly muddied grew sharp once more.
"You even said you were looking forward to it."
He was silent.
"Do you remember a little better now?" Odelli added, quietly.
At those words, Ludville held his tongue for a moment.
"…Yes. I remember."
It was not untrue. He had gone to her first, shown his interest, and provoked her; she had only answered the provocation. But more than that—
"What is that ability, exactly? Healing? It does not seem the same as divine power."
Can an ability this absolute even exist?
When she proposed the contract marriage, Odelli had cured Ludville's headache in a single instant. No medicine had managed it. No one had managed it. Even the High Priest had said there was nothing to be done for a pain that had no substance. And now, as if healing that headache in a moment were not enough, she had restored a memory lost to the drug.
"Is it ancient magic? I was given to understand that only the head of the house and the heir can use that."
In truth, Odelli wanted to brush the question aside with a lie.
Ludville remembers nothing about me. But he did know that the Blue-Eyed Woman lived under unhappy circumstances.
If she revealed her ability, he might infer what she had suffered all this time in House Cardel, and the link to the ancient power. It would be trouble if he realized that she herself was the Blue-Eyed Woman he had been seeking. And if, in the course of that, he recovered every memory—
"You do not seem inclined to explain. Very well. I have no intention of prying. Not yet."
"…No."
If she meant to keep using this ability on Ludville, she would have to explain it to some degree. Hesitating while she read the situation, only to draw his suspicion, would make things worse still. Odelli spoke the words she had prepared.
"It isn't a healing power, like divine energy. It is a purification ability. Put simply, it renders harmful things harmless—the way one draws the poison from a pufferfish before cooking it."
"A purification ability?"
"That's what I call it, for convenience."
"Then you mean it is an ability unique to you?"
"That's right."
Only one Purifier was born to a generation. Odelli gave her answer while deftly hiding an enormous truth inside a smaller one.
"Last time, I purified the headache Your Highness was suffering. This time, I purified the symptoms of the drug. That is all."