Carved into the Mind
"...So the memories would simply come back."
"It isn't anything so grand. I only cleared away the side effects of the drug. Curing amnesia, or anything like it, is impossible."
At the explanation that followed, Ludville looked faintly, and somehow, disappointed.
Had he meant to use her and take back what he had forgotten? He certainly aims high. She had no power so mysterious to begin with, and even if she had, she would never have helped him recover those memories. Ludville had to remain without everything the thousands of regressions had piled upon him—above all, without every memory that touched Odelli. Only then might he someday set down his obsession with the Blue-Eyed Woman and live a life that belonged to himself.
From then on, Odelli followed him in quiet and unrelenting persistence. When he skipped a meal, she noted what had happened just before it, and kept a separate record of whatever seemed to move his appetite. If he stared blankly out the window in the middle of a meeting, she wrote down the exact hour. She even counted the times he stepped onto the terrace and set a flame to a cigarette.
Ludville stood leaned against the terrace rail, letting a thin white smoke drift from between bloodless, parched lips.
"I was told the insomnia began three months ago. How long, then, have you been smoking?"
"..."
"And how long have you been dependent on it?"
"..."
"How many do you smoke in a day?"
Ludville lifted his head, slowly. The eyes resting on him held every feeling carefully in check. It was only the look of someone taking a condition apart, the way a physician studies a patient—and whether she was hiding what she felt that thoroughly, or truly felt nothing at all, he could not tell. The gaze refused to be read.
"...How far do you intend to follow me?"
"I wouldn't call a terrace open on every side a particularly private place."
"And you offer that as a reason..."
He had been answering as if the whole thing were absurd when he went still. Then, almost by reflex, he ground the cigarette at his lips out against the rail. The ember died in an instant with a soft hiss.
"Leave. You're frail enough as it is, and you haven't a shred of caution. What do you mean to do if the smoke so much as touches you?"
Before he knew what he was doing, he waved a hand in haste and broke the smoke apart. He was midway through ordering her out, frantic that she not draw in even a little of it, when—
...What?
The sense that something was wrong came over him all at once, and he frowned. Almost without thinking, he had put out the cigarette, scattered the smoke, and even spoken words of worry for her, as if the response had been carved into his brain. It was not a normal reaction. Had anyone else pestered him to the point of ruining his rest, he would have blown the smoke straight into their face and told them, ever so politely, to get out. And yet his body and his mouth had moved of their own accord, betraying his will, as if something were pulling his strings.
Brainwashing magic?
No. It wasn't that. Such magic scarcely took on Ludville to begin with, and if he had fallen for so crude a trick, he ought not even to have found it strange. This was more like a habit—
"I'm only a little dizzy. It happens all the time, so please don't worry."
"Stop talking and sit down. Your face is pale."
"I'll be careful not to become a burden. So... you won't abandon me, will you?"
"Abandon you? Ha. Even if you pushed me away, I don't know whether I could bring myself to stop."
"I would never do such a thing."
"...Someday, you will. But by then it will be too late for regret. I've already decided to live with even your corpse in my arms."
Again...
Without fail, that delusion had begun. Whether it was some forgotten thing from a past too distant to reach, or a dream, or mere imagination, or a hallucination born of norvaline poisoning, he could not tell. Only one thing was certain. The woman had blue eyes, and those eyes had always turned toward him, begging desperately for help.
She was someone he wanted to hold and never let go for all of time—someone to whom he could not even permit death. Always precarious, as if she would collapse unless he caught her. She brought up blood so often that wherever he went, he carried two handkerchiefs. Small, and frail, and quiet.
...The opposite of Odelli, in every way. Then why was he laying one image over the other without meaning to? He could not understand himself at all.
They can't be the same person.
Blue eyes, and frailty. That was the whole of what they shared. They were this different, and still... Yes. That frailty. If he kept being shaken, kept losing his footing, it could only be because of that one thing.
"No—were you even frail to begin with?"
He began to press her.
"They said you were too ill to set foot outside your house. Why are you this well? Luring thieves and beating them down, rushing all over the place..."
He had put his finger on the very thing she had no wish to discuss, and for a moment the hand that had been writing went still. Then it moved again as if nothing had happened, and she answered.
"Rumors are always given to exaggeration."
House Cardel had spread the story of her frailty in order to hide Odelli's existence from the world. It was true that the side effects of her purification had left her living on a counted span, but that was a very different thing from having been born sickly. Her insides might fester by degrees, yet on the outside she looked perfectly sound. When death drew near, of course, even that would begin to show. For now, she could still pretend.
"I'm rather sturdier than you imagine. Sturdy enough, as you said, to lure a thief and beat him down."
She went on with perfect ease. Somehow Ludville seemed to believe she herself had been the one to take Zeke down, and she made no effort to correct him.
"So you aren't frail."
"I'm not."
On borrowed time, yes. But not frail. Had she not been exploited since childhood, had she never used her purification, she would have been healthy. She was only paying the price of the power she had spent.
At an answer that slipped so neatly around the truth, Ludville's face settled into of course—just as he had expected. There might even have been a trace of relief in it.
Peace, for a while. At least for the days that remained, they were unlikely to clash over the same thing.
And if it is a fraud?
Set beside the frauds Ludville worked on me through thousands of regressions, this hardly counts. Most of them, to be fair, had been kindly meant.
To keep me alive. Because if I learned the truth, I might run. Because I might give up, and simply die...
But she knew. The further it went, the more the effort wearied him, until he was deceiving her with lies that barely tried.
"In any case, please answer my questions. I need an accurate picture of Your Grace's condition as it stands."
"...The contract, as I understand it, has not yet been signed. I don't see why you are interfering already."
Odelli, who held her notebook as though it were a patient's chart, answered without a flicker of feeling.
"Say what you like. You cannot send me away until the fortnight you promised has run its course."
"..."