The Law of Equivalent Exchange
"……As you know, this affair came of Your Grace's own making."
Odelli added it almost like an excuse, and Ludville answered with a short sigh.
"Did anyone say otherwise?"
That he required purification at regular intervals was likely the truth. The span of three years, or of five, was another matter: that, without question, Odelli had fixed to suit herself. She was the only being who could heal a condition no one else could answer, and the only choice now open to him was to accept.
And yet he had never particularly wanted to live. He did not even have the strength to end his own life. He had simply gone on without will, drifting as the current took him—until the lady caught hold of him. Of him, standing at the brink of monsterification. With a power close to a miracle she had erased the miasma, and she was offering to lend him that power while asking nothing in return.
No. She said she had ambition. And yet the condition was a mere five-year contract marriage. The sums did not balance in the slightest. At that rate, it was closer to volunteer work.
Is she planning to assassinate me within five years and seize the title? If that were it, he could almost understand. If those were her intentions, it might even be entertaining.
But Odelli's aim was the exact reverse. Again and again he drew himself toward death, and she was doing everything she could to pull him back out into the world and keep him alive.
"And you, my lady."
Ludville asked it without warning.
"Yes?"
"Does your purification carry no side effects?"
The question went straight to the heart of the matter.
"You wield a power close to a miracle. I am asking whether there is no cost. This world enforces the law of equivalent exchange, whether one notices or not."
"……"
For a moment, silence settled over the sickroom. The tips of Odelli's fingers twitched, but she gathered her skirt as if the motion were only natural. She was quiet a little longer. Then, without so much as a blink, she answered evenly.
"That is why I set the term so long."
"Hm. Purify at intervals, and there is no harm?"
"There will be no problem."
Ludville nodded, untroubled by any particular doubt.
"I see."
Instinct had driven him to a sharp question, yet he did not seem to reach so far as the possibility that she was staking her own life on the purification.
"Some side effect one can bear, then."
"……In a manner of speaking."
It was a natural response. Who would readily imagine that a perfect stranger meant to throw away her life for his sake? Inwardly, Odelli pressed a quiet hand to her chest. She had not been found out. Not yet.
Fortunately, the worsening of her body after she used her purification could be hidden. She had only to climb into the baggage wagon and plead fatigue. No one in the Archducal Castle, then, would know the state she was in.
While she reassured herself, a brief silence passed through the room. Ludville glanced up at her still, composed face.
Every other choice had been closed off, and so he had been placed, in a sense, in an unpleasant position. On any ordinary day he would have told her to get out and leave him to enjoy his new life as a monster, or driven her off with an order not to care whether he lived or died. Strangely enough, the restraint was not so unpleasant as that—even though her manner was calculated, transparent through and through, and something she made no effort to conceal.
Strange.
Because she had stepped forward so eagerly to mend him, he found himself wanting to tell her to go ahead. It was not that some sudden desire to live had been born in him. Only an impulse, strange and utterly unfamiliar, to say that she might do whatever she wished.
Ludville watched her for a long while without speaking, then slowly looked away.
"……It has not yet been half a month. We will speak of the contract then."
A quiet disappointment stirred in Odelli, but she nodded at once and answered calmly.
"I understand."
She could feel, as if by instinct, that he was already half persuaded. What Ludville needed now seemed to be time to think. The decisive move had already been played. All that remained was to wait quietly until he gave her a firm answer—and, in the meantime, to do what she herself was able to do.
"Then I will wait until you send for me."
Without the slightest warning, Ludville left the castle, his aide Edwin fastened to his back like the droppings of a goldfish.
He had neither wanted the company nor permitted it. Edwin had simply come trotting after him as though it were only natural. As he always did.
"Your Grace, I hear you nearly became a monster?"
The instant Ludville saw him, he frowned without disguise. He said nothing, but the look itself was a rebuke: why, exactly, are you following me? The pressure in it was enough to buckle a man's knees and drop him where he stood.
Edwin met it brazenly, with an expression that all but said, Here we go again.
"There is a saying that one must become a monster to hunt monsters. I don't imagine they meant it quite so literally, though……"
"……"
"You shake me off and go wandering, and just look at the state of you. If this is how it's going to be, why did you ever put me in the aide's seat?"
"……"
Edwin poured out his scolding without pause for breath, then narrowed his eyes. Ludville looked as though he were not hearing a single word, not even with the back of his ear.
"You're not speaking because even talking to me is too much trouble. That's it, isn't it."
"……I was retracing why I made you my aide in the first place."
"Don't you remember? You kept me beside you because I was amusing."
"My sense of humor must have been badly defective at the time."
Ludville entertained the thought of sewing Edwin's mouth shut. Unfortunately, his aide was the sort who would go on chattering with his face and his hands if his mouth were stopped, so leaving him be was the wiser course.
"So where are you going?"
"Rosenbach."
"That country village? Why all the way out there……"
Ludville rode on in silence.
From the moment he had felt the true force of Odelli's purification, a certain instinct had taken hold of him. Perhaps she held the heart of the ancient magic. Or perhaps—
Her power itself may be the true substance of House Cardel. Its very essence.
The thought had come to him, and so he resolved to investigate the house in earnest. He would see for himself the domains said to have been purified by House Cardel's ancient magic. What he found turned a vague suspicion, little by little, into certainty.
The same phenomenon repeated in every village. A landscape that looked perfectly sound on the surface. Streets that were too quiet. Villagers wearing smiles. And yet something artificial drifted over each place entire, and the people moved as stiffly as actors upon a stage.
……Illusion magic.