Before Belader Burns
No one dared object. Only silence followed.
Odelli, who had heard every word of the council, quietly drew in a trembling breath.
The plague in Belader.
An acute fever that had begun in the port city. She remembered it with perfect clarity: what the sickness truly was, the roads by which it spread, the symptoms it left behind.
Before the regression, this was something you ended in a single stroke, before it ever had the chance to spread...
Ludville had been the first to uncover the cause, the first to still the panic, the first to secure a cure. He carried the memories of a regression repeated thousands of times over. Perhaps he had put the plague down almost by inertia.
But the man of this life...
Burn it, he said.
His memories were gone, and with them every "right answer," every shortcut. Unlike the past, the Ludville of this life was living with no knowledge of the future at all. In that position, the resolve to sacrifice a single town might, coldly reckoned, be the most realistic and rational judgment available to him. Dawdle, and let the sickness run the length of the empire, and the result would be a hell too dreadful to name.
But if Belader truly burns...
Ludville would no longer be a rational ruler. To the people of his domain, he would become an object of terror. And Belader was a port; visitors from other regions, even from other empires, would be staying there. This would not end as a rumor that circulated only in the north. If things went wrong, the whole of the empire might remember him as evil.
You must not become a man like that.
Cardel was still called the hero of the empire. And yet her one and only savior was about to be branded the empire's villain. The mere imagining of it left her unable to breathe.
If I laid the whole truth of this plague before Ludville, and gave him a certain way to end it...
Odelli wavered for a moment. Then she set the thought aside.
He would not believe her. Suspicion would come before anything else: how did she know?
This is mine to solve.
And for that, she had to leave at once. Only then could she reach Belader in time—barely—before it happened.
Odelli packed without delay, gathering up every last thing she had bought along the way, village after village, since leaving the Cardel lands. When her preparations were finished, she drew a robe over her head and started toward the carriage lane at the rear gate.
A junior supply convoy caught her eye, just done taking on provisions and making ready to depart. Odelli slipped into the space at the back of a wagon. The wheels lurched, and they began to move.
Ludville waited for Odelli in the reception room.
He went on waiting.
Time passed without mercy, and the tea grew cold. He stared at it with an expressionless face, and then—
Bang! His fist slammed down on the table.
A teacup leapt into the air and shattered in a crash of porcelain. Watching it, Edwin foresaw disaster. No. Disaster had already come.
"...She isn't coming."
"Compose yourself, Your Grace."
Cold sweat poured off him as he racked his brain in desperation. He had to calm his lord somehow.
But how?
Edwin had always been a slippery man, too quick with his tongue; however large the trouble, he usually laughed his way past it. This time, though, even he could not see a way to mend what had broken.
She meant to stand the Archduke up! My lady, how much nerve do you have?
Until this very morning, that infamous Iron-Blooded Archduke had been a shade more docile than usual. Now not a trace of that faint warmth remained. In its place, a cold that cut to the bone had seized the reception room.
"Ahem. I'll step out for a moment."
He had just chosen to ease his feet toward the door and flee when Ludville spoke, as if to bar the escape.
"She asked for this meeting herself, and now she's a full four hours late. What kind of conduct is that?"
"S-something urgent might have come up...?"
"Urgent?"
The corner of Ludville's mouth crooked into a sneer one could not quite sort into scorn or self-mockery.
"Thinking of marrying the mad archduke must have made her want to run."
"Oh, come now. If she meant to run, she'd have run ages ago. She weathered Your Grace for a fortnight and stayed in the castle. She would hardly pick today, of all days, to suddenly—"
That was when it happened.
The Guard Captain flung the reception-room door wide and burst in.
"Your Grace! The young lady is nowhere to be found!"
"..."
"..."
Did she actually... run?
Edwin turned his head, slowly, and began to look upon his lord as a powder keg with the fuse already lit.
The Guard Captain did not even pause for breath before he went on.
"I confirmed it with the maid assigned to her. She says the young lady has not been seen since she set out for this room to keep the appointment."
Ludville's eyes changed in an instant. He asked again, his look fit to kill.
"Why am I hearing this only now?"
"The young lady has been staying in the annex on the castle's outskirts, and she dismissed every one of her escorts... No. That is only an excuse. I will accept whatever punishment you see fit."
After a brief silence, Ludville straightened the cuff of his coat. It was a motion he repeated out of habit, and yet today the hand that fastened the button was unusually rough.
"Track her. Now. If she isn't in the castle, then she went outside."
The Guard Captain bowed low and bolted from the room.
How long passed after that? Only a few minutes—though to one of them the interval felt like an eternity—before the Guard Captain opened the door again. Still short of breath, he continued his report.
"This afternoon, at precisely that hour, there is a record of a kitchen supply convoy passing the gates."
Ludville's eyes twisted all at once. A single name flashed through his mind.
He murmured it as if to himself, then rose without a moment's delay. As though even the time it would take to give an order were too precious to spend, he spat only the conclusion.
"Saddle my horse. We leave now."
"Your Grace!"
Edwin, who had been watching the Guard Captain's report in a sweat of anxiety, started in horror and planted himself in the way.
"I'll send troops!"
"No need. I'll go myself."
"We don't even know what sickness is spreading through that city! If you walk in unprepared and catch it—!"
"I'm sturdy. I'll manage."
"What kind of answer is that supposed to be!"
"Didn't you say my recovery was on the level of a monster? Monsterification started in this body and then stopped. It won't affect me much."
He had said that. He had. But he had not said it so His Grace could haul the words out and use them however he pleased!
"It's all speculation!"
Ludville spared him a glance over one shoulder, then walked on without so much as pretending to listen.
The instant it occurred to him that Odelli might be bound for Belader, his body answered before he could fasten any reason to the need to chase her. No one had pushed him. No order had been given. And yet why was he moving with such desperate haste?
Reason offered no answer at all. His heart, though, had been shouting for some time. If he did not go there now, something would happen that could never be undone.
He mounted and rode straight for Belader, never slowing, never once looking back.