The Ring He Does Not Remember
Well. And what exactly am I meant to say to that.
Slowly, she lifted her head and looked at Ludville.
"...This is a poison-pill clause, isn't it?"
At that, he raised one brow by the slightest degree and returned the question without expression.
"Do you object?"
His tone was calm, and nothing of what he felt could be read in it, yet she could not shake the impression of something dogged underneath.
Odelli considered for a moment, then shook her head.
"No. I don't."
The clause did not disadvantage her alone. Ludville, too, had a habit of vanishing without a word whenever it suited him. If she thought of it as a provision she might use to keep watch on him, it was not a bad bargain.
At the very least, it ought to stop him from bolting off alone into the forest of monsters.
In silence, Odelli took up the contract.
"I'd like to add a clause of my own. Would you lend me the pen?"
And she, too, wrote a new article on the spot.
Article 9. All private feeling shall be wholly excluded, and the parties shall conduct themselves toward one another on that basis.
Before the ink had dried, Odelli pushed the contract back toward Ludville.
"This is a political marriage. There will be no emotional involvement."
"......"
"To put it bluntly, I mean that there is no chance I will ever come to love Your Grace."
"No chance you will come to love me?"
"Even the small things, I thought, ought to be written down exactly."
The small things.
Ludville gave no answer. His eyes remained on the contract, but his thoughts had already slipped past the sentence itself. Only after a long while did he reply, in a voice unusually low and dry.
"...Is that so."
"I trust Your Grace will agree with me on that point. Once feeling is mixed into it, a contract is all too apt to come to nothing."
Feeling could never truly be governed by a contract in the first place. Even so, Odelli had to draw the line, if only in this way—the smallest safeguard, to keep Ludville from coming to feel more for her than was necessary.
No. Even if he did come to feel something... only enough that he would grieve my death for a while, and someday shake it off and go on living.
That much would be all right. Everyone lived that way. Even when a person lost the one they loved, time kept moving, and in the end each of them lived out a life of their own. She wanted him to do the same—plainly, as other people did. Only then could she leave with any peace.
Ludville looked down at the contract in silence, then slowly raised his gaze.
"You must possess some talent for governing your feelings, my lady, if you can settle even that in advance."
He spoke in a flat voice, without rise or fall. And yet, somehow, it sounded faintly like mockery.
"Of course I can't command my feelings as I please. But I can hide them so that not a trace ever shows. This is that sort of contract."
Hide them so that not a trace shows? This sort of contract? Did that mean she had once hidden a love with desperate care, because of a contract?
A fierce feeling gathered, little by little, in Ludville's violet eyes, and they began to burn with a low, quiet flame.
"...You know rather more of this than I expected."
The manner was courteous. Beneath it, a cold scorn had pooled.
"Have you entered into a similar contract before?"
The keenness of the question made Odelli flinch inwardly.
...Did I sound too much like a woman who has already lived through a contract marriage?
Perhaps he took her brief hesitation, and the silence that followed it, for assent. Whatever the cause, the force of him turned visibly savage.
"...!"
Without warning, he reached out. His fingers caught the chain at her throat and drew it taut in one sharp pull, and the old ring threaded on it swung up into view, dangling between them—a contact bold enough to be called insolent.
While Odelli caught a startled breath, Ludville was already looking into the ring. It was nicked and worn, as if someone had lived with it on his hand for a very long time.
"A grown man's. And of a size that would fit only a large man, or a finger long accustomed to a sword..."
An indifferent glance skimmed the inner band.
The hand closed around the ring tightened.
"Does this have something to do with the ring's owner?"
His voice had an edge. He might have been a husband who had just found his wife wearing, at her throat, a lover's token exchanged with another man—as if to ask how she could carry a thing like this so carefully against her heart and still come proposing a contract marriage.
"I am asking whether you added that clause, the one excluding private feeling, because of this."
"......"
"The man who is said to resemble me. Is this his ring?"
"......"
"So I was right."
No. It's simply yours...
Once, the Jewel of Regression had been set in that ring. The third regression: the ring he had bought by turning out every last coin of the fortune he had scraped together, back when Ludville was a knight of House Cardel. The token by which Odelli and Ludville had first confirmed what they felt for each other. He had worn it all his life, fused with the Jewel of Regression, and now it existed nowhere in his memory.
So... he thinks I have a lover of my own?
From where Ludville stood, she must have looked like a woman who had come to propose a contract marriage while already keeping someone else.
True enough. In my last life, looking at Ludville's ring, I made the very same mistake.
The same ring, drawing the same misapprehension from both of them...
What am I supposed to say?
For the moment, she offered the briefest explanation she could.
"He isn't my lover."
"I did not ask whether he was your lover."
"......"
"If he is not your lover now, then he was, once. You still have not forgotten him?"
No. That isn't it.
Odelli had no idea how to undo the misunderstanding. The name engraved inside the band—her own—seemed to have settled the matter for him beyond all argument.
No matter how many times I say he wasn't my lover, he isn't going to believe me.
Then there was only one way.
"That person... is gone."
"......"
She had no choice. She made a dead man of Ludville. It was not even a lie. The ring truly was his keepsake—what he had left behind.
"Even in a contract marriage, I imagine it would displease you if I were seeing someone else. But he is already dead, and the funeral has been held... so there is nothing for you to fear."
A perfectly composed explanation. Odelli delivered it with perfect calm, as if to prove she would give no one cause for gossip. And yet, strangely, Ludville said nothing.
"......"
His face was as expressionless as ever, but the muscle of his jaw had set hard.
Telling him the man was dead only seems to have scraped him rawer...
Still, she could think of no excuse more convincing than that, and so she held her silence.
He was quiet for a long while. Then, slowly, he took up the pen and added a line beneath the contract.
Article 10. For the duration of the contract, emotional or physical intimacy with any other person is forbidden.
"...?"
"Sign."
Odelli looked down at the line that had been added to the contract.
"Isn't that only natural?"
Was it not simple courtesy toward the other party? And it would hardly do for rumor to spread that the archduchess had strayed, or for scandal to close in around her.
"Even the small things, I thought, ought to be written down exactly."
"......"
He was looking at her as if he meant to allow not a hair's breadth of room.
Odelli said nothing more. She lifted the pen toward the line where her name would go.