It Was Never Ambition
If things went on like this, the one hailed as the savior of House Cardel would be that woman.
No. Centuries of history might not be enough to save the house itself. A single person could bring the whole of it down.
No. Not yet.
However brilliantly she had displayed her purification ability, the talk of it was still confined to the north. Gawin clenched his fist until the veins across the back of his hand stood out, rigid.
"I will finish what I left undone. I will go to the wedding."
The duke stared at him in silence, then sighed.
"Move with Beloa."
Those few words made it plain he no longer trusted Gawin completely.
"Yes."
Gawin ground his teeth. The answer was as meek as if he had flung himself to the floor, but inside he was boiling—vengeance, wounded pride, inferiority, and the seed of a madness fixed on Odelli. All of it tangled and seethed behind his eyes.
"May I go and kill them now?"
Ludville asked it the moment he returned from the meeting. Odelli had just let out a breath of relief at the news that he had come back safely, without causing some enormous incident, and at those words she went perfectly still.
"Your Highness, when I told you to endure, I did not mean you should strike on a delay."
If he had been unable to hold back from the start, that would have been one thing. He had held himself in check, come all the way home, and now meant to turn around and kill them.
"Wasn't it an order to smile like those hypocrites to their faces, and drive a knife into their backs once they turned?"
"Of course not."
Why had he come back so combative? Then again, he had always been a little like that.
For Ludville to bare his feelings this openly.
She had not seen him like this once since the regression.
Then again, if he met Gawin, it was only to be expected.
That man had a particular gift for dragging the violence and loathing out of whoever stood across from him. Sometimes he engineered the situation with meticulous care; at other times he simply seemed born to it.
He needles them until they throw the first punch, then weeps as if he were the victim.
And at the end of it, he forgives them with magnificent generosity and gathers everyone's praise. He was adept at tricks of that sort. He was the one who started the fight in the mud, yet the blame for the filth that splashed always landed on someone else.
For a man like that to raise hell on another person's land, and for Ludville to come back without ever drawing his sword—that really was something.
This was Ludville, already struggling through a stretch in which he could barely govern his own emotions. He must have exercised a tremendous restraint. Odelli had no idea what she was supposed to say to calm him. She cast her eyes about for a moment, then spoke.
"I hear you wrung seven and a half billion out of them. You did very well."
Perhaps praise really was the answer. For a moment he went quiet. Then, a beat late, he asked in a low voice.
"In words alone?"
The feeling in it was unmistakable. Not mockery. Not anger. Not a joke. Expectation.
What on earth is he expecting.
From me.
Odelli blinked, held her silence a moment, and then spoke, slowly.
"Do you want to be praised in some way other than words?"
Ludville looked as if the question had robbed him of speech. With a rare flicker of fluster, he asked back a beat later.
"And if I do?"
"I can't hand you seven and a half billion, but I do have a fair amount set aside on my own."
Ludville was quiet for a moment. Then he answered.
"Forget it. I was a fool to expect anything of the lady."
Was that meant as an insult? In truth, Odelli had a faint idea of what he had been expecting. She was only pretending not to notice, and looking the other way.
He doesn't even remember me. Since when has he been nursing a fondness like this?
Since the epidemic? Or over those few days he spent nursing her? Or had the signs already been there in that forest, where he had come so near to monsterification? His memories were gone, and still his instinct seemed to be chasing her without end. Odelli swallowed the sigh that rose of its own accord and drew a long breath, so her heart would not soften again.
"As you've likely already guessed, House Cardel has used purification ability users as consumables for a very long time. The history runs deep. It seems to have gone on, generation after generation."
She returned to the point. Her tone was even, and her eyes were as cold and empty of feeling as ever.
"It went on?"
Ludville asked it with his arms folded, leaning against the wall. His face had gone grave.
"You mean that in every generation there was someone with the purification ability? That you weren't the first?"
"Yes. Ancient magic never existed in the first place. All of it was the purification ability."
He had expected as much. He had been certain of it. Even so, hearing the truth from Odelli's own mouth, he thought he finally understood what it felt like for one's blood to surge backward.
So that was it. The reason the lady of Cardel had vanished for the past three months was neither a runaway whim nor a kidnapping. It had been flight. To live, somehow—to get free of that house—she had fled with her life in her hands. The desperate offer of a contract marriage had been the same. Not some green girl's ambition, not a caprice, but a bid to cast off the name of Cardel, because she had nowhere left to retreat. She must have heard of the archduke obsessed with the Blue-Eyed Woman and decided that marrying him was her only chance.
And he, never knowing she had already been driven to the edge of a cliff, had only pushed her harder toward it.
"Why didn't you tell me sooner?"
In the end he ground his teeth and raised his voice.
"Why didn't you say from the beginning that House Cardel had persecuted you, that you had fled from them? Why spout that nonsense about ambition, about a contract—"
He could not finish. Even if she had said it, would he have believed her? No. Never. He knew that better than anyone. Had she laid her circumstances out honestly, he would have mocked her and cut her down all the same. He would have sneered and told her to come back with a more original story.
Ludville let out a sigh steeped in despair and dragged a palm down his face. At that reaction, Odelli was rather thrown.
He seems to be misunderstanding something.
It was true she had suffered Cardel's persecution. She had not fled because she feared them. It was closer to stepping around shit.