We'll Call It a Lovers' Flight
Had Odelli never lived through regression, the thought of facing them at the wedding might have left her a little cowed. But now, not in the least.
"Your Highness, they stir nothing in me."
"If the miracle of ancient magic that Cardel wrought came entirely from your power, then what they did was horrific abuse. Exploitation."
Raw, untempered anger rode in Ludville's voice.
"There is a limit to pretending one is fine. How can you speak of it as if it were nothing……"
Odelli gave up on explaining. The more she insisted she was all right, the deeper the misunderstanding would almost certainly grow. So instead she turned the subject, perfectly calm.
"In any case, those born with the purification ability appear in House Cardel only once in a generation."
"……So in this generation, there is only you."
Ludville watched her abrupt change of subject with a complicated look, and then his face set, grave.
"You mean the next purification ability user cannot be born until you die?"
"That's right. You catch on quickly."
"So that is why they were searching so desperately……"
But House Cardel would soon conclude that winning Odelli over was no longer possible. And if that were so—
She nodded.
"They will try to kill me. I am certain of it."
She did not bother to add that she was already living on borrowed time. Everything else that mattered, she had given him, so that he might prepare for however Cardel chose to move.
And yet Ludville, who had seemed sunk in some deep calculation—
"……We'll call it a lovers' flight."
He arrived, without warning, at an outrageous conclusion.
"Pardon?"
Odelli asked it back with a blank, foolish face.
"I mean that, before other people, we should look like lovers who cannot live without each other."
"I beg your pardon?"
What in the world was he saying? She doubted her own ears and turned the words over and over. But Ludville was entirely serious.
What is he talking about?
While she floundered, he uncrossed his arms and took one slow step toward her.
"Cardel will be the greatest threat. But once the purification ability is known to the world in any measure, others will come for you without end."
Odelli blinked slowly, then sank into thought.
Now that he mentions it……
Across the thousands of brutal lives Ludville had ground through, there had been more than a few in which he revealed her ability to the world. And every time, malicious factions had fastened onto her, along with those whose minds were not entirely sound. Cardel went without saying.
I never paid it much mind, thinking I only had to endure five years.
Hearing him now, a chill settled over her. She might meet some absurd, violent end before her allotted life was even spent. Even so—
"Of course I never meant to tell the world that this is a contract marriage. If we simply say we are marrying properly, isn't that enough?"
"A pretext of that degree cannot protect you."
"……"
"A marriage can be a political transaction. And a marriage of convenience is a bond either side may break the moment the terms suit them. That is how the world sees it."
He was an archduke, and Odelli a lady of a ducal house; of course people would take them for a political match. Among nobles, that was simply the assumption.
"You could become the spark of a war. Because you are a purification ability user, the imperial house will covet you, and the nobility, and every other power besides. You could be traded, seized, torn apart."
It was a merciless reality. He looked straight at her and went on.
"But love is different. Love is a private feeling, and wholly subjective."
"So it cannot be made into a means of trade."
"And it is difficult for outsiders to interfere, or to intervene politically."
That much was true. Was this not the very method Ludville had used so often in the past, in those lives when he repeated his regressions without end? No matter what anyone said of her, no matter how reasonable and just the objection they raised—
"Are you saying you have some complaint against my wife?"
With a single sentence, he shut their mouths. No one had ever dared to ask again. If anyone laid a hand on her, he cast aside political face and simply tore into them like a mad dog.
That was how it had been then. Not because he had calculated, as he was doing now, that such behavior would be politically useful, but because he had truly, fiercely loved Odelli.
And watching him propose to perform that same conduct as an act left her feeling strangely unsettled.
"All the better."
Ludville continued, unruffled.
"Rather than being treated, as before, as the Iron-Blooded Archduke—a man without blood or tears—doesn't it suit me far better to be called a madman?"
"……What is it that suits you?"
"Playing the devoted lover."
"……"
He went on in the same even tone.
"I will announce that you are the blue-eyed woman I have searched for so long."
At those words, Odelli's eyes trembled, ever so slightly. For an instant her heart dropped with a heavy thud.
Surely he had not recognized her long ago and been testing her all this time? Had his memories returned? Or had he simply felt it, by instinct?
In that brief moment, dozens of thoughts drifted through her mind.
"Is there a problem?"
But the instant she looked into his eyes, every possibility collapsed.
Ah. He is saying this without knowing anything at all.
Without knowing that the very person he had just named was standing before him.
She did not need him to explain why he had said it. It was not a whim, nor some sudden surge of feeling, but a finely calculated judgment.
All this while, the story that Ludville was searching the whole of the empire for the blue-eyed woman had spread. He had not spread it on purpose. He himself had only searched with a desperation close to losing his mind. Still, that was the result. Before anyone noticed, the rumor had become the tragic tale of an archduke driven mad by a single woman.
And now he meant to give that mad narrative to Odelli—not merely the story that he had married her because he loved her, but a love so unhinged that the archduke had lost his mind because of her.
And the irony is that it is the truth, and that I really am his blue-eyed lover.
In any case, the moment that story attached itself to her, Odelli would become someone no one could touch. Not Cardel. Not even the emperor. No one would dare lay a careless hand on her.
Part of that was the immense power and military force Ludville held. But more than that—
Who would touch the favorite bone of a mad dog that bites even its own master when crossed?
People simply kept clear of the mad. That was the ordinary thing to do. No one knew which way they might lash out, and they had no limits.