You Will Be the Blue-Eyed Woman
At Ludville's words, Odelli smoothed the bitterness from her face as best she could and answered.
"I suppose the effect, at least, would be certain."
No one would dare so much as think of laying a hand on her.
"But will you be all right?"
"With what?"
"Even if I become known as the Blue-Eyed Woman."
Odelli asked it as if the matter were nothing, all the while studying his face.
"Do you mean you no longer intend to look for her?"
"Ah."
Ludville answered, indifferent. For the briefest instant, exhaustion flickered across his face.
"How should I put it."
He rubbed his jaw, lost in thought for a moment, then returned to a blank expression and went on.
"From the start—in time, and in space—a woman like that could not have existed in this world."
Odelli said nothing.
"My vassals were always diligent about reminding me of the fact. That she was a woman who could not possibly be real."
"Well. Every time I heard it, I seem to have drawn my sword and gone completely mad."
He added the words as if groping after a faint memory, though it could only have been a short while ago.
"Perhaps I truly had lost my mind and was seeing hallucinations. I was wholly addicted to the drugs, and I had been driven to the very brink of monsterification."
So that is the conclusion he has reached.
"It was only that I wanted to fill something empty inside me. It might have been a person. It might have been nothing but a delusion."
Odelli, who knew the whole truth, had no idea how she was meant to respond. She had already judged that leaving his misconception uncorrected would be kinder to his mind, and so she held her silence.
"That emptiness is a little less now. I think I may be all right."
"……Less?"
"Enough that I can go on living."
He said it flatly. Then he hesitated, as if he had been needlessly honest, and turned the conversation with an awkward air.
"Who would believe it if the archduke who had been searching high and low for one woman suddenly fell for another and married her?"
He drove the point home once more, as though there had never been a choice to begin with.
"You will simply have to become that Blue-Eyed Woman."
Couldn't we simply not put on some performance about being madly, hopelessly in love?
Odelli thought so, but Ludville gave her no opening to object.
"As for your disappearance, we will say you ran away because your house opposed your meeting me."
"Then why did Your Highness go to such lengths to search for the lady of Cardel?"
"Because the lady met me while concealing who she was."
"This isn't a fairy tale……"
"Not bad."
And just which part of it, exactly, was not bad?
Ludville, however, looked rather taken with this romance, childish beyond all belief. A mischievous look crossed his face as he lifted one corner of his mouth.
"There was a masquerade at the Imperial Palace four months ago. That night the lady slipped out of her house and attended in secret. She happened to meet me, and we knew each other at a glance……"
The longer she listened, the more her head swam. Not a single word of it held together. A mysterious woman who had driven the iron-blooded archduke mad? Was that not the sort of tale that required a goddess of love descended from the heavens, or else some forbidden drug?
And yet, before she knew it, Odelli was absorbed in the third-rate romance.
"It isn't convincing in the least. It has to be at least somewhat plausible if anyone is going to be taken in. People aren't fools……"
"It isn't…… that implausible."
"What?"
Before she could ask again, her face full of doubt, Ludville pressed on.
"When the clock tower's bells rang, you left for fear your identity would be exposed, and I could not hold you when I had not even learned your name. Only those blue eyes remained in my memory……"
"I have heard this story somewhere before."
"Stop picking it apart. The public loses its mind over exactly this sort of obvious tale."
It would be memorable, she had to admit. Once the story spread, it would brand itself into every mind. Ludville had already drawn enormous attention by summoning blue-eyed women to the castle, and everyone would be waiting for what came next. Who would ever have guessed that the woman in question was the frail young lady of House Cardel, her identity hidden all the while? People would talk of the two of them for days on end.
"Your Highness, even so, this is a little……"
"And stop calling me Your Highness."
She fell silent.
"Something more intimate than a name would be better, so calling me Lu would also……"
"……I can't do that."
There was a brief, pointless scuffle over the finer points, but in any case their love story seemed to be concluding along those lines. Worn thoroughly out in that short span, Odelli asked him with care.
"You haven't forgotten the clause about setting personal feelings aside, have you?"
A snort was her answer.
"When did we ever agree to that? We are only putting on an act for House Cardel to see. That this is a contractual relationship changes nothing."
Odelli held her tongue.
But aren't you talking rather a great deal? Today of all days, you seem to have about five times as much to say as usual……
She narrowed her eyes and studied him.
"You know as well as I do that this is the best course, the most efficient, and even the most effective. Don't you?"
He turned the question back on her, and because the words were, unfortunately, true, she had no answer to give.
"No…… I ought to call you Odelli as well. Or is there some other name you would prefer?"
"Odelli is enough."
Only afterward did she realize she had been swept along, and by then it was already too late. Not long after, the rumor spread like wildfire.
After receiving Odelli's purification, the nightmares that visited Ludville grew markedly fewer. The dream that had repeated every night—no, the hell that had invaded even his days—now came only two or three times a week. He could sleep something that resembled real sleep. The hour or so he had once managed to snatch in a day stretched, at times, to three.
Not every day, of course. Nights when sleep still would not come found him at regular intervals, and he still endured the dawn like an addict, drawing hard on cigarette after cigarette. Even so, he was steadily smoking less. The change was plain. Instead of being crushed every day beneath dreams in which he came apart, he had begun, little by little, to feel as though he were alive.
That did not mean the nightmares had vanished.
……Again.
When, after so long, he was shut completely inside that nightmare, the one that repeated without end; when no amount of struggling showed the slightest sign that he would wake; when it seemed he would spend infinite time in a darkness where he could not see an inch ahead—he could no longer take it as he once had, as something familiar, something he was merely sick of. For the first time in a long while, he felt true despair.
He dragged in breath as if he were suffocating. Pain that had dulled while he endured it every day came back all the sharper precisely because it had grown a little less frequent. Had he been given room to breathe only so the suffering could be made greater? The thought went that far. In the very moment he felt he had crawled onto land and could finally draw air, he was dragged back into the depths with no warning at all—into a darkness that was deep, and airless, and without end.
Ludville had returned to the abyss.
This had to be a punishment laid upon him for some great sin in a previous life. There was no other explanation.
Why else watch someone die? Why else rot? Why else dream, without end and without end again, of a fall that never stopped?
How long?
Would it go on until he died?
But even death had not been permitted him. Someone had kept him from dying—following after him to an irritating degree, prying into everything, interfering at every turn. She had taken the man who had death before his eyes, the man who had been a breath away from hell, and dragged him back into the world of the living.
No. I never needed someone like you.
And yet you made me need you. You seized by the collar a man sunk in that pit, waiting only for the gates of hell to open, hauled him up, and forced him to live. You gave meaning to a life that had none. Then you have to take responsibility, don't you.
Yes. All of it is your fault.