A Sleep Without Nightmares
The room was silent.
Ludville's breath came ragged, as if he had been running without rest, and cold sweat had soaked him through.
He lay on the bed and groped at the space beside him. There was nothing there. Of course there wasn't. He had lived alone his whole life, fallen asleep alone, and never once let anyone sleep at his side—so why was he doing this? He could not understand it himself. Then again, when had he ever understood?
He got out of bed. His mind still seemed to drift along the border between dream and waking, hazy and unmoored, but his body moved without the slightest trouble. He walked with unfocused eyes. His consciousness had no idea where it was bound, and yet his feet moved with unmistakable purpose, fixed upon a single destination.
The moment he left his room, he turned down the corridor and came to a stop before Odelli's door.
Ludville reached out and opened it. On soundless feet, like a night wind, he slipped inside, and looked down at Odelli where she slept at the center of the wide canopy bed, her hands neatly folded.
She still sleeps like a corpse.
The thought came to him unbidden. Whether she lay in a coffin or alone in a bed, she rested so meekly, so prettily still. There had been times he seized her and shook her, trying to wake the woman lying in that coffin, and times he watched her sleeping in a bed and wept as if the world itself were ending.
Without even knowing what he was thinking, Ludville quietly lay down beside her. Then, of his own accord, he drew her into his arms and held her tight.
"Mm…"
She fussed in her sleep as if she could not breathe, pushing weakly at him, and he patted her back with a familiar hand.
"It's all right. It's me. Your Lu. Your knight. Your slave…"
He did not even know what he was whispering.
Ludville closed his eyes. The moment that peculiar warmth seeped deep into his lungs, he could breathe at last. He sank into a deep sleep—for the first time in months. No dreams, no nightmares, and for quite a long while.
The next morning.
Ludville slowly opened his eyes. The cry of some nameless bird, announcing the early hour, rang at his ear.
Morning?
He had woken in the morning, and not in the dead of night? Unlike usual, his head was clear and his mind sharp—that particular freshness one feels upon waking from a truly deep sleep. It was a sensation he had not known in a very long time.
And then, almost at once, the wrongness of it. This was not his bedroom. The feel of the sheets beneath the covers, the faint herbal scent worked into the air, even the pleasantly warm temperature of the room—everything was entirely unlike his own chamber.
…What is this?
More than anything, he could feel someone's small, warm body heat gathered in his arms. Waking in an unfamiliar bedroom while holding an unfamiliar person was, even for him, a first. Ludville had no choice but to lose every scrap of his usual composure.
He slowly lowered his gaze—and met the eyes of Odelli, bright and wide open against his chest.
"…!"
He thought his heart had dropped clean out of him.
"…You were awake?"
"Yes."
"Why didn't you wake me…"
"I tried about twenty times, and then I gave up."
It seemed that because he had been holding her so tightly, she had not even been able to work her way free of his arms.
"How in the world did I end up here…"
For an instant his mind went white as blank paper. Had he come looking for her without knowing it? Had he?
His heart was hammering wildly, so he hurriedly set Odelli apart from his embrace.
"I must have… been out of my mind."
"It's all right."
"It's all right?"
Why was it all right? Rather than accept it, he threw the question back at her utterly unruffled answer.
"What, exactly, is all right about this?"
"People lose their minds when they can't sleep. Your Highness was already a little mad to begin with, so you've simply gone twice as mad."
"…"
"I understand."
"Well. What a deep well of understanding you have."
He answered with a sardonic edge and pushed himself upright, his posture stiff. But for all that he spoke as if nothing were amiss, he could not seem to rest his gaze anywhere.
Silence. Neither of them said a word.
Ludville tugged at his collar for no reason at all, as if his chest were still warm from her body heat. The man who was always proud, always cold, never once swayed by any feeling, was nowhere to be found. He sat a step back, as if he were fleeing from her.
"…I don't remember."
That was the truth. More precisely, he remembered the nightmare, and he remembered rising from it. After that, nothing. The rest was a blackout. Only a faint sensation remained, of walking as if drawn along by something, the way instinct draws a body forward.
It was probably because the tribute maiden possessed a purification ability. His survival instinct had, without his knowing, gone looking for the one person who could take his pain away. But there was no chance an excuse like that would hold.
He was turning over how on earth he might recover from this disaster, and how he ought to apologize, when she spoke.
"It looks that way."
Odelli answered quietly. She asked nothing, and she did not press him, as if she held no feeling at all about what had happened. Or perhaps her eyes said that she understood. That was stranger still.
And it made him angry.
Ludville, who had been flustered in a way that did not suit him in the least, suddenly hardened his face to ice and, out of nowhere, drove her into a corner.
"If some other man crawled into your bed in the middle of the night and fell asleep there, would you react like this?"
Odelli blinked. His voice was low, and keenly edged, and inside it clung the messy shards of an emotion he could not even explain to himself.
She was silent for a while. Then she tilted her head, just slightly, and spoke with perfect calm.
"Of course not."
For a moment he did not understand what she meant. He felt his anger slowly settling beneath that neat, quiet voice. Ludville looked at her without a word. She still met his gaze head-on, but she showed no emotion at all. Yet beyond that composed face, he found a faint tremor in her eyes.
He had flustered her.
"…I'm sorry."
In the end, it was Ludville who spoke first. It was an apology no one would have expected.
"No."
Odelli rose first. Smoothing her dress with composure, she offered him a light greeting, as she might on any other morning.
"Then I'll go on ahead."
With those words she walked toward the door, and just before she opened it, she added one short line.
"…If it hadn't been Ludville, I would have kicked him in the groin."
"…"
"But you were sleeping so prettily, I couldn't help it…"
Prettily. Was a word like pretty even fit to be used on him? But before he could so much as register how absurd it was, Odelli left the room without looking back.
Ludville watched her retreating figure in silence. The door closed, and the room grew quiet again.
He dropped onto the bed. His heart was still racing wildly, all on its own. He slowly uncurled his fingers. It seemed as if her warmth still lingered there.
…This is going to become an addiction.