The One Who Must Be Protected
Someone who must be protected.
So it begins.
He put on a show of worry, and all the while he was cutting Odelli down into a child who could do nothing on her own.
"House Cardel has always watched over you. You grew up cherished in that warm embrace. But this is the North—cold, rough, and frightening. I worry, deep down, that this barren land will drive you past all reason. That you might collapse in a faint here, the way you used to at home."
On the surface, he was the blood kin who loved her and fretted over her more than anyone. In truth, he was planting a doubt in everyone present: did she even deserve to be archduchess?
Gawin smiled as if it were nothing, the very picture of a tender older brother concerned only for his one and only little sister.
"Still, if this is the life you want…… Odelli. Living as an archduchess will not be easy, but if you ever need help, you have only to say so. Your brother will be at your side. We are……"
He let a beat pass, and set a warm gaze upon her.
"……family, after all."
Family.
I never even knew whether Gawin knew my name.
She had been called nothing but Purifier for so long. To him, Odelli was a consumable: squeeze her, and she spat out that mysterious power called purification. Her life was nearly spent, and now she threatened the safety of the house itself, so the only question left was whether to throw her away, or—since a little still seemed to remain—wring her once more and see if she could still be used. He was prodding at her with no thought deeper than that.
And yet he said family.
It was so absurd that anger would not even rise.
Expose them here, and I lose.
Gawin's words rang like an attack, but they wore, to the last, the shape of concern. Push back, and Odelli would be the one who looked strange. The moment she spoke of abuse or exploitation, the whispers would start.
House Cardel?
The woman who ran away for love, suddenly condemning her own house?
And besides—
No one knows better than Gawin what happens when I use my purification.
That power gnawed through a life. The greater the gift, the more fatal the price. Even if she drew her purification forth and proved that this was the very ancient magic they all claimed to know, what then, if in the next breath she coughed blood and collapsed? She would look unstable beyond all saving.
Set against the ancient magic of Cardel, which for hundreds of years had stood as the symbol of stability and peace, Odelli's new power was to these people nothing but an aberrant variable. Show them the truth as plainly as she might; a public that believed only what it wished to believe would side, in the end, with familiar authority.
And from the first, every use of the power shaved her life shorter. That was precisely the picture Cardel wanted. Why should she be the one to hasten the day of her own death?
So Odelli set her glass down in silence. She gave Gawin's words no answer born of feeling.
"……Thank you."
A short reply, and nothing more. But that was not the end of it.
"So the house was protecting me."
Odelli went on, calm, as if she were tracing a memory from very far away.
"Kept indoors at all times, forbidden even to leave a room that scarcely let in the outside air—and that, too, was because they cherished me. I understand at last."
She turned her gaze out over the banquet hall.
"Cold, and rough, and frightening…… I wonder. It must be a matter of perspective. Only after I came to the North did I learn it for the first time. That the world outside was far warmer than I had ever imagined."
A stir moved through those gathered in the hall. Anyone listening could tell that Odelli's words were anything but ordinary.
"Of course I will receive my brother's concern with gratitude. But from now on, rather than remain someone who must be protected, I would rather be the one who stands guard at another's side."
Odelli paused. Then she went on, her voice low and clear.
The implication that she had been imprisoned under the name of protection, joined to the rumor that House Cardel's third daughter had never once set foot beyond the house, landed with considerable force. Eyes began to turn on Gawin, and to change. However one dressed it up as protection, refusing to let a person leave her room was something common sense could not accept.
Gawin's lips parted, but nothing came. Caught by Odelli's unexpected counter, he could not even think to take up the act again.
A heavy silence had only just settled when the sharp click of heels broke it.
"Brother. So this is where you were."
A quiet voice slipped into the gap. A woman with her silver hair pinned neatly up parted the crowd and appeared—hair as white as snow, the same as Gawin's and Odelli's. The classic mark of Cardel.
The moment Gawin saw her, he smiled brightly.
"Beloa."
The tension left his shoulders, and he swelled with triumph, as if he had just gained an army of thousands. To anyone watching, he might have seemed nothing more than a brother glad to see his sister. Odelli saw otherwise. She saw how pathetically he leaned on his second sister.
"But, Brother, talk like that may invite a needless misunderstanding."
She came slowly in between them as she spoke.
"It could sound as though we had locked our youngest away somewhere."
What Odelli had turned aside in metaphor, Beloa struck head-on, as if it were nothing. The remark was a precise move, one that handed Gawin a chance to explain himself.
"Ah. Dear me."
Gawin did not let the chance slip.
"Locked away? That was never the intent."
Feigning fluster, he worked a serpent's tongue.
"We only wanted to keep danger from you, as far as we could. And yet to hear you suffered so…… it pains me."
He laid a hand over his chest and sighed.
"Odelli, you know it too, don't you? How often you were ill. Watching you like that, our hearts were truly fit to tear."
At his side, Beloa kept her eyes fixed on Odelli. Then her expression turned strange. She had seen, beyond any doubt, that Odelli had changed. She had guessed as much from the circumstances, but she had not expected it to be to this degree. Even so, Beloa recovered her composure at once.
"So we wounded our youngest without meaning to. Had we only been wiser, it might have been better. Then we would never have earned such a misunderstanding from you."
It was not the exaggerated performance Gawin put on, and precisely because it was not, it felt as though she cherished Odelli in earnest. She had always been that way. Even while she arranged the board herself, she stood one step behind it, and even while she handed down decisions crueler than anyone's, she never once soiled her own hands.
Across thousands of regressions, there were turns Odelli could not forget.
The turn they branded her insane for refusing to purify, and shut her away beneath the temple.
The turn they bound her to a magic circle that wrung her purification out by force, the better to exploit it, and made her vomit blood several times a day.
The turn they slandered Ludville as a devil-worshiper and delivered him to the temple's inquisitors to be tortured.
And the turn they decided they no longer needed Odelli, branded her a witch, and sent her to the stake……
Beloa stood behind every one of them. All of it had been a board of her making.
"I don't mind if you hate me. I only hope this marriage has made you happy. To think they took you in, after you went so far as to run away……"
Beloa let the end of the sentence trail off, quietly.
"How grateful a thing that is."
Grateful. As if she were thanking someone for hauling away trash she had thrown out—was that not the voice of a benefactor, bestowing a favor?
It was then. A heavy voice came down and condemned Beloa to her face.
The previous Archduke of Exepsion—Castia.