Who Taught You to Dance
"Then let us begin the performance in earnest. As a man hopelessly in love."
No sooner had he spoken than Ludville, with perfect ease, drew the fingers he already held and pressed his lips to the back of Odelli's hand. The gesture was courteous and elegant. His eyes, however, were grave enough that the play might have been taken for the truth.
"……Your Grace."
Odelli's eyes flew wide, caught off guard. She snatched her hand back and, without meaning to, retreated half a step. Ludville only closed the distance, his arm winding more tightly about her waist.
"If we are acting, we ought to act in earnest. House Cardel is watching."
"And if they decide we are nothing but a contract, and move to kill you—what then?"
He was smiling. The tone was teasing, the manner light, and yet his eyes had darkened like deep water, holding something far heavier than the words.
"……I never asked you to go this far."
"People are watching, Odelli."
Ludville caught her hand and held it fast. Shut in his arms, her fingers tangled with his, she could not move at all—a butterfly snared in a web. Through the thin silk of her dress, the heat of his body reached her.
It is only a contract. Only a contract.
She repeated it, but her senses were not so easily fooled. Her heart kept answering of its own accord.
"If you cannot endure even this much……"
He bent his head and murmured at her ear.
"what do you intend to do about our wedding night?"
"The wed—"
"Surely you were not thinking of separate rooms?"
Ah. That was right. She had been so occupied with House Cardel that she had forgotten to settle the matter of separate chambers at all. But a couple who had fallen in love at first sight and rushed from meeting to marriage in a flash of lightning, only to sleep apart from the very first night—would that not look far too suspicious? Anyone with eyes would take it for a political match dressed up as love.
Ah.
Surviving the ceremony would not be enough. There was no slipping free of it now. Before House Cardel, and before Castia as well, the two of them would have to seem as though they could not live without each other.
This is no longer a matter of things merely becoming difficult if we fail to play at being in love……
What had come upon her was a situation that would tear apart every plan she had made for the five years she had left.
She turned a resentful glare on Ludville, the man who had proposed the scheme in the first place.
"……Why are you looking at me like that?"
She had no answer for him. They had gone so far as to write a clause shutting private feeling out entirely, and yet—call it acting if he liked—for Odelli it could not possibly be acting.
No. Pull yourself together.
Ludville remembered nothing. So long as she alone held fast to her wits, nothing would come of this. She gathered in the heart that kept stirring of its own will.
"Those are not the eyes of a woman in love."
Looking down at her flustered face, he crooked the corner of his mouth and, as if to remind her that her gaze must play its part as well, drew his fingers softly along the edge of her eye. The rough tip of his finger met her skin, and her lashes trembled.
Ludville forgot the teasing remark he had been about to add. For a moment he simply went still.
A curve as fine as if it had been woven of silver thread. Shadow settling over skin that shone white. A frail flutter, like the wingbeat of a snow-white butterfly. That single tremor stirred the fog that had only ever pooled, dull and gray, inside his mind.
All at once the clamor of the banquet hall seemed to fall away, far beyond the reach of his notice. Her gaze, a single breath, seized every sense he possessed. Everything moved slowly, as though time itself were flowing around her.
His eyes dropped, briefly, to the scar set along Odelli's collarbone—the scar she had fabricated in order to enter the Archducal Castle, pretending to be the Blue-Eyed Woman.
Why does it feel so much like mine? As if it had always been mine?
An unaccountable sensation took hold of him. The thought that only he ought to be permitted to look upon this being, that he must protect her, that he must possess her—it would not stop.
His gaze fixed on her eyes, he spoke as if to himself.
"……The role suits you better than I expected."
What does he mean?
Odelli was still blinking, the sense of it lost on her, when the music broke off and an elegant waltz spilled through the hall. She glanced toward the musicians. They must have seen the archducal couple standing pressed so close and decided, of their own accord, to shift the mood.
No one asked them to.
She clicked her tongue inwardly, and Ludville let out a soft laugh.
"It seems our acting is landing better than I thought."
"Shall we go, then, and show everyone how fond we are of each other?"
He led her toward the center of the hall as if it were the most natural thing in the world. For the couple whose wedding was nearly upon them, the crowd parted of its own accord and left the floor clear. Before she quite knew how, Odelli was waltzing before them all.
The first steps were cautious. Then their breathing found each other, quickly, and their bodies moved as though they had matched this rhythm for a very long time—as though they had danced it hundreds of times, thousands, and only ever with the person now before them.
Come to think of it, the only person Odelli had ever danced with was Ludville. Across thousands of regressions, he had never once permitted her to dance with another man. Nor had he himself ever danced with another woman. Not once. Truly, not a single time.
Odelli bit down on her lip, then murmured. The words had slipped out before she could stop them.
"……Your last dance, at least, you may give to some other woman."
"Are you joking?"
Ludville stopped dead in the middle of the step, his face gone suddenly hard.
"You seem to have forgotten Article Ten. For the duration of the contract, emotional or physical intimacy with any other person is forbidden."
"And where have you ever seen a husband dance with another woman the night before his wedding?"
"No—not right now……"
Flustered, Odelli hurried to add the rest.
"Someday, I mean. It is a five-year contract."
At that he narrowed his eyes and looked at her as though she had said something strange—a gaze that seemed to be reaching for whatever lay beneath the words. Then, a faint crease between his brows, he said:
"……You dance more skillfully than I expected."
"I cannot imagine House Cardel ever taught you."
Of course they had not. A house that would not even let her step beyond its walls was hardly going to indulge the eccentricity of teaching her to dance and nothing else. Ludville seemed to realize as much. All at once a different current moved through his eyes—thick, and steeped in obsession.
"Who taught you?"
……You did.
"That man you said resembled me?"
No. Just you.
"You said you had never left the house, so you must have met him in House Cardel."
"A guard knight?"
There had been a time when he, too, was a knight of House Cardel. A slave-born lower knight in the house's employ. Lu.
Not a guard, exactly. On the surface his place had not been to protect her, but to watch her. He had stood in silence at the foot of the dark stairs, before the hidden room underground where Odelli was kept. Even that, of course, had only been a way in. He had infiltrated the house to see her escape.
"You said that man was dead. Did he die protecting you?"