Rings the Color of Her Eyes
The magic circle did not react to Odelli's purification in the slightest. The shafts of blessing-light draped from the ceiling did not so much as waver. No ripple of energy, no recoil, no distortion registered at all.
The guests merely watched the ceremony in quiet composure, as though admiring one more tableau of a holy rite.
"……?"
Gawin could not hide his confusion. His eyes flew wide, and he swallowed a curse that had nearly burst from him. Had something gone wrong? Had there been a mistake in the installation? He narrowed his eyes. No. This was a matter on which House Cardel had staked its very fate. They would not have blundered on something so grave.
Beloa, for her part, searched Odelli's face in a rush, her own expression gone rigid.
Calm. Far too calm.
She was a bride in the midst of her wedding, and yet not the faintest tremor could be felt in her—not even standing where the eyes of the imperial house, the temple, and every noble converged. There was no way she felt no tension. There couldn't be.
And yet…
The sacred relic held its silence. The magic circle did not so much as stir. No murmur rose, and no anomaly answered. Even the more sensitive among the clergy seemed to have sensed nothing at all; they simply kept their attention on the rite.
She wasn't nervous in the slightest?
She had mastered her feelings that perfectly?
…Impossible.
While the Cardel siblings' confusion dragged on, the High Priest's prayer of blessing filled the sanctuary.
Odelli did not need to glance toward the guests to know what faces Gawin and Beloa must be wearing. They would be struggling to hide the panic in their eyes. The only variable they had allowed for was that Odelli might be a little tense. Had they ever even imagined the trap might fail to trigger at all?
A shame. They prepared it so meticulously.
Cardel had left not a single trace. In any ordinary case, then, Odelli ought to have been drawn tight with dread, wholly unable to predict when or from where they would strike—like a rabbit trembling in the grass, never knowing from which direction the predator crouched in the brush would spring.
But…
That would only have been true if I had never seen Ludville's memories.
And not just any memories: those of a Regressor who had walked this same ground thousands of times over.
In this moment, there was only one reason the sacred relic gave no answer.
Because I took the whole of it apart first.
Odelli knew exactly how Beloa had brought her down. Within the stage called the Great Cathedral—by what means, in what order, and at what timing the attack had come.
I was summoned here endlessly because of my purification.
She had been made a saint. She had been imprisoned. She had been interrogated. She had been burned at the stake… Across thousands of lives, the times Beloa had tampered with the barrier merely to destroy Odelli already numbered in the dozens. Beyond that, there were roughly a dozen patterns for sabotaging the wedding. A contact poison set where a hand might brush it, to induce paralysis. Magic calculated to draw her into forgetfulness. Even the choir, pressed into service.
Odelli had retraced every place inside the Great Cathedral where the woman had struck her. Under the pretext of inspecting the interior adornments, she sent Freya. Freya had once been head maid of the Imperial Palace, and she shared a long acquaintance with the official in charge of protocol at the Great Cathedral. In the end they confirmed that Cardel had tampered with the barrier, and they neutralized it.
She knew, too, that Ludville had opened that path for them. A few days earlier, he had delivered a document to the temple: a request advanced on the grounds that, the ceremony having received imperial sanction, the interior decorations would be given a final inspection. On the surface it was a simple check. In truth, it cleared the way for Odelli and Freya to search the interior.
"Odelli."
It was then. As if he had noticed her attention slip, for a moment, toward the guests behind them, Ludville quietly spoke her name—a signal that the ceremony was drawing to its close.
The High Priest's voice rang out.
Edwin came forward, bearing a tray in both hands. If one wondered why the archduke's own aide was performing the office, the answer was simple: he had dug in his heels and insisted the task be his.
Upon it lay a matched pair of rings. The gems set into the finely worked bands were nearly colorless. Catch the light, and a faint sky-blue skimmed across them; at a glance they might have been cut from ice. It was a color like a clear, transparent lake pressed down into a single stone. They were Pielite—the gems of legend, once mined only at the far northern edge of the continent before the vein vanished entirely.
Odelli recognized them at once, and she flinched.
How did he…
…How did he obtain them?
Among those thousands of lives, there had been a time when Ludville brought her this gem. But that had been possible only because he was a regressor who still carried the memories of the life before. When, then, had he begun preparing these rings, that he could have them in time for the wedding?
"Your Grace, what you instructed me to prepare the other day—at last…"
All at once she remembered Edwin coming to find Ludville only the day before. The errand he had called urgent… surely not? Had he been hunting for the rings right up until the day before the wedding?
She turned her head, and Ludville was there before her. He had been watching her all the while with that same unrelenting gaze, and suddenly she felt as if she could not breathe. He still said nothing. But his eyes held a feeling even he could not have named, and they were fixed on her.
While Odelli stood frozen, Ludville reached out first. He slid the ring onto the fourth finger of her left hand.
"I thought it looked like your eyes."
Even so, this was… not something one could obtain merely by wanting it. And if he had been seeking it from the moment he resolved upon their contract marriage, she could not begin to guess what means he had used. Dazed, Odelli looked down at the ring seated perfectly on her finger.
"Put it on me, Odelli."
His whisper snapped her back to herself. In the life before, the exchange of rings had been omitted, and the gesture felt strangely unfamiliar. She lifted the other ring and slid it onto Ludville's finger. The band, thickened to fit his hand, looked a little ruder than hers. Set side by side, though, anyone could see that the two rings held the same craft, the same grain, the same light. They had, without question, been made for one another.
A thought came to her then. If she had not dismantled the sacred relic Cardel had planted beforehand, she might well have lost control by now.