The Scar He Remembered
Odelli was not the only one listening closely. The merchants seated across from the traveler leaned in, each offering a word of his own.
"From what I heard, he's searching for his first love—the girl he was forced to part from as a child."
"No. I heard the Archduke is looking for the perfect woman he saw in a dream."
"That's not it. He can't forget a dead lover, so he takes in any woman who resembles her."
"...So which of those is actually true?"
At the rebuke—why was everyone telling a different story?—one of the merchants shrugged.
"If the man himself doesn't know, how would we?"
"What? He doesn't know?"
The traveler shot the question back, incredulous.
"A servant who works in the castle said so. He can barely remember anything about the woman. Whether he forgot because it was childhood, or it was only a dream, or he's lost part of his memory... no one can say."
He was holding those extravagant banquets day after day to find a woman he could not even properly recall?
"Isn't that simply madness?"
"It is. He's mad. Properly, thoroughly mad."
The merchant twirled a finger beside his temple and went on.
"They say it's as if a ghost got into him. His manner of speech, the look in his eyes—completely changed. Displease him even a little and people end up dead. A tyrant, if ever there was one."
His speech had changed, and his eyes? People died for nothing more than ruffling his mood? It couldn't be. Odelli wanted to seize the merchant by the collar and shake him—what nonsense was this; stop talking rubbish. Something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.
"Ha... that Iron-Blooded Archduke..."
The merchant paused, watching the sighing traveler, then added in a lower voice.
"What's certain, at any rate, is that the woman the Archduke seeks has blue eyes. And..."
"Here."
He tapped his own collarbone and continued.
"A woman with a peculiar scar, right here. Shaped like a semicircle drawn above a horizontal line."
"A semicircle over a line... Wait. You don't mean the divine sigil?"
"That's why everyone says it might be a Saint's Scar."
Odelli flinched. Before she knew it, her fingertips were tracing her collarbone.
A semicircle above a horizontal line. It was the scar she had acquired as a child, in the years she spent as an expendable subject of House Cardel. Coincidence alone had made it resemble the divine sigil; it was no Saint's Scar, nor anything of the kind. It was only the mark of sacrifice and abuse.
...Ludville remembered that?
Pieced together, their talk came to this. Of late, women were pouring into the Archducal Castle even from distant foreign lands. Noble bastards, commoners, slaves, dancers, saints, princesses of fallen kingdoms—their stations and their stories differed, but what they shared was plain: blue eyes, and a scar upon the collarbone. Those two things alone earned a woman the right to attend the banquets held within the castle.
If one among them caught his eye, she was permitted to remain and treated with exquisite care—lavishly enough to put an imperial princess to shame. Yet no woman lasted beyond a fortnight. At some moment the Archduke would turn, as if seized by a sudden whim, and cast her out of the castle. He did, however, press a vast sum of compensation into her hands as he sent her away.
"They say women are even forging scars to crowd into the Archducal Castle. Get chosen, and you walk away with a fat reward even if you're driven out. If fortune favors you, you might become the Archduchess."
The women the Archduke chose shared one further trait. Most of them gave off a frail, delicate air and carried some heartbreaking story. Because of it, the banquet hall these days was said to be packed with women each determined to put forward a past more wretched and unfortunate than the last.
Those points in common, too, called Odelli to mind.
I thought he would remember nothing at all.
In truth he retained little more than a few faint fragments, and was searching at random by instinct alone. Ludville had not forgotten her. He was obsessed to the point that the people of the northern domain were calling him mad.
...Surely he isn't going to go on like this until he finds me?
For the rest of his life?
No.
She had brought him back at such cost, and this was what came of it. Odelli slowly unclenched the fist she had squeezed until her nails bit into her palm.
...I have to go and see what state he's in.
She rose from her seat. There was no time to waste. She had to leave at once—for the Exepsion domain, where he was.
A sharp spear was thrust suddenly before her eyes.
"Where do you think this is, crawling in here?"
One of the guards looked the woman who had appeared from nowhere up and down. Scorn and irritation clung to the end of his gaze. Shards of ice hung from the hem of her robe, and snow and mud were caked filthily over her boots—the traces of someone who, unable to secure so much as a single carriage, had crossed the bitter northern cold with nothing but her own body.
"Get out. Now."
But the captain of the guard beside him studied the eyes visible past her robe. Ice blue: a color as clear and transparent as ice itself. He looked into them a moment, then spoke flatly.
"The scar."
Weariness lay in the question. It was a verification he had repeated more times than he could count.
Odelli did not argue. She eased her collar down just enough to bare the scar along her collarbone.
"Let her in."
The guard opened the gate, grumbling.
"We've really reached the bottom. Now even vagrants are turning up."
The instant she crossed the gate, the north's vicious wind—which had seemed as though it would last forever—cut off all at once. The season changed. Unlike the frozen world outside, the air within was thick and cloying and sweet: fragrant fruit wine, fruit steeped in honey, and perfume as if every flower in the world had been gathered into one place. It was like stepping into a garden at the start of summer.
So the rumors were true...
A banquet was in full swing. String music drifted from afar, and a carpet threaded with gold ran the length of the marble corridor. When the doors of the hall opened, light and music, fragrance and laughter spilled out all at once.
The Golden Banquet Hall. That, it seemed, was what they called the place these days, for chandeliers wrought of gold embroidered the ceiling like stars across a night sky.
...There was nothing like this in my past life.
In a mere three months. Odelli looked around, her face unsettled. A tide of silk and lace. A fragrance as overripe as fruit on the verge of rot. Laughter more brilliant than jewels. Blue-eyed women, adorned to the height of splendor, smiled and danced, each in her own way.
"...His Grace still hasn't returned."
One of the women murmured it, worrying her lip in anxiety.
"That woman who just left with His Grace the Archduke—the one they call a saint. She couldn't possibly be the real one, could she?"
At that, another woman let out a hollow laugh.
"Of course not. What saint in the world attends a banquet just to catch the Archduke's eye?"
"You can't be quite so certain."
Odelli's gaze turned quietly toward them.
"They say she lost every memory in an accident as a child and was raised as a saint in the temple. If the scar on her collarbone is a Saint's Scar... she might be the real one His Grace is looking for."
"Heavens. How very dramatic."
One woman sneered, hiding her mouth behind her fan.
"It was plausible enough, I'll grant you... but really. Would His Grace give his heart to a fraud whose intentions are plain to see?"
"Well, even so, it wouldn't last a fortnight at the longest. It never has."
They said as much, and yet their eyes kept flicking, anxious, toward the entrance of the hall. Who would be chosen this time? Looks woven of expectation and jealousy, hope and unease, passed endlessly among them.
Crash—!
A tremendous boom burst from the entrance of the banquet hall.
"I—I nearly died of fright."
"What's happening?"
Women decked in brilliant cloth and jewels, and the patrons who attended them, jolted and stirred. The strings fell silent in an instant, and conversation died with them.
Footsteps broke through the commotion. Thud. Thud. Regular as a drilled soldier's, heavy as though a massive frame were crushing the floor, they grew louder and louder. Every mouth closed at once. No master of ceremonies needed to announce the entrance. They all knew whose footsteps those were.
Ludville Exepsion.
With his sudden appearance came a reek of blood so rank that no perfume could cover it.
"Hhk—!"
"Aaaah!"
Everyone screamed at the same time. From his hand hung a man, dangling limp as a corpse.