I Am Next
The archduke came in with a man's ankle locked in his fist, scoring a dark crimson trail across the marble. A red line drew itself straight behind every step he took.
"Y-Your Grace...!"
Someone cried out as if the sight had struck them, but he paid it no mind. He flung the man, barely clinging to breath, into the center of the banquet hall, and blood spread there like a pool.
"I am growing tired of this. I should like them to approach the matter with a little more creativity."
He muttered it as if bored, and with an expressionless face drew his sword.
In that instant someone among the murmuring crowd gasped and clapped a hand over their mouth.
"...Th-that's the priest who was with the saintess!"
Only hours before, the man had attended the banquet presenting himself as guardian to the woman said to be a saintess. The revelation of who he was threw the assembly into confusion, and hard on its heels a woman was hauled in, both arms seized by two knights.
The saintess. The very woman everyone had been watching with wary eyes, wondering whether she might be chosen by the Archduke of Exepsion.
"If you are truly a saintess, then surely you can prophesy something as near to us as the immediate future."
He turned his head and looked down at the woman on her knees. The tone was light, as if he were offering a riddle, but scorn soaked the voice.
"This assassin meant to poison the tea I was drinking. Do you suppose I shall kill him, or do you suppose I shall be generous enough to grant him mercy?"
Ludville smiled, languid.
"By all means. Prophesy."
His steps swayed, and his gaze sat a little askew. He was plainly deep in his drink, yet his violet eyes burned with the keen light of a beast fixed upon its prey.
The woman went deathly pale. She trembled, then sank to her knees where she stood.
"P-please spare me. Mercy, I beg you...!"
The saintess flung herself flat against the floor and pressed her brow to the stone. Ludville did not trouble himself to hear the answer out.
"You are wrong."
The next moment a ripping sound tore the air, and the sword flashed. The man did not so much as twitch again.
"Aaaah—!"
The saintess's legs gave out beneath her. She collapsed and wailed aloud. The knights, as though this were nothing out of the ordinary, did not blink. They hauled her upright and dragged her away.
Silence filled the banquet hall. Not one person dared open their mouth.
Ludville nudged the blood-soaked trophy aside with the toe of his boot, walked to the high seat, and sat, as calmly as if nothing at all had happened. There was no feeling in his eyes. They held only a hollowness deeper than madness.
"Who is next."
That single sentence froze the hall. No one dared step forward. Not a soul.
Amid the silence, Odelli slowly studied the man before her.
Ludville Exepsion.
My Lu...
She traced him not with her fingertips, but with her gaze: the brow, the hard set of his jaw, the cheek flecked with blood. From a man snarled in madness and the reek of blood, she sought him as if confirming the warmth of someone still alive. A very long time ago—their first meeting, which she had remembered at last. The sensation of watching him with only a wall between them answered ahead of thought.
My lover. My savior. My sword... and my deceiver.
A man who had once bled for her, and who had once been crueler than any stranger. And still, in the end, he had kept her alive.
You're alive. Even now...
But he had changed too much.
The man he had been was a ruler and a strategist. Whatever chaos came down upon him, he had found a way to hold the situation from inside it. Now she could see nothing but a wildness that had lost its bearing, and the will to kill. Eyes that had once flashed without rest beneath every manner of calculation were empty as an abyss.
The memories are gone. Of that, there is no doubt.
That he had not come seeking Odelli himself, and was instead taking in women as if he were wandering, was proof enough. His memory of her seemed gone as well, save for fragments such as blue eyes.
And that was the trouble. Until now he had lived for a single purpose: to keep Odelli alive. Stripped of that purpose, he was no different from a ship that had lost its compass and drifted on the open sea. It was the worst turn she had failed to foresee.
She had wanted him to forget her and be happy. She had wanted him to live a life that was his own. Left as he was, this man would one day sink by his own doing.
"...I am next."
She broke the silence and stepped forward, then slowly lifted her head. Odelli hardened her heart. She would watch. She would remain at his side. She would make him fill the empty blank in his memory with something other than herself.
Beyond the old, threadbare robe, her eyes held one person alone, straight and unwavering.
"I have come to propose a transaction, Your Grace."
Ludville returned the word very slowly.
"A transaction?"
Dry. Listless. Whoever stood before him, he seemed not even to spare them his interest.
"What manner of transaction?"
He asked it as if daring her to prattle. There was no expectation in the question, and no wariness. It was only the reflex of a man answering an approach repeated past counting.
"...It is not the sort of matter that can be spoken in this place."
Ludville let out a short breath of laughter.
"Of course it isn't. The mysterious figure in a hood, the secret tale, the special condition that it must be the two of us alone... The self-proclaimed saintess began that way. So did the deposed princess."
"I..."
"Do you mean to say that you, too, are the woman I am looking for?"
He asked it without so much as properly looking at Odelli.
She could not answer.
When the silence held, Ludville turned his head as if the whole of it had become a nuisance.
"I suppose it is time I brought this banquet to an end."
He rose, ignoring her completely. For a moment Odelli found no words.
The urge to tell him that she was the one he sought pushed up unbidden. But that was the one thing she must never do. Odelli would not live past twenty-nine—a woman under sentence, with scarcely five years left to her. If Ludville were to grow attached to her again, it would drive him into ruin a second time.
Ludville walked past her. As if a miracle had parted the sea, people quietly opened a path before him. Upon the red carpet the hem of his black cloak stirred, indifferent to all of it. Odelli watched his retreating back for a long time and said nothing.
Meanwhile Ludville left the banquet hall and walked the long corridor without interest. The farther the brilliant music and the laughter fell away, the thicker the emptiness grew in his chest.
Since when had it been, this slow slipping of the world out of true?
A man of slave birth, crawled up from the most wretched depths of the empire. Archduke of Exepsion, lord of the harshest land at the empire's farthest north. On nothing but the venom carved into his blood, he had cut down thousands of enemies and severed hundreds of plots.
And yet.
...What a bother.
He could not have said why. It simply was. Commanding soldiers. Offering the empire his loyalty. Victory, conquest, rule—again, and again. At some point all of it had come to feel as though it meant nothing.
Why had he fought so fiercely? To what end had he ground his life away? He spoke, he moved, he drew breath, and still everything felt like a shell. The voices of people laughing and talking seemed distant and meaningless, as if they reached him from beyond a wall, and the sensation was unpleasant past all explaining.
He felt as though he had forgotten the most important thing. Something he would rather have died than forgotten.
"Ngh."
A sudden pain lurched through him, and his body staggered.