Absolutely Not My Type
The fever began to climb around the time the carriage rolled out through the Academy's front gates.
Carmiel pressed the back of her hand carefully to the cold window glass. How long it took for the coolness against her skin to fade — she had long since made a habit of gauging the day's fever by that sensation alone.
She didn't make it to three. The back of her hand had already warmed the pane.
...Not a good day.
She folded her hands into a loose circle on her lap. The faint tremor in her fingertips was unmistakably the fever. She had skipped her morning dose — nodding off during the preliminary assembly would have been a problem.
She replayed what had happened in the garden, beat by beat. Rauen's idiot eldest son barking, and herself drawing the line to match. A routine that would have unfolded exactly as it always did — save for one variable. Today, that man had not backed down.
That single line. The cold, crushing presence that had poured off a massive frame which had spent a lifetime hunched in on itself, trying to look smaller. The moment a man who had spent two years living with his mouth stupidly shut had dared to fire back — using her as his excuse.
Inside the carriage, Carmiel chewed over that arrogant sentence again, her fingertips trembling in fine, rapid bursts.
...How utterly rude.
No matter how she turned it over, she should have been the first to leave. When a scene started to swell, withdrawing was the most basic of noble etiquette. More than anything, remaining there would have bound her name tightly to an unsavory rumor.
And yet she had stood there, dazed, and stayed. What, exactly, had she wanted to see?
...It's the fever.
She clenched her sweat-damp fingers tight against her lap. When the fever rises, my judgment lags. It always has.
The air inside the carriage suddenly felt too warm. Carmiel let out a small breath and cracked the window halfway open.
The Krause Estate was always quiet. A wealthy house this deathly still had a simple explanation: there were simply too few people in it. The staff was kept sparse because someone was extremely averse to anything that happened inside the manor leaking out.
Walk the long corridor and the portraits of successive family heads lined the walls. Of the dozens of them, only nine had lived past forty.
She knocked twice on the heavy study door.
"Come in."
Count Krause — her father — was looking at a mountain of documents. Even as his daughter entered, he did not lift his head, the pen still moving. It wasn't that he meant to ignore her. This was a man who had always spent more time looking at paper than at people. With no right-hand retainers to speak of, the work the family head had to handle himself piled into mountains.
"How was today?"
"It was the preliminary assembly. I confirmed the roster."
"The fever?"
"It's fine."
The scratch of the pen stopped, and her father raised his head. Carmiel knew better than anyone how her father caught a lie — the way his gaze went first to her nape whenever she was lying, because that was the first place to flush when the fever rose.
"You skipped your medicine."
"...I couldn't afford to fall asleep."
Caught in the lie, she answered with her eyes averted, something like embarrassment in it.
"Collapsing would be more of a problem."
"Yes."
The brief exchange was over. Her father turned his gaze back to the documents, indifferent once more. Carmiel made her bow and was about to leave — then stopped dead, her hand on the cold brass doorknob.
Until she was sixteen, Carmiel Krause had wanted a different future.
A love sto— well. No. The kind of trite story that only existed in books. Eyes meeting in an unfamiliar place. Becoming aware of each other's stride even in the most meaningless brush of contact. The one who approached without warning being the first to cross the line. Invading each other's ordinary days with that kind of noisy intensity, sharing warmth and feeling, until at last they willingly bound the whole of their remaining lives to one another.
An ending so obvious it was almost boring.
At seventeen, talk of a marriage arrangement had appeared out of nowhere. Someone she had never met. A single portrait had arrived first, dangling ahead of everything else — and even that portrait, when she later saw him in the flesh, had not resembled him in the slightest.
And when they had first stood face to face, the man had dropped his eyes uneasily and kept his mouth shut tight. A massive frame a head and a half taller than she was — and he wasted that impressive bulk on a voice that crawled along the floor, trailing off his sentences like a fool, standing with both hands clasped behind his back. A man who sat with his shoulders hunched small and timid, advertising his own pitifulness with every inch of himself.
The thought Carmiel had at that moment was a single one.
...I'm going to have to look at that for the rest of my life.
And in the two years they continued to meet after that, the man clung to that same posture with a consistency so perfect it made him look like an idiot. Carmiel had hated that look of his to the point of madness. Not because it frightened her. Not because it was rude. Simply because even sitting still and looking at him made a corner of her chest seize up, as if something were lodged there and would not move. Every time she imagined having to watch that farce for decades to come, her breath caught in her throat.
"Father."
"...Speak."
"There is one thing I would like to ask."
"I already told you to speak."
"Why did it have to be him?"
The sound of pages turning stopped.
"I had never even met him. A single portrait arrived first, the seal was stamped, and even that portrait looked nothing like the real person."
"..."
"It was a document that swallowed my name. My entire life."
Carmiel steadied her trembling breath and stopped there. She hadn't had the slightest intention of saying any of this. When she had walked into the study, her plan had been to give a brief report of the day's events and leave immediately. But she couldn't help it. The fever she had been suppressing still hadn't come down, and when the fever rose, her rational judgment always lagged by half a beat.
"...If I had only had a little time, I would have chosen for myself."
Count Krause set down the pen in his hand with a sharp tap.
"Carmiel."
"Yes."
"Do you have that time?"
In an instant, the air in the room froze solid.
She didn't. She knew perfectly well that her father hadn't said it without knowing — that it wasn't a cruel stab made in ignorance. This was a man who had carefully calculated the remaining years of his only daughter's life, and who sat at his desk every morning and ran that merciless calculation again. He was probably the most diligent family head she knew.
But understanding something with the head and accepting it with the heart were entirely different matters.
"Even that little bit of time — I would have wanted someone I actually—!"
A thorny, willful complaint had burst out of her mouth of its own accord. ...This is mortifying. Genuinely. Nineteen years old and sitting here going on about someone she liked, like some foolish girl dreaming of first love.
"That's enough. Go back to your room."
A clear dismissal. But she bit her lip, unwilling even to give an answer. Carmiel turned on her heel and walked out of the study just like that.
Behind her, the heavy wooden door began to close, slowly. Through the narrowing gap, a voice asking a retainer drifted out.
"...The reply from the North?"
"Not yet, my lord."
"The North is occupied with winter preparations at the moment. Delayed replies are common."
"Wait ten more days. If there's still nothing after that, send someone yourself."
A click. The door shut and cut the voices off.
The moment she returned to her room, her personal maid approached carrying a letter on a silver tray. The crude crest of House Rauen was stamped on it. Excuses and cheap advances she didn't even need to read to know. Carmiel threw the letter into the fireplace without even opening it.
Watching the flames swallow the paper, she finally felt as if the breath that had been stuck in her chest could move again. But over the burning red, that rough face from today — the one that had stood with its shoulders squared — superimposed itself without warning.
She sat on the edge of the bed and roughly undid her tightly bound hair. Violet strands spilled through her fingers in a slow cascade. Until she was eight, it had been a soft brown, the exact image of her late mother's. From the year after she first succeeded at Overclock, the ends of her hair had begun to stain this muddy color.
The family elders had all praised it in one voice as proof that the Krause bloodline's talent had manifested. Carmiel understood that praise in an entirely different way.
This was the color of life force burning away. When something inside the body burned too long, too uncontrollably, the color eventually bled out. A vicious curse: the better you used the ability, the faster you burned to ash compared to everyone else.
...Thirty, if I'm lucky.
She collapsed onto the covers as if falling. Her thoughts kept catching and stumbling over one particular scene.
Kaizan Lovellon.
The oppressive bangs swept back clean. The chin tilted up in arrogance. And the voice he threw out still had fire in it. It was clearly the same person, and yet somehow he had looked a full half-span bigger than usual.
Carmiel squeezed her eyes shut against the heat gathering at the rims.
A face that savage is absolutely not my type.
Even within the Empire, faces mixed with Southern blood were alien things — features oversized, the lines of them coarse as sandpaper. Smile and he looked like a threatening beast. Don't smile and he looked even more savage, as if killing intent were sitting on his face.
There isn't a single woman in the entire Empire who'd grin over a barbaric face like that, even if you searched every last corner.
She yanked the edge of the blanket up to her chin with both hands.
Vulgar beyond words.
She pulled it all the way over her throat, over the crown of her head.
'......'
Only much later, unable to bear the suffocation, did she yank the blanket down again. Hot breath had backed up all the way to her throat. Carmiel caught her flushed nape with the cool back of her hand. Even her fingertips burned.
...I need to change the medicine. Starting tomorrow, no question.
That night, Carmiel Krause tossed and turned in bed and slept less than three hours. Of course, she herself filed the whole thing away neatly as nothing but the fever's perverse fault.
