PDCOO Chapter 39

While he was considering, Karlah's voice came out uneven.

"...Look, you can laugh at me if you want. But tell me the truth. Do you have feelings for my daughter—any kind? Wanting, or—or something else?"

Bertram didn't laugh.

His answer came without pause, and its steadiness made things worse rather than better.

"Both of those are emotions I don't know. But—it is true that I want to spend more time with Anna."

"No."

Karlah came at him. Her dry fists struck his chest.

"Don't say things like that. Leave this village."

"This is very important to me."

"You think repaying some small debt is going to make your sleep easier? Nobility can live however they please—go be reckless somewhere that belongs to you. What could you possibly be lacking that you would do this to us?"

The confusion in her voice twisted around something else. Bertram pressed his hands firmly to her shoulders.

"Calm yourself. If you raise your voice further, Franz may come running. Then I won't be able to hear you."

"Ah..."

"What are you afraid of? Is it—has a nobleman hurt you? Is that something still with you?"

Commoners disliking nobility was unremarkable. And from what Anna had said, Hans had been taken from them by what were presumably noble military commanders, interrogated until there was nothing left of him. For Anna and Karlah, nobility must carry a particular and accumulated weight.

But accounting for all of that. Karlah's anger seemed pointed in a slightly different direction.

She drew several uneven breaths and hunched her shoulders. The sharpness in her eyes had receded slightly—reason returning.

"...Is Anna truly important to you, Bertram?"

"Yes. She is."

"Goddammit..." A small, tired sound. "I always said I'd give Anna to whoever was the first to say that. Why does it have to be you."

"Fortunate for me."

"It's the worst possible outcome for me. I'm going to tell you something now—a very shameful story from over twenty years ago. After you've heard it, I want you to swear to one of two things."

Karlah raised two fingers.

"One: leave this village today and never come back. Two: stay in this village and grow old beside Anna."

"Those are extreme options."

"The first is faster and simpler. And whatever you choose—tell Anna yourself. Directly. Do you understand? Can you swear it?"

"I swear. Tell me what happened."

Karlah hesitated for a long time.

Then she began.

The lives of the people in this village were predictable. Most married a neighbor before twenty, had children, raised them the same way they'd been raised, and died at around sixty surrounded by the faces they'd known all their lives, to be buried in the hills behind the village.

Karlah had never thought to argue with this future.

Around sixteen, talk of a match had begun with Hans, a young man from the village. Tall and unremarkable, with pale wheaten hair. His eyesight was poor—he squinted perpetually—but his shy smile was easy enough to like. She'd thought: this will do.

But fate, as a rule, reserves its disruptions for exactly the people who have just decided to accept things.

When Karlah was seventeen, an uninvited guest came to the village. A young nobleman with golden hair. He'd said he was fleeing a family dispute. He lodged at the restaurant her parents ran. He had jewel-blue eyes, and he made the hearts of the village girls unsteady.

She didn't allow herself foolish dreams. He would leave eventually. This was a spring flower—best enjoyed as memory, not expectation.

That was what she'd told herself.

Until the day he leaned close and whispered:

'Do you love Hans?'

Love was something she didn't know. She liked Hans. She trusted him. That was all.

She'd laughed—what a strange thing to ask, so embarrassing—and he'd looked back at her with such seriousness.

'That's different from me, then. ...I love you.'

The first time anyone had ever said it. Devastatingly sweet for exactly that reason.

Her mind went soft. He brought his lips to hers. And after that—

A story she has never told anyone.

Some time later, he received a letter from the capital and announced he was returning. He didn't thank the villagers for anything. He behaved as though he had bestowed upon them the honor of hosting him. The villagers sent him off with hollow smiles.

Not long after, it became known that he'd been trying to charm girls all over the village. Trying to kiss one after another. Karlah's friends laughed and shook their heads: nobles were always like that. Karlah laughed with them and said unkind things about him.

And then her cycle stopped.

And she couldn't laugh anymore.

Her wedding night. She told Hans everything—every word of it—and her own weeping left no room to see what expression he made. She remembered only his hand on her shoulder.

Eight months later, a baby came. She was so small that no one thought to count backward through the months. She might genuinely have been early—Hans's child, born too soon. So for a moment, Karlah felt relief.

Then was horrified at herself for feeling it, and wept.

Until Hans stroked the baby's fine golden hair and said, softly, look—harvest gold—and smiled.

"Hans knew everything. He claimed eight-month Anna as his own from the first. A lovely husband. A lovely father. But good fortune doesn't erase what came before it. I spent two months hoping that man would come back. And the twenty years after that dreading that he would. Both were wasted in the end, at least."

Anna's exact shade of green eyes had gone bright with tears. Bertram reached toward her and Karlah knocked his hand away.

Where Anna's eyes curved soft, Karlah's angled sharp—and those sharp eyes looked directly at him now, having placed every weakness she had on the table between them. Like a god of war who has flooded the ground behind her and left herself nowhere to retreat.

"A foolish woman trapped by a foolish past, making life harder for everyone. I know. But I will not watch my daughter carry what I carried. If Anna matters to you—choose. Leave forever. Or stay forever."

"I'll stay."

It took Bertram less than one second.

So naturally that Karlah, for a disoriented moment, wondered if she had asked an important question at all, or whether they had simply been making ordinary conversation.

"Ah. You'll stay... Bertram?"

"I'll go cut the onions now."

"No! You need to think before you answer something like that!"

"There wasn't much space between the choices. The decision wasn't difficult."

He was already treating the conversation as concluded. Karlah kicked a chair into the doorway.

"Do you intend to marry my daughter?"

"I can't promise that. I don't know my own feelings yet. I don't know how Anna thinks of me."

"And if it doesn't become that kind of relationship?"

"I'll work the farm. Same as the other settled workers."

"You're nobility. You can truly live that way?"

"Yes."

This answer came faster still.

Karlah acknowledged her mistake. He'd spent years ground down in the field, and more years wandering rough roads after that. He wasn't going to weep about sleeping without silk sheets.

And Bertram added:

"I don't know much about happiness or suffering. But sometimes—the way a carnivore will instinctively tear up grass to retch out what's killing it—I know how to go looking for a way through. This village has held the most answers of any place I've found."

'Answers.'

A sharp reply curled at the tip of Karlah's tongue.

'This village is not a rest cure for weary noblemen.'

...But even wanting to hold the edge. Even facing him directly with every intention of staying sharp.

It was not easy.

The only serious conversations she'd ever had while looking into those grave eyes amounted to questions about onions—how many to trim, whether to mince them or slice them.

And when it came to Bertram's most serious question of all, that had been it.

'Am I cute?'

Just thinking about it made her blood pressure rise while simultaneously draining the strength from her body. She remembered, too, the laughably small yet utterly self-assured attitude with which he'd come home cradling the piglet. He was nothing at all like the noblemen Karlah had dealt with over the years.

'I wonder how a person like this would get on in the capital.'

Would he attend banquets draped in silk with that bear-like frame of his? Wouldn't there be people picking fights with him for constantly bumping shoulders? Wouldn't he get cursed at by people in the seats behind him at the theater for blocking their view? Would there even be a woman who would readily take those rough, thick hands in hers?

As Karlah's answer was delayed by these needless worries, Bertram carefully spoke up.

"I believe I understand your feelings, Karlah."

"Hm? What do you mean?"

"It seems as though you're giving me a choice—but watching you withhold your answer until I choose 'leave'... I see. You do want to drive me away after all."

"Th-that's not it... Wait. You're deliberately playing pitiful, aren't you!"

Bertram didn't answer. That only made it worse.