TMWDS Chapter 37

Leroy, as it happened, reached the terrace sooner than Ionna had expected.

He'd kept her in view even while dancing with Erich's sister, so there'd been no need to go hunting for her afterward.

The moment the song ended he'd followed her out and taken up a quiet post at the entrance.

He could have burst in and interrupted the two of them without warning, but he found himself more curious what that insolent junior knight was working up to say.

And just then, from inside, came a topic that was bound to catch his attention.

"Say it plainly, for once. What is it you actually want, giving up even the job you'd given your whole life to?"

'Ah—the very question I'd been wondering myself.'

Leroy thought this, unbothered, as he raised his champagne to his lips.

"A happy marriage."

He very nearly choked on it.

"Romance."

Before Leroy could even doubt his own ears, Ionna added this as though driving in the final nail.

He didn't properly hear whatever came after.

He was too busy simply processing her first sentence to have any attention left over for the second.

Which was why, by the time Erich came storming out onto the terrace, Leroy still hadn't managed to compose his flushed face from holding back a cough.

Erich spotted him and stopped short, then said, in a voice thick with suspicion:

"Don't tell me—this isn't a forced marriage at all, but you two actually——"

Erich couldn't finish the sentence. He ground his teeth instead. Then he walked straight past Leroy and out of the ballroom.

It seemed he'd invited an unintended misunderstanding, but there hadn't been a moment to correct it.

No—thinking it over, it wasn't really a man he owed any explanation to in the first place.

Some tomcat sniffing around a woman who's about to be married. If a misunderstanding like this was enough to shake him off, wasn't that good news?

'Might not be a misunderstanding for much longer, either.'

With that thought, Leroy let his eyes move slowly over her—the flush at the tips of her ears, the flustered look on her face, the hand fisted in the fabric of her skirt.

She seemed to have finished replaying the conversation with Erich in her head, because she answered him, stiffly.

“I don’t know how much of that you heard, but I only said it to get rid of him quickly. That’s the truth—there was nothing behind it.”

It was a reasonable enough explanation.

But the question Leroy asked next tore down, without effort, the logic she'd been using as a shield.

"Then let me ask you one thing. If I make a habit of running around on you after we're married, would that be fine too? Since a happy marriage was never the goal?"

There was no more cowardly attack Ionna could have imagined.

In her previous life, she had expected there would be other women, and had accepted it as a matter of course—but that didn't mean she wanted to live that way again this time.

A flicker crossed her habitually blank face, one she couldn't quite manage to hide.

Before she'd even finished sorting through the thoughts crowding her head, she found herself blurting out a rebuttal.

"That's a different matter entirely. Do you think so lightly of fidelity between spouses? However little love went into a marriage, one still owes one's partner the bare minimum of decency. Surely Your Grace wouldn't——"

Ionna was rattling this off like gunfire when she caught herself and stopped short. Laughter had come crashing down from above her, without warning.

His inexplicable reaction left her frozen in confusion.

Leroy spoke to her, his manner looser than before.

"I kept thinking I had no idea what went on in your head. Now I think I'm starting to."

Leroy slowly retraced, one by one, all the different sides of her he'd discovered.

The count's household that had brought her into the family for her usefulness, never once bothering to make her feel like family, only ever working her to the bone.

The Crown Prince, who claimed to cherish her even as he tried, again and again, to drag her into some sordid extramarital arrangement.

And then there was the inexplicable warmth she'd shown him the moment marriage came up as a subject.

Gathered together, the scattered clues pointed, unmistakably, in one direction.

Leroy let the smile fall from his mouth as he thought:

'So even through marriage, if that's what it took—she wanted an ideal family.'

She couldn't marry the person she actually loved, so had she decided, instead, to try loving whoever she ended up marrying?

It was a foolish, stubborn kind of thought. And yet—it was exactly like her.

If he was right about this, then it likely wouldn't have mattered who the man was; she'd have done her best for whoever ended up her husband. Even if that man hadn't been Leroy himself.

Nothing would be more foolish than assigning some grand meaning to a role that could have belonged to anyone.

But the man set to marry her now was, in fact, no one else.

Out of all the countless ways they might have never crossed paths, they had, as it happened, both stopped in front of the same road.

What an unbelievable coincidence—and how powerful the temptation to let himself be swept up in the cheap illusion of fate.

Leroy closed his eyes against the reason that tried to correct him.

"You're right. Fidelity between spouses is never something to take lightly."

Leroy spread his right hand and looked down at the empty palm, then folded down every finger except the thumb and the pinky.

He held the hand out to her, and Ionna looked at him, puzzled.

He knew perfectly well this was the sort of thing only a child would do, but he didn't stop himself from the childish gesture.

He said:

"Shall we make a promise. If you and I really do marry—that we'll be faithful only to each other."

She seemed to think, at first, he was making the offer because of how conspicuously she'd reacted, and couldn't quite bring herself to accept.

She hesitated, her words trailing off.

"I wasn't trying to put a burden on you when I said that——"

"It's a promise for both of us. Why would it be a burden only for me?"

Leroy asked this back, then, in an unhurried voice, listed off the terms one by one.

"No affairs. No giving in even if an old lover comes to tempt you. And no suddenly deciding your feelings have changed and asking to end it."

"……"

"Let's just make sure this marriage doesn't end up making either of us miserable."

As if urging her along, Leroy laid his hand over the tip of her little finger.

He felt her flinch at the sudden contact. She seemed to hesitate for a moment, but in the end, she found the nerve to hook her own finger to his.

The tips of their two thumbs touched, carefully. It was a flimsy sort of vow. But the two of them, at least, felt that the other meant it.

Even once the brief promise was finished, Leroy didn't let go of her hand.

The two of them stood there, hands linked and hanging between them, looking at the same spot for a while.

By then the musicians must have finished their break, because a thin melody began drifting out from beyond the curtain.

Leroy said, abruptly:

"Guess it's about time we go back out to the ballroom together."

Nothing worked better than a dance for showing off a well-matched couple. Given the actual reason they'd come to this ball, they needed to make their way back out there before long.

Ionna agreed with him in principle, but there was one thing weighing on her mind.

Hiding her embarrassment, Ionna said:

"There's something I should mention beforehand. I'm not very good at dancing."

"Never been taught?"

"It's not that I don't know it at all—I'm just not practiced. I might step on your feet."

"Good. Truth is, I'm not fond of dancing either. Two left feet."

Leroy answered this offhandedly. Ionna knew it was a lie.

But she didn't press him on the truth of it. And Leroy, for his part, didn't hurry her back out to the ballroom again either.

Worried, evidently, about how mortifying their dancing might look to anyone watching, the two of them simply stood there side by side until the long song finally came to an end.

"I called for you all this time—why are you only coming now?"

The woman in the black veil said, irritably.

The man seated before her was the Crown Prince of the Empire of Lemann—not someone anyone would dare speak to with such insolence—yet no one nearby thought the scene the least bit strange.

That was because the woman was his own mother, the one who had borne him, and the reigning Empress of this country.

"There was a great deal to handle. I couldn't think straight."

"Your excuse lacks sincerity. I know very well you always claim work whenever it's inconvenient for you."

The reproach in her voice, for all its sharpness, carried real affection for her son.

Rihardt lifted his eyes, unconsciously, to search her expression, but through the thick veil there was nothing at all to make out.

Rihardt often found himself wondering, behind that veil, what expression she truly wore.

Fourteen years already, now... no—fifteen, perhaps.

Yes. It had happened right around then.

Ever since she'd been burned in the great fire that broke out in the palace all those years ago, she had never again shown her face to another living soul.

Not to her own children. Not to her husband. Not even to the maids who attended her.

Not content merely to hide her hideous face behind the veil, she had gone further and locked herself away inside the palace walls.

Avoiding a meeting with someone who had shut herself away was easy enough. All he had to do was keep his steps away from the Empress's residence.

Exactly as the Empress herself suspected, Rihardt made a habit of declining her summons with the excuse of being busy, whenever he had a bad feeling about them.

Naturally, he had no intention of admitting as much to her honestly.

"I'm hurt that you'd think so poorly of me. As you can see, I came to see you the very moment my work cleared."

"Sly thing."

The Empress said this with a sharp little bite, her eyes dropping to the surface of her tea.

"I heard you've arranged to marry that girl off."

She meant Ionna.