Previously
When asked for her favor, Jeanne requests to send a letter to her family, surprising Baldur who expected her to ask for a pardon through Mael. The conversation turns to why Baldur remains unmarried, and he explains his desire to avoid the miserable marital dynamic his parents suffered.
‘If only a warmhearted woman appeared who could appreciate that man’s true worth.’
Yet right around there, even as the words left my lips, a creeping sense arose that something was dreadfully amiss.
The moment the sentence ended, it hit me. I had just tweaked the whiskers of a sleeping lion.
His expression was one of sheer disbelief, as though doubting whether his own ears had heard correctly.
At the sight of his contorting emerald eyes, my senses snapped back in an instant.
‘Oh, no.’
Only then did I realize that I had crossed the line entirely. I had blurted out an insolent remark that one wouldn’t dare utter even to an intimate friend, and above all, I had no right to say such a thing. What did I know about family? When I hadn’t even built a household of my own.
Belatedly terrified by the brazen rudeness I had committed, I scrambled to beg for his pardon. My hands trembled so violently from the shock. Yet it felt far too late to gather up the spilled water.
“What do you know?”
He openly displayed his displeasure. Like liquor touched by open flame, every trace of drunkenness lingering in my veins evaporated at once. The remainder of the meal felt far more precarious than the cracked, razor-thin ice that had nearly claimed Ana’s life.
For dessert, they served a dish I had longed to taste again, wondering when I would ever have the chance: crème brûlée. Yet I could taste neither the sweetness of the crisp, shattering sugar crust nor the velvety custard beneath that gently coated the tongue.
“…”
Leaving his dessert untouched, he rose from the table and walked out without a word. Returning from the dining hall to my chamber, I collapsed atop the bed before I could even take off my dress.
‘What in the world was I saying?’
As if I were some trusted confidant suited to give him counsel—he had merely voiced his thoughts aloud as though talking to himself. Why, then, had I played the know-it-all, pretending to understand everything?
‘Have I gone mad?’
Lying on the bed, I regretted every single word that had left my mouth. From beginning to end.
‘I can’t believe it. Why would I say that?’
I could not fall asleep that night. His contorted green eyes were not only seared into my heart, but the chance to write a letter to my family seemed to have vanished into thin air as well.
‘To dare offend the man who holds the power of life and death over me.’
* * *
At that very hour, Duke Baldur de Skadi was suffering through just as restless a night.
He stared up at the ceiling with wide-open eyes. Whether he closed them or opened them, he saw a woman with brown eyes clad in a cream-colored dress.
‘Why did she say such a thing to me?’
The woman burned onto his retinas wore a dress that suited her so naturally it might have been hers from the start, looking at him with eyes devoid of laughter and stripped of fear.
‘Why so suddenly, of all things?’
To be frank, Baldur had been flustered from the very moment she stepped into the dining hall. Jeanne was so changed from before that one might have wondered if she had cast some sort of spell. Who could possibly believe this woman was the same person who had arrived at this mansion looking half-dead, as if transported on a stretcher?
Her cheeks and lips were unusually flushed, and her eyes sparkled brightly. Faced with eyes shining like stars, Baldur had been the one forced to avert his gaze first—as if he had done something wrong to her. It had been the same in his library yesterday. Looking straight into that woman's eyes had become difficult. Yet he could not stop his gaze from drifting toward her all the same. Baldur struggled to comprehend his own feelings. Objectively speaking, there were plenty of women far more beautiful than Jeanne de Toulouse.
Feeling his mouth go dry, he had offered her a drink, and he had drunk as well. It was winter, and the spirits served alongside meals to warm the body were far stronger than in other seasons. Yet drinking strong liquor in winter was so natural here—as instinctive as breathing—that it had never crossed Baldur’s mind that she might be unable to handle it. Nor had he anticipated that the potent fumes of the alcohol would make her eyes shine all the brighter, let alone bring about what she considered a grave slip of the tongue.
‘I am suggesting that marriage might be a solution for Your Grace, rather than a nuisance.’
And what had come of it? Baldur had become completely ensnared by Jeanne’s words.
‘Your Grace assumes that every princess would be like your mother, but just as not all men in this world are alike, not all women are the same.’
Baldur turned her words over in his mind endlessly, mulling them over until he felt sick of them, trying to decipher their meaning. Yet the words remained undigested, sitting heavy in his gut and tormenting him.
‘If someone out there might truly appreciate Your Grace and this territory, wouldn't it be too regrettable to abandon marriage based on mere assumptions?’
Had anyone else made such an insolent remark, Baldur would have merely shrugged it off as absurd.
‘I only hope Your Grace will not abandon the wish to welcome a wise and kind woman as your wife.’
Yet because the words belonged to Jeanne, they held immense power. Almost like magic. Baldur had been rattled enough to lose his composure, fleeing the dining hall in haste before the meal was even finished. Naturally, he hadn't even been able to ask Jeanne how the crème brûlée tasted after so long without it.
‘What do you know?’
He, who had never known fear, had turned tail and run like a beast chased by a hunter.
‘Just what was that woman thinking when she said such things?’
While the woman who had spoken those words was likely fast asleep with her legs stretched out in comfort as the night deepened, he was left tossing and turning alone, unable to find rest.
‘Not all women are like my mother? What could she possibly know about my mother?’
Attaching meaning to words that had crossed the line so egregiously, all by himself.
‘Besides, wouldn't she herself leave this place without a second thought the moment her feet were unbound?’
Like many an exile cast off to this land, his mother, a princess of Lancis, had loathed his father for her entire life. It had been an established fact that one of the princesses would come here to wed the Duke, but she had never imagined that the choice would fall upon her. Of the five women, his father had chosen his mother of all people, and through that choice, she suffered throughout her brief life.
Had you not picked me among the five sisters, had you chosen a sister other than me, had I not caught your eye.
With each passing day, his mother’s hatred had only deepened. Her sense of loss must have been all the greater knowing that one of her sisters remained unmarried, standing at the center of the court and sparking scandal after scandal with various lovers.
His brother and he had grown up watching their mother despise their father day in and day out. To his eyes, his mother’s fury seemed tireless. What if she had felt affection for her sons instead? Yet his mother, like other noble ladies of high birth, entrusted nursing to a wet nurse, playtime to a nanny, and instruction to a governess. He harbored no grievances over that; they were all professionals. But perhaps because they were women chosen by his mother’s hand, they never crossed the line.
Baldur had grown up unloved. How could he not have noticed? A parched man can scent water even from afar.
When he was young, Baldur had wished his father would simply divorce his mother. It was like a marriage of fire and ice; they only harmed each other. Whenever his mother flared in fiery rage, his father grew colder still, burying himself in work, war, and books instead of conversation. And then his mother would sneer as she looked upon him and his brother.
‘I thought I had married a Duke, but it turns out he was a scholar.’
His mother died when he was twelve. The cause was lung disease and a chill. While wearing thin clothes in the dead of winter was pointed out as the culprit, the servants whispered that the Duchess had taken her own life.
Even then, he had felt neither surprise nor sorrow. Though she was the mother who gave birth to him, she was a figure far too unfamiliar and distant, both emotionally and physically.