Chapter 19

했다. 공식 문서와 편지는 필수 스타일 요소로 유지한다._TITLE: An Annulment Without My Seal

James first saw her at the Academy. He was trudging back from sword practice, bone-tired, when a bright, lively girl with her straight silver hair gathered up into a single knot called out to him.

"Excuse me. Where is the entrance ceremony?"

"Ah."

He flushed like a fool. Eyes as prim as a cat's, a straight nose, red lips—all of it set, neat and delicate, into one small face. She was beautiful.

"I— uh, probably... that way..."

"Thank you."

She must have realized he didn't actually know. The girl swept past him without slowing, and her silver hair fluttered after her, light as smoke as it scattered, trailing a sweet scent. James, hopelessly ignorant of such things, couldn't even tell what the fragrance was. I must have reeked of sweat.

He dragged the back of his hand across his forehead. Sweat that had not yet cooled came away in a slick film, and the thought that he had given off something foul in front of her sent the heat rushing back into his face of its own accord. Who is she? She asked about the entrance ceremony—a new student, then? She had already vanished far down the way, and still her face kept flickering before his eyes.

Taciturn as he was, James kept company with only a handful of people at the Academy, even now that he was in his final year. They were every bit as unsociable as he, so if he meant to learn her name, he would have to wear out his own shoes doing it. He roamed the grounds in earnest. A fortnight of that, perhaps—and at last he had it.

Olivia Florence, of the Department of Accounting.

"...Olivia."

James opened his eyes, slowly. The blur sharpened until a familiar ceiling filled his sight, and hard on its heels came a keen, smarting pain through his abdomen.

"Ngh."

Even he, patient man that he was, had taken a wound severe enough to drag a groan out of him unbidden. The adjutant who had been keeping watch at his side hurried over.

"You're awake, Your Grace?"

"Yes."

A dagger had run clean through his abdomen. The surgery had been thrown together in such haste that there was no proper nurse, nor anything else worth the name; a single army surgeon had stitched his belly in a fluster, and had even broken down in tears, wailing that James was more likely to die than not. But James opened his eyes all the same. He had been born hardy, and his will to live was every bit as fierce.

"You mustn't move!"

When he tried to sit up, the adjutant went pale and tried to stop him, but in the end that stubbornness would not be bent. Biting his lip until it bled, James endured the pain and, barely, managed to sit with his back braced against the wall. He rubbed his gritty eyes with the back of his hand and asked,

"How long was I unconscious?"

"About a week. This time it was truly dangerous, Your Grace."

On this frontier, Duke James Parnel was as good as a god, and the adjutant looked at him with a respect that all but dripped from his eyes.

When that green young duke had first come down, the frontier troops had flown into a rage, certain the bastards in the capital didn't care whether they lived or died. A year under James's command, and they had become fanatics who would trust his word enough to leap into a fire. If a man could not respect a superior who hurled his own body into the fight without a thought for his own hide, then whom, exactly, was he meant to respect?

This injury, too, had come of hunting down the spy in their own ranks who kept leaking information to the border tribes. The adjutant burst out in fury.

"To think they'd planted so many spies among us. Vicious bastards."

"Yes."

James nodded. He had come within a breath of dying, and his answer was calm to the point of emptiness. At that, the adjutant gazed at him with a respect deeper still.

"Even so, because you found them early, the damage was slight. How in the world did you know?"

James gave no particular answer. His breathing was rough, and the adjutant took it to mean he was simply having trouble speaking.

Duke James Parnel, who had majored in military science at the Academy, had been sent to the frontier war the moment he graduated. It was a local conflict against foreign peoples who had lived along the border for hundreds of years—not the sort of war that would ever swell into a full campaign, a minor thing on its face, and yet a troublesome front all the same, vast in reach, where the people of the region had been suffering for decades.

And to a post like that, they sent me. A man with no experience.

He was the sole heir of House Parnel, the symbolic guardians of the Empire. He had no family with weight in politics, but his bloodline was good, and that was pretext enough. From the time James was a child, the Emperor had wanted to send him away. That was also why, unlike other nobles who summoned tutors and piled up their learning at home, he had been made to study military science at the Academy. The one and only excuse that had shielded him from the war was this: he was unmarried. And so, scarcely a few months after he took the field, he was married. A strange ceremony—the groom on the battlefield, the bride in the capital.

I wonder if my wife is well.

Perhaps because he had dreamed of the old days, he missed her. Out of habit, James fidgeted with his index finger. And then—what was this? The gold ring that ought to have been there was nowhere to be seen.

"...My ring?"

"Pardon?"

"I had a ring on my finger."

"Ah. That."

There wasn't a soul on this frontier who didn't know of that ring. Swordsmen who swung a blade often wore none, for fear of injuring their fingers, and the same was true of James, who, commander though he was, took the front line often enough himself. Yet he clung to the wedding ring with a strange obstinacy, hindrance though it must have been.

Even for a wife whose face he's never seen, he keeps faith. His Grace is that sort of man. Thinking so kindly of it, the adjutant answered in earnest.

"The inside had worn so thin it snapped. It must have been from swinging a sword with the ring on. It's being repaired now."

"I see."

James answered with a face as blunt as ever. But his fingers kept straying to the bare one, where the ring should have been. Something felt wrong.

Is it the pain?

He was turning over whether to lie back down or take a report when the adjutant picked two letters up off the commander's desk.

"Come to think of it, letters have arrived."

"From my wife?"

James asked at once. Olivia had written him only once, and yet from that day on he was always waiting for a letter from her. The adjutant frowned, as if it pained him to answer.

"No. It seems to be from the Dowager. One came from the imperial household as well."

"The imperial household?"

If the imperial household had urgent business, they sent an envoy. A letter like this was rare. James tilted his head and opened the imperial missive first—and before he knew it, he had let the paper drop.

"Wh-what is this..."

"What's the matter?"

Startled, the adjutant strode up to him. What James had dropped was not a letter. It was only a copy of an official document. The nature of it was written across the page in letters so large that there was no need to pick it up to know what it was.

The lips of James, who rarely showed what he felt, trembled. He rubbed his eyes again and again, as if he could not trust them. When the words still refused to change, the color drained from his face.

"An—an annulment. Why in the world..."

"Ah. So that's it."

He had gone white before a thing he could not begin to understand, and from beside him slipped a sound of recognition, as if the other man already knew. James's sharp gaze cut to him at once.

"What exactly do you know?"

"I—I did hear a rumor. I thought it was nonsense, so I never brought it to you."

"A rumor?"

"Well..."

The adjutant hesitated, then squeezed his eyes shut and said it.

"They say your wife, Lady Florence, and Duke Tyrone are in the midst of a passionate affair. And that His Majesty the Emperor, upon learning of it, resolved to join the two of them himself."

"Duke Tyrone? Ian Tyrone?"

Hearing it, James this time doubted his own ears. He could hardly do otherwise. Ian Tyrone, of all people?

"He's impotent, isn't he?"

Even James, deaf to gossip, knew that much. The man was, in every sense of the word, the National Impotent.

And even supposing the two of them had become entangled, a marriage was not something they could settle between themselves.

"No—in the first place, I never set my seal to any annulment."

Olivia was already his wife, wasn't she? He could find an answer to none of it, but he had a feeling the answer lay inside that other letter, and with a shaking hand James drew out the one that had come from the ducal house.

Amid the long, rambling pages, what he had been searching for was mentioned only briefly, at the very end.

James forgot he was not to exert himself and forced strength into both arms. The letter tore with a rip, as if it had been two sheets all along.

No matter what I did, I could not hide the bruises. In the end I tied a scarf at my throat and bound my hair low, letting it spill forward over my front rather than down my back.

The maids who had helped me dress smiled with flushed faces as they offered their greetings.

"Congratulations on your marriage—again."

"May your love be a beautiful one."

Those sidelong glances were half curiosity and half amusement. They were savoring, in real time, the greatest scandal in the country: the fraud of the National Impotent. How entertaining it must have been. But what crime had I committed, to be the one on the receiving end of those looks? Why was the shame mine to bear?

"Why... why do I have to suffer this humiliation..."

I was perched on the edge of the bed, shaking, when Ian walked in. A shirt undone at the top two buttons, black trousers—and he looked every bit as composed as he had yesterday. He had been coming over at his ease, but the moment he saw me he started and closed the distance in long strides.

"What's the matter? Are you hurt somewhere?"

I wanted to flare at him—this is all your fault—but he had lowered himself to a knee to meet my eyes, and faced with that, the words stopped dead in my throat.

He's worried about me.

It was a thoroughly unfamiliar thing. I had not shown him so much as a glimpse of the wounds in my heart, and yet the tender look he turned on me, each of these small considerations, seemed to settle over those places like a balm.

Why, of all people, with this man...

Through all forty years of my previous life, I had never once felt this ticklish, restless stir, and I could not understand why it came flooding in the moment I faced him. If I kept looking, I felt I would spill everything inside me, so I shook my head. Then I wrung out as bright a voice as I could manage.

"Please move aside. I'm not hurt."

"Truly? Not even a little?"

"Yes."

My throat did ache a little. Even so, the medicine seemed to have done its work; the voice that had croaked like a frog had settled a great deal. I cleared my throat. And then the man I had expected to say he was glad went and murmured something else entirely.

"Dear me. I was far too lacking."

"...What did you say?"

I doubted my own ears. Lacking? Lacking in what?