A Spring That Should Not Have Come

The Azantis Archduchy had at last broken its long silence. The Black Forest Knights were home, bearing a great victory from their campaign against the foreign tribes.

From first light the ground before the castle gates had been a roaring press of the archduchy's people, packed shoulder to shoulder to welcome their new lord.

When the gates finally opened, the guards began to hammer their shields. The crowd answered that thunder of iron by shouting the young hero's name.

"The hero who smashed the Tatars!"

"Long live the Archduke of Azantis!"

"Long live the Black Forest Knights!"

Evelynn, waiting for him at the entrance to the main keep, closed her eyes. She could have painted every detail without looking. The earth would be shaking under the roar of welcome, a rain of blossoms drifting across the sky, and every face split wide with joy.

Just as they had cheered for her on the day she came north to be married.

The drum of hooves drew steadily nearer, and with it the clash of metal as the knights' light armor struck and shifted.

The Black Forest Knights devoured the level road from gate to keep in a single surge and at last drew up before the main castle.

Everyone within the walls had come out to receive the new archduke. Evelynn stood at the very front with a baby in her arms and looked upon her husband.

It had been two years.

A solidly built man in black light armor came toward her, each step measured and unhurried. She watched as if the moment could not quite be real. When at last he stood before her, she greeted him with the words she had rehearsed hundreds of times, thousands, praying with everything in her that her voice would not shake.

"I'm so glad you've come home safe."

He said nothing. He only stared at his wife's face with a relentless, searching intensity. The weight of that gaze was more than she could bear, and Evelynn bowed her head. Ilya's eyes followed the movement down.

The thing cradled in the woman's arms.

A black-haired baby, asleep like an angel. His son, born—so he had been told—while he was away at war.

To the child he was meeting for the first time, he did not speak a single word.

In that suffocating silence, the hostile stares turned upon her and the baby only grew sharper. Evelynn tightened both arms around the child as if to shield him. Her whole body trembled at the thought that someone might snatch him away.

Ilya seemed to lose interest almost at once. He turned his head toward the chief steward.

"My brother?"

There was one matter he had to settle without delay: the funeral of the former Archduke of Azantis.

"Ah, Your Grace. The body has been laid in the chapel."

The steward was already addressing Ilya as Your Grace, though the title had not yet been conferred. The late archduke had died unmarried and left no heir; there was no one but his younger brother to receive the rank. And he was the hero who had set the empire ablaze with fervor. Should the title be withheld, he had only to take it.

"The funeral ought to be held as soon as possible."

"Your Grace, about that... I believe you should see the chapel for yourself."

The steward spoke as if the words pained him, wiping the sweat from his brow again and again with a handkerchief. Watching him, Evelynn felt the corner of her mouth twist upward.

"Is there a problem?"

"Your Grace, it isn't exactly a problem..."

He did not wait to hear the rest. He spurred his horse toward the chapel.

Quick to read the moment, the steward checked the others who would have surged after him. In the end only the steward and a few escort knights followed Ilya.

The hinges groaned as the knights flung the chapel's great doors wide. From the threshold a deep, rich scent of flowers rolled out to meet them, and confusion crossed every face. It was as if spring had come to this place and nowhere else.

The former archduke's body lay in a glass coffin upon the altar. They crossed the chapel in a few strides.

The instant Ilya roughly tore away the family banner covering the glass, every breath in the room caught.

"The body hasn't rotted at all!"

"What in the world is this!"

The silver-haired beauty lay perfectly straight, as if he had only fallen asleep. His delicate white face looked almost holy. Knights long accustomed to death rubbed their eyes at a reality they could not believe. Ilya let out a hollow laugh and sneered.

A crushing sense of defeat seized him whole, and he bit down hard on his lip.

Rain fell hard that night.

"No sleep for me tonight, either."

Half sprawled on the sofa in his bedchamber, drinking wine alone, Ilya set the glass on the table with a soft click. He stared at the streaks of rain beyond the window and murmured, blankly.

"Even the sky is grieving that my brother is dead."

His brother, born to a splendid bloodline, had been as good a man as his angelic face promised.

Kind enough to smile even at a beast like me, who coveted his place.

He could not tell whether what he felt now was sorrow or joy.

As if something had taken hold of him, he left the room and made his way to the chapel where the body lay. The pouring rain soaked the face carved as finely as a sculpture. The knights guarding him startled at the sudden impulse and hurried after.

When he opened the chapel doors, the flower scent from the afternoon met him, and with it a woman he knew. She was stroking the glass coffin with careful hands.

Pressing down the displeasure that surged in him, Ilya approached the altar at a slow pace.

"I didn't expect to find you here."

"I came to say goodbye..."

A pair of pale green eyes, soaked through, looked up at him.

"More tender with a dead man than with the husband who came back from the ends of the earth."

Liquor and rain came thickly off the man who had drawn so near. The unfamiliar scent sent a jolt of fear through her. But there was something Evelynn absolutely had to say. If she let this chance pass, there would never be another hour in which the two of them could speak alone.

She steadied herself and looked her husband full in the face.

"How moving. Did you and my brother actually fall for each other while I was fighting myself to death out in the Tatar lands?"

"It isn't... like that."

Not like that, she said—she, who had been caressing a dead man with such desperate longing in the middle of the night. Ilya barely held down a rage fit to explode, and a sharp voice drove into his ear.

"You won. Nasser is dead, and you're alive."

"...!"

"You'll be Archduke of Azantis any day now. Is that still not enough?"

She flung the words at him, looking straight into her husband's eyes.

The wife in his memory had always been a woman who watched him and blushed, shy... Thrown off balance, he did not even realize she had spoken his brother's name without the slightest hesitation.

Evelynn stepped closer to the husband who had lost his words. There was a strange force in her, and Ilya caught his breath.

"Ilya, I want to make a deal with you."

"A deal... Is there anything you own that I'd care to want?"

Ilya scoffed. Before the mockery had even left his face, Evelynn raised her hand.

She gestured into the empty air, and space began to warp. The faint fragrance filling the chapel vanished, and a horrific stench stabbed at the nose.

A knight could not fail to know that smell. This was the smell of death.

By instinct he turned and looked at the body inside the glass. Even he, who had spent long years on the battlefield, found a sight before him foul enough to turn his stomach. The wine seemed to burn out of him all at once.

He raked his wife from the crown of her head to the tips of her feet. She was not so very different from the woman he remembered, and yet a sense of wrongness wound around his whole body.

"Well? Don't you want it?"

"...!"

Evelynn smiled, just slightly, and gestured again. Space warped once more. The scent of spring folded softly around the chapel, and within the glass the silver-haired beauty lay as if asleep.

"...An Illusionist?"

Evelynn nodded.

The Black Forest Knights had no Illusionists among them. Skill of this order would certainly be of use.

But he could not trust damned Mardus. They were the traitors who had sent their own allies to their deaths. His wife was guilty of nothing, and yet she was Mardus all the same.

"I refuse. That deal."

Evelynn went on with a calm face, as if she had expected as much.

"Then... what about this?"

"Something else? You're surprising me in all sorts of ways today, my lady."

Ilya jeered, cold.

"You may look forward to it."

As a child she had lived by her father's moods, and after marriage by her husband's. If she meant to turn his heart, she would need something more decisive than a parlor trick like this.

"For you... this is probably what you need more."

Her voice was sure, but Evelynn's heart was pounding.

She barely steadied herself and bit down hard on her thumb. She bit so savagely the finger was left in tatters.

"Ha— what are you suddenly—"

Before Ilya could finish, Evelynn drew her bleeding finger lightly across her husband's lips. She slipped it between lips that had parted in surprise and traced his hot tongue and the tender flesh inside his mouth.

He had been grimacing at the raw, metallic taste of blood when his breathing abruptly turned hot and rough. The air in the chapel seemed to flare. He swayed for an instant, dizzy. He caught his balance, and the eyes that fixed on his wife were savage.

"What... did you do to me?"

From childhood Ilya had almost never managed a proper sleep. The insomnia he was born with had only grown worse after he lived through that incident on the battlefield. Neither medicine nor drink had done any good; there had even been nights when the knights beat him unconscious simply to put him to sleep.

"I don't know what that deal is, but I'll take it for now."

His face twisted into something vicious. Ilya seized his wife's arm and crossed the chapel in a flash.

He flung the door open and came out, and the escort knights stared at the two of them in alarm. Unable to match his long stride, Evelynn was dragged along in his wake.

"Your Grace, where are you going?"

"The bedchamber. Don't follow."

The knights, who had been shifting anxiously from foot to foot, all fell silent.

"S-slower... just a little slower, please."

Hauled through the pouring rain by her husband, Evelynn staggered.

Only once he stepped into the main building did Ilya stop and look back. When she met those deep blue eyes head-on—heaving like a sea in a typhoon—Evelynn felt her heart clench.

"My shoe... I can't walk."

Soaked to the skin, Evelynn could barely stay upright; the heel of one shoe had snapped. Servants and maids woken by the uproar before dawn gaped at them, mouths hanging open. Shame made her want to hide somewhere.

But in the eyes of a husband drunk on blood and on sleep, there seemed to be nothing in the world but her.