It was a funeral of unparalleled grandeur.

Some wept and wailed in open grief; others let the ceremonial music speak for the sorrow they could not put into words. And there, amidst all those mourning souls, stood a woman with her back ramrod straight, not a single tear on her face.

“Her husband and daughter both died on the same day, at the same hour — and not one tear. Can you believe it.”

“And he died on the battlefield, no less. A man who gave his life……”

Throughout the funeral rites, the whispers never ceased.

Gave his life. There was no phrase in existence that suited her husband less.

Beneath the black veil that fell in soft folds from the crown of her head, Olga let out a quiet, humorless smile.

“And what of the way she keeps her mouth shut like that.”

“I heard there was talk of divorce — I suppose it was true after all.”

She turned a cold shoulder to every accusation that drifted her way.

They wouldn’t know, of course.

What her husband Leod had done to her throughout their marriage. The ways he had dismissed her. Belittled her.

That until the very moment she closed her eyes, there had been nothing but contempt — that, they would never know.

‘Now you know what it feels like.’

And so Olga kept her mouth shut.

She offered no prayer for his peace, no word of sorrowful condolence — only silence.

So that even now, in death, he might understand what his own silence had done to her. How it had slowly closed around her throat.

‘Just how maddening silence can be.’

Her narrowed gaze drifted, slowly, toward Leod’s grave.

After He Asked for a Divorce

***

Olga de Primavera.

She was the only daughter of the Primavera earldom, yet her father — a man who had wanted a son above all else — had never once treated her as though she were fully human.

And yet, even for someone like Olga, life had not been made up entirely of grey and dreary things.

Leod Moel de Morvant, Duke of Morvant.

Their fateful meeting had been like a single handful of sunlight breaking through the clouds of her life.

It had begun at a party.

It had been one of those days — the kind where her father’s contempt for her, his relentless disappointment that she had not been born a son, had left her sinking into a familiar, quiet misery.

On days like those, Olga would take a small boat out onto the lake and lose herself in solitary meditation.

But that day, the boat — which had always been perfectly sound — had a hole in it, and before she knew what was happening, she had gone under.

“P — please, save me——!”

“Are you all right!”

“——Hh, hah——!”

The man who appeared as if by fate and pulled her from the water draped his jacket over her trembling, soaked shoulders.

“You — who are you……”

She had tried to ask his name, at least, but he only smiled at her — soft and unhurried.

Her trembling, emerald-colored gaze found Leod.

And in that moment, a sudden gust of wind swept through.

His golden hair, shimmering with the subtle iridescence of pearls, scattered beautifully into the air.

Tucking a stray lock behind her ear, Olga watched the man’s retreating figure as he grew smaller and smaller in the distance.

Slowly, the fading sunset wrapped itself around him, swallowing him whole.

Perhaps it was the deep amber of the evening light — but his ears had gone a vivid, unmistakable red.

She carried the warmth of that flutter in her chest all the way home, and yet she hadn’t the faintest idea who that man was.

Only that the deep scent of pine drifting from the jacket he had placed around her shoulders had quieted something loud and restless inside her.

It had all felt like a dream — those few stolen moments.

Olga shut her eyes tight against the memory of her first meeting with Leod.

Because the husband who had been so kind, so gentle — had changed overnight the moment she told him she was with child. As though he had become an entirely different person.

“You said you loved me. You said you loved me——!”

What had she done wrong? What had displeased him? Or had it all been a performance from the very beginning?

She had begged. She had grabbed at his sleeve. She had raged. But Leod had met every outburst with nothing but cold eyes and silence.

The more she let her grief spill outward, the more wretched she became.

“……My lady, the Duchess. This has arrived……”

“A divorce — what do you mean, a divorce……?”

And then, the moment Olga gave birth to Liet, the divorce papers came.

Not delivered by Leod himself — not even a conversation, not even the dignity of eye contact. Sent through the head butler.

She had stormed to the Duke’s study herself, fury written across every line of her face. But his door had been shut fast against her.

“My daughter — your daughter, Liet — what happens to her! I will never agree to a divorce!”

Every day, new women came and went through the doors of the annex where he kept his quarters. The divorce papers she tore apart were brought back to her, fresh, by the head butler.

And then, one day, he was simply gone — off to the front lines. And he had come back like this.

He must have despised the sight of her so thoroughly that he’d willingly gone to a war he had no obligation to fight.

The mourners who had packed the burial grounds to capacity began to drift away one by one, until at last she alone remained before the grave.

Only then did Olga slowly part her lips.

“If only you had lived……”

Her gaze moved to the small headstone beside Leod’s grave.

[The Little Star of Morvant, laid to rest here. Year 146, Day 356 — Year 148, Day 258 Liet Moel de Morvant]

It was her daughter Liet’s grave. Liet, who had left this world less than a single day after news arrived from the front that Leod had been killed in battle.

Expressionless as a doll that felt nothing at all, Olga spoke in a low, quiet voice.

“She hadn’t been sick. Not with anything.”

No physician had been able to name what had taken her.

“I cannot make a diagnosis……! I have never seen nor heard of an illness like this.”

Never seen anything like it, they said.

If the Duke of Morvant had at least been home, perhaps some other avenue might have been tried — but the Duke, as misfortune would have it, was away at the front.

She had waited for his return with plans to rail at him, to curse his name to his face. But in the end, the Leod who left for the front had come back like this.

There was nothing left that a powerless Duchess — unloved by her husband, alone — could do.

In the end, she had been made to watch her beloved daughter slip away from her, just like that.

Why a man of his standing, a Duke no less, had dug his heels in and gone to war against everyone’s objections — and why he had died without leaving behind so much as a single last word — she could not even ask him that, standing here before his grave.

Olga’s fists clenched tight at her sides.

One drop, then two — raindrops had begun to fall.

The black clouds that had gathered silently above her now split open without mercy, pouring down in sheets.

In the driving rain of a cold winter night, her lips slowly turned blue.

Standing in it — letting it take her completely — Olga forced her lips open once more.

“You changed so suddenly, I know……”

Something fell ceaselessly down her cheeks — whether rain or tears, she could no longer tell.

“But still — would you have saved her, at least……? Could you have saved her……?”

She could no longer hold back the sobs forcing their way between her lips.

At last, overwhelmed by the grief crashing over her, Olga crumpled to the ground and wept.

Even through the driving rain, her cry rang out clear.

Clutching fistfuls of the earth above Leod’s grave, Olga let loose everything she had kept buried inside her until now.

“Why did you treat me and your daughter so coldly, so callously…… and then, just like that, on your own terms——!”

Her emerald eyes bore down toward him, trapped somewhere beneath that cold, dark soil.

“You just went and died……”

The words came out hoarse and ragged, scattering into the empty air.

She didn’t know. She couldn’t make sense of any of it.

Whether it was grief for her little girl, gone too soon. Whether it was the loneliness of being left behind. Or whether it was simply the cruelty of a man who had been so cold to her, and yet——

“You shouldn’t have smiled at me like that……”

Sobbing without restraint, Olga called back the days when Leod had looked at her and smiled.

“You shouldn’t have told me you loved me……”

That smile alone had carried her through everything.

Now there was nothing left.

From within the folds of her robe, she drew out a small glass vial.

“Don’t worry, Liet.”

The hand holding the vial trembled violently.

Inside the glass, something dark churned and surged — like waves seen in the dead of night.

Liet was still far too young to be buried in cold earth.

Only three years old. Still an age when a child needed her mother’s arms.

“I won’t leave you alone.”

Her whole body shook with the cold. Or perhaps — if she were honest — it was fear.

Olga turned her face away from that fear as best she could, and drank down the contents of the vial.

“Ugh——!”

The vial slipped from her fingers and rolled away.

Her body was shaking so violently she could no longer hold herself upright. Clutching at her own throat, Olga collapsed — falling forward before the graves of Leod and Liet.

Her lips turned violet. Her cheeks grew paler by the moment.

Her teeth chattered against each other with every tremor that wracked her.

The poison she had swallowed writhed through her body like a living thing — like a serpent thrashing beneath her skin.

Pressing her lips tightly together, she thought:

‘Be born as my daughter again, in the next life.’

Her emerald eyes, their focus slowly dissolving, drifted toward Liet’s headstone.

‘Next time, I won’t let you go like this — so senselessly, so soon. I will protect you. Whatever it takes.’

Her eyes, brimming with tears, moved slowly to the grave beside it. Leod’s grave.

‘And Leod.’

Olga squeezed her eyes shut.

‘In our next life, the two of us……’

Tears spilled out from beneath her closed lids, falling fast.

How long she trembled in that agony, she could not say. But at last, the shaking began to ease. The pain, too, began to fade.

Her consciousness drifted away — as though her body were rising, floating free.

‘Let us never, ever meet.’

In the final moments of her life, behind her tightly shut eyes — the night flashed through her. That night, dense with stars, when Leod had looked at her and smiled as though she were his whole world.

In rain that fell so hard it left the ears ringing, Olga met her end — as forlorn a death as any could be.

She had believed that was the end of everything.

***

“You are awake.”

That voice. She had heard it somewhere before — and it was not until she opened her eyes again that she understood why.

A sense of wrongness came over her, a dizzying déjà vu, and Olga shot upright.

“Did you have a nightmare?”

She turned her head slowly to the side. Through the brilliant flood of sunlight, the silhouette of a figure came into view.

The moment she made out who it was, her pupils blew wide.

“Olga.”

Her name fell from those lips — the lips that had always been frozen shut, cold as ice.

The corners of Leod’s mouth, as he looked at her with perfect clarity, curved into a slow, unhurried smile.

Those blue eyes, always so cold — were warm. Unutterably warm.

Was she dreaming again?

Even after a death she had writhed through in such agony — was she truly to be denied even the peace of rest?

“Hh——!”

She had prayed never to see him again.

Covering her mouth with her hand as a sudden surge of grief tore itself free, she wept — and then lost consciousness entirely. Or perhaps let it go.

This time, she prayed she would not wake.