I Have No Intention Of Forgiving Anyone

“Did you just… call me Marienne?”

A wind sharp enough to cut grazed my cheek.

The man before my eyes was no ghost, no illusion; his steady, ringing voice was too vivid to be anything but real. I stared blankly down at that great hand, and Herman Ernst, watching me hesitate, beckoned me forward again, unhurried.

One step, and as if bewitched, I moved forward.

“Yes. Just like that.”

That this man had come back alive from the dead struck me, just then, as strangely unremarkable. All that mattered was that he had appeared like a miracle at the very bottom of my despair.

Another step, and I dragged my foot heavily forward.

“You’re doing well, Marienne.”

It was only a name, and yet at the sound of it I felt I might burst into tears.

Does he know who I really am? Does he truly know the whole of the truth?

I looked at him with the desperation of someone clutching at straws, and Herman never once looked away from my gaze.

Looking into those ash-grey eyes, like all that remained once everything else had burned away, I felt a vague and absurd hope stir in me.

Maybe that man, at least, will hear me out.

I wanted just one person, one single soul, to understand the wrong done to me. Though never in my wildest dreams had I imagined that person would be my twin’s husband, Herman Ernst.

He might be my last hope.

“Take it. Now.”

I seized the callused hand at once, gripping it like a lifeline flung down to me. In that instant Herman hauled me in without mercy, and the next I was locked fast in his broad embrace.

But in the space of a breath, Marienne’s last hope proved a cold illusion.

The moment they were down off the spire, Herman rounded on her before she could catch her breath.

“Pull a stunt like that one more time.”
“…What?”
“This time it ends with you locked in your room. Next time, you’ll find your arms and legs tied to the bed.”
“Y-Your Excellency!”

Marienne thrashed, trying to wrench herself free of his arms, but all that came back was a dumbfounded snort and a dry, rasping “Your Excellency?” There was no stopping him.

“Didn’t you just recognize me?”
“As if I could fail to. What kind of fool anywhere in this world wouldn’t know his own wife?”

Even as he said it, Herman hoisted his wife up onto his shoulder. She gave a short shriek and clung on.

“Y-Your Grace! What in the world—!”
“‘Your Excellency,’ ‘Your Grace,’ and what comes next? ‘Um, excuse me, just a moment,’ something like that?”

Herman clicked his tongue in irritation.

“P-Put me down!”

Marienne kicked her legs and pounded her fists against his back, but like a small wave breaking against the hull of a great warship, her feeble assault posed no threat to him at all.

“No — just a moment ago you clearly called me Marienne—”
“What wouldn’t a man say to stop someone from throwing their life away? You were insisting you’re Marienne Drake, and to handle a madwoman, you have to talk a little mad yourself.”
“…So everything you said to me up on the spire was a lie?”
“Persuasion, coaxing — there are finer words for it, and the best you can manage is ‘lie.’”

At his exasperated answer, Marienne seemed to give up, and her struggling stopped. Mortified enough by dangling there, she even remembered to cover her face with her hands.

Herman shot a sidelong glance at his wife, gone limp over his shoulder.

Quick to give up, at least. That’s a mercy.

He wanted nothing more than to shut this woman away in her room as fast as possible. Once he’d sent in food and water and turned the lock, the whole commotion would be more or less settled. After that he meant to sink his weary body into hot water; the grueling journey had left him thoroughly spent.

“…Your Excellency.”

At his wife’s faint voice, Herman stopped mid-stride.

That cursed ‘Your Excellency’ again.

He decided he’d have to make it plain to his still-addled wife, once and for all. They had said she’d lost her mind. Was he now to teach her even this, patiently, one thing at a time? It was enough to drive a man clean out of his wits.

“Let’s not do this. Let’s try talking instead.”
“Me. Talk. With you?”

Watching the woman try to coax him in turn now, Herman thought, She’s gone mad more gracefully than I’d have expected.

“First, if you’d just put me down—”
“And on what am I to trust you? What, will you throw yourself off the drawbridge this time?”
“You’ve misunderstood. I had no intention of dying. So please, let go of me. A gentleman who knows the meaning of honor cannot treat a lady this way.”
“A gentleman? Sorry to say it, madam, but I’m a soldier before I’m a gentleman. Not creating dangerous situations comes first.”
“I won’t deny that climbing up there was a dangerous thing to do. But you’d do well to remember that I am not one of the soldiers under your command.”

The longer the exchange dragged on, the more Herman’s brow creased.

Well, would you look at that.

For a woman said to be mad, she argued remarkably well. The way she parried his every word, point for point, crisp and coherent, was frankly astonishing.

Herman could fairly claim to have met more madmen than anyone short of the monks who tended the insane. In the thick of war there had been as many men driven half out of their minds as there were men wounded in body. And yet, unlike any of them, his wife kept a perfectly ordinary conversation going.

“I’m asking you — like this, I’m begging you, Herman Ernst!”

In the end, at Marienne’s desperate cry, Herman had no choice but to set her down. They studied each other’s faces at close range, and before long, neither of them leading, both let out a deep sigh.

I’m the one who’s been through hell, so why is she the one wearing the face that says she’s had it worse?

Herman studied his wife closely. Hair blown wild and disheveled by the wind, eyes red and raw from nights of weeping, lips ruined from being bitten who knew how many times.

By anyone’s reckoning, it was the look of a madwoman.

“I— first, I’m sorry for raising my voice at you so carelessly.”

Eyes of clear blue, properly focused; a voice that carried her meaning plainly; a posture held straight and true. And yet, strangely, everything about his wife seemed to prove that she was no madwoman.

“Only, I am not mad, nor was I trying to die, Excellency Ernst.”

Herman gave a slight jerk of his chin, silently urging her on: go on, don’t stop there.

“Then why in the world did you go crawling all the way up that high spire?”
“I can explain everything. Only—”
“Only?”
“—only if you’ll believe me, Your Excellency, no matter what I say.”
“I’ll be the judge of that. You just answer what you’re asked.”

Marienne drew in a deep breath, as though she had firmly made up her mind about something.

“I hardly know where to begin, but I am not Gloria Ernst — I am Marienne Drake. Not long ago I was caught up in an outrageous conspiracy, stripped of my name, and driven out to this domain—”
“Stop.”

Herman raised a hand and cut her off.

“I asked you why you climbed that high spire.”
“Your Excellency, to explain that reason, I have to start from this.”
“No. It’s too long. At this rate the point of the conversation will only keep getting muddied.”

A soldier before a gentleman, he’d said, and as though to prove it, he drove the conversation forward the way he would interrogate an enemy soldier.

“In that state, why did you climb the spire?”
“Because I was so choked up inside.”
“And the reason you were choked up.”
“As I said before, because my twin stole my name from me—”

At that, Herman let out a sudden scoff and cut her off again.

“So, to sum up what you’re telling me: your twin framed you and stole the name ‘Marienne’ from you, and being choked up over it, you climbed that high spire and staged a suicide scene you never intended. Is that it?”
“Yes — that’s exactly it!”

They had exchanged only a few words, and yet Herman seemed to have seen straight through the whole affair.

“I should have known from the ardent welcome you gave me up on the spire.”

Herman laughed, dumbfounded.

“I’ll give you full marks for the effort.”
“What effort?”
“The effort you put into trying to persuade me.”

For the briefest moment his wife looked like a perfectly sane woman. The trouble was simply that his patience for humoring nonsense ran dry at exactly that point. Herman, who had let himself half-believe she’d come back to her senses, quickly thought better of it.

“Fine. Let’s say everything you’re telling me isn’t a lie. So — what then?”
“…What?”

As though it were an answer she hadn’t expected, Marienne’s eyes went wide. Herman gazed at her steadily, then asked again.

“Tell me. What is it you mean to do now?”

It took a long while before any answer came, but Herman waited for his wife patiently. It was something like the last mercy he had it in him to grant her.

A long while later, Marienne spoke with firm decision, her small fists clenched as though she’d resolved on something.

“I am going to set everything right. I’ll take back the name that was stolen from me, and I’ll make them pay for their crimes.”

For the span of silence that followed, neither of them moved. Then Herman huffed a laugh and pressed a hand to his forehead.

“Listen well, Gloria Ernst. No — Marienne Drake, or whatever — just… you.”

Herman frowned without meaning to. The absurdity of his own position, unable even to settle on what to call his own wife, was almost laughable.

After his parents died in a sudden accident, he had gone off to war despite everyone’s efforts to stop him. The marriage had been a hurried thing because of it, forced on him to guard the house against a collateral branch greedy for its rights and holdings.

And so he had left for the battlefield without so much as the ordinary parting words a departing husband gives: I’ll come back safe, so wait for me. If he happened to die, he had wanted her free, not bound to him.

“If it’s proven that what you say is true, I’ll file for annulment at once. And then I’ll throw those wretches over at the Drake county manor into prison for adultery.”

But his wife had kept faith with him to the very end. On the journey home, when he had heard that she still hadn’t remarried and was waiting for him, he could not shake the feeling that welled up in his chest. The knowledge that he, too, had a family to return to had felt like a balm for all the hardships of those years. And so, without meaning to, he had let himself grow tenderly attached to her.

If she meant to throw me and the Ernst name away over drivel like this, she should have done it before I came home.

Someone might have countered that if his unhinged wife was set on leaving of her own accord, wasn’t that all for the better? And yet why did her words fill him with such a sense of betrayal? Why could he not simply stand by and let her go, let her make herself the laughingstock of high society?

Yes — because I do believe my own failings had some hand in making you what you are.

And now that he had come back alive, perhaps his wife, too, would return to her senses. Even if that was nothing but a vain hope.

And so Herman pressed her all the harder. Waking his senseless wife to reality was, he believed, how a husband did his duty.

“But I don’t think my anger will end there. Your family raised their child so poorly that they brought harm to House Ernst, and I don’t imagine they’ll escape their share of the responsibility either.”
“…That’s absurd. On what charge, exactly?”
“Charges are there for the making. And the Emperor might well take pity on a dear friend who risked his life on the battlefield.”
“It wouldn’t be half bad,” Herman added, “to fill the family coffers with the astronomical settlement I’d wring out of your kin.”
“My parents and my younger brother have done nothing wrong. Our Edward, especially—”

Marienne hastily leapt to the defense of her younger brother, the heir to House Seymour.

“I’d say the very same of myself. What crime am I guilty of — I, who fought for the Empire with my life on the line — that I should have to stand here listening to your nonsense?”

Marienne, unable to offer any rebuttal, clenched her fists until the knuckles stood out white. His threats seemed to be having their effect.

“Whether your nonsense is true or false doesn’t especially matter to me.”

He drove the final wedge home without pause.

“What matters is that I have no intention of forgiving anyone.”