They Say My Wife's Gone Mad

Inside the carriage I did nothing but sleep, eat, and stare into space, on and on without end. By the time we reached the ducal castle I could scarcely tell anymore what was a dream and what was real.

“Tsk. What is this.”

Father clicked his tongue and made a face of distaste. Beside him, Mother could not close her mouth either at the sight of the ducal castle.

“Oh my…”

Spires clawed at the sky, and the drawbridge looked fit to bear any weight; both seemed to attest to the grandeur the ducal house had known in days gone by. Yet one thing was beyond doubt: it had all fallen halfway to ruin, so far gone that no one would ever guess people had once lived there.

But none of it mattered to me. I only gazed with hollow eyes at the highest point of the castle.

“To think I must leave you in a place like this. How heartless the gods are. I pray for you dozens of times a day — how could they send you a trial like this…”

Mother wept, doting on me with a worried tenderness I had never once been shown back when I was Marienne.

Once, in my thoughtless younger days, I so envied the way Gloria monopolized Mother’s worry that I would act strange on purpose to win some of it for myself. I gave that up soon enough, though.

And now, given that very worry at last by turning into Gloria, I found the whole thing almost funny. A dry, brittle laugh slipped out of me before I knew it.

“It isn’t much, but it should still help you a little.”

Mother pressed a heavy purse into my arms as she spoke.

“Hold on just a little while, my dear. Once your father’s anger settles, I’ll be sure to come and visit you.”
“Hurry, Louisa. We must set off before the sun goes down.”

Muttering that he had no wish to linger here a moment longer, Father climbed into the carriage.

“All right. Don’t rush me so. I still have to say my goodbyes.”

Unable to withstand Father’s nagging, Mother quickened her steps.

“Be sure to eat well, Gloria.”

Before I could offer Mother any farewell of my own, my parents’ carriage rolled away. I stood blankly before the castle until it shrank to nothing and was gone.

“My lady, we have everything ready for you to rest from the journey. Please, come inside.”

The old butler of the ducal castle bowed deep and courteously to me as he spoke.

“You must be hungry, so first, a meal—”

“No.”

I cut the old butler off firmly.

“I just want to sleep. For a very long time.”

A week later, in the imperial capital.

Herman Ernst, the Nation’s Savior Once Believed Lost, Arrives in the Capital

Commander Ernst and Twenty-Six Stragglers: A Chronicle of Castaways on a Deserted Isle

Herman Ernst’s face ran on the front page of the Imperial Times and every other daily besides. The papers vied with one another to be first with news of the hero come home alive, and letters celebrating the Commander’s return poured in from every corner of the realm.

“It stirs the heart to see you again. To think I’d lay eyes on this fine face of yours once more. I heard you’d been put through the wringer, and yet somehow you look better than ever.”

Castro III, Emperor of the realm, could not hide his beaming smile. With his oldest friend and most favored subject returned to him, he could scarcely keep his joy in check.

“I grieved bitterly to lose one of the Empire’s finest, and now that you’ve come home alive like this, nothing in the world could please me more.”
“You honor me far beyond my due, Your Majesty.”
“This is a state secret, mind you, but after I held your funeral I couldn’t so much as touch affairs of state for a good while. Which earned me quite an earful from the Finance Minister at the council of state.”

The Emperor’s chatter showed no sign of letting up. Then, catching sight of Herman seated bolt upright without a hair out of place, he collected himself and cleared his throat.

“The triumphal ceremony is still being arranged — time’s been short — but we’re hastening it as much as we can. For now you must be worn out from the long road, so what say we hold it sometime next week?”

Herman was silent a moment at that.

“I thank you, Your Majesty, but if it can be managed, I would ask that the triumphal ceremony be put off for a while.”
“Hmm. And why is that?”

The Emperor tilted his head, as though he could not make sense of it.

With every eye in the realm turned toward him now, there could be no more fitting moment to celebrate so miraculous a homecoming. And besides, the families and acquaintances of the returned soldiers had gathered from all across the country and were lodging in the capital even now.

But Herman’s mind seemed to be running along different lines. All through his private audience with the Emperor, he kept drifting off into thought. He turned his teacup round and round for no reason at all, eyes lowered, as if calling something to mind.

When the Emperor pressed him once more, Herman gave a light smile and spoke.

“There are people waiting for me back on my ducal lands.”
“Ah, so that was the reason. Yes, yes, of course. If there are people waiting on you, then naturally…”

The Emperor, who had been nodding along so readily, stopped short. The ‘people waiting,’ after all, could only mean his wife, the Duchess Ernst.

This is trouble. He hasn’t heard the rumor yet.

The Emperor sank into unease. A strange rumor about the Duchess Ernst had lately been making the rounds of high society.

Half out of her mind, she took to aping her twin, and when that wasn’t enough she tried to seize the woman’s place outright. Got herself cast out for it, or so they say.

The sisters’ family, it seemed, wanted the whole thing hushed up and buried, but the toll it had taken on Countess Drake ran deeper than anyone expected, and there was no stopping it now. At tea parties, they said, she would flinch and start at the mere sound of the name ‘Gloria.’ Pressed on what was the matter, she would only shake her head in silence, until at last the tears came.

When the ladies of society, never ones to let such a thing pass, made their inquiries and pieced the story together, Countess Drake was said to have begged them, please, not to breathe a word of it.

Marienne Drake, standing by her mad twin to the very end. It made a pitiable picture, and an admirable one besides.

Awkward, this. Truly awkward. Is it even my place to be the one who tells him?

As head of the Emperor’s faction, Herman had taken the lead in committing to the war on the Central Continent. His resolve, to be sure, had not sprung wholly from some fierce patriotism; but going to war had been no small choice all the same, and the Emperor felt himself deeply in the debt of a friend without equal.

And yet, even an emperor finds it hard to lay a careless word on what passes between a husband and wife.

“Duke Ernst.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“I hardly know where to begin with this. It’s been five years since you last saw the Duchess — since the wedding itself, was it not?”
“That is so.”

Between two people torn apart for the battlefield the very moment they wed, there could hardly be much of a bond. Theirs had been a wedding thrown together in haste, once his deployment date was already set, and among the common folk there was even talk that the pair had likely never had a proper wedding night at all.

“I understand you may not be well abreast of the news, having been away from the Empire so long. And no doubt you’ve had your hands full with a hundred things since coming home.”

After turning it over a moment longer, the Emperor at last steeled himself.

“Duke — there’s a rumor going about that of late the Duchess has taken to strange conduct.”
“If it’s that rumor, I’ve already heard it, Your Majesty.”

The Emperor had expected at least a feigned show of surprise, but Herman answered without so much as a flicker of expression.

“…You already know?”
“Yes. Everyone tells it the same way.”

The Emperor swallowed hard.

“They say my wife’s gone mad.”

Watching Herman shrug off such dreadful news as though it were nothing at all, the Emperor could feel, at last, that the great war hero of the Empire of Balter had truly come home.

“It isn’t my place to meddle, but if it’s what you wish, I’ll help you see the marriage dissolved,” the Emperor said. “Circumstances being what they are, if you brought an annulment suit on grounds of fault on the wife’s side, it’s a fight you’d stand every chance of winning.”
“That won’t be necessary. Nor have I any intention of it.”

Herman answered without a shred of hesitation and brought his teacup to his lips.

Five whole years. All that time she had spent alone in a strange place, without a husband, put upon in a hundred small ways. Reason enough, he supposed, for a wife to lose her mind.

Though how mad could she really be, in the end.

He had seen more than his fill of men the war had driven mad; more than that, he was the man who had brought even those men home alive. What could have unhinged a woman with food enough and a warm bed to sleep in, he could not begin to say. But she was his wife all the same, his one and only.

He had gone through with the marriage for a less-than-honorable reason: to safeguard his title and his fortune. And she had proved so faithful a woman that, even on hearing word of her husband’s death in battle, she had not remarried but waited for him.

“I intend to take responsibility for her.”

Toward her he felt a sense of duty, shot through with guilt.

“An unexpected decision — but it’s very like you.”

The Emperor stroked his chin as he studied Herman. For all that the man wore the very picture of a devoted husband, something in some corner of the Emperor’s mind found him chilling, even fearsome.

“Once she learns her husband has come back alive, that woman will surely come to her senses as well.”

Herman drained his cup in a single swallow. The black tea had been throwing off furious plumes of white steam only moments before.

And as the flustered Emperor sat there merely blinking, Herman added one thing more, in a flat and even voice.