You Said You Wanted Us to Break Up - Black Velvet Elegy Web Novel

Completed Novel now Available on Kofi.

“Your Grace!”

As Iswen’s body leaned forward, the knight at the door quickly grabbed his arm. The cane he had dropped rolled across the floor.

The man’s unbalanced hand gripped the knight’s arm. Blue veins, like proof of his pain, stood out sharply on his large hand.

“What’s wrong?”

My voice, which rushed out, sounded distinctly panicked even to my own ears. As if bothered by it, Iswen’s jaw clenched.

“It’s none of your concern.”

The sound was rough and hoarse, closer to a growl than speech.

Iswen stubbornly held onto the knight’s forearm and righted his posture. The knight signaled to a colleague nearby. His colleague ran off somewhere.

Even having regained his balance, Iswen looked completely different from his usual self. His pale forehead was slick with sweat, and his silver hair, which was barely distinguishable from his complexion, was heavily disheveled.

It was a look that clearly indicated a significant health problem, and one that Iswen had never shown before.

No matter how strained our relationship was, seeing him in such obvious pain sent a chill down my spine. I asked him,

“Are you hurt?”

Iswen didn’t answer. Instead of asking him a second time, I bent down to pick up the cane that had fallen on the floor. It was then that his hoarse voice dropped from above my head.

“Don’t touch it.”

I paused at the rough yet characteristically aloof tone when someone called my name from behind.

“Iella.”

I turned around to see Demian, whose clothing was disheveled as if he had rushed over. Behind him was the colleague the knight had signaled moments before. It seemed he had gone to call Demian.

As Demian appeared, Iswen was helped inside his bedroom by the knight. I asked Demian, who was about to follow him inside.

“What happened to the Duke of Rowen?”

Demian turned to look at me, his eyes filled with a complicated, unreadable emotion, and gave me an answer I hadn’t asked for.

“You don’t have to worry. He’s fine.”

Demian turned his back. Soon, the door to Iswen’s bedroom closed.

I stared blankly at the closed door when I heard light footsteps behind me—tap, tap.

“My Lady?”

I turned around to see Apple standing there.

“The hallway is noisy. Did something happen?”

She sounded full of concern, as if she hadn’t been away at all, despite having only recently returned.

I shook my head, and she didn’t ask further but took my hand. Unlike in Raslet, where the only warmth I felt from skin contact was the other person’s body temperature, her hand was infused with the warmth of the gentle spring breeze.

Only the calluses at the end of her fingers remained the same as before.

I squeezed her hand tightly.

I had a premonition that I needed to uncover the secret hidden in this house before leaving for Resebel.

Iswen Rowen had a dream.

It was a dream, like the recollection of an old memory.

In the dream, a woman was holding a small baby. Iswen knew the baby’s name. Iella. A baby with the same initial as him.

When the baby’s mother showed him several name candidates, Iswen deliberately chose that name. His father, surprisingly, did not interfere.

Iswen stood on his tiptoes to see the baby’s face. The woman read his intention and lowered the cradle in her arms slightly.

To Iswen, who was now eleven years old, the baby was truly small. Even though several months had passed since her birth.

While Iswen watched the baby, who was wiggling her small, silk-wrapped hands and feet, as if mesmerized, the woman murmured.

“I have committed an unforgivable sin.”

A depressing sound followed. I will probably fall into hell.

There is no hell. There is no punishing God. The fact that their father was living gloriously was proof of that.

Eleven-year-old Iswen tried to convey that fact in the way he knew how, but the woman didn’t accept it.

That day, she spoke words that seemed like pure fancy.

“A day will come when everyone, except for you, will forget my name.”

She looked down at the daughter nestled in her arms.

“When this child is fully grown, tell her my name.”

It was a request with the implication that she would not be alive until then.

“It won’t be easy at first, but after repeating it a few times, this child will eventually remember my name.”

“…”

“I have committed many sins and can do nothing, but this child hasn’t done anything yet, so she might be able to break the curse placed on you and Demian.”

“Iella?”

The woman smiled without answering. Iswen read the mourning for her daughter’s future in his mother’s curved lips. He spoke with a throat tight with emotion.

“She is my sister, too.”

Although they hadn’t been together as long as he had been with Demian, Iswen was certain of this fact from the moment the child looked up at him with eyes that resembled their mother’s.

I have one more piece of my own flesh and blood.

The woman, who knew his unusual attachment to his kin, soothed him with a gentle voice.

“She is my daughter. She has an inherited destiny.”

Whatever that destiny was, all he could see was a baby smaller and warmer than Demian.

“I don’t want that.”

The woman quietly smiled again.

It wasn’t long before the woman passed away. Her heart simply stopped one day without warning. Ironically, it happened just as the child was learning to pronounce her name.

Iswen gritted his teeth as her coffin was lowered beneath the red soil. He spoke forcefully over the closed casket of the deceased.

“I refuse.”

She is my sister. Demian and she, as long as I am here, will not be handed over to any destiny.

That day, at the funeral where the spring rain fell, Iswen repeatedly shouted inwardly.

This time, no smile returned.

Demian shook his shoulder.

“Brother.”

Iswen blinked. His golden eyes, still hazy, scanned his surroundings. He smelled a calming incense somewhere.

He looked up at the canopy with unfocused vision and ordered.

“Turn it off.”

“It’s the same herb that’s in your cane head.”

Iswen actually carried pain medication in the head of his cane for exceptional circumstances. It was an herb that melted and released its ingredients upon contact with human body temperature and reacted only to bare skin.

However, using the medicine by his own will was different from having the ingredients enter his body while unconscious.

Iswen commanded again.

“Turn it off.”

Demian sighed and covered the lid of the censer.

Iswen, who had sat up in bed, asked his brother’s back.

“Iella?”

“She went back with her maid.”

By maid, he meant the woman with the red hair.

In this household, she was the only person Iella liked. Iswen rubbed his temples, recalling the skinny girl who had been thrown before him in a ragged state.

“Did she say anything…”

“No. Don’t worry.”

Demian approached him and sat in the chair beside the bed.

“Why did you do that?”

It was difficult to understand a question without a subject when his rationality was half-paralyzed. When Iswen remained silent, Demian made the question a little more specific.

“You could have just told a knight to do it.”

He was talking about Iella’s riding lesson.

Iswen realized it was a question he wouldn’t have answered even if the subject had been included.

When he remained silent, Demian narrowed his brow.

“Brother.”

“… ”

“Brother, nothing’s wrong, is it?”

The only thing that could be considered “wrong” for the brothers was the father who had to die.

A memory naturally surfaced.

‘We have found traces of what you ordered us to track.’

Iswen’s jaw clenched, recalling the brief report that had followed. Seeing this, Demian twitched an eyebrow.

However, before he could ask a question, Iswen shook his head.

Returning to my room with Apple, I quickly wrote down what I knew in my notebook before I could forget it.

The entry—that I had been asked by the Emperor about my mother’s name at the Imperial Palace, and that when I asked Iswen the same question to answer it, the memory of that moment completely vanished—still felt strange even as I wrote it with my own hand.

I went to see Iswen for fear of forgetting even the fact that I had written this down, but Iswen wasn’t in a state to talk.

Had he developed some kind of chronic illness since I last saw him?

The thought naturally occurred to me as I recalled the man’s appearance, which was clearly steeped in pain even to my unknowing eyes.

But even if I asked what was wrong, Iswen wouldn’t answer me.

‘Don’t touch it.’

Hadn’t he reacted that way even when I tried to pick up his cane?

I deliberately pushed away the sight that uncomfortably lingered in my mind and asked Apple.

“Have you ever heard my mother’s name?”

“No.”

After answering, Apple frowned.

“That’s strange.”

Now even she seemed to find it suspicious that no one knew the second duchess’s name.

I told Apple,

“There was a portrait of my mother in Iswen’s library.”

It was small but very finely painted. It seemed closer to the realm of true talent than just art learned as a hobby in a noble family.

“Beneath it was the signature of someone named Lerissa. She must have been a good painter, so she might have worked as an artist. Since she seemed to have a deep connection with my mother, I should try to find her.”

The painter used the possessive term your before my mother’s name.

She might have been a very close friend or a lover of my mother. Although Lerissa is a feminine name, names and gender don’t always strictly align.

I wondered if I should have asked Iswen for the portrait. The thought came to me belatedly.

The portrait would have helped in finding out my mother’s name, but it felt awkward to ask for it now since I had been so curt in refusing him then.

“It was written in the Kaulm language, so she was likely a Kaulm person…”

I should also consider the possibility that I might have mistaken the pronunciation because I’m not fluent in the Kaulm language.

Northern people learn to speak the Kaulm language almost like another mother tongue, but my Kaulm language skill was stuck at a cultured level.

It was unusual for the language of a distant Northern kingdom to be a cultural language in the South.

However, the relationship between Kaulm and the South was a bit peculiar.

The Southern regions, including the capital and Kaulm, had opened up exchanges several years before I was born.

Kaulm and Raslet overlapped in terms of region, so their products also overlapped, but the Imperial family, led by the former Emperor, pushed for trade with Kaulm after relations between the former Emperor and Raslet completely broke down.

As the Imperial family grew closer to Kaulm, learning the Kaulm language became fashionable among the pro-Emperor nobles.

My late father was practically the representative of the pro-Emperor nobles.

A few years after the imperial family signed the agreement with Kaulm, Kaulm was destroyed at the hands of the former Duke of Raslet.

The Emperor then seized every opportunity to announce several laws overly disadvantageous to Raslet, and those laws were later abolished when Sioden negotiated with Beatrice.

That must have been one of the reasons Raslet joined the rebellion.

I don’t know the detailed circumstances. I hadn’t been taught enough to understand all the political situations in the country, nor was there anyone to properly explain the situation.

I only knew the background of why I learned the Kaulm language as a cultured subject. Because that was all my Kaulm language teacher explained.

Could my mother have been from Kaulm?

Why did no one ever tell me about my mother?

It was something that was so naturally concealed from a very young age that I passed over it without even questioning it, but the more I thought about it these days, the more suspicious it felt.

Apple, who had been standing next to me with her brows furrowed in thought, spoke.

“I’ve heard the name Lerissa before.”

Apple got up from her seat and quickly wrote something down and brought it back.

“Could this be the spelling?”

On the paper Apple showed me, a Kaulm name was written in slightly rough handwriting.

“Yes.”

I checked the spelling and nodded at her.

“Where did you learn Kaulm?”

Apple didn’t know the Kaulm language before going to Raslet.

Apple put down the paper and answered.

“When I was staying outside the outer castle, I made friends with a few people from Kaulm.”

“They also connected me with a merchant they knew to get the boat tickets to Emerta.”