Chapter 49
Chapter 49: Let’s Get Along
Three months had passed.
I stayed in the capital when the Duchess, Libian, and Eileen returned to the mansion.
I figured if I went back too, it would only delay the chance to see Raphael again.
Two months ago, I had sent him a letter, urging him to return to the capital.
But after the social season ended, no one came looking for me.
All I received was a note a month ago saying Eileen had visited the mansion.
I suppose they all thought I had returned to my domain, as I should have.
She had her place to be, and I had mine. There wasn’t much chance of us meeting.
We were still young and had plenty of time ahead of us. No one sincerely proposes to a girl who’s barely of age. At most, it’s just an engagement made in passing.
Finally, Raphael came back.
This time, he wasn’t riding the brown horse he used to. Perhaps it had died, for he now had a black horse, its left eye hollowed out.
Raphael himself was a mess.
The boy whose eyes once sparkled with dreams of becoming a knight now looked lifeless, like a fish dead in the water.
A long scar marred his left eye, and his pinky finger was severed from his left hand.
“Marie.”
I wished he hadn’t returned injured.
I hesitated to speak, afraid that the wrong words might escape my lips.
My mouth opened and closed a few times before I managed to say anything.
“I was supposed to head straight back to the mansion, but you asked me to come,” he said, watching me as he rummaged through his pocket. He pulled out a ring and tried to place it on my finger.
The inside of the ring was smeared with blood. It seemed he hadn’t even had the time or the mind to clean it.
“Say something.”
I took the ring from his hand. At first, I tried to slip it onto his pinky, but my gaze lingered on the stump where the finger had been severed. After a moment, I quietly placed it on his ring finger instead.
Raphael’s voice was hoarse.
Even if someone cried every day, their voice wouldn’t become this ragged.
I reached out and gently caressed his face. The scar beneath his left eye was deep, a mark left even after treatment.
“Raphael, did you become a knight?”
“You used to tell me every day that you would,” I said.
He nodded.
“Now that you’ve achieved it, you don’t have to leave my side anymore, do you?”
“…That’s…”
“If you’ve grown to hate me, and never want to see me again, just throw the ring away and leave.”
Raphael’s expression turned into something between sadness and anger.
Perhaps it was natural. After surviving such hardships, the only words he heard from me were practically reprimands.
“I came back alive, and this is all you have to say to me?”
“Of course you should’ve come back alive—alive and whole, with the same bright eyes you had whenever you talked about becoming a knight. Raphael, you haven’t looked in a mirror, have you?”
“……”
“You once told me I wasn’t like the old Marie anymore. You said I seemed like a completely different person. At the time, I didn’t know what you meant, but now I think I understand.”
A little hardship really could change a person’s entire demeanor.
There was a time when I’d look in the mirror and think I didn’t look this bitter.
I’m still beautiful, though.
“Was it hard for you?”
At my question, Raphael nodded.
I approached him, this boy who had once spoken so fervently of his seemingly impossible dream of knighthood, and embraced him.
He buried his face in my shoulder, wrapped his arms around me, and sank to his knees, sobbing.
A Shattered Voice
The sight of a grown man crying with a hoarse, broken voice was less sorrowful and more painful to witness.
I patted his back, my expression stiff and unmoving. Perhaps it was because a thought had crossed my mind—that maybe it hadn’t been so bad for him.
After all, if he could cry, it meant he still had the luxury of feeling sadness.
With that, I pried Raphael’s trembling hand from the reins of his horse and passed them to a servant nearby. I took his hand and led him toward the mansion.
“I don’t have anyone to talk to, but at least you’re here. Let’s just talk about anything—most problems can be solved that way.”
Hearing my words, Raphael’s body trembled even more.
Until he went to bathe and change into clean clothes, I passed the time smoking tobacco—leaving out the opium, of course. Raphael hated it.
After all, this was the first time we’d met in a long while. It wouldn’t do something he disliked.
I’m so thoughtful and considerate. Truly, I’m such a good person. Ha.
When Raphael finally entered the room, he said nothing.
He sipped some tea, glanced around nervously, and flinched every time a servant passed by, as though expecting an ambush.
About an hour passed, and as the sunlight streaming through the window shifted slightly, Raphael finally managed to speak.
“Marie… back then, when you brought me with you…”
“Yes?”
“At that time… I killed someone.”
“Hmm.”
“I—I stabbed them…”
Raphael, it seemed, was more prone to tears than I had thought.
His voice, laden with sobs, made his story halting and strained.
“And the person I killed… they… they keep showing up in my dreams. Or… or I hear their screams…”
Dreams, he said.
If I close my eyes without opium, dreams always come. Memories of punishments—beatings when an angle was wrong while eating, fingers crushed by fountain pens if I failed to memorize text, deranged gazes fixed on me as a hand slapped my face until it split open.
The gentle Duchess could never have done such things, but these visions haunt me nonetheless.
Whether they were real or not, I couldn’t say.
Raphael, though, was gasping for breath, clearly overwhelmed.
He must be too upright, too honest, unable to rationalize things away.
It’s simpler to think of it like this: the one who hurt Alina wasn’t a person—it was a beast. That’s how I’ve always explained it to myself.
“Raphael, I’ve never killed a person. What you killed wasn’t human—it was just a beast that happened to speak our language.”
I removed the pipe from my lips, sat beside Raphael, and handed it to him.
He hesitated, refusing at first, but when I assured him it wasn’t laced with anything, he cautiously took a drag.
After coughing lightly, he seemed to take a liking to it and smoked diligently. Once he calmed down a bit, he handed the pipe back.
I took it and resumed smoking.
The atmosphere was too heavy for any silly remarks about indirect kisses.
“Tell me what happened. It won’t solve anything, but at least it might ease your mind.”
I, for one, couldn’t even tell Alina. I had never fully opened up to anyone.
It’s a miserable thing to have no one to confide in.
So I hoped Raphael would confide in me.
Thankfully, like a penitent man confessing in a church, he began to speak.
He spoke of splitting open the head of a surrendering enemy in a frenzy, of massacres, looting, and rapes that followed the capture of a village—things as clichéd as they were brutal.
Did he expect knights to be different?
Honor and valor are nothing more than the fantasies of children. Men are slaves to their base instincts, after all.
I listened, comforted him, and embraced him when he broke down, patting his back like one would a child.
Unlike Olivia, I didn’t have a large chest to soften the embrace. It probably didn’t feel very comforting.
Through his tears, Raphael confessed he had once been trapped in the mountains. With no food, he stole supplies from starving villagers, leaving them to die.
He watched as one of his comrades, Kesel, assaulted a village woman. Instead of intervening, Raphael focused on grabbing bread from the table.
He had built an impossible ideal of what knights should be, likely based on fairytales. Those tales painted knights as paragons of honor and righteousness.
Raphael wanted to be that kind of knight. Now, he seemed utterly crushed by the truth.
He even admitted to killing a child who had tried to stab him with a kitchen knife. And when the child’s mother tried to protect them, he killed her too.
Despite all this, the heroic stories of his exploits on the battlefield were absent from his lips.
“Raphael,” I said softly, “do you think I’d hate you because of this?”
Raphael nodded.
“It’s disgusting, isn’t it? Horrible. I’m no knight… we’re…”
His voice trailed into a downward spiral of self-loathing and despair.
It wasn’t something I particularly wanted to hear. But as a friend, it seemed only right to offer him some form of comfort.
So, I leaned in and kissed him, silencing his words.
I’d done the same for Olivia before, so it was only fair to do it for a friend.
He had always looked out for me, protected me from bullies at the orphanage, and remained nearby even as we grew older.
If it was this hard for him, then I simply wouldn’t let him return to the battlefield.
He could stay as my personal knight, or if that didn’t work, we could just get married.
Raphael sat there in a daze, touching his lips, before looking at me with a stunned expression.
“Who cares?” I said. “No matter what you’ve done—even if you were a demon worshiper using newborns to create elixirs—it doesn’t matter to me.
Unless you’ve grown to hate me, just stay by my side.”
At my words, Raphael called my name—“Marie, Marie”—over and over as he hugged me tightly.
The servants nearby blushed as they watched, likely embarrassed by the scene.
Looks like marriage prospects are out the window. Not that I planned to marry anyone anyway. Ha.
How troublesome.
Someone like Olivia would have been far better suited to comforting Raphael.
She could heal even old wounds and make him fall for her completely.
The old me would have burned with jealousy at the sight, probably plotted against Olivia, and ended up beheaded by Raphael for it.
Not the worst outcome, honestly.
Maybe all the foolishness and envy I’ve displayed so far was deliberate.
Without opium, I’d have thrown myself from a building long ago.
Even now, whenever the Duchess, Libian, or Eileen speak to me as if nothing has happened, I want to escape through death.
Finding Kesel’s pistol and killing everyone in the Duke’s household before turning it on myself is also an option.
But I know what would happen—I’d hesitate, trembling before putting the barrel to my temple.
That’s how deeply memories embed themselves into the body.
Ah, come to think of it, I heard the Duke and his eldest son are dead.
They say it was due to failing to protect them.
Doesn’t matter. It’s none of my concern.