Chapter 28: The Spring Journey (3)
“I will not use the name Ethelred even if I marry you.”
This was the first thing Chloe said when she first met Edmund.
At the time, the young Count Edmund laughed heartily at her audacity and nodded his head.
Ethelred and Lamaring.
The couple’s first meeting began at a banquet hosted by the two Count families.
Even Cain had only heard stories of this time.
Some said they were a happy couple, while others said they should never have met.
Though he was their son, and though he was living his life for the second time, he still didn’t know what the right answer was.
However, the mother in his memories.
She always wore white pajamas, lay on a white bed, with white skin, breathing with difficulty.
Her once bright blonde hair had dulled into a dull white, and only her piercing purple eyes shone unnaturally against her gaunt face.
Perhaps he felt a little closer to Arna because of that image in his memory.
She was always sick.
She was always lying down.
Chloe Lamaring, the mother who always looked at the empty air as she took her last breath.
For the first time, Cain saw a different side of her.
🔹🔹🔹
Oleciren had never met Chloe, so she spoke her mind without hesitation.
The situation on that day, when she spoke hesitantly, was like this.
Arian walking down the road.
It was snowing, so she was holding a crimson umbrella. And someone was coming from the opposite direction with a black umbrella.
“They exchanged words. And Arian collapsed━.”
“You didn’t see who it was?”
“No. From my perspective, I only saw the black umbrella.”
Arian collapses, and white snow piles up on top of her.
And then, suddenly, a beautiful woman with purple eyes and white clothes like snow appeared.
She swung her arms, cut off the hands and feet of Arian’s corpse, and disappeared.
“The black umbrella killed Arian, and the one who cut off her wrists and ankles is different.”
Cain, who had seen all sorts of things, was simply bewildered.
Vanderbilt, too, was curious to hear about the actions that Chloe, whom he knew, wouldn’t do.
“Right. Oh, there’s one more thing.”
Oleciren focused.
She listened to Chloe’s small, faint mutterings from beyond time and repeated them.
“‘Emma is, after all…….’ Who is she and why isn’t she speaking? She’s so beautiful that it’s hard to find someone like her even in the royal capital.”
“Is Emma, the one with the black parasol, the one who killed Arian?”
Cain instinctively brushed off Oleciren’s question and tilted his head at the unfamiliar name.
Vanderbilt opened his mouth with a hardened face.
“The head maid’s name is Emma.”
“What?”
The three of them turned to look around the castle simultaneously.
The one who made them go to Vanderbilt was her, and she was also the one who was most likely to have killed Arian?
Cain shook his head and said.
“But she’s a commoner.”
“Maybe she used an artifact that causes a heart attack.”
“Artifacts don’t come cheap, and the head maid wouldn’t be carrying one around just to kill a single maid.”
“What if it’s worth the price?”
“…….”
Oleciren seemed to have guessed something.
“So, who is this woman with purple eyes? She’s obviously not an ordinary person, and the two of you know her right away, so she must be someone important.”
Cain’s short answer.
“My mother.”
Oleciren’s jaw dropped.
She wondered if she had made a slip of the tongue.
“Let’s go. Let’s see what the head maid Emma has to say this time.”
They came as two, but they left as three.
The three of them rushed to the room where they had just met the head maid, and they opened the door.
Clank━.
We shall renew the world with our flames.
A note fell, and just as Cain was about to pick it up, it flared up━ and disappeared.
Inside, the chair.
The head maid Emma, who had been talking lively just a moment ago, was dead with blood on her lips.
Cain examined the small glass bottle in her hand.
“Poison.”
Oleciren used her witch’s power to examine Emma’s room and shook her head with a bitter expression.
“She drank it right after we left and died.”
The witch’s power, which she used in the underground library and on the forest path.
“I just realized that Her Highness can see the past.”
Vanderbilt’s thick voice.
Cain turned to Oleciren.
“Did you tell anyone?”
She shook her head violently.
“Never, I would be called crazy. Isoel only knows that I have powers, but she doesn’t know that I can do this.”
Cain stroked his chin and pondered.
“But the head maid knew we were coming to see her and committed suicide. How did she know?”
Cain began to search the room.
The head maid Emma had worked at the Count Ethelred’s house for at least decades, so there must be some trace of her in this room.
The three of them began to search for traces of Emma.
But there were none.
Oleciren glanced at Emma’s dead body and sighed.
“There’s nothing here, it’s strange.”
“I couldn’t find anything either. It’s as if someone carved it out, it’s very clean.”
Cain closed his mouth and stared at the body.
‘Is it possible for a space where someone has lived for decades to be devoid of any traces of that person?’
It is possible.