Evelyn Rosetta's Past (2)
Morning in the Rosetta household began with the sword.
I was out on the training grounds before the sun rose, repeating the basic forms until my palms split open. After breakfast came imperial history, territorial law, and military maps. In the afternoons I studied social etiquette and dance, the tangled interests between houses, and how to tell when the tea had been poisoned.
None of it was work for a ten-year-old. In the Rosetta duchy, it was simply expected.
“The West does not wait for children,” Edrick had said.
Edrick Rosetta.
The Sword of the Western Empire.
And one of the five living Sword Masters.
His name had appeared a few times in the original novel—always as the villainess’s father, the dangerous duke who held the western military, the old-fashioned noble who fell protecting his daughter’s crimes. That was the sum of it.
The man I actually faced could not be reduced to those lines.
When he stood on the training grounds, the knights’ breathing changed. Without a word of command their feet aligned; the hands gripping wooden swords tightened. The title of Sword Master did not simply mean he was good with a blade.
It meant a single man’s silence carried the weight of a fortress wall. It was why the imperial family needed the Rosettas, and why the Temple, for all its arrogance in the West, still tread carefully at the threshold of the Rosetta ducal house.
Every answer stood before me each dawn, wooden sword in hand.
At first I thought the talk was exaggeration—strict noble education, a device to emphasize the sword-house setting. I dismissed it lightly.
Less than a month later I understood.
The West truly did not wait.
Beyond the ducal walls every carriage carried the smell of dust and blood. Knights returning from the ramparts were always injured somewhere; the infirmary never emptied.
Farmers torn open by monsters. Soldiers back from border skirmishes. Commoners who could not afford Temple healing fees and so knocked on Rosetta’s door. All of it had been background scenery in the original, dismissed in a few lines.
The Western Front.
The monster calamity.
The military power of House Rosetta.
Inside those short words, people lived.
And died.
I learned that truth far too early.
“Young lady.”
From one side of the grounds Noah Berg corrected my stance. He was a young sub-commander of the Rosetta Knights, a character who barely appeared in the original. Short brown hair, a gruff face. Rough-mouthed, but with good eyes.
“Your wrist is too high. Thrust like that and you’ll catch on the opponent’s ribs.”
“Is it normal to talk about ribs so casually to a ten-year-old?”
Noah paused.
“Hmm. If the young lady starts acting like a ten-year-old, I’ll reconsider.”
I adjusted my grip on the wooden sword.
“Insolent.”
“I learned it from His Grace.”
Noah smiled lightly.
My mouth almost curved upward before I forced it down. Evelyn Rosetta did not smile easily—at least not in front of people. Noah, of course, caught the flicker.
“You’ve changed a little lately.”
The tip of my sword stilled.
“Changed how.”
“Your speech. Your eyes.”
“Children grow.”
“That old-soul way of talking, too. If a child grows that much in a single month, we ought to call a physician.”
Is that so? Kids shoot up fast, don’t they? And in Evelyn’s case, she’d overheard plenty already. Nothing strange about it.
I looked at Noah steadily.
He spoke like it was a joke, but his eyes were serious. Rosetta people were sharp. Those who survived the front lines reacted to the smallest shifts. I had to admit I was being noticed more than I thought.
“Noah.”
“Yes.”
“If I’ve changed, is that a problem?”
Noah was silent a moment.
Then he rested the wooden sword across his shoulder.
“As long as the young lady does not betray Rosetta, there is no problem.”
“Then we’re fine.”
“Will you betray us?”
“No. I’m the heir. What would I gain by betraying anyone?”
The answer came more easily than I expected.
At first the family had felt foreign. Father Edrick was frightening; Mother Selena was hard to read; the knights looked at the child me less as a person and more as Rosetta’s successor. But time taught me something else.
Rosetta was cold, yet it never abandoned its own.
They did not turn away soldiers returning from the field. They did not drive out commoners who could not pay for healing. In return they always paid the price in blood and coin. When the Temple and the imperial court spoke of saving the empire, Rosetta stood on the walls with swords drawn and held the line.
I had planned to use this house to survive.
Somewhere along the way I also wanted to stop it from falling. Whether that was because it was mine now, or because it had always been Evelyn’s, I still did not know.
The boundary blurred faster than I expected.
At first I tried to see everything as calculation. Edrick was a shield for survival. Selena was a teacher I could use in high society. Noah was a convenient instructor for swordsmanship. Draw those lines, I thought, and I would not be shaken.
People, however, refused to move like chess pieces.
Edrick spoke little, yet every time I collapsed he lowered the next day’s training intensity by the smallest degree. Selena smiled coolly while commissioning new gloves that actually fit my hands. Noah made insolent remarks, drove me harder on the days I overreached, then deliberately missed with the final strike.
None of them were good at tenderness.
Still those clumsy kindnesses piled up day after day. At some point the fall of House Rosetta stopped being a novel’s plot point and became the deaths of the people who sat across from me at the table.
“Again.”
Noah said.
I raised the sword.
This time I closed without hesitation. I killed the distance with my toes, dropped my wrist, and aimed the thrust first at his right knee. Noah caught it on his wooden blade, but I was already flowing into the next motion.
The body was becoming mine.
A little girl’s body.
A villainess’s body.
A swordsmanship genius’s body.
At first all of it had felt like someone else’s clothes—too small, too light, too strange. Day after day of gripping the sword taught me otherwise. The body is honest. No matter what I thought, it moved as much as I trained and learned as much as I was hurt.
Han Seo-jin’s memories still lived inside me.
But the sweat spilled by this body was becoming mine as well.
“Good.”
Noah offered rare praise.
“That one will work in real combat.”
“If the opponent goes easy on me?”
“It works even better if they don’t. The young lady’s sword is not pretty.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“In Rosetta, it is.”
After training I salved my palms and headed for the study. Selena was waiting.
Selena Rosetta.
Evelyn’s mother. In the original she received only a brief mention—dead of illness after her daughter’s fall. The real Selena was no frail woman. Her mind, at least, was sharper than anyone’s.
She sat with a teacup before her.
“Your hands are even worse today.”
“Training ran long.”
“Even so, you must lift the cup with elegance. In society they notice the angle of your fingertips long before they notice the calluses on your palms.”
I took the chair.
“On the Western Front, do we kill monsters with fingertip angles?”
Selena laughed.
“You may not kill monsters that way, but you can certainly kill nobles.”
She spoke lightly, yet the weight beneath the words was different. I would not live only in the West; I would have to learn this too. As Rosetta’s heir, entry into high society was unavoidable.
…Engagements and marriages can wait for later.
From that day I learned two swords.
One for the Western Front.
One for the ballrooms.
How a single sentence could shake a house. How a smile could pierce an opponent’s weakness. The art of refusing an invitation, of forging an alliance, of killing a rumor or giving it life.
Selena’s lessons left me more breathless than the training grounds.
With a sword, at least the direction was clear. You read where the opponent thrust, which foot carried the weight, how open the wrist was. Society’s blades were invisible. An insult dressed as praise. A rumor slipped out under the guise of concern. A single careless omission from a guest list that gnawed at a family’s dignity.
I was caught more than once at the beginning.
Because my hand rose a fraction late to the teacup, I heard, “She still has that western manner.” Because I stepped half a beat early in dance practice, I received the non-laugh of “Grip a sword too long and a young lady loses her line.”
Each time Selena did not shield me. Instead, in the carriage home, she asked,
“What did you miss?”
I had to answer through clenched teeth.
That was how I learned.
Malice always arrived wearing a smile. And the name of villainess could, at times, be a far more honest shield than those smiling faces.
Selena said,
“Evelyn. People fear a villainess.”
I set down the teacup.
“…Mother. Are you telling me to become one?”
“If necessary.”
Her eyes curved gently.
“But remember this. The name of villainess is like a scabbard. It can hide the blade, or frighten people before the blade is even drawn. Wear it too long, however, and it fuses to your flesh.”
When I heard those words, I could not smile.
I already knew the future in which that name would fuse to my skin.
That night I opened the original novel’s notes again.
Evelyn’s execution.
I stared at the line for a long time. At first it had been nothing more than an ending I wanted to avoid. Now more names clung to it.
Fall of House Rosetta.
Edrick’s death.
Selena’s death by illness.
Collapse of the Western Front.
Noah missing.
The original never detailed these things after the main couple’s happy ending. Readers closed the book on the crown prince and the saintess’s kiss. But the people outside the book would have kept living. Or died.
I picked up the quill.
Avoid the villainess route.
Beneath it I wrote a new line.
Rosetta survives.
Then, after a brief hesitation, I added one more name.
Liana Bell.
My plan to stay clear of the original heroine remained intact. Yet her name appeared far too often in the western reports. Temple pilgrimage lists. Infirmary donation records. Tax ledgers from border villages. The Temple’s hand was already reaching the village where Liana had been born.
“Tsk.”
Earlier than in the original.
I folded the paper.
If I can avoid it, I avoid it.
But if I cannot—
…I move first.
That was the Rosetta way I had learned.