Sweet Romance12 min read
A Green Jade, a Divorce Paper, and the General Who Came at Night
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I was scrubbing the sweat and the fever from his mother's skin when the messenger handed me the thin silk note.
"Where is my husband?" I asked before I opened it.
"The master waits in the front hall," the servant said.
I folded the wet towel, smoothed a lock of hair from my brow, and went.
Eldon Blanc's family was one of those old names that should have meant comfort. Instead it offered me a single cold paper. We had never shared a bed—people whispered the reasons that made sense for men who left and came back—but we had been married in law and name. I had tended to his mother for three years. I had paid for the house's small comforts with the hours from my father's bean-cake stall and the grit of my own hands.
Now there was a divorce, waiting for my finger to press and bind us.
Eldon stood on the stone steps in a white mantle. He scanned my hands—red with the work of caring for an old body—and his face showed neither pity nor triumph.
"You understand why," he said.
"I do," I answered, and then I asked the thing that troubled me more than my pride. "If you can send a paper to dismiss me, do you owe me a reason?"
He shrugged. "A divorce is a divorce. What reason do you need?"
I leaned forward and spread my chapped palms. "You could not pay for servants. Your mother grew ill, and I washed and fed her for three years. You cannot say I was idle, nor can I leave my father's shop to starve."
Eldon looked at his long-time attendant. "Six—bring papyrus and ink."
The hand that took the seal moved with an old ease. When the man read aloud the form Eldon had written—distant, starch-stiff words that called our match "mismated" and wished me "happiness and a prudent second marriage"—the attendant smiled like a man who had done a piece of neat work.
"Put your thumb," Eldon said casually. "It binds."
"I won't press a mark on a paper without knowing what it is," I said.
"You think I would trick you?" he sneered.
"You didn't tell me you would divorce me when my father married me off," I replied. "We were both made to fit a shape."
Eldon paused as if he'd been pricked. For a second his eyes softened—then the wind in the courtyard pulled his attention elsewhere.
"Fine," he said. "Sign. Go pack. Make me no trouble."
I collected what I could—two laborers who had come with my dowry, a few dresses, the folded things that had been all I had. I curtsied, said "Thank you," and walked away.
At home my father, Sergio Ewing, shook his head and said, "Your dowry was small. Their family took it badly." He went back to kneading bean paste at the stall. The city smelled of steaming buns and rain. My neck bore a faint red bruise I could not explain: the memory of an old dream where someone hanged me on a sour-jujube tree.
Two nights after I came back to the narrow lane, a stranger with a dirty cloth over his face stared into my bowl while I ate. He accepted the hot soup without a word and then, as if pulled by some cruelty, pulled a knife and stabbed one of my young helpers.
I screamed. "Who are you?" I shouted.
"A messenger," he said. "You should be dead, you life."
Before he could move, a shadow fell over the doorway. A man in soiled black cloth moved like a knife. He came forward, took one step, and before I had time to make sense, his blade rose and cut. The slasher's head tumbled into the cooking pot like a thing discarded. The stranger who had stabbed my helper collapsed a moment later, bleeding from many wounds.
"One meal paid back," the man murmured.
He faltered and went down. I crouched at his side and, with trembling fingers, ripped the filthy cloth away.
A face like none I had seen: pale as bone, with green eyes that shone like pools. The man had a deep gash in his leg, and a hard name written on a small jade pendant: a single carved letter, like a family claim. I wrapped his leg and worked until dawn. He breathed shallowly and often cursed the pain.
"Who are you?" I whispered.
"Call me whatever keeps you safe," he said. "Do not name me and spill danger."
He slept and then woke and smiled at me for a single, dangerous moment.
"What's that on your neck?" he asked, nodding at my old bruise.
"A dream," I said. "A bad one. I won't let it be true."
He said nothing, yet from then on we watched each other. I tended his wound with honey and with ragged care. The wound was a ruin of rot and worms—no one without a steady hand could salvage the leg. I used sugar and an old grandmother's trick and cleaning, and the man blinked at me like a person remembering warmth.
"You're cruel," he said one time, when I placed maggots to pick the dead. "Maggots."
"They clean," I said.
"You'd do that to anyone."
"You almost stabbed my helper," I said.
"Small price," he whispered. "You feed me. I return the favor."
We argued. He slept. I kept watch. The pendant's carved letter matched a name I would soon learn to cherish: Alejandro Christian.
Days later, men in fine clothes appeared at my stall and whispered that I had been taken up by the county register for the palace's drafting list. An official, Joel Carter, came to me at midnight and shoved a paper and a bowl of coins toward me.
"Your husband wishes you to have this," he said. "The house will provide shelter."
I lifted the cloth that covered the basket and, with no thought, kicked aside the straw—and a human head rolled out.
"Take it to his house," I said. "Tell him this is the courtesy he paid me."
Joel's eyes widened as if he'd seen a ghost. Yet he took it and went. Even then, a foolish hope, a tiny corner of the mind still expected Eldon—at least some man—to move.
He did not.
When I moved into the small house Eldon supplied, I found Alejandro half-dead and wearing a pendant that, when I read the carved letter, said he was not the vagabond they thought. He was a soldier who had lost much and kept more. He had been the man who saved my life, and he was still alive by my hands.
"I will not be a widow," I told him one night. "Not for you. Not for anyone."
"You would marry me when I am half a ruin," he said. "A man with a rotten leg."
"I will not be tossed aside again," I said. "Sign with blood. Bind me."
I forced a scrap of paper and pricked his finger. He pressed his mark, then laughed low and raw.
"You are daring," he said. "A wife who binds by blood. Keep your knife out at night."
When the palace's blue-clad eunuchs came with questions about me being called to the capital, I pretended we were married. I performed the small half-lies a person stitches to survive. I braided myself into a picture: a proper wife of a proper house.
That was when the danger turned like a blade. The county lady—Claudia Crawford—had eyes that wanted to strip the world and keep it for herself. She had once been the favorite of a more powerful mistress, and the way she looked at me was all claim. She wrote my name on lists meant for the imperial selection. Men came to our gate. One night, Leonard, one of the killers hired by her, threw a net. Guards arrived because Alejandro's men had ears everywhere. The county lady's shadow fell across the courtyard. She smiled like frost.
Eldon came back to the city at last, wetter than I had seen him before, humbly pleading and oddly bright with power.
"I came to find you," he said in the rain. "I want to bring you back."
"Why?" I asked.
He told a story of position, of an office that could buy dignity, of a soft throne he had been given. "I have power now," he said. "Return to me."
"Would you have killed the woman who sent men for me?" I asked.
He looked away. "Complicated matters," he said.
Complicated until the day the county lady bustled into the long hall at a meeting with ministers. The argument between war and supply was into its second day. Alejandro had come to speak with the generals. I sat to the side, because a wife is not supposed to take the floor where affairs of state are dealt with. But someone had left a door ajar.
Claudia Crawford came in like a silk storm, bright and defiantly cruel. Her retinue bent around her like a tide of gossip. She threw a thin hand at Eldon and sneered. "You pitied her, did you? You kept her while she fed the old and served your bed? She would be nothing without a husband's name."
"It is false," Eldon said quietly.
"I saw her with a general," she said loudly. "Isn't that a scandal? A woman owns a general's coin and a general's nights."
The hall stilled.
"Enough!" Alejandro said like thunder.
He stepped forward. He did not raise his voice. He did not shout. He walked like a blade going to its edge.
"Silence," Eldon said in a voice that was not his before, not the man who had pushed me away. "You have terrorized this house. You have used death as a favor and called it mercy."
"Traitor!" Claudia screamed. "You will not—"
Eldon moved, calm as breath. He drew a slender ceremonial blade he kept hidden—one meant for pageant, not murder—and with a motion that made the whole room gasp, he cut a clean line across Claudia's throat.
For a moment time stopped. A hush fell like a curtain.
"Claudia!" the women shrieked.
Her face turned from color to shocked white. Then, as she bled, her expression passed from triumph to shining horror. She clutched at Eldon. "You cannot—" she rasped. "You cannot do this in front of men, in front of the ministers."
"Do you not remember the bodies?" Eldon said. "The head in the pot, the knives sent for a woman who tended a poor man's stall? You sent men to kill children to prove your power. You hid gifts in your sleeves. That is how you burned us."
She laughed, at first a thin clipping sound. "I gave them justice," she crooned. "If only you had the wit to—
"You lied to the crown," Eldon said. "You made lists with names meant to vanish in the night. You sold people for favors."
"Do you have proof?" she cried, ragebrandishing like a weapon.
Eldon pointed with the tip of his blade toward the eunuch Joel. "Speak."
Joel stepped forward, pale as paper, and recited the names and the letters, the receipts they had found—the list of contracts that tied her to murders, the sealed messages the couriers had failed to burn, the gold that had passed hands with blood-stains under it.
At first she smiled as if a public performance could still be salvaged. Then her lips trembled. She reached for her retinue—and her attendants moved away, faces draining. One by one, his old allies flinched and then placed small distance between themselves and her.
"You will not—" she sputtered. "You cannot take my honor."
A murmur rose in the hall. Men began to speak and point, then fall silent when they saw Eldon's steady face and Alejandro's dark gaze. Servants pulled out scrolls and began to read out transactions and witness statements that matched Joel's murmured recital.
"Look," Eldon said in a voice that now had a cold light like a winter blade. "The market knows your name for the deaths. The cooks know your coins for keeping silence. Enough."
She shifted from denial to rage to fear in the space of a breath. Her eyes went wild. "You lie!" she screamed. "You all lie! I—I'll call the guard—"
A clerk in the corner laughed low, then loudly, and other sounds followed: a gasp, a whispered "filthy," then the sharp click of fingers pointing film officers toward her. People in the hall began to take out small knots of cord and thin strips of paper; the courtyard filled with the rustle of hands drawing up evidence.
Her mouth fell still. She looked as if she had been asked to swallow glass.
"Take her away," Alejandro said.
The guards moved in, but Claudia's throat had been cut, and she clutched at blood with her fingers. Her face went pale. She tried to maintain her breath by a grimace; her eyes shone wet. "I—" she whispered. "I am—"
At that, a woman from the back—one of those who had once bowed to Claudia—turned and spat. "You were a hawk among sparrows," she said. "You ate children to make your nest. We watched."
"Shame!" someone shouted.
Claudia's world contracted into the slur of those words. She had thought power would protect her—until the people who benefited from her charity turned and found their mouths too crabbed to hold her. The murmurs turned to an open chorus. Someone took out a small mirror and held it to her, the same mirror she had used to smooth her face when she walked among judges. She saw herself, and in the mirror she saw the red running down her chin.
"Help me!" she begged, voice thin and wavering.
No one moved to help.
Her attendants stepped back as if burned. A scribe drew near with a ledger and began to write her crimes, loudly, to make sure the whole hall heard each accusation given weight by ink and schedule. Someone in the crowd even snapped a crude picture with a metal plate—a way to reduce the moment to a token for later shame.
She shifted now to bargaining. "I will give land. I will give coin." She named names and titles like offerings.
"Too late," Eldon said. "You broke what cannot be fixed."
By then the ministers had decided: she would not stand a trial of whispers that could be controlled. The hall had become the judge and the jury and the public, and in that vegetation of accusation she was the thing left to rot. Men in the back who had watched her grow fat with corruption now turned away. The county lady who had believed herself untouchable was reduced to a wheezing body on the floor.
"How did you come to this?" someone in the crowd asked, partly in wonder, partly in scorn.
Eldon looked at the bleeding woman with a shame that was less for his act than for the necessity of it. "You made me choose between letting her live to kill more, or ending it now and lighting the truth," he said. "This is the way of the world we have left. I choose truth."
The crowd's voice rose and broke into a dissonant applause and then a long bitter silence. Some cheered, feeling clean at the stain lifted. Some wept for what had been destroyed. People pulled out knives and ribbons and bit their tongues to see if the taste had changed from before. Phones did not exist; instead, there were quick hands and faces that would tell the story in every corner of the market by nightfall.
Claudia's reaction swung like a pendulum: at first fury, then denial, bargaining, then pleading. Finally she became small. People watched and whispered; some raised fingers in blessing, others spat. A child laughed as blood dribbled on the floor. A woman stepped forward and spat a brown piece of herb onto the red floor.
Claudia gasped. Her eyes searched for shelter and found none. She tried to strike Eldon. He stepped back. Alejandro covered his mouth with a clenched fist as he watched the woman die. Eldon's face had lost its softness. He looked older, carved out by a cruelty he had wanted to avoid.
When she died, there was a muted intake. Someone patted me on the shoulder. No one cheered. The air smelled of iron and damp wood. The hall would remember the scene in quiet ways. The ministers would file it away as a necessary brutality. I would remember how someone I had loved—once—had cut a throat to save many.
When it was done, I found myself both hollow and lit up with a feral kind of relief. I sat on the edge of a bench and heard the ministers talk about men and guns and grain as if nothing had been burned at their feet. Alejandro slid into the bench beside me and kept his hand close to mine.
"You did what you had to do," he said simply.
"I had to survive it," I whispered.
He did not answer, but his fingers found mine and squeezed.
That hall changed a great number of things. For the first time, I saw Eldon with a kind of clarity: cruel, decisive, capable of killing for the world he was afraid to lose. I saw Alejandro differently too: not a monster, not a saint, but a man who took wounds into himself and could lift his sword to settle accounts.
After that night, we moved south. Alejandro gave me gold and fabric and an offer to be taken to Chen County, where he claimed his family had a name buried under reclamation, and I, still stubborn, said I would go if he promised to take my father too.
"You are asking me to bring you and an old man into war," he said.
"I am asking you to promise," I said.
He clenched his jaw, then softened. "I promise," he said finally.
We married with a thin page of silk and a thumbprint on a scrap of paper. We kept the jade pendant—the green stone with the letter he had worn—and tied it to my waist. I wore his hair lock braided inside my own. He left for the north with men, and I stayed to feed the army with bean cakes and salted preserves. We were both doing the practical things that come when people try to make a life: we made lists, orders, and a small iron routine. We wrote to each other with thrift and hunger, and he always, always signed in a shorthand that meant he would return.
When the last winter came and the great banners went down, I walked once to the sour-jujube tree in my small yard. I stood beneath its bare branches and touched the green jade hidden in my sleeve.
I had been a woman who waited for a man to choose mercy. Instead I learned what it meant to be chosen by decisions—some terrible, some tender—that left marks. I had a divorce paper folded in the drawer. I kept it. Sometimes, late at night, when the house was quiet and the jade warmed in my palm, I pressed a thumb to the paper and remembered a courtyard, a white mantle, and a blade.
I had survived being signed away like an invoice and had been given a new life with a soldier who smelled like iron and old herbs. There were still nights when I dreamed of being hanged, and there were mornings when Alejandro returned with a new scar and laughed at my cooking.
"Will you stay?" he asked once, looking at me like he wanted to keep the world in an hourglass.
"I will," I said, "if you will keep your promise when the world tries to take me in pieces."
He lowered his face and kissed the mark above my collarbone—the bruise that used to pulse with the memory of a noose. "I never wanted you to hang on my hands," he said, "I vowed to hold you down when the world tried. That is my oath."
I held his hand back. We had much to pay for and a longer war to survive. But beneath the sour-jujube tree, with a green jade and a thumbprint that tied a divorce into a history, I understood that living sometimes meant answering a cruelty with a sharp, certain blade—and then setting down the pieces with care.
The End
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