Sweet Romance11 min read
A Princess, a General, and the Peach Tree Promise
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I remember the drought like a dry mouth that never found water.
"Have you heard?" Spring—my maid, Jazlyn—whispered as she braided my hair. "Refugees crowd the borders. Everyone says the roads are full of dust and hunger."
"I have heard," I said. "What else?"
"There's a new general in the capital. Alejandro White. They say he is fierce, and his family is old and proud."
"Is that so?" I laughed. "A general? How dull. Does he smile?"
"He smiles at little things," Jazlyn said, then quieted when I looked up.
That afternoon I forced myself out of the palace. I walked until the training field opened before me like an oath.
"Every drop of sweat today matters!" Alejandro shouted at the men. "A soldier who trains soft will stand soft on the battlefield. Practice your feet. Practice your heart."
"That's the man?" my brother Callum—always blunt—asked, as we watched.
"He's handsome," I said, then quickly shook my head. "Not to worry."
Callum laughed. "Ida, do not play coy. You are the princess. Go look."
I did. I watched him command the training ground with such calm that my chest tightened. I thought, For a man who fights so well, his hands are steady even in softness.
"Princess, he looks like a proper general," Callum teased later as we walked the gardens.
"Do you like him?" I asked him.
"What? Me? No. You?" He grinned.
"I am not married yet, am I?" I said, and we both pretended the subject did not matter.
The drought left people hungry. One morning, the emperor—my father—called the court.
"Who will pay?" the emperor asked.
"I will," I said before I could stop myself. I felt every pair of eyes on me like rain on a dry roof.
"A woman intervening?" one old minister scoffed.
"I am the princess," I said. "Allow me to help."
The hall held its breath. Then Alejandro stepped forward.
"Your Majesty," he said, steady and clear, "I will help the princess. I will lend the men and the loyalty of my house."
"Then you three will supervise relief," the emperor declared. "Ida, Callum, Alejandro—do not disappoint me."
We did not. We set up shelters and shared grain. When the refugees had roofs and rough food, I found myself watching Alejandro again. He tended the sick with a gentle hand and talked to them as if they were old friends.
"You're always so busy," I told him once by the gate.
"We must do what we can," he said. "The people are why we train."
"You are kinder than you seem on the field."
He looked at me like a man who kept a small joy in his chest. "And you are braver than you let on."
That tiny exchange made my heart flip. The first small flutter. He had never smiled at me like that before.
Then one night the worst thing happened. Someone tried to scare me in my rooms. I woke to small snakes and insects. I screamed.
"Help!" I did not say it long. Alejandro heard me—he always seemed to hear where I was—and rushed in.
"Ida!" he shouted.
I leaped into his arms without thinking. "Get them out! Get them away!" I cried, and the next thing I knew I was pressed against him, pulse and breath thudding.
"Stay still," he said, and for a moment he was only concern. Later he told me the snakes had bit him. He held my hand while his face paled and his vision blurred. I watched him faint and felt a fierce, hot panic.
"Call a doctor!" I screamed.
When the doctor finished and left, Alejandro woke with my face inches away.
"I told you I like you," he said, hazy and honest.
"You said that?" I whispered. My mind jumped like a bird.
"I did," he repeated. "I want to ask you properly."
We laughed at how badly he formed the words the next morning; we laughed when he tried and failed to be stoic. We argued playfully, and he saved me again. Two heartbeats: a hand on my back when a storm frightened me, a finger brushing sugar from my lip at the lantern market.
We were married soon after he asked the emperor for me right on his knees in the hall.
"Father," I said, and felt something like a bell ring in my chest when my father nodded. Callum looked at me with that old protective fire. Alejandro bowed and then stood as my husband.
"Promise me one thing," I teased him later.
"What?" he asked.
"Protect me, no matter what," I said.
"I will," he promised, and I felt the warmth of that vow like a blanket.
We made our peach tree the place to meet. He planted it by the small stream of his childhood valley and we watched its pink flowers each spring. One of my happiest moments: him taking my hand under the petals and promising to be mine.
Three heartbeats: the morning he wrapped his cloak around my shoulders when the wind bit; the small, secret smile he gave me over a crowded table when no one else noticed; the light, careful way his fingers touched mine as we walked.
Then the war came. The prince of the neighboring country—Jagger Denis—raised his banner. He wanted to hurt us for pride. Alejandro and Callum rode out to command the troops. I stayed and prayed, small and sharp.
"Go," I told him at the gate. "I will wait."
"I will return," he said, his voice very quiet.
The battle was a whirlwind. Alejandro captured Jagger's token and brought him bound to our court. The emperor rewarded them. He made Alejandro lord of a district and praised him before everyone. I was proud beyond words.
Then the home calamity. My husband's parents were killed in the night—murdered in the valley we had known only as our private place. I remember Alejandro arriving with his face a mask of ice.
"Who did this?" he said. His voice broke when he saw them.
They found a hairpin in the mother's hand—my hairpin, the one my mother had given me. It was a trick so sharp that the world tilted.
"Ida," Alejandro said later, voice low, "this hairpin—where did you place it?"
"I never left it," I told him. "I keep it hidden. I did not kill them."
But Brianna Barlow—Alejandro’s sister—stood and pointed at me like a blade.
"You were not here," she cried. "You were far from home that night. You had motive. You have the hairpin. You should be judged."
"Stop it," I said. "Brianna—"
"You are lying," she spat.
Alejandro folded like a man with both love and grief tearing him. He looked at the hairpin, at the place, at me. He had always been so steady. I had expected him to be my rock. Instead he became a man in a storm.
"I will investigate," he promised at last, but mistrust sat between us like a wall. Soon he decided, tired and raw, that it would be best for me to return to the palace. He said he would find the truth.
I left on a cold dawn and the palace welcomed me back with cup of silence. Callum held me. "They have accused you?" he said. I cried. I cried because the man I loved had believed a planted token more quickly than he believed me.
Then they took me.
It was dark when men with foreign armor slipped into my garden. I woke bound and cold in an enemy camp. Jagger Denis stood with a smile like broken glass.
"Princess," he said. "You will help me teach Alejandro a lesson."
He kept me with Brianna for days. Jagger wanted Alejandro to choose: the sister he loved or the woman he wed. He wanted to humiliate Alejandro in front of everyone and make him prove where his loyalties lay.
"I will never make him choose like that," I said. "This is cruelty."
Brianna watched me. Her eyes had something like shame and something like triumph.
"Why?" I asked her once, quietly in the dark. "Why would you hurt them?"
She told me her story—short and jagged. "They loved you, Ida. They forgot me. When I asked, I was pushed aside. You walked into my house and took everything."
"I am sorry," I said. "I never wanted your pain."
She laughed the laugh of someone who has already decided the shape of the world. That night she left for the guards and did not come back to me.
Alejandro came.
He fought like someone burning. He found me by the tree where I had waited alone outside the inn. He took a sword for a blow that would have killed me and bled for the vow we had. His chest opened and he still pulled me close.
"You are safe," he said, voice raw. "I was a fool. I let grief speak before fact."
"Then do not let the blade of doubt cut again," I whispered, and I meant it. He took me back.
We returned to the capital. Alejandro carried proof—a torn letter, a watchman's word, a shopkeeper who had seen me waiting outside the inn. He had found the thread that showed Brianna's men had burned the letter she used to trick him. He had also discovered money sent to the killer from Jagger Denis’s agent.
We did what the court loved most—we made a scene.
I stood in the grand hall. Alejandro stood beside me. Callum stood at my left. The emperor sat like a slow sun, watching.
"Bring her forward," Alejandro said.
Brianna walked in, white as porcelain but hard like stone.
"You accused the princess," Alejandro said, voice low. "You put a hairpin into a corpse's hand. You hired killers."
"No—" she started, and then she tried to pull the lie out and wear it like armor.
"I have letters," Alejandro said, and he raised them. "I have witnesses. You paid a man to set the trap. Do you deny it?"
Her face shifted: from surprise to forced pride, then to fear, then to fury. She tried to laugh. "You brought nothing!" she said, but her voice trembled. "You—"
"Bring the man who took the money," Alejandro said.
They brought him. He was small and pale. He stared at the hall packed with courtiers and common folk. Alejandro's men had already searched his room and found the coins and the knife. The man folded like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
"You traitor," the man muttered, then his fear spilled out. He named names: agents, a messenger, the path the money took. The hall buzzed. Some whispered that Brianna had been jealous. Others spat.
"Is this true?" the emperor asked Brianna.
"I—" she tried to say no.
Then Alejandro walked to the front of the hall, and he pushed the papers and the proof onto the low table.
"You wanted to ruin my household to make room," he said to Brianna. "You thought murder would break us. You thought I would choose you after your cruelty. You were wrong."
She laughed a brittle laugh. "I loved you!"
"You loved an idea of him," Alejandro said, very softly. "Not the man himsel—"
"Shut up!" she screamed. Her voice cracked between laughter and a sound like a broken thing.
"Enough," the emperor said. "This is a palace matter. We will hold judgment publicly. No closed rooms. Let the city decide."
The hall doors opened. People streamed in—traders, soldiers, servants, neighbors, all hungry for truth. The emperor wished for an example as much as justice.
This is the punishment scene. I will tell it slowly so you can feel the turning of her face as she falls.
They put bullhorns on the square by the market. The noon sun burned low and bright. The city had never seen a dishonor like this from such a gentle house. Alejandro stood tall even as his chest healed. Callum stood proud like a steel pillar. I stood with a small cloth in my hand—for a charm—because even in this storm, I could not be without hope.
Brianna was led out. She wore a plain robe. Her hands were bound. She kept her chin high despite it all.
"Who saw this woman plot?" Alejandro called.
A dozen hands rose. A servant from the valley spoke of the hairpin. A stableboy spoke about strange men at night. The man who took the money confessed in the open square. The sound swelled—voices like rain on metal.
"Why did you do it?" a woman asked from the crowd, voice small but clear.
"For love!" Brianna shouted. "For attention! For the life I deserved!"
"Love does not mean killing," Callum said. "Love does not mean murder."
"They will see the truth in front of everyone," the emperor had commanded. "Let the city judge the cruelty. Let the shame be seen."
Then Alejandro did something no man had asked him to do—he told stories about Brianna's youth. He remembered when she learned to tie her shoes, when she laughed with a small, sharp grin, when their parents doted on her. He showed people what had been good in her life. It made the crowd hush, like wind dropping before thunder.
"And yet," he said, "that does not excuse what she did."
They brought forth the killers—men who had been paid. The crowd gasped when they saw the knife with the emperor's crest stamped on the blade. Brianna’s shoulders seemed to shrink.
"You thought you could replace kindness with fear," I said, voice steady. "You thought anguish would bind him to you. But cruelty never covers hunger—it only leaves a deeper hole."
Brianna's reaction moved through stages then. At first she was defiant—"I did all this for him!"—then she was deflated when the money counted against her. Her eyes searched Alejandro's face and found no mercy. She bargained—pleaded—then tried denial. Finally, as the weight of witnesses and proof pressed in, she began to crumble.
"Forgive me," she whispered, but her voice was thin and useless in the square.
The punishment the emperor set was public and symbolic. He ordered Brianna to stand in the center of the market while the people passed judgment. She would be made to publicly apologize, and then she would be removed of all honors—her titles stripped—and forced to hand over her holdings to the families she had harmed as restitution. She would be banished from the house that had raised her. She would be paired with armies of labor to rebuild the houses damaged by the scheme.
"Is that enough?" a man shouted.
"It is not enough," Brianna wailed. "It is always not enough!"
The crowd watched as she read her apology aloud. Her voice broke on each word. Some spat. Some cried. A few clapped—not in praise, but in the raw way crowds clap for any drama. Children pointed. Old women said, "It is justice."
Her change was visible. At first she refused to look at me. Then her gaze, frantic and searching, found me. Her eyes said all the words she could not speak. She mouthed, I am sorry. I am sorry. A soldier pushed her forward and a crowd member—an old woman whose house had been saved by Alejandro in the flood months before—shouted, "Confess! Tell them all your lies!"
Brianna began to tell more. Under the pressure, she named the man she hired and the messenger who had run the money. She cried and described how she had thought she could force a family to fold to her will. The crowd listened. Some shook their heads. Some looked at Alejandro and saw the cost of justice in his face.
A few children played on the rim of the square, oblivious. A baker dropped his basket and rushed to the front—he had lost a sister to the chaos of those nights. He paced in front of Brianna and cried, "You took my sister! You fed her fear and left her cold!" People murmured. A seamstress spat and then wept.
When the judge finished reading the sentence, Brianna was led away with a small parcel of the hairpin and the knife pinned on a board—symbols of her guilt. The crowd followed for a time, hissing and judging. Some called for harsher punishment. A few begged for mercy.
What moved me most was the change in Brianna's eyes. She had gone through denial to pleading, then to shame, and finally to a hollow, raw understanding. She did not die in public, nor was she led as a spectacle to be tormented forever. The emperor forbade cruelty. He wanted shame and restitution, not blood revenge.
The next day, Alejandro returned to me and said, "I have given them justice that the city will remember. I have not destroyed her beyond return because hatred would eat me alive."
"Was it enough?" I asked.
"For the city, perhaps," he said. "For my heart, not yet. But it is a start."
We also punished Jagger Denis publicly in a different way. He was stripped of ranks and forced to witness his agent's humiliation. He returned to his country shamed and without the token of rule for a time, because the emperor demanded his penance through diplomatic loss. That was a different kind of ruin—his pride taken, his plans unmade. His rage was private and his threats hollow after that.
After the public shaming, life was not the same. People who had stood in the square spoke of the day the princess stood under sunshine and did not fall. Alejandro and I cleared the debris of our life together—mistrust, grief, and fear. We fixed the peach tree in the yard, tied new ribbons to its branches, and planted a new row of small seedlings where the false fires had burned.
My chest had learned to breathe again. Alejandro learned that sorrow and truth must be held together like two hands. Callum learned that sometimes swords do more harm than words. Brianna left, broken but alive, to rebuild a life anywhere but next to us. She married into a quieter fate later with Callum's blessing, surprising all of us when choice and kindness finally found their way.
Months later, the city settled, and the peach tree bloomed the way a promise kept its bloom. Alejandro taught the new recruits with a gentler hand. "Good soldiers first," he would say, "are good humans."
"I will plant another tree," I told him one spring.
"You already have one," he said, smiling. "But plant another, if you wish. More trees mean more promises."
"I wish for one thing now," I said, leaning my head against his shoulder. "Keep this city safe. Keep our people fed."
"I will," he whispered, and he kissed the parting line of my hair where the hairpin lay safe inside my chest. The peach tree shed a pink petal. It fell on my palm like a small, steady heartbeat, and I said thank you into the quiet.
The End
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