Sweet Romance15 min read
"An Ill-Fated Princess, a Stubborn Companion, and the Choices Between Them"
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I have always known that my life was small and brilliant and brief.
"You're the only one I will ever spoil," my father said once, and he meant it. Garrett Scholz ruled this land with a hand that let nothing shake his will. He gave me everything two kings could buy and all the softness he could find. He called me his "little pearl." He named me Joy when I could not even speak. He made it easy for everyone to think my life would be all music and lacquer and silk.
"You're foolish to let him," Cynthia Yamazaki would mutter at me, but she'd never take a jewel off my neck. She kept the house, smoothed the sheets, boxed my faults with a patience I did not deserve. She called me "porkling" the way mothers call their children by nicknames no one else hears; she meant it as love, and I took it as mine.
"I am not made for long years," the court physician had told my father, years before, with his hands tired and his face drawn. "Twenty, maybe. Twenty at most."
"Then we will make fourteen of those years thunder," my father had sniffed. "We will stuff her life full."
When I was seven, my mother died. She was pretty and something quieter. The palace sighed, and everyone said small things in curt looks, but my father's arms widened around me like the sea—unstoppable. "No grief," he said. "Only Joy." He named me again, made me parades and song and a crown for a girl he knew would not see a full woman.
"It's not a consolation," Cynthia whispered to me once, years later, when my hair ached from too many pins and my sleeves had been re-cut for another festival. "He keeps her so she can't touch anything that might make her mar." She pointed at my hands with the same sternness she pointed at the palace cooks.
"Don't," I scolded. "You're not allowed to scold him. He gave me this."
"That's not the same," she said. "He's an emperor. He gives like someone buying the world. That isn't the same as love."
I pretended to be offended because I didn't like what she suggested I would lose—my delicious, easy reign of being adored. Still, I had a small, secret place where I believed she might be right. I used that tiny, dangerous place to think of things I was never supposed to say.
"You could come outside of the city," I told my father once, more daring than I felt, leaning on him with the lazy weight of royalty. "Let me see the palace gates. Let me see the streets without a shepherd."
"For a day," he granted. "One day if you beg like the pirate you are."
I begged like a pirate, of course. I came to the wedding at the city edges for my sister Margherita Crawford; it was supposed to be a state pageant I could watch without leaving a cushion. I thought to be seen, to eat and go home. The world had a way of tripping me.
"I want to see the garden," I said to Cynthia as we stepped into a stranger's estate. "Is it true that the floods bring lotus from the south? Is it true that the boys there throw fruit at each other?"
"Probably no," Cynthia said, resigned to my mischief. "But you will wander and come back with the estates' secrets, I know you."
I wandered. The garden had paths like silk roads. I drifted to a hedge where the music blurred like silver and I saw a man kneeling, very near a child. The man was startled; the child walked through sun and shadow like a small king.
"Stop!" I cried because I had forgotten about etiquette and because the scene made me burn.
The man flung himself down, and the child, as if pulled by a cord through the air, fell into my skirts, hands clutching like a drowning thing. He buried his face in my robe. He had that soft, child-face that makes spoilable things of us. He smelled like dust and a sweet I could not define—some coastal sugar—and his sobs were quick and small.
"Princess!" a voice snapped somewhere. Faces turned.
I had not thought of what would come next. A man across the garden flung forward like a being with a secret plan. His bow was low. "Prince— your Highness," he began, and I could see the name of his house, the pressed silk on his chest, his pride trembling like a bird.
"He is the son of a concubine of a house," the old man said when he came forward. "This child—" His eyes flicked to me as if burning me with explanation, then crawled back to the child. "—is not for public display."
I raised the boy up because what else could I do? He fit in my arms like a carved thing. "He's just fallen," I said. "I caught him."
The world grew loud around us. Rumors started like moths. The old man called names, said the boy came from a household that traffics in things. Some men crowded; some whispered.
"You will not leave my princess," announced one. "To behold such a thing! The palace will have eyes upon her."
I was barely spared from being a scandal by the old man's cowardice and by my own quick lie. Someone had told him that my father would not stand for slights to me, and he had thought better in a hurry. He patted the child's head as if to inventory him and then, by some boldness or by fear, had him taken to my household.
Sometimes chance becomes a little ladder. This was my ladder.
"We keep him," Cynthia said when I argued to keep the small thing. "You can always be lonely."
"I just wanted to see the hedge," I told her, like a child excusing herself.
The child's name was given to him by my hand later. He had none, not even one to be scrapped on ledgers like a creditor's tally. When I asked what he wanted to be called, his little face folded—there was so much hunger in the simple request. "Give me a name," he said as if he had been told to graduate into someone else's law. "I was never given a name."
So I gave it. "Marcus," I said because it sounded like a spice and a soldier and something that would stay my secret.
Marcus Coelho came into my life like salt in soup. He was small at first, a thin thing with a sharp, sly look in his eyes. In the shelter of my rooms he learned to name birds and to read the careless script the old tutors left about. Nathan Dickson, that gruff little scholar with more fire than mercy, was my father's choice of teacher. Nathan taught me with a kind grin and a ruler he used like an instrument.
"Sit," he would say to us. "History waits."
"History bores me," I would say. "Make it skip."
"Then you skip and fail," he would warn us both. "And then you are asked to kneel in front of men who never learned a book."
Marcus learned fast because he wanted to older people's respect. He learned because I pushed him into the world like a little boat.
"Will you be kind?" I asked him once in the dim of the bedchamber when we both were too tired to put on armor for the day.
"I will be your step in the dark," he said, and I believed him. He used my words to climb.
Years passed as people like years do in palaces: sharp and bright. My coming-of-age was a blaze. Garrett Scholz had me dressed in silk and gold and gave me a ceremony that shut the whole city in light. I pinned pearls to my hair and felt like a queen of a night. People walked the streets lighting lamps and shouting my name like a charm. My father watched me and smiled, the kind of smile that made actors honest in their theatre.
"You're the only one I will ever spoil," he told me again, reaching to lay a heavy crown upon my head.
I was fifteen, then sixteen, then not quite the same as those numbers. I took Marcus with me to the great feast at my elder sister Margherita Crawford's home; he sat near me with a grim little face, and his fit of studying had made him lean and warmer than the boy I first found in the garden.
"How are you, Marcus?" I asked, because I liked to hear him talk.
"Well enough," he replied.
"Have you friends?" I pushed.
"A dozen," he lied in the way of children.
"Good," I said, though I could tell the lie showed a small ache.
There were many small scenes like this—Marcus with his ink on his fingers, Nathan scolding him and me, Cynthia pressing broth into my hands when the wine went to my head. Each day grabbed a small piece of the world and kept it safe or sharp.
Then the courts found their purpose. A great corruption lay coiled like a sleeping snake in the provinces. Men with names like firebrands and a lover's cruelty took money as if it were the sound of waves. Boyd Jensen and his circle sat with greed like an old blanket; they were the men who took more than a fair measure. They brought their daughters and their eye-catching gowns into the palace. Among them moved a woman, smiling like a cat made of silk—Katalina Dawson. She had married up, and where she walked, men miscounted their loyalties.
"Do they think they can bribe fate?" Cynthia spat once in the kitchen, her hands working like wind. "They think themselves bigger than the law."
"Don't worry about it," I said, too small to be the judge in their theatre. Yet when Boyd Jensen's disgrace came, it did not fall kindly.
"Who told him?" I asked Marcus once, because he always saw what I did not.
"Those men kill quietly," he told me. "They are not loud as weather. But someone found a ledger. Ledgers tell the truth. Men who thought themselves clever left their hand in their bowls."
Sometimes power moves as quietly as a tide. My father, who had tolerated much for decades, finally took aim. He struck like thunder. Boyd Jensen was hauled to court and made to stand under the great hall where all could watch. Katalina Dawson, the woman with a silk smile, sat in a seat no one would give her back again.
"This is the day we teach the court to fear greed," my father announced from the dais.
The punishment of Boyd Jensen and Katalina Dawson was not to be a small thing. The charge was large, and Garrett Scholz insisted the punishment be seen by many. He ordered a public reckoning—a spectacle to cleanse the rot for the people and to show the court that no one, not even those wrapped in silk, would hide from the law.
"You cannot take away my name!" Boyd Jensen shouted as the officials placed the ledger on the table and read aloud the receipts and hidden lines. The hall was a sea of faces. "I have served this crown. I have fed armies."
"Your service was of coin," the chief minister said quietly. His voice cut like a blade. "Not of duty."
Katalina's lips trembled as they lifted the seal of accusation. "For thirty years you gave us this comfort," she sang at first, voice like silk trying not to tear. "We were friends of this household. We gave gifts and enjoyed life. You punish us for being gracious?"
"Come now," I called, and because I was the princess the hall all but turned to see me. "Gifts do not come from nothing. Who forked the bread? Whose children starved while you sewed jewels?"
Boyd Jensen's face grew red, a color like the wine he poured into other men's cups. "You are not the judge," he snarled, because he forgot I was the emperor's daughter and thus everyone else's mark of unease.
The minister motioned. They were stripped of titles in a thunderous counterpoint. Men in the galleries called for ropes or for prison. It was decided the law would strike them publicly, and so they were made to run the length of the hall—hands bound, robes stripped to show the plainness beneath. The common folk were allowed to come close. They would be made to sit upon the benches where once they belonged and listen as each accusation was read, as each coin was tallied.
"Behold," the minister called. "See your scales. Hear your numbers. No more fattened houses, no more secret ledgers."
Boyd Jensen tried to bargain, offered names of lesser men who had given him coins in secret, offered rumors and names like someone scattering salt to feed a lost horse. The crowd could see the circle widen until it struck those who had thought themselves outside sight. The humiliation was precise and planned; the purpose was to prevent pity.
"Look at them," a woman in the gallery hissed. "He gilded his table with our taxes."
The sight of Katalina Dawson hearing her name read, the ledger opened upon her life, changed something in the crowd. She had once made men fall with a glance—now men spat and a child cried because this woman had put the bread out of reach.
Katalina's face went from silk to granite. She staggered like a woman remembering how to fall. She had loved power with a lack of mercy. Now power had become a burden for her. "I did what I could to give to your palace's splendour," she whispered, and it sounded like a lie she had told to calm herself.
"A more particular punishment," the minister intoned, "is required to keep the court honest." He ordered them to walk through the market street at midday, with their names and lists tied to their sleeves, to be bought and mocked as their deeds were made plain. They were to lose lands, to be forbidden from entering the capital, and to undergo public appraisals where those they had wronged—those whose children had gone hungry—could spit their grievances.
Boyd Jensen tried to hold the minister's robes. "You will bring my children down!"
"Your children will live by their honest hands," said the minister. "If you had raised them well, you should now be proud. If not, let them learn the cost of greed."
The crowd—the very crowd that had once been kneeling before Boyd and his ilk—had a chance to speak. Old women who had been refused favors stood and named names. Merchants called for restitution. A miller complained he had been taxed into debt. People pelted Boyd and Katalina with rotten apples. The hush of court turned into a rustle of fervor like a storm gathering leaves.
At the end, when it was done, Boyd Jensen found himself in the dark of a cart bound for exile. His face was cracked with shame. Katalina, smaller in her skirts, walked with a step that had no silk. She turned in the doorway and tried, with that old cat's smile, to look the crowd into submission.
"Shame me if you feel," she hissed, "but remember: kings have fast allies and quick forgetfulness."
"Then the people will remember longer than your smile," I said, because I had been there in the gallery and had felt the weight of all the plates piled for comfort while children starved. "And if they forget, their memory will be my counsel."
Cynthia didn't hide her pleasure. "Finally," she said softly, and the manor's stew-pot hissed like praise.
Marcus stood by my side during the spectacle. He had watched the boys and the men in the gallery with a particular sharpness. After, he took my hand as if to anchor both of us.
"They will not forget," he said. "They will never forget that day."
"They will try," I replied. "The memory of one meal seldom feeds a nation."
For months, the court retooled. The sting of public punishment rearranged some loyalties. And life went on: feasts were eaten, old songs sung, and I kept finding Marcus in my rooms with ink-smeared fingers and a serious look that made me want to laugh at him like the world was a child's game.
"Tell me a story," I said once, curling in a window where the light fell soft as cream.
Marcus sat very straight. "Once—" he began.
"Again?" I sighed. I was greedy for small acts. "Make it about someone small who wins something big."
"And what do you say the small must have?" he asked.
"Poison," I said, smiling.
"Then the small must have courage," he said. "And a foolish person to help him."
He had been in my life too long to be only useful. I had dragged him into a thousand little catastrophes and he had always answered. He had eyes that caught beyond me. And the small thing about him that no one else seemed to see was that his loyalty was scaled like stone—heavy and unmovable.
The seasons move like a clock that loves to tick. I grew more petulant in my beauty and more tender in the secret ways I let Marcus lean on me. I teased and I demanded and I loved, as the spoiled daughter of an emperor might, feeling the world tilt for me alone.
When my twentieth year neared, I had a plan. "We will marry," I told Marcus, one late night when the moon was a coin. "But we will make it ours. For fun. For game. Nothing public. We will marry in our rooms. You will be my bride and I the groom. We'll see if the world notices."
Marcus laughed until his shoulders shook. "You ask me to wear red and silk? To be made into a pretty thing?"
"You will do well," I said. "You will wear what I tell you."
"It will be the most ridiculous thing I have ever done," he said, "and I will do it, because you asked."
On my wedding night—our wedding night—those who loved me gathered in the chamber. The night had the sort of hush that comes before two conscious people decide to do a mad thing. My father had given grudging assent. He smiled in that way that meant he would allow me this small folly if it made me happy.
We drank the wine that tasted of plum. We bound ourselves with simple vows in the quiet the palace allowed. Marcus sat stiff in a braided coat and a covering over his face like a moon; I sat wrapped in a gown so pale it might have been the first sunlight. The room smelled of incense and of something like the sea.
Then the night broke in a way I had never expected.
We drank the last cup and I tasted the medicine the court physician had left as a precaution—the piece we took by habit because I had been wobbly, because the doctors always worried I would go too far. The cup sat in my throat like a drop of lead. I felt dizzy, and there was a strong, fierce pressure like the world had narrowed to a coin.
"Are you cold?" Marcus asked, voice a ribbon.
"No," I said, and I meant many things at once.
Then my heart folded. Pain, then nothing.
When I opened my eyes I saw a ceiling I did not know, and the light was thin and wrong. My lungs were full of water-smell. Men moved by the doors, and I heard a voice like a bell that belonged to Garrett Scholz.
"You are awake," the voice said, low. "Come back to me."
"I—" I tried to breathe, and it came hard, like wood breathing. "I am supposed to—"
"You were not to die here," the man said. "Not yet. We had other plans."
The physician and a certain reed-mouthed figure—my father—leaned over the bed. My father had a look on his face like a man who had been sleepwalking through a bitter dream and now found his child under the bed and could not help but sob.
"It was our only chance," Garrett Scholz said to me, the emperor who had the authority to take up almost any thing. "I went beyond law and sense. We used a new remedy. A tale I cannot tell openly."
As the physician spoke, the story came around like smoke. My father had paid, traded, compassed the desert, made bargains with folk the empire mistrusted. He had used strange cures, waited and bargained for a fabled medicine called the "union herb"—something that tied lives gently as if two strings might be plaited. He had gambled—stumbled into a net of old magics and older debts—and he had used force enough to buy my life back.
"You took a risk," I said, not sure whether my voice would hold.
"I took the only risk that could be taken," Garrett Scholz answered. "I could not lose my Joy."
Someone later called that decision by worse names and better ones. The history books would write it as a cruel and desperate politics and a father's singular love. I would learn that the man who sold a child's name for a moment could be the one who also walked into deserts. Both truths sat with me like twin children.
Marcus did not leave me. He came and stayed. He had been near like a shadow. He told me soft things like a husband does in a house made of memory. He called me by the name he had learned in the garden: "Joy," he said sometimes, like a prayer.
We left the capital some months later. My father signed a decree that would break out the harnesses of official greed; he praised my modesty and gave my orders as counsel. The men who had been punished were sent away or made to stand in front of markets. Boyd Jensen went to the edges where winter keeps men honest. Katalina Dawson vanished in rumor.
"You will not come back," my father told me by the carts. "This place will roam you like a ghost."
"Will you come?" I asked him.
He looked at me and his face was an old map. "No. I would make the palace empty if I stayed to play nanny. I will rule. But I will watch your letters. I will send you things." He paused. "Your mother… would have liked the difference."
I left with Marcus in the sunlight. When we arrived in the southern lands—green, messy, full of rice and salt and the honest smell of soil—Marcus had a duty as my appointed shield and counsel. He put down roots in a place where no one had expected the daughter of an emperor to go. I lived like a woman who had been given a second innocence. I walked on soft mats that had nothing to do with palace ritual. I ate pears that were not lacquered.
"Do you regret the city?" Marcus asked one morning as we watched a market start.
"I regret nothing I have lost that I am allowed again," I told him. "I once thought this life was nothing but lights. Now I want more small things. I want a bowl of stew without ceremony."
He laughed. "Then the city needs to be moved to the stew-pot."
We learned to love each other in the slow, stupid way people with long mornings do. There were nights when Marcus would wake afraid and hold my hand because of a dream he could not name. There were mornings when he would go and mediate disputes between fishermen and salt makers. I learned the truth of him: he was brave in ways that did not require banners. He had a stubborn heart, and he used it like a tool.
Years later, in our small house with a garden, I knew we had become something that looked like a family. When we learned I was carrying a child—a small, warm thing—I felt the world widen and then thin, like a reed under the hand. I grew and learned to bend. Marcus grew more solemn, held me against the nights. He would whisper, "We have made our own life," and I would press a small kiss to his cheek.
"You are the thief I never accused," I once told him. "You stole my fear and traded it for this life."
He sneered playfully. "And you stole the time."
In the soft peace of those days, memory threads came around like vines. People still remembered the scandal, the punishments. They still remembered my father's shining hand. His cleansings had been effective. The men who had been cruel in the capital had been taught their measure. Katalina Dawson had been shuffled to the edges. The minister's ledger changed the court.
When the child's tears silenced themselves and the son's first small foot stepped like a new note in the world, I sat down to count the names I had used: the conformities, the pleasures, the ways greed had been punished. I remembered Boyd and Katalina being made to walk and to face market tongues. I remembered the law being sharpened so that even a prince's taste could not hold a man's greed.
"Do you miss the palace?" Marcus asked me one night as our child slept.
"Often," I said. "But not the things in it that hurt. I miss my father sometimes, and he misses the child he dotes on. He did something terrible and something good. He bought me time. He made choices. He hurt people—maybe not all of them deserved what they got—and he saved me. A man can be both."
Marcus took my hand like a vow. "He saved you, and he gave you back to me."
We had been mad creatures once—spoiled, foolish, careless. We had been a princess and a street-found boy. The world had turned them into something new: a wife and a husband, a father and a man who sheltered a child's laugh. We learned to be each other's refuge.
"Do you love me?" Marcus asked, as if the question could be a key.
"I do," I said.
He kissed my hand in gratitude. "Then let's not make a history book of it."
"No," I agreed, and I thought of the ledger that had once been read aloud. "We will make ourselves instead."
The End
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