Sweet Romance14 min read
Half a Face, a Mask, and a Worn Amulet
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I did not expect my court dress to burn the night I was supposed to be crowned.
"I will wait outside until dawn," he had said, and then he walked away with the decree. That decree named him governor of the southern garrison, and it took him from the palace and from me.
"I want you to be remembered," I whispered into the smoke as I tipped the brazier. The flames swallowed everything on the shelf, and I wondered, not for the first time, whether Zane Gunther—if he ever heard I was dead—would feel the smallest pinch of regret.
I did not die. I was rescued. I woke with a scar down the left side of my face, the kind of line that makes strangers decide your story for you. The emperor heard rumors—narrowed, cruel words about affairs. He stripped my title. He banned my family from court circles for three generations.
"All of it on you, Leoni," my father, Damien Russo, said once, white with anger. He sent me away without looking back. "This is better than scandal."
"Better?" I laughed too darkly. "You sent your daughter away to die slowly of shame."
I was exiled to the far province of Qingshore. The city there lay under battered skies. It was ten thousand paces and a thousand rumors from the capital; news traveled like rust. For a while I hid, wrote patterns, embroidered to feed myself, and cursed Zane every day because I couldn't find the person who had started the gossip.
Half a year later, a messenger came with a white feather seal and a tale: Zane Gunther had fallen on the Southern Pass. The papers hinted at glory—at his last battle against a fierce northern tribe. An arrow pierced his heart, or so they said.
"He's dead," I told the roomful of moth-eaten curtains. The ink bled on the page in my hands. "He's dead and I have no one to blame."
I kept low. I embroidered for what felt like a new life. Then one morning Dean Jensen, the house steward, knocked and sent a man to me.
"Leoni, I brought someone," he said. He hesitated when he saw my face. "You should wear a veil."
"What for?" I said. "You saw my face already."
He had brought a man dressed head-to-toe in ink black. A silver mask covered everything but his eyes. He moved like someone who had practiced disappearing.
"Is he for me to command?" I snapped. "Will he cut my throat if I trouble him?"
"Calm yourself," Dean Jensen said, and then, with a conspiratorial twitch, "Ismail Atkinson was a caravan guard. He retired after a bad wound. He wants quiet work."
"Ismail Atkinson," I said, tasting the name. I had heard nothing like it in the capital, which made his anonymity worse.
"He will be your guard, in the house. He asked for nothing but a corner to sleep in," Dean Jensen finished.
He bowed away. I studied the man with the mask.
"You can call me Leoni," I told him, because I had nothing left of titles.
"Leoni," he echoed. His voice was hoarse, as if he had been shouting in windstorms. He did not call me "miss" or "lady." He called me my name, and that small slippage felt dangerous and kind at once.
"There's a straw room to the north," I said. "It will do."
"It will do," he replied.
At dinner, everyone eyed me like I might unsettle the bowl. He watched them all and did not let their stares land on me.
"Ismail," I whispered when the others left. "Why are you glaring at them?"
He lowered his head. "I am not fond of gossip."
"Good. Neither am I."
When a rib was left on my plate, I looked up and found the silver mask near my hand, offering me a piece. "Eat," it said simply. No servant ever offered me a bone in that tone.
After a week, he brought me a bag of coins.
"What is this?" I said.
"From your father," he said.
"My father?" I blinked. "He left me for dead."
"Dean Jensen said otherwise." He answered and then was quiet. I held the coins like a small miracle. They were gold leaves, enough to buy a year of ink and cloth.
"You stole it." I accused him.
"Paid for. From old savings," Ismail said.
"Then keep it." I wanted to prove I did not need charity.
He never took the gold. He refused to accept pay. Instead, he asked for something softer: I would write him calligraphy. "Not for sale," he said. "For me."
He stood awkward and hopeful when I wrote "Unbending Heart" and then the pseudonym I used in secret: "Jiang Zizai." He wanted a piece of my work and held it like it was a treasure. He promised, in a low voice, "You will have what you wish."
The embroidery shop opened in the bright street. Traffic of people and gossip did not affect the little counter where I drew patterns. He managed the storefront quietly and with an order that felt like a kind of tenderness.
"Why bother?" I asked one night when we sat with stew.
"Because someone gave me a life," he said. "I will repay by keeping yours whole."
His hands were large; they moved quickly and carefully. He would tuck blankets, fetch oil, and come in to stand between my customers and my awkwardness. I saw him look at my scar. Once, he crossed the room and, without a word, put an outer mantle over my shoulders. His fingers brushed mine.
"Don't," I said.
He did not pull back. "You will catch cold," he murmured.
I remembered the young man I had loved in the capital—proud, a prince among commanders. I remembered the red string on a wooden charm he had once given me under a wishing tree.
"Tell me about him," Ismail asked once. "Tell me the truth."
"His name was Zane Gunther," I said. Saying his name made my throat burn. "He left with a decree and never came back."
Ismail's eyes hardened in a way that surprised me. "I know him," he said hoarsely and then turned away.
I did not know then that I had been breathing next to that truth the whole time.
When I made plans for my mother’s memorial, he came with me as he said he would. He wore white for that day, making himself match me in a way that felt less like a guard and more like a companion.
At the temple exit, hands grabbed. I was muffled and carried, then thrown into a low hut. A clang of a door. A hole in my chest like someone had taken a bell and dropped it.
"This is a joke," I told myself. "He will save me."
I heard hoofbeats and a man's voice cutting the air—then a white-clad figure burst through. He hacked at ropes and weapons like the scene had always belonged to him.
"Leoni!" the silver mask shouted, and I recognized that phrase too late.
Ismail charged forward. He took beatings to free me. I saw his face when someone barked at him to take off his mask.
And in that instant my world tilted.
"Zane?" I breathed.
He paused like he had been pierced. "Leoni." His voice was torn.
He had not been Ismail Atkinson at all. He had been Zane Gunther wrapped in a mask and a borrowed name. The general who had left the capital, the man the court declared dead, knelt dirty and bleeding and holding me.
"Do not touch her," a bandit warned.
"Back," Zane said, sword a blade of quiet thunder.
"Is this your wife?" the bandit leader, Chance Greco—massive and dark—snorted.
"No." Zane's blade was at Chance's throat in a blink. "Release her."
Chance laughed. "You think you have the right, soldier? She belongs to my house—she will be my bride in five days, a bargain. You couldn't even protect her from the palace."
He held me like a proof of his power. "She will go with me unless you stop us."
"Let her go," Zane said. "Now." He turned to me and his eyes were hollow and steady. "I will not let them have you."
"I'll marry him," I said. "Just go."
"No," Zane's voice went warm and low. "You will not bargain yourself for his threat."
He stepped forward and the leader stilled as if lightning had struck him. They let me go because Zane's sword told a story and because he spoke with the authority of a man who had faced death and survived.
After we fled down the mountain, he shouldered me and carried me like a child when my legs failed. He took me to a home with a simple sign: "Jiang House." He walked in, hands bleeding, and left me to be tended. He treated my wounds himself. When he pulled off a damp cloak, a scar across his throat showed—he had lost his voice, or rather, hurt it so it was rough, half of what it had been.
"Why did you leave me?" I asked later when he stood at the bedside and placed a rough cup of rice before me.
"Orders," he said. "The sovereign reassigned me. I swore to keep the border safe. I thought it would protect you if you were silent and safe in the capital while I stood guard."
"You let me burn," I said. "You let me be stripped like a courtesan. You were near and did not come."
"I thought I was keeping my promise," he said. "I fought and then the court declared me dead to keep things quiet. I could not return, not without a sentence. I went away and kept watch from far."
He reached for me like someone frightened he might wake and find me gone. He leaned and wrapped his arm over my shoulder; the rough fabric smelled of smoke and iron and the river. He fed me and, for the first time in months, I let myself be looked after in a way that did not feel like charity.
"Three days," he said suddenly. "I will take you in three days."
"Take me where?"
"To be my wife."
"Why?" I asked. I half-laughed and half-sobbed.
"Because I will not lose you again," he answered.
The wedding was not gentle. It was a thing of whispers. My father, Damien Russo, hearing of my rescue, cut me out of his name publicly. He sent a letter of disownment and a day's wages. The capital's rumor mill ground on.
We lived, then, in a bare house. I thought my life would smooth into ordinary chores, then the sickness came. A fever that rose like a tide. I fainted and the doctor said a poison lived in my blood—planted long ago like a seed. The man suspected was Kristina Alves—my father's concubine, who had hated me since my mother's death. She had motive, access, petty cruelty.
Zane left on a long errand to find a cure. He came back with a tale of a cunning apothecary named Luciano Dunn, a man of medicine with a tower of strange plants.
"I can take no chances," Luciano said to Zane. "To fetch the herb you seek, you must give something. I will not part with it for coin."
"What?" Zane asked.
"Your blood, perhaps," Luciano said gently. "For some medicines, the gift of a strong man's blood helps attune the cure. It is harsh, but it works."
Zane knelt in rain and begged the old man. He bared his arm and let them draw from him. He came home paler and hollow-eyed, but they brewed the decoction and I drank it. Day after day, the poison thinned.
When the last fever broke, I realized how much he had given.
"We can live a quiet life now," I said, weak and grateful. "We can be ordinary."
"Ordinary is all I ever wanted for you," Zane said. He took my hand like it was the only thing keeping him tethered.
But a truth was burning under my skin. The old poison had not been some random spite. It had a hand and name behind it. I kept thinking of Kristina Alves—the stepmother—her thin smile, the way she nudged my father away from me. I could not let it rest.
So I did what Zane did all his life: I planned.
I asked him for favors in the capital. I asked friends for letters. Zane, despite the old sentence that kept him far from court, still had people who feared him and owed him. He arranged a small hearing at a public festival—an invitation to the gathering that would be the town's repentance day. I wanted the truth told among neighbors, where people would watch and the disgrace could be seen.
I did not seek slow justice. I wanted the kind that burned the guilty visibly.
The festival day was clear and loud. Lanterns like low moons hung over the square. The magistrate called people to bring any charges. I stood in the middle, my scar hitting the light like a map. People whispered.
"Leoni?" one woman asked in a thin voice. "Is that true? Are you seeking the Zhao?"
"She harmed me," I said. "She poisoned me."
"Poisoned?" murmurs rolled like wind.
Zane stood beside me in the crowd. He was no longer masked; his jaw had a stubborn, white strength. He had used his old connections to call forth witnesses.
"Bring her," I said.
They did not bring her in chains. Kristina Alves came with a powder-kisser's smile, hair done in the high style of court, wearing the arrogance of a woman who believed her net covered the ground.
"Leoni," she said, with false sweetness. "What a pity."
"Where is your brother?" I asked. "Do you deny your role?"
She laughed. "My brother was simply overzealous in a little scheme." She tilted her head and the court ladies clucked.
"Bring forth the herbs," Zane called to Luciano. "And the letters you collected."
Luciano stepped forward and unrolled a paper scroll. It contained the account of payments between Kristina's household and the kitchen that sent me flavored medicines. The merchant who had delivered jars of the same bloom that lay in my veins was produced and asked to match seals.
"Is this yours?" Luciano asked the merchant.
"It is," the man said, trembling. "Sent at the instructions of Mistress Kristina."
A ripple of shock moved through the lantern-lit crowd.
I stepped forward and opened my palms. "I have been given jars cooked with poison," I said plainly. "My life was sold in doses to spare a little humiliation."
Kristina's face changed. Her eyes flicked to the magistrate and back to the crowd. "You accuse without proof!" she cried. "You, dismissed, disgraced, cast out. What right have you?"
"You have a right to lie," Zane said gently. "You do not have a right to deny what your hands paid for." He spoke without the old mask of soldier and launched the proof—a ledger with her needlework counted in signatures.
"Where did you get this?" she hissed. "Where did you—"
"Your brother's confessions," Luciano said.
"Confessions?" she sneered.
"Yes," Zane answered. "He took a bribe. He kept the receipts. He came forward when I threatened the house with a court inquiry. He named you as the one who asked for me to be made an 'accident' so the house could be shaped otherwise. He named the jars."
At that, the magistrate called out, "Witness!"
A man stepped up. He had been her household cook, his hands black with service. "I was told to add a certain herb to Mistress Leoni's broth," he said, voice thin. "I could not refuse. I put it in. I did as I was told."
"All of you?" the crowd asked.
"All of us," he answered. The proof was like a net. The merchant identified wax seals; the doctor matched the poisoning compounds. The magistrate rang a small bell and began to pronounce the law.
Kristina's face drained first to a cold white, then a red that climbed into her neck like a live fever. She reeled through phases—anger, denial, then a sudden pale panic.
"I did not," she cried. "You lie! I am of good standing. Damien Russo swore to me—"
"Your brother took bribes," Zane said coldly. "You wanted a promise that my family name would be forced aside. You bought it."
"Liars!" she screamed. Her voice slid from fury to pleading like the cords of a puppet breaking. "You cannot do this to me. I will—"
"Silence," the magistrate said. "By the evidence produced and the confessions sworn, we find Mistress Kristina guilty. She will be stripped of her place. She will stand in the market and have each of her orders read and burned. Let the public see that those who poison their kin and clients will not thrive."
For a long time she did not believe them. Her face moved through the stages: first insolence, then denial, then a wild, animal fear. She looked at the crowd as if anyone at any moment would lift hands and push her away.
"Do you have any defense?" the magistrate asked.
She tried to demand witnesses. They had none who would come forward for her. People who had admired her curls now looked away. A woman who had once watched me make patterns reached to snap her fingers but could not. A child in the crowd, a market boy, reached up and mocked her.
"Stop," Kristina shrieked. "Stop!"
"Let it be known," the magistrate said, "that to poison for petty gain is to be unfit in any house. You shall be expelled from Damien Russo's household. You shall return all holdings to the family. The market will witness your shaming. If you appeal to the court, let it be known that here we present the truth."
They took her garments, not in violence but in ritual. They burned the list of the herbs she claimed were medicine. The crowd did what crowds do—they leaned close, they whispered, they filmed with glances and with gossip that would be fed that night to a thousand lips.
Kristina's expression broke somewhere after ten minutes. She went from fury, to bargaining, to weeping pleas. She tried to accuse others, to name people she would drag into her ruin, but her words fell flat. Witnesses stepped forward with receipts and contracts. Dean Jensen, who had come to see me in town, watched with a white face. My father, who had sat in the back, did not rise to speak.
"Forgive me," Kristina said finally, voice small, falling apart under the weight of the crowd. Her cheeks were wet. "Forgive me, please."
"Do you apologize to the woman you tried to kill?" Zane asked. His voice was calm and the whole square pivoted toward him.
Kristina looked dust-gray and filthy now, the gilding gone. "I...I—"
"No," I said. "You will stand and listen." I did not want revenge. I wanted public truth. "You will say what you did and why," I told her. "You will confess so everyone knows you did not act alone."
Her brittle edge crumbled. She told small lies, then bigger ones, then she named her brother and how he had taught her to hide spice in soup. She tried to shift blame to servants who would not confirm her.
The punishment lasted long enough for people to believe it. They tore at her confidence like hands taking lint. A girl in the crowd spat and left. A noblewoman removed a ribbon she had once given Kristina and flung it into the brazier. People took pictures with turning faces and whispered like wasps.
Kristina's face went through the stages the rules demanded—arrogance, then shock, then denial, then breaking down to plead. She was left humiliated in the center of her own small hurly-burly. People fingered the folds of her dress and declared how her face matched her deeds.
At the end, she was physically escorted out of Damien Russo's household, free to go, but without standing, with no place to return. They called it justice. She called it injustice.
I stood there with Zane by my side, and I learned the hardest thing—that justice done in public still leaves a hole. My father watched her leave with no expression, and later, when his servants came to my shop to tell what happened, he did not look my way.
"You did what you needed," Zane said quietly.
"I wanted them to see," I replied, and my hand found his. He squeezed it. He had not smiled for me the way he used to, but in a small private moment, he did—slow and closed and like sunlight through smoke.
Days passed and the shop thrived. Zane had given away more than he could afford to get my medicines. Luciano Dunn would not accept coin; he accepted loyalty, and then asked for something else once more. He needed a valet—someone to fetch and tend and hold tinctures at odd hours—someone who owed a debt. Zane took the post. He let them draw his blood once more, then more, and more. He called it his penance. He told me with a laugh that was only half a laugh, "You will never see me as anything but a man who pays for your life with himself."
"Then pay me differently," I said. I gave him the red-worn charm—one he had given me years ago—now softened by time. "Keep this. It has the mark of the tree where you first looked at me."
He put it in his pocket like an old jewel.
We married. Not because ceremony made it real, but because staying was better than running. He promised me, clumsily and fiercely, "I will not let you go."
In the months after the punishment, Kristina's fall became a public lesson. She found new ways to plead and to barter, but the square remembered. The cook who had confessed was taken in by a merchant and never spoke ill again. The bandit Chance Greco married the girl he had once meant to hold; he looked older, gentler, at the festival they invited us to.
When our son was born the next spring, we named him after a small mercy—Ari Morrison—as a nod to the medicine boy who tended us and to the small kindnesses that had kept us alive. We fed him with both our hands. Zane shook when he held the child, but those were better trembles than any I had seen.
Years later, when a small folded letter arrived with the news that Damien Russo had been disgraced for mismanagement, I threw it in the brazier. Zane reached for my hand and stopped me.
"Burn it," he said softly. "The past needs to go where it belongs."
"I will keep one thing," I said, and slid the other soft flat charm from my robe and put it in his palm. "This is your old charm. It is frayed. When you squeeze it, you will remember the day we stood in the market."
He smiled then, and once, for the first time in a long time, he said my name like a promise.
"Leoni," he murmured.
"I know," I said. I rubbed the scar on my face as if I could press the line away. "I know."
We live by small proofs now: a warmed cloak, a cup of plum soup, the tiny red charm burned to softness. The market remembers Kristina Alves; the ledger of receipts lies in the magistrate's vault. The bandit who once offered me as a prize is now neighbor to a woman he found in the night. The apothecary, Luciano Dunn, keeps a bottle labeled "For Zane" on his highest shelf.
Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can feel the weight of the mask he removed and the warmth of the coin he would not take. I can see the public square and the way the crowd bent like reeds toward truth. I can see the way Kristina’s face changed from high and cruel to small and broken under the lanterns.
Most of all, I keep the flat charm—worn at the edges, soft from years of holding—and when I feel small and frightened, I slip it into my hand. It is rough, it is simple; it is a map we both know by heart.
"Keep it," I tell him sometimes.
"I will," he answers, as if he means it for all his days.
The End
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