Rebirth12 min read
He Called Me His Heart—Then Told Me to Prepare to Wed
ButterPicks10 views
I discovered I was the villain of someone else's story.
I had kept Prince Apollo Shaw captive at my side, indulging him for three headstrong years until I loved him like a fool. I served him as if he were my father. I fed him, fussed over his coughs, warmed his brittle hands with my own.
He was poor and sick, or so everyone said. He wore the same white robe for days, pale as frost and thinner than a reed. I believed the whispering world that laughed at him: “The prince can’t even afford new clothes.”
People called him delicate and dignified all at once, but when courtiers sneered his way, his eyes would flicker with a light I took for mockery. He kept his chin high even when he was mocked. That arrogance—I thought—was a virtue I could admire and use.
Then one night, when his fever had flared and his skin burned like weak paper, his guard fell at my feet and begged for mercy:
“Princess Kaede, please—our master will not wake. He has thrown himself into an illness. Please, save him.”
I had waited for that exact moment. I put on my smile and offered the simple, sharp bargain I always did:
“Move him to the Moon Palace. I will care for him there, myself.”
They carried the prince to my bedchamber on straw and whispers. He was half gone—sleepless, delirious, hardly the man the songs painted. I watched him until the fever broke, tasted every broth and tested every herb myself. I did everything with one thought in mind: once he was mine in the palace, he could never leave.
When he woke, it was not my face he searched for. It was my elder sister, Claire Cannon, who had gone in and spoken over him with her soft, hovering politeness.
“Prince, be careful with your cup. Here, sip slowly.”
Claire’s voice floated like a lullaby. When I saw the bowl in her hands I nearly snatched it away. I had arranged for that very broth. I had tested it for poison with my own fingers. How dare she take my work?
“You took my medicine,” I said loudly, and the words ripped through the small room like a thrown cup.
Claire looked at the smashed pottery on the floor and sighed with that always-composed air, like the world was still a stage and she had all the right lines. “Kaede, I only came to see how you were. I found the prince here and I helped. You will be laughed at for turning your back on guests.”
I sat down by Apollo’s bed and ignored her. I leaned over him. “Prince Apollo—”
He opened his eyes, soft and amazed, and said my name, “Kaede.”
The word was small but warm like a key. He said it again, like trying out a new garment: “Kaede.”
For a silly, grand moment I believed he meant it the way I wanted. I draped my hand over his, felt the thin coolness, and kept my smile. Claire left then, gliding away, the palace murmuring anew.
After that day, I took Apollo as I took my baubles. I fed him, warmed him, and kept him as a private, ridiculous treasure. He was the sort of possession I wore like perfume—exposed and intoxicating. Everyone knew it; everyone talked. I liked the scandal. I liked the bridle I could hold.
Three years of tending him taught me his weaknesses. He was fragile in health, yes, but not in will. He was clever in ways no one guessed. He was patient. He watched people like a fencer watching for a loose wrist.
I decided to secure him properly. I prepared an intoxicant—“ecstasy powder,” a recipe whispered among the palace apothecaries and seasoned by my own hands. I told myself it was for proof, for possessiveness: if he loved me under its haze, then he was mine, not Claire’s.
On the night it came to a head, I watched him drink and waited for him to melt. But he looked at me with a curious half-smile and said, quietly, “Is the princess intent on having me until I am dead?”
I pretended indifference. My hands went cold; my thoughts jerked. In a dream—no, in a memory I did not own—an image surfaced: I was living someone else’s lines. This world was a book. Apollo was the hero. Claire was the heroine. I was the reckless, burning supporting villain whose end came on her wedding night, pierced and hated.
I clapped both palms to my chest at the thought. The dream gave me details—my rise to touch him, my petty cruelties, and the final, violent retribution. The last line of the vision was worse: he would take my heart.
When I watched him under the influence of my so-called “ecstasy,” he smiled like a man who knew every curve of a room. He did not stagger or fall. He drank like a noble sampling wine. The bowl I had watched other hands pour into him—I lifted it to my lips myself and tasted it. Broth. Chicken broth. Good broth.
Someone moved in the dark. I called for the apothecary who had delivered the vial. The servants brought her limp and snoring in—she had been sedated by the same scent I used to sedate Claire. Someone had not only planned my trap—they had anticipated it and turned it back at me.
I bared my teeth. That someone was Apollo.
When I confronted him, he leaned against the bed frame and laughed, thin and faint.
“You are clever, Kaede,” he said. “You assume you can push and pull like a hand on a puppet.”
I bridled. “You set my servants to sleep.”
He tipped his head. “You think I was asleep the whole time? My life is not a play to be acted upon. I have been watching for a long while.”
The realization spread like frost. He had known about my poison before I did. The servant who had tried to drug him? She was my personal maid, Kristina Bray, snoozing at my door. The scent on her sleeves matched mine. The only person who moved freely in the palace and its secrets was Apollo.
He stood, steadier than a man of his supposed constitution should, and said, simply, “Kaede, will you stop?” His eyelids drooped with mock fatigue. “You prepare to marry me; you want my life in your hands. I told you last night—pack to be married. You will go to my court.”
I wanted to be furious. Instead I felt hollow. My plans had been turned inside out. I had kept a fox as a pet—only to learn the fox owned my home.
The very next day, I moved faster than I ever had. I rewound my thoughts to the dream-scripts and replayed every scene where I had been an idiot. I would not be stupid twice.
When the Prince’s feast came—the celebration of his birthday—I made myself public. I made sure to sit by him, to squeeze his hand like a talisman, to declare him mine with a voice like a banner.
Then Claire gave her performance: a sword dance that ended with a cup of wine placed at Apollo’s lips. The court hushed to see the phoenix touch the prince.
“I will drink for the prince,” Claire said, poised and brilliant in her red gown.
I clutched Apollo’s fingers and then snatched the cup away. “No,” I declared. “He is ill. This drinking is nonsense. I will drink for him.”
I drained the wine with a theatrical flourish. The courtiers blinked. Claire’s smile thinned. Apollo’s eyes crinkled, but something like amusement shone there. He took the cup then, and in a voice like velvet said, “Since it is my birthday, I will drink, too.”
I expected him to falter. Instead, he drank—bitter, heady—and stood steady. He drank until the revelers reeled and the grand hall dissolved into a comedy of worse manners. Men and women slumped like broken puppets, and the prince—my prince—stayed upright.
He steadied himself, caught me with an arm around my waist, and for the first time did something I had never seen before: he pulled me close and whispered, “Do not be afraid. I will not be taken from you.”
That night, he asked me—soft, groggy and honest—“Will you be my wife?”
My heart clipped and stumbled, then flapped like a trapped bird. I wished, in that moment, that he were not part of some inevitable plot. I wanted to be the author of our future, not a character grinning on the margins.
He refused the word “would you,” and instead said the vow as though he had already decided. “Prepare to be married.”
I had been preparing for three years. Now he told me it was time.
I was both relieved and suspicious. Had he pulled me into his scheme? Had he always meant to marry me or Claire? The dream images—the sharp end of the knife, the drenched red robe—kept flickering. I feared that if I allowed myself to surrender to him, I would only hand him the means to fulfill the bloody script.
Days became a chessboard. Apollo slipped me notes and strange commands. His guard, Finch Cooper, revealed himself to be more than a watchman: he was a man who had once knelt before me begging to save his prince. He now lounged like a cat, tight-lipped and watchful.
“You should not meddle too much in public affairs,” Finch said once, blunt as a blade.
“Who else will?” I snapped. “I look after my possessions.”
Finch smiled without mirth. “Sometimes possessions move of their own will.”
When the imperial edict came—South and North exchanging royal hostages—the Emperor, King Gardner, sent a message that Apollo was to return to his homeland. For three years we had lived in a delicate lull; now the rumor whispered that Apollo would go home, and with him, the chance of alliance. The South asked for a bride to “cure” their ailing prince; everyone assumed Claire, the storied long princess, would be given across.
Then the world derailed again. My father, in his hot flashes of favor and fury, decided the matter differently. For the sake of dignity and political theater, he chose me. I, who had been sacrificed all my life to indifference, was to go as the bride.
I could have celebrated, alone, at the turn of fortune. But I had been watching enough plays to know that stage shifts tied to marriages do not end well for the woman who had been written as “wicked.”
I plotted in secret. I could be as wicked as the book required, but I would rewire the ending.
For a while, the script glanced off me. I held Apollo’s hand and let him lean into me; I answered the questions of ministers with a smile honed to razor edge. He called me “my love” in low voices and told me small things I liked. There were moments when his temper slipped and he looked like a patient man beside a cocked flame. Once he slipped, with a hand on my cheek: “Kaede, when you call me by my full name it is as though you gather me to yourself.”
My chest unrolled with something like warmth. There was a softness that belonged to the real man and not the tale. I stole those softnesses when I could.
And then they tried to burn me.
The night before my departure, my bedchamber exploded into flame. Smoke clawed at my throat. I woke coughing and blinded by orange.
I found Kristina vanished and the door thick with heat. The corridors were dizzy with shouting. I thought, briefly, of Claire—cold and luminous—and then felt the hot breath of fear.
Someone moved like a nightmare in the doorway. For a second I thought it was ourselves in a mirror: the concubine, Estrella Bowers, black-robed and quiet; her face pulled tight like a bowstring.
I did not have the luxury of being noble then. I shoved through the fire and found myself being rescued by a figure I had never expected to be my deliverer: Apollo. He charged into the smoke and flames, soaked and coughing, and flung me over his shoulder as if I were made of feathers.
“You fool,” I told him between splutters, because it was the only hurled thing able to hold itself to breath. “Why would you risk yourself?”
He answered simply, with a peculiar and relentless softness I had only seen once before: “Because I could not have you die where I might have kept you.”
He bore me out. Finch Cooper met us at the palace steps with water and blackness. I watched the concubine’s household unravel. Estrella Bargers—no, Estrella Bowers—was seized. The palace discovered evidence: that night’s oil-lamp pushed, the secret herbs planted in my broth, the small papers with handwritings that matched traitorous lists. Pei—our servant, whose name I now use—was found, and in that finding she confessed something I had suspected: she had been bribed and blackmailed by Estrella Bowers. She had paid the price.
The court erupted.
Estrella Bowers was dragged into the palace court one morning, her hair unbound and her jewels slapped off like tears. The crowd was a sea of eyes; the palace, always a theater, now became a tribunal.
“Why?” I asked when they thrust her to kneel on the marble.
She spat words like small stones. “It was to secure my daughter’s future. She is the one who should rule beside a worthy prince. I would do anything.”
“You would burn a living person?” I asked. I kept my voice even, because the book had taught me to be theatrical and because I had promised myself I would rewrite the ending.
She laughed—a brittle, thin laugh—and smeared dirt onto her face as if by doing so she could make herself more real. “You are the villain,” she said at last. “They will say I am the hero who tried to put things right for the rightful line. If you die, she will ascend. Am I a monster for doing what mothers must?”
A stir went through the crowd like a wind through flags.
“You will be judged,” King Gardner intoned, but his face was the color of stone. Where his favor had been uncertain, fury now filled the chambers like flood.
They led Estrella up on a platform. The ministers stood around like dead trees. The bailiffs read out the crimes: arson, attempted murder, bribery, manipulation of royal servants. Each charge carried with it the sanction the court declared fit.
But I did not want the minimalist justice of exile. The book’s neat pages demanded a scarlet ending for someone—someone must fall publicly so that the public could watch the character's role close cleanly. Estrella had attempted to make a queen by burning me. She had thought in terms of plot.
I wanted to ensure everyone saw the method of her crime, and that the public could not misread a mother’s cruelty as a misled virtue. I wanted the humiliation to match the scale of betrayal.
They had her stripped of veils and laurel. Her titles were shouted and struck. The royal scribe read her charges aloud, slow and precise, and when he spoke the name of my maid—the girl who had been my shadow since childhood—the hall gasped. Pei—Kristina—would not live to tell the world her suffering, but she had spoken true in the end before the fire had taken her.
Estrella’s face turned from arrogance to bone-white. The crowd, cruelly human, hissed like sea-worn stones. I watched as she tried to put words together: denials, then accusations, then a claiming that the world itself had been unfair. Her voice broke into pleas as her supporters peeled away. The man who had once lined her pockets and kept her whisperers in places of service now looked elsewhere. Her hands—so used to smooth silk—were bound and forced to touch the cold bench.
Then, in a move to confirm the spectacle, Finch Cooper—Apollo’s guard and a man with a deadpan sense of justice—commanded that Estrella be publicly shorn of her ornaments and escorted through the market. He had learned the art of public shaming in the underground places where he once made enemies fold. He had chosen, coldly, to turn the tables.
They led Estrella down to the palace gardens where the merchants and servants gathered. The procession was slow: each step a sentence. People gathered, children pointed, old women spat, and merchants took out their phones to record. I stood on a raised dais and watched it all, feeling a strange amputation within myself.
Estrella fell apart in front of them—her haughty composure shredded into ragged pleas for pity. When she saw my face, her eyes sought something—mercy, perhaps, or the return of dignity—and found my calm instead. I had learned compassion in the book, but also the hunger to rewrite.
“Face the truth then!” I said into the crowd. “You judged a woman who burned her sister’s house and blamed a servant for a palace’s fall. You thought she was a wronged mother. She is not. Look upon her.”
My words were measured, public as thunder. The crowd circled her like a whirlpool. Estrella tried to cry, tried to claim she acted for Claire, to tie herself to motherhood again, but it all sounded like costume. She turned her gaze from mine to Apollo's, then to Claire’s, but Claire did not meet her eyes. Claire had the eyes of someone who had learned that mothers were not always saints.
Estrella’s supporters began to disperse, one by one. The man who had counseled her—once a friend—now turned his back and walked off with his chin high. Her daughter sat distant, stunned, watching the ruin of the woman who had made her into a chess piece.
Then the final demonstration came: the ministers announced that Estrella would be stripped of her rank, removed to the minor house and made a ward of the cold court. They said she would be paraded through the city for a day with placards listing her crimes, so the people would see, forever, the instance of a woman who had burned a princess’s home for ambition.
Estrella’s face crumpled into something like recognition—that she had been found out. She had been, in her mind, immortalized as a player in the great drama of states. Now she would be an object lesson.
Finch Cooper leaned to Apollo and said, quiet enough that only he and the prince and I could catch it: “Let the people judge her. That is a punishment worse than any blade.”
The throng cheered as the procession moved away. The sound was a gale against my ribs. The justice had been public; the shame, complete. I had watched so many courts that I knew the ritual: humiliation extinguishes envy.
Afterwards, in the quiet of the private audience, King Gardner called me forward and said, “Kaede, what you did this time—standing before your sister as you did, saving the prince from conflagration, exposing treachery—shows a courage I have not seen.”
I looked at the man who had, for years, barely seen me at all. I thought on the fire and the way Apollo had wrenched me free, his coughs and the blood that had come into his handkerchief. The lines between salvation and show blurred into a braid.
“You shall travel soon,” King Gardner continued. “We will send you away with ceremony and honor.”
Apollo folded his hands and smiled at me with an odd softness. “Kaede,” he murmured, “even when courts move like chessboards, you will be my chosen.”
In private, after the throng had gone and the cold light of justice had eaten the night, Apollo took my face in his hand and, for the thousandth time, said my name the way a man would say a promise.
“I will not play that cruel ending again,” he said. “You will stay.”
I laughed then, a small sound like a bell scraped of rust. “And if a book says otherwise?”
He kissed my forehead once—light and surprisingly real. “We will write a different book.”
For the rest of the season I read everything like a map. I studied what the dream had shown me and what Apollo had done differently. I learned that he had not only kept secrets; he had gathered people like Finch, who had eyes and teeth. He had always been a player. He had staged fevers and plotted returns. He had been the author of many reversals.
When the vows were finally made and I rode for the South with Apollo, with the carved box Claire had once given me—a wooden hairpin inside—it felt like an ending and a beginning braided together.
We left at dawn. The palace receded like stage scenery and the world opened beneath the wheels. I sat by Apollo, wind tangling my hair, and the carriage carried us toward a court where the sun shone warm and the gardens were a riot of color.
He whispered in my ear, “There will be challenges. The stories we read are never all black and white. But—together?”
I turned his face to mine, and for once I did not fear the knife in any page.
“Together,” I said.
The End
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