Sweet Romance17 min read
How I Turned a War King’s Name into My Fortune
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I woke up with my mouth tasting like old tea and dust, my body aching as if I'd been folded and unfolded wrong a thousand times. I pushed myself up, every joint protesting, and forced down the bitter dregs from the porcelain pot on the table.
"Who's there?" I croaked.
A shadow moved under the moonlight, slippery and small, and a voice tried too hard to be soft. "My beauty, it's me—your husband."
I stared. The man at the door was filthy, a scabbed, yellow-toothed thing in mud-strewn clothes. He lunged before I could think.
"Get off me!" I spat. My hands were weak and new; still, I kicked his shins with all the life in me. He folded like discarded cloth, whimpering.
"Miss—" a thin maid's voice peeped from the doorway. "Shall we go in, Auntie?"
The housekeeper, Matilda Vincent, did not move. She'd been given a role and practiced it without mercy. "Wait," she warned, sniffing disgust.
I stood in the doorway and looked down at the man curled on the floor.
"This is your husband?" Matilda asked.
"He is trash," I answered before I could forget that I was supposed to be someone else. "Aunt Matilda, take him to the gate."
She looked at him, then at me, and her face pinched. "You want to kill him? The servants saw—"
"Then tell them what they saw." I raised my chin. "I am the third daughter's guest in my own house. I throw out trash myself."
They started to gossip immediately. "She must have lovers!" someone whispered.
"Silence," I said. I slapped Matilda cleanly when she opened her mouth to spout another lie.
She flinched like any woman who had been taught to be afraid of boldness in a junior.
"Do you want to try me?" I asked the servants gathered like small birds.
A whole theater unfolded as two women I had to pretend to be related to swept in: Valentina Beltran—my stepmother by law, the second lady, dragging her skirts, performance stitched into every movement—and Gwen Stone, her favored daughter, who yapped like an angry little dog.
"Shame!" Valentina sighed, a practiced lament. "Your name—your mother—"
"My mother's name is none of your script," I said. "If you want to make a scene, make it an honest one."
Gwen screeched, "She is shameless! Father, look!"
"I saw him with her!" Matilda crowed, making herself large with the pleasure of accusation.
My father, Nicolas Myers, came at the noise like a pillar of wind. He stood then, iron and temper wrapped in a robe of silk. He asked once, looking at me, the way a judge looks at an unexpected witness: "Explain."
"Father," I said, and for the first time I felt the dizzying knowledge of my other life fade into intent. "This man lied."
They hauled the man up. He begged. He even offered an odd proof: a scrap of a woman's under-robe, a token he said had my name on it, and the mark on my thigh he'd described when he cried that he had lain with me.
Valentina fluttered her hand like a parrot. "It is true! She is ruined. It is all true."
But Iris Dickinson—my father's gentle third wife, a woman of soft silk—didn't play along. "Wait," she said quietly. "Do you not find it odd that such a token would be here? Where did a poor rogue get such fine materials?"
"A test," I murmured. "A trap to push me into disgrace."
Nicolas Myers frowned, but he is a man who prefers to weigh fewer dominoes in his own court. He ordered the man dragged away and then, after the moonlight cooled, let the clock run. He was suspicious in his own way but not cruel for cruelty's sake. He admitted the man had named Matilda's maid as an accomplice to save his own life. Matilda, who professed virtue and spat blame, suddenly knelt and muttered, "Guilty."
I felt something warm and ugly in my chest—sympathy for a scapegoat, dislike for the woman who had helped set the trap, and a pragmatic idea forming, as steady as a new coin being stamped.
Later, while the household bustling settled and Iris took over the housework with a light that made people relax, I learned the truth in pieces from Gianna Stone—my faithful maid who had kept watch on me and the house.
"Lord Finnian Barber's men call me 'war-king'," she said, slipping into a little gossip. "They say he never favors a woman, his eyes are for battle. Yet... he has saved a city, and he has this fierce honor."
"He is like a modern star?" I said, thinking of cameras and endorsers and the odd gull of celebrity from my old life.
"Yes," Gianna said, happy to repeat the image. "A man many long for. If he were mine, I would braid his hair with silk and never let him out of my sight."
I felt my imagination slip into a market stall. "If a famous man lends his name, why wouldn't everyone buy the product?"
"Miss?" Gianna tilted her head. "You are thinking of a business."
"Always," I said. "A place for balls of leather, a house for kicking and keeping people." I said the word aloud. "Shooting-sphere. Play-hall. A place for the city's young men to sweat and make bets and bring their wives bread."
She looked at me, eyes honest. "You are clever, Miss."
"Or desperate," I said. "But money solves ninety percent of problems. I need money."
There was a spark in the story that night: Finnian Barber had been left for dead by poison. A warrior of myth, he had stumbled into my courtyard and into my life because I recognized a small half of a carved warm jade at his belt—the other half was tucked at my own waist in the shape of an old family trinket. He demanded either my help in exchange for not striking me down, or my household's oblivion. "Lead me to your rooms," he said, "and cure me."
"Two choices," he told me before I had time to wonder. "Bring me herbs, or refuse and die."
I did what whoever I am now always did: I adjusted the role my fate required and chose the more interesting script. I fed him tea, hammered at stubborn stocks of medicinal root, argued over the best decoction like a workman doing his job. He lied about a dozen small things and then admitted none of the small things mattered. He was Finnian Barber—battle-scarred with a jag at his eyebrow and a temperament like cold iron—but he also had a way of looking at me that suggested he calculated people the way generals count regiments.
"I will owe you," he murmured once, when the stew had done its work. "I owe men I did not want to live. I will repay."
"Repay?" I scoffed. "By telling everyone you owe me? That's worthless."
"Not worthless to your plans," he said. "There are ways to be useful to each other."
We made a pact of convenience. He called himself "Rogue" at first, then let slip the name Finnian when it suited him, and once he was well enough, he left a single instruction: "If you ever need me, go to the shop in Row of the East called the Zhu Jade. Ask for 'Rogue'."
I used the name like a key.
For the first few days I played both parts: the wronged young lady and the businesswoman with a crooked coin. I had Gianna as my wing, Matilda as my obstacle, and Valentina as the silver-backed viper. When an opportunity came—market upheaval, an admiring prince's day out—I seized it.
I devised a little hustle in which I commissioned belts—simple, handsome things—modeled on the War King's style. I asked Fabian Santiago, the South prince who was used to impudence, for a small drawing: he obligingly sketched the jade belt's shape, less by memory than by mimicry. Then I asked the ZHU Jade shop in the street to craft a dozen. The shopkeeper accused me of paying too much flirted with the sale I promised to make directly to people. I barked, and he dropped the price. I learned negotiation like a new dance.
Then I placed the belts strategically: one as a display, one gifted to my jealous sister Gwen Stone to make her flashier, and the rest sold quietly to the bored and greedy people in the city—women who wanted their men to believe they owned a piece of a hero's life.
"You're going to sell the War King's brand?" Gianna asked, lowering her voice.
"Not the War King's brand," I said. "War King's inspired. And we'll sell them to the people who want the illusion more than the truth."
We made several hundred coins that week. I was careful: I had to make the shopkeeper Verity keep silent, and I had to use messengers like Kaelynn Russo, a bright-faced courier I hired, to deliver belts discreetly. Soon, the city's gossip-fed market believed Finnian Barber had endorsed a pastry shop that displayed a crude portrait of him—"a war god in a terrible moustache!"—and the pastries sold out.
"Use the name," I told Gianna. "Fame is currency. Papers and posters. A picture of Finnian and the words, 'Recommended by the War King' will send the sold numbers sky-high."
"Is that not theft?" she asked.
"It is marketing," I told her. "And the law is often bored and looking elsewhere."
Before long, another game happened that I never expected: a palace ball-game. The Emperor announced a public match where the winner could ask for a wish. I thought: a wish from the Emperor? A stair to fortune. I entered, pretending to be only awkward and able, and I walked in among silk and jewels. Fabian Santiago and I were pitted against each other; he played with the casual arrogance of a man who assumes everyone will fall in love with his grin. I kicked the ball the way I had played strange sports across a life I remembered from my past existence, and I won, badly.
"Tell me your wish," the Emperor invited.
I looked at the circle of men and women: my sister Gwen with her face pale and bitter, Valentina smiling like lacquer, the War King Finnian watching from a carved bench. I looked at the Emperor and played every ounce of impulse into a single phrase.
"I wish the Emperor would grant my sister a husband," I said, smoothing my voice like a paper bird.
The hall broke into laughter and shock. "She offered up her prize for someone else?" they whispered.
Then, because I had learned how to place pieces and the court is always hungry for pleasing order, Finnian—seated with a gravity that flattened the room—named a suitable suitor, and the Emperor consented. A match was made in a few minutes amid the rapture and gossip of court.
Gwen was victorious and stunned, and Valentina clapped like a woman protecting her own interest. No one suspected that the first piece of the belt she began to gloat over had come from my hand and my plan.
I kept selling my belts and using Finnian's shadow as a lure. The money came in, and my small, crooked business grew. I saved coins and learned to hide them in places only I knew. I bought a run-down corner house that could become a "play-hall" in my mind's future. When dozens of commissions arrived, I kept going.
But people like Valentina do not fade quietly. Her hunger curdled into more ambition. She used household servants as pawns, she spread false tales, she tried to buy and buy loyalty. She had even tried to poison me once—an attempt that could have been fatal if not for Gianna's quick thinking and Finnian's quiet hand.
One night she miscalculated terribly. She tried to set me up with a staged madness—a way to scare my household into believing I had lost my senses—so that she could take full control. She hired a trinket-maker to put delusion-powder in the house to make the fowl go mad, and she planted sloppy actors to pretend to be goblins. She wanted an excuse to have me locked away and have Gwen looked after by the nobility.
We turned the trap into theater.
I spread the rumor that martyrdom suits fools and that revenge suits the crafty. I arranged for Finnian to know, and he arranged for a mock-ghost to make his entrance. Iris Dickinson pretended to be frightened; Matilda Vincent, who had been playing neuter, tumbled exactly when needed. Valentina puffed, certain the house would be hers.
We staged the ghost, and the would-be exorcist was a fool in a hat whose stick I had broken in a little act we prepared. We mocked their fear with painted teeth and a silver needle that Finnian had fatally put into a caged snake for effect. The "ghost" was a soldier with white powder, and Valentina fell for it hard. She shrieked into a scene of chaos and fainted from her own performance.
By the time the servants had collected themselves, Valentina had humiliated herself among the house and the neighborhood. It was a small thing. We relished it because cruelty tastes of tin if left to simmer. But I knew her appetite for taking more would not end there.
So I planned the punishment she deserved.
We arranged a guest list, and I told Finnian to come. Nicolas Myers, my father, agreed to hold what would be called a "reparations council" in the great hall the following day. I wanted not simple retribution; I wanted a display so that Valentina's social mirrors would crack in public, and she would understand, down to the marrow, the cost of her scheme.
The council met at sun-high. The great hall filled with people who, like grass, tend to gather where water is. There were neighbors, minor officials, and servants from houses all down the lane. I sat at the edge of Nicolas's high table with Finnian at my right and Iris at my left. My hands did not tremble.
"Valentina Beltran," Nicolas said, his voice like a bell. "You have been accused of supplying a banned substance—powder that causes hysteria—to the household of your stepdaughter. You have been accused of making arrangements to ruin our child's reputation for personal gain. How do you answer?"
Valentina's false smile did not break at first. She sniffed and fluttered her hand. "Nicolas, you wound me. I fell. I am in pain."
"Pain is easy to claim," Finnian said softly. "Truth is harder."
They had brought witnesses: the little trinket man who had been bribed to tell falsehoods, dragged in with a rope at his wrists—a creature who had lied for a plate and a silver. His face was pale. He trembled when he saw Finnian's dark, spare profile.
"Tell them," Finnian said.
The man crumpled. "I was paid to put the powder in," he admitted. "I was paid by a woman with a hand that smelled of lavender and silver, who said she could not afford ruin, and who said she'd raise me higher in favor."
"Who hired you?" Nicolas asked.
The man pointed. "Valentina Beltran."
A gasp ran through the hall like a wind through reed. Valentina's mouth opened and closed. "You lie!"
"We have fragments of the packages you bought," Iris said, and she displayed a torn bundle of yellowed paper, the kind only used for medicine, with a trainable mark that matched Valentina's seal.
Valentina's eyes narrowed. She leaned into the table like a cat to hide a thin fold of fear. "This is trickery," she snapped. "I would never—"
"Not true," Matilda blurted. She had been arranged to keep her mouth shut, but she could not, or would not, preserve Valentina's lie.
At that, Valentina crumpled into something human. Her voice shook, high and small. "I did it! I did it so my daughter would be loved and prized. I wanted our house to move forward. I wanted..."
"To hurt your stepchild?" someone shouted.
She looked around the room at the neighbors who had been coaxed in by my father's call. Faces already knew her color. Phones do not exist here, but tongues travel like birds. People shifted, murmured, and that was when I took the measure of the punishment and made it meaningful.
"Valentina," I said, standing, and the room settled on me. "You have designed ruin around a child's name like putting poison in bread. You spoke of social rise—"
"Laylani," she hissed. "You speak like a judge."
"Because this is our judge's table today." I forced my voice to remain even. "You will confess details, and you will do so in the face of those whose names you sought to polish with my ashes."
She put a hand to her throat, the pale color of her face flaring. "I will not—"
"Valentina," Nicolas said. "If you take your daughter's future and twist it into your own ladder, you will be answerable. The law names poisoning a grave offense."
She saw where the conversation went and did the one thing villainy often forgets will humiliate her most: she stood tall and prepared to lie.
I moved before she could gather the next false breath. "This is not only about law," I said. "You have built a theatre of life in which your lies have been props. You will be stripped of your social standing this day."
"Strip me?" Her voice became a laugh: sharp, nervous.
I had arranged with the household steward and the public crier for a ritual. "You will stand," I said. "You will kneel at the central dais and apologize to those you named and those whose lives you sought to tangle. You will hand over any seals and the money you used. You will stand in public as people pass and tell them what you did."
The crowd had a strange silence, the kind when it senses a long-feared thing about to break. Valentina's mouth twitched.
"No," she whispered. "You cannot."
"Watch," Finnian said. He moved like a man who needed no permission to place a piece. He stepped forward, put a single coin on the table, and opened his hand for silence.
"I will speak," Valentina said, sounding like a woman asking for a hand to catch her fall. The room surged into the terrible scent of attention as if vultures sensed a fresh wound.
"Say it," I said.
She began with the apology dressed as a defense: "I—" she fluttered. "I only did it because—"
"Because you wanted advancement," the crier said, prompting the crowd. "Because you loved the idea of those crowns on your head. Because you wanted to climb."
Valentina's voice shook. "I wanted my daughter to be seen. I did what I did to make sure no one would take her away from me. I thought if Laylani—if she were ruined less, my daughter would..." Her sentences collapsed like cheap dishware.
I listened as her face went through the sequence the law likes to name: arrogance, denial, pleading, then collapse. Her eyes flashed from hate to pleading.
"Shut up," Gwen spat from the side, but not with the venom she had shown before. Her voice was small.
Then the crowd changed. A man in the corner began to clap softly, then others followed until the hall was full of the sound of hands like small storms. The clapping was not kindly. It was the noise of judgment.
Valentina dropped to her knees. "Forgive me," she begged, and now she was naked of defense.
Then she scrambled up, tears washing her makeup into streaks. She begged Nicolas like a woman begging a god. She begged us all. People took out their handkerchiefs and some wept, some whispered, "She is undone." They took out crude sketchbooks and wrote down her confession. The servants recorded it by voice. The crier chronicled it. The spectacle was complete.
There was an ugly moment where she seemed to search for a face that would rescue her, and when none came, her composure dissolved into fear so precise I felt a kind of pity. "Please," she whispered, "I will do anything."
"Stand and be silent," Nicolas said. "You will be confined to the second wing for two months with no visitors beyond appointed nurses. You will pay restitutions to the household and publicly at the market you will walk facing the crates of herbs you bought and hand them over to the vendor you cheated."
Her legs buckled. She fell where she stood and cried: "Please, I was afraid."
The crowd watched, and among them were faces that had once courted her favor. Some turned away. Some pulled out little parchment and began to write down what they would tell their friends. Someone took out a small painted tile and carved her likeness onto it with a child's cruelty.
Valentina's reaction followed the script I had wanted precisely: she went from triumph to panic, from defense to denial, from begged-for pity to complete collapse. The servants around us gestured, some whooped, some sobbed. A few of the women clapped, and a child in the doorway cried out, "Shame!" as if he'd been taught that word for parties.
"Beg for mercy," she said, on her knees, crawling like an animal. "Beg, and I will not listen."
She knelt, then she begged, and we listened. She turned her face to me, to Finnian, to Nicolas, to the room, and pleaded for the mercy she had tried to steal away from a child she had put in danger.
That day her social mask came off for everyone to see. It was slow and it was public, and it was not merciful. It was a punishment precise enough to be remembered: she lost influence, the neighbor's trust, and her secret coffers. She had been punished in the place she had most craved: in the faces of those who could have given her more.
When the council was done, she was led away under the watch of two house servants. Her steps were slow and shamed. People followed, snapping little notes. I felt an unexpected quiet in my chest. The ground had shifted.
If you ask me whether I felt victorious, I will tell you this: the taste of victory is not always sweet. It is often cold and metallic. But it also frees the body from fear in a new way. The servants who had feared open violence dared to smile. Gianna came to me with two cups of tea and refused to meet my eye too long. Finnian brushed his fingers against the table and let them linger.
"Well done," he said simply.
"Notized," I corrected. "Not just well done."
He looked at me then, measuring me like a general sizes the horizon. "You are clever."
"So were you," I replied with a smile I hoped looked modest.
He inclined his head. "Would you like me to speak for your 'play-hall' if you make it real?"
"I would like you to show up," I said.
He considered. "I will attend. I will even train the men to knock a few coins in the baskets."
He smiled then—an odd, small drive of light—and I felt a warm dullness in my chest.
"One more thing," I said. "Promise me you will not let the Emperor's kind of power become the only truth."
"Power is often what holds the truth," he answered.
"Then you'll hold it gently," I said.
He had the look of a man who had been praised like iron and forged into something rare. "I will," he promised.
Weeks passed and my belts sold like hot buns. I saved coins, and I bought the decrepit building on the edge of the market. I hired a few honest hands and a clever cook. I trained them in ways that suited my memory of other lives: clean counters, small bets, a rule that people should return what they held.
"Miss," Gianna would say with a smile, "your place is getting customers the old-fashioned way."
"Money is only a tool," I told her. "But it is a good tool."
There were nights when Finnian visited. He courted nothing that looked like a lover's gestures; he offered strategy and protection. "If this town grows into what you say," he said once, "you will be called a 'founder.'"
"Founder is a boring name," I answered. "Call me 'Lady of Play'."
He laughed. "I will tell my men to call you that."
Then came the day of the market's biggest event: a public demonstration by soldiers and a chance for the city's influential to show their faces. The Emperor himself came and watched as knights and footmen displayed their skill. I walked in with an armful of my made belts and a small box of pastries to give to people I wanted to know.
Valentina, out from her confinement but not yet free of disgrace, tried to stand in the sun. The crowd turned to her with faces hungry for old stories. She made a hunger that looked like regret. When she saw me, her expression curdled into hatred.
"Laylani," she said with a thin smile. "You have made things profitable."
"Profitable enough for me to own a place that will not be ruined so easily," I answered. "Now stand aside, Valentina. You are done being a thief of children's days."
She spat.
But the city's great moment came when Finnian stood on a raised platform and looked out over the crowd. He raised his hand, and for a heartbeat the air went very quiet.
"I would like to say this," he said. "There is a woman here who made courage into a craft and turned a name into work for many. That person made belts that made strangers believe in something. That person deserves recognition."
Then he turned and looked at me.
The crowd cheered, not because they understood my plan, but because a man of legend had mentioned me in public. Money and attention poured my way like a blessing. Business prospered; my play-hall gained its first regulars. I kept my head down and my plans large.
We had more scenes—court intrigues, a false lover trying to burn my name, a prince who loved a pastry too much, a sister who learned what being traded looks like and softened in an odd way—but the thing that stayed with me was the jade half at my throat.
Sometimes in the quiet, Finnian and I would sit on the back stoop of my little hall, and he would tell me what it was like to go to a battlefield.
"Do you miss it?" I asked once.
"Sometimes," he said. "But now I miss a thing called home."
"Make one," I told him.
"Will you be part of it?" he asked.
"I already have my part," I said. "I have a business, a roof, friends."
He smiled, patient and surprised, like a man who had been given a book he never thought he'd read and realized he would love the author.
"I will come to your play-hall often," he said. "And if you ever wish for something small, ask me."
"I might," I said. "But for now, I will build."
We built a place where the city's laughter echoed, and in time the Emperor's court and the markets and the poor men who kicked clay balls all came to my door. I made a living that was my own and a little empire that fit under a single rooftop. People laughed when I said it was a hall for play, but they kept coming. They liked the sweat and the bets and the small brightness of a thing built without permission.
And when the war king walked in, not to dominate but to watch, I felt a strange kind of victory. He sat in his corner and watched men play at glory. He watched me and did not speak much. He only smiled once, small and approving.
That night, as I locked the door, I took the two halves of the warm jade and held them together. They clicked like a promise.
"Tick," I said to the jade. "You keep the secret. I keep the work."
Finnian, leaning in the doorway, heard me. "A good bargain," he said.
"Yes," I told him. "A very good bargain."
I had arrived in this life choking on tea and interference. I had learned to speak justice in public and patience in private. I had made coins where others saw only shame. I was only a girl who had been given a second chance. I had civilization in my hands.
When people asked me later what I wanted, I said, simply: "A roof. A name. A crowd that comes not to crush me but to be part of the noise." I had gotten all three.
And once, in a small, private moment, Finnian offered his hand, not as a lord but as a man, steady and warm.
"Will you be my wife when the time is right?" he asked.
I looked at him and laughed. "We will see about 'when the time is right,'" I said. "For now, let's win the next game."
He nodded, and I knew we had both chosen the future we wanted.
The End
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