Sweet Romance15 min read
I Came to Marry (And Waited Eight Years)
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"All right. I will marry."
The hall fell still the instant the words left my mouth.
"Princess —" one minister started, and then became a thousand tiny sounds swallowed by the hush.
"I will marry," I said again, and the old white-bearded counselor who led the court turned his head and frowned, like he wanted to say that women shouldn't step into statecraft.
He didn't say it.
"No one will say women cannot," I told the empty air. "Not this day."
My father looked down at me from his throne as if seeing which of his daughters I was for the first time. "Yue—" he began.
"I am not acting on a whim, Father." I moved forward and bowed, "Your servant does not act on whim. The third princess is gone. My younger sisters are children. If I do not go, how will we answer Song?"
A silence folded into itself; the ministers murmured approval and their voices swelled like tide. "The princess is wise," they all agreed.
"Very well." Father sighed and let the ceremony roll like a wheel he did not wish to stop.
No one knew then that I had waited eight years for that wheel to move. No one saw the years like I did—the counting of seasons, the nights of training, the tiny cruelties turned into sharp tools. I had wanted this bargain as if it were a key. I had wanted him—a cold heir of another land, the man who had once pulled a child out of a cave and taught that child to stop hiding.
When the envoys arrived to fetch me, my cat died.
I was holding the old creature in the sun on the steps of my quiet palace. He had been thin and tenacious for years, and when the Song envoys arrived with banners and tinsel, he let his breath go in my lap like a small secret finally told.
"I will find him," I whispered to the dead cat, holding its cool head and feeling absurdly bereft.
Brooke Hassan, my most faithful maid, entered then and leaned close. "He hasn't come," she said, careful as always. "Not in the escort."
He would not come. He was a crown prince. A man who held a throne in waiting does not greet the bride of an enemy kingdom at the gates. He sends officials, he sends a horse, perhaps a polite letter. He does not walk into a foreign carriage to lift a veil.
Five days later, with dowry wagons and a retinue, we crossed the border. My father watched me go with a look I had longed for once—an ember of something like pride.
"If you suffer, write to me," he said.
I smiled at him like a child who had memorized a lie. "I will," I said.
I had made a list when I was very young: things to steal back. A life for my mother's memory. The small mercies of a life of my own. This marriage could be the ladder. Or the cliff.
On the road, I stayed inside the curtains. No one was to see my face during the procession. All I permitted myself were the tiny freedoms—touching the silk hem, letting Brooke braid my hair, placing the talisman my mother had left on my throat. Once, in a lull, Brooke set a bowl of food near me. I glanced at the maid's throat and found a new jade pendant there—strange.
"Brooke," I said, easing my chopsticks, "where did that come from?"
She pulled the collar closed and looked at me with that particular fear I had learned to read. "Princess," she whispered, "I—"
I reached and found a foreign pendant tucked into her robes. The motion made her mouth part, and I dropped the trinket out of the window like a stone thrown clear of water.
"Did you promise you'd never leave me?" I asked quietly a moment later as she knelt.
"Princess," she said, near to tears, "I would never leave you."
I believed her. She knew how I had been raised. She had seen me cradle the dying cat in the sun. She had been with me when I decided that someone must carry the price for what the court had done. She understood things words could not bear.
When we reached the Song capital the next month, they told me to rest for a day because the marriage day was a favorable day.
It was not meant for me.
"Today is the prince and the prince's wife," a attendant whispered as my palanquin crawled through the city. My hand clenched an apple and the skin split with a soft sound in my palm.
We stopped at the Everjoy Hall. Curtains lifted. I stepped down and walked beneath lacquered eaves.
The crown prince did not come that night.
They brought the ceremony to me—the poles, the fans, the rites. They lifted the wedding veil. The rod of joy was presented to the prince's hand. For a beat, I felt ridiculous, like a marionette tugged by new strings. Then I saw him.
He was taller than I remembered. Time had sharpened him rather than dulled him. His eyes were cool water; he looked at me as if he were watching a tide come and recede.
"Are you satisfied, Princess?" he asked, voice thin as a reed.
"Very," I said and smiled.
He tugged the red veil and the tassel fluttered. The ritual had been done. The room smelled of incense and a tangle of courtiers. He took his seat apart from the bride and then—behind cloth and ritual—I leaned. I threw my arms around his waist and dropped my face to his shoulder.
He froze, then asked, "Have you had enough?"
"No," I said honestly.
He let the curtain fall and the roof creak with a hundred small conspiracies. He left almost at once to attend to duties; I waited a night and then reached for what I had been promised. He came and stayed. The next morning our world rearranged itself.
"You're different from the girls of Lin," he said once, tucked against my throat. "I used to think you were simple."
"Does the prince like different?" I asked, soft as hand silk.
He was distant. I learned how to read that distance like a map. He liked things neat—a motion taken or refused, never more.
"I don't like guessing," he said.
Then he learned to look at me in ways he thought he could not. He learned my odd gestures, the scar on my hand I had once told the court was a sign from heaven. He'd seen it before when we were children and he had asked then, and I had said it was a mark that would keep me from forgetting. "This is to make you pity me," I had said, and he had been a boy who disdained pity. The scar became something else—an intimate geography between us.
We slept together as if practice could make affection. He was skillful, and in the quiet after he always kept an even tone. But his eyes rarely burned. I began the old work—of turning small kindnesses into habit, of practicing tenderness like a craft.
"Who taught you?" he asked once, dry.
"No one," I said, and kissed him. "I taught myself."
There were small things that broke the ice. He would take my hand when I shivered on the terrace. He would offer cold granules of tea as an afterthought and then watch me with the faintest smile over the cup. "You like to read the old book," he noticed. "You carried it even when you left Lin."
"You gave it to me once," I replied. "You threw me out of a cave and then handed me a book."
He blinked, startled and unmoved and yet something like amusement touched the edge of his mouth.
The palace had people with sharp tongues and sharper knives. They whispered that I was from a pitiful court, that I had been raised poorly, that all I had was the cunning of a survivor. That suited me perfectly. I had survived.
Things were not all tenderness. I had given orders to Kenji Esposito—my found retainer, my shadow, the little trickster who had once been half-dead and I had chosen him up from a courtyard. He moved like a ghost in the palace. He was my hand.
One day I found him bound and brought forth by the prince's men. He stood tall and proud with his hands tied, and my smile did not stop.
"Why is he like that?" I asked Dylan when he entered the room.
"Did you send him?" he asked in the same flat tone.
"Did I? Or did someone else? Tell me what you wish me to do, Prince."
He stepped forward and looked at Kenji. Then, as one might test a horse, he gave the loyal man a small pill. "This will keep you alive," Dylan said. "Every seven days you will come and take the antidote. Do not fail me."
Kenji took it like a man used to being exchanged. He swallowed. "Whoever I serve, I will serve well," he said, and I thought: the world is cruel even to those who are neither kings nor courtiers.
"You gave him sugar," I whispered to Dylan as the man staggered. "I gave him sugar years ago when we had nothing."
He smiled that thin smile. "You are more dangerous than I thought, Princess."
I did what needed to be done with a calm hand. I had used Kenji like a thread in a web; he had woven the useful parts. But that did not mean I did not care for him. You can love your weapons and still keep them sharp.
Avianna Young came into my life like weather. She was the crown's chosen bride—soft white skirts that rustled with a laugh and a face that somehow made people trust her before she opened her mouth. She told everyone the prince favored me and then laughed so light that the point drifted off like a feather.
"Will he come tonight?" she asked me one evening as she twined a lock of my hair.
"Maybe," I answered. "If he does, be kind."
She laughed like a bell. "I will be your sister," she said, and I found her oddly dangerous. She shifted the room's weight when she entered—the soldiers softened, the guards bowed deeper.
Night came and left. He came when he came. Sometimes he stayed; sometimes he left. Once at the banquet an arrow flew and struck the pillar behind him. He flinched like any man. Everything became chaos. The Emperor—Emmanuel Chapman—descended into pale anger and then into arranging men and truth like dominoes.
"A stable plan," Dylan whispered to me as we moved away from the sunken stage toward the lotus pond, "is better than a brave sentence."
"Do you think someone aimed at you?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. "And you saved me."
"Who else," I asked, "could be so foolish as to try again?"
The palace's dark breath touched us. Later, in the hush of a lanterned pavilion, we fed fish in the lotus pool and waited like lovers disguised as politicians.
"Why did you do that?" he asked softly when I fed the carp.
"You looked like a small boy in a white shirt," I teased. "I remembered."
He smiled then, a real smile that pushed at the corners of his eyes. "You were there."
"Always," I said.
Even as we built our closeness, palace ropes tightened. I uncovered a plot—one of the prince's own attendants had smuggled fake seals and dragon robes, contraband to hand the throne to some other hand. The evidence was messy and terrible: a tainted soul, a falsified signet, a plan to replace one child's name with another's. I had set the threads in motion so that the truth would surface in his presence. He watched me when the pieces were laid on the table; his face did not flicker but his fingers tightened.
"You had him killed," he said to me quietly once.
"You mean 'taken away,'" I answered. "We took what we had to take. The world does not hand you gifts, Dylan. It hands you debts to pay."
He studied me under the dim light. "You are clever. Perhaps too clever."
"I know what to play, Prince," I said. "But I will never make you a pawn."
He laughed lightly. "Who would dare make me a pawn?"
We moved through seasons like predators. Then the arrow came again—this time at the hunt. I remembered my mother's face, the way she had died in that small palace room. I dove and took the second arrow in my side so that the crown would not bleed. The pain came sharp and an odd kind of time slowed: I thought of the nine linked rings that had broken when I fell as a child; I thought of the little cat that had left my side as the palankin approached; I thought of the small book Dylan had given me when we were children.
"They said you would be the one to die," Avianna whispered from the next bed when I woke. "You were meant to be the sacrifice."
"I was meant to take what needed to be taken," I replied, waking with a mind both stripped and full: the child I had carried seemed to have gone. My belly carried a silence, and I wrapped my hand over the place where the future had once been.
"You are not lost to me," Dylan said, and sat like a man who had both seen a battle and yet could not control the next wind. He became a man who would sleep less, who would think in sharp angles. He called Kenji to his side and would not let him go out of sight. He arranged men and gifts; soon the Emperor himself fell ill in the way court doctors cannot explain when conspiracies move like poison. The throne shifted and, like a careful hand, Dylan took the place his patient strength had prepared.
His ascension was steady and terrible. It smelled like burning paper and the iron of winter. People made choices in the night and then pretended they had always had courage. Some of them had truly chosen wrong.
When the day came to punish those who had worked against us, I made a list. Yael Golubev was one: a man who had whispered in the Emperor's ear and who had the habit of looking like a benign scholar while planting knives. Oleg Ball was another: a minister whose smile folded like a blade.
We did not kill them in private. We announced their crimes. We made them stand under the red banner where the Emperor had once sat and where people would come.
The punishments were public and varied—because justice, if it is to feel like justice, must be seen change a man.
"It is time," Dylan said to me when the great hall filled, "that the people who believed themselves tethered to the old world see the new."
"Let them be different sorts of punished," I suggested.
He nodded. "You will speak first."
I walked out into the hall with the confidence that had been trained into me. Brooke stood at my back like a small, calm island; Kenji sat nearby on a bench with his hands folded like a man meditating on a sharp stone. The accused were brought in with ropes and banners snapping behind them.
"Stand," I ordered.
They did. They were the kind of men who had grown fat on rumor and had clean hands from long ceremonies; their faces were pale as if the world had been novel to them.
"You," I said to Yael Golubev, "sold your voice to the idea that the crown is an object you can pass from hand to hand like coin. You sold letters and gave false seals to men who would have us fall. How many times did you whisper that a boy of another mother should sit the throne?"
He sneered. "You overreach, foreign princess. You set a scare—"
"I set truth," I interrupted. "You placed dragon robes and forged seals on a tray and expected the throne to be a place of bargaining."
Dylan's hand touched my shoulder, mild as a compass.
"For your crimes," I went on, looked at the crowd so that every noble could see his mouth, "you will stand at the city gate with a carved sign around your neck describing your sins. You will remain there for seven days. Each day—a bell. Each bell rings your name. The people will see your face and recall what you sold them."
This was public degradation: the first punishment. At the gate, children spat at his shadow. Women called out the reasons openly. He tried to keep his dignity by twisting words, but a man's voice can become brittle under a crowing; at night the market crowds took his food and threw it back, and he cowered beneath a thin blanket. The effect was slow and poisonous. He slid from power to contempt.
Next was Oleg Ball.
He had been fond of his station, graceful under candlelight, and his crime was more personal: he had orchestrated an assault meant to shame my name and then hide it as a sickness. For him, I arranged a different fate.
"Minister Oleg," I said when I spoke of him, "you never lifted a hand in the cold, yet you commanded men to cut. You used women as currency."
A murmur rose, the hall's breath quickening.
"For you," Dylan proclaimed slowly, "you will remain in the palace kitchens for a month. You will dress in an apron and serve the very family you attempted to dishonor. Each day you will knead dough in public, and the cooks will talk to you. The people will come and ask you to do tasks. You must obey. You will learn the smell of oil and the weight of a pan. You will be remembered by your work not your words."
It was humiliation by labor—the worst for a man who had been born to an easy seat. He turned red and spat and was tugged away to the kitchens. For a week the palace cooks refused to speak to him. Everyone watched. He learned humility.
"Finally," I said, turning to the third man, a slim noble who had hired cutthroats, "you will be exiled and stripped of rank. You will walk from the city with only the clothes on your back. We will escort your family from their posts."
"That is cruel," someone hissed.
"No," Dylan said, voice flat as a scythe. "It is necessary. People must see that choices have cost. When a man chooses to buy knives, he cannot be welcomed into the family of rulers. His children will live under shadow and his name will be spoken with a low voice."
The crowd watched with eyes that shifted like flint. Some applauded. Rumors were freed like pigeons. The gossiping tongues had more to chew.
We demanded confessions and made them read aloud the letters they had signed, the names they had sold, the times they had slandered and plotted. I watched their faces change—first arrogance, then denial, then anger, then a final hollowing as they recognized what the crowd had already decided. A group of women stood in the galleries and spat in their faces—figuratively and then materially—and someone filmed it with a small glass box that flashed like a spell. People laughed. People wept. It was messy and righteous and public.
I had my revenge. But it was not simply for the small satisfactions of vengeance. It was to re-write a history that had said my name was less than others' and to show that schemes will come undone in a wide place where everyone can see. I had forged the proof, yes; I had made the room where it would be revealed and then watched as those who had thought themselves protected by custom were stripped of their illusions.
They rarely begged for mercy before the crowd. They tried to lie and deny. One of them fainted and was carried away. Another cursed us and yet later swallowed his curses. The crowd's reaction was a chorus: some clapped, some recorded with glinting mirrors, some cried. I felt each reaction like the pulse of a city.
Dylan watched the scene with a fast, careful calm. When it was done, he took my hand.
"You are cruel," he said, smiling, and I could not tell if it was admiration or chastisement.
"Only at the right times," I answered.
After the cleansings, the palace was quieter. Some men left for the provinces with bundles and empty titles; some were left to their shame. The people had seen. The court had shifted.
But the strange part of my life remained: Avianna Young.
Sometimes she simply vanished. She was there in one moment and not in the next, as if the world liked not to keep her more than a dream. She sat with me on nights when thunder made me small and she would pull my ear close and cover it with her hand.
"I used to read a book and fall," she once said in the hush of the night. She had arrived soaked from rain that matched our griefs and lay across the bed. "I fell and became something else."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"I'm not from here," she said, and then laughed at me like something brittle being bent. "I am from a book. I dreamed one day and came down and thought, 'I must keep you safe.'"
At first I believed she was playing. Later I watched her cheeks for color and found them gone like paper.
One night she told me stories that did not fit in the world. She claimed she had seen my life before: how I tricked men, how I paid for secrets, how the child I had once carried would be taken by the valley. She told me she cried for me then, in the book's pages, and the book's sorrow leaked into the real world. I woke from one of her tellings to find the bed empty, her pillow warm but gone, and a single white hair on the cover that had not been there before.
"You're leaving," I said to her once when the thunder rolled, and she grasped my wrist and said, "I have to go back. I am not from this place."
I could not stop her. When she did finally leave, people said they had seen someone in a distant courtyard vanish like mist. I ran out one night and called for her name until my throat went dry. People said she had been a fancy, a trick of the crown. I thought she had been my sister.
I had no more room for illusions. The palace politics were a meat grinder into which we had all placed our small hopes. Dylan carried the weight of the crown with a stiffness that made him less comfortable and more dangerous. We weathered plots, arrows, courtly diseases, and the lurching grief that was mine for the child who had gone.
Then the day came when a letter arrived from my father written in tidy hand. "My child," it began, and looked like an ordinary parent's regret. He had written many letters. He said he had been sorry for not noticing the small hurts of his child until they had become monstrous.
I burned them all in his presence while Dylan held me and let me grieve and then slowly unclench.
"You forgive him?" he asked.
"I will not let the past tie me to old pains," I answered.
"Good." He kissed my forehead. The kiss tasted of ash and iron and the little spice of mercy.
We had what we had then—a strange, steady love that was not always warm but was always present. He named our loss at night and carved a small smile in the hollow where grief had been. He took to walking the palace by my side, listening to vulgarities from guards and servants and making them less deadly by turning them into jokes.
In the end, power changed the men who sought it, but it also changed those who kept it. Those who had thought they would thrive on secrets learned the hard way that time is a public judge. The punishments we gave were different from each other because the men were different—each cruelty received its own mirror, and the mirrors shattered.
"Do you regret the things you have done?" Dylan asked me once in the garden where the lotus bloomed too late for autumn.
"I regret nothing I used to be," I said. "I regret only the quiet that followed the storms."
He put his hand on my scarred palm and smiled.
"Then we will make more quiet," he said.
When the last of our enemies had been turned to stories parents told children by the hearth—"Do not peddle in false papers," they said—Avianna appeared one last time on a rainy night. She lay by my side and said, "You will keep him, won't you?"
"I will," I said, and meant it.
She closed her eyes and said, "That is all I wanted."
The next morning, she was gone. No one could say where she had gone. I kept the small memories she had given me: the firepot she taught me to love, the way she covered my ears during storms, the laugh that made me feel less strange.
Dylan put his forehead to mine and said, "You were always mine to have."
I kissed him and found that even the bitter things in us could be smoothed by an honest hand. The cat was gone, the nine-linked rings were cracked, my child's space was empty, but we planted a garden by the lotus pond and watched it grow slow and fierce.
One night, under the moon, I took from a hidden drawer the cracked nine rings and set them on the table. I wound my fingers through them like beads. The red veil I had once worn hung in a chest, its tassels a soft proof that I had been moved like a piece on a board.
"I waited eight years," I told Dylan.
He smiled like someone who had won and lost in the same breath. "You waited, and you won."
In the quiet that followed, I pressed the ward my father had given me to my chest and felt the hollow of what had been and the fullness of what we kept. The pond echoed the moon. The nine rings reflected a sliver of that light and clicked softly—just the way a full moon tugs on the small, steel things in a woman's hands.
The end was not clean. The court never lets things be clean. But in the room where the red veil slept and the broken rings lay and the memory of a cat that died waiting for a carriage hung like a small, stubborn star, I knew I had become the person who could keep what she loved.
The End
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