Sweet Romance15 min read
I Mistook the Little Healer for the Scholar — and Stole My Own Fate
ButterPicks14 views
They said I was a fragile child, a palace flower that might not see many springs.
"My daughter," Father would say, touching my wrist as if checking a pulse, "must be tended like the finest porcelain."
I remember the winter I first learned to fear my own breath. I remember an old man summoned from the edge of the map, a strange healer who spoke of stars and fortunes like throwing seeds into the wind.
"Her purple star has fallen into the palace mud, and the wolf star sails from the east," he told Father in a voice like cracked bells. "She has luck enough for a clan but not enough for a lifetime. Let a life of thick fortune share breath with her, and she may live."
Father bowed, solemn as thunder. "Bring me the one with little favor and much fortune," he ordered the court, and the chancellor's little son arrived in a rump of a bed, pale as winter rice.
They called him 'so-many-years' in play and pity. I called him Crew because the servants mispronounced his name at first. Crew Atkinson came into my rooms and into my days like a stray song. Where I grew brighter with each passing month, he grew thin.
We were children. We promised things like the kind of vows that live forever in small mouths.
"Only if you are alive, I will not let you die first," I said once, emboldened by childish certainty, and he smiled at me with too-old eyes.
"I'll stay," he promised. "Live or die, I won't leave."
Then the world turned as it does — sharp, indifferent. My mother left us in a season that smelled of salt and cold. I was dragged north to my grandfather in his fortress of wind and ice. I held on to a warm paper that smelled like the city and Crew's handwriting until the ink blurred from my tears. I did not know then that the man who kept me breathing with other people's power had already been taken away by the river.
Ten years passed like a scroll unrolled too fast. I trained with spears and guns until calluses mapped my palms. I thought the past a sealed room. Then one afternoon at the training field a maid ran up to me with a letter.
"A summons from the chancellor's house," she said. "Crew is to be forced into an unwelcome marriage with a libertine. He begs you to come."
"No hesitation," I said, and mounted a horse with a speed that splintered wind.
I came to the city with one goal: bring my little friend home.
What I found was a street turned into a parade.
"He's getting married," a bystander said, his eyes bright with gossip. "To that shameless Anning lady."
"Then stop it," I told the horse with my heels and leapt.
I fell on a sedan chair as if I had been born to physics and drama. Guards drew blades. I cracked lashes with my whip and the crowd gasped as I climbed the roof of that red carriage and announced, loud enough for the whole procession to hear, "This man is mine! Who dares lay a hand on him?"
A hand brushed aside the curtain. A young man stepped out like a picture from a scroll: long black hair, white robe, scholar's composure. He laughed very quietly.
"Since you're already here," he said, voice like a soft drum, "why hurry away?"
I froze. The person I had come to rescue was a pale face I had never seen — not Crew. He was Fitzgerald Simpson, the kingdom's triumphant scholar, a man whose name parents whispered into their children's ears when they wanted them to aim higher.
A house boy tumbled out behind him and shouted, "That is the new champion of the capital, the chancellor's eldest — you dare steal him? I'll run to my master!"
My whip slid from my fingers and clattered. A hot flush of shame rose in me as if someone had taken the ground from beneath my feet.
"I thought— I thought that was Crew," I stammered. The carriage's satin curtain hung like a verdict.
The city became an uproar. Patrols poured in. I fought and ran and fought again, but in the end I was hauled before Father, kneeling on the cold stones of the palace.
"Do you know what you've done?" Father thundered. "You have disgraced the court, the capital, the name of your house."
"I meant to save him," I said. "I swear I meant to save Crew—"
"Enough," Father cut me off. "Since you've made a spectacle, it must be settled properly. You will marry the man you threatened."
He slammed his hand down, and the edict fell like a guillotine. I could not imagine a worse sentence. The scholar's head would bend over my house as if I were some prize to be kept, and I would be the laughing root of every palace joke.
But at the same ceremony, after the officials had muttered and plans had been made, a gentleness intruded at the edges. Fitzgerald bowed to the throne and then to me, eyes steady and strangely calm.
"Aurora," he said softly when the crowd had dispersed and the moon had trimmed the palace in quiet, "if you truly do not wish to be bound, tell me."
"I don't," I said. "I don't want this."
"You need not pretend." He gave a small, crooked smile. "I never wanted to catch fame like a net before. I wished for many things, but I did not wish for an ungenerous life. If you will not be my wife, I will step away and keep my name intact."
He left us then, and Father looked at me the way a judge looks at a child who has broken a bell.
Yet that night my thoughts kept returning to Crew. I could not let him be pulled into someone else's farce. I slipped over walls and through the dark to the chancellor's residence, thinking a child's presence still warmed the house, thinking the ink on his letter was fresh.
"The chancellor's house has no such servant," the first footman I stopped told me, eyes round. "We do not keep a Crew."
"No one with that name. No Crew Atkinson," repeated another.
I felt like a trick played on me. The letter in my bosom was warm from the fingers that had written it hours ago. If there had been a Crew, where was he?
I prowled the estate and found what I was not meant to find: a hidden pool in a private bath. Steam rose like ghosts. A back turned toward me. Curves in shadow. The man turned and my breath left me.
It was Fitzgerald, sleeves wet, hair clinging to his shoulders like inked silk.
I had watched him without meaning to watch until a snail of shame crawled across my face. I had seen scholars and soldiers bare flesh in the north, but none struck my eyes like this. He moved with a soft grace that made my hands itch. For a mad minute I forgot the reason I was there.
Then something slim and living touched my hand — a frog, a snail, something ancient and damp. I shrieked and the house erupted. The oaths rang. I was hauled to the main hall like a fool.
"My daughter watched a man undressed in the chancellor's house," Father told the court, black as thunder. "Is this the behavior of a royal daughter?"
I tried to explain, to stammer that I had come for Crew, but there was a revelation in Father's face like a curtain torn.
"Aurora," he said quietly later, "the 'Crew' you loved — he died ten years ago. The boy who shared your bed and your breath was gone the winter you left for the north."
I sat down hard. "What do you mean dead?"
"Fell into the pond, drowned," Father said. "We buried him. That was ten years ago."
I had promised him my life. I had sworn over ancestral tablets. I whispered his name and found it hollow. I thought I saw the moon fall to the ground.
Days crawled after that in a heavy sleep. The wedding became a measured procession — but my heart had lost measure. Fitzgerald, who had been at once the object of my laughter and scorn, became a study of contradictions: a man who had staged things and who also, in small ways, surprised me.
"I had letters," he said once, taking my hand like a benediction. "I saw your haste. I wanted to keep you safe and thought a release would be kind. But I could not leave you with dishonor."
There was something disquieting in his candor, a precise admission of manoeuvre that made my stomach turn and also — bafflingly — made me listen.
Days passed and a gnawing rose in me: who had sent the letter about Crew? Who had tempted me back to the capital with the memory of a boy who had been dead for ten years?
I climbed to the roof of the chancellor's study one night and discovered, in the dim lamp-light, a string of conversation. The chancellor's voice — Klaus Masson — was low and practical.
"Father," Fitzgerald said in the voice I first heard, steady and strange, "the bait worked as planned. She returned in anger; she forced our hand. Shall we burn the letters?"
"Yes," the chancellor replied. "The world must have order. The princess gives us legitimacy. The family gains power."
There it was: a web. Fitzgerald's voice sounded different in the hush of the shingled room. He spoke of plans and timing — of sending a letter in Crew's name, of placing watchers along the road. He admitted orchestrating my humiliation so that only a sanctioned match could save the court's face.
I slid back from the eave like a thief. I folded the eaves tile gently, covering the evidence as my hands shook. Airless and furious, I thought of all the nights Crew had sat with me, the promises he had made, and the kindness that was his only coin.
My heart hammered. I had to confront them, but I did not want to be possessed by the same rage that made me jump onto a sedan chair.
So I watched more. I watched Fitzgerald in his quiet rooms and in the field. I watched small habits: how he held a pen with one finger curled in, how he rubbed the corner of his lip with the same mannerism Crew once had when he thought himself clever. I watched him sip tea and discreetly drop a sliver of dried orange peel into the cup like a secret flavor. I watched the way he lit a second candle on the bedside table though one was enough.
Coincidences stacked like leaning blocks until they formed a fragile tower that might be truth.
One night I broke into his chamber with the clumsy courage of a child and a spy.
He was awake.
"Aurora," he said, like an accusation or a welcome, I could not tell. "Night is not for secrets, but you have many."
"Are you Crew?" I blurted without preface. "Were you saved from the pond? Did you take his breath into your own?"
He was so steady, so disarmingly gentle. "I am Fitzgerald Simpson," he said. "But I am also what I became when I nearly died. The pond keeps its stories. I survived, and I changed."
"I do not understand."
He reached for his cloak and wrapped it around his shoulders before he spoke. Snow began to sift at the windows even though it was only late autumn.
"Ten years ago," he said, "I fell into the water with a boy named Crew. The healer saved us both in ways the court would call unnatural. One of us did not wake. The other returned… altered."
He looked down at his hands. "The man who came back kept memories of both of us. He kept a tenderness that was not all his own."
I felt faint. "So you knew? You used me?"
"I used the things I could. Yes." He did not flinch. "I thought to stitch a life that would not leave you in the cold. I arranged for your return when the time was right. I intended to make you mine honestly. When it failed, I took what I could."
I could not think. To be used was one injury; to be loved as if by two men at once was another. Anger rose through me like a flame and then collapsed into a weird, ridiculous pity.
"You planned to lure me like prey," I said. "You set watchers along the road. You wrote letters in a dead boy's name."
"I did," Fitzgerald said. "Forgive me if I sound monstrous. But I have no shame in confessing the truth. I would rather be monstrous and known than gentlemanly and false."
I wanted to strike him. I wanted to throw him into that very pond. Instead I laughed, long and broken.
"You used a dead child's name," I said.
"I used every lever I had," Fitzgerald returned. "Because I love you. Because I thought the palace and your father would never allow a true union without a spectacle that made sense for the court. I thought a slow, quiet plan would save you from fools. But I miscast my parts."
When I finally spoke, my voice had turned thin with a kind of weary defeat.
"And the chancellor? Your father? Did he know?"
"He knew," Fitzgerald said. "Klaus Masson knew. He needed a legitimizing match. He cares more for his line than for any child's ruin."
That night I did not sleep. I held the terrible knowledge in my palms like a live coal. The palace had been the stage; I had been both puppet and player.
A truth needs a place to burn. I took it to the only place where feathers and robes are weighed — the hall where the court sat in judgment and display.
It was on a day of formal audiences. The great hall was packed beyond propriety: ministers, generals, curious ladies who giggled under their veils, and commoners brought in as spectacle. Word travels — injustice is a sweet thing to lips hungry for theater.
I strode into that hall without herald or permission. Swords rang as guards tried to bar me, but I brushed past them with the same force I had used to leap on the sedan chair months before.
"Your Majesty," I said, kneeling but refusing to look small. "I stand before you because I was lured into the capital by a name that is dead."
A hush smothered whispers like candle-ash.
Pierce McCormick — my father — leaned forward, lines of his face like a map of storms. Beside him sat ministers and the chancellor Klaus Masson, who wore the calm of a man who thinks his plans are invisible.
I turned to the chancellor. "You sent letters in a dead child's name to lure me," I said. "You placed watchers on the road. You conspired to force a match to your advantage."
Klaus's face did not change at first. He smiled with the bland triumph of someone who believes in inevitability.
"Princess," he said silky, "all statecraft demands sacrifice. I am in service to the realm."
"To sacrifice a child?" I spat. "To pretend a dead boy still breathes so you can stitch a dynastic marriage? Where is your honor?"
"It is what the times demand," Klaus said, voice like oil. "The princess' health needs counsel. The family of the chancellor benefits. This is how the realm is steered."
"Then let the realm see its steersman," I said. "Tell us how you justified what you did. Tell us why you thought your convenience counted for a life."
"Convenience?" Klaus's smile thinned.
At my side Fitzgerald stepped forward. He had not been silenced by his own guilt. He stood like a man who had measured his own step and chosen it.
"It is true," he said. "I schemed. I helped. I misled a princess I intended to love."
"Misdirection and danger," Klaus said, "were necessary art."
"Necessary?" Fitzgerald repeated. "Do not taint art with murder. The child did not die because of our paper — he died in a pond. But we used his memory as bait. We made him into a tool. That is not art; that is rot."
Murmurs rose. Some gasped loudly. The court loved a scandal.
"Princess Aurora," Klaus said smoothly, "do you present evidence? Or do you stand on a stage and hurl accusations?"
I took a breath. I had expected to be dismissed. I had expected that the chancellor's weight would flatten me like a pressed flower. Instead I had the truth and I had eyes. I lifted my chin.
"I have overheard your plans," I said. "I listened on your roof. I know who wrote the letters. I know you placed watchers in the road. I will not be ashamed because something could be bought about with paper and charm."
Klaus's face became a mask. He opened his mouth and closed it. He tried to summon another courtier to support him, but the look on his face went from calm to brittle.
"Your Majesty," I said, "this realm should not be built on a child's ghost."
There is an anatomy to public punishment. It needs witnesses. It needs the perch of power to strike. I turned to the assembly.
"Let them speak." I pointed to the chamberlain who had carried the letter with the muddy seal. "Bring every messenger who delivered a word to the princess. Let each man tell the truth of who wrote what. Let the records be read aloud."
From the back, eyes boldened by the chance for spectacle, men stepped forward. A messenger read the letter aloud, and the hand that had sent it was found in the chancellor's dispatch chest. The clerk who had burned the copies confessed; his hands trembled as if they still held the ash.
Klaus looked on as his scaffolding crumbled. He had assumed power's warmth would protect him, but when paper and witness met, even an old fox can be cornered.
"Do you deny your orders?" I asked.
"No," Klaus said at last. His voice had become a thread. "I ordered the letters to secure the proper match." He tried to make it a small arithmetic of power.
"Did you think no one would notice?" I pressed. "That a princess could be baited and no one would raise a hand?"
A senator in the second row spit with disgust. "This is monstrous," he said. "We cannot have ministers rewriting family tragedy as policy."
They called for the chamber to pass judgment. I had not asked for blood. I wanted justice that mattered — removal of power and exposure so such a thing could not be repeated.
"By the mandate of the throne," Father said slowly after a long silence, "the chancellor is relieved of his duties. His houses and posts will be suspended. Let him be stripped of title and placed under the watch of records."
Klaus's mouth quivered. He had misread the room; he had treated the court as a ledger and forgotten people are not columns in accounting.
"But my service—" Klaus began.
"My orders are done," Father said with a weary voice. "You will be confined to your townhouse and required to answer the petitions of those you have harmed for one year under the supervision of the council. Your sons will not inherit your offices."
The chamber erupted in a chorus of approval. Some clapped quietly; others turned their backs on Klaus. Someone in the gallery threw a scrap of lace at him and it landed like a small, mocking flag.
Klaus folded, first like a man closing a book he can no longer read, then like one who realizes the price of his ledger. His eyes flicked to Fitzgerald, then to me, then to the floor. He opened his mouth and said, "I did what I believed served the state."
"You served your house at the expense of a girl's grief," I said. "You used a child's death as a ladder."
It was then that a new chorus rose: the people in the hall who had once murmured now voiced their astonishment and anger openly. They leaned forward, openly declaring their contempt. A few women took out cloths and dabbed their lips, pretending outrage but really savoring the collapse of an arrogant man. An official took out a scrap of paper and began to sketch the chancellor's face like a caricature. Someone started to hum a bawdy tune that made the row of ministers scowl.
Klaus's reaction shifted through stages: surprise, then fury, then denial. He clutched at his collar, then at his robes, then at the air as if he could hold the moment from slipping.
"This is slander!" he barked, each word thinner than the last. "You cannot—"
"You did," Fitzgerald said. "You wrote the letters. You ordered the watchers. You thought of the princess as a pawn."
That word — pawn — hit like a stone skimming and sinking. It was cruel and precise.
Klaus's face twisted into a final attempt at bravado. He stepped forward as if to strike a balance, but ten pairs of eyes were on him. The ladies near the dais whispered their scorn. A scribe with a long experience of the court stood and spoke of honor and precedent, a public litany of the kind of life a minister should lead.
"You will be watched," Father said. "You will answer every petition. You will be required to make reparation for those you harmed."
They hauled him out of the hall, not literally with shackles, but with the full shame of a handwriting now known. Servants who had once bowed to him now turned their faces aside as if the light had burned them. Courtiers pulled their children close, pointing with small, scandal-approved gestures. The city did what cities do — they turned gossip into law without needing the clerk's script.
Klaus tried to bargain. He scraped on the floor with words like "service" and "loyalty" and "statecraft." He promised to go into charity; he promised to fund orphanages. It was all theater, and he knew it. But theater can be a punishment: humiliation is a currency many cannot bear.
At the door, he finally fell to his knees and begged for the mercy of the throne. Cameras do not exist in our age, but the witnesses of the hall multiplied into a thousand small, memory-scribed copies. Some of those witnesses took to the outer market like a wind carrying a rumor; bakers told bakers and potters told potters. His sons were visited by whisper and smirks as they walked the streets. Commerce is small and vicious; it hates the scent of ruin.
And the court, which once valued cunning, now valued the spectacle of justice over the cunning that birthed scandals. For Klaus, the punishment worked as the court judges had intended: he was stripped of credit, his house reduced to a cautionary tale, and his words no longer carried the weight they once did.
I did not dance at his fall. I felt the cold of victory like a draft under a door. I had wanted truth to be spoken. I had wanted the name of a dead child not to be used as a trick. The hall smelled of ink and of old wood and of small triumphs. People who had watched me as the palace's spoiled child now looked on with a different ledger: anger, curiosity, a measure of respect.
Fitzgerald stood aside, watching the man who had been his father in office unmake himself without flinch. When at last the doors closed on Klaus, I turned to Fitzgerald.
"You planned this," I said. "You take the chancellor's craft and set it aflame."
"I set fire to my own schemes," he said simply. "I could not hide from you any longer."
"And you were willing to sacrifice a child's memory to get me."
"My heart will not excuse my hands," he said. "But if punishment for a father is shame and the loss of office, then let it be so. I will not stand to protect him when he has done a wrong that touches you."
He sounded like a man with a temperature — hot and sincere.
The aftermath did not heal everything. There were nights when I dreamed of Crew's small laugh and when I woke with the flavor of river in my mouth. But there were other nights when Fitzgerald would sit with me silently as I looked at the pear trees behind the palace. He learned the path of my hands, and I learned the cadence of his voice.
Months later, when the wagon of duties slowed and the gossip settled into new shapes, Fitzgerald and I found patience where once there had only been strategy. He taught me the way he had studied books and war and the world so he could one day be a man his house could be proud of. I taught him the roughness of the spear and the steadying breath of someone who will not break if the wind turns sharp.
"I do not want courtesy," I told him once, when the trees were almost bare. "Give me your truth."
"I will," he said, and then with a small smile as if confessing a childish thing, "I used to put a dried orange peel in my tea because a boy once liked the sweetness and because I kept it as a memory."
"Which boy?"
He looked up at me. "Both," he said. "And now I ask to be an honest man: no more schemes, no more paper bait, only a life we build ourselves."
I found the vow odd and small and full of healing. There were other vows too: to visit Crew's small grave and lay down a handful of pear petals every year; to allow the chancellor to make reparation by opening schools for children used by the courts; to live in a way that honored promises rather than disguised them.
Sometimes, when the wind moaned through the palace eaves, I climb to the pear tree in the small courtyard where Crew had taught me to count the falling blossoms. I sit there with Fitzgerald in the snow or the blossoms and measure the world again.
"Do you remember our childish promise?" I asked once.
He took my hand, and when he smiled it was a little lopsided, like a man who had survived frost and spring.
"I do," he said. "I meant every word."
Outside, pear blossoms drifted down like letters from the sky. The long white branches are ours to count: a thousand small promises, none of them perfect, but all of them ours.
The End
— Thank you for reading —