Sweet Romance14 min read
I Raised the Ninth Prince — He Wanted to Marry Me
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I found Foster D'Angelo when I could not even read a single letter.
You would think the story would start with a palace, or with me born under a red curtain, or with banners and silk and some title stitched into my bones. "I raised the ninth prince" — people always expect that grand beginning.
But I was a butcher's daughter. My name is Elise Oliveira. I grew up with knives and wet stalls and a house that smelled of blood and river mud. I learned how to gut a sheep before I learned how to hold a pen. I learned the weight of a liver and the price of a copper coin.
That winter night, the wind came like a blade. I had gone to buy a small bag of candied fruit because my stomach longed for one sweet thing. On my way home I passed the ruined temple where beggars slept. A thin voice reached me like a cold thread.
"Baby," it cried.
I stopped, then knelt. There, wrapped in rags, was a child no bigger than my hands. He was not wailing with the loud throat of a healthy cry. He had a small, stubborn sound, as if he were preserving his breath. His fingers curled around the hem of a sleeve, and his eyes—my God, his eyes—were huge and black as ink. He looked at me like he had been holding onto me with those eyes for a long time.
"Do you want some?" I whispered, because I knew how much I loved sweets. I took one candied fruit out of my mouth and, because I was foolish and soft, put it into his small mouth.
He sucked like an old man tasting honey after a winter fast. When the taste was gone, he smiled without teeth. I smiled back. For the first time that year, my chest loosened.
My mother and father scolded and then sighed. My father said we could not afford another mouth. My mother, who worked in a kitchen of a magistrate's household, said I had no business bringing strangers home. But she saw the light in my face, and the child’s eyes that followed mine like a shadow, and she gave in.
"You brought him home," my father grumbled. "Then you look after him. Your hands. Your time."
I was nine, too little and somehow too determined to refuse. They called him Foster D'Angelo because I had no sense of names from proper families; I named him with the strange book name I'd once heard a traveling minstrel mutter. The name stuck like sugar on a thumb.
"We'll call him Cloud," my friend Alfredo said when he first saw him. Alfredo Herve had hands that could fix anything. He was the one who found milk when Foster needed it. "Little Cloud," Alfredo said. "Like a cotton lump drifting."
"Cloud?" I teased. "We're not fools; you name things strange. Call him Foster."
"Foster suits him. A foster is cared for," Alfredo said, and he grinned like it was a secret.
We were a ragged little family around him. Raul Haas — who could carve paper like miracles and who always had five coins in his pocket for candy — helped. Chloe Larson, who had a timid smile and a pale face like a boiled radish, came to hold him when my arms trembled. We taught him tricks of our street: how to find hidden goats on sale days, where the sweet-seller hid her best sugar, how to hide from the patrols.
"He won't be a scholar," someone said. "Not with these hands."
"He'll be what we make him," I answered. I stitched his clothes with the few scraps my mother gave me. I slept with one hand on him, the other on a dull knife. I did not know how different the world was until he grew.
Foster grew fast. By the time I was thirteen and walking to the embroidery shop in the eastern city, he was already five and startling in his stillness. He did not shriek with other boys. He would sit and watch a sparrow until its shadow had crossed ten roofs. People said he looked like a carved doll. He had a quiet that made other children louder, as if his silence filled space up and pushed noise out.
"You'll be back in a month," I told him the morning the embroidery mistress dragged me into a life of needle and thread. "I will come home every month. I will bring sugar. You will be good."
"I will wait," Foster said, and his black eyes held me with a heavy correctness almost beyond his years.
I left him at home with my parents and the friends who had become family. I learned to embroider by oil lamp light. The mistress was cruel at first, but I learned to make clouds and birds and little frames for people's handkerchiefs. I hated the darkness of those months. I hated needles that pricked my fingers until they bled, and I loved the small, precise pleasure of stitches.
Half a year later my mother came to the gate, a handkerchief over her face.
"Someone asked for the boy," she said. "A man in a carriage. He took him."
My heart dropped so hard I thought I would faint.
"What man?" I cried. Every part of me braced for the worst, as if the world could be pried open and everything cruel fall out.
"He said he was kin," my mother said. "Court Friedrich — he says Foster is a prince's child, that the prince's brother came to take him back."
Court Friedrich. It was a name that roared in our streets like thunder. The inner city always smelled of spices and lacquer, and men who wore silk as if it were a second skin. Court Friedrich was a man like a closed book: polite lips, a face clean as paper, a presence that made you small.
"He'll be fine," my mother said, more to steady herself than me. "He's going to the palace."
My chest tore. I ran to the lane where Foster had last been, to the rooftop where we had watched fireworks. I found him just as Court Friedrich's carriage pulled away: pale, like a white moon, being lifted by servants.
"Foster!" I shouted. He looked at me. In that look was a long, strange sadness. He ran to me so fast it was like he had used up all a child's courage and pushed it forward.
"Don't go," I said, and I meant it in a way that made my mouth dry. "Stay. Stay with us."
"I have to," he whispered, and there was no fear in him, only an acceptance that cut me open. Court Friedrich's hand came down gentle but firm; the carriage door closed. He looked at me with a composed kindness.
"Your care," he said, voice like a measured bell. "You have saved him. I will thank you in due time. He must come with me."
Foster pressed his tiny hand into my palm and then let it go. The carriage rolled away.
They say a dozen things that are wrong with leaving. I say this: when you love someone small-made, you are not robbed; you are only given a new kind of ache. You learn to keep the ache as company.
Years passed. Foster did not disappear completely. He left a ghost-smile on our days. He sent letters once, brief and proper. He sent help in a way we could not refuse: gold in a quiet crate, a small chest, a parcel of silk so fine it shone like water. He did not come back in person. He sent his voice like a far echo.
I learned embroidery well. I learned how to coax patterns out of silk like coaxing a laugh from someone in pain. I learnt to read, clumsy at first, then with appetite. The books at the embroidery shop smelled of camphor and lemon. I took private lessons sometimes, and Alfredo — who had become a good-looking, practical young man — would slide a page with letters until I practiced them under my breath.
"Who are you writing?" Alfredo asked one night, as I traced ink with a cheap brush.
"My name," I said. "I could write Foster’s name if I dare."
"Do that," he said. "He will be proud."
"Is he still a prince?" I asked.
"He is a prince because men called him a prince," Alfredo said, shrugging. "Whether he is or is not, he is Foster."
Time did something strange. It made me a woman. It made Foster into a figure in rumor: "the ninth prince," people whispered, like a rumor that carries its own perfume. Court Friedrich's name surfaced now and then in the market when a man with a fine beard passed. Foster's black eyes were like a wound that did not close. He watched the world from further and further away.
And then, one day, a crate came. Not a small box. A crate heavy as if filled with the river itself. The footman from the palace left it at the embroidery shop and lingered like someone who had been told to leave a gift and not ask what to expect.
"From Foster?" I asked before opening it.
"Yes," said the footman. He had the calm face of men who stand between commands. "Master Foster wishes to repay you."
When I opened the crate, it shone. Silk folded like night. Pieces of fabric woven with threads so thin and bright they looked like day trapped into thread. Pearls threaded around a marriage robe, gold sequins sewn into the hem like snow. The embroidery on the robe made me lightheaded. The cloth smelled faintly of lotus and a palace room.
"You should wear it," Alfredo said, almost in a whisper, as if the air would break if he spoke louder. "He gave you the finest. It is a blessing."
I knew I should be grateful. But my pride is slow to bend. I put the robe back in the crate and sealed it with a rag tied around with a knot.
I met Edgar Lewis three months later. Edgar lent his shoulders to the life of the lane; he kept a stall that sold things you could not live without in a small house: candles, cheap combs, small pots. He had an unruly laugh and an eye that softened when he looked at me. We fought like children; we made up like old friends. He paid attention to the small things I said and then made them into jokes.
"Will you marry me?" Edgar asked at the end of one long winter, when the sky was thin and our hands numb.
"Why would you want to?" I asked, because to say no would have been an insult to him.
"Because it’s my turn to be foolish for someone," he said. He then made a clumsy bow so ridiculous that even I laughed and the air between us filled with quiet ease.
"My hands smell of blood and needles," I said. "My rooms are small. I have a past with a child I raised up."
"You raised a prince," he said and grinned. "That’s the best sort of past."
We married in a small way. There was no large ceremony because there was no large money. There was gossip and small gifts from our neighbors that meant the world. Chloe Larson and Raul Haas were there, clumsy and bright, and Alfredo — always Alfredo with his rough, generous hands — brought a small necklace he’d scavenged for me, secrets of his work he wanted to share.
When the day came to dress, I refused the palace robe in the crate for reasons I could not dress in words. Edgar did not insist. He wore a new shirt he had saved up for. We knelt and bowed. We fed each other rice. We smiled. The lane came with us like a shadow of blessing.
After the marriage, the crate did not stay secret. Word, as wind, travels where we cannot. A neighbor saw, another whispered. The embroidery shop mistress, who had tired hands and a heart that had given up on surprises, told Edgar in a small voice, "Do not pawn it. That robe is woven from something that belongs to a different sky. It is not only money."
But I had been foolish before that day. I took the robe one night, and I hid it in my chest. I went out to the pawn shop with a fist of courage and a mind that ached.
"Can you sell this?" I asked the man behind the counter, and I had touched too many bones in my life for my voice to not tremble.
He stared. The man's eyes, trained on such things, flickered with greed and then fear. "This is palace work," he said in a flat voice. "We do not deal with that. You must take it to a certain place."
"Then what place?" I asked. The coin I needed could feed a house.
"Black market," he said. "Go where men trade what they dare not show."
The black market was a dark seam in the city. I had never been. I walked there with my feet aching as if each step were a question. I carried the robe like a sin.
I failed.
I found fools and men who would grift a woman of a robe, who would unpick pearls like they were beans. I found a man, eyes like a hawk, who offered a low price. "Half," he said. "I will buy your shame and make it my own."
I could not. That night I returned with nothing but humiliation. I had tried to turn the only fine thing Foster had given me into bread to feed a fear. I had failed.
A week later, Edgar found the torn edges where I had tried to unpick a pearl.
"Elise," he said, holding my hands. "Why did you try to sell it?"
"I thought—" I tried to gather reasons like scattered coins. "I thought if I sold it we could pay for medicine for your mother. I thought if we had the money you would not look so worried. I thought—"
He pressed my hands to his chest and blew out a laugh that was more tears than sound. "You tried to sell the robe Foster gave you," he said. "You tried to sell his touch. Why didn't you ask me?"
"Because I am stupid," I said, and it was the truth.
He was silent a long while, and then he did something small and brilliant. He went to Alfredo, who had friends who moved like shadows in the city, who could find anything. Within days Alfredo came back with servants and a crate.
"Foster sent another," Alfredo said, and his eyes like copper were proud and sad. "He sent it by a man who refused to tell more than he must. He said: 'Keep it. She will need it.'"
That night Edgar and I took the robe out and pressed it like a relic. I understood then why Foster had given it. It was not only silk; it was a promise braided into thread. It was not owned by the knot of cloth. It belonged to something Foster had not had the chance to say.
Years later, when the city changed and the palace's light dimmed and shone like a distant tide, Court Friedrich — the man who had taken Foster — came to our lane one morning.
"Elise," he said formally, as if he were a letter that had learned to speak, "the palace requests that you come to a formal audience."
I thought my heart would stop. Court Friedrich allowed me into the inner court. I walked past gardens that smelled of musk and jasmine, past rows of servants whose toes were in neat rows, past windows where silk sleeves drifted like flowers in a jar.
Foster stood at the furthermost balcony, more grown and impossible than the child I had left behind. He wore a robe of the same fabric as that crate. He looked at me, and there was a whole lifetime in his eyes. The palace gave him angle and distance; behind those lines there was still the boy who had sucked a candy from my palm.
"You came," he said simply, as if it was a fact the world had to agree with.
"I always come," I lied. "Who told you to—"
"No one told me. I wanted to." He stepped closer, the balcony between our worlds narrowing. "You raised me. Edges of me hold you still. I wanted to come."
His hands were clean and careful. The prince talked with a voice that seemed used to commands and to not receiving them. He told me of formalities and duties, of baths and tutors and a woman he had never known but whose eyes must have carved something into him.
"I am not a man who chooses lightly," he said. "I am expected to marry properly, to make alliances. But—"
He broke off. I waited because he made me wait and I thought I would die.
"But," he said, and his hand found mine, "I do not want those alliances if they take me away from truth. I want the truth."
"Truth?" I laughed, a short blade of sound. "What is truth to a prince?"
"I learned it with you," he said. "You taught me how to live small and still be large in ways the palace cannot pay. I am told it is strange to say. Say it and they frown; say it and men say I am rash. But I will say it anyway."
He looked at me like a man would ask another to come to the edge of a cliff.
"Elise," Foster said, voice low. "Would you marry me?"
There is a sound like paper burning in my chest. I smelled the hot air of the court, the smell of crown rooms and lacquered floors. People shifted. Court Friedrich's face was a mask unreadable.
"You are a prince," I said. "I am a butcher's daughter. I have mud in my nails. I have stitches that hurt. You have silk and banners. If you choose me, you will have someone that—"
"Will love you," Foster finished. "Yes. Would you come?"
I looked at Edgar in the crowd. He stood with a small dignity that rivaled kings: he had built an honest life beside me, and that honesty meant something that even silk could not buy. He saw my face and did not move to stop me. He had always loved me with the crooked, honest hunger of someone who gives you his coat.
I took a breath like a rope being pulled tight.
"I cannot," I said to Foster. "I cannot live in the same cage as you. I am made of knives and oil and small lives. I have a place. You have a world with rules I cannot learn. You are the ninth prince. The palace is your sky."
Foster looked like someone reached and pulled all the air out.
"Is that a refusal?" he asked, small and terrified.
"It is not a refusal," I insisted. "It is a truth. I do not belong."
He let go of my hand and stepped back into the court. The silence in the room was a thing that stung.
Court Friedrich bowed. Neither of us answered. Foster went back to the palace. He sent a single, neat box to my husband — not to me — with silk and a note:
"Elise, keep your lane. Keep what is yours. I will keep what is mine. But if someday you want me like a person rather than a prince, send for me. — Foster."
Edgar read it to me and set his hand on mine. "You did well," he said. "You chose the life you wanted."
"You could have chosen him," I said. I had no answer but the slow spread of grief.
We grew, in our own ways. My stitches grew finer. Edgar's laugh filled the small house. We were poor enough to feel the world on our wrists, but rich enough in a way that money cannot buy: in the steadiness of two people who had promised to watch the other.
Years later, at a public festival, in the central square packed with people, there was talk of a prince who looked down from a balcony and announced reforms. There was a rumor that a ninth prince had married a common girl and that it had shaken some of the old courtiers like wind shakes an old tree.
I watched the crowd and felt a small, private smile. I thought of Foster in his palace, and I thought of the way he had once held my small hand and let it go. I thought of the robe and the crate and the pearls and the fools who tried to buy them. I thought of Edgar's patience and Alfredo's loyalty and Chloe's bashful little hand.
"Do you regret?" Edgar asked me once in bed, where we lay like two tired birds.
"Sometimes," I said honestly. "Sometimes when I smell candied fruit. Mostly I remember a cold baby smiling. I remember that I gave him something he needed. He gave me something else I needed. We both moved on."
Edgar kissed my forehead. "You gave a prince something no palace can teach him. That is a gift kings would kill to buy."
Later, when the city calmed and the palace rumors shifted like weather, a letter arrived again. This time it was for me, not for Edgar.
"Dear Elise," it read in Foster's neat hand. "You were right. I needed a palace and a title. I wanted something simpler and truer. I could not have both. I learned that patience teaches the kingdom, but love teaches a man. Live well. If you ever wish to see me as a man and not a prince, come. The gates will not be closed to you. — Foster D'Angelo."
I kept that letter folded in the lining of my small chest for years. It lived there with moth-eaten scraps of thread and a coin Alfredo had given me the day I married. People asked once if I ever saw him again. The truth is this: I saw him in the edges of my life, in silk and in letters and in a robe I could not wear. I saw him by the window where the palace light fell. I saw him when I watched a child suck a candy for the first time.
And when I was old, when the fingers that had pierced the hardest cloth were soft and the needle slips through silk like a whisper, a small young man came by the lane. He looked like no prince any book could have predicted: he had the hush of a child who had been loved and the tiredness of a man who had kept too many rooms.
He came, unannounced, and he stood by my door.
"Elise," he said, and there was the same depth in his black eyes, the same astonished way he looked at me as if I were the strange and wonderful thing in the world.
"I am Foster," he said plainly.
"I know," I answered, because sometimes you do not need a palace to know a person.
He held out a small parcel — not a robe this time, not a chest of gold, but a simple cloth wrapped around a pebble.
"For the road," he said. "For when you remember the temple."
I took it. It was cold, but when I pressed it to my palm, it felt like all the years folded into one. I thought of the boy who had smiled at a candy and the man who had become a prince.
"You did what you could," he told me soft as a confession. "I wanted to marry you when I was a boy with silk in my hands. I still want to keep you near in the way of learned men: with letters and the right to be silly now and then."
"I married a man who keeps me from being foolish alone," I said, without apology.
Foster bowed his head. "Then keep him. Keep the lane. Keep your hands. If ever you wish for more, you will know where to find me."
We laughed like old conspirators. People passing by might have thought it a small thing, two people talking on an ordinary street. But we both knew the weight of a childhood given. We both knew how large small acts could be.
When I die, they will say I was a butcher's daughter who married a stall owner. They will talk of the embroidery I left, of small quilts with clouds on them, of a robe I never wore. They will whisper of a prince who walked the city like a man with two hearts.
They will not know the nights I sat with a boy who had eyes like moons and fed him sweets until he smiled. They will not know how I once smelled of blood and silk and then of jasmine and palace rooms. They will not know how a simple kindness slid like gold through the years.
"Foster wanted to marry me," I will tell the quiet stars, and the stars will not say it is odd. They know about small choices. They watch.
And if anyone asks whether I regret: sometimes the sting of what-ifs sings in my chest. But mostly I would say this — to love a child like Foster is to teach a prince how to inhabit mercy. To choose Edgar was to keep a life that fit my hands. Both choices were true.
I raised the ninth prince. He wanted to marry me. We smiled at each other in different streets.
The End
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