Sweet Romance14 min read
I Was the City’s Little Tyrant — Until the General Came
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I remember the morning the whole market fell silent because someone shouted, “The little tyrant is coming.” I remember how people scattered like leaves and how one old man shuffled along, shaking his head like a bell. I remember thinking, in a soldier’s way, that a city that panicked at a rumor had worse enemies than any border tribe. I remember then that I was the one they whispered about.
“My name is Fisher Owens,” I said one day to myself in the glassed mirror of my room, and the name tasted like mischief and a dozen unkept promises. “I will do one good thing a day,” I told the bowl of tea on the dressing table, and it always sounded more like a dare than a vow.
“You should not speak so loudly,” Jayla Boone, my maid, said the moment I returned home from upsetting a fortune-teller and disrupting a fraudster’s stall. “You are the prince’s daughter. Do you want gossip to eat you for breakfast?”
“I don’t eat gossip,” I said. “I make it.”
“So you won’t change,” Jayla said. She had a way of saying the obvious that made me feel loved and troublesome at the same time. Her dark eyes were steady. “You will change when you have to.”
“Change is boring,” I answered. “But I can play dress-up for a day. Lead the way to the teahouse.”
I went to the teahouse because I could not bear the sound of a book or the glare of a governess. I went to the teahouse because the teahouse hummed like a living thing, like a wound that had been patched and kept warm.
“You are late,” said a voice when I crossed the threshold into the second floor quiet room. I looked and saw a sixteen-year-old boy with more softness than sense and more arrogance than he had any right to.
“Sebastien Abbott,” I said, and then I dashed the door open. “Stop acting like you are a hero in a book!”
“You threw a tea cup,” he said. “And then you kicked a little lord—”
“I kicked a bully,” I said. “They were asking for it.”
“You cannot solve everything by moving your feet,” Jayla whispered, but I waved her away because I had seen what was happening in the next room and I had to intervene.
A youth had cornered a girl. He was greedy with hands and words. I stepped into the doorway, one foot in and the other like an arrow ready to release.
“Hands off,” I said, and it sounded softer than I intended. The boy froze like a puppet that had lost its strings.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“I am Fisher. I take from fools and give to the frightened,” I said. Then I kicked him in the seat of arrogance. He fell, and the market that had been a steady hum became a chorus of outraged and delighted noises.
“My lord,” the boy’s family later called me, with cold faces, when the boy’s bruises had made a morning talk in the private rooms. “You have beaten the son of a noble.”
“He had it coming,” I had told the room. They did not like my reasons. They liked to fold bad things into small boxes, then put them on the shelf. I smashed the boxes and they called it scandal.
Then word reached the hall where guards stood like sentries at the edge of a child’s tantrum, and a tall man in black stayed at his post in the doorway and watched me.
He watched me with a soldier’s eyes. They said soldiers looked only for movement and threat, but his eyes measured me for something else — a misfit to a world of strict rules. He had come back from ten years at the border: ten winters and years of sun, ten seasons of testing steel against wind. People called him General. People called him Evander Wolf.
“Who is she?” his attendant asked when we left the teahouse.
“A storm with a name tag,” the attendant said. “She takes up space like a sword.”
“Do not make her a fight,” Evander said, but his voice only made the wall tremble, like thunder holding itself.
I did not know his name then. That evening, when I was supposed to be learning how to hold my posture and breathe like a proper daughter, I caught a man in the hallway watching me. He was lean, with the kind of jaw that makes maps of battle plans, and when I smiled he cocked his head like a wary animal.
“You’re noisy,” he said.
“I am not noisy,” I lied.
He smiled without warmth. “You are loud enough for a street,” he said. “You break things.”
“I mend what is broken,” I answered. “Not everything needs your protection.”
“You do not know what keeps a city whole,” he said. “People like you rip the seams.”
His words were the kind of cold a candle dies under, and then I hit him with a teacup. He turned his head and the cup smashed on the tiles.
“You threw a cup at me?” I asked, but no one spoke because no one knew quite what law was bent. Evander stood without making a move, and when I lunged to kick him as well, he caught my ankle and set me down on the floor like someone setting down a live bird.
“You will not read the city like a bargain,” he said. He did not scold in a man’s voice or a lord’s; he was simply a soldier who had seen what the world did to people.
I hated him between my ribs and also in the bright place where I hid my warmth. I left, but the feeling grew roots.
“Do we have to be enemies forever?” he asked once. We had met again by accident in the teahouse when he had come to sit in the dark and read while the buskers practiced louder mischief outside.
“You started it,” I said.
“You started it more grandly,” he said.
We became a war of small things, then a truce of mutual annoyance, and then conspirators in a plan that neither of us at first called a heart.
“People are saying terrible things about you,” Jayla warned, one late night as I sat surrounded by piles of portraits my father had received from people asking for a match.
“What things?” I said, because a rumor is a small animal until you see it up close.
“They say you…went to the small官’s house,” Jayla said, meaning small government servants. “They say you sought out a lover at the city servant house.”
“I would rather marry my boots,” I answered. Jayla was grave. “They also said Evander Wolf is…wrong in certain ways.”
“I could crush the rumor,” I said. “I could rip its head off, then parade it on a pole.”
“You are going to make it worse,” Jayla said. “Rumors feed on spectacle.”
Then someone made the spectacle for us.
Two traveling merchants said, in the middle of the teahouse when the light sank and the tea cooled, very slowly, “I heard the general is a fault of a kind.” They said the smallest word so that the room filled with the meaning without any voice speaking it fully.
“Say it,” the other merchant hissed.
“He was called a ‘断袖’,” one whispered — two words that in our world become their own cruelty: a man who loves men.
The room gasped and then operated like a machine: first denial, then emphasis, then fear. It reached the steward at Evander’s house, the old man Leon Rose, and his face knotted like a rope.
“The city will eat him,” Leon moaned later. “If he does not crush it quickly, the rumor will rot him.”
Evander swore to me he had a love of a different kind. He said he wanted to show the city something: that certain truths were stupid and cruel. He cast about, then, like a general planning a siege, and his idea was absurd enough to work.
He called me in, one day, with a sack of vices and a plan that smelled of iron and tea.
“We will bargain with lies,” he said. “We will break the noise by making a louder sound.”
I blinked. “Explain,” I said.
“Help me,” he said simply. “Be my false bride.”
I forgot that the world had rules for daughters and for generals and for all the small, polite things that hold polite people together. I forgot because I had lived with being loud for so long the silence felt like cruelty. The plan was insane: he would ask for my father’s permission. My father, Carver Blanc, would be furious, embarrassed, proud; he would accept to save face and, in doing so, quiet the city. We would be engaged, publicly. We would be a story: a warrior seeks a daughter of the prince; the gossip would stop; the rumors would find no purchase. We would pretend for a year.
“Are you trying to capture me with a net?” I asked.
“Capture is a strong word,” he said. “I ask you to be my ally.”
Jayla did not like it. She said, “You will be bound.” But the trouble was that every bound thing in my life so far had been a place to climb from. So I agreed.
“We will be ridiculous,” I told him when we hashed the rules. “We will behave like good fools. We will be polite. We will refuse to make a real marriage of our pretense.”
He laughed. “I will keep my hands to myself,” he said in a voice that made a different thing echo inside me. “I give you an oath with my name.”
I set conditions like small stones to walk on: one year, no intimacy, public affection only, no interference in our lives except by consent, no deception toward my father — but yes, a lie to the city.
He knelt in front of me, once, like a knight, like a man who had brought a field into being. He placed a palm to his chest and promised.
“You are ridiculous,” I said. “And tired, like you have one more war inside you.”
He smiled his tight, soldier smile. “I will be your shield,” he said. “And perhaps I will learn to be soft.”
We told the story to my father with a fanfare of boxes and a parade of gifts. I watched Carver Blanc as he watched the carriage laden with geese and live gifts stand at our gate.
“You came to take my daughter,” my father said.
“I came to take responsibility,” Evander answered.
My father frowned; he was pathetic and brave, and he was also tired. He had promised my mother on her deathbed to keep me safe. My acceptance that day was a transaction between my father’s loneliness and my appetite for mischief. I signed the paper that made my name a promise.
The city exhaled. People who loved a story were greedy. The newest one was that I had given myself to a general not for love but for trickery. The rumor merchants had to find new prey.
But the creditors of conscience are always paid late. Someone else was greedy for me.
Karina Jaeger — up from a respectable minister’s house with a tongue like a dagger and a face like a painted moon — thought to drag me into her small, private war. She wanted me to be the thorn in the side of women who had some status. She invented the scene at the gate where a little boy cried and claimed I had wronged him. The crowd gathered because crowds love blood, even when the wound is a paper wound.
“You are shameless!” she cried in the market, and the crowd grew like a tide.
“I am pitiful,” she said to anyone who would listen. “They stole my shame.”
Her father, Canyon Graf, paid more attention to the city’s orders than to his own child’s temper. He pretended not to know. That made him convenient.
It is a pity for people who make trouble that Evander’s mind does not turn to revenge like an ordinary beast. He plans like a chess player. He made me appear weak. He let the city rage. He let the gossipers tie Karina’s biggest lie into a knot. Then, in the middle of a market day — when the sun was a low coin and vendors hawked with hands like prayers — he unrolled the truth.
He arranged it like a performance and I led the opening line.
“Is it true,” I said, my voice steady, “that you told the crowd I had fathered an affair with a minor official?”
“You are a liar and a thief,” Karina spat, loud enough for the whole square to hear.
“It is a lie,” Evander said, stepping forward like a man who had swallowed a kingdom.
Karina’s face remained smug for a breath, then a nervous twitch, then a slow reddening.
“Prove it,” she said, raising her chin. “Bring me witnesses.”
So Evander brought evidence. He brought a dozen small notes and a few witnesses — the actors were there: the traveling merchants who had whispered the first lie, a servant with a careful, steady hand, and a flat-faced scribe who had copied Karina’s two-faced letters when she thought the market would not see.
“I sent her,” Evander said, calm, “and she confessed — among friends — to making up the story to harm you.” He held up a folded scrap of paper. His voice did not tremble. “Her own handwriting.”
The market swallowed then.
Karina’s expression slid from confidence to a small, white panic. “You have no proof,” she cried.
Evander nodded to a small boy — Sebastien Abbott, who had been earlier thrashed and had been given reason enough for humiliation — and the boy read a scrap that had once been thrown into the teahouse by accident. It was Karina’s handwriting: a list of lies, a chart of slander, a small ledger of petty cruelties.
“You are a liar,” the scribe said. “You wrote these things.”
Karina’s face changed like a theatrical mask. Her pride became a frozen thing. “I did not—” she began, then the word became strangled.
Around us people shuffled, half in curiosity, half in the fever of a public trial. The old men who loved scandal lowered their heads. The young women who loved theater made small oohs. Someone started to laugh, then someone else joined in, and the laughter became a bitter wind.
Karina’s voice went from high and sharp to thin and cracked. “I did not mean—” she pleaded.
“You meant cruelty,” Evander said, his voice like a bell struck at its just tone. He did not raise his hand. He pointed to the crowd. “Can you tell me why this is a noble thing to do?”
She clutched at a shawl that had cost her house a measly fortune and stammered, “It was for reputation. They said she would be ruined, and I—”
“He who ruins a woman’s name,” one merchant said, “should be made to understand what the ruin feels like.”
Then the crowd decided to make its own justice.
They dragged Karina forward to the raised platform at the center of the market that had once been used for proclamations. Her face, so carefully powdered, flushed with confusion and then horror as the square filled with the sound of people’s breath. Mothers held their children closer. A group of women began to murmur prayers. Someone brought a pot of water and a broom. No one touched her roughly at first; they only wanted words — to hear her undo the knot she had tied.
“Confess,” Evander commanded. His voice had the authority of a man who had commanded armies. This time the order shook her.
Karina stiffened, then laughed like a deranged thing. “I will not — I will not say—”
The crowd’s mood turned like a tide against a cliff. They hissed. The boys called her “coward.” Women spat on the ground. The merchants who had lost business because of rumor showed faces like creditors.
“Tell the truth,” I said, the words leaving my mouth like small stones. “Say you lied.”
Her laugh broke. Her hands began to tremble. She tried to deny the paper, to say the handwriting was not hers. She denied the witnesses. The arc of her reaction was a cruel play: arrogance, then annoyance, then confusion, then denial, then collapse.
“I didn’t—” she said once, and then the world of the market leaned in.
“You lied to get advantage,” Evander said, quietly this time. “You sent your lies into the streets. You broke a daughter’s name for sport.”
She tried to hold the stage. “I will not—” she started, but then her knees buckled like a puppet whose strings had been cut. She fell to her knees on the rough planks, and for a moment the market filled with the sound of her sobbing.
“Beg,” someone from the crowd said, half cruel, half only human.
She looked up, and the first thing that showed was terror that had nothing to do with dignity. Her eyes widened, then narrowed into pleading. “Please,” she whispered. “Please — I am sorry.”
The crowd hissed again. Some women laughed. A few shook hands in a private triumph. A young man took out a penknife and pretended to shave the air. Old men spat.
She crawled the tiny distance toward me across the wooden boards. Her breath came like one who had run long. She reached out and tried to touch my sleeve, but Jayla moved forward and pushed her hand away gently.
“I asked you to own what you did,” I said. My voice was not cold; it was simply a blade cutting the last pretence.
She stood, then, too fast. The crowd shouted things now — ‘shame’, ‘disgrace’, ‘teach her’, and worse. Someone raised a small piece of cord. Someone else began to clap — first slowly, then in a rhythm like rats on a roof. A group of women started to chant, a sharp staccato like a loom. “Confess!”, they cried. “Confess! Confess!”
Her expression after that was small and human: shock at the size of what had come down on her, then the old practice of denial, then a last, helpless plea.
“No—not—please—” she said, voice ragged. She begged the noblemen next to her, she begged the passersby, she pled for mercy. “I did not mean for it to go so far. Please, I—”
“No one takes back what they put into the streets,” Evander said. “Not without an apology that all can hear.”
So she apologized. Slowly at first, words like stones at the edge of a river. Then she knelt, and her prayer was the kind of small thing that tries to bend a storm. She begged my forgiveness with a voice small as a bird.
“Do you accept it?” Evander asked after she had spilled out all the small words she had.
I looked at her — at the flush in her face, at the tear tracks, at the way people bent forward as if to hear more of the ending. I said, “I accept the apology as proof that you are not the kind of woman I once feared you would be.”
The crowd did not go gentle. They wanted to see what the law of the street demanded: a reckoning. Some wanted her to be paraded with a rope. Some wanted a public beating. Instead, Evander did something worse to a petty thing: he made her stand and made her speak for an hour of what gossip could do. He made her confess in public to the whole ledger of mischief she had planned and to list the people she had meant to ruin.
Her reaction was a slow descent: first smug, then shame, then denial, then haggard pleading, and at last brokenness. People moved closer, whispering, slapping palms with each new confession. The crowd reached a place where they had seen truth and they were ecstatic with the sight of it. They recorded it with words, with memory.
She left not bloodied but thoroughly unmade. Her father, Canyon Graf, pulled her away and hid her inside her house. He tried to refuse the commands of the neighborhood for a time, but the market sang and he could not stand the noise. Karina’s reputation had been peeled like an onion and the layers thrown into the street.
That afternoon the city felt balanced again. People went back to their tea and their bread and their small hours of gossip. They had witnessed a punishment that fit the offense and that was, in their minds, justice.
I watched Evander then and my heart did a strange complicated thing. He had stood for me in a way that was not about power — it was about a man who would not let cruelty fester. He did not dance with vengeance; he pointed like a surgeon and called the wound for what it was.
“Do not let the city make you cruel in turn,” Jayla said when we went away from the crowd.
“I will not become their mirror,” I answered. “I will be my own storm.”
The months turned like a slow gear. Evander and I kept our bargain for reasons both noble and ridiculous. He took my hand in public manner; we walked together as if mystery had always been called courtship. People loved us, then railed at us, then admired us for our ability to do what they could not: to play a part and not be eaten by it.
At night, we each had private armor to remove. He told me about a field he had taken where the stars had been the only audience and a child had learned to stand under a sky that had no pity, and I told him about the nights I had sat with dolls that I had made into generals and queens. We learned each other as two people might learn a map: lines first, then the places where the shore gives way to cliff.
“You play a dangerous game,” he said once, his palm on the back of my hand, fingers hot, a soldier who had slept in foxholes now learning to keep from trembling.
“You are the dangerous one who made the game,” I answered. “You are the one who taught me how to be polite and cruel at once.”
We rehearsed our smiles. We rehearsed our silence. We fought once or twice so loudly the household heard us and the old steward, Leon, muttered to the walls that he preferred war to our domestic noises.
“Do not fall in love,” Jayla told me in a night when I could not sleep. “Not too fast.”
“I never fall quickly,” I said. “I prefer to cartwheel off cliffs and claim I knew the landing would be soft.”
“You will fall,” she said, and the certainty in her voice was not a prophecy but a bargain. “But remember why you lied.”
That day came like any other. Evander gave me a hand warmer — a little copper basket he’d found in a shop with a carved crane and plum. He handed it to me as if it were a relic.
“For colder months,” he said.
“For softer men,” I answered.
He caught the joke and did not scold me. He only said, “Keep it. It belongs to you now.”
When the market rumor returned like a dog who could not learn boundaries, when another woman dared to test me, I understood how much had changed. I had friends in alleys I’d never have noticed before. I had a man who risked his reputation to prove a point: cruelty could be fought with exposure and the careful weight of a public breaking.
And when the time came, and the year was nearly over and we had worn our public affection like fine armor and kept our private rules like vows, I realized the bargain had done something to both of us. We had pretended for the city and become honest in a way the city could not have predicted. We had taught each other how to behave as spouses in a world that had expected only decorum.
“Will you remain my ally,” Evander asked one evening, when the candles were low as coins and the fire had been reduced to the soft memory of light.
“For now,” I said. Then I added, with something like a dare: “And perhaps longer.”
He looked at me the way soldiers look at maps before a battle: carefully, tenderly, ready to risk much for the correct course.
We had, to keep the city safe, made a strange and beautiful lie. That lie became the road to a kind of truth neither of us had expected: there are people who choose you, not because the world demands it, but because they see you, and that is a choice heavier than any title.
When I put the small copper hand warmer back in the drawer that night, I clicked the lid shut and heard the soft, satisfied “click” like a clock in a house at midnight.
I closed the drawer and said into the dark, “Thank you,” and the city seemed a little quieter for the first time in a long while.
The End
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