Sweet Romance19 min read
I Wed the Lost Prince — and Took His Scars with Me
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"How long has he knelt?" I asked without looking up.
"He has been kneeling two hours, Your Majesty," Jazlynn Hu said, voice small in the warm room.
I set the red brush down and let the answer rest on the paper like a cold stone. "Let him kneel," I said.
Jazlynn's breath hitched. "But outside—it's snowing. He's in thin robes."
"Let him feel the cold," I said, and that was the truth and not the truth.
I did not always mean what I said. I have ruled long enough to know when a sentence is power and when it is comfort. Today I needed both.
After the second hour, I could not sit any longer. I threw the brush aside so it clattered, and I felt the room tilt in a way that made Jazlynn flinch. "Bring me my fox cloak."
She hesitated, then obeyed. "You're cold?"
"No," I said. "I am warm from thinking."
Outside, the court gardens were white and silent. The plum trees leaned under the snow like old men. Evan Flynn knelt at the gate with snow in his hair and on his lashes. He looked thinner than the paintings and rougher than the songs, but he still had the posture of a prince.
I stepped into the wind and the snow struck my face. He did not look up when I opened the door.
"Evan," I said, and his head moved like a slow tide.
He said, "Your Majesty," because every habit we grew within palace walls still lived. The voice that reached me from the snow was thin and hoarse. "I beg you to spare my father."
"Your father is the cause," I said. "He chose his course. You cannot blame a ruler for the choices of another king."
"Please," Evan croaked. "If you spare him, the people will see mercy. If you kill him—"
"You speak as though the lives of kings are the only measure," I answered. "What of the farmers? The border towns? Soldiers who die because rulers pretend wisdom but pursue vanity?"
He closed his eyes and the snow made small tracks down his lashes. "I am sorry for the lives lost. I am more sorry for the silence. I cannot change their deaths. Only my father's life matters to me."
"Then you kneel for him in the snow," I said, and I could have left him there. I could have watched my generals hang banners and take cities and end his line with ink and blade. That would have been easier.
I wrapped the fox cloak around his thin shoulders. He barely moved when I crouched and touched the ice at his temple. It was colder than I expected.
"Stand," I said. "You will go back to the palace. You will see the healer. Do not discuss state when you are wet and cold. Your stubbornness is not a quality I need on a throne."
He bowed his head and answered, "I will obey, Your Majesty," but when he rose his knees trembled and he almost fell. I caught him without thinking.
There are truths the court keeps to itself. He was the prince of the fallen north. He came as a ward to my court to keep his father's promises and to sleep in a palace not his own. I took him inside because I preferred a living debt to a dead one arranged on a table. People called it a trick. I called it a choice.
When he warmed by the brazier, he said to me in his soft voice, "Why do you keep me here?"
I should have said, Because I say so. That answer would have been enough for most. Instead I touched his frozen brow and watched the color come back to his cheeks. "Because you are clever," I said, "and because I do not like wasting things that are useful."
He snorted. "Is that mercy or calculation?"
"It is both," I said.
"Gentle and cruel," he said, as if listing traits of a strange animal. "You did not flinch when you ordered that city to fall."
"I did not enjoy it," I replied. "But I did it. A ruler must sometimes take decisions others cannot bear."
He reached for me with a hand that was still rough from training and not from policy. "If you had been my king, would you have permitted my father to send me to die?"
I paused, and because this was winter and the night was long, I told him the truth I keep rarely. "I would have sent you away only if I thought it was your safest option. I thought about that a lot when I was nineteen and they crowned me. I am twenty-two now, and sometimes I wish for a simpler life. But a crown is cold to the skin and heavy on the head."
He laughed, a short sound like a wind gust. "Then why did you take a crown if it chilled you so?"
"Because I wanted to be more than the daughter of a great man," I said. "I wanted to make sure no more children died because their fathers loved vanity more than people."
He laid his forehead against mine as if to see whether the temperature inside me matched the temperature outside. "You are good, June."
The name rolled strange in the palace. I was called June Watanabe when the sun had yet to make me a ruler. I accepted the title my people gave me—Empress, the Bright Law—but when he said my first name it was as if I had suddenly stepped into a room I had forgotten existed.
"Quiet," I said, and because the snow was soft and the world was small in that hour, I let myself be quiet.
That night, I promised him to send physicians to treat his knees. I promised him also that I would spare some of the men of the fallen state who were not guilty of treason. It was a bargain of warmth: human bones for human bones.
Weeks later, the war was over.
My generals took the capital and the old king and his sons were executed. I returned one head to hang like a hard winter fruit from the city gates so the people would know the price of war. I commanded that the women and children be treated with care. "No pillage, no taking of wives or grain," I wrote. "Soldiers who break these rules will be punished."
The order smoothed some of my conscience, but it did not stop people from talking.
"She is too soft with them," one official said. "She shows weakness."
"She is too fond of the north prince," another whispered. "He will be made into a king's favorite."
Sometimes power is a coin that buys enemies as easily as it buys allies. I learned that early. I also learned who would help me in a storm.
Alexandra Carter was there the night the decree was written. I have called her my counsel since we were children reading the classics under the same lamp. She is the only woman who learned law and penmanship at my side and kept her temper when men called her odd. Her voice in the council moved like a blade when it needed to. She is the one I pick when I need to test a new law.
"You must not let him rot in the palace," she told me then, when rumours began. "If you want loyalty, you must give him honor."
"He is a ward," I said.
"He is a man with blood and sense. Make him a place at court that cannot be dismissed."
So I made him Prince of Peace, and then—months later, when we had won and the ministers had quieted and the people were hungry but calm—I did something that would make the scrolls smolder for years.
"Evan Flynn is made a vassal," I declared in the hall of red pillars. "He will be lord of a proper house and serve as my right hand in the field."
The roar was not all praise. Many of the old guard leaned forward like men listening for lies. "You must keep the line pure," one of them said. "The throne cannot be mixed."
"Purity is a poor guardian," I answered. "A wise policy will stand because it is just."
They called me mad to my face. They called me a fool behind their hands. The journals painted our nights into a theater of lust. The joke traveled from tea houses to taverns, where men who had never seen true governance agreed that the fallen prince had used his looks to rise.
Evan laughed sometimes at the rumors. "They think I charm my way into office."
"Do you?" I asked, sitting at late-night papers.
"No," he said. "I think you charm your way into power."
"Do not tempt me," I warned, but I liked the look of his smile.
He had ghosts. He had that ache of a man whose world had been pulled out from under him. At times he wanted to be furious. He wanted to overturn the table and burn the city that had given him a title and not his father's forgiveness. Once he told me with a hard edge that made the servants step back, "If you make me a lord and give me rank, I will take it and I will play the game of crowns."
"Then take it honestly," I said. "Be my counsel. Stand in front of the ministers and argue law. Let them learn what you are."
He did. He learned to speak politely, to worry less about the past and more about the present. He learned to hold a pen and to sign his name with less tremor. He laughed sometimes at his own awkwardness at scripts. He said, "They will never believe the man from the north knows enough of etiquette to shame them."
I said, "Let them be shamed."
We were cruel to each other sometimes. He might nail me in the dark with a truth I had not wanted to hear. I might cut him with a command that not only saved lives but also ruined trust. We hurt each other like people who loved each other in public and fought each other in private because we were both stubborn and proud and would die before compromising the other.
"Do you ever regret bringing me here?" he asked one night when the lamps were low and he could not sleep.
"I regret a lot of things," I said. "Mostly I regret I cannot split myself in two."
"Make one part of you my wife and the other the state," he said, smiling poorly. "See which dies faster."
"Do not test me," I said. "You know the answer."
He drew his hand up the back of my neck and whispered, "Then stay with me."
We lived like thieves in the open. We stole hours in the palace between duties and policy, and we put our names to things that mattered—schools, laws, and a small garden of plum trees by the southern wall. Once I planted a plum where the snow had been heaviest that winter. Evan offered to help and then balked at the shoveling, but he stayed and fed the soil and learned to see small things matter.
The reform that meant the most to me was the one they would call dangerous: girls' education. I looked at the city women who ran households with clever hands and knew that if they could be taught to write and speak, the whole country would change. "Start them at seven," I said. "Teach boys and girls together until ten. Then allow them to choose—statecraft, market skills, stitchwork, or service."
Men in the council laughed. They called it a vanity project. They said it would make men lazy, or worse, weak. They said no daughter would dare to leave her father's side if there were no more dowries and no more need to be a wife for money.
"Do you fear your daughters will be free?" Alexandra asked them in the council. "Is freedom so frightening?"
"You cannot make every house a school," the senior minister snapped.
"You can if you create a reason to," she answered, and she named grain tax breaks for families who sent girls, and pensions for teachers, and public posts for women who passed exams. "Make sitting to read worth more than marrying for money, and you'll see doors open."
They objected, loudly. They wrote in the halls that the empire would collapse if women learned too much. But the people liked the idea of daughters who could read their letters and help with accounts. The merchants liked the idea of better clerks. I had the appetite of the nation on my side more than I had imagined.
Evan watched the debates and then stood and spoke. "If Your Majesty says so, I will teach recruits to read civics when they are young. I will show a village that a woman with a ledger saves a town more quickly than generals with swords."
"You?" the ministers sneered. "A scion of the fallen house, now lecturing on accounting."
"I will be a vassal who works," Evan said. "If learning is to spread, I will make it work for the people."
His speech quieted a crowd. Men who had sat in soft cushions and never worried about harvest replied with murmurs. Women at the windows cheered in whispers. I watched him and felt my chest burn—not with ruler's fury, but with a simple love.
Then the tide turned.
Rumors spread faster than laws. Someone wrote a parody of a poem about a mistress and a maid and a crown. The city roared with gossip as though it were a storm. People I had fed in famine mocked me for the night I had given to the fallen prince. Ministers I had promoted found joints creak under them, and they struck back with whispers. One morning, a small clerk in the pavilion left an unsigned note on the ministerial table: "The Empress wears love like a collar. She will be undone."
I went to Alexandra. "They will call me what they wish," I said. "But should I hide him to spare my office?"
"No," she said, very simply. "You must be both a ruler and a woman. You cannot hide the man who stands beside you because the men who oppose you fear him. Show him, so that they must face courage."
"Will you stand with me?"
"Always," she said.
The councils were a battle that made swords look simple. Men who had papers for hearts and ink in their mouths piled question upon question. "Is this the state we deserve?" they asked. "Will the children of the throne be of uncertain lineage? What of bloodlines?"
I had patience for law but not for hysteria. I stepped down from the dais and walked, slowly, into the open court where they all stood. The snow had long gone, replaced by a cold spring that kept the air clear. I walked down the steps and stopped in front of the assembly.
"May I speak?" I asked.
There were murmurs, sharp and wet.
"Listen," I said, and I said it quietly enough that only the room leaned in. "My place is to ensure the safety of this land. I do not hold grudges. I do not covet men. I hold judgment for the public good."
They expected me to turn and put my hand to some ceremonial item. They expected me to be indignant. Instead, I walked to Evan where he stood in purple and simple restraint, a man not of their line and nonetheless my right hand.
I took off my crown.
A hush like a held breath swept through the senators and scribes. Some rose an inch from their seats. I knelt before him.
I saw men blanch and some laugh in surprise. I did what none of them expected from their empress: I bowed my forehead to his hands.
"Please," I said, in a voice that no court had ever heard me use. "Please, do not hurt him for my choice."
They had thought my love would be a scandal. They had thought I would hide my pleasures and defend my policies from behind veils. I did not kneel because of heat or lust. I knelt because the court needed to see where the burden of shame would fall.
Alexandra looked at me, eyes burning bright. "Your Majesty," she said, like the wind. "Stand."
I did not. I stayed bowed until it hurt.
Evan put his hand on my back, not to lift me but to steady me. "Rise," he said, but he did not move to pull me. Perhaps he recognized that my kneeling had not been for him alone. It had been for all of us.
I heard whispers like cattle. "Shame!" someone cried. "The throne bows to a traitor's son!"
"She begs for her crimes in public," a minister hissed.
"Is she mad?" another asked.
"She is more cunning than we thought," said someone else.
I looked up at them, my face wet with longings I would not call weakness. "I do this because I love him," I said. "And because he is mine to protect. If that makes me a criminal to you, then I accept the sentence."
They could not sentence me. They had forgotten how to do anything except whisper.
Slowly, like dawn crawling up a hill, men rose from their chairs and bowed to me. Not out of love but out of policy. They accepted what the public must see. My bow had forced them to choose between the people's favor and their pride. They chose the people.
Evan bowed then, in the way of a man who will lift his head when the work is done. "Your Majesty, you have given me more honor than I deserve."
"You deserve what you earn," I said. "Stand with me. Rule with me. Teach the people if you can."
He raised his hands, and in the hush I heard a thousand small gears click. The world held again.
After that day, the rumors died down like embers. People still whispered in alleys, but the major players—men with titles and ink-stained hands—learned to be careful. They learned that I would accept anything except cowardice.
We worked openly thereafter. Evan learned to hold audiences. He learned to present petitions and to answer questions of border defense with the steady voice of a man who had seen war. We traveled together in silence and in speech. He sometimes made me laugh with a bad joke about the length of my sleeves. I sometimes made him angry with laws that took grain from the nobles to feed children. We traded truth for warmth and bitterness for tea.
Manon Duke arrived at Alexandra's house with thin sleeves and a steel look in her eyes. She had run from a poor life where her father tried to sell her to a trader. She told me, "I thought I would be sold. Instead I learned to read. I want to be a teacher."
"Good," I said. "Then teach."
She bowed. "Yes, Your Majesty."
I liked her because she reminded me of myself when I had first read books in secret. She was fierce but tender, language under her tongue like a weapon she had yet to sharpen.
Graham Orlov, the general, sat on the training field and watched her bow. "She's brave," he said, swinging his sword in slow circles.
"She will be better than both of us," I said.
"That would make me jealous."
"Then learn from her," I answered.
Our reforms moved forward slowly. I created tax breaks for households who sent daughters to school. I created scholarships for girls who showed talent. I created new posts in town halls for women who could run accounts. I ordered that public life would no longer treat women as though they were only pots and shadows.
They told me I was ambitious. They told me I was dangerous. I told them I wanted better schools and better maps and more doctors. I wanted our empire to be less hungry and more curious.
At night, when the papers sat warm on my table and the plum trees dropped sleep like petals on the garden, Evan would come and read aloud from books we had ordered for the academy. He read poorly at first, tripping over phrases like a man who had not practiced letters. I would correct him gently.
"Same word twice," I would say, tapping the margin.
"Do not be cruel," he said, but he took my hand.
We stopped pretending we were not what the world had said. We were not only a scandal. We were a team, two stubborn people who loved policy and each other. It turned out that law and love share many rules: both require attention, honesty, and sometimes the willingness to hurt for the right cause.
I taught Evan how to practice law. He taught me how to ride without collapsing from worry. He laughed at my clumsy falls. I laughed at his careful speeches. We built a life that was steady enough to hold other hopes.
The ministers kept testing us. Once a pamphlet circulated with a mocking portrait of me with my crown tilted and Evan with a crown of thorns. Still, when we walked through the markets, people we had fed came forward to touch my hands and bless me.
One morning, a boy I had saved from famine shoved a small book into my hand. "For the school," he said. "For the girls."
That small book was worth more than a thousand silver cups. The small kindnesses built our strength in ways no army could.
Years rolled, and with them came storms and more laws. Men challenged my edicts; men tried to seize the tax's collection for their own pockets. We fought with them, and sometimes we lost a minor battle. But the academy grew and more girls came to learn. They wrote their names on paper for the first time and signed letters that would bring money to their homes.
Evan never stopped being from the north. He never stopped missing the smell of the sea or the way his mother used to stitch under a pale sun. He missed their songs, and sometimes in the night I heard him humming a tune I did not know.
"Will you go back with me?" he asked once.
"Go where?" I asked.
"To your palace? To the north?"
"I have a country," I said.
"You have me."
"You have both," I said, and kissed the scar at his jaw.
Time changes faces. The plum tree we planted grew and hosted nests. Manon married a soldier named after a hero in one of the books we printed. Alexandra's hair silvered and she took to laughing like a bell that had been struck too many times. Graham Orlov learned to read and to correct his grammar. The children of the academy played in the shadow of the hall and their laughter was like a new language for the city.
One afternoon, the old minister who had once said I could not lead because I was a woman—he approached the palace gate. I expected an insult. Instead he came with a petition, his hands steady this time.
"Your Majesty," he said, bowing as men of a certain age will always bow, "your law on education saved my niece. She can now count the house's grain. We owe you—"
"Then continue your work," I said. "Do not stop teaching her to be brave."
He left, and I felt simpler than I had in years.
There were days the strain returned. The expectation that I would always be perfect haunted the palace. I was supposed to never love foolishly, never grieve publicly, never be wrong. They wanted their rulers to be stories, not neighbors. I refused to be a storybook figure.
Once, in the middle of a debate, a minor official stood slowly, swallowing his rage. "Your Majesty," he said, "you have given rank to the northman. He was born to a fallen court. He will not be loyal."
Evan rose then. He did not implore me. He did not try to charm by turning his history into coin. He looked at the man and answered in a voice that had not been allowed its full power before. "I am a man who lost his home. I chose to live and to serve. I served first because it saved my life, and I serve now because I believe in June Watanabe's rule. If my blood troubles you, look at my deeds."
"And if your deeds are the wrong ones?" asked the accuser.
"Then correct me by law. Do not mock me by making my existence a sin."
The council stopped. The man who had accused him could not find words that would stay in the room. The light in Evan's eyes was not the traitor's stare. It was a pledge to be judged and found wanting or found righteous.
He never once betrayed me. He never once used his position merely for show. He used it to feed villages, to open posts at the university, and to secure better hospitals for the wounded. He argued the point that child soldiers should be returned home. He made men who had been cruel be less heartless.
We had enemies who tried to make his past into a weapon, and yet every time they tried, the people protected him. It helped that he was kind to their children. It helped that he refused to hide. It helped that he chose to work.
Years later, at a festival under a sky the color of boiled tea, I stood and watched the girls of the academy recite laws aloud. Their pronunciation was sometimes wrong, their hands shook as they read. But their eyes were steady and their voices clear.
Evan took my hand in the middle of the crowd. He did not try to hide this touch. "You were right," he said. "This was worth it."
"Was it always worth it?" I asked, because I like hard answers.
"Every day," he said. "Even the nights."
We had fought, and we had made peace again and again. The court had plotted and retreated. The academy grew until its branches shaded more of the city than the old market. A small bell tower rang at dawn and called children to study.
One winter, a writer in the city published a mock lament about the "empress who loved a prince." He expected fury. Instead, the women lined up in the streets, handing him food and asking him to teach their children. The joke he wrote became the rhythm of a nursery rhyme. He had given us a voice unintentionally.
I learned a lesson that day: the people listen to truth through the mouth of story. If you can turn truth into story, they will take it into hearths.
The last summer of my thirty-first year, we went north. I took Evan and we crossed the border that had once been the end of his life and the start of mine. He led me through plains where he had fished as a child and through towns that had been razed and rebuilt by my taxes and by his will. The people knew his face and bowed not because he carried a title but because he had raised their granaries.
At the old palace where he was born the air was thin and quiet. We walked through halls that smelled of dust and old roses. He paused at a low window and said, "I remember my mother here." His voice was a match struck in the dark.
"We will plant a tree," I said, "so that your children and their children can stand beneath it."
He turned to me slowly. "You gave me a home I did not deserve."
"You earned it," I said.
He closed his eyes. "Do you remember my kneeling in the snow?"
"Every winter," I said.
He swallowed. "I thought to die. I did not. I thought to hate you. I did not."
We stood then, in the hall, and the world was full of small things: dust in the light, the creak of the floor, the low cry of a bird outside. And then he kissed me. It was not a court kiss, or a private theater. It was a place where all the years passed into a single quiet.
We planted the tree where his mother used to read by a small window. He dug with a spade he had been given as a joke when he was first given his title. I placed the roots in earth that smelled like rain. We laid the soil. I laughed at our clumsy hands. He laughed at my laugh.
"Tell me a secret," he said, as we patted down the last mound.
"What secret do you want?"
"Tell me that when the world is cruel to you, it is because of them, not you."
I looked up at the sky. "I keep my faults for myself. Some are for the court to find. Some are just mine."
"What's one of yours?" he asked.
"I am stubborn," I said. "I hoard pain because I think it keeps others safe."
He put his hand to my chin. "I will hoard some then. We will share it. Not all rulers are lonely."
That night in the small room of the northern house, we ate soup and spoke like two people who had nothing to prove. I slept with Evan's arm across my chest, and for once the throne did not feel like iron in my dreams.
Years later, when my hair had the first traces of silver and the academy had run enough generations to fill its own library, the people would tell stories. They would tell many lies and many truths. They would call me stern, and they would call me kind. Both would be right.
My children—some of them ours, some of them the nation's—learned to sign letters and count the grain. They visited the poor with baskets and the hospitals with blankets. Evan and I grew old in the ways that married rulers do: together, but still a little at odds over the placement of a cup or the wording of a decree.
One evening, in the plum garden, I stood and listened to the hush. Birds argued over branches. A girl from the academy ran past with a book tucked in her arm. The plum tree we planted years ago now sheltered small nests.
"Evan," I said. "Do you know what I asked the priest in the temple the night before we began this?"
He looked into the dusk. "You asked for three things."
"Yes," I said. "First, that our people have peace. Second, that our laws last. Third—" I paused. "Third, I asked that you live in peace."
He smiled then, and his face folded into softer lines than those of the young prince who once knelt in snow. "You greedy thing," he said. "You asked for mortal things."
"You asked for human things," I corrected. "We are not gods."
He pressed his forehead to mine. "I will grow old with you, June Watanabe," he said. "We will keep the academy full and the granaries heavy. We will give the little ones books and the fearful courage."
I held him there and breathed the scent of plum and earth and ink. It was the smell of a life I had chosen, and the price I had paid.
"Promise me one more thing," I said.
"What?"
"Promise me you will not be cruel to yourself if I make laws you cannot live with."
He laughed quietly. "I will be crueler to the world than to myself, if needed. But I promise."
Years passed, and the city learned new words: ledger, councilwoman, bookseller. The academy grew and filled. The men who once mocked us were old and a little less noisy. The people I had fed as a girl were dead or old, but their grandchildren ran the shops I had dreamed of.
When I finally lay down to die, Evan was there with a bosom full of sighs and hands that had been both gentle and firm. I had no great regrets. I had grappled with law and love in equal measure. I had knelt to no one but a man who had made himself into more than his past.
"Tell them," I said, voice thin as the soft paper of an early draft, "that I was brave when it mattered, and foolish when it helped."
He bent and kissed my hand and answered, "You were the best ruler and the worst liar I ever knew. Your name will be said in both ways."
"Do you still love me?" I asked, with the kind of childishness that aches at the end.
"Always," he said.
After I was gone, the plum tree bore fruit every spring and did not forget the weight of our hands in its soil. Manon taught children until she told me she wanted to write plays about brave women. Alexandra sat in her gardens and corrected scrolls and laughed at men who still did not learn. Graham Orlov sent reports on the border and drank a lot of tea.
People will write and they will say many things. Some will say I lost my head to love and lost my throne to a laugh. Others will say I changed the country for the better. Both will be partly true.
But if anyone asks me what mattered most, I will say this: I chose to be a ruler who could love. I chose to let my heart break for a man, because protecting him meant protecting a truth—that a person can change and deserve mercy. I chose to plant trees and to teach daughters, because the slow work of betterment is the only way to keep a kingdom from bleeding.
"Stay," Evan whispers to my memory now, the last night I hear, as the plum blossoms fall like slow, soft snow. "Stay as long as you can."
I am the one who planted the tree. I am the one who watched them grow.
If you walk by the garden at dusk, you might see a shadow of two people on the path, one with a pen and one with a spade. They will look ordinary. They will not seem terribly brave.
But if you listen closely you will hear me say, "We did what we could."
And you will hear his answer: "We did what we must."
The End
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