Sweet Romance15 min read
I Woke in a Mute Bride's Body and Hugged My Hunter Husband
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"I don't know how to speak," I said to the dark room first, though my voice came out in my head through someone else's throat.
"You are Imogen now," the system said, in a tone like a child with too much pride. "Time-Space Trading System YQH001. Binding complete."
I blinked at the single slat of light and the bruise-blue skin beneath my sleeve. My hands were small and thin, nails cracked, and my pulse felt like a frightened bird. I tried to sit but a wave of pain made my teeth ache. The memory that belonged to the body I wore was a half-pulled puzzle: a village, a marriage, a brutal night, a silver gift that had vanished, and an accusation shouted outside a house.
"Who—" I tried to ask aloud, but no sound came. My throat locked like a door when rain swells.
"Host is semi-mute. Limitation noted." The system's prompt blinked. "Newbie gift: one brown pill. Use?"
I swallowed the pill because lying there hurt worse than any unknown stranger. The relief was instant and clouded; I slept and woke in the morning to a courtyard that smelled of wood smoke and the faint iron of dried blood.
Outside, voices cracked like dry twigs.
"That girl stole our silver," a woman yelled. "She almost ran away with a man from the hills!"
"She came to our house sickly and useless," the older woman wailed. "Who would think she'd repay us with treachery!"
I learned then that my new name was Imogen Lopez, that Cason Castle was my husband—the hunter with a rough beard and one scar across his right cheek—and that the village had gathered to make me into a story.
"Cason, what are you doing?" a sister of the house demanded when Cason pushed open the little dark room and caught sight of me. Her voice was loud and ripe with greed. "You will not let our family look bad by keeping such a wife."
"This is my house," Cason said, and his voice was small but hard enough to clip the woman's whining. "This is my wife."
"He stole ten taels' worth of silver for her," another woman spat. "You should send her home with the money!"
I felt Cason lift me with care that surprised me. He moved like a man used to balancing game and weight, like the body and strength of a hill. His arms smelled of damp wool and smoke. I didn't know his hands yet, but I curled my fingers into his sleeve the way a child might. "Don't be cruel," I wanted to say. Instead I pressed my face to his chest and heard his heart, steady and slow and oddly comforting.
"She is not an outsider," he told the yard. "She is my wife. You all make too much noise."
"You are making trouble! You dare to defend a loose woman!" the same woman shrieked.
Cason carried me out to his small house anyway. He moved carefully. "You will lie still," he said in a lower voice as he set me on a thin pallet. "Don't try to speak if you can't. Rest."
I had memories of a life not mine floating up: a boy named Harper—no, that was wrong—Harper Thomas was a little girl who called me "Aunt" already; a brother named Y—no, these were patches. I discovered my voice could do two sounds and a few words. The system confirmed, unhelpful: "Host is semi-mute. Speech limited."
"Why would anyone want to run away?" I licked my lips at Cason. "Why does everyone assume the worst?"
"People here like gossip more than bread," he said. "Don't think of them. Sleep."
The village gossip came in waves. They had seen me with a man on a road, they said. The man had run. The silver had gone. My family had been paid ten taels for my hand. Men with easy money wanted to buy brides, old women wanted to make matches, and greedy sisters wanted to reclaim coin. I tried to force a memory of that day in the yard, but there were blanks—big pale spaces where other lives had been.
"System," I asked, when I could, "is this my body’s memory or mine?"
"Mixture," the system said. "Host inherited some past. Some suppressed. You have a storage space and a trading function. Use space to heal."
I discovered the space like a secret garden the first time I left my skin. It was a small yard of soft dirt, a pool, rows of vegetables, a spring that sang like a buried bell. I drank the cool spring without thinking and felt warmth climb through my limbs. The space was mine. It gave me a grape the size of a child's fist when I asked for one. It gave me courage.
When Cason returned, he carried a small, bruised root the herbalist had given him—"human ginseng," the village healer said, with a reverent hush—and he gave me half in a thin bowl.
"Eat," he said. "You must get better."
I ate because of the stew of gratitude and because my stomach flinched at the thought of staying weak when the world wanted reasons to kick me.
"She looks better," Cason's aunt said, when she came to press his suit. "We should return the silver."
"Not necessary," he said. "She was married here. No one takes her home."
Her face contorted with anger—Estefania Nielsen, the big-mouthed aunt, and her sister Fernanda Fitzpatrick—both made a show of teeth and fury. I learned the shape of their anger in days: they were greedy, loud, and gifted at making the village watch. They had motives and they were not shy about using them.
I had a child's glow of hope: if I got better quick enough, if I could speak, then I could prove I was not a traitor. The system supplied a plan. "Trade to gain points," it suggested, "buy goods in transaction grid."
"How do I get points with nothing?" I asked, looking at the thin coin Cason had handed me.
"Trade goods. Sell items with value. Use space produce," the system said. "Convenience noodles cheap. You can cook, sell, earn."
Cason watched me as if I were a small animal learning to use its limbs. "You can do it?" he asked.
"I think... I can try," I said.
We bickered and planned like two people learning to be a pair. He was rough with words and tender with small hands. He would come home with two meat buns sometimes, and I'd watch him as he chewed and chuckled, and find myself learning how his jaw flexed, how his eyes closed a fraction when he smiled.
"You should rest," Cason would say. "Don't go out."
"I will sell noodles," I said stubbornly. "We need funds."
"You are still recovering. Let me—"
"Let me do this," I would answer, and the look on his face when I backed down from his offer was like someone listening to a new kind of truth—astonished, then pleased.
Pretty soon, the first small successes came. I bought five packs of dry noodles with one copper coin. I boiled water in the old pot Cason's household had kept and made broth thick with a sprig from the space's herb patch. Cason laughed—"You can cook?"—and then ate two bowls and raved. A neighbor, Chet Barnes, came and bought one bowl, then two more. The system blinked green. Points ticked in the air like small lights.
"You make them different," Cason said, eyes soft. "Better than others."
"Because I have water that heals," I murmured. "And a head that remembers recipes."
The gossip did not stop. Rumors fanned and new ones blew stronger. A girl healed too fast, a daughter of a hunter eating ginseng, a possible witch—fables like wild birds: they roosted on any roof. The village women and men gathered like tide. At the market they questioned whether Cason had given me ginseng; suddenly I was loved and hated in the same breath.
One day, a woman in purple fabric—Lisa Duke—arrived at our courtyard, eyes bright and cruel. She had wanted Cason before I came. Her arrival pressed cold into the house.
"You have kept her?" she asked, with a sly smile. "I heard she was dying."
"Yes," I answered, the words stretching out of me before my throat could close. "Cason kept me."
She flinched, then laughed too loud. "Of course. He always liked pity. But he's my brother-in-law candidate. He should come home."
"He's married," I said, simpler than the speeches outside. "He married me."
"To a sick fool?" Lisa demanded. "To someone who would run away for silver? Think how foolish you are."
"I am not foolish," I said, and surprise and shame mingled under my shoulder bones like the weight of a harvest basket.
Cason stepped in front of me like a shield. "You will leave," he said to Lisa, and his voice was a calm river that could drown a storm. "Or you will leave quietly."
Lisa left and plotted. The sisters Estefania and Fernanda watched and winked. They whispered to an old woman in town, a petty fortune-teller who sold drama for coin—Addison Buckley—who loved a chance to be feared. Addison earned a sliver of money and a sliver of power by telling the gullible that the world needed a reason for fear.
Soon enough, the worst day arrived.
"They want to burn me," I told Cason when I saw the torches. "They will chain me to a stake and set me alight."
"They can't," he said, and his hands shook. "They can't."
"Yes, they can," I said. "They already want to."
I should not have been surprised. The village was a thing that fed on stories, and once a story grows teeth, it bites. They brought a pile of brush to the yard, and the women who had once lent me a bowl of rice earlier stood with stones and hate.
"She is a monster," Addison cried, arms flailing and voice like a church bell gone wrong. "She took the soul of the dead girl. She is a witch."
"She healed too fast!" Estefania screamed. "She must be witchcraft!"
"She's dangerous!" Fernanda added, leaning in to watch me squirm.
They tied me to the wooden column. The rope bit into my arms. I could see Cason across the yard, held back by men who feared him and also feared the crowd. He shouted my name like a prayer. "Imogen! Don't—"
"Let her go!" I cried, because I wanted him to be free and safe. The order of things was wrong. He was the one with a broken arm and a wound that would not let him hunt. He had given me a piece of root from his own share. For that, the village made me the villain.
Cason's hands were freed by force. He strode into the crowd. "Release her," he said once. "Release her now."
"No," shouted a man named Clancy Carpenter, who had brought a few strong men. "We will do what keeps us safe."
"She is my wife," he said again. "You cross me, you cross my family."
The crowd surged. A woman in the back tossed a torch. The flame licked the brush.
"Start the fire!" someone shouted.
I felt the heat and the panic like a rising tide. The judge in me wanted to run, but my legs were bound. The system was shouting in my head, useless air.
"Imogen, this is bad," it said. "Use space or you will die."
"No!" I thought back. Not yet. Not with him there, with his jaw set in the way only when he could not break. "Cason," I screamed, "go! Run!"
He didn't move.
"Leave! Save yourself!" I begged, and then, with a sound that was a child's half-laugh half-cry, he said what I had not expected:
"Unless I die, I will not let you burn."
The words hit the crowd like iron. It is strange how a single sentence can stop a multitude. In that stillness Cason stepped forward, seized the lit torch, and smashed it under his heel. Men rushed at him. He fought with the quiet, dangerous skill of someone who has split years of wood and wrestled game into submission. He took blows and gave blows, and for every person he felled, two more rushed from the side. He beat men he had once hunted with.
"Let him go!" I shouted, but my voice was a cracked bell. The crowd closed like a fist, and I was dragged into darkness.
For a moment there was nothing but the sound of feet and the smell of smoke. Then a new voice rose: a man's long and clean, the kind of voice that opens official doors. "Stop!"
Two men in the town's plain blue—Cason recognized them: the captains, the ones who answered to law, not rumor—stepped between us and the pile of burning wood. Their authority was a cold blade. They asked questions. They searched faces. They found pockets and coins and lies.
"Who paid you, woman?" one captain asked Addison Buckley first.
"I—" Addison's voice twitched. "I—she's a witch!"
"Do you have proof? Or payment?" the other captain asked, and the crowd's confidence faltered.
"She paid me—" Addison began to shake and then fell silent. She had been bribed with a handful of copper, and suddenly, the copper looked like a chain around her neck.
"Where did you get the money?" the captain demanded.
"From..." Her eyes flicked to Lisa Duke. "From her."
"Liar."
"She gave me five hundred copper," Chanted Lisa Duke—no, I realized then, the one who had set so many things in motion had been paying handsomely to clever tongues. Her face drained like water from a bowl.
The captains pushed forward. "Stand up. Hands out. We will bring you to the magistrate."
The scene that followed was what I had longed for quietly: public shame, not private cruelty. They dragged Addison and Lisa and the two sisters Estefania and Fernanda out into the market by the hair of their lies.
Addison wailed at first, then turned pale. Lisa's face contorted; she had confidence when the crowd feared witchcraft, but not when two county officers held a ledger and two witnesses stepped up.
"You are under arrest for inciting violence," the captain said. "For conspiracy to murder. For taking bribe."
The women who had shouted at me turned and pointed. "They tricked us!" cried one. "They bought our fear!"
But fear bought by others is a fragile thing; it cracks when it must pay for itself. Addison's bragging to an old witch had been recorded—someone had a ledger of coin—and now that ledger was proof.
The public punishment unfolded like a slow, hot summer: first they were led into the center, bound at the wrists, and the captains read the charges. Voices rose in the crowd—shock, applause, whispers, pity. For a long time the show continued.
Lisa begged first with a voice that had been cruel a week ago but now shook with cold. "I only wanted him," she said. "I only wanted him to notice me. I didn't think—"
"That you could make death for another?" the captain asked.
"I didn't mean—"
"Silence." The captain's voice fell like a stone. "You will stand by the magistrate. Your payments will be recorded. The magistrate will decide punishments."
Then Estefania and Fernanda were confronted with the women they had belittled. "You plotted to sell a story for coin," the captain announced. "You forced villagers to act on lies."
"How could they do that?" someone asked aloud.
"Look," said Cason, and he spoke softly so only the people near him could hear, "they were greedy. They chose coin over sense."
One by one, witnesses came forward. Liars shrank. Those who had been loud now went quiet. The villagers who had been ready to burn me now stared at their hands, at the dirt they had swept, at the way fear had made them cruel.
Addison's reaction changed gradually. First she was smug, then surprised when the captains pulled ledger and copper from a pouch she hid. She protested, then denied, then her face crumpled into pleading.
"Please," she whimpered. "I only took coin to keep food on my table."
"That is your defense?" the captain asked. "You will answer to the magistrate."
The crowd, who had been ready to watch blood, now provided a different show: they watched the fall. Some had approval, some had relief, some had shame. A thin woman in the front tossed a handful of dirt at the sisters and said, "You started it." A man who had lobbed the first torch stood transfixed, as if the world had changed its pattern.
Lisa went from color and menace to pale and broken. She began to cry out names she had bribed, to finger the coins with shaking hands, to scream in a language of bargaining she had never expected to use. At first she denied it, then flailed, then tried to bargain. People took out their bowls and counted the silver. When they found five coins in Lisa's sleeve—a gift she claimed was meant for witness protection—her voice changed from accusation to pleading.
By the time the captains had finished their reading, the air in the square smelled of ash and wet straw from the aborted pyre. Addison's face was streaked with tears and makeup of false power. The sisters Estefania and Fernanda fought and then looked away, their schemes exposed. They faltered under the weight of their own greed.
"See," Cason said quietly to me as they led the women away, "when lies are paid for, they are easy to unbuy."
Cason's hands trembled as he held mine afterward. "You are safe," he said. "For now."
"I almost had my throat cut by fear," I said. "Almost by my neighbors."
"They will think again now," he said. "The magistrate will make sure. I will make sure."
In the weeks after the burning attempt, life shifted in little ways. The captains took Addison and Lisa to town. The magistrate's verdict was public and strict: Addison would be fined and forced to work on the magistrate's stocks for months; Lisa's marriage prospects were ruined, and her parents had to return any money she had used to bribe mouths. Estefania and Fernanda were publicly shamed and ordered to work for the families they had slandered. Each punishment matched the crime and was carried out with witnesses—village people watching as the women scrubbed floors, carried wood, and returned all the small coins.
The punishments were not all the same. Addison worked on the magistrate's stores under a watchful foreman, forced to face the men whose lives she had threatened. Lisa's family had to stand at the market and declare her wrongs before the people she had wronged. Estefania was sent to repair a roof she had slandered a woman out of; Fernanda was assigned to fetch water and carry it for the homes she had plotted against. Their faces budded humility like slow, uneasy flowers.
For me, the aftermath was quieter, more private. The village still whispered, but now the whisper had room for wonder: "She used ginseng? The hunter sacrificed for his wife." Some were sympathetic; others were envious.
Cason came to me at night. He would sit with his back to the cold wall and hold my hand, and I would lean my forehead on his shoulder. "Do you know what you are?" he asked once.
"A new kind of stubborn," I said.
He laughed and then grew serious. "You are brave. You have a mind I did not foresee." He tucked a loose hair away from my face. "You will do this business. I will not let my arm keep us hungry."
That winter, we did start the stall. We sold noodles with little salt pork and pickled vegetables made in the jars I had bought at the market—three big earthen jars that had cost less than their worth after I bargained the vendor into believing my plan. The pickles were a minor miracle: space-grown vegetables cured in a way that kept them crisp and fragrant all winter. The soup we served had a strange warmth that made people sigh.
"How do you make the soup taste different?" a regular asked one evening.
I shrugged, proud. "A little spring water, a little patience."
The small shop on the hill did well. Cason would limp about his chores and come sit with me in the stall for a moment, half-recovered and proud. Harper Thomas—little Harper—would run around the yard in a patched red jacket and call me Aunt Imogen and demand apple slices. The village that almost burned me then came to stand in line for my noodles.
Sometimes I would stand in the doorway and watch the people eat and wonder how much fear costs, how little courage, and how a man with a scared face could carry so much softness inside. Cason would come up behind me and wrap an arm around my waist. "You did this," he'd say.
"No," I said. "We did. You saved me from a fire and I sold noodles."
He kissed my temple like it was an answered prayer.
At night, when the stall closed and the embers were banked low, I would go to the little shelf that held copper mirror Cason had bought me—a plain disk that showed me my face: smaller, steadier, holding a small confidence I had not owned before. The system hummed in my mind like a clock. It didn't have a tail or a face, but sometimes I imagined it proud.
"You are doing well," it said one night. "Points accumulating."
"Good," I told it. "Keep the receipts."
The village healed in its own crooked ways. Lisa's life unraveled like a cheap cloth. She had been publicly shamed and refused in towns where her family once hoped to make matches. Addison worked off the fine in the magistrate's yard and started telling fortunes only to those who came freely. Estefania and Fernanda scrubbed floors and learned that small people hurt in large ways. They were punished in different ways so no single end could be copied: jail labor, public confession, forced service in the homes they had slandered.
People watched. They recorded the cost of lies with their eyes.
I kept a secret jar of the spring water in my space and occasionally used a cup to brush Cason's arm until its scars paled. I kept another jar for pickles. And every winter I would steam the meat buns for him, and he would watch me with the tired, honest hunger of a man who had been given something worth more than gold: a new home.
One night as snow drifted like powdered silk into the yard and the shop's last candle guttered, Cason put both rough hands on my face.
"Imogen," he said, with a softness I had found I wanted more than anything, "do you remember your life before me?"
I thought of the life I had led once where I counted days by bus schedules and coffee cups. I thought of the life now with the trading system, the jars, the spring, the market. I touched the faint scar on his knuckle where he had taken a blow for me.
"I remember enough," I said.
He smiled like a man who had been forgiven for a secret sin. "Good. Because I like the part where you hug me."
"I hugged you before," I said, quiet. "I hugged you when I woke in your arms."
He laughed softly. "I like that too."
Outside, the village slept. Inside, we sat with warmth and a small pile of coins between us. On the table lay a copper mirror, a bowl with traces of broth, a list of ingredients I still wanted to trade in the system, and the little brown pill the system had given me at first.
"One day you'll owe me an explanation about that system," Cason said.
"I'll give you a bowl of noodles instead," I said.
He kissed my forehead then, quick and gentle. "Deal."
At dawn, I would put on the copper mirror and look. A woman who had almost been burned looked back, steady and alive. I would touch the little burn mark on the storefront door from the aborted pyre and remember that the worst stories can be changed if enough people choose to look for truth instead of a rumor.
"One more thing," the system sent, like a bell. "Mission update: continue trading. Use points to upgrade water filtration in space. There will be more tests."
"More tests?" I laughed.
"Of course," the system said. "You are the kind of host I like."
I picked up the last meat bun and offered half to Cason.
"Thank you," he said, and tucked the bun into his mouth like a blessing.
Outside, the market woke. Inside, a small family began their day. I touched the copper mirror. The system hummed. The spring in my space promised new vegetables.
We had been through fire and shame. We had been through quiet moments of care. I had been muzzled and still found words, and a man with one scar and two rough hands had given me a life I wanted to hold.
"Remember the fountain water?" I asked the mirror and then Cason, who hummed.
"Always," he said, and his face was full of the kind of tenderness that could shield a village.
This was our small world: a trading system with its cold offers, a spring that tasted like morning, a copper mirror, three clay jars of pickled vegetables, and a hunter who would stand in a fire for me. I carried them all like proof that I could write a different ending for a borrowed life.
The End
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