Regret15 min read
“I’m Done Waiting, Nicolas.” — Nine Lives, One Choice
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“I spat blood.”
“Elora, what are you doing?” Mina’s voice broke the snow and my ribs.
“I’m done waiting, Nicolas.” I tasted metal and the words came out like a vow. “Nine lives. Nine times. I’m done.”
Mina knelt, trembling. “Miss—don’t say that.”
I laughed without joy. “Do you know what it is to stitch a wedding dress with your own hands while your heart sews itself to a man who does not love you?” My fingers were numb from the needle. “Do you know what it is to let him go eight times and pretend that letting go is love?”
She covered my mouth. “Miss—”
The garden was white. A carriage rolled by the lane and a woman in thin silk clung to a man in white. He looked at her as if the world were made only for her.
Mina’s hand found mine. “He did not see you.”
“I saw.”
A bell tolled from the city gate. I kept breathing slow enough not to pass out, slow enough to stay a woman, not a corpse.
Nicolas walked toward me in a white robe, the same clean line he’d worn since boyhood. “Elora,” he said. His voice was cool. “I shouldn’t meet you privately. But I must be clear.”
“Clear,” I repeated, stepping up like it was a ceremony I had practiced for nine lives. “Say it.”
He tilted his chin a fraction. “There is someone else. I can’t—” He swallowed, as if some duty wanted to finish the sentence for him. “I have a woman I wish to marry first. You should release this engagement. For your own honor.”
The words were paper. I pinched the bridge of my nose until the world brightened and the pain at my side dulled.
“Who is she?” I asked. There was no courage in it—only fatigue.
Nicolas did not answer.
“So you won’t tell me?” I walked away as if leaving a small performance.
He called after me, polite and flat: “Elora, you need not come anymore. I leave for Jiangnan tomorrow to oversee relief. Our marriage is delayed.”
I handed the food box—my best fish, the book of calligraphy he loved—back to him the next morning when he returned the favors to the road and flung them to the dirt.
“You are unwelcome,” he said, and turned away.
Mina wanted to fight. She wanted to pick up the fish and the book and shove them into his hands. I told her it wasn’t worth the shame.
That winter, I sewed.
My father read dispatches by candlelight. My brother sent letters from the frontier—his doodles on the margins like he had kept childish in him despite the war. He promised he would return to escort me to my wedding.
“You will let me resign after you marry,” my father said, voice thin. “We will go to Jiangnan.”
“Good,” I said and smiled like a stitched mouth.
Then the news came in the middle of the celebration: Jasper—my brother—had won a great victory. The city cheered. The next morning, a clerk arrived with a sealed order. He died the day before the victory could be delivered.
At my wedding procession, on the road, I saw the funeral cortège moving to the same drumbeat: black banners, a single black coffin, the placard reading his name. The world split in half: red and black.
I tore at the curtains. “I want to go home.”
“You will make bad luck,” the matchmaker scolded. “You cannot break the rite.”
Nicolas’s voice at my shoulder was knife-thin: “Your father concealed your brother’s death so you would not worry. You will not go.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you let them lie?”
“You are not to defame your father. We marry today.”
I obeyed, because what else could I do? The world’s propriety fenced my grief in and made a room of it.
Later that night, the estate reeked with pretense. My new mother-in-law took me in, and the seat beside her shimmered with softness that was not meant for me. Nicolas said the words of husband and consent in the main hall and left me to sit in a bed that felt wrong.
I went to the study. He was still there, signing. “Why did you hide it?” I asked at the doorway.
He looked up for the first time like I was cold air. “You cannot come and go as you please. Stay in the bridal chamber. It is not proper.”
“You knew,” I whispered. “You knew my brother was dead. Why did you say nothing?”
He did not answer. When, at last, I asked if we might go together—“when you leave for Jiangnan”—he said: “I won’t bring you.”
Three days after that, my father returned to me—weak, coughing blood, gray as an old stone. He told us nothing beyond a few lines: he had been attacked in court. He signed no letters, he left no last counsel.
I burned my fingers on hot paper, pressed my forehead against the lacquered box of Jasper’s armor, and then—on my way to the funeral—the world gave me a new strike. Small hands that once belonged to a servant girl slapped my face as if ripping the last veil from the ceremony.
The woman, Fleur, accused me in front of my in-laws: “You tried to harm my child. My baby is dead because of you.”
“Nonsense!” I cried.
Nicolas looked at Fleur like a man observing weather: “We will handle this quietly.”
They brought Mina out in chains. Mina, my child maid, who had known me since I was small, who had kept my stitches and fed my grief—she was beaten and left bleeding in the snow and then, later, her body came to me broken and pale.
Mina coughed blood, and the yard smelled like iron and wrong.
“He is condemning us,” someone muttered.
I could not cry. I could not fight. I was sewn together as if with invisible thread—tension that could only break.
When Mina died on my lap, I stopped pretending to be anything but bone and knife.
I walked, blood in my mouth, into the courtyard where Nicolas stood, his back thin with a new, human sort of armor.
“Explain,” I said.
He lifted his face, and for the first time I saw dirt under his nails, and something in his eyes that was not ceremony—fear, or memory. “You should rest,” he told me.
“Why?” I asked. “Why is my father dead, my brother, my maid? Who set these fires?”
He told me they were accidents. He told me the court was cruel. He told me nothing useful.
So I asked: “Do you remember?”
He stiffened. “Remember what?”
“You and I.” The whole of the past eight lives pressed on my tongue like poison and sweetness. “We promised. You promised me, in snow and blood. Do you remember?”
“I—” His voice cut. He looked at the ground. “Elora, you are not well.”
“Then why do you call Fleur ‘beloved’?” I said. “Why do you let them say my father died an honorable death while little hands were struck for no reason?”
He turned hard. “You are making accusations,” he said. “We are noble. You are to obey.”
“You married me,” I said, hot. “You married me with your name and your seal and your promises. If you truly loved her—then name her. Tell me you love her.”
He narrowed his eyes. “I never said I loved her.”
“You said I was incompatible with you. You said you could not marry me. Am I supposed to be grateful for permission to live?”
He raised his voice, and for a moment the courtyard was only his and my breath. “This is politics, Elora. Your father’s rank—”
“You think my family’s weight makes me a commodity. You think I am a piece to bargain. Is that what you vowed to me for nine lives?”
The words hung. Snow fell. He looked at me and then, suddenly, his brows knotted as if a bell had been struck somewhere inside his head.
“Go,” he said. “Leave me.”
I folded into myself like a needle leaving cloth. I went home. The messenger with my father’s funerary orders arrived the next day—dead, official, final.
I watched the white turn to gray. I stitched until my hands bled.
I had nine lives of memory, and in this one I decided: enough.
The next morning I climbed the hill to the listening pavilion—the place where our childish voices echoed, where he had once said, “Come all lives, we will share one life well.” I stood where the carved line read my childhood scrawl. I put my hand to the wood and felt my pulse in my throat.
He came then, as if finally learning the map of my wound. He dropped at my feet and held my hand. He looked like a man who had found his shore only after it had been marked with a grave.
“Elora,” he whispered.
“You remember now,” I said.
He did not answer. He lifted my face and everything that had fractured in the last months seemed to press into him. The rain came, the way it always does when the sky cleans itself.
“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me everything.”
At first he stammered small things: the name of a poet I had loved, the pattern of snow on a dress he once kissed. Then memory cracked the shell and history poured out like an overturned bowl.
“You have memories of lives?” he asked, voice thin as a thread.
“Yes,” I said. “I have always carried them.”
His face changed like weather. “When I was a boy—when I walked with you by the river—” He stopped. He stared as if looking at some distant coastline, then spoke with a solemn, small kind of terror. “I am not only Nicolas.”
“What do you mean?” I said, careful not to let hope gild the edges of my fear.
He closed his eyes. “I am Wen Le. I... I am more than this life.”
“Wen Le?” The sound of that name felt like light on tombstone. I had heard it in dreams, in the edges of other names. “You?”
“Yes.” He swallowed like he’d swallowed years. “I was given a post—what they called a test: to walk as man and learn. I… remember pieces—how I tasted iron and snow, how your hand fit in mine—and so I kept searching. I thought the woman who saved me would be one life. I learned I am a god who walked as man and forgot himself.”
My chest tightened. “So you forgot every life until now?”
“Not until recently,” he said. “When you… when you collapsed in my arms and bled, a seam in the world tore. Something that had been folded reopened. I remember her—us. I remember the name you once called me: Lo Cheng, the general.” He laughed then, a dry sound. “I remember dying in the snow—carrying you—and promising you a lifetime. I remembered you, Elora. I did.”
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to fall into his arms and let all the years of waiting like knots unravel. But life had taught me that promises had to be seen.
“Prove it,” I said.
He took a breath and told the story that had been my life: every life he had played a role in was one he had lived only part-way—general, scholar, prince—and each time he loved someone else or married another. Each time I let him go so he could live. Each time I watched him choose a life without me. He named names, nights, seasons. He named the white-haired promise.
“You say you remembered,” I said. “Why did you not stop the things that happened? Why let my father die? Why let Mina be accused?”
“I tried,” Nicolas said. “The court—my mother—power—” His voice broke. “I was blind, Elora. I remembered and I did not know how to fix the wrong. I was a man who could command battle but could not command the past.”
“You can command this past,” I said. “You can call their names in front of the court. You can tell everyone that Mina was innocent, that my father was framed, that Fleur lied.”
He flinched. “You would... expose the family?”
“Yes,” I said. “Or I will expose you for what you are.”
There was a moment where the man who was a god and the man who wore white robes fought for air. He bowed, once, like a man accepting that the world had tilted.
“Tomorrow,” he said softly. “I will speak.”
The next day the palace courtyard thrummed. Men gathered like a tide. I went because I had to see. The matchmaker smiled like a coin; Fleur stood by with a face painted white with victory; my family’s honor trembled on strings and I could not tell which way the wind would break them.
Nicolas mounted the dais.
“People of the city,” he began. “This house has been too quick to judge. It has been too quick to take the life of a good man.” He named my father’s work, the letters he had written, the witnesses who had been paid to look away. He named the midwife who had lied and the servant who had been beaten into “confession.”
Fleur’s color drained.
“You accuse Lady Fleur?” the crowd murmured.
Nicolas did not flinch. “Lady Fleur’s child did not die by poison from Lady Seidel’s home. The child was stillborn and the blame was placed because of power. You shame us with cheap injustice.”
Fleur’s voice shrieked. “You lie! I—”
“Silence.” Nicolas’s voice filled the square like a bell. “Mina was beaten by guards sent by a man in your employ. My mother accepted the lie to save face. I have proof.” He dropped a packet of letters at the magistrate’s feet, names, receipts, orders. The crowd leaned in.
“You will arrest these men,” he said. “You will apologize to Lady Seidel. You will bring justice.”
There were cries. Fleur’s face turned to a mask. Her sponsor—the city official who had arranged the smear—paled and fell. The spectators watched the fall of names like watching a procession of leaves.
He did more. He read the letters written by my father to the throne—pleas for fairness, for relief in the border towns—proof that he had served the realm, not a traitor. When the truth lay exposed, a hush fell. People who had spat at me now bowed, the way the wind bows wheat.
Fleur screamed, then collapsed. The crowd stared as the magistrate ordered arrest. The servants who had beaten Mina were dragged before the dais.
Fleur’s face cracked into real fear. She crawled on the floor. “I did not—” she gasped.
“You made a child pay for your sin,” I said. The world narrowed to the sound of my voice. “You killed our maid. You sent men to beat her. You set my family up to die.”
Fleur looked at me like I was a demon. “You have no proof.”
“You had proof for me,” I said. “You had a letter—”
Nicolas cut her off. “Present it.”
Fleur could not. Her house collapsed around her. She was dragged away screaming. My father’s name returned to honor that day. The crowd looked at Nicolas as if he had reshaped the river.
When the dust settled and the crowd thinned and the snow had been trampled down to mud, he found me beneath the pavilion where our carved name—the promise—still weathered the wood.
“Elora,” he said. “I did this for you.”
“You did it because you remembered,” I said. “And because you could. Justice is not love.”
He bent as if I had offered a gift and took my hand. “Then love what I do now. Let me keep working.”
For a beat, my heart hummed with relief. The world seemed usable again.
But the night that followed was the edge of everything.
I could not sleep. I went to the garden where Mina had once braided my hair. I sat on the stone bench and let the memory of her last breath roll through me.
Nicolas found me there. He knelt, as if the earth were holy.
“Elora,” he said. He placed the palm of his hand over mine. “I have to tell you something else. Something that cannot be undone by law or apology.”
I braced for shame or excuse. “Tell me.”
He reached into his robe and took out a small folded paper. His fingers shook. “I have books in the palace that name things. Names of duties. Names of punishment. There is a record—of me. Wen Le. A deity at court. My post was to test myself in the world of men. I was allowed to love, but not to alter the fates.” He swallowed hard. “But I found you. I found you nine times. Each time the rules broke. Each time someone meddled. You were never a simple woman. In the book you are—Wan Hua. A name of the flowers. A being who once walked the court.”
I did not understand the words all at once. Part of me wanted to laugh. “You are saying I am a myth?”
“You were an immortal once.” He said the words like an apology. “Or something like one. You came down with me, or you came for me— I don’t know which at first. I only learned one thing: you kept coming back for me.”
“Why would I?” I asked.
“You told me in the snow, when you were a woman with my child in your arms. You said you would not give up. You waited with me at the bone and the blade and the council table. You paid and you suffered. You kept me tied to a promise I had forgotten.”
I remembered my hand in cold iron, tried to stitch the word together. “If you are a god—if I am—what do we do?”
He looked at the sky like a man seeking mercy in a ceiling. “There is a tribunal. There is an order. You violated course when you followed me once. The price was set: one of us must let go. Or both of us lose everything. I could return you to the order, restore your seat—let you be a goddess again. But once you are restored you will lose the memory of our shared lives. You will never wait for me. You will be pure as the song of a bell and I will be alone and punished by the weight of what I forgot.”
“You could give me back my immortality?” My voice barely held the thread.
“Yes,” he said. “I could. But the cost is—if you return to heaven with your rank, you must never seek me. You must let the past fold into the book. The tribunal will erase the knot of our nine lives. Or—” His hands closed like one choice over another—“I can give up my position. I can go down to the court and barter. I can tell them I will surrender my title to restore you and plead that we be allowed one life together as simple mortals.”
“Which means?” I asked.
“That means I become human. I bind myself to your time. I will age, I will die. We will be free of the gods’ games.”
Silence roared then. The wind had cut its voice off.
I understood the ledger of the heavens. Give away eternity to win one life—what a bitter price for faith.
“You must decide,” he said. “I cannot decide for you.”
I looked down at my hands. The needle scars on my palms were small as vows. Mina’s breath came back to me in the whisper of cloth. My father’s voice, my brother’s doodles, my little maid’s last plea. Nine lives had taught me two things: to wait and to bargain. My whole life had been for the man who could not keep his memory.
“How long do I have?” I asked.
“Until dawn,” he said.
I thought of the tribunal—of potencies and scales—and thought instead of small things: brass hairpins, Mina’s laugh, the line of Jasper’s letter. I thought of the listening pavilion where we had carved our childish vows.
“If you become mortal,” I said at last, “you will lose your duties. You will not be able to rescue the flood victims in Jiangnan. Hundreds will be without you.”
He looked at me as if I had split something open in his chest. “I can ask the court to assign others. I can—”
“You said your duty is to protect. I do not want you to fail because you are trying to keep me. I also will not go back to the heaven to be safe at the cost of losing all our shared history. I know what that feels like—how it burns. If you give me back to the heavens, I will not remember you. And you—will you forgive yourself for taking away our truth?”
He touched my face, like a man afraid he’d wake me. “I keep thinking of the snow and the red lines we left in it. I remember every time you forgave me.” His voice was less god than human. “I am asking you to trust that if I become mortal, the life I give you will be honest.”
Mina’s ghost sat there like a small wise woman and thudded at my heart. To be with a man who remembered and to have justice done. Or to let him have his immortality and the world keep spinning.
“Promise me one thing,” I said.
“Anything.”
“Promise that if you become mortal, you will not spend your years looking back, hunting gods in memory. Promise you will live.”
His eyes split open like raw coin. “I promise.”
We went to the tribunal as dawn softened. The priests were older than mountains. Their robes smelled of resin and paper. I walked behind Nicolas—now Wen Le—who had the look of a man with the weight of ten thousand years.
The head of the tribunal listened without moving. He looked like someone who had been waiting his whole life for rubbish to blow away.
“You have broken the order,” he said. “Wen Le.”
“We have loved across lines,” Nicolas said. He was steadier than I had seen in days. “We ask to rectify what was done out of error.”
“They violated sacred law,” the head priest said. “Who punished them?”
“We did not ask for punishment,” Nicolas said. “We ask for a bargain.”
The priests consulted like stone. The verdict was a long blue silence. At last, the head of the tribunal made a sound like a bell: “You will surrender Wen Le’s post. He will become mortal on the First Day of Spring. Wan Hua may be restored to heaven and hold rank, but she will lose memory of the nine lifetimes. Or both may be allowed one single mortal life, no memory of the previous houses. The tribunal decides that both of you are too entangled to serve the order, and so a third path is offered: Wen Le may renounce and join her in human life, but a binding oath will strip both of prior celestial power. Once sworn, neither shall call upon heaven or remember what they were. It is irrevocable.”
Nicolas looked at me. “Do you want to be mortal? Do you want a life I can share without being looked at by gods?”
I thought of Mina’s clay face, of my father’s last breath, of a quiet bed with a man who had once been a god and now would be simply a man warming the foot of my bed at night.
“I choose the third,” I said.
He closed his eyes like one who had just stepped off a cliff. He signed the oath with his blood on paper the tribunal had prepared. Then the priest gave me a cup. “Drink,” he said. “You will not remember that you were once other.”
I had only one thought: I would not let him carry the burden alone.
I tasted the bitter draft and felt a coolness pass through me. It was like stepping from winter to a blank room. The tribunal sealed what we had said. The stars seemed to dim.
When I woke, the walls were bare and the sun pewtered into the room like nothing else had happened. Nicolas lay beside me, hair not yet salt or white but ordinary, breathing like a man.
We left together. The city buzzed as if nothing had been reworked. Fleur’s arresters had been punished. My father’s honor restored. Mina’s name would be remembered as an error corrected. But the tribunal’s contract had eaten the shape of our memories like a moth. The nine lives, the promises, were smoothed over a page.
We settled in a small home outside the city. He worked in the relief of Jiangnan under another command; he taught, he visited fields, he learned how to sew a fishing net. I unlearned my stitches and relearned them. The small things we did together were introduced like old friends—sharing bread, reading letters from my brother (who, as fate allowed, had survived in other paperwork; fate had been kind to some things), sleeping in the same bed.
“Why did you choose me?” I would ask sometimes in the long months.
He would look at me as if seeing me anew and smile. “I chose you because you said you would be my home.”
We were ordinary, and ordinary was a mercy: no court titles, no tribunal lights, no gods’ expectations. I found that bread tasted sweeter when taken with him beside the hearth. Nicolas learned to set a field. I learned to say his childhood nickname without feeling shame.
Years came like tides. There were small, fierce things. I gave him a small needle case for his birthday; he made me a tool to mend nets. Jasper’s name remained on the scroll in the temple, honored by his own route. Mina’s grave had a small stone—our city had done what was right.
One evening, years later, I walked to the pavilion the way my nine lives had taught me: slowly, because time was something to measure now, not to steal. A weary wind combed my hair. The carved line we had marked as children—faded by storms and hands and time—still showed the initials we had once scratched like a promise.
A man sat on the bench, older now, his hair threaded with gray. He looked at a book of records.
“Hello,” I said.
He looked up and smiled—the smallest smile that held a whole lifetime. “Elora,” he said. He did not call me Wan Hua or any other name—he called me the one name that had always been mine.
My breath snagged. “You remembered me?”
“I remembered you the day I never wanted to forget anyone again.” He reached out and took my hands.
There is a burden to living, and a gift. We had given up the stars to hold one another. The memory of nine lives came back not in clinging ghosts but as a warm net that only held us safer.
“Will you marry me again?” he asked, voice soft as snow.
I laughed—a short sound like a bell. “We already did.”
He bowed his head and kissed the scar at the base of my thumb, where Mina had once smoothed a bandage.
“We did all of it,” he said. “We did enough.”
Around us, the snow began to fall, gentle and certain. It settled on the carved wood of the pavilion and did not erase us. Our hands were warm.
“Next life,” I whispered, against the wind.
“No next life,” he said quickly, smiling with the man I had chosen. “This time, we live it. We are enough.”
I believed him.
—END—
The End
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