Sweet Romance13 min read
My Accidental Crown: The Girl from the Sky
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I did not mean to tumble through a cave and land at the center of everybody’s gossip, but that is exactly how my week began.
"I fell," I said aloud at the street, because sometimes it helps to tell a story out loud, "and the sky fell with me."
People laughed. They did not hear the part about the cave swallowing me or the bright seam of light that spit me out like a coin. They only saw the clothes I wore, the pendant at my throat, and a face they had never seen before.
"Where are you from, child?" a woman asked, and I blinked into the circle of faces.
"I'm Dream," I said. "Dream Otto." Saying my own name felt like a foothold.
Someone pushed coins toward me. "Sing," they urged. "For the gods—sing for us."
"Sing?" I asked, because I had always liked to sing in the shower back home. Then, because everything else in the world felt stranger than my throat, I sang.
"My voice," someone behind me breathed, "is like a bell."
I smiled. "Thanks," I told the man who had dropped a pouch on the ground. He was handsome and wrong for my world in a dozen small ways. He waved his fan and said something to the man behind him. The man behind him ran into the crowd and tossed the whole purse at my feet, red-handed and proud.
"You're a goddess," someone near the tea shop declared.
"I am tired," I said, because none of it made sense and I was tired. I sat cross-legged, sang another verse, and watched gold and copper click into the bowl at my feet like a rain of permission.
"Take her home," a woman barked suddenly from inside the crowd. I rose because the will to move was stronger than the will to wonder. A matron in thinned silk swept in and hugged me like I had always belonged to her.
"My daughter!" she cried.
"Wait," I said.
"Dream?" the woman asked, and my throat closed on my real name as if it were a secret I wasn't allowed to keep.
"Cloud? My child?" the woman sobbed and examined the jade at my throat.
"Don't stare," I protested. "I—this isn't—"
The jade was familiar to me in the same way a childhood key is, the one you forget the shape of until you hold it. "I wore it a long time," I admitted. "I don't know where I got it."
"You belong to us," the woman said, voice full like a bell. "We will take you home."
So I followed them.
It was simple: a house of pillars and paper lamps, a man with a careful laugh who held someone else's authority in his quiet hand, and a family that wove the smallest gestures into ownership. The house said Cloud with a bold plaque. I learned quickly that a name could be given like a cloak.
"Call her what?" my foster mother asked the man, and he smiled.
"Colin Sherman," he said, and folded his hands. "She will be our daughter."
"Dream Otto, you are now recognized as Cloud's child," someone told me, and my legs gave a small wobble.
I had been pulled from another life as easy as pulling a thread. It felt like a dream that wanted to be stitched into a tapestry.
They did a test—some ritual of blood that made people lean forward like moths.
"Cut," my foster mother said, and I complied.
The blood mixed and did what blood does. "It matches," they announced. "She is one of ours."
"How? How can it be?" I asked, but everyone else already carried me like truth.
They called me their rightful daughter. They wrote me into the family book. They set my name on a place that had been empty for years.
"You will be our eldest lady," my foster mother told me, as if a new crown could be sewn from a handful of words. "You will be the Cloud heiress."
"That's a lot of sewing," I said.
It was quiet then, because someone had decided that a world had turned. I had clothes like other people, a bed that did not smell of the cave, and a plan in my head that wasn't at all clear. I would learn the rules here, I thought. I would sleep in a bed, smile when appropriate, and find the seam back home when the time came.
On the second day by the gardens, I met him.
"You should not be here," he said, which is probably the most romantic line my life has ever heard. He sounded annoyed and far too interesting to be annoyed only by my presence.
"Am I supposed to be somewhere else?" I asked, because I was.
He limped with a dignity that belonged to princes in ballads, though nobody had sung for him. His hand tore fabric to make bandages. "Help me wrap this," he told me bluntly.
So I wrapped it. I wrapped his wrist with a dirty scrap, just as I had seen in old dramas. I tied a bow because I couldn't help myself and I like bows.
"You're not a nurse," he said once I finished.
"I never claimed to be," I told him.
"I am Chase Anderson," he announced without preamble. "People refer to me as the prince."
"I didn't know," I said. "I didn't know anything."
"Is that so?" he said. He looked at me like he was cataloguing a very odd specimen.
He had guards and attendants and a man named Mark Denton who hovered with suspicion and a fan. Chase had a kind of attention that landed like a bird. He made notes where other people made noise.
"You saved me from something," Chase said once, another time, more softly. "You pulled me out of a crowd and dragged me like an old coat."
"I don't want to be your coat," I told him.
"Noted," he said. "Stay."
I did, for reasons I could not unpack. The world had its own gravity, and he was an anchor of a new sort.
They called me strange, absurd, helpless. None of that meant anything until a single rumor blossomed through the capital: I had sat with the prince. I had bandaged the prince. I had stayed in his house at night. The rumor did more than travel; it poured like oil and caught flame.
"You're shameless," one woman hissed as I walked through the market.
"She sleeps with him," another declared.
"She is a thief," said another.
"Let them say what they like," I told myself. "They have never learned what it is to have soup because someone else boiled water for them."
But the rumor was bad. The capital hated impropriety the way winter hates light. Out in the gardens the court's eyes were bright and cruel, and one girl rose to speak against me—Vittoria Arnold.
"You are newly claimed by the Clouds," she said in the main hall, smiling like someone flicking a stick into a hornet nest. "Why are you in the prince's quarters already?"
"Because I walked there," I said.
"It is unseemly," Vittoria said. "I challenge her. Let the prince's bride be decided by skill."
"What skill?" I asked.
"Any," she said. "We will test song, instrument, decorum. Whoever wins will be the prince's chosen."
"Fine," I said. "Name a test."
She chose a duel followed by music. I chose a song I knew—'River Snow'—and plucked out a tune that sounded like the memory of my phone's ringtone.
When the instrument snapped under stage lights—someone had tampered—the crowd gasped. Vittoria's face tightened. She protested and then took the stage, affront and all. She lost. I had sung a tune the city had not known and they liked it more.
"She cheated!" Vittoria cried. "It was rigged!"
"Prove it," I said.
There is a line in every place that matters: if you are accused, you must answer. If you win, people believe you. If you lose, they try to burn you.
I did not know I could hit. I do not mean in the ring sense. I mean I lifted my hand, struck Vittoria across the face where everyone could see, and said, "You take advantage of the stage. You break instrument strings. If you cannot out-sing me, you cheat."
Silence fell. Then laughter. Then applause. Then a low, dark muttering.
"She slapped me!" Vittoria howled to the emperor.
"She deserves it," I told the court.
"Enough." The emperor smiled, like a man who loves a proper play. "They will wed. Let it be the prince. Let the match be made."
I tried to protest later, but it had been decided.
"You're too bold," Chase said, when he thought I could hear. "You're reckless."
"You're lucky," I said. "Your luck didn't have to bandage you."
He laughed a short laugh that did not leave his eyes. "I will prowl and guard this capital because of your mischief," he said. "You owe me nothing, and everything."
At night there were whispers. There were people who scratched a note into my pillow: "Shameless." There were others who watched my red-lacquered sign in the market—my little kitchen, my dream of a simple restaurant—open: the Red Willow Inn. I had bought a tiny, crooked place by the theater, and I cooked like my life depended on it.
"I'll take the signature dish," a man named Graydon King boasted as the first patron, a man of easy clothes who puffed and ate with a vigor that made me grin. He had a face that could be kind and a voice that could be a rope.
He later became a note of regret.
"Why this name?" Chase asked when he once drifted into a seat at Red Willow and watched me arrange bowls.
"Names can't catch your heart," I said. "If you like the soup, come every day. If not, leave."
Chase came anyway. Sometimes he sat quiet with a fan and took my food. Sometimes he made comments that made Mark Denton—his guard—flush. "She cooks like a mortal who has learned to command gods," Chase told me once.
"Is that a compliment?" I asked.
"Yes." He said it as if the word weighed ten pounds.
There were other nights: nights when men tried to kill him. They called themselves the Black Dragon Syndicate. They moved at odd hours and left marks in corridors like signatures. Once, they tried to stab him in the street. I hid. I wanted to run forward, to do heroics, but sometimes the most useful thing is to be safe, and sometimes the most useful thing is a hand with a cloth and a quiet voice.
"Go," Mark Denton told me. "Hide now."
I did. The plan worked. He survived. We stood later on a rooftop, panting. He said, "You must stay."
"I will," I promised, which is how small promises begin and how they stack into a life.
Rumors then soured into poison. A pamphlet appeared that called me shameless. An old practitioner, a doctor named Cedric Bonner, read the signs and found slipstreams of slow poison in someone else's tea. A famous healer—one who owed no allegiance to the palace—helped me detect the root of a murder in our house. He recognized a poison I had never known from a talebook.
"You cannot simply accuse," he said. "But you can prove."
We went to the palace. The healer smelled at bones and scrapings and stayed late with the cook and the body. He found the tiny trace that the others did not feel.
"You were framed," he said.
That is when the other crimes stacked into place. Servants began to die, and all of them—one by one—had hidden marks, marks of a black dragon seal. The steward, Elliot Miller, swore he had done everything he could and that some parts of the house were blind even to him.
There were small disasters: the third aunt's death with a broken face and a hairpin at her chest. There were smaller, crueler lies, like a pinned hair ornament the rival claimed belonged to me. People believed so much in stories. I learned that a hairpin can be planted like a seed.
"Prove it," I said to everything that accused me, and it would have been laughable if it were not for the morning the city woke to the news: the lady of the household, the third aunt, had been murdered.
"She was struck from within," Chase told Elliot and the men sent to investigate. "Not by my household, not by the Cloud family. It is a war."
"A war?" someone asked.
"It is a war of power and rumor," Chase replied. "We will find the one behind the damage."
You cannot storm rumor as if it were a building. You can, however, reveal the hands that hold a pamphlet. You can, with patience and a bit of mischief, drag the authors into light.
I kept my hunger for justice dull and steady, the way a kettle keeps a simmer. I paid attention. I paid favors. I bought a small key from a boy who sold secondhand things and traded him a bowl of soup for a rumor. Elliot Miller found notes, and Cedric Bonner found traces of an old poison.
Then one night I found a man in the library.
"You will not be missed," he said, caught and surprised, a man with a short throat and no excuses.
"I will," I told him. "For starters, you will be seen."
He ran; I followed. A ceiling tile fell and shattered like a confession. He screamed the way men do when their plan is ruined. He told a story of money, of a job that paid well, of an odd, central figure who put the seal of the Black Dragon on his sleeve.
"Names," he hissed, "are expensive."
I dragged him to the main hall, because trials often require an audience.
"Who sent you?" Chase demanded.
"I won't tell," the man said, voice thin with fear.
"Tell or we expose you," I said. My hand moved, almost without thought, and I slung the pouch that had been in the library onto the table. "Everything that belongs in your pockets will be emptied in the open. Your friends will watch."
He buckled. "Fine. Fine. It's... it's the steward's deputy—"
"Mark a line," Chase said. "Bring the scribes."
Men came. A crowd gathered. We had them.
I had learned to notice the smallest things—how a man scratches his ear, which way his shoes point when he lies—and that is the skill you need when a conspiracy hides behind sugar-coating. I took the little man by the sleeve.
"Name names," I told him. "Who planted the pin? Who slipped the powder? Who wanted to make us look like savages?"
He mumbled. "Vittoria's father—Leonardo Greene—has been buying favors. He wants a match for his daughter. He cannot stand the maid who rose like a rumor."
"Then bring him forward," Chase said.
We did. We called the household and the small magistrates and the emperor's men. We packed the hall with servants, cityfolk, stew-cooks, theater boys, customers from Red Willow, and even the boy who sold keys.
"Let them watch," I told Chase. "Let justice be public."
We found Vittoria's father’s messenger with pockets full of silver and a scroll of instructions about planting the hairpin. We found ledger entries that traced bribes. We found enough to make a story credible, and men hunger for a story.
The punishment was a show: the emperor himself loved a proper unmasking.
"Bring them," the proclamation read. "Public humiliation shall be served."
They marched Vittoria in with her father, Leonardo Greene, who had never been comfortable in the open. He stood like a man who had been told that all his scaffolding had been removed.
"You call this a match?" Leonardo cried.
"You used your money to make a crime," Chase declared to the crowd. "You bribed men to poison and to slander. You thought you could buy the city."
I stood then and spoke to the gathering. "You saw my back in the lane," I said. "You ate my food. You heard us laugh. None of this was paid for by traitors."
The crowd roared with the small joy they take from truth. That roar felt like warm bread.
They stripped the messenger of his role and had him tell each tale aloud. People recorded it with their hands, with their whispers, with the way they turned to each other and nodded. The punishment was long and public. Vittoria was not simply shunned; she had to kneel in the market, in front of those who had once praised her. They read aloud her plans while tarring her honor with words. They had the theater girls unmask her vanity and they set her on a small platform. She had to answer questions—point by point—until her voice broke and the crowd saw that a woman may be polished by wealth but is fragile without truth.
"Shame," shouted someone near the wine sellers.
"She cursed her rivals and bought lies," said a baker.
Vittoria's face changed: at first she was furious, then incredulous, then pleading, then finally hollowed to a small child who had been shown the slippery side of the world.
"I did it for my family!" she begged once, voice running like water on stone.
"Then watch what your family has to pay," Chase said. "Publicly repent. Be seen in your wrong."
She knelt and the crowd watched as her father's account was read. Leonardo Greene was furthermore forced to relinquish privileges. He had to stand at the gate every morning and do tasks that his money had always avoided. Markets recorded his shame like bread.
It was more than humiliation; it was a small downfall into public light that let people see the mechanics of the crime. The ones who applauded were the same who had given my little inn a second chance. They leaned in as stories of deceit were read like a lesson.
Meanwhile, a different form of punishment awaited those responsible inside the palace: the steward Elliot Miller, who had tried to hide his own failures, was relieved, though not publicly pilloried. For what is punishment but learning? Elliot wept more than he argued, which is also a kind of public fall.
"And the Black Dragon?" a voice asked.
"You will see," Chase said.
There was more to come. Another punishment was prepared for those who had used the Black Dragon's seal—the Syndicate's sign—on the bodies of dead servants. That was not a punishment of words but of full exposure. We took the people who had been caught to the largest marketplace and had them confess, one by one, the roles they had played. The men who had provided the poison were forced to clean floors, to beg, and to undo the small harms they had done in the sight of the very citizens they had harmed.
They first had to scrub the city steps by hand, in the very place where their bribes had been counted. Children gathered and spat on them. The crowd clapped like a jury. When one man, a petty hand in a larger plan, broke down and started naming names, the ripple of exposure rolled outward.
"It started small," he cried. "A coin here, a favor there. They told us it was justice. They told us it was for the betterment of the House."
"You were paid to kill," I said, because it mattered to me. "You were paid to silence humans."
"I was paid," he whispered. "I was paid and I ate."
"Then at least let men know how the money tasted," Chase told the crowd. "Let it be known that greed cooked this doom, and we will not forget."
The market watched the men scrub. They scrubbed until their wrists ached and their knees shivered. It was not revenge in the old fairy stories. It was a slow, open lesson: there are consequences for small cruelties that accumulate into monstrous acts. The men who had been hired were not the only criminals. The higher hands who had brokered poison saw their careful books opened. Their names were spat like seeds.
Public punishments reveal faces and cause changes. Vittoria's father lost his place at court for a season. The Black Dragon's reach shortened because our names and proof were spread through the city like seeds. People who had felt small suddenly had language for what had been done to them. They walked more carefully, now that they had seen a truth revealed.
After it, the city smelled different. Maybe it was only my imagination that it smelled like soup and rain and a bit of new air, but it did. People who had once looked away were now more attentive. They came to Red Willow to laugh with me, to eat, and to gossip in safer tongues.
Chase stayed close. "You cannot go back to your old life," he told me once, when the market's noise slept low and the world felt like the inside of a well. "Not yet."
"Maybe I won't," I said, because the cave had stopped being the center of my story and had become a rumor of something else. "Maybe this is home now."
"You will always be Dream," he said. "You will sometimes be my anchor for chaos, and sometimes chaos will be your anchor."
"Deal," I told him. "But if you ever call me 'my anchor' in front of the townspeople, I will deny you."
He laughed, the same short laugh that didn't leave his eyes. "I would like to see you try."
We ate soup in my shop the next morning while the city woke. The pendant still cold at my throat. The shop's sign creaked in the wind.
"Name can't hold love," I said, and Chase looked at me as if it were a thing he had not thought but already knew.
"Then call me your guest," he answered, and our laughter folded the moment into something quiet, something living.
I had fallen through a cave once. I had sung to strangers. I had been accused and exonerated, slandered and saved, punished and forgiven. The road stretched forward. The pendant hummed warm against my skin like the pulse of a new country.
"Will you go back?" Chase asked, one night on the roof, where we sometimes traded fear for sky.
"I might," I said. "But if I go back, I will take Red Willow with me."
"Good," he said. "Take the soup. Take the sound."
The city closed its shutters. The market put away its pans. The pendant at my throat warmed, and I understood: some worlds catch you, and some worlds teach you. I would learn both their languages.
The End
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