Sweet Romance18 min read
My Birthday Snow and the General Who Came Back
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I was born under a snow that would not stop. On the day the courtyard glazed white and every roof wore the same cold hush, Remy Curtis came to my gate and said he would break our betrothal.
"I will not marry you," he told me simply, as if the words were a belt he tightened and left on the threshold.
I stood on the portico with my hair half-looped, a simple birthday cap pinning flakes to its rim. He looked like a painting—tall, battle-weathered at the edges but clean in a way that made him severe. His fox-lined cloak took some snow for him, but not enough. He was Remy Curtis, my childhood friend, the army's rising star, with eyes that were used to orders and not to pleading.
I planted a small umbrella over him and said, "Fine. If you want to walk away today, then walk." I thought I would be dignified. Instead I tripped on the hem of my skirt and fell into the snow.
"Stand up." He reached for me. He was brisk. He was not kind.
I clutched at him, and when he pulled back as if my fingers were cold iron, I complained, "Ouch. Can't help it, I'm stuck. Without five hundred silver you'll not leave."
He snorted. "Lie there then."
So I did the only ridiculous thing that came easy to me: I wrapped my arms around his thigh and called out, loud and childish, "The general is attacking! The general bullied a maiden!"
Remy cursed and pinched my mouth. His voice into my ear was low: "Get up."
"But," I objected, batting my lashes because the world still bent that way for me sometimes, "I want a bridal lift. Carry me out."
He half-exhaled, resigned. "What will it take for you to have me annul this engagement?"
"All the cooks from the Curtis household, one by one for a month," I said, and slipped in, "and your night pearl the Emperor gifted. For a coming-of-age present."
He bristled. "That is nonsense."
"Small man," I said, and he went red in a way that made me want to laugh and to hide all at once.
1
Rumor spread fast. "Remy Curtis came back from the border and left the betrothal," they said in market alleys and in the back rooms of teahouses. "He pledged to someone else," they added in a sourer tone. It was a different woman—soft-voiced, fan-tilting, the sort that smiled as if she smelled honey in every shadow. Jenna Byrd's name stuck to Remy like a rumor to a drunkard.
I ate my anger and my meals inside the Lin household for weeks. "Let them talk," I told myself. "Let them paint over what we had." It was easier to eat than to answer.
I invited the Curtis cooks, but only to learn flavors and to keep my hands busy. "You'll come," I said to my head maid Yuen. "We'll take walks, we'll drink plum wine, we will not let them see me broken."
"What would you do with eight Curtis cooks, Miss Emiliana?" Yuen asked, folding sheets.
"Make them teach my appointed chef," I said. "Let them show us how to braise, how a soul is coaxed out of meat."
We took to the city. Shop signs glittered; plum blossoms fought the cold. At a winehouse with fresh-brewed plum saki, I ran head-on into him.
"You're in poor taste," Remy said, smiling at our table as if we were still children.
"Your cooks couldn't feed me yet," I retorted. "Their Dongpo pork is still missing something."
Remy raised an eyebrow. "I'm going soon."
"To war," I said, and meant it both ways.
He drank to the toast and was gone to other men's merriment. Jenna sat across from me as if she owned the space, her eyes cool. "You're the one he left," she said flatly.
"Am I?" I copied her softness. "Or am I the one who cried on the general's cloak like a weeping white peony by the gate?"
Her face reddened. She staged a sob and then, as if rehearsing, she played the injured gentility card. I poured her another cup, all silk and sugar. "Drink for your health," I told her, and she drank with stagecraft; she choked and fanned herself in perfect syncopation.
Remy came back that night with his troops and said, "In spring I'll be gone."
I raised my cup. "Safe return." He raised his.
Then, in a breath, he was called away mid-toast. His men dragged him into other matters and Jenna's eyes narrowed. "You truly are the Lin daughter's match," she hissed. "The city's in knots over it."
I let her do the faux faint. When she rolled, I didn't flinch. "Shall I call the best physician for you?" I asked with politeness. "It could be worse than a cough."
She collapsed neatly into Remy's arms. He helped her. "Be careful," Remy said, and his voice was even. He carried her like a small thing. He left me standing.
"Typical," I muttered, and drank the hurt down.
2
Remy and I had been neighbors, sparring partners, the pair everyone called destined. On a New Year's Eve when we were teenagers, he had led me up to the city walls.
"Make a wish," he said, and the city's lamps looked like coals sleeping in snow.
"I wish for your safe return," I whispered, for the army was calling him to the border.
"What do you want?"
"To always be with you," I admitted, and fireworks split the night like silver fish.
When he left, he left red-wrapped tokens and promises. My father, Dean Lawrence, believed in the bonds of households and in the steady climb of fortune. He took to the court well, trading letters and favors. When Remy first came to formally ask, my father smiled and accepted the joy of it all.
"Wait for him," my father told me when he tread the corridor, face creased like folded paper. "He is of good blood."
"Of good blood who will leave me," I said to the mirror, and yet I made a nest of dolls to keep the emptiness warm.
When he returned from the frontier months later and told me he would leave us—himself—free, my heart fell like the last leaf from a plum tree. He stood outside the gate with snow still clinging to his cloak and said he had signed the papers. "Remy, why?" I pleaded. He looked at me as if I were a thing he could not remember how to smooth.
"I cannot take you there," he said. "Not in this time."
He stuffed my father's books and his honors into a sack and left. The word "betrayal" balanced on the tip of my tongue like a coin. I swallowed it.
3
Not long after came the worst. That winter, the emperor's men came with torches and demands. They found a ledger in the secret drawer of our house—ledgers that might topple men. Fingers were pointed. The ledger was a thing that could make a family crumble under an emperor's eye.
Only two people knew the secret drawer's trick: my father and Remy. When the ledger surfaced and emissaries rode like wolves, everyone assumed the worst.
I was furious, the sort of furious that made a woman make plans. "Men are quick to speak," I told Yuen. "They will betray the warmth in a hearth for cold coin. I will not let my father go down for my innocence."
When everyone slept, I did what quiet women are not often given credit for: I changed the books. I had practiced calligraphy. I knew how the handwriting of estate clerks bent. I had studied the pastry of archives, how a ledger could be slid and replaced. The ledger that was sent to the throne had qualities only a skilled forger could give. I smiled in the dark and left the true debt to one who deserved it.
"How could you?" my father asked when the court's questions settled like dust.
"I will go to the palace," I told him. "I will take the blame and stand between the judge and our home."
"You're too young," he said, but his hand was warm. "I will go too."
He left for his own audience with the emperor. Meanwhile, I waited and prepared.
4
Spring came with rumor that changed its tone. The ledger's hand belonged not to us but to the regime's own cronies, to a great lord who had hands in tax and cloth and grain—Fleming Martini. His name ran through the market like a fever. "The lord has fallen," people whispered. "The emperor suspects a plot."
Remy came to me with a frosted rabbit pelisse in his hands. "For your birthday," he said. He had been tending wounds. "Take it." He looked at me with something like apology.
"Is it for me?" I asked. "Or for her?"
"It is for you," he returned. "I wanted to bring you something less than the court's trappings."
I laughed. "If you believe I will accept it as peace, you must have been hit on the head by a spear."
He smiled, then stopped. "I'm going again."
"To battle?" I guessed.
"To the border." He nodded. "But first—" He did not finish. He looked tired in a way I had not seen on him before.
On the morning he left, I gave him a red invitation. "June eighteenth," I said. "I'm getting married."
He paused. "To whom?"
"To the Curtis household's best cook," I lied with a grin. "Someone who can make Dongpo pork like a blessing."
He fumbled a sentence. "Are you certain?"
"I'm very certain," I said. "It was your idea to mix good food and good choices."
He only kicked his horse and rode away, dust and wind swallowing his figure. He left me with a laugh and a dare.
5
Of course, the day of my mock wedding was staged like an opera. Lanterns, drums, cousins I forgot I had. The world came to watch my banishment and my new life. I wore red and a veil and a suit that pinched at the shoulders. The coach rumbled past faces that were more curious than kind. People cheered—some from joy, more from appetite.
Then, with the thunder of hooves, it all went odd. A man charged through the processional, flung open my sedan, and carried me off like a bride theft ballad from long plays. He rode me not to bandits' lair but to a courtyard painted with the Curtis crest.
Remy jumped from his horse and hauled me off. "Emiliana! What madness is this?"
"Did you not teach me to love theatrics?" I said. He was angry; he was worrying at edges. He asked me the most foolish questions like a man who had not remembered a thing.
"Why would you marry a cook?" he demanded. I laughed.
"You taught me that food can heal more than war," I said. And then I did the most ridiculous thing: I took his arm like a bride. "Come. Lead our mock wedding."
He looked as if thunder would split. "You mean to marry in the main hall? To be wed in the Curtis main room?"
"Yes, in your house," I said. "You learned my tastes—learn how to be my husband."
He argued, but there was a softness to it. "You are reckless."
"Then be the kind of man who hushes the reckless," I answered.
And so he did. He ripped open a little packet from my pocket at the ceremony and discovered the invitation with both our names on it. His face changed—then melted. He laughed like a boy and wiped a tear with beefy fingers.
"Emiliana," he said, "I will not be long from your side."
We were wed in the Curtis hall. Guests cheered as if they had wanted nothing else their whole lives. I thought it was the end and also the start. We drank. We bowed. We sealed vows. I felt adored and dizzy.
6
At evening the hall drained, and I found myself by the central table with him. He began to unlace his armor, showing the old scars that ran like rivers across his chest.
"I went to the field to think of you," he said suddenly, voice small. "You were in my head the whole time."
"Then do not leave," I told him.
He offered me a small jasper stone. "The emperor gifted this nigh-jewel," he said. "I thought you might like to hold something that would not go quiet in the dark."
I took it and hid the beating inside. I thought I was safe. We should have been.
The night shift drummer clattered and then the worst thing of all happened. In the middle of our greeting, in the center of all the music and trumpets and guests, a figure in a cloak stepped forward and—swift as a summer lightning—thrust a knife toward Remy.
He staggered as if struck through. The hall fled into a slow motion of its own. Cups toppled. People cried out. The blade glinted. Someone grabbed the attacker and pulled off a hood.
It was Jenna.
She laughed as if it were the end of a play. "See?" she cried. "See how quickly the world turns!"
She spat that the blade had been a poison, "a toxin that seals the lungs and closes the throat." She looked triumphant, the sort of triumphant that meant she had won a prize most girls dream of.
He fell, to the floor like a log. Blood shined. Panic undid the room like unwinding.
I knelt and touched him. He was warm. He breathed and then his breath rushed out like a wind. His eyes found mine and, to my infinite astonishment, he smiled.
"Emiliana," he whispered. "Stop. This is not the moment to faint."
Then he laughed and rolled to one side, hoarse as a child who had been caught.
"You fooled us!" I shouted, part protesting and part furious. "You—"
He clutched at me and I realized he was alive because he had stumbled on the floor to make a show. "I slipped," he said, sheepish. "I had too much wine and thought to make one more joke."
It was truer than comfort and less than relief. He was not dead. He was theatrically alive. Jenna sat sprawled, furious and then aghast when she realized that the blade had not pierced enough to kill him. Guards seized her, the crowd reacted, and the whole room swayed between disgrace and spectacle.
He pulled me close and hissed, "You knew she would try something like this."
I could only think, in the middle of knives, of the silly rabbit pelisse and the pearl. "You put my family in jeopardy," I half accused.
"I did not mean for white-lotus tricks," he said.
7
After that night, the truth began to unwind like ribbon. The ledger, which had started the calamity, had been planted by Fleming Martini in our home as a trap. He had named my family as corrupt to divert attention while he took bribes and embezzled. He had staged it neatly; he was a man of court and taste and poison.
Remy had been helping gather evidence for months. He had a list of accounts, of gifts, of bribes—names of men who bought off troops with fabric and malt and coins. He had the patience of an army officer and the cunning of one who lived by strategy.
"We work together now," he said. "You and I."
"I forged a ledger," I said. "I changed the papers."
"You are a wild thing," he breathed, touching my face. "I like your wildness."
But Fleming and Jenna had not been idle. They moved in circles of silk and servility. Jenna still pretended innocence while Fleming smiled like a man who owns the dawn.
People loved a scandal. The court loved to devour it. Fleming thought himself safe. He thought his friends were many, and his hands were worth more than any man's oath.
We knew he would never go quietly.
So we prepared an unmasking the way a baker prepares an oven: slowly, hot, with no room for error.
8
The punishment had to be public. It had to be final. Fleming Martini had been a man whose name opened doors; he would have to have every door closed before him. His friends were many. A private arrest would be swallowed by rumor; we wanted a spectacle where the whole capital could witness the collapse and weigh it for themselves.
"Where will we expose him?" I asked.
Remy looked like a man thinking of a charge line. "The hall of petitions," he said. "Where he sits before the lords and where his face is known."
We had the ledger—true evidence stitched with older receipts and a list of bribes that linked Fleming's men to corrupt officials. Remy arranged petitions and his soldiers. I wrote the claims with the kind of bold hand that a woman uses when she signs a letter for her family.
On the day chosen, the city was watching. The sun was blunt, as if to make every face visible. Newsmongers called in the streets. "Martini will stand," they said. "Martini will fall," said others with frowsy joy.
The hall filled with watchful men: ministers, clerks, merchants, the poor who wanted a show of justice. My father sat with a small tremor, his hands folded. Remy stood beside him, armor dusted and clean, face like iron and something soft beneath it.
Fleming entered in his usual way—pomp and arrogance, from a line of men who believe cloth can cover a soul. He glanced from face to face like a king visiting a tavern. He took his place with the old entitlement of one familiar to the throne.
"Fleming Martini," the chief scribe announced. "You are called to answer before the court."
He scoffed, as if amused. "Have at me with your chatter," he said. His voice was honey.
I stepped forward, my heart banging like a child's hand drum. "This is not a matter for whispers," I told him. "It is a ledger, signed by your hand and your receipts. It is a list of bribes and of taxes diverted to private pockets."
"She accuses me?" Fleming laughed with the sound of clinking silver. "This is the Lin daughter? You are bold."
He taunted. "What proof have you?" he asked.
"Proof," I repeated, and I placed on the table the compendium we'd collected: the ledger, copies of petitions, names of men who had pockets lined like puffs. "Your clerk wrote these. Your nephew took these bribes. These are from couriers who bribed inspectors. The seal is yours."
He waved a hand. "Forged."
"Then explain why the men you named received goods from your warehouses," I said. "Explain why your signature matches the ink on the receipts. Explain why couriers took their orders from a man named 'F. Martini' and not from the treasury."
He laughed, and the laugh came out thin. "You are a girl. You believe in stories."
"Let the witnesses speak," Remy said.
We called each witness: a clothier, a quartermaster, a soldier who'd sold pikes for coin. Each spoke. Each tied Fleming's name to a transaction. Each described how Fleming used his authority to divert flour meant for the frontier to market, where it vanished into his stores. Each told of beasts sold as "army meat" that never reached the homes of men in the field.
Fleming's face hardened. He began with denial, and then he moved to anger. "They are liars!" he cried. "They are paid to lie!"
"How much will you pay to make us lie?" Remy asked, and his voice was the hardest thing in the room.
A clerk from the treasury turned pale and then steady. The room hummed. Men who had once swung Fleming's favors now looked at their shoes. The hall heard account after account. Fleming's voice changed from confident to nervous. "You cannot—" he started.
"Silence!" Fleming attempted to command the court, but the court does not answer to the hands of one man when smoke has already been seen.
When the emperor's envoy read the tally of ledger entries showing misappropriation, the whisper at last turned into a roar. People who had whispered began to point. The clerks who had been bribed turned their eyes down. Fleming's face went from a red flush to a grey loosely assembled thing.
"Arrest him," someone called.
Fleming staggered. "You fools!" he shouted. "You ungrateful fools! I built fortunes where none stood! I made roads, I paid for festivals—"
"With whom's money?" a bystander called.
He tried ridicule. He tried threat. He begged, "You cannot show me up with a forged book!"
Remy did not speak in accusation alone. He produced letters, hand-copied, showing Fleming ordering men to make up accounts for the army and to pass them as public expenses. He revealed patterns of hay shipments that never left farms, of iron bought for men but melted into private smithies. Each revelation cut a tendon of Fleming's empire.
Now Fleming moved through denial, then disbelief, and then the slow crack of despair. He looked around for friends and found many faces turned away. He tried to call names—"My lord!"—but the lords had eyes for their own safety.
"Do you still command?" the envoy asked.
"I did," Fleming whispered. He tried to marshal a speech. "You cannot—my name is..." The name that had been polished into a doorbell had become a stone in his mouth.
The crowd that watched shifted from curiosity to anger. "Down with corruption!" cried one. "We starved for soldiers," said another. The ledger became an indictment not just of Fleming but of the injustice it had wrought.
The emperor's representative pronounced judgment—confiscation, loss of rank, public renunciation of honors, and banishment into exile where men lived with nothing but their names. "And a pillory," someone suggested. The court agreed that some humiliation must fit.
Fleming went through a series of faces: the bravado of a man used to command; the sharp shock that his friends would not lift an eyebrow for him; the frantic insistence that he had given them wealth; the denial that the accounts were wrong; the final crumble as every name receded. He begged, then he cursed, then he wept.
As the herald proclaimed Fleming's fall, the crowd moved in a tidal wave. Some spat. Some took quick notes for their journal. Some—less nobly—took feathers from their caps as if to make a private joke. Remy stood close to me, and I felt the weight of justice knit with the salt of revenge.
"Where is Jenna Byrd?" I asked, voice hard.
A servant pointed—Jenna sat in the back, hands white-knuckled and small as a child's. She was not immune to the tide. The court turned to her like a beast turns to the smallest sound.
Fleming's response had been a cascade, and the watchers' reactions were a mirror. "She played the victim," a woman called out. "She feigned fainting and used the blade as a prop." The hall hissed.
Jenna's demeanor rotated through a cruel merry swagger, a pale denial, and finally a blankness that was like a drained cup. "I did it for love," she squeaked. "He promised me—"
"Promises bought you?" someone screamed. "Your theatre nearly killed a man."
By the time the beating of gavel and the fell sentence finished, Fleming's honors were torn from his coat. Men took from him the pins of office and threw them onto a plain table, where dust settled on them like a fine ash. Fleming trembled. The crowd cheered: some for justice, some for the downing of a name that had been too large.
They declared he would lose all rank, his stores would be seized, and he would be escorted publicly through the market so the city might see his stain. The order sent him like a tether pulling him down.
As they led Fleming out, his face contorted not so much with pain as with the slow dawning of the reality that his life had finally been made ordinary. He was made to march through the bazaar, where vendors spat on his shoes and children threw pebbles. The lords who had side-eyed him earlier held their heads high. Some people photographed with crude sketches. It was a small triumph for a city that had had fewer.
Jenna was stripped of any pretense and thrown into the custody of a small guard who made a public announcement of her misdeed. She tried to plead for mercy, sought for sympathy, and then her voice thinly turned to pleas. But the crowd answered with derision.
Her changes were not like Fleming's—they were of a woman whose status unraveled into shame. She began with arrogance—then surprise—then denial—then an ugly pleading that made the viewers' stomachs twist. Some spat; some recorded; some laughed cruelly. Eventually she broke and begged, hands to the floor, "I was driven, forgive me!"
"No," I said aloud, cold and steady. "You do not get pardon because you loved a name more than a human."
Her face collapsed. With remorseless eyes, Remy stepped forward and said, "You will stay in the city prison until the Emperor decides your fate. You will be unmasked. The theater of deceit costs you what it pays."
The audience applauded as if the verdict were a season finale. Jenna's reaction moved slowly: first confusion—she couldn't see how a play had become crime—then the metallic flash of dread, and finally a crumple into sobbing, wild and routed.
Her public fall was different than Fleming's. Fleming's was the ruin of a man's career, a long slow uncovering and exile. Jenna's was immediate humiliation: her friends abandoned her, men who had offered smiles now offered no coin, and women who had once bowed now turned their backs. She begged Remy. "Remy, you said—"
He was unmoved. He had seen her cruelty up close. He had seen the dagger and the small theatrics. "You chose spectacle," he said.
"You chose her," she cried. "You chose to mock me with that girl!"
Remy's face did not change. He spoke once: "You were never mine to choose."
Her pleas multiplied into a paroxysm of regret as the crowd watched and recorded and made notes. A few noble women clucked, a few merchants pointed, and a child threw a peach pit that hit Jenna's cloak. She crumpled, begging for mercy. Men who had bowed once crossed their arms, and the emperor's men marched with the orderly precision of a military law.
It was not a private shotgun humiliation; it was a public unmaking. Jenna's public reaction—her pride to shock to pleading—was visible to everyone. She was shunned by friends who once flattered her. She found doors closed, her carriage refused, her name hissed behind fans. People posted ballads, little rhymes about the woman who faked fainting, and the songs spread like fresh bread.
Fleming's ruined grandeur was walked through the market like a lesson. Jenna's ruined softness was left on the steps like wet paper. Their reactions—one of iron-hard collapse, the other a self-begging rot—gave the city a spectacle that could be retold and laughed at in its kitchens.
9
In the weeks after, life reknit itself into something warmer. My father returned with his honor intact. The Curtis cooks rotated through our kitchens and taught us how to stew and how a broth could hold memory. Simon Smith, the head chef, became a dear friend; he taught me to stir with the patience of a watchmaker. The pearl Remy had shown me sat on a red silk and hummed cool. Remy and I learned, slowly, what it meant to be a pair not merely bound by promises but by the weight of what each would take for the other.
"Stay," he said one night, looking at a small moon. "I would have you stay with me in winter and in raids."
"I will," I said. "But do not make theatre with knives anymore."
He laughed. "Noted."
On my next birthday, when the light stayed crisp and the snow melted into the corners of the city's gutters, I slipped a rabbit pelisse over his knees. He laughed because I'd stitched it badly. "Your stitching is ugly," he said.
"You think I am made only of soft things," I replied. "I am not."
"Then show me," he said.
I did. And we built a life: not free of rumor, but stronger in the places that had been cracked. The ledger was placed in the Hall of Records as an instrument of truth—evidence that greed would be punished, and a reminder that a woman's hand could be cleverer than any man expected.
When I walked the markets and saw Fleming's stores empty, I felt a quick pleasure. When I passed Jenna in chains—later released but impoverished and hollowed—I had no taste for rejoicing. People had watched; people had judged. Justice was not a sweet thing; it was a sober one.
10
Years on, there are small habits Remy keeps. He will, in winter, throw his cloak over my shoulders even when I'm stubborn. He will bake a bit of the Dongpo pork with his own hands, which he learned clumsily, and offer me the first slice with both hands. Once, he put the night pearl on a string and told me, "If you ever feel yourself fading, touch this."
We married legally and loudly and then lived our days stitched more by work than by show. The court moved on from Fleming to another scandal; that's the way of things. But now, when I pass the Hall of Petitions and see the bench where Fleming had stood, I remember the sound of the crowd and the moment when truth was made visible.
"Do you ever miss your stage?" I asked Remy once, thinking of the night of knives.
He kissed my forehead. "I miss nothing that hurt us," he said. "I only want our quiet."
So we kept quiet, sometimes. And sometimes we rode to the frontier, sometimes we argued about spices, and sometimes I pressed the rabbit skin to his knee when the wind bit. We had lessons: that trusts must be tested, that lies are expensive, and that public punishment is messy but sometimes necessary.
On the day I slipped the jewel back into his hand, he grinned like a foolish boy. "You don't throw this in the sea, do you?" he teased.
"No," I said. "I keep it, because when the world goes loud, I like to remember that once, in a hall full of witnesses, truth unstitched a man who thought himself invisible."
He laughed. "And what do you want with a pearl?"
"So I can see you at night," I said.
He pretended to think it over, then said, "Then hold it. But let me keep my sword."
We lived, we loved clumsily and carefully. The cooks told the rest of the story at table: Fleming's stores seized, Jenna's carriage sold, the ledger on the shelf. Children hum the ballads in the street and sometimes throw peach pits at nothing at all.
The snows come every year and sometimes stop the city in its tracks. On my birthday, when the sky hangs heavy and the pearled light of lamps falls like small promises, Remy will stand at my gate, brush snow from his cloak, and ask me again to come with him. And I will, more and more, say yes because the times we faced the public together taught us to stand inside the same umbrella.
The End
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