Sweet Romance14 min read
My Childhood Betrothed Returned as a General — and I Lost My Pride
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I woke to two figures standing not far from my bed.
"Lenore, you're awake?" the woman said, and she leaned a fraction toward the man as if she were pulled into his shelter by invisible string.
He stood like someone carved from cool stone—long black hair gathered back, white robe embroidered with bamboo, a face that took my breath in a gentle, painful way. The woman was soft and pretty, brows knotted in worry. For a moment my head throbbed so hard I could not place them.
"Father, mother…" I said, blinking at the hands clutching mine. "What happened?"
"You silly girl, you just came back from the door of death," my mother replied, voice entire with relief. "They said you fell from the cliff. You were gone for three days."
The world latched into the pieces they handed me. We had been walking with Camila—yes, Camila Han was the woman beside the man—and bandits had attacked us. Camila had been taken away by one of them, the man she called cousin had rescued her, and I, in a moment of terror, had jumped.
The man called Orion Finch bowed his head to my father and said, "My lord, I could not save both in time. I did what I could, I am most sorry."
My father snorted, anger spread across his face like stormclouds. "An official like you, Orion Finch, and you could not save the rightful daughter of my house? Hmph."
The man who had saved Camila tried to smooth the air, voice quick with apology, "I only saved one, my lord. The bandits were many. If any blame is cast, let it be upon me alone."
I was dizzy with fragments. Then I heard behind everything, a soft, low voice.
"The imperial physician has come, my lady," someone announced.
And then I saw him—Gage Burnett—stride into the courtyard.
He looked different, darker in a black coat with a broad sash. He wore a small tear of a mole under his eye that always made me feel like someone had painted longing on his face. He had been a child in our house, my playmate, my safeguard, my childhood betrothed... the one I had sent away because my heart had been seduced by the wrong man.
"Gage?" I said before I could think.
He bowed, not looking at me, like a man who had learned not to expect warmth. Blood streaks marked his sleeve; his forearm was injured. My father, eager, praised him aloud. "If not for this youth, you might be dead by the side of the cliff. He spent two days and nights searching for you."
A rush of something I could not name climbed in my chest. I had told him to leave—had given him his freedom like a merciful thing—yet here he was, ragged and silent, and clearly he had risked himself for me.
I tried to speak my gratitude, to patch together my pride and say something clever. "Gage, you should have gone away for good," I heard myself say. "You were free—why did you come back?"
He looked at me then, finally, and I felt my knees go weak at the steady, unreadable look that met mine. He said nothing, only bowed and left. The room cooled as if some flame had been hidden.
"Lenore," my mother cried, "you don't remember? You and Orion were wed by imperial decree—"
"What? Married? No—" My head spun. I only remembered recently having demanded the end of my tie with Gage, haughty that the cold magistrate Orion put up no warmth for my courting. I had been embarrassed by my own childishness and had dismissed Gage, thinking him a thing of duty and not love.
"Do you not recall your childhood?" my father asked, voice softer.
I tried to assemble the memory: the small boy who had been assigned to be my companion, the one who had sat by my bedside when I had had smallpox, who had been scolded as unlucky because of that. Gage had been sent to live in the house as my ward—"child husband" the old superstition named him—but I had always thought of him as my shadow, my protector.
Two days later, the court physician called my sickness "a wandering soul"—selective amnesia. Funny how my memory surrendered only the entanglement with Orion and Camila.
"You were in love with Orion?" Mother asked, wide eyed with anger but also confusion. "You—who have set your little heart on that magistrate who is always distant?"
"Yes," I said before I could stop myself. "No—I'm not sure. I like… the idea of him. But I don't think he truly saw me."
"There is no reason to be embarrassed," Father said, with that regal tilt that made him appear kind when it suited him. "An imperial betrothal is not lightly dismissed. I will consult with the Emperor."
I tried to breathe like someone who had stepped underwater. My thoughts were blinded by Gage's arrival, by the memory of him moving through the garden like some quiet wind. He had taken so many risks for me. I felt foolish and ashamed.
Camila attached herself to Orion like ivy upon a wall, whispering apologies to me, pressing her lips in an apology that smelled of wine and false sincerity.
"Your Highness, it was my fault," she said on her knees, eyes wet. "If not for my pleading, my cousin would have reached Lady Lenore sooner. Please don't punish him for my sake."
She reached for my hand in a show of contrition, and I recoiled from the touch. The more she begged, the more I felt a heat of irritation.
Orion looked on with a grave face and said, "If Lady Lenore insists on dissolving the arrangement, we shall see to it in due course. But a royal betrothal is not so easily unwound."
"Then we will begin the process," I said, to stop the breathless crowd in my chamber. "I will speak with you all and decide."
Orion left with a lordly bow. Gage had already left earlier to tend some wounds; when he passed, his gait was quick and guarded.
I told myself I would be rational. I would do what any sensible person would: choose a match that made sense, not a boy born to duty.
Days later, when I saw Gage again practicing sword forms in the courtyard, the old ache rose in me like a tide.
"You've grown," I said, letting the words fall like a test.
He only glanced at me. "Aye."
I had banished him for my own pride; instead, I watched him from a half-hidden window until I could not stand it and went to bring him soup.
He looked inside the bowl with something like amusement. "Your hands made it," he said. "I will not refuse."
But then he said, quiet and dark, "My mouth is wasted on flattery, your Highness."
My cheeks burned. "I only made it because—because you stayed."
He scoffed and left. I imagined the bowl in his hand, his shoulders, his back. When the servants returned for the bowl, they claimed he had poured it to the hound. I burned with stupid, childish jealousy.
"Why would he treat me like that?" I demanded of my confidante, Keyla Acevedo. "I made it myself."
"Perhaps he is proud," Keyla said. "Or perhaps he is tired of pretending he can be just your shadow."
"If he only knew," I muttered.
I went to a woman known to teach separation and desire, a courtesan named Miriam Peters who had read more men than any scholar. She suggested an old trick: "Make him jealous. Show him you belong to someone else—show him you can be taken."
So, on a cold afternoon, I did what the courtesan said. I invited Orion Finch for a long stroll through the gardens, and all the while I made sure to laugh too loud, to let my eyes linger at Orion like they might flirt. I wanted Gage to see and burn.
"And so?" Orion asked, when we strolled and he dressed his politeness like armor. "What do you want, Lenore?"
"Only to know if you still mean the betrothal," I said, the words weighed by venom and longing. "Do you still want me as your bride?"
Orion's answer was cool as river ice. "If the imperial will stands, then we will proceed. But I will not be drawn into a spectacle."
I scanned the garden for any movement. Then, like a knife, Gage's shadow stepped into view. He stopped, his hand clenching.
"I will not marry him," I wanted to call. Instead, I followed the plan to make him angry.
I moved a hair away from Orion and let my eyes smile. Gage lunged forward and grabbed my wrist.
"Don't," he whispered. "Don't marry him."
Orion's face went pale. "Gage? What is this theatrics?"
"For once," Gage said, voice low as gravel, "hear me. You don't choose him."
I opened my mouth to shout something brave, or something cutting, and Gage's eyes, for a second, were full of a strange hurt I had never seen. He let go and turned away. "I'm sorry," he said, "this is useless."
He walked off. I went after him, but he disappeared. When I reached out to stop him, he was already gone.
Then, on a day that smelled like iron and lake water, Camila tried to kill me.
She met me in a pavilion by the lake and smiled a smile like silk.
"You never truly loved Orion," she said. "You only loved the idea of being desired. I cannot allow someone to unsettle my family."
"Camila—" I stepped back, my heart squeezing.
"Two men for one heart," she murmured, and I realized she had two hulking ruffians accompanying her. They closed in with dirty grins and cruel hands.
"You cannot—" I cried.
And the memory flooded back—the ambush, the cliff, the terror, the cold water. I stumbled and jumped.
I don't remember the fall so much as the sensation of being seized by a pair of arms that were both strong and gentle. Warm hands that pulled me from the water, fingers pressing into me like anchors, warmth of breath, the smell of sweat and metal.
"Gage," I whispered.
He carried me to shore, set me on a stone, looked over me. He saw Orion and then, with something so like resignation it broke me, he hid himself, leaving me in Orion's charge. He had put me on the bank and vanished into the reeds.
After that, Gage left for the frontier.
He rode off with troops marching north. The city rang with news that the littlest ward had become a general—General Gage Burnett, the one who had carried them to victory. The public greeted him roaring with "Gage the Brave!" When he returned three years later, he rode in at the head of the army, and he was no longer the shy shadow of my childhood.
He had a woman beside him then—Bridget Dell, a healer who had followed him to the field and mended his wounds when he had nearly died of poison. The court whispered about them, and my chest hollowed.
At a palace dinner the Emperor presented Gage with honors and hinted he'd prefer Gage to settle down. There, before the court, I watched as the Emperor teased, "Gage, your savior should be rewarded. Do you not have one to present?"
Gage said nothing. Bridget knelt and praised the Emperor. Rumors fluttered. I felt the world tilt.
Orion stepped forward at the Emperor's prompting and made a surprising and noble offer in the hall.
"Majesty," Orion said, voice like winter river, "I ask that the court consider Lenore Sommer's wishes. If she will consent, then I will ask the Emperor to grant me leave to take her as my wife without murmur."
My father beamed behind me. Orion's proposal shocked even me. I had accepted anything so as not to starve my household's peace, and now I was bound by honor to choose.
I thought of Gage and the way he had stood in the garden, the way his eyes had looked hollow and starving. I thought of the years he had been my shadow. I thought of the girl he brought up from the river—Bridget—who had tended to him in the cold and then been by his side in the capital.
I knew I had to choose. I could not keep waiting.
"Orion," I told him, "your offer is noble. But I do not love you. I cannot accept an offered heart."
The words were kinder than I felt. He fell to his knees in the hall in a scene of courtly devotion.
"Lenore," Orion said, voice raw, "if you cannot accept my love, then I wish only to be permitted to care for you in another way."
After much discussion, in the confusion of courtship and rumors, I accepted. It was safer, dignified, and it seemed to give my father peace. I thought I could live with a life of measured affection.
But on the night before the official binding, I sat alone in the garden and wept for Gage.
The window flung open and a familiar figure dropped, lithe and silent, into my private chamber.
"Gage—" I cried at the sight.
He came close, smelled of earth and camp and quiet oak. He crouched and brushed the tears away, rough fingers clumsy but precise.
"Why are you crying?" he asked, though the answer was in his eyes.
"Because I'm foolish," I said, voice shaking. "Because I let you go. Because I let the world tell me what I should want."
He laughed, low and soft, only the smallest sound. "You were always wilful," he said. "And I was an idiot to think I could be satisfied with being just your shadow."
He looked at me and asked something that made the world still: "If I said I could give up the official favor and the ties—if I said I would refuse the court's arrangement—would you stay?"
My heart hammered like the hooves of a war horse.
"Are you willing to give it up?" I whispered.
"I am," he said. "Would you have me?"
I realized then that all the plans, all the arranged marriages, all the politeness, had never been the point. He had loved me in silence through chores and games and quiet nights. He had returned not to claim royal favor but to stand for me when it mattered.
I tore from him then, the foolish pride gone. "Then come, Gage Burnett. Come be my husband."
He smiled, and it was like the first clean sun after a long storm.
But love that is too sudden must be tested by ruinous tools. Camila's treachery did not go unpunished. She had arranged my first attempt at murder twice—once on the cliff, once on the lake—and she had the audacity to weave lies in court to cover it.
When the evidence came to light—by a soldier who had once been hired by her to be a look-out and who could not bear the weight of guilt—the world rushed to attention. I insisted upon a full, public hearing, for if she had dared to humiliate me and try to take my life, she would answer in front of everyone.
The punishment was worse than simple exile. The hall was packed. The Emperor sat like a god on his dais. The public had come to see not only justice but spectacle. People whispered. Servants leaned forward. There were courtiers who had once smiled upon Camila now shifting uneasily.
"Camila Han," I said, standing before the hall, my voice steady though my stomach churned, "you plotted twice to destroy my life. You sent bandits to attack me. You paid cruel men to violate a noblewoman's safety on more than one occasion, in order to secure a marriage that benefits you. You confessed to what you did when the witnesses were unwilling to bear the shame alone."
Camila's face, which only hours before had been a practiced sorrow, blanched. She huddled like a cat pressed against the wall, hands twisting at her sleeves.
"No!" she cried. "You lie! I would never—"
Orion stepped forward with the soldier who had betrayed Camila's plot. "Your Majesty," he said, "I present testimony."
The man told his story, voice shaking, and named names—Camila's promises of reward, her laughter in a tavern, her payment to the bandits. The court hung on this like a baited net. I watched Camila slowly, step by step, go from self-possession to gasping denial.
Gage stood near me, turned away, jaw tight. When the man produced a letter—a scrap Camila had once written, ordering two men to intercept 'the noble one'—the hall almost cracked with noise. Camila's eyes darted. She tried to snatch the paper but a dozen guards closed like iron petals.
"Enough!" cried one courtier. "We cannot let such treachery go unpunished."
The indictment read like a rotten wound. "To the bandit ringleader: the noblewoman in blue by the lake must be taught her place. Two men will suffice." Her handwriting sprawled across the page like final proof.
Camila's composure shattered in front of everyone.
At first she sputtered, "It was for our family's honor! He promised—"
Then she clutched the rail and looked at me, then at the Emperor, then at the crowd. Her face changed—a mask of arrogance melted into the colors of fear. She denied, then begged, then lashed out.
"It was you! You drove me—" she screamed at me suddenly, the voice high and thin. "You coveted what wasn't yours!"
"Silence," the Emperor said. "You will answer before all."
And answer she did—through a punishment designed to make her ruin visible to all who had once admired her. The Emperor decreed that Camila be publicly shorn of her ornaments, stripped of the privileges of the nobility, and publicly declared a traitor to the decorum of the court. She would be led to the outer market square, where those she had hired would stand with her and where the people would be allowed to deliver verdicts in shaming and cast her out. She was to be exiled to the frontier with only the clothes on her back.
They dragged her to the square. The crowd swelled like the tide; shopkeepers stopped and threw fists of grain into the air. Camila's face was wet with sweat. People who had once greeted her bowed heads to avoid her eye. A market woman spat; a nobleman's wife threw down a pearl in contempt. Children mimed the ambush with their hands. Men who had been offered favors by Camila grinned now with malice, as if they had reclaimed a debt.
She stood on a small platform and the judge read aloud the list of her crimes—plotting to ambush a noblewoman, hiring bandits for rape and theft, falsifying testimony, causing a near death. The words landed like heavy stones. Gasps rose from the crowd each time the indictment named a victim. Camila's pleas withered; she looked small, the elaborate hairpins that once shone on her head snapped off by the guards and tossed amongst the crowd.
Her punishment was not only exile; it was the ritual of the removal of a mask. Her jewelry was taken, her robes ripped away to reveal plain garments. A ribbon torn from her hair was burned. She was mocked openly by those who had once courted her favors. Men spat and women hurled bitter phrases. Someone from the crowd—an old woman who had seen too many daughters ruined by the rich—stepped forward and hissed, "You would ruin a life for a man's smile? May your own life be plain and hard, girl, so your heart learns its taste!"
Camila's face moved through the emotions you must see to believe: first arrogance, then denial, then disbelief, then shame, then a small rope of anger, and finally a broken, trembling plea. She tried to beg for mercy, tearing at the judge's robe, but the judge's face remained flat.
"Let this be a lesson," the Emperor commanded. "No noble may use station to claim another's body or life."
The crowd, carried by the Emperor's sternness and their own fury, let their voices be heard. Some spat, some jeered, some clapped as if it were a festival. Men in the front took up the garments and hurled them into a dung pit. A soldier sprayed Camila's hair with water, dragging it into a crude plait, and the last of her pride was undressed in public.
When the final sentence was delivered—exile to the frontier, fine and loss of privileges—Camila's face crumpled. She lost color like a painting neglected. Her voice wobbled. "You will regret this," she moaned. "You will regret—"
"Women like you always say that," someone from the crowd said. "But regret is for the upright. We have seen your harm."
She was then placed upon a wagon to be led away. As the wagon creaked out of the square, men spat from windows, children threw clay pods, and women taunted with rhymes. The entire scene served as a mirror; a lesson not only for Camila but for those who might consider enchanting others into ruin.
When the crowd thinned and the air cleared, I sat heavily on a bench and let myself shudder. Gage came and sat down beside me, without fanfare. He wrapped his cloak around my shoulders and did not speak. Later, word came that Camila had been exiled three thousand miles away, that Orion had been demoted for failing to protect the dignity of his household, and that the Emperor had signed our marriage's dissolving papers at my father's request.
Even as the court dealt with punishment, my heart sagged with the realization that the three years had not been simple; three years had separated us and built new lives. But Gage did one thing I had never expected: he refused to be governed by public ceremony alone. He had turned down honors to keep his oath to me.
"Did you hear?" I asked one evening, voice small. "You gave up honors?"
He glanced at me. "I would not let a favor become your chain."
Then our wedding came—nothing like the stiff, polite wedding I had once imagined. He met me under a red canopy amid joyous songs. He was not a duke's empty statue; he was a man who bore scars and honors both. He took my hands and said, "Lenore, I have waited like a foolish soldier and like a better man. Will you—will you be mine?"
I thought of all the times he had stood to shield me and all the small private things: the bowl of soup he pretended he had poured for the dog, the way he had returned my lost dresses, the way he had kissed my hand like a benediction when I had cried. I said yes.
There was a hush as our lips met for the first time in public, and I felt the world reorder itself into something kinder.
We had a life that was both ordinary and miraculous. Gage still rarely spoke, but his hands grew softer, and his eyes spoke more than his mouth. Orion Finch came to respect us both, and he married elsewhere with a steady peace in his eyes. Camila never returned from exile.
A single jade bracelet—my father's old family-piece Gage had once kept in his chest—became the last promise between us. He always touched it when he thought no one watched, fingers tracing the translucent band like a talisman. Some nights, when the moon was thin, I would wake and feel his hand on me, and in the dark I'd listen to him murmur, "You are home."
I kept that bracelet for the rest of my days.
The End
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