Sweet Romance12 min read
Palace Wall Willow: A Slow Heart and Sharp Tongues
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I was fourteen the first time I learned how thin power could be, and how loud a laugh could hide a blade.
"My name is India Daugherty," I told the eunuch who led me, because I thought names were like badges. "I am from the Daugherty family in the north. I..." I trailed off. He had already bowed and tucked my hand away like he was putting a coin into a safe.
"You will sleep in Yi Hua Pavilion," he said. "Consort Loretta will instruct you. Bow thrice when you meet the Empress."
"Bow thrice," I repeated, curious about how three bows might change a life.
When I stepped into the cool shadow of Yi Hua, a woman with flour-dusted fingers and a grin like warm bread met me. She was Consort Loretta Hamilton. She was the first person in the palace who treated me like bread and not like an exhibit.
"Sit," she said, barking once and smiling the next. "You will not starve here, little India. You will not learn palace tricks on an empty stomach."
"I don't want tricks," I said. "I want a warm bed and a good meal."
"You will have both if you don't look for trouble," Loretta said. "Now smile haplessly and learn to eat well. Smiles are a kind of armor. Keep yours polished."
In those early days, the palace felt like a long house where half the rooms were empty and the other half watched. Everyone had rules, and I only knew how to be honest. I am bad at reading the silence between words. I am bad at guessing when a smile is a test.
One night, when the moon was white as boiled rice, I was put to the test.
"You're so sleepy," a voice said, low and gentle, like a hand on my shoulder. I looked up. It was the Emperor—Andres Schmitz—taller than I imagined, with eyes that measured me in a way a tailor measures fabric.
"Am I?" I answered. "Yes. I had a long day."
He laughed softly. "I will make you stay a little longer. Tell me your name."
"India," I said.
"India," he repeated, as if tasting the word. "Will you stay for tea?"
"I—" I should have bowed. I should have been prepared. Instead I found myself sitting closer, and before I knew why we were talking about tunes and small things. He made me laugh. He was always politeness folded into jokes. He fed me a tiny sweet, then leaned down and, with a very precise gentleness, wiped it from my lip.
"You're sweet," he said. "Not like the palace sugar. sweeter."
"That's—" I don't know, I said.
"Do you want to learn a poem?" He asked as if offering a glove. "This one is old. It speaks of childhood and being married young."
He wrote a line for me, copying a faded poem, and asked me to copy it back. "Write it like your grandfather taught you," he said.
"I will," I said. I wrote poorly and he smiled.
From that night, things changed because the Emperor laughed with me. He took to calling me "my little willow." He wrote lines of old poems into my cup and asked me to copy them. I thought warmth could hold. I believed the laugh could be a home.
"India," Consort Loretta warned later. "You are too soft. There are people here who will fold you into a paper boat and sail you away."
"Tell me who," I said, because I liked stories better than warnings.
"Do you remember Catalina Burns who came with the last lot of candidates?" she asked. "Beautiful and sharp. She thinks the palace owes her everything."
"She smiled at me the other day," I said. "She seemed lonely."
"Lonely is a kind word," Loretta said. "Lonely with knives, maybe."
I did not take Loretta's advice. I believed I could be gentle and safe. It took me a short time to learn I was naive. I did not want to be cruel, but cruelty found me anyway.
One afternoon, when the Empress Kathleen Hayes was well enough to sit in her hall, the entire court was arranged like a garden of faces. Catalina Burns, who had a booming laugh that could cut like a bell, stood with a face practiced for battle.
"You," she said, pointing a finger at me during a gathering, "are a pretty child, but do you know what the palace needs? Use. The palace does not need pretty playthings."
I bowed, small and confused. The Empress, always soft and wearing two dim dimples, smiled at me with an expression that made me trust her.
"Let children be children," Empress Kathleen said quietly. "Let the young have room to learn."
Catalina leaned forward like a tide. "My lady," she said louder, "do not be weak. People take advantage of weakness. They feed it with kindness, and the kindness turns to rot."
"Enough," the Empress said. Her voice skated across the room and froze Catalina's face. That silence was like a bell. Even Catalina staggered back, stunned. She had never before been met by cold that dark.
"India," the Empress said, folding her hands, "you are young. Be careful. The palace is not kind by design."
"I will remember," I said.
Days passed. The Emperor visited more often. He called me "my little willow" in private, and people began to talk. "She likes you," someone whispered in the corridor. "He writes poems for you," said another.
"I'm happy," I admitted to Loretta one night, as she boiled herbs for my sleep. "He is gentle with me."
"And that worries me," she whispered. "A man who can be both tide and calm will also be a man who pulls you when he is restless."
"What do you mean?" I croaked.
"Joaquin Rashid once said a politician who feeds a court can starve a nation," Loretta muttered. "When men have power, they are always wanting to prove they have it. Be small but not invisible. Be kind, but be careful."
The palace kept changing like weather. Catalina's games grew crueler. She arranged small affronts with the kind of patience born of hunger. She staged a slight against Consort Loretta then blamed servants. She snatched the hand of a kitchen girl and laughed.
"Look," she said one evening with a voice like a stone rolling, "they pretend they do not see. I will teach them all."
"You are cruel," I told her once, at the marble fountain, because I was honest and foolish.
"Call me what you will," she said. "I will be remembered."
"Remembered how?" I asked.
"As feared," she hissed.
I had no power. I only had a stubbornness that made me stay kind where it was reasonable to be cold. I continued to visit the Empress. I learned to play the old tunes better. I learned to keep my head bent and my fingers nimble. I stayed small.
The trouble grew. Catalina began to claim favor with the Emperor. She performed dances that made him laugh and, while he watched, she quietly spread slander. One winter, when spring should have arrived, she had an ugly voice in the court.
One afternoon, the palace broke its own rules.
"You are a nuisance," Catalina said, catching sight of Emperor Andres looking pleased at my side. "He writes to you. He helps you. Why should the palace be good to you?"
"You will not speak under my roof," Empress Kathleen said. Her voice was low and the room held its breath.
Catalina laughed. "Who will stop me? The Empress? The Empress is sick. This palace is a stage, and I am its brightest light."
"A bright light burns everything near it," the Empress answered.
That same night, the Emperor returned to the private garden and found a scattered chaos—shards of porcelain, a broken corsage, a servant sobbing. Catalina had thrown a fit. She had smashed gifts meant for Empress Kathleen and ripped into the curtains of the Emperor's favored rooms. A young maid who tried to calm her was struck. Catalina's rage was violent and public.
"Why did you do this?" Emperor Andres asked, voice flat.
"They do not love what I give!" Catalina cried. "They take and they take and give thanks to others."
"Is gratitude a metric?" he said, and the question hung like a drawn sword.
Someone had to act. The court had rules even for the tempest. The head steward, Teresa Carr—wise, calm, and named for patience—prepared the documentation. Catalina was noisy, but rules were lines people could use.
"She broke the Emperor's property, she struck a servant, she slandered the Empress publicly," Teresa said in the hall. "We must act according to custom."
"Do not take her title lightly," warned another minister. "The palace remembers favors and forgets people."
"Remember then," said the Emperor softly. "We will be clean."
Catalina's fall was swift. Her crown was taken in a room that smelled of boiled chrysanthemum and old ink. She stood in the central square of the palace, her figure smaller than when she had glared. The public punishment was ordered to be done openly, because the palace needed a lesson. It was not law as much as spectacle, and people had to see the cost of a voice too sharp and a hand too quick.
The square filled. Eunuchs, lower-ranked attendants, cooks who delivered soups, the palace women—everyone—crowded to watch. The Empress was carried in, pale but upright. The Emperor arrived late, a shadow of his charm dimmed by protocol. Consort Loretta and I were near the edge, hiding behind carved pillars.
"They will call her out," I whispered to Loretta. "Will it be so much that she breaks?"
"Watch and learn," Loretta whispered back. "Power is a public thing here."
Catalina was brought forward with her arms free but the silk taken. She was made to kneel on the cold stone. A herald read out the charges in the old formula, loud and clear.
"For public insult, for damage to imperial property, for assault upon a palace servant, the court strips Catalina Burns of rank and name," the herald read.
Catalina laughed once. It was not a brave laugh, not the bright bell it had been. It cracked near the edge. "You will be sorry," she said, looking up. Her eyes were sharp at first, then something like confusion, then a flicker of pain.
"Is this what you wanted?" someone in the crowd cried. "You wanted to be seen."
The crowd murmured. Faces shifted from curiosity to satisfaction. The palace's hungry gaze first watches and then feeds, and tonight it fed on humiliation.
When the imperial clerk reached for the cord that signified rank, someone in the crowd—an old kitchen woman whose boy had been quieted by Catalina's cruelty—stood and spat, "You deserve a bowl you never had!"
There was a ripple of agreement like curtains trembling in wind. Some began to clap, soft at first then louder. Others pulled out small wooden flutes and played a sour little tune that, in the old days, announced shame.
"Remember," the Emperor said, his voice now like metal pressed into the shape of a blade, "this palace will not tolerate blood on its floor. None of us are above measure."
Catalina's bravado crumbled. Her face changed. The smile that had burned others like untrimmed fire went through stages: alien anger, startled denial, then the small tremor of panic. She tried to speak—"It was not—"—but the words fell like pebbles.
"You think you can stand and claim truth?" the Empress asked, and for the first time since the ceremony began she used a sharper tone. "You used poison in your words and you used your hands. You wanted to be feared, not loved. That is not a life, Catalina."
The crowd shifted. A few who had favored her now ducked their heads. A young attendant took a small ink tablet and made a quick drawing on the platform, a mocking caricature. Someone else took out a scrap of silk and began to record details of who had seen what.
Catalina had one last movement. Her face folded in pain. She began to cry out, then tried to pray. "I only wanted—"
"To be needed," said a voice behind me. It was Teresa Carr. "But need is not a throne."
The punishment continued. Catalina was stripped of adornments in full view: a crimson sash, a carved hairpin. They handed them to a clerk who catalogued each lost item. Then, to make the rebuke a lesson, they marched her through the palace paths and had her speak the apology three times at three gates, each time using a different register of voice—prayerful, angry, then meek. People gathered and took notes. Children squealed with excitement at the spectacle. Younger palace girls whispered that a rising woman could fall like glass.
Catalina's face twisted into many things. There was rage—hot and thin—then disbelief as the crowd watched her unravel, then bargaining, "It wasn't like that," she said, "You misunderstand." Then the next stage: collapse. Her shoulders quivered, and tears streamed. She knelt before the Empress, who looked down not with triumph but with a tired sorrow. Several attendants behind the Empress pressed cameras—no, not cameras, but scribes and servants who learned the scene and wrote lines in their notebooks for weeks to come.
Around me, people reacted. Some clapped in satisfaction. Some took out scraps of food and recorded the event in gossip. Some—young and frightened—looked away and covered their faces.
Catalina's punishment ended with the Emperor's verdict: she was to be reduced to the status of a simple palace woman, moved out of her gilded lodging, and forbidden to wear any jewelry for the remainder of the year. She was to perform public service as punishment: carrying water, sweeping unswept paths, looking after the linings of the palace garments. That last part mattered more than the lost titles—work in public, with other hands watching you. A person can survive private shame. Public work—it stops the imagination.
Catalina left the square with her head bowed. Her eyes were hollow and sick with something like rage that had nowhere to go. On the way out, someone in the crowd spat through his fingers and said, "Now she will know what hunger looks like."
She looked back once as they dragged the last of her things. There was no scream. Only a small, dry laugh.
I learned something then: public punishment is not just about letting people see a fall. It is about turning private grievances into lessons. It is about changing how others measure risk. The palace eats both the giver and the given when it demands spectacle.
After Catalina's banishment, the palace quieted for a while, but the quiet left scars. The Emperor grew more deliberate. The Empress—soft, pale Kathleen—fell ill more often. Some nights, when the moon was narrow like a careful coin, I would slip into the Empress's private garden and listen to her steady breathing.
"Did you expect such a turn?" I asked one night, pressing my head to my knee.
"Who could expect kindness in this place?" she said, but she smiled like a tired person who had kept hope under her pillow. "No matter, little willow. We do what is right."
I told the Emperor I was content to stay small. "Do not move to Long Happiness Palace," I asked him once, because he had a habit of suggesting I should live there, near him.
He laughed, then touched my chin gently. "If you do not go, I will go often. I promise."
"Promises are as light as feathers," I said.
"Then I will make a net to catch them," he said.
I believed him for a time. He was gentle at home. He held our small children—two who became our joy—and when he held them, he seemed less like a man made of commands and more like a father folded in the way a warm coat fits.
"Do you think he will ever change?" I asked Loretta, rocking our child.
"He will change in some ways," she said. "Men who can be kind can also be thoughtless. But you can make a life inside these stone ribs if you mind the weather."
"Will I be able to bear all the wind?" I asked.
"You will learn to spin it into clothing," she said.
We had children. Two at once one year, a pair like a bright and quiet pair of birds. The Emperor spoke to them with the careful patience of a man who translated law into lullabies. He named them with pauses and meaning: a name for a boy, a name for a girl. He called them by small nicknames—"Jia" and "Le." The palace watched and said the usual things—how lucky, how cunning, how the future would be tied to blood and favor.
When my family from the north came into the palace on midwinter days by my request, I felt the old knot loosen a fraction. Grandmother fussed and scolded, and we ate warm things and argued about nothing. "You eat enough, child," she said. "A palace can starve you of small comforts."
I kept listening to the subtle sounds of the palace—the spoon tapping, the whisper of silk, the rustle of paper as an order passes hands. I learned to keep my hands soft and my eyes sharp. I learned how to ask for favors in the right tone, how to decline dangers like illnesses—"No, I am not well enough to host that"—and how to say "Thank you" and mean it.
Years rolled like the slow turning of a painted wheel. People rose and fell. Some were punished, some were forgiven. The Empress, my gentle Empress Kathleen, passed away one spring when the wind still smelled of green. We mourned in a way only a court can: places held the shape of her absence. The Emperor was hollowed with grief for a time and then filled with duty. He wore his sorrow like an order.
"If you are to rule by my side," he said to me once, cautious and nervous like a boy asking a girl to dance, "I want you to know I ask you to be patient."
"Have you always been patient?" I asked.
He laughed and then sobered. "Not always. But I will try."
Later, I rose, slowly and without desire, to be Empress in my own right. It was not a coronation of fireworks but a quiet moving of pieces. I told the Emperor I would not change the rooms he once used; I wanted to leave certain things untouched as if they might one day be a sign the past had not been erased.
When I was old enough to bear the heavy crown, I learned the final thing: mercy is not the same as weakness. We can punish and protect, and punishment must be public and precise to stop cruelty from growing. We must love our children in ways that cannot be stolen.
A life under palace walls is small, shaped by rituals. Yet in the small there are large things: two children on a blanket, a careful poem carved on paper, a kite taught to fly by a father who once had other sons.
I keep a small kite now—a thin paper thing with two tails that my husband once promised would fly back to my childhood. It is fragile. When the air is still, I take it out and set it to the wind. The kite rises, wobbling and wavering, and then steadies, which is exactly how I learned to live: wobble, steady, fly.
"Do you still think I am foolish?" I asked the Emperor once, years after the first nights.
He watched the kite and did not answer at once. "You were never foolish," he said finally. "You were always true. That honesty saved you, India."
"Saved me from whom?" I asked.
"From too many endings," he said. "From the ones that do not include laughter."
We both laughed, because laughter was a currency we had grown back together.
And sometimes, when the palace nights are quiet and a thin moon slices the sky, I can hear Consort Loretta humming in the kitchen and the small footsteps of children asleep, and I know that within these walls—cold and bright—there are pieces of warmth that stubbornly refuse to leave.
The End
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