Sweet Romance12 min read
Snow, Arrows, and a Gold Hairpin
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I slipped in the mud and watched the hem of my new skirt tear. The road had betrayed me after the storm; the world was gray, and my patience thin. "Caitlin Vorobyov," I told myself, "do not act like a fool and fall again." Then I blinked and saw his back.
He was all angles in black—lean, straight, moving like someone who belonged to wind and rope. I tried to stand properly. The skirt betrayed me again and I plopped on the wet ground.
"Keep running, Miss Caitlin," he said without turning around. The corner of his mouth had a humorless lift. He looked over his shoulder at me, then away, like I was a stray dog who kept trying to bite at his heels.
I want you to know I am no ordinary daughter of a minister. I am Bear Knudsen's daughter. I can order, I can scold, I can throw tantrums. I can also take aim.
"Who are you to give orders?" I shouted at him.
He cocked an eyebrow like the world had just become a puzzle. "Miss, you will slow yourself to death. Move."
I remember my father's tea cup slipping that day, the way he inhaled and fixed his face into something stern. "This one lives in my courtyard," I declared. "Lock him out. Kill him if you must."
Preston Bishop smiled without teeth and bowed like manners were a joke. He had the sort of quiet that made my blood heat. I ordered guards, I planned a public shame—enough to make him bow his head and learn his place—but the man laughed and took my bow as a toy.
"Miss, bows are made to be used," he said as he took the bow from my trembling hands and drew it with the cunning ease of someone who had practiced through frost and hunger. The string sang. The arrow cut the air and planted itself deep in the target. He handed the bow back with such a calm my face scalded.
"You're arrogant," I told him, more to cover up the flame in my chest.
He tilted his head. "If you learn, you'll find arrows are polite."
I was furious and humiliated by the same motion. He shrugged and was gone, leaving me with the echo of the smooth string and my father's displeasure like a cold coin in my mouth.
After that first week, I learned two things: he wore black like a promise of rain, and he knew things—too many things. There was always a faint scent on him that was not of soap or common air. Once, in a gust of snow, I almost traced the scent to his collar and inhaled. It was not one note; it was a mix of smoke, powdered scent, and something that smelled like pine after blood. I frowned and accused him of lying to be handsome and brave. He had, as usual, smiled like a man who had no business being kind.
"You're hiding something," I told him.
"You're hiding nothing," he said. "Your face hides many things."
He called himself Preston Bishop. I called him "small guard" until I learned his name. He corrected me once and I still remembered the sound of it.
Days became a string of small fights—snowball battles where he danced between a dozen flying snowballs like a leaf in a storm; lessons where he would take my clumsy hands and make my fingers warm by touching the bow; nights when he brought me soup because I had frozen myself from stubbornness.
"You don't owe me anything," I would say, but he would squat next to me, cup my chin as if he had the right and patience to break down mountains, and cheek into cheek, teach me breath.
"Miss," he said once while the moon was thin, "if you want to shoot well, don't think the arrow is the only thing that must be true."
"Then what?" I asked, breath cold.
"That the hand lets go."
A month later, the courtyard was quieter and the world more dangerous. The Emperor's sickness spread like a rumor. Princes moved like wolves. I knew nothing of the court—I had been a child in my father's shadow—but I had a small heart that learned to warm itself against Preston's presence.
Then the night they took me to the temple—forced as if I were a wayward lamb—
"It is for your safety," my father told me, embarrassed and furious. He looked at me with eyes that wanted to be both shield and gate.
At the temple, I met a monk who stirred my hand and said in a troubled voice, "Miss Caitlin's fortune runs in storms." I laughed then. I thought being coddled at the temple was the end of trouble.
On one white morning, a figure in black pulled up in a carriage. Preston Bishop sat at the head, reins in hand. He looked at me and said the single word I had learned to hate and love together: "Miss."
"Why are you coming?" I demanded, not bothering to hide the question now that pride had fled.
He smiled a small, mocking smile. "Your father asked. He thought I should take you back."
"You? Why not a proper escort?"
Preston's mouth quirked. "You did not want a proper escort."
On the way back, I accused him of all sorts of small crimes and plotted to make him bow. He answered with small truths, like someone dropping pebbles into a pond—each pebble a reason I could not find offense.
"Do you know anything about hunting?" he'd ask.
"Of course!" I lied.
"Then why do you make noise like a peacock? Go on, shoot."
I made a ridiculous shot and missed, and then he taught me to breathe like the sky. When I learned to aim, I also learned to listen. He taught me to steady my knees, to feel the wind, to find a point in the air and trust the arrow. He taught me gentleness in a world where people wielded steel.
I learned more than archery. I learned the soft, dangerous idea that someone could look at me and not want my father's power, but me—me as a child who laughed at cold.
One winter night, word arrived: a favored consort had been stabbed in the palace. The court spun with accusations. The Emperor's illness grew worse. The world grew dangerous as if danger had learned to walk upright.
Preston left suddenly after that. He came back and left again. He told me one morning that he had placed a favor on me and a charm in my pocket. "Take it," he ordered.
I did, of course. I was ridiculous but obedient with him in a way I never was with my father.
A week later came the thing I had feared the least and yet feared the most—kidnap. I was taken from the temple in the snow, tied, and carried toward a place I could not see. My heart thudded like a drum. I thought who could want me? Who wanted the daughter of Bear Knudsen?
"Kill them all," a low voice said behind the muffled curtain of my fate. "One less witness."
I tasted metal and cold and then fear became a hard rock. I thought of my father and the tea cup and Preston's strange smile.
When we stopped, the hood was ripped from my face and a shadowy figure loomed. I saw other men—mean faces, lines of hatred. Then a flash of black moved like smoke and a bowstring twanged. When the world cleared, they were gone—dead or sprawled—and Preston was at my side, chest heaving.
"You!" I rasped. "You saved me."
He did not laugh. He had a blade wet on his shoulder, blood on his sleeve, and a look that had once been gentle turned to something that hardened glass.
"You're reckless," he said. "Do not die because you think you are trouble."
When we reached his hidden camp, I found there a man sitting like a statue—a pale young man who had a softness in his look and a kindness that folded like paper. He looked at me almost shyly.
"Yuri Luna," Preston said quietly. "He was taken. I have kept him."
Yuri Luna's hands were thin but steady when he reached for a chess piece in the dirt. He smiled at me with an old gentleness. He saw me and said, "You are the daughter of Bear Knudsen."
"Yes," I said. "You are the missing prince."
He smiled, then coughed. Blood came up. My knees went weak. Preston bowed me to help. I felt a fierce, sudden rage like a wound opening. They had taken a gentle man like an animal.
"Who took him?" I demanded.
"The third prince," Preston said. "Hamza White. He seeks a crown."
I hated Hamza on sight—the name fit. He had the court's hungry grin, the fierceness of ambition. He wanted what he wanted and would break people to get it.
We went to the city like a secret wind. I, the chancellor's daughter, trailed in muddied skirts at Preston's heels, while the hidden prince rested in a battered inn. Word spread like wildfire: the missing prince had been found. People crowded the streets, mouths open like gulls.
My father was stunned at our return. The court buzzed: the Emperor's death, the missing son, the found son. I thought in a single long breath that we might be safe. Perhaps I even dared to laugh.
I did not know ambition.
Hamza White made his move like frost. He sought the crown with a hand that crushed anyone who stood in his way. He used people's fears like rope. He had allies high in the palace, people who smiled too smoothly.
Then we did the unthinkable. We took the proof to the hall. A list that Preston had found—papers, whispers traced to Hamza's hand, bribery and a secret letter instructing murder squads to thin the court like a sick garden. We called the court. My father, stubborn and pale, demanded the truth in front of everyone.
They brought Hamza to the hall. In the great hall of judgment packed with courtiers, I stood—small, cold, and furious. Preston stood at my side like a black cliff.
"Hamza White!" my father cried. "What proof can you show of allegiance to the crown?"
He answered with a smile that was nothing but winter. "I serve the realm."
We had the papers, hand-stitched maps, names, and witness accounts. Preston walked forward with the bundle in his hands. "These are your orders, signed and sealed," he said softly. The hall breathed; even the chandeliers seemed to lean in.
Hamza's face went from faint amusement to a slow frost.
"These are lies," he said at first. "Fabrication by the minister."
"Those who wrote sign their names," Preston said.
A courtier gasped. "This is treason," breathed someone near me.
Hamza's countenance faltered. He glared at the crowd, trying for composure. "You—" he began, then his voice narrowed to a snarl. "You would accuse me? You would accuse the prince?"
"Not an accusation, a record." My father's voice was a hammer. He moved like a man who had kept quiet for too long. "Read the names, dammit. Read them."
The chamber clerk read aloud. A murmur turned into a storm. Men and women in silk turned their faces—anger, surprise, betrayal like knives. People wept and cheered and shifted like unsettled stones. Hamza's smirk vanished.
He accused the court of conspiracies and, in a whisper meant for me, "You think your small guard can set me down?" His eyes flicked to Preston. For a beat he held himself like a man who would gamble his head for a crown.
Then the crowd moved. The very servants in the back stepped forward. "We served his orders," one said, voice shaking. Another held up a letter. Hamza's allies shifted their weight.
Hamza's demeanor cracked. "These are forgery," he shouted, fingers drumming like someone pressing a sore bruise. "They are liars. Arrest them for slander."
"Arrest the traitor, not the accusers," my father demanded.
The hall was a living thing; breath hitched. Hamza's face went white, then red, and a tremor danced through his jaw.
"Look at him," someone called, a woman with bright eyes. "He hands out favors, then kills the rest. He took the emperor's illness and turned it into a ladder."
Hamza's smile dissolved into a flurry of denials. "No—no—these are fabrications! They forge my hand!" he cried, and the sound was not convincing. The crowd, hungry for blood and truth, shifted into a chant: "Truth! Truth! Truth!"
For the next long hour, the court turned into a theater of ruin. Little by little, witnesses stepped forward, each adding detail like breath. Old servants, spooked courtiers, and even one of Hamza's own lieutenants—sweat and guilt on his brow—told of bribe-laden letters, night riders, and a sealed instruction to 'thin the palace'.
Hamza's reactions moved like a fall: first anger, then panic, then frantic denial, then vain threats, and finally pleading. He clutched at his chest as if a spear had found him inside. "I am innocent," he sobbed. "I would never—"
"Would you?" the chamber asked. Voices everywhere turned sharper than knives. Faces in the crowd recorded everything—some with phones and ink, others with eyes.
I watched him shrink, watched power slide like water from his fingers. He tried to call upon old friends, but faces turned away—the same faces he had trampled to climb. One by one, he saw his supporters vanish into the crowd. A clerk from his own house spoke up and spat the words, loud and clear, "He ordered the killing. He signed."
Hamza's change was brutal. The man who had called for crowns and plotted with knives looked suddenly very small. He reached out to the many in the hall as if to anchor, but they recoiled. "I did not—" he gasped. The hall hummed with whispers and the sick satisfaction of watching a great man fall. A woman near me started to clap; others joined in, slow and then loud.
The punishment was public and sharp. The magistrate stripped him of rank—where gold had shone, there was now only gray. His seals were taken. The court declared him traitor. People unstitched his banners; his portraits were draped. He was led through the court with his head bowed as crowds partook in the ritual of contempt. People jeered, photographers snapped, and servants spat. Hamza's face cycled through emotions: defiance—then shame—then grief—then pleading.
He fell to his knees before the judgment dais, hands kneading into the stone. "Bear Knudsen," he said hoarsely, "I beg you—mercy." My father did not answer. Preston stood, expression hidden, but his jaw was wound tight. The court watched the collapse of a man. It was an ugly, holy thing.
Outside the hall, the crowd demanded more. "Make him speak his accomplices!" someone shouted. Another woman screamed, "Where are the rest?" The noise swelled, alive as a wave, and Hamza's men broke into mutters of guilt. One-by-one, men who had smiled at the same tables as he now fled. The court made him publicly surrender his belongings; people clawed for medals and documents as if to erase the past by tearing tokens from him.
At the end of the day, Hamza had been reduced to a man whose name was a curse. He had bowed once to power, and everyone kept a record. The worst part for him was not that he lost rank; it was that people he thought were his suddenly looked at him with disgust. "Coward," one called. "Traitor," said another. His own lieutenant spat and walked away.
The ritual of punishment lasted longer than I'd imagined. It was not enough to say he was guilty. The court wanted him to feel the loss—a slow, humiliating path of being stripped of honors, of friends, of place, then paraded. It was the most splendid and righteous kind of justice I ever witnessed: the slow reveal, the public break, the sound of trust cracking. I felt sick and satisfied at once.
In the days that followed, other conspirators were unmasked—men who had spoken their alliances in smoke-filled rooms. Each came before the hall, and each scene was different. One man begged and was spared but stripped of title. Another tried to bribe my father and was mocked openly. They were humiliated in ways fitting their crimes. Some begged; some cursed; one threw himself from a balcony and was carried out broken. The crowd's reactions varied—tears for those who had been used, hisses for those who had betrayed, quiet satisfaction for those who were finally vindicated.
Through it all, I stood beside Preston. He had not asked for my thanks. He did not seek my praise. He had risked himself to bring a prince home. His eyes sometimes softened when they glowed on me, and once he took my hand and let it rest in his palm as if keeping time. I felt, against the thunder of public ruin, a private peace.
"Today," he said softly after the last of the conspirators had been marched out, "you saw how power can be carved."
"I saw men crumble," I said.
"You saw mercy withheld," he answered. "Sometimes the world is a knife. But sometimes the world needs to see a lie cut out in plain view."
A few weeks after the trial, quiet returned—thin and sharp. The Emperor's passing had been marked with full rites. The throne shuffled a little. My father was tired and older. Yuri Luna, who had been found weak and gentle and strangely brave, thanked Preston in a soft voice that made me see both men's history cross like threads.
One evening, when the city lights shivered over the canals, he proposed.
"Marry me," Preston said.
I had been waiting for flamboyant speeches and spells of poetry. He was simple, as always.
"What?" I laughed, and almost spat my wine.
"I mean it," he said. "Not for what your father is. Not for titles. For you. Stay, and I will keep you safe. Take my name? No." He smiled a small, crooked smile. "I will not make you trade the world you were born into. I will just stand with you. Be mine in the way a candle is mine: the flame and the hand."
I wanted to say clever things. I wanted to say, "I will be a queen," and then sign a treaty. But all I could think about was that through the panic and the ruin, that archery lesson when my fingers had been cold, that night he had carried a wounded prince, that he had stood in the court and unrolled truth like a blade. All the things that had wrapped me taut like string loosened and became—what? A possibility.
"Do you fear my father?" I asked then.
He shook his head. "I fear much, but your father will not be the thing I am afraid to lose. You will be."
So I answered him in the only honest way I knew. "Then I will be yours."
He took my hand. The city hummed around us, and from the window a small gold hairpin—my token—glinted in the lamplight. I thought of that tiny thing when everything else had been heavy. I thought of snowballs, church bells, archery targets, and the prince's soft smile. I looked at the man who had taught me how to let go and release and realized that the arrow had always flown true.
We married quietly. My father stood like a rock and the court spoke gossip but could not claim the truth from our hands. Preston did not become a lord, and he did not demand I leave the life I had known. He only asked to be beside me. In return, I promised to stand beside him in storms.
The end of the tale was not a thunderous coronation. It was the small slow soft thing: my hand on his, my father proud but reserved, the prince seated in a quiet corner smiling across his tea. The hairpin remained where I always kept it—a small gold thing I would sometimes twist in my fingers when the world wanted me to bow. Each time, I remembered the night arrows flew and men fell and the crowd cried for truth. I remembered the public punishment where liars shrank and the way Preston's eyes softened when I cried.
"Will you keep learning to draw?" he asked me one winter afternoon, when frost carved lace on the windows.
"I will," I promised.
He kissed my knuckles and made me laugh until I had to let the bowstring go.
The End
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