Face-Slapping14 min read
Snow, Ocarina, and the Door I Closed
ButterPicks14 views
I still remember the ceramic ocarina he brought me the day he returned from the frontier.
"Charlotte," he said, handing it to me with a quiet smile, "play this when you miss home. The soldiers play it to send memories over the wind."
I touched the cool clay and thought of ten-year-old promises. I said, "I will wait."
He left for three years. He came back with a different chest and a different light in his eyes. He came back with a memory that was not mine.
On our wedding night he lifted the veil and looked at me as if I were a stranger, then he said one sentence that burned deeper than any winter frost: "This match was your design, so you'll live with its consequence. One day you'll pay it back."
Then he strode out.
"Gerald Crowley," I told myself in the dark, "I will not let your single sentence be the last thing I hold of you."
But words are small weapons when men at the top are hungrier than hearts.
1
The house hummed with whispers. The servants pretended not to notice the cold between us, and I pretended not to feel it. My soup cooled on the tray because the guard at his study door looked at me as if I had crossed into forbidden ground.
"He hates you," one maid said, peeking from the stair. "He's been sleeping in the study since the wedding."
"If he hates you, why did he come home?" another whispered behind a curtain.
"Because his heart belongs to that general," someone answered, and the name Daniela Lindberg, the one-woman army, passed through the rooms like wind through reeds.
He liked horses and sunlit training fields. He liked stories of a woman who fought on the border, a legend that shone brighter than home. He told me he had a moon to chase, and I answered like a child: "Wait for me."
When he returned, the other woman rode at his side. Her laugh was a flash, her presence a compass needle pointing to distant blue. I tasted that winter and all my readings went wrong.
In the days that followed he moved himself to the study with a kind of determined distance. He told the servants, "She is like a sister." His hands never touched mine without appointment; his compliments were the empty kind that had learned to be polite.
"Do you want me to step aside?" he asked once, years later, when the word 'retreat' had already been spoken by my own mouth.
"No," I said stubbornly that day, "I will not step aside."
He smiled a small, cruel smile. "Then you'll be the one to pay."
Pay what? I wondered. For my existence? For a promise he had said when we were children? For a poetry line he thought he owned?
He loved Daniela Lindberg like a legend loves a sunrise. I loved him like a child loves warmth: simple, steady, and blind.
2
"I will change," I said once in a fit of youthful rage. "If you love the warrior's posture, I'll learn to ride. If you love arrows, I will learn to shoot true. Don't think I'll let you take someone else because of a story you read."
He watched me then, amused more than alarmed. "You can't be her," he told me, "but you can be clever. Let us be smart instead of ridiculous."
So I learned. I fell off horses and laughed only a little. My palms were raw from bows. I practiced until the skin built a map of calluses. I wanted his eyes to linger the way they lingered on Daniela's form as she rode by.
Once, when my hands were raw and the sun had burned my neck, he came and took the bow from me.
"You're wasted on this," he said, throwing it to the ground, then bending to press a poultice to my palm. He did it with the gentleness that none of his words seemed able to buy me.
"You'll never beat her," he said softly, "she's made of storms. You are a room with a fireplace. Both have their warmth, but not the same kind."
I cried that night in a way I had never expected to. No one had ever told me I was the wrong kind of warmth.
Later he would call that his moment of being noble, his one attempt to be kind. He would claim restraint. But then he rode away to the hunt and to the chapel of swords.
3
At a royal hunt, Daniela Lindberg drew attention like a bright coin. She shot three arrows that dipped and split the center of each target; people clapped and the young sovereign looked on with a kind of curious admiration.
"Want to try?" she asked me mildly when I spoke to her afterwards.
I blundered, because bravado is a foolish teacher. I challenged her and lost.
"You were extraordinary," I told her, truthfully.
"I know," she said simply. "But you have your own hands—don't break them trying to copy mine."
When he announced, on a field of horses and cheers, that he would declare himself to her, the crowd hooted like waves on a harsh shore. He stood and threw his heart forward in a blinding, foolish way.
Daniela refused him—publicly, sharply, with a straightness that left no room for a wounded ego to twist into complaint. The crowd scattered like frightened birds.
Afterwards he came to our house, furious and confused. "Who told her to refuse me?" he demanded, pointing as if I could be a puppeteer pulling strings where none existed.
"I said nothing," I said.
"Then you must have," he answered. "You are the kind of woman who makes small traps."
"What small traps?" I asked. "Words? Meals? Tea leaves?"
"It's your people," he said, "your kind. You turn things strange."
He dressed his hurt like armor. I had to decide whether to shower it with apologies or to keep my dignity. He favored the first course; I would start to favor the second.
4
Two houses, two fathers, and an Emperor with an appetite for arrangements decided otherwise.
"My lord," Kenneth Acevedo told my father complicity in his old way, "the Court needs balance. Charlotte’s marriage will settle more than two hearts. It will hold the province in line."
Manuel Lopez looked at me once and said, "For our people, some things we do are not ours. You understand?"
I did. I bowed. The wedding, when it came, was an edict as much as a promise. A crimson wedding pavilion, people singing because they were told to, and all beneath a sky of polite, ordered faces.
On the night of our wedding he said what he said and left.
The house took sides. My in-laws were kind to me because they could not afford otherwise. They would scold Gerald, they would fuss over me. He was bound by duty and pride and a less than steady heart.
They tied him back one night when he disappeared. They brought him back with ropes and embarrassment and a beating. They wanted shame to be the teacher where words had failed.
I found him tied to a chair in the dim. He turned his head and sneered, "I'm not yours to touch."
I slapped his face twice. "I never wanted to be owned," I said. "I only wanted to be seen."
That moment was private, loud in its smallness, and then it passed. He stormed away. I slept like I had been emptied.
5
The world has a strange way of making iron hot again. Fire in the Forbidden Quarter. Arrows flying under a new moon. We were at court, the hunt had been a week ago. The sovereign—old and flawed—was attacked that night; the palace shook with shouts.
Daniela rode like an answering thunder. She did what she had always done: place the country before the heart.
"There are assassins!" someone cried.
"Hold the women back!" another man commanded.
I found myself at the palace wall with bow in hand, because rage can be a strange and sudden teacher. History will say that I did what I could. History will not record that my hands shook.
Danger passed. The wounds were many, the old monarch's arm poisoned in a way that made the doctors in robes look truly small. In the span of days the sovereign died. The city folded like a paper bird. The old order went, a new prince rose, and the palace grew colder in its corridors.
Daniela Lindberg stayed. She swore publicly to guide the young prince, to never marry, to wear her loyalty like a banner. People cried in white and called her vows sacrificial. I watched her swear and realized that some things are heavier than any man can measure.
For me, the door opened.
The regent—a woman with the look of someone who had loved and lost—saw what I could do with ink and paper. "You have a steady hand," she told me. "You write with clarity. Come help me with the edicts."
She gave me a position that used my head and not my hands alone. I accepted. The city would later say it was fate. I would say it was work, sober and exact.
I wrote decrees and letters. I learned how a country explains itself in sentences. I found, in the tedium of pen and seal, a kind of warmth that was neither play nor pain.
6
Time brushed over the old wound. Gerald lived like a man who had been unmade and reassembled. He read poetry now. He practiced calligraphy. He took on the habits of the scholarly housekeeper that Kenneth Acevedo and Manuel Lopez had always wanted.
One year, under a powder sky, we met again.
"You have done well," he said awkwardly when he saw my court seal among the ledgers.
"Thank you," I said.
"The Court spoke well of you," he went on. "I—my father told me the truth about how this was arranged. I was wrong and blind. If I had known—"
"You learned only after the design was pinned at your head," I said.
He bowed. "I was foolish. Will you—can you forgive me?"
I wanted to give the old, youthful answer. I wanted to fall into the warm, safe habit of waiting.
Instead I looked at him and said, "Forgiveness is not a commodity to be traded in the market of late arrivals."
He stayed a moment longer, then asked, "Can you give me another chance?"
I turned my face away and walked through the powdered path as snow fell into my hair. He stood in the white and called after me like a child calling to the sea. I kept my pace.
7
But rules are iron and the world likes spectacle. Gerald could not contain himself; repentance in private suits a certain kind of man, but there are men who prefer a stage.
He came to the inner hall weeks later during a festival, drunk on bravado, with a petition folded in his hand and his voice hoarse from rehearsed humility.
"Charlotte!" he shouted, loud enough that the chamber fell into the hush of people turning toward a single broken thing. "I have been a fool. I wronged you. I beg your pardon in front of the Court. I was blind for the sake of a tale. Will you take me back? Will you consider—"
He had meant to bow dramatically; instead he stumbled, and the petition slid from his fingers like a small bird. Heads swiveled. The hall hummed with gossip like a forest of dry leaves.
I stood then, with the seal of the regent pressed beneath my thumb, and the floor of the hall contained more witnesses than any private room could have hoped for. This, I decided, would be the moment the world would see him whole: or see him shatter.
"Gerald," I said, voice steady and plain, "you have been loud for much of your life and small in your courage. You asked me to suffer privately. You left me alone in public. You thought to bargain with feelings like they were debts."
"He deserves silence," Kenneth Acevedo whispered beside my father, and they both stared at the man who had once been the promise of childhood.
Gerald's face flushed. Pride is a thin skin.
He tried to bend toward me, palms out. "Please, Charlotte. I made mistakes. I will make… any amends. I will—"
"Amends?" I mirrored his hand gesture. "What amends does a man offer when he has spent his life making another the rehearsal of his own affections? What amends does he offer when he has belittled another's talent to prop his fantasy?"
He blinked. Around the hall, people murmured. Some turned their shoulders in polite shame. A few of his old playmates — men who had once paraded with him in boyhood — shifted like guilty birds.
"Gerald, you stood in the middle of our wedding hall and told me to 'pay'—you used that word. I paid by staying. I paid by learning and by leaving when the doors were opened to me. I paid by turning raw hands into skill and into service." I lifted my chin.
A woman at the far side of the hall — one of the servants who'd once hidden my soup away — cried out softly, "She did nothing wrong. He did."
A ripple went through the crowd. Hands went to mouths. The silence widened until it was a kind of river under us.
Gerald's face folded — not into grief but a dawning horror, like someone staring into a mirror and seeing a stranger. "You—" he started, and then smallness uncoiled into the worst kind of confession.
"Do you know why my father accepted this match?" I asked, though I already knew the answer. "Because the Crown needed balance. Do you understand what that meant for me? We were used as chess to hold something larger than our hearts."
He shook his head, futile. "I thought—"
"You thought stories were realer than people," I finished.
He tried to laugh. "People say things in youth—"
"Then watch what a man of your age has made of your youth," I said.
That was when the punishment began.
8
I did not call for chains or public caning. I called on witnesses.
"Bring forward the ledger of the year of the hunt," I said. My voice had a small, cold clarity. "Bring forward the letters that were exchanged in secret."
A clerk scurried. He laid out pages. Each page had the tiny, careful script of arrangements, the hand of men who signed away a girl's future as if she were a vase.
"Here," I said, tapping a line. "A note from the Prime Minister to the Palace: 'The Crowley alliance must proceed. The general's favor must be balanced.' Here: 'Retain public decorum; do not allow personal whim.'"
A hush. People leaned in. Gerald's composure thinned.
"Do you deny this?" I asked, and the question was not to him but to the room.
He looked at Kenneth Acevedo, at Manuel Lopez, at the faces who had watched his boyhood and who had counted the cost of alliances. He looked down at the petition that had fluttered like a wounded moth at his feet. He opened his mouth and closed it.
Around us, the chamber warmed with a gossip like tinder. Someone began to shout, "He gambled with her life!" Another voice chimed, "He treated her like an accessory!"
Gerald tried to retort, and for a brief flash he stood tall with the guise of a man who had practiced renunciation. "It was not only I," he said. "Orders—"
"Orders do not excuse leaving a woman on her wedding night," I said. "Orders do not excuse sneers, nor gifts that mark you as both giver and thief."
Then I did the thing I had kept private until the world could hear: I named scenes he had not thought would be witnessed — the study he had slept in, the mornings he did not join the table, the nights he chose a campfire story over a home. I read out the names of servants who had borne witness and who had begged for mercy on my behalf. I read out the small cruelties because cruelty thrives in silence.
The crowd reacted like a field in wind. Some people stepped back in shock. Some of his associates fumbled for excuses. A few older men — colleagues who had once praised his sword arm — covered their eyes with shame.
Gerald's face lost color. At first he clutched straws of defiance. "You exaggerate—"
"I do not exaggerate," I said. "I do not need to. The truth is enough."
A group of young officers who had looked up to him now bowed away. "We followed him," one whispered. Another muttered, "This is unbecoming."
He staggered like a man who had been struck. Pride cracked into petty bile. "You paraded your skill in front of everyone to spite me!" he snapped. "You made me the fool!"
"Fool?" cried a woman who had once been his playmate. "You made the fool of us all."
He saw their faces turn. He saw, finally, how small his apology sounded in a hall full of eyes. His reaction changed as the tide of the crowd turned: smug bewilderment became tight denial, then a thin panicked laugh, then a throat-choked plea.
"Please—" he begged, voice ragged. "Please, Charlotte, I never meant—"
"Then don't mean it now," I replied coolly. "Let your life be the answer."
He sank, unceremoniously, into a chair. Around him, people who had once smiled his name now took out their own phones—some of the young ones, always hungry for spectacle—snapping images. The servants exchanged looks. Some of the crowd snickered; some clucked. The prime minister, Kenneth Acevedo, looked away as if he were too old to meddle with such trifles.
Gerald's voice cracked. He tried to name the moments he had suffered. "I was mocked," he said, "I was scorned. I had an impossible love—"
"Then love that does not amount to tenderness is not love at all," I said.
The humiliation unfolded slowly, like a tide. He felt the room's verdict settle: that he was a man who had not only loved foolishly but had been foolish with another's life. He had been stripped — not of rank, not fully, but of the small dignity that comes from people trusting you. Invitations dried. Old friends tucked away their letters. A patron who had once introduced him to a court circle later 'forgot' his name in a toast.
Gerald tried to beg for a private talk. "Take me aside," he said, eyes glossy. "Let us not make a spectacle."
"No," I said, and every ear leaned in. "You made a spectacle. I will not be the one to clean up your reputation in a dark room."
He fell to his knees, public as a man can be in a city that prefers discretion. First he was stunned. Then he fumbled with the language of apology. Then he begged in a child's register.
"Charlotte, please. I will publicize nothing. I will step down. I will—"
"Step down from what?" I asked.
He had nothing measurable left to give. His title could be kept, but titles without trust are like boxes without meaning.
He rose, crumpled, and left the hall with his head bent. The crowd turned slowly like a field. The sound of their turning was a kind of punishment. Some clapped—not in mockery but as an acknowledgment that truth had been spoken publicly. Others simply walked away.
Outside, boys who had once cheered him now whispered, "He looks smaller."
He would later say that this day broke him. He did not mean physically. He meant in the minute and hungry ways a man can be broken: the moment when laughter does not come from others anymore, when the private corners of your life hold no witnesses to your glory.
9
What I asked for in that hall was not vengeance in the cartoon sense. I asked for recognition. I asked the room to look at the ledger we had all been keeping in our heads and to name the debts that could not be repaid with private apologies.
He roamed after that day in attempts at penance. He changed his handwriting, he recited lines of poetry that had no belonging to his throat, he took on books and left with nights of feverish study. People softened a little; pity is a softer weather than scorn. But pity is not trust.
Months later he came to me in the snow, asking for a chance. I passed him by with the ocarina in my pocket and did not look back.
"Charlotte," he called, the white wind taking his voice like a thin paper. "Forgive me. Please."
I kept walking.
10
Years edged by and the world rearranged us both.
Daniela remained what she had been: a blade that served the country first. She kept her word to the young sovereign. I stayed by the regent, writing the edicts that steadied the fragile city and tasting a life measured in ink and duty.
Sometimes people asked me about the ocarina. "Do you still play it?" they would say.
"Sometimes," I answered. "Mostly on nights when the snow is heavy and the lanterns small."
Once, Daniela and I drank in a small chamber above the palace stables. We spoke of duty, of the strange ways men love, and of the cost of being chosen.
"You were never lost," she said to me, lifting her cup. "You were just misplaced for a while."
"Perhaps," I said, "but misplacement teaches routes."
Her eyes were soft with the kind of admiration that does not ask much. "They need someone like you," she said, naming the place I had grown into. "Clever with ink and brave enough to stand at the hall and read the ledger aloud."
"Would you ever have married?" I asked.
She laughed, the sound a quick knife. "No. Only a country can hold me. But some men believe their stories are whole and make us a chapter in them."
We toasted. Outside, snow layered the world into simple shapes. I walked back to the palace gates with the clay ocarina in my pocket and the taste of wine in my mouth.
11
I will not pretend my path was all victory. The punishment of Gerald Crowley in the hall did not restore everything, nor did it set a perfect right. But what it did do was change the ledger of our public lives: people saw that a quiet wrong could be named aloud. They saw that private cruelty need not hide forever under the silk of arrangements.
A festival later, Gerald came forward again—not with begging this time but with a small, steady apology that did not expect to purchase anything. He had become a man who had learned to measure himself not by the brightness he could attract but by the quiet of the work he could do.
I accepted his apology in the simplest way I could: by not letting it change me.
"Are you happy?" he asked one winter day as we stood facing a lane dusted with snow.
"I am," I answered. "It is a different happiness than the one you once promised me."
He bowed his head. "I have been late with a great many things," he said. "If being late can atone, then I shall be late."
"Some things," I said, "are not for sale to the late."
I put my hand in my pocket. The ocarina was warm from my palm. I did not give it to him.
12
I spend my days with ink and paper and, sometimes, with a bow. I shoot arrows as a practice of patience, not as a duel for someone's heart. Daniela visits when she can. Kenneth Acevedo and Manuel Lopez visit with old wisdom and the odd scolding for being too sentimental.
There is the odd rumor—men and women leaning into their cups to gossip about the old wedding that was more a game of court than a union of two lives. People like stories where justice is neat, but real justice is a thin thread: public truths told in the right place will unravel a habit, and sometimes they will not.
On a night of soft snow I once saw Gerald standing at a distance with his coat too thin for the season. He called after me in a tone that had lost its bravado. "Charlotte, wait."
I did not.
I walked past him under my umbrella. The snow fell on his head and on mine. He watched me leave. He felt the cold. He would feel it for a long time.
That is enough.
—END—
The End
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