Sweet Romance16 min read
Snow, Promises, and Two Gentlemen
ButterPicks13 views
I have waited for a man who rode away like a storm and left a promise behind. People said he died on the field. I would not hear it. I would not let my life be folded because someone else declared him gone.
"It will be fine, Miss," Kiko said softly as she smoothed my sleeve. "Snow on this day means good years."
"I know," I told her. "But I am waiting."
The hall was full. My hair was pinned with jewels, my sleeves heavier than I had ever worn, and the world outside was a white that seemed to swallow sound. They sang the ritual words, the officials bowed, my father blinked once like a man who has forgotten his voice. Everyone had already decided for me that my betrothed lay under distant soil.
"Joanna," Eloise said as she steadied my crown. "There are many good men in the world. If this one is gone, we will make something else of your life."
"I will not," I said simply. My mouth was dry. My throat felt like the river after frost.
From the doorway the world changed in a single sound—the wooden door fell open with a bang. Snow cut across the hall on a wind, and a figure pushed through, covered with snow and blood and the kind of ruin that makes you think of edges.
"Gideon Walter," someone breathed.
"You're alive," I found myself saying before I could stop it. A small sound more than a sentence.
He stood there like a piece of a storm—a tall man whose armor had been torn and stitched, whose hair had small icicles at the edge, and who looked at me with an ease that had once been comfort and was now an accusation.
"Joanna Santiago," he said, and there was a bow to his name that belonged to a different life. He walked forward and knelt. "Your coming of age is well met. I brought a gift."
He fastened the pin into my hair with a hand that trembled the slightest. The hall hushed. I felt the world bend inward to that small motion, as if his fingers had prised open all the months I had kept like a secret.
"You're back," I whispered.
He turned and faced my father. "I return on business, and on gratitude," he announced. "In the field a girl saved my life. I owe her my fortune and my heart. I release Joanna Santiago from our betrothal."
The words cut like glass. The hall thundered. My father slammed a cup and would have shouted except that the young general further bowed with the calm of a man who had decided a thing and would not be moved.
"It is settled," Gideon said, and then he untied himself from my sight as if the room was already too small for what he had chosen.
I sat rigid. The heavy silk of my skirt seemed to set like armor across my legs. Eloise hid me in her embrace. Kiko pressed my back. I tried to speak and could not. My voice felt like broken ice.
Outside the hall, Gideon walked away without once meeting my eye. The snow caught on his cloak like a white that tasted of mourning.
"Why?" I said later, when the crowd thinned and my father spread coin and trinket across the table for the compensated baubles that came back. "Why here? Why now? Why before my face?"
My father could not answer. He had always been a man of offices and documents. His priorities had smudged against the moment. Eloise tried to smile at me but her mouth failed.
I learned things afterward—how Gideon had led a night raid, how he had claimed a strange girl in the middle of a battlefield, how the emperor had raised the girl to a title and how the court had changed for her. I learned how my name sank like a coin into water and made nothing.
I survived the winter. I drew what I could into the silence of my rooms. Clara brought the tea, Kiko kept the flame, Eloise patched a dress and hummed a small song about spring. But in the garden the trees were tight with frost and my chest ached like a field left unbroken.
It was during that fragile spring that a minor chaos sprang up on the road. Kiko told me about a girl who had been harried by low men—men who believed themselves royal because they were sons of old families losing their money. I did not mean to watch, yet I found myself in the carriage, the old crest of my house slapping softly from the wind.
"They are taking liberties," Laila laughed from a window, but her voice was too small to be anything but cruel.
A hand lifted the curtain. A brazen youth reached as if to push the veil aside, as if to touch. I turned, and the hand was nailed to the dirt by a thin hairpin. He cried out. The man who had stepped from the road loomed, dark-limbed and furious.
It was Gideon again. He stood there, wind in his hair, and looked at me as if cataloguing something.
"Stand down," he said. His voice knotted a sudden fear into the man who had reached.
"I—" the youth gasped, and when he saw the soldier's expression he toppled like a house with a rotten foundation.
"Why are you here?" I asked, because the world wanted to know.
Gideon wrapped a cloak about a ragged girl who had been the center of the fray. She smelled of dust and bells and a freedom that did not belong in the houses of the capital.
"This is Amira Wagner," he said. "She saved my life. And now she is mine by duty."
I felt a small and strange blade turn in my chest. My face did not know whether to burn or fall still. Gideon avoided my eyes. He gave thanks mechanically and left. Again, my mind sewed itself into tautness and I breathed through it as if the world could not touch me if I kept the breath small.
Later, at the spring gathering on the rivers, I found Amira again—smeared with ink, mocked by girls who measured everything by family and thread count. They laughed at her clothes, at her hand that had been painted with ink from an overturned brush. Laila and the others made a chorus of scorn. The little crowd pinched her like a thing they did not respect.
I had a choice. I could fold myself up and look serene while the world took what it wished. Or I could stand and do something simple.
"Stop," I said, and it felt like breaking ice to speak.
"I did not help," I answered when Amira mouthed thanks. "You do not need my pity."
She had a small, bright, stubborn face and she did not seem to belong in the expectations of either the court or the field. The world loved to place a name on a person and call it done. Amira resisted names.
After that day, life altered its pace. I met Azariah West—young, thoughtful, the kind of man whose politeness had the cool polish of someone trained to a life in rooms lit by candles and papers. He appeared beside a willow and offered the water in a cup to touch my forehead as others had done in rites.
"Joanna," he said, softly, "may I?"
He touched a drop against my temple with the gentleness of a thing that cares what it touches. It was a small action, but it hung in me like a bell.
"Why are you not angry?" he asked me later when we sat by a pond. "You were set aside in public. Most would burn the whole house."
"I was not set aside," I said. "I was told he had died."
"Do you want him to have died?" Azariah asked, blunt in a way that came from royal upbringing.
"I want what I was promised," I said. "And I want to be allowed to feel loss when it comes."
Azariah laughed once, a sound that curved. "Then let us be reasonable. I ask your hand, Joanna. Not by force. By desire."
"Do you mean it?" I breathed.
"I do." His fingers closed about the back of my hand like a promise.
I thought of Gideon in the snow, the hem of his cloak caught in the wind as he left. I thought of that smile that evaporated in an instant. I thought of the way he had knelt to free me, then knelt to break the knot. I thought of Amira, new and raw like a wound.
"You will be kind to me?" I asked Azariah.
"Always," he said, and there it was: a vow spoken plainly. His voice trembled once.
We were engaged in the swirl before the court could pronounce anything. Azariah's mother, a woman of courtly care, smiled with the generosity of someone who has everything to give. My parents accepted the match; my father, Ruben Maier, arranged threads and dowry that made the new plan fit.
But the city had not quieted. The heat in the court simmered into a fever. There were whispers that twisted like snakes—accusations that the general's family had done wrong, that the marriage had been a cover for traitorous trade with the northern enemy. Old alliances sharpened into new knives. Those who had been glad Gideon returned now found in his actions an explanation for their fear.
People began to speak of traitors. They named men who had always had thirsts for more: Forrest Otto, a young noble who had been returned to private shame by an angry hand earlier; Denis Bailey, an official who traded favors like currency; Giovanni Guerrero, a lord with a proud front and hands that loved to pluck a treasury when no one watched.
Days ran into weeks. In the midst of embroidered gold and whispered shiftings, an accusation was hurled like a spear—Gideon had conspired with the northern state to sell arms, to hand over secrets. The court sighed and turned the page.
He vanished.
Not quietly. Not at first.
One night a word came to my bedchamber in a rustle and the rustle was Gideon's name. Heavy boots approached our gate and Azariah's face was suddenly a pale moon.
"You must stay," he said. "I will stay with you."
"I do not need a protector," I told him, but my voice was thin. "I need the truth."
Azariah's lips thinned. "We will find it."
They did not find it easily. Gideon had gone to dark places. Men who had once called him friend now spat his name in their cups and called him a traitor. His house was searched. His banners were torn. The court rejoiced at a simple story: the proud man falls.
But the truth is never so simple. I had seen Gideon alone in the night, at my door, shadowed and fevered, begging for a painting he had once asked me for. He sat at my bedside, not with armor but with ragged hands.
"One painting," he said hoarsely. "You promised a painting. Give me that. Give me what I asked."
"I do not owe you my tears," I told him, the words tasting like iron. "You gave your word and took another. You walked out of the hall."
"You do not understand," he said finally, and for the first time his voice broke in that way of honest defeat. "We are not only what we choose. There are things we inherit. My house—"
"Do I have to pay that price?" I asked. "Do I have to give up everything to fix your debts?"
He laughed then, a raw, mirthless thing. "No. But someone made a web. Someone used my name."
When Larsen—an old associate of Denis—finally came forward, it was to a hall crowded with servants and officials and a prince who had the patience of mountains. Azariah walked the chamber like a man who measures every step. He listened.
"You expect me not to be suspicious?" Azariah asked loud enough that people looked. "A general who leaves the battlefield with weapons unaccounted for. A lord with sudden wealth. Why should I not doubt?"
"You are right to look," Gideon answered, but he spoke in that low voice like the one that once told me that he would return by my coming-of-age. "Look well."
The accusations crumbled like old mortar when Azariah and I watched closely. Evidence was presented in the form of ledgers, secret rolls, and a broker's confession. The names that came forward were not Gideon’s small crew but men of city influence—Forrest Otto among them—who had traded on the volatility of war to enrich themselves. Denis Bailey had signed papers that placed shipments under secret labels. Giovanni Guerrero had accepted funds to withhold patrols. The spiderweb had people at several nodes. Gideon had been used.
"What will you do with these men?" I asked Azariah quietly in the corridors, as courtiers shuffled like a flock of uneasy birds.
"I will do right," he said. There was a light in his stance that I had never seen when he was simply formal and distant. He moved with a clarity that steadied me.
The day they were brought to public reckoning, the square before the palace thrummed. Merchants pushed forward. Servants leaned from upper lattices. A crowd gathered, all hungry for blame to be made visible. The hall was set like a stage: banners, the emperor's signet, a raised dais for the accusations to fall upon.
"Bring the accused," Azariah called, his voice traveling.
Forrest Otto strode in first with his usual insolent swagger. He still wore his father's ring as if it gave him license. Denis Bailey followed with that look of an official who believed paper could hide guilt. Giovanni Guerrero came last, his robe heavy with gold meant to impress a gullible eye.
Crowds buzzed. "They look guilty." "Look at their hands." "Do you know Master Otto has been seen at the warehouses?" The air tasted of expectation.
Azariah stepped forward to the dais. "You stand accused of treasonous trade, of diverting arms to enrich yourselves, and of using a soldier's name to cover your deals. Speak."
Forrest grinned, a blade hidden in a smile. "I am a man of family," he said loudly. "You would smear my name? I have given to temples and feasts. I have not—"
"Silence," Denis snapped, but the command came too late.
Azariah reached down and produced a folded ledger. "This ledger lists shipments from your warehouses to the north, labeled as 'textiles' and 'ritual tools.' The manifest is signed, Denis Bailey, with your mark."
Denis' face tightened. "Those are clerical errors."
"Show the ledger," Azariah said. "Let the people see."
I felt hands squeeze my sleeve; Clara had come and stood close. Kiko's eyes were bright. The crowd pressed forward as if to see a theater unfold.
Azariah opened the ledger and one by one read entries. The names were there—Forrest's warehouses, Giovanni's payments. A murmur grew and then rose like a small storm.
Forrest's grin faded. "Fabrication!" he cried. "This is plotted—"
"Who benefits?" Azariah asked, and there was that cold clarity again. "You who diverted supplies did so for profit. You moved arms under cover. You used the name of a general to legitimise shipments."
Forrest's face lost its rouge; he stepped back as the crowd's voice sharpened like an edge. I could see the first change: from defiant to alarm. He looked at the people in the square and found none smiled back.
"These men," Azariah continued, "hid behind other names. They lied to courts, they took coin, and when Gideon Walter's name was offered as shield they believed themselves beyond reach."
"You're lying!" Giovanni barked. "This is slander—"
"Is this slander?" Azariah asked the crowd, and heads turned, and the merchants who had been plundered stepped forward with invoices and chits. They told truth after truth, one upon another like a folding fan opening.
Denis tried to speak, his lips faltering. "I served the court—"
"You served yourself," Azariah said.
Then the court asked the worst question: who else knew? Fingers pointed to the protective networks—men of influence, men of chamber and ledger—names that would shock families. The crowd had gathered to watch the falling; now they watched a net tighten.
Forrest's reaction climbed a ladder of emotions. First he reddened with anger, then his eyes darted with panic. He lunged for a man in the crowd in a last attempt at bravado and was seized by soldiers. "This is a lie!" he screamed. "You will not—"
People around him began taking out knives, not to kill but to threaten, to show how raw the anger had become. Azariah stepped forward, and his single command calmed the men like a bell.
"Let them speak," Azariah said. "If they beg, let them beg in public. If they plead innocence, let them plead to those they hurt."
So they pleaded, their voices breaking. Giovanni, who had once given grand banquets, now found the tables turned. He looked like a man unskinned by gossip and stripped by the truth. Denis collapsed into a chair when his ledger was read aloud. Forrest knelt in the mud and begged for mercy.
"Please," he said, tears mixing with a crowd's jeers. "I was wrong. I misread the counsel. I thought I could profit without suffering."
The crowd found satisfaction in their fear. They spit in his direction. Some clapped. Some recorded the scene on devices and passed the details to scribes who would make broadsheets. The disgraced men hardened into statues of shame.
Azariah did not turn to vengeance. He sat in judgement with steady hands. "You will pay penalties," he said plainly. "You will return the profits. Your names will be posted for the market's days. You will be removed from offices. You will apologize before those whom you wronged."
"Arrest them so that everyone can see names of traitors," I urged under my breath.
"Yes," Azariah said. "And more than that."
The punishment Azariah decreed was not only legal but ritual: a public recantation for each conspirator. Each man had to stand in the open square and confess his crimes to the people he had deceived. Each was to forfeit privileges to the households harmed, restore what coin still remained, be stripped of titles for years, and be publicly named as discredited. Each would also be forced to serve in towns where they had profited, under watch, performing ledger work and public restitution. Their names would be embroidered on banners with the word "traitor" for six months.
The crowd cheered. The men shrank as if their hide could be peeled.
Forrest's last pleas slid from arrogance into a thin, raw pleading. "I did what men do," he cried. "I sought advantage. Have mercy."
The square replied in the only way the people had left: "How many have you ruined, Lord Forrest? How many wives cried because their sons had no armor? How many tails of livestock were taken so you could have a feast?"
"Enough," someone called. "Let him be made to pay."
Their ruin was public, methodical, and humiliating. They were made to stand in the market and read what they had done. People spat. Children brought pebbles and threw them at the boots of the men who had once tossed silver like confetti. The three men were led away amid jeers and the sound of a city finally having the names it could blame.
In the end, the most searing part was not the jeers or the returned coin. It was the quiet collapse when their former friends—men who had once smiled and raised goblets in tribute to their cunning—turned their faces and would not meet eyes. That, to me, was punishment enough: to be alone in a room where you had once been king.
Their reactions were textbook in heartbreak. They had first been confident and superior; then surprised; then furious; then denying; then pleading; then crushed. The crowd moved around them like tides. People who had been hesitant now recorded everything, posted notices, and wrote oaths that they would never again be fooled. Those who had once clapped now looked away. The punishment had many forms, and the public nature of it made the sting worse.
When the three men knelt on the cold stones and offered their recantations, several bystanders shouted their disgust and some even spat in the men’s faces. A young merchant held up a torn shirt that was a remnant of shipments the men had seized. "This went to bury a soldier's son," he cried. "Is this right?"
The men were not only punished by law but by social death. Their households closed their doors. Their wives and children moved away or were taken in by kin who would not speak with them. The net that had once lifted them had become a noose.
I stood beside Azariah and watched the men be carted away. Gideon had returned by then—thin, tired, but standing. He watched too, with a face like a cold stone.
"You did well," I said to Azariah quietly.
"We did what was necessary," Azariah answered. "Justice must be seen."
Later, when the rain had washed the square and washed up the filth of that day, the court was quieter. The emperor had smiled thinly and said little. People spoke kindly of Azariah as a prince with a hand for fairness. Gideon kept to himself and did not speak to me as one might expect. He had been cleared publicly, and yet some things that are cleared by words are still salted by the past.
In the weeks that followed, truth came like a slow tide. The emperor declared pardons for those misled. The navy rolls were corrected. Orders were sent to rearm the border. Gideon rode out to command again, and I watched him in the stable, handling a horse like a man who has given up a promise he meant to keep.
"Will you go?" I asked him once in the garden as leaves fell like small coins.
"I must," he said. "There is a place where no one will be safe if we do not take it back."
"Will you be happy?" I asked, though I knew the answer.
He did not answer right away. He walked to the edge of the garden and took a breath of cold air.
"I am not allowed simple happiness," he said finally. "I have a debt to a name and to the land. I will do what I must."
Azariah and I married in a small, warm ceremony screened from much rumor. His hands were steady; his vows were plain. "I will defend you," he said, and his voice had the truth of a blade. "I will be with you against wind and rumor."
I married him because the world had room for more than one kind of love. Azariah was calm and sure. Gideon had been lightning and storm. Amira was a bright thing who had bewildered me into an understanding that not all devotion meant what I had imagined. Each person held a piece of my life and I held a piece of theirs.
Gideon left not long after. He rode toward a season of arguing in court and war in the north. He sent a letter once, a short thing that smelled faintly of horse and steel.
"Joanna," it read, "I asked you to paint once. It was a silly request made by a foolish man. Keep the painting. Keep it for yourself. If I ever break your peace, think of it as a debt I owe the sky."
I kept the painting. I kept Azariah. I kept the summers and winters as they came, small and manageable. I kept a pocket of grief and folded it neatly like a handkerchief.
Years later, when the empire settled calmer skies and the name Gideon Walter became part of the stories told about valor, I sometimes walked alone where the snow used to fall and thought of a man who had knelt with the world at his feet and rose with a new price.
Once, when I was restless at night, I found a scrap of a letter from Amira—she had married into a minor house and sent a basket of preserves. "Gideon is gone sometimes," she wrote. "But he never forgets the small things. He taught my son to read a soldier's map."
"Did you forgive him?" Clara asked me once over tea.
"I forgave him the way a woman forgives the tides," I said. "The tide takes; the tide brings. You do not argue with the sea."
Azariah laughed softly. "You have a poet's patience."
"No," I said. "Only the memory of a girl who once waited in snow."
And sometimes, on a winter night when the lamps were low and my child's breathing a steady bell, I would take out the painting and turn it upside down. There, in the ink, was a small inscription I had written years before: "Three wishes." I had meant them at the time like a young, furious prayer—one to be kept, one to be broken, one to be denied.
I had written, "May you reach the years you ought," then scratched out the rest and wrote plainly, "May we never meet again."
Azariah woke up when I set the painting aside, and he touched my hair.
"Do you regret?" he asked.
"No," I answered. "I had winter. I had my lesson. I have more than a lesson."
He smiled and said nothing more.
There are still nights when the moon is thin and I think of Gideon walking a ridge in cold. There are mornings when Azariah pours tea and hums without meaning to. There are afternoons when my child laughs at a small bird in the yard and I forget the old things.
Once, in the market, I saw Forrest Otto hauled past in a cart, his head bowed, a sign around his neck. He looked broken. People spat. Children pointed. The sight was awful and small, perfect as a punishment that had the weight of ruin.
"Good," Clara muttered beside me. "He deserved it."
"Maybe," I said. "But watch a man when everyone leaves. That is when truth shows itself."
The city move on. Azariah sits reading state papers under light. Gideon rides somewhere beyond the borders and is sometimes in dispatches as a man who keeps his word more to a cause than to a girl. Amira's name is a bright thread I pull softly on a day when I am cruel enough to wonder what might have been.
I learned that promises are not one thing. They are apologies, bargains, debts, and gifts. Some come with winter, some with summer, and some with the slow friendships of comfort. I learned also that humiliation can be public, as when men fall from high places and the whole square watches; or it can be private, lodged in the quiet grief of a single woman folding away a dress.
"Do you miss him?" Azariah asked me one deep night when our child slept and the house was full of breathing.
"I miss the version of him who promised to come back," I said. "But I don't miss the way his promise became a knife in a hall."
Azariah pressed his forehead to mine. "Then your life is honest."
"Yes," I answered. "Honest and complicated."
Outside, in the garden, the first snow of winter began to fall. It fell on things that had been broken and on things that were being remade. It fell on the bench where I had once waited, on Gideon's old path, and on Azariah's footprints. It settled on the painting I had kept and on the cradle tucked in our room. The cold would pass. We would live.
The End
— Thank you for reading —