Sweet Romance13 min read
Snow, Tea, and Two Promises
ButterPicks12 views
I still remember the snow the day my life cracked open.
"It is decided. I return my pledge," Grant Robin told the court, bowing so deep before my father that his forehead nearly grazed the floor.
The hall swallowed the words and held them as if afraid to breathe. "Grant," my father roared. "What madness is this?"
"I know my place," Grant said, steady as iron. "I am unworthy of Princess Arielle. I beg leave to dissolve our engagement."
"Unworthy?" Father stood so fast his robe rustled like dry leaves. He snatched the tea cup nearest him and flung it. Scalding tea flew, and the porcelain broke against Grant's head—hot water and blood streaking down the side of his face.
"Father—" I grabbed at my father's sleeve. "Please—do not be angry."
I knew the truth in my own ribs before anyone else could speak it aloud: it was not that Grant was unworthy of me. The truth was I had never been worthy of him. Grant Robin came from the great House of Robin—three ancestors who had been empresses, four chancellors, six generals; the family's name itself was an honor. Had my mother not been in the blessed favor of Grant's aunt, we would never have been matched. I had learned to live within the confines of courtesy and contrition, the way a plant learns the edge of a pot.
Grant pressed his palms to the floor. "If Your Majesty sees fit, punish me as you will." His voice was not pleading. It was steel.
I surprised myself then. I slid beside him and knelt. "Father, if General Grant will not have it," I said softly, "let it be so."
He looked up at me as if he had not understood the weight of my words until that moment. For the first time that morning, our thoughts moved together—he and I in the quiet place of compromise.
"Very well," Father said finally. "Let it be ended."
"Thank you, Your Majesty," both Grant and I said in the same breath. The hall hummed with whispers. Those women in the rows—ladies who had always looked past me—looked as if someone had shown them how to curl their lips tighter.
Afterwards, when the crowd thinned and the day folded into a pale, snowy dusk, I stumbled out of the palace. Snow settled on my sleeves, and my lashes collected tiny crystals. I breathed out. Fog rose like a little ghost from my mouth.
"Who are you? You should not be alone out here," a voice said, bright as a bell in a room of dull tones.
He stepped out from behind a garden rock—red robe, a white fox-fur cloak thrown over his shoulders. His eyes, narrow and lively, held a mole at one corner that somehow made his face both handsome and wickedly amused. He leaned forward, chin cupped in his palm. "You stammer," he said.
"I do not," I replied, with the nasal hitch the court had long teased me about.
"Then—" he laughed, then put his gloved hand over mine and it was warmer than the sunlit iron of my chest. "Small hands. Cold hands."
He called me "little stammerer" at first like it was an experiment. "Don't cry," he urged when my breath faltered.
I refused to cry, but when he wrapped that fox fur around my shoulders and tied it with a ridiculous bow, something odd and soft leaked out of me—relief, maybe. "Thank you," I said, though I felt foolish.
He walked me part of the way back. "Remember this: if something doesn't please you, do not suffer it for long. Live according to your heart," he said, and I only nodded.
Later I learned his name—Emery Duncan—and that the city whispered about him as the Duke's roguish heir. He was a maker of trouble and a breaker of rules: cockfights and dog-fights and nights spent with gambling cards. His family called him a wayward sun; other people called him a scandal.
We met again not by design but by small accidents—me at my friend's birthday, him sitting in the upstairs room of a tavern like he belonged nowhere else but to mischief. Kaydence Collins, my closest friend, tugged my sleeve that day. "You're late," she scolded.
"Traffic," I lied. "Gifts?" I offered a small box; I could not pretend I did not care how I looked in public.
Kaydence grinned and pulled me to a seat. "Tell me everything," she said, conspiratorial.
While the party unspooled, someone tossed a game into the room: a ring of water like a tiny stream to float a plum blossom. Whoever had the blossom float to them had to tell a story, answer a question, or drink the cup before them.
Emery's laugh cut the mild tension when the blossom floated his way. "Answer a question," he said.
"What trouble have you lately found agreeable?" Kaydence asked.
"Recovering something I've misplaced," he said, which sounded like mischief and also like promise.
When the blossom bobbed to my side, someone—sharp-tongued Wu—asked, "Do you regret the end with General Grant?"
The room went quiet, like a pitcher tipping that might spill. I looked at Grant without meaning to. He looked back and his face was granite but gentle. I could not say no.
Emery's hand covered mine. "I'll drink for her," he said, and tipped the cup down like a man who didn't mind the heat.
When Grant accidentally knocked over a small pot of hot tea in the next moment, scalding his hand, I moved first. "Take her away," the hostess said, worried, and Grant left for a side room to change.
Emery's smirk softened when he saw how my eyelids fluttered. "You owe me dinner," I told him, ridiculous as it was.
"Then I will accept in the proper way," he said. He wasn't like others: he spoke often and he listened when I faltered. He asked things. He saw me as more than a title.
Snow became a motif in my life—firm, silencing, honest. That winter passed and the next year rolled in with festival days and quiet summers. I moved from palace life to my own residence as the court thought proper. The public part of marriage vanished with the breaking of a promise, but the private part, the ache, lingered.
Emery was peculiar in his care. He would climb walls—or have his servants do so—and appear with small things: a half-grown kitten, a wooden box with a folded paper inside. "Open it," he would say with an impatient grin. Once the paper said, "From Emery," and wrapped inside was a simple pin shaped like a butterfly and a jade bangle. He would say such gifts were meant for my hands and not for show. "Keep them," he said. "Carry them like the things that make you brave."
"You act as if you are courting me," I teased once, when he showed up in ruins of a duck fight, covered in feathers and dust.
"Because I am," he said simply.
The city liked gossip, and the gossip said two things: General Grant had taken ill, and Emery had once again gotten himself into trouble with his father. "It is either a disgrace or drama," Kaydence told me. She was my mirror, my bluntness when I needed it. "Which will it be?"
I sent hot broths and calming herbs to Grant's estate. I meant it. Some things do not vanish because a ribbon is pulled.
One day, word came that the hunting party the Emperor himself led would be opened to the ladies this year. I was given permission to go.
Snow fell as thin needles when I met Emery in the courtyard. He wanted to be brave; he wanted to win. "I'll be the first," he promised, already clasping my hand to choose a horse.
We raced and the cadence of hoofbeats felt like music. I rode a small red horse Emery insisted would be "just right." He teased me about my haste. "If I win, will you agree to be my wife?" he asked in a way that made my heart trip.
"If you win," I said, eyes bright, "you must understand what that means."
He laughed, but the world tilted on its hinge and time folded like cheap paper.
A rope hidden in the snow caught my horse's feet. The thud and the fall were a blur. I thought I would throw up. Wind ripped the air, and the cold bit my arms. Yet instead of hitting stone, I landed in something softer and my chest felt the shock of other hands.
"Are you hurt?" a voice pleaded. It was Grant—he had come from somewhere I could not fathom. He helped pull me and then—another sound. Emery, dashed to the spot, his face white as both horses shuddered. "Arielle! Are you—"
My left arm burned. I smelled iron. But worse was Emery's groan. He had caught me and, in doing so, fallen badly into the slope. His back was a landscape of blood and ragged cloth.
"Save him," I said, because my voice had only one priority.
Grant gave me no choice. "You ride," he said. "I'll stay."
"Grant—"
"Go."
I did. We were each other's lifelines that day: Grant to Emery, me toward the aid, and the court tore apart a plan that had been set like a snare. There would be inquiries. There would be names.
In private, I resented Grant for his distance and thanked him with a bowed head all the same. He had been honest about his inability to be mine. He was a noble with the weight of his house. Yet he stayed when it counted.
When Emery returned to consciousness, his world had flattened into a single focus: me. He held my hand as if it was the earth itself. "You promised," he whispered. "Say it again."
"I said it," I told him, though everything else trembled: the court, the rumors, the way men moved in the dark.
The hunt's accident opened a corridor to something uglier: a plot by several exiles who'd hidden in the empire's underbelly for years. A rope meant to break a rider now became proof of intent. The men behind it were not soldiers or ragged bandits. They were traitors with names and family histories. The Emperor, fierce as a winter storm, ordered them brought to the capital.
They were paraded before the court the day the city bloomed with spring. I was there in my husband's robes—Emery had recovered enough to stand at the dais—and I did not know then how short the world could be between mercy and triumph.
Dagger Scholz was the name that turned thousands of tongues. He was tall, angular, and the sort of man whose face had the look of someone used to being believed. He was presented before the court in chains, his companions reduced to whimpering figures.
"These men," the chief investigator said, "conspired to attack the imperial hunting party. They intended to assassinate a noble to cause uproar."
"Who hired you?" the judge demanded.
Dagger spat. "No one. We did what we did for ourselves."
The Emperor's eyes were hard as broken glass. "You will answer in full," he said. "Confess in front of the people you tried to frighten."
So the punishment began.
They summoned commoners, merchants, soldiers, women with eyes like hawks whose sons had died in the border raids these men had aided. The courtyard filled—not with the hushed formality of the court but with the human sound of anger: footsteps, cries, whispers turning into shouts.
Dagger was prodded forward to the center, and his chains clinked like a warning bell. "You claimed to restore an old dynasty," the investigator said. "Prove it. Tell them who sent you. Name them."
The man laughed—too sharp. "Do you think I betray my masters?"
"Name them or confess here," the investigator said, and the Emperor gave the word for the city guards to restrain him.
"Arielle," someone cried out from the crowd—an old woman whose son had been killed in a border ambush—"did not your people die because of men like this?"
The crowd pressed its weight into the air. Heads turned. Emery's fingers tightened around my hand like an iron band.
"Fine," Dagger sneered. "I will speak."
He began—at first cool, then cracking. "We were promised gold. We were told the empire's borders would fall into chaos and we would be rewarded."
"Who promised you gold?" the investigator asked.
"Men in high places. Men with seals."
"Names!" the crowd demanded.
Dagger's bravado wilted; the sun that had warmed him now heat-flared with the crowd against him. He bit his lips to hold himself. The first name left him like a cough. "Augusto Bartlett," he said. Eyes around the courtyard jumped like fish. Augusto Bartlett was a man of influence, a councilor's son.
"Another," the investigator urged.
"Isaac Vinogradov," Dagger croaked. Gasps echoed. Isaac was a merchant lord whose ships carried tax-stuffed chests. The accusations rolled out—names, times, meetings in wine-dark rooms. He spoke of letters and seals and a map that sketched where to plant panic.
At every spoken name, the crowd transformed. Murmurs hardened into reproach, reproach into invective. A woman who sold linens slapped her palm across her child's face to steady them. Men spat and pointed. "How many of our sons?" someone demanded. "How many lives paid for your coins?"
As Dagger named names, color drained from his face. The arrogance that had filled his shoulders at the start shrank under the people's eyes. He tried to pull back, to reclaim the performance; he tried to claim the names were lies. "They're liars!" he said, voice breaking. "They made me say it—"
"Then prove it!" a soldier barked. "Confess where they paid you!"
But the trap itself had teeth: letters, signed receipts, a silk scarf bearing the crest of a known patron. The investigator held them up one by one. The crowd saw the evidence flutter like little flags.
By the time Dagger stumbled into shame, the courtyard had become a court of public scorn. A merchant woman climbed onto a bench and spat words like arrows. "You think us a market for your treachery? You think we will stand and watch you stitch the nation's hem to ruin?" Her voice cut through like a bell. Men who owed their bread to merchants stiffened. Children clung to their mothers and peered.
Dagger's face shifted as if he had been stitched back inside himself and then torn. At first he tried defiance—"I will not be the one to go down!"—but the crowd would not let him do damage with words. Their stares bored into him like slow nails. He attempted denial, sputtered and twisted, then finally collapsed into the script he'd been given: the defiant proud man. Then only silence came from his mouth. He attempted to find a story where he was the hero, then realized to his terror that no one wanted his stories.
"Shame him," one man shouted.
"Bring forth his masters!" cried another.
The soldiers dragged him to a raised scaffold at the courtyard's edge. They bound him, not to kill, but to display, to make him feel the public's gaze press like a vise. A man in the crowd stepped forward—an ostler whose sons had been conscripted for an ill-fated campaign. He began to tell specifics: where Dagger spoke of routes used to smuggle arms; how he watched Dagger in the moonlight whisper with a noble underwritten by gold. The ostler's voice trembled and so did the onlookers. Photographs there were not, but the equivalent—scribes and people with quick hands—made notes and spread them to the market within hours.
Dagger's composure cracked completely when Kaydence Collins, Kaydence—my friend—stepped forward with a scrap of a letter she had happened upon in her ladyship's chambers. "You used me to memorize names," she said, voice even but edged. "You thought women kept only gossip. You used gossip to weave your lies."
He turned to her, edged with fear. "You cannot—"
"Oh, can I not?" she replied brightly. "We will ensure everyone knows your ledger."
The crowd broke into a noisy roar, a shifting sea that wanted names and justice. They wanted the men who had financed treachery to feel the sudden chill of want and exposure. They wanted to see that the gilded hands were not beyond shame. That day, Dagger's final mask fell. He went from swagger to denial to a white-faced man who saw his voice betray him like a pet or an instrument broken beyond repair.
Emery stood with me through it all. When Dagger finally, with ragged hesitance, muttered another name of a person of rank, the man named was seized from his place among the audience and dragged forward pale-faced. He blustered and pleaded. He tried tears and threats. The crowd, who had once passed him in the market and pretended ignorance, now pointed and remembered every slight, every tax, every family he had slighted. He tried to buy off the guards. He tried to run. Soldiers held him down while the Emperor ordered the city's magistrates to take custody.
The punishment that followed was deliberately public and as humiliating as the law allowed: confiscation of property, public recantations, the stripping of crests for the markets and the posting of their crimes outside the gate. For some, the judge required them to stand on the scaffold and answer the names of those they had hurt. For others, they were set to work making the rope they had intended for murder—only now to mend the roads and repair bridges where their greed had built holes.
No one was killed in the courtyard's spectacle, but the effect was worse than death. Dagger and his masters lost their names among the people, their faces catalogued in shame for every passerby to see. They watched as their belts were taken, their scrolls removed, their houses opened and pillaged of hidden stashes. The merchants who had feigned surprise at the banquet now wept at the loss of their comfortable chair. Those who had once bowed to them turned their backs.
The crowd's reaction swept beyond the punitive to the intimate. Women spat at them. A noble's coachman—someone who had been schooled in fear—ripped off his master's scarf and threw it into the mud. Children ran forward and wrote on the boards that had once carried these names, "Traitors," "Thieves," "Cowards." Scribes wrote the whole thing down and circulated it through the city; the markets hummed with the story like a hive.
Dagger's face went through an arc that read like tragedy: arrogance, flicker, outrage, denial, then collapse. He pleaded, then denied, then tried to blame his own men, and finally sobbed in open sight. His final change—when he begged the Emperor for mercy and then recoiled at the emptiness of the plea—was a slow undoing. The sight of him shivering under the people's verdict felt like the world turning over.
When the Emperor called for restraint, it didn't mean pity. He meant this: let the people see the punishment; let it be a lesson. The city's need for justice had its catharsis that day, and I stood holding Emery's hand while the world shook with a strange, cleansing noise.
After Dagger's confession, after the public humiliations were carried out, after the last name was posted on the boards at the city's gates, silence settled like a blanket of snow.
Emery squeezed my hand. "You were brave to put your trust in the inquiry," he said simply.
"I wasn't the only one," I answered.
As the court turned to moral repair—rebuilding trust, placing soldiers on borders again—I found myself on a quieter path. Emery's care of me was no longer a game of flirtations; he had put himself where injury could follow and had never asked why. The Emperor, satisfied that the traitors had been unmasked, granted us the formalities he had promised.
We were married on a day when red silk made the world feel warm even as snow lay in its corners. Emery took my hand before the Emperor and those who mattered to him. The vows were small, the heat of the covers small, and the days afterwards a soft domestic of chess matches, garden walks, and Emery bringing me the oddest gifts—an awkward lotus hat, a half-grown bird, a small carved horse.
And then the news came like frost: Grant Robin, the man whose presence had once been a gravity in my life, had been declared dead on the northern frontier. He had fallen to a rain of poisoned arrows, the doctors could do nothing. I sat with the news in my lap, feeling as if a drum had been struck and the echo had hollowed me.
"You loved him," Emery said that night, in a voice I had never heard so careful. "It is allowed."
"At times," I admitted. "I thought— maybe he and I were a story of what might have been."
Emery's fingers threaded through mine. "We are what we are," he said. "And we will be honest with one another."
I thought of Grant in his quiet ways, lying under a peach tree in the palace garden, holding my paper kite. I thought of the small letter he had left—those modest words he had sent later: "Peace and prosperity. A household blessed."
I thought, too, of Dagger and the public rope, of the way the city had turned a bright light on corruption and watched it twist. People would talk about that day for a long time—about the way the crowd punished those who thought themselves untouchable.
In the quiet that followed, sometimes Kaydence and I would walk in the palace gardens and watch the plum trees bloom. "You were reckless," she said once, and I laughed.
"We both were," I corrected. "We were young. We thought vows were like strings we could unknot."
She glanced at Emery, who was courting me in a way that felt like home. "You are less lonely than you were," she said.
"Yes," I said. "I am."
If anyone asks me now what I learned from snow and ruined tea and two men who loved me different ways, I would say this: honesty is a light. It can warm and it can burn. Better to stand where it can reach you than to bow to shadows.
When I open the drawer beside my bed, there is a small wooden box. Inside sits a pale bangle with slight pink hues and a folded note. The note reads, "For your safe journey," in a crabbed, slanted hand. I touch the bangle and remember the man who sent it and the one who stayed. I let the memory be a thing that lives, not one that pulls me down.
Life goes on. The city breathes. The plum trees blossom, and for a while at least, we are whole.
The End
— Thank you for reading —