Rebirth15 min read
Springhairpin and the Two Souls: A Reborn Bride’s Gamble
ButterPicks11 views
I remember the exact rasp of ash when I set fire to the Chancellory House—the night I decided I would rather burn with my pride than live as anyone’s humiliation. I remember how the flames licked the dark like an accusation and how, through heat and smoke, the face I had loved for sixteen years looked like an altar I could not climb anymore.
“You are going to watch us burn,” I told no one then, but I said it to the sky.
When I opened my eyes again, I was standing by my window exactly one month before Brecken Chandler came to tell me our contract was ended. The dream of the flames lingered like a scar. I had one clean chance to stop that ending. I would not be the woman who begged to be loved. I would not be the woman who accepted humiliation.
“Leticia,” my mother said when I announced my plan, “are you sure? Once you press a petition in the Empress’s hands—”
“I am sure,” I said. “I will ask for a decree.”
I went to the palace. In the hallway of jade and silk, the air smelled of ink and power. I found the Empress with my heart drum-tight.
“You want me to issue it?” the Empress asked, fingertips turning a bead of moonlight to gold.
“Yes,” I answered. “Either Brecken Chandler and I are wed, or we are not. If we are not destined, set us both free. If we are destined, then make it so.”
The Empress smiled a slow smile and stamped a small scroll with her seal: “Let them be unbound.”
I felt a foolish little triumph at that moment. A decree unbinding our contract should, by all reason, have set free the man who had once stood knee-deep in snow to swear he would make me a proper wife. Yet Brecken took the decree in hand and came to my house every night.
“You accepted the Empress’s papers,” I told my maid, Small Iris. “Then what do you want? Why haunt us?”
Small Iris slipped a note through the lattice. “He won’t leave you as promised.”
At midnight I pushed open my window and there he was, clothed in ink-dark, a silhouette on the garden wall.
“You promised to leave,” I said, but the moon caught his jawline.
“Who told you I wanted to leave?” Brecken’s voice was a blade and a hush at once. “Leticia Nichols, do you think I change like the wind?”
“I told the Empress to unbind us,” I said. “I said it for both our sakes.”
He climbed in like a creature born to that motion. “Say, who else have you set your heart on?” he asked, dangerous and small.
“You think I trade? You think I bargain?” I laughed, because the world was a joke if I could no longer believe in him. “Go. I don’t want to marry you.”
“You will tell me who,” he demanded.
“That’s—” I started.
“Is that who you want?” He stepped so close the scent of rain and iron braided through me.
“No one,” I lied, then gave him the hairpin he had carved for me years ago, an ivory thing with a green vein, and said, “This is yours. Take it. The rest is your business.”
“No,” he said. “Be honest. You said you don’t love me. I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t love you,” I said again, with a stab of the old fever there was in me. The memory of being thrown aside in the last life burned under my ribs. I would not let that happen. Not again.
Brecken smiled like a man who had been given permission to explode. “Fine. You think the heart changes like weather? Come to the palace ball. You see who you like. I’ll look for your rival.”
“You mean you’ll show up anyway,” I said.
He tilted his head, the moonlight like iron on his cheek. “I’ll come. And I will show you how the person you once loved still stands.”
Our history needed no telling. We had been promised to each other before we could speak. I had shared games and secrets with him, and once, under a snow sky, he knelt on his knees and whispered promises with his hands raw, saying, “I will bring home titles for you.”
He could be reckless, hard, fearless. He could also unmake me with a look. Over the years that followed the Empress’s decree, he changed in a way my past self had not seen coming. I learned through memory that he would bring another woman—Juliette Marino—into our world, as if a new name could erase sixteen years.
“You are not the one who will shy away,” he told me later, by candlelight. “If there’s a path back, I’ll find it.”
“Then don’t be late,” I said. “Don’t leave me in the cold of your absence.”
He pressed his forehead to mine and whispered, “I will bring you a new hairpin for spring.”
The palace ball was the theater of our undoing. Juliette’s arrival was like a spotlight: white dress, a laugh that sounded practiced, and a sway so precise it made the new courtiers restless. She walked as if the floor had been laid for her feet.
“Brecken,” she greeted him with a sweetness that smelled of made things. “I heard you had been generous in the west.”
He bowed once, a general’s bow, and for a moment I felt nothing but the cool iron of jealousy. Juliette, though pretty, belonged to the parade of things men used to craft destiny. People talked—they said she had once dressed as a soldier, had saved Brecken in a skirmish. People have a hunger for rescue stories.
“You knew her before?” I asked Brecken later, helpless.
“An episode once,” Brecken said. Then he surprised me: “Would you play music with me?”
The Empress watched from above like a moon with teeth. It was the oddest kindness—Brecken defending me from Juliette’s presumed claim. He leaned in and spoke to me like old days. “If you are tired, I’ll see you back.”
“You saw me back,” I said. “You stayed.”
He stayed. That night, he did what he did best: he closed the space between us like a wound sutured. He offered to walk me out, and when he set his palm to my back, the world rearranged. For the first time since the decree, when he held me the air was not full of frost.
“Tell me,” he said softly. “If you did not love me, why did you give away my hairpin?”
“Because you would find another way to make me yours,” I said.
He kissed me like a man who had come back from a dark place. “I will not let that other way win.”
But the dream I had—my old death by fire—was not so easy to lay down. In the past, after we were married, Brecken’s body looked the same, but a different man’s voice used it: cold, cutting, foreign. He had mocked me openly, some nights cruel in the bed they shared. His household moved like the teeth of a trap. The same things might happen again. I had no choice but to pull at the strings I had been given.
I began to probe. I visited the monastery where a slow-eyed master named Archmaster Jonas sat like a pebble in a mountain stream.
“You think any human can change another human into a stranger?” I asked him, words raw.
He smiled the small smile of old men. “The mind is many rooms. A stranger can hide in a house. Sometimes strangers are not strangers at all.”
“Could a strange visitor hide within a man and speak through his mouth?” I pressed.
Jonas cupped his hands, a gesture of both prayer and calculation. “If the world you know allows it. Some spirts wear faces like borrowed coats.”
“It happened to Brecken,” I said.
He raised a brow. “Then what did you do?”
“I make him feel things again,” I answered. “Or I will burn down whatever tries to take him.”
“You always loved the fire, Leticia,” Jonas murmured.
Rumors and a thousand small signs followed. Brecken went away to the west to fight mid-border rebels; letters came in with talk of loss and rescue. When he returned, something in him had loosened—the way a river changes a stone. There were nights he spoke like the man who taught me swordplay, the one who carved a hairpin and kissed me beneath sea-salt moonlight. There were nights someone else’s laugh rode his tongue.
The first time I saw the foreignness fully, I nearly threw up.
At the base of the old oak, where the servants kept the winter wood, a man with moonlight in his face and something else beneath—call it blood-slick arrogance—stood leaning against the stacked logs. He wore the same collar, the same set of family signets. But his eyes were not Brecken’s. They were sharp, garden-pruning knives.
“You asked me to bring you a wife,” the foreignness said as if answering a summons. “I brought you an empress of my making.”
Brecken—real Brecken—stood like someone watching through glass but unable to move. His jaw worked as if he wanted words.
“That is not you,” I said plainly.
“Names do not matter,” the foreignness replied. “You fill your mouths with names and stories. I take what I need.”
The man’s name, as both rumor and a wandering monk said, was Evan Thomas. He was not a general; he was a trespasser. He had a temper that smelled of old books and rotten fruit, a cunning like a small wealth of thieves.
I found Brecken alone, his eyes bruised by sleeplessness. “Tell me,” I demanded. “Do you know him?”
Brecken’s throat clicked. “I hear voices sometimes. I see things moving at the edge of things. I try to speak, and the voice that answers is not mine.”
“Then we find him,” I said. “We pull the collar from the neck of the thing pretending to be you.”
He tilted his head, confused, then steadying. “What are you—what will you do?”
“I will not be the woman who burns and then wakes to do it again,” I said. “I will be the woman who drags him out and leaves the impostor to drown in his lies.”
It was a fight of cunning more than steel. We learned the rhythm of the intruder: the foreignness took control when Brecken slept and when he bled. Pain—actual, physical—pushed the stranger back. That first time we discovered it, Brecken, in a rare act of self-wounding, took the tip of a knife to his own shoulder. He screamed like a child—then his body convulsed and slipped, as if something in his chest loosened.
“It hurt me,” he said through tears. “It hurt and it left me for a little while.”
“You will never need to injure yourself for me,” I said. “So long as I have breath, I will stay by you.”
It was arrogant and naive, perhaps, but necessary. If the foreignness was like a parasite that shrank before pain, perhaps we could make him weak, reveal him.
We set a trap. We spread a whisper that the Empress wished to see all parties bear witness to truth. A court room, rows of courtiers, the high dais and the low-throated buzz of many small animals that make up a court. In the center, we placed Brecken. He was to be his true self. We put Juliette in the audience because she was part of the lie; she had been coastal-made hopeful, and there were too many stitches of guilt in her mouth.
The day came and the palace chamber crowded like the inside of an angry bell. I stepped forward and said what I knew in quiet words I wanted to be heard.
“Brecken Chandler has been taken by a stranger,” I told the Empress and the court. “He has been spoken through. I ask for a trial of truth.”
“You ask for a spectacle,” said the Empress. “You will have a verdict. Speak.”
“Evan Thomas,” I said. “He is not a soldier of my country. He is a parasite. He made Brecken’s life a plaything. Bring him here.”
There were murmurs. Juliette’s cheeks paled like petals after frost.
The man who had stolen a man’s face walked in, smug as a cat that owns a room. Evan Thomas nodded as if he was returning a borrowed book.
“I did what I had to do,” he said, and he spoke with a voice like a quill scraping glass. “You do not understand what it is to be hungry.”
The Empress’s eyes were small hard beads. “Speak truth now or be unmanned.”
We had prepared witnesses: old servants, a monk who had seen Evan whisper to Brecken at night when the candles guttered, and a courier who had tracked mid-border bandits said to have been paid by a man who laughed like a cracked bell.
I moved through a series of actions meant to hurt and to release. I placed a mirror before Brecken and had him look into his own face and recite the vows we had once spoken. My mouth trembled—a dangerous tremor—because I had to coax the real man back. We called his mother, an old woman whose heart could break rock. We called soldiers he had marched with into storms.
“Tell them who you are,” I said to Brecken as if commanding a soldier. “Tell them your name.”
“My name is Brecken Chandler,” he said, the syllables like metal. He said it twice and then a third time as if the sound willed him into being.
Evan smiled then, the smile of a man who has been discovered but insists on enjoying the moment longer. “A pretty play,” he said. “But you cannot unmake fate.”
The Empire’s hall held its breath. The Empress inclined her head.
“Let the confession be public,” she declared. “If this man claims another’s face, let him stand in the market square.”
So we set a punishment. But the law called not for strangling nor a private knife—this had to be theatrical, a punishment that would peel away Evan’s dignity like an onion.
At noon the market was a hive. Merchants, soldiers, the city’s small kings and queens—their capillaries running with gossip—assembled in a crescent around the raised stone. They brought with them the taste for spectacle; they had a hunger that matched Evan’s.
Brecken walked at the center, the man who had been stolen, but whose eyes were now like flint. Evan Thomas was bound with a rope that dragged.
“You took his life as a stage,” I called to the crowd. “You made a man speak what was not his to say. Today you will be named.”
The Empress declared the charges loud enough for every ear: impersonation, manipulation of a noble’s mind, conspiracy with foreign brigands. The charges were dirt-fine and exacting. For public humiliation, for the theft of a man’s honor, for the plotting that cost lives, the punishment would be a spectacle of exposure.
First, the heralds read the list of his offenses—each word a scraped coin. Then, Juliette, who had been made to stand at the edge of the square, stepped forward. She had been a willing accomplice in that she was a ladder to feed Evan’s pride. Her face flamed.
“Stand and tell the truth,” I said. My voice would not tremble. “Tell them where you first met him.”
She opened her mouth, and what came out was a tremor and then honesty: “He spoke to me as if I were a story I had not yet read. I wanted to be read.”
The crowd hissed. The merchants loosened their collars.
Next, Evan’s conquests—the men and women whose affairs he had ruined—were called. A soldier who had lost his wife to a rumor Evan had spread came forward. An old scribe who had been paid to rewrite letters confessed to carrying Evan’s words into noble houses. A child who had watched a man collapse in the square told what he had seen: “He found a man and made him say his words.”
At the center, the Empress declared what the people would do: first, Evan would be stripped of titles. Then the city would name him—a public shaming that would last for a year: a painted placard with his crimes hung around the city gate. But that was not the worst, not for him.
For the worst, he would be made to face those he had stolen from. One by one, they would peel back the lies he had worn like a cape. The crowd would watch him stand while the people he hurt spoke their names and their losses aloud. The idea was that a man who had hidden behind other names would be forced into his own.
Juliette stood to speak again. Her words were short. “He promised me what I could not ask of a man. I wanted more.”
When they led Evan forward, the old scribe stepped close and spat the truth in the sun. He read letters Evan had written to noble houses—letters promising favors in exchange for obedience. The soldier whose wife had been dishonored told of how Evan had spun false stories into a fever of rumor.
The final humiliation was the market square’s loudest bell. They brought forth a simple box and placed it in the center. It contained masks—many masks of men and women, plaited and painted. The magistrate explained: “Evan Thomas will be made to try on each mask and proclaim who he is. The more masks he wears, the more he will remember the faces he stole. Until he cannot tell: himself or the others.”
He put on the first mask, a merchant’s smiling face. Evan’s voice changed, and for a breath the crowd believed him. He put on another—an old beggar—and the voice was a rasp. Each mask tugged his eyes with memories not his own. He staggered. The final mask was small, scratched, and it fit like a lover’s hand. Evan raised it and looked at the crowd as if trying to trade back the world. He faltered.
Then, Brecken walked up to him. He took off one more mask and pressed it into Evan’s hands. “Name yourself,” Brecken demanded. “What do you want, Evan Thomas? Why steal a life?”
Evan sagged. He pried at the rope around his wrists, then let his arms fall. He laughed once, a poor little dry sound. “To be seen,” he said so plainly that the laughter died. “To be someone.”
“That someone was a person you killed slowly,” Brecken said. He said it like a verdict and stabbed the word with his eyes.
For the final moment, the Empress ordered the crowd to spit on the placard that bore Evan’s name—a ritual stripping of dignity. They did. The merchants spat. Mothers shielded their children. Juliette turned as white as dawn.
Evan fell to his knees. The masks lay around him like a broken constellation. He clawed at the dirt with hands that had promised kingdoms and given only ashes.
“You will live as a beggar,” the Empress decreed—“and you will not bear another man’s name. For a year, you will serve in the palace storerooms and do honest labor. Let the world see you without theater.”
He trembled. The punishment was public; it stripped his future into pieces the crowd could pick apart. He would be watched, scorned, and remembered as a thief of people. He tried to protest, he tried to shout that his pain was a hunger—no one listened.
When they took him away, Juliette collapsed into a bench seat and began to sob, wracked with a grief that was partly for herself. The crowd dispersed, their voices a river of satisfaction and gossip. The Empress watched the retreating figures with a cold expression and then turned to Brecken.
“You have your man back, then?”
He nodded once. He looked at me, and in that look was the weight of all the nights and the fight and the kiss he had given me under the pear blossom tree.
But the world is not gentle. That evening the Empress had other decrees. The Emperor’s bedchamber was an empty throne of mystery; the scarred man Evan Thomas had once used to enter the Emperor was gone, but another dark thing lay in wait. There were more shadow-threads than one could count. A second soul had been flirting over the capital’s edges.
I had won a battle. But if the world had rooms full of thieves, there were more doors to close.
After the market punishment, Brecken and I remained bound by a new honesty. He walked me to my chamber, hands rough and warm.
“Next time,” he said, voice crooked with fatigue, “tell me first.” He put his forehead to mine. “I do not want you to go alone.”
“I will not,” I said. The words tasted of the fatigue that comes after the battle has been won. Nothing about the night felt clean. I thought of fire again and felt both giddy and ashamed.
We married in the Empress’s grace soon after. We stood beneath lantern-light and spoke vows I had once burned to make real. He smiled in private moments, and I learned all over again that a man can be two things: one he wants to be, and one he can be forced to become. I promised myself to guard him, to pull at the dark and pry it loose.
On our wedding night, when the curtains were drawn and the servants dismissed, he kissed me with the tired dignity of men who have marched through storms. “I am yours,” he said. “I have been stolen, but I am back. I will not be taken again.”
I believed him. I had to. For once, I let myself believe and fell asleep wrapped in his arms, the carved spring hairpin catching the moonlight like a promise.
Weeks later, there were loose ends to cut. The Empress had required private investigations into the ring of brigands. The markets whispered of arrests and of broken alliances. Juliette’s family withdrew her from public view. Evan worked at the palace storerooms, hauling grain and suffering the slow sting of public memory. But my victory tasted of metal and ash—proof that a woman can force a fate to turn.
Months passed with hard work and small seasons of quiet. Then, in the hush of dawn, I saw in the courtyard a strange figure—one who walked like a man who had eaten fear for breakfast. He bowed and said, “Lady Leticia. It is time I repay a kindness.”
I looked up and: it was not Brecken. It was a debtor, a courier from the border, someone whose life had been wound into the before-times. The chapter we lived was not free of danger—new ghosts hover near doorways—but I had learned how to fight them.
On the second night of summer, the Empress summoned me.
“How fares your husband?” she asked, eyes not leaving my face.
“He is his own man,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Because there are other matters of the realm that require you and his families to be patient. You have courage, Leticia, enough for two. Keep it.”
I bowed and left, thinking of the hairpin. I took it from its box and held both halves in my palm—the one Brecken had carved, and the replacement he pledged to handcraft. We had torn a lover out of a dream and sewn him back into his proper skin. That night, I placed the two hairpins on my dresser: one shattered, one promised.
Days became months. The story changed but did not evaporate. We moved through the life we had chosen. We held courts and feasts and counseled generals. We laughed, badly and with effort, and sometimes broke bread with people who had once spat on masks.
We never forgot the marketplace, however. The city would always remember Evan’s humiliation; it would not let him hide. Juliette learned that being a ladder for someone else’s hunger leaves you with missing rungs.
And me? I became someone who could both burn and rebuild. I learned that love could be a defense and a weapon. I never burned the Chancellory House again. I set a different kind of fire in the servants’ hearts—a stubborn light that said: do not be taken; do not be borrowed; be present.
In the quiet after the scandal, when I cut out a piece of silk for Brecken’s uniform, he looked at me and said, “I have seen a thousand things in the west, but one sight beats all.”
“What?”
“You. You with smoke in your hair, sharp and fierce. Do not ever forget you are my army.”
I laughed until my breath left me. “Then don’t ever leave me reckless enough to be stolen.”
He pressed the hairpin into my palm and hummed, “Not while I can lift a sword.”
And once, in a dream that visited me when I slept exhausted, I saw the other life—flame, ash, the woman who had burned a house of a man she loved—and the woman in the dream looked not at me but at the man beside me: Brecken, who had been taken and returned. He knelt in fire and said, “If the world ever asks you to burn again, let me burn with you.”
I woke and whispered to him in the morning light. He turned over and kissed my unreckoned freckle.
“We will not be straw for anyone’s fire,” he promised.
We keep that vow like a weapon, folded beneath the pillow: sometimes a shield, sometimes a blade. We learned that the worst acts of the world come from those who would wear another’s face, but the longest acts of love are those that pry those faces off and wash the blood away.
I married him not as a striped prize but as a partner who had, through pain, found his way back. Together we stood at the palace gate when the market bell tolled. The city roared, and this time the sound rose for a man who had been reclaimed.
The hairpins sat in a small box on my dresser. Sometimes I held them and felt the weight of our history—heavy and true. Sometimes I would spin the small carved spring blossom between my fingers and remember the market square, the masks, and the moment when a crowd spat on a name.
That was when I understood: the world will try to steal men and stories. We may lose them. But we can write the next lines of our lives ourselves.
The End
— Thank you for reading —