Sweet Romance18 min read
Sugar, Snow, and the Green Bracelet
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I signed my name at the bottom of the paper and let the cold wind blow on my fingers. The ink blurred. I let it blur.
"I'll be back before dawn," I told my brother when he stood across the courtyard and frowned at me. "It's only the temple, Corbin. I go to pray."
"You've been to the temple for three nights," he said. "One night is enough for any worshipper. Come home."
"One night won't fix what I'm about to do." I tucked the last piece of candy—brown and sticky—into the corner of my sleeve. "Just trust me a little longer."
He patted my hair like I was a child. "Callie, you will lie to me and you'll hurt yourself."
"Then I'll hurt well," I whispered.
Snow blew across the stone steps like dry salt. The monastery bells were thin as a fingernail scratch. He left. I stayed. The door shut with a creak.
I had planned this small rebellion for months. I had been the dutiful daughter of an old house, quiet in company, flawless in bowing, smiling with a measured lift of the eyes. I had been trained to be a good daughter, a pressure valve for family pride. But for one winter, I wanted to be only one thing: selfish.
I wanted to taste one man.
"He is trouble," they all said about Zack Eriksson. "He will burn you and walk away."
"Is that not the point?" I told myself. "One roaring match and the rest of my life goes dark or is light—either way, it is mine."
In the temple guest room it snowed very hard. He sat at the bed edge and watched me like a man reading a dangerous map. His face was the kind that made flowers look guilty for blooming.
"Are you an actual nun?" he asked, pretending a question.
"No," I said. "I am Callie, and I am here to make one memory."
He laughed. The laugh was low and tasted of whiskey. "All women say that at first."
"I mean it," I told him and stepped forward until the fabric between us was only a breath. "I only want the night."
He did an odd thing. He toyed with the thin tie on his robe, found the knot, and pulled. The robe gave. He did not blink when he saw me. His eyes were still the same steady dark lakes. I swallowed and pressed forward.
"You're brave," he said, with a curiosity like an unlit match.
"It's foolishness more than courage." My heart tripped and then beat in a new rhythm. "Do you refuse?"
He smiled—a small slice of something that was both dangerous and patient. "Come here," he said simply.
We lay beside one another. He curled an arm around me that felt like a small wooden gate closing around a house. He tasted of sugar and smoke. He tested me with a question: "Are you afraid?"
"Yes," I whispered, "and I want it to hurt."
He leaned down. His mouth was warm, and his kiss was not kind. It was a claim. It took and took until the world narrowed to a single point of breath.
Later, when he softened, his hand played at the corner of my mouth. "If you throw yourself at a stranger's arms, you are responsible for your choices," he said, as if delivering a lesson. "You will regret things."
"I won't," I told him. "I only want you."
He said, slurred, "All women say that at first." But when he smiled—really smiled for the first time that night—my knees nearly gave out.
He left the promise in the dark like a stone. "I like your mouth. I like the way you speak."
"I like you," I answered. The snow outside stole our words and scattered them. He laughed softly and kissed the place where I had whispered my name. I left the monastery that night with frozen feet and a warmed chest. I had been selfish. I had been free.
The next nights were little rituals. I brought him sweet cakes—candies shaped as tiny moons—and he always lit up when I slid one across his palm. "You keep spoiling me," he'd murmur and lick the sugar from my finger like a child. I would bump my shoulder into his as we walked in the market; he would buy meat because I haggled well. He taught me to ride and to hold a bow. Once he said with a laugh, "You'd make a terrible soldier." I smirked. "I am not a soldier. I am greater mischief."
"Don't pretend you don't know how to excite a man," he said, and his jaw was amused.
I told myself time and again: This is a single flame. Nothing more.
Then the world tore. Corbin found me on the fourth day and hauled me home by the sleeve. "You must stop," he begged. "Father's men have been asking questions. Mother frets. You're on the edge."
"I'm giving you four days more," I bargained. "Four days, and I come along to finish the prayers with you."
He held me to his chest like I was a wounded animal. "Four days, then you are home."
I had three days rolling like marbles of bright light and danger. On the second, Zack surprised me by taking me out of the temple to ride in the big empty of the plain. Wind cut through the layers; the sky was sharp blue. He held me like a thief holds treasure. "First time?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
"Then we'll teach you better." He guided the horse with a gentle hand at the reins and a stronger at my waist.
He told me, almost absentmindedly, that his head was troubled. "Someone said I ruined them," he mumbled. "That I ruined an army. That five thousand died because of me."
"Then leave," I said, startled. "Leave and fight somewhere that matters. Get clean."
"No." He laughed with a dark edge. "If I leave now, those accusations will remain loud. If I stay, at least I can watch. Maybe the blame will quiet."
"Stay and be cheered?" I asked.
"Stay and keep someone I care for safe," he said softly.
He had a softer side that chewed at my lip like a dog with a bone. He wanted to protect a woman—Isabella Benson—someone whose name when he said it made his voice catch. Sometimes he'd spill the bitter half of a memory. "She said one sentence and I tasted my ruin," he'd confess one wet night. "That's what she did."
"I thought you cared for me," I said in a moment of fright and foolish hope.
He looked at me and the look was icy and bright. "We're not the same thing, Callie. Your thing was a delicious theft. Isabella—she was a corner of my life I couldn't let fall apart."
His words were not gentle. I swallowed.
Days later the insults came. A cluster of smug young men—lords with too-clean hands—cut across a country lane and called out to him.
"Zack Eriksson!" one shouted, and then the slurs came like mud. "You who left men to drown—how can you parade about? Traitor!"
They jeered at my presence. One of them lifted a whip. The whip cracked a hair's breadth from my face until Zack's hand slammed the instrument away and the whip teased the air like a snake stung back. He turned those men like a stone and asked me in a quiet voice if I wanted him to break them.
"No," I said, and the corner of my mouth laughed the kind of small sound that comforts the terrible. "No. Let them be small and loud."
He allowed me to speak. "You talk too much," he told me later that day with an amused, dark smile. "You say more than a woman should who lives behind silk."
"And you say less," I replied. "Zack Eriksson, you are cruel to yourself."
His eyes warmed, then flickered hard. "You shouldn't say that so well."
They slung more dirt. A crowd formed. The accusations became knives. "You killed my brother," they shouted, "you let five thousand die!" The pile of voices grew, then turned on us.
I had never seen a man as still as Zack in the face of ruin. He took a beating of words like a wall takes snow. I felt my throat close, the sugar in my pocket burning like guilt. I drew my dagger in a mad, blinding motion and put its cold edge against a nearby man's throat.
"Stop," I snarled. "All of you, stop."
For a breath they paused. For another, the sea of faces rippled, some leaning forward like animals sniffing a new scent. A city clerk recorded everything in his small paper and then, with a small shrug, slipped back into the crowd. The man at my throat squinted with fear and spite. The leader of the jeerers, a lord named Sabine Nunes—a cruel man with a gift for rumor—stuttered, "You are mad."
"Mad? Maybe," I said. "If mad means fed up."
The crowd, hungry for scandal, splintered. And then Zack took the dagger from my hand with an unclenching gentleness that was sharper than any blade. He stepped between me and the man I threatened. He looked at the crowd.
"I am tired of your mouths," he said, voice low and bright. "You will not abuse what you do not understand."
Sabine laughed and spat, "You are soft with women."
"Soft?" Zack said. He turned fully and looked at them like a single storm. "You will be softer soon."
His hand, the grip that felt like iron encased in silk, caught the leader's collar. He raised him, not in rage but as if he were showing a child to a room. The man's face turned as white as the snow. Zack's fingers curved and pressed, and the man's knees buckled.
"Apologize," Zack said, and his voice was a rope pulling taut. "Say the words."
"M—m—I—" the man stammered.
"Not like a liar," Zack hissed. "Like a man who knows his debts."
"Sorry." The word arrived like a thin coin. The crowd laughed, some shrieked, some cheered. The man who had called us names left; his face was streaked with shame and whatever pride could be scraped off. The crowd's reeds cracked under the wind. Some took pictures—paper sketches, the new fad. Some clapped. Some spat at the ground. A few, oddly, cried.
Zack looked at me and there was a small softness, a kind like coal banks after a frost. "Are you hurt?"
"No," I said. "But the crowd will remember my dagger."
"They will remember me picking it up," he replied, and kissed my hand. "I will not have you punished."
I smiled and let shame and relief squabble in my chest. The world had changed; it had turned, and a few men had been seen for what they were: small and noisy. But that scene was nothing compared to what would come later.
Our small world kept moving, spinning in ways both soft and hard. I learned more of the palace's machinery when I returned a bride of ceremony to a place called the Red Hall. I learned how thin the line was between status and survival. I learned that a crown, even when gilded, can be heavy enough to choke.
On the day my marriage was arranged in name only, the street where my bridal procession passed was thick with people. I pulled the red veil tighter because the crowd suddenly seemed full of knives of sight. I hoped to peek. That short moment—just one glance—was the last free thing I would have for a long time. I almost tore the red silk away for the briefest look at the man my heart still stole toward in memory—just a glimpse—and then a drumroll of footsteps and bright banners thundered by: it was Zack who rode past, light and deadly in armor, the crowd parting as he approached.
"Zack!" a man shouted in the street. "You old coward! You killed our sons!" The cry spread like an oil stain. The crowd turned. They pelted him with rotten eggs and with terrible words. I felt each insult like a blade between my ribs.
"Don't," I wanted to shout, but my mouth was part of the protected silliness of my role. I could not step into the street and stand with him.
He stood, faced the onslaught, and took every curse and rotten fruit without fighting. My blood collided and the chance to reach him closed like a falling trapdoor. I clutched at my red veil until my knuckles hurt.
Then something snapped inside me—some small, furious animal. I saw him bent and swallowed by bile and hatred, and I could not watch. I pushed through the closed carriage door, burst out, and sprinted to the pulsing center of that April storm. I drew a small, sharp dagger from my sleeve and pressed it to a man's throat.
"You stop," I screamed. "You will stop now."
They stared at me like someone who had been told a new religion. For a second, the entire mob was a single thing only I could see. Sabine Nunes's face blanched. The man I threatened went pale. Someone started to laugh. Then, with a sound like a wind-snap, Zack—calm and terrible—lifted my hand, gently removed the blade, and set it back in my palm.
"I will not have her touched," he said. "Do you hear me?"
That day, the crowd shifted. Some still cursed. Others, ashamed, dropped their weapons of insult. Sabine's mouth made a small, ugly shape. He had lost the fight that never happened: a man who could have been trampled was stood back into the light. The crowd narrowed its eyes and began to spread new gossip: the man with his arm around the woman in the bridal carriage was the man to fear.
The palace swallowed us after that. My veil hid a face that had seen a man be ridiculed and saved. My new position gave me a roof and a cage. My husband—the Emperor, Gabriel Schulz—was a cold thing. He was polite and dangerous. We were to be a picture of duty. When the palace sang, we would be the chorus. Alone, he was another animal of court, and I learned quickly how to wait.
"Callie," he murmured once, when the court quieted for night, "they said a woman can't rule men."
"Men have never been very good with rules," I whispered.
He smiled like frost on glass, then kissed my forehead and left for other dark rooms. The bed was a stage for cold hands and unsmiling hearts. He tried to coax affection by forcing closeness. He would pinch and prod my nerves as if testing a new instrument. I learned the shape of his pressure: he wanted to own my silence.
I discovered a deeper wound: a favored consort, Ginevra Alvarez, had claws and leverage. A beautiful woman, she played at jesting and turned the palace like a toy. She was clever and cruel in a way that made many tremble.
For eleven days, I lived in the shell of a queen that was far hotter than the crowns on other heads. My life was a series of small tests; I was a bowl to be turned, and the people around me tried to see what would spill. They sniffed for weakness like hounds.
Then the body was found.
A palace maid had discovered Linfei—one of the emperor's former favorites—hung under an old tree behind the southern wing. Her belly was ripped open. The palace filled with a blood scent that tasted like iron. The court turned as if someone had thrown an ember in their laps.
"Find the man," the Empress Dowager, Mercedes Renard, said. She looked at me as if I were a window to the whole affair. "We must find who did this."
I was ordered to lead the inquiry. "Keep your head," she told me with an odd intimacy. "You will look, but don't overstep. A queen should not get her hands bloody."
I asked for a judge. I asked for men I could trust. The Emperor smiled and suggested I take help from the palace guard. Among them was Zack because he now wore ranks that brought a kind of bitter privilege: he was a deputy of the palace guard, a position that placed him near enough to helpfulness and danger in equal measure.
We read the maid's diary together. Tear-stained pages described secret meetings and one particular detail: a future meeting under the old tree. The maid believed herself pregnant. She believed her lover would run away with her. She believed in that lie with a whole foolishness that made my throat ache.
"Who could have taken her child?" I asked Zack one night. He lit a small oil lamp, and his face carved in the lamplight made the room look small.
"He wouldn't take the child," he said. "He didn't know she was pregnant. He wanted to keep a secret she told him in soft breath."
"Then who benefits?"
"Someone who needed her dead," he said. "Someone whose name will make this palace run to the ground."
We searched. The diary mentioned jewelry given to her—small baubles not normally accounted for. We checked registries and found things missing. We watched the pawnshops at the edge of the city, and there, the lid of a secret cracked open.
At first the trail led to a city clerk with a small house full of pawned trinkets. At his table sat the same Sabine Nunes who had jeered at Zack. He denied everything, sweat on his brow and fear in his voice. When the guards closed around him, he shouted that he was a small man with small need. He didn't know.
We kept searching the web. The palace was a net with many knots; pulling one string rattled others. In a dark corridor, a chambermaid whispered that the maid had been seen with a familiar man and that the man spoke at night to someone higher. We followed the whispers and found a name that sat with a majesty of oil on the tongue: Ginevra Alvarez. She had been seen near the maid the evening before the murder, and the maid had been last seen wearing a hairpin that matched a certain design favored in Ginevra's rooms.
The pair of them—Ginevra and a young clerk in her shadow—told different stories. But no one wishes to accuse a favored consort directly. It's dangerous chess. I had been taught to bow and not to strike.
But the public cannot be satisfied with whispers. The palace would not move until a needle—sharp and public—was pointed. So I prepared to expose people.
"Be careful," Zack warned. "There are knives that can reach even robes. There are numbers in the dark and favors that buy the silence of men. If you burn them, you'll have the half-smoke on your hands."
"I have to know," I said. "If I fail here, someone else will pay."
We set the net. We provided false evidence and left it to hungry lips to find. In the great hall, during the week of the Empress Dowager's observance, the court gathered. I took my place, and the Emperor pretended to smile. The high officials sat like stones. I let the trick ripen.
"Lady Ginevra," I said, from the throne step, my voice thin and clear, "we have reason to believe someone close to you took the life of Linfei."
A chorus of gasps. The courtiers reached for shade. Ginevra laughed like a bell. "A scandal? How quaint." She flicked her fan like someone brushing crumbs off a table. "And who told you this, little queen?"
"A clerk," I answered. I turned my gaze slowly to the gallery where guards carried in the clerk with a small head bowed. The Empress Dowager clapped once, a tiny staccato like a fallen coin.
The clerk trembled. "I didn't mean—" he began.
"You sold things," I said. "Are you sorry?"
"Yes," he whispered. "I'm sorry."
I told the Empress Dowager I would like a public correction. The courtyard filled and the gossipers leaned in.
But Ginevra's smile turned from amusement to shock—then to fury—and the court moved like a school of fish around a bite. "You accuse me," she cried. "You little clerk is a liar!"
"Is he?" I asked and let silence crush the room. "We have proof. He pawned jewelry from Linfei's chest. He was seen delivering trinkets to your servant. He was seen near the tree."
"You are mad," Ginevra said. "You cannot force this into a charge."
"Then stay. Let us show everything."
They brought a small trunk forward. The foreign pawned jewels sat like a confession inside. Ginevra's face—so practiced and untouched—blanched. Her hands shook, and she looked for the Emperor's mouth for rescue.
He only watched. His eyes were glass.
"The queen asks for the truth," Mercedes Renard said. "Let the crowd decide."
A judge rose, a man who had been poor all his life and who therefore loved the taste of power. He read aloud the clerk's testimony, and the expressions in the hall shifted like a tide. Ginevra's camp debated. Her eyes ran to the right and to the left. The rumor spikes. She tried to smile. Her staff looked terrified.
"What do you intend?" she hissed to me later in the corridor, where the lanterns were small and the stone smell of smoke was lessened.
"I intend to be just," I answered softly.
"Justice is a luxury we can't afford," she said, and her voice trembled at last. "Do you know what you have done?"
"I know what the truth requires," I said.
The punishment the judge ordered was public and made the sharpest kind of law. Sabine Nunes and the clerk were paraded to the courtyard where the city folk gathered. They had to wear banners naming their sins—theft, slander, complicity. They had to stand on a platform in the bone-cold air while citizens spat or threw rotten fruit. People were allowed to speak their hurt. The judge read the charges aloud. The two men began by sneering and defiance, but as the crowd chanted their shameful words and the rotten fruit splattered their clothing, they changed. Pride curtailed, it turned to pleading. Sabine's voice hardened then broke, his face showing a map of changes: smugness, then shock, then frantic denials, then a haggard collapse into begging. The clerk at first was silent, then offered stilted apologies. The crowd's mood changed from thirst for spectacle to a curious pity. Some took pictures with etching plates, some spat and some wept.
"Say their names," people cried. "Say what they did!"
"Tell me," I said, "who ordered you to do this? Who wanted Linfei dead?"
They could not answer. Sabine clung to the edge of the platform and looked as if he tried to dig his life out of the wood. "I only—" He stopped, and then he listed names I had already suspected: minor hands, courtiers who needed appointments. The crowd chanted louder. Sabine grew defiant, then he tried to shift blame to higher people. "It was for the good of the palace!" he barked, then sobbed into his sleeve when no one believed him.
The judge declared that Sabine would be publicly humiliated and then banished, and the clerk would be whipped and sent to labor. People cheered and then felt ashamed at their cheering.
Ginevra's face changed when she saw the crowd's hunger for blood and the Empress Dowager's hand reaching for the rope to pull the strings. She had played hazard and lost.
When we walked back that night, Zack took my hand and did not let go. "You made enemies," he said.
"I made a right," I answered. I did not fully know whether right would last; I only knew it had to be done.
The next months were a storm. The Emperor wanted to show his muscle in the provinces and reward the brave with positions. He proposed assigning Zack a role nominally powerful but carefully constrained: deputy commander of the palace guard. It sounded like a kindness. The Empress Dowager fought for more credit to her nephew and for others to receive what they felt deserved. It looked like a balancing of favors, but it also meant chain and leash.
Then he announced that Isabella Benson—the woman Zack loved—would be married to someone else by arrangement, a match made to consolidate favors with the emperor's circle. Zack's face wavered. He had been a man of war who had once been famous and had fallen into a quiet that blood could not shake clean. His eyes hardened in a way that froze my own veins. Later he told me, very calmly, "The marriage was the barrier. She chose safety. I walk in the city with my head held high and my chest full of broken glass."
I felt something like pity and something like an old angry hunger. But there was still the palace's pulse—every step might be a trap.
One night the worst happened: Linfei's death had been used as a wedge. Men at court sharpened knives behind smiles. The Empress Dowager suggested a grand feast to honor the nation. The Emperor smiled and suggested I organize it, as a test of loyalty. Corbin told me to accept. "Make it well," he said. "If you fail, you will be reduced to paper."
I accepted. I built the feast like a fragile thing that could be blown away.
The feast's day arrived, and with it, the final betrayal. There was a commotion outside. Someone pulled the curtains; the emperor's guard had brought forth new charges—this time toward men who had supported Zack in the past. They were accused of treason. In the hall, one by one, men were stripped of rank. The Emperor's voice was cold as frost.
"Let men learn that any failure becomes a sin," he said. "Let a name be cleared if its bearer can pass through fire."
The court clapped in a way that sounded like a drying stream.
Zack rose from his seat. He had taken the deputy role. "I will accept the station," he declared quietly into the hush.
The Empress Dowager showed a small smile that looked like a shark's fin. "Very well," she said. "You have served well."
I had tears down both cheeks and no time to wipe them. Zack found me and touched my hand once. "Do not make yourself small for my sake," he said. "I will leave if you ask me to."
"No," I breathed. "I can't. Not now."
I cannot promise that the palace could have been kinder. I cannot promise any safety. But the thing that held true inside me was this: I had loved wrong, loudly and foolishly, but the love had shaped me into someone who would not hide. For better or worse, I had chosen a self.
Years later, in a warmer season, we stood again in the quiet at the old tree where the maid had been found. Zack and I had numbers of enemies and odd allies. They were both heavy things. I pressed my palm to the bark and whispered toward a future that would not be simple.
"Remember," Zack said, putting that wolf-tooth amulet—a small stone he'd given me—into my hand. "Don't let the court make your moral very small."
"I won't," I said.
We had both paid in some ways. I remained the more exposed, the more used. He had stayed and kept stepping into iron. That was the shape of our slender kingdom.
"Will you ever forgive me?" I asked him once in the dark.
"Forgive," he said, and kissed the scar on my lip where once the Emperor had bitten me in a fit. His mouth was gentle and terrible. "Forgive? Perhaps. But love is not forgiveness only. It is the slow building of a thing that can survive all weather."
"I wanted one night," I reminded him.
"You had more," he said. "You had four days. Then more, in our small ways."
Outside, the city sighed and went on. In the palace, men changed their masks. The Empress Dowager spoke of kindness, and the Emperor recalculated, and the consorts readjusted their smiles. But in my hand, the green bracelet still caught the light like an accusation and a promise—the sugar's tiny imprint of a summer and the wolf tooth's rough honesty.
"Keep it," he told me. "As a memory, not a chain."
So I did. I put the bracelet into my sleeve and kept walking down the long corridors of noise. I had become a woman who could speak and who had cut the air with a small honest blade.
Months later the court came to public judgement again, but this time the punishment was not simply for thieves. Those who conspired to ruin others for power, who plotted to weaponize rumor and blood, were brought into the center of the square. The crowd that gathered had different faces now—some faces I had recognized as enemies now looked at me with new curiosity.
I spoke from the steps. "Look at them," I said. "See how small men become when the mask falls."
Ginevra stood there, white-limbed, and Sabine was led with rope. As they stood under the glare of the light, the crowd pelted them not with eggs but with old garments—symbols of a stripped dignity. The veils and cloths were thrown so that they were covered and uncovered, a terrible game. I watched their faces. First a flash of contempt, then surprise, then fearful denial. Sabine spat and tried to lie, "I was only a man doing a man's work!" But the crowd, which had been a hunter, now became a jury. The judge read out the charges in a voice that did not quiver.
"These men and women took life, gave false witness, and sought to shift blood across the palace for political gain," he said. "Let it be known: such acts will be seen."
Their punishment was performed as a slow exhibition: they were placed on a low stage and required to confess their deeds. The confession is humiliating. Sabine's voice shook from bravado to denial to weeping. He said whoever had paid him had been nameless and wide, but he named names under pressure and under the thin light. Those names were brought before the court and the Empress Dowager herself looked as if she were slicing her own tongue.
The people watched. Some nodded. Some spat. Some took out tiny sketchbooks and drew the scenes. And then, as a final punishment, each conspirator was sent from the court into the market square, to stand beside those they had ruined and to apologize publicly. The feeling in the crowd shifted into something like a purge. This is the public moment the rules of court allow: spectacle, shame, and a thin hope for reconciliation.
No single punishment can erase the past, but seeing those faces contort with guilt in the square made the world seem true for a moment.
In the end, I sat by the old tree, the green bracelet hidden in my sleeve, the wolf tooth cool in my palm. I knew there were new wars ahead, that a palace would find new villains to worship and new allies to rally behind. But one thing would remain: the taste of sugar and snow on my fingers and the knowledge that I had chosen to take a dangerous love, to give a foolish night of warmth, and to stand and watch the court itself tremble when found wanting.
I folded my hands and felt the wolf tooth press into my skin.
"One day," I said to myself, "if a thousand people stand where I stand, maybe they will not look for a woman to blame."
Zack stood near and watched the sunlight skip off the green bracelet's surface. He turned to me, and his mouth was soft for once.
"Keep it," he repeated, but this time it was not instruction; it was a promise. "Keep it as a memory of how you burned and did not go out."
I touched the bracelet once more. It glittered like an old scar and a small lamp. I walked inside.
The End
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