Sweet Romance19 min read
The Blind Girl, the Demon Lord, and the Broken Heart‑Lamp
ButterPicks8 views
I remember the first dream like a wound that never fully healed. In it, a woman in wedding white smiled at me and promised a life of quiet light. In the next breath she held a sword and spat words that burned. "Rowan Marino, you are ruined. A dying thing cannot be my husband."
I woke with my hands cramped, with the world tasting like iron and salt. My name is Livia Bush. I am from the silver‑leaf Snow‑Dove clan. I was born blind. I learned the shapes of the world by sound and touch, by the weight of a hand on my cheek and the cadence of a laugh. I learned the names people called me. When the Lord of Mo Cangyuan came into my life, he did it like a winter storm.
"Lord Rowan," my colleague Lorenzo Lindgren said that morning at court, his voice careful, "the guest from the Endless Sea is here."
Rowan Marino sat on the high seat like a mountain carved from midnight. He listened with an expression that made the whole hall colder. He did not rise. He said nothing for a long time.
"Let him wait," Rowan finally said.
"Yes, my lord," Fabian Burns, Rowan's lieutenant, answered quickly and bowed so low his coat brushed the floor.
I heard Rowan move. The steps were a slow, certain kind of animal sound. He left the sleeping hall in black and the world hummed away from him.
Rowan's voice was low when I first met him by accident in a lake path, not on purpose. I was collecting a bitter herb for an old woman who'd raised me—Minerva Sauer. "Who are you?" I had asked, more sharp than I felt.
"You blind girl from the Snow‑Dove clan. What are you doing in my lands?" he had said, and his words had the weight of a bell.
"I pick herbs. I bring them home," I said.
He watched me with eyes that were not blind and then he touched the herb I held. "That's the Soulfall Flower," he said. "Eat it alone and your soul slips. Mix it with Snow‑moss and it mends what is broken."
I flinched. "You know herbs?"
He smiled, which in him felt like a small fracture in a black stone. "I know things," he said. "Don't be careless."
Then a trap came. The ground split and I fell into a cold lake. I screamed, lunged, grabbed at air, and then something rough and warm caught me and pulled me up. The hands that held me were the hands of Rowan Marino.
"You thief!" I spat when I could breathe. "Let go!"
He did not let go. He carried me to his hall like a man carrying a problem that had weight in his mind.
"Put her down," Fabian said.
"Not yet," Rowan murmured, and he looked at my forehead. There, hidden under hair and ash, was a purple mark in the shape of a Snow‑Dove. For a moment he looked like someone who had been remembering a face. "This is not a mark of the common clan," he said. "Who placed this on you?"
"My... grandmother," I said, because my throat closed. "Minerva. She is—"
"Come," he said. "I will ask her questions."
I wanted to run. I wanted to run and not feel the burn of being seen as a curiosity. I did not run. I had always been afraid of the world, and of those who ruled it with hard hands. But then Rowan did something I did not expect. He spared her life.
"Do not make me burn your widow's house," Rowan had told the Snow‑Dove elders when they came crying. "Bring me her bones if you wish to speak. Bring me truth."
I did not thank him. I bit him once in the shoulder when he held me too close in the bedchamber that night. "You are cruel," I hissed through gritted teeth.
"You are noisy," he answered. He kissed my mouth then, not as an apology and not as a promise, but as something that left both of us shaken.
Weeks stitched into each other. He learned things about me that I did not tell anyone: that I kept Minerva's old charms hidden in a wooden box, that I once wanted to be a healer, not a shell of one. He made me drink bitter brews when my cough stole my breath. He woke in the night and would sit by my bedside like a shadow falling across the world.
"Why did you bring me into your home only to lock me in?" I asked him once, furious.
"I did not bring you for kindness," he said. "I brought you because you are part of a map I have not finished tracing."
"Part of what map?" I asked.
"Of her," he whispered. "Of Camila Sherman."
My heart hit my ribs. I had only heard her name in whispers. Camila had been his bride long ago—magnificence and a ghost rolled into one. People said she had vanished and taken the light with her.
"I am not her," I said. "Do you want me to say it more, so it makes you feel better?"
"I want the truth," he said plainly.
There was a time I almost believed I was nothing more than a trick in his long game. There was a time I wanted to be only a thing that could be used and then discarded. But grief and anger make odd bedfellows. I made a plan, small and foolish and brave: I would leave the palace. I would go to my sister‑friend Faye Bonilla's wedding and show I was alive and not Rowan's puppet.
"Can you get me out?" I asked him once, feeling my hands shake with an odd, new hope.
Rowan hesitated, then answered with a shrug. "We will see."
He gave me his signet to show the guards—then pulled it back at the last minute, teasing me. "I have not decided," he said.
"Decide now," I demanded. "I will not be kept like a bird in a gilded cage."
"Fine." He smiled that slow, dangerous smile. "You may go, if you want to. But remember this: there are things in the world called chains. Some are physical. Some are not. I do not take kindly to people breaking rules in my house."
I took a bottle of wine, and I wrapped it in my cloak like a talisman. "It will be your fault if I never come back," I said, and left.
On the road to the Endless Sea—where my friend was to marry—there were fights and rumors. I stumbled into a skirmish between Duke Johan Mathieu's men and a noble of the Endless Sea named Dawson Vasquez. I pulled the fallen Dawson from the sand and cupped his face with trembling hands.
"Who are you?" he asked thickly when he could breathe.
"A nurse," I answered, though I had never been one. "Drink."
"Why would you help me?" he said, coughing.
"Because I am human," I said.
He fell in love with me in small, clumsy moments: I had saved his life from an enemy blade; he had plucked a shard from the back of my head once with shaking fingers after I fell. He wanted to stay near me. He said he would let me go whenever I wished. That was the promise men always make when there is a war in their blood.
Rowan watched all of it like a hawk. He was not the kind of man to forgive small joys. There was an edge of something that tasted like hunger in his calm. One moonless dawn he went to the hall where men gathered to make laws and decisions and sent a question like a blade across the room.
"Someone in my halls," he said, "stole at night and laid hands on my bed. Who among you will say she is innocent?"
Gasps, quick breathings. Fabian, his faithful shadow, answered for him with a small, curt laugh. "No one crosses Lord Rowan and lives."
I had a grandmother whose last act had been to bind my eyes with a charm and put my hands into another woman's hands.
"She dies before I find her," I told Fabian once bluntly. "Is that what you want?"
Fabian was only a servant, but he was loyal in the way men are when a leader's shadow stretches long. He would have killed to guard Rowan's ease. He never seemed to see the cruelty in the person he served.
There is a moment in every life where the small sparks gather until they are a fire. For me that moment came when they took Minerva into the stone prison.
"Minerva is old and stubborn," an official said. "She spoke badly of your lord."
"She was not an enemy," I protested, feeling the ground tilt under me. "She loved me. She taught me how to stitch lungs and read the pulse."
"Your clan's rites matter little when the heart of Mo Cangyuan is distrustful," the man replied.
That day the hall smelled of iron and of heated wax. I pressed my hand to the wooden post and closed my eyes. Then Rowan did something odd—he held the old woman's hands and watched her slowly, like a man reading an old script.
"She can die for us," Rowan said at last.
"Then she will," Fabian answered immediately.
But Rowan changed his mind at the last second. "Do not kill her," he ordered. "Let her give what she will give."
It was an order we all obeyed. It would be the first of many decisions that would thread the rest of my life to his.
Days later, some at court rode into a frenzy. "She blasphemed the spirits!" said one doctor. "She burned the memory of our soldiers at the Aegis Gates!" said another. "She used the souls of the fallen!" they cried, because men who wanted a name will shout any thing to get it.
Rowan called a meeting. He let everyone shout until their voices bled.
"She used the souls of the fallen?" Rowan repeated slowly. "Who says this?"
"A healer from the eastern ward," a councilor said, brimming with self‑importance. "She set the sword in the ruins and pulled a piece of the light. It is sacrilege."
"Enough," Rowan said. "Bring them here."
They brought the doctors, the officials who had called for my head. They came like roosters who wanted corn and did not know the farmer's hand. I stood beside Rowan that day, which was braver than anything I had done so far.
Rowan rose and walked to the center of the hall. "You told me to kill her," he said to the men who had demanded my death. "You wrote on parchment that she betrayed our honor. Why should I trust a man who writes bloodless words behind a screen?"
"Because—" one of them tried. He used his silvered tongue.
"Because we serve the people!" another cried.
"Prove it," Rowan said simply. "You demanded she be removed for defiling our dead. You demanded that her life be swept away. Now prove your claim with truth."
Rowan snapped his fingers. Fabian pushed a chest forward. Inside were the letters the councilors had written, each inked with scorn and a plan. Rowan flicked one open and read aloud. My name burned in each line. "Execute her," one said. "Make an example," another wrote.
The men who had been haughty paled. For the first time, I saw the pretty arrogance in their faces crumble. They went from smug to flurried to blind panic.
"Remove the old red ribbon from his coat!" Rowan barked. "Bring the one who said she dishonored our dead to the hall within an hour."
"Lord Rowan—" the man stammered.
"Leave," Rowan said. "Leave and follow. Come back when you bring me the testimony of your courage."
They left and returned bound like animals with their collars of shame. Rowan had arranged for crystal-screen scribes to be at every corner of the hall. The great windows of the dome reflected them, and the servants brought out small crystal slates which gleamed like mirrors. The crowd in the great hall gathered in a hush—court scribes, soldiers, kitchen boys, city merchants. The news passed through them like lightning. People who had only ever dared whisper now leaned in to watch.
Rowan placed a silver chain, heavy as cold truth, around the neck of the first man who had called for my death. "You wrote: 'Kill her to soothe the spirits,'" he read, his voice a slow, low thing that made the air tremble. "You wrote: 'She used the dead for her profit.' You want to know what you will taste? Taste the shame you served!"
He had them stripped of ribbons and titles. Guards pushed them onto the dais, and Rowan spoke to the whole hall.
"You all demanded the killing of one who touched the dead to heal. Let us make your judgement public." He raised his hand. "Stand."
Five men kneeled. Their knees were rough from travel and from arrogance less than the weight of what they had been given to carry. Row after row of faces pressed together—farmers, servants, men who had never had more than two coins. Someone in the back murmured and the murmur rose like a tide.
"Now," Rowan said, "confess what you thought you'd gain."
The men were dry with sweat. Their grandiosity bled away. "We were protecting the honor of Mo Cangyuan," one said, trying to sound brave.
Rowan laughed, and it was a sound sharper than the cold. "Birds of prey. You wanted a harvest of victims. You wanted to hold power like a cup." He turned to the crowd. "Will you let them take justice into their hands because they crave spectacle?"
A thousand voices answered with a hush and then a ripple of whispers. "Shame on them," one woman said. "They lie."
Rowan had the men stripped of their official brooches; the guards dragged them to the center, bound them, and then made them stand. They looked at the crowd with faces that had once been proud. The crowd leaned in. Someone took out a small enchanted slate and began to record. "Make the matter public," Rowan had said, and our world obeyed the highest man in the room, for he was the law and the law can be cruel.
"Tell the truth," Rowan ordered. "Tell them you lied."
Their faces tightened. One began with a huffing laugh that was half fear. "We were afraid," he said. "Afraid the people would lose face if the honor of the shrine was defiled. We were frightened our names would be forgotten."
"Then you sacrificed a life for your names," Rowan replied. "For your cowardice."
The men tried denial. "We were only protecting—"
"Protecting who?" Rowan asked softly, and his voice was a snap. "Protecting your position. You wanted to be seen as righteous."
They had a moment of clarity—the flip from triumph to ruin. Panic moved like a sickness through them. "No," they said. "No—"
They started to beg. "Please—please, my lord—"
They dropped to their knees properly this time. Their voices went thin and raw. "Spare me," one said through tears. "Spare my honor. I did not mean—"
Someone in the crowd hissed. "Shame on you," whispered a woman who had lost sons to the war. A child started to cry. A market woman began to clap—first a single slow clap—then more hands joined, some in anger, some in relief.
Rowan moved with terrible grace. He had them strip off their outer robes. He ordered their titles to be read aloud and then he ordered the titles burned. The crystal slates recorded every sentence. The scribes wrote the names. The guards forced the men into the center; Rowan commanded that they kneel on the cold stone and he had the town crier sound the words that would forever mark them: "Today, in the Hall of Mo Cangyuan, these men confessed they sought lordly death for the sake of honor to cover their cowardice."
"Now," Rowan said, "you shall make reparation."
He instructed the guards to shorn their heads like common thieves, to strip them of ribbons and fine cloth and brooches so that the crowd could see them as they were—nothing. "When those who would burn the innocent ask for power, let the world see them stripped of it."
They begged. Their faces moved through stages: first arrogance, then confusion, then denial, then the realization of true loss. One man went white, then red, then collapsed trembling. He crawled, hands scraping against the stone, and wept into the floor. Another spat and then sobbed quietly; a third fumbled for words and could not find any.
People took fainting spells; some laughed in relief, and one old woman climbed up on a bench and spat on the ground where a councilor had stood days before and whispered curses. Everything was recorded: a merchant with a crystal slate took notes that would travel to other cities. A young scribe whispered, "This will be on the slates by dawn."
Rowan looked down at the broken men and then at me. His expression was unreadable, like someone who had opened a wound to see if it bled. "You saved his life," he said to the one woman who had chosen to do right in a small way, "and you nearly gave your own. I owe none of you a favor. But the men who would make martyrs of others so that their names might glimmer—let them be known."
He called the hall to witness. He read the confessions aloud, one by one, and he asked the crowd to decide their fate. The crowd answered by throwing rotten fruit and some coins at the councilors' feet—an old custom of shaming. They were dragged away, bound and stripped of prestige. They begged and pleaded and finally, in full collapse, they cried out for mercy in ways we had not seen before.
I stood. I did not speak. My grandmother's hands had burned themselves into my memory. The old woman's lips, when she had been coherent, had repeated one line to me in her last hours: "Love does not die if you do not give it to the wrong thing." I had no idea then that justice could be sweet in public, but watching those men hurl themselves from height into falling shame made something light inside me breathe.
Yet shame is not the same as true justice. For a long time after, I waited for the punishment's echo to reach the homes of those who had plotted. I wanted them to feel the pity they had never had for others.
Rowan's acts were strange. At one moment he was the fierce iron ruler; in another, he showed a softness that did not suit the legend told of him. I learned that day that power is a wheel you can throw people under at will.
It was not long before the noise of politics turned to other things. Dawn happened. Faye married with a thousand snow‑dove flowers in her hair. I sat on the edge of the crowd with a signet in my hand that had Rowan's seal on it, stolen under a drunk sky. I had made it out.
"How did you get this?" Faye asked when she saw me, confused and delighted. Her voice was warm. "Livia! You look like a storm."
"I stole it," I said, and she laughed as if I had told a joke. "I am not your kind of storm."
"Who is he?" she asked about Rowan, whom she had only seen once and disliked.
"A king made of frost and lonely," I said.
"Then I will send warm bread to him," she declared.
The wedding was like everything a girl could imagine: silk, laughter, two men from the sea who spoke softly to the bride. Dawson Vasquez—who I had saved—was there, and he kept trying to hide behind flowers to fetch me from the crowd when he thought Rowan would see. He hated Rowan's glare like everyone else. "You saved me," he murmured later. "I will stay close."
"Promise," I said, and he did. That’s what faint romances are made of: promises made in small places before the fire.
I had little time for a new life. Rowan haunted me like an unfinished sentence. He kept calling me into his orbit with small, infuriating gestures. Once he cut a single lock of my hair quietly and burned it on a heart lamp that had once been Camila Sherman's. "It must be seen with fire," he said simply, and lit the wick.
"Why do you keep that lighter of a past you cannot have?" I asked.
"It is not mine to have," he said. "It is a map. It is proof that she existed."
"Then leave the past alone," I retorted.
He only smiled, a small edge of snow. "She chose to leave me. If she lives somewhere else, I will find her. If she is dead, I will keep her memory lawfully wed to honor."
People called him monstrous and loved him in turns. In council rooms and at market stalls, his name was a weather pattern. I kept my distance as best I could, and at night when the world fell into a hush, I thought of the strange kiss we had shared and how sometimes a person can be a danger and a refuge at once.
There came a moment—years later perhaps, or months that felt like years—where the world shook. The great light strip over the land called the Aurora Belt dimmed. A band of lights was gone. People said it was omen. Rowan's face went sharp and terrible. "Someone has meddled with the warrior spirits," he said gravely.
The city rumble turned into a chase. Rowan flew out to the place where the old soldiers lay, where the dead were remembered in a field of stone. I followed on foot. I found the thing that made me feel like my heart would stop: the sword I had made with the souls of the buried, my small desperate attempt to cut the mark on my own brow before it killed me.
I had taken the bones and made a blade from grief. I had done it with my blood. It had almost killed me.
"When you do something like this, you tear a thread from the world," Rowan said when he found me half‑buried in sand. "You took what did not belong to you."
"I had no choice," I said, coughing blood. "She—Minerva—gave everything to mend me. I could not keep her voice while blind."
He wrapped me in a coat and carried me home. I believed then that I was to die. He had no need to save me. He said nothing as he ordered the best healers into my bedchamber, and he did not sleep until the lamps burned low.
The healers declared they could not fix the part of my spirit that had been burned out. They said there was a flower in the Godlands of the high temples—the Bodhi Orchid—that could mend such ruptures. It was a thing of myth and guarded by gods.
Rowan looked like a man debating whether to pull the world apart. Then, in a voice I heard only for me, he said, "I will go."
"Go where?" I asked.
"To get what will fix you," he answered.
"You will go to gods for me?" My voice floated like a small, stunned bird.
"I will do whatever is necessary," he said.
He left. He went to places I had never been. He came back with a small white blossom that smelled like memory. He held it between his fingers like it was a coin he could buy the sea with.
"I will use it," he said. "But know this—every kindness has a price."
I drank the tea he brewed. The blossom uncurled in my mouth like morning. My eyes filled with light like rain. I could see—faintly, like fog—but I could see him.
"Why save me?" I asked, because the question in my chest was bright.
He looked at me and smiled without the snow. "Because you were part of a map that I—wanted to finish," he murmured. "Because you are not her and because I hate lying in bed thinking of the past."
"Then do not make me a place to keep her," I said. "Do not put me like a shrine."
"I cannot promise that," he admitted.
That was the truth he could not hide. He loved what she had been and what she might have been; he loved the idea so much that sometimes he could not tell the idea from a living person. He wanted me to be like Camila so he could solve a puzzle and be comforted.
"Do you hate me?" I asked once, sitting near the heart lamp where the flame still smelled faintly of her hair.
He took the lamp and set it between us. "I do," he said quietly, "and I do not. I hate how much this memory rules me. I do not hate you, Livia. You frustrate me, but you are not a memory. You are—" He hesitated. "You are more dangerous because you are real."
That summer he punished men who tried to make victims of others. He got the council to read their letters in the hall. He made them beg and kneel and he burned their titles in the scroll room so the city would know where the rot lay. The public scene was long and slow and hard and it showed everyone that a lord's mercy could be a weapon.
I slept more those nights, sometimes in his arms and sometimes on the edge of the great bed. I told myself I would not fall in love with the man who had the power to put me to death with a thought. But some things don't go by plan. I loved his anger and his strange small kindnesses. It was terrible and human.
"Why do you keep me?" I asked one night when we were alone and the room was hollowed with moon.
"For reasons you will not like," he said.
"Speak them," I said.
He hesitated and, for once, said something like a confession. "Because in the echo of the past, your face is a map. Because if I let you go, I might never find out what happened to Camila. Because you make me smile and I do not know how. Because I am a coward of a man who cannot throw away a single piece of the puzzle."
I laughed then, a small ugly sound. "So I am a clue."
"You are more than a clue," he said.
"And less," I said. "Because you still love another."
"Maybe," he allowed. "But the things we love do not fit neatly in boxes."
We fought sometimes like animals and loved like children. We hated each other and we saved each other. I do not know if I ever wanted to be anyone else but the strange woman he tried to keep, the woman who was not Camila and who did not want to be.
Once, at a feast where the Endless Sea princes had come with their banners, a rumor rose again—this time that I had made a weapon from the dead to rob the world of honor. The councilors rose up, red with the hunger for names. Rowan's face folded like someone who had been misread.
"Bring them to the dais," he said.
They came and begged. The crowd watched as Rowan called them to stand in the center and confess. He made them kneel while the crowd recorded with crystal slates and whispered and pointed and threw rotten fruit. He watched the mercy he wanted to dispense become a spectacle and then a lesson. They kneeled, then they begged with voices cracking like old wood.
"Please," one cried finally, "spare me, I did it to keep my place."
Rowan had them stripped of honors. He had them wear hair of ash and carry signs of their error through the market for two days. They went from pride to confusion to denial to shock to pleading. People gathered and some laughed and some cried and some clapped slowly. When one of them collapsed and knelt on the stone floor, Rowan turned and looked at me with a face that had something like tenderness in it and said, "No one orders the killing of the innocent on my watch."
That day I understood that his justice was a jagged thing. I also understood that men might throw themselves on the ground and grovel if they knew their names would be seen. The crowd's reaction went through the same loop as the men's faces: gossip, then murmurs, then the sense of satisfaction when a proud face is cut down. It is a crude feast for those who hunger for order.
And the men broke like old bread.
They begged and crawled and cried. One of them, who had always been a fine dresser, lost his wig in the dust and then his breath. "Please," he whimpered, "I was young."
The crowd turned in the heavy silence as if expecting more. Someone clapped. Others took out slates to write down the speeches. Some pointed to the iron that wrapped around their wrists. There were whispers of "record" and "send to the districts." Children were kept away by mothers who did not want them to see the decay of high men.
It was ugly and clean at once. For my grandmother's memory, for the old women who had no power, it was a righting of wrongs. But it was also the sort of punishment that filled the stomach with bloodlust, and I knew then that Rowan could be cruel with mercy, and merciless with cruelty, and we were all left dizzy.
He had not yet become the man who would one day stand on the shore and decide whether the gods would be asked to give life, not simply for prestige but because he had learned how to be afraid of nothing. He was learning to use his power carelessly, like a child with matches.
Sometimes I thought I would tear off the mark from my brow and run back to the hills with a bundle of herbs and Faye's laughter and never look back. Sometimes I stood with Rowan and watched the heart lamp, the copper mirror, and the map he kept folded like a small, terrible secret.
"Promise me one thing," he said once at the edge of the courtyard where the snow‑doves grew. "If I ever wear a crown and forget to be human, stop me."
"I will remember," I said. "I will keep the map, even if it is of you."
He laughed softly, and for a moment I thought no one could ever be more dangerous than that smile. Then he kissed me like the winter had come to sit on my lips.
The last scene I will tell plainly: in the great hall when the men lied and then fell, when the slates glowed with the names of the false, and when the crowd had both clapped and turned away—we found our truths and our small, terrible comforts. A thousand hands pointed. A few people recorded. More than one young scribe gasped and wrote it down for the next day's bread.
When it was over, Rowan carried his hand to his heart, then to his forehead like a man easing a splinter. He looked at me, and I looked back, and in that look he dropped a piece of what he had been holding tight. He had punished the men in public as the law demands, and in that same public, he had shown a softness to the woman he had kept as a living map.
"Do you think you did right?" I asked later, finding him alone.
"I don't know," he said. "But the public must see the truth. The men who would burn people to hold their names must be shown like cut flowers at the market."
I nodded then, because he had done what he had to do, and I had my own small rebellions to burn.
There would be other days of mercy and cruelty. There would be wars of politics, and lovers who misread each other's small kindnesses. There would be betrayals, and I would learn the edges of a heart lamp and the way the light looked when it fell on a copper mirror with a crescent chip missing—like a mouth that will not speak whole.
We were all living between the flame and the mirror.
When I became strong enough to use my grandmother's teachings properly, I healed more than small cuts—I learned to fix the broken cords of people who had been hurt by power. When Rowan sat on his seat and watched the heart lamp burn, he sometimes put his hand on my head and called me Livia with something like affection.
And when he looked up at the heart lamp, he would sometimes whisper to it, "Camila—if you hear—yet live—show yourself."
But in the quiet end of a day, when the dome of the hall is black and the copper mirror sits like a moon on the dresser with its jagged crescent, I will touch the place on my brow where the Snow‑Dove mark used to burn faint and smile. Not because I am free of pain, but because I remember the old woman who gave her life for a pair of eyes.
I light the heart lamp now and then. The wick is small. The flame does not roar. It is a warm amber that casts a thin, honest light. When the light trembles across the copper mirror and makes the broken crescent glow, I put my hand on the mirror's cold rim and remember my oath: to keep alive, to remember, and to never let men of power think they can burn what they want.
Rowan says he will keep searching for what he lost. I say that if he finds it, let it not be the end of the world. If he does not, let him learn to live in the room with the lamp. If we are lucky, the broken things will teach us how to be whole again.
The End
— Thank you for reading —