Sweet Romance12 min read
The Emperor, the Bandit Queen, and the History He Wrote
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I am the imperial chronicler, the one who writes down what the emperor does and says. I write in neat columns and I dream that someday my own name will sit on a page that people point to long after I am gone.
"You want to be remembered?" Alejandro Mendez asked when he first caught me staring at my own handwriting.
"Who doesn't?" I answered, and the next night he gave me a chance I never expected.
"I'll write you into history tonight," he said, all solemn and troublesome.
"He promised me a place," I told myself later, when his whisper became a promise and his promise became want. He arranged wine, he arranged food. He arranged his smile to be soft and private for me.
"Sit," he said, and pushed a bowl toward me.
"Why is there so much?" I asked as I forked at crystal jellies and roasted venison.
"If you want rank, first you must be tested," Alejandro said with the lightness of a man who believes tests are luxuries.
"You mean hardship?" I said, and he fed me prawns with his own hand.
"Opposite," he murmured, smiling like a cat that has found the cream. "You shall be coddled."
He looked at me, and the world narrowed to him. "Veronique," he said, using my given name like it was the sound of an only bright thing. "You will be remembered."
I was drunk on wine and the sudden tenderness. I did what a stupid woman does when a throne leans toward her— I let him have me.
"I never expected this," I told myself later, as I tugged on a ruined sleeve. I had been a mountain bandit once, ruler of a camp at the border, woman enough to keep twelve men in order and a name that made governors frown. Then I became the palace chronicler, a title that sounded safer than it was.
"Do you regret it?" Alejandro asked in the dim morning, nudging my shoulder with the careless intimacy of someone who treats kingship and want like two toys.
"Do you think I want to be the thing you offer?" I snapped, and the back of my hand met his cheek.
He only laughed, soft and bewildered. "You are still the same fire, Veronique. You said once you'd toy with me a thousand times if you could."
"That was when I was drunker than you," I said. "This is not a plaything. If you wanted me, you could have put me on a throne. If you wanted me, you wouldn't have used me as a joke."
He blinked. "You think the throne can make anyone into who they are not," he said. "I want you, not your titles."
I left the palace furious—first furious at him, then at myself for the small relief that his arms had given. I took only what I could carry: my writing book, my knives, the memory of warm breath that now tasted like ash.
Back in the mountain that had been my home, my brothers and I drank until the valley echoed. I told them what had happened. They laughed and called me queen, then the laughter faded and my head became loud with a different sound.
"The dragon-hawk general," they said, naming the man I had once loved from a story. "You still think of him."
"I do," I said, because I did. Stories stick like burrs.
"Who is he now?" a brother asked, and I shrugged. "A ghost maybe."
The next morning, standing at the ridge, I saw a shadow advance like a myth come true. He rode into the valley as if the roads were made for his feet. Bram Roy, unbent and armored in a way I had not seen since the myths. He moved like someone who could split a tree with a look.
"Veronique," he said, voice dipped in memory, "you look like you broke a small world."
"You are not dead," I said, and there was a long time when we only looked at each other.
"Alive because you left me half-dead," he said, making a joke of the past. "You left me to rot in the mud."
"You insult my methods," I answered, and then everything exploded into motion. Arrows came from the trees. Men I recognized—some with Alejandro's colors—rushed like wolves.
"They sent their arrows," Bram said. "They wanted you gone."
They hit my calf with a black feathered bolt. Pain licked the muscle and I tasted iron. The world was suddenly small and urgent: Bram's hand, the horse, the river, the desperate running.
"Go!" Bram barked, and when he flung me onto the horse he did not look like the man who had once only been a story. He looked like a captain who would not let his ship drown.
We fled. We crossed the border. We reached a house with moss in the thatch and warm straw, and there I woke wrapped in Bram's cloak, the river's murmur in my ear.
"You woke," he said, thoroughly matter-of-fact.
I tested the name that had become a lie and a song. "Bram?"
"Yes." He smiled then, small and uneasy. "I thought you were dead."
"Someone wanted me dead," I said. "Someone used my chronicler position as bait."
"Who?"
"Alejandro Mendez."
Bram's first laugh at that was sharp. "He will regret that he thought he could touch you and not learn."
He treated my wounds with a tenderness that had nothing to do with politics. "You are stubborn," he said. "You always were."
"Did you always look like that?" I asked, feeling foolishly piqued by how the years had been good to him.
"Battle tends to do that," Bram said, and there were nights he looked at me with a softness as if measuring whether he ought to break the world for me.
It was not long before I learned more than I wanted. There had been a plot, a long plan threaded through years. Bram was not only a general who had risen by merit; he had been used and praised and pushed into a corner, and his ambition had become a thing that snarled in the dark.
"And why would Bram Roy conspire?" I asked him once, and he straightened like a man irritated by a fly.
"Because the throne is a warm bed but it is not always the only bed you want," he answered. "Because power can be an instrument to do the right thing. War is a blunt tool, but it can be used."
"Used for what?" I asked, not trusting him.
"For the people I remember," he said. "For the names that were forgotten while the palace kept polishing faces. For the girl who threw me into a pit once and did not know the meaning of mercy."
He smiled that crooked soldier's smile.
I was angry with Alejandro. I was angry for being used. I was angry at myself for wanting a place in history by asking him to make me part of his own.
When he reappeared in the courts of another kingdom—this time in Bram's—I almost laughed at the audacity. Alejandro Mendez had gone to war and back, he had used peace like a cloak, and now he was where he had not been wanted: chained, defiant, beautiful in his stubborn way.
"Why are you here?" I asked, standing in the marble hall where Bram had the men to hold sway.
"To ask forgiveness," Alejandro said, spreading his hands like a man who loves grand gestures.
"Forgiveness?" I barked. "You used me as bait. You shot me with your black-feather arrows. Forgive me if I don't faint from your pardon."
"Alejandro," Bram's voice said, and the hall changed because when a general speaks, even marble listens.
"I came for you," Alejandro told Bram, and in the moment of their eyes meeting, all the meanings I had given to both men collapsed into a single, dangerous game.
"What did you want?" Bram asked.
"To make you look," Alejandro said, and the hall exhaled cold air. "To make you see me unarmored."
The plan that night became a spectacle. Bram had brought an army to the door of a small court; Alejandro had walked in like a fool who refused to hide. The king of that lesser state had made a banquet and said polite things. Bram had stage-managed a capture.
"Is this a trap?" I asked, lunging between them and Bram's hand found my arm and tightened like iron.
"Not for you," Bram said. "For him."
I had the habit of biting what I could when words were not enough. That night I bit Bram's hand; he cursed and laughed and then his arm went limp because I can be stubborn in deeper ways than speech.
"Why drag him in?" I demanded between laughs.
"Because the world loves a public trial," Bram said. "Because when men who believed themselves safe are shamed, the rest will think twice."
Then the scene spun to a different axis. Alejandro stood, and his voice was a kingdom of its own.
"I brought myself here," he said, deliberately soft. "I have come because she is mine; I have come because I could not live with someone else thinking I owned her if I did not prove it."
"She is not an object," I shouted. I pushed at Bram, and Alejandro's laugh sliced the air.
"She is mine because she is there," he said, and then, at his own risk, he reached for my hand as if hands could solve any problem.
That night was a knot. Bram's plan unraveled in a way he had not imagined because the heart is a contrary weapon. I found myself pressed between two men, at the center of a story that would be written and re-written.
After the fighting and the screams, after the swords had sung and the minor king had fainted at the audacity of it all, Bram and Alejandro stood before the crowd. The court had filled: ministers, foreign envoys, the soldiers who would swear their oaths again with blood on their palms. They wanted survivors. They wanted drama. They wanted a moment to carry back to their countries and whisper, "We saw it."
"This is where the punishment must be," Bram murmured to me later, "public. Let those who conspire be seen for the dirt they are."
I did not like the taste of revenge. But I had been baited and shot. I had been made a footnote. If history was to be my refuge, then I would make sure the names on the wrong side of it would be read as warnings.
The day came when Bram would expose the traitors, and the place was the grand plaza of the capital—a wide square ringed with columns and flags. The sun was merciless. Soldiers made lines like a spine. Merchants crowded the edges, children perched on shoulders. The noise was a living thing.
"Bring them," Bram commanded simply.
"They are not here," a captain said, sweating.
"Then bring the ones who acted as if they were," Bram said. "Bring the men who laid black-feather arrows and made my woman ride for her life."
"He is the emperor of another land," someone hissed.
"He is the man who struck her," Bram answered, with a cruelty that had been forged on many battlefields. "He is Alejandro Mendez, who used a promise like a net."
They brought Alejandro forward in chains. He stood straight, crownless, dignified even when the sun painted his cheek with shadow. His eyes found me and for a heartbeat the world again narrowed to his face.
"Why do this in public?" Alejandro said to Bram.
"Because truth is a performance," Bram said. "Because the people need to see."
Then Bram spoke to me, quietly, right so only I could hear in the roar, "Do you want them to see how he humiliated you?"
"Yes," I said, and I surprised myself by how ready my voice had become.
Bram turned to the crowd then and in a voice that did not belong only to one man, he began to tell the story. He spoke the facts: arrows, lies, bait. He told how Alejandro had veiled a plot with the soft words of love. He told of my wound. He painted the image of a king who used a woman's name like a prop.
The murmurs grew. People who had bought ale that morning leaned forward. Children tugged at cloaks. Someone began to shout, "Shame!"
Alejandro's face changed slowly. He went from arrogance to surprise, then to anger, then to stubborn denial. The crowd's rhythm became a drumbeat against his ribs.
"I did what I thought was right," he said at first, his voice steady. "I wanted her. I loved her. What crime is love?"
"Love is not a trap," Bram said back. "Love is not a black-feather arrow."
"You condense truth into revenge," Alejandro said. "You set a game and then cry foul when you lose."
The crowd hissed now. Someone spat. "You who would make a woman bait," a woman called from the crowd. "You who dressed promises as bread!"
Then Bram did a thing he had kept hidden until the last moment: he produced the correspondences, the notes, the ledger entries that showed payments, the names of those who had been sent to pretend to be our friends and to shoot the arrow. He presented the witnesses: petty guards who had been paid to lie, a messenger who carried Alejandro's seal.
"Do you deny it?" Bram asked.
Alejandro's face whitened and the smile that had been his armor cracked. He first laughed, brittle. "You lie," he said.
"They have your seal," Bram said. "They have your sigil. They have your hand in the ledger."
The crowd swelled with the music of disdain. The city's scribes pulled out their papers. The merchants stopped weighing coins. Women who had been fretting over suitors now spat and turned away. A child screamed, "That's the man who hurt her!" and the child's cry became a chorus.
Alejandro's defenses now began their slow retreat. He shifted from disdain to pleading. "You do not understand," he said, voice thin. "I did it for the greater good. I—"
"Save your excuses," Bram said. "Excuses are not an empire."
He held Alejandro's eyes and for a moment the emperor flickered with something like fear. Then he attempted to call for his own guards. The guards, seeing the crowd's mood and Bram's control, hesitated. A few even lowered their spears.
"Do you know how they look at you now?" Bram asked loud enough for the whole square to hear. "Do you know what these vendors will tell their children about the man who made a woman a lure?"
The people began to answer. "Shame!" they chanted. "Liar! Traitor!"
Alejandro's face flamed red as the chant rose. He tried flinging words at me like shields. "She slept with me willingly," he said, desperate. "She—"
"Stop," I said then, and the sound of my voice was like a crack across the square. I stepped forward, barefoot where dust climbed my skirt, and the crowd parted like water.
"What do you want?" Alejandro demanded, though his voice had the hollow ring of a bell struck too many times.
"I want you to name what you did," I said, and the words were simple. "I want you to say it in front of these people. I want you to say that you used me as bait."
He staggered like a man struck. He reached for the dignity of the crown that was not there and for the pride that still made him human.
"I only ever—" he began.
"Say it," I insisted.
He looked at me. His eyes searched for softness and found none. The square held its breath.
"Alejandro," Bram said softly, for the same ears. "Say it."
He broke. He looked at the ground and then at the crowd, as if an audience were a judge that could not be bribed with smiles.
"I," Alejandro said, voice cracking, "used her as bait. I sent men. I shot the black-feather arrow. I thought it a plan."
The square convulsed. A woman struck the dirt with her palm. A merchant laughed outright. Alejandro went through the stages like a man in a bad play: pride, shock, denial, defense, then a small private crumble. He begged for understanding, for forgiveness like a beggar asking for bread.
"How could you?" Bram said quietly, his voice a knife. "How could you make such a thing of a woman?"
The crowd answered like a single throat: "Shame! Shame!"
Alejandro's face twitched through expressions. He tried to deny, then to rationalize, then to plead. He looked at me, and his eyes were empty with a man who has lost a map to himself.
"Tell them to forgive me," he pleaded once, a husk of his former arrogance.
People spat. One old man stepped forward and kicked the tassel of Alejandro's sleeve. "You lied. You used a woman's name," he said. "You will answer now."
Bram pronounced the punishment then, loud and precise.
"Public shaming," he said. "For those who turn human bonds into game, for those who trade people's lives for strategies. Alejandro Mendez will be stripped of the trappings that let him hide. He will be forced to stand in the square and listen while the people tell his tale. He will not be killed. He will be remembered—only as a man who thought he could make history by making pain. His name will be written into the record as a caution, not a crown."
The crowd roared. Alejandro flinched as if the very air had become a blade. He tried to strike back, to call for a pardon, to promise anything, but the square swallowed his words.
They made him stand at the center. They removed his fine cloak and left him in a plain tunic. Musicians played something like a dirge. People came forward to speak, one by one: a woman who had been wronged, a soldier who had lost men to a faked skirmish, a child who had seen the arrow. Each voice hammered another nail into the coffin of Alejandro's pride.
He changed before us. The face that had been so sure, so sly, became a study of collapse. He moved from bright arrogance to pale shame, denial to pleading, and then to the small humiliation of a man who had been reduced to a story.
Some in the crowd spat at his feet. A merchant took from his pouch a scrap of Alejandro's ledger and burned it, tossing the blackened ash to the wind like a signal.
"You will be remembered," Bram said when the speeches ended. "You will be read in the chronicles. But you will be read as a warning."
Alejandro crumpled then, a great wind knocking a small tree. He wept without sound. The crowd dispersed with murmurs that would turn into gossip and then into legend.
Afterwards, when the square had emptied and the sun leaned westward, Alejandro came to me. He was hollow and small and still insisted on explaining.
"Forgive me," he said, the words exhausted.
"I was not the only bait," I said, voice dry. "You were not the only sinner."
He bowed his head. "I wanted to be worshiped. I wanted to keep everything."
"You nearly killed me," I said, simple enough.
"I know." He touched his chest like a self-healing man. "I will be written in a way I do not like."
"Then be careful how you live," I said. "If you want immortality in the book, you must be cautious of the ink."
He laughed once, a quiet thing. "What would you have written?"
"I would have written that one emperor learned to keep his promises unbroken," I said. "Or else he learned to lose them without making others bleed."
We did not agree that day on much. Bram did not apologize for his public cruelty. He called it justice. I accepted it as a stage where truth, once shown, could not be unseen.
History took it down. My hand wrote the words that would be read, and my book held the shape of a man who used love as a net. Alejandro was recorded with his fault. Bram got his military honor. I got a place on the page—an odd, stubborn line that said what had happened.
After that, life shifted away from the square. Bram and I kept a wary alliance. Dalary Sanchez—my sister, once a spy disguised as a servant—returned to hold my hand when the nights were long. RaphaeI Carroll, Bram's old guard, took to sitting by my desk and saying, "History is cruel, but the ink will keep."
I married Alejandro in a strange arrangement, a union of politics and stubbornness. He fed me dumplings on our wedding night and called me names that made my cheeks warm. He offered me the title I had once ridiculed—power to stand in a palace and be read aloud. I accepted on my own terms.
And yet there was one more truth I would never let be softened: when traitors thought themselves clever and men turned women into bait, the public could still take a shame and make it into a mirror. In that mirror, a man looks small.
The last line I wrote in my chronicle—after pages of petition and war and bed and breath—was not a crown nor a curse. It was a hand on a page.
"I set a mark," I wrote. "And in the square, with sun on our faces and dust in our mouths, we learned what kind of history we would live in."
The End
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