Sweet Romance10 min read
The Girl Who Would Not Be Sold
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I was thirteen the night my life was traded for fifty pieces of silver.
"Juliet," my mother said as she shoved the coins into a ragged pouch and shoved me toward the open carriage, "count yourself lucky. You'll be kept warm. You'll eat. Don't make trouble."
"Mother—" I reached, but her hand tightened like a clamp.
"Don't call me that," she snapped. "You go be grateful to whoever buys you."
I went because the world I knew had no other answer. The road smelled of moss and cold earth. The carriage rocked like a cradle. At the other end was Ivan Gallo's grand hall, and later—stranger still—the palace.
"What's your name?" the man in the private chamber asked the first night, and the question echoed in me so often it became a drum.
"My name is Juliet Peters," I said, voice sinking into the mattress. "My small name is 'Poppy.' My mother says small names keep you alive."
He did not answer at first. He watched me as if measuring me by a ruler he held inside his eyes. Then he smiled—an odd, thin curve—and asked, "Do you like flowers?"
"Yes," I said.
He took to calling me Poppy. The palace taught me other names—new threads woven into an old tapestry. They called me "Lady Forsan" and gave me a room lined with silks and a tiny jade comb. The emperor—Foster Lombardo—was pale and quiet, and he asked me strange questions that kept my heart too full of fear and wonder.
"How old are you, Poppy?" he asked on the first morning we met properly.
"Thirteen," I answered honest as truth.
He froze as if someone had touched a live wire. For a moment I thought I'd said something wrong. Then he laughed softly. "You are very small to be in a place like this."
"Maybe," I said. "But I know how to fetch water and how to tie a knot."
He touched my shoulder once, light as a winter leaf. "Be honest with me, Poppy," he said. "Say what I tell you to say, and do not tell it to anyone else."
I nodded. The palace was loud in quiet ways—a shuffle of silk, a whisper that never went away. I learned quickly how to survive the hush. I learned which servants were kind and which looked at me like I might break.
They sent me to Patio K—an outbuilding for novices, then ordained me "Lady Forsan." I ate sweet steamed buns that made my hands greasy, and I slept on cushions that smelled faintly of the emperor's robe. He let me keep my small name. "Poppy," he said once, and the syllable stuck to my ribs like syrup.
"Do you like your new life?" he asked nightly when the candles burned low.
"If you did not breathe," I said one dusk, "I would not know it."
Foster Lombardo—the emperor—was not unkind. He had a scar along his left side that made me keep my hands careful. One night he coughed so hard I thought he would fall. I wanted to be brave, so I brought him warm broth and sat while he rested. He told me, "In my life I have many enemies, and in their plots they will use whatever hands they can find."
"Will they hurt you?" I asked.
"If they do, will you be brave enough to tell me?" he countered.
"I will try," I said, and meant it.
There were many people in the palace who wore smooth smiles but sharpened knives behind their teeth. Ivan Gallo—the man whose family had bought me—had reach and appetite like a wolf. His daughter, Kataleya Ferrari, smiled like a porcelain doll with teeth, and she wore jewels so often her hands twinkled when she cut bread.
"Your garments are too plain," Kataleya told me once, opening a wooden box of trinkets with a careful cruelty. "For one who stands so close to the emperor, Poppy, you should shine."
"Thank you," I said, though I wanted to spit. Gifts can be hands that offer rope.
The palace taught me rules: bow lower, speak less, be visible and invisible at once. It taught me how to lie about comfort and about fear. But it did not teach me how to wash the moment my heart split.
A plan unfolded in the hush that smelled of camphor and old money. I was told, by a trembling servant, that some wanted the emperor gone. "They'll make it look like a kitchen accident," the woman whispered, eyes wide like frightened birds. "They'll tempt him with rare fish, put something in the broth—then the blame will be yours."
I remembered the small, hard bead the servant had handed me. "Put this in his tea every third day," she had said. "If you don't, they're threats—if you do, your family lives."
I froze. They had him as leverage: my family, my little boy brother Keegan Cannon—my brother who still believed in my cooking and used to hum when we slept. "If I do what they ask," I said out loud, barely hearing myself, "they will leave them alone?"
"Yes," she replied. "They promise."
So I lied to save them. I learned to walk the kitchen at midnight like sleepwalking. I slipped a pearl-sized bead into a teacup and told myself it wasn't poison because the servants were kind. I told myself it was only a promise.
Then the plan changed. Foster had reasons to test me and reasons to trust me. The night the emperor almost died, it was not by my hand. The fish broth was put down on his desk, and he drank less than a sip. He crouched to teach me to write, and then his face went white, and he coughed up blood.
They called the healer; the palace smelled like distillations and fear. The court murmured. Someone said "poison" like a verdict. My heart froze. I had laid plans, yes, but I had not imagined I might be the scaffold under a man with the emperor's breath.
After a blur of clamoring voices and a host of cold faces, Foster looked at me through a web of pain. "Did you bring this to me?" he asked.
"No," I blurted, though the heat of shame burned my throat.
He watched me, the way he always watched: not cruel, but entirely aware. "You brought me an egg custard," he said, "and told me it's good for the stomach. You also brought other things, and you go to many palace houses. I would ask only this of you in return for my life—be honest."
When I protested, he did not scold; he coaxed. "If they would use your family," he said quietly, "we will not let them make you their rope." Then he told me he already suspected someone in Ivan Gallo's house: odd favors, too many smiles that hid claws. "You did not cause this," he said. "You will not be forced to stay where you are, or to carry that sorrow alone."
Later, as the moon slid like a pale coin across the garden, he sat me down and told me the truth. "I have watched you since you came," he said. "You run toward harm, for reasons I cannot teach, and because of that you have made enemies and friends in equal measure. Do you trust me enough to let me act?"
"Yes," I whispered. The word felt like a stone and also like a seed.
Foster Lombardo acted like a man who read names as maps. He decided to draw out the wolves. "The chancellor will brag," he said. "Pride shows the teeth. We will make him snap in a place with witnesses."
I was afraid—afraid not for the first time—but I agreed because my brother's face came to me: Keegan Cannon, who loved to run barefoot and climb the fence. I would not let those hands be used like a bargain.
For days we prepared. Foster arranged a visit to Ivan Gallo's seat under the guise of reconciliation. In truth, he planned a public spectacle to make all the underthings of the house show themselves. He invited witnesses: the city's magistrates, courtyard ladies who liked to gossip, clerks with their neat bundles of papers—people who would talk and whose talk would become net.
When the day arrived, Foster stood at the hall and looked like a man made of bone and light. The doors were thrown open, the servants bowed, and Ivan strolled forward like a man who had prepared a banquet and a trap.
"Welcome, Your Majesty," Ivan said, his voice the smooth oil of a wheel. "We are honored."
Kataleya Ferrari trailed behind him like a scent: bright, shiny, sharp. She smiled at me in a way that felt like an accusation. "Lady Forsan," she said sweetly, "how fortunate to be here as decoration."
Foster did not bite on that. He smiled thinly. "I came to speak of loyalty and of home," he said. "But first, we will look at what your house keeps as proof of its faith."
He ordered that the household scrolls be brought out. The magistrates watched. They watched as the records were read aloud. Charges of plots, lists of clandestine shipments, notes of payments to a man who kept a boat beyond the east gate—small things, but when read together they formed a map.
"Ivan," Foster said, his voice quiet, "you claimed none of this. How do you answer the record?"
Ivan's smile tightened. "Your Majesty complains of small things. I am a servant of the state. My loyalty is written on these papers."
"Then perhaps you can explain how the name 'Keegan Cannon'—your gift recipient—appears in your ledger as payment for 'discreet services'?"
Ivan flushed. "That is a clerical mistake."
The hall's air shifted. Women gasped. A clerk in the back smirked, then stopped when he saw Foster's face.
Then Foster turned, and with a hand that was both ruler and blade, he walked the room and began to unroll the yarn they had made for themselves. He spoke of a pattern of coerced favors, of threats leveled at weak heads in tiny kitchens. He spoke of ivory parcels that never reached their stated destination: medicine replaced with bitter root, gifts with strings. Each phrase was a stone, and Ivan Gallo was the bird caught by the weight.
"You forced youths into silence!" Foster said. "You used families as bargaining chips and called it governance."
Kataleya's face changed. It went from porcelain to something brittle. "These accusations are outrageous," she hissed, a petulant queen who realized she had been turned into a piece on a larger board.
"Outrageous?" the magistrate asked, and for the first time a coldness entered his voice. "We will examine the ledgers and the witnesses. If your household has traded citizens for silence, it is treason."
Ivan's expression slid: from smug to stunned to wild. "You have no proof," he cried. "You would accuse me in public—"
"Because your plots were never private," Foster replied. "Because you assumed whispers would stay whispers. Because your arrogance forgot that courts have listening ears."
The magistrate signaled for the guards. They moved like the tide: slow, inevitable. "By imperial order," someone announced, "we detain Ivan Gallo pending inquiry."
Kataleya's hands flew to her mouth. "No, no, you cannot—" Her words thinned out into sobs.
I had expected that the punishment would be swift and brutal and private, but instead Foster let the law do its work. The public unmasking was sharper. Each clerk, each servant who had been bribed or threatened sat forward and told what they had seen. A kitchen boy spoke of beads taken from the storeroom and melted into draughts. A former steward confessed he had signed away the names of families who had been promised protection if they kept silent.
Ivan's change of face was the slow undoing of a fabric pulled apart. At first he blustered, then he pleaded, and then, when even his allies turned aside, he crumpled. The crowd's murmur became a chorus. Women in the court muttered, "So he used families like chess pieces." A clerk threatened to take the ledger to the city. Someone in the third row took out a small tablet and began to copy details with precise, clinical cruelty.
Kataleya wept in a way that made people turn away. She had thought her station gave her invulnerability; she had believed herself small by design, not by circumstance. As the magistrates ordered Ivan and his household men detained, a dozen witnesses stepped forward: men who had accepted coin and then had been forced to do dirty work; a cook who had been given orders to tamper with medicine; a courier who had delivered packages labeled 'for private use' and watched a small boy fade afterward.
It was public, and it was loud, and it was terrible to watch. Ivan's face collapsed under the weight of his own misdeeds. He was dragged past the courtyard gates and into the hands of judges. Kataleya, stripped of her coarse jewels and left with nothing but a dull robe, was sent to stand and answer for how she had aided the schemes.
"No!" she cried finally, voice cracking like glass. "I did not—"
"Silence," said Foster. "You are not above the law."
She staggered as if punched. Her servants whispered, some plucked out their earrings and offered them to the magistrate as surety. A woman in the crowd recorded the scene, trembling as she wrote. Others spread the story like a ribbon until the whole city—stable boys, spice merchants, the woman who sold pickled pears—knew what had happened at Ivan Gallo's house.
I walked to Foster's side and stood there. He did not look at me with victory so much as with fierce sorrow. "They were wrong to use you," he said. "No woman should be set like a token on a table to be traded."
The punishment was not vengeance; it was exposure and justice. Ivan Gallo was stripped of titles, his estates inspected, his accounts opened like a book. The people he had used as pawns were given hearing. Kataleya was humiliated publicly: not by a rope or a brand, but by exposure—her complicity read aloud, her pious smiles rendered empty by the ledger of payments. Women who once adored her now spat and turned their faces. Men who once praised her for her jewels now shouted and demanded recompense.
They were in chains of law and in the chains of public scorn, and both are cold, and both are final in their own way.
I had imagined the worst for myself: that I would be cast out, or worse, made into the scapegoat and left in a dark corner with my name smeared. Instead, the city saw the truth. People wept and cheered; some held up my and Keegan's names like talismans. There was a sound in the courthouse I will never forget: the sound of people deciding that one less predator could not have the whole night for itself.
Afterwards, Foster and I walked the gardens where the moon hung like a silver coin. "You did not ruin him—he ruined himself," he said.
"But I put the pearl into the cup." I could not stop the memory of my trembling finger.
"You did what you had to," he said. "I could have had you punished for touching the emperor's food. Instead I used the law to drag the truth out."
I rested my head on his shoulder. It was the first time I felt less afraid. "Will there be more?" I asked.
"Always," he said. "But we will be ready."
We married in a way small people understand: not with trumpets but with the quietness of two hands that refuse to let go. The city remembered the trial for months. Ivan Gallo's name was a warning. Kataleya's jewels were sold and used to settle debts. The merchants talked until their gossip grew old and then thin.
Foster and I built a life that could be measured by small things: a warm bowl of broth on the table, Keegan's laughter when he returned to town older but safe, the way our house smelled of woodsmoke on winter nights. I still burned my hands sometimes on the oven; I still woke sweaty on certain nights when the past pressed close. But there was law now, and a hand to hold me.
"Do you ever fear," I asked him once, "that you loved me because I ran into danger?"
He laughed, and it was the kind of laugh that warmed the back of my neck. "I loved you because you ran. Because you had the courage to act when others only spoke. Because you were honest with all your flaws. Because you were brave enough to be small and still choose to do something."
I liked that version better than the old one where I was simply traded. I liked being chosen.
Years passed. The palace changed and people moved like tides. One winter, as frost coated the garden and Keegan chased snowflakes like a rabbit, Foster and I stood on the balcony and watched the city lights like a field of stars.
"Do you remember that bead?" Foster asked softly.
I smiled, because I had kept it even though it had never been used. "I keep it in my hand now when I am afraid," I said.
He took my fingers, warm and steady. "Then put it in mine. We will get through fear together."
Outside, somewhere far below, the city's market traders called their wares. Inside, the lanterns burned slow.
I had once been sold for fifty coins. I kept that number like an old scar: something that taught me how to choose otherwise. Now I learned new trades: loyalty, and the small quiet currencies of a household that loved me.
We lived not like kings in a tower but like people who had stitched life from small things: an honest meal, a laugh at a bad joke, the slow, irretrievable knowledge that somebody would always come find you.
The End
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