Sweet Romance16 min read
The Jade Rabbit, the Crown, and My Terrible Talent for Staging Fate
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I woke up inside someone else's life because I fell asleep in the library and the book I had been curled against had been even stranger than usual.
"I thought I was napping," I told the thin slat of light at the window. "Apparently I napped into a plot."
Mae Ford pushed the gauze aside and peered at me. "Miss, if you are done with dreams, breakfast is ready," she said.
"I am done," I lied, sitting up too quickly. "Where am I?"
"You are where you belong, Miss Jana," Mae said, with that practiced warmth that people throw around like scenery at a play.
"Am I... me?" I asked. "Am I Jana Gray?"
Juliet Wang blinked. "Miss, you are Miss Jana Gray. You have always been Miss Jana Gray. Do you mean... otherwise?"
I gripped the quilt until my knuckles ached. I had read the book that had been our bedtime entertainment last week, the one all the girls in town knew about. I had taken it from a shelf and winked at the predictable ways of plots. I had memorized a dozen deaths, betrayals, and poetic downfalls. I had laughed at how a minor character could misstep and ruin an entire fortunescape.
"What do I do if I remember the book?" I said. "What happens to Jana?"
Mae folded her hands. "You are pale, Miss. Do you need tea?"
"I remember everything," I said. "I remember the chapters."
Juliet squeaked. "Chapters?"
"I remember a woman named Aurelie," I said. "She is beautiful like a lake. She becomes my friend. She will tell me she likes a scholar. In the book—" I closed my eyes. "In the book I interfere."
Mae's fingers tightened on the tray. "Miss?"
"I tease and block and protect. I do not mean harm, but I think the story calls it meddling. Then something bad happens. Not to Aurelie—she has the hero's arc—but to me." I looked at them both. "In the book, I die."
Mae choked on a breath. "Die?"
"It is fine," I told them quickly. "It is not fine. I do not intend to die in a book I didn't consent to. So I have a plan."
Juliet's eyes grew wide in the honest way of servants who had never barreled into rebellion before. "A plan?"
"Yes," I said. "We follow the original plot, except we change one detail. We let Aurelie fall for the man the book wanted her to fall for. We encourage it. We refuse to block love. And we keep myself alive."
"That sounds... doable," Mae said, and I believed her.
"I will be the safety net," I said, "the one who pushes them together."
"So we promote a match?" Juliet asked. "That sounds kind."
"Exactly. We will play cheerleader, not saboteur."
She smiled like a saint. "I will do my best, Miss Jana."
The first test came sooner than I expected. "Aurelie is coming," Mae announced, as if to puncture the quiet I had constructed.
I smoothed my skirts and pretended normalcy. "She is my friend, I said yes. I will support her."
The moment she arrived the air changed. Aurelie Ball glided into the room like a page pressed from a poem, hair moon-dark and eyes vast. "Jana," she said softly. "You are awake."
"I am." I took her hand like a pledge. "What is the trouble?"
"I like someone," she said, and the way she said it made me want to cheer. "I think I like him so much it hurts."
"Then, of course," I said seriously, "you must go."
She looked at me in astonishment. "You support me? You really do?"
"Of course," I lied again with a comfort that tasted honest. "You will not stop. You will chase this. I will help."
She cried a little, the way rivers do when they find the sea. "You are wonderful."
"Yes," I said, and meant it. "Now tell me everything."
She leaned toward me and confessed with the shy poetry of an honest girl. "It is a scholar, Miss Jana. A poor scholar; he is not a noble."
My internal gears twisted. "A scholar? But—" I fended off the panic. The book had said Aurelie loved someone else entirely. The plot had already folded in a new crease. "When will you meet him?"
"Tonight, at the temple for the fifteenth night's offerings," she whispered.
"Then we will go together," I declared. "I will bless you. I will pump you with courage."
She smiled, and for the first time I felt a small, honest warmth bagpipe through my chest. Maybe saving my skin would be simpler than I thought.
That night at the temple things went wrong almost immediately.
"I will wait here," I told Aurelie, and watched her climb the stone steps.
I finished my incense slowly, letting the smoke pull my nerves taut. I decided that a little brave intervention could never hurt: a kind word, an awkward compliment. I had time for contrivances.
Footsteps hurried. A shadow slipped inside the guest lodging and pressed against my mouth with a rough hand.
"Shh," the shadow breathed. "Close the door."
I did as instructed. "I did not see anything," I said when the hand moved away. The voice had been low, and there had been a raw smell in the air that might have been a candle or something worse.
"You will say nothing," the shadow said. "Promise me."
"I promise," I whispered, though I actually planned to run in a heartbeat.
I ran. I tripped over the threshold. I hit my head on the door jamb and made an ungodly noise. Two maids—my two—were there in a second, scrambling at my sobs.
"What happened?" Mae demanded.
"Nothing," I managed, holding my forehead like a wounded tourist. "Just a bug. I am fine."
Juliet checked my wrist. "Miss, your trinket—your carved rabbit— has dropped."
My face went cold. The jade rabbit my brother had given me was gone.
The rabbit had been a talisman I clutched like a tiny, green heart. Without it I felt deflated as a windless lantern.
Across the courtyard a man, five figures in hard coats, strode toward us. I swallowed and pulled the maids toward the river gate.
"Miss, what's wrong?" Aurelie asked later, seeing me pale as paper by the temple steps. "You look haunted."
"Perhaps I am," I said, for I felt very haunted. But I lied cheerfully. "Someone frightened me. A misunderstanding. Beetles. Everything is trivial."
She did not probe; she only squeezed my hand like a kind of benediction. "Aurelie, you must tell your family of your plans," I said. "You must not be hurried. Wait for the scholar to pass the exams. You must be patient."
She nodded. "I will. Thank you, Jana."
We kept up the farce for months. I turned myself into the most efficient matchmaking apparatus I could think of. I bribed bakers (Mae bribed them really), I staged coincidental meetings (Juliet worked the garden gate), I showed Aurelie how to tilt her head for the light in the way a portrait wants, so that passersby might remark on her radiance.
And then, of course, the city took a breath and the other thing happened: a woman I had spent little time worrying about, Claudia Booker, declared war.
"You should not be here," Claudia snapped on Lantern Night, a jewel-box of a person with a voice like a snapped ribbon. "You should not take his attention."
"I take no one's attention," I said mildly, looking at a carved rabbit lantern that swung its painted ears in the breeze.
"Then why are you always here when he is? Why are you always arranging meetings?"
"I am not arranging anything," I said, which was technically untrue.
She said, "You must be stopped."
"Stop," I told her. "I do not see how. But try me."
Her hands shook with rage. "One day, you will be sorry."
She stood above me on the lanterned street like an accusation.
The day she made that promise she set in motion the public scene that would make a feast of humiliation later, but at the time I only saw a petty enemy with too many ribbons.
Ezekiel Blake arrived in my life the way storms arrive—without notice and carrying a weather. He was built like a line of ink, handsome and odd, and his smile was always the kind that hid a question.
"Miss Jana," he said when I bumped into him at the tea shop—he had been leaning against the door frame the whole time like an incongruous shadow. "You are always in a hurry."
"I am always in a hurry," I admitted. "There is much to arrange."
"I heard you said you liked me," he replied, voice like a bell striking.
"What?" I nearly choked. "Who said—"
Aurelie, bless her, jumped in at a forty-five-degree angle. "She was only flattering you, Your Grace," she said.
"Is that so?" Ezekiel's black eyes were tiny knives of amusement. "I prefer honesty."
"Then be honest," I said, because I had to. "I admired a man I thought was in the habit of scaring people."
He laughed in a way that made my stomach shiver.
It should have been simple. I should have continued my role as facilitator, but the tricky thing about acting like you love danger is that you meet someone who thinks danger is a duet.
I fumbled, I flattered, and somehow Ezekiel found all my failings charming. He started showing up where I was. He sent me a carved rabbit from his collection—my rabbit. "You dropped this," he said, handing it to me as if it had been a common thing. "I thought it might comfort you."
"It is mine," I stammered. "You have it now."
He smiled like a man satisfied with the geography of fate.
I forgot the original plan for an afternoon.
"Are you courting him?" Aurelie asked one day in a whisper that held both shadow and hope.
"No," I said. "I was going to arrange for you."
"But you are never not near him," she said. "You must tell him how you feel."
"I will not," I insisted, not entirely sure why. "I was going to keep my heart... uncommitted."
He made me feel like a comic relief character who had stumbled into the hero's arc and refused to leave the stage.
Days bled into months of awkward courtship. I performed more than I lived. I staged small heroics, I carried heavy parcels, I smiled at the right moments.
Ezekiel was a peculiar audience. He laughed at my failures and rewarded me with small kindnesses until I began to believe in the kindnesses more than I believed in the plot.
Meanwhile Aurelie's world tilted in the direction I had so carefully nudged. The scholar, Marco Price, passed his exams and became the sort of man who brought flowers like letters. When he came to the house to ask for Aurelie's hand, he did so with the shy bravado that made the world feel like it still had good things in it.
"Jana," Aurelie told me the morning of the proposals, eyes bright as a bell, "he is coming to ask."
"Good," I said. "Let your mother see what a patient heart can win."
"And you?" she asked, suddenly cautious. "Are you well?"
"Perfect," I said, and nearly believed it.
Then everything accelerated. Marco arrived with poems in his hands and a face that had studied the grammar of joy. Aurelie's mother was over the moon and eager to bind such fortune. I watched them sign the small contract of futures and felt both loss and an odd spike of relief.
If Aurelie won the victory, it was mine in the end. I had done what I promised—encouraged, not obstructed. And somehow, in the act of encouraging, something had shifted under my feet.
But Claudia was not finished. She had been the one who had tried to harm Aurelie earlier—planting stories, arranging insults, sending men to spy—and she wanted to be crowned in rage.
She arrived at the spring fair with a plan like a blade: to expose me as a fraud, to show that I had been acting, to tear me into pieces in front of the city and have the prize of my humiliation placed at her feet.
"I will show them who you are," she hissed once in a garden, hands like claws. "You will be a joke."
"I will not go quietly," I said, and because I had learned not to be alone in anything, I asked for a small, theatrical favor instead of begging for protection.
"Help me put her on display," I told Mae and Juliet.
"Outside?" Mae blinked, believing in nothing as much as she believed in soup. "Miss, what are you thinking?"
"Publicly," I said. "We will give her the stage she wants."
Juliet's lips parted. "Why would you do that?"
"Because a shame she plans for me will be directed where it belongs."
The day of the fair the town smelled like honey and fireworks. Lanterns bobbed like honest stars, and crowds braided through the streets.
Claudia had hired two singers. She posted a rumor in fine script: Jana Gray had been bribing the scholar's messenger to steal Aurelie's letters. The town was small; the rumor would travel like a sparrow.
I ordered a small stand and placed in front of it a basket and inside a few trinkets—minor things designed to look like spoils. I took Aurelie's hand and asked her to help me perform.
"Why are we on a stage?" she whispered.
"Because she wishes to be the arbiter," I said. "Because when someone wants a spectacle, we must give them one with truth behind it."
Claudia arrived, harvest-maid pride burning behind her cheeks, ready to recite her accusations.
"I have come to reveal the fraud," she declared, voice like a bell. "This woman—" she jabbed a finger— "struck deals with the scholar's messenger." She produced nothing. The crowd hummed with suspicion.
"I have witnesses," she said. "A maid who took a bribe. A man who saw her steal a letter. Who will stand and say otherwise?"
A hush fell. People loved justice the way they loved bread—hungry for it.
Then I stepped forward and did two things people do not expect from those they intend to shame: I offered proof, and I offered grace.
First: a man a baker owed me a favor from the month I had given him free loaves during a storm. He came now, swollen-cheeked and a little anxious, and handed me a satchel. Inside were letters—letters he had picked up off the street after someone had dropped them in a rush. The envelopes bore Aurelie's name and a seal from Marco Price.
"These were found," he said, voice small.
"Here they are," I told the crowd. "These are the letters. See how the seal matches? See how they are honest? Now who wishes to testify against me with truth rather than rumor?"
A murmur moved like wind through wheat.
Claudia's face hardened. "You have an accomplice or two, no doubt," she snapped. "You set this up to humiliate me."
"Then we will call her accomplices," I said.
I motioned to a street vendor, the one who had seen Claudia's servant slip a folded scrap behind a cloth at the fair earlier that morning. He had been paid to stand silent until I gave the nod. He cleared his throat and came forward.
"I saw a slip," he said. "I thought it was waste. I picked it up." His voice trembled under the lantern glow. He placed another folded scrap on the small table. It was a confession, written in a hurried hand. "It says," he read, "'Plant the rumor at the tea house. They'll be all ears. I took the coin.'"
The crowd shifted. For every person who longs for the spectacle of a fall, there are ten who love a tidy truth. Faces turned.
Claudia's eyes flashed. "You lie," she demanded.
"No," I said, and there my voice found something steady. "You brought men to Aurelie's lodging when she was young and frightened. You sent them to scare her and take things. You spread gossip to get attention. You wanted to be the center."
She laughed then, a brittle sound. "And what of your theft? The story says you stole a trinket to sell."
"That night?" I smiled gently and told the crowd about the hand that had covered my mouth and the men I had seen leaving my guest chamber. "I hit my head. I lost my own rabbit. I fled. Do you think someone else could be kind enough to return it? Ezekiel returned it."
A man in the crowd—Ezekiel—stepped forward then, his coat dark but his presence undeniable. "This is true," he said, and his voice carried. "I returned Jana's rabbit because she is my friend."
Claudia blazed. "You cover for each other!"
"Ezekiel," I said, "you saw those men?"
He met her question with an unreadable smile. "I saw them. They were not of noble bearing."
Someone shouted, "What is your proof?"
Ezekiel reached into his sleeve and produced another glinting thing: a locket with the insignia of a house known to traffic rumors and hired spies. "This was found near the lodging. This house is frequently seen at Claudia's meetings."
A gasp rolled through the crowd. Details matter in public trials. The city's gossip-politics are precise and vicious when friends point fingers. We had found a string to pull, and we pulled.
Claudia's face crumpled. Her posture shifted from pride to confusion to fury to panic. She sputtered, searching for the floor she had been standing on and finding only air.
"You planted the letters! You bribed them! You—" she cried. Her words ate themselves and came out ragged.
The crowd's mood turned. Where there had been curiosity there was now condemnation.
"You accuse me without proof," she shrieked finally, breath hiccuping like a broken bell.
A vendor held up the scrap with her servant's hand caught in ink. "This was found behind your booth," he said. "I remember the handwriting of your servant."
Faces in the crowd began to whisper. Whispers at first soft as moth wings soon found each other's breath. "She hired them." "She spreads lies." "She scares girls."
Claudia's servants stepped back like dogs sensing a thunderstorm. One of them, a pale boy, collapsed into tears and said, "Mistress—" but his voice was too small.
"Claudia," I said, and tried to keep my voice civil. "You can stand here and deny what everyone sees. Or you can answer me."
"Answer what?" she snarled, but there was no heat left, only the thinness of a thing that had been burned too many times.
"Did you send men to frighten Aurelie at the temple?" I asked.
She blinked and a fragile denial fled from her. "I did not—"
"Do you deny paying a scribe to place false letters in teahouses?" I asked.
Her throat bobbed. "I did not—"
Ezekiel set down the locket and glanced at the people near Claudia's booth. "We have witnesses who saw the coins," he said quietly.
The crowd's murmur rippled into a roar. "Shame!" someone cried.
Claudia staggered then, like someone pushed off a cliff of dignity. Her neat necklace snagged on the collar of her dress and came undone. A small trinket dropped and clattered into the dust. People bent to stare at the fallen object as if it were the proof of an entire life.
"You wanted the stage," I said softly. "You have it."
She tried to walk away, to strike a face that had turned on her. Hands reached for her; not to pull her together but to push her away. Women who had once smiled in her direction now crossed the fountain away from her. Vendors who had known her family now shook their heads.
"Don't touch me!" Claudia screamed, but the crowd would not obey. She had been writing a story about my shame and had instead written her own.
"Claudia Booker," a matron called, "explain your payments!"
"Explain them!" another demanded.
She tried to pull them back into her orbit by lies and promises but watched those lies crumble. Her voice moved from anger to pleading to a small, hollow terror.
"Stop," she begged at last, to no one. "Please. I am ashamed. I am sorry. I—"
Her apology landed on the cobbles like a coin: visible but worthless.
People started to take out small slips of paper and write the confession down into their own pockets. Others snapped crude drawings with ink to immortalize the spectacle. A few children jeered. Someone started a chant that was not violent but utterly social: "No gossip. No harm."
"What will you do now?" I asked quietly.
"What do you want?" she screamed. "Do you want me to beg? To—"
She fell to her knees under the lamps, clutching the dust as if it might forgive her. Her well-made dress spilled around her like a dark, unwanted bloom. People made a ring like bees around a splintered log and then moved on, because a public disgrace is not always a spectacle of punishment but also a lesson: do not be her.
I walked closer. "Stand up," I told her. "Tell them what you did. Take responsibility."
She looked up at me with eyes suddenly small and hollow. "You made me do this," she whimpered. "You—"
"No," I said. "You made yourself do this."
Claudia's face contorted, and she tried to beg, but the voices were too many. They said, "We will not gossip again." They said nothing else much because a communal refusal is sometimes louder than revenge.
People walked away. The singers Claudia had hired slipped away with their coins. The vendors who had once sold her favors closed their booths. Her family, who had been watching from a distance, appeared suddenly and pulled her away like something they had caught on a hook.
She tried once more at the lintel, "They will listen—"
"No one will listen," a woman called out. "When you bite people for attention, you lose your right to be heard."
And then Claudia was led away. She collapsed in the shade of a carriage and sobbed, and people whispered, but it was no longer a festival for her. She had been undone publicly: her friends turned their faces, the market drew back, and the city administered the kind of punishment it understands best—ostracism wrapped in a lesson.
I think she expected something more theatrical. She did not get that. She got a silence that is worse. She felt the slow burn of being un-included. She saw the subtle shift of alliances and realized she had nowhere to stand. Her supporters slipped like gravel from a slope. Her high title could not stack into a chair to sit on.
"Please," she pleaded to a world that only heard her as a lesson.
"No," someone said. "We saw."
She begged, then. She promised to change. She offered money back. She tried to spin a story that redeemed her.
The crowd did not grant her the stage necessary to beg successfully. It was as if the city had a jury made of gazes, and they delivered their verdict by withdrawing attention: Claudia was allowed a minute of righteous pleading and nothing more.
Later that night I heard she had been quietly cut off—no invitations, no woven favors, no new merchants calling. The small cruelties of social exile sat like tiny stones in her path. When she tried to come to the next public festivity, women crossed the street. When she sought conversation at market stalls, shopkeepers made an excuse.
Her reaction changed the most in the hours after: the confidence that had once been like a cape became a tremor. She attempted denials, then tears, then outrage, and finally the awkward, private bargaining of a person bargaining for a place they had decided to lose.
"Ezekiel," someone hissed to me later, "why did you side with her?"
"I did not side against anyone," he said. "I stood for truth."
"Was that your intention?" the woman pressed.
"I prefer truth to rumors," he said. "And I prefer when people are brave enough to own up to what they did."
Around us the city exhaled and moved on. Aurelie and Marco walked by, hands clasped. I watched them and knew I had done right.
"Thank you," Aurelie said to me later, wrapping both hands around the small carved rabbit I'd once lost and now carried again in my pocket.
"You did all the work," I protested.
"You stood up," she insisted. "You did more than anyone."
I smiled and tucked the rabbit back into my sleeve. The jade was cool. It felt like a small heart.
Ezekiel came to me the next day with quiet insistence. "You are oddly brave," he said, "and sometimes, for reasons I cannot explain, I enjoy the way you stumble and stay."
"Is that a courtship?" I asked.
"It might be," he said. "If you will have it."
"I have no desire to be villain or martyr," I said. "I would like to be allowed to live."
"Then be allowed," he replied.
Months changed. Aurelie married Marco with the silly, tender pomp a woman who had waited deserves. I went to their wedding, and for the first time in many moons I felt that steering a plot was less necessary than watching a good thing unfold.
Ezekiel and I took slow steps that were not labeled as romance in the book I had read. He bought me tea when the world felt small. He listened to my horrid jokes. He kept the rabbit by my pillow.
"Why the rabbit?" I asked him once, fingering the green jade.
He shrugged. "It looked like it belonged with you."
"I can be dangerous," I told him.
"You are," he answered, and his smile had a crease that meant a private amusement.
I used to think my job in this book was to not die. That was selfish and foolish in equal measure. My job turned into something more humane: to make sure love had space, to keep the petty from rolling like stones at the feet of the honest, and to keep my own name safe from the book's proposed disasters.
"You saved yourself," Aurelie said to me at the wedding, when she danced with Marco and his joy made the air brassy.
"No," I said. "We saved each other."
Ezekiel's voice slipped into my ear as the fireworks whispered. "You made me believe in small ordinary things."
"I did not know I could," I said.
He laughed like a man who had learned to enjoy the unexpected. "Neither did I."
At the end of the spring, I took the jade rabbit out. It had been missing and returned and missing and returned again. It fit into my palm the way a small secret does.
"Keep it," Ezekiel said, seeing my fingers fidget. "Keep it near you."
I slipped the rabbit back under my sleeve and felt the world fold into a quieter shape.
"You remember the book?" Aurelie asked that night, when the city was finally calm.
"Every line," I said.
"And do you regret changing it?"
"No," I answered. "I wrote a new chapter that kept alive more than one heart."
She kissed my cheek like a blessing. "Then that was worth everything."
I lay awake that night and thought about the ways people punish and the ways people forgive. The city has a way of choosing—sometimes it chooses sharp teeth, sometimes a long silence. Claudia had chosen spice and public notes and had burned herself. Aurelie had chosen patience and had won a good man. I had chosen survival and had found a kindness I did not expect.
Outside the window our little lantern hung, painted with a rabbit turning slowly. Its moving face made a gentle, private show.
"I will not be a footnote," I whispered to the rabbit.
"Nor will I," Ezekiel murmured back.
We listened to the soft tick of the fair's leftover music. I thought of the book, and then I put it on the shelf where it belonged, because some stories need reading—and some need being lived.
The End
— Thank you for reading —