Sweet Romance15 min read
The Jade Token and the Crowned Mistake
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"I married once before I entered the palace."
The Emperor laughed like he always did when he called me by that old nickname. "I know you married before, it's that Abraham fellow. Don't worry. The Crown Prince and he are close."
"I could find someone better for the Crown Prince. He deserves better," I said.
The Emperor's brows drew together. He lowered his voice. "Isla, are you afraid the throne won't pass to the Prince because of this?"
I blinked. "What?"
"If you worry night-long," he said, "I can die now."
I was stunned into silence. Then, later that day, when a marriage decree reached my father's house, I sat with the Emperor—my uncle, the man who had watched me grow—and told him plainly that I would not marry the Prince.
"Then run," he said simply. "I'll tell them you passed in your sleep. We'll end the match."
I cried. I packed. I left.
"You can't," a voice yawed behind me on the road.
I turned. Bastian Finley, the Crown Prince, stood there with a handful of attendants. Beside him my maid Kendall Vang looked like she had swallowed a sour plum.
"Kendall," I motioned, "didn't His Majesty tell you anything?"
Kendall pressed her lips. "Miss, His Majesty said: she runs, he chases. She spreads wings and still cannot fly."
I stared. "…"
That night I became the Crown Princess. The Emperor threw a party to "deepen our revolutionary friendship," he said, and came with an entourage to the bridal chamber. They played childish games, put the Prince in the doorway, and scattered coins at my maids. The Emperor insisted on finding my hidden shoe. He made the Prince eat dates with his mouth. The whole court seemed like a family gathered to shame me into loving.
After the guests left, I opened the gifts. The Emperor had sent a pure-gold washboard.
"Bastian," I said with real confusion, "why a washboard?"
He blinked at it like it was a riddle. "Does washing need to be royal?"
"Then why did His Majesty send it?"
He shrugged. "He believes in chores."
We argued about the washboard like children. A while later he asked me, "Do you sleep?"
"Yes?"
"Why is last night's water not drinkable, but morning's is? Is night a poison?" He smiled. "I know: it's your loneliness."
I wanted to tell him that loneliness was an old thing for me. "…"
The next morning, we went to the palace to pay respects. The Emperor was playing mah-jong in the Empress's apartments. He smiled when he saw me. Then, like a dark cloud, he looked at Bastian.
"Bastian, why are you here?" the Emperor grumbled.
Bastian bowed. "To see the Emperor and Empress."
"You think they need you?" the Emperor said.
Bastian said nothing, then presented a jade bracelet to the Empress. The Empress clasped my hand and drew me into her side.
"These sweet cakes are made by Yulan," she said, passing me a plate. "Take some home."
The cakes were a kind of lotus and honey pastry. I was grateful and said so. The Empress looked pleased.
"Yulan," she called to one of her long-serving housemaids, "go with our Princess to the Prince's house. She likes your cakes."
"No," I protested, "Yulan has served Your Majesty for forty years. She should not leave."
But the Empress insisted. "I have no daughter now, Isla. Take her."
I reached for my cake and tried to hide the sudden ache in my chest. The Empress's eyes were warmer than any I had known in a long time.
Then a ripple came through the court. A man asked to see me. His boots hit the marble like a drum.
"Abraham," the Emperor said, his smile gone cold, "what business have you in the inner court?"
Abraham Fournier bowed with a grin that did not reach his eyes. "Familiar, Your Majesty. Very familiar."
The tea on a tray fell and shattered at his feet. The Emperor's face turned hard. "Do you think I will not punish you for such insolence?"
Abraham only smiled the broader smile. "Punish, Your Majesty? As you wish."
In that moment my stomach dropped. The memory of him—how he'd taken me in when I was found with no memory, how he'd claimed me, how I learned to call him husband—came back like an ache. I had once been rescued from the battlefield with blood in my hair and nothing in my head. He had fed me and made me a wife. Later he fled the limit of his loyalties, returned to court for rank, and divorced me as if I were a suit of clothes.
Bastian stood by my side then. "She looks pale," he said. "Isla, shall I take you out?"
"Yes," I whispered.
He escorted me out. Passing Abraham, I felt my heart hammer as if a fist squeezed it. I wanted to run. I wanted to hide. I wanted, for the smallest second, to believe he would be gentle.
Days passed and my life with Bastian settled into small surprises. He brought me a special chicken from a famous shop, and in his earnestness he had captured a live chicken to preserve its flavor. He explained the chicken's daily regimen with solemn pride.
"This chicken woke at dawn, slept at eight, walked twenty thousand steps," he said as he presented it. "It absorbed the sun and moon and is full of vigor."
"You are ridiculous," I told him, laughing at the thought of a regimented chicken.
"I need praise," he said. "Say it."
"Fine. With you around, I am impressed."
He beamed and showed me two tiny teeth when he smiled. He insisted on killing and cooking the chicken himself. The bird flapped and flopped until he finally managed to dispatch it with another stab, and I nearly fainted.
"Doesn't someone go to prison for killing like that?" I joked, because I could not say how strange he made me feel.
He only said, "Perhaps the chicken has feelings."
We wrapped the meat and went to present it to the Emperor. The Emperor tasted it and said, "I can tell it's meat."
Bastian blushed like a child. I felt oddly proud.
One morning word passed through the court: Abraham had asked the Emperor for permission to remarry—someone else, someone with better connections. The Emperor, bored, gave his blessing, and Abraham carried on as if the court belonged to his vanity.
"How could she be happy?" I thought of the woman he chose, of the pregnant courtship displayed like a trophy. The woman flaunted her fortune and taunted me. "I can marry General Abraham," she would say to anyone who would listen.
The court celebrated Abraham's wedding with pomp. He soon left for the frontier.
Bastian and I were sent also—to the northwest to build schools, feed the poor, and repair roads. We set up a place called the Charity Hall and made children laugh with small carts we called baby carriages. When we returned to court, the new general's wife's belly was round with child and the court's gossip circled like flies.
"Someone didn't mind his father's old age," the Emperor sniffed. "She will have so many grandchildren she'll need a new family tree."
Bastian only smiled and gave me his coat to put around my shoulders. His hand found mine by habit, and I felt its cool strength. When he noticed me watching him, he said softly, "What are you thinking about?"
I almost let my old fear spill out. Instead I said, "I wanted to walk for a little."
He wrapped my shoulders and squeezed my hand. "Then let's walk."
I returned after that trip to my father's house. He had aged as if a season had passed without a summer. He spoke little, worked the garden of peonies, and touched a small clay doll I'd made once. He did not smile. I sat in the flowerbeds until the sun went low and finally asked, "Father, do you hate me?"
He froze, then quietly asked, "When did you know?"
I remember the moment I learned who I was—how my memory had been a blank and Abraham fed me until my past crept back like frost. He had known my identity and yet treated me with brandished cruelty after his own ambitions grew. The day he choked me against a wall is burned into me. He had called me worthless, said the Emperor would not give him the throne, and he would not accept me if I were only a pawn.
I had taken a knife and stabbed him. I remember standing over him, feeling the weight of each breath as he fell. I took his token then—the tiger token he used to command troops—and ran. I could not bring myself to speak of it to others. I ran away, and then the Emperor and Bastian found me.
"Father," I said that night, "I will travel. I will come back."
I left the Prince's house after that with a stolen piece of silver and the thought that maybe freedom meant I should learn to crawl through the smallest hole. I squeezed through a drain and stumbled out onto grass. A figure lay on his elbow looking at the stars.
"Stop," he said with a lazy voice when he saw me. "Not a thief?"
"I'm the Princess now," I told him, outraged and breathless.
He smiled, not impressed, and tilted his head. "Name?"
"Isla Vorobyov," I said.
He laughed. "Try again."
"I will pay you five hundred silver to carry me."
He raised an eyebrow. "Five hundred? The Princess of the Prince's house sells herself cheap."
I threw a silver note at him. "Now carry."
He hoisted me onto his back like I was feather-light.
"Who are you?" I asked as we walked.
"Arjun Perkins," he said. "And you're stubborn."
He carried me all the way to a small town called Anqing. I bought a small courtyard there, planted vines and bamboo. I built a life shaped like simple dinners and the sound of wood being sawed. I liked the ordinary. I liked that Arjun could laugh at the way I fretted, and that he knew how to bite my finger to make me learn a foolishness.
One late evening, I rose to fetch water and watched Arjun saw wood. I cut my finger on a splinter. He pressed my wound gently to his lips as if such contact could seal pain away. For a second I let it be. For a second I felt human.
Then one morning at the market, as I sold vegetables, I looked up and saw Abraham standing across the lane.
"Abraham," he said in that slow voice. "Isla."
My face drained. I did not know if I wanted to run or to stand and watch as his expression thinned and warped. He had tracked me to the frontier, captured me, bound my hands, and demanded the tiger token. He once forced me to live in a tent, made me eat bitter wild greens, and let me rot in a fever until Arjun found me and brought me back to life.
I had thought him dead in a way: dead to my heart. But he had not been destroyed by defeat. He had ambition.
"Where is the tiger token?" he demanded one night in a dark tent near the frontier.
"I don't know," I told him. "It was lost."
He tightened his grip. "You lied to me then."
I had lied because I would not give it to him. He needed that token to command men and to hold weight in the courts. He thought giving me a wife would buy him the Emperor's favor. It had not.
I struck him when his hands tightened, and I escaped into the dark with my stolen token. Arjun found me near death and nursed me back with syringes of herbs. I learned to breathe again.
When our country came to war with the neighboring realm of Roan, Arjun went as a commander. The Emperor laughed and then hesitated. He placed a trust in Arjun and spoke to me with a child's grin. "This is your friend," he told me. "You will help him be a good soldier."
Arjun blundered like a man who had read more poems than military manuals. He marched the wrong way, burned the wrong barns, and once set our own granaries alight by mistake. He kept refusing to believe that war was simple. The Emperor tried to manage it like a gardener trying to prune a riotous vine.
"Burn it," the Emperor said, pointing at the enemy's supply. "Don't touch our stores."
Arjun did what he could. It went badly. The soldiers grumbled, and Abraham used the gossipy cracks in the camp to whisper that Arjun must be an enemy spy.
I could not let Aljun be crushed by rumor and incompetence. One night I slipped into the enemy camp with Kendall at my side and took a hostage—an old villager who claimed to be their leader. I marched him back, dagger at throat, and nearly had both sides draw their blades. Arjun stood between my father and the man with a glinting sword. A stalemate formed.
"I will not let you take my father," Arjun told me in a voice like iron.
"If this is a marriage of necessity," I said, "do it properly."
The commanders panicked. As the two kings exchanged begrudging smiles, the war cooled like soup gone cold. "Make a marriage," they suggested, as if ceremony could stitch a wound.
We married under the stars in a tent half-baked by smoke and the smell of stewing beans. It was ridiculous. It was real.
When we returned to the capital, snow fell like flour, and the court was as usual a furnace of small humiliations and big vanity. Abraham returned too—older, rumor-led, and with a bitter smile. He came with the faint hope he could use his old ties to reclaim advantage.
But time had a way of unfastening masks. Abraham's power had been built on bluster and a secret bargain with the enemy. One afternoon in the hall when the Emperor sat bored and the court gossiped, I decided to end the thing.
I stood and called out, "Abraham Fournier!"
The room hushed.
He rose, surprised. "My lady?"
"Where is the tiger token?" I asked loud enough for every ear. "Where is the token you used to command men? Who did you trade it to?"
He smiled, slow and confident, like a man who thinks the world is his oyster. "You're loud," he said. "And foolish."
I reached into my sleeve and produced a parchment: the record of his secret letters, the payments, the names of those who had taken coin to open gates at night. Abraham's grin faltered. The Emperor's eyes narrowed like knives.
"Isla," the Emperor said, and his voice was not the warm laugh from earlier, "explain."
"You know everything," I said. "He demanded the token. He tried to use it to buy power. He sold information to the enemy."
Abraham's face went through a meter of colors: first slack surprise, then anger, then denial. "Lies," he spat. "They are lies."
"No," I said, and then I told the hall everything—how he had choked me, how he had wanted the throne, how he had left me for his own gain, how he had colluded for the war. Each sentence landed like a stone. The courtiers leaned forward. Kendall's hands were white in her lap. Bastian's jaw clenched.
"You traitor," the Emperor said finally. "All here shall see justice."
At once the hall turned into a theater.
"Seize him," the Emperor ordered.
Abraham's mouth opened. He had not expected to be led in this way. He had expected whispers, a backdoor negotiation. He was not prepared to be played like a puppet before an audience that included the very soldiers who had followed the token he once brandished.
They dragged him to the center. The herald read the charges—treason, collusion, attempted bribery of commanders. The crowd murmured, then grew loud.
"Abraham Fournier!" the herald proclaimed. "You stand accused before your Emperor, before the Princes and Princes, before those you betrayed."
Abraham laughed at first, a brittle metallic thing. "You have no proof."
I stepped forward. "These ledgers. These letters. The seal from the border village that took your bribe."
He flinched. The soldiers produced the documents. The Emperor's hand tapped the table and the court fell silent.
First his expression hardened into arrogance. He glowered at the Emperor like a dog finding a bone. "You have no right," he said. He smiled to the crowds as if to win them by charm. "This is a trick. I am a hero of the frontier."
Then he looked at the soldiers who had once obeyed him. Some looked down. Some looked to the Emperor. A few looked at the ledger and back at Abraham. The theater of his fall began.
He tried denial. "I did what I had to!" he shouted. "I served the realm!"
Faces did not soften. A woman near the balustrade whispered, "He stabbed her once." A boy muttered, "He sold out our granaries." Phones—I mean, scribes—caught every word.
The Emperor decreed the punishment be public and unmistakable. "We will strip him of rank and his honors," he said. "We will take the tiger token and return it to the Emperor's chest. He will be paraded through the market with the banners of his shame."
"You cannot!" Abraham clawed for dignity. "I served—"
"You served yourself," the Emperor said.
They removed his insignia. A guard bound his hands with a red cord. They forced him into a sedan and carried him through the great market. People crowded the streets. Vendors pointed at him. A child spat and an old man called him traitor. Merchants who had once bowed now kicked dust at his boots. Kendall watched from a balcony, trembling. Bastian followed at a distance with his head bent.
At the city gate they halted and a public reading repeated the list of his crimes. The crowd jeered. Abraham's face shifted: first shock at the volume of hatred, then fury, then a panic-stricken denial. He begged, first to the Emperor, then to the crowd.
"Your Majesty, I beg you!" he cried. "I made mistakes. I was misled. Forgive me and I will serve you still!"
"No," the Emperor replied. "You will answer to the country."
They tore his robe and hung on him a placard naming his acts. He sputtered. He tried to plead with those who had once called him commander. "I was brave," he said.
A soldier who had once stood under his flag spat into the dust. "You sold us for coin," he said. "You left us to starve."
Abraham's pleading turned to snarling. He tried to blame me. "She told lies," he said, lunging for me through the guards. The crowd roared. The guards slammed him down. He convulsed in anger. He swung his head, eyes wild. At the sight of his former allies turning away, he lost his smile.
The Emperor did not order execution. He wanted shame to be the punishment—the slow burn of reputation lost. Abraham was paraded in a wooden cart through the market, led by two veterans who spat at his feet. They forced him to hand over the tiger token, which they then smashed and burned before the market. Smoke curled up and the token's fragments lay like black seeds in the sun. People took pieces as talismans.
"Look," the Emperor said to the crowd. "A leader who sells his country cannot lead. He sells trust. When trust is gone, a man has nothing."
I watched Abraham's face as it crumpled. First he went red, then pale, then wet. He sought the faces of the courtiers who had once courted him and found only turned heads. He cried out. He tried to seem dignified. He begged. He raged. He fell silent. At last he curled inside himself like a wounded animal.
When they brought him back to the hall, they forced him to kneel before the Emperor. The crowd outside clattered like rain. The Emperor looked at him as at a ruined thing.
"Let him be banished to the frontier," the Emperor said. "Let him be fed by his enemies if he can. But let him never again hold command."
Abraham's protests turned into a blank stare. He realized his life of ambition had been patented under his own name and now rescinded. The crowd that once cheered him now hurled insults and stones. He begged to be allowed to leave with dignity. The Emperor's face softened for a second.
"Humility is not given," the Emperor told him. "It must be earned."
Abraham looked at me then. For a fraction of a second he tried to apologize, to say the old words he had used when he took me in from the road. "Isla—"
"You sold men and granaries," I said. "You choked more than one person. I will not take your apology."
He slumped.
The punishment did not end in a single day. It stretched; the market tales grew. He was denied carriage. His name was not spoken in high houses. Letters were returned unopened. People put duck feathers on his door and called him "the bird who sold the barn." The Emperor had made sure his fall would echo.
Abraham's reaction changed over the weeks. At first he was arrogant, then he denied, then he raged. Then he begged. Then he broke. He came to the gates in rags, calling for the soldiers who had once followed him. They turned away. A woman who had once courted him spat on his shoes and walked on.
The crowd's reaction was a slow mirror of justice—shock at the revelation, then pain at betrayal, then satisfaction at the exposure, then the coldness of shunning. People who had once called Abraham brother now called him fool.
I watched all this from a window. Bastian stood beside me. "You sound cold," he said.
"I'm not," I answered. "I am steady."
He took my hand. He did things without loud demonstration: he left his coat on my shoulders, he learned the names of my favorite pastries, he defended me in quiet ways that mattered more than a parade. He was stubborn in ordinary things. He would bring me a jar of plum candy on a bad day and stay when I wanted silence. When he told me once, "I do not like how Abraham looks at you," he did not throw a spear. He simply refused to leave my side.
Arjun, too, stood at my back. He was blunt and simple and made mistakes, but his hands were honest. When the Emperor offered to make him a permanent commander, he accepted with the same half-smile he gave life. Later we returned to the snowed palace and sat by a pot of stew, laughing like children over stupid stories.
The identity that had once been a frail thing in my chest—an old name, a lost childhood—settled into a new place. I learned that being a princess was less about titles and more about how you let yourself be seen. The Empress taught me small kindnesses that did not come with orders. Kendall remained with me, watching storms and small joys.
In time, at a small festival, I carved a wooden swing with Arjun. He had once sawed wood for me and said he'd make me an autumn swing. When it hung between two plum trees, and the late afternoon light caught the jade pendant at my throat, I felt like someone who had stitched the torn cloth of her life.
"Bastian," I said once, swinging slowly as the world blurred, "did you ever think I'd sit here?"
He laughed, and then he said, "You were always this stubborn."
"I thought I'd be quiet," I answered.
"You are not quiet," he said, hooking his fingers through mine.
I looked down at the token in my hand—the broken fragments of the tiger piece now in a small box—then at the swing, at Arjun's hands full of calluses, and at Bastian's gentle insistence to stand beside me in public and private. Each showed a different truth.
"My past tried to make me smaller," I told them both. "It tried to sell me. But I keep the piece of token in this box so I remember. Not where it commands men, but where it reminds me of who I will not be."
Bastian kissed the top of my head like a benediction. Arjun clapped like a loud friend. Kendall cried once, quietly, and the Empress smiled like the warm sun.
At night, when the courtyard is dark and the swing creaks low, I can still see Abraham's face as he begged. The public punishment had been long and fierce, and it had left an imprint on the city. People would whisper of it as a lesson: betray trust and public scorn will find you. But the lesson for me was different.
"Isla," the Emperor said to me on my last night before a journey, squeezing my shoulder, "you did the right thing."
I held the little carved swing rope and thought of the washboard, the jade bracelet, the chicken, the cake, and the tiger token. Each object had its memory, its knife and balm.
"Your Majesty," I said, "I married a man who stood with me when courts laughed. I married a man who plucked a chicken badly and brought me plum candy. I will not be a pawn."
The Emperor laughed like a child and then grew quiet. "Then be a queen of your own choice."
At dawn I kissed Bastian on the brow, and I kissed Arjun on the cheek, and I tucked the token into the box behind my dressing table. When I closed the lid, the little wood swing in the courtyard creaked in the wind.
That sound is mine. It always will be.
The End
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