Sweet Romance17 min read
The Loft, the Bargain, and the Last Reveal
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I tell this in the loft where I read my books and kept my nights. I tell it in the first person because every hurt and every small joy lived under my own skin. I will not dress it up. I will say the things I wanted said when there was still breath in me.
"I said, 'Are you going to marry only my sister?'" I hooked my fingers in his robe and pulled.
"Amara," Booker muttered, teeth as if clenched. "Do you have to call me that? Will you keep it up for a hundred years?"
"A hundred years is too long," I answered. "When you die in my bed I will stop."
He sighed like the weight of a campaign on his shoulders. "Next month I'm heading south. I came to steal one last night."
"Steal?" I said. "Because I'm not a bride and you're not a groom. We are thieves in a house full of mirrors."
He tried to smile, then swallowed. "You are—"
"Amara Moreira," I finished for him, leaning forward where the loft's low beams kept our secret. "Who am I to you, Booker?"
"You are my—" He stopped. "Why do you always make me answer riddles?"
"Then say it," I said. I pushed him back until his boots hit the trunk. "Say who I am."
"Later," he begged. "Just tonight."
I did not move. I needed him to say it because the loft had been my confessional and my battlefield. The shelves that used to hold poems now held the smell of his shirts. He had told me not to wash the covers; he wanted the scent to be proof. Proof of what, I did not know.
"You are going to marry Fiona," I said finally. "When you go, are you taking her as your true wife?"
"She is the empire's choice," Booker said. "She is the one the court expects."
"Then who am I?" I repeated, fingers digging small crescents into the meat of his back.
"You are Amara," he hedged, anxious and tired. He was never tender when tired, but he was always honest when he feared. "You are the one who knows how to make me forget the world."
I laughed and the sound shook like broken glass. "Is that what I am to you? A forgetful thing?"
"You are..." He sighed. "You are my ruin and my refuge."
"Then be ruined, then be a refuge," I said. I had always said harsher things when I loved someone. Love had taught me how to weaponize small cruelties.
"Why won't you slip away?" he said, voice low, as if afraid his enemies might hear through wood.
"Because no one would notice if I left," I said. "Who would speak for a girl whose mother was her father's wet nurse? No one, Booker. I was born into the wrong line."
He touched my cheek with a thumb and the action was clumsy and kind. "You are not the wrong line."
"Don't use words like that tonight," I said. "They sound like vows."
He laughed a short laugh. "I once thought I wanted to make you a wife."
"You told me you didn't want to marry her."
"You told me I couldn't marry you."
"Then why sleep with me?" I demanded.
He pressed his forehead to mine. "Because the world is cruel and sometimes we choose the cruelest comforts."
We stayed tangled until the moon tilted and I felt the chill that always chased us. He was leaving again for a campaign the following month. "If you die out there," I said, "will you make sure people remember you were brave?"
"Why ask me what I will be when I'm dead?" He sounded almost playful.
"Because if you die, I lose my mark," I said. "If you live and marry her, I lose everything."
"Do you want me dead?" he asked. The question was ridiculous but I could not help the harshness in my answer.
"I wish you would die on the battlefield and not in my bed," I said. "If you die in the field, you'll be brave in the histories. If you die in my bed, they'll say a disgrace turned a general mad."
"You will call me names if ever I disappoint?" He smiled that slow smile that had toppled me into many foolish things.
"I will call you a liar," I said.
He returned to his boots. "Then consider me warned."
When he left I folded into the pillows and thought of other things: the sister who used to steal pastries for me, the girl who later wore coronation red, the little boat on the river where a different man had once drowned.
"Who is he?" I asked the darkness.
"He is a servant boy," my own voice answered, as if the loft were listening.
The world outside moved as it always had. My father, Eldridge Archer, was a general who barked orders like cannon, and my mother—Dream Horn—was a woman proud and bowed at once. Christina Clark, the lady of the house, kept her mouth in a thin, polite line and kept her plans in an iron clutch. Fiona Han, my sister in title, was all gentleness and learned words. She learned how to hold her hands as if they were priceless objects and how to bow like a blessing. She had a face for altars. I had the loft.
"You are nothing," my father told me once, smacking the back of his hand across the table where I had laughed too loud. "You are an embarrassment."
"I am," I said to him that night. "I will be a problem you can sell away."
He left the house a little paler than before.
The first time Booker came to the loft he brought me a small jar of ink and a map of battle lines. "I thought you'd like the map," he said. "You like the edges of things."
"I like the edges because they keep out the middle," I said. "The middle is where they keep instructions."
He kissed my forehead like he was apologizing to me for the whole wide country. "Do you promise to keep my letters?" he asked.
"I promise to read them when I am cold," I answered.
It is ridiculous now how small things could mean so much. A map, an ink jar, a burnt match. After he went to war again, I waited for months, reading the same letter until the paper came soft and the ink blurred into a forgetting.
"I met him once," I said to the river. "I met Ignacio Cisneros."
"Ignacio," the river hummed back if water could hum. I had found Ignacio on a night of music and apples. He was a young son of a household minister, stumbling, singing wrong and slipping into the river like a man who trusted himself too much. He drowned if the boatman had been slower, and I dove down and pulled him up, and he coughed and spit and the moon saw him stay alive.
"Thank you for saving me," he said in a voice like paper. He did not know me from a signpost.
"You're welcome," I said.
"You saved my life," he said later, shy and earnest. "If there is a reward I will offer it. My father is Ignacio Cisneros—my father says I should go far."
I laughed and wiped his face with my shawl. "Save words about reward for the court," I said. "I collect nothing but trouble."
He stay-sat near me on the river that night as if the world had shrunk to the two of us. He had no cunning. He had a face that would open the seeds of kindness in strangers. He called me "Amara" with a quiet devotion that felt like a hand on a fevered brow. "You are kind," he said. "You are clever."
"It is easier to be clever than kind in this house," I told him. "Kindness gets you eaten. Cleverness gets you a roof."
That night, in a fit I cannot justify now, I told Ignacio that he could never be anything but polite because the court will be cruel to anyone with a pure heart. He only smiled and called my name again, "Amara," and I cut him a little with my honesty because he deserved less of the cruelty than I did.
The world kept moving. Booker returned from the south with laurels. He told me he would marry Fiona Han. "She will be the empire's help," he said, cheeks pale with duty. "The court asked for her."
"And where am I?" I asked that night, hands clamped to a waist that should have been my protection.
"You are my—" he faltered. "You are my memory."
"Is that enough?" I asked.
"No," he admitted. "But it is what I can give."
I laughed that ugly laugh again. "So you give memories and take crowns," I said.
He looked at me like a man who had been given a choice between fire and water and could not decide. "If you want a title," he said suddenly, "I can try. I can ask for favors."
"Ask for a crown, then," I said. "Ask them for a throne that will fit me."
He tried. He went to the rooms where petitions were made and songs were bartered. The court whispered and conferred and bowed like a forest of wooden men. He came back with promises and hollow gestures. "There will be a minor place for you," he said. "A status. They will make a show in your name."
"A show," I said. "You think a show will wash the dirt off my feet?"
"You are foolish." He touched my hair. "You are beautiful when foolish."
When the day came that Booker presented Fiona with the formal garlands and called her wife in the way the court expected, I went to the wedding as his quiet triumph and my public ruin.
"Look at her," people whispered in the corridors. "The sister turned foolish."
"You are so lucky," another invited woman said to Fiona. "To hold such grace."
"I should be grateful," I said.
"Say so," Booker whispered in my ear. "Say you bless them."
I folded my hands and did what was expected. I called her "sister" and smiled because I was good at pretending I was someone else. Inside I was not even sure I liked myself.
That night I slept in my loft, bare and raw. Booker came to me after the wedding. "We can make this work," he pleaded. "I can keep a place for you."
"I would rather be an honest woman than a queen's shadow," I answered. "But I will keep your scent on my pillow. That will be my proof."
He laughed with a sound wrapping both love and something like nausea. "You do not mean it."
"Do not tempt me," I said.
Time went on. I ate and drank and sometimes I took walks outside with a lightness that surprised everyone. I found a back wall in the palace garden that fell to the market, and I climbed it and walked among the people who had no names in the court lists. Those hours were like breath.
"It is near," I told the guards who sometimes pretended they had not seen me. "The city has corners you can escape into."
Then I discovered I was with child.
"You're what?" Fiona asked when the midwife told us. She looked at me like a woman seeing a thing in a glass: curious, polite, slightly removed.
"Pregnant," I said and touched the unfamiliar hollow of my belly like it might be a lie. "Do you think it is his?"
"Who else?" she asked. Her face did not move. She was trained to be gentle.
"Who else?" I echoed. "Ignacio?"
"No," she answered. "We do not speak of that."
"You are kind," I said at her. "You keep a softness for me. Why do you?"
"Because you have been useful to keep the court balanced," she said. "And because I like to be better than other people."
That was her truth. It was sharp and bright. She was better than the murmurs. She would look after the house as if it were a temple.
Months passed. I swelled and the way men looked at me changed. They measured propriety with their eyes.
"Eat," Fiona kept telling me as if it were a command I had a duty to obey. "Think of the child."
I thought of nothing but the sound of my own heartbeat and the way Booker’s hand sometimes stayed too long on my hip and then moved away as if ashamed of his hold.
When my child was born it was on a winter night of laughter and perfume. The small face was perfect; the child had two dimples when she smiled. The midwife laughed and called her Gracie Francois.
"She has your dimples," the midwife said.
"She has Ignacio's smile," I answered without thinking and then wished I had kept my mouth shut.
Booker came, leaned over, and made a noise of distaste. "She's ugly," he said too loudly. "Tell me she grows into an interesting child."
"Excuse me?" I bristled. "She is mine."
"Do not be dramatic," he said. "She will be nothing to speak of. She is a child."
I watched him with the small creature in my arms. "Do not ever say that about her," I told him.
"I will not have others fool themselves," he said. "If you wish foolishness, be my foolishness, but the blood is my concern."
That night I swore I would keep her close. I named her to the world as Gracie Francois and I taught her to laugh. She laughed with both dimples at once and the court fell in love with her while I watched.
When the year-smoke rose and the court feasted, they held a circle full of flourishes and compliments. They called her a gift and called me the reason for a line. I watched from behind a screen as ministers bowed and wrote letters. I felt the old itch of hunger: to be recognized by the mouths that ate my life.
"She is lovely," a senator said. "She will be a worthy daughter to the dynasty."
"Of course," Booker said. "She has some merit."
He said it with the air of a man performing his role. I had seen that performance often enough to know the notes.
The court loved a child. They made a sun out of her for a while. Then whips of rumor blew across the hall. He began to say things in half-words.
"Do you know anything of Ignacio?" he hinted to me one night.
"What of him?" I asked, calm and small.
"I saw him," he said. "At the hall when he came in with permission. He looked at Gracie in a way I did not like."
"He looks," I said. "He is a man. He looked the same way I look at your letters."
"Do not make jokes," he said darkly. "It is a serious matter."
"Ignacio is a poor petitioner's son, Booker," I said. "What does it matter?"
"It matters if—" He stopped. "It matters if the blood is not mine."
"Then test it," I said, smiling until my teeth hurt.
"That is not how things are done," he said. "You will not leave me such wounds to lick."
"Then I will show you," I said. "I will not give you lies." My voice was soft but my fingers bunched the babies' shawl. "If you doubt me, we will make a test."
He laughed bitterly. "You would sacrifice honor for a trick."
"I would sacrifice myself for truth," I said. "And if that costs me the court, I will do it."
He looked like a man offered his own tongue as a bribe and he took it.
Days turned toward the banquet where the court would celebrate a seasonal victory. I was thin by then, hollowed by sleeplessness and grief and a strange hunger. I had been quiet and no one had guessed the plan I would carry like a blade beneath my skirts.
"Amara, you are pale," Fiona said. "Do you not eat?"
"I eat," I lied. "I only save room for celebration."
The day came. I wore a color not bright enough for a bride and not dull enough for a mourner. I walked into the great hall with Gracie in my arms and placed her on the dais as every face turned.
"Let the mother be honored," someone said. "Bring forward the joys."
"Your Majesty," Booker intoned, because he liked to use the court's language as if it were armor. He stood and looked at me with the bland boredom of a performer. "We celebrate marvels. What marvels do we see tonight?"
"Ask them about Gracie," I said very softly so only those near could hear. "Ask them who loves her."
Someone murmured a compliment. Then I stood.
"May I speak?" I asked the hall.
There is nothing quieter than the pause when one woman stands to speak in a room where men are used to speaking. The court turned its ears.
"Booker," I said, "you have accused me softly in private and loudly in your mind. You have painted doubt where there was none. Tonight I'll prove what you will not say."
He smiled a practiced smile. "Prove what you must."
I lifted my hand. "First," I said, "I brought the man who would be called a suitor of mine. Ignacio Cisneros, come forward."
A hush like a cloth fell. Ignacio rose, bewildered, and walked to the dais as if called by the gravity of something he did not understand.
"You saved my life," I said to him. "You gave me warmth. Does that mean you own my blood? No. But when I needed you, you came. You are a good man."
"Amara," Ignacio whispered, face dry as a summer road. He bowed because that is what he had been taught.
"Now," I said, turning all those eyes to Booker, "you have said you would test the blood. You feared the child was not yours. I asked for proof. We shall have proof. But not with needles and not with whispers. We will have truth before everyone."
Booker made a small noise and shifted. "You cannot—"
"Watch," I said. I pulled from my sleeve a folded paper and set it on the table. "This is a list of names and a promise. Many signed it. Ministers and midwives, women who kept watch at my birth and men who were in halls I walked. And here on this table,"—I tapped the paper with a nail—"is another thing."
I lifted a tiny vial. "This is my blood."
A gasp.
"It was taken when I was in private," I said. "I asked the royal physician to seal it. I asked for another vial to be opened if ever a question came against the child."
"Do you mean you will make them do—" Booker began.
"I mean," I said, and for the first time my voice did not tremble, "that I will demand a public proof. If you suspect my daughter's parentage you must let the court see that I have not lied."
"That's an outrage," Booker said. "You will shame us."
"Shame me," I told him. "Then we shall see who takes the greater wound. Will you have the court watch us? Will you have them test, with the physician and with witnesses? Or will you keep the doubt and poison our child with suspicion?"
"Amara—" Fiona tried, hands like sails.
"Silence," I said.
Booker stepped forward, jaw tight. "If you cause scandal," he warned, "you will ruin more than you."
"Then ruin me," I said.
The physician came and the court craned. The tests were crude by the standards of men who liked to pretend there were only symbols, but they had witnesses, oaths, and every one of those witnesses was present. They compared marks, memories, the way the child smiled and the way the blood looked under a lamp. I cannot tell you the science—only the faces.
Booker's face changed as if a wind had taken his breath. First he was a man of smirks. Then he was rigid. Then he grew pale as cloth. Later he tried to laugh and failed. I watched the slow unbraiding of a performance.
"How can this be?" he whispered at one point. "This cannot stand."
"You always suspected," I said. "You wanted truth. Here it is. You wanted to know if a child was yours. Now that you know you can choose."
He looked at the crowd. Ministers shifted their feet. The ones who had smiled at his power earlier began to look with different eyes.
Then he did the thing everyone feared: he lashed out.
"You dare set a trap?" he shouted. "You dare!" His voice bounced off the stone and became a beast. "You offend the dignity of the court."
People drew closer. Some covered their mouths; some reached for their papers and began to write. The air was loud with rustling.
"Booker," I said, low but it cut. "You will not frighten me with stages. Either you accept the evidence or you confess what you have planned."
He laughed like a man losing his reason. "Confess? Confess what? That I love you? Look at me!" He pointed at his uniform and medals. "Look at what I have given. I am not a man to be accused by a—"
"I am a mother," I said, sharper than the sword. "I have given life. You have given me a title only to make me a thing in your house. You have claimed honor while you held a dagger to my throat. Stand up now and be a man."
The hall was quiet as a grave. I saw the faces of the ministers and even of Fiona, who looked like a woman seeing a storm and not knowing whether to open an umbrella or run.
Booker folded. The first thing he did was deny. "This is slander," he said. "I will not be mocked in my own court."
"Then answer," I said. "If you are innocent, why do you seek to test me in secret? Why threaten me for a truth you claim to desire?"
He looked smaller than the man who had once put on coats and won wars. The public can be the harshest judge: they see a man undo himself, and they remember.
"People," a minister said. "This is not the time for—"
"No," I said. "Listen. He has been cruel. He has been cruel privately and he has been cruel publicly. He has hidden behind glory and called it virtue. Let him be seen."
What happened next was not a trial. It was a public breaking that some men will call justice and some will call cruelty. I do not pretend to hold the word "justice" without blood on it.
Booker tried to explain and then to plead and then to bristle, going through the stages like a man wearing a mask that would not keep. People watched and drew lines. Some left the hall in disgust. There were whispers of betrayal, of a general who could not keep the measure of his life. The emperor was informed; Grey Beil, who had more use for stability than for scandal, called for a recess.
When the hall emptied in parts and the servants began to record the incident, I saw Booker change. He went from dominance to humiliation, and humiliation is a thing hunger and fury sharpen.
"Get up," he told me when the crowd thinned, cruel and small. "You cannot do this to me."
"I have done it," I said, and my voice was steady. "You wanted proof. You have proof. Be a man and accept it."
He looked to his supporters and found their eyes turned like away. For once, honor had a price and the ledger opened. He tried to bargain: promises, threats, blood-tests, denials. His mask fell piece by piece.
The punishment was not chains. It was worse in some ways—it was being unmade in public.
He stood before the court and the emperor and even Fiona and begged for something like forgiveness. He tried to explain with the old excuses of war and honor and tiredness. There was a moment where he looked at Gracie and stopped speaking. He tried to reach out, and she recoiled as if expecting a sting.
"Do you beg him?" he asked Fiona, voice cracking. "Do you say anything to save me?"
Fiona stepped forward with her hands folded. She had the face that forgave because she could not do otherwise. "If you have erred, you must mend," she said. "But I will not be dragged."
There were tears in the room then, but they were not all for me. Some were for the fall of a man who had been the empire's favorite. Some were for the sickly weight of court life. Some were for the child upon the dais who had to bear decisions she did not make.
Booker left the hall that night with less than he had walked in with. In the days that followed men spoke of him with cooler tongues. He was allowed to keep rank; the throne needed such men, but his power was less of a blade and more of a stone in his hand. He had been publicly shaken. His pride had been battered in full view. He came to me later, unsteady.
"Amara," he said. "I have been shamed."
"You wanted truth," I answered. "You have it."
He fell to his knees like a soldier who had lost his command. "I beg you—" he said.
"No," I said, and my voice held the new hardness the hall had given me. "Do not ask me to give you what you took. You wanted to know. You know now. Decide what you will be."
He begged and then he left. People will tell you it is cruel to expose a man in public. They will say a woman destroyed a house. They may sing a dirge for his honor. But I say this: when a man uses a woman's body as proof of his name and then shames the child in public, the public must see the man unmasked.
After that night the court changed. Some smiled fewer smiles at his table. Some refused invitations. The man who had once commanded more than one banner found himself watching as alliances shifted like sand.
I do not pretend he was destroyed. Great men bind themselves back together; the state eats men as it eats fruit and makes sauces of their bones. He kept his rank. He kept his household. He kept Fiona at his side. But the court remembers who can be made to fall.
I took the child away after that. I wrapped Gracie in a shawl and taught her songs that would not belong to the palace. I taught her to find the market and to read the faces of bakers. She would need more than a name. She would need ways to be soft and strong at once.
"I won't be what they were," she said once when she was old enough to speak more than halting words. "I will be my own."
"Swear," I told her. "Swear to make your own choices."
"I will," she said and her dimples dug like two little miracles.
I grew colder after that. I had given my truth and taken the cost. I did not regret it. I only felt the long, steady hollowing of the body when grief becomes a housekeeping necessity. My blood was thin and the nights longer. I could feel the winter approaching my bones.
"Amara," Booker said once more, voice small on my bed. "If you are ill, let me—"
"I am ill of too much living," I answered.
He left his words unspoken. He married Fiona fully in name and ceremony and the court toasted. He remained near the throne. He kept the empire's weight on his shoulders while I kept the child's weight on mine.
I died quietly as the snow fell thick one empty morning. Gracie's hands closed around my own. "You promised you'd teach me everything," she whispered. "You promised—"
"I taught you," I said. "I taught you how to laugh even when it hurts."
She cried then, but she was a child who had learned early to be brave. Booker visited once and stood at the doorway like a sentinel in mourning. Fiona folded like someone who had learned to survive in polite ways. Ignacio came with the awkward, silent grief of a man who had been saved and then shut out by honor. Eldridge Archer, my father, came and did not say the words a father should say but left a handful of old clothes.
They told each other stories. They told each other how they had meant the world. They all meant many things at once.
After I died, the court found ways to live. People forget the exact shapes of sorrow and blot them with festivals. Fiona remained at Booker's side and later became the one the court called a mother of state. Ignacio made his way and found a small post that did not require the shame of great men. Gracie grew with dimples and anger and a stubborn insistence on kindness.
Booker—he was punished in the way courts punish: he was seen. He lost a little of the gleam on his armor. He learned the smallness of asking too much when asked for everything by those he loved. Some nights, I suppose, he would bring flowers to a locker and put them away. Pride takes a long time to heal.
If you want to know who was the worst villain, I will tell you: men who hide their cowardice in banners. They make grief quiet and call it honor. Let the record show: when cruelty is private, the public must make it public; that is what I used my small body to do.
I have one final thing to say.
"Gracie," I told her as my heart slowed. "When you are old enough, do not let a dare of a man become your whole map."
She kissed my hand. "I won't," she sobbed. "You won't be forgotten."
It is true: I am not forgotten. The loft still smells of ink and dust. The map I kept is still drawn on my table. People will say many things about me—some cruelty, some praise. I prefer that they see the truth of the night: a woman who loved, who dared, who would not be silenced.
If I had one wish, it was that Gracie would learn to name herself before a court did. If I had another, it was that Booker would learn how little armor protects a man who cannot love.
They remembered me by my defiance and my small kindnesses. The world moved on, and so did the child who had my face and someone else's smile. She lived. They all lived. The court ate and argued and changed. The loft stood, and sometimes Ignacio wandered by and put fresh flowers where I liked them.
"To Amara," he would say under his breath when the wind was right.
I smile if I could; I smile in the one place that never lies: the place where I held Gracie and taught her to laugh.
The End
— Thank you for reading —