Sweet Romance17 min read
The Plum-Flower Pin and the Crown's Truth
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I was born with the wrong face.
"Listen to me," Wilma Murray said the first time our eyes met. "You will wear her veils. You will never speak of your face. You will serve."
I bowed until my head ached and answered, "Yes."
I had asked for so little in life: a dry corner to sleep in, a bowl that did not rattle, a few hours without lashes. Instead I was lifted from the cold servants' room into silk and light, into the eyes of a family that kept me as a secret and a tool.
Regina Malik watched me the first day I took her place in the inner courtyard. She wore another woman's calm like armor.
"Cover your face," she snapped with practiced cold. "Do not show your face to anyone. If you forget, you will remember pain."
"I will remember," I said, voice small.
Every day I learned how to be a shadow. "Brush the silk softer," she would say. "Fold the sleeve like this." I learned to braid, to measure, to be thinner with my steps. When I learned too slowly she struck. When she learned I had better sense of riding, she made the whip worse.
"I do not like this," she accused one evening as she watched me repair the fine embroidery the tutors meant for her. "You smile like you were born to better things."
"I'm only doing my work," I whispered.
Regina laughed, a sharp sound that bit the air. "Do your work then. Remember your place."
I had a favorite small thing: a simple sandalwood hairpin carved with a tiny plum blossom. Catalina Kuenz, the old midwife's secret, had given it to me. "For when the world is too cold," she had hissed, while she pinched my cheeks that winter.
"It will keep you warm," she promised.
I carried that pin like a talisman. When my lips split from cold, when the water had bitten my hands, I would press my fingers to that carved blossom and feel a small, impossible warmth. The man who later called himself my friend—Isaiah Hahn—noticed it once and smiled as if that smile belonged only to me.
"Where did you get that?" he asked softly, close enough that I could smell travel and dust and something green on his coat.
"Catalina," I said. "She likes plum blossoms."
Isaiah only nodded. "Plum blossoms tell the cold to go elsewhere," he said, as if he understood the small comfort of a carved flower on a hairpin.
When the spring hunt came, Regina planned like a woman planning an altar. "Make me the center," she ordered. "Make me the one they look at. Make them know how much I deserve to be set high."
"Yes, my lady," I said.
At the hunt I did my duty and then some. I mounted the horse Regina left me, and the wind braided my hair into readiness. The prince—Isaiah—rode near, and he called, "Come ride with me."
"With pleasure," I answered, though my voice was not supposed to be heard.
We galloped deeper into the field, and the game bowed before the swift, practiced hands of the one people thought a servant. When the sky split with an arrow, everything changed.
"A sniper," Isaiah swore as he bent double, breath dragging blood.
I grabbed him, dragged him to a shallow dip, and the world became small and sharp: arrows, blood, the metallic taste in the air. Two darts glanced my limb, and I felt the cold burn in bone.
"Hold on," I told him. "You need to breathe."
He coughed, laughed even, a rasping sound that only made him more real to me. "You are reckless," he said, and then he smiled the way a man smiles at something fragile he wants to protect.
"I'm clumsy at being a servant," I said. "I’ll learn to be better."
Isaiah's hand brushed my cheek, not seeing my face but seeing me. "You are not merely good," he said. "You are rare." He faltered, then closed his eyes against the pain, but his thumb rubbed around the faint scar on my temple where an old stitch lay.
I lost consciousness on the way back. When I came to, I was bound and feverish in a thatched room. Catalina had put a coarse cloth in my mouth and spat bitter medicines down my throat.
"Drink," she insisted with gestures and angry eyes. "You are alive."
"Why...?" My voice was a dry thing.
Catalina winked. "You are stubborn."
When I was taken back to the inner chambers, Regina's face looked shell-white, hands wrapped as if she had been beaten by her own jealousy. She beat me with her soft whip the moment I was brought before her.
"Why did you steal the prince's gaze?" she demanded.
"I did not intend to," I managed between gasps. "I rode—"
"You took my life and wore it like a dress." She struck again. "Tell me everything."
"Prince Isaiah and I rode, and arrows came," I whispered. "I pulled him away."
She twisted the whip as if it were a coin to be squeezed. "Liar."
The wound on my cheek ached, but I said nothing about how Isaiah had lingered a moment, had said something that felt like a contract between two people who would be on each other's side.
Weeks passed like brittle leaves. Regina would send me out dressed as her and make me test her skills in public. I learned to love the soft silk of her garments, to hold my chin in the perfect angle that made nobles look at you and forget to breathe. I would come back with bruises, my fingers shredded from needles that had been my instruments of survival.
"Why do you keep doing this?" I asked the moon once.
"It shields you," Catalina said from the shadows. "It is the price of something else."
Still, the world shifted. Isaiah visited the house occasionally; he laughed like a boy and kept gifts in secret: honeyed candies from the east market, a small bundle of peach cakes he claimed no one should eat alone, and once, when no one watched, a delicate embroidered handkerchief.
"This is for you," he said, leaning near enough that I could watch the muscles work in his jaw, the small breaks of light in his hair. "It is clumsy, but I thought it might be yours."
"It is mine now," I said, cheeks hot. "Thank you."
"Do not tell others."
"I will not."
Regina, ever hungry for the throne of attention, did not eat the quiet. When she discovered evidence that she could be favored by a rising young noble—Hassan Davenport, a man with silvered promises—she decided to act.
"I will be the one to secure the prince's favor," she told me once, tapping the carved plum pin as if it were a metronome to her plans. "I will have the role that elevates me above all."
"You will be what you were destined for," I said, lips tight.
When she learned she could not change the political tide alone, she turned to a bolder trick: she told the household—she told the world—she was with child. "A sign of favor," she said. "A woman set with destiny."
The house buzzed. Men smiled tighter. The elder Franklin Abe who sat as magistrate in public bowed toward Regina with a pride like carved wood.
"She will bring an alliance," he said, and pats were given to those who had his ear.
But the heart of the plan required that a certain marriage be made smooth. Regina's body would take one step closer to the throne. She would be wed to Hassan Davenport, perhaps, or his friend. She wanted to be something everyone wanted to touch.
"I never thought pregnancy would be this easy-hearted," she said one evening, slanting her gaze at me. "But your face helps, does it not?"
Regina misread the world.
On the morning she cried, she came to me with raw, white panic in her voice.
"Change back," she cried. "Give me the name that is mine. I am the rightful daughter. You must trade me back."
I could have. I could have stepped down and given her the seat of warmth she desired. But the things she had done—the lashes, the scoffs, the way she had tried to make my life a spectacle of humiliation—sat in my chest like coals.
"Where did that servile bravery come from?" I asked quietly.
Regina attacked my head with the same malicious grace she wore to be admired. "You are a servent, a servant, a nothing! Give it back!"
"No," I whispered, and I let truth stand where fear had once been.
She crumpled and then bared her teeth. "You will pay for this."
The palace court sang like a hive. News rippled to Isaiah, who had the weight of princely curiosity and a heart that did not distrust what it had seen.
"Tell me everything," Isaiah said when he came to the edge of the house the day I was called to the palace. "I need the truth."
I told him the ropes my life had been tied with: Wilma's bargain, Catalina's sacrifice, the shame and the stitches. "I was born wrong," I said. "And then I was fixed into a wrong so people could be well."
He looked at me, eyes narrowed as if my story were a map and he was a man who loved maps. "You did what needed to be done," he said. "And you saved me."
"My scars are real," I told him. "My hands remember the whip."
"Do scars matter to someone who can see?" Isaiah asked, and when he smiled it made me almost forget the bruises.
The court had room for tricks. Hassan Davenport, who had been whispering plans into Regina's permitting ears, tripped on his own overreach. Isaiah, curious and swift, set a quiet trap. He announced a public inquiry about the assassination attempt at the hunt, and the court filled like rain.
"Who will speak?" Isaiah asked the hall. "Who has seen something?"
"Have you seen the face?" Hassan sneered between his teeth. "These women are like dolls, who can tell?"
I stepped forward because I could not help myself.
"Let the physician examine the wounds," Isaiah ordered.
"Who will lift this veil?" Hassan said, but his voice came like a stone tossed into water.
Regina panicked. She pressed her palms to her belly and wailed, "My child! My child! Do not test us!"
The physician came and probed. He noted the peculiar hooks of the arrows; an old band of mercenary archers had a style—Hassan's band. Isaiah had found that detail like a line in a book. He had set the truth before the court like flour before kneading.
I spoke. I told them how I had been the one on the horse, how the last arrow aimed for me, and how the wound fit a particular arrow type. The physician confirmed and then other facts emerged: coins, bribes, documents. Small things Isaiah had had his men pull together like threads.
Hassan held his composure until the line of evidence finished like a rope tightened around his plans. "Traitor!" he spat, red like a wound. "You plottin—you think you can pull this over me?"
Isaiah's face was still. "Show your hands," he said quietly. "Let the court see."
Hassan trembled. The court hissed with a thousand whispered opinions.
When they found the packet—a list of payoffs, a sealed letter between Hassan and certain officers—the room shuddered. Franklin Abe, who had given Regina social backing, saw fate twist and with it his fortunes. The magistrate looked like a man who had swallowed cold water.
Regina tried to drag the story back to her pregnancy like a shield. "This child is true," she sobbed. "You cannot strip me now."
I stepped up then and did what I had not dared before. "If you want proof of blood," I said, "you have none. You want pity; you have none from me. You sold your loyalty for a seat, and yet you thought yourself above consequence."
The emperor—Isaiah's father, a man whose patience liquidated into action—decided to make something certain. "Punishment must be seen," he declared. "Traitors and liars will be judged."
Regina's eyes slowed and then widened. "No," she whispered. "You cannot—"
They stripped her voice of effect by calling the court to witness the truth. The trial was short; the proof had weight. Hassan's betrayal was plain. He had paid archers and sought to hasten a chain of power. Regina had been an accomplice: she had covered lies with bridal lace and called the house to believe.
I will not tell this part lightly or quickly.
They brought her to the main public square of the palace the next morning, bright as if time had been painted to expose her. The crowd gathered—nobles with fans, soldiers with spears, servants who had whispered about her cruelty, housewives who had seen a woman climb and think she could not fall.
"Drink this," Wilma Murray hissed to Regina as she was brought out, but even Wilma's voice had lost its power. The magistrates stood like pillars, the emperor sat silent but immovable, and Isaiah watched from the raised pavilion with a face that had grown hard enough to slice winter.
"Regina Malik," the herald announced, voice like a bell. "For conspiracy, treason in intent, and deceiving the court, what do you say?"
Regina's reply was a bundle of breath. "I... I was frightened," she said. "I thought—"
"You thought to raise yourself over another's life," one of the houses said from the crowd. "You sold the loyalty of your line."
She lifted her head. I could see the ghost of vanity there, as if she still believed a crown would fall and save her.
"Where is your courage now?" a woman called from the crowd. "Where is your shame?"
Regina's eyes darted and then slunk. "Please," she mouthed toward me at the edge of the square. "Please—"
I had a choice—the quiet merciless choice the years of lashes had coaxed out of me. "You taught me those words," I said aloud so the crowd could hear. "You taught me to kneel, to call myself names. You taught me to bow until I cracked. Now you will stand where I stood."
"Beat her!" someone shouted.
"No," said Isaiah.
Regina's face split with realization as the emperor ordered a public humiliation befitting nobles. She would be stripped—not of fabric but of pretense. They had studies of customs and weighty sanctions for those who would use pregnancy as a shield for treason. The courtroom would watch, and the palace would teach its children that deceit had equal measure.
They unrolled a list of her crimes in loud voices, and an attendant read each one while a drummer struck a slow steady cadence. The crowd leaned in. Some shouted curses. Others clicked fans with that filtered rage that is also pleasure.
"She pulled strings to ruin men," a merchant snarled. "She made bargains that bled out the poor for her steps."
Her voice climbed and then cracked.
"Regina Malik," the emperor declared at the end, "for betrayal of house and crown alike, you will be publicly punished. The court will witness the consequences."
"And what will that be?" she cried.
"They will make you speak and bear the shame," Isaiah said softly, "and then you will be made to perform the labor of those you made smaller."
They set a stool in the square. The magistrate read the list of tasks: to stand in the sun for three days wearing a simple cloth with a placard naming her crimes; to have a servant of the house publicly strip her of privileges; to have the household's loyal help spit in the open and turn their backs at midday. Each detail was painstakingly chosen to fit the cruelty she had inflicted upon others.
The first day she was led through the market. People spat at her hem. Children laughed and mimicked her curtsies. It was small, acid humiliation, and Regina's face burned in a kind of concentrated shame. She gasped for breath as ladies who had once bowed to her walked by without a blink.
"Remember the one you called servant," a woman snapped as Regina passed. "Remember the one you called less."
The second day she was brought before the house where the servants who had learned to fear her would stand. "Speak your truth," they commanded. "Tell us why you made us smaller."
Regina trembled. "I... I thought it would make me safe," she sobbed. "I thought I would be loved."
"Love is not bought with lies," Wilma Murray said and then, with a cruel wrinkle at the corner of her lip, she spat in Regina's direction and turned away. The servant who once scrubbed floors now had a chance to spit without fear. She did.
On the third day, when the sun was highest, they placed Regina in the central square and let the crowd come. For an hour they let her stand as a woman who had wanted to dress herself in other people's fates. They let children point, and they let the nobles look with curiosity. Hassan Davenport, watched from the side with a face like someone who had been unmasked. He tried to beg, tried to paint his actions as necessary statecraft, but the crowd chewed him apart with their gaze.
"What did you feel when you folded lids over people's lives?" an old fisherman demanded.
"I was hungry," Regina said, voice thin. "Hunger for more."
"You fed that hunger with others," the fisherman said. "You ate them. You are no woman."
At midday they brought forth a wooden rack. The magistrate ordered a gentle, old-fashioned punishment: fifty lashes with a rod meant to chastise, not to kill. It was public and designed to remind rulers that cruelty to the small breeds retribution that everyone can see.
"You taught the servants to fear you," the emperor said. "Now they will not stand in silence while you weep."
They took off her embroidered jacket and placed her against the post. Her voice rose into a thin protest that faded into moans as each strike fell. The crowd did not celebrate with glee; it stood silent like a body watching a lesson. Some wept. Others set faces to stone.
Regina started with ears filled with vindictive pleas. "It was for survival!" she wailed. "I will not—"
By the tenth strike she was gagging. Her hands, which had once wielded a whip, now grasped nothing but empty air. By the twentieth she began to plead and then to babble. "Forgive me—please—" she begged to men who had followed her orders and to women whose backs she had twisted with humiliation.
"Have you learned?" Isaiah asked as the last stroke faded.
Regina could not answer. Her body shook. The crowd watched with a complicated mixture of pity and long-denied satisfaction.
When she was finally released, they left her in a shallow pool of shade. She curled like a child who had been taught to hold a cruel game as normal and then discovered the truth of pain's measure.
Hassan Davenport was led away in chains. The magistrate pronounced confiscations. Franklin Abe found his offices suddenly cold. His patronage and influence shrank like a fabric left in the sun.
For the court, the punishment had become a parable: do not make the small feel nothing, for one day their smallness will respond in the most public way.
After the humiliation, the house fell to a hush I had never known before. Regina's family looked broken; she herself had nothing of the arrogance that had carved her mouth. Some called it just. Some called it cruel. I called it the visible lesson the palace had decided the world needed.
When Isaiah caught my hand later beneath the pavilion, he spoke softly as a man who had seen a storm and remembered the quiet afterward. "You were brave," he said.
"I did what I had to do," I murmured, thinking of that hairpin pressed to my palm.
"You will not always have to," he promised. "You will be safe with me."
Canaan Knudsen came into my life then like a steady drumbeat. "I should have seen sooner," he said once, eyes dark with contrition. "You are not what they told me. You are your own person."
Canaan was steady in a way the court needed—he was a general of kind hands and hard lines. He fought wars with a careful eye and judged loyalty more by acts than by titles. He asked for my hand honestly and without fanfare. "Will you ride with me?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
We married in a measured way, later before a crowd who had learned that faces could hide, and that names could move like a breeze. Canaan held my fingers in public the way a man who had found treasure might do.
"I will watch the world so you need not hide," he said, and I believed him.
Life after marriage was an odd bloom. We laughed at small things—he loved how I arranged bowls, and I loved how he refused to let anything be wasted. We walked the markets, and he would defeat my stubbornness by acting like a man who had nothing to prove but everything to protect.
The battle that would define us came when the border tribes—an old enemy—swept down with a wave that took half the countryside.
"Your father-in-law's land is threatened," they said. "We must go."
I did not want to leave my new life, but Canaan's jaw tightened in the way a man makes plans. "We go," he said. "We take what we can."
I rode with him to the threatened town. When we arrived, it looked like a place of brittle hope: a wall half-standing, a grass wheel charred here and there. Our soldiers shouted commands. The town's defenders looked hollow-eyed with loss.
Then someone came forward screaming that a woman in white sought our help at the gates.
"She says she is the general's wife!" one guard cried.
I looked up and met the sight of Regina in rags, face streaked, her speech jagged with falsity. She waved a sword with a hand that was shaking. "He is trapped!" she cried. "My husband, the general, is trapped—"
"Canaan turned his face, and I saw it close like a curtain. "She is lying," he said.
"She has his sword!" another guard said, seeing the weapon at her hip.
From my place on the wall, I saw the pieces fall together like a trap catching a small thing. Her sword had been taken during a time my husband left his armor in a hurry. Someone—Regina or her consorts—had kept it and now used it as proof.
"People of the gate!" I called out and took the bow that sat near me. "If she were my husband’s true wife, would she stand here and scream for help? Would she run instead of ride away? Look on her!"
Calls rose like drafts. Men who had been lured by falsehoods began to murmur. I fitted an arrow to the string, aimed not at her heart but at the leather of her thigh so she would not fall and give the enemy what they wanted: chaos.
The arrow hit, she yelped, and the truth spilled out—someone in the line recognized a small stitch on the sword leather she had no right to know about. The siege needed no more proof. The townspeople began to see what she wanted to hide.
"She dealt with the enemy," someone declared. "She is traitorous!"
Regina was taken from the field and dragged to face equal punishment. I stood on the wall, bow at rest, and watched a woman who had once mocked me be dragged with all her lies trailing in the dust.
War made things stark. Men fought and died in ways that taught the living lessons that ink cannot. When the battle turned and Canaan's men feinted as if retreating, the trapped host threw themselves into pursuit. Canaan rode with a plan as brutal as a storm. They came back with banners and a captive general, and in the rout, they saved the town. Eventually, the enemy was routed in a desperate last-hour charge.
When the dust settled, Isaiah—who had come at the head of reinforcements—stood beside me. His face had changed in the field: the look of a man who had seen ruin and decided to be kind within the remaining space.
"You stood like a tower," he told me later, as we cleaned soot from the bowls. "You pulled them back."
"I pulled as I could," I answered. "The bow does what it can."
He took my hand again, careful and reverent. "I have watched you," he said. "And I would watch you more."
When the emperor later sat and listed names to be cleansed and titles to be changed, a silence followed my request.
"I ask not for jewels," I told him in that great hall, "but for a name that does not tie me to a lie. I ask for a life that is honest and a place where children will know me as whole."
Isaiah stood then and spoke for me in a voice that steadied the room. "She is beyond the names they've used," he said. "She has earned a place. Let her be named what she chooses."
The emperor listened, saw the general beside me, and in a finalville of weight, he spoke. "From today onward, you shall be known as Valentina Harrison," he declared—choosing an old family name he had stored like a relic for those who served honorably. The name was strange on my tongue, but it felt like fruit on a winter tree: sweet and surprising.
Valentina I became then by proclamation and by the way Canaan took my fingers in the gardens where the plum trees were beginning to bud. He pressed his mouth to my hand and said, "You are my wife with no shadow."
Days grew into a season of repair. We had a formal wedding after the wars were ended, with Isaiah handing me a ribbon threaded through a small carved plum blossom hairpin the way an old boy might give a charm to someone he loved without pretense.
"You kept the pin all this time?" I asked, touching the tiny carved plum.
Isaiah smiled. "You never put it away."
I held it now differently, like a compass pointing not to a false north, but to the truth.
We lived not perfectly but with a wide room for tenderness. Canaan teased me mercilessly and always bought more of the east-market candies Isaiah loved to bring. Isaiah remained a friend of the household, sometimes prideful, sometimes shy, always a presence like weather.
When anyone at court mentioned the name Regina Malik, they said it like a lesson to be spoken aloud and then put away. Hassan Davenport's name was tied to those of those who had lost power. Franklin Abe had been sent away to a post that was warm for him and distant from influence. Wilma Murray, who had once wanted only the comfort of control, learned a hard, clean humility in the years that followed.
And the carved plum pin—my small treasure—sat in the little box on my dressing table. Sometimes I took it out and turned it in my fingers and tasted sweetness on my tongue from a candy Isaiah once gave me. Sometimes I would put it in my hair and let Canaan smooth his hand over it when he passed by.
"Do you ever think of the winter?" he asked one night when the plum blossoms had unfurled into the quiet of spring.
"Often," I said. "I think of how cold felt like a living thing."
He kissed my temple. "And now?"
"Now I have a name that does not hide me. A husband who doesn't mistake me for my face. A friend who saw me when I bled."
He laughed softly. "And candies?"
"And candies," I said, and we both smiled as if that had been the first true thing either of us had said.
My life had been a ledger of wrongs and redemptions. I was stitched together by the hands of those who dared to be kind, and unstitched by the ones who wished to climb. But when the story was told by the fire, people would not remember the lashes so much as the way a small carved plum blossom lightened a woman's throat.
The court changed, as courts do. A few learned to watch the small servants as if they might be truths; others learned to mold power carefully. I learned to look at Isaiah sometimes with an affection that had room for many things, and I watched Canaan with a love that had room for weather and battle.
In the end, when I tightened the small hairpin in my hair and stood at the garden gate while Isaiah waved from a distance and Canaan put his arm around my shoulders, I thought of the last public punishment—not as vengeance but as a strange ledger that settled with the world.
"Do you regret it?" Isaiah asked, once, by the plum tree.
"No," I said. "Regret would mean I wished I had acted different when the chance to live properly was offered."
He smiled, small and private. "You chose truth," he said.
"And I chose my own name." I touched the carved plum and felt its smoothness, a mark of the life that had been given me.
At night when I cannot sleep and the world is quiet, I take the little candy Isaiah once gave me from the small box and let it dissolve on my tongue. Sweet, like a memory folded between leaves.
I will not say the ending is clean. No hand can press a life perfectly. But I will say this: the hairpin with the plum blossom is my compass. When the wind tells me cold truths, I press the pin between my fingers and remember a child on a snowy night, a small thief of kindness, a friend who handed me sugar.
And I stand, with my name like a banner on the wind, and I do not bow except to those I choose.
The End
— Thank you for reading —