Sweet Romance12 min read
The Soldier Who Wore a Dress
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I woke up in a silk dress and almost did not recognize my own hands.
"Camila?" Francis said, and then he laughed.
"You laughed," I told him. "Right when you saw me."
He put his hand over his mouth like a boy caught with a trick. "You look like Sabine," he admitted. "I almost called you by her name."
"I am not Sabine," I said. "I am me."
He blinked. "Right. Of course."
"Why did you laugh?" I asked.
He shrugged, still smiling. "Because you looked fragile. Because you wore blue and not armor. Because for a second I couldn't find the Camila who threw men and took names."
"You have always called me a man," I said.
He made a face, half apology, half jest. "You fight like one."
"Then stop laughing." I hooked my chin like a child. "Stop pretending I am anything but a woman tonight."
Francis's smile died in the slow way of men who were not used to being asked to change. "You look... different," he said finally.
"I am different," I answered, and because I had spent fifteen years carrying a sword and not a hand mirror, I did not know how else to prove it. I kicked his chest. He toppled backward and stared at me, mouth open.
"You hit like a soldier," he said when he could.
"Because I am a soldier."
He laughed again, helpless. "And yet you looked like a princess at the gate."
I went to the roof that night and lay between shattered tiles and half-empty liquor jars. "You promised to protect me," I told the sky. "You promised, and I followed a promise."
Someone sat beside me.
"Camila," Francis said, softer than he ever let anyone hear.
"Don't," I said. "Don't be soft. You and I are soldiers."
He did not answer.
When he finally did, his voice was small. "You should not have to be a soldier."
"Then protect me better."
"We are friends," he said.
"Friends." I spat the word like a thorn.
He tried to laugh it off and failed. "You are like a brother to me," he said in the same voice as always, the voice that had wrapped itself around my courage for years.
I remember a younger me listening to him boast about Sabine, the woman the court called the princess. "She is the most beautiful I have ever seen," he would say, and the name "Sabine" became a small stone inside my chest that I polished in secret until it became heavy.
"You called me a brother," I reminded him now. "For fifteen years."
His shoulders tightened. "I never meant to hurt you."
"You hurt me by being ordinary," I whispered.
"By being what?" he asked.
"By not noticing what was in front of you." I put my forehead to the tile. "By wanting a palace when you had a campfire."
He reached and tapped my head with a hand that trembled. "I should have paid more attention."
"It is too late," I said.
I said that because I meant it, and because the truth tasted like metal on my tongue.
Later, back in the rooms, I drank until the world shredded and the truth came out in pieces. "I like you," I had told him, words that had been stored behind a wall so long it had become a story. "I like you. I did for fifteen years."
He looked at me like a man seeing a wound. "You said it when you were drunk," he argued.
"It is true," I replied. "Not drunk or sober."
He was pale then, like a boy caught between two orders. "I only ever thought of you as a brother," he said finally.
"Then keep it," I told him. "Keep the word 'brother.'"
We slept under a roof that night and did not speak the thing that lived between us.
I woke days later to someone humming, and a hand that smelled of herbs tucked a little cloth into my palm.
"Where am I?" I wrote on a scrap of paper. My throat was raw.
"You are in your house," Oliver said, and his voice smelled like bandages. "You were badly hurt. Rest."
"Why are you here?" I wrote.
"I came because I could," he said. "Because you were injured and I am a doctor. My name is Oliver Carroll."
"Oliver," I said aloud. The name fit him as if it had always belonged. He laughed without mirth. "You should not be here for long if you say so yourself."
He did not leave for days. "You should not talk," he warned. "The wound needs rest."
"Then I will write," I said.
He sat by my bed and wrote me names of medicines and stories about strange towns. He fed me bitter broths that tasted of roots and honesty. He gave me a sugar-preserved quince after one particularly dark night and told me to eat it.
"Why a quince?" I asked.
"Because you are brave," he said, and then the small laugh returned, warm and easy. "Because you will like sweets when you have been given nothing but bitter for a while."
"I don't like being pitied," I said.
"I am not pitying you," he replied. "I am tending to you."
And in the slow nights, I caught myself watching him.
"Do you stay long in one place?" I wrote once.
"No," Oliver answered. "I travel when I must. I mend where people let me. I will not be tied."
"Would you stay if someone asked?"
He looked at me a long time as if weighing sand and then said, "If I am asked by the right person, I would stay a while."
"Who is the right person?" I asked.
He smiled like a sunrise. "You."
The thought was a small, dangerous flame. I tried to smother it.
The campaign came. Sabine called for guards, and I found myself in an arrangement of shadow and flame. The palace needed us for the autumn hunt, and I was placed near Sabine for a night when the banquets were to be held. Francis was there, the firelight caught in his jaw, and Sabine was everything he had promised.
"Why are you here?" Sabine asked me that night, not unkindly.
"To protect," I answered.
"To who?" she asked.
"To who needs it," I said.
She looked at Francis as one looks at a familiar constellation. "You two are close," she observed.
"We are companions," Francis said, in a voice that pulled tighter than a bowstring.
Sabine laughed and offered me meat. "Eat. Do not starve yourself because of some invisible pain."
"I do not starve," I said. "I fight."
There was an arrow that night, and the air broke open. Someone had tried to kill Sabine in a single, precise movement. I moved. I always moved.
The blade found me. It slid through layers and sang cold. I remember the sound of the steel, the hot weight of it, and then nothing but a cool heft on my chest.
"Camila!" Francis shouted. "Camila!"
I saw faces hurrying like shadows, and Sabine's hand white against the flame.
When I woke, Oliver was there, bandaging and fierce. "You were cut deep," he said. "You will mend."
Francis stared, and when he finally looked at me, his eyes were raw. "I thought—" he began, and the sentence dissolved.
"You left me at the gate," I wrote. "You left me to fight."
"I failed," he said.
"You failed me when you told me I was a brother only," I wrote. "And you failed again."
He tried to take my hand but did not. "It is my duty to protect the realm," he said. "And I will not apologize for that duty."
"But your duty allowed others to harm me."
He closed his eyes. "If I say I am sorry, will that help?"
"No," I said. "It will not."
A fever of decisions began then—letters, orders, a pull to the frontier where I had first learned to make my hands iron. Sabine pressed an imperial favor into my palm.
"I will arrange a posting at the northern passes," she said softly. "It will be a place where your skills are needed."
"Is this because you fear I might die?" I asked.
"Because you are needed and because I like you not to waste."
Later, at a quiet market, I saw Oliver again under lantern light. "I cannot ask you to stay," I said before I could stop myself. "I cannot ask you to give up wandering."
"Then do not ask it," he replied. "Walk with me when I go, and I will follow where you lead."
I wanted to tell Francis. I wanted to tell him that between the bitter medicine and Oliver's quiet hands, another path had opened.
He came to the stall, eyes dark. "You are not married," he said, and then he laughed, too quick for the dusk. "Not yet. Are you? Have you promised your life away?"
"I'm not married," I said.
"Good," he breathed. "Then stay."
"Stay where?" I asked. "At your side?"
"I mean stay," he said. "Be mine."
"Your words are heavy with promises you do not keep," I said.
"Then give me a chance," he begged.
The horizon came with the bandits. The plan we had hatched—my appearance as a bride to lure them—came together like a trap. They thought me fragile; they thought they had a prize. I walked into the den with my hands tied and my heart pounding.
"Do not make a sound," Oliver whispered as he tied a handkerchief at my throat.
The bandit lord eyed me like a man choosing between spoils. He was neither handsome nor subtle; he was the sort who believed his own shadow enormous.
"Tonight you are ours," his voice boomed.
Oliver stood close, and I watched his face. There was something very fierce in it.
"You are frightened," he murmured.
I forced a laugh. "Only of the roof falling in."
The wedding was grotesque. The bandit lord boasted. He put me in a room with a tiger skin and then, in a ridiculous, clumsy moment of their "love," he thrust me into Oliver's arms and shouted, "Make her mine."
Oliver held me and looked at me as if I were something he had grown and could not now pluck away.
Later, when the signal went out and soldiers stormed the valley, I found myself in the chaos of the roof. I had relayed the plans; Oliver had been the signal that turned the night. We had arranged the fall of the bandit mountain.
What followed was not clean justice. It was messy and public and had to be seen.
They dragged the bandit lord into the town square with ropes on his hands. People gathered. Children climbed on carts. The magistrate demanded silence with a raised hand.
"People of the town," Francis said from the front of the square. "This man and his band did not simply steal our goods. They bound wives, they crushed men, and they sold daughters. They pretended to be leaders; they were cowards."
The bandit lord spat at his feet. "You owe me for soil and coin," he hissed. "You owe me for fear."
"Then you shall be repaid," Francis answered. "By the sight of your own undoing."
They brought forth the witnesses. The baker whose cart had been taken stood first, fingers still raw from the lash. An elderly woman shuffled forward and pointed a trembling finger at the bandit lord. "He took my son," she said. "He sold him to a lord three provinces away."
A murmur ran through the crowd. The bandit lord laughed and shouted, "Lies! Lies!"
Oliver stepped forward, his voice calm. "No," he said. "The scars are true. I dress wounds. I know the language of bruises."
They stripped him of his ornaments, of the false crowns he had worn. They displayed the talismans he had stolen from families—amulets torn and used for trade, children's lockets used as coin. They showed the dagger he had used on a defenseless farmer's ribs. The sight of his greed was a cheap light in the square.
"Bring him to the scaffold," the magistrate ordered.
The magistrate's punishment was not merely a hanging or a blade. It was a ritual of humiliation that the people demanded. They would see him lose what he had prided himself on: his power, his voice, his place among the village.
They paraded him through the market with a painted mask of his own face—grin painted too wide, eyes blackened. They forced him to march past every shop he had extorted. The shopkeepers spat into the street at his feet. Mothers pushed children to the front and made them point at the man.
When they stopped at the square, the magistrate produced a roll of parchment recounting the families that he had wronged. It was read aloud, the names of husbands and wives, of sons and daughters, poured into the hot air like sand. People listened and wept. The bandit lord's laugh went thinner and thinner with each name.
Then came the worst part for him—his public unmasking as a fraud.
Francis stepped forward. He was not a judge by law, but he was a judge by history. He forced the bandit lord to kneel. "What have you earned?" he asked in a voice that carried.
"I earned what the world gave me," the bandit lord snapped.
"And what did the world give you?" Francis demanded.
"Fear," he said. "Coins. Respect."
Francis produced one of the bandit lord's own stolen tokens, a child's amulet. He held it up for everyone to see. "This was taken from a weaver's child," he said. "This was given to a child during sickness in faith. You sold it. You made faith into coin. How do you look now? Do you have faith for yourself?"
Faces in the crowd turned, and the bandit lord's bravado faltered. He looked at his hands, at the dirt under his nails, as if seeing for the first time that none of what he had was love or loyalty.
"Release him," the magistrate said, surprising everyone.
"Release him?" someone cried.
"Let him see," the magistrate replied, "the faces of those he took from him."
They brought out a mirror. It was a polished metal disc used for weddings. They forced the bandit lord to look into it. In the reflection, he saw not a king of thieves but a man with a crooked jaw and burned hands. The people around him began to speak their truths—wives told how they had been beaten; sons told how they had watched fathers stolen; daughters told how they had been bartered.
Each story was a stone thrown into him.
At first he screamed and raged. "They lie!" he shouted. "They lie!"
"Then tell the truth," Francis said quietly. "Or be made to live with the truth."
He tried to pick a fight. He had been used to moving in the shadows, where screams were muffled and power could be faked. Under sunlight and the weight of a thousand eyes, his bravado floated away. He began to tremble.
The crowd moved like the tide. Hands reached out and pulled his masks off. His limbs shook as men who had once obeyed him stepped forward and spat on the dagger he had used. Women grabbed his bridle and tore it as if to show the child that the beast was not royal. Children threw stones at his feet. Some chanted the names of those who would no longer be bought.
He fell to his knees and then to his face. He begged, a thin, terrible sound. "Please," he said. "I will return. I will—"
A woman whose husband had been taken leaned forward. Her face was dry and patient. "No," she said.
"No what?" he wailed.
"No mercy for the man who sold mercy," she answered. "Go. Leave this town. Live with the shame."
They led him away, but the sentence was carried everywhere: he would never again walk among them with his head up. He would not be killed—because the magistrate wanted the town to be better than blood alone—but he would be stripped of honor. He endured parades of scorn where once he had expected worship. The children would mimic him for years. The merchants would lock their shops when his face wandered near.
He begged. He denied. He finally fell silent, hollowed by seeing himself revealed. I watched his chest heave as if he were trying to force a new identity into a frame already full. At last he looked up at the magistrate, eyes empty and wet.
"Do you understand now?" the magistrate asked.
The bandit lord nodded like a bent reed.
He was left with a reputation ruined, stripped of his claims, forced to labor under the eyes of those he had wronged. "Public punishment," people later called it. For the bandit lord, it was not the lash that hurt most; it was the knowledge that he had been unmade by ordinary people. He had wanted to be feared; instead he became a story told to shame others.
I felt no glee at this. I felt only a slow, cold satisfaction that the town could speak and be heard. "Justice," Francis said as we watched the crowd thin. "Not revenge."
Oliver stood beside me. He had a piece of cloth in his hand, still damp with the work of binding. "You acted bravely," he said.
"Enough to be stupid," I replied.
Oliver smiled. He offered me the preserved quince again. "Eat," he said. "You will need strength."
I took it and tasted something ordinary and sweet, and it steadied me.
Later, Francis found me at the edge of the square. "You will go to the northern pass," he said. "I am ordering it."
"You are," I said, and he shrugged.
"I will go where I am needed," he said. "And I will argue for you when I can."
"You argued for me tonight," I said.
"You did the rest," he answered. "You set the plan."
"We set it," I corrected.
He looked at me like a man discovering a map. "If you leave..." he began.
"If you do not love me," I said, "then your words will not be mine."
"I cannot change what I feel," he said.
"Nor can I," I replied.
Oliver came up then and bowed, a funny, precise bow that made Francis snap a look. "Miss Camila," he said. "If you are well enough, I will travel for a while. There is a physician in the north I would like to learn from."
"Will you go with me?" I asked before thinking.
He did not hesitate. "If you will have me."
Francis watched us, and a wind moved through him that looked for a moment like surrender. "Then go," he said at last. "Go and find what you need."
We left the town with the amulet he had given me tucked into my palm, the metal warm from my skin. I thought of the battlefields and the nights full of stories. I thought of the way Francis had laughed at me when I tried silk and how he had cried when he thought he failed me.
We walked toward the north together—Oliver at my side, and Francis walking the other way, carrying his own burdens.
At the last inn before the pass, I sat alone and turned the amulet in my hand. The string was frayed and the paint had worn. The metal had a faint burn smell from where Oliver had once used it to light a candle in our hospital tent.
I closed my fingers around it. I thought of vows and of small mercies: the quince, the hand that bandaged me, the way Francis had tapped my head and said, "I will protect you," even if his protection had not always been the kind I wanted.
"Will you be all right?" Oliver asked.
"I will try," I said.
Francis breathed in deeply across the courtyard, and when I looked up he raised a hand in a small, soldierly salute. "Take care of her," he told Oliver.
"I already have," Oliver replied. "And I will always have."
Francis smiled, a tight, complicated thing. "Then go."
I slid the amulet into my palm and felt it press like a pulse. "If any one of us forgets," I said, "let it be a good forgetfulness."
Oliver laughed softly. "What is that?"
"A forgetting to hold on to what hurts," I said.
We left the inn and walked toward the cold north. The amulet rested in my palm like a secret, warm and stubborn. It smelled faintly of smoke and the street where Oliver had once used sugar like an offering. It was mine to carry, which in the end, felt like protection enough.
The End
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