Rebirth12 min read
The Spring Begonia That Would Not Let Me Go
ButterPicks16 views
I was seven the first time I almost died.
"Stay with me," I croaked. "Ariya."
She looked older than seven then, quiet as rain. "The spring has come," she said, and pushed a wet branch of spring begonia into my hands.
"Where did you get this?" I whispered. My voice was small. The fever had hollowed me out.
She smiled the way she always smiled—soft, steady. "I found it in a yard. I thought it would make you better."
"I—" I tried to say thank you, but the words were stones in my mouth.
She sat beside my bed and hummed a nonsense tune, the kind lullabies teachers make out of math. The smell of the flower rode on her sleeve. After that night the fever broke like a tide easing away.
"You're stubborn," my father scolded me later when I tried to hide my weakness. He pointed at the scrolls, at the sword he wanted me to learn, at the duty he believed would shape me.
"Ariya shouldn't have to pay for my mistakes," I told him then. "I'll be better."
"You should," he said flatly. "If the Lu family complains the match won't hold. You'd better be worth her."
"She is worth it." I said it like a promise.
Years slide in details. At fifteen Ariya was already the bright name people said softly in the courtyard. She never laughed loud, but when she looked at me the air seemed to tilt.
"Come to the Lantern Festival," I asked. "I'll wait under the willow."
She came late, stepping shyly from the carriage. Under the paper lights she looked like a sky of small stars tangled into a face. I had a sword balanced at my side, but I stepped forward with both hands. "Ariya."
She bit her lip. "I—" She faltered. "Gerry, I am promised to another."
"You are promised to me." My voice wanted to be a laugh. I reached and pulled her down into my arms. "You're promised to me."
"Stop," she said, struggling, cheeks flaring red.
"Who else would be worthy?" I teased. "Who else could carry you like this every night?"
"You're impossible," she pouted, and then her voice softened. "You should be kinder to yourself."
We watched the lanterns until our feet cramped. I wanted to press my lips to her and let the world thin to only us, but we were children of a future bound with plans. "One year," I told her. "One year and we'll be married. I promise."
She looked at me like she believed it. "If the begonia blooms in my garden next year," she whispered, "I will not take it as a trick."
It did bloom. We both looked at the flowers and pretended surprise together.
I meant to be worthy of her. I trained harder. I read faster. I made a point of being everything the house expected. Even then I carried a private belief that duty and will were a pair: you worked and the world bent to you.
I did not expect to be stolen.
"You will not understand how he got there," I said once later, to myself, when the fog of those years faintly warmed against memory.
I will say it plainly: something entered my mind. It was not a thought, not a mood I could shake. It was a presence that settled like a cold stone.
"I am Tate," it said at first, not with a voice but with a knowledge. "I have places to go. I will sit here."
I could feel it moving my fingers, see through my eyes while being unable to shift a single muscle. I watched my own hands draw letters I would never write, watched my mouth speak words I did not mean.
When the presence used me to speak cruel things to Ariya I felt each word like a cut. The man who used my face and my name—Tate Girard—had no patience for gentleness.
"You're in the way," he said to Ariya during a dinner that blurred into one of his many rehearsed spites. "You expect me to be tethered forever to a promise?"
She held herself small. "I did not expect to be hated."
"Don't be naive," he spat. "Promises are paper. People change."
She did not cry then. She stood quiet, as if words that big would break a body made of glass.
I tried to fight. I hammered against the walls inside my mind. The stone presence only laughed. "You have a stubborn engine for a shell," it said. "But it is convenient to borrow."
I watched Tate pick at everything: he sowed doubts where there had been trust. He found insults in smiles and flung them like stones. I watched him mock my family, embarrass them with staged follies, drive wedges between brothers. He was sharp and clever in ways I had not expected.
One night I saw him bend Ariya's chin and look down his nose. "You seek pity," he told her. "You think you own me by token of a childhood gift? Grow up." He pushed her until she staggered.
"Why are you doing this?" I screamed, but there was no sound.
Afterward he married someone else—Polina Duffy—without any proper shame. He used my name in letters and in bed, and then he used it to wipe his own conscience dry.
"He never was what he showed," the court whispered later. "He used Gerry's face to hide his little cruelties."
"You're cruel," I thought to Tate once in the dark. "You take lives to fill a hole."
"You are soft," the presence answered, with careless cruelty. "Soft things are useful. They get stepped on and then comfort comes when they beg."
My hands were empty while someone else burned my life.
Ariya did not fall without fight. The night Tate chose to rid himself of our promise, she did something the whole capital would talk about for years.
"Then do as you please," she said, when he declared she must be put away. "If you leave, leave. I will not stop your preferment."
"Good," he snapped. "I am done with you."
She stood in her wedding dress later—bright and terrible—and in the stable she smashed jars, letting wine run like rivers across the floor. She took a single torch and moved toward the rafters.
"Stop!" a servant screamed. "Miss—don't—"
"I will not be pitied," she said. "I will not be a joke." She struck the torch. Fire rose, smelling like oil and death.
I was bound inside and could not move. I watched sparks settle on embroidered silk. I watched her eyes, and for the first time in months I felt something like a blade reopen inside me.
"I am Aly—" I began, but my voice did not reach.
Flames licked the wedding cloth. She did not cry until the heat pressed at her face. Then she wept softly and whispered one name: "Gerry."
The flames did not take her to silence. She emerged scarred, trembling but alive. Her hair was half singed and her hands held the hilt of the dagger I had once given her as a mark of trust.
She used that dagger like a key to cut the smoke that bound me. "Who are you?" she demanded of whoever occupied me that night.
The presence paused as if caught off guard. "I am what I need to be," it said. "Leave me be."
"You leave her be," she snapped. "You leave him be."
I did not know which of us said the next words inside that cracked night—maybe it was her, maybe a ghost of my stubbornness—but suddenly my limbs trembled and obeyed. The fog inside me thinned and for a beating stretch of time I saw Ariya's face close and raw, and I reached for it.
"You are stubborn," she told me later when we were hidden and the capital spun a rumor storm. "You always were."
"Why did you risk everything?" I asked. My voice shook like a fledgling.
"Because you were in there," she said, and she touched my cheek. Her fingers were cold and smelled like smoke and begonia. "I knew you were in there."
That was not true. The truth was worse and kinder: we both had memories buried in bone. She had dreamt a life she had lived with me before, one that had been stolen from us. She believed it enough to act on it.
I did not know then if the world had mercy, or if our stubbornness was a kind of law that punished the foolish as much as it saved them. I can tell you this: there is a kind of stubbornness that becomes faith.
At the white gate before I left for the southern campaign, I said to her, "If I live, I will come back and marry you."
"You might not come back," she said, in a voice that folded like paper. "Promise me we will not part again?"
"I promise," I said. The vow tasted like iron.
War takes memory, too. In the fight at White Crane Bay I was hit by two arrows and fell into the river. Water invaded my ears and mouth and the world narrowed to sound and smell. It was like dying and being heaved back between breaths.
When I came up the second time, everything unspooled. Faces, long-cold arguments, the ways Tate had used my name—they all rushed back with the returning air. I remembered being a different Gerry once. I remembered watching him use me. I remembered Ariya's dagger and her burning dress.
I climbed back to the capital the slow way, as if the city itself had to learn my pace again. I arrived to rumors pitched like hawks and to a household that had learned to bow under sudden winds.
"You're home," she said the first night I returned. Her voice was thin, but she smiled.
"You waited," I said.
"What else would I do?" She drew near. "I tried to leave once. But it's better to stay."
We married quietly, with hands held and no grand theater. The next morning she woke with a sound that folded into my bones.
"Say my name," she whispered.
"Ariya."
She curled into me like a small bird and asked the question she had asked long ago. "We will not be torn apart? Ever?"
"We will not," I answered, and this time I meant it the way a man means bread and shelter. I would not let the past be a shovel scraping open our graves.
But fate and men with claws have a way of keeping score. The presence—Tate—did not leave without making a last effort. He sent slanders, anonymous notes, threats slid like blackfish under doors. He tried to make the court laugh at us, to turn the world small and mean.
I bared my teeth. "You will stop," I told him in my head.
"If I stop, I starve," he replied, as if kindness were a market and he only a miser.
One part of the world, though, needed more than my stubbornness. It needed witnesses who could not be bought.
The day of his punishment arrived because someone else kept a ledger and did not forget the little things. A clerk—small, plain, someone Tate had mocked—kept copies of letters. Another servant he had humiliated had voice and courage. They gathered proofs: letters signed in my hand, actions taken in my name, loans taken and defaulted that had almost ruined my house. All of it woven into a story that could be told plainly.
We chose the hall where the capital held ceremonial audiences. The dais was high. Flags made a sea around the pillars. There were merchants and soldiers and the wives of men who mattered. The charge was simple: Tate Girard had used the body of Gerry Schneider to commit betrayals, to ruin households, and to betray a pledge that had been kept since childhood.
"Bring him in," I said, but my voice cracked like thin wood.
They led him in in bonds. The man walked with the arrogance of someone who never expected to be restrained. He lifted his chin, looked over the sea of faces, and smiled a smile that had no warmth.
"You have a lot to say," he said aloud. "Speak then. Let the court be entertained."
I felt Ariya's hand catch mine under the bench. "Be careful," she whispered.
I stood. I had not planned a long speech. I had planned truth.
"You hid behind my face," I said. "You called yourself a visitor, an accident. You used the life you'd stolen."
The hall murmured. Men shifted. Someone whispered, "The general's house—"
Tate rolled his eyes. "What a show," he scoffed. "They always let the tired make accusations. This is theater."
"Whose theater?" Polina Duffy stood then, her face pale as if she had been cut by glass. She had been a part of the pattern, the name whispered into the right ears by the man who used me. She backed away like a knife removed from soft flesh.
"She was willing," Tate said, quick as a viper. "She was pretty. She was useful."
"That's not true!" she cried. Her hands fluttered like a bird's in a net. "I did what I did because—"
"Because you wanted power," Tate interrupted, and his voice sharpened to ridicule. "Because you loved the taste of climbing, didn't you?"
Polina's mouth opened and closed. One of her patrons stood up, enraged. "Shame on you," he barked, "to involve this house. To lie using a man's face."
Ariya made no sound. Her eyes were bright and dry. The hall smelled like cedar and old ink.
I laid out the ledger with my hands. "Here," I said. "Letters in my hand that I did not write. Here are orders I supposedly gave that ruined a farmer's fields. Here is the list of debts he took on in my name."
"Forgery!" Tate cried. "You fools—if these are forgeries—"
"They are not," I said. "They are his handwriting when he could not help but sign himself to mischief. The clerk who kept copies is here." I nodded. A thin man with gray in his hair stepped forward and swore the copies were true.
"Do you deny forging my signature?" I asked the man in the dock.
Tate's face changed then. It was a small change, a shutter falling. "I—" he began, then snorted. "Forging. How quaint."
"Why did you ruin them?" Ariya asked quietly. The hall leaned in. "Why destroy people with a borrowed face?"
He finally looked at her fully. For the first time his smile broke. "Because I could," he said. "Because I was tired of being small. Because I tasted more taking than giving."
"That's not an answer," she said. "That's a confession."
The murmurs grew teeth. A woman at the back beat her palm once against a pillar. "You used him," she said. "You used his life like a cloak."
Tate's expression hardened, then folded through stages. First there was arrogance, then a thin panic, then a flicker of denial, and finally a crumple. "You have no right—" he started. "You can't—"
"Watch him," someone hissed. Men reached for the ropes that held him. They wanted to see the body act, to see the culprit quake.
He looked smaller under the crowd's gaze. "I am not what you say," he pleaded suddenly. "I only wanted... to be seen."
"You are seen now," I said. "Not as you wanted."
He laughed—an ugly, brittle laugh. Then the first person stood and spat at his boots. "You deserve more than spit," the crowd said. "You deserve to be shown what you have done."
Ariya stepped forward. For the first time in public she did not look like a woman made of patience. She looked like someone who had carried a blade and does not mind unsheathing it now.
"You will answer," she said. "In the market. In front of the people you hurt."
"You will not kill him," I hissed. "We are not them."
"No," she agreed. "We are not them. We will show him."
They dragged him to the square after the council had spoken. Trade stopped. Bells struck once. People leaned from lattices. Children were pulled close to see the spectacle. It was the sort of audience that could not be bought with money or apologies.
"Look at him!" someone cried. "The man who takes faces."
Tate tried to glare. He tried to composes his face to the mask of insolence. "You are fools," he told them. "You think you can ruin a man with words? Who among you is free of sin?"
A baker threw a crusted roll and hit his cheek. Polina watched from the crowd, her face wet and wild.
I stood on a low cart and told the simple facts as plainly as one stacks wood. "He used my name to call away soldiers, to take money, to shame houses. He took our sister's dowry and used it in bets. He took my father's stead when it pleased him. He used the things of our house as if they were trinkets."
"Is this true?" a woman asked in a voice like a bell.
"It is true," I said. "Ask the clerk. Ask the women he meant to marry. Ask Polina if you must."
Polina stumbled out a defense but it frayed as people began to mock the man who had thought his lies were works of art. They set signs up—small, hand-painted ones listing deeds: "Tate took a dowry," "Tate used a marriage to climb," "Tate robbed a farmer."
The crowd did what crowds do best: they become jury, executioner of reputation. They did not kill him. The law would take care of law. But the punishment the market offered was worse to such a man: it was public undressing of the self.
He changed before our eyes. At first he tried jokes. "Is this a play?" he asked. He forced laughter. Then he denied everything. "I have been maligned," he said. "These are fabrications."
"Then speak to the records," I insisted. "Prove us wrong."
He could not. His hands shook. The first tear slid down his cheek and he slapped it away like an offense.
The crowd shifted, smelling sang-froid and weakness. A handful of men who had once admired him turned their backs. "He deserves to be watched," someone muttered. "Let him be given tasks to rebuild what he broke."
And so they did not hang him. They did not brand him in public with iron. The market ground on, but Tate was left to the worst sort of punishment a man like him could meet: he was watched by anyone who remembered how he had smiled and lied.
He came to us later, on his knees in the dust near the shrine by the granary. He begged. There were cameras of gossip now—scribes wrote of it for unknown weeks—and his pleas made an emblem of his downfall.
"You will never belong to our house," I told him then. "You used me and you used her. You are not forgiven."
He tried to bargain. "I will return the money. I will leave the capital. I will go find a new face."
"You will leave," Ariya said. "But I will not be fooled into pity."
He begged for forgiveness and got only the coldness of a city that had learned to be cautious. Men spat on his boots and turned their eyes away. Women hissed. Polina fled the city under shame and a dowry that would not return her dignity.
When he finally left, he bore the small weight of a man who had nothing to charm with. He had lost the market of faces and must now face a world where things were remembered and unpaid.
The punishment did not end with him leaving the city. People told the story for a long time: how a man who used another's life to climb fell because the one he used refused to be silent. Men who had once admired him learned to check favors, and women who might be tempted to bow to an easy hand grew careful.
I will not say I felt satisfied. There is an emptiness when a monster is defeated: you expect thunder and find only silence. But the market's eyes were a kind of law. It was enough then.
Ariya and I rebuilt slowly. She kept her dagger on the table beside her needlework. She tended the spring begonia in our yard like one would tend a fragile truth. "It blooms every year," she said. "It remembers."
"Does it forgive?" I asked once.
She looked at the petals, damp and newly opened. "Maybe forgiveness is for people," she said. "The begonia just grows."
We had other troubles: whispers that some part of me was still wrong, that a bad thing had been done in my name. But her steadiness made a place for me. Each night she lay by my side, and sometimes she would draw patterns on my palm with forefinger. "You are back," she would murmur. "You are stubborn as ever."
"I am," I said. "I promise again."
Seasons turned. One spring the begonia bloomed full and heavy. The yard under the window turned pink like a soft storm. We sat on the roof and watched as lanterns of petals drifted in wind.
"I thought we had lost this," she said.
"You never lose what you plant," I answered.
She laughed—a small sound like a shell tapped by a child. "Then keep planting," she said.
I do. Even now, when the wind smells faintly of smoke in the far-off memory of that night, I walk the garden and touch the petals. I remember the edges of being stolen and returned. I remember a man with no shame and a public square where the market finally did justice.
And I remember a girl with burn marks on her wrists who used my dagger not to kill but to pry open a prison.
"Stay," she says sometimes in the night.
"I will," I answer.
The begonia trembles in the wind. The petals fall and settle like small good things. They make a quiet, steady sound when the world listens closely.
The End
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