Sweet Romance15 min read
A Crown, A Lake, and a White Jade Pin
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I remember the day the snow fell like paper cuttings and the world went soft around the edges. It was the day the betrothal ended.
"You want to end the engagement?" Matteo Martins asked me like he was describing weather. He sat with his hands folded, and his voice was a small, indifferent thing.
"Yes," I said, and my voice held steady because I'd practiced saying it in the mirror a hundred times.
"You love someone else?" Matteo's eyes flicked to Aiko Garcia, who sat beside him with tears that looked far too practiced to be true.
"Aiko and I have our reasons," Aiko sobbed, and then she turned those practiced eyes on me. "Sister... I—"
"Enough." I cut across both of them before any performance could stretch another minute. I stood, smoothed my skirt, and let the room feel my spine. "Then we will annul it. Say what you need to say and end it tonight."
Matteo blinked like someone waking up. "You agree so simply?"
"Yes." I smiled with the gentleness my nurse taught me, and it felt every bit of a blade. "The engagement was a parent's choice. If it's unsuited to me, then let it be undone."
The reaction was a matter of choreography. Shock from the elder guests. Contempt from Aiko's mother, Esperanza Correia, whose fingers played with her jade bracelet like counting coins. My father, Ross Burke, sat in the seat of authority but his face was an empty question mark.
"Very well," Matteo said tautly. "Make it public tomorrow. Best if all of the capital knows."
"I will leave," I said, and I pushed the plate with the betrothal token. It fell and smashed—my mother's jade pin by my gown shattered, and the sound felt like a bell tolling for a life.
"A clumsy hand," I murmured, and no one believed the lie because they had always liked the drama more than the truth.
Aiko's smile looked like a small triumph. She had stolen many things from me when we were children—my sweets, my pet rabbit, the praise of tutors—and she had always performed better in the places that mattered. I had learned to let it go. It had been survival. But watching her take even Matteo—the least of my grievances—felt like the last piece of my quiet life being pulled away.
"Wait, sister," she called after me in the garden before I left. She ran, dislodged the trained attendants behind her, and stood with tears and perfume and a grin. "Did you like the coming-of-age gift? The skirt? The hairpin?"
I stepped near, lowered my voice, and told her what I had begun to tell myself for years like a small prayer. "Aiko, as long as I live in my father’s house I am the true daughter. You will be behind me."
She laughed then, a sound like a bell being struck. "Of course. That's forever," she said, fluttering the stolen collar as proof. She stepped to swing her hand, and I took that hand, tightened my fingers around her wrist, and let the truth rest like cold stone.
"Take the trinket," I said, smoothing her broken step of triumph into a courteous bow. "I will take nothing else."
They did not understand the liberty in refusal. They only saw the smallness of my choice. They could never see that sometimes a person simply stops being small.
The night fell. I packed the last of what I felt I could call mine. Blakely McCormick, who had been my nurse and companion since I could remember, stayed; Esperanza Cunningham and Jaylene Larson, the two girls who were my world in their small, persistent ways, came too. We left for the temple the capital called its "sacred retreat": a place of austerity, hidden in pines out beyond the city where rumor had once attached itself like moss.
The monks complained and the steward of the temple, a man named Elvis Dell who had the skill of a healer and the bluntness of a ledger, offered levies and curses in equal measure. "You are too delicate for the rags," he said once, peering at me with a doctor's curiosity.
"It is not about delicacy," I answered. "It is about being invisible until I am no longer needed."
They forced us into simple quarters. The head nun—an older woman with a sharp jaw—declared my presence required for the peace of her temple. "There is imbalance," she intoned. "Two daughters of one house bring a storm of envy. The remedy is separation."
Aiko's face in the temple windows was a picture made of cold things: pearl drops, hunger for power, and that practiced sorrow. They bundled me up—only what I could carry—and set me to tasks that made my back ache and my fingers blister. I learned how to haul water until the whole of me hummed with fatigue. I learned how to kneel and sweep and make the meager offerings that soothed other people's consciences.
Three nights in, the rain came—a curtain, a drum. I set out with two buckets to fetch water and felt my calves burn against mud. The storm rose. The stone path became a ribbon of glass. A slip, a crack, the sharp pain that blooms when a body is surprised they are a body. Darkness came after the fall like a blanket pulled over a lamp.
When I woke, the room smelled of medicine and wood smoke. My cheeks were wet from tears that were not my own. I opened my eyes to see Axel Andreev sitting by my bedside, a pale handsome man who looked like a painting that had been allowed to breathe. He watched me with an expression that held both interest and the terrible ease of someone who wants to check a box.
"You awake," he said simply, as if my survival was a matter of logistics.
"Who are you?" I croaked.
"Axel." His mouth twisted into a soft, infuriating smile. "Most in court call me the Prince of Rui. But I have been called many names."
"You are not a monk," I said.
He laughed, a low sound that made the room tilt for reasons my rational brain didn't enjoy. "No. The temple is a place of rest. I am resting here."
"You dragged me into your rest."
"You were outside in a storm." He tilted his head. "I brought you in."
It was not the first time someone had decided to rescue me and call it charity. It was not the first time someone had called me fragile and put me in a safer cage. But Axel was not merely rescuing of his own kind. He tended my fever and wrapped my bruises in linen with fingers that moved like they had been taught the same tenderness as I had learned shame.
"You must return to the city," I said when I could sit up and not feel the room spin like a lantern's flame.
"You should eat," he said instead. "You are paler than you should be."
There was a candor about him I hadn't seen in the grand houses. It was dangerous, because candor tends to make people answer back. I began to speak to him in little shards—about the palace, about the broken pin, about Aiko's laugh—and he answered sometimes in more shards, sometimes with a story, sometimes with silence.
"Why did you help me?" I asked one long evening when the sky was a bruised blue.
"Maybe because you looked familiar when I saw you by the pond," he said. "Maybe because you were staring at the carp like they had a language I knew. Or maybe because," he added with a curve of a grin, "you are pretty, and I have a weakness for people who look like they belong to stories."
"That is hardly a reason."
"It is a reason," he said, and reached over to shift a strand of hair from my face. My skin answered like a plucked string. There was a small electricity. "You're stubborn and soft. That's a bad combination if you are living in a house of vipers."
Axel had not been kingship's puppet for long; he had poison in him—an inherited slow poison, a legacy of palace plots that made doctors worry and made him own a calm no one who did not belong to him could find. "They told me you have lived too recklessly," he told me once. "That you are a mishap waiting to happen."
"And what?" I asked.
"And I decided to put a shield on it," he answered. "Call it my whim or my duty."
He taught my maids how to sling a small staff. He gave me books he said I should read. He wrapped me in finer cloth and sent gifts to us "anonymously"—a small tray of sweets, proper dresses stitched in cloth I had never seen. When the first dress came, I thought it was an error and tried to hand it to the steward. Axel caught my wrist.
"Keep it," he said. "I want to see it on you."
His demands were small and relentless and strange. He was not the sort of man to do the measured politeness of marketable affection. He teased like a boy and cared like a man who had decided to keep someone. It made my pulse do foolish things.
My life continued to be spent in small wars. The head steward of the temple—an old woman with poison in her smile—tried to starve and scold us. I taught her a lesson she would not forget. One night, when the moon was a coin in the sky, she scolded me for wearing prettier than the other novices. I laughed at her with all my teeth. She shoved me; I shoved back. Her shriek gathered everyone like gossip.
"May the gods save us," she said, and I did something I had never done in public. I drew a small blade from my belt—an act of theater—and pressed it under her chin.
"Confess," I said quietly. "Tell them what you did, and tell them why you are afraid."
She had been bribed by Aiko Garcia and Esperanza Correia. She confessed in a wave of frantic tears: she had hidden my chances, fed lies to the monks, and left me alone in the storm. She'd been promised coin and a safe retirement. I offered a bargain: confess publicly or accept exile.
She chose confession. The head nun, who was never without an eyebrow raised, announced what had happened to the assembly. The old woman's face shifted through a parade of colors: shock, then anger, then the small, animal panic of someone who had been counted out. She begged for mercy, then lashed out, then begged again. Her last prayer was a thin thing like a moth's wing.
The villagers around the temple watched with hungry, whispering faces. Word carries in the capital like a trampling herd. News went faster than candle smoke. Matteo heard, everyone heard. In the temple, I realized the freedom of one small victory—how long could that last?
Shortly after that, I wandered the temple grounds late and found Axel feeding the carp. He had wet leaves in his hands and was more awkward than I had ever seen him.
"Are you making a show of virtue?" I asked.
"No. I am telling you I will keep you," he said. "Publicly. Privately. By any means."
"That sounds like a promise," I said, and noted how the word felt warm on my lips.
"It is a promise," he said.
The return to the capital was a parade no one in my house expected. I came home because my father—Ross Burke—sent a carriage to the temple and spoke with a man whose face was as grave as a judge's. "Come home," he said. "We have business."
I was escorted back to a home that looked like nothing had changed. But it had. The city was the same while we, those moved around the board, had shifted. People who had once looked my way with polite disinterest now studied me with the currency of rumor. They saw the new dresses, the folded silk, the way I did not bow in the same small ways. That was when the capital began to pivot.
One evening, the house threw a winter feast as if nothing had happened. I did not go. I sat in my room and took a thin breath as footsteps stomped and voices laugh-distorted with wine. Aiko came to the door with a face like a contrite child. "Sister," she said, and I could smell roses and play-acted sorrow. "I wanted to... apologize."
"You want what you wanted," I said, and the words were a blade.
"I didn't mean—" she started.
"You always mean what you say in the places where gold matters," I said. "I did not come home to forgive you, Aiko."
She pressed her lips together like a bird with a seed. "Then why did you come? You went away to die and came back with a prince. Why? Why the theatrics?"
"Because I could," I answered. "Because sometimes refusing your fate is the only dignity left."
She fumbled, then hissed. "You will not have him. I will make sure he hates you."
"Try," I said, and the levelness of my voice killed her a little.
When I returned to court life—because that is what came after being taken to the palace—the scale tipped. The world watched, and people make bets. Axel's attention is a thing hard to hide; it gives people fuel. For my part, I listened to what was said in quiet rooms and wrote down names: the men who owed money, the merchants who broke oaths. Axel did not need me to seek vengeance. He had a patience honed in cold corridors.
And then everything erupted.
The lake incident at the winter feast—Aiko's plan to humiliate me by staging an accident—failed because a witness, a frightened servant girl who had been coerced into lying, broke down and told the truth. The courtyard filled with people like a wind, for when privilege falls, it draws a crowd.
"She pushed you!" people said.
"No," Aiko shrieked. "She tripped. We were near the pond. It was an accident—"
"She had your dress clutched in her hand," said the witness, a trembling voice with tears and a girl's courage left like a raw thing in the air. "Aiko told me to wet the dress. She told me to make it look like she fell."
It was then that my father, Ross Burke—the man who had once refused to meet my eyes—went pale. The crowd's whispers sharpened into a blade. Aiko's face changed like a page in a book—first the practiced innocence, then an edge of fury, then a desperate denial, then a sudden scramble to blame someone else.
"She lied to you," I told the circle that formed. "She used my vulnerability, she used the servant, and she staged the scene to point the finger at me."
"Why would she do such a thing?" someone asked. The crowd looked hungry.
"Because she wanted to ruin me," Aiko said, and her voice cracked. "Because—"
"Because she has always wanted what was mine," I said, and looked straight at the woman who had played sister and patron.
The palace magistrate called for witnesses. The servant girl told, hands shaking, eyes wide. People murmured. Aiko's mother, Esperanza Correia, tried to throw cash in a show's attempt at hush, but the merchants present saw the coin and smelled bribe. A hush is bought, but the scent betrays the buyer.
We were taken to the hall where officials meet—the hall with banners and a table that could crush any household with the right signatures. The magistrates read charges: attempted murder, conspiracy to slander, coercion of servants. The names rolled like thunder: Aiko Garcia, Esperanza Correia, Ross Burke, Matteo's family implicated in bribes for favours.
I sat like a coin in a palm and watched the scene uncoil. It was there—public, sharp, the kind of exposure that unravels reputations like frayed rope.
The punishment scene was the kind all palaces whisper about: full, humiliating, precise.
It began before dawn in the great square. The morning crowd gathered beyond the palace gates—merchants, officials' pages, noble wives with their scarves tied higher than the law allowed. They wanted spectacle. They wanted to see pride break.
Aiko was brought first, cloaked by a silk that no longer hid her. She walked between two guards who held her like a leashed animal. At first her face wore the defiance of someone used to getting their way. Her eyes snapped at me and I met that gaze without flinching. Then the witness stepped forward. She told the court everything she had been forced to say and do. The magistrate read the charges aloud, the words clanging like a bell.
"You plotted to drown her, to ruin her reputation. You paid witnesses. You bribed the temple steward. Why?" the magistrate demanded.
Aiko's face changed in steps that could be traced: first disbelief—"I didn't!" then a surge of fear as she realized the dam of lies had been broken—"They made me do it!"—then shock, denial, then the thin, animal pleading—"Please, I swear, no!" She began to beg, her voice uneven. Tears streamed but they were no longer the practiced kind. She attempted to gather the attention of influential cousins in the crowd; they looked away. The magistrate announced a fine and public disgrace: Aiko would be paraded through the market with her head uncovered and her name read to the crowd. Her mother, Esperanza Correia, would be forced to publicly apologize and surrender her gilded bracelets, and pay a heavy penalty.
The spectacle was designed not merely to punish but to turn social currency to dust. The crowd who had once whispered a favorable word about the family now hissed. Hands pointed. Children spat and imitated her performance. Some people took out little sketchbooks and scribbled. There was applause—bitter and precise. The girl who had spoken now stood and watched Aiko's shame and breathed, a long, fragile inhale. She had been freed, not by law alone, but by the commonality of human witness.
Ross Burke's punishment was of a different shape. He faced the court later. He had been complicit in turning me into something small when he should have been my shield. His face was drawn, his throat working. The magistrate announced his removal from office, confiscation of titles, transfer of his privileges to the crown for a period of disgrace. He was to live as a common man—no public carriage, no honorifics, a ban from council meetings and a stigma that would last his lifetime. He kneeled, pleaded, his voice a dry croak. For a moment he begged like a man who had been surprised at his own consequences, then denial, then stunned silence. The crowd murmured the tides of satisfaction. When he left the square he was not the man who had seated himself above us. He had been unseated with a clean, surgical blow. His friends folded away. His name would not be spoken with honor for a long time.
Esperanza Correia, Aiko's mother, received a punishment suited to the wary: social exile. She was stripped of her access to the court's inner salons and given a small house in the country with her finances monitored. She clutched at her bracelets as a child clutches a blanket and ranted and cried in ways that only made courtiers point and say, "Karma." Her expression progressed through the ritual stages: smug insolence, rising anger, full-throat denial, and finally, a hollow crumble when she pressed both hands to her face and realized her gold meant nothing to the men who had stripped her titles. The onlookers' reactions varied—some whispered with grim satisfaction, the wives muttered approval, the merchant class who had been nicked by the family's backhanded deals cheered. Officers rubbed their hands like men who had got a good bargain.
Throughout the punishments, the crowd reacted: some raised their hands to clap, some clicked tongues of disapproval, some took out their own scrolls to note the details, some exchanged smirks. A few faces in the crowd had known me once and tilted their heads with something like embarrassment. The magistrate, stoic and impassive, read the sentences off as if telling the weather. Public shame changed bodies: Aiko went from a preening bird to a shivering thing in minutes. Ross Burke's shoulders sagged. Esperanza's mouth began to tremble, not with composure but with the sudden impotent ache of a woman stripped of her stage.
Axel stood on the fringe of the crowd like a stone, expression unreadable. When the sentences were final, he came to me with a small, soft smile.
"Would public shaming make you feel even now?" he asked.
"No," I said. "The truth wasn't for spectacle. It was for not letting them break me."
He nodded, and I felt something steady settle in my chest.
After the punishments, life rebalanced. The gossip that once seemed so sure of its victims now shifted to other things. Aiko and her mother retreated from the capital to the countryside, with reputations broken and pheasant feathers gone from their caps. Ross Burke's seat at the table was taken by new hands, and his estates were managed by officials who were strangers to him.
There were consequences I didn't want—people who had been my allies watched from a distance—and victories I did want: I was no longer bound by the house I had grown into and out of. I was free in a way I had not understood until I saw the back of those who had tried to cage me.
Axel did not parade his protection. He did not rub my misfortunes in anyone's face. Instead he came day after day, and the little things he did were the most important. He warmed my tea when the first frost bit, he taught my maids to sew better seams and to hold their square in a fight, and when he had his moments of mischief he stole a coin and left a book.
He offered me a choice in a way he believed in: "Haisley," he said—because, yes, I am Haisley Coulter now, the name the court reads with a different cadence—"be my wife. Let me be enough. Let me be the one to stand in your shadow and call it light."
I laughed, because it felt like a ridiculous question and the answer had been growing in me like a root for months. "You are too relentless," I said.
"Then let me be relentless for you," he replied.
There is a quiet when one agrees that belongs only to two people. We were careful in our vows. He did not demand control. He promised a shelter and then he kept it. "I will not take another," he said to me one night by lamp light, and the promise thudded against my ribs like a drum.
The wedding was the sort of ceremony the capital claimed as its own spectacle: brocade, phoenixes embroidered in gold, a crown that felt like a planet balanced on my head. My hairpin—shards of white jade left from my mother's broken token—was fixed in my hair in a way that made me feel like I bore my mother on my skin, and the priest said words that made my voice small as the tide.
On the last night before I left the house for the palace, I walked to the small pond in the courtyard where once Aiko had schemed. The moon laid a silver path over the water. Axel came and stood beside me.
"You have been offered the crown's shadow," I said half to the moon, half to him.
"I did not offer it," he said quietly. "I asked for your hand."
"Words are different from promises."
"They are," he said. "But promises are what I intend to be."
We stood there, his hand over mine. "Do you ever think about the little girl in the courtyard with the kite?" I asked. "Do you remember her?"
"I remember a brave liar who said I would come back," he said.
"I am not that child anymore," I said.
"Better," he said. "She is smarter now."
The crowd had loved to watch the punishments, but I liked to think about the small, private mercies that saved the life. Axel's hands were always honest. He did not play the part of rescue for applause. He was stubborn enough to stay. And when he finally bent to ask me to be his, there was no pomp, only the quiet insistence we had taught each other.
"Will you?" he asked. His face was close enough that I could count the small scars that made his jaw softer.
"Yes," I said because I had learned how to say yes on my own terms. "Yes, I will stand with you."
He smiled as if I had given him the last thing he had been missing. He lifted the white jade hairpin—the last piece of my mother—then slipped it into my palm. "Hold this. Let it be your anchor."
"I will keep it," I promised.
We married in winter light and lived into spring. The capital watched us from its balconies and whispered until whispers moved on to other things. I married a prince and found a husband who could also hold a bowl and warm green tea. He could also unhook an ugly old steward's scheme with a look.
People think of court as one long play, and sometimes it is. But sometimes it is simpler: two stubborn people who found each other, and a handful of loyal friends like Esperanza Cunningham and Jaylene Larson who learned sword positions and recipes. We had children later—one small boy named in a flurry of affection—and he taught me what kind of woman I had become: not the quiet house daughter, but a person who could demand a room and keep a heart.
When I look back on the moment the jade pin broke, I think of small things as the pivot of fate. A smashed pin. A storm. A rescued body. A witness who chose a voice over silence. A prince who came and decided the world could be made kinder by stubbornness.
"Keep your hairpin," Axel said to me one afternoon, as sunlight fell in stripes across the floor. "Whenever people ask why you survived, show them this broken piece, and tell them the story of a girl who refused to be small."
"I will," I said. "And I will tell them how plainly you asked me to stay because you could not bear to lose me."
He kissed my forehead like it was a map he had read every night. "I will always be your shield," he said.
I smiled and slid the white jade pin into my sleeve. It was not whole, but it kept a corner of my mother with me, and the world had turned because of its smallness.
The End
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