Sweet Romance13 min read
A Half-Faced Mask and a Promise
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I remember the day I was crowned in the capital as clear as the scar that learned to live on my left cheek.
"I am Finley Coleman," I said when they first named me among the brides, and the crowd answered with the kind of clapping that makes your palms ache.
"You will be a fine addition," someone whispered behind a fan. "They say the Prince is stern as winter."
They meant Sebastian Otto.
He knelt at the palace gate for an edict and left the city without looking back. The edict he begged for that night was to station his forces at the southern border. It was stamped with the bright seal of the throne. It meant he would never return.
That same afternoon, I set fire to the Pavilion of Starlit Mirrors.
"I should die in the blaze," I told no one in particular as I tipped the candle. "If he knew I died, would his chest twist, even once?"
Flame ate lacquer and paper, and I waited for it to take me with a fierce kind of fairness. It didn't.
I survived.
When the servants pulled me from the smoke, I woke with my left cheek a map of wound and new skin. The Emperor heard a gossip that tied me to Sebastian Otto, and he stripped me of my court rank, bannishing my family from the next three generations of the bridal selection. They turned my supposed scandal into a cautionary tale.
"My daughter will never disgrace me again," my father, Manuel Neves, said once in a voice that did not hide his shame.
He was a minister, and that shame cut paths. They sent me from the capital to Blueford—the furthest of his avoidances. Exile wore the name nicely; I wore the scar.
"You're meant to be quiet," Amos Cox, the steward, told me the day he took me there. "Make little trouble."
I found quiet in the courtyard and the ache in my throat became a string of work—stitching, painting, selling trinkets I embroidered. I cursed Sebastian in every breath. That was my private sport.
Months bruised into a strange peace. Then a messenger brought news that rattled the calm like hooves: Sebastian Otto had died at southern battlefront, pierced by an arrow in the war against Yueshi. The capital sent word: the front was won, the enemy broken for a decade, and the Prince had paid with his life.
My inkblot stopped on the paper. "Dead?" I whispered.
They said he died a hero. I wondered, traitorously or playfully, who I would curse now. Without him, my world had no culprit to aim my temper at.
Life in Blueford is slow enough to teach you patience or madness, whichever you already carry. I embroidered for visitors, sold my work on the busiest days, and my face grew famous for reasons I did not want. Children would point and the market ladies would mutter about scandal. I kept to my court of one: me, my needle, my anger.
Then Amos, always a man of small rebellions against habit, arranged a servant for me.
"He's a guard, formerly of escort duties," Amos said. "Call him... Yarden. He has sworn not to fight no longer."
I tried to smile and said, "Yarden? That's a curious name."
He did not say much when he came. He was tall and he wore a plain black mask that left only his eyes open. Even then, in the far distance of a kitchen glow, I felt a flicker I could not name. Why would a man who refused to be violent look like someone who had been broken in battle?
"You can call me Finley," I told him. "I have no court here."
"Yes, Finley," he answered. His voice was sand-rough. He rarely said more than what was required.
When I saw his mask at dinner I almost laughed. He arranged a plate of ribs in front of me like a servant who had never been told to do a woman's bidding.
"You don't have to..." I began.
He cut me a look with the silvered eyes of his mask. "Eat."
"You're not used to this," I whispered later.
"I am," he said in that low scratch. "Now."
My life shifted with small things. A bag of gold leaves appeared in front of me one morning, heavy and real. I touched them and my mouth forgot to close.
"Where did you get this?" I demanded.
"From your father," Amos said, baffled to be the bearer of this news.
"Manuel?" I scoffed. "He has left me to die in the capital's rumor mill."
Amos shook his head. "He left this with me. Said for you."
I was both relieved and suspicious. While my fingers counted coins, my heart tried to unlearn loneliness.
"Don't spend it foolishly," the masked man said one night when I offered him a gold leaf as a foolish apology for hogging the bed.
He refused the coin. "I don't take gifts. I will take a brush."
"A brush?" I asked, surprised.
"Your ink. I would like a piece with your hand on it. A phrase."
"Fine. What phrase?"
"Unswerving fidelity," he said. "To mean it, only."
I felt foolish and proud at once. I wrote with whatever fingers did not shake: the characters that became my pen-name and the phrase he asked for. He rolled the paper into his gloved hands and said, "It will see me through."
"You're odd," I told him. "You sound like every romantic story I once read."
"You're the romantic," he said, smiling behind the mask.
We opened a little shop together—he ran errands, I drew patterns. He refused my money, but he never refused a request to go buy fabric or to handle an awkward customer. I began to see him as a presence I did not have to shock with my temper. He brought warmth to the sparsest corners of my day.
I still thought of Sebastian.
At night, when the air smelled of woodsmoke and the market closed, I would tell the masked man about the first time I saw him in the capital garden.
"You were very bold then," I told the masked man. "He—Sebastian—took a ribbon from a wishing tree and offered me a talisman. He seemed to feel everything with a fierce heart."
The masked man listened. There was sorrow in him, like old rope.
"Did he return to you?" I asked.
"He left," I told him. "He left to guard the south, and I burned the pavilion. He never came back. Or that is what I thought."
The masked man said, "People leave you alone in many ways. Some leave with flags. Some leave by not calling."
He was not one for long reasoning.
Then the day the cart came and a pair of men took me from the temple. I had stepped out to breathe after incense and the world tilted. A cloth over my head, hands that were neither cruel nor tender, and then nothing, until I woke in a hut that smelled like hay.
"Who—?" I said, trying to pull at ropes.
"Quiet," a voice said.
A man stepped forward who called himself the leader of a band—that man's name would later be known to me as Sergio Brown. He told me with a grand, patronizing voice that I would be his bride in five days.
"My future wife will be treated well," he said. "She will be fed and clothed. She will not be harmed."
I knew bandits had an etiquette. I also knew that I did not want to be anyone's prize.
"Let me go," I said.
He frowned. "You don't belong to them. You belong to me."
The world undid itself then. I screamed until my lungs protested. I tried to remember the face of the masked man, the way his shoulders moved when he refused coin. I hoped, with the dark kindness of the truly desperate, that he would come.
And he did.
I heard the clatter at the edge of the camp, like someone had brought a storm with boots. Figures rushed in, a white-clad figure at their middle. He did not take off the mask but the eyes—my heart almost stopped.
"Let her go," the white-clad figure warned.
"You dare come here?" Sergio said, amused.
"You are a fool," the masked man—he fought like someone who knew how to end arguments with steel. He pressed at our captors like water pushes a row of stones. At one point a blade brushed my neck and I tasted copper and regret. The masked man let out a throat-rough sound I had never heard before. He stooped, then he hurled his sword in a reckless arc—someone caught it—and then he let them take the sword and fall on him.
"They hit him," I cried, my voice brittle. "Stop."
"Let her go," the masked man rasped.
The night's wound opened like a white flower; his mask came away to show a face I remembered like a secret.
"Sebastian?" I breathed.
He coughed, the voice that came out raw and strangled, as if he had not used vowels in years. "Finley."
He was the Prince I had thought dead.
"You were dead," I said, and then choked as my legs trembled.
"Not all stories end when they look finished," he answered. "I could not die. I was sent away. I came back to find you."
He carried me down the mountain like someone who would carry me for the rest of his life. He bound up my neck wound, and his hands trembled.
"You told him your name?" he asked, soft.
"Yes," I said. "I told the bandit leader I'd rather die."
He sat me in a house with a sign that read—bold old letters—'Jiang Inks,' because Amos is practical and had found a place for my patterns. He wrapped the corners of a wrapped parcel in ways that I'd seen in the capital. He looked like a man who had learned new rules.
"Eat," he said.
"Why do you do so much?" I asked.
"Because you are hurt," he said simply. Then he added, "Three days. I will marry you in three days."
I thought of the decree that sent him south, of the rumor of a hero's death, and of a chest so full of deserted things. I said the words I had practiced in my head and then decided against them.
"I won't marry you because you ask me to make up for deserts," I said. "I will not be traded for comfort."
He looked at me as if I had asked him to pick the color of his own blood.
"If you don't like me," he said finally, "that is your right. But do not say it lightly. If you say you will leave, I will stop you."
"Stop me?" I laughed, a sharp little sound. "How would you do that?"
"With chains," he said.
He said it without flourish, as if to state the weather.
I saw then that the man before me had been carved by harsh wind and ordered labor. He had not been the young man with bright eagerness beneath the rubbing of the palace; he had become a border-scarred sentinel. He looked like a man who would take what he decided he needed.
"I will not be locked," I said.
He did not argue. He only looked at me the way the newly truthful look at things that still need mending. We married three days later, quietly. The capital did not clap. The town gossiped and a few merchants came to see the spectacle like it was an odd fruit.
Then I fell sick.
"Poison," the physician said, in that businesslike way that makes your chest empty. "Her symptoms are old. The antidote needs a hard ingredient—Ginseng from the Garden of the Sage. Very rare."
Sebastian ran like a man with no time to lose. He walked into storms and knelt in rain to beg a man named Elias Moreau—the herbalist with a thousand secrets—for the one root that could save me. I watched him go and I realized how much he would give.
"I will pay anything," Sebastian told Elias, kneeling on the bamboo floor while rain kept the sky in its own mourning. "Name your price."
Elias Moreau, the old man in green, looked at Sebastian and squinted. His garden had a thousand locks. "What are you worth?" he asked.
"Everything," Sebastian said.
Elias laughed like a mouse in a cupboard and then said quietly, "Be specific."
They bargained with a kind of respect older than bargains. In the end, Sebastian promised his own service to the old herbman: he would become an assistant in the garden, tending to plants and—if it was what the man wanted—giving a measure of his blood for medicine. Elias took the pledge and a bowl of Sebastian's blood went to a carefully held crucible.
I did not know the cost until a thin-faced assistant told me. "He said it was for your life," the assistant told me. "He will call himself an herbman now."
When the antidote arrived, he took to sleep with fever and a face like a pale moon. He lay then like a man who had lost part of himself. "You will wake," I told him, like someone who knows no better than insistence.
"Will you start again with me?" he asked later, when he could barely open his eyes.
"I will," I said, and meant it with the feeling of someone who had finally found a home.
Time shapes people like water wears stone. Sebastian's voice remained rough. His throat had been broken by smoke and dishonor and the screams of battle. But his hands were steady, and his promises were not empty.
I found out in the following months that there were still snakes inside the palace—Zhao, the concubine of that old house who had been wicked enough to poison me long before. Her brother was found embezzling relief funds, and their family fell like a house of cards.
I suppose revenge is a low dish, but people like the taste.
One winter morning, the city magistrate called for a public hearing in the big square. The entire market crowded the steps, and the magistrate read charges in a voice like an axe. He laid out the evidence—the intercepted letters, the poisoned jars, the merchant's ledger.
"Kaelyn Rodriguez," the magistrate declared. "By order of the court, you are charged with attempted murder and corruption. You are hereby stripped of your rank and privileges. The city will hear your plea."
Kaelyn stood in the center of the square with a face that had been painted with a calm that did not reach her eyes. When the crowd pushed forward to watch, I felt the old, ravenous satisfaction wait to be let out.
"How dare you!" a voice shouted.
"She tried to kill my daughter!" another cried.
Kaelyn's eyes flicked, caught mine, and for a moment she saw the scar and remembered my name. She clutched at the sleeve of the robe she tried to make look like a shield.
"You have no proof," she cried, but the magistrate laid out the receipts and named witnesses. Amos stood, looking gray and small, and testified about shipments she had ordered. A merchant who had sold the poisoned tonic to her family told the story in shaking detail.
"This woman did not merely court danger," the merchant said. "She purchased ingredients. She paid hands. She smiled when she thought her hands could hide the truth."
"You can't—" Kaelyn began.
"Silence!" the magistrate thundered. The crowd quieted only because the elements wanted it, if anything.
They brought forward a jar, the same shape of the bowl that had once been offered to me in the capital. A craftsman lifted the lid. A smell brushed the crowd like a cold finger.
"She did this for money," Amos said. "She thought her family would gain by my silence."
"The city finds you guilty of moral treachery and of attempted homicide," the magistrate announced. "You will be paraded through the marketplace with a placard naming your crimes. Then you will be stripped of your household status and exiled to the hinterlands. Your male kin will be investigated and prosecuted."
At this, Kaelyn's composure split.
"No! You don't understand," she shrieked. "I did it for the house! For power!"
Her smile fell apart and her eyes widened like a deer in the trap. She reached out, as if to clutch the crowd, but hands found her first—women who had once bowed before her, now pushing away, their faces steeped in a new kind of righteousness.
"Shame!" someone shouted.
"Look at her!" a child cried, and the child had not yet learned the slant of political prudence that makes adults think before they say a thing.
Her face moved through a catalog of emotions: first incredulity, a haughty disbelief that the world would ever turn on her. Then a quick, animal denial, lips forming protest without thought. She appealed to the magistrate, her voice full of practiced scorn. She attempted to charm the crowd, telling them she had been misread and misquoted. She watched as people filmed her with small boxes of glass light and carried her image away in a hundred directions, each one to be replayed.
"You're lying!" she snapped to one witness when he described the wrapped herbs.
Her hands trembled. Her body shrank. When one of the market women spat at her feet, Kaelyn took a step back as if a physical slap had landed.
"Don't!" someone hissed, but the city does not listen when a scandal is ripe. Men who had once courted her now turned their shoulders and pretended they did not know the name on the placard. Her brother—once a man with a ledger of soft power—was then a man with empty pockets. The magistrate's sentence was a blade that did not leave blood but did leave a ruin.
"Take her away," the magistrate ordered. "Let the witnesses be recorded."
They led Kaelyn through the streets with a banner hung around her neck that named her offenses. The crowd was a mob and the mob moved like a tide.
She walked with tears at first—then with stony terror. She tried to speak the names of those she had used, seeking to trade one ruin for another, to grasp a hand and drag someone into mutual collapse. But every hand she reached for pulled away. People recorded her fall on glass, children pointed, the market-keepers whispered that no one would work with her ever again.
Her voice changed shape between every step: from defiance to pleading, from shock to a hollow, greedy bargaining. "I will pay you! I'll give my lands!" she cried, and the crowd laughed like wind over dry leaves.
By the time they put her on a cart bound for exile, her brother had been arrested for misappropriation. The eyes that had once admired her now averted as if the sight of her could stain.
"How does it feel?" someone called from the crowd.
Her face twisted into a final mask, a ruined attempt at the confidence she had once worn. "You will regret this," she said. "One day you will see your errors."
People cheered.
And that was what we wanted—public ruin, the kind where the villain unlearned her swagger in the open, where she watched the world turn her from a person of influence to an example.
I stood with Sebastian behind a low wall and watched. He reached for my hand, and in the place where my scar met skin, his fingers settled like a promise. I said nothing. He squeezed and said, "It's done."
"It is," I said, and then added, softer, "Did you want them to watch?"
He did not answer for a while.
"I wanted them to stop hurting anyone," he said finally. "There are things we cannot undo."
The story did not end in perfect light. After the trial, the city still was full of undercurrents. Sebastian had become, for a time, something else—an assistant to the herbalist Elias, and people joked that he was tending tarragon while wearing the silence of a soldier. He had gone through humiliation to bring me a life.
"You're like a stubborn weed," I told him once, in the quiet between a baby's cry and the rust of afternoon.
"You could say the same," he answered, and I laughed.
Time stitched us into a new shape. We had a child—small and loud and fearless—and when the child was born, I felt a kind of fear that is sharper than any blade. Sebastian held us both and there were tears that were not about loss.
One day, among the letters I burned because they tasted like old grief, a scrap remained. A scrap that said only, "Your love makes me less afraid." I kept that scrap folded into a small white box. Sebastian found it when the child was sleeping, and he kissed my forehead like a man who has known war.
We grew not into a perfect couple but into a pair that matched mismatched corners. Sebastian kept his silver mask hung by the back door. Elias Moreau sent a small jar of throat medicine that kept the roughness at bay. Amos Cox came down to visit and brought stories he could not keep to himself. Sergio Brown turned up once, sober and foolishly gentle, and we spoke of the oddness of life.
At the end, I do one small thing each night. I take down the silver mask from the peg and set it beside the little wooden cradle and then I put my hand in my husband's callused palm.
"Promise me one thing," he murmurs.
"No cheap lines," I say.
He smiles with a mouth that still holds dust and battle. "Promise me you'll say you love me when I wake from the fever."
I don't make magnificent vows. I put a single wash of ink on the back of my hand and write one word: "Always."
He frowns like a child at the handwriting.
"Do you think I'll forget?" I ask.
He laughs softly. "Not when you keep the mask in the kitchen."
I hang the mask back on its peg, beside the window where light catches its silvered edge in the evening.
There are many ways to heal a face: powder and medicine, and the slow work of kindness. There are also ways to heal a heart: steady hands, an offering of shelter, and an unshowy willingness to chain yourself to someone else's happiness by being present.
Above the cradle, I hang the mask where no one can mistake it. When the child wakes at night and calls my name, I lift them and whisper, "This mask kept us. This face kept us." The mask gleams and looks nothing like a crown. It looks like a promise.
The End
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