Sweet Romance14 min read
A Princess, a Player, and a Broken Pin
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I have learned to speak quietly in this house because silence protects small things. I was bought at a market stall and brought into silk halls with more chandeliers than real smiles. They call me a player, a face kept for music and late-night company. My name is Bodhi Taylor. My world began and ended with a wooden harp and the princess's quiet breath.
"Play," she would say, like a small command that opened everything.
"I'll play what you like." I answered, fingers already finding the strings.
"Not that one. The slow one. The one that remembers afternoons." Blythe Mori's voice had the silk-rough softness of someone who had given up shouting.
I sat cross-legged on the lacquered floor and let my fingers remember songs that were older than both of us. I kept my eyes down, because when Blythe looked at me with attention, it felt like being seen without armor. That was dangerous. That is the wrong word—beautiful. Dangerous and beautiful at once.
"Why don't you speak tonight?" she asked, more to the room than to me.
"I am learning to serve," I said. "Words are clumsy when strings do the talking."
"Then let strings tell me about you," she breathed.
I obliged. Half the room was moonlight, the other half was wine. She drank slowly and listened like someone measuring a long story in small bites. After three winters in the house, I was still called the smallest, the youngest among the players. Men of my age wore reckless faces outside. They, the other kept ones, said sharp things and laughed sharpder. They meant it as a comfort that I did not share with girls. I wanted their jokes for a minute just to feel ordinary.
"You keep a child in a man's body," carved into my name like a coin's stamp. "You must be worth something for that," the other players muttered. They thought songs were my trade; they never guessed my hunger.
One night after I missed seven notes in a single song—my hands felt clumsy as if someone had tied ropes around my fingers—she reached out and tugged at my sleeve.
"This color suits you," Blythe said, smiling like someone who had found an extra coin in their pocket.
"Thank you," I said before she tore the sleeve tear from my collar and, with breath-sour from too much wine, hooked my neck beneath it.
"Who are you dressing to please?" she asked, the breath close enough to make me dizzy.
"Not Kristina." I swallowed. "Never Kristina."
"Not Kristina?" The word left her in a laugh, then it hardened. "Who could it be, then, small thing?"
"Nobody," I said, the lie cheap and raw in my mouth.
"Don't tell lies like that." Her hand pressed my chin and turned my face so I looked at her. The room narrowed to the small, bruised circle of her pupils.
"Can one not be what one is?" I whispered.
"Not with me," she said, breathless. "You're mine for as long as I like."
She said it loud enough for her drunk breath to bloom around us like incense. I should have felt triumphant, but instead, a lock clicked shut somewhere inside me I didn't want closed.
The next morning we slept on the same bed. She in a thin robe, me wrapped in a careful silence. I told myself nothing would change. I was older than a boy, I told myself; seventeen is not a child. Yet the house had a way of freezing time until you were what they expected.
A man in armor smashed through our door like a memory with bad timing.
"I should cut you down tonight," he said to Blythe, hand on the blade.
"Who?" I mouthed, prepared to stand between the steel and the woman who had warmed me.
"Nonsense," she retorted with such careless ease she made my heart want to protest.
"New toy?" he barked, looking at me like I was contraband.
"He's been here some days," Blythe answered. She kicked at me with her foot in a mock gesture, her skin warm against my jaw, and I understood then that the night's danger had been a test that ended in nothing but show.
The man left without the theatrics, but he left an ache that lingered like the poor aftertaste of bad wine.
After that night, the house was more watchful. People who had laughed at me suddenly looked twice. "He has so much luck," some would whisper. "The princess takes to him." I wanted to answer that I took to her, but pride and fear and the shape of our world prevented it.
Then there were the other girls—Kristina Choi and Kinsley Jacobs and a dozen more who fetched and mended. They offered charms, they said small things in corners, and one named Kristina came sometimes with folded bags: "Gifts," she would say. "Go somewhere private." She meant behind the ponds, under the willows. But my curiosity was never for skirts or to learn the hidden names of women's bodies. I wanted to know Blythe.
"Don't you want other women?" Kristina asked me once, the moon flattening her questions into silver.
"I want only what makes my chest like a small bird in a cage," I said.
"That's not an answer, Bodhi," she replied, half annoyed, half thoughtful. "You're blind to everything but what hurts."
I did not deny it. I had been forged in a place where girls like my mother were market-worn and still called beautiful. I had grown up in a small quarter famed for its songs and its cheap glory; the places where being seen was a profession. I thought I could live in that pattern forever, until the princess made me feel otherwise.
Months later, when guests filled great halls with praises and presents for Blythe's birthday, the general Miguel Cotton arrived with a woman who looked like the princess in a mirror with a different frame.
"Who is she?" I whispered.
"Newcomer," someone near me sighed, and the whispers swelled. "A famous courtesan, it is said."
Blythe changed the angle of her eyes, the world sliding a fraction. Yet when Miguel presented the woman by his side to the hall, he did not expect her to look like a shadowed memory of the princess at sixteen. The room held itself.
"Isn't she too much like you?" someone dared to say.
"She is only a younger echo," Blythe answered freely, then—just to sting—she lifted her cup and drank as if the small humiliation were a sweetness she could swallow.
I did not show that I was bothered. I let the music blur the edge of that night. But the way she looked when she thought no one would notice—that day, the look was not only hurt. It was the map of someone deciding to fight a game on her own terms.
"Drink," she ordered me later, pulling my cup away with two fingers. "Drink so you make the right face at my birthday."
"I will be whatever you need," I said.
"Good," she said, almost pleased.
She tried to stop drinking after a time, to care for her skin and sleep earlier. She took boiled herbs for the face, baths of milk, lotions that smelled like distant forests. "I will not let a young courtesan mock me," she told me once, very small and honest.
"Don't you think that is odd?" I asked.
"What's odd?"
"You drinking and then trying not to drink at all."
She laughed, half-mad. "You don't know what it's like to be thirty inside sixteen bones."
We plotted small revenges like children: showing up in the same coat at a game, wearing the same ash-blue as she wore and daring the courtesan to be more beautiful. "Wear what I wear," Blythe said, pressing the fabric into my hands. Both of us felt ridiculous and delicious.
At the hunt, an open day full of pretense, Miguel watched us ride and then offered me a cluster of game. Some noblewomen gathered and clucked their delight at my cooking; I burned the meat lighter than usual for show. Blythe came back and pretended to be casual and then stoked the flames of my little victory by flinging some birds on the table in a mock tantrum.
"You're showing everyone I spoil you," she hissed when guests left their chatter for gossip.
"You spoil me with steps of kindness," I said.
"Then be kind to me," she said, and in that game the balance was done.
When the house emptied of other faces—the other players bundled and sent to make lives outside—the emptying felt like a loss and a release. They left with generous pensions and promises to open shops and make families. "You should go too," Kristina told me, handing me a small white cat and saying as she gave it, "Keep this, you'll need something soft."
"I have what I have," I said, meaning Blythe, and Kristina smiled with a sadness people have when watching a tragedy fold itself slowly.
The rumor came one morning like a cold draft: Miguel Cotton had pledged to the Empress that if he were given Blythe, he would eliminate a rival in the court—an old, dangerous prince who threatened the Empress's hold. It was politics dressed as marriage.
"You're getting married," I said when she told me.
"Yes," Blythe said, eyes flat. "To stop something worse."
"Are you happy?" I asked very small.
"I am more complicated than happy," she answered. "I am tired, Bodhi. I like the small lights. I like the songs. I don't know how to choose between what keeps me safe and what keeps me alive."
"Then choose me," I said, leaving the words out like a child dropping a stone in deep water, knowing it would never surface.
She handed me a parcel of coins on the eve of her wedding. "For your future," she said.
"I don't want your money," I said.
"Take it," she insisted. "Make a life. Have children if you wish."
She promised many impossible things with the same blunt, clumsy bravery she did everything in. The day of the wedding, I walked behind her procession like a man out of a fairy tale who knew he was only a background. I saw her in silk and crimson and a crown, and I had the sudden feeling of being a ghost who had loved someone alive.
They took me later—masked attackers in a lane, voices like dry branches. They spoke of drowning me to keep the peace, of making the death quick and neat. I remember the shouts, the cold hands, and then a terrible weight on my chest as I tasted the river. In the dark water, someone shouted my name.
"Who dares harm my Bodhi!" a voice screamed that was not mine. Panic flashed red and ugly, and then the world went grey.
I woke on a cot with guards around me and her hair a tangle near my fingers. Blythe's face was a mess of mud and tears and fury, and blood from a thorn had marked her cheek like a crazy badge.
"She found me," I whispered when the first coherent breath returned.
"Of course she did." The captain of the guard breathed out a laugh that had no humor. "Who else would she send to drown a kept player in the city lane?"
"Bodhi!" Blythe cried when she saw I had opened my eyes. She gathered me like a hawk picking at a wounded pigeon, and for the first time I felt named.
They came. The crowd gathered as if they had been waiting for fun. They gossiped like crows. The Empress—an iron face in silk—arrived, and when Blythe threw herself before her mother, something in the air broke.
"You tried to destroy my daughter and her plaything," Blythe roared to the crowd, and every head in the court turned at that heat.
"She is a disgrace," the Empress said at length, her voice the cold that can freeze a river. "She has been led astray by foolish attachments and must be punished."
"Punished?" Blythe whispered. "You'll punish me for saving him?"
"Bring the ledger," the Empress said. They looked at Miguel Cotton like a beast that had been tamed by their making. "You will be made a model."
Public punishment followed a different logic than street revenge. It became metaphor, ritual, spectacle. Blythe knelt before the Empress and said, "If mother says I am wrong, then I must answer. But if a man's hands harm my Bodhi, I will tear the world apart for him." That last line—impossible and raw—hung in the air like a threat and a vow.
They banished Blythe from the palace. The Empress cut her lineage from the public rolls, and her wife-shames were announced like a proclamation. The princess was taken from her title as if titles were clothes to be stripped. She became a woman in exile, but she walked free of iron bars. The court called that mercy.
Miguel Cotton, meanwhile, received a crown of laurels. He became a hero for politics. He accepted honors with a smile that did not reach his eyes. "I did what was needed," he said in the banquet hall, to hands that patted his back without the heat love brings.
That should have been the end of the matter. Blythe was exiled but alive; Miguel was praised and rich. I should have learned to fold myself smaller, to recede into the simple life of someone who had been given coin and a new house, but when the world gives you a wound and a chance for a reckoning, some people will not let that pass.
I did not know how to begin a proper revenge. I only knew how to be steady as music. Blythe, deprived of crown and court, did not die. She did something stranger: she learned to gather proof.
"I will not be quiet," she told me months later when we had a custodian's cottage and a small, sharp cooking pot. "He took what was mine like a man pulling a robe off a sleeping body. He will stand in a place where everyone looks and he will know shame."
"And if the Empress will not listen?" I asked.
"Then we will make them look," she said.
We began simply. Eamon Fitzgerald—a friend in the edge of court who owed Blythe a favor from a time before titles—brought small papers: lists, receipts, and recorded speeches. People laughed and called us mad, but we stitched each shred into a tapestry.
"Do you think it will work?" I asked one evening as we laid out words like flowers.
"It will work if we tell the right story in the right place," Blythe said.
And so she planned the one thing the court feared: an exposure so public that silence would be impossible. She wrote a little note and had it delivered to the mansion where Miguel would receive his laurels and new title. The note was simple:
"All that glitters hides a rotten seam. Day of the investiture. Remember the river."
On the morning of the public ceremony, the square filled with people who liked to see the rich rearrange themselves. Miguel stood in his armor that glittered false as a king's prop. The Empress watched with measured face. I stood to one side in unpretentious cloth, the bag of her old coins heavy on my shoulder. Blythe stood at the center with a thin veil and a look like weather before a storm.
"Why here?" I whispered.
"Because this place thinks it can clap for him," she said. "They will clap for anything if it is polished enough. Today we will test how loud applause really is."
The herald announced Miguel Cotton's deeds. He spoke eloquently and the crowd clapped. Then a messenger walked in and handed a paper to the Empress, who raised an eyebrow as she read. A murmur rose.
"What is that?" Miguel demanded, face reddening.
"Read it," the Empress said, and the hush that followed felt like a hand on the throat of a great beast.
The paper—one of many we had gathered—told of nights he had spent gambling with men of low repute in houses of laughter. It told of coins and favor shifting like fish nets. It told of the man who planned to buy his way into a marriage not for love but for the promises he whispered in the dark: promises to remove rivals if the Empress gave him Blythe. It named names, it named exchanges, and it tied them to a ledger showing transfers of land and favors.
Miguel's mouth moved. "This is slander," he spat.
"Then answer to it," Blythe said, stepping forward. Her voice was not the flutter of a silk fan now. "Answer who you are in front of those you would lead."
He had leaned on the court's smile and the Empress's favor. For a moment the armor of his reputation felt as thin as paper.
"You lie," Miguel said.
"Then swear an oath," Blythe replied, and that small demand was a trap. Oaths are hard shapes to keep when hands are sticky with secret deals.
The crowd shifted. Eamon and a dozen witnesses we had coaxed stepped forward to speak of nights and wagers and whispered promises. Guards who had thought themselves observers now looked like jury. The Empress's face cracked slightly; she did not like surprises that threatened the balance she had made.
"Do you deny these ledgers?" the Empress asked Miguel.
"I—" Miguel faltered. He could not produce a clean denial. He tried to laugh, to scoff, to call men liars, but the paper cut deeper than his voice.
"And do you deny," Blythe continued, "that you proposed marriage as a contract of political exchange and promised deeds and debts in exchange for my silence and my name?"
He could not. He went from firmness to fluster to fury like a man unseated on a horse.
"I did as I must for the realm," he said finally, a brittle defense.
"For the realm?" Blythe's laugh was a small, sharp thing. "Or for your own ledger?"
The crowd that had come to see pageantry now saw something else: the pulling away of a well-stitched coat to reveal torn seams, the exposure of a man who had married ambition and called it love. People gasped. Some laughed. A few threw insults. A woman at the back took out a little slate and began to record every word like a hawk collecting prey.
Miguel's face changed. The color left it in bands. "You shall not impugn me," he said, making a move as if to strike.
"Then be struck by the truth," Blythe said.
"It is false," Miguel pleaded, then he began to cry out names, to call people conspirators. He accused Eamon of jealousy and the guards of bribery. He did all the things desperate men do: pivot, blame, deny. Each time he denied, another paper was produced. Each time he tried to insult, a witness stepped forward.
The Empress raised her hand like a judge. "We will not tolerate corruption worn in favor's cloth," she said slowly. "If these charges are true, then Miguel Cotton will lose his honors until the Council of State finds the proof beyond mere accusation." It was a moderate sentence on the face of it. But the real punishment arrived not from the parchment but from the crowd.
Men who had been his cheerers now turned away. Women who had thrown flowers at his feet crossed their arms. Political allies whispered and folded like bad maps. Someone in the press began to write down the ledger items with furious hands. People who had wanted him elevated now threaded their way from his side as if the contact were contagious.
Miguel stood at the center like a man who had always been propped by favors. The mansion's shine could not keep him. His face moved through shame, denial, anger, and then a slow collapse as the world amended itself without him. He tried to reclaim dignity with words that sounded empty now.
"You shall be suspended," the Empress declared finally, and as if on cue, men whose hands had been warm toward him turned their backs. No immediate iron cudgel struck him; punishment in a court built of honor takes different forms. He was not dragged to a public scaffold; he was stripped of a more subtle thing—consent. People would no longer trust him. Trades that had opened would close. His houses would be watched. He had been famed and flattered; now fame was a mirror that showed his crooked bones.
Around him the crowd made noises—a mixture of triumphant whispers and pity. "Look," someone said, "how the mighty were kept up by little lies." Another spat on the ground. A mother held her child's hand tight and pulled the boy closer as if to warn him of the roofs by which men hide.
Miguel's reactions moved like a bad play. He scowled, then pleaded, then accused, then finally sank into a strange stillness. He tried to bargain with the Empress, but her patience had thinned with months of careful strategy. "We cannot have men who sell marriages for promises," the Empress said. "This court will be cleansed."
The humiliation continued after the ceremony. Messengers were sent to neighbors and allies. Heads in the market spoke of nothing else the next week. People come to a public falling not just for blood but for the lesson: that even the bright can dull.
It was not a crown taken in a single stroke, but a steady erosion. Miguel lost contracts, he lost friends, and, worse for a man who had made his life of favor, he lost the narrative. The story told about him shifted from "brave general" to "a man who traded promises as if they were precious coins."
At one market a woman spat in front of his house. At a theater his name was hissed from a balcony. At court, young men looked at their own chances and stepped away from alliances he once took for granted. People had the remarkable appetite to withdraw their warmth and watch a man shiver.
He crumbled differently from the way I thought he would. He did not fall into poverty overnight. He collapsed into the strange private misery that comes when reputation, the most marketable of goods, is seized. At a banquet two months after the exposure, he stood in the corner and watched as no one toasted him. The table murmured. His wine cooled. A page boy tripped and spilled a cup and no one blamed the poor child; they blamed the man who had lost the right to claim misfortune as his.
That was justice in a court that prized appearances. It was less dramatic than execution, but worse in many ways: he was always there, always visible, and everywhere people could point and remember.
Watching him fade, Blythe did not laugh. She looked at his collapse as if at a mark on a map she had not wished to make. "I did not want him destroyed," she sighed once. "I wanted to live without him calling my name like a debt."
"You did something honest," I told her when we walked home, her hand in mine like a bird.
She pressed our fingers together. "I did what I had to. He cannot call to me anymore to bargain for my silence or my body."
After that, the city forgot to cheer for Miguel. It remembered everything else.
As for us, the Empress never restored Blythe's title, and the court took their picture of her as a caution. But she lived. She built a small house by a pond. She kept the clothes she liked and wore them in the sun. She sang badly on purpose sometimes and danced in the rain. She kept a tiny pigeon-blood hairpin that she had once given me and laughed when I put it in my hair to irritate the memory of court frivolity.
"Do you regret anything?" I asked her when the world was quiet and the night had settled like a soft cloth.
"Only that I thought I could be two people at once: one who keeps the state's face and one who keeps her heart," she said.
"I will keep your heart," I answered.
"You already do," she said, and when she spoke those four words, everything in me that had been pinned tight came undone.
We did not have titles. We had a small house, a few coins, a pair of cats, and the truth between us. We had nights where she fell asleep with her head on my lap and I let my fingers trace the scar from her fall. We had mornings where she read my handwriting and laughed at my poor poems. People asked her how she felt about the world and she said, "Calmer. Hungrier for a life not made of speeches."
"Will you ever go back?" I asked once.
"No," she said. "There is no crown that fits better than this life we have made. And if some day the city calls me a caution again, let it also learn that a woman can choose what to burn and what to keep."
She kept the pigeon-blood pin in the inner seam of her shawl, where it glinted like a secret. When people asked her where she had learned such courage, she would look at me and smile, and the answer—the only true one—was always the same: "I learned from music, and from a man who would not leave."
The End
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