Sweet Romance13 min read
A Rabbit Lantern, a Hidden Blade, and the Quiet Promise
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I fell in love with a shadow.
When I told my eldest brother — the one who would sit the throne — he only turned a page of his document and asked, "When you say 'fell in love,' what do you mean by 'fell'?"
He wasn't thinking like the women of court. He didn't ask whether I had run after a boy at a festival or sniffed at some trivial flirtation. He didn't ask the dark guard's name. He only looked toward the high hall's shadow and said, "Send her," as if choosing a toy for a child, and the attendants obeyed.
I knew then that my case was settled. The palace kept its secrets like locked rooms. One group — the imperial shadows — existed only because my grandfather once ordered them; their leader lived forever behind the emperor. For me, that leader had always been a ghost at the edge of my days.
When I was six, a housemaid led me to a forgotten palace wing with soft words: "Your mother waits in the imperial garden." We walked until the sun tilted wrong and the red walls looked stained and old. Suddenly the servants closed in, expressions like stone. One said, "Send the princess along." A pair of hands pressed me down. I thought I would die then.
The world went black. Then a white blur. I heard bodies drop like dolls. A hand grabbed my robe; a boy clung to the edge of the well and pulled. He had the coldest, deepest eyes I had ever seen. He was small — nine, maybe — with a sword taller than himself. He was alone. He cut cloth; he leapt; he saved me.
"Who are you?" I mouthed in the dark.
"Nine," he said, and that name, simple and blunt, lodged in me like a compass.
We landed in the well's mud. He took my weight on his chest as we fell. He tasted of blood and something iron; later he would tell me of broken ribs and a pierced belly. He barely complained.
"Does it hurt?" I asked, when the terror settled and the cold from the well made my teeth chatter.
"I am used to it," he said.
He taught me an odd lesson then: that some pain can be folded into silence and carried like a cloak. He also taught me that silence could be the kindest thing. When I cried in the dark that first night, he said, "Don't. The well will take you if you breathe too hard." He checked my breathing as if he were measuring the tide.
After that, he was always there in my shadow. When I lay in my bed, feverish and blamed, he perched on the beams above and answered whatever I asked with a patient "Hm" or "Yes." I called him "A-Jiu" in the way children give nicknames to big things; he answered in a voice that felt like an order and a promise both. "Knox," he'd later say when he had to use a name asked of him. We learned how to live in the palace's angles: I in silk and drawing, he in black cloth and the careful silence of someone who could not be seen.
"You're the only one who listens," I told him once when I was punished and silenced again.
He answered, "You lead."
That night he curled near my bed with his sword across his knees. He taught me steadiness by the simplest action: showing up.
The palace is a careful machine. My mother, Leila Herve, had been the favored consort; my brother Colton Woods was the child born into a web of rumors and danger. When he was a boy, the court nearly strangled him under suspicion. It was my grandfather's order that kept my mother and my brother alive — the secret company of dark guards, the hidden men who step between assassination and heir. So I grew under a double shadow: of protective hands and of long, cold politics.
I grew up learning to pretend ignorance as a defense. The ladies of the palace called me "slow" or "childish" in polite whispers. "She looks like a bird that doesn't know how to fly," they said. When I practiced embroidery under the watchful eyes of the old tutors, I felt safer than I did in great halls.
"Why learn needlework?" Knox once asked in his usual flat tone.
"I will stitch armor into my life," I said, and he nodded as if that were a kind of command.
He would stand below my window with two bowls of midnight rice and a blank face, and I would stand by the curtain, tell him about days and birds and stupid jokes, and watch him answer "Hm" to everything. He began to be my audience. He also began to be my secret: a black figure who smiled only as if a muscle had twitched and who taught me to name my life with tiny rebellions — a rabbit lamp I found at a fair, a paper kite Colton had given me one spring.
"Knox," I said at the Lantern Night when I first dared to ask for him to go out with me in the city. He had to agree.
"You don't like crowds," Knox said.
"I like them with you," I answered. He only nodded and propped me on his shoulder like a small thing.
That year the city had a scandal. A young wasteful scion of a powerful clan — named in court as Pierre Coelho — had done an unthinkable act at the festival: he had taken a girl's lamp and done worse. He had broken the law publicly. Everyone hushed. Pierre's kin were powerful, but power in the palace is a thing with two edges. To strike one side is to risk the other.
"They say the prince was involved," my mother warned once, eyes narrowed. "Stay close to our house."
"Will you harm them?" I asked, thinking immediately of the boy who had held my life in his hands.
She smoothed her skirts. "We do what is necessary."
Knox listened from the beams. He never asked what "necessary" meant. He only did what was asked of him: he protected and he followed orders — until orders and his quiet heart disagreed.
The rumor of crime deepened. The prince was accused of encouraging his cousin Pierre's crimes; the court found this shameful. They interrogated, they hinted, they threatened. Someone had to be punished to appease the tide. It was a cleverly arranged scandal: set the puppet to fall and the crowd would scream for blood. In court, the rumor could be shaped like a blade.
"Knox," I whispered one night when the palace felt tense, "if they come for us, will you carry me away?"
"Yes," he said. "I will not let you die."
"Do you ever think of a place without these walls?"
"Only when you are not here," he said.
I would not know how deep that vow was until much later.
The palace politics cracked further: a general named Griffith Patterson returned from the northern campaigns. He had a smirking face and an army that had tasted blood and found it easy. When his banners were seen near the imperial villas, gossip boiled.
"They bring men who obey only the blade," Wellington—no, I called him the wrong name in my head; in the palace the names blurred. I learned to call him 'that general' — and yet he had a name: Griffith Patterson.
One winter, a disguise of reason turned to violence. The general and his men stormed a villa. It was the winter in which I thought the world would end quietly: the bright snow, the hollowed-out courtyard, the scent of blood and iron morphing the air. They said they had orders to bring the palace to account, to "stabilize" the realm by hunting traitors. They would not be stopped by nobles or by prayer. Steel filled the night.
"You will be taken out," one officer spat at me as they tore through the servants. "You, who were part of the plot."
I laughed then, a broken, stunned sound. "We plotted nothing," I told them. They only looked at me as if I were a bird to be plucked.
"To the yard," Griffith Patterson said, voice dull as a whetstone.
Then someone smiled — the smile that would forever haunt me. Darkness moved with a blade; black like the inside of a coffin. From among the folds of shadows he came. Knox.
He ran like only a single person could run where he shouldn't, and in that rush he became a tide. He cut through the line of men who would have butchered us for ceremony. He took a wound, bled, kept moving. I watched him block a raised blade with his own body and think, not of victory, but only of me.
"Leave," I cried, as he hacked a path through the brandished spears.
He answered, "Not without you."
So we fled into a night of snow. I cannot describe all the smell of iron and the sounds of men tumbling like fat puppets. He held me; I leaned into his chest as if into a mountain and we moved through a world lit only by stars and the burning trail the army left behind.
Afterward, in the soldier camp three hundred miles from the palace, he collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut. I sat by his side and saw him breathe — ragged, but alive. Then came the court's reaction: a hunt not only for the palace's enemies, but for the ones who saved me.
Dillon Coelho was sent in a guise of help. He was a general of a different kind: not the iron-faced Griffith but a man of measured steps, a man who could smile and then take your hand and break a promise. He found me as part of the staged relief; he found me on a stretch of road and carried me into a camp arranged as a safe place. He was the man who, by order or guile, made the trap look like sanctuary.
"It is arranged," he told me politely. "You will be safe here."
"Who sent you?" I asked.
He looked at me as if I had asked whether dawn is blue. "Orders, princess."
Knox had already left before morning. Someone pulled him back into the dark because he had done something forbidden: he had saved a pawn the throne wanted left out in the cold.
I lay in a rough tent. The lie tightened around me like a net. It was then the court's instruments swung. The Yang clan — represented here by the young Pierre Coelho — were one target. They had long been entangled with the palace's resentments. A public punishment was needed to demonstrate justice. They were displayed and judged, and I sat in the crowd of those who watched and had watched and had known nothing of the full shape of truth.
The punishment scene was as terrible as any drama of the court: the plaza filled with people; the sun burned down like accusing eyes; banners snapped. The accused were dragged in, their faces pale with the awareness of what awaited. "For crimes against the people and for corrupting the court," the herald cried. "For murdering an innocent outside the palace, for abducting, for dishonor."
At first Pierre Coelho held his face high, lips curled with the arrogance of wealth. He tried to smirk. "Do you think that will be enough?" he mouthed as the crowd leaned forward, hungry for a show. He had always thought his name a shield.
A line of judges stood like carved stone, and Griffith Patterson — whose troops had been named in the investigation — stood to one side with a face like rubbed iron. The chief judge read accusations. The words were cold, stripped of mercy. "You used your status to terrorize the people. You killed to gratify your appetite. The law is the law."
Pierre's eyes flicked toward the crowd. People he had tipped coins to five years ago looked back with mouths open. They took out fans, whispered. The crowd's mood shifted from curiosity to a slow, sharpening malice.
"Confess!" a woman shouted. "Confess so we can spit on you first!"
"Confess," echoed someone else.
The accused tried to jag a laugh. "You cannot— you don't prove—"
A magistrate hammered a decree. The executioners did their grim, practiced steps. First came the shaming: garments torn, name called out for every sin. They tied a placard to Pierre's chest listing his transgressions. He went from smirk to flushed face to pleading. The change was a study in collapsing pride.
"Not me," he cried, voice thin. "You are mistaken. I am a good son, a good man."
People around him who had once bowed now spat or turned away. A merchant he had bullied a month ago stepped up: "You took my wife's lamp. You beat my boy. You killed him." His voice broke. The crowd surged; someone shouted to bring out the young woman's husband — he lay in a cart with a cloth over his face. The sight was enough. Men who had been on Pierre's payroll closed their mouths in shame.
"See?" a farmer to my left said. "The rich think themselves above, until the rope takes them."
Pierre's arrogance crumbled in a visible spasm. He begged, "Your Majesty—" and then, bafflingly, he stuck his face to the sun and began to beg for mercy. "I am sorry. I did not mean— I did not know—"
The judges were implacable. They displayed his goods — the trinkets, the coins, the lamp stolen as proof — then called witnesses whose testimonies were short and precise: names, dates, times. The crowd recorded it all on their faces, a chorus of evidence.
A young woman from the canal city — a commoner who had lost a husband — came forward, hands shaking. She looked straight at Pierre. "You took my husband's life because you desired a thing. I slept with his blood on my hands. The law must see. Let it be so."
When she finished, the plaza held its breath. I saw tears spring from cheeks that had never known to cry for a noble's downfall. The guards moved in with the blade. For the last moment he looked around as if expecting someone, some hand to pull him away. No one came. The crowd's noise rose like a tide; I heard an old man mutter, "Good."
They displayed him high. His cries turned into ragged whimpers. The magistrate pronounced the sentence. He was stripped of titles. He was paraded. Men and women I did not know shouted for the highest humiliation. They wanted his name cut from their mouths. He was dragged to the scaffold.
I will not describe the blade's final sweep in detail. It leaned into the audience's appetite for closure. The humiliation had phases: the courtroom's scorn, the crowd's spitting, the physical downfall. Pierre's face contorted, then sank. The spectators shifted from cheering to awkward murmurs as a small boy — a child who had lost his father to the man's arrogance — threw a flower and then threw up. The sight of smallness disrupted the neatness of justice.
In the end, when his head lay on the tray, the crowd leaned forward to see the face of a man who had thought himself untouchable. They recorded it with their eyes and told one another they had witnessed order. The judges relaxed. Griffith Patterson looked on, the edge of triumph hiding in the set of his jaw. The families that had suffered shouted and some clapped. Others — the men who had once benefited from Pierre's largesse — averted their faces.
That day the plaza was full of motion and sound: the judges' proclamations, the vendors who tried to sell hot cakes to the witnesses, the gossips who turned the scene into a thousand small stories. I stood, watching, thinking of someone with a black mantle, who had once carved my way out of a well. The punishment satisfied many. It did not, however, make the world wholly sane.
The aftermath hardened the court. Griffith Patterson took on a flavor of unstoppable force. He had wanted a purge; he got one. The crown used that purge to reset power lines. Families trembled, alliances shuffled. My mother's faction gained a temporary victory; the palace folded and bent like reed grass in wind.
But there is always a cost. Knox had been absent from my side. In the snow I had watched those who had saved me vanish like ghosts. They took him away because he had broken the rules by saving a pawn. I could not stop it.
Time wrapped itself around me in new seams. My embroidery grew famous. The court complimented me in words that hid barbs. Colton — my brother now — sat more like a ruler than a boy. He carried weight in the steady tilt of his hand as he moved paper and decisions. He was kind to me often, and he bore a responsibility that made him careful. He offered me little things like kites and a paper rabbit. Once, he said, quiet and warmed with rare affection, "If you leave, go somewhere where the wind is better and the foxes honest."
"I will," I promised, not knowing how that promise would be tested.
For a while we had peace. I learned medicine a little, tried to fix my useless legs when winter bent them. I embroidered screens: mountains, rivers, the places I longed to see. I sewed a twelve-panel screen with rivers and dragons for Colton as a farewell to his reign of youth. He smiled, half-ashamed to be praised. "Take your things," he said once more when the palace tremor subsided. "Return home if you wish. The court will not quiet itself forever."
I did leave at last — not because politics had eased, but because the path had been opened too wide: my mother had become Empress Dowager when Colton ascended the throne, and my station had become an instrument of peace. It was time to go.
I left with a rabbit lantern I had treasured for years. The lamp hooked in my luggage like a stubborn memory. Knox came to see me off on the palace wall the night before my departure. He did not speak much; he never had. He only came and stood there with me beneath the moon.
"Knox," I said. "Will you ever come to see the river in the south?"
He looked at the rabbit lantern, at the small flame within, and then at me. "If you hang it in a window for me," he said, "I will find the way to see it."
"That is a promise," I whispered.
He glanced at the way the moon lit his black clothes. "I promise."
Years passed. I married a man chosen to be my shelter: Dillon Coelho, the general who had once found me on the road and who turned out to be a quiet, blunt man with the habit of telling truths as if he were cutting cloth. Dillon treated me with steady, odd kindness. He did not ask me for more than I could give. He laughed at my counted stitches and listened when I spoke of mountains. In the southern town where we lived, I opened a little stall for my embroidery. People came to buy things they said had an "imperial" charm.
Colton visited sometimes. Knox — that dark, patient sentinel — slipped into life like a shadow that had learned a door. He often stood in the doorway of my shop, his black cloak a contrast to silks and lantern light. He watched life as if measuring steps, and now and then he smiled in the small way I had come to know; it was not much, but it was enough. We celebrated Lantern Nights together like a new family: Dillon with his blunt jokes, Colton with his regal half-smiles, and Knox with the quiet watch.
One Lantern Night, as fireworks spidered the sky and bowls of rice warmed our hands, Knox sat near the window where the rabbit lamp hung. I set a small bowl of sweet dumplings in front of him.
"Next year," he said in the hush between explosions, "we will make a new lantern."
"You'll help me tie it?" I teased.
He nodded, that simple motion that once guided me through a well. "Yes."
He had scars. The winter and the palace had left marks across his skin and a numbness in places. Once I asked, "Does it still hurt?"
He looked at his hands. "It does. I am used to it."
"I worry," I admitted.
He looked up, dark eyes softening by a hair. "You will be safe now," he said. "You have a little shop, a man who will not be cruel, a brother who rules. I have a bench and a sword. That is how the world is arranged."
I put my hand over his. He flinched, then did not pull away. He said, "You made me keep a promise once."
"What promise?" I asked.
"You promised to hang the rabbit in the window."
So I did. The rabbit lamp glowed each night. Sometimes I would catch Knox looking at it as if it were a map. Sometimes he would walk by the river, stare at the water, and let himself be a man tighter than any title allowed. Once, in the festival crowd, someone said, "That black-clad man? He saved a princess once. They say he was the storm." People love a neat, bold picture. I preferred the small truth: he stood in the doorway of my life and refused to leave.
Time is strange. It does not heal like cloth; it layers. The court settled into quiet, then into new wars of its own. Colton's reign had moments of laughter and long shadows. My mother, who had once used me as shield and bludgeon, apologized one afternoon in a way that did not undo the past but at least put words where there had been only deeds.
"Forgive me," she said, and I said, "I forgive you because I wish to be lighter."
She did not know that "lighter" was a fragile thing, a paper rabbit that can burn if you are not careful. I wrapped my memories in embroidered silk and carried them across rivers.
At the very end of this story that has never been short on iron and flame, there is something small: the rabbit lamp. It hung in my southern window for years. Winter after winter, festival after festival, its little light mattered like a pulse.
"Will you stay?" Colton asked me on the day he came to see me again, older and with more hair at his temples than when I left.
"Here?" I asked, as if the place had a purpose of its own.
"Yes."
I looked at the rabbit. I looked at Knox. I looked at Dillon, who had fetched more rice cakes and trundled them in without ceremony. Knox's hand found mine under the table. Colton's eyes softened.
"This house is small," I said. "But it fits us."
Colton took a breath. "Promise me you will keep that lamp in your window," he said in the way of brothers who mean more than a silly request.
"I promise," I said.
Knox smiled the smallest smile I had ever seen from him. The rabbit's flame trembled and did not go out. The festival fireworks rolled on. The sky kept breaking apart like a field of flowers.
"Next year," I whispered to the rabbit, to my witness in black, to the brother who had learned to weigh a crown, "we will meet again at the river."
Knox's hand tightened. "I'll be there."
And in a house small enough to fit three people and one guarded secret, the little rabbit lamp kept us honest about what we had survived and what we would not forget.
The End
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