Sweet Romance12 min read
A Soldier, a Smile, and the Wooden Puppet
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I grew up with a bow in my hands and bruises under my skin. When I say "I," I mean Kiley Charles—though no one back then bothered to call me kindly. My parents said I was wrong because I practiced blade and bow instead of ink and brush. My father, Amos, and my mother, Laura, kept their goodness for the world and their cruelty for me.
The first time I saw Emersyn, she ran up barefoot, a laugh like a bell. Two boys followed her, but she walked as if the sun belonged to her.
"Wow, you shoot so well," she said.
I didn't answer. I was used to silence.
She didn't go away. She watched every arrow land, clapping. "Sister, can you teach me?"
I frowned. "You're too small."
Her face fell and yet she stayed, like a stubborn flower. When she left with the boys, one of them—Trey—turned and apologized as if she had offended me.
"I'm Trey Mitchell. What's your name?"
I didn't tell him. I had learned not to trade words with strangers. But a seed of something began to grow, watered by Emersyn's clapping.
Months later my parents found my bow. My father slapped and scolded. My mother shouted about propriety and the future. I kept quiet until my back hurt too much to bear.
Then a small hand blocked my father's whip.
"Is he going to kill your daughter?"
The house fell silent. Emersyn looked up at them with a brave, tiny face.
"She is too fond of... war things," my mother said, angry and proud both.
"She shoots truer than many soldiers," Trey said quietly from the doorway. He had grown to be a soldier by then—already a deputy under a general. "If Kiley wants to serve, she should be allowed."
My father reddened. My mother fumed, but the wind of the court was shifting. Emersyn's favor—she was a favorite of the Empress Dowager—meant things moved differently. I heard her say, soft and fierce as wind, "Why punish the one who fights as if she has a country inside her?"
My father's voice lost its edge. They went away stewing. Emersyn bandaged me anyway, clumsily—she had always been clumsy when she meant well.
"You look like a commander," she said, grinning.
"If I were a man, I'd be a general," I said after a long silence.
"You like generals?"
"Yes."
She told stories about Trey with stars in her eyes. "He's brave. You should meet him again."
A month later Trey became a general in his own right. The court celebrated. I sat in the back, cooling like iron, watching Emersyn play with the child-king. She smiled at me in that small, private way and then kept to her games. I wanted to say something, but I had begun to expect that the small kindnesses were the hardest things to take.
That winter Trey left to fight. He let me go with him in a way I did not understand until later. He promised me one thing in the hush of a tent: "Remember this mark. If you ever go missing, this mark will find you."
I laughed and tried to sound brave. "What mark?"
"Come and see," he said, tracing a simple symbol in the dirt. I copied it.
War came like a blind net. I tasted defeat and pain and watched our general fall. They said I was captured. I woke bound and dirty in a tent full of rough men, in the enemy's camp. They thought I was weak. They were wrong.
"Little girl," one of them sneered. "Serve me and I'll send you home."
I looked at him with everything I had and risked a dangerous thing: I smiled and said, "Will you untie me first?"
They did, greedy and careless. I used the rope like a blade. I struck and I did not die. The men screamed. I did what I had to.
Someone stopped at the flap of the tent: tall, in black, with tired eyes. He laughed and said, "If you were not a woman, I would call you a general."
"You know me?" I asked coldly.
"Only by shadow." He bent closer, curious. "You are the sort who can survive anything."
He did not kill me. He tended my wounds, and when he sat up night after night, I watched him pale and tire. Foster Alston was his name, a general of the enemy who had a strange way of looking at me—like someone who had found a small, stubborn light and wanted to keep it from going out.
"We will return you," he told me once. "Not because I am kind, but because I choose to be."
He taught me an enemy's patience: how to steady breath, how to hide a plan in a smile. I listened, mostly for the one thought stitched into everything else—Emersyn's clapping, her laugh.
Then one night the court shouted that the enemy general had been killed. Trey came back like a man unmade. He said, hoarse, "I couldn't find her. I couldn't even find a body."
I had not died. I had been set free by my own hands and by Foster's strange mercy, and I carried the weight of it like a secret stone.
When I finally returned to our country, it was Trey who brought me home. He bore my wounds as if they were his own and would not let them set me down.
"Will you—will you let me stay?" I told him at the gates, weak with fever and relief.
"Of course," Trey said simply. "I'll take you home."
Emersyn opened the gate. She blinked at us, then helped Trey steady me as if I were the most fragile thing. I watched Emersyn's face change when she saw the blood and the hunched, fierce way Trey cradled me. For the first time that I can remember, something ranted and dropped in my chest: the fear that she might like him because he was kind and brave but not because of me.
Inside the house, my father and mother tried to keep their dignity. The court did not forget what had happened. The Emperor, Frederick Casey, was wary. War made people brittle and suspicious. Some whispered I had killed an enemy general. Rumor is a sharp thing—worse than any blade.
Trey sat with me through the long nights. He never demanded my gratitude or my love, only my safety. "Kiley, I will keep you," he said once, voice tight. "You said you'd follow me. I mean it."
When I asked him, half-rough, half-hopeful, "Do you love me?" he did not call me silly. He said instead, "You are brave. That is enough for me." His eyes were steady and warm. For a time, I allowed myself to live in that warmth.
People see what they want. Emersyn saw a man to admire. She smiled at Trey and played with him and rode the sun of his attention. I watched them, and I decided I would do something childish and large: I would make her notice me. If kindness failed, I would use attention. If she liked generals, I'd be a general. If she liked fire, I'd be a bonfire.
So when the court celebrated, I accepted the vows Trey offered. I wore the red silk and the crown. I learned to stand like someone who belonged in a house. I kept my bow hidden. Yet I never let the fire go out.
"You're married now," Emersyn said gently one evening, holding a wooden puppet I had bought in a stall. "Are you happy?"
"I married a man who saved me," I said. "I married a man who will stand in battle."
"That's enough," she said with a small, almost cruel smile. "Go on and be a soldier for his army."
"I will," I said. I meant it.
Time is a slow blade. People forget, forgive, change. I watched Emersyn shift closer to Trey in easy, everyday ways. She was open like a window; he had a soft place for her as a friend. I kept counting the small moments she turned her head, the way she laughed at his jokes. Each look I did not get tasted like plain bread.
Then came a festival day at Cangling Mountain—Emersyn's name day, the one she loved. I sat with a wooden puppet clenched in my hand. Trey sat beside me quietly.
"You still like her?" Trey asked.
"You knew," I said.
"I married you because I couldn't let you be gone," he said. "Because I wanted you safe. I didn't understand everything. But I knew I wanted you."
I smiled then, bitter and small. "I am sorry."
"You have nothing to be sorry for," he said. "You are mine."
We went to the mountain. The sky was heavy. Rain came like a curtain. People crowded the path and watched the two of us go up the trail. It was crowded and careless.
And then the voice I had dreaded—sharp, distant—"Someone is hurt!"
The crowd parted into a dark oar. Emersyn lay on the ground, her skull split, face ruined by a stone. People screamed and flailed. I ran. I lifted her and something inside me tore itself to pieces.
"You—don't—leave," I whispered. "Say anything."
She opened her eyes, a small, brave thing, and said in the half-light, "Kiley, where is Frederick?" Her voice drifted like a dream.
"He's fine," I lied for her comfort. "Trey—get help." He ran.
We were alone in rain. I wrapped Emersyn with my cloak. Her breath thinned. I begged the world like a beggar. "Don't die on me," I said more than once. I offered my life. She kept smiling, weak and stubborn.
"Why did you do such things with your life?" she said in a whisper later, when her fever had started to go down. "Why hurt yourself?"
"I wanted you to speak to me," I said truthfully. "I wanted you to hate me enough to take notice. I thought causing trouble would bring you near."
She cupped my hand and her fingers trembled. "You made me laugh and be worried and angry. I did not know you were doing it for me."
"Stay," I begged. "Be my friend. Be everything you want to be."
"I love Frederick," she said simply, then smiled sadly, "but I like you too. Can we be friends?"
"Yes," I said, and folded myself small around that word.
Time moved. The war flared again. I rode with Trey and the army as a deputy commander. They let me because it had become impossible to pretend I was only a lady. I led men, and I felt alive when wind and metal and order lined up. The south rose up. Men died. I watched and I learned to hold my grief in muscle and purpose.
At court, the Emperor stood with a cautious eye. Rumors about my doing harm to an enemy general circulated despite Foster's help. They wanted to settle scores and show peace. I kept quiet and let Trey speak for me. He was fierce and tireless.
Then the day came when the final judgment on my family's worth was to be made. My parents had grown comfortable with a society that used favors and whispers to stay above scandal. They had hoarded favor and denied me the simplest kindnesses. I had suffered in secret.
Now, standing in the great hall, the courtyard full of courtiers, officers, and citizens—an audience the size of a small village—I decided it was time for truth.
"You would make me bow and break my flesh for the sake of propriety," I said. "You would call me unfit to breathe unless I painted myself with the manners you loved."
My father's face reddened. Amos Gonzalez, who had beaten me, who had said I should be ashamed, stood tall as if his status could armor him.
"My daughter..." he began.
"Don't," I said. "I will tell the truth here."
Trey tightened his grip on my hand. The Emperor watched with a look like a measured blade.
I stepped forward onto the raised platform. The crowd quieted; even the gulls seemed hushed.
"You remember the day I was bound?" I asked, and the murmur rose like wind through trees. "You remember the whip that cracked and the blood that ran?"
My mother, Laura Schmitt, tried to cut me off with a pinched voice. "We punished what was improper," she said. "We raised her for court."
"Proper?" I echoed. "Proper is a word you use to justify cruelty."
Faces shifted. Some of my father's friends leaned forward, scandalized. Others looked this way and that, hungry for spectacle.
I continued, slower now. "When I was a child you locked me in a dark room and called it discipline. You burnt my bow and told me the sound of steel was unladylike. You told me to hide the only fierceness I had because it did not fit your dream. You taught me to swallow and bleed alone."
A woman gasped. Someone whispered, "Isn't she the soldier who cut down the southern general?"
"Silence," the Emperor said. His voice filled the hall.
"I am done swallowing," I said. "And I will not let you keep your status while you pretend you loved me. You used me as a shame and a secret. You said you wanted me to be honored, but you cursed the very hands that would bring honor."
My father looked like someone pricked with thorns. His face alternated between anger, then a strange, white fear, as if realizing his house could crumble.
A clerk stepped forward with a packet of sealed papers Trey had been given in private: testimonies, old servants' sworn words, the ledger of favors—proof of orders to have me hidden, proof that my parents had accepted bribes to stand silent about other cruelties in the household.
I let the evidence speak. The courtyard filled with whispers that made the air buzz. A dozen attendants said they'd seen me chained in the cellar. A former house steward declared that my mother had ordered the burning of my bow. Sentences unrolled like a scroll of disgrace.
My father laughed at first. "Lies," he said. "These are the words of the desperate."
"Watch him change," Trey whispered in my ear. "Pride to panic."
That change came in waves: pride, shock, sputtered denial, anger, pleading. The crowd saw it all.
"How dare you!" my mother cried, eyes flashing. "You ungrateful wretch."
"You made me a thing and hid me," I answered. "You sold your kindness for favor and wrapped yourself in piety."
A murmur like a broken reed swelled. People leaned over the railings. The Emperor raised his hand to still them, but the judgment had started.
"By the Emperor's order," Frederick Casey said at last, voice even and final, "these papers are accepted. Amos Gonzalez and Laura Schmitt are stripped of their minor titles and household privileges. They are required to stand in the square at dawn for public penance and to perform labor for the poor for the next two harvests. The household's holdings will be redistributed to those wronged, and any who can give testimony against the abuse will be heard."
"You can't!" my father raged. "I am—"
"Your title will not shield you," the Emperor said. "Not from the law, nor from the people's eye."
My father went from red to pale, then to a brittle white. He lunged to explain, to curse, to call upon old friends, but the courtyard had turned. Faces I had seen as small constellations of apathy now looked at him and saw a man naked of honor. Men spat. A child shouted, "Shame!"
He fell into the stages everyone fears: arrogance, denial, the trembling attempt to rake back the words—"They lie!"—then, like a slow collapse, the blankness of a man who understands he has nothing left. His voice choked into a pitiful plea, "Kiley, please. Forgive—"
"No," I said, simple and cold. "Your forgiveness is a thing you sell. You will work to repay what you took."
My mother tried to kneel and beg at the Emperor's feet. "Sire, we raised her—"
"Raised her into pain," I said. "Let them not be left to feign virtue."
Those around me responded in waves. Some who had once eaten at their table now hissed and turned away. A few servants, faces hard and wet, stepped forward and spat in my parents' direction. Others recorded everything with eyes and paper and memory. Emersyn, standing nearby with Trey, had that blank, unsure face—then she put out a hand and squeezed mine. "You did the right thing," she whispered.
My father's face finally cracked apart. He fell to his knees—not in a show of humility, but in raw, naked fear. "Please," he begged, voice breaking from false pride. "I'll do anything. I'll beg for mercy."
The court looked on like a crowd watching someone drown. Some gnashed their teeth; some clapped; some simply stared at the fall of those who had been huge. I felt nothing but the cold satisfaction of a truth bared. It was not relish. It was relief. Justice, public and irreversible, cleansed an old wound.
They were marched out to the square at dawn. People lined the streets: soldiers, merchants, mothers with children. My parents were made to wear simple garments and carry water and wood to the poor. They cried and begged, and the crowd supplied buckets and judgment both. They were made to stand and listen as the elders told what they had done, and the people spat. Their reaction changed through the day: arrogance to shock to denial to pleading to breakdown. Around them, the city gave voice: some clapped, some shook their heads, some recorded it with careful eyes. For once, the worst of their cruelty was seen, and they could not hide.
After the public penance, when the crowds had gone and the day was empty, I walked by at dusk and watched them—tired, broken, smaller than they ever had been. I did not gloat. I only felt a cautious peace.
"Thank you," Trey said later, when the Emperor had restored some of what the city could not take—a small home for me and a clean name. He set his hand over my knuckles. "You did right."
"I did it for me," I said. "But I did it for everyone who could not speak."
Emersyn was at my side. She had been there through the worst and would be there through the next worst: the wars and victories and quiet days. She put her head on my shoulder and laughed once, a small, bright laugh that made my chest ache in a new way.
When the south rose again, I rode with men who trusted me. I stood at the head of a unit and learned to win with as little blood as possible. Trey fought beside me. Foster proved not a monster but a man who had, in his own way, been kind. He smiled when he saw me leading well. Emersyn sat in camp and stitched little wooden puppets to keep the children amused. Once she came to me and said, "I made one for you. Keep it by your pillow."
I did. I kept the puppet through all the cold nights. It reminded me who I was and who I fought for.
The war ended with a treaty. The southern king agreed not to rise again. The armies cheered. We came back tired and alive.
In the end, what I wanted was not to own Emersyn's heart—she had chosen Frederick and that was a thing I could not change—but to be seen by her as more than a ghost. To be seen as someone solid and true. In the quiet after the storm, Emersyn took my hand and tugged at my sleeve and said, "Stay with me tonight. Tell me about the time you first shot the arrow straight."
"All right," I said.
We sat by the window. The wooden puppet leaned on the sill. The rain had stopped and the air smelled like iron and green leaves.
"You kept your promise," Trey said softly, from his place by the door.
"I kept mine," I said.
Outside, the city hummed with life. Inside, I had a home. I had a husband who loved me, a friend who noticed every small thing, and a life I had carved with my own hands. The puppet sat on the sill, crooked and funny, with a painted smile I had given it. Every time I looked at it I remembered Emersyn's small hand passing it to me, and the night on the mountain when I begged and begged for a life that mattered.
We did not end as a perfect pair. We ended more complicated and truer: with me holding the puppet by the window, with Trey asleep by the hearth, and Emersyn laughing like a bell in my memory.
"Are you happy?" Emersyn asked once, leaning on my shoulder.
"I am," I said, and meant it in a way I had never meant anything before.
The End
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