Sweet Romance13 min read
"Did the Empress Lose Her Temper Today?"
ButterPicks12 views
I am Iris Stone. The morning Esteban Lang told me, "The empress cannot be you," his voice was low and raw.
"You mean that like a joke?" I said.
He blinked as if surprised by my calm. "You're not angry?"
"A little," I admitted.
He took my hand then, like a child caught doing something forbidden. "I swear, Iris. Aside from the throne, I will give you everything."
He almost laughed it away as if vows were toys. I did not laugh back.
I was sixteen the day I was promised. I had been his childhood promise too, the bargain of two families, but fate had scattered the plan. I had been married into another household first. Then Esteban—then a prince sleeping in exile who once smelled of blood and rain—burst into my wedding convoy and carried me away on his horse like a storm.
"Why did you do it that day?" my sister-in-law asked later, eyes wide. I only remembered the wind, the dirt, his upraised hand.
"It's foolishness," he said later, when no one else was near. "Because I could not stand you being anywhere else."
He made my father chancellor as a peace offering. He gave me shelter with the gilded suffocation of palace life and lavished me with sunlight and then put a shadow between us: a throne so heavy it must be tested.
"Do you hate my family?" he asked one night when the moon was a silver coin in the sky.
"Sometimes. Do you?" I returned.
He looked at me for a long time and his face did something like softening. "I will not let them hurt you," he said simply.
"You talk as if I'm fragile."
"You are stubborn," he corrected, in that quiet way he had when his voice was not the throne. "I like it."
I smiled then and let him pull me close. He loved me, I knew that; I also knew how a crown can be jealous.
The palace was a gilded cage. The women who did not die in silence learned the ways of careful smiles. My chief maid, Aoi Bonilla, learned how to fold worry into her sleeve. "Madam, the empress is coming to pay respects," she whispered once as she smoothed my robe.
I swallowed and said, "Then we will receive her."
When she came, she wore a taste for ceremony and a hunger for power.
"Your majesty," I said, polite as a lake in winter.
She sat, eyes roving like someone counting allies by their shoes. "You are lucky, lady Iris. To rest here in the daylight while I sleep alone."
"You should not think so poorly of yourself," I said, calm.
A week later my stomach turned. I had been careful—too careful—yet when Esteban leaned over me in the corridor that smelled of sandalwood and said, "Iris, could it be?" my breath fell out of me.
"Impossible," I said quickly. "I have always—"
He did not press. He held me for a long moment and then sent for the physician.
The physician's face carefully avoided my eyes while he spoke. "Her Highness is weakened. She must not be overstrained," he said.
"Not overstrained?" Esteban repeated aloud, like tasting a foreign word. Then, softer, "You must rest."
He kissed my forehead—pressing a promise into my skin. I could not decide whether to trust him then or not. He had made me swallow bitter draughts that were called "health tonics"; he had watched my body like one inspects a chess piece. I felt foolish for the suspicion and angry for the secrecy.
One night, we lay together and I decided to ask. "Why the medicines?"
He blinked. "Because I was afraid."
"Afraid of what?"
"Of losing you."
I laughed despite the dry place in my chest. He looked ashamed. "When I was young they taught me to see threats as patterns. I thought to make sure you were well. I said cruel things to my fears."
"Did you make my father chancellor to control him?" I asked, remembering nights of whispers, the way decisions had been measured.
Esteban sighed and told me, for the first time in many truths, the long strategy he'd woven.
"I used a throne of softness to lure thorns, Iris," he said. "I will sweep them away, but I could not do that with you in the dark."
"I trusted you," I said, more gentle now. "Do not make me regret that."
He took my hand until his fingers hurt. "I will make it right."
Days blurred. Esteban was a man of sudden storms and careful traps. At court he was a boy who laughed too loud; in counsel he became a hunter with an unblinking eye. Ministers misread him as weakness—he let them believe that. Sometimes he would look at me across a table as if I were the only compass in a sea of men.
"Stand a little closer to me," he would say, and his guards would frown at history, as if history itself could scold a man for holding his wife.
"Why do you smile like that when you see me?" I once asked, in the middle of the day while bronze bells chimed.
"Because I can," he said, as if that answered everything.
Our life was a tangle of small tendernesses: him stealing my pastry at midday and frowning when I scolded playfully; him slipping a small copper charm—a street purchase from a day we had gone out in disguise—into my palm and whispering, "Keep it. It sees the truth."
Once, when the city lanterns were set afloat to make the gods kind, he whispered in my ear, "I love you." He said it so many times that night that the words lost meaning but gained weight.
But life kept reminding us that love could be fuel—dangerous and fire-hungry.
One evening smoke crept like a slow spider through the palace corridors. Scream and running feet. My heart fist-clenched. Aoi shook me, "Mistress, the west wing—flames!"
"Are you hurt?" Esteban demanded when he found me by the garden steps, my hair smelling of ash.
"No." I lied.
He did not believe me. We ran together through corridors of flame and then out into the courtyard where men in black had set webs of chaos. Blood was bright on the stones. People lay where traitors had fallen. We found the empress's attendants—dead. The empress herself—shock and white sheets.
The palace was a bruise.
"Who is behind this?" shouted Bowen Tran, one of Esteban's captains, as he dragged a black-clad man towards us. He wore a face too young for malice but his eyes were empty shells.
Esteban's face set like flint. He took command with a voice that made men move. "Lock the gates. No one leaves."
We gathered what remained of the guards and found that the arson and the knives were only the first move. The man we captured spat accusations: "You set the empress aside! We owe the rightful line!" His voice bounced like a stone. "We will restore the old order!"
Esteban's hand tightened on the hilt at his hip. He was quiet, a wolf with countdown in his breath. "Bring him here. Bring them all."
That night, in the Great Hall, Esteban unveiled a plan. He had, over months, let certain men believe a story—let them taste a ruler distracted by love, allowed them to feel they could move with impunity. Then he had set a net. Men came to the bait and found themselves caught.
I watched him as he moved from accusation to answer, drawing sighs and gasps. He was cruel when the occasion demanded cruelty. Later, I would understand why.
"Why are you so ruthless?" I asked once, when the smoke had charcoal-marked the curtains.
"Because hesitation kills more than steel," he said. "Because if I do not burn the rot now, generations will suffer."
He had a way of stating things that forced the world to submit. It was a dangerous hunger in him—I had married a man who loved me and a man who loved his country like the back of his hand.
We learned, painfully, who had been traitors. A line of names stretched like a stain through the court. Among them, Rodrigo Martinez—once a powerful prince who had plotted, who had gathered men and fled to the north years ago—was now the figurehead of rebellion. He had been rumored to barter treachery for lands, for titles. The crown had kept him alive, a bargaining chip, waiting.
"Bring Rodrigo to the square," Esteban said one morning, quietly, as if this were as simple as ordering tea.
He was not simple.
The day of punishment came like a winter morning, bright and cruel.
The main square was packed. Merchants, laborers, nobles who had once whispered against us—each had a face. Their eyes were sticky with expectation. The air smelled of cold iron and hot bread. Word had spread that traitors would pay.
Rodrigo Martinez was brought in, bound, his clothes stained but his chin still lifted like a man who believed in life by bluff. Beside him were several men in silk who had once been ministers. Their steps faltered.
"Do you know why you are here?" Bowen Tran's voice rolled like a drum. The captain stood near the dais.
Rodrigo laughed once—short and ugly. "Do you think you can humiliate me and end this? Your emperor plays with masks. He thinks he can buy loyalty."
Esteban sat on the raised throne, but not as a man playing act. He looked tired but unbending. He raised his hand, and silence clasped the crowd.
"Rodrigo Martinez," he said, voice flat, "you betrayed this land for coin and promises. You sold our towns, our people's grain, our soldiers' lives to those who would see our children as hostages."
Rodrigo spat, "You gave my family nothing but insult. I did what I must."
Esteban's face did not change. "You conspired with the enemy. You chose to stab your country."
The crowd shifted. A woman cried out from the back, "For our sons!"
A merchant near me threw up his hands and began to curse the traitors with a rage that startled even himself. Men with pitchforks leaned forward like they might leap. Servants secreted away small knives and videos—some recorded silently with their hands. The spectacle was immense, public.
"Bring the first man forward," Esteban commanded.
They dragged out a former high official, a face slick with tears and anger. He was accused of funneling supplies to the enemy. His eyes flicked from Esteban to the crowd, then back.
"You sold your signature," Esteban told him. "You signed away a province and called it diplomacy."
"No!" the man shrieked. "I was coerced. I—"
"Coerced? By fear of death?" Esteban's voice rose. "You chose contracts over people."
The official's bravado crumbled. He began to beg with that spine-broken plea of men who have everything to lose. "Please," he gasped. "I have a family."
The crowd's reaction shifted in a fraction—shock, then hunger. A thousand faces were waiting to see whether justice would be mercy.
Esteban walked down the dais, his robes whispering. He stood face-to-face with the man. "Your family will be cared for if you confess what you know," he said.
The man paused, sent a look to the side—maybe to a friend who had already been carried away—and then, with a sound like a fish flopping, he broke. He named names. He said how envoys had been paid in coin and favors, how maps had been sent, how villages had been promised to be spared.
"Where are the warehouses?" Esteban asked after each name. "Who delivered them?"
The man stammered until the answers came. Each confession brought a piece of the web into the light. Each piece tightened the noose.
Then, Rodrigo himself was called forward. He had watched the confessions with a face like an actor who had forgotten his lines.
"Rodrigo Martinez," Esteban said quietly, "you once thought you could bargain with our state. You thought your life, your house, your children would be safe. You were wrong."
Rodrigo lifted his chin. "I did what I had to."
Esteban smiled thinly. "Tell them what you had to, then."
Rodrigo's voice rose, trying to reclaim his dignity. "I sought peace. The north offered lands in exchange for cooperation. I thought—"
"Peace?" Esteban repeated. "Peace built on the bones of our villages is still war."
Rodrigo's jaw began to tremble. "You cannot—"
Esteban's gaze hardened. "You chose your pocket over your oath. You chose a foreign lord's promise over your people's lives. You are not a man; you are a ledger."
It was then that Rodrigo's face changed in a way the crowd had waited for: the smile dried; his bravado evaporated. He went through the motions of denial—anger, then pleading, then pleading turned into disgust—first toward himself, then toward his handlers.
"Please," he whispered after a long moment. "Do not shame me further. You cannot ruin my house. The north will—"
A child in the crowd spat on his boot.
"You who sold us out," a farmer shouted, "look at your hands. They are the hands of thieves."
The crowd's voice swelled.
Esteban did not shout. He stepped down and lifted a sealed scroll. He read the accusations aloud—names of men who had met Rodrigo in secret, of secret codes, of ships waiting in the night. The square echoed with each syllable like drumbeats announcing a death.
"This is the people's square," Bowen Tran said, and the soldiers spread out like an iron sea. "You will see justice, not theatre."
Rodrigo's face sank into horror as one after another, men he had thought loyal now spit on him, now turned their backs. His eyes moved, frantic, searching for allies among the crowd. A few nobles who had thought to protect themselves by siding with him now swallowed and began to cough.
"Why punish him in public?" a murmured voice asked.
"Because he used secrecy," I answered, before I knew I would speak. "Because secrecy made him safe. The sun stops secrets."
There were motions now—chains, the shuffling of feet, the clink of armor. Men were taken away.
Rodrigo tried to bargain—"I can give you names, I can take you to the caches—"
Esteban raised a hand. "Tell them now."
Rodrigo's voice broke. "There are others. They hide in robes of silk and in the houses of ministers. They are here." He named some names. For each name, the crowd hissed and a face from the procession turned gray. A noble who had once smiled from the dais was dragged down, his fine robe stained in a second with the dirt of shame.
I saw a woman I had spoken to on a market day accused of giving shelter. She screamed and began to spit at everyone. "They made me do it!" she cried. "They promised my son's safety!"
A man behind me, iron-faced, began to clap—slow, like the click of a metronome. "Good," he said. "Show them shame."
The traitors were stripped of titles. Their children watched from behind the ropes, eyes wide. Some mothers fainted. A merchant threw down his stall and walked away. A girl began to cry out, so big with grief it sounded like a trumpet.
Rodrigo, finally, had no mask left. He sank onto his knees. "I meant to save us," he said, the words falling away like dry leaves.
"You saved nothing," Esteban said. "You drained it."
Then came the punishments. They were not all the same because justice is not a blunt stone. One man, who had sold the grain stores, was publicly stripped of rank, his robes pulled by the crowd as they spat and the soldiers tied a rope to the wooden post. He begged. His pleading softened into incoherence.
Another, a minister who had signed false papers, was led by Bowen Tran to stand on a raised platform and have his head shaved. The crowd jeered, and his wife shrieked, then fell to the ground. He was paraded through the city with a placard hung from his neck listing his betrayals. Children pointed and laughed. Old men spat.
Rodrigo's punishment was merciless in the way a sun is merciless. Esteban read off a list of crimes that sounded like the tearing of a contract—words that made Rodrigo's face go slack. The crowd watched the man who would have traded his country's life for coin change through many stages: arrogance, denial, anger, bargaining, collapse.
"You have no right," Rodrigo cried at one point, his voice thick. "You are a usurper!"
"Am I?" Esteban asked, quietly. "I have a crown. But crowns do not make a man. A man's actions make him."
There were those in the crowd who once feared Rodrigo; now they stepped forward to spit on him, place their foot on his hand. Some took out their phones—small black mirrors—and recorded everything. The recordings would travel quicker than any scroll.
I watched how Rodrigo's supporters fell away. One by one, men who had once bowed now turned from him as if he had become contagious. They muttered to each other, eyes down. Children on the edge of the crowd shouted insults.
"Look at him," a woman behind me said. "How small he is."
Rodrigo's face fell in stages—first a flicker of disbelief, then horror, then a mask of fury that crumpled into raw panic. He tried to speak, tried to appeal to the crowd's sense of pity. "My family—"
The crowd answered with a thousand small cruelties. Someone threw a rotten fruit that splattered across his face. A merchant began to call out how Rodrigo's markets had hiked prices during the famine. Bitter songs rose from the crowd.
"You," Esteban said, "will be exiled with a mark on your forehead until the end of your days. Your houses will be seized. Your blood will not be spilt in private. It will be a lesson."
Rodrigo broke. He fell to his knees and began to plead, tears in his voice. "I will work. I will do anything. Please—"
A woman near the dais pushed forward and slapped him, right across his face. The sound was sharp as a bell. She spat, "You took my brother, you took my grain, you took my child."
Rodrigo's expression stuttered through denial, then through an animal fear, then resignation. He begged, he screamed, he tried to bargain. The crowd responded with chants that felt older than law, older than robes.
When it was done, when they dragged Rodrigo away with his head down, his followers either jailed or turned to beggary, the crowd began to disperse. Some cheered. Some wept. A few stared at Esteban with a new light—fear braided with respect.
I stayed at the palace windows that night. Esteban came to stand beside me without fanfare, and I could see the fatigue under his eyes like a bruise.
"You did well," I told him.
He laughed, a sound that tasted of iron. "Did I? Or did I only do what had to be done?"
"You did both," I said.
He looked at me with those deep pool eyes and for a moment he was only my Esteban—the boy who had once sat in a temple and swallowed his blood and pressed his face against a handkerchief.
"Promise me," I whispered, impulsive, "that if ever you must be cruel, you will tell me first. Let me not learn what you do from other people's screams."
He put his hand to my cheek. "I promise."
Months passed. The north war turned in our favor because the net he set caught more than traitors; it captured arrogance and greed. When Rodrigo fell, the northern lord's support crumbled; his banners turned to retreat.
But punishments in court are not the only retributions. There was the quiet punishment that had been reserved for Vittoria Bailey—the woman once placed near the throne as a bride. She had been used and then discarded. She had staged her own despair on the threshold of the palace and then fallen against a pillar. The court said she was gone of her own hand. I only remember the wet sound her body made when they carried her away. Some scolded her. Some pitied. I felt only a hollow cold.
"Do you think she meant it?" Aoi asked me once.
"I don't know," I said. "I think she meant something." The emptiness lingered.
The years that followed were not showy. We had a son—small, loud, and named with a shout of hope. Esteban's lightness returned sometimes like a bird that would not settle. He took walks with me in disguise, and once he learned to cook so badly that I pretended not to notice burnt meat in my bowl.
We took the copper charm with us to a small house between travels. He told me, "One day, when I feel old, we'll go there and I will make you tea."
"I'm not afraid of being old," I said.
"You should be afraid of me being old first," he teased.
We made small promises and kept some, and whatever cost came, we paid.
I remember one particular night when I found a scrap of a market receipt in his pocket—the little copper carving ticket he'd bought on the day we walked the lantern festival.
"You still keep it?" I asked, amused.
He smiled like the moon. "You asked me to keep things that see the truth."
I kept it in my hand that night and when the lanterns rose into the air like slow stars, I thought of the square, of Rodrigo's final levelled face, of the woman on the pillar. I thought of Esteban's long plans and of the way his hands fit mine.
"Did the empress lose her temper today?" someone had joked at court once, and the question had been more than a naughty line. It was a challenge. I had been petulant and patient, loved and suspicious, a wife and a weapon.
"I did," I whispered to the copper charm, "and I will again if I must."
Esteban put his hand in mine and squeezed. He pressed his forehead to mine and said, "I will make a place for us, Iris."
"And you will tell me if you must be cruel."
"I will," he said.
I smiled. The copper charm was warm.
The End
— Thank you for reading —