Sweet Romance16 min read
“Don’t Touch the Coffin” — A Tale of One Man, Two Faces
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“Don’t touch the coffin.”
Those were the first words I remember saying that morning, and I said them with my hands on cold wood.
They moved like they belonged to someone else—small, fumbling, still learning the shape of their own weight. The lid slid under my fingers and the room smelled of lacquer and borrowed sleep.
“I didn’t mean to,” the guard said. “I thought—”
“Then don’t,” I said again. “Don’t touch anything.”
He backed away as if I might bite. I stared down at the woman inside the glass-clear coffin. She was me in silk and rouge, the new bride I had been for three foolish hours.
“Matilda?” a voice said behind me.
I turned. The voice belonged to Hugo Martin, the court clerk, all whiskers and worry. He kept his distance as if the place burned.
“He’s waiting,” Hugo said. “The Emperor sends word—Wolfgang Hamza.”
My throat closed. Wolfgang Hamza. The name had a chill to it, a slow weight as if carved from black stone.
“You let him in,” I said.
“He is the Emperor,” Hugo said. “You will see him now.”
I wanted to rip off the mask of silk, throw off the red robe, kneel by the coffin and scream the truth until the rafters answered. I wanted to ask why a man I had loved for ten years—no, why two men had haunted me—was sitting like a god and watching me like a judge.
Instead I bent and touched my own cheek. The skin felt wrong. The breath in my lungs felt like borrowed air.
“You look like you need a choice,” a voice said.
I looked up. He stood in the doorway like a shadow wearing a scholar’s robe, hands folded behind him, hair in a white net. He was not the rough-shouldered fighter who had taught me to stand my horse and aim a blade. He was the Emperor. He was the man who had sat in my daydreams and never once let me think he could be real.
“You made me die,” I said. “Someone shoved me. Someone killed me at my wedding.”
He inclined his head, small, polite. “Yes. A tragedy. An unfortunate debt. You can live again.”
“You can fix a crushed heart?” I asked. I felt like a joke. “Why should I beg you?”
He stepped closer. The air around him felt cold like a shadow on ice. When he spoke his voice was without a tremor.
“You must ask,” he said. “Ask me with the mouth of a living man and I will return you whole. Beg me at my feet and I will bind your life to mine. Say it and you will wake as if from sleep.”
“How is that even fair?” I spat. “You think I’ll bargain my life like a bowl of rice? Like some thing to be traded for your pity?”
“No.” He did not smile. “You will bargain for memory, Matilda. You will bargain for choice.”
The truth—what he had never said aloud—was finally in the air between us. He had the power of law and of old rules. He was the Emperor of the Nether Court. He could call back the heartbeat. But everything cost.
“Then take me to court,” I said. “Let them hear what happened. Let someone else judge you.”
Wolfgang Hamza’s face was the same one I had seen a dozen times in the long night: cool, polished, with a bruise of something behind the eyes. He did not look surprised. He answered as if he had been waiting his whole life to answer me.
“Very well,” he said. “You will stand in the hall.”
— — —
They called it a court, but it felt like a stage built of bones and lacquer. The great doors sighed open and rows of judges in black robes watched me as if I were a play that would end badly—because I would not stay dead, I suppose, the play would need a finale.
“Forbes Estrada,” Hugo said beside me. “He will take the witness.”
I nodded. I could feel every eye on the coffin, counting the seconds I had spent alive and dead and the hollow between.
“Madam Matilda Fisher,” Judge Hugo said, voice clear as a bell. “You ask for life. You ask for truth. Speak. Tell us what you remember.”
My voice came like a blade. “I remember opening the door of my bridal room. I remember silk under my feet. I remember a hand—too quick, too smooth—push me—and then cold like water and the world went black.”
“You were shoved,” Hugo said. “Do you know who pushed you?”
I looked out to the benches. Canon Schneider sat to the side like a man who had lost something important, fingers on an empty chair where his instrument should be. He wore the face of the musician I had called my shelter: soft smile, easy hands, the kind of man who listened to the world and gave it back as song.
“I met him on the road,” I said. “He taught me how to move with music, he gave me food when I was hungry. I married him because he promised to be steady. I trusted him.”
The court shifted.
Wolfgang Hamza’s fingers rested on the edge of his desk. He said nothing, and that silence felt like a blade.
“Forbes,” Hugo said, “is Canon Schneider present?”
“Present,” Forbes answered.
A hush. Canon stood, eyes on me like two small fires. Then his eyes moved toward the Emperor—toward Wolfgang—and something like a twitch passed through his shoulders.
“You were with her the night she died?” Forbes asked Canon.
“Yes,” Canon said. “I left to answer the call of Lady Song—”
“You left,” Forbes said. “Where did you go?”
“I… to the yard,” Canon said. “Someone ran by. I saw a woman in red—someone ran. I ran after them.”
“Did you stop them?”
“No.”
His hands were jittery. The court wanted ropes and a culprit. The Emperor watched like a man who had already made up the verdict.
“Matilda,” Wolfgang said then. “You have been given the choice I spoke of. Beg me and be bound. Refuse and die with your memory.”
I laughed like a cough from something dead. “So I beg and I get my life with the cost of kneeling to you? God, Emperor, you offer compassion and call it law.”
“Yes,” he said. “My law. My mercy. Beg.”
I looked at the coffin and then at the musician who had hummed in my sleep. I thought of the years I had spent trying to forget one man and hoping for another. I thought of the way a stranger’s hands had pushed me.
“I choose a trial,” I said.
Wolfgang’s face did not change. Hugo looked alarmed. Canon went pale.
“You choose a trial?” Wolfgang asked. “Very well. Then justice will be made. Let the witness speak.”
They brought forward a woman who had watched me that day. “I saw a hand,” she said. “It was not Canon’s. It was a tall man in a grey cloak. He left through the east gate.”
“Forbes, anywhere a man like that has been seen?” Hugo asked.
Forbes hurried to the list in his hands. “There—” He read the name and his voice went small. “Canon Schneider has debts. He was seen that night leaving in a hurry. But—there is another: a man named Mason Adkins—traveling swordsman. He is known in villages. He fights with a white blade.”
My chest tightened. Mason Adkins. The name struck like a bell. He was the wild one. He was the man who had stolen me once in a market alley and taught me to stand my ground. He was young, rough, and full of wine and jokes. He had left years before, to some place I never knew, and I had cried for him until my fingers went raw.
“Where is Mason?” I asked. The court looked at me as if I had called down thunder.
“He is not here,” Forbes said. “He vanished five years past. There are rumors he drowned.”
Wolfgang’s hand tightened on the desk so faintly I would not have noticed if I hadn’t been holding on to the coffin.
“Wolfgang—” I almost said Mason—then my voice broke. “Did you know him?”
“All things I know,” Wolfgang said. He came to the side then, slow, like a tide, and looked down at me with those steady eyes. “Mason walked for twenty years with a soul that belonged not only to him. I sent him to walk the world. I gave him a life. He was mine.”
“You—gave him a life?” I echoed.
“Yes.” He did not hide the truth. “I have more than one way to be. Long ago I split a part of myself to walk among men. Mason was that part. He learned to laugh, to drink, to sin. He learned to love.”
“And he loved me,” I whispered.
He nodded. “He loved you. Perhaps once. He loved you with a man’s messy heart. But he was only one edge of me. When he died—when he died at that village against the night—he returned to me like a shard. I kept a fragment, Matilda. I kept a memory.”
The court leaned forward like a pack listening for a crack of meat.
“You kept him,” I said. “You let him go. You made him a man to guard your small soft places and then you took him back when you needed his courage.”
Wolfgang’s jaw worked. “I created risk. My laws are old and hard. I tried to keep him from pain. I failed.”
“Is that what this is? You say you failed, so you watched me die and then you—what? Brought my soul here and told me to beg?”
He swallowed like a man asking someone to step into deep water. “I brought you here because you asked me to catch the thing in your memory. When the man pushed you, I had to preserve the record. You would not ask me then; you left. You came back. You asked for proof. I have proof.”
“Show it,” I demanded.
Forbes unrolled a ribbon of night and set it on the table. Small townswomen shuddered. The ribbon was a thin strip of cloth, a scrap of red silk, stained faint with a mark of sweat and a brand of someone’s touch. Canon’s hands trembled when he saw it.
“There was another witness,” a woman said. “The seam in the alley—the man left a scrap when he brushed the curtain—he had a sword.”
Forbes read the notes, and the court became a net closing.
Canon made a sound like a bird, a small broken sound. “I’m not the killer,” he said.
“You were there, Canon,” Hugo said. “You fled.”
“Because I was frightened,” Canon sobbed. “Because I saw a blade. Because I—”
He broke off. The room watched him like a thing waiting for the body to split open.
“You’re not the only one with weakness, Canon,” the Emperor said. “But you are the one with the debt. Where did you get the silk?”
Canon’s face crumpled. He looked like someone who had been hammered into shape. “They paid me,” he said. “They paid with coins from the bet house. I was to sing, to distract, to give them the room. I never thought—”
“For a man in a grey cloak,” Forbes said. “Who paid the bet house?”
The whole room smelled of something sour. Men looked at one another and at me, and I understood that I was no longer the main thing in the room. I was a piece that lit a furnace.
“Show me the man,” I said. “Find him.”
Wolfgang closed his eyes. His voice when he opened them was like iron. “We will. But first you must decide. Beg me at my feet and be returned now. Or stay and let the law find its work.”
I stared at my funeral clothes. My life before the coffin had been wild and bright and full of scraping edges. I had loved a man who loved me in pieces. I had hated an Emperor who watched me like an experiment. I had died at a wedding like a fool.
I took a breath and flattened my palms on the coffin lid as if it were a table.
“If you ever loved Mason—if you ever made him real—find him in what you are,” I said. “Find him in the man who pushed me. Find him in your own hands. If you loved him, then you will find truth. If you loved him, you will not hide it behind title or rule.”
Wolfgang’s face did not change. He reached and touched the lid, gentle as if it were glass, as if I might snap. “Very well,” he said. “We will hunt the man. You will stay until judgment.”
— — —
They led me to a chamber where the light came like gray milk. Guards with names I had only heard announced stood watch and readied parchments. I sat on a bench beside my coffin and watched the Emperor pace.
“Why do you let her speak?” Forbes asked him once.
Wolfgang looked almost tired. “She is the one who has the courage to choose. I admire it. It is foolish but real.”
“For what, my lord? A woman who would rather die than beg?”
“For what?” Wolfgang repeated. “For a thing I have no name for. For a place in a heart. For the part of me called Mason that loved falcons and wine and a bad, crooked grin.”
Forbes stared at him. “You name his faults and you name your tenderness like coins. Are you a king or a father?”
Wolfgang only stared at his hands, which were perfect and cruel. “I am what I was made to be,” he said. “I am as I am.”
A week of searching began. They retired witnesses, they burned old debts, they walked through villages and asked about a man in a gray cloak. My world narrowed to the lid of a coffin and the faces of those who worked for truth.
On the fourth night, a boy came to the door, his mouth full of secrets. He had seen a cloaked man near the river with a white sword sheathed at his hip. The boy had chased them until a cart moved too fast and the cloak melted into nothing. “He went like smoke,” the boy said.
Mason. The name tasted like a hope that might be poison. I lay in the chamber sometimes and tried to summon the image of his grin, of the way he had slapped my shoulder and made me laugh. He had promised me a life of trouble and bread. He had promised he would never be a king.
“Do you wish the man found?” the Emperor asked me one night.
“Yes,” I said. The word came like a thin spear. “Even if it kills him. Even if it kills me.”
He stared at me as if he could read the edges of me. “And if he is me?” he asked.
The question turned over like a small stone. I thought of Mason’s hands, of his laugh, of Wolfgang’s cool, of the way the Emperor had once held my wrist and been gentler than the world.
“If he is you,” I said slowly, “then cut truth out from you like a rotten root. Don’t hide. Don’t say you can do both and keep the things—people—you love safe. You make your laws to hold down the world. But you cannot hold hearts the same way.”
He turned away. The next day they found the man and hauled him into the court by his gray cloak.
— — —
He walked like a man who had been out in winter too long: shoulders tight, jaw set. His hair caught an edge of light and he had the look of someone who had been split, mended, and then split again.
“Mason Adkins,” Forbes said.
He blinked as if his name were new. A dozen people called it out and it rattled in him like coins.
I rose. The coffin lid pressed the weight of wood to my palms. “Mason,” I said. My voice was small. He looked at me with a face I had ached for.
“You lived,” I said.
He braced his mouth as if to speak and then the Emperor stepped forward.
“You were seen at the scene,” Wolfgang said. He walked the distance between men like a hunter. “You carried blood on your sleeve. Why?”
Mason’s jaw trembled. He swallowed. “I was there to stop a thing,” he said. “I thought—”
“You thought to push her?” Forbes asked. “You thought to kill the bride?”
Mason’s hands shook. He began like a man thawing. “I did not mean to kill her,” he said. “I meant to scare. To stop a thing. She was going to marry a man I thought paid men to learn how to hide sorrow. I followed, I slipped. I only wanted to push her away from the door so she wouldn’t go inside and fall into debt—”
“You pushed her?” the room all but screamed.
Mason’s eyes found mine, and they were a hollow I had known since the market where we’d first met. “I pushed her because I thought someone else would kill her if she stayed. I pushed her away so she’d be safe.”
“You pushed me into the river,” I said.
His head sank. “I did not know the stair would be loose,” he said. “I did not think—Matilda, I did not mean for your head to hit the stone.”
My thumbs dug into the coffin lid until my nails hurt. The world narrowed to the poor truth he gave.
“He is also the Emperor,” I said suddenly. The court froze.
Mason’s eyes widened as if someone had lit a candle in a dark room. “You know?” he whispered. “You know that I—”
“How?” Forbes asked.
Wolfgang stepped forward like a man closing a book. He did not seem the same as the two who stood in my memory. He stood like a bridge between two storms.
“Mason is a part of me,” he said. “A shard. I gave him life because I needed a blade on the road. He did not know his origin. He fell. He loved. He returned to me and I kept the part of the memory that remained human.”
Mason’s face split into grief. “I thought she was going to be taken,” he said. “I was afraid.”
“You call it fear,” Wolfgang said. “You call it love. You call it law. All are true.”
Canon Schneider made a small sound like a violin string let loose. He bent his head and then lifted it and the anger in him was a new thing.
“Why were you at my wedding?” Canon said suddenly, voice sharp. “Why did you send men to my hall to gamble?”
Mason looked shamefaced. “I thought to make you safe,” he said. “I did not plan her death.”
“Forbes,” Hugo said. “Canon placed a bet on the Emperor’s woman. He paid for a cloak and a cut on the stair. He let a knife be sharper.”
Canon fell apart. “I only took money,” he said. “I thought it would settle my debts. I thought a night would pass without blood.”
“For what you did you will be punished,” Wolfgang said. He did not shout. His justice was the slow thing of winter. “You will be bound to pay in service. You will be made to sing for the mourned and to pay coin to the family of the dead.”
Canon covered his face. Men whispered that a worse fate loomed where flesh meets law. I watched him crumble and the crowd made its small music of triumph and pity.
Then Forbes looked at me. “What do you want?” he asked.
For a second I felt foolish. I had asked for a trial and the truth had split open like a rotten fruit.
“I want him to speak his name,” I said. I looked at Wolfgang then. “If Mason is a shard of you, then tell the court. Tell them that you are two faces of the same coin.”
Wolfgang’s hand closed as if he would hurt himself. “It is not thoughtless,” he said. “The laws forbid me to admit such things in public. It will shake the Court to its roots.”
“You hide behind law and call it safety,” I said. “Tell them.”
He looked at me as if I had set a trap of light and he was stepping into it. Then he nodded.
He stood in the center. His robe fell like night. He lifted his hands and the hall listened like a thing waiting for thunder.
“I am Wolfgang Hamza,” he said. “Emperor of the Nether Court. And I am also the one who split a part of myself into a man called Mason Adkins. I did so to walk among men and learn. I failed in time and then I failed in love. I hid the truth to keep balance. I confess now because the woman before you demands it.”
The judges’ faces were granite. A murmur rose like wind through reeds. A dozen hands reached for pens and shook.
Forbes looked at him as if he sought a shape in the air. “You stand here and admit you split your essence?”
“I stand here,” Wolfgang said, “and admit that I loved a foolish human enough to make him into something I thought I could command.”
The court went still like a lake. For a long breath, no one moved.
Then Judge Hugo said, very plainly: “You admit it. Then you will answer for it. If you were content to split what you are, then who are you to keep a woman from the life she seeks?”
Wolfgang’s jaw did not move. “I kept her because she asked me to keep the memory,” he said. “And I kept it because a man died who loved her.”
“You feared the truth,” Forbes said. “You feared losing the piece of yourself that loved. You turned law into a shackle.”
Wolfgang did not deny it. He did not strike back with his rank. He looked smaller than before, like someone who had run until he could not.
“Then what is the judgment?” he asked.
The court murmured and then it decided with the steady cruelty of seasons.
Wolfgang would not be stripped of his seat. No one who built a throne from law is hunted down by law. But he would swear, with the weight of reed and ink, never again to hide a shard of himself under law. He would open the Court to truth where it could not damage the balance of the worlds. Canon would pay his debt. Mason would be allowed to stand adjacent to Wolfgang and speak as himself. I would be returned to life—but free of vow or claim. I would leave as Matilda Fisher, not as something bound to the Emperor.
I looked at Wolfgang. He met my eyes with a kind of private grief, like a man who had been awake and gone mad in his sleep.
“So you free me,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “You will be given back.”
— — —
They do strange work in the Nether Court. They wrapped me in cloth that smelled of dawn and old ink. They took me to the crystal chest and pressed a small cold panel over my lips and forehead. The world opened like a fruit.
When I woke, the first thing I felt was sky in my throat.
I ran my hand over my face. I was whole. The sting of the river had gone. The scar on my neck tasted like a memory and nothing more. Mason sat across the room with a cloth in his hands. He looked smaller up close, like someone who had squeezed his life out of a bottle and now had the pieces.
“You are alive,” he whispered. He stood too quickly and the room reeled with his movement.
“You pushed me,” I said. The words did not carry the weight of accusation I’d hoped. Instead they were a kind of map. “You didn't mean to.”
He trembled. “I know,” he said. “I fled. I came back. I told the Emperor that I had been sent to the world to be his shard. He gave me air and a name and then took me. I wanted to protect you. I was a coward with good intent.”
“You are not a king,” I said. “And you are not a shard now.”
He did not smile. “I am whatever you name me.”
I stood and walked to him and for a beat I remembered the market and the wood of a cart and the laugh in his mouth. He had been more flesh than law. He was also part of a god.
“You should have said so sooner,” I said.
“So should you,” he said. He said it like a confession and a laugh and the sun was hot in his eyes.
We did not marry that day. We did something more awkward: we spoke. We sat in a room where I had been a coffin and became people who had made mistakes and wanted to be honest.
The wood of our talk was bare. No proposals, no vows. Just truth.
Later, they brought Canon Schneider out and the court sentenced him to sing in halls for debtors and widows, to give his nights in work and not in coin. He took it like a man who had lost the only thing he loved and paid for it with hands that were cheaper to him than the sound of his voice.
Wolfgang stood while they handed down punishments. When they finished they turned to me.
“You are free,” he said.
I looked at him. There was an ache in his words that made me want to kill him and to kiss him and to fix something in the world.
“Free?” I said. “You release me like a bird but expect me to remember.”
“Yes,” he said. “And if you choose to live with memory, you keep it. If you choose to forget, I will give you what soothes. But I will never again bind you in false mercy.”
“You speak like a god and you are making us humble,” I said.
He smiled then, a small, tired motion. “I have been a ruler a long time,” he said. “I am learning to live with the parts of me I made.”
— — —
What I wanted was not the Emperor and not the shard. I wanted the right to choose a life that belonged to me.
So I left the Nether Court and went out into a world that smelled of grass and rain. Mason came with me for a while. He laughed in the mornings like a man who had swum out of a cave. Canon took his penance and his songs and left the town, to be a voice for those who had no coin.
Wolfgang? He returned to his throne, the long-suffering man who had learned to split himself and still could not close the cracks. He opened the Court to small things. He visited, sometimes, like an uncle who returns with gifts and awkward apologies.
“Why?” my friend Aurora Oliver asked me once, when we met by the river where I had once fallen. “Why not stay? He has power and—
“He almost stole my life twice,” I said. “He almost stole my choices. But he also saved me. People are not all good or all bad. I want a life that lets me decide.”
Aurora laughed and then she sobered. “You always loved danger.”
“I did,” I said. “I also love my own hands. I want to hold them and not hand them over because someone else thinks he knows best.”
Mason took a sword and he learned to live with his hands. He taught children to stand and to draw breath. He kept the grin, but it was softer now, like someone who had found something and decided to guard it rather than turn it into a weapon.
One night, months later, the moon low and fat, I went back to the bridge where dead things were led by an old woman with a bucket of soup. I walked it alone. The path had changed and it had not. The cold that had once lived in my bones was gone.
I set a small bundle on the rail. Inside was the little string tassel from the sword Mason had given me the first day. It was frayed and faint with age.
I thought for a second to beg the Emperor to join me, to ask him to kneel in the dust and plead for my word. I imagined him in the court with all its judges and laws, lowering his head. I imagined the shame and the kindness that would follow.
Instead I sat on the rail and waited for the foxes to come and for Mason to find me. He came, as he always did, late and full of apologies he never managed to say in the right order.
“You could have asked him to come,” he said, hands in his pockets. “You could have asked me to.”
“I wanted to do one thing for myself,” I said. “To set this down.”
Mason sat beside me and we watched the river move. The moon made scales on the water like silver fish. He reached and found my hand and held it.
“You alright?” he asked.
I turned my palm up. My scars were faint and the memory clean. “I am,” I said. “I am living.”
He smiled, and his smile was a new blade—sharp enough to stop blood, gentle enough to cut bread.
We kept our lives small and our choices nearer to our chests. Wolfgang Hamza reshaped some of his laws. The Court became, in small ways, less heavy. Canon sang songs that made the widows laugh and the debtors sleep. The truth had been bared in public; wounds would scar, but the infection of lies had been stopped.
Once, in a dream, I saw both men standing side by side—one with wine and a white sword, one with robes and a book. They were the same, and they were not. I woke up smiling.
“You kept a part of him,” Mason said that morning, looking at me with the kind of knowledge that now fit both our faces.
“I kept a part of me too,” I answered. “Someone told me once that living again is like learning a song you used to forget. You have to learn it measure by measure.”
He laughed and then leaned in and kissed me, not like a bargain or a claim, but like a weathered man who had come back from the wrong side of the world and wanted to say he was sorry with his lips.
The bridge smelled of old soup and new rain. The tassel lay on the rail and the river took the rest.
Sometimes wolves mark territory. Sometimes men make laws. Sometimes women like me decide to live.
I pressed the tassel into my palm and kept walking.
—END---
The End
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