Sweet Romance15 min read
"Give Me Death, Then Take My Silver" — A Courtroom of Hearts
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I never expected my death to be the loudest celebration in the capital.
"Everyone's crying for joy," they said in the streets. "The great thief-poisoner is gone." They shouted it like a blessing.
"No one knows," I told myself. "No one knows I'm faking it."
The palace called me back to the study the day I pretended to be dying.
"Faron," I began, bowing as was proper. "Master, you summoned me."
Faron Vinogradov—thin-skinned, boyish, with eyes like cold wells—looked at me across the desk. The candles made his cheekbones sharp. He said, "The northern floods took the granaries. If we do not release grain, the people will starve. I must borrow from you, Iris. Ten thousand silver pieces at least."
"I can help," I answered.
His lips twitched like he was surprised to hear generosity from the likes of me. He looked softer for a heartbeat.
I leaned forward. "If His Majesty brings me the banknote, ten thousand will be ready," I said, "but it must be exchanged for a night."
His eyes darkened. "You insult me."
"I am a rich marquis' heir," I said calmly. "What is one night to you? You get what you want, I get my life arranged."
Faron nearly ripped the papers from the table. "I am the emperor!"
I knelt, loud and quick. "Long live the emperor. Long, long live the emperor."
"Iris," he hissed, "how dare you..."
"I dare," I said. "I dare to be practical."
He moved like a wounded animal. He reached for the sword on the wall. I said, "If you kill me now, who will loan you the silver? Think, Faron."
His hand fell. The sword clattered.
We did not make love that night. We made a bargain that felt too like a lie.
That bargain was my plan.
I had been a son in my father's house: my father made me into a boy for my safety, taught me cards and accounts, and left me the title when he died. I, Iris Garnier—then called the Marquess' heir—had money enough to shame the treasury, and a life that would be killed if the court discovered my secret. My father told me, before the end, "When the palace eyes come, vanish. Fake death and flee to the south."
So I tried everything: drownings, cliffs, poisons. Each time, someone came, someone took my treasure, and someone wanted me alive. A healer, a swordsman, a Taoist, each saved me and eyed whatever jewel could be pried away. The world would not let me die.
Until I learned that only the emperor could grant what I could not take from others—a true release.
I provoked him publicly. I called him names. I showed too much. I pinched his pride and his temper and his curiosity.
"You want me to die?" he snapped, once, in the study.
"Just grant me the death I ask for," I teased. "A bottle. One night. Let it be quick and polite."
He almost did it. He called me traitor. He half-believed I was trying to blackmail his crown.
"You're cruel," he said once, in a softer voice I was not used to. "You tempt me like a child."
"Because you are my old playmate," I said. "Because you know me."
He had me in his arms before I knew it. He said, "You are impossible."
"Then kill me," I said, breathing his scent. "If you spare me, deliver me the silver."
He did not kill me. He ran instead, furious, scarlet-eyed, fleeing into the night.
I returned to my manor and luxuriated in the trivialities of my life: a jade basin, servants, and winter gardens kept warm with dragon-fire stoves. I wore fine cloaks and had men attend to my feet. It was all to make him jealous, to make him want me or destroy me.
"What are you doing, Iris?" my steward David Jackson asked when I told him my plan in a whisper.
"Living," I answered. "More specifically—pretending to die."
"That sounds... hazardous."
"It is the only way," I said.
So I drank the poison that was a fake. I had a life-saver inside the poison and a signal arranged. I lay on the ground and let the pain wash over me, savoring the performance.
Later, when I was supposed to be boiling in my own fever, Faron came with his hands empty and eyes full of storm.
"Give me the names," he whispered on the palace steps. "What else are you hiding?"
"I hide nothing but my own patience," I told him.
"Then die, and be quiet about it. Let the court have its justice," he said, half in anger, half in something else.
That night, I drank truly enough that my body convulsed. The jailers came, the magistrate arrested me, and the capital had song and praise when the news spread: the corrupt Marquess was dead.
"Ha!" the crowd sang. "The country is better already."
I was loaded into a coffin by David Jackson, who had been loyal since my father's last breath. His voice shook: "My lady, if you wake—if you truly live—the plan stands."
I did not truly think the plan might break. I had thought of every rescue: the boat, the cliff rope, the hidden herbs. But the world has a different humor than the minds that plot in warm rooms. I woke trapped.
"Your coffin—" someone outside said. "He will take you to the south, Lady. He promised to place you in the river line."
That voice was Faron's.
"He will see you to the boat himself," David whispered.
"Don't you dare," I thought, but the lid closed and the world forced itself into a thin, suffocating dark.
I nearly panicked. Air cleaved thin. I banged the casket until my hands swelled. I thought of everything—my jewels buried, my gold hidden, my plan, my father.
Outside, Faron spoke to the steward with the strangest voice I had ever heard him use. "Take him—I mean, her—to the south. Let the body sleep."
They sealed the coffin more tightly than the plans required. I felt the cold of the wood, felt my lungs fight.
When I finally woke on the river—awake and coherent, my hair braided and dressed as a woman for the first time fully—I realized I had miscalculated the most dangerous thing: the emperor's peculiar devotion.
"He carried you himself," David said, eyes guilty and ashamed. "I thought he'd only take the body to the joss-house. He... he carried you, and he cried."
Faron had carried my coffin through the dark like a penitent. He had gone straight to the palace even as the city sang. He had refused to turn me over until the Empress came, and then fought for custody—only for the Empress, Melissa Marino, to insist. In the end, the Empress ordered me bound for the river boat and the south.
"I could have left forever," I said, hollow with gratitude and anger both.
"Then you fell asleep," David said.
I should have escaped and left Faron and the palace and everything behind. Instead, my chest kept thinking of him. His hands on the coffin, his wet face in the lantern light. The power of an emperor can be a net or a cage; in my case it became both.
Three months in the south did not kill Faron from my thoughts. I tried to buy merry boys and drown in pleasure, but his memory made every song bitter.
"Maybe you're gone for good," David said once, placing a tray of green cakes under my hand. "But you should move on."
I couldn't. I dreamed of him reading me verses, of him pinching my foot with a teasing scorn, of tiny private wars and even smaller reconciliations. I found a boy who looked like him—a low-budget imitation by the name of Nolan Kovalev—and gave him a role to keep by my side. It helped a little. He had Faron's faint slant of a smile.
Then one night on a wide river in the southern capital, as lanterns bobbed and old songs crooned, someone took my wrist.
"Do you love him?" Nolan asked, sober, the way an actor will ask a part of himself what it feels like.
I laughed and pushed him away. "I'm done with fools tonight."
He would not be done with me. He had a strange heat in him. He kissed me where the seam of my woman's robe clung to my thigh and said, "You lie well."
I should have left him there. I did not.
I should have fled before Faron found me again. He had come. He had crossed provinces and beaten a courier to my door.
"Why do you run?" he said, cornering me on the road. "Why make yourself prey?"
"I'm tired of being hunted," I told him. "I am tired of playing dead to get my own life."
"You make me reckless," he said, and the words surprised him by their softness.
He took me to bed that night. We tore seams and boundary and pretence. He was gentle and raw and more dangerous than any sword. After, he slept like a child; I lay awake with a handful of ruin and bargain.
"Stay," he murmured in a voice that should not have held that much ache. "Stay with me."
"No," I said at first. "I must go. I'm dangerous to your crown." Then I almost told him everything; I almost begged to be allowed to live in the palace as I was. I almost begged him to be true.
He laughed a small laugh. "I have already carried your coffin."
I had stolen and lied and tempted. Now he stood before me, daring me to be honest.
"You are wicked," he said finally. "You have made enemies and fools, and you flirt with death like a pastime. Why?"
"Because I was given a life that will be cut off if known," I said. "Because I learned early that the world will not let me die unless someone important chooses otherwise."
Faron's hand closed over mine. "Then you will not die like that."
"How can I trust you?"
"Because I have carried you," he said, like a child proving a point. "And I would carry you again."
I did not trust him the way I trusted my ledger, but I trusted him enough to stop fleeing.
Of course, the court had other plans. Melissa Marino—the Empress, my enemy from the first time she saw my gilded waist—heard rumors and fanned them into flame. She made a spectacle of my "treasury thefts": painted posters one night, town cries the next. The same magistrate Ravi Jimenez who had presided over my mock arrest had been bribed before by other hands to find traces of scandal. They found a letter in my villa, a fake note with a sum that made the magistrate grin. It was enough to haul me to lockup.
"How is it you keep getting away?" Faron demanded at the council table, where ministers sighed and leaned. "Why do you still stand so rich at court if you are a thief?"
"Because she is clever," Henri Michel, the general, muttered.
"Because she is shameless," the magistrate Ravi said, and everyone looked at me like a carcass.
They dragged me to the dungeon. The city sang again.
I did what any smart person would do then: I paid. I bribed where bribes could be turned, and I sent David to beg for one last parole. But the Empress wanted spectacle—she wanted my name on every wall.
"Let them see a fall," she said to the ministers. "Let them make sport of my enemy."
They were happy to oblige. I was put in the lockroom, and the empress prepared a public humiliation meant to finish me.
I had intended to leave, but then I decided: if I were to be the object of a public spectacle, I would be the one to control its end.
"Tell me what you'll do," David whispered in my cell. "If you go out there, you will be torn to shreds."
"Then I shall direct the shred," I said.
When the day came, the courtyard was full. Merchants, concubines, soldiers, and scribes crowded to see the Marquess' heir judged. The wooden stand in the center was polished to reflect faces. The Empress stood at the throne, ribbons of silk falling like a curtain. She was splendid, an old queen of cruelty.
Faron stood at the side. He did not look like a man who wanted to kill me. He looked like a man who was unsure whether to save me from shame or to watch my ruin.
"Bring forth the accused," Ravi intoned. Chains clanked. I walked in a woman's robe, hair combed, face pale but composed.
They paraded the forged letter and the "found bribe." Town criers read accusations like a litany. "She took from granaries! She hid the people's silver in her vaults! She trafficked with the magistrate!"
"Stop!" I said, louder than anyone expected.
Silence sharpened like a blade.
"On what proof do you condemn me?" I asked, walking straight toward Ravi. There were murmurs. I lifted my chin. "On what proof do you think to hang me with?"
Ravi opened his mouth. "The letter—"
"—was planted," I said. "Did you ever ask who had access to my study? My steward? My own servants? Or did you accept a convenient note because you wanted a triumph?"
Henri Michel stepped forward. "Lady—"
"I will speak," I cut him off. "I will tell you what happened. The Empress ordered the smear. She sent a courier to plant evidence with you and to buy the town crier's loyalty."
Gasps ran like wind through the crowd. The Empress' cheek paled, but she smiled like a queen who had long expected this accusation.
"You slander the Empress," Melissa said. "You accuse the mother of the realm! How dare you!"
"I dare," I said. "Because I have proof."
I had spent three winter nights and a small fortune buying witnesses in the city: waiters, a silk dyer, a palace scribe with loose teeth. I had coaxed confessions from a courier who had been promised a pension by my steward. They were cheap, and they were true.
"Bring forth the courier," I ordered.
A young man who had delivered the fake letter was shoved forward. He trembled. "I carried it," he said. "I was paid. I—"
"You were paid by whom?" a merchant shouted.
"By a woman in the red palace chambers," the courier said. "I was told to place the letter in the marquess' desk and say nothing. I was paid with a pouch of silver."
The crowd turned. The Empress' hand went pale around her fan.
"You lie!" she screamed. "You lie, every one of you!"
The courier spat out, "Look at me. I deliver the letter to the magistrate. I took the coin to the city gate. The purse bore the Empress' crest."
A murmur turned to a roar. People who had come to jeer now came to gawk. The magistrate's face hardened. Ravi's jaw clenched.
"Is this true?" Faron demanded, voice cold.
Melissa staggered as if struck. "My son," she said in a trembling voice, "this is slander."
"Then let the palace seals be shown," I said. "Let the guards search the Empress' chamber for the pouch and the seals."
They did. Palace guards, who dreaded an imperial command, broke into the curtains with swords. They found a silken pouch—stamped with the crest—hidden in an embroidered sleeve. The public gasped as the pouch was opened and coins tumbled out.
"They have your marks," the magistrate said finally, his voice an animal sound.
Melissa's face turned as white as the silk in her hands. "You will not—" she began.
"Silence," Faron said, and his voice carried like thunder. "Stand down."
Melissa's eyes snapped to me. "You will pay for this," she snarled.
"No," I said. "You will answer."
"Confess," Faron ordered. "Speak to them."
The Empress' mask started to crack. I watched a careful, practiced woman unspool before the crowd. She was at first indignant, then incredulous, then furious. "I am your mother!" she cried. "How dare you! How dare you throw me—"
"Confess," Faron repeated, and there was steel in his voice now that belonged to the throne.
The Empress' face emptied. She fell first into denial. "I did nothing! I did not—"
Then her hands went to her throat. She could not find words to build the wall again. She looked at the coin, at the guards, at the people pressing forward. Her voice shifted: "I... I sent for an inquiry—I wanted spectacle to shame her—"
Her sentence broke like a bad string. Around us, people leaned forward. Those who had once mocked me now saw their part in the rumor mill. Old women who had shouted at me days before now averted their eyes. Soldiers who had barked at me in arrest now stood silent.
The Empress' greatest crime was not theft; it was the betrayal of the court's trust for petty hatred. Her face fell through stages of expression: astonished, then angry, then frantic, then pleading.
"Mother!" Faron cried, but his voice was not pity. "You used my name to slander. You used state resources to conspire. You put a man's life and a whole house at danger to satisfy your spite. And for what? A whim."
"Your Majesty—" Melissa crawled, not on hands and knees, but she fell on the marble steps before the throne, and the crowd watched the Empress reduced to that. Her robe spilled like a tide. Around us, cameras of the time—scribes and gossipers with ink and quill—scratched like a hive.
"Tell them everything," I insisted. "Tell them how you paid the courier, where the silver came from, who else was paid. Let them see your plan."
She started to speak, and the concert of her voice broke down into confession. She named the courier, the magistrate who took a kiss of coin, a palace maid who hid the pouch: names that flitted through the public mind like flies. Each name was met with a sound: a gasp, a cluck, a cry.
The crowd changed. They no longer wanted only one spectacle; they wanted justice. They wanted to see the Empress held accountable.
"Take her jewels," someone shouted. "Let the taxes be returned! Let her honors be stripped!"
Faron stood, an emperor in his most difficult moment: between his blood and the law. He looked once at his mother and then at the people, whose faces pressed to the rail like hungry birds.
"Melissa Marino," he said quietly, "step down from the dais."
She staggered. Her mouth opened and closed. Around her, women whispered and took up their fans as if to hide the tremor in their hands.
The punishment that followed was detailed, ritual, and public. The Empress was stripped of the smallest trappings of imperial privilege—her ornate fan taken, the gold threads of her robe cut and held up, the embroidered dragons on her sleeve removed. The chamber echoed as jewels were counted out and silver returned. Servants were questioned in front of the crowd. The magistrate Ravi Jimenez, who had accepted the bribe to make the arrest quick and theatrical, was pulled from his seat, brought to the center, and publicly made to read the names of those he had wronged and the sum he received.
"I accepted coin," he said, voice small, "and for that I have been forgiven by the law but not by my conscience."
They made Ravi kneel before merchants whose goods he had taxed unjustly, and he returned coins and documents. People who had cheered for the spectacle now cheered for restitution as the magistrate passed the coins back to the market-keepers. They took his robe, too, and he left the hall shamed.
The Empress was forced to stand at the palace gate for three days. The city had arrived to watch. They spat upon the silk that once wrapped her name. She could not hide from eyes. She was not physically beaten—we were not barbarians—but she was forced to listen to the chants: "No tyrant above the law." Children pointed. Noble ladies turned their backs. Even the senior ministers who had once bowed now spoke in softer voices.
Her punishment was more terrible than any blade to her: the slow dismantling of public trust and honor. She had commanded with fear; now she was commanded by shame. She begged, she pleaded, she tried to bribe back the pouch; it did not help. In the end she was made to return a ledger of how many times she had used court money for private ends. The ledger was burned by the palace clerks to cleanse the stain, but every line of the ledger was read aloud first. Each line was a peal of humiliation heard by the market and by the temple.
I watched it all with my hands clenched. The crowd's faces changed from glee at my disgrace to satisfaction at the truth. Many who had rushed to stone me now looked toward the Empress with angry recognition.
Faron, when he finally turned to me, looked hollowed by the course of justice.
"You wanted me to kill you," he said quietly.
"I did," I admitted. "But I did not expect the court to take so quickly to spectacle."
"You will not die," he promised. Not as a prince would promise a toy, but as a man who had once carried my coffin through the dark.
After the trials and public shaming, the Empress remained in the palace but without the trappings she once wore. The magistrate's career ended that season. Ravi's name was written in the public records as a cautionary tale. The courier and the palace maid were dismissed and given small coins to survive.
"Now what?" David asked me later, as we walked away from the palace, my skirts trailing like a move in a game.
"Now we take the silver back," I said. "Now we repair what can be repaired."
And Faron and I began a slow and strange truce. It began with small things: he stole my night-time tea, I described him shamelessly as a thief, he admitted to hugging my ankles once in the cold, I teased him in the study while he tried to write laws. We did all the usual things lovers do, and all the unusual things the imperial love demanded of us.
"I never told you," he said once, taking my foot in both hands as if it were precious and not like any other. "When you were in that coffin—"
"What?" I said, breath catching.
"I could not breathe for you either," he said simply. "I was helpless with a thing I had done. I thought even the crown could not protect me from the thought of losing you."
"Faron—"
"You owed me a night," he said. "You demanded it like a payment. But the truth is, I chose to pay you with something different."
"And that is?"
"Everything."
We married when the Empress' wrath had cooled by the law and by spectacle. People discussed us in the market and in the tea houses. We left a trail of gossip like a parade. But behind the rumor the palace breathed.
A year later, we had a child—small, loud, suspicious of men in armor. We named him after nothing grand; we named him after the first laugh he made. Our house in the provincial town was loud with small feet. He called me "Mama" in a voice that warped my heart and his father "Da" in a voice that made the general smile.
One afternoon, it happened as it always had: Faron came home, weathered, with a map of new reforms. My child ran to him. He scooped the child up and turned to me, grin bright, and whispered in that old voice, "Tonight?"
I smacked his shoulder and laughed. "You have taken everything from me except my pride," I said.
"Then take that, too," he answered and kissed the arch of my foot as if it were a vow and not a joke.
We lived through the small humiliations and the large designs. People still whispered about my fake death, the coffin, and the jade basin I had so loved. They still joked about the "prop" I used to frighten an emperor. Once, at a garden party, militiamen joked and asked, "Where is that prop now?"
Faron looked at me over his wine. "Is your prop safe?" he teased.
"It is under my pillow," I said, and I meant it—of course I didn't. But I kept one small thing from my many schemes: a scrap of carved wood from the fake coffin, shaped like a child's toy, tucked into my desk.
At night, when the house was still and the small boy snored, Faron would come to my jade basin and say the words his youth had used as a dare: "Where's your tool now, Iris?"
I would shrug, and he would laugh, and then he would kneel and ask again, half in jest, half in hunger.
"You used to say, 'Give me death,'" he said once.
"And you used to say, 'I will carry you,'" I answered.
He kissed the small of my foot, fingers warm like an oath. "I keep my promises."
We both had been changed—by shame, by spectacle, and by the narrow world of a throne. The Empress never regained her old pride. She learned, publicly and painfully, the kind of punishment hunger loves: exposure, the slow public folding of power into rumor. The magistrate's name was a lesson.
At last I kept the jade basin full of hot water and little roses. At night the house smelled of steam and jasmine, and sometimes the child would bang toy soldiers against the table and call them "Da."
And sometimes, when the world was quiet, I would pull out the small scrap of coffin-wood and rub it between my fingers. It shaved my memory into something I could handle.
"Where's my prop?" Faron would ask in the dark, grinning like a boy who still remembered how to chase me.
"In the drawer," I would say. "But sometimes, when I need to be reminded, I take it out and listen—"
The jade basin ticked with hot water like a secret. It was my sound and his and ours alone. The rest of the city could cheer or hiss. I had learned to listen only for the sound made by the basin, the sound of a small foot under a warm hand, and the steady, dangerous promise in the emperor's voice when he said, "I will carry you."
The End
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