Sweet Romance12 min read
I Fell, I Remembered, I Rose — The Two Jade Pendants
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"I can't have you leaving."
"You can go. You'll only find what you deserve."
"I told you—stay."
"I won't."
The water drew me down the way memories draw a string—tight, inevitable. I remember his hand, steady as always, reaching—then shifting away. I remember a voice that used to be safety turning into a judgment. I remember choosing the cliff like pruning a dead branch.
"I won't beg you," I whispered to myself as the cold swallowed me. "Not again."
I woke up in my own courtyard, wet and shivering, with hands that smelled of river mud. I sat up and met my own reflection in a brass basin—pale, angry, small and furious. The world had been rewound to the moment when Isabela first came to our home, a thin thing with a practiced tremble. I had been granted a second run. I had been given the chance to stop the fire that would turn my life to ash.
"June," came a voice as calm as moonlight, and the door eased open.
"Cullen," I said before other names, the one that felt like home. "You're early."
"You slept on the way back," Cullen Wells said, inspecting my wet sleeve as if it were a record. "Did someone push you in?"
"No one pushed me today," I said. "I almost pushed myself."
He frowned, then softened. "Don't say that."
"Then don't let me."
He did not for many years; he knelt and pressed a damp cloth to my ankle like it was the most natural thing in the world. When the court physician Cyril Pena fussed and fitted a soft bandage, I watched Cullen from the corner of my eye and felt a dozen small thorns of gratitude and regret. He had once knelt in the imperial study for days demanding mercy for my father. That memory was a string I would pull tight until it knotted in my favor.
"How did you end up in the water?" Cyril asked, professionally curious.
"A lotus," I said and smiled, because a small lie was sweeter with him listening. "I reached for a lotus."
"You shouldn't reach too far," Cyril said. "An ankle sprain won't keep you from walking, but be careful."
"Thank you," I said. "And thank you for coming."
Cullen's voice had that low reserve that, in another woman's telling, would be indifference. "You should rest. I'll stay." He did not add he would stay even if I pushed him away. He simply stayed.
I let him.
Isabela Rossi glided into our lives like a borrowed melody. Her voice was soft as gauze, and her hands seemed crafted to catch pity. Cedric Johnston—my father, the chancellor—found her in the disaster relief camps. She had been an orphan; he took her in. My mother Gracie He wanted to provide a dowry and a safe household for a girl with nowhere else to go. I had thought her a nuisance, then a rival, then a pin in a wheel.
"I brought some soup for Lady He," Isabela would whisper in the tea room. "I can mend the hem of her robe—"
"—and wash the silver," mother would say with the smile of someone disarmed.
Isabela's gratitude was an armor. She smiled in a way that built a story: look how soft I am; look how wrong the world is for me. People fell for that story because they wanted to. I watched them fall. I gave them enough rope to rope themselves.
"She is too willing," I told Cullen once, in the bamboo grove that smelled like cold tea and old shade.
"Too willing to what?" Cullen asked, and I realized then he did not see her the way I did.
"Too willing to be loved by everyone," I said. "People confuse willingness with worth."
Cullen did not answer, only took my hand and squeezed, which was the same as making a promise.
I set the first stone without thinking it would roll so fast. The annual poetry gathering at the Jade House was a place where young households displayed taste, wit, and a touchstone of who would be a good marriage partner. That year the prize was two matching jade pendants—same heart, meant to be worn by two people who would promise something.
"Will you write for me?" Cullen asked. "We will win both."
"Will you win them for me?" I said, eyes fixed on the carved jade in its glass box.
"I will try."
Isabela arrived in white, like a petal. Cameron Medina—"Prince Qi" from court—arrived with the lordly swagger of a man used to being granted everything. He saw Isabela and his eyes found a new resident.
"Who is she?" Cameron asked, sliding a look like oil.
"An orphan," I said. "My father's ward."
"She's pretty," he said, like it was a discovery instead of a claim.
"She is not yours to take," I said.
"Not when she is so willing to be taken," Cameron said.
I set Isabela next to him at the poem reading. I set Cullen next to me. The contest was bright and loud and full of people who would later gossip. Cullen's poem—quiet, precise—won the day. He handed me one pendant with a look that could have been a court summons, a plea, and a vow all at once.
"One for each of us," he said.
"One for each of us," I repeated and tied the jade to my sash.
The plan I had then was simple. Push Isabela and Cameron together. Give Isabela the venom of attention; let her bite off more than she could chew. Let their carelessness be loud enough for my father and mother to see, and let them be the ones to choose how the story would end—without the court catching fire through our home.
"It will make them leave," I told Cullen. "If she leaves, no one can use her to bring us down later."
"Are you sure?" Cullen's hand was warm around mine. "This is cruel in its way, June."
"It is necessary," I said.
And it was. Isabela, tasting the power of being desired by a prince, learned to use it. She traded the obedient orphan mask for quiet strategies. She dressed more openly. She tolerated the prying eyes and grew bolder. I watched from my balcony as gossip changed faces and grew teeth.
"You asked for this," Cullen said once, voice a rough petal.
"I didn't ask for her to burn the house," I answered. "I asked for her to leave."
When my father was accused—when a forged letter, planted in the study, accused him of treason—I thought I had miscalculated. How could a woman like Isabela get a hand on such a thing? Could she have? She had the skill for small things; she had learned how to place herself where people would find her. Had she found a way to bury a knife? Or had someone else used her as an instrument?
"You must leave," my mother whispered, fingers like small birds. "Cedric has to manage—save what he can."
"They will never take his loyalty away," I told her, and then I lied. I had the spirit, but not the power. I dove off the cliff rather than be paraded like a trophy.
I woke to second chances.
"Don't jump this time," Cullen had said, all the things my memory hoarded.
"I won't," I said. "I will do better."
So I did. I learned the architecture of gossip and the currency of favors. I made a nest of small kindnesses for my parents, feeding them soup, sitting with my mother in the late evenings and listening. I fastened allegiances where I could. I smiled with tooth and plan.
"Tomorrow's banquet," I told my mother. "We will invite friends. We will be seen as solid—stable. We will not be vulnerable."
"You are changed," mother said. "You are... gentler."
"I am careful," I corrected.
I began to move people like chess pieces. I invited Nova Gordon, a sharp-eyed woman with a soldier's blood, to befriend the court ladies. I let Bonnie Castillo—my childhood friend—spread word when an interesting person arrived at the city gates. I sent a small note to Susanne Watts, the Empress, who had ties to my mother's past. The threads tied.
And when Isabela and Cameron began meeting in the backroom of an old temple, I made sure someone else would see. It was a dangerous gambit. But danger is only a word until it is put into play.
"You plan to shame them?" Cullen asked once in the courtyard as lanterns stitched light into the night.
"A trap," I said. "A public truth is different from a rumor. If the truth is ugly, it should be ugly with witnesses."
He hesitated. "This could hurt more than you want."
"It will hurt them," I said. "Not us."
On the day the trap clicked, I wore the jade pendant at my waist like a county. Cullen sat at my side as if he had always been there, and for the first time since the second life began, I felt whole because he was watching.
The scene at Cloud-quiet Temple was a theater. Nova's eyes were keen. Bonnie's chatter had attracted the curious. Among the crowd, Nova let the Empress's retinue step closer unnoticed. The air smelled of incense and something else—anticipation.
"You came," Cameron said, when he found Isabela in the back room. He was still arrogant, but there were cracks now. "You made me wait."
"You made me feel like someone," Isabela breathed. "You said we'd leave together."
"But what about honor?" Nova demanded as she burst in. "What about decency?"
It took one sharp voice to turn whispers into a storm. Nova painted the tableau with plain, clean words: "You come to a holy place and make a scene. You pretend love in shadow. You shame the house that sheltered you."
Isabela's practiced mask splintered. She swallowed and flung ugly accusation back, but the Empress's face in the doorway watched, and her brow knit. The story changed from "Isabela is poor and wronged" to "Isabela led a prince to shame in a temple." That change was a razor.
"This is a public place," Cameron said quickly. "They shouldn't—"
"They shouldn't what?" Nova asked. "Hide their choices behind other people's roofs?"
Then the noise came. Fingers pointed. Voices rose. Someone called for the palace guard. The temple became a stage.
I watched the crowd divide like a tide around a stone. When the Empress stepped forward and asked for an account, Isabela bowed and pretended grief. Cameron, who had been used to masks and to getting what he wanted, looked smaller in the face of so many witnesses.
"We will not stand for it," Susanne Watts said aloud. "A complaint has been made to me. Enough secrets for one day."
"Your Majesty," Cameron began. "This is private—"
"Private in a temple where you behave like a courtesan?" Nova's voice was cold steel. "In front of noble women? You should have better sense."
The Empress's hand was the only one that could tip the scale. She did not hesitate. "Bring the records," she said. "Bring testimony."
Public judgment followed like the fall of scales. I did not need to shout. I had stacked witnesses, ensured men and women of reputation had seen something they would not let pass as rumor. My father, though shadowed by accusation, had not been turned into a martyr for nothing. He had allies who smelled truth like rain.
Court days later, when the Chancellor's name was cleared and the palace called everyone into the great hall, the truth we had crafted was the thing that broke them.
"How dare you?" Isabela cried at the dais, when the Emperor read aloud the report compiled by ministers. "I was a ward—"
"You were a ward who used the wardship as a cloak," the Emperor said. "You used the chancellor's household as a stage for your ambitions."
"That is slander!" Isabela shouted, voice shrill.
"Isabela Rossi," the Emperor said, the same steady voice as a blade, "you were raised here. You were given shelter. In return you plotted to convince a prince to compromise himself within a sacred place, to force favors on a household that trusted you. Do you deny these deeds?"
"No! I—" She flailed. "I did not forge any letters!"
"Your hands are not the only hands," a minister said. "But you stood in the middle, dear woman, and you spread harm."
Cullen leaned forward and reached for my hand. "June, you don't have to—"
"I do," I whispered. "He cannot be allowed to think he escapes."
Cameron, the prince who had thought himself above consequence, had less luck. The Emperor read the secret reports I had arranged to be exposed, the petitions Cameron had written, the men he had gathered, the bribes he thought he hid under songs.
"Prince Cameron," the Emperor said, "you swore to uphold decorum. You conspired. For this you shall lose title and rank. You will go to the western memorial grounds and serve in exile as keeper. Let this be a lesson." The hall breathed.
Isabela's face went from fury to colorless shock to the twitching of someone who knows the floor will fall away. "You cannot!" she screamed. "You have no proof!"
"There is proof," Susanne said. "Witnesses. Testimony. And your own indiscretions caught you."
The crowd reacted as stories often do: some with triumph, others with a stomach twist of pity. The ones who had seen her as an innocent now spat. The ones that had seen her as a challengers nodded—justice.
Isabela's punishment was not bureaucratic alone. I had petitioned for public penance, because rumor had been public, so must the correction be.
"Isabela Rossi," the official intoned, "by imperial decree you shall be stripped of the protections afforded by your station here, and you shall receive public reprimand."
"Reprimand?" Isabela tried to make it into a laugh. It came out as a sob.
The official continued, "In front of those you misled, in the palace square where music once played, you shall be made to acknowledge your deeds and accept imperial censure. You will be bound with a silk rope, symbolizing your ties severed from this household. You will be made to walk through the market, and each citizen may voice their verdict."
It was not a physical cruelty invented for malice; it was an unraveling of status—fame to disgrace. People with power have the most to lose from reputation's fall. The outrage that had once been powder would now light a disclosed fire under them.
Isabela's reaction moved like this: first surprise—she thought like a stage actress she could improvise; then indignation—screaming at the Emperor's "injustice"; then bargaining—pleading for clemency because she had been "ambitious for love"; then panic—the first guards moved to bind the symbolic silk, and the crowd closed in.
"Do you see?" she cried at the faces she had once charmed. "Do you see what you have done to me? I was someone who wanted a life!"
"You were someone who burned houses to make room," someone shouted from the back.
"Shut up," she begged, but the crowd had the momentum of a small storm now. Phones didn't exist in our age—thank heavens—but gossip spread like wildfire.
She was made to stand and accept the censure. The silk rope was tied loosely so as not to physically hurt, but tight enough to humiliate. People watched. Some cried in suddenly merciful regret. Many took out their whispering fans and leaned in for the rest. Children stared.
I wanted to watch but not gloat. When she choked and the crowd's voices crescendoed, a woman in the second row—one of my mother's old servants—spat, "You spit where you fed." It pricked me like cold wind.
Cameron, stripped of rank, turned ashen. He who had once commanded rooms now found doors closed. His reaction moved through stages: bluster—"It is a mistake"—to denial—"You cannot do this"—to rage—"I will reverse this"—to crumbling. The day he was ordered to the tombs was the day his friends deserted him. Men he had used as tools as quickly crossed the hall to distance themselves; courtiers who owed him favors abandoned the bridge under him.
"Please," he begged the Emperor on bended knee in a private plea the day before exile. "Your Majesty, do not cast me away."
"You chose your pleasures," the Emperor replied. "You knew what you risked."
Cameron left the capital on a gray dawn. The gates swallowed him with no fanfare. A few people stopped in the market to spit. The ministers who had once fawned gave him a curt nod at most. A man who had it all was now a lesson.
Isabela's public fall was longer. She was taken through the market; women pointed their fans; men in lacquered coats laughed too loudly. A group of young girls who had once admired her called out, "Thief of honor!" A vendor who had once sold her trinkets spat on the road. She faltered, then cried, then finally collapsed into the arms of guards.
"Do you regret it?" someone shouted.
"My mother—" she started, but the crowd only wanted more.
She was led away, not to a prison, but to waiting exile arrangements. Her name would be tainted. She would be sent to a distant prefecture with a small allowance so she might survive. The punishment was public and private: reputation taken, exile assigned. It was a living death to someone whose life fed on attention.
When the last sound faded of Isabela's boots, I felt a strange emptiness. "I wanted them to stop being danger," I told Cullen in a room smelling of candle tallow. "I didn't want people to be destroyed."
"You did what you had to," Cullen said without the polish of any diplomat. "They hurt you, and you fixed the lever."
"I fixed it at a cost," I said. "People were cruel."
He pulled me close. "But the right people know your truth now."
"Do they?" I asked.
He kissed my forehead. "Yes."
After the fallout, my father's name was cleared by imperial decree; the forged papers were exposed as planted by men who feared his probity. The Emperor restored our household's honor with a gentle formality of public notice.
"June," my mother said, at last, at peace but also raw, "you changed everything."
"I changed what I had to," I replied.
"Did it cost you?" she asked.
"It cost them," I said, and the sentence tasted wrong like a half-formed prayer.
Cullen had never been a man of theatrics, but after the courtyard had returned to its calm he knelt and took both my hands in front of my parents.
"June," he said, voice small and enormous. "We've weathered storms together. Will you let me make you mine—officially, properly?"
"Will you?" I whispered back.
He smiled, something like a boy who had just learned a poem. "Tomorrow I will ask my father to write to the throne. I will go to your home to propose. I promise—no more fire, no more cliff edges, no more masks between us. I will be yours openly."
"I will be his," I heard myself say.
He lifted the second jade pendant from where it lay folded next to him. "One for you," he said. "One for me. Same heart."
"Same heart," I echoed, and when our fingers brushed the twins of carved green stone, I felt that the very world was quieter—like a held breath released.
There are iron laws for second lives. They say the past can be read and changed, but people are stubborn threads. They can twist and knot, and sometimes a person must pull the knot loose by force. I pulled it loose, and the rope frayed under other palms. Some men fell; some women crawled. Some got what they deserved by the letter of the law. Some had to live with what they had done.
When the petitions were finally signed and the Emperor decreed our household's restoration, the jade at my waist clicked softly as if to say, "Enough." I had the pendant and a man who spoke his feelings in small, steady acts rather than grand speeches. That was better than any gilded throne.
"Promise me something," Cullen said, though we had sworn enough already.
"No promises." I shook my head with a small laugh. "I prefer vows I can feel."
"Then feel this," he murmured, closing his hand over mine.
Later, in a private moment, I walked to the balcony where the river had tried to take me. The moon lay in a shallow pool above the willow, and the two jade pendants reflected like a pair of watching eyes. I whispered to the empty air, to the girl I'd been, to the girl who had angered the gods and then begged for mercy.
"I learned the map," I said to no one and to anyone. "I relearned how to build a life."
A ripple passed through the water and carried the whisper away. The pendants clinked.
"June?" Cullen's voice came, soft, from the room.
"Yes," I said.
"Tomorrow," he said, "we will make it real."
"Tomorrow," I agreed, and the jade warmed between my palms, like a small heart answering back.
The End
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