Sweet Romance10 min read
I Never Meant to Be Empress — I Just Wanted to Sell Lipstick
ButterPicks10 views
I never planned to be anyone’s wife, let alone an empress. I planned to sell out my father’s two hundred thousand silver, buy back every drop of stock, and leave the palace richer. That was my plan.
"Three hundred thousand," I told my father that morning.
"Two hundred at most," he answered.
"Fine, deal."
So I took two hundred thousand, piled my cart, and went to the capital. I learned fast how to be obvious without being obvious. I learned how to hide small mirrors and pots of rouge in the hems of petticoats and in the folds of my gown. I learned to laugh when the other girls laughed and to bow when the matrons bowed, and to keep my eyes on the price of a good coin.
"You came to the right stall," I told a girl with a cracked mirror and a furious expression the first night. "One mirror and a discount on a powder tin. You'll look well at court."
"You?" she snapped. "Who are you?"
"Emelia Eriksson," I lied, because Emelia Eriksson sounded finer than the name I was supposed to carry. "I can help."
She bought the mirror. Later I saw the girl with the big face, the one everyone called a cat because of her arrogant stride — Gianna Peng — sneer in the dark and throw the mirror at a smaller seamstress. The small seamstress, the one who always wore blue, Jessica Sanchez, stood stunned.
"She broke my mirror," Jessica whispered when I slid under the curtains to where she hid. "She broke my mirror and laughed."
"I have a mirror," I said, and handed it over for one coin. "You'll need it in these courts."
"One coin?" she blinked. "You're generous."
"It pays to be generous," I told her. "People remember who gives them what."
I learned the palace that way: small trades, small personal favors, a gold coin here and a ribbon there. When I slipped a handful of gold into the palms of an elderly tutor and a supervising steward, they smiled like gulls. When I winked gifts to keepers of doors, they nodded when needed. Business was the language I spoke well.
"What's in that little jar?" a lithe young eunuch asked me the second night I sold at a corridor stall.
"It's just face oil," I told him, playing a merchant. "Some people swear by it."
He cocked his head, curious, like a child. He took my hands in his palm when I reached too far across the stall and called my name as though he had been waiting for somebody.
"What's yours?" he asked.
"Emelia. Emelia Eriksson," I answered.
"Call me Aramis," he said, and smiled.
Aramis looked smaller than his manner suggested. He looked like someone who had learned to hide power. He bought a small stitched tiger I had on the shelf — a child's thing embroidered by my roommate, Journey Young — and he asked me to make another like it.
"For my mother," he said softly. "For memory."
I should have charged more. Instead I bribed a seamstress in the dorm with ten silver, and she stitched it overnight. When Aramis returned three days later, he kissed the tiger like it had a pulse and slipped something luminous into my palm.
"Is this some court treasure?" I asked, wide-eyed at the glow.
He smiled, and the faintness in his look made me sell my better judgment. "I liked the tiger," he said. "I wanted something made by you."
I took the jewel and turned it over in my fingers. It was a pearl carved with such light that it seemed to hold a small moon. I could have kept it. I could have hidden it and built a fortune. But I thought of profit first. I wove a small lie of display and drove the price so high even Gianna Peng gasped.
"Ten thousand," she spat, and slapped a purse into my hands.
I walked away with a coin-laden grin and a heart that flickered like a candle in a draft. I told myself the pearl was a business transaction. I told myself I had earned those coins with a clever tongue.
"You sold the pearl?" Aramis asked when he found me again.
"I took good care of it," I said.
"You could have kept it," he said, the light in his eyes holding a question.
"Kept what? Profit?" I laughed. "I have a shop to run."
He looked at me as if for a long time, and then his hand brushed my chin like someone closing a book. "Are you happy?" he asked softly.
"Happy?" I scoffed. "I sell cosmetics. I wear shirts that don't fit half the time. I eat when I can. Happy is a word nobles keep."
"You are not small," he said suddenly, leaning in. "You are not like the others."
I flushed and smiled, distracted. "You flatter me, Aramis." I had not expected his kindness. I had expected a thin-faced bargain. Instead he was gentle and funny, and when he left, he promised, "Come to my place. I will find you."
I laughed and called after him, "Don't forget to pay!" and then felt ridiculous, because Aramis's face had a quality I could not sell.
Days later, Aramis did not come as Aramis. When I bowed and greeted a man in a borrowed robe, I found his face familiar and other, and the words he used were crisp brass.
"Emelia Eriksson," he said, voice like a bell. He smiled and then said, "You should call me my name."
"Atlas Jorgensen?" I asked because nothing about my life had prepared me to face an emperor.
He only looked at me as if he recognized a script he'd loved once before. "You owe me a hundred thousand," he said lightly.
The world around me tilted. I tried to laugh, tried to bow, tried every small merchant trick. "I only sold a pearl for ten thousand!" I argued. "I—"
He reached out then and pinched my chin. "You think to play the emperor with tricks and bargains? No. Come." He drew a breath that made the air around him thin. "Tonight, sleep at my side."
My knees wanted to fold. I had not bargained for this. I had not planned on men's eyes like winter light.
"I—" I stammered.
"Tonight," he repeated. "Come."
He was cruel and kindly in the same breath. He would smile like the spring and then order the world turned. I had not realized that the soft eunuch who liked my stitched tiger and the imperial voice that ordered me into the palace were the same man. I had certainly not planned to be the one chosen.
"Emelia," my friend Journey hissed after the selection. "You should have run."
"I ran my business," I said, as if that made our docile world steadier. "Besides, who else will buy my stock if I run?"
"You didn't run away out of fear," she said. "You ran away because you liked the coin."
"Clear and true," I answered. "A merchant knows his margins."
When trouble came, it came with teeth.
Gianna Peng — full of herself, a woman who had once pressed a broken mirror into a fight — gathered the girls and stormed the dorm where Journey slept. I arrived to shouting, to fists, and to a wave of hands that wanted to take the breath from me.
"She—" Gianna shrieked. "She is a fox who bothers the emperor!"
"Enough!" someone cried.
I pushed forward, arms clumsy, and wrapped myself around Journey to shield her. My voice was high and brittle: "Stop! This is—"
"—the traitor," Gianna spat. "She sold a pearl. She lied. She took our honor!"
I had expected whispers. I had not expected knives in faces. They were many and I was a single, small merchant woman, and their hatred washed over me.
Then a voice — a single, terrible voice — cut the air. "Stop."
Atlas's walk filled the doorway like a wave. He wore the robe of a man who moved mountains. He strode into the room, and the commoners fell away like driftwood. His eyes scanned the throng, blunt and hungry.
"Who started this?" he asked. The room shrank.
Gianna bowed her head and forced her voice to be a purr. "Your Majesty, she—"
He cut her off. "You will be judged before all."
Her face flushed with startled pride. She had expected whispers, not a summons.
He stepped down from the raised dais and spoke so that everyone could hear.
"Gather," he said. "All of you who raised your hand in violence, come forward."
Hands moved like a sea; the instigator lifted her head to find the emperor no longer smiling.
"You will be punished here, in full view of the court. You will learn what happens when you make a spectacle of the people I protect."
Gianna's smile fell like a curtain. She had never been called out like this. She searched for a favor, a whisper from some friend of higher rank. The friend was absent. Her supporters looked away.
"Take their names," the emperor ordered.
Two stewards moved through the room and read names aloud like a litany. When they named Gianna Peng, the room held its breath.
"Public punishment," Atlas said. "Fifty lashes and removal from service for the ringleader. Twenty lashes and banishment from these precincts for those who followed. Remember their faces. Remember the price of cruelty."
Gianna's expression moved in a rush from mirth to shock. There is a peculiar, small sound a person makes when they believe their fortune will save them and then see the fortune's hands folded into the sky. "Your Majesty—" she started.
"You incited men and women," the emperor said. "You gathered a mob. Violence in the palace is treason."
"Please—" she whimpered. She pressed hands together, the way a woman who expected a patron's ear would.
"Do not beg," he said. "You should have thought of the consequences when you raised a hand."
The officials moved her aside. The punishment occurred in the courtyard at noon, under a sky white with midwinter light. I stood with the other women on the fringes, hands clenched into small fists. Around me were dozens of palace servants, footmen who had watched the markets and the quarrels, and nearby, some merchants who sold in the outer markets and had come in curious. The courtyard was full enough to be a town square.
They tied her to a wooden post and the wood smelled old and final. The sound of the lash was paper and thunder. Gianna's face first held the mask of arrogance. Then, when the first strokes landed, blood and shock, she gasped and the arrogant mask splintered.
"Oh!" she cried, and the noise was not honeyed but raw. She tried to look up and find the emperor's face, to bargain, to rally her allies. Instead she found my face — small, angry, and steady.
"Look at me," I said, though I was not sure why. "You called me a thief."
Her mouth opened to deny, to spit curses the way she had in the dorms. She could only make the sound of someone losing a comfortable faith.
Around us people murmured. Some wept. Some took out small scraps of paper and folded them into triangles as gossip. A few women made quick notes with quills on the sidelines. A young maid snapped a picture on a curious little lens they had brought — a modern thing tucked in my head like a fantasy — but the effect was the same: the moment would be repeated by memory.
Gianna's eyes swung from me to Atlas. "You do this!" she shrieked, though the lash had taken a rhythm from her joints. "You— I only—"
The pity in the crowd hardened into scorn. "She deserved it," someone whispered. "She taught herself to be cruel."
"Is this what you wanted?" a steward asked her.
She tried to plead. "It was just business. She bought… She gave me the pearl to show—"
"Show?" the steward barked. "Did she give you the right to strike? Did she approve violence?"
"No!" she wailed. The lashes kept time.
I watched her collapse, then try to clap mouth and nose as if the sound of her own suffering would choke her. I watched the emperor's face remain a stone, then soften in a way I could not name.
"One more," he ordered finally.
The final lashes came. Gianna's voice broke into a cry like a child being pulled from a swing. She tried to kneel, to pray, to charm. The crowd swallowed her pride like a tide.
When the lashings ended, they cut her ropes and shoved her toward the gate. She wobbed like some storm-blown reed. Her supporters were gone, banished and heartbeat-dazed. They would find lodgings in a town of their own making, but their names would be known now. Her cheek had a red seam and her pride a permanent bruise.
"Let it be a lesson," Atlas said, voice soft enough that only those near could hear. "We protect those in our care."
The crowd breathed out as one and dispersed, the taste of victory mixed with the sharp tang of cruelty witnessed. Some clapped. Others murmured about mercy. Gianna disappeared through the gate like a shadow carrying a jagged wound.
That day Gianna's public fall made something in the palace change. The girls who had once circled me like knives now pretended small kindnesses; some avoided me altogether. The emperor's protection became a visible thing I wore. People watched me differently.
"Did you see?" Journey whispered when we were alone. "You are the one he protects."
"I sold a pearl," I said. "Don't make it sound like virtue."
"Still," she insisted, "you are safer."
"Safe?" I laughed, but the laugh died inside. "Safe is a word a rich woman keeps."
Atlas — who had first been Aramis and then the man who claimed me — began to be around me more. He displayed small indignations at other men's greed and watched me test the markets and the waxes like a man who had learned to like a certain ruinous honesty. He was unpredictable: one moment a sovereign; the next a boy who liked embroidered tigers.
"You are not a merchant," he said once, standing at my stall while I sold lipsticks to a lady with a severe bun. "You are not meant to be small."
"I'm meant to make coin." I sliced a ribbon and handed her a small pot of rouge. "Coin keeps me. Coin keeps my family fed."
"Then let me be your patron," he said, and dropped a bag of coin at my feet.
"No," I said automatically. "I will not be bought."
"You already are," he said softly.
I was sold, in a sense — not the pearl, not the merchandise, but by the way his regard held me. By the way he smoothed my hair and called me "my love" to people who had never known me. He made promises in words and gestures. He called me his future in the hush of corridors and promised ten thousand bright things: an office, a title, a sitting where I would not have to hide my wares in sleeves.
I did not say I wanted to be empress. I said I wanted to be free to sell my stock and get my capital back. But Atlas wanted me in a different ledger. He wanted me to be known and above and loved.
"Will you be my wife?" he asked the day the court decided to show its teeth over me. He asked it like one asks a merchant to accept a gift.
I laughed once and choked. "I never meant to be an empress," I said.
"Do you?" Atlas's face was quiet as ground before winter. "Because I plan to make you one."
When your life is pulled across a currency you never meant to trade in, you have to keep your eyes open. I kept them open. I kept my ledger and my stitches. I kept Journey and the small quiet people who wrapped the world for me.
When the court fought and the ministers debated whether a merchant's daughter could be made a queen, I could not help but watch the numbers ledger in my head. I thought of the pearl I had sold. I thought of the ten thousand I had swallowed with silk and guilt.
I would grow into the office, or the office would swallow me. I would make bargains I never intended. I would learn that love could be counted in ways money never taught.
"Stay," Atlas said the night before the ceremony, when the palace had lit every lantern and the corridors sang like strings.
"Not forever," I whispered.
He laughed. "Forever can be persuasive."
I touched the silk of his sleeve and felt the hum of a different life: one with a name and a crown, and a hundred rooms that needed perfume.
That night, with the moon stitched into the sky, I lay awake and counted the coins I had made, the pearls I had sold, and the steps I had taken. I had come to sell a mirror and had found a throne.
I did not feel that I'd become a woman who wished for crowns. I felt like someone who had learned, with every small transaction, what it meant to be seen. Atlas saw me; the palace punished those who hurt me. I had not planned any of it. But the ledger kept filling, and every line was a choice.
When the court finally read the decree naming me empress, with the sound of paper and the hush of power, I stood beside Atlas and felt the weight of gold and of gold's gaze. I had been a merchant, and a liar, and a woman of quick hands. I had been sold and I had sold.
"Do you regret it?" Aramis — Atlas — asked in my ear, and his breath smelled of lanolin and of the courtyards. He had already given the world away for me more than once.
"Sometimes," I said. "But I still keep the ledger."
He smiled. "Keep it."
That was my story: a girl who went into the capital to trade and came out with red ribbons on her sleeves and a crown hovering like a question above her head. I had learned how to bargain, and how to forgive myself, and how to accept the strange currency of being loved.
The End
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