Sweet Romance14 min read
I Raised a Prince Into a Farmer — Then He Took Me Back to the Palace
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I have never been good at anything useful.
"I can't even fry an egg properly," I told myself the first night I found him leaning on the straw in our yard, eyes closed, blood dry on his forehead.
"You shouldn't call yourself useless," he said when he woke, voice low and oddly formal even while barefoot and smelling of manure. "Help me sit up."
"Hugo—" I had no right to use any name like that. Names leaked memories. I had read a stupid old novel once and then, somehow, I slipped into its seams. I was supposed to be a little teacher healer, a clever hand. Instead I was Bella Dixon, a hopeless city graduate with a talent for ordering food and killing houseplants. Now I had a living, breathing prince on my floor who kept calling me "Jue"—a nickname I didn't like—and a pile of reasons to pretend I was the elderly sage who raised him.
"Don't call me anything," he muttered, rubbing the back of his head. "Just—cook something. I'm starving."
So I did what I did best in that life: I pushed past my shame and learned to boil, to season, to treat meat like a treasure. He watched like a child discovering the sun.
"Come on, Jue," he said one day, cradling a woven basket he'd made himself, "Come eat meat."
"I told you—" I tapped ash off my sleeve, "—call me Bella, not Jue."
He shrugged and laughed, the laugh of a man who could command an army and yet preferred to tease. "No. Jue fits. You'll get used to it."
He fixed me breakfast every dawn once he could sit straight and he fixed fences, plowed a strip of land into a modest vegetable patch, and learned how to braid baskets with fingers that had once handled banners and seals. At night he would sit by the door and hum like someone remembering a lullaby.
"You're good at this," I told him when he prodded at the tomatoes. "You were a prince, right? It's weird learning how to plant carrots when you used to plant flags."
He looked at me, serious for the first time, and said, "I don't need flags. I need a plate of food."
That sentence was one of the first small heartbeats: he broke his own rule for me, choosing the small, honest labor over the grandeur he might have been born to. It felt like being chosen to be ordinary with him.
"You always say you're protecting me," I told him later as we sat under a low eave while rain stitched itself to the night. "But you can't lift a wooden gate and not sprain something. You should let me do things sometimes."
He half-smiled then, and the way his thumb brushed my knuckle wasn't more than a brush—yet I felt it. "No," he said softly. "I like taking care of you."
That was the second heart-beat: the tiny theft of a touch that said more than words, the way he put a coat around me when the wind came through though he had less cloth than I did.
The day the storm came, I knew, like a page shifting in a book I'd memorized, something was meant to happen. "It's a thunderstorm," I said, trying to sound casual. "Stay here."
"It's fine," he said, and went out anyway.
He slipped on the mud and hit his head on the pigpen board hard enough to forget. When I dragged him back under the eave he lay quiet, and the first sound he made when he came to was a single, imperial word: "Mother."
"Mother?" I whispered. The voice belonged to a prince, a memory worn into bone. For a moment, I thought the book had fixed itself and I'd return to my small, useless life. The second heart-beat came later, in flashes: when he looked at me with that remembered heat and kissed my forehead the way one might bless an altar.
"Morning," he said the next day as if nothing had happened. "I have to go to the city."
"Wait," I said before I could stop myself. "Go where? To—"
He smiled and took my hand. His fingers were still calloused from work, starchy with soil. "To find who I was. But I will come back. I promise I will come back before harvest."
"Promise?" I said. "Hugo, you're not allowed to be dramatic about promises."
He brushed thumb over my wrist and left a warmth. "Bella, if I don't come back, I'll owe you a life of red-braised pork."
That is not how princes are supposed to talk. It made my chest curl.
We set off for the city like two wandering fools: him in patched clothes that couldn't hide a posture that once belonged in court, and me with the nerve to hunt for the one woman's family who could swing open palace doors. He wanted favors, I wanted security; the city offered neither cheap.
We walked four months. On the road he learned to bargain for better cakes, and I learned how silly my city vocabulary sounded against the wind. We arrived ragged; we made ourselves small and clever.
When I first saw the cloud family's residence—the Cloud Manor, all lacquered eaves and sun-darkened steps—I understood for the stupid, childish beat of my heart: I had read this, and I had somehow become not just the teacher but the girl the book worshipped. I had the girl's backmark that would make them call me their lost daughter.
They did not hesitate. "She is my girl," the woman who held me to her chest said, fingers as cool as carved jade as she touched the butterfly-shaped mark on my shoulder.
"It's been ten years," her voice shook. "Our daughter."
I let them carry me into warm rooms full of silk and silver, and when the family cried and smiled and spoke my childhood name, I swallowed a thousand guilty thrills. Cloud Manor was the sort of palace of love in the book, all helpful servants and a brother with huge shoulders.
That brother—my new brother—was Fox Bryant. "Sister," he said at table, shoving a pastry into my hand, "do you know how to eat like a proper lady?"
"I know how to eat," I said honestly, and watched him unscramble my life by offering food.
Fox had a thundering laugh and light in his eyes for the first time since returning home. "Hugo is your betrothed, isn't he?"
I choked on a bite. "He—what? No—" I looked across the room and found him standing in the doorway, eyebrows arched. He had come with us; he had been granted the dubious title of cousin so as not to be endangered.
"You're telling them the truth?" Fox asked when we were alone, voice low. "You're really the missing girl?"
"I am cosplaying missing," I said. "But look—"
"Look at the meat on your face," he said, and laughed until I slapped him.
My position at Cloud Manor was odd, surreal: everyone treated me like a rescued treasure; I couldn't shake the sensation that I was a thief, but my stomach liked the pastry, so I grew brazen. I learned the shorthand of household politics: how to reply to a bow, how to accept a hand with a little nod. I learned to hide the fact I knew nothing of palace strategy under polite smiles and an endless appetite for red-braised pork.
"He's come back as our cousin for now," Fox told me one moonless evening, sitting across from me with a small silk box in his hands. "Don't worry. We'll keep him safe."
"When will he stop pretending?" I asked. "Hugo is louder than a sleeping ox when he wants to be."
"He'll do whatever he must," Fox said, eyes narrowing. "And we'll do whatever we must, too."
At Cloud Manor I also met Justine Copeland—the girl who lived up to the book's reputation as venom. She wore pale silk and a smile that cut. "So this is the lost girl," she said the first time we met, voice honey and grit. "Welcome home."
"Thank you," I said carefully.
"You shouldn't take everything so literally, you know," she whispered once, leaning so close that her pearl comb brushed my ear. "This place is a stage. If you want to stay, you will learn how to play the part."
Her words crawled under my skin.
I will not pretend that I was brave. I was terrified. I also, embarrassingly, was very much in love with a ridiculous man who still made me laugh when he covered my face with a floury apron and called it a mask.
"Promise me one thing," he said in private as we sat on the Palace stairs that would later be called very dangerous. "When I'm away, do not behave like a noble because it's boring. Be your terrible, useful self."
"Fine." I punched his shoulder. "Promise you won't die doing heroic prince things."
He cupped my hand and whispered, "I won't. I'll be back to eat red-braised pork."
There were three heartbeats like that: his childish promise to trade pomp for meat; the moment he slipped his sleeve over my shoulders on a wet night when I shivered; and the day he took the small candy I had kept from a street vendor and shared it with me like a secret only we held.
Then the palace burned with rumors: the old emperor was sick. Men we trusted as friends turned into lists of possible traitors. Horses thundered. A march came at the gates. Fox's dark face said something unsaid and then left to raise troops. The world sharpened into a single knife-edge.
"Go to the back rooms," the housekeeper Heidi Persson whispered, clutching an ivory statue. "Lock the doors. Make no noise."
I hid, heart in my mouth. Screams, then the thunder of armored men. A rough knock, then a voice I'd seen in a dream: "In the name of order, come with me."
I thought of every plan I had not prepared. I thought of Hugo, who would be outside somewhere, fingers tight on a sword he had never known how to hold properly. I thought of Fox, who had always looked too young for a battlefield.
A young man, face streaked with dirt and blood, bowed at our threshold. "I am Adrian Eriksson," he announced, steady, clean voice. "I come with sealed orders of safe passage. Follow me."
"He is a stranger!" Heidi hissed. "How can we—"
"Adrian," I said without thinking. "We accept."
Why I said that? Because he'd said "safe passage" the way my book remembered and because there are some men whose voice is like someone placing a helpful hand over a sink and mopping up a mess. He led us away, and I told myself I'd keep my mouth shut and my head low.
When we reached the courtyard, the sky was still a bruise. Soldiers filed by like lost leaves. I saw Hugo then, caught between men with creased brows, and when our eyes met he tried to smile.
"You're alive," I said, running to him.
"You are loud," he muttered, and then he hugged me so hard I could hear the cracks of bone and breath. "Don't you ever let me go."
"I won't," I answered.
The court stank of fear, and then—then came the betrayal. News that the second prince had taken advantage of the confusion to seize power. The name stuck like a splinter: he had murdered men we had called honorable. He had hidden knives beneath his lapel.
"Traitor," someone said in the hall, and the word passed from mouth to mouth.
Hugo went out with soldiers to clear the palace. He did not wear armor, because he never had the patience to find suitable sizes. He fought like someone who learned how to mend a fence with a blade. When the second prince's standard fell, it was Hugo's hand—not the glove of a general—that pulled it down.
"He killed my father," the dying second prince spat when they dragged him before the assembled people. "He is a usurper—"
I remember the crowd when the news came: they grew into a single living thing, a ripple of faces that were first stunned, then hot, then loud. People pushed forward to see. "Tell the truth!" they cried. "Why did you betray us?"
The second prince's eyes slid to me then, as if the shape of betrayal had a female face. I felt something cold and sour in my stomach—remorse? Fear? The thrill words used to give me. He had been a villain in my book and now he was a man with a moustache, sweating in the same light as everyone else.
We brought him into the central square at dawn. The square was full: servants, family, soldiers, and traders who had not slept. "Bring justice to the people!" someone shouted.
This is where I will not be short. The punishment had to be public. It had to be complete.
He stood on a low platform in the center. The crowd edged closer; many had sharp things in their hands—pitchforks used for fields, but in the city's confusion repurposed into signs of judgement. Adrian Eriksson stepped forward and read aloud the charges: treason, conspiracy with foreign hands, the murder of innocent officers, and the bribery of court officials. He laid out documents, letters, and handwriting that matched the prince's seal.
The prince began in the old way: eyes blazing, voice rising. "They're liars! I did nothing—"
"Why did you sign these orders?" Adrian asked, raising a page. "Why did you send men to ambush the palace guard in the northern corridor?"
The prince faltered, his face flushing scarlet. "I—it's a lie. I was framed. I—"
"By whom?" someone cried.
"Too many questions," Fox growled from the side, his voice thin with fury. "He has answers."
They produced witnesses: a disgraced secretary who had been bought, a stableboy who had heard secret plans, a guard who had watched the prince's men move at night like thieves. One by one, they told of payments made secretly, of words whispered with enemies, of a letter in which the prince joked about the emperor's death.
The prince's face sagged as if the light itself were undoing him. From pride to panic—his expression changed in breaths. At first he barked denials; then he accused those who stood against him of envy, of making stories. "You will see," he spat. "You will regret—"
By midday the crowd had a new hunger: to watch the fall. They murmured and snapped pictures on simple glass devices some traders had—an oddness in a time like ours. I saw faces I had never met, muddy and ordinary, lean in like they could pin his lies with their eyes.
"You wanted power," I said aloud, my voice bold enough to surprise me. "You took lives for it."
He turned to me like a caged animal. "Who are you?" he demanded.
"The one you thought you could use to get higher," I said. "The one you used to carve out a plan."
At that moment, someone in the crowd—one of his former courtiers, hair ragged and rage wild—stepped forward with a small satchel of coins that had been offered for silence. He flung it down onto the platform like a sinner tossing himself at mercy.
"Is this not what you were paid?" the courtier said. "You hid the coins like a dog."
The prince's face crumpled. There was a second of scrambling—then denial, then the tremor of breaking. He clutched at false friends who stepped away. His voice wound into smaller sounds: hedging, pleading, blaming. "I didn't mean—"
"Meaning doesn't matter," Adrian said. "You've betrayed the realm."
The crowd began to change. Shock had already cemented into anger; anger into loathing. People spat. The vendors who had watched the palace burn came forward and slapped his face with their open palms. A woman I recognized from the market—who had lost a brother that night—pointed and hissed, "You killed my brother!" Her face was streaked with soot and determination.
The prince collapsed into denial and then into raw, wet begging. "Please—my mother—my children—"
There was silence. I watched his hands shake as he reached for mercy. The crowd had expected theatrics, a dramatic fall, but what they witnessed was smaller and more human: the once-proud man's face crumbling into quiet, pitiful pleas.
"Let him answer the charges," a judge declared. "Let the court do its business."
The court did its business: stripped symbols, banners torn from his lapel to be trampled by those who'd bled for the emperor. He was humiliated publicly, forced to confess every secret in front of the marketplace: how he'd sent men to sabotage the palace, how he'd met with merchants to buy soldiers, how he'd planned to brand the emperor as weak and take the throne. The assembly hissed, hissed louder, and then some clapped—cruel applause for a man no longer on his feet.
"Do you repent?" Adrian asked quietly as they took him away.
The prince could only choke. "I—yes. I—"
But repentance in a crowd is a small thing. The final act was humiliation: he was paraded through the streets in plain clothes, with the banners of his false authority tied about his shoulders like laundry, and then the town crier read the names of those he'd betrayed. Women I had met at the market spit at him. Men who had once bowed now spat at his boots.
The point of public punishment is not only retribution; it is the public reckonings we need to feel safe again. I watched strangers I would never meet applaud the small justice of a man humiliated for crimes that had been whispered for too long. He begged, he screamed, he tried every stage of denial and then collapse: from angry accusations to shocked silence, then to pleading and to bargaining. People recorded him on their devices; they took notes and photos. "Look," one boy said, eyes wide. "The mighty are meat like us."
Justine Copeland's punishment followed a different script. She was less a ruler and more a manipulator—poison in lace. We brought her before the house of Cloud, where family and servants had gathered. "Why did you try to ruin us?" Fox demanded, words like knives.
"You are a simple country girl," she said, smiling her old smile. "You have no idea how things work."
"Is that so?" I said. "Then why did you bribe my supposed allies? Why did you spread letters insinuating the Cloud heir had turned traitor?"
Her mask fell for a second. "I wanted what my station deserved."
We brought evidence—letters she'd written accusing me of theft, notes she had delivered to a general calling for my disgrace, receipts. Her expression moved from poise to haughty denial.
"You're a liar," she hissed. "You have no proof."
"I have your ink," Fox said, producing a writing sample and a note he said he'd found hidden. "And I have those who took your money."
She scoffed, rage flushing her face like rouge. "You think this is enough?"
"He thought it was enough to pay men to ruin our name," I said. "Do you see the faces? Do you see how a trick of your pen can try to kill a life?"
Her reaction was a spiral: first disbelief, then fury, then frantic attempts to weasel out of blame, then the last stage—collapse into public shame. Women in the courtyard called her bold and cold; men who had once laughed at her retorts turned away when asked to defend her. She begged, then threatened; she tried to pretend illness, to throw herself into dramatics. The crowd grew louder. The house staff who she'd scorned for years took their chance: they stepped forward with stories—how she'd ruined another girl for the sake of a dress, how she'd laughed when someone fainted. They had been waiting.
Her collapse was quieter than the prince’s—no dramatic screams, just a hollowing out as the house turned on her. "You can't be allowed to stay," Fox said. "You will leave this house and never return."
"You're being cruel," she cried.
"No," I said. "We're being honest."
A public dismissal was her punishment: to be forced out of the social circles she'd tried to buy, to have her letters read aloud on the manor steps, to be watched and judged by the people she'd used. She tried to bargain with gifts and with her wiles. The crowd hissed and moved back.
She left under the weight of the stare. Her final reaction was incredulity: she had expected a duel of whispers and instead was met with the slow, social erosion of power. She begged Mercy from Fox. Fox only said, "Leave," and the house shut the door.
The lessons were not violent, not gory. They were public, loud, and meant to revolve power back to those it belonged to. The villains' faces changed as they realized they were no longer obeyed: first shocked, then angry to the point of trembling, then pleading, finally collapsing into the void of their own exposure. People who had once praised them now turned their backs.
After the punishment, life rebalanced. The city breathed again as if it had been holding its breath. Hugo came to me with a small, ridiculous grin.
"You were magnificent," he said, voice woolly with pride. "I have never seen you command a square."
"You are exaggerating," I told him. "You always exaggerate. Also—"
"Also?" He leaned close, and his breath warmed my face. "Also what?"
"Give me that muffin," I said.
He laughed and handed it over. Then he took my hand and brought it to his mouth like a schoolboy, pressed a crumb into my palm, and put his head on my shoulder for a beat that belonged only to us. That was the third heart-beat: the private, small intimacy amid public thunder—him hidden, honest, comfortable enough to be silly.
He was proclaimed back in his place slowly. The crown did not fall into any hungry hands without the people's voice now. The court had been cleared of poisonous men. The second prince's headlong ambition had burned hotter than his ability to hide. Justine Copeland had been stripped of pretenses and exiled. They had been punished in the sight of many. The public had seen a reckoning.
"Why did you come back?" I asked Hugo one night when we walked the quiet palace halls that smelled like sage and smoke.
"I came because you are here," he said simply. "Because even when people cheered me as a prince, I wanted to come home to red-braised pork and the girl who calls me Hugo."
"Is that all?" I teased.
He stopped and looked straight into my eyes, pressing his forehead to mine. "Isn't that enough?"
It was. It was enough that he had chosen small things over great things, had traded crown for the sound of my laugh. He kept his hands busy with repairing whatever needed mending; his laughter returned to the service of our silly life. He still argued about the right thickness for pig belly to make red-braised pork, and he still promised to make me honey-candied fruit like his mother used to. He kept his word—he never missed harvest.
Years later, when the story was told around kitchens and market stalls, people would still say, "She raised him into a farmer first; he raised her into someone brave after." I would wince at the exaggeration and then tuck my apron and smile.
When he proposed, he did it in the dumbest, sweetest way. "Bella," he said, kneeling as if he had practiced in the mud. "Will you marry me?"
I wanted fireworks and pens and a speech about vows, but what I got was a plain ring and a promise to cook for each other forever.
"I will," I said. "But only if you promise one more thing."
"Anything."
"When we argue, the loser has to make the other's favorite dish."
He laughed. "I accept those terms."
The final scene that stuck in my chest—my last memory in this chapter—was simple: in the kitchen where a thousand small fights were solved, he pulled a rag off his sleeve and wiped the table until the wood shone like a mirror. He looked at the bowl of red-braised pork and then at me, and said, "Eat."
I took the spoon and tasted home.
The End
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