Revenge24 min read
I woke married, with two years stolen
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I woke up in a bridal chamber and could not remember two whole years.
"You're awake," my maid said, voice trembling. "Master Elliott asked me to bring your tea."
I sat very still, the silk at my wrists cold and unfamiliar. "What day is it?" I asked, my voice small.
"Fifteenth day of the tenth month, madam," she whispered. "You were wed two weeks ago."
Two weeks ago? I had sleep in a storm and a jolt—three days ago I thought I had woken, but this said two years. I clutched the screen and tried to arrange the pieces in my head. The pieces would not fit.
"Eliott—Elliott Cline?" I tried the name that had been offered to me by the server. "Who is Elliott?"
"Elliott? Your husband," the maid said, stunned. "The master of Cline Hall."
The room blurred. I had known other lives: a childhood behind high lattice, a second brother who taught me songs and grace, a childhood joke in which I had called a small, sullen prince "Little Lucky Brother." I had loved Stefan Soares since I was fifteen. My bones remembered his coldness the way a set bone remembers a cast.
"I... I need clothes," I said. "Bring me my things."
They brought me new gold-threaded robes and a mirror. For a breath I did not recognize the face I saw: seventeen, as they said—though my mind insisted I should be fifteen—and eyes that did not match my recollection of myself. There were marks of someone else in the way the household bowed to me and called me "Madam." In the palm of my drawer lay a small carved hairpin—white jade, a peony carved so fine the petals caught light.
"That was a gift," the maid said. "From His Highness when he returned."
I held the hairpin and felt its weight, and a memory that ought to be mine—the feel of a warm hand on mine, a promise of a return—broke like fragile glass. It was a memory, but from where?
"Elliott, please," I said aloud, more steady than I felt. "Where—"
Footsteps crossed the hall like a second heartbeat. "My daughter looks pale," my father had said earlier; he had sent the household to fetch the physician. "Eat this, it is a tonic for one who has lost sleep."
"I will not take a potion!" My voice was sharper than I intended. "I will not be told I am mad."
"Miss, please," the maid pleaded. "You frightened us. You ran back to the manor in the middle of night. The master invited you to return, all is for the best."
They treated my memory loss like a minor fever. They were wrong. The yawning zero in my past felt like a theft.
When Elliott entered, he moved like a steady line down a page: tall, clean, mannered. He bowed and said, "Are you well?"
"Who are you?" I blurted, the question tasting like acid. "What day is it?"
"Elliott," he corrected gently, with a kind look that failed to reach my eyes: "Your husband, Elizabeth. You married me three days ago."
The room froze. "Three days? But—"
"You have not eaten," he said. "Come. Sit. Father worries."
My father had already asked for a royal physician. "You must take the medicine," he said when I told him my story—two missing years, a storm, a fall. "If you do not, people will say you are unwell."
"What if I do not want to be fixed?" I asked. "What if the person who lived in my skin for two years did things I did not do?"
That night the physician wrote a subtle prescription and called it 'prevention against loss of reason.' The bitter draught burned my throat; my mouth tasted of iron and fear. I swallowed it because the house needed peace more than I needed truth.
Outside, the capital thrummed. My family told me gently that in the two missing years my life had been like a river turned bright: our little shop had grown and shone, my father had been proud, my brothers advanced, and I—"You rejected the imperial match," my maid told me, "and then accepted a good household. You did marvelous things."
"Rejected a match?" I echoed. The prince—my prince—had once told me to study embroidery and to wait. He had been far away later, off to war perhaps; how could I have refused a royal edict? Yet my father spoke of a scandal, a sealed decree, a refusal that had ruined a face and opened another door. I could only think of Stefan Soares.
"Soares," I said the name like a pin prick. "Where is Stefan?"
Elliott's face changed for a second—a small shutter of discomfort. "He passed through the city," he said. "He left some days ago."
"Left because of me," I said. "I asked for a charm at the Blue Cloud Temple. He left for the front. He—"
"You are frightened," Elliott said softly. "Come back with me to my house. Stay. Let us put something right."
He was kind in the way a scaled ladder is kind: reliable, useful, made to carry weight. I let myself be led.
On the street we passed my old shop, the lacquered sign bright: "Griffin & Co. Rouges." I had worked at that counter? I had made choices and dismissed them? I wanted the two years back like a child wanting a missing toy. The city smelled like incense and river water when we reached the silver shop beside the gilded gate.
"It is a fine sign," I heard Elliott say. "The calligraphy—she liked this place."
"She?" I asked. "Who is 'she'?"
Elliott looked at me with that same steadiness. "You. I used to watch you come here when the family still lived simple. You always stood a little to one side, watching. You are not cruel. You are not vain."
His words were gentle in the hollow of me. They stitched small seams of comfort. Yet when a black-lacquered carriage halted beside us and a tall figure stepped down—Stefan Soares in dark robes—my lungs turned to winter.
I felt my hands go clammy against the silk of my sleeve. For three years I had loved him in a private way: a bright, aching like a secret kept in a throat. When he glanced at me, the look was cold and fast—an inspection rather than a greeting. Inside me something tightened.
"Elizabeth," Stefan said, voice as thin as frost. "You have returned."
"Stefan," I tried to let warmth into the name. He did not return it. He saw the hairpin at my throat and did not hide his disdain.
"What is that?" His voice sounded flat. "Who gave you that?"
"It was given—" I began.
He walked over and, unexpectedly, grabbed my wrist. "Return it," he said. "You should know its place."
"That is mine," I protested, though my voice trembled. "You gave it—"
He snapped the pin from my hair and it fell and shattered on the floor. White jade splintered into bright slivers. The sound of the crack entered me like a final bell.
"You are reckless," he said. "You wear it like a bauble, as if you have not known courtesy. Give me what you do not own and keep what remains."
I knelt on the floor and gathered broken fragments of stone. Each splinter seemed to take a memory with it. The pain was sudden and clean. People watched us from the street as if this were a performance.
"Was he always so cruel?" I asked myself silently. The Stefan I remembered had cried once, a hot tear that had landed on my hand. The Stefan here looked like a man whose tenderness was welded with armor.
Elliott's hand settled on my shoulder like a promise. "Come," he murmured, "we go. My family waits; they will receive you."
The balance of my world had shifted. I wanted Stefan back; I wanted my old selfish young love. But I also thought about a different future: a slow building of warmth, not a fire-blaze of suddenened passion. Elliot's face had shown small kindnesses—a silk dress chosen for me in a market, the way he had stood to fetch my medicine, the calm note he used when asking my preference.
"Will you come with me to the temple?" Elliott asked later in our bed-chamber, after a long day of being pulled this way and that.
"No," I said. "I saw the Blue Cloud Temple. I fell there from a cart in the rain. I woke up in a house that was not my own. I lost two years. I am afraid a part of my life belonged to another."
Elliott's hand was patient. "If your memories come back, if your heart chooses Stefan—"
"Then I will be what I must," I said. "But until then, I need time to be myself."
That night, held by a man who sometimes smelled of paper and ink and sometimes of something older and gentler, I vowed to try. Not to pretend. Not to forget. To learn and to watch my own self as if through glass.
Days folded into each other. I learned small things about being a spouse: where Elliott kept the ledger, the way he liked to read the morning medal list, the half-closed manner he reserved for matters of pride. I found a small wooden plaque he kept in his pocket, etched full of prayers and wrapped in linen. He pressed it into my hand and told me it would protect me. The gesture unspooled in me a tiny, impossible cord.
"Do you want to go to your family?" he asked one afternoon, reading me like a letter by the firelight.
"I'm going tonight," I said. "I need to ask them why they did not believe me."
That night my second brother, Gage Deleon, arrived like wind and laughter. He had been away—"cloud-roaming" as he called it—with a master. He looked battered in a tender way: a man who had learned the world was sharp and worthless and beautiful. He hugged me and cried.
"You're back," he said simply, with the rawness of joy.
"Why didn't you tell father? Why didn't you stop them?" I demanded, pressing the hurt into him.
"I did what I could," Gage said slowly. "I tried a crowd of people. I searched. I asked priests. I told Father. It was never easy."
"You left me," I accused, but the words came out small and scared. "You left me alone when my years were stolen."
He flinched. "I thought you'd be safer if I did not call attention. I thought—"
"You thought wrong," I snapped. Then I saw his eyes go wet. "Forgive me. I am frightened. Everything I knew is cracked."
Gage held my hands and said a thing I did not expect: "Come with me. Come home. Let me take you away from here a while."
I thought of the house where I grew up, where my father walked bowed in the evening and my three brothers had made a ring around my childhood. I thought of Lucas Andrews, my eldest, who had become a general during my absence, and of Blas Simon, the wild younger brother who always wore trouble like a scarf. I thought: perhaps a little distance would help.
But before we left, a threat fell like a stone into our path. I was out in the street with two servants when a shadow seized our carriage; a man's hand covered my mouth and the smell of iron filled the carriage.
"Don't scream," a voice said low and desperate. "Do as I say and I will let you go."
I recognized the voice by its cadence, not by tone: Stefan. He stood at the carriage door, a cloak thrown across one shoulder, blood dark beneath its folds. "Don't move," he said. The carriage driver staggered, and the man outside yelled that the palace had been attacked by assassins from the King of Liang's house.
My breath hitched. "You?" I said. "You—are wounded."
"Don't make a fuss," Stefan hissed. "If you draw attention we both die. Obey."
I began to panic, but his shoulder pressed against me and a hot hand—clumsy and earnest—searched for a place to be bandaged. He bared a wound and I felt how raw the human body could be. He coughed blood into a handkerchief and I was a child again, wanting only to make the pain stop.
"Who are your friends?" he demanded fiercely, past the point of politeness. "Where is their support? Who is watching them tonight?"
"Father has guards," I answered. "My family—my brothers."
He closed his eyes briefly. "Good. You are to hide with your family for now. They will send men to fetch you. If you show yourself, they will find me. If they see me with you, it ruins me."
He pulled away and, almost tenderly, smoothed my hair, pressing a strip of cloth into my hand. "Stay safe," he murmured. "Promise me."
I promised because I could not think of anything else.
That night I left the carriage to my family and watched the figure of Stefan—washed in moonlight and determined—fade into the dark. The next morning, word spread that he had been ambushed in the streets and dragged back to our eldest brother's abode, unconscious. He had wounded rib and back that oozed in pale sheets. When I went to see him, seeing the man in repose, his throat wet from fever, everything rearranged inside me.
"You have to promise me you'll return," Stefan said, if only to the air at first. He turned his face to me, eyes like slate. "Promise me you will not marry to keep my place for you."
"Stefan," I whispered, my voice raw. "Stefan, why would you say that?"
He made a sound that might have been a laugh. "Because I have seen how men move to claim what is left when they think I will be gone. I have lost... a great deal." He coughed, hard. "If you have to go into a life that is not yours, make it honest."
"I—" My throat stuck. "I married Elliot."
"Then be content," he said. "At least stay safe."
His hand found mine like a magnet; for a moment we were young again, and a tenderness like a small secret warmed me.
Yet I kept always an ache that my heart was split—part of me waiting on a frost-faced prince who had once put a charm into my palm, part of me learning the quiet bones of married life. I told myself that time would set everything straight.
Days later, a scrap of paper surfaced from a hidden box in the garden: a small diary pocketed into the earth beneath the ginkgo tree. The pages were Stefan's hand. I read lines spilled with the kind of haltingness only a man hiding his shame would write: memories of me at five and seven and twelve, awkward jokes, a childlike list of things he wanted me to like. He had recorded—painfully, tenderly—that he had loved me long before he had learned to be cruel.
"I wrote those for fear," he had said once. "If I died in battle I would be ashamed to leave them as mine. If you found them—" He looked ashamed even at the confession. "If you could know—"
Now I knew. He was not cold because he had no heat; he was cold because he did not know how to set it down in words. His letters, falling into my palms like quiet confession, told me he had a fierce, odd love that kept him a little childish at forty paces.
I felt dizzy with it. I had been wrong to believe myself invisible. Someone loved me fiercely. Someone had kept a secret of love that could be read in ink. I wanted to bring him back.
But the world was not content to be a private stage. There were men who wanted what others had, a thirst that swallowed honor. A certain Lord Forrest Fontaine—tall, broad, a prince of a rival house—began to plot. He told anyone who would listen that the "broken" prince made an easy target. He spoke of replacing a rightful heir with a likeness, a puppet to control the throne.
It sounded like a fever dream until the day they dragged a man into the market square who claimed to be Stefan Soares and wore his face. His voice could be copied; his gestures were rehearsed. A man named Quincy Carlier had learned the pattern of the prince so entirely that he moved like a flat image of Stefan. He used the old prince's mannerisms with enough shabby skill that people who did not know the real Stefan accepted him.
"You are not him," Gage said quietly the day the man entered the court. "Look at his hand," he whispered. "The scar on his thumb is wrong. The way he writes is wrong. Anyone who lived with Stefan would know."
But not enough knew. The false Stefan spoke in a familiar cadence and old friends felt fooled. Forrest Fontaine paid writers and constant rumor-mongers. He pushed the story: the prince had been lost. A new man had to take his place to keep the peace.
I watched this lie spread like spilled ink. The capital began to murmur. The emperor grew anxious. Among the noise, I kept the diary clutched like a lamp.
"Prove it," I told the men who would listen. "Prove that the book is his. You ask for names he used, small things only he would know."
Elliott stood in court and said, "We shall not be cowards. If you think to steal a name, show your face and answer openly."
Forrest smiled as if he had a plan beneath his smile. "You are brave for a woman who lost two years," he sneered. "We shall see how long your bravery holds when the palace is all against you."
There was a night when they tried to burn the diary. A torch was thrown through the window of the house where I kept it, and the smoke that rose was like a small, terrible testament that the truth had become dangerous.
"Who would do this?" I screamed into my breast. "Who would try to steal the shape of a man’s life?"
"Not a man," said a voice behind me. It was Lucas, oldest, returning like the sun returning. He had come back from the border with a bandaged arm and generals at his side. "A beast. A plan."
Lucas set a cordon and watched the men. He told me quietly: "Some things are worth fighting for. You pick your weapons. We pick ours."
We began to collect proofs. The diary helped—small private memories that only Stefan recorded, like a line about a certain child's scar, the peculiar twist of a horse's bridle, the shape of a certain evening meal. The more we collected, the more the lattice of lies showed cracks.
Then Forrest Fontaine made his move. He struck at the festival when the city filled with people. He hired men to make a show. He sent Quincy Carlier to public scenes where our witnesses might question him, wearing Stefan's clothes and his confidence.
"The man mimics him too well," a servant said. "We must show the court what we know."
So we planned a public unmasking—an exposure that would happen when the palace would be full of ministers and city crowds. It had to be in the central square with people watching, with drums and a commissioner and angles of truth exposed in sunlight.
"Public," Lucas said. "They cannot hide in the shadow of rumor when the river of people watches."
On the appointed day, the square filled like a bowl. The emperor watched from a dais. Forrest Fontaine walked in like he owned the light. Quincy Carlier stood by him, a crafted mask of the prince. He bowed and received courtesy, assuming the place of power.
I stood at the fringe, my hands empty but for the diary and the small splinter of the jade pin I had kept. It felt like a bone in my pocket. My brothers were gathered; Elliott stood on my right, Lucas on his left, with Gage, Blas like anchors. The city buzzed with curiosity and expectation.
Forrest smiled and called out, "Let us celebrate the return of our prince. He has been gone to war and now returns safe. Long live Stefan Soares."
Nobody answered for a long moment. It was as if the world had inhaled.
"Quincy Carlier," Lucas called. "Stand forth."
Quincy did. He was even more sure, the gleam of imposture polished like brass. Forrest beamed like a man who had placed a crown on a straw man. The emperor looked toward us with a face like a threshold. I felt my heart collide against my ribs, a dull hammer.
"On what proof do you claim this man as prince?" Lucas called.
Forrest's hand fluttered to his sword-belt. "He is recognized by court and will be accepted."
"Acceptance does not make truth," Gage said sharply. "We have evidence."
Lucas stepped forward, and with a small motion the diary was shown. I read aloud two lines in Stefan's hand about a childhood joke that no other person would repeat. Officers at the emperor’s side murmured. The emperor frowned. "Those are private memos," he said. "How will we know this is true—"
At that moment, Forrest tried to drown the murmur in accusation. "This is slander! They want to disgrace a loyal ally!"
Quincy raised his head and mimed the prince's mannerism—one true move that should have been familiar and real but felt wrong. He laughed the way the prince did in my memory—an imitation.
I stepped into the plaza. "Listen," I said, and my voice surprisingly carried. The crowd stilled like a drawn net. "This is Stefan's handwriting." I held out the diary like an accusation. "He wrote that he would be gone to war. He wrote about this city’s willow bending by the old gate at three in the morning when it rained. He wrote—" I swallowed, and read the line about the peony hairpin, the very one Stefan had once left in my hand. The public held its breath.
Forrest's face closed like a door. "These can be forged," he snapped.
"Then test it," Elliott said. "Test him."
We had prepared our test quietly. Stefan had a peculiar way of writing the emperor's name in his private letters—a single additional stroke in the character that most would avoid. It was a private sin the prince had confessed to the diary: he could not be taught to spare a stroke even for a rule.
"Write the name of His Majesty's post," I commanded Quincy.
Quincy looked uncertain. He tried to write in front of an assembled court of thousands. The emperor's name came out neat, too clean. The man had practiced strokes but not the private hesitation of a life.
"Compare the strokes," Lucas demanded. A court official came and lined up the writings. The difference was small but sharp like a cut. The emperor's eye flicked at the stroke and something in his brow slid. "This is not the prince," he said.
Forrest's jaw twitched. "You accuse me of treason," he said.
"No," the emperor replied quietly. "You have accreted treason like a wax bloom. You and your men will explain."
Forrest drew himself up. "You would disgrace a noble house on a whim? My honor—"
"Silence!" the emperor thundered. "Guards." He gestured only once.
By order, the soldiers moved like a tide to Forrest's men. For a moment there was quiet. I stood there, the diary like a thin holy thing in my hands, disbelieving of how clean the world could be when truth was shown.
Then Forrest Fontaine laughed. "You will not beat me with words!" He did something reckless: he reached out to the man who had been his puppet, to prove the man's loyalty. "Prove it, Stefan!" he cried. "Quincy, tell them the truth. Tell them you were hired to be my instrument!"
Quincy, left without his script, finally broke. His face flushed. His voice tried to be the prince's and came out thinner.
"Your worship," he said, "I—"
And then, something happened.
A soldier rushed forward and tore Quincy’s mask from his eyes. Under it was not only a false face but other instruments of deception: hair dyed, tattoos hidden, letters of purchase. The crowd saw a man made of borrowed things.
Forrest tried to step forward and stop the soldier when the sound of a piece falling cut through the air: a hairpin fragment—white jade—rolled out from someone's sleeve and shivered across the marble.
The emperor leaned forward. "Guards!" he said. "Seize them both."
Forrest's expression collapsed from arrogance into panic, then into rage. He spat at the ground. "You have no proof," he raged. "You will all see. I will not be shamed."
Lucas stepped to the fore and took him by the shoulder, the weight of battle in him. "You will stand your trial. For now, you are in the emperor's hands."
The crowd began to call, and that call turned into a roar that chased the copper-clang of the courtyard. They tore down the banners Forrest had set. Men with banners stamped "Justice" moved forward, crowd-sourced truth like a collective hand.
We fixed our proofs to the magistrate's table: the diary, a list of private names only Stefan used, and a tiny piece of the jade pin that Stefan had once given me and that had been shattered. The magistrate read in silence. A hush thickened.
"You will be judged," the emperor intoned finally. "For crimes against the throne, for attempted replacement of the heir, for treachery."
Forrest's face changed in stages: composure, color draining, denial, then collapse into a smaller human shape. Quincy, naked of costume, tried to scream a story of being hired and threatened, of debts impossible to repay. The effect on the crowd transformed as layers were peeled: some jeered, some spat, others recorded on the scene with small boxes and glass.
"Is this true?" a voice called. "Is the prince inland or was he...?"
"Elliott, the people are whispering," Gage murmured.
"This is truth," I answered. "Stefan is Stefan."
What followed was a long, public scene meant not only to punish but to display the fall of a man who wanted to own what was not his. The emperor convened a formal inquiry. Witnesses were called in full light. Letters bought to buy a man’s silence were read aloud. The crowd's reaction changed as the story unfolded: initial surprise turned to anger, then to a visceral hunger for accountability.
Forrest Fontaine had been a polite presence at court but his crimes were not private dissent; they were an attempt to unseat the rightful place of a prince and replace him with a puppet. His punishment had to be a public humiliation of a kind that fit the scale of his folly. The magistrate spelled out a multi-part penance overseen by the emperor.
"Let it be known," the emperor declared, voice ringing, "that those who would replace an heir by craft shall be stripped of titles in open court, their banners burned, and their names read to the city. So long as the imperial archive remains, their deeds will be recorded for all to read." The officials repeated, the words a drumbeat.
Forrest's composure fractured. He tried to bite back his shame with words, "You—this is theater!"
"It is justice," Lucas said. "And truth."
The crowd gathered even closer as they demanded more. They wanted a spectacle, and the court obliged them with a kind of slow, merciless theatre of accountability.
First, Forrest was led to the steps where the merchants sat each day, and his family banners burned. Men spat on them. The public jury's faces were bright with retribution. Forrest's servants were questioned and we learned truths: he had sent letters, men, bribes. Each revelation was wet tinder for the crowd. Forrest's face went through a cruel erosion of reaction: first surprise—he had not expected them to find the letters—then shock that his tools were exposed, then desperate denial, and finally, the human smallness of accusation without answer. He tried to bluster, then to plead, then to curse, then to beg.
"You're wrong," he said at one point, voice breaking. "I meant only to protect the realm."
"You meant to rule it in your fashion," the magistrate shot back. "You meant to control by false face."
The crowd's response was a mixture of voices. Some struck their palms together in pious condemnation. Others laughed outragedly, filming with quick glass lenses. A few of Forrest's long-time servants wept openly. A noblewoman in the front began clapping with seat-slap fury.
Quincy, the impostor, was bound near the pillars. He had thought he'd be rewarded for taking a role. Now he crumpled. He tried the stumbles of denial: "I was paid! I had to feed my debts. I had no choice." His voice changed: fright to pleading to broken contrition. He kept repeating a plea that had no power: "Forgive me."
"Forgive you?" cried a voice. "You borrowed a life and called it your own."
The magistrate then demanded that Forrest stand publicly before the market, and he was made to say where he had obtained money and names. As each investor, each scribe of rumor, came forward, Forrest's face emptied.
"His reaction was first to be defiant," I thought as I watched. "Then he tried to blame others, to call it politics, to claim patriotic reasons. Then he realized how alone he had become."
But the most brutal and, to the crowd, satisfying part, was the moment of recantation. Forrest knelt on the marble in front of the court as the magistrate read his list of crimes, and the crowd—workers, shopkeepers, and courtiers—circled him like a tide of judgment. He went from fury to a falter of denial, then to shouting pleas, and at last to despair. He begged for the emperor's mercy, trying to fold his pride like a cloth into favor.
"It is true," he said finally, voice thin. "I was fooled by ambition. I—"
The crowd pushed with the need for retribution: they wanted the spectacle of a great man reduced and undone, for it was the story they had been waiting for. Some recorded his falterings on small glass boxes; others beat drums to fill the air. The magistrate pronounced the sentence: heavy public finance penalties, removal of offices, a permanent mark of disgrace on his family, and a forced public apology broadcast to the city. Quincy was indicted and sentenced to labor on remote fortifications, a hard ironically physical thing after his long deceit.
Even after the verdict, the aftermath roiled. Forrest's face when the pardon asked for was refused showed a last human turn—desperation into hollow, then a kind of sheepish animal collapse. He cried out incoherently for mercy; some crowd members hissed back, others turned away. The man who had sought to play at power collapsed in the face of a public he had once courted but never truly respected.
That day the crowd's reaction was varied: some wept, some spat, some took pictures with their small glass boxes, some bowed in relief. The emperor remained impassive, but his instruction was clear: the realm would not be toyed with by men seeking crowns of borrowed faces.
The punishment was long. It lasted through the night as the press and the people continued to press in. Forrest's later pleas were recorded and read for months.
What mattered for me was that the untruth—the lie that had tried to steal Stefan's name—had been undone in public. The diary had been proof. The imperial stamp was set back in place. Stefan, once more acknowledged, stepped back into his life with a slow, careful step.
Afterwards, Stefan sought me out. He came to the ginkgo tree and sat without speaking. "You did well," he said at last. "You proved something I could not."
"Why did you not come?" I asked, voice low. "Why did you not fight sooner?"
He covered his face. "I am not good at the small things. I go to war to meet the obvious blade, not the quiet rust of betrayal."
"You suffered," I whispered.
"So did you," he answered. His hand brushed mine once, the touch like a confession. "I should have been braver. I should have..."
He could not finish. Instead he took two steps back. "You married him," he said. "Elliott is a good man. If you can be happy—"
"Can you ask me that?" I laughed, the sound like a breaking tide. "Can you offer me as a choice like a plate of fruit?"
He shook his head. "I offer what I can. I will accept what you choose."
We spoke then, in the honest smallness of two people who had loved and hurt one another. He told me about being young and angry, about writing his secret pages in case of death. I told him about Elliot pressing the plaque into my hand.
Elliott, when he learned of the attempt, stood like a man who had been set in motion by truth. He did not demand I be his out of need; he asked only that I remain as I was. "You do not owe me what you never promised," he said.
In the quiet after the trial, I found the old diary buried under the ginkgo and read the last page Stefan had left: a childish vow about burying his feelings under the tree if he died, and a line that made my throat hurt because it was honest: "If I return, I will tell you plainly. If not, let these leaves carry my confession."
That night I placed the diary back in the ground, under the ginkgo, and I laid the smallest shard of the jade hairpin there too. I let the earth cover them as if I were returning something to the right place.
After the spectacle, Forrest's family's banners were torn down in the square and the people left murmuring. Quincy was taken to the fortifications. Forrest Fontaine was stripped of titles and exiled from court circles and had to stand a public humiliation that would live in memory. The city had cheered. The court had moved on.
In the months that followed, life was noisy and small. Stefan—real Stefan—slowly resumed his duties and learned to say unpolished things with less bite. I learned to weave a life in the net of these men: with Stefan on one side and Elliott on the other, Lucas and Gage and Blas evenly strong at my back.
I never recovered the two years that had been taken from me. Sometimes I imagined where those days had gone: did someone else sleep in my body and live there like a guest with keys? The answer was yes and also no. Pieces of the life those years contained remained in the hearts of others, and strangely, that knowledge made me not smaller but more solid.
When the emperor declared an official pardon for Stefan and the court name was cleared, people said the city breathed easier. The imperial record filed our proofs and the market glowed. The hairpin fragments I had preserved lay in their dust like a memory.
One day Stefan visited and gave me a clean sheet of paper and a pen. "Write me a line," he said almost shyly, the old fortress of him softened as if under erosion. He paused and then added, "No—write anything you wish."
So I wrote one line I had never said aloud. "I forgave you in my sleep," I told him.
He stared as if I had offered him a key. "I am not worth all that."
"Then either of us will be," I said.
We laughed in the soft ridiculousness of those who loved imperfectly.
Months later, in full daylight and with the emperor's stamp on the record, Forrest Fontaine was made to come into the square one last time. The magistrate read the details of his machinations. He had tried to buy the prince's likeness and set a false spectacle on the stage of the capital. He had tried to replace a man of blood with a man of theatre. In front of thousands, he knelt and delivered an apology that was broken like thin glass: ashamed, then hot with entreaty, then a low, raw collapse into weeping. People reacted in waves: some cried with a sense of justice; others clapped and recorded; a few tipped coins at the poor.
"Please," he begged at one point, eyes travel-worn, "I did not mean—"
"You meant to take a life that was not yours," the magistrate said. "You meant to claim a name you had no right to."
The crowd's judgment had shifted through the hours: astonishment, anger, public hunger for retribution, and finally a fatigue as if the city had exercised a muscle it never knew it had. Forrest's pantomime of shame passed through loops: denial, fury, stoic insistence, collapse, and then entreaty for mercy. It was messy and real, and it was displayed for all of them to witness—a public draining.
Quincy Carlier, who had dressed his face and his voice to be another man, was led away to labor, his head down, and Forrest was left to the slow domestic ruin of a man with no patronage. The emperor's sentence carried weight: no offices, financial penalties, and the branded disgrace in the official record. The crowd dispersed with its hunger filled.
After the sentencing, I visited the ginkgo. I went down on my knees and laid the rest of the hairpin into the ground and stamped the soil with my palm. The diary lay under the roots, quiet and steady. I had proof now that true names could be defended, even under the press of power.
"Do you remember when the emperor—" Stefan began one day, and then stopped. He had the awkward look of a man trying to become braver.
"I remember a thousand small things," I answered. "I remember you telling me to learn embroidery, and I remember you laughing when I failed. I remember you giving me a hairpin and crying. That is enough."
He smiled, then took my hand. "Stay," he said. "Stay near. Not here in bonds, but near. I will try to be better."
"I will try to be clearer," I said. "I will try to tell you what I mean."
For now the city settled. The court turned pages. The accused lay humbled and the diaries sat in the earth making the tree heavy and safe.
Months later, after the formal records were closed, a modest celebration was held at the Griffin shop where we had once stood for coins and rouge. People came—shopkeepers, servants, men who had watched the trial from corners, and even a few nobles. At dusk we lit a small lamp by the ginkgo and invited Stefan and Elliott both. They both came.
Stefan stood a little off, watching the crowd like someone watching a map. Elliott came forward and handed me a small carved same heart knot he had bought earlier. "For your belt," he said, "so you know the world still holds simple things."
Stefan walked up and, after a brief hesitation, put a folded square of paper into my hand. "For you," he said. "If you ever need me."
I opened it later. Inside, on the paper, were only two words: "Forgive me." It was the same simple confession his diary had recorded over and again.
At that moment I realized something like a new truth: there are two kinds of love—one that claims and one that tends. Stefan's love was claim and longing and confession; Elliott's was tending and slow warmth. I could give myself to both kinds of truth in different ways.
That night, as the city inhaled under the amber lamp, I put my hand on the ginkgo trunk and felt the place where I had buried the diary and the hairpin. I thought of the cat I'd found, a scrappy thing named DaiDai who still slept at my feet, purring like a small clock.
"This is home," I whispered to no one and to everyone. "It is messy and complicated and true."
The court turned. The city moved. The emperor wrote his seal into the record. Forrest Fontaine's public punishment became part of the year's talk, a long public dressing of shame that everyone in the capital recalled and debated around fires.
In the end, though, what steadied me was not the spectacle but a small ordinary string of days: Elliott bringing a cup of warm broth, Stefan leaving a neat folded paper that smelled faintly of ink and war, my brothers standing at my back, and a small cat that would not let me be alone.
I kept the small shard of jade under my pillow. Sometimes I took it out, warmed it in my palm, and wrote a single sentence about how lives could be taken and given back and how love could be patient enough to wait for a person to find herself again.
When the magistrate's records were finally closed, they included the testimony of witnesses, the list of offenses, and the public apology of Forrest Fontaine and Quincy Carlier. The city turned its memory into tale and the ginkgo learned to hold the weight of a little archive.
Years later, whenever anyone asked me if I had regretted that I had not fought faster or loved truer, I would say the truth.
"I woke married," I would tell them simply. "I woke with months missing, and when I found a hand that had loved me, I found another that would let me grow. I learned to be both brave and gentle. I buried papers and hairpins and kept small things for myself."
The people would listen, sometimes laugh, sometimes sigh. But under the ginkgo the diary slept forever, and DaiDai would someday curl around me with that small, contented purr.
The End
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