Sweet Romance13 min read
Lotus, Bets, and a Paper Note
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I found her in my master’s bedchamber as if the world had folded and left only a smooth, terrible crease.
"You—what are you doing here?" I burst in before thinking. My voice cracked into the room like a dropped cup.
Ephraim looked up, mild as carved jade. "Emmalyn, you mustn't barge in."
Margot turned her head, a quiet smile curving at one corner of her mouth. "Don't scold her too hard, Lord Ephraim. She looked shocked."
"I—" My hands wanted to grab something sensible and failed. "You found someone? You, Lord Ephraim, have a... a match?" I sounded like a child who had lost a toy.
Ephraim blinked. "I brought Margot back from the mortal hall. We have spoken much."
I heard the laugh in my own throat and couldn't stop it. "I bet Master Hunter ten thousand, no—ten thousand taels he'd never find a match. I promised him a hundred thousand if he was wrong!" I cried.
Ephraim's face went blank and then oddly small. "You bet..."
Margot’s smile stiffened. "Oh?"
I sank onto the stool as if someone had cut the legs of the world. "A hundred thousand," I wept. "Ten—ten thousand—no! A hundred thousand taels! Why?!"
Ephraim pursed his lips like a man who had swallowed sour tea. "Emmalyn, you can't make promises lightly."
"Little thief!" Hunter stormed in, ruffling my hair in mock comfort. "Pay up. Pay up slowly. I can accept installments."
"Stop!" I shoved his hand away. "I am not your bank."
Ephraim took me aside later, his expression a curious mix of irritation and something like glee. He scolded me properly, of course, and then his eyes softened in a way that made me suspicious.
"How many parts did you divide the taels into?" I asked, flat.
"Six and four," he answered, unblushing. "I took six, Hunter four."
My lungs broke into laughter and then anger. "You tricked me, you two-faced—"
"That is not the point," Ephraim said, ignoring me. "Through our time with Margot, I have come to hold feelings."
Margot happened to enter at that sentence and tilted her head, as if the words were petals falling in slow motion.
"Oh Ephraim," she said, voice soft as silk. "You must not speak such embarrassing things before your disciple."
"Embarrassing?" I said aloud. "I vomit."
Ephraim's calm cracked like porcelain. "Go to supper, Emmalyn. Margot and I have matters to discuss."
"Margot will wait in the room," she murmured, turning away.
When the door closed I said, carefully, "This was your plan to take my money."
Ephraim slipped from the roof in a literal display of melodrama and then lay on the tiles. "I only wanted the scene to feel true. I thought I could give her coin after the act."
I pressed my foot to his chest until he 'died' dramatically. "This is the cost of tricking your disciple."
He whimpered.
The truth is, I had read the plot. I knew that in the original tale, my master only brought a woman into the sect at thirty thousand years, not twenty. I had been smug. I had wagered on time, on numbers. I had resigned myself to disappointment if need be. I never expected this early return.
"I am the supporting girl," I told myself, bitterly. "In the book, I leave and perish. My death brings the master to madness. The woman he brought—she becomes the true heroine."
So I left for the capital to visit my father, the Emperor Aurelio Benson, with a handful of pills for longevity he had demanded. I expected nothing but the usual courtly boredom.
At the banquet my head nodded like a tired bell. "Announcing the visitor from the west—Prince Duke Brandt." The drums announced him.
Duke Brandt smiled like painted spring. He introduced himself and called me "princess" by mistake, which sent me on an odd tangent about odd foreign names. Ephraim hissed at me.
"Stop staring," he snapped. "You are behaving queer."
"I am female," I replied. "I have always been female."
Margot performed a dance titled "Phoenix Seeking Phoenix." The final flourish showed a pale foot. Ephraim's praise came out sideways.
"Why bare your foot?" he said, and then, softer, "Might there be a scent?"
The hall caught its breath. Margot's face flamed. "It is nothing," she murmured, but the whispers spread like spilled tea.
Duke Brandt laughed kindly and said something absurd about names. I joked at him and almost tripped over my own tongue.
That night, I found myself speaking with Duke Brandt. We discussed nothing and everything—the sort of talk that threads people into acquaintances. Ephraim pulled me away like a tethered kite.
Back at the mountain, life settled into small cruelties. The monks complained to me about Margot's presence. The younger disciples cast suspicious looks. I began to think that Margot was cunning: she smiled in the right places and stuck to the master like warm honey.
"She is a lotus," murmured Hunter one day, sniffing at her perfume.
"She smells like a tealeaf," Nehemias said.
"Call her... flower tea," I concluded.
We sparred and laughed and the old rhythms resumed. Then the sect elders announced the opening of the Canghai Trial—a secret place where the Nine Nether Lotus grew. My mind stirred; in the story, this trial took place after the master and Margot had reconciled. Now it came early.
"You cannot go," Ephraim said to me. "You are young."
"Then who will lead the team?" I asked.
Hunter, with his loud laugh, said, "I gathered you left for far longer than this. Pay up, my bank!"
We left for the trial anyway. Ephraim delayed by weeks, arrived as judge. Margot, like a stubborn weed in a cracked pot, came along, clinging to him.
At night inside the Trial's mists, the path turned dark and I walked with Hunter, Nehemias, and the boy Joaquin. Monsters came—frost-bears with growls that ate words. We should have fought. Instead the bears sniffed us and offered a fire, then strange mushrooms that smelled of home, which we ate until the whole weird world said "you belong to yourselves."
We laughed. The other sects spying on us ran back breathless to tell their elders, "They... ate excrement!" The rumor took life and like all great lies became a legend.
The Trial twisted into a dream. A gaunt voice declared, "You will walk through your greatest fear, little thing." I swallowed. I have been many ages, and fears shift like the tide.
The dream took me back into a modern study hall—computers, cameras, a teacher's voice: "Open page thirty-seven. Emmalyn? Where are you?"
"You can't make me turn on the camera," I said, and in dreaming I argued with the specter of virtual lectures until the phantom relented. The test was small. I passed and woke brittle, but alive.
Duke Brandt—no, actually the boy named Duke in my dream—had arranged the trial. He admitted as much in a low voice, eyes mild.
"You were to be harmed," he said. "I could not follow."
We trudged back to the Meeting Hollow and found the Trial's passage was unstable. The elder sects formed ranks and scowled. They whispered about "the lotus woman"—Margot—who had her own plans. Margot stood by a ruined rune and laughed serene and awful.
"I made the Trial vanish," she said. "I wait here, and I will take whatever fate I like."
The assembly stared. I clutched the leather of my boot.
"She says she is the Nine Nether Lotus," an elder scoffed.
"Impossible," someone cried.
"She claims to be a sacred flower." The delegation looked toward me. "Is it true, then?"
Ephraim came to my side and sniffed Margot like one tests rain with a thumb. "She smells of tea. She drives insects away with that scent."
"Of course," I said, loud with a false calm. "She evolved. She is not merely a woman."
The words burned in my mouth as I said them. Margot's small, wild face lit with triumph.
It turned out Margot had read only half the book she was in; she thought I was the heroine. She tried to steal my fate by making me fear my deepest secret. She brought a boy to probe my nightmares. She destroyed the Trial by forcing its time.
"You are wearing someone else's chapter," I said once, blunt as a blade.
Margot's eyes flashed. "No, I am the main now," she declared. "You will see. I can tear out your role."
"You're deluded," I told her.
"You are the one who is a transplant," she said. "Your fear is small. Mine—"
She began to chant problems like recipes. She recited calculus rules in the hall, as if the sound of L'Hôpital would bind the universe. The crowd did not know whether to laugh or to gasp.
I looked at Ephraim and saw the man I always knew: not a tyrant but a strange child who had learned how to be patient. He had been foolish earlier, yes, but he had never been cruel.
Days slipped. Margot’s antics escalated. She spread rumors, tricked classmates, set traps. The other disciples began to snicker and to place wagers: would my heart bend to Ephraim’s?
One night, we returned to the sect with a banquet for the Emperor. The court was full; the servants moved like secret names. I confronted the men who had bet on my heart—Hunter and Nehemias.
"You two made a wager," I said to them in the hall, where tapestries kept their mouths open. "You each risked ten thousand taels on my feelings."
Hunter grinned, oblivious. "It was harmless."
"No," I said, voice steadier than I felt. "You used me."
Nehemias paled. "We meant no harm."
"You meant amusement," I corrected. "You made a joke of my life. You counted my heart for silver."
And then, because stories need heat, because I had been read as the supporting girl too long and wanted to re-scribe the margin, I moved the scene to the emperor's hall and opened the doors.
"Present," I said, and every eye in the hall turned toward the inner doorway. Guards, servants, visiting princes, elders of sects, even Margot and Ephraim—everyone watched.
Ephraim's face had that strange small look again, as if someone had shown him a map he had drawn in childhood.
I walked up the marble steps with a decision in my bones. "Hunter Diaz," I said, loud enough for the banners to hear. "Nehemias Jimenez. You placed bets on me."
They froze.
Hunter laughed, false, because men will laugh when faced with shame. "It was a wager between friends."
I let that stand and let it go like a rope and then pulled.
"You took my life for laughter," I said. "You made me the object of sport."
The hall hummed. The emperor leaned forward, fingers like small flags. "Explain," he said.
Nehemias tried to deflect. "She is proud. We only spoke—"
"You laughed when I gave away ten thousand to a man who is my brother in training," I said. "You counted me as a coin. You thought my heart was a toy."
A hush fell. Margot’s eyes had narrowed. Ephraim's hand opened and closed at his side.
"You are ashamed?" I asked the two men. "Will you apologize publicly?"
Hunter's face flickered. His friends shifted like shorebirds. "This—this was private," he said.
"Private," I repeated. "Then make it public."
I took the small note from my sash. "I will make this public now." I unfolded a paper where I had written the wager in my own hand, the oath, the names.
"Read it," I told the hall.
A servant read the crude lines aloud. The words thudded against the silence.
"How much?" Emperor Aurelio demanded.
"One hundred thousand taels total," I said.
The crowd inhaled.
"Ten thousand each? A hundred thousand!" A guest whispered. "For what? For a girl?"
I stepped forward and let the accusation land. "It was not only gambling. They conspired to see my heart. They treated it as an amusing experiment."
Nehemias swallowed. He tried to laugh. "We were children."
"Ephraim?" The Emperor turned to my master, who had been still as a statue.
Ephraim's voice was soft. "They were thoughtless."
"Thoughtless?" I echoed. "You allowed it."
"No," he said quickly. "I was not party to their bets."
But eyes found the small paper again. "Ephraim, did you not take part in dividing the prize?"
The room smelled like incense and the sudden tang of metal. Ephraim's face flamed. He could have lied. He did not.
"I took six parts," he admitted. "Not for myself—as payment for staging—but I did take six parts."
Gasps filled the hall like a wind.
Now the punishment scene must be honest and public, I thought, because there are debts words cannot repair.
I demanded restitution. "Return the money."
Hunter barked, furious. "Return? After she brings us shame?"
"Shame?" I said. "You think you had none?"
Nehemias tried to speak. "We... we will give it back."
"On the dais," I said. "Before everyone. You will kneel and ask forgiveness."
The hall trembled with murmurs of interest. Bets had been made about love; now a better wager formed: would a proud man admit wrong?
Hunter's face crumbled into something like thunder. He laughed and then stopped, the sound snapping off as if cut by a blade.
"You want a public apology?" He spat. "Fine."
He took off his ceremonial sash and threw it on the floor. "I apologize to Emmalyn Rios," he said. "Forgive me."
It was cheap. The assembly had heard apologies before. They wanted more.
I raised a hand. "You will tell them how you spoke of me. Tell them the words you used when you called my feelings a wager. Tell them who else joined."
He tried to resist. "You cannot force me."
"Watch me," I said.
So he told the story—his voice first steady, then catching—and his companions leaned forward. He spoke of jokes made in the dormitory, of bets traded like playing cards. His tone shifted: smugness, then anger, then denial, then an attempt to laugh and disguise shame. The change showed in him like weather.
Nehemias then confessed, with a red face and hands that could not stop trembling. He had dared to think me pliant, he said. He had meant no deep harm. He asked for the chance to make amends.
The crowd reacted in waves. Some hissed. Some clapped a slow beat for spectacle. Elder monks frowned and whispered. Children pointed. Even Margot paled, not because she was guilty but because the world had tilted.
Then I asked for the final, honest act. "Take your money and put it into the sect storehouse. Let it be used to feed the novices for a year."
Hunter's jaw worked. He wanted to refuse. He wanted to hold on to his pride like a talisman. Instead he looked at Ephraim, at the Emperor, at the faces of the novices who peered in from behind curtain, and slowly, as if a weight had been placed on his shoulders, he walked to the chest and poured coin after coin into the sect's box. The sound was like rain.
Nehemias followed. He made a sound that could be called weeping.
The hall's murmurs changed. Some muttered that public shaming was cruel. Others said it was justice. The Emperor nodded, satisfied. The ministers whispered about decorum and duty.
Hunter's proud mask cracked and fell. He was no longer the boisterous gambler of the dormitory. He was a boy who had to look at the eyes of those he had hurt. He tried to laugh it away and caught only pity.
"Will you kneel?" I asked finally.
He dropped to his knees in front of all. "I beg your forgiveness," he said. "Forgive me, Emmalyn."
Nehemias echoed the plea, hands clutched.
They had the arc I needed: smugness, wobble, denial, collapse, plea. The hall watched; the novices cried; the elders shook their heads. This was punishment of a kind that stained the ego rather than the body. It was loud and it was public. It was not violent, but it rendered their pride naked and then wrapped it in obligation.
"Let this be a lesson," Emperor Aurelio said. "A sect that values honor more than games will be stronger."
Margot watched all this with a stillness that made me uneasy. She had been the instigator of many later nuisances; yet my anger did not extend to her the way it did to the bettors. Perhaps because Margot's aim had been larger—she had tried to snatch fate; the bettors had only been petty.
Later, when the guards had left and the candles guttered, Ephraim came to me, weary and steady.
"You made them return the money," he said.
"I made them return their manners," I replied. "And their coin."
He sat very near and said, slowly, "I never meant to wound you."
"You did," I said.
He hummed. "I will make it right. I take what I did seriously. I..."
He could not find the language. He had always been awkward with things that mattered.
"So will you repay your half?" I asked, soft.
"I will," he said. "I will repay with deeds, not words."
We were absurdly young in the face of the long ages. Still, in the quiet that followed, he took my hand once, then twice, and we argued like two stubborn children about a map we both loved.
In the weeks that followed, Margot proved messy and earnest. She tried to teach classes (L'Hôpital's rule in the hall), she chewed over the Trial, and she wept when the sect refused to hold her as holy. She was not the monstrous villain I had expected. She was a woman trying to be important, and in doing so she had trampled things that mattered.
When she fainted in the heavy rain, the remedy and the suffering combined to make her true form shine through. She became a lotus, a sickly blue at first, then shifting colors, and finally a seven-colored bloom. The sect carried her home with embarrassed reverence. No one else stepped forward to claim the Nine Nether Lotus.
Ephraim and I were left to tend the curious flower that was also a woman and, slowly, to tend each other.
One night, after an argument about a misplaced note, I walked to his door and slid a small paper under it.
He read it when the moon was thin. Later he came to my door, a look on his face like a child who had found a starfish.
"I like you," he said, plainly.
"Say it like you mean it," I teased.
"I mean it," he answered. "I like you."
We laughed. It was a small laugh, and nothing like the wild alarms of the world. It was domestic and brave.
Time did not suddenly straighten into a single perfect line. We argued. We mocked. We played childish wagers with each other, only this time the stakes were a shared bowl of porridge and an extra mat near the fire.
Hunter and Nehemias still had to live with what they'd done. They performed chores publicly, serving novices and carrying water, the once-proud gamblers humbled into usefulness. The sect spoke of them less and they were forced—daily—to recall their misjudgment.
Margot, now a seven-color lotus that refused to take human shape fully, sometimes whispered sweetly at night and wrote long notebooks full of apology that made the novices laugh. She taught them numbers and rules and how to breathe in the rain.
As for me, I kept the paper he had read and sometimes, in the quiet, I rewrote its edges with silly jokes.
We were not the book's main characters in the way the pages had intended. We were messy, alive, and stubborn. Ephraim brought me out to watch snow and we quoted bad poems and sometimes we did not talk at all.
"Why do you stay?" he asked once, climbing down from the roof. "You know the story."
"Because I prefer the mess," I said. "Because I like your strange face."
He smiled a smile like a candle and then, for the small and private world's sake, he kissed the edge of my palm.
There were many mornings when I remembered the bet and laughed, remembering how proud I had been of my sure prediction.
"Payback?" Hunter asked one morning, holding out a sack of dumplings.
"You owe me," I said, pointing to his empty pocket. "You still owe me a hundred thousand—"
"Half of it is in the storehouse," he said.
"Good." I took a dumpling, and the world became, for a bite, very plain and very kind.
We lived on. The lotus hummed at dawn. The Trial doors sometimes opened and sometimes did not. The Emperor visited and asked after the novice's chores. Duke Brandt stopped by with odd gifts. The sect kept its balance by small things: shared blankets, long conversations, a paper note tucked into a sleeping robe.
And once, on a morning when the mist lay close like a secret, I tied a strip of cloth around Ephraim's wrist and said, "If you ever lie to me again, I will make you eat all the porridge."
He squeezed my hand. "Deal."
The later years were not the book's later years. They were our later years.
We had a note, a hundred thousand taels in the housetreasury, and a seven-color lotus who glowed in the rain. We had Hunter carrying water, Nehemias polishing swords, Joaquin performing little plays, and Margot humming calculus when the moon was fat.
"Will you promise me something?" Ephraim asked one evening, standing in the doorway and looking at the petals on the sill.
I smiled, and this was my ending—no universal vow, but a small personal touch. "I will keep your secret. But you must keep mine." I tapped his chest.
He bowed like an old gentleman and returned the tap.
"Good," he said. "Now, help me tie my sash."
I took the sash and some dumplings and the paper note that had started a chain of laughter. I tucked it into my sleeve and let the morning light fall over us like a cup.
This is not the book's ending. It is our little ending—unique because of a lotus that stank of tea like a stubborn promise, because of a sword called "Love" that bled nothing, and because of a paper note that once had numbers and later became a private joke.
And every time it rained and the lotus sighed, Ephraim would sniff the air and mutter, "That scent again."
I would smile and think: that scent kept people honest.
The End
— Thank you for reading —