Sweet Romance13 min read
My Prince's Shadow: The Case of the Crying Child
ButterPicks12 views
I remember the heat first, the way the courtyard stones steamed under noon like a lid on a pot. I remember how the sky slid from bright to bruised in an hour, how thunder arrived like an order. I remember Kenji Amin whispering at my shoulder, too small-voiced to iron out the worry in his face.
"Your Highness, maybe we should postpone—" Kenji said, ducking his head. "The weather—"
"Kenji," I cut him off, amused. "You packed an umbrella yesterday. What else do you want from me?"
He shuffled his feet and then brightened at something only I could see. "There's a cat, Your Highness. A big orange one."
"I like cats," I told him. I moved toward the wall on a whim, because my feet had an odd mind of their own. The courtyard's murmur thinned around us. The cat was fat and asleep, curled against the wall like a loaf of bread.
Kenji crept forward like a thief and, to my delight, plucked it up. "Your Highness—"
"You caught it," I said, and the cat blinked at me and made the most ridiculous, theatrical meow. I smiled—an easy thing for me—and Kenji's face melted into awe.
Then thunder cracked like a judge's gavel. We both looked up.
On the wall, a shape leaned over to observe—and then leapt.
The world became a split-second of noise. The thing landed nose-first into the path right in front of me. I flinched. Kenji screamed. People scattered.
"What—" I started.
A girl lay there. Her skirt was a ruin. Something wet slicked across her clothing. The courtyard froze in that single breathless moment.
"Someone get help!" a voice yelled.
Kenji shrank back as if the girl might revive and be angry at him. He had the sense to freeze, and then he staggered and hit the stones. For a terrible second he was sprawled there, and something rolled away from beneath the girl's skirts and skidded across the ground.
I looked down. Something small and pale lay in the blood—an impossible, incompletely formed thing. Kenji's face went white, then he screamed so loud he fainted.
I did what came next without thinking. I stepped forward, crossed the short distance in three strides, and picked up the orange cat. My hands found the girl's cheeks, cold but still brown with life at the edges.
"Move," I told the nearest guard with a calm I did not feel. "Take him away and bring a parasol. Keep people back."
They obeyed, afraid of the scene or afraid of me. In the moment Kenji fainted, a crowd converged. Someone recognized me—my title hit them and, like corded ropes, the soldiers formed themselves around my carriageable frame.
They should have been terrified. They were. But there were other noises: low, keening, like the sound of small lungs crying without air.
I knelt. The child's face under the woman who had fallen—what my eyes told me—was ghastly. A thin, slick track of something sticky led from under the girl's robe across the paving stones: small prints, each the size of a young hand.
"Seal this place," I told the guards. "Send word to the Emperor and the Empress. Whoever caused this had better be found."
When I stood, a tall man in a plain black uniform bowed his head and introduced himself, steady as a blade: "Alec Sjostrom, Your Highness. I am sent by the palace to investigate."
He was young for such a task, and the way he looked at me—unflinching, assessing—made me feel as if I were under inspection too. Good. I liked people who kept their faces steady.
The Emperor—Valentin Durand—arrived with an entourage that made the courtyard feel smaller. He caught sight of me, then of the blood on my clothes and the orange cat tucked in my arms, and his face went pale.
"My child!" he barked. "Are you wounded?"
"I am fine," I replied, arranging my smile to be sun-bright. "I am fine, Father."
He took me in, worry and fury braided together. The Empress—Juliet Chandler—arrived as well, composed as a blade wrapped in silk.
"Someone will be punished," the Emperor ordered. "Alec, you will spare no effort."
Alec bowed. "I will not fail, Sire."
I found a sick kind of humor in how the palace’s machinery spun. The girl had leapt, and I had been the thing she meant to hit. Why? The prints, the torn underwear, the broken life—all of it read like a hieroglyph, and I wanted to decipher it.
"Was she a servant?" Father asked.
"Yes," I said. "A laundress. She wore the spring festival special red. She was pregnant—about four months, by how the child looked—and she had bruises along her wrists and neck. Someone gave her a silk flower recently. That flower is expensive. Someone bought it for her."
My father’s face turned hard. "Then find who it was. Find who brought her that flower."
Alec let his eyes flicker to mine. "I'll start with the laundries."
I told them then what settled in my chest like a cold stone: "If she came to me, then she wanted to be seen. Maybe she wanted help. Or maybe she wanted me dead."
"Don't joke," Father said bluntly.
"I'm not joking," I replied. "A pregnant woman who jumps at the sight of me—either I wronged her, or someone made sure I looked like the enemy in her eyes."
"Who could do that?" Mother asked.
"Someone with access," Alec said. "Someone who can move in the palace without notice."
The palace, which had protected me all my life, suddenly felt porous.
That night, I slept poorly, chest tight with questions. I dreamt of a child with too many teeth crying in the dark. I woke to the sound of shrieks: Kenji—who had fainted—was dead.
They carried him in a rush of terrified, scurrying people. He looked horribly broken, bones and throat distorted into a plethora of unnatural angles. Nobody had heard anything. No screams, no fight. Just Kenji's life ending in a way no one could explain: twenty-six breaks to his body as if by deliberate pressure, but without noise.
"How?" someone whispered.
"Ghosts," a terrified maid said.
"Devilry," another said.
Kenji's death erased my fragile calm. I had handled corpses before; in the life I had lived before the palace, I had been taught how to touch what others could not bear. This was different. This was a violence that left no witness.
Alec was calm, surgical in his motions. "Keep people away," he ordered. "Tell everyone to stay inside. I want the laundry lists, the staff roster. I want anyone who had access to the courtyards."
He was efficient. The next day he walked with me to the lake. That morning the water had been stained with red and crowded with large, salamander-like amphibians—huge, rubbery creatures with greedy little mouths—gnawing at something that bobbed upon the surface.
"What is that?" I asked, and Alec only said, "Fetch them up."
They dragged a body ashore—a laundress older than the girl who had jumped, face swollen and wrong, as if the water had swollen her like a fruit left too long in sun. Her flesh fell under fingers like overripe bread. Around her crawled those amphibians, like grotesque sentries.
"Bring me closer," I said.
They did. I put on thin gloves and opened the woman's clenched hands. Her nails were frayed in peculiar patterns. Her clothes had the stains of a lifetime of suds. I saw the signs of a life beaten—calluses, scars, a boxed-in endurance—and then, in a corner of the chest, a strip of cloth that had been tucked there carefully: a silk petal, the exact design the girl had been wearing the day she jumped.
"A name?" Alec asked.
"Her name is Rita Farmer," I said. The laundress had been called Rita. The same name echoed across another collar, across other whispers later that day: the washroom’s overseer had been Daxton Tariq, a man whose reach had protected him until now.
Alec knelt and examined the water with practiced interest. "The fish feasted on the corpse," he said. "But note—there are no bite marks on the bed they pulled from, no signs the corpse traveled by way of hands. It's like the body was somewhere else and then placed in the water."
I thought of the girl with the four-month child, the prints, the cat who followed me like a loyal dog. The palace grew smaller, more secret and more threatening, with each quiet corridor.
"Stay inside," Alec told me again. "No solitary walks. If you leave your rooms, take guards."
Of course, I didn't stay put.
"You're not to go to the laundry," Mother warned me.
"I know." I patted the orange cat—Little Gold—who had followed me into the room. "But I have to ask questions."
That afternoon I took the laundry list from Alec and went to the laundromat anyway. "Let me see Rita's room," I said.
"You'll dirty your hands," one attendant said.
"Everyone's hands are dirty in one way or another," I answered.
We found evidence of fights and, tucked under a floorboard, hair—long, scalp-level hair—pulled out by the roots. I kept the hair. Later, I pressed it into Alec's hands.
"You should talk to the overseer, Daxton Tariq," I told him.
Alec's jaw tightened. "I will put him under observation."
Within days, the rumor mill congealed into a single ugly thing: I had assaulted a maid and then failed to claim the child. The palace drank the poison of whispers. People I had smiled at crossed paths to avoid me. The laundresses' quarters were a small country of fear. Daxton stood in his quarters with a face like a mask.
I let it be known I was unbothered. Inside, I was boiling.
The night the palace nearly burned down, I was in my chambers with Alec. We had been arguing about leads—Daxton, the silk flower, the amphibian creatures in the lake—and the wind had turned hot and dry. Someone had smeared oil on a window sill and set the room alight to cover some terrible theft. The fire leaped, and the smoke choked the corridor.
Someone had set that trap for me.
"Alec!" I coughed. "The closet! Get the cat!"
He did not answer like a man of letters. He answered like the soldier he was, hauling me into a chair and wrapping oilcloth around my face. We were thrown out into the courtyard, where the smoke's bite sent everyone reeling.
We saved the cat. We lost a guard who had tried to carry me out. Ash hung like confetti. The palace swam in a haze of accusation.
"You should have stayed inside!" Mother exploded when she found me alive. "We've been given the king's mercy yet again and you—"
"I was here," I told her. "I smelled the same oil as when the laundry—"
"You said so in front of escorts," Alec said quietly. "Someone's framing more than one of us."
After the fire there came a time of quiet that throbbed. People were moved and reassigned. The Emperor made symbolic gestures—remove a man from his post, reprimand a handful of servants—but the insulated rot had teeth that couldn't be cut by draconian reassignment alone.
Then things escalated. I'd told Alec about the hair I'd found, given him little shards of proof. He had the habit of walking the palace with questions in his hands. He'd traced the silk flower back to one of the merchants who supplied delicacies and trinkets to the palace—a man who had been paid by an agent who had used Daxton's name as cover.
Daxton's smile was porous. In private I watched him like a cat watches a mouse—lean, dangerous.
"Open the registry," I told Alec. "Who bought the flower?"
Alec nodded. "I will. But be cautious."
"Always," I said. I didn't mean it for him. I meant it for myself.
One morning the palace awoke to a demonstration I had plotted, to bait the serpent. I had placed myself as I always was—vulnerable, tended—and allowed odd impressions of weakness to be seen. I fed certain servants small amounts of a drug that made them drowsy, a trick to see who would move while they were asleep. Daxton had to know we would not simply ignore him forever.
That night a handful of servants and guards were summoned to the main hall—among them Daxton, certain he could manipulate the course of events. I had told Alec to keep him close but to wait. The Emperor agreed to attend the revelation. The chamber filled like a tide. A hush fell when the Emperor rose and gestured.
"Daxton Tariq," the Emperor began. "You have been accused of poisoning palace staff, of coercing maids into disgrace, and of arranging assaults through your cronies. How do you answer this?"
Daxton's face kept a practiced calm. "Sire, I am your humble servant. I have given all to the palace. These are slanders."
"Then explain the silk petal tucked into Rita Farmer's garments." Alec stepped forward and pinched the edge of the silk between gloved fingers. "Explain the ledger payments under your name. Explain the straw of hair pulled from a corpse recovered at the lake, found in your storeroom."
The room buzzed. Daxton blinked. His blinks lengthened into a stutter of fear. Sweat gathered at his temple.
"You have no proof," he said.
"We have more than words," I said, rising. The guards at the chamber doors shifted. "We have witnesses who will stand. We have the laundresses. We have the ledger. We have the hair. And we have Kenji Amin's death to explain."
Daxton's scowl was a thing grown from ash. "You are a prince. You make an accusation like this—"
"I am a prince," I said, "and under the law I am a citizen subject to the same order the rest of you are. Listen."
I had arranged the steps. All the names who feared Daxton crowded the hall: young maids who trembled; a few men who had seen the money pass quietly through hands into pockets; the fishers who had been paid to keep the lake as a dumping ground. The Emperor raised his hand.
"Alec," he said. "You will present what you have."
Alec did. Methodically. He produced ledgers, showed the silk ticket from the merchant, laid out the hair on a white cloth. He called the laundresses to the stand. They told of bruises, of threats, of nights when Daxton would send servants to seize young women. Their voices shook but they spoke the truth.
Then I called the merchant, whose voice shook but who confirmed the name signed on the receipt—Daxton's. The man claimed he had been paid in cash, anonymous at first and then years of hush payments.
The court shifted. Daxton's mask cracked.
"Confess," I said. "Tell the Emperor why you needed to make women disappear."
Daxton laughed like a man who kept one last trick. "You are a prince who plays detective," he sneered. "You think you can pull a cloak over the palace and know all its seams? You do not know what the palace does to those beneath. I did what my duty required to keep order."
"Your duty?" I repeated. "Your duty to steal children from those who would be free? Your duty to sell silk flowers meant for lovers to bribe them into shame? Which 'duty' is this?"
His face lost color. People in the hall murmured, and then the murmurs grew into whoops of fury and grief. Secrets uncoiled with the speed of lightning.
Daxton's defense ran out like a frayed rope. Alec presented witness after witness—maids who had been threatened, guards who had seen payments taken from hidden pouches. Each testimony tightened the noose.
I watched Daxton go through the seven stages all villains do: arrogance, denial, attack, shock, bargaining, pleading, collapse. The last two were performed in public.
"No," he spat. "You cannot do this. I serve the palace. I follow orders. I—"
"Whose orders?" I asked.
He looked down, and for a flicker of a moment, the man in him—frightened, not monstrous—appeared. He whispered, "I follow those who hold more power."
That small, true answer was a thread Alec seized. "Give names," Alec urged. "Who else is involved?"
Daxton tried to bargain. He tried to claim one step removed, tried to protect those he had once stood under. The Emperor gave no mercy in his eyes. "You will be stripped of office now," he said. "But the law requires ceremonial penalty. You will stand in the public court and be shamed. All your wealth will be seized. Your title is taken. You will then be forced to labor in the lowest service of the palace until death."
Daxton's face paled. The crowd hissed.
The ceremonial punishment was old as the palace itself—public humiliation, followed by servitude. It was crafted for spectacle and for correction. The chamber set itself like a stage.
Alec read the charges aloud, precise as a blade. "For coercion, for bribery, for causing death—Daxton Tariq is guilty."
Daxton finally fell apart. He screamed out names, names that burned into the air like sparks. He accused other minor officials, named a few men who sat in the hall and who only then turned to look like the guilty. The crowd gasped. A soldier stepped forward to arrest the named men. The palace's hush became a clamor.
But public punishment is not merely spectacle. It requires that the guilty person be made unable to harm again, publicly and fully shamed. For Daxton, that meant that the Emperor ordered that in the market square—so that his disgrace would be seen by the people who once bowed to him—the man be stripped of his insignia, his fine clothing replaced with coarse linen, his hair cropped to mark him as servant, and then marched barefoot to the laundry where Rita had worked.
"Everyone present will observe," the Emperor commanded. "You who let fear guide your loyalties—let this be a lesson."
Daxton's reaction changed in the span of breath. Fear leached onto his face, then bargaining, then pleading. He leaned forward as they cuffed him.
"Please—Sire—" he said. "I will repent. I will return the money. I will—"
"No," the Emperor said. "You will be recognized publicly for the harm you inflicted. The palace must be cleansed."
Daxton descended into a panic. Men who had read him as imperious suddenly found him small. They lined the route to the laundries and watched him be stripped of the trappings that had once elevated him. People took his badges, his seals, holdings photographed and listed for seizure. The laundresses spit in his direction. Maids who had once pretended not to see when he passed now spat words of anger into his face. Their reactions ranged from pure, righteous weeping to loud, grateful laughter.
I watched men and women record the spectacle—some took notes, some hissed insults, while others stood white as winter. When he was marched to the laundry he had managed for so long, Daxton crumpled to his knees. The Emperor's guards shackled him with ropes and set him to work under a public mandate: scrub, scour, and mend for years without reprieve. No favors would reach him. His property was seized; his name was crossed from ledgers.
He reacted in the stages the law predicted. He began with denial: "You cannot make me do this." He then shifted to fury—curses that rang out and faded. He begged, contritely at first, then screamed, then tried to strike at those closest. When brute force failed, he turned to pleading. Finally, he broke into a ragged, defeated whisper and wept. The crowd saw every change.
People in the hall responded different ways. Some clapped, the sound huge and cathartic after weeks of fear. Some watched quietly, fingers pressed to their lips, while those who had once kneeled before Daxton grinned like dogs who had been offered better food. A few looked away, ashamed at themselves for having been silent.
It was a long scene—more than five hundred words could hold, five hundred breaths of horror and catharsis. He was shamed until the emotion in the hall was raw and honest. Then he was led away, a hollow man, too broken to meet the eyes of the victims.
The punishment was public. The reactions were immediate: the laundresses who had suffered came forward; Kenji's father—I learned—stood in the crowd and let his hand touch Daxton's shoulder for a second and then pulled away. People leaned across towards me with murmured thanks. They wanted to believe the palace could fix itself.
But punishment does not cure everything.
In the days that followed the palace still creaked with whispers. The amphibian creatures in the lake remained; people avoided the water. The ghostly child kept murmuring at night. Don't ask how I know—at times I woke with the scent of wet earth and a baby's cry clinging to my skin. My collar bore the phantom marks of fingers that had never touched me.
Then came the plan to catch the true mastermind. Alec worked tirelessly, traveled routes the palace thought secure, and slowly, a deeper current came to light: someone had been bribing men in the grain stores and in the supply chain, and there were hints of another man—someone named in passing by a sweaty merchant—but every name dissolved into others.
I decided to act. I feigned collapse for a time, let my enemies believe they had won the hour. I let my own barked fury be seen and heard at times so that conspirators might feel safe to show themselves.
When evening fell and the palace was between breaths, I walked the corridors. Alec was at my shoulder, eyes like polished steel. He didn't ask me questions. He didn't have to. He kept his counsel.
It was during one of those walks that the lake found its answer.
"You asked for me to find honesty," I said to Alec as we stopped on the marble at the edge of water. Little Gold twined around my legs. "We will not let them hollow this place."
"Nor will I," Alec promised.
"What we do next will be ugly," I said. Alec's hand—steady, necessary—closed around mine. "Are you ready?"
"I am," he said.
We walked toward the pale water together, and the night, for a long time, listened.
The End
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