Sweet Romance17 min read
My Scar, My Rebirth, and the Masked War Prince
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I remember the cliff like a photograph burned into the back of my eyelids: the wind that smelled of pine, a shout that was more hunger than language, and then the terrible, sudden blank.
"Don't come closer!" I screamed, my voice a brittle thing in the dark. Three rough men moved like shadows on the mountain slope above me. One of them laughed.
"Hahaha. Who will save you here?" the leader said. His breath smelled of iron and stale wine.
"I—my sister will come. She's a genius in the city—she will come." The word "sister" was a thin reed I tried to clutch, a belief I had always carried like a small talisman.
He spat. "Your sister hired us to ruin you. She wanted a corpse, not a rescue."
My skin tightened with disbelief and pain. I fought. I bit. I ran until the cliff opened and the world became air and then water and then nothing.
But I woke.
"Where—?" My hand brushed hot, living skin. This body—my hands—felt wrong and new. A stranger's thoughts brushed mine, like leaves. The mountain lights blurred, then rewound. I tasted iron. Then a white, steaming bath filled my view and a man's chest rose and fell above me like a cliff.
He smelled of herbs and cold rain. A sliver of a face hovered over me, masked in gold and dark leather. His eyes were the color of winter thrift—so sharp I wanted to blink them away.
"Who are you?" I spat between coughing, and the answer arrived as hands—sudden, powerful—drawing me into safety and, infuriatingly, silence.
"My name isn't for you." The voice was low, unyielding. "Stay. Don't move."
He tucked me into his arms as if I were something breakable. My heart did something traitorous then—an animal sound I couldn't hold back—and the embarrassment of being carried like a secret prickled my cheeks.
I bit him. "Ow—" he hissed. "You bite like a drowning thing."
I twisted and kicked, shockingly small and furious. He flinched and then, with the same unease I felt when held by a stranger, his hand steadied.
"Stop," he said, the single word sharp like a blade. The world narrowed to the curve of his palm and the steady beat beneath his chest. "You will wake up again if you keep struggling."
I was sure of two things, suddenly: this body wasn't mine and I had not died. My name from another life—Ines Legrand—sat bright and clear in my mind like a signature. And this man's scent threaded into my clothes, into the steam and the wooden boards: what a terrible coincidence to fall into the arms of a prince or a warlord, I thought. What a worse luck to be alive at all.
"Don't touch me like that. I have standards." I tried to sound angry and clever and failed; my voice came ricocheting off the bath steam, a child in a woman's body.
"Standards?" The corner of his mouth twitched. "You don't know what the word means."
He was powerful. He had a presence that made the steam shudder—Rafael Kelley, I would learn his name later, and then learn how the name made people step back as if they had burned themselves. He wore a mask carved with a thin gold thread, but his hands were bare and dangerous. He had been soaking in a medicinal pool—one part herb, one part rare root—and I had splashed him as I fell. He could have killed me for the insolence. Instead he held me.
"You fell from the western cliff," he said after a silence. "You could have died."
"It seems I only bruise," I said. I thought of the men who had chased me, of my sister's voice like honey that attracted vultures. A fury like a bright coal sparked in my chest.
Rafael watched me like someone used to watching wolves make decisions. "You are not the kind of small we usually throw into trouble," he observed. "You smell differently."
I went to his house the way a moth goes back to a flame—cautious, curious. My new name, the body I had woken into, belonged to the daughter of a minor noble family in the city—people called her a flower vase, beautiful but useless—and I found the life messy and fragile like a pot with a crack. The girl in whose shape I now lived had been designated to serve at the house of Rafael Kelley, the masked warlord, as part of a royal command. The court's whim, a punishment, a spectacle—what did it matter? I had a mission now: survive, learn, and find the truth about the poison that had been carved into this life.
"You're late," my father, Conway Cardoso, snarled the moment he saw me in the courtyard. "Where have you been?"
"You forgot the etiquette for your own daughter?" I said coolly, because the old reflex to fear him had burned away with my other life. "You forget your titles or you bought them only as a memory?"
He spat the words adults thought dangerous and walked faster to a chair he thought he owned. At dinner, Danielle Anderson—my sister by the old life, now the woman who had ruined me—watched with a smile that had teeth.
"You're back," she sang. "Did the mountains chew you? We can still fix you—my allies, the prince's house—"
"Save your lies," I said under my breath. My face, at least for a while, remained hidden by a simple veil I wrapped around my scars. The first thing I learned was that this world valued appearances and power and that I had two things missing until I took them back: a whole face and enough strength to stand when others pushed.
Rafael's kitchen was a rumor of riches, but that day he did something no rumor justified: he offered me medicine. "You are stubborn," he said, looking at the bandage I had made of my torn dress. "Stubborn is interesting. Come for the baths tomorrow."
"Are you testing me?" I asked. Pride made my mouth clumsy.
"I'm testing the world," he said.
Over the next days a ritual established itself. He would order me into the medicinal pool, where herbs and bitter roots boiled like secrets; he would watch me with an interest that scraped like a blade, and sometimes he would speak instructions and sometimes he would be still as a statue. I learned ambitious things from those baths, things I would use later: how to feel the edge of herb and heat, how to push poison into paths where it would do less damage. My hands—those belonged to a woman who had stitched patients in another life—remembered needles before I had to. I took to making small silver pins, my old life teaching my new body a craft I had not been allowed there.
"You're doing this for yourself," Rafael said one night as steam curled between us, "not as a favor. You should not think otherwise."
"Who would think otherwise?" I asked, but I knew the answer—a lot of people in this city who imagined my story simple and pretty.
The baths healed some things. They cured a portion of the wound that ached at my face and smoothed the rawest edges. The poison inside me—some slow, gnawing thing that had stolen vigor from the body—took longer. I felt a cage inside my chest; it would not open without work.
"Do you have a name?" Rafael asked once when the steam had gone thin and the moon painted silver lines across the floor.
I could have told him the truth about the other life and the steep debt I owed to being stubborn in another century. I did not. "Ines," I said, because the name fitted as if I had borrowed it and made it mine.
"Ines." He tasted the name and did not smile. "You are dangerous."
"And you are expensive," I said.
He looked offended by both statements. "Perhaps," he said, and then, softening in a way that took me by surprise, "perhaps you are also interesting."
Interest and irritation. That was the first of many small betrayals that would become kindness.
The village in front of the city had its rumors. "Rafael is a nightmare," people said when they pretended to speak of him as a thing not living. "He eats men who misstep."
If you are reading a book like mine because you love a delicious, slow burn between two people who bicker like knives, you will be pleased. He began to notice the little ways I survived: the way I set a tea cup down, the way I kept my eyes open while other women looked away. He began, unbelievably, to protect small things not because he wanted praise but because of a property of his nature I could not name: he preserved what pleased him. Once, when he left the city to the mountains for a week's command, a steward told me I would have to go with him to serve. I felt like a moth, again and again.
And then I found it: an odd bracelet in the hems of a stolen coat I had taken from Rafael's cloak. It was small, carved with a curl of silver that bit into my wrist like a clasp of light. When I touched it the world went thin and opened, as if a seam had been unzipped.
Inside was a tiny house and a childlike presence that spoke as if the instrument of a clock: it told me the bracelet was a vessel—a space—and that the space would grow if seeded. The voice was not a person; it was an appliance with a temperament toward mischief. There were a few strange items in the room: a tiny sword, the size of a palm, a bead carved with characters that flared in my head and taught me a form of movement, and a fragile egg that thrummed like a heartbeat.
"Pick the sword," the voice suggested. "Or the book. Or the egg."
"I can't take a living thing," I said, because my muscles understood the old law: take everything you can for your life and leave nothing wasted.
I made bargains with that small house. I learned to plant herbs with the care of someone sewing the future into the world. The egg cracked and—well, that story is absurd and also precious, and a calmer voice might make you believe it faster than I can tell you. A small thing came of the shell, and it looked at me with an ancient sleepy intelligence.
But my progress was not only found things and quiet victories. Danielle Anderson—my sister—had not only orchestrated the attempt on me; she continued to sell stories. The city loves tales that smear other people. One morning a storyteller on the main street spoke of a disloyal daughter who had betrayed her family and dallied with a masked lord. The tale was folded into songs. The courtyard filled with saliva and whispers.
"Who paid you?" I asked when I found one of Danielle's maids slipping into the tea house with a pouch of coins.
"Money makes stories bloom," she said. "Keep to yourself."
I did not want to be the woman who made war publicly. But the thing about women who live a double life is this: sometimes the world forces your hand. My grandfather, Thomas Huber, lay sick in a mossy cave that had been his place of cultivation. Poison had eaten him slowly for months. The poison was rare—mutated, the kind that needed a six-grade cure to be pulled out. I could not craft such a thing from nothing. The only place rumored to hold the medicine was Rafael's vault, the same vault guarded like a temple.
So I did what any woman with no choice does: I went to Rafael.
He was not impressed, not at first. "You can take something," he said when I told him. "But nothing that kills a man."
"I am not asking you to give me your money," I said. "Give me a chance."
He paused. Then he handed me a single small vial—sixth-grade antidote in a sliver of crystal. "This is dangerous," he told me. "You must know what to do with it."
"I do," I said.
I did not expect his hands to shake as he watched me working to clear the poison from my grandfather. But his voice was steady: "You owe me a favor."
I laughed without humor. "What for? Saving my grandfather?"
"For getting your face out of my pools," he said. "For that, you owe me nothing."
Under the moon, at the bedside of a man who had once led tens of thousands, I administered the cure with needles, with the slow, careful touch of a medic who had been another person's miracle in a different century. My hands moved in a pattern I did not know I still remembered. Old poisons bled from Thomas Huber as if pulled through a sieve. The man woke, thin and grainy like a paper, but alive.
He looked at me like a child sees a parent for the first time in years. "My girl," he whispered. "Is that you?"
"It is," I said, and for the first time the name that was in my head—Ines—felt settled like a stone in a pocket.
The public tests came soon after. At the Academy of Spirit Lore, a ceremony would measure a person's aptitude. I'd been labeled a vase once; the memory of its shame—of the way the world had told me I was nothing—made a furnace in me. The orb of testing glowed; the pillars that corresponded to the five elements blinked; then they all turned black and then—like a thunderbolt—the orb recorded something the recorders had never seen.
"She—" the chief examiner stammered. "She has a rare kind of attunement."
"Record it!" someone shouted.
Rafael had wiped the records a moment before when he thought I had no need of being seen. I felt him at my shoulder: "We cannot broadcast this, Ines," he murmured. "Not yet."
But a miracle does not like to be kept in a drawer. News leaked like a scent. Words were said. Danielle smiled in the corner with the small smile of a person who believes they own every outcome.
The real turning point came in the hall of a hundred mirrors—the place where the city's high families set their celebrations. I had allowed the rumor to stand until it was a weapon ready. The day I struck, the courtyard was full: governors, merchants, the petty lords, even the storytellers who had spun my downfall. Danielle walked among them in a dress stitched with false humility. Conway Cardoso, my father, sat like a judge, waiting to reward the virtue he invented.
I walked into the hall with a thing in my hand: the silver bracelet. I had no plan beyond the truth. But a truth laid out is a kind of hunger for a person who once ate bread of comfort and now eats the hard bread of retribution.
"Make way," I said, and people moved because people always move when the voice is not small.
Danielle looked at me and smiled the spear-smile people use for other people's faces. "You are bold," she said.
"We are all bold in stage light," I replied. "But boldness in the dark is something else."
I set the bracelet on the table and drew a cloth from my wrist. "This," I said, "is a thing you sold like jewelry to paint truth black."
"Artisans," Conway Cardoso snapped. "You buy such things in the market."
"Then listen," I said. "To the storyteller who is paid to spin tales."
I had caught the storyteller earlier—a weak man with a belly like a map of poor decisions—and I had fed him a pill, a truth-tung medicine that would make lies fall out of him the instant someone asked. He had vomited the name Danielle and the pouch of gold and why the gold had been given: to smear me into the mouth of the city for a bargain of power.
"She took coin to make a story," I said loud enough for the hall to tilt its attention. "She preferred being queen of a rumor to being sister."
"That is slander!" Danielle's voice pealed like silver hitting stone. "You—how dare—"
"Ask him." I gestured. "Ask the storyteller."
They dragged him forward like a fish out of lying water. Under the weight of the pill and my patience he told everything: how Danielle's maid had slipped him a bag, how Conway Cardoso had demanded the tale be repeated until the city believed it, how he paid the low men in the mountains to make sure I fell that night.
"It is a lie," Conway bellowed. He was red with rage and something like fear.
"Is it?" I asked. I placed a small needle prepared with a simple truth dust under the storyteller's tongue. The man could not lie now; it had been stripped from him like a cloak.
"She paid me," the storyteller said. "Danielle Anderson paid coin. Conway Cardoso told them to make a scene. He offered men for a 'lesson'—and, yes, they were to ruin the girl's face, make spectacle, and then offer her to the prince's house as 'evidence' of virtue."
A silence like a drawn breath fell. The hall began to rustle with voices—shock, delight, the hungry click of gossip.
Danielle's face went through the stages of revelation I'd imagined: a flash of cocky triumph; a sputter of denial; a smooth move to anger—"This is slander!"—and then, cracking, a hiss of fear. She had cultivated arrogance for years and it split like an old pot when the world turned on her.
Conway tried to speak; his throat closed. He met my grandfather's eyes—Thomas Huber, who had been brought to the hall for this moment—eyes that had lost some of their shine but still held a soldier's quiet. He leaned forward and spoke.
"You used my name," Thomas said slowly. "You used my house."
Conway started, and then the quick, hot plea: "I only—only to protect our standing."
"You protect your standing by trampling the living?" Thomas's voice was thin as a paper cut. His power had waned but the line of a life in him tightened at the injustice.
Then the punishment—a spectacle the city expected and the law allowed—began.
First, there was public confession. The storyteller, bound by the truth-pill, related the payments in full; the men who had been hired were produced—two shabby, frightened men who had a ledger with Danielle's maid's handwriting; pockets emptied of coin. People gasped. They took out small scraps of paper, the kind used for receipts, with the signature of Conway Cardoso. There it was: proof.
"She paid them to ruin her!" someone cried. "She paid them to ruin Ines Legrand!"
Danielle's mask fell. "I—" she choked. She tried to tear away the fabric of her dress, as if shedding costume would rid her of guilt. "It's not true! Do you see what she does? She steals, she mocks—"
A woman near the front rose and spat. "You would make a sister's life a stage and then play the grieving victim?"
The crowd closed in. The governor—an old quiet man who owed both the Cardoso and Kelley houses favors—took a step forward and read the law aloud. "Slander against a woman of another house when done for personal advantage is punishable. The court will have discretion."
They called for witnesses. Servants who had been paid were brought forward. They confirmed dates, payments, promises.
Danielle's reaction changed shape like melting wax. First she was smug. Then her face drained. She pointed a shaking finger at her father. "He told me—he said we'd be rid of her renown—"
Conway's face fractured. The public had been his to terrify; now, seeing proof, his posture crumpled. "I—" he started. "I was afraid... I—"
"Afraid of what?" I asked, because the hall demanded it. "That you would be judged lower than a man who fights? That the world would look at you and call you lesser?"
There were cries from the back—some in favor of mercy, some wanting spectacle. The law demands punishment be seen. The governor consulted with men cloaked in the power of justice; they rattled the forms as if the bureaucracy itself had teeth.
Finally, the decision: Cecilia—no, not Cecilia; I had to remember the names—Danielle Anderson and Conway Cardoso would be punished publicly. The magistrate pronounced it with the voice of late autumn.
They began in the way a city likes: with stripping of honors and public humiliation. Danielle's ornaments were taken; her hair was unpinned. "Take away her pride," an old woman muttered, and hands obeyed.
"Do not harm them physically," someone advised. "Let the shame be the lesson."
But the crowd's hunger was a living thing. They wanted to see the arrogant felled.
Danielle, who had worn smiles like armor, now went through the phases I had seen in smaller forms—the smugness, the sharp denial, the shake of panic. She started to laugh, thin and brittle as dried reed. "You cannot—this is a lie! Father!"
Conway shouted for help. "This is a setup. Their prince is behind you—"
"Is the prince involved?" asked Rafael, stepping forward now, his voice a calm blade. He had not made a sound during the morning, but there he was, in the center, a quiet that silenced the room.
"No!" Danielle saw him and, like a wild creature discovering a cliff, she lunged for him with words full of venom: "You kept her safe because—because you wanted her. You wanted—"
The crowd hissed. Words that suggested the worst in men are a strong spice for a public to taste.
I stopped her with a look that cost me nothing and everything. "You sold a girl's ruin for coin and comfort. People will remember what you did," I said. "They will not forget it."
It was a small victory, and then it turned into larger work. People who once snubbed my grandfather now stepped forward with whispers of disbelief and anger. A woman who had once been betrayed by a relative shook her head and said, "No one makes a ruin of another and calls it justice."
Danielle's final collapse came when the magistrate announced a new decree: Danielle would be stripped of all the honors her family had lavished upon her. Tiles were taken from her roof, banners ripped down, her name removed from guest lists; but the cruelest part was the social one: women who had once coveted her position now turned away, and men who had once bowed refused to meet her eye. Friends left the hall in a cold solititude.
Conway—he was worse. He did the thing men embroiled in pride do: he tried to buy his way out, he tried to force wielded favors, he tried to string out the law with bribes. But the ledger existed, and the witnesses existed. The crowd, which loves an origin story, loved nothing more than to see the powerful humbled.
At the end, Danielle sank into sobs that were not like the measured cries of a contrite sinner but like a person who had misplaced a life and did not know where she had left it. She dropped to her knees and slapped her wrists as if to call the city to see her ruin. People took pictures with little glass leaves that flashed and recorded; others whispered and recorded with their tongues in spite. Some filmed, some applauded, some spat.
Conway stood, stunned into the old animal grief of losing a thing he thought permanent. The crowd turned away from him. His name would no longer open doors the way it had a week ago.
I watched them break and I felt something complicated and cold slide over me. Justice is a thing that tastes like iron and lemon. It fills your mouth and never quite satisfies.
The punishment did not end with spectacle. The law required penance and public labor. Danielle would be demoted to the servants' quarters; she would serve women she had mocked. Conway would be fined, stripped of the defense funds he had used to bribe men, and forced to issue a public apology in the morning market so all who wanted to could hurl comments at him. The storyteller received his fairer share and was paid less than he had been promised, for he had been petty and done wrong. The men who had assaulted me on the mountain were arrested in a noisy public trial: they had thought themselves invisible. They were not. People spat. One by one they were paraded—made to stand in the market while their accomplices recited their offending business. The crowd's voice turned on them as if it had found a target for its collective stomach.
Danielle's collapse had another phase: when she was forced to scrub the hallways where noblewomen once swept in her presence, when she had to attend the woman she had tried to ruin and apologize on her knees. The woman—an old nurse who had once been humiliatingly silenced by Danielle's lies—looked at her without applause. People filmed the scene; they recorded the disgrace. Danielle tried to speak in protests and they met with cold hands and cooler faces. Her panic became real. She begged. She threatened. "Have mercy," she said, but the city had little patience with inherited cruelty. Her voice went soft and slippery with shame.
Conway's last public humiliation was the worst: his own servants turned their backs while he was forced to read a statement of apology in the market; people laughed. They hissed. They took his coins back with a joy I could not fully savor. He had once owned menace; now he owned only weakness.
When the spectacle was done, when the crowd had dispersed to talk of the weather and the next scandal, I found myself alone with Rafael at the edge of an empty square. The night tasted like victory and iron.
"You did well," he said.
"I did what I had to," I said. "For my grandfather."
He looked at me with an odd, unreadable expression. "No," he said finally, "you did more than that. You made others see."
"Do not make the other men into monsters just yet," I said. "People do horrid things for small comforts."
He closed his eyes once. "I will not pretend you are not terrifying sometimes," he said. "But I will protect you. Not from the law. From the things that would rip you to pieces because you touched them."
"Promises," I said, and his laugh was a broken light. "I don't take promises lightly."
"But you will take the baths tomorrow," he said softly. "There are herbs in the pools you have not seen. There are things you can learn."
I looked at him and then at the sky. In the distance, the little house inside the bracelet breathed like a living thing under the earth. The space had become my refuge, a secret chest of tools and a small, stubborn creature that had chosen me as its steward. The moonlight struck the edge of Rafael's mask and the gold thread winked like a seam that could not be mended.
"I will come," I said. "But don't think this makes us friends."
"Good," he said. "Friends are problematic."
And so the city changed me slowly: I took hands when I needed to, I gave back blows when they came, and I learned to stitch truth into the fabric of life until the pattern could not be ignored. I taught the rescued youths—Jordan Ahmad, Kenneth Mills, Thomas Cantu—to climb, to hold, to steal a life and make it their own. Gunner Sjostrom, who had handed me his soul-bead in a desperate moment, became my first sworn brother. Thomas Huber, my grandfather, roused himself with patience and breathing and a promise not to leave me without a shield.
And Rafael—Rafael Kelley—stood like a cliff beside me, sometimes kind, sometimes cruel, never without that mask and a small, meticulous care that made my blood heat in unexpected places. The masked war prince had a way of looking at me that made it hard to think of much else.
The bracelet whispered to me one night from its tiny house. "Plant more," it said. "The space grows with what you give."
"I have planted more than herbs," I whispered back. "I have planted truth."
It answered with a small, pleased sound like a child who had found a coin.
You will ask me what comes next—if I kept my face, how the city forgave and what became of Danielle and Conway. You will ask if I stayed with Rafael or if I left for lands beyond. You will ask if the small creature in the bracelet grew to be a companion or a weapon.
I will say this: my scar remained, but it became a map. The bracelet grew. A small sword nested in my palm like a secret. People who had once despised me either learned the cost of that feeling or were taught to keep quiet. Danielle learned the humiliations of a ruined reputation; Conway learned that power is sometimes a brittle thing. The city learned that you do not ruin people for spectacle without expecting the city to answer with its own brutal fairness.
And for myself—I learned to wake up every morning and claim the life I had been given. I learned to make medicines, to use needles as a blade where needed, to look at other people and measure whether they would help me or hurt me. I learned that Rafael is not all rage and that I am not all wound. We learned to be dangerous together, in the slow way of iron shaped by steady hands.
Later, when the plum fields bloom each spring and the bracelet hums like a hive with small plants, I sit on the edge of the pool and watch Rafael take his mask off, ever so briefly. He tries not to laugh. I mock him for being a formal man with no sense of humor.
"You were never meant to be a lady," he tells me. "You were always meant to be a storm."
"And you were never meant to be gentle," I reply.
"I never promised gentleness," he says.
"Then keep your promises," I say, and he presses his forehead to mine. The sound the bracelet makes is small and ridiculous and full of all the sly things the world lets us, in small hours, take back: a piece of ourselves, a stolen victory, a face that will not vanish into rumor again.
The End
— Thank you for reading —