Sweet Romance15 min read
My Unwanted Prince and the Eight-Treasure Pin
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"I married the crown prince to save a dying emperor," I begin, because that's the short version and short versions please fewer questions.
"You did what?" Ellen Elliott peered over my shoulder at the manuscript, her eyes wide.
"I accepted a royal decree," I said. "Think of it as a job with a very short training manual and a very long dress code."
"It said 'job' on the decree?" Ellen smiled, but it fizzled into a grin that meant both amusement and worry. "Julianne, you're going to be an empress now."
"I married to give the old man a reason to live," I told her. "They wanted 'vitality.' I gave them fire."
"You didn't," Ellen choked out.
"I kind of did," I admitted, and then we both laughed because the truth of it was still a little absurd and very much a loaded confession.
The marriage was explosive in more ways than one. The emperor lived long enough to issue the marriage order, then two days after a very energetic wedding night—poof—he was gone.
Zeke Beck knelt before his father's casket like a statue that had been run out of oil.
"Someone said you bring luck to your husband," he whispered without looking at me. "They said someone claimed you were... 'fortunate' for a husband."
I felt the air drop out of me. His tone was the slow kind that lands heavy and cold.
"Who said that?" Zeke asked.
I pointed, because I am not gifted at lies and also because there was only one obvious direction to point.
"There," I said, and the retort hung in the smoky room between flowers and condolence banners.
We did not get along at first.
"I'll remind you, I am a general's daughter," I snapped the first time we truly clashed at a state banquet. "I don't do dainty."
"You're seventeen and messy," Zeke answered, cool as the marble floor. "You do not belong at polished tables."
"Good," I said, because I liked where my hand landed on his sleeve. "Tables are boring. I prefer training yards and roasted venison."
That memory—me eight, him ten, claws and pride and a red handprint across a prince's cheek—stayed. He cried then—big, theatrical tears that stalled my punches—and I, for reasons I don't entirely understand now, told him I would let him hit back later. He took the later very seriously.
"You hit me seven times and kicked two scullions," he had sniffed once, as if he were listing achievements. "You should be ashamed."
"You cried," I pointed out, because the ledger of childhood wrongs required equilibrium.
"I cried," he admitted, "because your elbow almost took my eye out."
We clashed, we sparred—sometimes with words, often with fists, once with a hairpin, once with a wooden doll that I prized more than sense.
"You pesky crab," he muttered under his breath at the hunting ground the year we were older. "You stare like a pickpocket at a perfumed purse."
"You stare like a prince who thinks prizes fall into his lap," I said, and then I rode like a gale. I wanted the first prize, the white-jade hairpin with eight little treasures set into it. That pin was the sort of trophy that crowned more than a hand; it crowned stories.
"Julianne, want to settle for second?" Zeke asked, disdain folding into curiosity.
"I want first," I said.
When I won, the court buzzed louder than the hunting falcons. My father, Grant Austin, a man who wore his iron like a joke sometimes, scowled at palace ears for stealing the prince's thunder.
"Give me one favor," the emperor said with a chuckle that came out like a cough and a promise, "I will grant you any one wish."
"A wish?" I asked, because who gives such things away but the sky.
"Anything," he said, and the kind in his eyes made me bold. "Even an immunity token."
"I want a safe card," I said, and laughed as if I had told a joke. "Give me an amulet that says 'no one can hang me'—an 'immune' token."
"You have it," he smiled. "One immunity token, for you."
I collected the shiny rectangle like a prize at a child's fair and tucked it away, because a soldier's child hoards odd things.
The prince did not like it. He glowered at me as if the token were a personal slight.
"You could have given it to me," he said once, his voice a blade of disappointed glass.
"You could have won," I countered.
He did not like the white-jade pin, nor the way I laughed when the tutors called me coarse. He did not like the way people whispered, "She will kill her husband of fortune." He did not like me.
I did not especially like him either—until a night when the palace felt too quiet and I heard him sigh like a book that was closing slowly.
"Julianne," he said one evening, "did you know I used to hide and cry?"
"Why would you tell me?" I asked, looking up from the pile of silly paper I was trying to edit into something respectable.
"Because you were the only one who would hit me without meaning to hurt me too much," he said.
I blinked. "That's the strangest compliment."
"Say it isn't," he murmured. "Say you still think I look alright."
I blinked again, because who forgives a childhood grudge with such nonchalance?
"I think you look..." I hemmed. "Okay. Fine. You look no worse than a noble with bad posture."
"That's faint praise," he said, narrowed eyes glinting.
"Faint but honest," I replied.
"Honesty is... unexpected," he said, and there was warmth there I did not know how to handle.
And there were others to love in small, bright ways. Adriana Bentley existed like a gentle breeze. She was kind when she did not need to be, soft-spoken, and the sort of person who made someone feel like a window left open in spring. She was Zeke's white moon; his eyes softened for her the way oil softens a blade.
"You like her," I told him bluntly once.
He shrugged. "She is a kind girl. That is rare."
"Be kind to your kindness," I said, then added, "and do not give it away freely to anyone who says pretty things."
We both learned, in crooked, clumsy ways, how to be less cruel.
There was a market night I will never forget. I slipped out, disguised badly as a boy—because 'disguised as a boy' in my case always reads like 'someone who forgot how to tie his hair.' I bought a wooden figurine—a boy carved with clumsy hands and a stubborn smile. I named him Morning, because names amuse me.
A hand took a statue I had just dropped; a voice said, "Sorry," like a bell.
I looked up and my heart did a silly leap. The boy—no, the man—whose hand had closed over my toy looked at me with real eyes.
"Are you alone?" he asked.
"I am," I said. "At least for now."
"You're a girl in a boy's coat," he said, smiling as if he'd solved a riddle. "A masquerade with trousers."
"My name is Julianne," I said.
"Ellery Ortiz," he replied.
He was a singer, a player, a small-town performer who smelled like crushed jasmine and paper. He called me "a bloom in rough weather." He called me brave when I felt faint. He said, "You are beautiful," a second time that night, and I thought I would melt like sugar.
Then he disappeared into lantern light and palace clinging arms. He returned, later, to the manor in shackles.
Zeke stood at the head of a line of men with faces like thunder.
"Ellery Ortiz," he said. "Traitor."
"What?" I was light-headed. "No—"
"Your small friend," Zeke snapped, "has been making eyes at our markets and borrowing songs from rivals. He is likely an agent."
"An agent?" I demanded.
"Perhaps," Zeke said, and the word had the weight of a verdict.
I was dragged into a scene that still makes my skin prickle: men in silk arguing, the clack of sandals, the hiss of whispers. "Traitor!" someone shouted, as if a single cry would burn guilt into a man's skin.
"Ellery left," I said. "I don't think he is a spy."
Zeke's expression shook between something like pity and something like triumph. "The evidence says otherwise," he said.
I wanted to dig my nails into his collar.
"You can't... you can't do this," I told him. "He's kind. He gave me a compliment. He bought me a wooden boy."
"Julianne," Zeke said, voice low and terrible, "this is not the moment for sentiment."
He had the authority then, a ruler's neatness in a harsh world. He had the right to order, to bind, to frighten. He used it.
He used it in a way that made my stomach drop into a hollow place.
After the embarrassment, after the shame, after the long exile in the small dark room my father used as a punishment once more, I thought of revenge like an ember smoldering. But revenge is patient. It does not leap to fire. It takes its time and strikes in a place where the world must see.
The court is a theater; courtiers are the audience who love a scandal. People prefer a tragedy to the truth. So I made a plan that used that preference.
"I will show them," I told Ellen. "They must see the root or they will just pick at leaves."
"How?" she asked.
"Publicly," I said. "Nothing is more stinging than shame in front of silver candlesticks and ink-scratched recorders."
"You will tell the Queen Mother?" Ellen suggested.
"I will make them confess," I said.
I knew who fanned the rumor that I was "fortunate to kill a husband." I knew who laughed in the corridors when Ellery's name was dragged through the mud. Five names came to me like a list of stones: Cabot Rivera, Charlie Gerard, Max Calhoun, Dylan Ludwig, and Gavin Vorobyov. They had been loud and cruel, a gossip circle that fed each other like crows.
I did not want blood. I wanted a spectacle that unclothed them.
The day of the reveal, the Hall of Records smelled of incense and old ink. Regina Henderson, the dowager, sat on her raised cushion with the air of someone who had seen worse and enjoyed the teaching. The benches were full of faces that had eyes like knives.
"Julianne," Regina said, arching a brow, "this better be interesting."
"It will be," I promised.
I called them out one by one. First Cabot Rivera, who had cheeks like ripe apples and a voice that was arrogant and loud.
"Cabot," I said, walking up until my skirt brushed his knee, "do you remember what you told the tea women about me? About the emperor and my... 'blessing'?"
He huffed. "I told a joke."
"A joke that put a man's life—an artist's—on the line," I said. "Tell us, please, what was the exact phrase?"
He shrugged with practiced charm, expecting a laugh. "I said the usual. You know. 'She'll bring luck... or misfortune to any bed she touches.' Hardly a war crime."
"Hardly a war crime," I repeated, louder, and the room burbled. "You said it into the hall. Did you say it when Ellery Ortiz was turned over to the guards?"
He blinked, suddenly small. "I—no."
"Other records disagree." I waved a scrap of testimony I had gathered—notes from servants, a scribe who had overheard them. Cabot's face changed from bluster to pale. He stammered, "They were teasing. We didn't—"
"They were teasing," I echoed. "And because you teased, because you wished such things aloud, a man lost his freedom."
The murmurs turned into a swell. There was a sound like a flock of birds scattering.
Next, Charlie Gerard. Charlie had been elegant in his cruelty—snide remarks dressed in silk.
"You said the emperor was 'beaten to death by a bride's vigor,'" I accused.
He laughed, but it was the laughter of someone who is being watched for the first time in a long while and does not like it. "I said sarcasm. Poets like to be clever."
"Did you see Ellery in chains afterwards?" I asked.
"Does that matter?" He curled his lip.
"It matters because people listen when you speak," I told him. "Your words have weight. You used your weight to tip a man's fate."
People were whispering now. Heads turned to the scribe in the corner. He stood and offered his ink-stained hand.
"He wrote down what you said," I pointed to the scribe. "You will not like the record, Charlie."
Charlie Gerard's composure broke like thin glass. He started to deny specifics and then trailed off into silence when a laundry list of witnesses confirmed the timeline. His face took on the color of a man who had been holding his breath for a long time and finally had to exhale.
Then Max Calhoun. Max had been particularly gregarious in painting the story of my "dangerous charm."
"Max," I said, "you started the rumor in the wine's company. You bet three coins on the story's spread."
"I wagered it would be entertaining," he said.
"Is entertainment worth a man's life?" I demanded.
Max's servants muttered. He stuttered, "I—no—"
People leaned forward. Their fingers found the edges of their fans like weapons.
Dylan Ludwig laughed like a man who had swallowed his pride: "She must be dangerous. I only said it to frighten the stable boys."
"And Gavin Vorobyov?" I added, because the list had a leader.
Gavin stood up straighter as if his backbone had been sharpened by arrogance. "I merely repeated what others said," he declared.
"You publicly repeated falsehoods that had no proof," I said. "Ellery Ortiz was dragged from the market because of whispers. He was clasped in chains because your voices made the rumor true."
The hall had fallen quiet. The air felt like the moment before lightning strikes.
Then I presented evidence that made them go still: a tucked letter showing payments for false witnesses, a lacquered box with coins from Cabot to a man who overheard them, testimony from a groom who had seen Gavin hand a sealed envelope in the moonlight.
"These are very specific claims," Cabot protested.
"Specific enough to get men arrested," I said.
The men shifted. Protest turned to sputter. Pride curdled into panic.
"Do you deny the exchange of coins?" I asked, and the proof—an account book in Max's handwriting—told its own story.
Cabot's face emptied of color then hardened into something like pleading.
"Julianne," he said, "we were... we were joking. It was foolish."
"Foolishness doesn't undo chains," I replied.
He went from flippant to frightened in a heartbeat. The room watched as someone powerful shrank. A dozen other courtiers murmured, already snapping up the morsels of spectacle.
"Public confession," I said, and there is something about a spoken word in that hall—ink on paper, seal on wax, scribe by the ledger—that makes shame land on a person like a wet cloak.
I had arranged for the emperor's physician, the head steward, and three servants to be present. They recounted the timeline, the arrests, the bribes and the way the circle of gossip had escalated into a criminal accusation.
Cabot's bravado stalled. He tried to lie but then blurted, "I... I took a coin. It was a dare. I didn't see the harm."
"Dare?" the steward repeated.
"Yes," Cabot whimpered. "We laughed. We thought it would be amusing."
"Is amusement what you call the destruction of a man's livelihood?" I asked. "He lost work, sleep, his name—he was branded because you wanted to be clever."
Cabot's mouth twisted. He tried to rally, to point fingers at others. "They all did it. This is a circle."
The circle, it turned out, had a few spokes that led to real hands. Gavin's voice had been loud enough to travel across the market; Dylan had told the marshal they 'saw' suspicious behavior; Max had slipped a servant some coins to say anything to keep the rumor burning.
One by one they shifted from angry to defiant to pleading.
"Please, my lady," Charlie begged, the first to break at the knees. "We didn't think he would be jailed."
"Then think first," I said.
There was a moment when Cabot's face moved through the stages I'd been taught to write: smug, startled, shrinking, pleading. He clutched at the silk of his collar like a drowning man.
"Do you apologize?" Regina asked, quietly. Her voice was not loud; it did all the cutting it needed.
Cabot nodded; Charlie, too. Max's jaw worked. Dylan's expression was the color of someone who had been caught stealing bread and expected a slap but got the stocks.
Gavin, who had led the rumor mill, did not fall to his knees. He held his head too high even as the evidence stacked like bricks. "I repeated what I heard," he said.
"You made a decision to repeat," I corrected. "Words are actions when you have ears and a mouth and a crowd."
Now came the penalties, and I did not want blood. I wanted humiliation that taught caution better than death. I wanted visible consequences so that the next whisper might die before it could spread.
Cabot was sent to perform three days of public service cleaning the kennels and mending harnesses—an indignity befitting a man who had sharpened tongues for sport. The finest courtiers had to watch as he scrubbed mud from harnesses with his gilded hands.
Charlie had to stand in the market and publicly retract every maligned word during three market days. The vendors who once lifted their hats to him were given free license to call him what they'd like.
Max's coin accounts were seized; he had to return every coin and publicly pay for Ellery's lost wages. The scribe read out the calculations while he stood very still and red.
Dylan, who had been the gossip courier, was made to work under the marshal for a month, doing the paperwork he had lied about. He looked like a man learning humility through ink smears.
Gavin's punishment was different. For being the ringleader he had to kneel and state in the Hall of Records, in front of all assembled, that he bore responsibility for Ellery's arrest and that his arrogance had caused real harm. He would lose his honorary title for a season and be barred from court entertainments. He begged in a way that was surely humiliating for him; his voice shifted from cocky to small, a fall that made everyone lean forward.
The crowd's reaction was immediate and strange. Some applauded with a sense of relief. Others murmured that I was merciless. A few—mostly women who shopped in the market—smiled because someone had finally paid for lies with work and penance.
"Shame," one woman said. "That's the medicine for such men."
They watched as the group went from arrogance to collapse. Cabot's defiant eyes flicked, then watered. Charlie's eloquence ran dry. Max's coin-counting became a public ledger. Dylan learned to fold parchments without a sneer. Gavin, used to being listened to, found his voice small.
Then something moved in me, a small soft thing.
"Enough," I told the hall, and it quieted instantly.
"I have shown mercy," I said. "Not because you deserve it, but because we must make the court a place where mistakes, grave though they may be, can be repaired. This is not vengeance. This is correction."
Regina inclined her head like a judge who had watched training wheels fall off. "You have done well," she said. "Let these men remember the market's face."
They did remember. Cabot scrubbed harnesses until hands bled; Charlie recited apologies in the market until passersby laughed; Max paid salaries with fingers that trembled; Dylan learned to ink his name without arrogance; Gavin swallowed his pride and bowed in the Hall.
Ellery Ortiz returned eventually. He came in plain clothes and smiled at me like the moon had risen early. "You shone in there," he said, and it was the sort of compliment that did more than heal—it made me want to believe.
But the court's punishments are never all: there are aftershocks.
Zeke watched everything. He saw me stand up against his peers and be steely and kind—both qualities he valued and found threatening. He saw those men lose their gilded masks. He saw what I would do for someone I thought unfairly treated. His face when he looked at me that night—after the confessions, after the cleaning—was a new thing: recognition that I was not merely a bruiser of his pride.
"You were dangerous," he said later, in a low voice that should have been frightening but wasn't. "You were deliberate."
"I was necessary," I corrected.
"You were beautiful doing it," he said, and my breath stopped in a way that felt alarmingly like a surrender.
There are days when a woman discovers she can be two things at once: tender and formidable. I wore both like armor.
In the months that followed, we reached a truce that folded into something like friendship. We shared silly private jokes about the wooden dolls—Zeke laughed when I told him I had named mine Morning—and he began to sit at the end of my packet of pages when I wrote.
"You write like a woman who has beaten men and then forgiven them," he teased.
"I write like a woman who has eaten bad sugar cake," I shot back.
"You remember when you fed me sugar cake and I said it tasted like coal?" he asked.
"I do," I said. "You called it coal."
"You called it coal," he repeated. "I still remember the look on your face when you thought you'd poisoned me."
"You forgave me," I said, because I could. "You forgave me and I forgave you because—" I faltered, because why else?
"Because we are married," he supplied, and then quite unexpectedly took my hand and kissed it like it had been a small, private prize.
It was a tiny moment. It was one of three moments that, stitched together, pulled at me in ways that made me see Zeke anew: the way he once smiled at me in private; the night he wiped ink from my cheek with his sleeve; the time he announced in court that he'd rather listen to my speech than any minister's, and meant it.
"First time you smiled at me without glare," Ellen noted once. "That was a victory."
"Second time," Collins Newton said, "was when he tucked your hair behind your ear."
"The third time..." Helga Sasaki whispered at a banquet, "was when he took you into his arms in the market and stood proud as if he'd stolen the sun."
We were unremarkable in that way: two people who had begun in bad temper and finished with something soft. The court gossiped a new tune. People loved a redemption story almost as much as a scandal.
And the wooden doll and the eight-treasure pin? They remain on my dressing table. Zeke jokes that I should name an army after Morning.
"Name it something intimidating," he said once, stroking the doll.
"Morning is intimidating in its cheer," I replied.
"Then the world fears daybreak," he said, and kissed the pin I had worn when I first won it.
We lived our chapters with quarrels and tea, with dances taught by my formidable mother-in-law, Regina Henderson, who somehow had the energy to turn the palace into a repertory theater and then appoint me as lead of the grand dance. She called it "broadway for the back halls" and made me rehearse until I could pirouette even while scowling.
One night, under lantern light and the watchful eyes of the court, Zeke leaned close and murmured, "You change things."
I thought of the punishment scene, of the men who scrubbed kennels, of Ellery's return, of the way a market woman's applause sounded like church bells.
"I change things that need changing," I said.
He kissed the top of my head, the place where my hair had never behaved anyway.
"Then stay dangerous," he said, smiling into my hair.
"I will," I promised.
And if someday someone asks: did being given as a bride to cure a dying emperor make me something else? I will answer: it made me into someone who knows how to stand in a hall and make men confess, and how to hold warm hands when the night is cold.
The doll sits by the eight-treasure pin, and when I glance at them both, I remember the market, the small hand that first reached for my little wooden boy, and a man who once wanted to cut my head off for making his father die earlier than expected.
"Don't be dramatic," I tell Zeke when he moans at the memory, and he laughs like a child.
"We stomped on arrogance," I say, turning to the window where lanterns float like stars, and the court below hums.
"Yes," he says tenderly, "and you made sure the stomp came with instruction."
We do not know every tomorrow. But I know at least this: the eight-treasure pin will keep its shine, Morning will not splinter, and if anyone dares to toss a rumor, the Hall of Records will have ink enough to make them kneel.
The End
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