Sweet Romance13 min read
Odd Changes, Same Heart
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I remember the day I shouted it like a spell.
"Strange things change, but odd things do not!" I cried, pushing through Fox Cervantes without thinking.
"Whoa? You too?" a voice answered, and the world narrowed to the hand that reached for mine.
"You remember Volume 184 of that history book?" Vicente Crawford asked me, voice small and urgent. "I can't remember. I couldn't sleep for two nights."
"Uh..." I blinked. "If you can't remember, just stop trying."
He squeezed my hand; his eyes shone. I let go quickly because letting him see me tremble felt like showing a secret.
That night he asked me to sleep in the same palace wing. He said, "Three rules."
"Three rules?" I said, and made it sound braver than I felt.
"I can sleep on the floor or the bed. You sleep your way. I won't force you to be close."
"Then we'll take turns. You are the emperor." I tried not to laugh.
"But you came through earlier than I did. You were here five months, I just arrived one month ago," Vicente said, tugging the blanket over his legs.
"You didn't notice me before because—" I started.
"No, I noticed you," he cut in, smiling. "You were the garden girl, weren't you?"
"I'm Georgina. I wasn't a top-ranked maid."
"Ah, sorry." He pointed at my hair. "I thought you were dressed like a lower servant. Different time, different taste."
I kept my mouth shut. The truth was I didn't know how to do fancy hair. The highest I could manage was a messy knot that might have been fashionable in some other century.
I had come to the palace hungry. Sometimes hunger pushes bravery into strange actions.
At first I tried to get to him by normal means. I went to the study and was blocked by Fox Cervantes. "You can't enter," he said.
"Let me in," I begged. "I promise I won't be so lowly."
He snorted, "Garden girls, you have high hope."
"It's not hope. It's stomach," I lied. "I haven't had a proper meal in months."
He still stopped me. So I waited like someone outside a locked house waiting for a light to switch on.
Then I learned where he went every afternoon — the imperial garden. I ran. I shoved through the crowd and finally, at the little bridge, shouted that phrase that saved me and him both.
"Strange things change, but odd things do not!" I yelled.
He looked up and laughed. "You know math?"
"Thank the education system," I panted. "Now, can you tell me where to get food?"
That was how our days began.
After that night, he granted me a title. He called me into the morning light and said, "I will lift you up. You will be Jiéyù in the palace records."
I blinked. "You will what?"
"From garden maid to a titled concubine. You can move to Zhongcui Palace." He sounded like it was a small favor. It was not.
I moved in at once. For the first time someone else did my hair, but the style was almost worse than my own.
I worried about the man who had the highest place in the land. He kept working at state business, answering petitions, speaking with ministers. I asked him if he really knew how to be an emperor.
"I'm a history student," he shrugged. "I was stuck on my thesis. Then a library time-skip happened."
"You, a history man? Of all majors," I teased.
He shrugged. "You studied medicine, didn't you?"
"A bit," I admitted. "I learned basic Chinese medicine at B University."
He pretended to be impressed.
Our secret was tiny: he loved to cook. He hated the imperial kitchen's food. "It's too bland, too many long-cooked things. Where's the fragrance?" he complained.
One afternoon he knocked on my door and said, "May I borrow your small kitchen? The imperial kitchen is unbearable."
"You don't have the key," I said.
He looked at the small stove like a man seeing a rare bird. "I'll use pots. I promise."
He came twice a day, sometimes once at noon, sometimes late at night. We would eat some palace food in public and then hide a small pot on my little stove and laugh over what the imperial cooks had failed to do.
"You know," he said once, chopping scallions, "maybe you were a culinary prodigy in another life."
"I studied acupuncture, not chef school," I replied.
"Does not matter," he said. "You are my taste tester."
We were careful. Fox Cervantes would never notice — or so I thought — until the rumor spread.
Whispers began: she held the emperor's heart because she cooked something secret. The palace women started to learn to cook, then to beg him for recipes. Some came to my door in the daylight asking to learn, their smiles sharp as knives. They wanted influence. They wanted to hold the only person the emperor visited without protocol.
I wanted only to keep my little secret and my small bowl.
But palace life is never gentle with secrets.
One day, the grand empress dowager Lenore Castillo arrived at my door, cheeks like pale porcelain. Her presence froze the hall like a winter pond.
"Georgina, do you know where this is from?" she held a tiny bottle like a key.
I smelled it. "Opium powder," I said, correct and calm. "Poppy shell ground into powder. Contains codeine, morphine."
"Then you admit?" she asked sharply.
"No," I said, and I was not sure whether I was telling the truth or reciting an examination answer. "It is not mine."
"Found under your pillow." Lenore's voice folded like a blade.
I palmed my keys and said, "The kitchen key is only with me. If I wanted to hide something, why put it under my pillow, where the maid who tidies will see it? If I wanted to plant something, why plant it where every morning a maid will straighten the pillow?"
She did not believe me. "Search the kitchen," she ordered.
They smashed open my little kitchen door. It was humiliating in its intimacy. Fox Cervantes watched like a judge who had found his verdict before the trial. The palace doctors searched my pots, my jars, my rice, my small wooden bowls. They smelled. They poked. Finally, someone brought a small bowl of leftover food from midday and the imperial physicians tasted it like detectives tasting a crime scene.
"It is tasty," the head physician declared, surprising everyone.
If the discussion had been purely about taste, I could have laughed. But it was about poison, about addiction. The accusation hung over me like a storm cloud.
Then a junior palace maid broke down. She confessed in a whisper that she had put the opium under my pillow because she resented me for being strict. She wanted me blamed. She wanted me pushed down.
The court was not satisfied. The empress dowager wanted testing. "Prepare a dish," she ordered me in front of all the attendants. "Prove your skill."
"Make what?" I wanted to sink into the floor.
"Cook." The empress dowager pointed. "In the palace kitchen. The physicians will watch."
I had never been so frightened. I was not a cook. I chose the simplest plan: roast lamb over a charcoal brazier. It should be simple and honest.
Fox Cervantes coughed into his sleeve. Clement Watanabe held a fan and fluttered as if to wave away the smoke. I burned my hands, spit and cried while the lamb blackened on the outside and remained raw inside.
"Is that a coal? Georgina, have you made charcoal or meat?" the empress chuckled, but the emperor came and sat near me like a shadow.
"Let him taste," Lenore said, eyes gleaming.
He did. In an instant he finished the lamb and declared it good in front of the palace. "A good bite," he said, smiling like a boy who had found a toy.
Later, it turned out. A minor maid admitted she'd planted the bottle, and she took the blame for having hidden it, but conspiracy lines were long as rivers.
Things quieted for a while. He called me "my favorite cook" in whispers. I called him "my silly emperor" when we were alone. "You cut meat poorly," I scolded.
"Then teach me," he said, and for all his rank he learned like a patient student. We had small moments of tenderness: he put his coat over me when the wind bit, he handed me a cup of broth when I had a chill, he laughed in a way he never did in court.
But whispers grew. A new one — more dangerous — arrived: the poppy powder was not the only thing hidden. I accidentally discovered a pile of military equipment in a grain store. That grain should have been distributed to people in the north suffering from famine, but the warehouse was full of armaments.
"Who would do this?" I asked.
"Ask the governor," Vicente said. He already knew who to suspect: Knox Hernandez, a well-dressed magistrate who had been too cheerful when the famine began.
We pushed. We dug. We found more pieces that did not fit the palace jigsaw.
Then the worst happened. An assault. A collapse. Guards sent word that the emperor's carriage had overturned. He was missing.
I ran with the others. Men in uniforms and fur lined cloaks moved like flocks of birds. I wanted to be useful, not just a worried woman. I wanted to help find him.
When I came close to the scene, I saw him standing there, alive, a bit shaken. Snow had failed to kill his sense of humor. "You looked worried," he said, but he was the one who looked touched when I crashed into him and his arms caught me as stiff as the world.
A week later a far worse plan unfolded. A group of conspirators attempted to kill him. They were poorly planned but they had a plan; they had felt the courage of desperation. It turned out not all conspirators were equal. Some acted out of greed. Some out of loyalty to the wrong man.
We found the tale of two villains: Knox Hernandez, the governor who hid grain and stored weapons, and Dimitri Farley, the Prince of Pingyang, who wanted the throne. Brittany Ortega — a charming but false court lady — had been his inside hand; she had been appointed to lure and betray.
They thought we were ignorant. They thought they had cover.
They were wrong.
The moment of punishment must be told. It was public. It was sharp. It was long enough to make them wish for silence.
They brought them out to the Hall of Records where ministers and servants, palace women and guards gathered like the sea. The sun cut through the frosty air and every breath came out as a faint cloud.
"Knox Hernandez!" a guard cried. "You are accused of hoarding famine relief and stockpiling weapons for rebellion."
Knox tried to smirk. "I am loyal," he said. "These are stores I guarded for the state."
"You're a thief!" I cried, and my voice carried in the hall more steady than the guards' brass.
"You dare?" he spat. "Who are you to accuse me, maid?"
I stepped forward. "I am Georgina Dyer. I am the one who found your warehouse." My hands were steady now. "Do you think the starving will forget how you hid grain? Do you think the soldiers will eat your lies?"
He looked at me as if I had spoken in a foreign language. "You are no one," he said, and blinked at the number of noble eyes narrowing.
"Then watch," I said. "Watch the documents." Clement Watanabe, who had been observing, stepped to the table and laid out the receipts we had recovered — signatures, notes in the governor's hand, lists of shipments that never reached the north.
Knox's color left his face. He went from irritation to shock, then anger. "Fabrication! Forgery!" he cried. "You are a liar!"
"Your own man signed these when he was paid," Fox said. "You cannot steal from famine and pretend it is treasure."
The crowd shifted. A woman hissed. A child whispered.
Then Dimitri Farley was brought forward. He had been calm in his arrogance until his name was called. He was tall and wore a linen coat, but his polite face went cold. Brittany Ortega stood beside him, beautified, a sly smile like frost on glass.
"Prince," Vicente said, voice low but sharp. "How long does one hold a throne by blood before the people decide blood is not enough?"
Dimitri's jaw tightened. "I meant only to take what I was owed," he said. "The throne is weak. I only wanted to prevent disaster."
"You called murder prevention," I said. "You called theft patriotism. You called betrayal a duty."
He laughed once, a brittle sound. "Do you think you can shame me in front of the court?" he snarled.
At that moment Lenore rose like thunder. "You thought you could drag the empire into revolt," she said. "You thought you could hide behind courtiers and bootlickers. You were wrong."
She ordered them bound. The sight of Prince Dimitri stumbling as his silk was ripped, the soft rustle replaced by the chain's clang, was ugly in its nobility.
First came the unmasking. Documents found in the governor's stores proved supplies were diverted. Witnesses, bribed and then reclaimed by conscience, told how Brittany had moved crates at night. She tried to look innocent. "I only followed orders," she whispered.
"Then let the court decide," Fox said.
They brought out a list of people who had starved in the nearby counties. Mothers, names read aloud. A clerk read recounts of trucks rerouted, carts driven straight into the warehouses for no apparent military need.
"Do you deny murder by omission?" Vicente asked the prince.
Dimitri swallowed. "I... I never wanted them to die. I wanted a faster path to the throne."
Brittany began to cry, theatrically at first, then smaller. Her face went from triumph to realization to denial. "I was used," she said. "It was orders! I cannot—"
"You duped soldiers to reroute food into armories," I interrupted. "You were not a woman with a broken heart. You were paid with commodities and promises."
The crowd's reaction was a tide. At first there was shock. Then anger. Then the men who had once bowed to Knox spat. Some people took out little devices and jotted notes; some took secret pictures. Children pointed. Others whispered of how the governor had smiled over feeding himself while the north grew thin.
Dimitri's face changed in stages. He went from scorn to confusion, then to anger. "You have no proof!" he bellowed.
"We have this receipt list, the ledger you thought destroyed," Fox said. He opened the ledger. The handwriting pinned them like flies. Dimitri's denial collapsed into horror.
He tried to fear-monger: "Do you want chaos? I would have kept order!" He pleaded to nobility who had once agreed with him. "Am I to be executed? If I go, there will be…"
"Enough!" Lenore thundered. "You have led with greed. You have stolen the people's bread and then armament for your dreams. For that, you will be stripped of your titles before the whole court."
"Publicly?" Brittany demanded. "You cannot!"
Lenore's face had no humor. "Publicly, yes. So that no future liar thinks to hide such sins."
The punishment was detailed. Knox and Dimitri had assets stripped. Knox's name was forever barred from office; his family houses taken. The governor was marched through the palace courtyard with a placard hung from his neck listing every offense — hoarder, traitor, thief — while people spat or murmured. He was led to prison to await a formal tribunal, but not before his pride was publicly drained.
Dimitri's punishment was more dramatic. He was stripped of rank in the same open space. The prince's crest was torn from his robe. A herald read aloud the charges. Then, in a ritual designed to show his public fall, Lenore had arranged a slow denouncement. A chain of guards placed him on a low platform. People who had once courted him turned away, their faces expressions of disgust. Brittany tried to cling to him; he shrugged her off as if she had become cold to the touch.
"Your power was a lie," Lenore said. "Your promises were empty. From today, you are no one of royal blood until you earn it."
He begged, and the arc of his emotion plunged: pride, the flicker of triumph, denial, bargaining, a final collapse into pleading. He said he had been driven by fear of political enemies. Brittany fell to the ground and begged to be spared. People took out small mirrors and phones and recorded the spectacle. Trumpets sounded once, a final note of state condemnation, and they took Dimitri away.
It was a long, messy public falling. The crowd changed from shock to murmuring to merciless mockery. A woman spat and called him "hunger-thief." A guard laughed openly. A young soldier cried, thinking of his mother who had died of hunger three months before. People made opinions on the spot. Some clapped. Some threw a rotten apple. The spectacle served to warn the bold, the greedy, and the desperate.
In the aftermath, a wave of relief moved through the palace. The food was reclaimed and distributed. The grain carts that had been behind closed doors rolled out in the snow like a tide returning to shore.
After the public shaming, I went back to the small kitchen. Vicente sat in the doorway, the light catching his profile.
"You did well," he said softly.
"I was just a court witness," I answered.
"You were the one who would step forward," he said. "That is rare."
We ate quietly. There were hushed smiles and one or two stolen looks. The world was still dangerous. Men still plotted. But for a while the palace's small streets breathed easier.
Days later, there was trouble again. A man tried to stab the emperor, and in a twisted way, it was good that we had prepared. The attacker was caught because the plan had holes. Brittany, who had once been part of conspiracies, had been caught in a stupor of opium and could not carry out the last piece. People joked later that she slept through a coup.
He called me his "my dear cook" in private, and in public he used the more distant titles. The palace's rhythm returned to its strange normal.
We diverged and converged. He sent me books and notes. I taught him simple herbs and soups. He taught me to cut meat without mangling it. Sometimes he would stand at the door and ask me in a small voice, "Do you want to go home?"
"I don't know," I said. "Home is messy. Home is complicated. But I know that here my life is... warmer."
"You will not be alone," he said.
I liked that. He was a man of ink and scroll and reform by paper. He had a tenderness that no one else offered.
Later, war threatened again. The prince who had failed rose, gathered his supporters, and came to the palace gates. We stood on the walls and watched the army gather like a dark storm.
"Dimitri came back?" I asked, heart honest in my voice.
"He tried," Vicente said. "He offered to take the throne if I stepped down. He called it stability."
"How did you answer?" I said.
"I said I'd step aside. I offered him the seat if he would renounce blood upon it. I offered my life; I offered the shape of rule. I gave him the choice to not spill the people's blood."
"You did what?" I said.
He turned his profile toward me. "I lied and saved lives," he said simply. "If the throne changes hands without a river of blood it is still an outcome. I traded rank for the people's safety."
We laughed at the absurdity and cried at the same time.
He left the throne. He lost the title. He got what we had always feared — a life halved of power, but maybe whole of life's simple things. He was exiled gently, in a fine house at the edge of the capital, given attendants, but also watched.
I went to visit him. He had been stripped of his robes, but he kept a light in his eyes.
"Do you regret it?" I asked.
"A little, for the paperwork," he said. "Mostly I don't regret the people."
We rested at last in small honest hours.
Around us life quietly rebalanced. I was made Imperial Noble Consort for my help in the famine relief — a title that gave me a roof and a loud name. He became a scholar again, in the small ways he preferred: walking the bookshelves, tasting tea, repeating old poems.
We found little joys: picking fruit from imperial orchards, stealing a sweet bun in the market disguised, teaching the emperor to braid a plait. The palace became a place where we learned that power is heavy, but warmth is deliberate.
And once, when the snow still smelled of clear winter air, he sat across from me and said the quietest thing.
"Do you want to go back when this ends?" he asked.
"Go back where?" I asked.
"Home," he said. "To the world we came from."
I thought of my old life, of a campus and a library and a cat who loved a burnt bun. "Maybe," I said slowly. "Maybe if the world lets us."
"Then promise me one thing," he said, very gently.
"What?" I asked.
"Remember a phone number," he said with a grin. "In case the stars mistake our time again."
We buried laughter in the simple habit of trading numbers. It felt foolish. It felt true.
Months later, life moved. The palace kept its rituals, the poor grew fed, the guilty paid some price. I taught clumsy palace women to flip a pancake. He taught me how to fold a robe so it didn't look like a rag. We both learned to be less alone.
One night, under a roof of paper and candlelight, Vicente reached across the table and took my hand.
"Do you remember when you shouted that math phrase at me?" he asked.
"I do," I said. "It saved both of us."
"Then come home with me, when it's time." He smiled with a tired, warm thing in his eyes.
I nodded because the truth was simple: I had already chosen.
We found our way by small acts — cooking, patching, reading together, rescuing grain, saving lives, standing in the snow. We fought public battles with words and evidence. We held small, brave hands. We made mistakes. We fixed what we could.
And when the world tilted again, we had one another to steady it.
The End
— Thank you for reading —