Sweet Romance18 min read
Red Plum, Old Thread: A Palace of Snow and One Quiet Sacrifice
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I remember the order arriving while I had just swallowed another bitter draught.
"Sit and wait for the edict," the palace attendant had said. "You needn't stand."
"I will sit," I told him, and I did. I let the powder on my tongue dissolve into ash and cold, and the world narrowed to the warm hum of the lacquer bowl in my hand.
"Your Highness," Commoner Chang—no, that is a poor habit of mind. "Constant Eunuch said the Emperor orders you not to kneel. He says rest. He says take the edict seated."
"Thank him." I lifted the lid, and the steam fogged my sight.
He left, and the watchman returned with the paper. Their shoes on the tiles made a sound like a small bird seeking shelter. I opened the paper. The words were straight and heavy, like old branches.
"By imperial decree," the paper read. "In honor of the new era, Lena Maldonado shall be made Guifei."
I folded the edict with fingers that remembered another name. I thought of the little red bead around my wrist, the hand-jewel Roman had once tucked there like a promise. I thought of the winter when he knelt in the snow and said he would make me his. I thought of the other woman, the red-clad shadow who had already lived in his chest for years.
"Thank you," I said to the eunuch, and I smiled the way one smiles for a painting.
He bowed so low his face nearly touched my robe. "Madam—Guifei—my lord's mercy is great."
That mercy had a shape that was not mine.
"Don't worry," I told myself. "Being called goods of silk is not shame. It is a name. A place to stand." I lay back on the couch and let the pale winter light make a white river across the floor.
Weeks later, I stood in the hall to greet the new Empress.
"Your Majesty," I said, though I had no right to call her so then. She was in full bloom of court favor: hair high as a temple spire, brocade like a river of red. The hall smelled of incense that tried too hard to be sweet.
She took my hand as if I were a warm bowl given to a guest. "Guifei," she said, "you must tend your health. Will you sit?" Her voice had the ease of victory.
"Thank you," I answered, and she smiled in a way that made roses of the whole room.
"Be at peace," she said.
Outside, the plum tree in the garden had opened like a laugh. I thought of the red riding coat I had once wanted and never worn. I thought of the man who had promised me quiet things and then took another promise as well.
"I will rest," I told the Empress. "There is no hurry."
"Good," she said. "The palace can be kind to those who accept order."
She left, leaving a trail of perfumed air. The ladies around her looked at me like strangers folding up an old map. One of them sipped wine and said in a low voice, "To be illly put, to be unmaking of one's self."
I only smiled.
"Don't be bitter," a handmaid whispered later. "The Emperor treats you kindly still. He comes and he frets. He keeps that red bead on your wrist like an anchor."
"I am anchored," I said, because a lie is sometimes a soft thing.
At night, when he came to my chamber, Roman would sit across the lantern and look at me the way a man studies a painting he has only just realized he owns. He would touch the bead on my wrist and murmur, "I will not let you be wronged, Lena."
"Then let the rest be right," I told him. "You must be happy."
"I will be," he said. "For you."
But the shape of his happiness had already been drafted in another color.
"They call her Valentina now," a servant told me that autumn. "They're saying the general's house is full of joy."
I heard the name and the memory of the red coat returned, bright as an arrow. There were paintings of her in the palace, a portrait that made a room hush, a poem that people recited like scripture. Valentina Schreiber had that unapproachable beauty others called fate.
"Would you speak with her?" asked my brother, Alfonso, when I returned to our house for a brief visit.
"I don't want to cause trouble," I said, because truth and consequence do not always share a house.
"You are the Emperor's Guifei," he said with the hard kindness of a boy who means to be a man. "Do you understand how that protects us? You have a place now, Lena. You should keep it."
I picked up a pair of shears and cut a scrap of old cloth until the threads bled red dye onto my fingers. "Promise me," I said, and I made him sit down before I allowed my voice to codify into a command.
"What, sister?" Alfonso asked and did as I bid. He was young, all elbows and scabbed knees, a boy made of stubborn wood.
"Promise me never to attempt—" I stopped, because the phrase was ugly and the meaning had too many knives.
"Never to chase after position?" he finished.
"Yes. Never let the family be the pay for one man's whim."
He hesitated only a second, then bowed his head. "I promise."
Some promises are the thin skin on a wound. They close for a while, then open again under pressure.
When the Empress miscarried, the palace shook its porcelain voice. The rumor came like a cold wind. Roman stormed into my chamber and struck my cheek.
"Why would you hurt me?" he spat, red in the face, his breath like winter coals.
"Please," I whispered. "This is not mine to answer."
"Your servant is—" he began, then stopped, tears sharp in his eyes. "I cannot bear this. I thought you were... I thought you would keep me safe."
"The maid's confession?" I said slowly. "She loved me. She said she poisoned to repay a debt. She said it was my idea."
He took a step back as if the ground might open. "That cannot be true."
"I do not know what is true now," I said.
He sealed my doors. "You will stay in here," he ordered. "Only cleaned meals. No visitors."
"Then there will be peace," I said. "But those who served me—are they to be punished?"
"Those who would harm the Empress will be punished," he said.
And so it was. Men in iron walked the corridors, and screams came from the cells. The name Maureen Gutierrez was dragged forward like a flag of accusation. "She confessed," the Captain of the Guard told the court. "She said she helped Guifei to take what was not her's."
Maureen's eyes were huge and red. She grabbed at my sleeve and whispered, "I did it because I loved you. I would do anything for you."
I shushed her like a mother who cannot save a child from the tide. I could not bring myself to touch her.
Later I would learn the truth is seldom so simple.
One day at the mid-autumn banquet, when the lanterns hung like small moons, a man in a red sash bowed to me and then stood too long.
"Guifei," he said, smiling like a blade, "your brother is spirited. Does he play in the pavilions?"
"Who are you?" I asked because I knew every face in the palace as a seam knows the grain of fabric.
"Felix Fontana," he replied. "Valentina's brother; I am here to honor my sister."
"Valentina is beautiful," I said, for politeness is a kind of armor.
"I know she means the world to him," he said. "But you, Guifei, you look like you'd rather be somewhere else. You look... fragile."
His hand rested on the hem of my sleeve like a casual trespass. "You should be careful. People envy what they can never have."
I took a step back. "So do you," I said. "People grind their teeth on envy and call it hunger."
He laughed, a light bell in which something sharper clinked. "You are sharp with words. I like that."
Inside my chest, an old ache woke. I had loved a different life once. It had been quick and foolish and full of red cloth and bandy horses. I had made a poor choice, or perhaps the choice was made for me. Either way, another life had been taken and I had been draped in a safer color.
"Be careful with your friends," I told Alfonso later. "Not everyone who bows will help you stand."
"I will be careful," he said, biting his lip. "I will keep the house together."
But the house does not stay intact by promises alone.
Once, I found a red riding jacket tucked away behind a curtain in the garden pavilion. I had dreamed of it once when I was young and bold and foolish. Valentina had known this. I thought of the jacket like a memory of fire.
"Do you want it?" asked Gilbert Cunningham, who looked after my body. "I can mend it. Sometimes, mending the cloth mends the person."
"No," I said, and my fingers brushed the embroidered stitch work. "Keep the memory for me."
He laughed, the sound like warm bread. "You are impossible, Lena. You think of other people's hands when your own are empty."
"I think of children's names," I said. "Names like hopes, not yet crushed."
He put the herbal bowl down and crossed himself in a small, private way. "You must not take such poor medicine."
"I must," I said.
It is a strange thing to choose death as a currency. I chose it to buy my family's safety.
When the General Quincy Vega offered an impossible bargain, I took it.
"You will be Guifei and yield the throne's future for a price." He spoke as if he were weighing coins in his palm.
"A father's price," I answered, because I had heard the words my father had written in his last letter. The letter was blood and ink and a white paper that claimed finally to preserve our name.
"If the child is known to be the Emperor's, you keep status and your brother keeps life," Quincy said. "If you do not, the Shen family's honor will crack and scatter. Is the price too dear?"
I swallowed, and my throat made the sound of a locked door. "I will do what keeps them safe," I said.
"Good," he said. "Then take this. It will ease the way."
The slow poison they gave me was like a winter that comes a little every day. It did not burn so much as it took away the warmth of the hand that held yours. My sight grew pale at the edges. I learned to be smaller.
"There is rumor," Felix said once when I met him under the pretense of passing through the palace—a lie arranged by fate for show. He smiled, and inside the smile there was celebration. "They say you cut your throat? You scared them into believing a story. Good."
"That is a wild tale," I said, because a woman's life cannot be known only by the pages men write for profit. "I only tuck my future in the folds of the robe."
"You are brave," he said. "And brave people make for good lessons."
He leaned so close I felt his breath like a thorn. "Remember this, Guifei: everyone must pay the taxes they owe. Hearts are currency."
When the snow first came, pale as an apology, Roman called me to walk the main corridor. He wore an old knee pad I had once sewn, the stitches crude, the care tender.
"It was cold that day," he said. "Do you recall? I knelt in the snow. I thought the world would end if I did not have what I wanted."
He touched the knee pad. "You sewed this."
"You asked me to," I said.
"You sacrificed for me," he whispered. "Why would you do that?"
"Because you asked." A truth as small as a coin.
"Why would you sacrifice even when I loved someone else?" he asked, and for the first time his voice cracked.
"Because you were my husband," I said.
He looked away. "I have failed you."
"Perhaps," I said quietly. "But what will you do about those who did wrong?"
His face was a landscape of regret. "I will do what crowns and thrones allow."
We passed each other then like boats that no longer have the same current.
Later, when my father's funeral was a memory of straw and incense, and Alfonso's voice was a promise polished by grief, I found my days thinning like paper in rain. I drank the draught Gilbert prepared, and the world softened.
"I will not fail you," Gilbert said, squeezing my fingers when the pain came like waves. "You must fight, Lena."
"I am tired of fighting," I said. "I learned that some things are not won by the brave. Some are lost by being merciful."
"Do not say that," he said. "You are the bravest person I know."
One night, they brought us together in the emperor's private hall. Valentina was there with wings of silk and emerald, and she reached for Roman's hand as though the night belonged to them both.
"I have loved you always," she told him. "I would have waited ten years more if you had asked it."
Roman held her and said, "You have always been my heart."
I watched them, and my world was a small cup of water. I could only smile.
"Will you forgive me?" Roman asked the air, and the air shook like a thin bell.
Then the accusation came. Valentina miscarried. Fingers pointed. People wanted blood. The palace matron declared truths like swords. Maureen's name came up, and she confessed with eyes that had no light.
"She did it for me," Maureen told the court. "She said she would give anything."
The cruelty of the court had a beauty to it. People like the tidy strokes of a completed painting, even when the colors are blood.
I was bound for the cell. Roman's face had the sternness of a judge. The Empress pointed like victory is a hand with claws.
"Guifei," she said with cold, "you will see the consequences of those who let darkness into their chambers."
I smiled like someone who gives a child a toy to stop it crying. "Let the truth be a fire and burn the rot out," I said.
They closed my doors. The guards were given orders. Men who once worked in my garden were tortured and beaten; some were gone. I told Gilbert to leave, to find Alfonso and to save the rest. "Do not let them be destroyed in my name," I said. "You must keep the family."
"I will keep them," he promised.
I drank the last of the bitter medicine as if it were wine. I thought of a little red riding jacket and how it had been promised to me. I thought of the knee pad I had sewn for Roman and the beads on my wrist.
"Forgive me for being so small and so large," I told the dark.
When I died, it was quiet. My last thought was of snow and of a plum tree that would bloom red again. The palace did not break when I left, but something inside Roman did.
Later, months and then a year passed. The court circled like vultures over lessening flesh. Valentina took the Empress seat with gilded ease. Felix went to the frontier with a boastful bow and a hundred loyal men. Quincy kept his fortress. The world rotated, indifferent.
But truth has a habit of sharpening itself against the dullest lies.
Gilbert had kept promises as he always did, and Alfonso grew into manhood with a hunger for right. One small legacy I had left was a letter—old inked words never sent, but tucked between the binding of a study book I had once loved. Alfonso found it in a stack of unsent notes. Inside, my confession: the choices I made, the bargains, the people involved, the names that had pulled strings. It was a map.
"Why did you hide this?" he asked me when I was still a memory in his chest and breathing like a horse that might not last.
"I wanted to save you," my handwriting said, when he read aloud in the dim kitchen where candle soot had settled like small stars. "I wanted to break the chain."
He took the letter to Gilbert. Gilbert, with his calm face and his steady hands, read until his eyes were full of fire.
"We cannot let this go," he said. "People must see."
"People will see," Alfonso replied. "They will see what they did."
They began with a whisper that became a wind. Small facts were set into motion. A midwife who had been paid and forgotten returned suddenly to the court with a new set of courage. A scribe found foreign ledgers that did not belong where they were supposed to. A cupbearer remembered an exchange in a corridor late at night. Little things stacked, like stones in a jar.
It took months to build the case. The palace, which had reveled in silence, found its throat. A council was called under the guise of discussing foreign policy, and the truth was pulled out like a papery thread.
The day of the punishment was bitterly bright. It snowed the kind of snow that turns the world into white paper and makes one's breath visible as a small ghost.
The court gathered in the outer hall, and people came in numbers enough that the stone floor thrummed. "Bring them forward," Roman Drake ordered. He looked older in a way that makes men seem carved.
"Felix Fontana," the captain called.
He walked toward the dais with the swagger of a man who had never believed in consequences. "Your Majesty," he bowed lightly. "What distress brings the court today?"
Valentina stood behind him in a robe of an outrageous red, her face the same calm as a pond.
"Speak," Roman said. "I will ask what I should have asked sooner."
Gilbert stepped forward with the midwife and the scribe at his side. "We have testimony," Gilbert said. "Testimony of deliberate poisoning, payments, and orders. Testimony linking several acts to be within reach of the General's house and their associates."
Valentina's face did not change. "These are accusations without proof," she said, voice silk.
"There is proof," Gilbert said, and he dropped a large folded paper on the floor. It was the ledger the scribe had found, a list of payments, names, times.
Felix's eyes narrowed. "Forged," he barked. "You bring forged papers."
"Listen," Alfonso said, stepping forward with the letter I had written tucked into his sleeve. "Listen to the midwife who remembers the powders, to the cupbearer who saw the hand that poured, to the man who delivered the pouch."
The crowd began to stir.
"You stand accused of using your position to alter the fate of an unborn child, to bribe men, to order harm," Roman said. His voice was rough. "What do you say?"
Valentina's hand clenched. "I am innocent," she said. "I loved you. Why would I harm what I love?"
The first reaction in the crowd was a soft intake of breath, then a chorus of tuts and low curses. "How ironic," someone whispered. "How grim, to claim love and then to take life."
"Where is the man who used the pouch?" a minister demanded. "Where are the payments? Who signed them?"
Quincy Vega shifted and looked like a man whose armor had been loosened. "Your Majesty, these are grave claims. I will answer—"
"Answer now," Roman said. "Speak."
Quincy opened his mouth and faltered. That pause was a crack opening up. "Your Majesty," he said at last, "I — I was advised. I thought it best—"
"By whom?" Roman pounded the wooden rail with a fist.
"By those who sought to better the realm," Quincy lied badly. "Who else would counsel me otherwise?"
"Your counsel are tainted," Gilbert said. "We have names. We have dates."
Felix stepped forward then, rage like a live thing. "So the lowborn now speak with the tongues of lords," he sneered. "They bring me shame for the amusements of youth."
"You mean to mock them?" Alfonso said. "You were the one who bragged of 'the taxes hearts pay.'"
"Do you accuse me?" Felix challenged. "You, the outcast's boy? You have no proof."
Alfonso put my letter on the dais. "I have proof enough to show the patterns," he said. "Read the ledgers; ask the midwife; check the attendants."
For a hush that was nearly holy, the hall went silent. The ledgers were examined. The signatures were traced. The midwife's face did not shake.
Valentina's cheeks flushed. "All of this is a political maneuver," she said, and the tremor in her voice was unmistakable now. "You come to take me down because you cannot bear a rival."
"No," Roman said. "We come to bring truth."
A servant in the back wept. A nobleman shifted his weight, as if his conscience were a pebble in his shoe.
Felix's face crumbled. The bravado left him like a cloak. "You can't do this," he whispered. "You cannot make me—"
"I can," Roman said. "You have taken life and bought silence. You will answer."
"Answer?" Felix laughed weakly at first, then barked, "This is theater. You are mad."
"Then let the theater be the measure of justice," Roman said.
They made Felix kneel. They read the list of his deeds aloud. With each item the crowd's voice rose until it was a tide.
"Felix Fontana," the herald intoned, "you are found guilty of conspiracy, attempted murder of the royal line, and corrupting the court. You are stripped of titles and lands. You are exiled—"
"No," Felix cried, the first real sound of fear. He rose on his knees, hands flailing. "You cannot throw me away. Do you not see how everything will fall? My father—"
"Your father will stand to answer," Roman replied. "But your deeds are your own."
Felix's change was furious and quick. He swung from denied arrogance to pleading. "I did it for honor," he begged. "I did it for family."
His voice slid through the hall like water through a grate. "I was protecting my sister. I would have given my life."
"How does destroying another life protect your family?" Gilbert asked.
"I could not hold the laughter," Felix sobbed. He pressed his hands to his face. "It was a child's life. I thought I might save my own."
The crowd watched. Some whispered, "Look at the fall of a proud man." Others spat with open contempt.
Valentina was next. The ledger's path led to her by the evidence's cruel geometry. She had argued; she had denied; she had even claimed guise of hurt. Now the papers touched her like cold fingers.
"You will be given a choice," Roman said. "You may either stand and undergo the rite of revelation, or you may step down instantly and relinquish claim to the throne."
"Do you think I will accept exile?" Valentina's voice was small, then huge with a woman's last resort. "If I step down, everything my father has built collapses. I cannot—"
"Then step down," Roman said. "If you refuse, we will force the truth into the public eye."
The Empress had the rarest look of all: the look of a person betrayed by themselves. She had worn cruelty like a crown. Now the crown pinched.
She laughed once, as if at a distant joke. "Fine," she said, the sound brittle. "Take it. Take the throne. But know this: when the blood dries, you will see that power is not given by paper."
They bound her presence with the kind of exposure that leaves a woman without a mask. The attendants were called to swear their parts. The ledger was traced. The midwife told the court of the powder and the pouch. The cupbearer spoke of the hand that poured draughts destined for a child's bed.
Valentina's face turned ashen. "No," she murmured. "I did not—"
"Enough," Roman said. "You will not speak again."
They removed her embroidery and opened her robe to show where the pouch had sometimes been kept. The crowd took in the sight and felt both sick and satisfied, like men who dine on scandal the way others dine on one rich dish.
Valentina's reaction followed the script of a human being whose maps had been turned inside out: first defiance, then denial, then a shaking attempt to cling to an invented truth, then finally collapse.
"You," she said weakly to me when they brought her near the court—"you took my child."
"I took nothing," I answered, though my throat lodged the truth. "I traded my days so others might live."
She stared at me like a condemned woman seeing a mirror. "You set me free," she said in a voice that had lost command. "You made me the story people will tell."
"Then you will stand down," Roman said.
They stripped her of crown, her carriage, her privileges. The crowd who had once bowed now watched like strangers at a theater: some gaped, some clapped, some spat. The authority that had sheltered her turned slow—like a great beast rolling onto its side, revealing belly.
Felix knelt, screaming, then begging, then weeping. Valentina's eyes emptied. They led them both out, not to prison alone but to public penance: a day's humiliation in the market square, where merchants who had once sold to them would look on and decide whether to weep or to laugh.
People came in droves. The square was like a roaring sea of faces. The band played no music. The judge announced their crimes in a voice that made the words hard to forget. The soldiers forced them to the scaffolding.
"You did not see coming the tide that would take you," a woman in the crowd said, and her voice was a kind of low thunder.
Felix's body language told a story in its own right: from bluster to shame, from denial to bargaining to pleading. "I can make amends," he cried. "I will gift you coin. I will give away my lands. I will—"
"Your coin cannot buy the breath of the dead," an old man cried. "Your lands cannot give back the child."
The crowd hissed. Men took out blades and scratched their swords on the railings. Women spat into the snow. Children cried because they had heard rumors and their small hearts were full of urgent justice.
Valentina was the final portrait of ruin. Once regal, she now shook. She tried to speak and the court listened, greedy and heartless.
"Do you feel shame?" a merchant asked as she was lowered.
She looked at a place on the bench as if seeing a ghost. Then she laughed in a thin, jagged sound. "Shame is for those with something to lose," she said. "Do you think I did not bargain? Do you think I did not pay? I loved and I thought my love made me right."
"Your love killed," the midwife said. "You made that choice."
The shouts rolled in like a storm. People shouted their condemnation, some added curses, others extolled Roman's quickness in justice, and some quietly wondered whether it was right to watch a woman fall for the entertainment of the hour.
The punishment lasted like a bad winter. Felix was banished with a small guard. Valentina was exiled from palace life, officially stripped, paraded, and then—because Roman could not wholly take her life—she was given a smaller, crueler fate: humiliation and removal from the court. Her father, Quincy, was told to resign his commands and to see to his household.
What mattered was not only what they lost, but how they lost it—publicly, and with the judgment of many pairs of eyes. Their pride was shattered in the market, their names spat at and carved like cheap graffiti for anyone to read.
They moved through seven stages of facing ruin: stunned stillness, denial and rage, bargaining, a mad kind of pleading, and then utter silence. The crowd supplied all manner of reaction: some pelted them with old loaves, some recorded the incident with little devices for gossip. Some applauded; most watched with faces turned to stone.
When the public penance ended, and the snow still fell like cold ashes, I walked out into the courtyard where ashes like confetti lay. I placed my palm on the old kneepad I had once stitched; the stitches had held though the thread had worn. I touched the bead around my wrist, and the memory of the pouch, and the slow, quiet bargain.
"Why did you do it?" Gilbert asked later, when the tumult had eased.
"For them," I said. "For a family that had a roof and a name. For a brother who will grow into right. For a garden that still needs tending."
"And you?" he said. "What of you?"
"I am already traded," I said. "I am only a shade left. I do not need the palace's pity."
He took my hand. "Do you know—" he started, and stopped.
"I know," I said. "You will keep them."
He promised again.
Roman came to me after the storm. He touched my hand with a gentleness that had become rare. "I should have seen it," he said. "I should have protected what was true."
"You protected what you could," I said. "I protected what was left."
He knelt on the snow as if in that old winter and pressed his forehead to his knee. "Forgive me," he whispered. "For all of it."
I did not answer because there is no answer that would make the day unhurt. I only took the small red knee pad and set it in his palm.
"Keep it," I said. "If you ever remember a stitch, remember this: some stitches were done by hands that simply loved."
He looked up at me, and the rawness in his face was something like a child who had lost a toy.
In the end, justice had its public face. People shouted and filmed and laughed and cried, and the punishments were done in daylight so that shame would have light. Those who had made others small were themselves made small, and their downfall was slow enough to savor the righteousness of the watchers and sharp enough to cut the last thread of their pride.
And yet, even with the guilty punished, there was the ache of all the hours that could not be returned. People bowed and said "right" and "order" and "law", but the place under my ribs where quiet had once slept remained hollow. The plum tree, however, still woke to spring and the red blooms shuffled out like a battalion.
Many years later, they talk of me as a kind of legend: the woman who traded her name for her family's safety, who drank the slow poison, who wrote the letter that unspooled a conspiracy. They say the market square still keeps the stone where the guilty were judged. People come to see it like pilgrims return to a place of pilgrimage and whisper about justice.
At night, when the snow comes down thick and soft, I sometimes imagine the red riding jacket I never wore. I imagine Roman with the small knee pad in his pocket, touching it like a worry bead. I imagine Valentina in some obscure town, sewing new names into her cloth and wondering what she had lost.
"My red thread," I wrote once in a small letter I tucked into the bindings of a book Alfonso still owns, "is not the shame you think. It was a map, a suturing of what remained. It was my last small piece of control. If you find yourself at the edge of something terrible, sew a small stitch."
When I closed my eyes for the final time, I heard snow whisper against the window like someone folding a sheet. I thought of the little red bead, the patched knee pad, the plum tree. I thought of a quiet life on the other side of winter.
"Listen," I had told Roman once in a lighter hour, and I say it now to anyone who will inherit the palace when the gild is worn. "When red blooms under snow, do not confuse the beauty with consent. Red under snow is survival. Remember the red knee pad and the small bead. They are what I left you."
And the ending is not the grand one that people like to imagine. It is a small thing: the red knee pad burned and wrapped in a note, the bead left in a drawer, the plum tree surviving. If you ever come to the palace and you find the little patch of snow under the red plum branch, you will know which story is mine.
The End
— Thank you for reading —