Sweet Romance15 min read
The Belt, the Stable, and the Letter I Could Not Send
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"I've seen him strike once before," I said, watching the belt curl through the torchlight. "But never like this."
"Why would he need to be shown?" Griffin Kiselev's voice cut through the hall like winter wind. "Why would any man need proof that a traitor sits in his house?"
"You don't understand—" Gilbert Donnelly blurted, his face wet with sweat and greed. "My lord, I only meant to be loyal. The woman is not who she claims."
"Speak," Griffin said. He folded the belt in his hand as if testing its weight.
Delilah Castro lay on the floor in a pool of lamp light, hair unfastened, her embroidered gown at once immaculate and ruined. She blinked, a fragile dismissal of the world, then raised a small hand in the old, perfect way she had whenever a soldier tipped his helmet or a servant bowed too low.
"Please," she breathed. "Please forgive me."
"Is she the princess?" Griffin snapped at the captives brought in from the field. "Tell me the truth."
"They say—" one of the prisoners began, throat working. "They say she served as the palace maid for the Princess—"
"Then she is a liar," Griffin finished. He did not wait for the word to land. He snapped the belt.
I remember the sound like a stone dropped into a silent pool. It cut the air, then met Delilah's ear and slid across the skin. Blood flamed as red as a warning flag. She reached automatically to the place and found her fingers wet. She did not scream.
"Tell me again." Griffin's voice was low. "Are you the Princess sent by Bian?"
Delilah's eyes, so often soft with a practiced humility, sank. "No," she said, very small. "I am sorry."
"We keep traitors in the stables," Griffin said. "We keep traitors for the dogs."
They dragged her away after that. The belt had done more than bruise. It had announced: betrayal would be made visible. Men who had laughed at our raids learned that my lord did not forgive mockery.
"Go to the stables and watch," Griffin ordered me before most left. "Make sure the creature doesn't die on us."
"Yes, my lord." I followed the officers' steps and the trailing scent of blood to where she lay among the straw. Her face had lost color; still, Delilah smiled when she saw me.
"Thank you, sister," she whispered.
"Call me Alice," I told her, though "sister" had become the habit between us.
I had been Griffin's handmaid long before Delilah came. I knew how he moved inside his own head. I had seen his hands soften over coin, harden over rebellion, and loosen only once—for her. He had taken coins and prisoners, land and meat, but for Delilah he had a tenderness that confused the men who served him. That tenderness did not mean weakness. It meant danger if tested.
When they put Delilah into the stables, they were telling the world she was property. The newly arrived man who had spoken—Gilbert Donnelly—wanted the favor of the Lord. I had watched him feather his speech, make small bows. He had been praised for being "loyal to the new house." He had, like so many who arrive to a victorious camp, a readiness to point a finger to raise himself.
Delilah would not die in the stable. Griffin left that order with his face taut, like a string about to snap. He wanted the stables to hold her—kept alive, but broken.
"Will you stay?" she asked, faint and hidden in fear. "Will you stay with me?"
"Yes," I said. "Yes. I'll fetch the doctor."
She closed her eyes. She always closed them like a child who had learned to trust hands.
I learned her story because she gave it to me in pieces, as if each sentence were a match struck against the dark. She had been a maid near the Princess of Bian for years. She had been chosen to take the place of the real Princess when the emperor's coffers could not produce the silver demanded. For three years' peace, she had given herself. She had burned her wedding clothes before she left the palace so there would be no turning back.
"Three years," she mouthed once. "Three years is all I asked."
I thought it a noble thing then, a sacrifice anyone might make for country. But her face had the look of one who had been made to carry another's fate alone. She told me of a boy she loved—Gabriel Crosby—who had sworn to wait. Gabriel had gone to the passes to command men, and he died there with his spear in the earth and no tomb. Delilah spoke of him as if his name tasted like both rose and iron.
"Why did you come?" I asked once as I fed her a spoon of warm broth. "Why substitute?"
"For three years, Alice," she said simply. "To let them live. To let them grow brigades. I thought—if I go, perhaps they will learn to stand."
"Did they?" I asked, but the answer was happening in the east, a thousand paces away: soldiers taking ground, lives cut like grass.
When Griffin agreed to the trade, he had told the envoys, "She must be the emperor's daughter." The wording better suited his pride than his needs: to take a princess would humiliate the Bian court more than silver ever could. They sent a woman who could not claim her throne, and yet Delilah wore the name with an earnestness that made him offer his hand.
"Will you be my woman?" he asked in front of his captains.
"Yes," she answered.
After the belt and the stable and the fury, Delilah grew quiet. She did not plead; she breathed. She learned, like I did, how to hide a whole mountain under the hem of a dress.
"You're not the princess," the new man had said in the hall that night, hoping to be rewarded with coin and status. He had not expected to watch a woman struck for all to see. He had not expected to watch pride become punishment.
Time had a weird way of collecting itself around her. She danced at feasts for Griffin because she had been trained to do so in the court—the same tiny, offering bow that sated him, the same song that emptied the room of thought. When the king's camp celebrated victories, she would dance and we would wonder if she hated to praise the man who would march upon her homeland. She performed devotion and acceptance while a different, harder current flowed underneath.
"She eats like someone who is determined to live," I told Griffin one morning when he fretted over campaigns. "She is strong in ways you don't see."
He looked up from his maps, his face a mask of thought. "She hides something," he said. "Every woman carries secret."
"I will watch over her," I promised.
And I watched.
Months folded into battle seasons. Griffin took the passes, took towns, and returned with spoils. He never called Delilah anything but the other woman's name he had been given to practice—Zhao Wan in my memory of that false sound, though names are slippery at the edge of conquest. He called her what he saw fit. He offered money when asked, and in that way he was always both miser and gift-giver.
Then, at a victory feast, he presented to Delilah the head of the enemy who had once been called Gabriel Crosby. It rolled from the lacquered tray like a bell fallen from a tower. She shrieked, and the hall laughed, some from horror, some from drink, and Griffin smiled as if victorious over a stubborn gate.
"It is my gift to you," he declared. "A token from the field."
"Gift?" she said, a laugh that had no grace. "Remove it. Do not mock the dead."
"Will you sell us coin for his head?" Griffin teased, "or tell us how to make coin of grief?"
"No one likes a corpse," she said. "Send him back. Let his family have him."
Griffin laughed and told the guards to return the head as a bargaining chip. She regained favor, warm by his side again, as if the bellows of a man's appetite could be stoked by such theater.
Later that night, she tried to kill him. She crept into his tent, the way that grief makes a woman small and ferocious. She struck him with a hairpin into his flank like a child's secret. The wound was shallow but the function of it was precise: she had wanted to mark the house that took her with the pain it had given others.
He did not kill her. He rebuked her. He called her mad. She sobbed like a child, and I stayed away because some places a woman goes, the world will not follow.
She lived, bore a son, and found herself called queen. She became something more permanent. She stitched her son a tiny kerchief and sent letters home that were folded in embroidered sleeves. They contained not only a child's cloths but fragments of intelligence she had tucked in the hems. She meant to help her countrymen; she meant, in quiet stitches, to leave breadcrumbs for the day when someone would choose not to step on the splintered bridge behind them.
"Do not feed him the maps," I told her one night, "not until they are sealed."
"It will keep," she said with a little smile. "Men forget the things they have taken unless we remind them."
Seventeen months later, the brace of seasons changed. Griffin, who had promised peace for a held term, was ready again to take coin and land and insult. He wanted the court at Bian and the last of their silver. We made war because we had always done so—because men who take land must test the ground again and because we wanted what money could buy.
Delilah's brother, Maximiliano Hernandez, a young commander who had grown in the smoke of border fights, rose to defend the pass of Yiyong. He was not the same Maximiliano she had called a boy back home; he had seen the way men break and the ways they hold together. He learned strategy from the enemies whose lives had taught him, and he stood against us with a fierce, unyielding posture that none of us had expected.
"Who is she to you?" Griffin asked me one dawn when the horses snorted and the world smelled of iron.
"She was a maid," I said. "She was a lover to a dead man. She is a sister to a soldier who fights like a storm."
"Then why would he stand?" he mused. "Why is the pass strong?"
Because she's blood, I thought, because a sister's blood is the sharpest steel. Because the woman who had burned her own wedding dress held in her a country she could not betray.
I told her, secretly, of the siege. I told Delilah in a letter to beg her to take Maximiliano out, to send him away under a flag of truce. I thought she would beg him. I thought she would plead. I believed in the fragility I knew from her battered wrist.
She did not beg. She did not plead the way I had hoped.
"Please," I wrote, "forgive my meddling. Tell him—"
"I cannot," she answered when I found her. Her hands closed around the infant like a promise. "My brother fights because he must. I cannot have him live under a my lord who has done what he has done to my heart."
"What do you want, Delilah?" I asked.
"I want him to live," she said. "I want them to live. But I will not have my son become a man who rides to burn their fields. I will not let that lie be his name."
The next night, during the siege of the pass, we received a note. Griffin read it in the dark and his thumb tightened. A different messenger came—rumors of betrayal, of a signal fired, of plans found in the seams of a baby's cloth. Men looked to Delilah, to me, to any woman with a needle: if they have secrets, who else could hide them?
Griffin mounted and left the field. Soldiers whispered of treachery in the royal tent. He turned his horse's eyes home and rode like a man whose sleep had been cut into.
We arrived to a camp in quiet disarray. Griffin's face had gone tight with a new color. "My wife is missing," he told us. "My son is missing."
They tracked scent and rumor, and the dogs pulled. We followed the line into the hills until the cliff opened like an unwatched secret. The hook of the rope waited. We found women threads, a small shawl, a child's boot.
"She jumped," one of the scouts whispered.
"She would not leave the child," I said before I realized the thought had bloomed into breath. "She would not. She would not give him to the sword."
We found her letters later, in a small folded stack under a stone, her handwriting torn, words run together as if written across waves.
"If I live," one line read, "my son will one day ride with the banners that will burn what I love. I cannot let him be that. I will not let my blood be a weapon against my blood."
It undid me. It should have been a story I could not hold, like a hot coal. Instead I held it until the edges cooled and I read it for what it was: a map of one woman's impossible choices. She had leapt not from despair alone but to deny the world another blade.
They accused me in the days after. "You let her go," they said. "Why did you tell the man she might help? Why did you speak unless you wanted this to end?" I had thought I was giving her a chance.
"She killed herself," I said to the men who whipped their hands over their mouths in horror and then turned back to meat. "She chose her own end."
Grief has strange measures. Griffin grieved as a man who had lost something he did not know he cherished until it was not there. He blamed the houses and the banners and the losers. He blamed, too, a small man who had pointed the finger that night: Gilbert Donnelly.
Gilbert had been given the favor of names for his treachery. He had brought suspicion to lighten the name of a newcomer. His voice had been loud and hollow. He had watched Delilah's face when she was struck. He had not imagined her last days. He had not supposed that the frail would draw a line in salt.
I watched the way Griffin decided calamity requires retribution. He did not grieve quietly; he turned pain into a demonstration.
"Gather them in the marketplace," he ordered. "Bring the man who spoke first. Let the people see what loyalty buys you."
I did not expect the punishment I watched in the square to feel like the beginning of a larger story, but it was not at all a private thing. Gilbert Donnelly had hidden in the triumph of his report until the weight of it swung like a door. Now, the same hands that had praised him would be the hands that unmade him.
They led him to the center of the town, hands bound. They cut a circle of rope and set a pole. The sun turned bright as if curious about what we would do with a man who had spoken for fortune.
"Gilbert Donnelly!" Griffin called. "You spoke against my house. You accused a woman without proof. You would earn favor at the expense of another's life. Tell the people why."
Gilbert's face had been flushed with the trade of attention, but when he stood under heads that watched and the torches that framed the square, his breath shortened. He had never been called to stand like a crucible before men he once smiled to.
"I—" He opened his mouth. There was a minute where a crowd held its breath like a wind waiting.
"You called my wife a liar," Griffin said with a glass-lidded patience. "You said she was not the Princess of Bian. You told that in the hall where men drank and knives hung ready. You thought you would be rewarded."
"I only meant—" Gilbert tried. "My lord, I meant to show loyalty. I saw—"
"You saw her. You saw a woman. You saw a name that might bring you favor. You spoke, and you earned a belt and a stable and then you hid while the rest of us tended what we had created."
"Stop," I said. I could not say nothing. I had to make it clear what had truly happened. "You wanted to be more than you were. You wanted to climb."
The crowd muttered. Someone spat.
"Why did you say it?" Griffin asked coldly. "Why?"
"She is not a princess!" Gilbert shouted as if repeating the claim would make him lighter. Then, as he watched faces harden, he added, "They paid me coin. They told me her story and I wanted to be praised."
The first wave of reaction came as a shocked silence that broke into murmurs. Then the square's rhythm changed. I saw people producing mirrors in their mind—had they been complicit by silence? Had they watched and not asked?
"The man lied," Griffin continued. He raised his hand. "You cost me something."
Gilbert tried to bend his head into pleading. "My lord, spare me. I did what I thought best."
"You cost her a life," Griffin said. "You forced a hand that could have sought other ways. You pointed fingers for small coin."
"She was not my property," Gilbert said, sudden denial. "I didn't mean—"
"Denial is thin as paper here," said a woman, one of the market-sellers whose son had gone to war. "You make fortunes on rumor, and then you leave the bones."
They lashed out then—first with words, then with a crowd that sings like the ocean when it has found wind. They wanted to make Gilbert small. The punishment they chose was public and designed to strip him of what he had gained: his name, his place, his safety.
They shaved his head, shaving the locks that had been flattered in the halls, leaving pink skin under the midday sun. They tied a rope around his neck—the kind used to drag someone through the pens. They affixed a placard to his chest: GILBERT DONNELLY, INFORMER, SELLER OF LIES.
He looked small, the way a man looks when he realizes the landscape no longer fits his stride. He tried the old tricks—pleading, bargaining, promises of heaps of silver—each one dropped like a coin in a well. The crowd turned to stone with their verdict.
"Apologize to the town," someone called. "Apologize to the woman."
"I told the truth!" Gilbert cried. The sound was high. "I told the truth. I saw her. I—"
"You told a lie," a child shouted. "You told a lie about her hands. She saved us with those hands."
"We will not be sold for talk," another voice said. "We will not be traded."
The crier called for the stocks. They bound his arms, then the crowd, hungry for spectacle and for justice, pushed forward with words like knives. People spat on him, some heaped old grievances, others worse. They cut up his shirt and showed him the shards of his reputation until there was nothing left but a man muttering a plea that had no audience.
He tried to bargain with money, promising coin he did not have. He attempted to name those who had first whispered to him, to move the blame upward. But the square had circles like sun; blame could not circle upward easily anymore. Men wept for what was lost; women bristled at the audacity of a man who said he acted for the good and traded their lives as if they were cattle.
"Look at him now," a veteran said. "He sold rumor and now he smells like shame."
The punishment did not end in blood. The town had its limits. They could not hang him—Griffin refused to be a monstrous example. But they could strip him of dignity. They could make him walk the arc of humiliation until even his tongue felt lighter.
So they paraded him through the market square, the mills, and the fields, carrying the sign, and the people spat and called out the truth: "LIAR! LIAR!" Children threw pebbles. An old woman spat on his boots. The shoemaker who had sold him good leather cut a seam in his shoes and vanished in his pity as if to say, you will never spend in my shop again.
We took pictures on parchment. We carved songs. The town made sure Gilbert Donnelly would never again step into a hall and smile without someone reminding him of the woman whose name he had meant to cheapen.
Gilbert's face changed a hundred times in those hours: first red with feigned bravado, then pale with confusion, then wide with disbelief, then into the smallness of a man who begged like a child. He denied, then he tried to bargain, then he cried. The faces of the market watched him transform from predator to prey with an animal curiosity that ate him slowly.
By the time they left him—thrown out of the gates with no purse, no house, no job, and a scar of shame—he had pleaded until his tongue was sore. The crowd thinned with the feeling of having been relieved. They had watched the fall.
"Let this be a lesson," Griffin said finally. He stood on a raised cart and addressed the people. "No man will turn rumor into power in my lands. Speak true. Be loyal. Or lose what you thought you had."
There was a hush. Then the square returned to its business. Women resumed selling bread. Men went back to their posts. The spectacle unmade itself like tide drawing back.
I had watched his punishment and my heart rubbed raw like a piece of cloth that will not sit still. I wondered if this would burn away the rot or simply bake new hard skin over it. Gilbert left with no friends; his name was poison. He wandered the roads and never again stood in a hall with a tray of favor warm in his hands.
We reclaimed the walled city months later. Griffin took the true Princess—Frida Oliveira—into his camp as a trophy and, in his own way that could sometimes be almost tender, he pressed the burned place of his heart into ceremony and the dull business of empire.
I kept Delilah's letters in a small case. After the court crowned Griffin Emperor and called the city ours, we buried her name in a memory like a wound that healed into an old scar. They named the child again—after the blood and after the brave—and told stories that glossed over the edges.
Years later, I stood at the edge of the court, washing my hands of the day and thinking through the list of things we had taken and left. "Do you regret anything?" a young girl asked me, watching the silk fall from the looms.
"Yes," I said. "I regret that a brave woman thought killing herself was the only way to keep her child safe from being another sword sent to her own people."
She frowned. "Was it wrong?"
"She chose the only way she had left," I answered. "And in the square, a man paid for his loudness. But whether that cleans a wound, I cannot say."
The child looked at me as if I had opened a book she had not expected. "What will they remember?" she asked.
"They will remember a name: Delilah Castro," I said. "They will remember a belt and a stable and the night the crowd learned what its voice could do. They will remember a head on a tray and the price of a lie."
"And the boy?"
"The boy grew into a name that belonged to the court," I said. "Griffin named him, and the empire taught him coin before it taught him pity."
I carry Delilah's last letter folded in a drawer beneath my bed. When the wind is right and the horses are quiet, I take it down and read the lines she wrote between the hills and the fields:
"If my son must ride with banners that burn my river, then let him have a name that finds no peace."
I do not tell the tale to make a hero. Delilah was not a saint. She was a woman caught between love and country, who could not let one make the other a weapon. She acted in the only place left for her—inside her own heart—and I have never seen a choice so clean or so cruel.
We buried many things in those years: villages, songs, and a European summer of memory that had nothing left to prove. Gilbert Donnelly walked the roads thin as a rumor without a home. Griffin took more land and a crown, and yet sometimes at dusk I would see him look at the river and call the name she had once been offered. He said it out of sleep: "Zhao Wan." Once, he said it like a prayer.
When the banners faded, when coin lost its glitter for a night, the thing I held onto was a small scrap of embroidered cloth with a child's name sewn into it in the cramped hand of a woman who had tried to save her people with the only thing she had: a needle and a secret.
We are all actors in a game that props itself up with names. We call one another princess and traitor, maid and queen, informer and hero. The square decided Gilbert's shape for a while; the cliff decided Delilah's for always.
"Tell me," the young girl said as she rose to go. "Would you have done anything different?"
I folded Delilah's letter and looked out at the courtyard where children played with wooden swords.
"No," I said. "I would not have undone a single stitch, and yet I would have loved her to live."
I tucked the paper back into its drawer. The wind made the courtyard flags stir softly, like a last breath. The animal of the city slept. The square's memory of Gilbert hissed like a candle guttered and smoldered. And somewhere in a valley that the map called nothing, a woman's choice lay like a stone you could not lift without changing the river.
The End
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