Sweet Romance14 min read
The Blue-Lan Sword and the Choice I Couldn’t Hide
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I still see the ruined plain when I close my eyes: torn banners, broken chariots, the taste of iron on my tongue. I have held bones I could not name and watched men I loved fall like rotted trees. I held my sword as if it were a promise, then rode back to a land that wanted me in a different shape.
“Are you sure you must take the helmet off?” Dylan asked, her hands steady on the straps of my rusted armor.
“I will to sleep,” I said. “Call me what you used to, will you? Katie, not some court title.”
Dylan laughed. “Katie, then. The helmet comes off, and so does the war.”
I peeled away the plates. My hair fell like a dark flag. “Do I look different?” I asked.
“Like trouble,” she said. “Trouble in a clean gown. Trouble the court will not know how to serve tea to.”
Dylan had always been near me—through marches, through cold watch, through the nights when I counted the living and the gone. She had hands that could tighten a bowstring and soothe a fever. She was not the kind women at court thought proper. She was my mirror.
“Father called a messenger,” Owen said when he finally walked into the yard. He was my brother and the only person whose shoulders were as wide with care as with muscle. “Esteban had his seal. He says the late king ordered your match.”
Esteban Barnett had been a general for three decades and wore his service like a second skin. He bowed, and his eyes were a tired map. “Katie,” he said, voice low, “it is done. The court will have you near the throne. We serve the realm even with marriage.”
“So I am to be a prize?” I asked. “A pawn wrapped in a gown?”
“No.” Owen came forward and took my hand like he took a standard—firm and sure. “You are a link. That is all.”
“Then allow me to link,” I said. “But do not expect me to sit quietly.”
They laughed, and for a second the war did not press on my lungs.
The road to the capital tasted of dust and strangers. We stopped at market towns. I went without mask once in Nanyang, because I needed to feel I was still a living woman, not only rumor and armor. I moved through the crowd with Dylan, and a young man—smooth as a string and careless—argued with an old vendor.
“Let him be,” Dylan murmured, but I stepped in.
“I will pay,” I said, and the crowd watched; they expected a lord or a merchant. They got a woman with callused hands.
“Thank you,” the young man said when I handed coin. He bowed like a practiced actor. “My name is Emanuel Torres.”
“Then may the name suit you,” I said, “Emanuel, and be careful with sharp tongues in market squares.”
“You are not from here,” he said. “You speak like someone who has known more sky than a market.”
“Good eye.” I smiled, and he laughed. The laugh was a bell. He escorted us to a great hall and called people who bowed like the moon. He ate with us and listened. He called me “black lance” as a joke.
“Black lance?” he asked once. “Why so fierce a title?”
“Because I carry cold iron,” I said.
He became two faces in my memory: the merchant who slipped me a fine gift and the prince who would unmask himself as a storm later. “Emanuel,” I told myself, “is a sharp wind.”
We reached the capital, and the palace did not greet us as a house but as a stage. Gold spun the low rooflines like trapped sun, and men with smooth hair and colder eyes waited with thin smiles. The orders came fast: to take off my armor, to accept a crown, to bend.
At the ceremony, a man with a slow smile read Esteban’s letter aloud. “Mark Baldwin, by order of the late king,” he said, “you shall take as wife the daughter of Esteban Barnett, Katie Sherman.”
When I knelt, someone—Mark Baldwin—met my eyes. He looked like a portrait in motion: quiet, steady, the kind of man who had been taught to hold peace like a shield.
“You will be safe at my side,” he said.
“You speak with the comfort of a scholar,” I said. “Do you like swords?”
“I like order,” he answered. “I like care.”
That was all. We married because states have mouths that must be fed with alliances.
Three days later, I stood in a hall of silk under lanterns and met a thing I had not expected to meet: warmth of a different color. Emanuel had come to the city and the joke of his market charm fell away into something like an ache. He gave me a sword, a plain blade whose steel threw a cold blue flash. Someone had chiselled two characters along the length—Qinglan. He called the sword “first of its kind.”
“You give me a weapon?” I asked.
“You will need it,” he said. There was more in his eyes than a merchant; there was a man who had learned how to keep his feelings folded like maps.
“You must take my hairpin then,” I said. “As a debt.”
He held the silver hairpin like a relic. I had cut its end small, carving a tiny jaded circle where I had once played as a child. The hairpin took him by some small grief. He smiled like opening a sealed letter.
“Tomorrow you leave,” he said quietly.
“Yes,” I said. “My duty remains.”
There is a part of me that is made of sharp edges. I titled my face to the court and called it diplomacy. I would not be naive. I would not accept being a footnote. The man I married—Mark Baldwin—was quiet and fair in his ways. He had a patience I had not expected. He spoke softly, walked with purpose, but his eyes tracked me like a steady craft on a long shore.
“You do not need to be a page,” he said to me one night when I refused to accept the maid’s words. “You will not be hidden.”
“You sound almost like you mean it,” I said.
“I do,” he said.
I believed him in small measures then—because the truth of a person shows itself in the small.
But a thing had already rooted: Emanuel wanted me. Mark knew—some things the palace cannot hide—and a choice was made at a council table where men in robes folded strategy into the shape of marriage and military command. They sent me away again, to find what the doctors called a “cure” for a malady that hindered the palace, a flower the king believed might close a wound.
The mission to find the six-petal ice lotus was dressed as a test; every time I reached for the swordhilt, the world rose and fell. Everyone said I was chosen because I was a warrior. I knew another reason, but I held it like a private prayer.
“You will not go alone,” Mark said the morning before my leave. “Emanuel knows those mountains.”
“You sent your rival to guide me,” I said.
“You have my blessing,” Mark said. “You also have my trust.”
I left with Dylan, with Owen, with Garrison—Emanuel’s old companion—and with Leonardo Soto, an archer who had killed a tiger in the field and who kept his gaze like a drawn bow.
“Lean on me,” Leonardo said, half-smile, when I checked my armor. “I will watch your back.”
“You already have,” I said. “Do not boast too early.”
Winter grabbed the land. The road to the valley cut through rocks like teeth. The mountain air bit in my ears. We moved fast because the empire wanted quick miracles. The drug valley was not a place for courtly airs; it was a mouth of stones and old animals.
The valley tested us in ways I could not have rehearsed. We found tracks like old stories: wolves and old men who had died long before.
“Which way?” Emanuel asked on the first frozen pass.
“Which way?” I said back. He touched the sword at his belt, the Qinglan cold even through cloth.
Emanuel was different when we were alone. He had not the polished guard of the court. He laughed like a boy who had not yet learned how a world broke people. “You ought not to be a prize, Katie,” he said one night by the fire. “You ought to be on the front line of every map.”
“You flatter me,” I said. “You also give me a sword and then tell me to run faster.”
“I want to see you without armor,” he said.
“I do not have a dress for the mountains.” I smiled. “Only knives and a hundred reasons to keep both hands.”
He leaned close. “I gave you the Qinglan because you are honest with it.”
“Then do not make a liar of me with your promises.” I pushed him away gently, but the touch lingered between our shoulders like a promise thrown to the wind.
We found the valley carved under grey slopes and a stream that moved like a memory. The valley breathed colder than the air around it. At the heart, in a hollow with six ice petals that folded like a sleeping thing, something unseen guarded the bloom.
“You were not to be alone in this,” Mark had warned. “The ice has rules.”
“They always do,” Leonardo said. He slotted an arrow. “Prepare.”
We moved as a unit—the kind of movement that comes from nights of shared danger. Then a howl rose. The ground tore with the weight of a big cat—a tiger whose eyes were storms.
“Back!” I shouted. Dylan pulled an arrow. Emanuel unsheathed a short blade. Leonardo held his bow like the world depended on it.
The tiger struck like the end of a breath. It folded between my legs and the sound of my life cinched, but I rolled and thrust my knife. The beast’s weight went over me and I grabbed at its throat. It was a wrestling of limbs and iron and the smell of old blood. I kicked free and drove the blade through a gap.
When the dust settled, we were all alive but raw. My back burned where claws had eaten the armor; my blood salted the snow. The six petals shivered like a breathing thing. I had been near to being a memory myself.
“You are mad,” Emanuel said softly, kneeling to my side. “You should not have risked it.”
“I am not a treasure,” I said. “Do you see now?”
He took my hand. “I have for days.”
I did not answer then because the valley had its own language. We took one petal back—wrapped and cold—and the bitterness of our victory followed us like a shadow. There were moments I thought of Mark’s quiet patience and Emanuel’s quick light and did not know whose hands I would accept when the world asked me.
We returned as a unit to the capital, and war had left behind other ghosts to settle in gilded rooms—the spy who had once fed false trails the enemy used to trap our soldiers. His work had taken twenty thousand lives from our ranks. I had said nothing then because a court does not always do justice.
But some things do not wait to be asked for.
“We found him in a market in a border town,” Emanuel told me when he found me alone. “He met us like a rat between alleys.”
“Catch him,” I said. “Bring him before the people.”
We did, and the day they brought the spy into the market square, the air tasted of sweat and copper. A crowd had gathered—faces I had seen in campaigns, faces of merchants and mothers. They formed a ring of witness. The mayor beat a drum and the envoy from Mark ordered him to stand.
“Name!” called one.
“You called me not to be a prize,” Emanuel said. He stood across from the spy and did not hide his anger. “You called me to be honest.”
The spy sneered. He wore a cheap robe though the market had better cloth. When they brought him before the hall, he spat like a man who had nothing to lose.
“I worked for the other side,” he said. “Money is law. I sold maps and names.”
“He sold lives,” I answered. I had my armor, stained, but I wore the blue-lan sword at my hip. The crowd hissed like a wave breaking.
The mayor opened the floor. “You betrayed our people for price,” he said. “Tell the truth now, in front of those who lost kin.”
The spy laughed. “Do you think a king cares to remember a single village?” He spat again. “I was a small coil in a great clock.”
“You stood outside a gate and pointed inside,” a soldier said. “You watched twenty thousand go into a mouth.”
The spy’s face tightened at those words. He coughed, then barked out, “They were cannon fodder. Empires feed. I did what I was paid to do.”
A cry went up from the crowd—“Traitor!”—and mothers near the front wept aloud. The market edges blurred with movement. Someone threw a rotten fruit; someone else raised a hand to strike.
“Listen,” I said. The square quieted like a cloth pulled tight. “We will not give you the cheap satisfaction of a blade. Empire law requires your confession and return of the items you sold. Then you will stand before the judges. But we will not let you go unseen.”
They made him kneel in the center. The mayor took the ledger the spy had kept—list after list of names and locations—and read them. “You took houses for coin,” he read, “you gave directions to the enemy. You noted gaps in our patrols, where the grain stores were light. You engineered a trap.”
“That was the plan,” the spy said.
“You almost killed our men with your plan,” Emanuel said. He stepped closer. The crowd smelled of rage now. “You sold the steps where fathers stumbled.”
The spy broke.
“At first it was only money,” he said, voice thin as linen. “I told them what I thought they wanted. I was paid silver and food. Then I was paid more to whisper, and more when they saw the orders… and I was afraid to stop.”
“You were not afraid of wrong,” I said. “You were afraid of losing what you had when you could have kept your soul.”
He looked up at me with a face that had once looked like every man who makes a small decision that cascades. “I had a child,” he said. “A girl. She was seven. I could not see her starve.”
A woman in the crowd, her hair wrapped as a widow’s, stepped forward. “Then see her live with guilt?” she said. “You traded her to keep her alive only so she would grow up with a dead land.”
People murmured. The man’s eyes filled. He clutched the ledger; he wanted to offer papers, coins—anything to make it smaller.
The mayor took the ledger from his hands and read aloud all the places. There were towns I knew, soldiers still named by ghosts. The crowd’s mood changed from anger to a cold grief.
“You will speak each name,” the mayor said, “and tell the households what you told the enemy. You will reveal every hand you took money from, every gap you pointed out, and you will stand in the places you betrayed and tell the families who paid you.”
“Do it?” someone cried. “Make him speak where he sold them.”
They planned a route that took the man to every village where his whispers had been a scaffold for death. People lined the roads. He went. He was led from one square to another. At each place they made him stand before those he had betrayed. He repeated lines, the same as a gambler repeating losses—“I told them the watch beats here,” “I said the carts would rest here”—over and over until his voice was raw.
At each stop, the crowd had a different reaction. In one village an old man spat in his direction. In another a mother said nothing but touched each name he pronounced like a rosary. Children pointed and shouted the words traitor and liar and plebeian till the spy’s back compressed with the weight of stares.
At the biggest market, in front of a temple, when he confessed how he led the scouts past the supply wagon gap and where the ambush lay, an old veteran from my company raised his hand.
“You were clever in your smallness,” the man said. “You thought profit could be counted in coins. You forgot souls.”
The spy fell to his knees and sobbed. He had to speak the details, naming men I had eaten with, named the ridge where we had run, said how he had sold the knowledge of the fords. The crowd leaned close. People took out their devices and wrote it down—the whole thing exposed like open seams.
The punishment was not a single blade because the court wanted a sentence that could stand in legal memory. He was stripped of title and property. He was bound to do five years of reconstruction work on every road he had admitted led to death. He would labor in villages he had betrayed. He would be forced to plant food with the families whose sons had been stolen. He would wear a sign of his crime on market days and read aloud his ledger of lies.
Then, the part the crowd wanted most: the public burning of the list that led to the trap, with his own hands feeding the flame. He held the pages, trembling, and set them on fire before those who had been wronged. People watched as ash rose like a small cloud in a cold sky. Some cheered. Some wept. Some took the ash and mixed it in their meals like a bitter spice—no, not to eat, but to remember.
“You will do good,” the mayor said, voice hard. “You will repay what you wished to help destroy.”
The spy cried, then, in the way of lost things. I watched him—kneeling, hours to go in the labor of his sentence—and something in me did not glow with triumph. Justice is not a bright thing. It is slow and gray and heavy as wet wool. But the public had seen him, and the families whose sons had been eaten by a hole in a plan had some answer that was not simply silence.
“Will he be watched?” someone asked.
“Every week,” the mayor said.
“You will not lift your head and feel free again for a long time,” a woman in the crowd said to the spy. “Your daughter will not be spared the story. That is part of the punishment.”
He knelt. He took it. The crowd dispersed like a tide. I stood there with the blue-lan sword at my side and felt a weight that was not all relief.
After that, the court breathed a different air for a while. The king kept his word and left us to maps and orders. Mark treated me with a gentleness that matched the way he had seen me fight, not as a thing to be hidden but as a force to be tended.
Emanuel came back to the palace, and he and I walked the corridors at night and spoke in whispers. “You were brave,” he said once, and then, quieter, “and foolish.”
“You chose a sword once,” I said. “You chose honor once.”
“I chose you when I thought I could,” he said. He took my hand.
Mark watched. He did not look like a disappointed man. He looked like a man who would build a garden in the middle of winter.
“You have my permission to come and go in the court,” he said once over a pot of tea. “If you must be torn by two winds, then make sure the winds do not tear the house down.”
“Who told you such odd propriety?” I asked, and for once his half-smile broke like a small dawn.
“An old lesson,” he said. “No one owns a free bird.”
The months changed like pages. I learned household accounts—Mark demanded I learn the small things—and I learned painting lines on paper, and I trained recruits when winter thinned into a cold green morning. I wore the armor he had given me some days and a plain dress other days. In the stillness between storms, Emanuel would come with wine and ask me about the valley.
“Did you find the lotus?” he asked.
“We found a petal,” I said. “That is enough for a king and a prayer.”
“You keep the sword,” he said.
“You keep the hairpin,” I answered.
There were days my hands ached from ledger work and nights when thought of the tiger’s bulk left a cold spot in my chest. There was a time when the palace's web seemed to tighten, and a quiet terror that good things were heavy with the need to be kept.
Months later, at a festival to honor the fallen, the city gathered. We stood on the high dais with Mark beside me and Emanuel a step behind. The king himself had come and the market square was a bright mouth full of faces. I thought of the spy’s hauling and of the four great things a person must carry: shame, duty, love, and the desire to be known.
They raised their cups, and I felt the glow of a small life agreed upon. Emanuel touched my sleeve. “You chose a duty,” he whispered.
“I chose to be honest,” I said.
He looked at me as if wanting to knock sun from the sky with his bare hands. “Make me honest then,” he said, which was a terrible thing to ask.
I looked at Mark. "Keep a sword," I thought, because a sword kept what it was meant to keep.
What I carried home that night was more than a petal; it was a choice held inside clothes and hard words. I kept the Qinglan sword at my bed and the hairpin in a box. Emanuel kept a space in the nights between duty and longing. Mark kept the house steady and his quiet like a harbor.
“You were right,” Mark said once as I sat with him under thin dawn. “You are not a prize.”
“No,” I said. “I am a person, and I have loved and I have held back. I will not be traded again.”
Emanuel came sometimes and laughed like he belonged to a storybook. He was my choice of stubbornness and salt. Mark was my steadiness and the soft center all great doors closed upon.
In the market square the spy labored, and people passed him with eyes that counted the ledger’s ash and let a small forgiveness fall like seed. It was not enough to rebuild what was lost. Nothing could do that. It was the smallest chance to take something back. I watched him plant and watched him sweat like a man who had learned how to give the world back.
My life is not a line divided simply. It is a braid. I walk a court and a training yard, and I keep my sword bright. I keep the Qinglan at my side—its blue flash is the memory of the man who first handed it to me, and also of the man who taught me peace. On nights when the city cannot sleep I think of the tiger, the ice blossom, the spy’s ledger, and the small voices of my people.
“You ever regret?” Emanuel asked me once in a quiet corridor.
“Regret is a small thing for an empire,” I said. “I have choices. I keep them.”
He held the hairpin I had given him long ago. “I will watch over your hair if ever you want me—to wish it well.”
“Then stay,” I said, and he did, at first as a friend and sometimes as more, but always with respect to the world I had chosen.
At the festival's end I walked to the place where the six petals had been burned into my memory and I set down a pair of gifts: the blade I had been given and a packet of seed. Mark stood with me then and Emanuel at my shoulder. The crowd watched. It felt like the world was listening.
I do not end this story with vows that will suit every heart. I end with a small gesture:
I placed the Qinglan on the altar by the city gate, where merchants and soldiers pass. I tied the hairpin to its sheath. I whispered to both of them what I had learned.
“You held a sword,” I said. “You gave me a hairpin. Keep them both and do not make a prize of the quiet things in a life.”
The wind took my words into the square. The sword shone like a place where truth and mercy meet. The ice lotus outside of the valley keeps its own hush. I keep my hands full of accounts, training men, making a home. I keep my choices in a braid—some pieces bright like silk, some pieces like iron.
If I must name the thing that rests in my chest above all else: it is that I chose to be known. The Qinglan knows, and so do they.
The End
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