Sweet Romance13 min read
The Court Notes: How I Kept a Throne and Lost My Life to a Bed
ButterPicks13 views
I never meant to be anyone’s treasure. I meant only to be a clerk who could eat three meals and not freeze in winter.
"Write it down," Uri said on my first morning in the palace, and his voice was already a command I had to obey.
"I will," I answered, and meant it for the books, not for him.
They called me a起居郎 in the records — the man who tracked the emperor’s waking and sleeping and every word that slipped out at inconvenient hours. In truth, I was a woman named Emmalyn Colon who had learned to sew a laugh into a man's face and braid a calm into a voice. I had done it for my mother, for the quiet hope that she would not die thinking I had been born the wrong way.
"Emmalyn," Alonso Figueroa said to me the day they dressed me for court, "you look like you might be useful. Remember, three steps, three words, three breaths. Do not forget the emperor's habits."
"I will not forget," I promised, and I actually meant it this time.
Uri Herrera had a way of making orders feel weathered and inevitable. He strode like thunder in embroidered silk. I followed three paces behind him, a scribbling shadow. He had asked me to tally things I would never have thought to count: how long a favored concubine slept, whether the emperor sneezed before breakfast, if his laugh was full or half-hollow. I wrote all of it down.
"Why do you always write everything so plainly?" he once asked, leaning over my small notepad as if he were reading someone else's gossip.
"Because if I lie, I die," I said. "Because the record is the only truth."
He laughed softly. "You are a funny little man."
"I am not a man, Your Majesty," I thought, but I only wrote: "Majesty smiled."
At court, jokes were currency. Outside my private ink there were whispers: the emperor was strange, the clerk was strange, the clerk did not look at the women like other men. Alonso would glance at me with the pity of a man who believes he knows a joke’s punchline.
"You could be a proper husband," Alonso said one evening while we delivered food tongs and folded silks. "There are good matches. A marriage would be an honor."
"I am a clerk," I replied. "My duty is an office, not a bed."
Alonso shrugged. "You say that now."
Anastasia Larsen was a storm wrapped in silk. The day she said she wanted me, she stomped into the great hall and accused Uri of playing games.
"Brother," she said, "you promised me a marriage. How can you leave me to rot while your clerk stays by your side?"
"Anastasia," Uri said gently, "the throne has needs. Your match will come."
She slammed a fan shut. "You promised! You cannot take my happiness and make it a jest."
"Then offer me the reason," Uri said, and he looked at me in a way that made my ink tremble.
Anastasia raised her voice: "Emmalyn, I will be your wife!"
"I did not realize we had the pleasure of being intimate at all," I muttered under my breath, but I wrote, "Princess complained of unkept promises."
The emperor liked to tease and make small cruelties into lessons. He would hand me a robe and ask me to help dress him — "Because only my notes can keep my memory, and my memory must be tidy." He made me adjust collars and fold sleeves. Later, he would call me forward and pinch my elbow like a man pinching someone’s small coin: "You are getting rounder. Why are you not eating properly?"
"What you eat, I eat," I would say, because I could not tell him the truth: I had learned to accept the palace table’s offerings when it fed both my work and my secrecy.
"It is my business how you live," Uri would answer, and his eyes would slide past me like knives.
The palace was full of contradictory mercies. Alonso warned me, too: "Uri listens to you. The emperor does not often listen, but to you he lends an ear like a child lending a toy."
"Why me?" I asked.
"Because you do not ask anything grand," Alonso said. "You only ask to be left alive."
One night, after too many late papers and whispers, the emperor ordered me to help him change. I had always handled the silk of others like something sacred. To dress me was to touch the line between secret and revelation.
"Be quick," he said, which in the emperor’s voice meant, "Do it my way."
I tied his belt. He was preoccupied with papers and with his own sighs. He noticed, then, that my hands were clumsy, or perhaps that my fingers were softer than a man’s. He rapped, playful and sharp: "Why do you fumble like a child?"
"I have an injured thumb," I lied. "It hurts."
He tapped my sleeve with a pen and said softly, "You are the one who keeps my day. I like that. I like that you watch."
"I watch for my job," I said, and meant both truth and hiding.
Uri's eyes on me changed things. They made me a mirror he sometimes wiped with his sleeve. They made the palace gossip wheel faster. Anastasia's clinging grew fierce. She tried to drag me out of the hall more than once, whispering about private escapes and vows of mi yue — wild things she meant to do with both of us.
"Let us run away," she begged once at the infirmary when I lay patched and sore after slipping on stone steps. "Just you and I, and forget the throne."
"I will die if I leave," I said plainly. "I will be beheaded. Father may thank me for trying to be a son, but the court does not forgive a liar who plays with a crown."
"Then marry me secretly," she said. "I would rather die having tried than live another year with the waiting."
"No," I said. "I will not drag you into this mess."
She pressed her mouth to my forehead one night like she was trying to seal a bargain. "Emmalyn, you will not refuse me forever."
Neither of us foresaw how a private joke could become public myth.
Rumors are thirsty things. They drink in alleys and vomit in gardens. Dmitri Barr, a mid-ranking courtier who had enough ambition and too little shame, began murmuring slow poison. He liked to push plates and then watch them fall. Dmitri spread whispers: that I had bewitched Uri, that I had pushed Anastasia to flee, that I had robbed a princess of a husband.
"Do you like him?" Dmitri asked me once, leaning across a low table, his voice oily.
"No," I said. "I like peace."
"Yet you sleep in the emperor’s outer room," he said. "You are not only a clerk. You are much more."
I slapped a bowl of congee away from him and left. His breath smelled of cheap wine.
The palace shrank around such talk. One afternoon, two consorts — Galina Galli among them — stopped me in the passage.
"Is it true you are in the emperor’s bed?" Galina asked, in a voice like a scald I had not felt in months.
"It is nonsense," I said. "I am an officer of records."
"Records are intimate work," she whispered. "You keep track of his waking and his sleeping."
Uri stood at the doorway then, and his shadow swallowed the women. He did not glare. He stepped forward like a man stepping into his comfortable chair.
"She is mine to trust," he said flatly.
"Your trust frightens us," said another consort, the queen of court gossip. "What if the empire learns its secrets? What if our children are not of the right blood?"
Uri's hand found my shoulder. It was only a light rest, but it was an announcement.
"You will not talk of my household," he said.
The consorts left like curtains parting. Behind them, the palace ground buzzed.
Dmitri’s slanders did not stop. He persuaded town criers to murmur of a 'newlywed wife' and a 'locked house' in a county far away where a 'wife' supposedly burned letters. He used a page to carry false tales, and each whisper added a strand to the gossip-net.
"Why do you let him do this?" Alonso asked one night, slapping a folded map on the table and then looking at me as if I might have a plan to stop rumor.
"Because it takes two to topple a throne," I said. "And I do not have the strength to uproot a court full of men who enjoy gossiping like children fight over toys."
He looked terrible and soft, and it made me angry to see pity on Alfonso’s face. Later, I found that pity is a dangerous place to live.
The day the village learned of my 'scandal', it came as a carnival. Dmitri had spread a claim that I had abducted a princess and that the emperor hid our marriage in the county. People came with torches, with songs, with mocking bread. They followed the rumor until it reached the county where I had been sent as a punishment, to be a county magistrate. I had not been gone a day before some men shouted, "Witch! Emmalyn stole a princess!"
At first I laughed. Then the laughter turned to stones.
"The emperor married his clerk!" someone hollered. "They say she rules the bedchamber!"
It wasn't just talk anymore. It was a spectacle.
"I will not stand for this," I told Isaac Mason, my county confidant. "Do not hand me over to a people with pitchforks and wronged virtue."
"You cannot fight words with ink," Isaac said. "But you can fight a man who spreads them."
He led me into the market square. "Bring proof," he told me. "Bring witnesses."
So I summoned witnesses. I walked into the open square in my county robe and said simply, "Who here has seen me beat a princess? Who here knows the emperor’s private bed? Who here can say I am a wife of the throne?"
Voices were loud. The mob was louder. Then Dmitri himself arrived, puffing, with a handful of pages and a crowd that cheered and hissed.
"There she is!" Dmitri crowed. "She hides under cloaks! She steals beds! Your magistrate is a liar!"
"Lie?" I said.
"Yes," Dmitri answered. "I have proof. She is married."
"Proof?" I said, and I looked into the faces of the crowd. They wanted blood.
Isaac stepped forward and gripped my sleeve. His voice was low. "Let the court decide."
"I want no court," I said. My voice was flat as a drawn bow. "I want a public hearing. If you have an accusation, bring it to public and speak. If you have slander, I will cut it down where it grows."
Dmitri laughed and signaled his men. They pushed forward with scrolls and whispers. He thought himself clever and righteous. He did not understand what would come when a knife of truth was pulled.
"You want a hearing?" I asked the crowd. "Then we shall give you one." I looked to Isaac. "Summon the magistrate's bench. Summon the elders."
Isaac did as he was told. The square became a court for a moment. People leaned in. The market sellers stayed with scales hanging midair. Children swallowed.
Dmitri presented his scrolls. He read the rumors as if they were verse. The crowd hissed and ate every word.
"Who else has secrets?" I asked softly. "Who else here traded in the coin of lies?"
Silence answered me, stretched thin and brittle.
"Then hear me," I said. "I have records I took when I served in the palace. I have names, not gossip. If you say I am married to the emperor, point to a decree. Bring forward the signature. Bring the seal."
Dmitri shifted, sweat thick on his brow. "I have witnesses," he said. "I have men who will swear."
"Then speak," I replied.
He called a man — a thin, frightened page who had been paid a cup of wine to be loud. The page came, voice high like a bird. "I saw them in a carriage in the night," he sang. "I saw them ride."
"You saw the emperor traveling in plain carriage without guard?" I said, and the crowd laughed. "Who is brave enough to tell you more?"
The page mumbled, legs shaking. He could not keep his story straight. Dmitri's other witnesses were less vivid than puffed melons.
"Men," I said quietly, and the market fell silent. "We are here in a public square. If you spread rumors in the market, you bind us with them. Words have weight. They sour children’s minds. They make wives cry. You who have been deceived by suspicion, tell me: did you seek to test the source, or did you follow the scrum because it looked like sport?"
A woman hurled a roasted chestnut at Dmitri. It hit his cheek with a smack that cracked his dignity.
The magistrate's bench, forced by the open crowd, opened its books. They called for the seal. No seal was produced. No sealed decree was produced.
"Then what do you ask?" the magistrate asked Dmitri, in a voice bored and strong.
"I ask that she be removed!" Dmitri shouted. "I ask the emperor be told that a betrayer sits where an officer should!"
The magistrate glared at Dmitri like a wolf smelling rot. "Do you bring proof or slander?"
Dmitri faltered. He had a mouth full of wind and nothing else.
"Then you have made a false accusation," the magistrate said. "And for false accusation, you will be punished."
The crowd exhaled like a storm leaving. The magistrate ordered Dmitri to stand in the center, to confess. He called for witnesses to his own words. He asked Dmitri to swear by his ancestors that his claim was true.
Dmitri's voice stung thin. "I swear—"
"Swear here," the magistrate interrupted, "and be done with it, or be proved a liar."
Dmitri swallowed. He had no proof and knew it. The crowd closed its hands around the news like it was a bone; they wanted blood and then they wanted repentance.
"Then you are to be publicly shamed," the magistrate declared. "You will stand in the market for a day. You will carry the wooden rattle that signifies a liar, and all who wish may name you as they like. Your salary will be halved for a year. You will be forbidden to hold office for three years. And if you harm the officer again, the law will take a sterner hand."
The market cried out, half joy, half hunger for spectacle. They wanted more. They wanted him stripped of clothes, but laws had bounds.
Dmitri flushed purple with humiliation. He tried to stammer. "This is—this is—"
"Enough," said the magistrate. "Say your apology."
Dmitri knelt, his silk muddied by dust. He spat out an apology that tasted like what it was: paper-thin and paid for.
The crowd jeered and then, for a long while, they quieted. Shame had been served like a dish. People took their chestnuts back to their stalls and the market resumed. The rattle dangled from Dmitri’s hand as if it had a new life.
Uri heard of the square's judgment later that day. He smiled with that slow smile that meant hunger satisfied and kindness given in his peculiar way. "You did well," he said to me when he next found me at my table.
"I did what I could," I answered. "But the square is a volatile thing. It will love a spectacle and then forget the person who made it."
He tucked a pen behind his ear and said, "You are messy with words, but you keep them clean. You are mine in one sense: you keep my hours. Keep them well."
"There are other ways to be mine," he said once to Alonso when Alonso stared too long at me. "We need an heir. We need a lineage on record."
Alonso staggered as if struck. "You want a child," he said flatly.
"We need someone to carry the name," Uri replied. "The palace is quiet in certain ways. We will remedy that."
I laughed too soon. "Let us not talk of bearing crowns as if they were simple tasks."
Uri only watched me with an expression that had been patient and then became fond. "You will have a child in the palace or outside it, but you will keep your life. That is my bargain."
He made peculiar bargains. He made them like a man who believed his promises were carved into jars. When it suited him, the empire flexed and made exceptions. I found that even an emperor would conspire to keep the life he liked close.
"Emmalyn," he asked once, quietly, "if I asked you to love me, could you answer honestly?"
I had been fearing this for a year. I had been practicing refusal like a parched man practices drinking water — with controlled breaths.
"No," I said, because the truth was complicated. "I cannot promise to love you in the way you ask."
"Would you be willing to be near me?" he asked.
"I am near you by duty," I answered. "That is my safety."
He smiled in a way that made the air thinner. "Then be my proximity," he said. "Be near me so I know the hours."
Time folded into strange shapes. I was made into different names — magistrate here, wife there, clerk always. When the palace court finally decided that my usefulness had roots beyond a mere clerk, they made me a six-rank officer and then, absurdly, a bride.
"You marry the emperor," whispered one of my county clerks, eyes round. "You will be gone like a bird."
"I marry in name and survive in body," I said. "Watch."
The wedding was a rumor that became a festival. Anastasia screamed with a mixture of fury and relief when I was carried away to the capital. Uri called his ministers, and Galina Galli and others watched like women who place bets. Dmitri sulked with the wooden rattle he'd been forced to carry. The court liked the spectacle.
"Remember," I told Isaac before I left the county, "if they say I disappear, you will tell them the truth."
"Tell them you are off to be an official, not a lover," he said, and we both laughed like thieves.
Wedding days are short and long at once. The emperor took what he wanted and made me swear a dozen soft oaths I did not understand. I swore the right things with a right mouth. I pressed my lips where the oath demanded. When the night came, my body did what bodies do, and the court does not always watch where it thinks it looks.
Later, months later, when gossip tried to name me the sort of woman who used her bed for power, the truth was stranger and stranger.
Galina, who had been kind to me in quiet hours, told me one night, "Sometime the emperor will ask for the seat of your life. If he does, you must decide how to answer."
"I am no other's object to give," I answered. "I have a child in my belly, perhaps, and I will keep that child safe."
"I think you are to be a mother," Galina said softly. "Perhaps two."
"Two?" I repeated, and my mind performed an arithmetic of terror.
The palace held its secrets like a meal. We ate carefully.
When the child's first cry was not mine to hold — when the emperor fathered a child by the palace midwives' craft in another room and the babe was placed in the imperial nursery with my blood on its small life — I felt a theft without violence. The child was safe. The court rejoiced. I laughed a cracked laugh and then found myself back in the county with my title and a letter from Uri that said only, "Guard the border and guard yourself."
I kept my office. I kept my ink. I returned to my county. The emperor came to visit like a rumor — sometimes he walked the county as if it were his palace for a day, eating at the best inns and improving the bedding. Sometimes he left like a storm.
"Will you come back?" Isaac asked when I returned to the magistrate's seat.
"When they call, I will answer," I said. "I will do as an officer does: keep the law and keep my secret."
Years passed in a rhythm of ink and obedience. The emperor’s interest changed like weather. Sometimes he loved my hands and sometimes he loved the way I wrote. Once, when Dmitri tried to rise again and whisper of my cruelty, the court had its own justice. Once, when Anastasia found her proper husband and yet kept a tender for jokes, she laughed and forgave me for not choosing her.
"You are strange," Anastasia told me in the years after, as we sat by a garden pool. "You will not love him properly, and he will not love you properly, and yet you both continue like two clocks wound to different hours."
"Not a clock," I answered. "A ledger. We keep each other in the balance, and the state keeps its own books."
Uri visited the county twice more. Once he rode in disguise and ordered a bowl of rice and ate it while I watched. "You keep good records," he said, chewing. "You write what matters."
"What matters?" I asked.
"The living," he said. "You can keep them."
At that I smiled. "Then keep your own hours," I said.
When I am asked now about that year — about the emperor and the princess and the county and the child and the public square where Dmitri learned to bite dust — I tell them simple things.
"I was an officer," I say. "I kept a book."
"Did you keep love?" they always ask.
"I kept what was left of me," I answer. "I kept my life."
The market square still remembers Dmitri’s wooden rattle. The magistrate's bench still has my name penciled in one corner. The emperor still writes at midnight and sometimes looks for me. Anastasia laughed at her wedding to Enzo Xu later, and she still sends me a jar of fruit every new year. Galina greets me with a nod in court when she passes. Alonso Figueroa often pinches my cheek and says, "You should have married nicely."
"I married well enough," I say.
Maybe I lost some things. Maybe I gained others. There are nights I wish I could have refused the emperor without losing the job that fed me. There are mornings I wake and trace a line in my ledger, remembering how I once wrote down, plainly and true: "Uri smiled."
And sometimes, when the palace is quiet, and I cannot sleep, I write the hours anyway — because if words have weight, then I want mine to be honest.
The End
— Thank you for reading —