Sweet Romance16 min read
The Emperor's Two Faces and the Moon-Shaped Pendant
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I found out the emperor's secret.
"Ruben," I said to myself once, when the moon was a thin smile above the palace roof. "What are you hiding?"
"You knew we would marry." My father's voice had always been steady when he mentioned destiny. "You knew your path."
"I know," I replied, even to him I kept things simple sometimes. "I know."
He had been my friend since I was a child. We had played in the same courtyards, chased the same dragonflies, fallen into the same puddles. At ten, Ruben fell into the river and came back different. He used to shout odd, disconnected things.
"Math is hard!"
"English is hard!"
"Cola tastes good!"
We both laughed then, because why not; children find the silly things funny. The nonsense tapered as he grew up, but there was always a flicker — something set apart in him.
At sixteen, standing under the round bright moon, he said, "Jocelyn, I like another girl. I like her a lot."
I felt the moon tilt. "You like who?" I asked.
"You will marry me," he had said once when we were small, pressing a small carved wooden bird into my palm. He had promised then with the frankness of a child. So when he said he liked another, everything tumbled.
"Ruben," I asked quietly, "what is she like?"
He turned to look at the moon as if it could answer. "She's far away. One day I will go to her. I promised."
"Promise who?" I asked without meaning to.
He didn't answer me with words. He had a way of holding his hand on the moon-shaped jade pendant at his waist and staring like the pendant was a window.
I kept my composure because I was the chancellor's daughter. "I will be the empress," I reminded myself. "Empresses are composed."
"You are cold." He said it once, lightly, when we were kids. He called me later the reward name he'd invented: "Stinky." He would tuck that nickname into late hours like a confession.
"Stinky," he murmured once, catching me by surprise, "you smell like the tea my mother makes. I like it."
I had no right to ask why he called himself a different name in daylight than at night. I watched him as he did his emperor's duties, stern and thin-lipped, then as night fell he would laugh and toss me a folded paper fan, and the laugh would belong to the other man — the one who taught me how to play games.
"You lose again," he would say, teasing as he stacked the small ivory tiles for the game of luck we played on the floor of my private chamber.
"Of course I lose," I would reply. "You rig the game."
"Rig it?" He feigned indignation. "I? Never."
"Ruben," I said once, while he was still half-dawn and half-night, "do you ever tell the daylight Ruben about us?"
He put his forehead against mine and whispered, "The daylight me doesn't listen. The night me keeps secrets like pockets."
"Then keep one for me."
"There's no pocket big enough," he answered, smiling with a mouth that once again made my heart clatter.
There were two sets of rules for Ruben. Daytime Ruben followed duty, addresses, and jade seals. Nighttime Ruben followed jokes, games, and small private rebellions. Daytime Ruben kept a moon-shaped jade pendant close to his chest; nighttime Ruben would, for a while, leave it on the table and forget it.
"You like someone else," I said the night he first told me outright.
"I do," Ruben answered, calm and curious as if stating a fact about the weather. "Not you."
Silence widened between us. It was a soundless thing heavy as a stone.
"Then what am I?" I asked.
"You are my wife."
"Then what does a wife mean?"
"Everything," he said, then laughed softly and kissed my forehead.
That was Ruben. He gave me a candy and a cut and a kiss in the same afternoon.
"Why do you look at the pendant all day?" I asked another time when the pendant slipped from his fingers and clattered onto the lacquered desk.
He reached for it as if it might fall through the cracks of the palace. "She's far away," he repeated. "One day I'll find her."
"Why don't you bring her to the palace?" I demanded, though I should not have dared. Even emperors cannot have everything.
"Because she cannot come," he said, with an odd softness. "She is not of this place."
"She is a story, then?" I asked.
"Maybe," he answered.
I swallowed. My heart had known he was different, but it had always hoped he would be mine. Hope is a small, nonsensical bird that sits on the sill and sings; only fools believe it will never leave.
On our wedding day he wore new robes that smelled of lacquer and ink. He bowed and said all the words a man must say. "Jocelyn," he said, "I have already promised my heart to someone. I promised not to touch any other woman."
"So, you will not touch your empress?" I asked.
He smiled a smile that contained everything and nothing. "I will touch you at night," he answered, "not in the daylight." Then he turned to the court and laughed as if we had told a fine joke. That night he called me "Stinky" and taught me to play card games by candlelight.
"Stinky, tonight we play war," he said, and grabbed my hand. "Or poker. No, not poker — we play for feathers."
"You cheat," I accused.
"I don't." He winked. "Sometimes I win. Mostly I let you win."
"Have you been letting me win?" I asked.
"Of course." His chin rested on my shoulder. "You would be miserable if you always lost."
He tied my wrist to the bedpost one night, muttering things like charms. "I can't risk it," he said, voice low, "I can't risk burning up and leaving."
"Burn up what?" I whispered.
"Everything," he said. "Don't think about it."
He bled once in the night when he was murmuring verses like a man in prayer. Two thin streaks came down his nose. "I'm fine," he said, but he didn't mean it.
"Ruben," I said, "you will not go anywhere."
He looked at me then, with eyes that had once been children’s only and now held the weight of night. "I might have to," he said.
I moved through the palace as a woman who had been told to wear armor every day but who secretly wanted a ribbon. I kept my head down where decorum asked and my heart up where it begged.
"Why ask the emperor to bring his chosen into the palace?" I asked once quietly in a garden where the hibiscus opened like paper cups.
He had been looking for something with a handful of eunuchs. He took the moon-pendant I held in my hand.
"Keep it," he told me. "If you find it, you'll know her."
"Will I?" I asked.
"You will," he replied.
He told me one strange thing late one night. "I dream in other people's houses," he said. "When the sun is away I have other memories. Sometimes I don't remember the morning."
I found this secret like a song with missing notes. It fit the rhythm of his two lives.
When the spring hunt came and the court went to the hills, the pendant went missing for a day. The court searched. I held my breath and then an arrow screamed at us out of the sky.
"Jocelyn!" he shouted, and at that moment I forgot titles, vows, everything. An arrow cut the air and my body moved before my mind could decide. It hit me in the shoulder and the world became a single warm river of pain.
"Hold on," he shouted, voice raw. "Don't close your eyes."
I laughed weakly because that was the only sound I could make. "You are the emperor," I told him. "Stay alive for the empire."
He took the jade pendant from my failing fingers and clutched it like a talisman. "Don't be silly," he said. "You are the empress."
Days became stitches and medicine. The court swirled around us like rainwater.
"He will not leave you," the physician declared. "If he recovers, it will be for you."
"You!" I cried once at the ceiling between spells of fever. "Why keep me if you love someone else?"
He pressed his forehead to mine. "Because I promised to protect you," he said simply. "Because you are my home."
I couldn't decide if he was telling the truth then. But he sat at the bedside through long moons, feeding me spoon by spoon, talking to me of silly futures.
"Next we will go to the market," he said. "You'll hold my hand and I will get lost just to feel the crowd press against us."
"Promise?" I asked, suspicion thick.
"Promise," he said. Then he added in a small voice, "Stinky, if I ever go away, wait for me."
"I will," I promised, though that promise was a stone with no guarantee.
I would wake sometimes in the dark and find him folded at the foot of the bed, a watchful sentry, and the pendant gone from his waist.
"I can't bring her at night," he told me one silent dawn, "I can't bring her into your sun."
"I will not beg," I said, because empresses do not beg. "But do not tell me you love me if your heart is away."
He cried then like a child. "I told two truths and one lie," he whispered. "I said I loved someone, but I did not say I loved her more than you."
I held my breath.
Time made small repairs. He came back to me with small gifts, with poppy seeds, with carved pins he claimed he had made overnight.
"You made this?" I asked.
He flushed and wiped at his nose. "Yes. I will make a thousand more."
He was clumsy and earnest, and I slowly learned the difference between the man who ruled the court and the man who slipped into my room like a thief at night.
"Why do you go out at night without the pendant?" I asked once.
He shrugged, looking at the pendant on the table. "That part of me — the part that misses her — keeps it for days. When he comes, I forget."
"When who comes?"
"The other me." He smiled with a tenderness that scared me. "He plays with you."
"Why does he play with me?"
"Because he likes to see you laugh," he said.
The truth is I liked him too. Even when he hurt me with his absent words during the day, he warmed me with unpredictable play by night. I fell in love with pieces of him like a person collecting rare stamps — not complete, but held carefully.
Once, a year later, I woke to the smell of smoke and alarm. Flames devoured the lacquer and heat browned the sky orange. There were screams, and I choked on smoke, but I heard his voice through the crackle.
"Jocelyn!"
A beam fell and he threw himself to protect me. Later I found out he had been badly burned and unconscious for seven days.
"Who did this?" I demanded when I could stand.
"Someone wanted you gone," he said when he recovered enough to whisper. "Someone wanted a palace without the empress."
We discovered later that a court faction, led by a man with long ambition and short conscience, Chester Ball, had hired the archer and set the arson. Chester wanted influence, wives to be traded like favors, and a throne he could twist.
"Why me?" I asked him in the cold morning light. "Why target us?"
Chester smiled in the council like a cat. "Because some people in this city still value obedience over love," he said to a table of men who nodded. "Because you, Empress, remind them the emperor can choose."
"You will not succeed." Ruben's voice was steady. "You will be punished."
Chester laughed then, loud and messy. "And who will punish me? You? The man who kisses at night?"
He believed himself safe until the evidence began to pile.
"Jocelyn," Ruben said one night, holding my hand, "let me handle them."
"How?" I had said, because I used to be a chancellor's daughter and also because I was an empress with a small, stubborn flame.
He smiled. "With moonlight and witnesses."
We began to walk out of the palace more often. We staged nights where Ruben acted like the man who loved another, and then like the man who loved only me. We let certain messages be intercepted, let certain servants overhear and record. The court is a place of ears; if you know how to place your words, you can make a spider unspin its web.
One morning we set the scene in the Great Hall.
"All right," I whispered before we entered the chamber where a hundred faces waited. "Make it clear."
Ruben's hand closed around mine. "He will not be able to laugh when everyone sees."
We knew Chester played with public respect. He was proud of his status; there are few punishments a proud man fears more than public disgrace.
When we strode in together the hall hummed like a hive.
"Your Majesty," the chief minister intoned. "There are claims of treason."
"Speak," Ruben ordered, cool and carved.
A servant stepped forward and unrolled a long scroll. "This details the payments made to a foreign archer," the man said. "And here is the tie, Your Majesty — a ledger showing the payments originated from the accounts of Lord Chester Ball."
Chester's face went pale. "This is slander!" he spat.
"Is it?" Ruben turned to the eunuch who had been ordered to place the intercepted letters on the dais. "Read this letter, please."
The eunuch read aloud with a tremor because everyone had been drinking at night and everyone liked to hear gossip.
"'To Lord Ball,'" he read, "'The archer has done as instructed; the fire was successful. Your reward is attached.'"
"Chester," Ruben said softly, but there was steel under the softness, "why did you try to kill my wife?"
"What? I would never!" Chester tried a thin smile. "What sort of accusation is this?"
"Is this the face of a man falsely accused?" I asked, and the court turned like a theater to look at him.
"You!" a young courtier called. "So you thought you could play with two lives and not be burned by them?"
Chester's cheeks flared with color. He turned, looking for allies, but the hall sat like water — still and watching.
"You sent the archer," I said, louder now, for my voice had sharpened. "You wanted the empress gone. You wanted the emperor weak."
Chester snapped, "You have no proof! This can be made into a story. What will the emperor do—"
"Proof is the ledger, the witness who sold the arrows, the letter, and your own signature," Ruben interrupted, holding up the final page. All eyes leaned forward. "Do you deny your own writing? Do you deny you gave funds?"
Chester's mouth opened and closed. "I—I—maybe I... someone else signed it."
"Then who signed it?" the minister demanded.
Chester sputtered names, then he tried to throw blame. "It wasn't me, Your Majesty! I thought— I thought to remove a rival. The archer would only scare her—"
"And the burned beams?" Ruben's tone took on a chill. "The houses that were razed? You call that 'only scare'?"
The crowd murmured like wind. People began to point.
"You thought you could set fire to a palace and not be seen?" I said, and I felt a terrible power — the steady one that comes when truth becomes a rope and you are holding its end.
Chester tried to laugh to hide panic. "This is a lie," he said, but he said it too loud. His hands trembled.
"Arrest him," Ruben ordered.
Guards moved.
Chester's expression cracked from arrogance to disbelief. "Do you know who I am?" he cried. "Do you know what I have done for this court? I have given, I have served!"
"You have given only to your vanity," Ruben replied. "You served only your hunger for power."
They brought Chester forward in chains. Then Ruben did something the court had not expected. He did not sentence him to quiet exile. He set the case to be judged publicly in the courtyard where the people, not just the nobles, could see.
"Bring him out," Ruben said.
"Please, Your Majesty," Chester pleaded as he was marched out. "I have children! I have—"
"You will stand at the center of the market and tell the truth," Ruben declared. "You will name every man you paid, every archer you hired, every official who aided you. You will confess your scheme. If you lie, if you conceal, you will be stripped of rank and marched past three gates so everyone may spit."
Chester's fingers clawed at the rope. "You cannot force me to—"
"Watch," Ruben said, and he pointed to the open doors where the city thrummed with gossip. "We will let the people be our judges."
They took Chester through the palace gates. The market buzzed with vendors; the smell of roasted fish and warm bread filled the air. People jostled forward when they recognized the sight: a lord in chains. Hendrances were rare spectacles.
"Tell them!" Ruben had ordered. "Tell the market everything."
Chester lifted his head like a wounded animal, scanning the crowd for sympathy. "This is false!" he shouted. "I am innocent!"
A baker spat, and a woman with a baby pushed forward. "You almost killed a lady's home," she cried. "Do you call that innocent?"
Chester's voice wavered. He began with a bogus tale, a false bravado. "I was framed! I have enemies. Someone planted these ledgers!"
"Who?" demanded a fishmonger who had worked the quay for twenty years. "Who has the skill to plant your hand?"
Silence fell before the baker asked plainly, "Who paid the archer?"
Chester tried to name a dissident, then he tried to name a soldier. He named some old rival who had died; he named an ally who had already proven himself loyal. The people hissed.
"Your hand is shaking," an old woman said from the back. "Your eyes tell me you are afraid."
Chester's face was changing. His arrogance drained away. He found himself in the open, no noble roofs to hide him, only faces.
"Please," Chester begged. "I will confess—if the emperor spares me."
Ruben stood on a raised crate to be visible. "Tell us why," he said softly. "Tell the people why you wanted the empress removed."
Chester's resistance crumpled like paper caught on a candle. He burst into a fit of angry sobs and laughter, as if realizing how fragile his dignity had become.
"She stood where I wanted to stand!" he said. "I wanted favor, a woman to trade with, a throne to bend like willow!"
The crowd gasped. A man laughed, and the laughter turned into a sound like stones rubbing.
"Look at you," a child in the front called. "You are not brave. You are small."
Chester's expression shifted again — fury, then plea, then denial. "No! I didn't mean to—" he stammered. "I didn't mean the fire to go so far—"
"You meant it," Ruben said. "You meant to break the life of someone who defied your little rules."
The people had changed during his confession. Where once they had merely watched, now they cheered at every humiliation he suffered. They whistled when his titles were read and torn from his garments.
"Take his signet," Ruben ordered. "Strip the ribbons of his office."
The officers moved with brisk hands. They tossed Chester's tokens and ribbons into a basket. He tried to grab for them, but a soldier knocked his hand away.
"I demand an honor duel!" Chester roared. "By the gods! I demand—"
"No," Ruben said in a voice colder than the winter wind. "You will answer every question. Every name. If you lie, the market will decide your fate."
Chester's face moved through every stage the rule required: smugness at first, then the spreading of alarm as the crowd closed in, then the denial and frantic finger-pointing, then the collapse when there was no stronger hand to seize, and finally prostration — not out of humility but because his world had been stripped.
"Spare me," he begged, bowing to the dirt. "I will apologize! I will pay! I will leave!"
"No," the baker said aloud. "You will not leave. People like you go away and come back."
The sentence did not include death; it included disgrace, the worst currency for a man like Chester. They took his official robe, cut off his ribbons, and paraded him through the city gates with his name called out. Children shouted at him. Women spat. Men spat. Someone took a broken tile and threw it at his boots.
When they led him back through the palace gate, he was a quieter man. He was forced to kneel at the palace steps and read aloud his own crimes, while merchants and gardeners and laundresses listened.
"Your name is Chester Ball," Ruben intoned when Chester could not bring words to his mouth. "You conspired to harm the empress. You arranged arson and an assault. You hired an archer. You thought you would get away."
Chester's shoulders shook. "I—" he started.
"You have been stripped," Ruben said. "You are a man without privileges now. You will be exiled to the northern farms and must labor for ten years. Any plea for mercy will be heard by the people and will be denied."
Chester's face crumpled. He sobbed like a child. The crowd had their fill of spectacle; the healer in me felt a sick satisfaction for justice done.
"Tell me," I asked later, when it was quiet, when Ruben's hand found mine in the darkness. "Does it hurt to watch a man fall?"
"It hurts to watch people lie and hurt," he said. "But watching wrong done be returned — that is necessary."
"Did you enjoy it?" I asked.
"No," he said instantly. "But I felt safe. I felt like the man who could protect his wife."
I believed him then because he had unmasked an enemy and because the man who had stood on the crate felt like our man — the emperor who would step into the open light. The punishment scene had been long: Chester's staged denial, the crowd's shifting reaction, his armor of smugness shattering to panic, and then the parade of disgrace. People recorded it; they whispered; some took clay figurines of himself and threw them at his boots.
It had lasted for hours. It had been satisfying and necessary. It had also been painful to see a life unravel.
"You were afraid all along," I said, leaning my head on his shoulder like a small bird. "Afraid of losing everything."
He kissed my temple. "I was," he admitted. "Afraid of losing you."
We repaired the palace slowly. Ruben avoided daytime showmanship and chose instead to spend afternoons in my garden, returning to the Great Hall to sign papers with a quiet dignity. He no longer hid the pendant in the day; he tucked it in his sleeve and sometimes showed it to me.
"Ruben," I said one night as we lay on our backs looking at the thin moon, "why are you different at night?"
He laughed softly. "Maybe I have always been two people. Maybe the river took one and returned another."
"Will the two ever be whole?"
He squeezed my hand. "Maybe they don't need to be whole. They just need to be honest."
"Honesty is dangerous in palaces," I said.
"I know," he whispered. "But your hand is mine."
We grew used to the swings. There were moments that beat my heart like drums.
"You are smiling at me," he would say, and his face would not be the emperor's but the boy who had once stolen my ribbon.
"Stop calling me Stinky in public," I would reply.
He would mock-seriously fold his hands. "I will do it only at night."
We made small lists of future things: "Release the courtyard doves," he said. "Buy a thousand little paper boats and float them." He would act out these grand, clumsy plans and I would laugh and feel lighter and less like an empress pinned under ritual.
There were three moments that turned my chest bright:
1) The time he walked into the courtyard at dawn and, while the sun was still small, pulled a carved hairpin from his robe and presented it to me. "I made this last night," he said, voice trembling. "I did not sleep but I made something for you."
2) The night he wrapped his coat around me and refused to go back to his bed until I had fallen asleep. "You fell asleep like a child," he whispered to a servant later. "I could not let the rain touch her."
3) The afternoon when he, in the middle of a council full of men, stopped the scroll reading, turned and suddenly said my full name aloud. "Jocelyn Butler," he said, in a voice that carried across the hall. "She is my heart." Men looked up like stones had been thrown; the court burst into quiet. It was the closest he had come to a daytime confession.
Our life was not perfect. There were nights when he left to go to the moonlit rooms like a man with two houses and a heart to divide. There were whispers. But we endured.
Once in the quiet winter I found myself alone outside, watching the snow fall like pages being turned. I could not breathe the cold. I felt small. I feared him leaving.
He appeared as if conjured by my fear.
"You came back," I said, more like speechless praise than surprise.
"I promised," he said.
We patched things together with the color of afternoons and the silk of small gifts. He stopped refusing to let me see the pendant; he gave me the carved hairpin more than once. The moon-pendant changed hands between us like a private religion.
In the end, though the court still whispered and men still schemed, we created a private world where names and games mattered more than titles. We kept each other honest in the way only two people who have known exile on both sides of the river can.
"Will you always be here?" I asked the night our child was born — a small thing that opened a new corridor of wonder.
"Always," he lied this time, but with a softness that held truth. Even in his day form, he bent carefully when he held the small baby's fingers.
He showed me love in knocks and quirks — setting up little feasts at midnight, trading ridiculous vows about who would be the ship captain of our imaginary plastic boat, and teaching our daughter how to fold paper into small birds.
We learned how to live with two faces. The daylight face kept the realm, the night face kept the home. The moon-pendant sat between them like a small bridge.
Sometimes I would find him staring at that pendant and whispering the name of the faraway woman, but in the end he returned to me with actions.
"If you ever leave," I said to him once, "I will wait."
"I will come back," he answered, fierce like a promise. "Even if I must cross oceans I will return."
"Then come back sooner," I said simply.
He laughed and kissed my forehead. "I will, Stinky."
The End
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