Sweet Romance13 min read
The Game of Two Faces
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I remember the thunder the night my sister ran, and how the rain made everything seem like a different world.
"My sister has fled!" my mother cried as she burst into the courtyard. "Emmeline is gone. She took a servant and disappeared."
I looked up from my chessboard. I had been bent over patterns and problems as I always was. My fingers smelled of lacquer and ink from the carved pieces I loved. I heard the words, felt the rush of panic, then the plan unfold in my family's faces.
"You will go in her stead," my father said before I could reply. "For honor. For safety."
"I?" I answered, and the word felt small.
"Yes. You will be a substitute," my mother insisted. "The house must not be shamed."
That night, wrapped in red silk I didn't understand, I walked into a palace that looked like a painting made cold. They called him Prince Dell Legrand. He was perfect in the way carved statues are perfect—smooth, important, everything in its place. He did not speak much. He pledged no warmth.
"Isabella Said, you are the prince's bride," the chamberlain said.
"I am Isabella," I said. "I only know how to play."
He had been expected to marry Emmeline. Everyone had expected him to look at her and smile the way people smile when the sun is allowed out. Instead, he looked at me with a face like a mask. He lifted his cup to his lips, and then the cup shattered.
"Oh—" someone cried.
"Call the physician!" someone else ordered.
He had fainted. Blood on the edge of the cup made him pale. He trembled at the sight of it. It was a small thing that marked him; he had been raised to rule and also to fear the color of blood.
"Isabella," he said once, later, when the candles were soft and the room smelled of smoke. His voice was not the sharp one of a ruler. It was weary. "Are you hurt?"
"I am fine," I answered. "You are not."
That first night, I learned to keep our secret. He learned to hide his fear. We both learned to stay unchanged for the world.
Weeks passed as careful measures. I sat with my pieces and studied the maps of the palace. People called me the quiet one, the chess spirit reined into flesh. They said I had no heat. I kept to that surface. I learned a new kind of silence: the silence that hides much.
"He used to play with Emmeline," the chambermaid told me once. "They were children under the same roof."
"I do not remember them playing together," I said. "I remember him more at the edgelands. He once threw a cup and cursed the rain."
"Then the prince is strange," she said. "But you—"
She left the sentence. She needn't finish it. Everyone else already finished it in their heads.
Months moved like a slow game. Then, on an autumn afternoon that smelled like dried leaves, the prince returned to the palace in a rage and left again at sunset because someone whispered that my sister might be found. He ran off to follow the hint like a hunting hound.
He returned with a hollow face.
"False alarm," he reported, and I felt inside me a sudden lightness. He could find his Emmeline. It would mean everything would be restored to where it should be.
That night, I did something I had not planned. I took my chess set and went to the garden alone. I wanted to feel the chessboard under my hands in a place where no one could watch. The moon was thin. In the bamboo grove behind the eastern hill, I found him—someone who looked exactly like the prince, but carried himself differently.
"Who are you?" I asked, before my fear could silence me.
He smiled with a softness that made the moon seem kinder. "Call me Leaf," he said. "Call me Finley if you like. Call me what you wish."
"I did not come to names," I said. "I came to play."
He set a black stone on my board and moved it with such certainty that for a moment I forgot the palace. "Adapt to my rules," he teased. "I play opposite. When I play black, I count white as my weakness."
"You're cheating," I said, and he laughed.
"Then cheat with me."
I was foolish. I let the laughter carry me. We met in secret. He taught me to fish in the moonlight. He taught me that there were games beyond the palace. He taught me to love a version of a man that wore his hair loose and his smile like a promise.
"You must never tell him about me," Leaf said once. "Promise."
"I promise," I answered. "I promise to keep our chess as a thing that lives in the dark."
Our meetings became a refuge. In the palace, I kept my head bowed and my hands neat. In the grove, my fingers flew over the pieces and my mouth curve to laughter. He called himself Finley Jacobs when he wanted to hide. He said his true name was like a fallen leaf—no steady crown, no warm bed.
When Prince Dell celebrated his birthday, the city brightened like a torchwork. People sang. Fireworks popped. I sat near him, smiling the smile trained into me. But that night, steel and silk betrayed us—assassins appeared like bad pieces dropped on a table.
"To the prince!" someone cried.
I moved without thinking. "Don't look," I said. "Close your eyes." I shielded his face from the blade's flash. Blood spattered, and he staggered. He gripped me and murmured, "Don't die, Isabella."
"Stay with me," I answered. "I am here."
They caught the attackers. They ripped tongues and took secrets. The palace called it a plot from the rival house—Governor Chen, the sixth prince's faction. But in whispers, the court suspected more.
"Sixth Prince seeks the throne," one minister said. "We must be ready."
The prince—Dell—took charge. He healed. He smiled stiffly in the light. He steered the court with a hand like iron.
Yet there was another truth. In the grove, Leaf—Finley—waited with cold hands. He loved me and also feared me. He called himself 'Leaf' because life clung and fell like leaves in his lonely world.
"One day, you will be mine," he said softly. "Or I will be gone."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
He touched my hand. "I am not like him," he said. "But I am him. I am what is left when he cannot breathe. I am a memory that will not die."
I did not understand, not fully. I only felt the hunger in his voice and the quiet that came like falling dusk.
Then Emmeline came back to us. She was broken, painted with grief like old bruises. She was no longer the sprite who had run away in a thunderstorm.
"You stole my life," she cried at me when we met. "You took him. You took everything."
"You ran away," I answered. "You did. I went where duty called."
"You replaced me!" she screamed. "You are a fraud!"
"Emmeline, listen," Dell said, standing between us. "Enough."
He looked like a statue. His face was quiet. He held me by the shoulder and said small things that sounded like a ruler soothing a child. Later, after the servants took Emmeline away, he said to me, quietly, "Do not fear her."
I often told myself I would confess everything—about Leaf, about the grove, about those nights that had light and music. I planned to ask Dell to let me go. I planned to run with Leaf to a place with no titles. But I could not find courage in the right times.
"After the great match, I will tell him," I promised Leaf. "After I win the game, I'll be free."
He took my hands. "Wait for me," he said. "I will be here."
The match came. The city held its breath. A foreign envoy with a love of chess said he would speak to whichever house proved the better player. The stakes were a treaty, a friend in the dark game of crowns. The prince wanted my victory.
"Win for me," Dell whispered before I left. "Win for the future."
"I will," I said. "I will play like someone with nothing left to lose."
I did not lose. My stones marched and surrounded the envoy's king until the public roared. I was lifted in glory. The palace flowers looked like rivers. For a moment I felt proud.
Then I went to our grove, to keep my promise to Leaf. I ran. But the grove was not what I had left. The flowers were ash. The bamboo stood like charred teeth. The house we had hidden in was a black husk.
"Finley?" I called, voice cracking.
Inside, a figure sat—a man in court robes, not the grey rags Leaf wore, the prince's garments like armor.
"No," he said. "There will be no Leaf anymore."
His face was the prince's face. He leaned back and drank tea.
"You killed him," I said, and the words were a stone.
He did not flinch. "He had no place in the world we were to make. He was a danger to all we fought to win."
"How could you?" I whispered. "He loved me like a moon loves the night."
"I removed a threat," he said flatly. "A brother who could unsettle the succession. It was a necessary cruelty."
I staggered back. "You burned him."
"I had him dispatched," he admitted. "It was a mercy, of a sort. He should never have existed in the reality I was building. The house could not hold two sons who looked alike."
The grove swam. The chess pieces rattled in my pocket like a small grief. I felt all the warmth leak out of me.
"You told me he was a man of the grove," I said. "You told me... you lied."
"I lied to preserve you both," he said. "Would you have left? Would you have let me secure the throne? I could not risk everything."
"Why him?" I asked. "Why choose life for you and kill him away?"
"Because power is built on choices," he said. "He was a weakness."
I should have cursed him then. I should have screamed and called guards. Instead, a quiet rose inside me—cold, precise. I thought of the chessboard and the ways a single sacrificed piece can win a game. I thought of Finley's hands, his laugh, the way his hair hung over his brow, the way he had said my name like a promise.
"I cannot live in a world where you decide who can be," I said. "Not anymore."
"You will stay," he commanded. "You will be queen with me."
"No," I said. "I will not be what you ask."
I returned to the palace with a plan that had no heroics in it—only quiet, a poison held on a white stone.
"Isabella," Dell pleaded later, as I sat before the board and thought of all the nights. "Talk to me. Tell me why you look like someone who mourns."
"You removed what I loved to secure your crown," I said. "I cannot love a man who burns boys in the earth."
He took my hands. "I did what I had to. I did it for the realm. For you."
"For me?" I laughed, though tears fell. "For me? You set the pieces and killed the one who made me laugh."
That night, at the emperor's mother's funeral where all the court wore black and cried the right measured tears, I did what I had already decided.
"Isabella!" someone called. "You should not be alone."
"I am not alone," I answered, and my voice was steady under the silk. I put a hand to the chessboard at my side and lifted a white stone.
"You cannot—" Dell began.
"It is mine now," I said.
I had smeared the white stone with a slow powder I had learned to press out of a certain bitter plant. It would not hurt others. It would end me. It would end the shape of my heart that held his shadow, but it would punish him in a way he could not ignore.
I placed the stone, white against black, and let his black fingers close over mine once more.
"Why?" he asked. "Why do this?"
"Because you took Finley," I said. "Because you killed him and called it mercy."
I pushed the stone between my teeth. I felt it dissolve like paper on a tongue. I felt my heart slow like a clock being wound down.
"You will stay," he whispered desperately. "You will be here when I wake."
"I cannot be with a man who thinks death is his tool," I said, and the room tilted.
My hands pressed his face. I wanted him to feel what he had done. I wanted him to see the emptiness he had made inside me.
I died that night with the taste of copper and chess on my tongue. The court screamed. They called physicians. They wailed for the queen-to-be. She was quiet as a closed book.
They buried me with honors. They called my last act madness. They called it grief. Some whispered it was a saintly sacrifice for the realm. They could not know the exact shape of a private sorrow.
Two years later, when the people of the city gathered for my funeral days turned to memory, a different truth could no longer be contained. Greyson Jorgensen, a minister who had kept his eyes on small things, came to the fore with evidence. He had followed breadcrumbs I had not even known I left: servants' slips, charred wood, whispered confessions from a priest set to tidy the mountain grove.
"You cannot hide blood forever," he told the court. "You cannot hide a murdered boy as easily as you hid a victory."
He made the proofs public. He called a council. He read a ledger out loud. "The prince ordered a ritual. The grove was burned. The boy known among the hill people as Finley Jacobs was never given burial rites. He was taken and killed as a sacrifice to your succession."
The court gasped. The crowd in the outer square gathered like a storm. There were shouts. "Traitor!" someone cried at the prince. "Monster!" someone else shouted.
The emperor—Dell—stood like a statue grown suddenly weathered. He tried to speak. "This is lies," he said at first.
"No," Greyson replied calmly. "Here are the invoices. Here are the witnesses. Here is the firewood bought with palace coin."
Crowds pressed at the palace gates. They had loved the prince for his promises. They had believed the games, the wins, the steadiness. Now they smelled rot.
"You did it!" a woman cried. "You killed a child and burned a garden. You fed a brother to your crown!"
He tried to pull himself into the logic of state again. "Order, please—"
"Order?" someone screamed back. "You ordered a murder!"
He looked around. People had phones and tablets in modern garb (a city learns new things), and servants recorded the scene. Faces lifted. The public watched the ruler transform from a god in silk into a man with an answer he could not swallow.
"I did what was necessary," Dell said, and his voice lost the calm it had had. "The crown is more important."
"But at whose cost?" Greyson said. "At the cost of a life you extinguished."
"He had been erased for policy?" someone shouted. "For your fear?"
The emperor faltered. He went through motions like a king used to the sound of his own commands. He lifted his hands and addressed the crowd. "I acted for the realm—"
"You killed your brother," a voice said close to the front. A woman brandished an old wooden chess piece—one like mine—and laughed a laugh full of vinegar. "You made a grave and set it on fire. You lie."
The crowd surged. They wanted a spectacle. The palace guards tried to form lines, but human things are messy when they find a wound. A minister from the other house had the courage to stand and say, plainly, "He executed a boy in secret. He burned the place where the boy lived. He told the woman the boy was a ghost. He lied to her because he wanted her to stay."
Now the emperor's face did what it had hidden from the world: it emptied. He had intended to crush rivals and build peace with the silence of the knife. He had not expected honesty to circle back like a river.
"Forgive me," he said once, a single word that felt like a child holding up both hands. "Forgive me for what must be done. Forgive me for what I could not avoid."
"Forgive you?" someone screamed. "You killed a soul!"
A young soldier stepped forward and spat in his direction. Cameras flashed. People recorded. The minister Greyson read the final list of charges aloud.
"Ordered murder of Finley Jacobs," he read. "Destruction of private property and evidence. Abuse of power."
The crowd bowed its head like a blade. The emperor, once someone who had drunk victory like water, now found himself naked in a public square. He tried to make a speech in the rhythm of regents: "For the good of the realm—"
"No more," Greyson said. "The realm cannot be built on bones."
They took him before a council made of his own peers and a public that would no longer be silenced. They read witness statements that described the way he had sent priests, the coins used to pay firesmen, the notes that were hidden in a burnt chest. A woman who had been a servant at the time described how a young boy had been woken at night and led away.
"He sang as they cut," she said, and the crowd gasped, and a heavy quiet settled like dust.
At one point his face changed: there was thunder in it, then denial, then rage, then a cracked pleading. He called to those who had supported him. "I did what had to be done. I saved you—"
"You killed a child," someone shouted. "A prince's brother! A living thing!"
There were those who tried to defend him, pointing to wars averted and treaties signed. But the tide had turned. The public wanted more than efficiency; they wanted a human answer. They wanted to hate or to understand, and now they had to choose.
"They will not restore him," Greyson said. "No ceremony will bring Finley back. But we will not let silence cover this."
For hours the square filled with the hum of witnesses. He stood at the center of it, a man stripped of masks, and experienced the crowd's metamorphosis: awe to anger, reverence to contempt. He realized that victory had a price he had never paid. He felt the shape of his crimes reflected in the mirror of public eyes.
He tried to step down. He tried to plead mercy. He begged the council for pardon. "I was afraid," he said, voice breaking. "I was afraid of losing everything. It was the only way I could keep the peace."
"Peace?" a clergyman spat. "Peace bought with a child's life is a lie."
As the process moved forward, certain punishments were enacted quickly. He was stripped of many ceremonial titles in public; his robes were taken by those he had trusted; his statues were marked; his name carried new whispers. For the people at the gate, who had cheered his victories, the sight of their prince forced to account made a hollow of the old cheers.
He fell from pedestal to flesh. He stood before the crowd and watched it change its music. There was no single collapse: there was instead a long unwinding. He kept changing his face—proud to pleading to hardened—but the world had learned a language older than rhetoric: the truth in witnesses.
It was not an arrest suddenly, not a dozen men with chains. It was a public showing, a slow, careful shaming: his houses were opened and audited; the priests who had aided him were removed; the courts called for restitution. And worst of all for a ruler who had made himself untouchable—people told their stories. They told them loud.
He tried to tell them the cost of the crown. He tried to tell them what he had gained. "Order," he said again, voice ruined by its own pleading.
"Order," the crowd answered, but it was not the order he meant. It was the order of justice.
When it was done, he remained a man. He had a crown of questions to carry, and a weight in his chest that did not lift. Public verdicts do not always give a single satisfying finish. They give instead a thousand small reckonings. People turned their faces away. Women spat. Children who had once waved at him did not wave again.
He was not burned in public. He was not dragged to the scaffold. He faced the court, and the court, with the people's voice behind it, stripped him of the most precious of honors. He had his titles taken, his private seal removed, and his public duties suspended. He was forced to answer for what he had done. And in the eyes of every holder of a mobile device, in the recording of every one of those witnesses, the story of a boy named Finley Jacobs had been rescued from silence.
For days after, people came to the grove. They left small stones and white pieces. They set small wooden markers. They told the tale of the man who had been killed to secure a crown and the queen who had died to prove a point. They remembered names.
Greyson stood before the press where I could not, and he spoke, voice iron and tired.
"We cannot turn back the clock," he said. "We cannot restore the dead to breath. But we can record the truth, and we can make sure no ruler holds life as a tool again."
Some cheered him. Others wept. The punishment was not theatrical enough for some; it was not merciful enough for others. But it was public. And that public watching was the most terrible thing a man like the former prince could meet.
I was gone by then. They could not undo what I had done. They could only hold his name and fold it within a long list of consequences.
The world kept moving. The throne was heavy and hollow. The name Dell Legrand became a painful syllable in many mouths. People spoke of him in the past tense even as he walked among them. He lived on, but under watch. He was, for the rest of his life, an answer to the question: what do you do when those you love become monsters?
He never again had the freedom of a moonlit grove. He never again could hide behind a mask. The crowd had taken that for him.
The End
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