Sweet Romance16 min read
The General and the Basket of Sweet Potatoes
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I woke to the kind of danger that snaps the world into focus: the smell of smoke, the clang of metal, the taste of iron in the back of my throat. My eyes flew open and my body moved before my head finished asking questions.
A blade slashed where my face had been a moment before. I rolled, kicked, and the attacker—clad head to toe in black armor—staggered back. I didn't wait to think. I struck and the black soldier hit the dirt with a sound like a snapped branch.
"Who—" I started, and then the battlefield answered for me. Smoke, shouts, women in armor everywhere. My armor was silver; others nearby wore silver trimmed in red or plain black. The woman in black had been one of the enemy.
A new pain stabbed my temple like a hot nail. Something tried to force its way into my mind—memories that were not mine. I gritted my teeth and let them push in. There was no time to sort them out.
"Charge!" someone cried behind me.
I looked up and saw a woman in white-and-silver robes leading a dozen fighters. She rode a silver-gray horse and carried a spear. Her armor was finer than my own. She reined in sharply when she saw me.
"General Qin—" I said before I knew myself.
"Journey," she cut me off, not unkindly. "This is no time to dream. If you're going to be brave, do it fast."
She had the look of someone who had left the walls to come find me. I was still dizzy. My head throbbed. But the battlefield refused to pause for my confusion.
"Give me the bow," I heard myself say, because the commander on the enemy horse needed removing and I could see where she sat—too far for sword, too close for waiting.
Katherine Chapman blinked at me. "You want the bow?"
I leapt. I felt ridiculous mid-air, but something old and patient that belonged to the woman whose life I had worn the last twenty-eight years took charge of my body. I snatched the longbow from her back, drew, aimed, and released. The arrow flew like a knife and the commander toppled from her horse.
Katherine's mouth hung open. "You shot that—"
"Because I don't like unexpected headaches," I said. It came out as a thin smile. My head was still splitting with foreign memories, and the battlefield felt like a terrible, bright classroom I hadn't enrolled in.
They pulled back. Our side cheered. The enemy sounded a horn of retreat.
When the dust settled and the river's makeshift bridge clanged shut behind us, I followed the soldiers into the city gates. Above the wooden archway, two black characters were painted plainly: YANG CITY.
I should have been relieved. Instead I felt the pressure of a life that wasn't mine settling heavier on my shoulders. I had been something else before—someone who owned a strange, impossible space that made plants grow fast, a woman with hands that had learned how to knead dough and press bones and read old seed catalogs. In that life I had led... well. In my other life I had run an order of people and then stepped down. I had a quiet, stubborn peace.
Here I was General Journey Luna—no, that was the other woman. The name my mouth kept finding was Journey, and it felt right.
"You're quiet," Katherine said as we walked toward a compound with a pair of soldiers on guard. "If you're going to be our general, you should at least look like you belong."
"I belong where my head isn't hammering at my skull," I muttered.
They called me "young general" as I passed. Everyone in this town seemed to have heard the same rumors about the young general who was a "paper tiger," a "timid prodigy" who had never truly led.
The compound was small and solid. I found my courtyard empty. The house had a bamboo hut tucked out back—simple, exactly right for the kind of life I secretly loved. I dropped to the floor and let the new memories pour fully into me.
It hurt.
When the headaches eased, the truth lined up: I had Journey's body and the other woman's past. This world was one where women did the fighting, the ruling, the earning. Men embroidered and brewed tea, and some looked pleased with the arrangement. The empire was called the Moon Sovereign Realm. My grandmother, Deanna Olsson, had followed the previous empress into battle and been crowned a storied marshal; my mother, Marcella Alexander, wore the title of great general now. Both had reputations that filled rooms with reverent silence.
The woman who had been Journey, it seemed, had always been labeled timid despite inheriting a mountain of skill. She had been married that morning and then shipped off by imperial order to the front. The last memory that had belonged to her showed her being left on the battlefield because everyone had been lured away by a feint. She had died there alone.
Lucky me. Or cursed me. I was now wearing her life like a cloak.
"How's your head, Journey?" the voice at the door asked.
I hadn't heard something knock because I had been staring at the corner ceiling, practicing new memories like dangerous puzzles. I stood.
"Someone said the border clans have moved," said Katherine Chapman. "They have numbers. They want Yang City."
I forced a smile. "Then let's greet them."
*
I learned fast in daylight.
Katherine proved a true friend—brash, plain-spoken, whose bluntness had been why Journey hadn't liked her. I liked Katherine. She had a trust that was a small, fierce gift in a world of flattery. When I told her to bring a hundred volunteers, she thought I was leaving them to die.
"A hundred? Lady, do you realize they're a thousand?" Katherine barked once we stood on the wall. She was affronted more by my lack of pleading than by my courage.
I looked out. The enemy was a mass of hired troops and a few leaders on horses—two women, two men, their colors ordinary. At first I wanted to be merciful. I thought of the harvests waiting in the small space that had come with me, of all the quiet useful things that made life survivable. A whole village didn't need to be slaughtered to be subdued.
"Let's make a bet," I heard myself say. "If I beat their leader one-on-one, they join us. If I lose, I step down and never leave the compound again."
Katherine's eyebrows climbed like flags. "You would wager our lives on a duel?"
"I would wager their loyalty," I corrected. "And their leaders' decisions."
We rode out, and the duel went in a heartbeat. I met the leader, Kylie Griffin, on the field. She charged spear-first. I did something I had never allowed myself in that body before: I dropped my sword, took the spear, and with two turns of the wrist had it sliding from her grip into mine. I put my palms to her back, and because the movement was honest and strong, it separated the world into before and after.
"You lost," I said when she coughed up a mouthful of blood.
"You cheated," she replied through her astonishment.
"You started the fight," I told her. "You were in our field first."
The bargain that followed changed the balance of the region. Kylie bowed, then knelt, and then the mass behind her kneeled as well. For the first time since the campaign began, three tens of thousands of people pledged themselves not to me as a distant "paper general" but to me as their leader.
I didn't let them kneel for long. "Get up," I ordered. "From now on, call me Journey or General. Save the 'master' for the one that actually earns it."
They called me Journey, and the sound hit me like rain. It felt right.
That night I found a room with grain sacks in the courtyard. Men and women in plain clothes shuffled nervously. They were rice merchants from the next town over, and they had been moving what should have been army grain.
"They sold our army's food?" I asked the county magistrate, Eben Braun, who had been forced to come because he ran the nearest town.
"They said it was a private stock, not military," Eben stammered. He had the look of a small man in a big coat who already felt guilty for his own handwriting. "They convinced some of our people that grim times meant private fortunes."
"Private fortunes built on other people's hunger," I said. The anger that wasn't mine rose sharp and clean. I thought of the men who would die of cold or hunger if the supplies were gone. I thought of the children.
"Where are the merchants?" I demanded.
"They're—" Eben pointed. "They'll be back tonight."
I arranged an ambush for the evening, and my little army moved like a single thought. We took the yard where the merchants had stashed burlap sacks. Among the men who tried to flee through the back gate, one tall figure with a straw hat slipped through too. He moved like a ghost.
We followed.
He ran into a grove and tried to mount a horse. I ran him to the ground, and the hat tumbled off.
"You're a prince," Kylie said coldly.
The man was beautiful and furious. He tore off the last of his disguise and sneered.
"Desmond Dupont," he said. "Prince of Ping."
I remember the way the sun caught his face as if the whole world was a stage. He looked shocked to be on the ground. He looked even more shocked when he met my gaze.
"You took Federals' grain and sold it back to them for a profit, promising them secrecy," I told him. "And you came into my lands to do it."
"Who are you to speak to me like that?" Desmond spat.
"I am the woman standing," I said. "And I am taking back what you took."
Katelyn—Katherine—had ideals of fairness. She tied the men and left them under watch. The county magistrate was already shaking at the idea of dealing with a prince. But the prince had overstepped. He had come to steal and profit while the fields in the north were bare.
I didn't expect the chain of events that followed.
We brought the stolen grain home. I distributed it by dawn. People who had been gray with hunger brightened. Children laughed again. There were so many faces, all the small joys and small wounds of the town, that when I walked into the old general's hall my grandmother, Deanna Olsson, nearly cried.
"You brought them back," she said simply.
"They were not mine to keep," I said. "They belong to the people."
"Good," she breathed. "My Journey is back."
When word reached both the Ping and Qing courts that princes and generals had been made captive in Yang City, envoys arrived in furious wheels. They demanded returns, they threatened war.
I offered a bargain that made the court clerks' fingers twitch: return our captives and we will give you rows of grain, ten carts for one man. They laughed when my grandmother first announced it, but she had a mirthless look.
"If you won't exchange, we'll tell the world you greedily sold off military supplies to buy your own loyalty," Deanna said. "And then no one will trust you."
It was a bluff that turned out to be a very sharp blade. The two allies coughed up grain carts the next morning, and we sent the last of our wounded into a better place of healing.
The country still grumbled. The two powers demanded public justice for the men who had robbed our soldiers. I wanted the thieves punished, yes—but I also wanted a lesson that would stop others from thinking they could profit off starvation again.
We held court in the central square, under the watchful eyes of a crowd that filled the main arcades. The magistrate called the merchants forward: three store owners, their accountants, the small men who had signed receipts for sacks they did not own. Among them was a woman in a spotted robe—Yang's manageress, the one who had accepted a fat down payment for "privately procured" sacks.
The sun slanted low. Torches were lit. The crowd pressed in. Children clung to their mothers' skirts. Soldiers stood like black pillars. I mounted a small platform so people could see my face.
"These men sold what our soldiers needed," I said, and the square hummed. "They took what belonged to our people, to feed our troops and our children, and they sold it for coin."
The largest of them—a broad, greasy man named Graham Best—laughed. "We did good business," he said. "Times harsh, soldiers pay more."
"You'll have your market," I said. "But you won't sell our lives."
He grinned and tried to look proud. "And if you try to take my money?"
"We'll take your dignity first," I said.
Then we began.
I had no wish to ruin a man’s life with slow tortures, but the crowd needed to see the consequences of such greed to believe the rule would hold. The law required a formal public punishment when army supplies were stolen. I reminded myself of that when we cut the ropes that would bind one of the merchants to the post.
At first he was smug. Graham Best stood on the platform and puffed his chest.
"You can't," he said. "Don't you know who I am?"
There were cheering of contempt from some corners—people who had been kept fed—until they remembered the risk they had run.
"You sold our sacks meant for the soldiers," I said, even though I already knew the facts. "You sold food for profit while mothers here starved. You sold their daughters' cover and children's bread."
He blinked. "It was business. The market—"
"Business?" I repeated slowly. "Do you think grief is a ledger book that can be balanced with coin?"
He began to laugh. The laugh was ugly, full of bravado. "So what? A fine? A bribe? Name your price."
"Name my price?" I answered. "You'll be given coin? Or will coin repair a child's brittle ribs?"
The crowd shifted, close as muffled thunder. Mothers cursed. Old warriors spit.
Graham's bravado wavered into a thread. "I—I'll pay," he said, his voice thinner.
"Pay?" I tasted the word like dirt. "You paid with our people's grain. You will not be allowed to take coin to the gravebone of a child you starved."
I stepped down from the platform and ordered the magistrate: "Make him kneel and apologize. Make him return what he stole, and let ten carts of seed he cannot sell be sowed in August to feed those he tried to starve."
Graham laughed again, which was the wrong thing to do. One of the county clerks, a hard-eyed woman named Klara Scott, had a ledger and a pen. She looked ready to cross every entry with his name. He swallowed.
"Don't you dare," he whispered.
"They will not be allowed to prosper," I said. "And to ensure no other merchant thinks they can do this..." I paused, because I wanted the square to feel every syllable. "Do you remember the men you sent as guards? The ones who tricked our soldiers into paying more? Bring them."
Four men were dragged forward—slick, frightened, used to taking pay and thinking that small men and women would let them. They had been the ones selling sacks marked "private" that used to have the army knot.
"Stand," I ordered the broad merchant who had smiled so contemptuously. "You will look at their faces."
He did.
Then the crowd watched the guardmen's bravado dissolve. The first man was made to kneel. He begged; his voice was hoarse. "Please," he said. "We had children. The little ones—"
"No more pleas," I said. "You had choices."
His knees hit the dirt. People around us murmured. Someone recorded the scene on a wooden slate and began to pass it from hand to hand.
"Now," I continued, "you will be stripped of your licenses. You will be branded with a small mark that tells the world you sold military grain. You will be shamed in market records and put on a permanent list. Your stock will be seized and given to the people. You will pay as long as there is anything to take."
Graham shook. He insisted loudly, at first, that he would not be dealt with. "This is treachery—"
"No," I cut him off. "This is justice."
Shock replaced his smugness. He looked from face to face and saw the anger that had been waiting for him—a slow burning resentment that had been fed by months of fear and hunger. This was not the sudden fury of a mob. This was patients' slow decision to stop being prey.
He began to deny it. "I didn't know—"
"Of course you didn't," I said. "And now you'll know what only honesty teaches: that appetite must be tempered by mercy."
His lips trembled. Sweat beaded at his temples. Then, as the magistrate read the sentence aloud, his face drained to disbelief. "No," he whispered, but it was a child's no.
He fell to his knees. The crowd's murmurs rose like a chorus. Some hissed. Others, who had been spared by the sacks returned to their bellies, spat. Hands went for the wooden tablets to write down names. Photographs—no, not photographs in our world, but men with small sketchbooks—and the town scribes made drawings and handed them around.
Graham broke. He began to beg. "Please. Please, I will work. I will—" His voice wet with sputter. He clasped his hands in supplication. He looked like any man who had been stripped of certainty.
A woman who had lost a son that winter stepped forward, stone-faced. She spat into the mud. "Beg me for my boy? Beg me in front of everyone? You sold his bread."
Graham's body convulsed. He fell forward and hit the dirt; his broad shoulders folded like a rag. The crowd stayed silent for a breath too long—then the square erupted into sound: people shouting, some clapping—tiny cruel applause for a man brought low; some thrumming with a deeper relief.
He called my name, then the general's name, then mine again, voice thin with terror. "Please—Journey, I will return everything—just don't—"
"Stand up," I told him. "Return what you can. Next time you see a child hunger for bread, may you remember the weight of this day."
He could not meet my eyes. He was dragged away to the magistrate's house, where he would be processed and shamed in ledger and market. The scribes would write his damnation into the town's books where traders would see the mark for generations.
When it was done, they carried sacks of grain into the square and handed them to the mothers and to old women who had worked in kitchens for decades. We did not hammer the men—none of that. The public scene was to make the consequences real.
The prince, Desmond Dupont, had watched most of it in solidarity from the guard line. His face was pale as paper. When the magistrate read the orders for the high-born—return the sacks, make formal apology before the city council, pay for the treatment of troops he endangered—his expression dissolved from arrogance to shock, to denial, to pleading in the space of ten minutes.
When he went down on his knees, it was not immediately. He tried to keep his dignity.
"You will be brought before the city," I told him, stepping off the platform. "You will apologize publicly, and you will have your acts recorded. If you cannot find a way to make restitution, I will take that to the throne."
"P-Please," he stammered, when the weight of seeing the mothers with their children met his gaze. "I did not know—"
"You should have," I said. "You are old enough to know."
He fell into the pattern the merchant had done—first sneer, then anger, then denial, then the slow, wobbling collapse.
And the crowd watched him change.
When it was over, the square had emptied with sacks on shoulders and people talking about the future. The story of the punishment spread with the speed of gossip. It was exactly what it needed to be: a warning written on marrow.
That night, I sat in the bamboo hut and thought about the life I had been given. I thought about a basket of strange sweet potatoes and potatoes in my larder—an absurd, warm treasure that could feed many. I thought about how this world balanced on the simplest commerce, on kindness, and on bone-hard rules.
"You're thinking too much," Katherine said as she set a bowl down and laughed.
"I am thinking about rules," I said. "And about what I can teach them."
"You can teach them to fight," she said. "You can teach them to keep watch. But you'll need more than that. You'll need a way for them to live when there's no war—and to want to stay."
"I have a space," I told her.
"A...what?"
"A small room that grows things quickly," I said. "And a bamboo hut. And a basket that won't stop producing if I care for it."
Katherine looked doubtful, then moved closer. "That might be a miracle or a witch's promise."
"It's a seed catalog and a head for slow ideas," I said. "Either way, it's mine."
*
The next weeks became hard, bright work. I trained the three thousand new recruits—men and women, villagers and former highwaymen who had decided they could not go on stealing sacks while mothers went hungry. I taught them to lift weight and to march and to work together. I gave them little things from my other life—methods to conserve flour, ways to layer root vegetables into storage pits so they wouldn't spoil, and recipes that made a fist of potatoes into something people called comfort.
They called me a hard general. They called me a madwoman. They called me a savior. I liked "Journey" when the soldiers said it like a benediction.
At the back of my courtyard, the bamboo hut grew more crowded. My small space showed its strange gifts: red tubers and knobby potatoes sprouted larger and heartier than the region had ever seen. I began to experiment, packing sacks and sending them with the supply wagons. I altered rations so the troops would have more than stale grain and bitter broth.
In those nights when the panic of new memory haunted me, when the foreign afterimage of another woman's home life stretched like a seam I could not stitch, Griffin Curtis arrived like a piece of the past returning.
He came alone at first—wearing the right clothes for a man who had always belonged to a different life: quiet, quick to bow, eyes that had been through pride and shame. He had the look of someone who had been burned by love and had been given a second chance at youth.
"Journey," he said when I opened the gate. "You look... different."
"I look less dead," I answered. "Where have you been?"
"Lost," Griffin said, smiling with the kind of crooked humor men have when they do not want to speak about their past. "Where should I start?"
He had been in my other life, too—the handsome husband no one had expected to keep. He wore a thin ring on his finger—an old token. I should have felt the constraints of duty press hard. Instead I felt a curious, quiet warmth. He was the man I had left to a life I'd not really known; now he had stumbled into my world.
"Stay for red potatoes," I said, pointing at a steaming bowl.
"Only if you teach me how to make them taste like the ones I remember," Griffin said. "And if you promise not to command me to do anything foolish like lift a hundred-pound beam."
"I only have beams on certain days," I told him. "Come with me. We need to watch the recruits."
He followed. The recruits ran under my orders, heavy logs balanced on their shoulders. He watched, and then something like pride lit his face.
"You're a terror," he murmured.
"I am a general," I corrected. "Terrors are not always wrong."
He stayed when he could. Sometimes he argued with my decisions, sometimes he brought a quiet hand when the night was too cold and I couldn't sleep. He told me small stories—stupid jokes to make us laugh in the kitchen, complaints about the taste of hard army biscuits. He was no prince. He was a househusband who grew into a soldier's wife.
Katherine watched him with suspicion at first. She had her own careful loyalties. But the more she saw us together, the more her face grew softer.
"Don't marry the world away," she told me once, as we walked the training fields. "Keep the basket."
"I intend to," I said.
*
Weeks turned into a new rhythm. The recruits grew stronger. The town's opinion shifted from mockery to wary respect. The generals from farther provinces visited, watched my unusual drills, and left with their own questions.
One dawn, a scout ran to the hall with breath that smelled of cold and far roads.
"The north army's famed commander is on the move," he panted. "They say she wields formations like teeth. She and a prince are travelling within twenty days."
"Then we train harder," I said. "And we plant more potatoes."
Kylie came to me, brimming with her tribe's new loyalty. "You look like a woman who knows how to keep grain," she said earnestly. "Teach us."
"I will," I promised. "But only if you obey one rule."
"Name it," Kylie said.
"Do not sell what we cannot spare," I said.
"Yes, General Journey," she replied, and I believed her.
The training under the morning sun drove us harder. I made them run burdens of wood five kilometers, we taught them formations of a kind most generals didn't bother to teach, and at night we sat around and ate roasted tubers until we were content.
The enemy's will to strike at our supply lines diminished after our public equation of shame and restitution. No merchant wanted his name written into the market ledger as the man who starved soldiers.
But wars never vanish because you make a good dinner. They shift, rearrange. We used the space I had found—my small, impossible warehouse of growth—to seed new hope. We fed the city and the troops and saved jars of seed for next season.
One night, after the day had been long and the recruits lay asleep, I sat with Griffin in the bamboo hut. A small basket of steaming sweet potatoes lay between us. He took my hand.
"Journey," he said softly. "If you command the world, do not forget your small basket."
"I won't," I whispered. "It planted a lot of trouble and a lot of comfort. It's mine."
He kissed my knuckles and something quiet settled like dust. Outside, a lantern clanged as a watchman made his rounds. The town breathed. My grandmother slept with her hand on a map of the old campaigns. My mother sharpened blades by the hearth.
In the end, leadership was not a singular thunderclap. It was a dozen small choices: not letting a merchant sell food to line his pockets, training a ragtag army until they could stand proud, sharing tubers with a hungry child. It was holding a man accountable in public so others would learn what would not stand.
I put my palm over the little basket, closed my eyes, and let myself be Journey in full—the woman who had been shy and the woman who'd made a bakery of her battlements, who could roast a potato and command a formation. I had the space to do both.
"Tomorrow," I said, without fanfare, "we march a little farther. We teach a new drill. We plant a new bed of potatoes."
Griffin grinned the tired grin of a man who had found a place to rest. "And you won't tell me to lift a beam?"
"I will," I said. "But only if you promise not to grin when you drop it."
He made a sudden vow to be clumsy and loyal at once, and I laughed at him because it made the night softer.
When I fell asleep, the last thing I thought of was my little bamboo hut and the basket of sweet potatoes: small things that tasted of ordinary life and, astonishingly, of the future I had chosen to protect.
The End
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