Sweet Romance13 min read
The Jade Ruyi, The Lotus Soup, and the Emperor Who Kept Returning
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I was used like a shield.
"Everest," I said once, half laughing and half mean, when he came in with a new little thing in his sleeve. "What is it this time?"
"Look," he said, and his grin was a boy's grin, not an emperor's. He pulled out a jade ruyi that caught the candlelight and looked alive. "A treasure for my favorite collector."
My eyes went straight to the green. "You brought me a ruyi?" I reached without thinking.
"Careful," Everest laughed. "Don't drool on the court gift."
"I wouldn't," I said. "But it is mine now, yes?"
He tapped my forehead. "Yes, Bianca. It's yours."
That night, people in the palace started pretending there was a reason the emperor had been sneaking into my rooms, laughing and eating late-night rice together. "She has some skill in bed," they murmured, and their eyes were sharp as pins.
"Stop saying that," I told Beth, who was folding my sleeve. "We talk about colors of jade. We fight about taste in pickles. What's wrong with a woman who eats?"
Beth leaned on the screen and whispered, "Lady Bianca, some ladies say you taught him too many games."
"Then I taught him the wrong games," I said and picked at a grape.
The emperor continued to come. The first night it was a piece of jade. The next night it was sweet wine from the south. Another night, he offered a painting. I only ever gave back polite scoffs.
"Everest," I said once, when he teased me about my lipstick. "You keep coming and then you leave. What am I to think?"
"Think of me as a man with a thousand papers," he answered, and he sat very close. His breath was warm and smelling of plum wine. "Think what you want, my favorite."
"Do you ever stop thinking of her?" I asked before I could swallow the words.
He hesitated. "I think of what I must think of, and I think of what I want," he said softly.
I didn't ask who. I didn't need to. Everyone knew there was one woman who lived in the emperor's chest, like a little sealed letter he never opened for anyone else. My sister, Gianna, had been raised by the Empress Mother, Veronique Lopez, the way a child is kept by a grandmother's shawl. People called her a white moon, flawless, the only true love of the emperor's youth. They told stories of the days when Gianna's little face and the young prince's chest had shared the same books and the same lessons.
"Don't be stupid," Beth said later, hearing my small cry. "You are not a moon. You are our moon's shadow."
"You are rude," I told Beth, but she was right in her ugly way. I loved money and sweets. I loved my little kitchen and my fat orange cat, Oilcake. My small pleasures were honest. I told myself they were enough.
Then they came back: Gianna and Bronson Ellis, the general. The city made a festival of their return. The emperor invited them to a family feast, the kind of show where old lovers and new lovers are placed under the same lamp.
"Why are you dressed so plain?" Everest asked me, frowning at my simple gown.
"I'm always like this," I said. "You like the honest me. Besides, I have grapes waiting."
He had servants put a bright hairpin in my hair. "There, now you look like the queen of pickles," he said. "Sit and be lovely."
I sat. He sat beside me. Gianna came with a face like a polished shell.
"Bianca," she said softly and offered her hand with the practiced gentleness of a girl taught by a mother with time. "You look radiant."
"Gianna," I answered, gripping her small warm hand with my rough fingers. "You look... good."
"Will you have wine with us?" Everest asked.
"Of course," I said. "We will all drink."
There was polite talk. There was praise for Bronson's steadiness and his horses. There was even laughter. Once, Everest praised my cooking so loudly I almost choked with pride.
Later that night, when my feet felt small and my heart felt oddly bright, Everest came to my room with his lute.
"You couldn't sleep?" I asked.
"No," he said, and for a breath he looked like the boy who had once thrown fruit at his tutors. "I wanted to hear your thoughts on tonight."
"They were about crab meat," I said. "And how cold milk makes my teeth chatter."
"Of course," he said, and his hand found mine. "You always make me laugh. Why do you cry when I say a name you don't know?"
He had called Gianna "Warm-Warm" that night, using the nickname of Gianna's childhood. He had leaned in and said, "Warm-Warm, where did your mole go?" to the sleeping form and then fallen asleep without remembering.
"You called her by her old name," I said quietly.
He blinked awake. "Did I say that?"
"You did," I said.
He rubbed his temple and offered me a ridiculous grin. "I was drunk. It was nothing."
"But it was something," I whispered.
He watched me. "You are jealous," he said very calmly.
"I... maybe," I admitted. "A little."
"Not so many people get you," he said. "Not because you are less pretty—because you are not playing my game."
"What game?" I asked.
"To be a shrine," he said. "To be a memory first and then a face."
"I am not a memory," I said, and I pushed his chest. He laughed and nearly dropped the lute.
That laughter was a bruise of comfort. We fell into a pattern: he would quarrel with the sky of his duties and come to the warm bowl of my company. The court whispered. Men who had once ignored me now bowed with sharpened looks. Women who had once only looked at me with knives now looked with scales in their eyes.
"She's up again," Denise Vitale, the gossiping concubine, said one morning like a small weather vane. "Everest keeps flipping her name card."
"Let him," I said and ate two sugar cakes.
I would lie: I didn't love him—at least not the way Gianna had been love. But a man who came for late wine and left morning letters left a soft place in my chest.
Then the funeral happened. The Empress Mother, Veronique, passed. The palace hollowed into a place you could measure in footsteps. Gianna, who had always been loved by the Empress Mother like a secret, came to stay with me. She was pale, often faint. I worried. I fussed with warm soups and medicines. I burned incense for her and pretended I did not care when she looked at me like someone who had been taught to prefer marble halls.
"Stay here," Everest said to me one night, pressing his hand to my trembling lips. "I will bring her to you."
He did. For a week the palace door never closed inside my rooms. There were extra cooks and a small pharmacy in an outer chamber. I played the proud little hostess and watched Gianna sleep.
"You should not touch that," Gianna scolded once when she saw me with my hand on a bowl she thought mine. "You will ruin your face."
"Face?" I spat and then laughed because I was so tired. "You think I married for face? No. I love my food."
"You love everything too much," she said gently.
"Jealousy," I said bluntly. "Do you remember the day you left?"
She turned and looked at me with a kind of terrible softness. "Bianca," she said, "there are things people cannot take and cannot ask for."
"Then why did you come back?" I asked.
She took a breath and looked away. "I had to. And because I could."
A week later, in the quiet before dawn, she did something I had not expected. She picked up the bowl of hot bird's nest soup I had brought to her and—without a word—threw it at me.
The soup splashed like small suns across my arms and chest. The room smelled of burnt sugar and broken trust.
"Gianna!" I screamed, burning and stunned.
Everest came running with robes flying. "What happened?" he asked, and when he saw me there, smoke rising, he looked as if a part of him had cracked.
"She—" Gianna's face was blank. "You always had what I wanted."
"You did that?" Everest asked, hurt and anger mixing.
"I—" Gianna began and stopped. The room filled with people. Beth screamed. The silence was loud.
Everest took me into his arms. "How bad is it?" he demanded.
"The burn is not small," the palace physician said. "She will scar."
I wanted to be small. I wanted to sink into a hole. "It was a mistake," Gianna said, and her voice broke in the exact place it always broke when she tried to be kind.
The emperor lifted his head, staring at Gianna with a look I had never seen: not the lightness of a man teasing, but the heavy stone of one betrayed.
"Bianca," he said finally, "you will be treated. I will not have anyone hurt my house."
Gianna left. She went back to Bronson, to her new life, to a distance I could not measure. For the first time, I felt like a sister had made a knife and held it out to me.
People came. They whispered. Some clapped small hands and said, "Now we see her true face." Denise Vitale's smile cut the room like a saw.
But then something happened that I had not planned, not even in my worst imaginings: a packet of letters arrived at my rooms from the old manor—the letters Bronson had sent when he courted me as a girl. They were copies, browned and folded, found in a trunk in my uncle's house. They said he wanted to marry me, that he would run away to the south with me. They were tender and honest. I had burned them once. Someone had saved a copy.
I read them by lamplight and felt my whole chest rewrite itself. Bronson had loved me—not the grand love of vows and banners, but a soldier's fierce, steady thing. I had let him go when duty and family weighed him toward Gianna.
I did not know if that made him a villain. He had not known then who he would be forced to marry. He had written words that were his bones.
"Bring them to me," Everest said when I told him.
"Why?" I asked.
"To show the court the truth of things," he said, and for the first time I saw a plan like a blade in his eyes. "If anyone thinks you were a cutter of hearts, we will show them the archive of hearts that loved you."
We did it in the Hall of a Hundred Candles, where ministers and ladies gathered to sign seals and measure the fate of a dynasty. There was no small crowd. The emperor invited the ladies of the court, the generals, the servants who liked to gossip—so many that even the rafters felt crowded.
"Bianca," he said quietly when we entered. "If you will forgive the show."
"Do it," I said, though my hands shook.
He called for a reading. "These letters," Everest said, holding out the papers, "were meant for Gianna Colombo, later found and kept in the manor chest. They tell of the honest intentions of Bronson Ellis years ago."
"Stop!" Bronson shouted. He came in with armor dust on his boots. "Those letters are private. You cannot parade them."
"Public memory is public," Everest said. "We will read."
Someone in the crowd laughed—then silence. The first letter was read aloud in a voice the palace clerk lent. It read of a promise of marriage, of plans to win a life together. It read of a boy leaving a village for war and still writing about a girl's laugh.
"Why did you not tell her?" I called out to Bronson when the clerk finished.
"I tried," Bronson said, with a soldier's flatness. "But duty, and my mother—"
"His mother," Everest said, "did what mothers of rank do. She bound him where she could."
Gianna watched, a statue of whitened marble, and when the second, third, fourth letter were read—each as soft as a confession—her face cracked.
"How could you keep this from me?" Gianna asked Bronson, and her voice was small in the big hall.
"I didn't keep it," Bronson argued. He looked at the crowd. "There were orders. There were—"
"Orders," Everest repeated, as if testing the sound. "So duty puts chains on a man's heart."
There was a murmur. Denise Vitale's face had whitened, Fey flavor sharpening into real alarm. I saw other ladies exchange looks.
"Is this to shame us?" Gianna cried. "What do you want?"
Everest walked forward. "I want truth," he said. "I want the court to see what history made of people's feelings."
He motioned to the clerk who read then the last letter—Bronson's plea for me to run away together. Bronson's face, which had been steady as a drum on the battlefield, now looked raw.
"Run," Bronson murmured to no one. "I was a boy then. I thought—"
"Enough," Everest said. "This is not about judgment alone. This man—" he gestured to Bronson—"made promises he did not keep. He loved two women by accident of time."
"I loved you then," Bronson said hoarsely, and his voice broke across the hall.
"A man who loves in a choice and then chooses duty over a woman's trust—" Everest's voice dropped low. "We will not exalt him for convenience."
I felt the hall hold its breath.
"Bronson Ellis," Everest said loudly, so that every head turned, "you let the woman you once wrote to be promised to another by the hands of her elders. You have been rewarded with rank and honor. What will you show the court now?"
Bronson swallowed. He looked to Gianna. He looked at me. Then he turned his face to Everest.
"I did what I thought I must," he said. "I married as ordered."
"And did you ever make amends for what your silence cost?" Everest asked.
Bronson's eyes flicked and then hardened. "I fought wars. I built walls for this country."
"So you have a country trophy," Everest said. "But people are not trophies."
There was a shift in the air, like wind moving through paper. The ministers, who had been silent, took note. The empress, Fiona Simon, watched with a hand over her mouth. Veronique Lopez's old face was folded with quiet grief.
Everest stepped to the front. "Let every man and woman here decide," he said. "If someone has caused hurt and never faced it, we will name it."
A dozen voices rose. Some said forgiveness. Some said cold justice. But the court was not a place of private quarrel. It was a place where reputation is measured in steps.
Denise Vitale, who had once mocked me, stood and spoke loud and thin. "He is a hero," she said. "What does a woman expect?"
"Israel," someone murmured, because Denise would not relent.
The hall grew louder. People began to shout. I stepped forward despite myself.
"Listen," I said. "I do not wish for public blood. But if the truth must be told, then let it be told."
"Tell it," Gianna said, fragile and bitter.
"Bronson," I said, looking at the general, "did you ever mean to hurt me?"
Bronson's whole body dropped into something like shame. "No," he said simply. "I did not."
Then, rather than some savage punishment, Everest did something wiser and crueler at once.
"Then apologize, in front of them all," he said.
Bronson's jaw trembled. He knelt before the whole court—an old soldier on a hard floor—and said, "Lady Bianca, I failed you. I let my silence be your wound. I am sorry."
There were gasps and a silence that pressed like a weight.
Gianna stood as if drawn by wind. "I will not silence him," she said. "I—"
Her voice stopped. The court was watching, and in that watching she knelt too, though she had no need.
A woman behind me started to clap. A few others did. Some hissed.
"It's not a theater," Denise spat.
Everest watched like someone who had set the pieces he wanted in motion. "Let the record show," he said. "Bronson Ellis publicly apologizes for what his silence caused. The court will remember that men's promises matter."
Because it was public, because it was witnessed, something like change settled. Bronson's face broke down, his proud soldier mask dissolving into real regret. He had to stand there and feel the crowd watch him like a mirror. People whispered that a man losing face in front of nine hundred people was a kind of punishment worse than prison.
He rose and bowed low to Gianna and then to me. "I will not ask for your forgiveness," he said. "I will only say I am sorry."
Whether that was enough I would not know for a long time. But he had been forced into a truth he could not hide from. He had to feel the heat of eyes that meant a thousand judgments. He had to stand in a place where honor could not hide the hurt of a promise left unfinished.
The crowd's reaction changed over those long, electric minutes. Some scoffed at the apology. Some cried. Some took up their fans and whispered. Cameras did not exist, but memory is a fierce recorder. Word of that day would make the rounds—every gossip girl, every servant would tell the story like a bell.
"Did this hurt you?" Everest asked me after, pulling me from the noise into a small corridor.
"Not more than the burn," I said.
He touched the scarred place on my arm where the soup had splashed. "Should we show them more mercy?"
"Show me some," I said. "I like my soups safe, and my husbands better behaved."
He laughed in that small, secret way of his. "I will keep you safe," Everest promised, and I felt something real like an anchor fasten in my chest.
Time rolled on. Gianna left the court more often. Bronson returned to the west. The palace gossip had new fuel and old embers. I healed slowly. Everest took to stopping by with jars of sweet pear wine and a small tin of sugar petals. He held my hand in council when worries were heavy. He bent to hold my head and brush tears when a memory stung.
"You love him?" someone whispered once.
"Who?" I said, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.
"Everest," she said.
"I like his hands," I said. "And his terrible jokes. And that he forgives me when I'm fat and I steal the last piece of crab."
He came to the altar of papery things and kissed my forehead. "You will always make me laugh," he said.
"Do you ever call her Warm-Warm again?" I asked, one night when moonlight painted the court like a thin wafer.
"No," he said, seriously. "I called you a wrong name once. I remember where I put my wrongs."
We kept living inside the palace, and people will call it the "strange honeymoon of a new emperor," but it was not strange to me. I had a warm bowl of soup, a silly cat who would not stop stealing my slippers, and a man who would jab me with a teasing knuckle when I overate.
Months later, when the doctors announced I had child inside my belly, Everest's laugh shook the curtains like bells. "A child!" he said. "We are in trouble."
"I like trouble," I told him. "It tastes sweet."
He kissed my stomach and looked like someone surprised by good news for the very first time.
At night, when the room was quiet and the jade ruyi sat on my small table, I touched the carved handle and remembered the way he had once given it to me.
"Keep it safe," Everest said, leaning in the doorway. "It is the only thing I give you that smells of court."
"I will," I replied. "And you, promise me you will stop calling things by names that are not theirs."
He smiled, crooked and soft. "I will try."
That promise did not need to be the ending. It was a small thread, a promise he would tug at when storms came.
In the end, the palace kept turning like a great mill. People left. People returned. Some hearts bent, some bent never to straighten fully. I learned that the truth, when laid out in public, is sharp and useful. It can punish and it can heal. It can show a man the cost of silence and give a woman the right to know.
"Everest," I said one winter night as snow came like small white coins against the windows. "Do you remember why you first came to my room with treasures?"
He shrugged. "Because you laughed when I was stupid."
"Then laugh now."
He did. His laugh filled the room like warm wine. The jade ruyi sat on the small table, catching the lamp. Oilcake, my fat cat, jumped onto the cushion and made a happy mess.
At times I still thought of Bronson and the letters that had once set me spinning. "He loved me as a boy," I told Beth once. "I forgave him in the end."
"That is not the same as being loved now," Beth said.
"No," I agreed. "But the past makes the woman I am. The jade, the soup, the scar—these are mine."
"Where will you keep the ruyi?" Everest asked.
"In a drawer," I said. "On top of the old letters I burned and the ones I kept."
He kayed his head. "And the child?"
"I will teach him to love sugar," I said.
"Not too much," he warned, smiling.
We laughed. Outside, the palace slept. Inside, we had small soft wars that ended in truce.
Later, when I would show the jade ruyi to our child and tell the story of the great public reading and the burned letters and the soup, I would say this: sometimes a thing you did not ask for—like a bowl of hot soup thrown in anger—becomes part of your map. Sometimes the emperor comes with a treasure. Sometimes he calls the wrong name and learns to call the right one. In my drawer the jade lay with the knowledge that being seen—truly seen in a hundred pairs of eyes—is the fiercest cure and the quietest punishment.
And in the quiet nights, when Everest teased my stomach and Oilcake snored like a kettle, the jade ruyi would catch the lamp and throw back a green light like a small, very private ocean.
The End
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