Sweet Romance11 min read
The Loquat Tree, the Promise, and the One Letter He Never Read
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I remember the day the order came like a bruise under the skin—hard and sudden.
"My father says we must choose by lot," I heard my sister whisper while we bowed our heads in the courtyard. "Who would want to marry Prince Sebastian Corbett? He breaks more hearts than hats."
"I'd rather marry the dead than him," Gabriela said, but she laughed like someone who didn't mean it.
I wiped my eyes with the same handkerchief I had sewn that morning. I had sewn many things for many people; none of them had been for myself. I kept my face calm.
"Stop crying," Father—Daniel Becker—said from the head of the table. "A match like this is fortune. Look at his blood, his face."
"But Father," thirteen of us whispered at once. "Father—"
He waved his hand. "Draw the lot. If the prince is to have a bride from the Becker household, then fate will tell."
"So it will be fate," Gabriela said. She folded her hands and closed her eyes.
On the day the lot fell to me, they said I had the worst turn of luck. "She drew the worst lot," someone muttered. "To be given to a playboy prince is a curse."
I covered my face. The bridal veil burned at my forehead, flaring red in the chamber light. The prince leaned close and looked at me like the moon looks upon a pond.
"Did you draw the worst lot?" he asked, and a small smile curved his mouth.
"It was not a lot," I said quickly. "We drew by chance. Whoever found the little painted paper became the bride."
He laughed as if the answer was the most honest thing he'd heard. "So you aren't a liar. Do you mind if I steal a truth?"
Before I could answer, he pushed me gently, kissed me, and hid my words.
We were married. We left the city and the palace the third morning and rode until the roads thinned into dust and then into grass. He called our new land "Lingan" the way some people call a far shore "home." He made a small house beside a young loquat tree.
"Here," he said, hands full of straw and clay. "We will build a life."
I planted a loquat sapling myself. "There is a line from a book I liked as a child," I told him, "—'In the courtyard a loquat tree, planted by my wife the year she died.' I wanted to write it differently."
He scoffed then leaned his head against the tree. "You are childish. But I will fence the tree. I will carve the words, 'This loquat grew with us.'"
We settled into a strange kind of peace. He tilled small fields; I sewed handkerchiefs to earn us a few coins. Nights we huddled under a threadbare quilt and spoke of silly things and of faraway palaces. He had a habit of saying outrageous things about the future.
"One day," he would whisper, "I will be more than a name. I will be the man to change how a country breathes."
"You are already dangerous enough," I would say, and he would grin like a boy hiding knives behind his back.
The first time he got sick, he had a fever that burned through our sheets. I bathed him in cool cloths, tore my only spare into strips for bandages. When he woke, he took me into his arms and said, "I will never leave you."
"I am oily and my hair is unwashed," I said.
He kissed me for a very long time.
"Then I will stay for a very long time," he said.
He did not stay. Weeks and then months and years passed in a rhythm of departure and returns. Once he left with two hundred silver pieces and a promise carved in stone at our doorway: "I go to buy you a bracelet; I will return."
Time taught me to measure hope by days. I carved on the wall with a stone, day after day: "Day 1 of his promise," "Day 200," "Day 543." Ross—our Ross—learned the sound of my voice reading those marks.
"Is father coming back?" he asked when he was too small to know the cold that absence leaves.
"He will," I lied, because a lie for my boy sounded better than the truth.
He returned after a whole bright year, taller and darker, with the bracelet on his wrist. He kissed Ross so fiercely the boy sputtered laughter. "Give me a son," he said to me whispering in the quiet of our straw bed. "Let me see my name in his eyes."
I gave him a son. Ross Ash. That name is a whole story of its own; he is a living promise that I loved once and loved enough to risk small hopes on a big man.
Years slipped. The world beyond Lingan changed. War reached towns and townships like a spreading oil. One evening a rider arrived with a uniform and a face like thunder: Dax Russell, the captain of guards.
"By command," he said, "the prince must return to the city. The emperor summons him."
"He will go," Sebastian said in a voice that had learned to sound like an order. "I will ride."
He rode and rode until his shadow grew small in the dust. He left Ross and me in the house with the loquat tree throwing thin shade over the roof.
Then came a slow and subtle shift—letters became fewer, then nil, then a rumor: a new marriage, an alliance with a powerful house. Rumors turned into a name: Antonella Dudley.
"She is the daughter of a general," the town gossips said. "She is clever. She will give the prince what he needs."
"I raised him from laughter and fever," I whispered to myself. "I kept the fire when he wanted to be elsewhere."
The day Antonella came into the city with silk and with the smile of one who had calculated everything to the bite, my hands discovered it: a cup of tea with a bitter edge. Someone had learned to boil promises into slow poisons. My breath turned sweet and then hollow.
"Do you feel dizzy?" Ross asked as I sat still, my fingers of making needlework limp.
"I am tired," I said. The lie fit easier than speech.
He came to visit twice after I had gone quiet. The last time he came in his coronation robes, he read a proclamation aloud: he had become emperor; he declared me empress. He held my hand under the high dome and proclaimed to his realm, "This is my wife, whom I cherish."
"I pledged to you my entire life," he whispered in the vast hush. His speech was a bright web of memory: loquat trees, fevered nights, and small embroidered handkerchiefs stitched in candlelight.
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to open my eyes and say, "You are my home." But the warmth was already leaving me. My chest felt like a bell that no clapper could strike.
"Forgive me," I managed to murmur one night at the edge of a dream. "Forgive me for wanting to keep you."
He took my hand and promised me the world. "I swear," he said, "no other shall take what is ours."
The next morning the palace found me cold and very still. The court bells tolled for an empress who had died the night after the coronation. He fell to the floor and tore at his coronation robe. He shouted. He struck the marble. He called me his wife and kept saying it like a prayer.
"She was mine," he demanded to those around him. "No one shall say otherwise."
He mourned for nine days and then… life moved like a slow river. He honored the ritual and took Antonella as a consort in a way history would later try to smooth with soft words. He gave the boy Ross Ash into hands that pretended to love him—Antonella promised she would raise him safe. She smiled and took the child.
I had never thought she would be so brazen.
Years passed and Ross grew, and he grew into a young man who understood the world too much for his age. He learned to read my letters and the letters the boy had kept secret inside the loquat-tree trunk. He grew into the position his father could not see straight.
When Ross came of the age of authority, he read the papers that had been hidden. He read the ink that had been pressed by hands that trembled with guilt. He read why I had been tired: a cup of tea, a conversation with an envoy, and a deal too sweet to refuse. He read how Antonella's family had grown fat on promises, how power had granulated into hunger.
Ross came to the capital with Dax Russell at his side.
"Bring them," he said. "Bring everyone who thought they could fold truth into money."
They brought Antonella Dudley and the counselors who had pushed the marriage, the scribes who had powdered their conscience for profit, and the very magistrates who had nodded while the cup was brewed.
The courtyard where they made them stand was vast and white, the color that the palaces like to pretend makes things permanent. The court was full—nobles, commoners, soldiers—anyone who had a mouth was given one on that day. The sun held back as if stunned.
"Ross Ash," Antonella said coldly when she saw the boy who had grown into a man whose eyes knew both loquat trees and coronation halls. "You have no title to judge me."
"You forced your way into a life that was not yours by murder," he answered. "You promised to guard a child and instead opened a way to take him. You stood with the men who decided a woman should be taken."
Her chin flicked. "You talk like grass," she said. "Your father loved me. He knew what he wanted."
"Dax," Ross called. "Read."
Dax Russell stepped forward and unfolded a paper taken from the archives. "This is the record of the envoy meetings," he said. "These are the transactions. These are the notes of the apothecary who made the 'tea.'"
He read, and it sounded like soft iron. "Here," Dax read, "the agent notes 'a slow dye to be added to the leaves.' Signed: the hand of the Dudley house."
A murmur ran through the crowd like a cold wind.
Antonella's smile hardened. "Fabrications," she said quickly. "Court propaganda."
"Watch the woman," a voice called from the back. "She has the look of a woman who has made others count for nothing."
Ross did not shout. He did not need to. He stepped forward and took her hand.
"You said you would raise him as your own," Ross said. "Did my mother's letters mean nothing? Did her loquat sapling mean nothing?"
From the crowd rose women who had once bowed to Antonella's family. They had been promised positions, pensions. "They lied to us," an older woman said. "They promised jobs. They promised sons. They took a life for a promise."
A cluster of boys and girls who had been in the palace kitchens showed the inspector's ledger where they had written the purchase of herb after herb; they had seen the bottles; they had tasted the bitter cups. They cried and spat and pointed.
Antonella's hands flailed. "You have no proof!" she said.
Ross turned to the crowd. "Do you want truth?" he asked. "Do you want the truth my mother never lived to see?"
A chorus of shouts answered him. "Yes!"
"Then hear it." He held out a book—my handwriting—my letters bound together. "These are the words she wrote to the man she married. He read some, but not all. He loved her and then he listened to men who called care 'ambition.' She was offered a bargain and she chose her son over the throne."
A hush.
"Someone here chose to trade her for favor," Ross said. "Someone here made a deal with my father's fears."
He looked at Antonella. "You wanted power. You wanted your house to stand. You married the man who would make you useful to the country. You promised to be good. Instead you sipped what you arranged, and when a life ended, you smiled in public."
Antonella's composure cracked.
"What do you want?" she hissed. "Do you want me dead? To be hung?"
"What I want is for the truth to be plain and for you to be made to feel what you made us feel," Ross said. "I want you to stand and be shown by all of us what betrayal looks like."
Dax called to the guards. "Take off her silk," he ordered. "Strip the gilding from the woman who thought gold would hide blood."
They stripped layers until she shivered in a plain robe. The crowd pressed closer. Men who had once bowed to her family spit and called her names. Women who had been bribed and then tossed aside came forward with cupped hands full of small tokens—pieces of cloth, pills, little glass vials.
"She bought the apothecary," one woman cried. "She paid him to lace a cup with 'sleep'."
Antonella swayed. "You fools," she said. "You will not take my name from me."
"Name?" Ross's voice was quiet and terrible. "You took my mother's life. You took her handkerchiefs. You took her sewing and her nights of bread and you sewed your own story into the fabric."
A young kitchen boy threw down a small packet on the marble. "We kept it," he said. "We hid what we found in the pantry under old rags. We thought it was sugar."
They opened the packet and the apothecary's own distillate was there. Its smell was sharp-iron and bitter. Another voice said, "We found receipts too. Coin to coin. Coin to the Dudley house."
Antonella's face went from pale to hot to grey. "You cannot—" she began, and the crowd jeered.
"Public shame," Ross said. "You will be paraded. Your house will be stripped of rank. You will stand in the market squares of each county and every hand that once took your coin will spit, will call you by what you are."
"Have you no mercy?" Antonella cried. Her voice broke.
"Mercy?" Ross echoed. "You asked for mercy when you bribed men. You asked for mercy when you bought silence. What mercy could make up for a mother's breath stopped for a throne?"
The magistrate read the verdict: loss of rank, confiscation of house, banishment of the family head to the distant province where the air is thin and the harvest lean, public sessions of apology in three counties.
They dragged Antonella through streets where once she had walked in silk. Servants who used to curtsey spit at her, merchants who used to sell her trinkets threw them at her feet. Women slapped her face. Children ran ahead and shouted, "Poisoner!" The magistrate's bell clanged at each place: county square, market hall, the temple steps. Everyone came out to see the fall.
Antonella's expression moved from confident to confused, to denial, to frantic pleading, to a low animal wail. She tried to claw back her robe, tried to shout, "It's a lie!" She bent and tried to bow to anyone who would listen, but the crowd formed like a wall.
"Do you deny?" Dax asked on the last square.
She looked up and saw faces—faces of the women she'd displaced, the servants she'd broken, the apothecary whose mittens she'd soiled with promises. She could not find a single face that did not turn away. She gasped.
"No," she said at last, like a child saying the wrong answer.
For an hour she staggered through that punishment: shouts, spitting, spurned hands. For an hour she moved from one square to another, and with every step her dignity dropped like a coin into a well. The magistrate read out the list of her offenses—trade in false herbs, bribery, conspiracy to cause death. The crowd took notes, and the notes were rough and sharp.
At the last square, Ross spoke.
"She will not be killed," he said. "We are not barbarians. We will be better than that. But she must see what she made us all become in the trade for her ambition."
Antonella fell and folded into herself and the crowd took one last look. Some shook their heads and then moved on, satisfied that the ledger had been balanced. Some spat. Some wept for a woman who had once been useful and had chosen to be cruel.
In time, the houses of Dudley were broken and scattered. They lost titles. They lost retinues. They lost the roof over them. But they kept their names, and with the names came the memory.
Ross returned to the old house and the loquat trees and found letters still hidden in the trunk. He read them slowly, hand in hand with the memory of me. He brought the letters to the court and let them be read aloud.
He came to the palace where my body lay years before and placed the last letter inside my carved handkerchief box. He planted another loquat beside the old one and watered them both.
"You loved him," he said, not to me—because I could not answer—but to the small sprigs that would one day bear fruit. "You planted hope and you bore a son. I will not let your name be lost to easy lies."
Years after, some called him merciful, some called him hard. But in the shade of two loquat trees in a courtyard that had once been straw and thatch, a boy who had become a man planted his mother's letters in the soil and read them out to the wind.
"She wrote," Ross said, reading my last paper aloud, "that she once told a lie because she wanted to be near a boy who gave her a sweet. She wrote that she would rather have tamed the world for a small life than have the world open her like a book to strangers. She wrote, 'If you ever find the loquat, pick one and think of me.'"
He picked a fruit and laughed, and it tasted like everything I had ever sewn: bitter, sweet, and honest.
I had been a foolish woman in some ways, patient in others. I had loved a man who wanted to be more than what he was; he had wanted power and sometimes the path to power is paved with people's small lives. They called me an empress. I was a woman who made a promise, and the world they built around that promise could not keep it.
He read my handwriting and he punished those who had taken me. He taught the court that names had weight, and that one cannot trade a life for a title without paying a price.
I am gone, and yet the loquat tree stands. When the wind passes over its leaves, it whispers something like, "We planted it together." I listen from whatever place a memory finds refuge.
The End
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