Sweet Romance17 min read
The Lotus, the Parrot, and the Needle
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I have always told myself one small truth: my life only asks for a shallow shelter and a quiet corner. That was all I wanted. That was all I dared to want.
"My lady," the old maid said, smoothing my sleeve, "appearances matter tonight. Remember your place."
"I remember," I answered. My voice was soft as silk but steady. "I will do nothing that stains the house."
The house was Vaughn Porter's. My father, Grand Tutor to strangers and lord to thousands, held sway in paper and in coin. He had one proper daughter who was bright as dawn and made all small things into jewels, Aurora Burks. I was the second-born, born of the woman who had been once a handmaiden, Estrella Davidson. Estrella bowed low and did what bowed women did: she bent, and in bending she broke every chance of being called mistress.
"You will stand by Aurora," my mother—the one who wore the finest silks, Ivory Kuznetsov—had said once, when my legs still kept the wobble of a child. "Learn. Be useful. Read what they allow you. Know your place and keep it."
"Yes, Mother," I had mouthed. I told myself this every night like a prayer. I read what the household scholar gave us. I learned my letters and the names of things outside our walls. From books, a whole world breathed into my hands, and I learned to dream a little, dangerous and quiet.
On Aurora's coming-of-age, the house was lit like a second sun. Nobles lined up with wrapped treasures; courtesies fluttered like flags. I stood behind Aurora, the folds of her robe at my fingers, the mirror catching her face: poised, pale, perfect. My hands trembled with the steam of tea and the heat of other people's eyes.
"She will be queen one day," one guest said softly.
"She will be the best wife the heir could choose," another answered.
I bowed my head until the nape of my neck stung. Then men came in bright robes and the prince came—Finbar Persson, who everyone called handsome and who carried himself like someone born with a crown already placed. He looked at Aurora and the world stilled.
"Your Highness," Aurora managed, just a small tilt of the chin. "This is an honor."
Finbar's gaze did not lift from her. It stayed like heat. He smiled, and the air tasted like spring.
I watched. I watched until my chest hurt.
Later, when the laughter from the courtyard thinned and guests moved toward the gardens, I slipped away to count the stacked gifts. A small wind pulled the silk door; I walked toward the lotus pool to breathe.
Footsteps behind me—sharp, abrupt. Ellis Gardner. My half-brother, the house's son with a voice like a whip. He liked to ruin what pleased me. He liked to throw a stone at a bird and watch it fall.
"You dare look at the prince," he spat. "You dare think of such things?"
"I did not," I answered, but his face flared, and before I could move his hand had shoved me. I stumbled.
"You are not fit to stand near a lady of style," he said cruelly.
I tried to step back, but my foot caught on a jut of stone. Cold water swallowed me.
"I cannot swim!" I shouted once, surprised at my own voice, and then the mud and the dark and the taste of iron filled my mouth. I kicked, I choked.
"Get out!" someone shouted.
Then hands—a sleeve, a strong arm—clutched me. The next sound I remember is a pair of eyes, wide and sharp like a hawk's, close enough to read all my panic. Finbar Persson had jumped the drainwall, had reached into the pond, and hauled me to the rim. He pulled me to shore with the ease of a man who had been born steady. He took water from my hair with a gentleness that shocked me more than the cold.
"You will be all right," he said, and his voice was neither a command nor a comfort; it was a fact.
People gasped. "The prince saved her," someone breathed. "How scandalous." "How lucky." Aurora's face was unreadable. My face burned hotter than the bathwater.
"Do not let me see your face by the pond again," Finbar told me, and then he left as if he had only closed a book.
The next morning, the house revolved like a slow, cruel wheel. My name, until then a small thing in the service list, began to make small rings across the city. A woman without rank, plucked from water by a prince, could become something else in the mouths of men who liked headlines.
"She must be punished," my stepmother Ivory said, with civil sweetness. "To be saved so publicly... it stains the daughter whose name is meant to rise."
My heart sat cold in my throat. Aurora's expression was a fraction of surprise and a sliver of satisfaction. "She will have to leave," Mother said. "Send her away. Let the monks take her."
So I went to the nunnery, as if walking into the pages of a book I had read a hundred times. The temple sheltered me; the thin days filled me. I learned to make tea, to sweep a room until its corners shone like promises, and to make my back take the weight of silence. I became someone who could breathe again.
"Will you be happy here?" Sister Kalani Sutton asked, one night, when the wind had a teeth to it.
"I hope so," I said. "Do you think the world remembers small things?"
"Some small things change the world," she said. "Do not look for proof."
I stayed nearly a year. Books filled me. I grew white and slender as a reed. Love for the quiet grew deep.
Then my house remembered me.
"Return," the old matricarch had told the envoys. "We need her."
"Need her for what?" I asked Estrella when she came.
"For our daughter," she said, and her face was thin with hunger for favor. "Aurora needs a hand. We will be served better if you go."
I went because I could not refuse the twitch in Estrella's hand. I returned to a house that had been altered to hold politics like threads, and I wore a new robe that pinched at my shoulders. They sent me to Finbar's house, and I was to be set near Aurora as a quiet blade to keep the younger rival from stealing light.
I learned the rules of that house quick. I swallowed hard and obeyed. Finbar visited when his temper allowed. Aurora received his attention, and I learned how to be small again—deliberately small, useful, unnoticed. I learned the small kindnesses that could be magnified into loyalty: to keep the prince's child warm, to sew when everyone else laughed at my stitches, to learn the names of each eunuch and maid.
Then Cassandra Ito came.
At first she was a friend. "We are sisters," she said one night under the moon, handing me a piece of candied fruit. "Do you trust me?"
"I trust you," I said because her smile was warm and her voice plain and because I needed a friend.
"You are not the sort who keeps place in court," she said. "You are clever."
We talked. We shared secrets small as needles. She told me of the way power smelled—of alliances struck like matches. I listened until I believed her. I gave her the small trinket I had sewn for the prince's son, a tiny tiger charm with crooked stitches. She tied it to her own sleeve and said nothing of it, but the world did strange things when two women's hands tied their lives to the same string.
"Be careful of the others," Cassandra would warn. "There are wolves everywhere."
She smiled at Aurora and bowed to Finbar with a practiced ease. She laughed with the court and with the women who had household names. She seemed, I thought, like a lantern lit to keep me warm.
Later, when the palace swallowed Finbar into itself and he stood at the edge of a throne no one had promised him, the house changed. Men grew pale. Aurora's body gave the court a son. The court called the child a blessing; my father praised the union.
"Keep quiet," Aurora whispered once, giving me a bowl of broth. "Do not speak beyond your station."
"Never," I promised.
Inside the court, the roses had thorns. Cassandra's smile sharpened. She was not simple-hearted; she had teeth sharpened for a fight. She wanted a place and was not ashamed to take it.
"You helped me once," she told me quietly one evening in the palace yards. "Now you owe me. Do a small thing for me."
"Anything," I said because I didn't know how to refuse without a blade at my throat.
"Go into the other woman's chamber," she said. "A little powder. It will keep her from conceiving. Nothing cruel—only a delay. The palace loves children. You will be the friend who keeps the peace."
I thought of Aurora then, of the way she smiled dryly and the way she stitched out my pride like a loose thread. I thought of Estrella and Ivory, their faces hungry for favor. I thought of Ellis and the stone he threw that had sent me into the pond. I thought of how helpless I had been in the house of my blood. I thought of books where poor women had to remold themselves into useful things or break.
"I will not kill," I said. "I will not ruin life."
"It is not death," Cassandra said. "It is a small skip. The world will not end."
I swallowed the powder for another woman's brood. I thought of doing harm to save myself from worse harm. I believed the lie.
The powder worked. The woman miscarried, and the palace was filled with rumor. Accusations flew like hawks. Fingers pointed to the wrong places. The court chose not to look too closely. But the palace remembers, and memory demands blood.
"I did it," I confessed to Kalani one night. "I gave the powder to a woman who would bear a rival."
"You did not make the first cut," Kalani said. "But you touched the blade. Be careful. The court never forgives hands that help."
She did not know all the truth. I did not tell her that the woman I had harmed had been cruel to me with a kind of toy-haired fury. I did not tell her that in each choice I thought I could save someone else—Estrella, my mother, my small self.
"Cassandra lied," I discovered later. "She had been playing both sides."
Her betrayal splayed open like a wound when the day came to press. The palace was in an uproar: someone had tried to poison the heir's wet nurse; someone had planted slander against a favored concubine; someone had leaked a secret letter. Fingers collided like flint. The throne trembled.
One morning a scroll was brought to the throne-room. It had been embroidered by an invisible hand with a coldness that only the court knows. The emperor—Finbar, now on the throne—read it slowly, as if the letters choked.
"Who gave you this?" he asked then, his voice a river.
"It is traced to Cassandra Ito," came a voice.
"Cassandra?" someone laughed, in disbelief.
"Bring her," Finbar said.
They brought her like they bring a vase to be shattered: led with hands on her arms, a string of courtiers watching. I watched from the side. I heard my heart like a drum.
"Cassandra," the emperor said, standing, cold as the marble floor. "You have been accused of treachery, of turning palace women against the lineage, of plotting births and deaths like games. How do you answer?"
She stood straight then, the dancer who had never shown fear. "I answer with truth," she said. Her voice had been silk unspooling, smooth and unafraid. "The court has often used my service. I have served where needed."
"Is it true you asked Lady Ayla to place powders?" Finbar asked.
She smiled. "Ayla loved the child. She could not have done such a thing."
Behind her, the crowd murmured. My name made a ripple, like a thrown pebble. Faces turned.
"You lie," another woman hissed. "She takes what pleases her, she collects friends like beads."
"Enough," Finbar said. "Today we will show the court what the truth is."
They took Cassandra to the great courtyard. The sky was open and the sound of market-voices far away made the emptiness of stone even lonelier. The emperor had invited the ministers, the Grand Tutor Vaughn Porter, my father, and others—faces that had scolded me as a girl. The crowd at the palace gates swelled; news of a trial turned into a spectacle.
"Cassandra Ito," the emperor said, standing upon an elevated dais. "You have been cunning. You have poisoned trust. I will ask you here, before these people, to answer with memory and with proof."
She laughed then, a small brittle sound. "I would answer if I had a mind to be judged."
"Did you instruct concubines to use abortive powders?" he asked.
"No," she said. "But perhaps I taught them how to keep a secret. Does teaching make me a murderer?"
"Did you ask for favors from a foreign family? Did you promise the Dowager things beyond your station?"
"My family is no stranger to power," she said. The court gasped. "I have my kin that help. Is that so terrible?"
"Did you keep lists of women to be used and women to be broken?" the emperor asked, voice thin with a slow anger.
"Ask her," I said suddenly, and the word broke out of me like a shard. "Ask Cassandra what she promised me."
Heads turned like sunflowers. I had not meant to speak. The syllables crawled over my tongue because the truth had weight. I stepped forward. My knees hit the cold tile and I felt small.
"Cassandra," I said. "You asked me to place the powder. You told me it was only a small thing. You told me it would keep trouble away. You said it was needed for Aurora's safety."
She looked at me then, and for the first time, her expression faltered. The mask slipped.
"You will tell the people, then," she said, voice gone brittle. "Tell them all."
"There were letters," Kalani said, appearing at my shoulder. "You wrote them. You promised titles. You promised names."
One by one, the crowd recited accusations that had been murmured in hallways for years—how Cassandra had parceled out whispers like bread, how she had traded compassion for rank. She saw the list widening, the trap closing.
"You told me I'd be safe," I said. "You told me I would be rewarded. What reward did I receive? A woman's shadow. What did you receive? Titles. Friends. The people's trust."
"You are a liar," she hissed, her voice sharpening into an animal sound. "You would bring me down to raise yourself."
"Then stand and deny," the emperor said, and there I saw something settle in his jaw. He would not be fooled again.
Cassandra's face changed. At first there was amusement—she was certain of her scripts. Then the amusement thinned to a smirk, then to a frown, then to a panic that climbed into her throat and finally to utter collapse.
"I—" she began, and her words dissolved. She clutched at the railing. Her breathing came ragged.
"Confess," Finbar said. "Confess to what you sought to do."
"I sought a place," she said hoarsely. "I sought to secure power. I thought I could help my family. I thought—" She broke off, lips trembling. "I thought the ends would justify the means."
"Do you deny manipulating the concubines?" the Grand Tutor demanded.
"No," she said. "I do not deny the letters. I do not deny my intent. I thought to collect power as one collects beads." Her voice grew thin. She had nowhere to hide. "I gave instructions. I asked for powders. I asked others to speak. I thought I was clever."
The courtyard's noise shifted like a kettle on a boil. People who had once bowed to her now murmured with thinly veiled glee. Little hands framed faces; scribes scratched down notes. Someone took out a tablet and began to draw arrows—this would go down in stories.
The emperor held out the official edict then. "Because of your schemes, children have been endangered, and the throne itself may have been threatened. The law will be the law."
They did not drag her through filth. The spectacle was worse than that. They stripped her of the court's finery in public. The silk that had once caught sunlight fell around her shoulders in a heap. Her neck, once ringed with delicate pieces, felt empty. They removed the signs of favor—the brooches, the whispered tokens, the small gold seals her family had sent.
"Look," said a woman in the crowd. "She wears nothing now."
Cassandra's face changed through every stage of feeling I had ever known: triumph, fear, denial, rage, shock, and then collapse. "You will not do this," she said, voice small. "You cannot—"
"Enough," Finbar said. "To let power grow like a secret weed is to allow rot." He looked at the assembled ministers. "Bring forth her letters. Show them the markets and names she promised."
One by one the letters unfolded like a map of betrayal. Names I knew were written there: patrons promised, favors named, young women's stories used like pawn-stamps. He read them aloud. The crowd listened, then gasped, then murmured like rising wind.
"Now," Finbar said. "We shall punish in a way the courts will see."
They did not kill her. The emperor wanted a message rather than a corpse that could kindle pity. Cassandra was bound to a low platform. They draped her head with black cloth and led her through the palace lanes to the outer gate. At each gate a herald read her crimes aloud. Children were brought to peer through latticed windows. Old men spat and turned their faces. Women who had once smiled at Cassandra tossed their own scarves into the dirt at her feet.
"She taught us to poison the nest," one woman cried. "She took the dear and used it as coin."
Cassandra's reaction changed during the walk. At first there was stubbornness—she called out: "You forget how I helped you! You forget my kindness!" As the crowds multiplied, her voice thinned to pleading. "It isn't true! I only wanted to lift my family."
Then denial: "Not me! Not me!" she screamed as a group of servants spat.
Then desperation: she tried to call out for clemency, for mercy, for witnesses, for anyone to say a kind word. Hands shoved her forward. Then collapse: by the time the procession reached the main square, her voice had become a whispering thing—"Please," she said into the black.
People who had once admired her now pressed their palms to their chests and whispered that she had been rightly exposed. Some cried. Some clapped. Some took out their tablets to sketch the scene.
"Let her be kept as an example," one man shouted. "Let her family be shamed!"
The emperor ordered that Cassandra be stripped of rank, her properties confiscated, and her family stripped of the honors her name had bought. She would not be killed—yet she would be punished so fully that there would be no easy rise from the ashes. She was sent to exile—not into a comforting cloister but to a remote house where she would be watched, where scandal would follow her like a shadow. Her name was declared forbidden for use in courtly conversation. Children were warned never to play with her beads.
When she was led away, her face was not that of the woman who had plotted with ambition but of a broken child. The crowd—guards, ministers, women of the inner court, and even the apprentices who had once laughed at our sewing—watched with faces turned like a tide. A few even shouted that justice had been done; a few tears fell; some recorded everything with quick hands.
I watched from the side of the steps. My hands were still. I felt no triumph. I felt no satisfaction. Guilty and guilty, we both were. Yet the court liked to wrap justice in a spectacle. It liked to make a lesson of human error.
Later, when the crowd dispersed, I found Cassandra in the place where exiles are watched. She stood, ragged and hollowed. Her voice had lost the smooth deftness it once had. She looked like someone who had been cut away from indulgence and left to the bitter cold.
"Did I deserve this?" she asked. She spoke almost to herself. "I wanted a place. Is that so monstrous?"
"You wanted what many want," I said. "You wanted to survive, but you played with the lives of others."
She stared at me then. "You spoke," she said. "You threw me to the crowd."
"I spoke a truth that people needed to hear," I said, because I could not find better words. "You hurt more than you saved."
She laughed, small and flat. "You think the emperor forgives you? He would not."
"Perhaps not," I said. "But he cannot unmake what was. And neither can you."
She bowed her head. The sun had already begun to sink behind the palace roofs; the air tasted of copper and the day's last tea. I left her there, bound by law and shamed by spectacle, and walked away with a burden I could not name. The crowd had cheered, but in their cheers there was always the echo of what had been at stake: children, lives, the fragile things the palace trades like coins.
My life continued, because I had to feed the hungry threads of it. I became careful and useful even to the emperor. I sewed the prince—now emperor's—little clothes and later the garments for his son, the boy who would be called the future of the realm. I learned to make my hands smaller so they barely left a mark. I learned to hide anger like a stopped clock.
"Why did you bring me back?" I asked Aurora once, while we sat in the garden after the winter snows had melted into mud.
"Because your being there matters," she said. "Because the house needs options. Because sometimes a blade is more useful when she is hidden."
"Are you ever grateful?" I asked.
"Sometimes," she said, and her voice had the softness of dusk. She looked at me then, truly looked, and I saw in her eyes a contract that had never been spoken aloud. "We have both learned how to survive."
Later, when sickness took the old emperor and the court shifted like sand, Finbar's hands grew heavier and older. Aurora gave him children, and for a while the court quieted. Then one winter, snow like down fell again and Aurora's heart failed through blood and cold. The palace mourned her on paper but not in the way that could save a person. In the hush of those days, the emperor's grief bloomed like a dark flower. He could not hide it.
"You loved her," I said to him, when he sat, grayer and more fragile, in the chamber where I had once nearly drowned. His hands were thin.
"Love is a strange debt," he said. "We are all owed things by each other, Ayla. Some of us pay. Some of us only take."
He took my hands then—an old, royal gesture—and told me to stay close to the heir, to teach him the books and the small kindnesses I had learned. He made me a consort. He made me a place in the palace where I would be safe enough to sew and teach and breathe. He used the very thing the court had once mocked me for—my smallness—as his comfort.
Years passed. The boy grew into the man who would be called upon to carry the realm. I taught him to knot his hands, to treat servants kindly, to read the grain prices and the names of provinces. He listened as if a lantern had been given to him.
"One day," he said quietly, "I will repay the favors you showed me."
"You will be a good ruler," I told him. "Learn the people's names, not just their titles."
The world turned, and the palace, like all great machines, kept grinding. I had walked through tides—drowning, exile, accusation, spectacle—and each time I had remade myself. I had survived by being useful and by being the small needle that could mend a torn robe.
At my father's funeral, they lifted the banners and all the faces looked older. Vaughn Porter's shadow had shrunk to a memory. The court continued with its quiet cruelties: favors exchanged, rivalries stingy as bees. Cassandra's family was disgraced and forced from their office; the people who had cheered at her public humiliation told new jokes in the market, and the story was told as warning for a new decade.
I have been asked many times if I regret anything: the powder, the letters, the way I handed a secret over like salt. I do not know if regret is the right word. Regret is a clear thing. Mine is a constant ache, a thin thread of loss that runs through the cloth of my days.
Once, many winters later, I found the tiger charm again, the little crooked stitch from when I had been small enough to sew a child's delight. It dangled from a box of Aurora's things. I had given it away, then forgotten. When I held it, I thought of all the hands that had touched me: Estrella with her bowed back, Ivory with her sharp silk, Aurora with her cold light, Finbar with his hawk eyes that once saved me, Cassandra with her teeth, Kalani with her quiet warmth, and the young heir with his steady curiosity.
The palace has taught me how to live with compromise, how to nurse tenderness into a world that often wants to trade it for titles. I have kept my needle sharp. I have walked the halls with the parrot that once belonged to the prince and who once called me "You are loved" in a little squeak I taught him.
"Why do you keep the parrot?" the young heir asked me once in the dim light before he went to bed.
"Because," I said, "someone needs to repeat small truths when we forget them."
He laughed. "And the tiger?"
"For luck," I said. "For the first shaky stitches that made other stitches possible."
The court still burns with the same human heat. People rise and fall in soft and cruel ways. But the lake where I nearly drowned—its stone edge smooth with time—stills the wind differently now. Once, when I was very small, I thought I would always need permission to breathe. Now I know how to take a breath without asking.
At the end, when I thread the needle and pull a silent line through a robe, I remember a verse Kalani loved: small things become legacies when kept with care.
My hands move. The parrot tips his head. The tiger charm rests on the window. The court murmurs, but I have learned to listen only to those I trust. I have learned that being small can be a weapon and a mercy, and that sometimes saving a life begins with something as small as a stitched tiger or a whispered truth at a council table.
When the parade passes at festival, I watch from the balcony where the emperor once stood and think of Cassandra on the day she was stripped of silk and name. The crowd had been thirsty for a sight, and it had been fed. For months after, I would wake with the taste of that day in my mouth and wonder if justice had been served or if it had simply dressed itself as spectacle.
"Did you ever want more?" the young heir asked me that night as candles guttered.
"Sometimes," I said. "But I wanted peace more."
"Then keep it," he said. "Teach my sons the names of the people who do the work. Teach them to untie knots."
"I will," I said, and this time there was no lie.
I have sewn many robes since then. I have stitched for princes and for ministers, for joys and for funerals. I have kept a place for kindness in a house that values rank above compassion. I have watched women be crowned and be cut down. I have seen the emperors rise and sink like tides. I have learned to be the needle—small, useful, and sometimes sharp enough to hold the pieces together.
At the very end of my years, when the parrot repeats the phrase "You are loved" at odd moments and the younger children ask about the crooked tiger charm, I tell them the truth: that the palace is a place of broken promises and strange loyalties, that kindness can be bought and bought back, but also that small acts—giving bread, tying a hem, telling the truth—can change a life.
"It is not an ending," I say to the boy who listened. "It is a sewing."
The boy nods, and the parrot whistles. The lotus by the old garden pond still opens on warm mornings, and sometimes I walk to that edge and remember the cold water and the prince's hand that caught me. Sometimes I still feel the grip of the stone that tripped me. But mostly I feel the thread in my fingers, and the slow, steady comfort of making things whole.
The End
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