Sweet Romance13 min read
The Morning After the Wedding: Gold Pins, Palace Jokes, and Quiet Promises
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I woke up slow and late the day after our wedding.
"You're finally awake," Hannah said, giggling as she nudged me toward the bronze mirror.
Her hair smelled faintly of jasmine. She moved like someone used to careful hands and quick fingers.
"Which jewelry do you want, madam—no, wife?" she asked, cheeks pink from holding back laughter.
I blinked at the mirror. My hair was already being lifted into a basic bun by small, practiced fingers. The powder on my face still felt like sleep.
Phoenix stood beside me the way he had stood at the hall the night before—steady, calm, and strangely solemn. He stepped closer and spoke like a man who had rehearsed politeness.
"Why not the filigree ruby set?" he asked. "It will match the gilded camellia hairpin I gave you."
I turned the hairpin over in my palm. It was heavy in the way gold is heavy, and it held the warm smell of his hands from when he had given it to me.
"Are you trying to make me wear your gift every hour?" I teased.
"Not at night," he said at once. "Take it out before you sleep. You must not scratch our little one—" He stopped himself, then smiled as if he'd allowed a secret to escape. "—Ah, before the child arrives."
Hannah and the other women muffled laughter behind cupped hands. I flushed a bit and scowled at Phoenix.
"Am I offended?" I said.
He leaned in, soft and sure, and kissed the hollow under my cheekbone—light as a bird's wing.
"Are you angry, Deanna?" he asked, trying for a mock repentant tone.
"I am not," I said, though his lips had already undone me.
"Then allow me to draw your brows to proper shape as penance," he said, as if he might have been a court painter instead of a general.
I watched my reflection as he worked. His fingers were large and careful. He laughed when his hand brushed mine.
"I always knew my wife had the best face," he whispered. "No one can measure it."
Later that day, because of the match called for by his household and my family's formal gift, we had to go to the palace to pay respects to the Empress Dowager.
The palace was a place of breathless light and chilled marble. We bowed in the heavy hall. The Emperor, Sergio, happened to be there and he seemed in a good humor.
"A little joke from the other day," he said, smiling, "the Noble Consort told me here is a young man of talent, and she heard he has a sister—would she make a fine concubine?"
I started—unprepared for the casual way a man's life could be spoken of like property.
Before I could find any reply, Phoenix knelt down with practiced speed.
"Your Majesty, I thank the Noble Consort for her praise," he said. "But my temper is sharp, my ways are blunt. I am no keeper of comfort. I would not darken the life of another."
My heart thudded in my throat. I sank to the ground beside him out of habit, because that is what wives did there.
The Emperor's voice flickered. "Is he blunt, or is she intolerant?" he asked, with a half laugh.
I looked up, surprised, and answered in a voice steadier than I felt.
"If His Majesty knows that I am jealous by nature, why tease us so?"
The Empress Dowager watched with eyes like flint softened by memory. "The Emperor need not be the villain," she said in a tone both fond and amused. "I raised you two. I have seen you grow. Do Emperor and Empress really need me to divide them?"
Sergio smiled, easing the sting out of his words. "I only jest," he said.
When we left the palace with gifts like small suns in our hands and the carriage rolled away, I asked Phoenix quietly, "Was that a test or a joke?"
He wrapped his arm around my waist and kissed the top of my head.
"Either," he said. "Either way, you need not mind. The Dowager's word sorts the rest."
We rode through the city slower than before, because there were smiles to answer and bows to accept. And in the softer dark of our carriage, Phoenix reached down under my skirt with a warm, searching hand.
He moved with the practiced boldness of a soldier and the tenderness of a man who had read too many poems in the quiet nights. I bit my lip and tried to hold my breath, half out of habit and half out of something I could not yet name.
"Deanna," he whispered, "do not worry about the court or the loud mouths. Everything is mine to shelter."
"Outside," I murmured, because I remembered the rules of the world.
He hesitated. The hand stopped. Then he breathed out, "I won't move. Let me hold you, just for a moment."
"I was thinking of the court," I admitted, voice small.
"Then stop thinking," he answered.
He had always been many things: a soldier known for skill with the sword, an uneven scholar of the classics, a man who could read a weathered map and know what storm came next. I had known this when our match was first proposed. What I had not known was how he would be in the slow rooms of the night—how certain and warm he would be.
"You're not kind in small ways," I told him once, resolving to be honest.
And yet, in small ways he showed me care, like a man who had forgotten to be tender but worked at it until it came right.
When morning returned and we were back in his house, he half-lifted my chin and said, "It's late. You should rest, Deanna."
I closed my book and looked at him. He had slipped into a white robe—again so soft and close to the way dusk falls on a bed of feathers—that it made my heart do a curious thing.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"A drink," he said. "But someone spiked it."
He set the cups down as if the thought hurt him more than it would have if they were brick.
"Who would do that?" I breathed.
Phoenix's voice grew husky. "Someone wished me dull," he said. "But then—" He reached out and pulled me down, seizing my mouth with his.
"Say what you think," he said against my lips. "Like when I taught you to fence. Say it. Say whatever you hide."
"I—" My body answered before my mind. "We are married now," I told him.
He laughed in a low, dangerous way.
"Then be mine in truth," he said. "Not only in title."
There was a time I would have fought him off. There was a time I would have pressed my hands against his chest and pushed him away. That first night we had been pressed together in ways that taught me that he wanted to own my skin as if it were a map to his homeland.
But not all maps are cruel. He had the gentlest violence I had ever known.
"You are strong," I confessed after, fingers curled in his robe. "You have always been more than you let others see."
He drew me closer. "And you are stubborn," he said. "Do you know that?"
"I know you are unafraid of good things," I murmured. "And that you are afraid, in small hours, of losing them."
He laughed softly. "Then I will guard."
He did guard. He found small ways to be near me even when we visited other houses. He would place his hand over mine when tea was poured. The servants saw it and pretended not to, but servants see everything.
Once, when my mother—Eleanor—was fussing about my hair at breakfast, she made a face.
"Who did this? You look like a child with hair on wrong sides," she scolded.
"It's his work," I admitted. "He tried."
Phoenix's pride fell in a theatrical way. "Very well," he said. "I will learn then. I will study hair as I studied the blade."
He took lessons from the city's marriage hairdresser, the same kind who built entire reputations out of combs and pins. He practiced in our room while the moon learned a new face each night.
It became a small war of skill: he learned new styles, Hannah fussed and played the critic, and I sometimes pretended I didn't notice when he re-did my bun for the third time.
The winter thawed to a late spring, and one morning I woke green and pale and felt a faint, sudden sickness. I told no one at first.
Phoenix called for the household physician without delay. The man pressed his fingers to my pulse and looked up.
"There's the pregnancy pulse," he said, like a verdict that made the room spin.
Everything changed like a page turning. Phoenix's face caught as if light had been trapped in a bowl.
"Are you sure?" I asked, because it still felt like a rumor.
"Yes," he said softly. "We are to have a child."
For the first time, I saw him falter like a man who had been told he had to be more than he had practiced being. He dropped to one knee and held my waist like a promise.
"I never thought we would reach this," he said. "I never imagined—"
"Then imagine," I told him, because it felt wondrous even in my own simple chest.
We planned small things like the name of our son, though the child was not yet a son. He pressed his lips to my hand and laughed like a boy. His joy had edges of something like fear, but he wrapped it in the sheerst warmth.
When he spoke about my brother Benjamin, he did so with a different softness.
"Do you want to know how your brother and that girl are?" he asked one evening, when the house smelled of stew.
"Tell me," I said.
He took my hand and led me to the courtyard wall. We climbed the banyan to stand like thieves upon the roof tiles.
Below, my brother Benjamin stood like a man waiting for fate to come claim him. He was a measured man, not quick to smiles. He had hands that could sign papers and lift flags; he tended to the family affairs, and in the city he seemed carved of reason.
Opposite him, Viktoria looked small and raw but steady. Her shoulders carried a kind of apology to the wind. Her face was honest as rainwater.
"Do you see them?" Phoenix asked.
"I do," I said. "He looks strange—like someone learning to be gentle."
Benjamin took a white jade pin from his pocket and set it into Viktoria's hair. She went red as summer fruit and tried to bow away.
"You will think this is a play?" Benjamin asked when I later demanded the truth.
"Maybe I did," I admitted. "Because you always act as if you have no heart."
He smiled once, a slow way he had. "She was hidden on my land," he said. "Her name was sullied. Her father wishes her to marry an old man for favor. I could not allow it."
"Then you chose to marry her?" I asked. The surprise in my voice was real.
"Yes," he said. "Because it was the right thing. Or perhaps because I could not stand being the reason she was ruined and then ignored."
"Benjamin—" I stepped forward, tongue tripping. I had thought him a man of ceremony more than sentiment. This was new.
He lifted Viktoria's chin and spoke to her as if to a prize no one had understood. "I will take care of the noises they make," he said. "I will be your name in the court when theirs has no honor."
When Benjamin declared his intent openly, there was a stir the way a wind stirs a paper lamp. Families came in with indignant voices. The Dowager's small court whispered, and someone said a harsh thing.
"You deceive us," Viktor's father might have cried, or so the rumors went. But I do not like repeating other people's nastiness. Instead I remember the scene in the courtyard: Benjamin removing a bit of shame with the white pin, Viktoria pressing a hand to her mouth to hold back tears, the way a leaf might finally let go.
After that, when Benjamin married Viktoria with little fanfare at our house, Phoenix was as light as a swallow.
"Do you see her?" he asked me later in the night, sliding his arm around my waist.
"I do," I said. "She looks like someone who survived much."
"And you will be my comfort," he said. "Will you let me do that?"
"Yes," I said. "As long as you keep being gentle."
He leaned his head against mine. "Then begin by learning to be jealous in better ways. Learn to show it only like a feather, not a storm."
We had more small days of peace after that—tea in the mornings, letters from the Empress with slanting compliments, long walks when the sun decided our schedules.
One winter, during the New Year's thaw, I began to step oddly. There was a quiet unease that no powdered face could hide.
I told no one. Hannah noticed and raised a soft alarm. Phoenix ordered the doctors as if they were soldiers to come and mend a broken fence. He did not lose his composure outwardly, but at night he paced like a man who had learned new routes across the earth.
When the physician confirmed what Hannah had suspected first—and what I had let hide like a secret in my ribs—I felt the house tilt in a good way.
"It's a baby," he said. "A strong pulse. Keep quiet. Rest."
The news traveled faster than a sparrow on a gust. Phoenix laughed, and then he cried, and then he promised the ceiling things about being a father that were almost childish in their wonder.
We started to prepare. We stowed extra quilts. We read old manuals of family etiquette with the bemused air of people learning a new language. Phoenix took to tying sash knots with new tenderness and re-teaching Hannah how to arrange rice in the proper bowl.
There was a night some months later when the wind was a soft thief through the paper windows and Phoenix came in like a gust with a handful of small gifts—little toys shaped from carved wood, a tiny silver bell to hang over baby's cradle.
"Do you like them?" he asked, trying to keep the sound of his own voice from slipping.
"They are rough," I said, because wood was not like the silk of a court robe.
"They are ours," he answered, and the word sounded like it would hold the house up.
The court's voice, however, never fully quieted. Once, in the middle of our slow happy days, I heard a rumor ripple like a loose thread.
"She cannot keep the house," one woman said in a whisper that meant to be kind. "The daughter-in-law will misplace things."
Such words cut like small knives because they are meant to find a place of weakness. I took Phoenix's hand and he tightened his fingers.
"Tell me who said it," he demanded.
"It was only—" I began.
"No," he said. "Bring them forth. I will hear a mouth that speaks of you."
But he was not one for blood. He was one for standing in front and shielding; he did not make public spectacles of private slights.
He did, however, make a small scene when the person who had sown the rumor came to the house. He invited the woman into the room where the maids were folding cloth. Phoenix sat opposite her, and the air grew thin.
"Why speak of my wife so?" he asked.
The woman blinked, taken aback by a man who did not raise his voice but whose eyes were like a net.
"I only said—" she tried.
"You said she could not keep the house," Phoenix repeated. "Why?"
The woman mumbled reasons that had no strength. "She is slight," she offered. "She is young. She has no experience."
"She will learn," Phoenix said. "And when she makes a mistake, we will teach her, not hide behind gossip."
People watched as the woman's defense melted, not with raw humiliation but with the cold discovery that a lie had no friend in that room.
She left without her head held, and the servants laughed a little, relieved. It was not a great punishment. But it was public enough to warn those who might whisper again.
When our child moved for the first time—when a small flutter answered a late-night song—Phoenix and I held our breath and listened with mouths wide.
"Did you feel that?" he whispered.
"Yes," I said. "It is like a small bird within me."
He laughed, then covered his face with his hands as if to hide the tenderness.
"You are my heart," he said, in a voice that was of the world and not of the court.
I pushed his hand down and found his eyes. I wanted to keep him in a pocket. I wanted to keep the memory of this man right here, pressed like a leaf in a book of simple things.
The weeks slid forward and then, one day, I was ready. The room was full of lamplight and the scent of warm broth. There was a hand at my head and a hand holding mine.
Phoenix refused to leave my side. I was delirious with pain and joy, and at times I could not tell which was which.
"Do not go," I begged, and he did not.
The child came like a whisper and cried like a small bell. He was not large, but he was mine. I felt him as if the world had redistributed its weight.
Phoenix leaned forward and kissed the baby's head until the air hummed.
"He is ours," he said simply. "Ours."
The courtyard rang with soft laughter, and Hannah cried in a corner, holding a bundle of clean cloth as though it were treasure.
In the weeks after, I watched the house learn the balance of a new life. Visitors came with polite smiles. The Empress Dowager sent a small folded handkerchief embroidered with a camellia. Phoenix taught the baby to grasp a finger, to find comfort in the sound of a voice that had become steady.
There were jealous moments still, small and human. Once, when Phoenix watched my brother deliver a speech, he said, "Do you admire him?"
"Sometimes," I answered. "He is steady."
Phoenix's mouth twisted. "Not enough to make you look at him like that," he said, in a tone both teasing and sharp.
"Phoenix," I said, and he looked up like a man who had been caught in a child's game.
"Forgive me," he said. "I was being foolish."
I forgave him, easily, because he learned.
Not every night was a calm return to the same bed. Sometimes he left for months on campaign. Each time he came back, he brought news, documents, a small carved toy for the child, and a kiss that made my breath stop.
When trouble came—not great, not the kind that takes kingdoms, but the kind that can twist the edges of quiet lives—it came through the city like rain.
An old rival's remark slipped into the market. Someone else wished to claim a small advantage. Benjamin had eyes like a ledger and refused to be drawn into petty fights. But Phoenix saw that someone had touched my name and moved without a shout.
He brought the matter to the floor of his hall and resolved it so that the others could only laugh like embarrassed children.
"How do you always find a way?" I asked once, when he had returned late and the household was asleep.
"By not losing the small things," he replied. "By keeping them warm."
There were days when I would stand by the window and watch him train with swordsmen. He moved like a poem of motion. His smile then was rare and dazzling.
"Do you delight in this?" I asked once.
"In this, or in you?" he answered, and then he actually smiled.
It is a simple thing to admit: I loved how he learned to braid my hair like someone learning patience. I loved how he tucked the blanket over my knees. I loved how once, at a festival, when the lanterns were being lit and a careless boy knocked into me, he reached out and put his arm around my waist as if the world were about to spill and he would keep me.
"I never did this for anyone else," he said once. "Only you."
Those small pronouncements were not shallow. They were the days he painted with his hands.
At times I would watch my brother Benjamin and his wife Viktoria. They would walk like two people stitched into a strange tapestry. Benjamin would carry Viktoria's basket, and Viktoria would watch him like a woman who had read too much sorrow and decided to stop.
One day at the market, a woman who had once mocked Viktoria stumbled and spilled her wares. Without thinking, Viktoria helped her up. The crowd saw it and softened.
"See?" Benjamin said proudly, when he told us. "Kindness has more gravity than pride."
The court had softened too. Our house became known less for alliances and more for the way it held quiet cares. People came with grudges and left with bread.
I kept small tokens. A letter from the Empress Dowager sat folded like a lover's note. Phoenix kept the camellia hairpin somewhere he could see. Benjamin had his jade pin polished regularly.
"Will you leave it to the child someday?" I asked Phoenix once, meaning the pin.
"For a while," he said, "then he will have to choose his keepsakes."
"Teach him to be gentle," I told him.
"I will," he promised. "I will teach him to kiss the world like it is fragile."
That—simple and human—was the truth of us. We lived in a house where the wind sometimes slammed the shutters and the rain sometimes soaked the rice, but the meals were warm and the laughters were honest.
I will not tell you that everything was perfect. There were nights when old fears returned. There were whispers from distant halls that our household was growing too soft. There were men who would measure power in old ways, who would rather have sun than a child.
But we kept our small rebellions: we kissed on roofs, we braided hair wrongly on purpose, we taught the child to clap for the moon.
And each day, when I stood before the bronze mirror, Phoenix would come and knead the knot out of my brow with the same gentleness he used on my hair.
"Are you happy?" he asked once.
"Yes," I said. "I am."
He smiled then, like a man who had found what he had been looking for without knowing it.
"I will guard this spring," he said, "and every spring that comes."
Outside, the rain softened to a lullaby. The camellia pin lay in my palm, heavy with his giving. The court laughed when it must. The Empress Dowager sent one more folded cloth with a careful stitch. The baby slept like a bell in the hush of the house.
We were married, truly, not only in name, and each small thing we learned made the world kinder. I learned that a man's strength can be the shelter for a thousand small joys.
I kept my eyes on Phoenix as he read the lines of a letter and then looked up to where I sat by the window.
"Come," he said simply, hand outstretched.
I put the camellia back in my hair.
"All right," I answered. "I'll go."
The End
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