Sweet Romance17 min read
The Princess, the Cold Commander, and the Half-Pearl Promise
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"I call the stakes!" I shouted, fingers still sparkling with stolen coins as I pounded the wooden table. "Put down what you have. Buy or fold, quickly—I'm opening!"
My voice bounced off the embroidered curtains of my chamber and into the night. The attendants around the table—girls and boys with practiced faces—played along with the ritual. They had played it every night for weeks, turning my private hall into a laughing, rowdy den where I preyed on boredom and boredom's price: jingling silver and flimsy trinkets.
"Princess Avery," Gary Stewart whimpered, clinging to the last piece of jade at the edge of the table. He was as loyal as any ancient eunuch could be, eyes already wet with the knowledge that the jade would be mine. "I only have this one ornament left…"
"Spare me," I tossed the jade onto the table with the casual cruelty of someone who had been rescued into fortune once and had never learned to be gentle. "Buy or step aside. Buy or step aside…"
"Princess—" Judy Kaiser began, but I was already shaking the cup with the bones, the clatter punctuating the room like a drumroll. I smashed it down. The result was mine; I who had been called lucky since childhood, who had once changed the family's fate with a single prophecy, who had learned to wear my fortune like armor.
"A four-five-six big!" I crowed. "Ha! Again."
The muffled grumbles of the chamber's little world warmed my chest. I liked winning. I liked the way the room bent toward me when I smiled and the way the girls and boys looked guilty and softened. The court called me capricious, erratic, dangerous. I called myself alive.
Night came and the laughter ebbed. "Princess, the bath is prepared," Judy said softly, clearing away the coins as if they were crumbs.
"I'll go," I said, curling my fingers around the hem of a robe. "Send everyone away. Tell no one."
When at last the chamber emptied and the warm steam rose from the stone pool, I breathed out and let the night settle. I was washing my hands of the day when the sound came—shouts, a scuffle, a singular wet crash—and then a man fell from the sky into my water like a fallen star.
My breath stopped. He lay there, half-submerged, armor slick with water, his dress marked with a qilin motif that screamed the name of his office before his face did. The man staggered up, head reeling, and looked at me with eyes that were both dark and stormy.
"Who dares—" Judy started, rushing in, but I silenced her with a single look.
He blinked at us as if those candles were something foreign. His hair clung to a high, noble brow. He wore the short sword of a belt and a long coat that said: I am the law. I am the north frost. He smelled like ink and damp leather.
"Who are you?" I breathed, though I already knew.
"Dante Young," he said in a voice low enough to be a warning, high enough to carry the emptiness of someone who had been carved of ice. "Commander of the Northern Watch."
I willed my face to show nothing but my usual insolence, but when he collapsed, half-limp, into the cushions, I bent forward without meaning to and studied his profile. He was beautiful the way a hand-forged blade is beautiful: dangerous, exact, with a cold light on the cheekbone that struck the same place on me that childish crushes had once hit.
"Are you a thief?" Judy demanded, hands on her hips.
"Bandits," Dante corrected, struggling to stay upright. "I chased one and—"
"And fell into my tub." I finished for him, with a grin I tried to make mischievous and not entirely flustered. "How rude. But luckily you met me. You are a guest now. We will treat you with kindness."
He blinked. "This is a private chamber. Leave."
"Do you know what 'private chamber' means?" I teased, leaning closer. My breath warmed his ear; his skin was salt-cold. "To you a room is an office. To me it is a toy chest. I rescued your life. Are you grateful?"
His eyes narrowed. "You are reckless."
"And you are damp," I said. "But that will do for tonight."
They say that people reveal themselves in crisis. First impression, second chance, the shock of water and the slipper of fate—that night began what would become because-of-you and against-you, softness and clash in the same heartbeat.
"Call the men," he said suddenly, clearly losing strength. "I must be taken to my post."
"No," I said. "You cannot leave on wet boots. Sleep on my couch. I will command it."
When the room emptied again, when the bath's steam curled like a cat's tail, he slept. I sat by him and watched the rise and fall of a chest that had once been full of lines for the dead. He was not smiling.
"Are you the cold man they speak of?" I murmured.
"Do not call me a man with words to throw beyond their intent," Dante said, eyes closed, voice a breeze. "Leave me to my sleep."
"Not before I know your name." I said it like a dare.
He opened his eyes and, for a single shard of a second, smiled. "Dante Young."
"Remember that name," I told him, rising to leave. "For one day you may serve me."
He reached for my wrist with a steady hand I mistook for weakness and pulled me to him. I stumbled into his chest and felt the beat of something that was not only duty.
"Words," he said, soft as a knife. "Think them before you say them. They can be used as weapons."
"Then use them on me," I teased, and left him with the tangle of our first impossible small contact.
The next morning I sent no birds. Instead I put on my armor of curiosity and wandered to the northern outpost where Dante worked. I had plans: to inspect, to test, to ignite interest and be taken for a dullard at my own pleasure.
"Princess Avery," his lieutenant Uri Wells said when he saw me at the threshold.
"Avery Robinson," I corrected with a flourish. "And you are in my city."
"Dante," he said. "Commander." He bowed with stiffness and a sort of shame I couldn't read.
"Lead me around," I commanded. "But leave your frown."
He grunted. "Come with me."
He showed me the prison, the docks, the quiet corridors where men confessed things they were terrified to say aloud. He explained the logistics of trade and the law, the canvas of the city's bones. He disappointed me with competence; he infuriated me by not being dazzled.
"Do you always keep this expression?" I asked.
"Always," he said.
"Try smiling," I said. "At least for me."
He did not. He picked up a prisoner by the collar and tossed him into a cell as if that answered for entertainment.
"You are cruel," I told him, unnecessarily.
"Justice is not cruelty," he replied.
"Are you a man with no softness?" I pushed.
"What makes you think I lack it?"
"Everything," I answered simply, then cleared my throat. "Today you will take me to places of interest in your fine jail. I will take note of how men fare under your eyes."
"It is not a place for a princess."
"Then it shall be," I said.
He did not say no. He had a way of not arguing that was more infuriating than yes or no. He led me.
We walked the city together. I kept stepping forward to put my hand on his sleeve in small gambits to see if he flinched, if he would pull away or if—impossibly—he would lean in. He did neither, and that became its own provocation.
"Do you always keep your hands at your sword?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. "And it keeps me alive."
"Then keep them from me," I said, and laughed, but privately it was taking shape as a game I could not resist.
There were nights I followed him like a comet, nights I pretended to be shy, nights I forced myself to be fierce. There were mornings I would wait outside the gate until dawn and shoot him a glance as he returned from some grim duty. I gave him food. I teased him into anger. He returned none of it—at least not openly. He was a frost whose edges had been burnished with sorrow and truth.
"You belong to the watch," I told him once, lowering my voice. "You are allowed hobbies. Is it stubbornness you practice, or solitude?"
He looked at me, and something in his expression broke that old glass of ice. "There was a time I had others," he said. "Then I had nothing. I learned the world does not give second chances. I make mine by not trusting it."
"You could trust me," I said, unthinking.
"Trust is a risk. I have made too many transactions with risk," he answered.
"Then let's make one more, and I will take its loss if it costs us," I replied.
He only looked at me until a bell rang off in the distance and men came running with news of crimes and secrets that refused to stay secret. Duty was always louder than promises.
Days slipped by and so did small kindnesses: a dish of rice left at his table, a remark that cut the edge of his solitude, a small handkerchief tucked into the pocket of his coat. Each one was a pebble across a stream. He did not step immediately; he only looked at the pebble and then at the shore.
There were outings that embarrassed me delightfully and enraged him quietly. Once, to rile him, I walked into a brothel remembered by the city as a place of refined entertainment—the Listening House—simply to see how Dante would react if he found me there. The manager, Javier Ortiz, bowed like a man who had pretended to be on courtly terms with everyone he had ever known. The courtesans wore veils and smiles and the air hummed like a harp. I chose a woman in red to accompany me upstairs when men with leathered hands burst in, searching.
In the rush, one of their captors landed across the floor like a storm, and the red-clad woman screamed and then went limp. Dante had come—silent and precise—his hand covering her mouth in a professional motion. For a heartbeat he and I were cornered in a divided intimacy: his body between discovery and ruin, my body a curtain over the image men would misread.
We lay there under quilts, pretending to be lovers in distress. It was a lie—yet when his mouth brushed mine in the stolen, strategic kiss that kept the hands outside the door from prying too far, it was electric and true. The sound of our lips was soft, the world tumbling out of focus as something younger than sense took hold.
"Stay still," he whispered, and for once I obeyed.
When the search passed, and I had pushed men out with a smile that said 'find nothing,' Dante rose like a wolf brushing off rain: cold, predatory, and, bafflingly, almost tender.
"You shouldn't have done that," he said.
"You'd have liked it if I had been found," I countered.
He gave a half-smile that was almost a crack. "You are reckless."
"You're enchanted," I said.
He did not say it back, but later, when we sat across from each other with the city like an ocean around us, his fingers brushed mine while they both reached for a cup. It was the smallest theft of a kingdom.
"You're the first man to smuggle dignity into my life since my childhood," I said once, which was true in its clumsy way. He shrugged like one who had not rehearsed an answer.
"You flatter," he said. "But it will not be enough to stop me from doing what I must."
"What do you do when someone insults me?" I asked one evening, watching him roll the hilt of his dagger between fingers. "Because people insult me as a sport. I have been trained to reply with the sharpness of my tongue, but I have never learned the art of being hurt."
He was quiet for a long time. Then he took my hand and, to my infinite shock, placed his coat over my shoulders though night air had long ago lost its bite.
"Small kindnesses change things," he said simply.
My heart, traitorous as ever, rearranged itself.
There was a night, though, that would bruise everything like something inevitable. During a public banquet where nobles leaned in like vultures and the music swelled just to hide the tension of knives, a blade was thrown by Estrella Anderson—my rival in gowns and influence. She was the quiet sort of enemy who smiled at courtly rituals and then tightened ropes behind doors. That night she made a careless whisper into a drink and a malicious suggestion into the ears of the wrong people: that Dante Young had a marriage arrangement.
"My dearest," she said, loud enough, like a cat batting a string, "you are foolish to toss your heart at a man pledged to wed. A commander must keep one's promises."
The words landed in the hall like stones. People tittered. Kingpins of rumor leaned forward. King and queen glanced up. I froze. Not because of the accusation—oh, I had feared worse—but because the rumor had teeth. That rumor, whether true or not, was a furnace of ridicule aimed at me.
"Is this true?" I asked Dante, voice small in a way I never used.
He answered with a word like a blade: "Yes."
Everything quieted. Questions rose like rats. People whispered about my foolishness. I walked out of the hall with wet cheeks because I could not bring myself to perform outrage for those who had turned my life into spectacle while sipping wine.
At my chambers, I gripped my token—the half of the pearl I had split long ago—and remember how it sounded less like jewelry and more like a promise. I had given the other half to him as a test. Now I wanted it back.
"Bring Dante Young the half-pearl," I told Judy, not willing to wear the face of a woman resigned to defeat.
Judy came back like a comet with news. "He refuses," she said. "Says he'll not return it yet. Says it matters less to him."
I burned with a cold that had nothing to do with the night.
I decided, then and there, to act like the woman I had trained myself to be. To be the one people whispered to fear. I arranged small public maneuvers, paid visits, sent people out to learn the edges of his story. I learned that the marriage arrangement had existed—an old thing between houses—but also that it had been in the process of being ended. I learned that Dante had tried to break it but that the other family—a salt merchant clan from Rong—had refused to drop their hold on a promise they believed had been made.
"Was he going to marry?" I asked timidly.
"Yes," Ivy—no, Uri Wells said. "Yes, he had a pledge. But he tried to release it. They won't let him."
"Then," I decided aloud, "we will let them let it."
"How?" asked Judy.
"By making them look ridiculous," I said, eyes bright with a new weapon: sincerity. "By proving he's mine without courtly lies."
I went to the market and found a soothsayer, an old man with yellowed paper and hands that had read too many palms for too little gold. Traders, sobbing widows, and small children sat in a circle to hear my question. I wrote one character—'fate'—and placed it on the table.
"Will he be mine?" I asked, though the old man squinted and said nothing.
He said: "You meet, you keep, you lose, you keep—unfold the thread." His words were airy, but they were a string that I would tug tight.
At dusk, I walked under the old pear tree by the palace gate where I'd once sat waiting for a messenger who came late and later never. I waited. I looked at the gate. I rehearsed the line I would not say, the one that would make me look like a woman of sense rather than a fool.
"Tonight," I whispered to myself, "I will see what he hides."
He came at the time of the hour when deer go quiet. He climbed the tree with the ease of a man who did not fear risk. He reached the branch like a rook comfortable on its stone. I let him fall into my arms as if nothing could surprise me more.
"Why did you not come?" I asked.
"Because I feared the consequences of my coming," he said. "Because I feared I could not keep my head in a court and keep my heart in a pocket."
"What do you want," I pressed, not knowing if I wanted the truth or the pretense.
"To be with you," he said.
"Then prove it."
"How?"
"Make them see. Tell them yourself. Quit the promise. Leave the farce."
He was quiet for a long time. The birds muted. "I will handle it," he said at last. "But not by words alone."
We kissed then, under a sky that knew our names and refused to care. He pressed his forehead to mine like a soldier asking for pardon.
"I will fight what is tangled for you," he said quietly. "I will make it right."
When we returned to the city, the war that raged was quieter and sharper. Evidence got found. A clerk in a merchant house told us that the Rong family's claim was weak and built on vanity. His name was Uri Wells, a flag officer who had respect for me now not only as a princess but as an ally. We contrived meetings with voices in whispers and hands that passed sealed letters.
There was a night—one that I had dreamed of—when I stood in a hall where important men sat like a small mosaic of fate, and Dante stood behind me in a way that felt like protection. I spoke the truth and then the proof: letters and cancelled promises and witnesses who came forward with fear and shame. The Rong family's emissary, who had visited the court with shimmering robes, grew small as the facts stacked like coins.
Estrella Anderson—the woman who had sought to humiliate me—sat at a table across the hall. Her smile was gone when the truth fell like a net. I stepped forward with a calm that had been forged in nightly plotting.
"Estrella," I said, loud enough that even the chandeliers seemed to listen. "You have sown falsehoods and fed them to the court like a poison. Because of your lies tonight, you risk not only my name but the peace of my city. Why did you speak at the feast, if not to see me stumble?"
Her face shifted with something like fear and disbelief. "I only spoke of what was true," she said.
"Then explain why the man you quoted—our commander—has official papers of release, a signed statement that the engagement was to be dissolved, and a witness who says your claim was a rumor handed to you by merchants seeking favor?" I asked.
There was a murmur. Men leaned forward like tidal water. Estrella's color left her.
Then, in front of that same assembly, Dante stepped forward and produced the second half of the pearl—clean and real—and placed it in my palm. The room exhaled something that sounded like relief.
"You said something else at the banquet," he said, voice now steady like a drum. "You said it as a fact, Estrella. You sought to wound this young woman's heart publicly. I will not let the court be the ground for your malice."
"What is your claim?" someone called.
"I will strip her of her courtesy in the palace and demand public apology," I said in a voice I had concentrated like steel. "And demand that the family of Rong answer why they have insisted on holding a contract the groom had signed to release."
The chamber hummed. Men shuffled. Estella rose, finally—pale, cruel, and then collapsing into a whimper.
"You pitied," she said, voice cracking. "You think I sought to…"
At that precise moment a young clerk came in with a confession: she had been paid to lie. She said the name of the merchant who paid her. The merchant cowered. The house of Rong turned to ash in the court. Estella stared, the last window closing on her stage.
I had imagined this scene often. I had thought of the tribunal, the slow unthreading of lies, the people who would applaud. But nothing had prepared me for the way the crowd twisted into a presence that ate you alive in a way even victory could not soften.
I stepped forward and asked for an audience in the courtyard the next morning, under the pear tree where I had waited and where our secret had first leaned into daylight. I demanded that Estella explain herself, in front of everyone the court could gather: officers, merchants, maids, eunuchs, and the women who wore veils and fanned themselves with costly boredom.
When the day arrived, the courtyard swelled until it was a sea of faces. Dante stood to my right. The Prime Minister—Ambrosio Davidson—was there, as were the commander of the East Office, Gavan Green, and the house steward Javier Ortiz. Even the queen—Ellen Klein—watched with a face like a slow tide.
I called out in a voice that steadied my hands. "Estella Anderson, come forward."
She came like a dog, eyes darting, cheeks burning not with red but with the particular gray of shame. She had expected whispers behind fans. She had expected groups who would murmur and let the gossip evaporate. She had not expected to be placed under a sky.
"Estella," I said, walking closer until I could see the moisture where she had once painted herself into arrogance. "You accused a man of a promise he had released, you fed the court with rumor, and you tried to turn a whole hall into a laughing stock. Tell us why."
Her mouth opened and closed. The crowd leaned in—their own hunger was a roar.
"I—" she started. "I thought—"
"You were paid," someone from the back said. "You asked for favor with the minister."
She looked over at Gavan Green, trying to place a brow of innocence like a shield. He did not flinch.
"You expected the court to adopt your story as gospel," Ambrosio said. "Tell us what you were given."
"Money… influence… a promise of placement," she stammered. "They said the Rong family would support my—"
"Who?" I demanded.
There was silence like a held breath. She named a name and then another: names of men who had patronized her before and after. They looked away like thieves in daylight. The crowd was now a jury in the purest sense: a crowd that wanted exposure.
I unfolded the punishment I had planned—because in this kingdom words alone would leak and leave wounds. The punishment I designed would be public and would strip away her carefully constructed power.
"Estella," I said, loud and clear. "From this day you will be stripped of your honorary salon's privileges. Your name will be removed from all lists of court entertainments. You will publicly retract your falsehood at the steps of the courtyard where the insult was made. You will apologize before the men and women you set against my honor. You will give the sum you were paid to the family's orphanage your patron promised to help, and you will, for three days, stand in the market square and receive the scorn of those you offended, while the city watches. You will not be shielded by any of your old friends."
I saw her eyes flash—then sink. "You want me to be humiliated," she said, voice thin.
"Yes," I answered. "Public humiliation is a form of justice when lies are dressed as truth and given to the powerless to cut. You will feel how words carve."
People around the courtyard reacted. Some clapped. Some murmured. Some took out paper and ink and recorded the proceedings, eager to see the fall of a woman who had thought herself untouchable.
Estella's reaction moved like an arc I had planned to witness: the bright color of triumph, the pale smear of dread, the quick denial, the lie, the recognition, the collapse.
"You're playing cruel," she said, trying for indignation.
"Am I?" I asked. "Or am I returning the cruelty you gave others?"
She doubled down. "You are the princess. You have favor. I am nothing."
The crowd hissed. I stepped in, because I had learned how to do this: make shame a mirror and make the mirror impossibly clear.
"You are exactly what you have been: someone who used lies as currency. Now you will make amends."
She shuffled her feet, and the courtyard air tasted like iron and cotton. Then her face broke. She tried to cry, but there were no supportive hands. Her friends withdrew. The men who had once nodded in her favor looked away, some with the weakest of pity.
"I will not," she said at last, voice cracking. "Please—"
"Then let the court decide," Dante said suddenly, voice like thunder after quiet rain. He had waited, as always, to gather details, to have facts. He said, "I will strip her of any official favor she holds within the palace. Her salon will be closed. Her patrons will be told to refrain. Those men who paid her to lie will be called to account."
He pronounced the verdict with a calm that left little room for appeal, and in that moment I watched the last of Estella's color drain. She moved from overblown power to a husk of menace, paraded and then abandoned. I watched her go through stages that were searing to me even as a planner—pride, surprise, small lies, denial, anger, pleading, then the slow collapse into silence. People hissed, some took out fans and began to clap. Others recorded the humiliation on their small legal slates.
When she finally crumpled—no arrest, no violence, just the steady removal of support and honor—her public face changed: the smile had been replace by the hollow of someone who had misread the human appetite for spectacle and shown them a feast. Her pride was the thing that broke the loudest.
Afterward the courtyard buzzed for days. The merchants took bets on whether Estella would return to curry favor. People queued to say they had seen her humbled. Her servants were reassigned. Her patrons muttered. She tried to salvage dignity by offering a public apology, but it sounded like the scraping of paper. The children at the charity I supported were given coin from the sum she had to give. The city, as hungry towns do, had its appetite satisfied.
Dante watched silently as I spoke and commanded. When it was over, he took my hand and we walked home under the old pear tree where we had first confessed.
"You made her feel small," he said, not accusing but stating an observation like a fact.
"She made me feel small first," I replied.
"You are not small," he said.
"You will not be 'not small' because you call it so," I teased.
"Then you will stay my size," he said, suddenly and carefully very soft.
I laughed because I could not help it. We sat under the boughs as night wrapped the city and felt for the first time wholly unafraid of being tender.
"Promise?" I asked, leaning my head on his shoulder.
"Promise," he said, in a voice that finally clung to the shape of being human.
We kissed as a promise and not as a game. The world could gossip, could judge, could invent cruel fictions, but under the pear tree that night the two halves of the pearl sat on my palm and matched in a way that had nothing to do with court law and everything to do with the small, private treaty of two people who had chosen each other.
"Keep it safe," he said, pressing his forehead to mine.
"I will," I whispered. "Because I've learned to keep only the things that matter."
"No more games?" he asked, half-smile and half-dawn.
"No more games," I replied, meaning it and meaning more.
We walked back to the palace—hands locked. The city had forgiven me publicly, in part because justice had been served and in part because I had learned how to be a leader with a heart. Dante had turned out to be a man who could wield a sword and a soft word with equal measure. He had been my cold commander, my redeemer, my element of stoic warmth. That night, under the pear tree, he proved what he could be.
From that day on, I let my wildness live beside his quiet. I sat by him in council and laughed at his stern faces. He learned to hide my scarf in the folds of his coat, to be gentle when a boy trembled under his judgment. I learned to trust a man who had once vowed to trust no one.
Later, when morning would come and the court would sharpen its tines against us again, we would stand together—and the half-pearl lay warm in my palm, exactly where it should be.
The End
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