Sweet Romance14 min read
The Red-Bean Lantern and the Promise I Made
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I still remember the first time I saw her, small and stubborn and entirely unbothered by the rules everyone else thought mattered.
"We have to see her," Boston said, tugging at my sleeve. "They say the Taifu brought back a girl. Song's wife."
"Song's wife?" I barked a laugh. "A child married already? Come on."
"But what if she is interesting?" Boston's eyes gleamed with that same foolish curiosity we all shared as boys.
We went in a pack and stayed at the gate until Cornelius Shaw ushered us in with a grim look. Song's boy fled when he saw us. Coward.
"We won't be loud," Boston promised, but we never kept that kind of promise.
In the courtyard, she was practicing hands and feet—at least that was what it looked like—and then she slipped and sat down with a tiny thud. She blinked, got up, and kept going like nothing happened.
"She won't cry," Boston declared. "She is not a crybaby."
I had my doubts, but when she turned and faced us—small, round-faced, the hair on her forehead soft as fuzz—I thought, Why is she the bride? Why is she his wife?
"Hey!" I called, because that is what we did. We called out when we saw something interesting.
She didn't run. She just crossed her arms and glared.
"Are you the little bride?" Boston teased.
She stamped her foot. "I'm Everlee."
"Everlee?" I repeated. The name felt right on her. "Where did Song find you?"
She stuck out a chin. "Cornelius brought me. I was practicing because I like to be strong."
I wanted to take that stubborn little hand and keep it. I didn't know why then. I only knew that she annoyed me and delighted me both.
Years moved fast in a way I didn't notice until they didn't anymore. She kept appearing at the window of the school room, not to listen to the teacher but to watch Song. Song acted like a prince who had been given the crown but had lost the will to rule. Cold, small, and always on the wrong side of kind.
Once, the teacher caught Everlee wearing a boy's robe, her hair tied in a tiny knot. She'd been hanging upside down from the wall to frighten people. When the teacher asked whose apprentice she was, Song retreated silently. I stepped forward.
"She's mine," I wanted to say. Before I could, Everlee pointed at a passing bird and the teacher turned and the moment she moved she slipped away. She had a talent for disappearing that made me laugh and sharpened my curiosity.
We argued about her joining our band of mischief-makers. We planned to teach her how to steal bird eggs and climb trees. But before we could make her one of us, she changed. She softened. She learned to speak like someone who had read books and to hide the wildness that had been her charm.
I was not pleased. I wanted the girl who could climb the gate and fight back. I wanted a person who would match me for mischief and laughter. But she drew away, and like everyone else I let the world push her small figure into the corner of my view.
Then my world changed. My parents died and the great house felt empty. I grew into the title I was given and learned the knives and masks of the court. I thought I wanted to be safe. I thought I wanted to be feared. But none of that stopped the way that memory of Everlee kept showing up in quiet moments.
"She would have filled the house with noise," I told nobody one night, touching the dent in the table where my father used to put a cup.
"She'd have been trouble," Boston said. "Good trouble."
It was foolish, but I visited Song's house often after that. Song married Everlee as arranged; the day of their wedding I did not go. I stayed drinking until the floor and I were tired of each other.
Later, Song grew worse. I saw him once in an alley with another woman. His face when he saw me was not guilt; it was a small, furious surprise as if he'd been caught stealing a plum from his own garden. I learned his appetite for convenient comfort had been constant. He was not cruel; he was lazy and hungry for the wrong things.
One afternoon I found Everlee walking like a ghost. She had learned to hold her shoulders straight. She had learned to be polite. I followed her, because I could not let it be. She stopped in a dark street and looked as if she might faint. I wanted to pick her up and claim her like a prize. Instead, I watched her steady herself and continue forward.
"She knows," Boston said when I told him. He shrugged. "But she hides it."
"Why?" I asked. "What good is hiding?"
She married him. I did what men like me do and watched from a distance. Then I saw the kind of betrayals that make me breathe sharp. Song met with a woman—again. A woman with the smile of a spoiled heir, and Everlee—Everlee had taken to wandering in the cold after those meetings, eyes hollow, as if someone had taken the center out of her.
"What are you made of, Everlee?" I said to myself, one night I followed her. She waited by the plum trees and listened as if someone might read love letters from the wind.
I do not know when "watching" turned into "rescue," but one day I walked into a garden and found her half-dressed, a knife of fear across the air. The Prince Antoine stood nearby with a smile that belonged to men who believe they may take anything.
"Get out," I said. It was very small, very useless against a prince's will.
"Who are you to tell me?" Antoine asked, pushing his jacket away with a practiced hand.
"Why don't you find out?" I said.
Everlee was trembling. Song had come in then, eyes flickering with cowardice. He looked at me with the same face he'd shown in the alley and then at Everlee as if she were some fragile jar he could set down and pick up again as he pleased.
"You should be ashamed," I told him.
"Shame lives somewhere else," Song said. His voice barely reached the level of sound; he had learned that silence could be disguise.
I did many things then that I would later be glad and ashamed of. I left the Prince with a broken stride—he had paid for that, and I would pay too. I removed Song's protection and made sure that men who serve kings see the small guilts that grow into larger stones. I sowed rumors; I tugged on strings. Song began to lose favor. Antoine kept his title but found his steps watched.
Everlee changed more palpably. She began to come to my yard. She would sit on the low wall and talk about small things. "The moon looked odd tonight," she'd say, and I would lie and say the moon always looked odd in the way that made her look better. She liked steam breads and the sound of riverboat horns and the way the long curtains swayed in wind.
One night, not daring to say what I wanted, I took the seat next to her at the inn. She was wearing a plain jacket, and her cheeks were pink from a few cups too many.
"You always look better than Song," she mumbled, honest as a child. "Why didn't I meet you when I was smaller?"
The world tilted in some small and large way. I stroked the back of my hand across her cheek to see if it was real and felt her small palm capture my fingers.
"You didn't," I said softly. "But you did find me."
She looked at me like someone discovering a new constellation and said, "You are so handsome."
"Thank you," I said, because what else is there to do when a woman you like praises your face as if it is a banner?
We shared a kiss in the flicker of candlelight that night. It was clumsy and sweet and unmistakable.
When she sobered, she pretended not to remember. She hid her face and left with the dignity she had learned from pain. I could have cursed her for forgetting, but instead I decided then and there that I would not let anyone take her away from the shape we were making.
"I will teach you how to play," I said once, when she sat beside my heater and watched me play cards with Bettors. "I will let you win."
She smiled, and it was the sort of small smile that turned my insides to sugar.
Somewhere between the wanting and the doing, I fell into the foolishness of being theirs and yet my own. I wrote to her when I had to go. The letters were greasy with attempts at bad poetry and instructions that seemed private but were designed to be intercepted and twisted into proof that I only performed love. I thought I could hide my heart while my hand signed away the impossible.
When I returned, the house thought I was dead. Boston had spread a rumor—funny how a tiny lie can explode into the largest truth. Everlee sobbed at my bedside when they told her I had fallen. She and I had been playing a sort of game and she had thought she had never been worthy.
"You must not be dramatic," I scolded Boston for telling me later. "You nearly lost me the chance to see how much she can cry."
She was there every hour my wounds kept me sleepless. When she told me she had things to say—words that clutched at my chest like thorns—I closed the door and asked her to stay.
"I love you," she said in a voice that would have sounded foolish if it had not been so brave.
"I will not fail you," I said, with the kind of pledge men say and fate listens to.
We made a private life out of shared cigarettes and small rebellions. She liked when I pressed my shoulder against hers in crowded rooms. She liked that I would, without thought, take off my coat and put it over her when the draft cut through. Once, in the middle of the market, she dropped her basket and I helped her pick up the scattered fruit, my fingers brushing hers as if apologizing for all the days I'd been absent.
"You're a show-off," she murmured.
"I only try to be useful," I lied, and then laughed because there was nothing false about the way my heart hurt when she pulled her small hand from mine.
We married quietly and said vows that sounded fancier than the way we lived. The first night was not perfect and it was raw and then it was wholly defined by the sweet, clumsy discoveries of two people new to each other.
"Do you really want children?" she asked one spring afternoon, leaning her chin on my shoulder as fireworks from a distant fair painted the clouds.
"Only if they look like you," I answered. "And if they fight like you."
She laughed, and in that laugh I heard my home.
But men like Song and princes like Antoine do not forget that they lost. They hunt the shape of what they believe they own. Song began to try and regain what he had wasted on his cowardice. He would appear in places he was not welcome and say things that tasted like regret but were only a bitter wine of convenience.
On a day when the town celebrated lanterns and red beans—an odd phrase she once carved on a lamp—Song walked into the lantern fair with his head held like a man who thinks his shoes can clean his history. I saw him before I saw him coming. My hands tightened on Everlee's fingers and I watched the way he looked at her with the old, small hunger of a man refusing to be denied what he considers "his."
"She is married," I said before I had time to think.
"I know," Everlee answered. Her jaw was set. She did not flinch, but I could see the ghost of fear like someone holding a paper candle near flame.
Song's eyes flicked to the lamp she held. He saw the small calligraphy she had written—"red bean"—and a look flashed, something like regret and something like a plan.
He pushed through the crowd and whispered to a pair of men. They moved like men who had been assigned a dirty job.
"She will not be taken," I said aloud. There is a part of me that becomes very public and very loud when something I love is threatened.
Song's men lunged. I caught one arm; Boston struck out and the crowd parted like water. "Get your hands off her," I said. There was no pleading in my voice.
"Cyril," Song breathed, an apology that tasted like poison. "You are meddling. This is not your concern."
"She is my concern," I said. I did not stop to be polite.
"She is mine by law," Song snapped. "She is my wife. Remember what you are."
"What I am is a man who will not let you take from her what you never kept," I said.
The men moved faster. Then someone in the crowd shouted, "He cheated! He kept company with that Zhao woman! He left her in the cold!"
Whispers ripple in a crowd like wind through corn. Those men who had been ready to grab her hesitated. I stepped forward. "You took my wife's nights. You took her rest. You took her trust and sold it for coin," I said. "Tonight, you will answer."
Song's face changed through six expressions in the time it takes to light a candle. At first he was stunned, then angry, then he tried the old denial—"I did nothing"—then he tried to laugh it away, then he looked small, and finally he turned to disgust. Around us, the crowd's mood swung like a pendulum.
"Are you calling me a liar?" he said, trying to make his voice bigger than it was. "Who says—?"
"Do you not remember the alley?" I called. "Do you not remember leaving her while you met another? Or do you think a town forgets what it sees?"
A woman near the tea stall began to shout details, and someone else chimed in with times and places. Men started to pull out little slips of torn cloth—tokens of the Zhao family mistress—and one of them held up a letter with Song's seal. The crowd leaned closer like the tide rolling in.
Song's face was white. He clutched at his robe as if to hide himself.
"Shame," a voice said behind us, the word sharp as a knife. "Shame on a man who steals nights and calls it destiny."
Song's knees began to tremble. "It's lies," he kept saying. "It's lies."
Everlee's hand was at my back. She stood tall. "It's truth," she said. Her voice did not shake. It was the kind of voice that makes people lean forward to hear. "Every night you left me alone. You left me for her. You used me and called it marriage. I forgive you for your mistakes, but I will not be ground to dust for them."
The crowd's reaction shifted completely. Those who had once bowed to Song looked at each other and whispered. Men who had been his allies moved away as if the heat of the accusation might burn them.
"Do you have anything to say?" I demanded.
Song tried to apologize, to twist his posture into the humble shape of a repentant man. He began to kneel and then rose, struck by a new panic. He grabbed at the hands of those close by and demanded they speak for him, but many of them had turned their backs.
"Look at him," someone muttered. "Does he look like the man who honors his wife?"
Song's face crumpled. He tried to deny again, then to deflect, then to bargain. "You all know I have done service," he whispered. "I have served the right tables…"
"You served yourself," a woman spat. "You served your appetite and left the rest."
At that, a child in the crowd began to cry. An elder patted the child's head and then pointed at Song with a fierce, tender gesture. "No more," the elder said. "We have seen enough."
Song's reputation, which had once been a cloak, began to fall away piece by piece before our eyes. A baker spat toward his shoes. A scholar tore a poem he had written for Song and threw it into the mud. Someone set down a dish he had once claimed as proof of generosity and smashed it, the shards like small white lies breaking.
"I will leave," Song said, his voice thin. "I will—"
"No," Everlee said. "Leave now. Leave and do not come back pretending you can take what you cast aside. Go. Find a life that is worthy of you, and when you are ready to be brave, perhaps seek forgiveness elsewhere. Not tonight."
He turned to beg those who had once protected him. No one met his eyes. His mother—who had once pulled strings—stood with her face hard as stone and would not reach for him. For the first time, Song was alone in a marketplace full of witnesses. He moved off like a man carrying a sack of shame, and the crowd watched until he disappeared and then moved on, as crowds do when it's time to rent silence into gossip.
That was one punishment. It was not the only one.
Antoine, who had tried to force the worst deed on Everlee once, stood among the dignitaries in his high robe, and I made sure the Prince would not simply smile away what he had wanted. I had dismantled his influence in quiet steps over months, proving in ledger and whisper how he had traded favors for nights and how those favors could be traced to small corruption. The council convened, as councils do when someone beyond their reach begins to step on raw nerves.
"Your behavior has been unbecoming," the councilman said when it was made public. "A prince afflicts the state's virtue if he thinks it can be bought."
Antoine's face, always painted to command obedience, crumpled. He tried to deny, to threaten, but each word hit a ledger kept by a clerk who liked to write things down in minute detail. The prince begged for leniency. Men who had once bowed were now recording his every misstep.
"What is your plea?" the council demanded.
Antoine tried to bargain with coin and flattery. His tone slid from arrogance to desperation. He looked small before them. When they stripped him of the right to appoint officials and publicly reassigned his duties, his post was taken and his honors reduced. He stumbled through the formal apology they demanded—three days of standing in public with a placard declaring his crimes. The city windows were full of people watching the man who had thought himself above reproach humiliate himself.
When he was led through the main square, the same men who had once laughed at my gambits now recorded his fall, and children pointed at him and asked why a man who had once looked strong now limped in shame.
"Is he not the Prince?" a boy asked his mother.
"He was," she answered, "until he forgot that he belongs to the people."
Antoine's face was red and streaked with tears. He mouthed apologies that sounded like small stones thrown against stone walls. He tried to explain that the world had been cruel to him, that he had been tempted. He sought pity, and there was none left for him among the people who had felt his lash.
When they brought him before Everlee to recite his apology, he faltered. He had no right to ask her forgiveness. She did not give it. She simply stood, steady as wood, and said, "You will not touch me again."
The crowd who watched applauded not for triumph but for the rightness of seeing someone stop taking what did not belong to them.
After the public punishments, life went on with a new honesty. Song left the city, his name carried away like a rag of thunder. Antoine kept a lower profile and learned how institutions breathe when held to account. People talked about the day as if it were a storm that cleared the air.
Everlee's eyes carried a quiet light that no longer dimmed when men like that passed. She forgave some things and refused others. She leaned into our life like a child finding the best hiding place in a game.
There were small daily proofs that I had not been a fool to claim her. Once, winter cold found her hands smaller than mine. I took off my coat and draped it over her shoulders as if the world were simple enough to be warmed by a single cloth.
"You're ridiculous," she said.
"Only for you," I answered.
Another day, at the market, a pickpocket brushed her sleeve. I caught the wrist and held the thief until the guard came. Everlee reached out and smoothed my shirt and said, "You always do this."
"Always?" I asked.
"Yes," she said, leaning in. "You always take what needs taking."
And then, the best moment of all, was when she handed me a lantern at the festival and had written, in her small careful hand, the phrase that had haunted me: red-bean dice, safe red beans. The words meant something small and impossibly personal. When she reached for my sleeve, I stopped the fair with it. People looked at us and then away, because there is nothing more private in public than two people who have chosen each other.
She fiddled with the lantern between her fingers and said, "You promised me once."
"What did I promise?" I asked, though I remembered.
"You promised to take me when I was ready," she said. "Not when it was convenient."
"I meant it," I said. "Do you mean it too?"
She nodded. "I mean it."
We married, truly this time, with the world knowing what we had done and many people in the crowd still talking about the punishments. The first night was honest and messy and kind. She trusted me and in return I taught her to trust that being loved could mean being seen.
Months later she turned to me in the quiet of our room and said, "Cyril, let's have a child."
"You sure?" I whispered.
"If it's yours," she said, "then I want it. But only if you want it too."
"I want it," I said, and she laughed like a sun breaking.
We lived in small triumphs after that: rain that didn't break the market day, bread that rose right when we needed it, her laughter spilling out from the curtains when we should have been stern. She taught me songs about small things—boats, river mud, rice barns—and I taught her how to read the night as if it were a map.
But some nights, I still let myself remember the first time she man-handled me like a child riding me down the lane and I smiled because it was true: she'd always been mine in the moments I had not yet claimed.
"Do you regret saving me?" she asked once as we watched the lanterns float.
"Never," I said, the words simple and honest. "Not once."
She pressed her head to my shoulder and for a second I could see the little Everlee in the courtyard, practicing her punches, falling, getting up, and never crying. I felt like a man who had taken a compass and found the right direction at last.
That lantern we share still hangs above our door. On it, in Everlee's careful script, are the words that remind me of the long road we took: red-bean dice, safe red beans. Every time the light flickers, I hear the small voice that first said, "I'm Everlee," and know that in a hundred small ways she has taught me to be better than I was.
The End
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