Sweet Romance13 min read
The River Gave Me Up, He Gave Me Home
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“Hold still,” I said, wiping a smear of blood from the little boy’s temple.
“He’ll wake.” Carter’s voice trembled behind me.
“No, he won’t.” I kept my hand steady. “Not if I put the stitch here. Count to three and breathe.”
“One.” Carter counted, breath knocking against my wrist like a tiny drum.
“Two.” Jalen’s small paws were folded in prayer.
“Three.” I pushed the needle through, quick and clean.
“He stopped crying,” Carter whispered.
“He’s tired,” I said. “Let him sleep.”
I am Kaylin Santos. I was found in a basket on the river when I was days old. My first friend was a red bird that liked to nap on my chest; I called her Aster. I learned how to make wounds close with gentle hands and the little heat that lived under my ribs. No one told me why I could do it. The world taught me anyway.
“Kaylin.” Gage’s voice at the door was rough with worry. “They say the town guard wants to speak with you. The woman from the caravan—she’s awake.”
“Valentina?” I asked. “She’s awake?”
“Yes. The woman who carries the seal. She’s asking for the child you found.”
My chest did a slow, heavy beat. The child on my lap—soft, small—had been given to us by a pale woman who left a broken seal and a demand: “Keep him until the war settles.” We kept him, fed him, called him Xuan because he smiled like sunrise.
The caravan woman had collapsed on our road months ago with a dying bodyguard and a child with dark veins. We pulled her into the boat, warmed her, and she gave orders with labored breath. Then she slept. The county put a guard. The city put a rumor. Now she was awake and asking about the child again.
I wrapped a linen around Xuan’s head, then followed Gage into the yard.
“Madam Valentina,” I said when she saw me. “You woke.”
She lifted her head. Valentina Koehler’s face was a pale moon of lines and moonlight scars. She brought with her a war smell and a privilege. The seal in her palm was stamped gold—an imperial mark I had seen once in a dream and never guessed I would see for real.
“You saved him,” she said. Her voice was thin as parchment. “You saved the prince.”
My fingers froze.
“Prince?” Carter echoed from behind me.
Valentina’s hollow laugh was like a blade rubbed blunt. “Not a proper prince to you, perhaps. But the child carried the palace mark and a fever that no common man could name. My duty was to bring him south. We were ambushed. I thought him gone.” She blinked slow. “You found him. You stitched him back to breath.”
I felt Aster hop from my shoulder to perch on Valentina’s knee. The bird’s head cocked as if reading a line of poetry only she could hear.
“You saved him,” Valentina repeated. “I would have lost him.”
“You called him Xuan,” I said, steadier than I felt. I had learned his breaths, his little noises. I had taught him my name, and he had started to call me “Kaye” when the nights were long.
Valentina studied my hands. “You have a gift.”
“Only enough to keep him out of the dark,” I said.
She nodded. “When the court trims its sails, it sometimes needs a stand-in. I need someone to stand up now.”
“Stand in for what?” Gage asked.
Valentina let out a breath that smelled like iron and rain. “The prince must be hidden. The court must be told he is safe. The wrong men will stop at nothing.” Her eyes brightened in a dangerous way. “I will name you guardian. You will stay with him until we can reach the capital.”
“You want me to go to the capital?” Carter’s voice was thin with hope and fear.
Valentina touched the little seal in her sleeve. “No. I will take him to the capital when I can. But I will need someone to stand between the rumor and the road. The prince will be safer if the county believes he is the foundling of a common house.”
Gage stared at me. “Kaylin, they want you to go?”
Valentina’s fingers curled. “He is an odd child. He will require a gentle hand. I saw your skill. The court needs people like you.”
I looked at Xuan. The hair at his temple was still damp with sweat from the fever. He smelled like bread and river mud and the warm line of my chest. He fit in my arms like a river fit its bank.
“I’ll do it,” I said.
Gage wiped his face. “Then we go tonight.”
“This is dangerous,” Carter warned.
“Everything that matters is,” I told her.
— — —
We left our river house before dawn. Aster slipped into the folds of my hair like a secret. Valentina rode ahead with a guard and a sealed petition. Gage drove the cart. Carter and Jalen sat stiff as sentries. The road smelled of hay and regret.
On the way a mounted rider overtook us. He wore a blue mantle and a face I did not forget—the kind of face that looks at stars and takes what they point to. He slowed, then came to a stop.
“Gideon Dodson,” the rider tipped his head. “Delivering a notice from the capital.”
Valentina’s hand stiffened. Gideon stepped down and folded the paper like a jewel. “He’s the child,” Gideon said flatly, as if reading what every living thing wanted. “The child from the south road. I came as soon as I could.”
Valentina’s eyes moved to Gideon. For a strange, caught breath, something like a private conversation lit between them, a thread I could not pull.
“You are late,” she said.
“And yet not.” Gideon’s eyes held me.
I felt something small and dangerous stir in my chest. “Who is he?” I asked.
“He is Lord Commander Wallace’s grandson,” Gideon said. “Or so the palace says. There are many names and more knives here than at the butcher.”
“You can’t leave him with strangers,” Valentina snapped.
“You don’t leave him with strangers,” Gideon said. He stepped close enough that the smell of his sleeve—pine and candle wax—rose to my face. “You give him to the right guardians.”
Gage bristled, hands on the cart’s rim. “We’ll keep him. He’s mine to keep.”
Gideon smiled like a knife hidden in silk. “You keep him until I decide to take him back to the place that made him. That is all.”
His voice made a line of heat across my neck.
— — —
The capital was a world built of shining roofs and jealous shadows. Valentina moved through it like a lamp guiding moths. Guards bowed. Courtesans smiled like thin knives. Through it all, the child slept on my chest. I learned, quick, how to hold my breath until the city passed and did not see me.
They called Xuan “Little One” to his face, and “the Heir” behind the screens. The court chose its words carefully and with great hunger. When officers asked about the child’s birthmark, Valentina produced a ribbon I had not noticed—a thin red thread tied around Xuan’s wrist in the darkness. It had a mark like a crescent moon burned into it.
“You found him wrapped in this,” she told the officials. “He was in a basket by the river. A miracle saved him.”
“Miracles are expensive,” one minister said.
Gideon found me in the courtyard two hours later.
“You stitch well,” he said.
“I stitch better under pressure,” I said. “You have a tense jaw.”
He laughed, soft. “You don’t answer like a noble person. That’s good.”
“What are you?” I asked.
He looked at the sleeping child. “I am his father in every way the world will let me be. I amuse the empress and watch storms form. I break courtesans’ hearts like brittle glass.”
“You are not gentle.”
“My tenderness belongs behind palace doors,” he said. “But I can be gentle where it is needed.”
“You will take him,” I said simply.
Gideon’s eyes flicked to mine. “I will ask to take him. The court may say no.”
“It will say yes if you ask properly,” I said. “Ask for the prince. Talk to the one who keeps knives in his robes and truth in his eyes.”
“You know how to read a man,” he said.
“Birds taught me,” I said.
He smiled then for real, a sudden, clear thing. “I want you with him, Kaylin.”
I felt my name as a small thing, and larger. “You want me to be—?”
“His guardian at court,” he said. “A presence others underestimate. A woman who stitches, cooks, and can say a thing that makes men blink. I want you where I can see you.”
His words were a velvet offer that smelled like smoke and rain. I had spent my life being the thing the river let go. This man—Gideon Dodson—offered me a bank to run to. I said yes like it was breathing.
— — —
Life in the palace was less a velvet dream than a lesson in how many ways people could lie with their eyes open. Valentina taught me etiquette with a hand gentle as soap, and Gideon taught me how to stand in a room full of men who wore titles like talismans.
“I don’t understand the court,” I told Gideon once, in the small hours with Aster snoozing on the sill.
“It is a game,” he said. “But games can slide into war.”
“Will you teach me how to play?”
“I’ll teach you how to hold a line and smile at the same time.”
Our lessons passed into stares that held too long, into hands that brushed purposefully, into small dinners where two spoons were left for the watching. For every laugh the court pretended, the quiet between Gideon and me grew warmer.
“You stitch well,” Gideon told me again six weeks later, before a council meeting. “You saved him.”
“You are welcome to take the credit,” I said.
He caught my hand. “No. I want you to have the credit. They will listen when you speak.”
When Valentina returned from pleading with the empress, her face had the fatigue of someone who had walked through a storm and come back with a ship. She handed me a small box.
“It belongs to him,” she said. “It is the key to tracing where he came from. Keep it safe.”
Inside was a tiny carved jade—an old family emblem. It made my chest small in a way I could not explain.
“Why me?” I asked.
Valentina’s eyes were steady. “Because you loved him before you knew titles. Because you breath-heal by a touch that is rare. Because you make him sleep.”
After she left, I pressed the jade to my lips, and Aster sang.
— — —
The court turned sharp when it smelled blood. A whisper grew teeth: where did the prince come from? Was this a lie to shift power? Ministers who had nothing but patience in them tried to show teeth. Someone in the palace wanted the child dead.
The roads were not safe. I felt it in the way shadows leaned against the walls. Guards grew jumpier. Valentina said nothing violent, but there was a hardness to her that put an end to jokes.
One night, as rain ran down the palace eaves, a knock came at our door.
“Gideon,” I called, heart quick as river stones. He came to me in a shirt and a look like a blade.
“You stay with him,” he said. “Do not move from this room.”
“You come with me,” I argued.
“I come with the storm,” he said. “And I will not bring it through your door.”
He kissed my forehead—soft, like a promise that could be kept—and left. I pressed my lips to the sleeping child’s hair, and I waited.
The attack came at midnight. Men with black cloth over their faces moved like wolves against the gates. They had knives that smelled of oil and a plan that smelled like iron. Soldiers and servants woke with the first shout. I held Xuan to me and made my small heat bloom.
“You have to leave,” Carter said. “They will destroy the palace if they find him.”
Valentina’s voice was calm as a tomb. “No. The truth must be seen.”
We hid in a small chamber near the medicine stores. Aster’s feathers vibrated against my cheek like a delicate bell.
Footsteps passed the door. A blade slid under the sill. I kept my hands like two knives folded in sleep.
The lock scraped. The door opened.
A man stepped forward—a soft-mouthed official known for his easy smiles and harder pockets. He held a paper in one hand and a lamp in the other. His face was pale.
“You should not be here,” he said. He did not shout. He did not need to.
Valentina stepped forward. “You forget yourself, Councilor James.”
Councilor James’ smile fell. “Valentina. You still nurse old loyalties.”
“Old loyalty is called law when a child lives by it.”
James didn't answer. A curtain of guards fell behind him. For a moment I thought the child would be taken in single breath.
“Take the boy,” James said suddenly. “The empress will not hide him forever.”
“You will take him to what end?” Valentina asked.
James’ eyes flicked to Gideon’s insignia, then back to me. His fingers flexed toward a dagger. “The palace needs order.”
Valentina stepped forward and lifted her chin. “We will not hand over the boy to a man who signs death warrants with a smile.”
James’ face flushed. He spat out words like smoke. “You are a traitor.”
“Traitor?” Valentina laughed like a broken bell. “You are the liar, Councilor.”
James lunged.
The room became a fight of steel and small, hot hands. I stitched a cut in Valentina’s arm and ordered Carter to fetch the medicine. Guards flooded the hall like a tide. James was dragged out, his robes torn, his mask fallen. Aster took one step forward and pecked at his boot.
He would not speak; not then. He had many friends in quiet places.
“Expose him,” I told Valentina while the men dragged him away.
“He will burn his letters before dawn,” she said. “But he has made mistakes. The court will not forget.”
She looked to Gideon. “He must be taken south. He must be remembered in a way that matters.”
Gideon put his hand on my shoulder. The touch was like an anchor. “Stay with him,” he said.
I stayed.
— — —
Dawn brought with it messengers and orders and the kind of silence a city falls into after a storm. The empress summoned councilors. Valentina read the report. Gideon stood beside me when the empress called the palace into the Hall of Records.
“You saved him,” the empress said when Valentina told her. “He will be kept. He will be trained.”
“And his guardian?” Valentina asked.
The empress’ gaze slid to me like a measuring rod. “The court chooses who raises its image. The child will be raised under watch. Yet—” she paused, and the pause was cold and long—“we value loyalty. The woman who loved him first may stay.”
Gideon’s fingers tightened in mine under the table. He turned to the empress. “Sire. Kaylin has my utmost trust. Allow her to remain. She will act as ward and teacher until I request the boy for his education.”
The empress smiled like a queen closing a book. “So it shall be.”
It could have been the end of a story. Instead it was the beginning of everything else.
— — —
Weeks became months. Xuan grew; his black hair fell like river reeds. He learned to babble, then to speak syllables, finally to say the name I taught him—the one I had given myself in a boat long ago.
“Kay-lin?” he murmured one night, clutching Aster.
“Yes.” I bent low. The light from the lamp caught his lashes. “Say it again.”
“Kay-lin,” he repeated, heavy and sweet.
“You are my boy,” I told him.
He giggled and wrapped his stubby fingers around mine. “Kaye.”
Gideon watched us with that odd softness he kept for very small things. One evening he stopped me in a corridor.
“You wear danger lightly,” he said.
“I stitch it away,” I answered. “You watch it like a hawk.”
“Good.” His hand closed over mine. “Then one favor.”
“What?”
“Marry me.”
I let the word hang there because the court taught me to be patient. “Why?”
“Because I am tired of the court whispering. Because the child will need lines of loyalty that are not written in paper. Because I want you in my life so I can see you over dinner and laugh over the way you frown when I am late.”
“You think I will be easier to own than a horse?” I asked.
“I think you will be harder to handle,” he said, with a crooked smile that made my knees stumble like a child’s.
“You are not a kind man,” I said.
“I am kind for you.” He bowed his head slightly. “Say you will.”
There I was, the river’s child. He offered me a name in the capital, a place at a table that broke knives. I let myself take it like a warm bread.
“Yes,” I said. “But on one condition.”
“What is that?”
“You make Xuan your son in law and call him by the name he chooses.”
Gideon laughed, and the laugh sounded like a bell unwrapping. “It is a promise.”
— — —
The court will keep its stories. Some men are burned by their choices, and some men are turned away from knives. Councilor James was shamed but not ruined; a lesson to be used later. Valentina left the palace when duty called her elsewhere, but she left me with a note:
“You will be tested,” it read. “Love is patient. So is steel.”
We bought a small house near the palace garden. Gage and Leonie—my adoptive parents—came to live there sometimes with Carter and Jalen. They called our son “Xuan” in private and “Little Lord” when the court came visiting. Gideon brought him toys from far seas and books with edge-stiff pages.
Months later, a woman came to the gate with mud in her hair and tears in her eyes. She carried an old linen tied with a ribbon. When she asked for me, she knelt and placed a small carved comb into my hands.
“This was fastened to the child when he was stolen from our house,” she said. “I was the woman who took him to the river, and a greedy woman bribed me. I could not live with it. I confess. Forgive me.”
Her name, when she spoke it, was Elisabetta Robertson. She wept with honest lungs. I could have sent her away. Instead, I sat her down, gave her tea, and let her tell the truth to anyone who would listen. The court did not punish her as a lord might, but the truth made the court still.
Gideon watched me take the comb, the ribbon. He looked at me then like someone who had discovered treasure in the dirt and decided to keep it not for value but for the way it fit his hand.
“You missed a father,” he said softly.
“I missed someone who promised me a name,” I said.
“You have one now.”
— — —
Years pass when people do not watch. Xuan grew into a boy who laughed like riverwater and fought like a small storm. He called me Kaylin, then Kaye, then Sister, then sometimes Kay. Gideon taught him how to sit on a horse and how to watch men’s mouths when they lie. I taught him how to sew a wound and how to plant beans that would grow even in spite of shadow.
One night, when moonlight laid a silver dress over the palace roofs, I climbed the small roof of our house with Xuan tucked under my arm and Aster a bright feather beside my ear.
“You taught me my name,” he murmured.
“I taught you how to say it,” I said.
He leaned his head against my shoulder. “Teach me one more.”
“What?”
“How to be brave like you.”
I kissed his hair. “Brave isn't loud. Brave is the small stitch when the wound is deep. Brave is going on when you are tired.”
He listened, solemn as a child waiting to learn to read.
Gideon stepped out onto the roof behind us, and the world rounded its edges. He sat, careful and real, beside me. He placed his hand over mine. The warmth was a safe thing.
“You did what no one else could,” he whispered.
“And you gave me a home,” I answered.
He turned to me, face inches from mine. “And I will keep you.”
The bird called Aster fluffed in his small sleep and gave a single clear note, like a little bell.
“We will keep each other,” I said.
Gideon kissed me then—steady, a sound-less vow. Xuan laughed his small laugh, and the moon listened.
Later, when the palace remembers us in books, they will tell of a foundling who grew into a lady. They will praise the man who loved her. They will forget the river and the basket and the night the world let me go. But I keep those memories like a secret stitch.
“You were a lost thing,” Gideon said one morning as Aster looped around our heads.
“I was found,” I corrected, and I looked at the sleeping child in our home—the prince now called Xuan and sometimes “Little River.” I looked at the man who bent his head to laugh with me and at my parents who still came to our table. I looked up at the bird who had followed me from the river.
“You found me too,” I told them.
Gideon smiled. “Always.”
And when I closed my eyes that night, I did not drift on the river. I slept on a roof under a sky that had changed but kept its stars. I woke to a boy calling my name, a bird on the sill, and a promise that no one would take again without my consent.
Aster shifted her tiny head and sang the one small song she knew.
“Kaylin,” the boy murmured in his sleep, and somewhere the river remembered me and sent a small, pleased ripple down its length.
—END---
The End
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