Sweet Romance13 min read
The Twice-Crowned Emperor and the Rice-Wine Chicken
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I was lying on the fainting couch, eating grapes and reading a little storybook, when a eunuch hurried in and said, "Consort, His Majesty summons you to bedchamber tonight."
The words "summons" and "bedchamber" hit me like a cold bucket.
I dropped a grape. It rolled away and burst like a small, embarrassed star. My face went pale. I looked like I was about to meet death instead of a dinner invitation.
"I—" I tried to steady myself. "I will go at once."
They called me to the imperial chamber on the fifth night of the seventh month.
I am a consort of the emperor. I had already learned the law of the court: to be summoned to the inner hall was to invite fortune or death. The stories my fellow ladies whispered always ended the same way—favor, then a closed casket.
Nelson Bradford, the eunuch in charge, led me through the corridors. "Keep your head down," he said. "Walk straight. Do not breathe unnecessarily."
I walked with a heart that felt like a small drum gone mad. When we reached the inner hall, the emperor sat by the bed, his robe open at the chest, careless and beautiful in the way dangerous things are beautiful.
"Come here," he said, voice cool as marble.
I stepped forward, foot by foot, pretending calm I did not feel.
When I was at arm's length he grabbed my wrist like a sailor catching a rope and pulled me into his arms. My forehead struck his chest. Stars flashed in my eyes.
"Watch your hands," I wanted to say.
Instead, the emperor began to unfasten my gown with impatient efficiency.
"Excuse me—" I couldn't finish the thought.
"Stop," a voice sliced through the hall like a blade.
A shadow stepped into the doorway, sword in hand. "Monster emperor," someone yelled. "Give up your life!"
The emperor's hand moved fast. He drew a short blade from beneath his pillow and met the attacker.
I scrambled back, trying to fix my robe and hoping the ground would swallow me. For a while I hoped the entire fight would ignore me.
It did not.
When the tide turned and the emperor faltered, the hall filled with men in black. "Die, the emperor's woman too!" someone shouted.
I ran. My foot hit something invisible. I slipped. I fell against the emperor's back.
A sword came down behind me and struck my abdomen.
For a moment I only knew a silver pain and the smell of iron. Then the world blurred. The last thing I heard, while the hall rang and hilts clashed, were shouts: "The Guards! The Guards are here!"
I thought I would die.
I did not.
I woke in my bed. Around me, handmaidens cried and fussed. "The Consort is awake!" they chimed, voices like birds on a roof.
"Water," I croaked. They handed me a cup. When I tried to sit up, the wound in my belly screamed. I had a long, ugly stitch of a scar for a month. For a month I stayed in bed and watched the court like it was a storm.
Everyone knew the rule: any woman summoned to the inner hall and favoured by the emperor never returned alive. Yet I had been curious and reckless enough, or unlucky enough, to bar a sword for him. I returned. I should have been dead, and yet I lived.
"Perhaps," I whispered to myself, "the gods are bored."
But my relief lasted barely a week. The summons came again.
"I'm not ready," I told Freja Lucas, my nearest maid. "I refuse to be summoned again."
"You cannot refuse a command," Freja said. "Just wear something soft."
The emperor led me into the inner hall as if he meant to dine rather than destroy. He had food set out like a feast.
"Why dinner?" I asked, suspicious.
"Because sometimes an emperor has whims," he said.
I ate with the zeal of someone who believes this meal might be her last. Every bite tasted like fate.
After, he looked at my scar and startled. He pressed his thumb to it and said quietly, "You risked yourself for me."
"Of course," I lied with a bow and a grin. "I would die a dozen times for you."
He softened. He kissed me.
I swallowed each second like a bitter herb. I didn't move. The emperor kissed and then carried me to the bed. The rest of the night is a blur I will not detail, except to tell you I expected death when dawn came.
But dawn did not come with a grave.
He woke and spoke, not like a monster but like someone rehearsed at serving kindness. "You are awake."
"I'm hungry," I said, and he ordered Nelson Bradford to fetch breakfast.
Later he called me again to the inner chamber. I braced for punishment. He told me to strip.
I froze. "Why—"
"To check your wound."
He touched the scar carefully. "Thank you," he said. His fingers lingered. For the first time since I arrived at court, his voice carried something kinder than cruelty.
"Do not thank me," I said, and then lied. "It was my duty."
He surprised me by laughing softly and then kissing me on the lips. For a moment my heart did something foolish. But he was the reason half the palace whispered with dread. I should have been afraid. I wasn't. I couldn't tell whether I was brave or merely numb.
After that night, he did not kill me. Instead, he raised my rank. I became a higher consort. I could have rejoiced, but fear sat in my stomach like a stone. How long would the respite last?
One evening, greedy for home comforts, I had a serving of rice-wine chicken—the little dish my mother used to make. Two bites and my face flushed, my head swam, and I was drunk as a willow.
The emperor came that night smiling, but when he stepped into the chamber I saw red strokes along his cheek like cat scratches.
"How did you get those?" I asked.
"A drunken cat scratched me," he said.
"You mean—"
He looked at me, blunt as a blade. "I mean you," he said.
I turned pale. "I? But—"
The court handmaidens exchanged glances. Freja nodded. Nelson Bradford looked away with a small, guilty twitch.
I had indeed clawed at him—when his hand had been overmuch. He could have killed me for it, yet he did not. Instead, he laughed and called me a "little drunk cat" and warned me never to eat that dish again.
My relief grew teeth and bit me. Why did he spare me? He'd been known to have servants executed for lesser faults. Once a eunuch's cup was not to his taste, and the man was torn apart. Once a maid knelt a breath too late and died piece by piece.
But the emperor's face healed, and he began to show me gentleness I had not expected. He taught me to ride a horse, and he named the stallion Fleet.
"Hold my hand," he said at the stables. "I will teach you."
He was tall. I was small. He reached back and took my hand, guiding me upon the horse. When his hand settled on my waist to steady me, I bristled and elbowed him away. I did not mean to strike hard—then his mouth filled with blood.
"I didn't know I had such force," I said, trembling.
He collapsed. A palace doctor pronounced that the emperor had a congenital weakness in his heart, something no open wound could show but rather a fragile core that could take a mortal blow.
I was paralyzed with guilt. I feared he would have me executed for injuring his "dragon body."
He opened his eyes a day later. I knelt like a kicked dog.
"Why are you on your knees?" he asked, blank.
"Because I am miserable," I said.
"Get up."
"I cannot."
"Why would I punish you?" he asked, in a voice like water.
Because I had read the stories of his cruelty, I kept kneeling until he looked at his hand and then at me.
"Do you remember three months ago? You tend to people in the night," he asked. He rolled up his sleeve and showed a scar on his arm.
"Is that—" I whispered. "It was you—then—"
It all unspooled like a thread. The man who had been wounded three months earlier, the one I had tended and hidden in my small dormitory—he said his name was Samuel.
"Samuel?" I echoed. "But His Majesty is Abel."
He smiled sadly. "Abel was always the face the world needed. I have walked in the shadow of my brother."
He told me a story that read like a play: one mother, twin boys, a decree that twins were bad luck, a secreted childhood, a life on an island, a rescue. "My name is Samuel Green," he said. "Abel Orlov is my brother."
This was the keystone of everything. The cruel emperor the court revered was Abel Orlov. The man beside me at my bedside, gentle and hesitant, was Samuel Green.
"Why did you not tell me?" I asked.
"Because I needed to fix the court first," he said. "Because I did not know I could trust you."
I remembered the night I tended a black-clad figure and patched a wounded arm. I had not seen his face. I had thought I was saving a rebel, saving us all. I had not imagined I was saving a prince.
Samuel told me of plans and plots: assassinations, crowds of guards, the attempt that had wounded him and turned the court inside out. He told me they had meant to replace Abel and that fate had flung me in the way.
Then he lifted my hand and asked, "Will you let me stand for you?"
"Yes," I said. "If you will let me breathe."
He was kind. He said a promise. He said, "I will not be like my brother. I promise to try."
I wanted to trust him. I wanted a normal life. If I thought romance would bloom quietly, I was wrong. He was king now in name and kindness, and I loved the man for his gentleness, for his small private vows.
We had our tenderness. We had nights of ridiculous, childish laughter where he let me plaster kisses all over his face until he laughed like a boy. He once asked for a kiss before bed every night, and I obliged with points and stamps and silly, giggly ceremonies.
But the past has claws.
One midday, I walked into the study with Freja carrying cooling tea and found Samuel with a woman in his arms.
My heart took a cartoon tumble. The woman looked startled. Samuel pushed her away as if embarrassed. "Annika, this—" he blurted.
I curtsied like a well-trained courtier. "I came to bring cooling tea," I said blandly. "I will leave."
Back in my rooms, Freja's eyes were knives. "You should have seen you."
"I don't like being seen like that," I said. "I will be calm. I will keep my position."
I told Samuel I did not care. I lied badly. He was not the type to hold ill. When he caught me in the throne room later, he said gently, "You don't appear to care like you used to."
"Because I don't," I confessed too quickly. "Because an emperor cannot be expected to love just one woman."
He looked wounded. "Let me change that," he said.
"How?" I asked.
"By promising," he said. "By taking the whole world and saying it belongs to you if you want it. By giving you my promise with all my power."
He turned his chin up and his voice hardened into a vow. "Annika Blake, I swear on my crown—no other woman in the court will be mine. If I break this, I give away my throne."
I laughed then, a small, incredulous sound. "You are giving away the throne like a trinket? You mean it?"
"I am saying I want your heart," he said. "I heart you because you saved me."
The awkwardness of our relationship came with laughter and stubbornness. He liked to be adored. I liked to see him blush. He liked to be obeyed by nobody but me. I liked small dominions I could command: which blanket for our child, which book for the morning. We made a kingdom for two within the palace.
But the court could not let a cruel emperor walk away with only a secret. Abel Orlov's shadow lingered. Whispers grew into papers, and papers into alarms. The truth or half-truths about the past began to be carried in public.
Abel Orlov was not just cruel in gossip. He had been responsible for murders, executions, ruin. Those who remembered him were not going to let the stories die.
When the moment came, it came with the slow dignity of a crowd collecting to watch a comet.
"It is time," Samuel said, voice hard as a blade when he told me. "If Abel's acts remain unpunished, the court will never heal."
I sat on the steps of the grand hall and watched a gathering form: ministers, ladies, eunuchs, even the same street vendors who had once been bribed. They filled the courtyard until it looked like a lake under the noon sun.
"Today," Samuel said from the throne platform, "we will show the court what justice looks like."
He had arranged for Abel Orlov to be brought forward—not in silk and gold but in simple robe, hand bound in front. He walked like a man who had once been used to command, whose weight of power had been stripped. He held his chin up, still the same arrogant face, but his eyes were shadows.
Samuel read out names. "Here are those who died by your command," he said. "Here are those whose families suffered." He named places—accounts that made the crowd quiet enough to hear a coin fall.
"Why?" Abel spat. "This is treachery."
"Why?" a voice in the square cried. "Because we remember."
There were witnesses who stepped forward—maids who once trembled at Abel's orders, a eunuch who had been ordered to poison a bowl, a soldier who had been forced to break a body. Each witness told a simple truth. Their voices trembled but did not fall.
"Abel Orlov," Samuel intoned, "for the death of three palace maidens, for the tear of a doctor, for the ruin of those below this hall, we will disgrace you in the manner of your own crimes: publicly, openly, so the record matches the deed."
Abel laughed. "Do it. I will laugh while you hang me."
"Not hanging," Samuel replied. "Public shame. You will be exposed to those you ordered harmed. You will be forced to look upon their faces, to hear how their names are spoken."
They shaved Abel's hair, not as a punishment of monk's repentance but as a symbolic humiliation. They put a plain robe on him. A drum rolled. Men carried banners naming his deeds across the courtyard. A woman whose brother had been killed stepped forward and spat the name of Abel to the world. "You had him killed because he was slow to kneel," she said. "You had him killed because he made a joke you disliked. You cut down a life like trimming a hedge."
The crowd began to chant—not with joy but with a terrible gravity. "Remember. Remember. Remember."
Abel's face changed. It moved from pride to rage to a quick, small panic. He tried to shout, "You lie! You lie!" He tried to deny, but each denial met another witness who had stood in the same air and had nothing to gain by lying.
I watched him crumble not on the scaffold but within the aloneness of public memory.
They led him to the platform at the center where the condemned were once humiliated. A roll-call of his actions was read again. The gathered scribes recorded each name so that the deed would not be lost to rumor.
Abel's shoulders shook. He had always been a man of command, but in the face of a chorus of his victims, he looked small, insect-like.
At one point he lunged, "Samuel—" and for a beat I feared for the old rival's life. But guards restrained him.
"Because you sought to make terror your currency," Samuel said, voice a blade now softened by regret, "you will not die by a quiet, noble death. You will stand where your cruelties are named and be known by the world as the man who took lives for whim."
Abel's face turned to blotches. He tried to laugh the first laugh I had ever heard that was not brave. "Do this," he said. "Make me a mockery. Let them take my name and burn it."
They did not burn his name. They did something the court had not seen for decades: they unstitched his legacy. They took medals and titles, they tore the banners with his sigil, and in front of everyone they read ledger entries showing fines, mutilations, confiscations—all orders with his signature. The people who still grieved came forward. The crowd watched the emperor who once bent the world to his whim taste the smallness of a man without robes.
He fell somewhere between denial and entreaty. His voice moved like weather. "I did not—"
"You did," said a woman who had lost a father. "You cannot hide now."
When Abel's bravado collapsed into trembling, many in the crowd turned away. Some took out cloth and wiped their eyes. Some recorded everything, snapping with small wooden frames. Freja stood with my hand in hers and kept it. Nelson Bradford looked as if he had eaten something bitter; he was shaking but present.
"Begging won't help," Abel whimpered. His face finally showed the transformation the public punishment required: from absolute ruler to isolated man.
And yet the crowd demanded more than private pity. They wanted a lesson. Abel was publicly stripped of honors—nothing violent, no blood for blood. His property was seized; he was paraded through the streets with banners listing his crimes. He was then placed in a house of exile at the city's docks—not executed but cut off from power and fame.
People had different reactions. Some spat. Some applauded, a slow clap of justice. Some murmured that the sentence was lenient, that Abel should have been made an example by the old cruel methods. Others were quiet, the way people are when they've watched a family burned and survive by strange, heavy luck.
Abel's final expression on the day of punishment was a brittle, small thing. He was forced to stand and hear, and he heard the names of the dead and the grief, and he could not lie them away.
When it was over, I realized two things: public retribution does not stitch back what was broken, and justice does not always require blood. The important part was that Abel could no longer command fear the way he once had. He was made small and thus powerless to punish again.
After the spectacle, Samuel turned to me. "Do you see?"
"Yes," I said. "But mercy—"
"Is a choice," he said. "We chose justice and mercy where possible."
The courtyard conversations changed after that. People walked straighter. The halls quieted. The previous air of terror was replaced by a cautious, bright breeze.
Samuel and I went on to build a small, private life together. He told me he wanted to hand the kingdom to his sons and to leave the pomp. "I want tea mornings with you," he said once, pressing his forehead to mine.
We had a child—our son, whom we named Muir. He was a soft little boy who liked the way my hair smelled. I made rice-wine chicken once more, smaller portions, and Samuel teased me about my weak constitution.
Years passed like a slow, pleasant book. Samuel grew older and kinder. He promised he would never make me kneel under fear. He kept his vow.
When he eventually withdrew from the throne, the court blinked. We left the palace like two common people, more in love every year. We traveled the country. We let Muir run by rivers, and he learned to ride Fleet's old son.
Once, in a small market, a woman came up to me and said, "You are the woman who saved a prince years ago."
I laughed. "I was just foolish."
She shook her head. "You were brave. That was enough."
At home, by the fire, I would sometimes think of the scar on my belly and touch it. It was a small map of a time that had nearly ended me—yet had given me my life.
I remember the rice-wine chicken with a ridiculous fondness now. I remember the red scratches on a proud face that became gentle. I remember hearing Abel's name read aloud in the square until it became small.
When I think of my life in the palace, I do not recall one single enormous moment but a thousand small ones: a hand offered to help me onto a horse, a light kiss before sleep, a quiet promise to be only mine.
On the anniversary of that first night in the inner hall, Samuel found me in the kitchen stirring a pot of rice-wine broth.
"Do you remember the first thing you said to me in the palace?" he asked.
"I said I was hungry," I answered.
He laughed. "And now?"
"Now we have fed a country with kindness rather than fear," I said.
He kissed me then, like a man who had learned to be gentle. "Annika," he whispered, "you cracked the shell, and I learned to be soft."
The scar on my belly tugged when I laughed. It was a small, ridiculous thing—like a thread sewn through time, tying my past to my present.
That is my story: the woman who fell, who tended a wounded stranger, who tumbled into a throne and took a hand that promised a different world. The rice-wine chicken stayed in my life as a joke and a warning. Fleet's hooves echoed in the fields of our retirement. Abel Orlov's name became a lesson read aloud in public squares to remind people that power without mercy breaks itself.
If any memory could be a closing note, it is this: I eat rice-wine chicken now in the open sun, and when I lift the bowl, I remember the scar, the stable, the horse, and the man who taught me steadiness.
The End
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