Sweet Romance12 min read
When the Emperor Was a Woman: The Dragon's Masquerade
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I remember the first time I was led before him—Andres Collins—with my hands bound and my hair loose, a fallen beauty in a ruined palace. They called me a fox, a witch, a puppet of a dead dynasty. I told them my name the way they expected a trembling concubine to speak it.
"I am Corinna Gray," I said. "Concubine to the late emperor."
Andres sat on the throne as if he had been born to it. He lifted his chin, a slow, easy motion. "Corinna Gray," he repeated. "The emperor's favorite? The one the old court fed with poison and silk? Is that you, little fox?"
"Yes," I answered. "I was—"
"Stop," he said, and his voice folded the room into a sharper shape. He rose and came closer. "You're so small in this light. Tell me, did he love you enough to run with you?"
"I don't know." My voice cracked. "He said he would never leave me."
"And yet the palace burned," he said. He drew a dagger and drew it along the corner of my jaw without breaking skin. "Does the emperor leave you?"
"He..." I swallowed. "He did what he had to."
He smiled then, fond and rude at once. "Beautiful and faithful. How convenient. Tell me where he hides."
"I swear—" I choked on the oath, on fear, on memory. "I swear I don't know."
"And if you did, would you tell me?" His dagger rested on my cheek. The steel was cold and perfectly indifferent.
"I would never betray him."
"And yet when the city burns, you do nothing but cry," he said softly. "Why keep faith with a man who lets you fall?"
"I—" I could not answer then. My tears came loud and hot. "He said he'd come back."
"And you're so sure of that?" He scoffed. "A pity. Men and thrones are fickle."
He threw his head back and laughed like thunder and then, in the way of men who think themselves conquerors, he offered me a bargain.
"Come with me," he said. "Take my protection. Refuse and you die, like so many loyal fools."
"I chose to be loyal to him before your army stormed those gates," I answered. "I will not be yours."
He bent low and kissed my knuckles as if I were an honored guest. "A pity. Very well." He left me then—he left me with guards and a room that smelled of ash.
That night, when the moon was thin as a razor, he came back.
"I have a proposition," he said, and he smelled of wine and smoke. "I can make you safe."
"I want nothing of your safety," I said.
He laughed, and the laugh was not cruel now, only tired. He sat beside me like a man who had made up his mind about a game. "You love him."
"Yes," I said.
"Why?" He looked at me with a sharp curiosity I had never seen on any courtier's face.
"Because he is... the best man I know," I said, surprising myself with a fierceness that belonged to other years. "He is clever, brave, and he kept me when no one else did."
He paused. "Then tell me of him. Tell me what he wears. Tell me what makes him unbearable and irresistible."
So I told him. I told him of the way the emperor would laugh, of how he touched a lute and the room would stop, how he could read a poem and make you forget to breathe. Andres listened like a man feathering a net, patient and intent.
When I finished, he told me something that made me cling to the bench with both hands.
"You should see him without his golden robes," he said. "He used to be a legend. Perhaps he still is."
"I swore he'd not leave me," I said.
"And yet he did." His tone was kind and cruel. "I cannot believe that the man you praise could run."
"Then you can find him." My voice was smaller than I wanted.
"Perhaps I will," he said. "But perhaps I will first have you change my world for me."
I thought he wanted my body. That was the first thought of a woman who had seen men as danger for so long.
"I won't beg," I managed.
He watched me until I cried myself weak. Then, as if satisfied by the sight, he left.
When he returned there were days where he did nothing and days where he raged. He let me roam under guard, and once he sent for a lute and asked me to play.
"Play," he said when I entered the little garden pavilion. "Play what you used to."
"How do you..." I looked at him, puzzled.
He shrugged. "I watched you play once in a dim house—years ago. People whisper in taverns. I liked how you made the strings announce your heart."
"That was long ago," I said, and plucked a tune that made the garden hold its breath. He applauded when I finished, suddenly earnest.
"You—did you know all this time?"
"Know what?"
"That you are trouble."
"Trouble?" I echoed.
"Yes." He smiled with something like respect. "Trouble in silk."
Our voices braided more and more, words like threads. He sat close. Sometimes I thought him softer than a conqueror had the right to be.
Then came the day of the rumor—the seal. A man in the court told him I possessed the imperial seal, the soft, ridiculous token of a throne. That rumor was as a match to his ambition.
When he spoke of choices I made a bargain. "If the seal is what you want," I said, "you may have it—take the seal, but not my body."
He stared at me, stunned as if my refusal were a new kind of weapon.
"Do you have it?" he asked, eyes sharp.
"Yes." I revealed it, a small carved stone I had worn hidden. "Take it. Take it and rule if you can. But do not lay a hand on me."
He laughed then, half-astonished and half-delighted. "Ambition and faith in a silk dress. How rare."
When he finally picked up the seal, his fingers trembled as if the thing burned him. He left with it clutched to his chest, like a man given what he'd wanted all along. And for a while, he kept his word.
He kept away from me.
That relief lasted only until the wind changed. Then he returned with news. "He's alive," Andres said to me coolly one evening. "Your emperor. The man you worshipped is alive."
My heart did a stupid thing and leapt.
"Where?"
"At Mu Mountain. Two days away with hidden troops."
My entire being turned to one sharp instrument.
"You must choose, then," he said gently. "Join me and live as my consort. Or choose him and watch the world you knew burn a different way."
"I chose him," I answered.
"In that case," Andres murmured, "you must do what lovers do—sacrifice for their sovereign."
He offered me a hand, and I accepted none of his bargains. I only did what I had to do, and when the day came and the yellow banners marched into the square, I did something no one expected me to do.
I threw off my robe—my silk, my mask—and I wore beneath it the resplendent yellow, the embroidered dragon that had the right to rule. I walked to the balcony and turned to the soldiers.
"Listen!" I called, voice lifted, as if I had always been made to command. "This city belongs to the throne, whoever sits upon it. If any man here truly serves this land, follow me."
For a moment nothing happened. Then a murmur. Then a shout. "Long live the emperor!" came from the soldiers who had been my father's watchers, who had been loyal beyond reason.
The banners shifted. Andres' own troops found new orders sliding into their ears like knives. Their eyes were no longer his.
He looked at me as his world slipped away. "You are the emperor?"
"Yes," I said simply. "I always have been."
He staggered back like a man hit. "You—" he whispered. "You lied."
"I wore a woman's hair and a mother's dress because it served me," I told him. "I learned both law and lute. I am no fragile thing."
The day that followed was a thunder of robes and clashing loyalties. I reclaimed my seat and watched Andres' face as the tide turned.
"You could kneel," I said to him from the throne, the crown heavy at my brow, "or you can choose another path."
He spat and would have shouted but the court rippled with officers holding him fast. His face was flush with rage and wild grief.
"I will not kneel to you," he snarled.
"Then you will be punished," I said, and the decree was not only iron but intended to carve shame into the air for others to feast on.
He had been a man who loved both conquest and spectacle. I knew spectacle better than he knew war. The punishment would not be private.
—The Public Punishment—
They did not drag him in at dawn. I made them wait until the courtyards filled and the city flocked to see the fate of the man who had tried to burn the world down for his hunger.
"Bring him," I told the herald, and the sound of the chain rattling made a hundred heads turn.
He was pushed through the great doors in the center of the outer hall. His armor was torn, his gait uncertain. He did not look like the unstoppable general who had crossed rivers and walls. He looked small and very human.
I sat, and I watched, and the counselors shuffled to their places like predators pleased at a spectacle.
"By imperial decree," I said, slow and clear, "Andres Collins raised arms against the state, burned palaces, and attempted to seize the throne. For these treasons, he shall be punished openly so none may think treason a path to glory."
He laughed at that, a raw sound that did not reach his eyes. "You," he said, "you wear a queen's dress and a general's plans."
"Do not speak of my dress," I replied. "Speak instead of what you destroyed."
They paraded the faces of the dead—names and small biographies read aloud so the crowd could understand the weave of ruins. Mothers yelled. Merchants wept. The scholar Edmund Kaiser, who had chosen treachery once, stood in the corner and bowed his head.
I had called forth those whom Andres had betrayed. I let them speak. A soldier whose brother had died pressed forward and spat in Andres' face. "You took my brother for your parade," he said. "You gave me a scrap and a lie."
An old woman, once a courtkeeper, held up a scorched piece of silk—the robe of a fallen guard. "You took his life for your pride," she said. "You will not enjoy the fruits of his death."
The crowd's voices rose like waves, each tide rolling in accusations and raw grief.
Then I stripped him not of clothes but of meaning. I took from him his rank in a formal sequence of ceremonial gestures so public that every eye recorded it.
"By this seal I strip Andres Collins of his titles," I intoned. A clerk read the line, and a scribe wrote it and the ink stayed wet for the world to see.
They bound him in the place where the old tribunal had been, in the court of the outer hall. The hangings were taken down and he was seated upon a low stool. A ring pushed into his fingers would remain there until the end of the day so anyone could look and know he'd been denounced.
I ordered the city crier to recount his betrayals: the villages sacked, the households burned, the oaths bent. Each charge landed like a bell, and the crowd listened, leaning forward as if to catch the syllables of his shame.
At intervals I allowed testimonies—women, soldiers, officials—each telling a story that edged the man closer to what he had done. The sound of accusations was not just a tool; it was the people's voice, the voice I'd aimed to amplify.
Andres' expression changed as the day moved on. At first he refused everything.
"I did what a man must," he shouted. "I took a kingdom."
"By killing and lying?" a widow asked. "By feeding my child the ashes of my husband's hopes?"
His denials began to fray. His jaw tightened. His eyes darted, seeking allies in the crowd, finding only faces drawn with hurt. He tried to laugh lightly once, to make spectacle of himself, but the laughter came out as a broken thing.
He shifted through stages of reaction right there in public light. At first he was angry, snapping words with a soldier's quickness. Then he went to denial, claiming falsehoods. When another witness held up a piece of a letter with Andres' handwriting—proof of counsel that had ordered a massacre—his face paled.
"That's a forgery," he said at first. "A doctored scrap. You cannot—"
The crowd hissed. Someone in the front row pulled out a scrap of his own banner, the embroidered lion, stained. "This is real," a merchant said. "I sold him the dye, and he paid with gold taken from my neighbor's safety chest."
He stared at the proof and the change in him was obvious to anyone who watched closely: from defiant to confused, from angry to fearful. The man who had stormed walls now trembled at the proof of his own treachery.
He fell next into bargaining—"I can reform," he said to no one, then to me, and then to the crowd. "I can serve. Put me to your guardhouse. Let me teach soldiers. Give me a task."
People spat. The soldier whose brother lay dead stepped forward. "No lesson from you," he said. "You kill the men you teach."
After bargaining came a brittle kind of pleading. His voice shook when he addressed the mother who had lost her son. "I am sorry," he said. "I am sorry."
The mother looked at him as if seeing a stranger. "I don't need your sorry," she said. "I need him."
Even his men—those who once marched by his call—hovers at the edges like wilted banners. Some offered a weak attempt at defense, blaming hunger, blame on orders from higher, but most had fled the moral cost of such defense. One by one, they kept quiet.
The crowd decided the worst part: humiliation. They did not stone him. They did not strip him naked in the mud. They did what they could not take back: they took away his honor.
They set him upon a low cart and paraded him through the market. Women who had lost children spat calls and curses. Children shouted. Men cursed his name. Where once he had been a figure of fear, he became a figure of ridicule. Vendors pointed and laughed. Someone threw stale bread. A musician played a mocking tune.
During the parade, Andres' face broke open into real suffering. He shouted, then pleaded, then sobbed. He clasped his hands to his face and wailed. He went from rage (the first reaction) to disbelief (the second), then to pleading, then to quiet surrender. When faces he had once ordered to death stood to shout his crimes, his reaction changed again—panic, as if he were drowning.
There was one final act of consequence I would allow: he would be made to serve the court he had betrayed—not as a man of honors, but as a servant to those he had wronged. He was assigned to rebuild, under the supervision of those he had betrayed. He would carry supplies, mend roofs, and give over his strength to restore what he had broken. He would be observed, watched, and every day he would have to meet the eyes of those whose lives he had ruined.
"Let his work speak where words fail," I said, and the crowd roared, not always with mercy, but with the satisfaction that justice, in one form, had been done.
When the cart came back and they unbound him, his face was hollowed. He put his hands out as if offering them for the first time. He had been stripped of rank, dragged through scorn, and assigned to rebuild. He was reduced to labor and to the look of a man who had been made small.
He fell to his knees not in supplication to me but in the weight of what had been done to him.
"Do you understand why?" I asked.
He looked up with eyes raw and human. "I do," he said, voice small. "I see now."
"Good." I gave the order. "Begin tomorrow at daylight."
The crowd did not applaud. They were not a theater for mercy. They were a city that had been burned and then reborn through public acknowledgment. The punishment had been a spectacle, but more, it was a reclamation.
—After the Punishment—
Andres' humiliation marked the end of the immediate spectacle, but not of the private tangle between us. He returned, as men do, with the slow crawl of someone who learns the cost of his choices.
There were other things—less grotesque than public shaming, more intimate—that happened after. I let time do what courts do. I watched him rebuild, watched him flinch when a child called him by his name, watched him fall into quiet work that left him exhausted and sober.
One night, when the moon had thinned and the roof tiles had been mended, he came to me in the garden where only my close guards and the soft night breathed. He looked at me like a man who had learned the meaning of small mercies.
"You gave me a dismantled possibility instead of death," he said. "Do you regret that?"
"I regret many things," I told him. "But public anger heals a people. Your humbling was necessary."
He lowered his head. "Do you hate me?"
"No," I said, and it was true. I had once loved him in a different life of guile and quiet. "You are broken in ways proud men rarely let themselves be. I will watch you because you matter to the shape of the world."
He let out a laugh that was rusty. "Then watch me, emperor. Watch to see if I can become someone fit to stand in the sun."
I smiled and allowed him the grace of rebuilding. The city watched too. People are strange that way—they forgive slow and punish fast.
Months later, he returned not as a general or a lover but as a man who had been refined by shame and labor. We did not become lovers again in any simple way. We were, for a time, two people with a history scorched into them. He carried his guilt like a badge; I carried my crown.
Sometimes at night he would appear in the servants' quarters and sit, exhausted, and talk of the children who had shouted at him and the shopkeeper who had thrown stale bread. "I remember," he said once, "the song you used to play. I would like to hear it again."
"Then play it," I said.
He plucked at a small lute someone had given him in charity. He played the simple tune that had once led him to the room where I practiced being a concubine. When he finished, he laid the lute aside and bowed, not in fear but in a strange gratitude.
"Will you forgive me?" he whispered.
"I will not forget," I said. "Forgiveness is a thing I grant and take away by degrees. You will earn it by who you become."
He nodded like a man who had received a sentence half lenient, half judgment.
We kept our distance and yet shared a strange, uneasy peace. Once, he looked at me and said, "You did not run. You stayed and reclaimed the throne."
"I did what I had to," I answered.
"You are something fierce," he said.
"So are you," I told him. "You loved badly and you paid for it."
"And yet," he murmured, "I would do it again for some part of what you were."
I did not answer. The truth of that was a blade with two edges.
Later, they would tell songs of that summer—of a woman who was emperor and a general who learned what his hunger had cost. They would tell of public shaming, yes, but also of labor, of rebuilding, of a city that learned to watch its leaders with a harder eye.
When I think of him now, I remember the way his face shifted that day in the hall—arrogance to shock to bargaining to pleading to brokenness. I remember the market parade and the stale bread. I remember the silence that followed.
And I remember why I had to do it, why justice should mirror what it conquered: not with equal cruelty, but with an exposure that taught and mended. The spectacle of his punishment taught the city that treason is not glorious; it taught him what his choices took from others.
I kept the seal. I kept the crown. I kept the memory of the lute and the red gown and the yellow dragon. And when the nights were still, I sometimes put on the gown and play the tune that once made a man forget his hunger.
The End
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