Sweet Romance13 min read
Where I Bartered My Name and Found a Promise
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"I am Kendra Amin," I told the wind as if it were a witness.
"I am nothing now," I said, and let the words drop like coins.
"Are you cold?" Julieta asked, her voice small.
"Always," I answered.
My life turned over in three months. One morning I was the magistrate's daughter; the next my name was tied to a wooden tag and a metal shackle. I remember my father's study—the carved desk, the red ribbon on a ledger—and then I remember fire, then the public edict, then exile.
"Listen," my grandmother had said before she set the gold hairpin back on the table. "Live. That's all."
"Live," I promised. "I will live."
"A bargain," Julieta whispered, and that was all she could give me. Her fingers were thin as chestnut twigs, and when she gripped my hand they trembled with a weight I could not imagine carrying.
We left with other families bound for the northern border camp. The road threw flour-dust into my throat, wind folded my hair into a cage. A clerk named Sterling Pena watched us as though we were a parade.
"Do you know," Sterling said when he thought he had my attention, "I arranged this convoy. I mean, a favor. If you need a friend—"
"Save your favors," I said. I had learned quickly to keep my head bent and my mouth closed.
He smirked like a man tasting meat. "You'll need a friend up north."
"Noted."
Julieta grew thin on the road. The cold bit old bones cruelly, and once the shackle rubbed red across her wrist, she stopped laughing.
"Sterling is not a good match," she rasped when I could hold her no longer.
"I know," I whispered, and the words were an evasion and a truth all at once.
The convoy's cold kept many from speaking. The guards were clean and precise. Sterling was not yet caught in the act of being cruel; he was patient, like a spider. He offered cloaks, then he offered words.
"Eat these," he said once, pressing a handful of peanuts into my palm with a fake gentleness.
They were a test. Within an hour my face flushed with red bumps, a rash as if the road itself had decided to mark me. Sterling's smile sharpened.
"Now you'll be mine," he said softly, and the sound of "mine" made a cavity of fear inside me.
In the border camp, women older than me were led away; the younger ones were herded into a waystation. We were shown into a hall and told the officers would choose. The general—an old man whose laugh filled rooms—ruled the day.
"If any of you agree willingly," the general barked, "then your status is changed. But it is by consent."
"Consent," I mouthed and let the irony hang.
Many girls were chosen fast. Money and pretense moved faster than grief. Sterling watched and heaped glances like coal.
A man in a six-rank uniform stood there last, quiet as a well. He was scarred—one line across his brow and down the corner of his eye, and when he glanced at me it felt like a memory. He looked older than he needed to be; he wore a scar like an old argument.
"Who are you?" I whispered to myself, then to him, when my heart had a mind to speak.
"Conway Yamamoto," he said, and his voice was gravel and warmth.
"Conway," I repeated aloud because the scent of that name seemed to ease an ache. I reached into my sleeve and let a jade ring fall into his palm—my only secret of worth—and I said, "I have money; please keep me."
He studied me, then smiled with an amused tilt. "You are Kendra Amin, aren't you?"
"Yes," I said. "Yes." The name tasted like a promise and a lie.
He took the ring and tucked it away. "Good. I accept you."
When people around us laughed at the way he handled the selection, a man named Jose Guerrero made a sudden ruckus, dragging forward a buxom bride for himself. Jose's grin was easy and loud.
"Conway!" Jose shouted. "Pick someone better than that!"
Conway laughed, and his hand found mine without pretense. The first time his palm covered mine it was like a shield.
"Conway," I said later, when camp lights burned like soft eyes. "Thank you."
"You're nervous," he murmured.
"You don't know how to be tender," I accused.
"Maybe I do," he said, and then he surprised me with a line full of mischief. "We can bargain tenderly, too."
The wedding in the camp was simple. Red paper was pinned to a wooden door. Old men clapped. The young soldiers pinned tassels on their armor. I walked ahead of Conway with a weight inside my chest like a seed.
"Is this a joke?" Sterling asked in a low tone when he found me.
"Keep your jokes," I said, and my voice did not shake.
Conway walked me through the rites like a man remembering a tune. He joked about the "spring night's worth a thousand coins", and the joke made Sterling wince visibly.
"You're cruel," Sterling said to Conway, later, with a face like a struck bell.
"Maybe," Conway said, then took my hand. "But I am yours tonight. Keep your sword for the road."
That night, with the red candles sputtering, I sat on the edge of a stranger's bed wondering how to be a stranger's wife.
"You don't have to pretend," Conway whispered when he saw me hesitate.
"I promised to buy my life," I said.
"Then we bargain fairly," he answered. "Add coin, add comfort. I can promise comfort."
"You promise too much for a man who did not taste the inside of a home," I said.
He smiled like a man who had carved the smile out of the weather. "I have a chest of wooden dolls," he admitted, almost shy. "They keep me from forgetting faces."
"I had a childhood on a float," I said. "A statue's helper, dressed as a little jade girl."
"You were bright then," Conway said. "And then you were hidden with gold."
He lifted the small jade ring from his finger and turned it between his callused thumbs. "You hid this well, Kendra."
"Enough to be alive," I corrected.
Days grew into a small rhythm. Conway's house was a modest compound with a courtyard and two red lanterns. An old servant named Fox Bradley bowed with a grin so wide he sometimes embarrassed me by how pleased he was with everything.
"Conway," Fox said once. "She brings light."
"She brings mischief," Conway replied.
We planted a patch in the yard, and I learned the slow pride of small things grown. He taught me to plant a seed and wait; I taught him to notice that the sky changed color in small increments.
We built warm corners. We shared small silences. We shared the way the tea steamed between us. He had a cough he kept secret.
"Take your pills," I scolded one evening.
"I will, if you stop eating the peanuts," he bargained.
"Peanuts make my skin rash," I said.
"Then I will keep you away from peanuts forever," he said.
His hands were rough and honest. I liked to trace the scar with my finger as if it were a road to a map no one else could see.
"Tell me," I asked once. "Why this face? Why this scar?"
He looked at me like a man seeing his own map. "A debt to a cruel step. A fight where I lost more than blood. But I live."
"You look like someone I once met," I said. "When I was a child I gave cake to a hungry boy and he put powder on my face. Then he cut himself free and told me to run east."
"This isn't a story you tell often," Conway said quietly.
"You've always looked like that boy," I said. "Maybe you are him."
"Perhaps," Conway allowed, and then he laughed with a small, wild sound. "Maybe I am both."
Life grew small and steady. Conway was strange and slow and fierce in private. He would toss people out of the gate if they spat once too many times at my name.
One night, the camp alarm woke us. A raid was coming. Men rose like iron and wind. Conway kissed my forehead.
"Stay hidden," he told me.
"I am not afraid," I lied.
He left with a bag of blades and a sigh, and the gate swallowed him.
While the battle happened, Sterling Pena—the clerk who had lingered while Julieta's breath had become small—found me when the air was still. He grabbed me, blind with rage.
"Kendra," he said, teeth tight. "You think you bought your life? You owe me, and I will take it."
He dragged me through dust and into a broken yard. He wanted to punish the woman who rejected him by breaking her.
"You think I can hurt you?" he hissed.
You know the moments before one is put to a cruelty: light narrows to a slit, breath becomes a stone. I thought of Julieta's hands, of the jade ring, of Conway. I thought of running east.
Instead, I waited for a sound. I listened for the iron tread of soldiers and the whinnying of horses. I heard a heavy breathing I did not expect—Conway's, though I had told myself he'd be far.
"Sterling," a voice said flatly. "Let her go."
Conway moved like a shadow uncoiling. He smelled of sweat and iron. He struck Sterling hard enough to make the man drop like a sack. There were soldiers behind him, yelling, and Sterling stumbled toward the gate.
"Tell them," Conway said quietly to me later. "Tell them everything he did."
I did. I told everyone in the yard what Sterling had taken and threatened. I spoke of the days Julieta's hands were thin as twigs, of the nights he pressed peanuts at me like bait. I found the words with a ferocity I had reserved for survival.
The punishment was public.
They dragged Sterling to the parade ground the next day. The old general convened an audience. Men and women crowded the square, about two hundred in all. Soldiers leaned on their spears, children peered through doorways, and Fox Bradley stood amid the crowd with his mouth open.
"Sterling Pena," the general said, voice booming. "You are accused and you will be judged where all can see."
"You owe me," Sterling spat. "She is mine to mock."
"Enough," Conway said. "You will answer here."
They unrolled the charges. I spoke. Conway stood by with his hand on his sword but not drawn. Sterling's face held the color of a man who had expected applause and instead found a wall.
"She told us," Jose Guerrero yelled from the front. "You watched her suffer on the road! You tried to take her by guile!"
Sterling shifted. "I—" he begun, but the crowd had leaned in.
"Do you deny that you tampered with her food?" the general demanded.
Sterling's mask broke a little. "It was—"
"It was a trick," Conway supplied coldly. "A man who crafts traps for women deserves the crowd's judgement."
"Shame on you!" a woman shouted. "Shame!"
The crowd's murmurs grew until they became a tide. They pushed forward. Someone called for his seal to be taken; someone else demanded he be flogged. Sterling had imagined a private humiliation, then some silent advantage, but he was wrong. They wanted spectacle.
"Bring him to the rack," the general ordered. "Let the town see how a man who thinks himself owed is unraveled."
Sterling lunged. He tried to push past three soldiers and was restrained. "You will not hurt a man like that!" he screamed. "I had influence!"
"Influence," Conway repeated like a curse. "You used your influence to prey."
They bound Sterling to the rack in the square. He spat at the sky. A crowd gathered in a tight ring, holding their breath like a held tide. I watched from the steps of the hall; Julieta's grave was a thought behind my eyes. Fox Bradley's hands clenched so hard his knuckles blued.
"Look," someone said. "This is how they use us."
The first lashes fell. Sterling's face crumpled in ways he had never allowed it to crumple. Each blow was met with a gasp from the onlookers—disgust, pleasure, relief. He had expected private cunning to win him a fate quiet and advantageous. Instead he met the truth of a public mind.
Sterling moved through stages. First there was superiority—eyes hard, chin up, as if to say his pride could not be touched. Then surprise, when the first lash found his skin. He tried to deny, to laugh, but pain wrote new words in his face. Denial flapped and then failed. His bravado became a denial, his denial a wail. He tried to lessen his guilt by blaming others, panting, "It wasn't only me! They asked me! They encouraged me!" The crowd hissed.
"You're a liar," Jose shouted.
"Watch him break," someone else whispered, and the watchers pulled closer, hungry for the moment where a man like him fell.
Sterling's face went flush as blood and flinched as each blow marked him. Tears cut clean lines down his cheeks unlike the spare ones Julieta had shed. He began to bargain. "Please!" he begged, voice ragged. "I have a family, I have—"
Soldiers burned with a new will. "You used your name as a patch for your cruelty," a woman cried. "You deserve to be stripped of your honors."
The crowd began to chant. "Shame! Shame! Shame!" They recorded with hands and spoke with fingers. A child held a pebble in his small hand and watched as if the scene were a lesson in justice.
"Conway," Sterling said suddenly in a smaller voice, "will you let this go if I apologize?"
Conway's eyes were steady. "You can apologize in a cage," he said. "And I can promise you a quiet life away. But your hands have touched what they shouldn't. You'll never hold your head high again—because now everyone knows."
"No," Sterling whispered. The realization of loss tightened his throat like a noose.
People in the crowd shifted. "He will be cast out," someone said. "No guild will touch him. No clerk will trust him."
"Your wife?" a woman asked mockingly. "Will she stay?"
Sterling's pleas turned to a series of soft exclamations, “Please—no—my name—”
The general stepped forward and drew a line with his staff in the dirt. "He will be stripped of title. He will be dismissed, shamed. He will be told where his greed left him. He will walk from this place known as his ruin." He lowered his voice to a hammer. "And he will show his face where you all can see the ruin of a man who thought himself above a woman."
Sterling's reaction was textbook: from pride to crumbling, denial to pleading. He cried as the crowd watched. They whispered. Some recorded the moment with small mirrors, others stamped in approval. "Good," one old woman muttered. "Now the world knows."
He begged for mercy. "I can return the gifts. I'll go away. Give me a job far away, in the mines. I will fix it."
"No," the general said. "You will carry the memory of this day. You will stand outside the gates each market day for a year with your sign, telling who you were and what you took. Let the children learn."
"So be it," Sterling sobbed. The world was smaller than he had thought, and everyone saw his fear, his humiliation like a banner.
They escorted him out through the main gate and forced him to walk the market road. Fox Bradley spat when Sterling passed their house. A woman threw a bucket with a sour face at him. Children mimicked him and laughed. Men turned their faces away.
Sterling's last expression in my sight was not that of an honorable man; it was the look of a person who had been stripped to nothing before his neighbors.
The crowd followed. They watched him confess and tell the same shame story in every market. The punishment lasted weeks. He came back like a broken cart.
For me, seeing Sterling humiliated in public rewired my thinking. It rewired the things inside me that had been dulled by fear. I had expected payment, not justice. Public truth had a taste as sharp as iron.
Conway stood with me through all of it, sometimes silent, sometimes speaking on my behalf. When Sterling's story ended and the city chatter quieted, Conway took my hand.
"You spoke," he said simply.
"I had to," I replied.
"Then we both bought something then," he said. "You bought your life; I bought the right to be beside you. We shall use both."
I learned then what being loved could be—protective, steady, sometimes fierce as a blade. Conway was not a shining lord; he was a steady person who could hold when the world pulled hard.
We had more days. We had soft nights full of easy breath. We had arguments about small things: the way the tea was too hot, the way he kept his boots by the bed. We had laughter about how Fox Bradley would make any cloth into a curtain and then bow as though he had built palaces.
I grew stronger. I took my money and we fixed the house. I learned to laugh at Jose's crude jokes. I kept the wooden doll of a little jade girl on our shelf and sometimes I dusted it with reverence, thinking of the child on the float who had once given cake.
One winter, the war spat out new waves. I was taken again—this time by a group of men who meant to sell me. Sterling's kind of greed had multiplied into a pack. I was hidden in a ruined yard.
"You are mine," a thief said, and I could see the same shine in his eyes as Sterling's.
I closed my eyes for a long time and thought: Conway is gone. He might not be a legend. He might be hurt. I tried to picture his face so hard I could conjure it.
Then came steps—heavy, precise. Conway burst through and the yard filled with the sound of armor and breath. He moved like someone who had carved his way back to me.
"You," the thief cursed and lunged.
Conway's sword was quiet. He took the man down, then the next. It was not violence for pleasure; it was violence to clear a way home. He fought without fury, with a measured economy, and each man fell like a felled statement.
Afterwards, he sat beside me in the dark and withdrew from his cloak a small carved figure.
"For you," he said.
It was the jade girl—my old memory made small. He had carved it with patient fingers, making sure the mouth was just right.
"You carved her?" I asked.
"I remembered," he said. "I remembered your face on the float. I remembered a promise that someone might come back."
I laughed—half relief, half sorrow. "You keep a box of wooden dolls," I said. "You keep the past in your hands."
"Yes," he said. "And now we will carve a present."
Time moved on. We planted more, saved more, laughed more. The days were quiet like a hand cupped over a flame. We planned to leave the border in three years when Conway could transfer to a gentler post. I dreamed of the city, of Julieta's garden, of an altar where she might rest without dust and without the cold that had taken her breath.
"Will you come back with me?" I asked him more than once.
"If you want," Conway would reply. "If the home calls you, I will come."
I had learned to bargain with my heart. I had taken what I needed for survival and wrapped it in a decision: I would be alive. I would be free. I would not be small in the world.
There were quiet admissions. One night, in front of the wooden dolls, Conway said, "I am not always brave. I am not always good."
"You are brave enough when it counts," I answered.
He nudged me like a boy. "Then be my brave. And my loud."
Years later—years that still feel like seconds when I recall them—people mention that this is the tale of a woman who bartered her name in front of a cold wind and found a man's steady hand instead of a thief's grin.
"Do you regret?" a young woman once asked me, eyes wide and sincere.
"No," I said, because the truth is sharp and simple. "I traded fear for safety, and then I traded safety for love."
"Is he your hero?" she asked.
"He is not a hero carved from marble," I replied. "He bleeds and coughs and mends. He forgets appointments. He remembers my tea. He carved me a girl from wood. To me, that was enough."
Once in a while, the memory of Sterling crossing the square and the market's laughter returns to me like a lesson I taught myself.
"Do you still keep the jade ring?" Conway asked one afternoon.
I took it from the shelf where it had slept, held it to the light.
"Always," I said.
He smiled. "Then we have both kept our promises."
We kept on planting in the courtyard. We invited Jaylene Vieira, a bright-lipped woman from the camp, to teach the children how to draw faces. Fox Bradley organized a small festival where everyone brought a dish. Jose Guerrero grew less loud and more fond of the stew.
When I go to Julieta's graveside, I still tell her of the days. I tell her, "I did not die. I bartered and I lived. I loved."
"Did you ever forgive Sterling?" someone asked me once, cruelly curious.
"I did not forgive him," I said. "I learned from him." The answer is not the same thing. Justice had taught me to use words as weapons; love taught me to heal.
Conway placed his hand over mine, callused and warm.
"I am Kendra Amin," I say sometimes to myself, so that old echoes know I am still here.
"And I am Conway Yamamoto," he replies, and then he adds with a soft grin, "And you are mine to guard, not to own."
We laugh, and the garden laughs with us.
The End
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