The Emperor's Rose

Sawajiri was born with her dead mother's eyes - red-flecked, unmistakable - and has paid for them all her life. Blamed for a death she did not cause, worked to the bone in her uncle's house while her sisters lounge in silk, she wants only one thing: never to be sold like a parcel to some stranger. Then her uncle sells her anyway.

She is sent to the imperial castle as a menial, into the household of Emperor Hisato - the tyrant whose wars have set the noble houses against each other, whose harem has no empress, and whose previous lover died with questions still clinging to her name. The court expects Sawajiri to scrub and vanish. Instead, one careless evening, she sings.

The lullaby stops the Emperor where he stands. He has never asked anyone for anything twice; he demands her voice again. But the song does more than snag a tyrant's ear. It rattles a door he nailed shut years ago - and neither of them yet knows why the melody feels like something coming home.

Marriage follows, and Sawajiri trades one cage for a gilded one. The court closes over her head: a venomous rival who smiles with fangs and keeps vials of truth serum; a prince who believes a servant girl cannot refuse him; ministers who price her worth in whispers and question the blood of her children; treasurers whose winter accounts feed rats on schedule. Sawajiri has been soft and silent before. She is done with both. She slaps a sovereign, catches a cooked ledger in front of the council, and discovers that the monster everyone fears keeps headaches, grief, and the shards of his dead mother's vase at the bottom of his rage.

Because Hisato has a secret. Years ago, a boy with a broken straw hat met a prickly girl in a summer meadow. Names were leashes, so they gave none; he called her his rose and she called him her knight, until the day he went home and never came back. She has spent years mourning the wrong man. The tyrant she was forced to marry has loved her since before she knew his face, and he remembers every word of the song she taught him.

Now the stakes are imperial. Survive a wedding night behind sliding screens, where the faithless moon is the only witness and the dark keeps what the lamps begin. Outlast the rival who wants her gone, the prince who wants her broken, and the councilors who want her children named bastard. Settle accounts with the house that sold her. And when a crooked pine is carried across the Empire and set down in a garden ringed with first roses, Sawajiri must decide whether she dares to bloom for the man who never stopped waiting under the tree.

Passion burns slow and hot, and fades to black; the doors slide shut on whatever the moon is sworn not to tell.

A historical romance of court intrigue and quiet, obstinate love - of a straw hat worn crooked for fifteen years, and a rose that blooms where it was planted, thorns and all.