Rebirth11 min read
A Prince, Two Women, and the Ash of a Promise
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I was born as the second prince in the northern court. I say it plainly: I grew up inside silk and shadow. My mother was a favored consort, and my childhood smelled of perfume and incense. People called her the light of the palace.
"Do you remember how I used to say it?" she would joke. "Princes are like iron. Cold, steady. One day they'll be a blade."
"I remember," I'd say, because those small betrayals of memory made her laugh.
But when I was five, they killed her with a decree as light as a feather. I was five and I remember the cold in my father's eyes on the throne. I remember the quiet that followed, like a curtain dropping between me and everything warm.
"Your mother had enemies," they said.
"I knew they were cruel," I said to myself. "I knew the world was thin."
Years rolled. I grew inward. People called me distant and warned me, "Be careful, Your Highness." I replied with a small smile that was really a hinge closing.
When I was twelve, I met a girl in the hills by the tea pavilion. She was a bright motion—no palace polish, only movement and laughter. Bells at her waist tanged with her steps. She climbed a low tree and nearly fell and laughed.
"Who are you?" I asked, because some questions change everything.
She turned, face masked by a light veil. "None of your business."
"Come sit with me," I said, which was the first thing I ever asked of anyone that felt like hunger.
"I won't," she said, but the bells jangled and she came.
We talked like two people who had found a small warm place in a cold world. I tried to know where she came from.
"Tell me your name," I said one dusk.
She blinked. "What if I don't want to tell you?"
"If I don't know your name, I can't love you properly," I said, and she laughed—a bright, quick sound like a bell.
"I'm Giselle," she said at last, and my heart spun like a bird.
"Do you like the hills?" I asked.
"I like running down them," she said. "I like trouble that leaves you laughing."
"Then stay," I whispered.
She stayed. Later I coaxed her into telling me small things: she was the daughter of a scholar's house, a low branch in the world, not fit to be a prince's wife. We both knew the truth.
"You're mine," I told her once on the path home, reckless as a child. "One day I will take you."
She slapped my shoulder. "You will? You think the sky is yours to hand out?"
"I do, when you're with me," I said.
When I was nineteen the court moved me like a piece on a board. I was arranged to marry the daughter of the general—an alliance the throne demanded. I resented it before I met her.
On the wedding day she lifted her red veil. She smiled at me in a way that folded the air.
"Do you know me?" she asked.
"For a minute, it felt like I did," I lied.
"Good," she said. "Because I will be here."
Her name was Hilary. Later I learned she was the general's only daughter. People called her bright and blunt. She knew horses and banners. Her laugh was open and strong.
"You're not as cold as they say, Matthias," she told me once, after a feast. "You look at things like puzzles."
"I prefer puzzles that don't bite," I replied.
At first I treated Hilary like a chess piece. I softened her out in public because my old wounds were sharp and because my father's conquests were still a map I navigated.
"You must be careful with the Empress," my steward warned. "Her house holds swords."
"Then I will sugar the sword," I told him, and smiled.
But my mind kept pulling to Giselle. She had entered the palace as a small, bright scandal—she came to the city to sell cloth, said she, and somehow the bells on her hip were known in places where common girls did not tread. She was clever, full of quick kindness, and blunt in a way that made me ashamed for my soft, careful words.
"Why do you look at me like the world owes you something?" she asked once when I lingered by her. Her hand slipped and the bells jingled.
"Because the world does owe me something," I whispered.
She hit my hand. "Don't be a fool. Take what you can."
I took her in a way I had no right to take—one late night my desire turned like a trap. I forced her, and she yielded or could not stop me; I cannot smooth the memory. Shame lives like a stone behind my ribs from that night forward.
"Why did you do that?" I asked myself afterward.
"I could not stand the emptiness," I said. "I was afraid it would take her and I would have nothing left."
Afterward the court shifted. A rumor, then a small wave, then a flood: Hilary's family asked to retire, signs of withdrawal from the general. I signed papers like a man cutting flowers, not noticing until later what the scent meant.
"Will you stay?" Giselle asked one dawn when I came to the pavilion. Her hair was a wild thing, her eyes full of sleep and anger and hurt.
"I promised you," I said, but my tongue tasted like ash.
She looked at me like a map kept secret. "You promised yourself," she said. "You promised your crown."
I tried to make things safe for her. I made Giselle a lowly palace attendant, dismissed whispers with token kindness, and told myself I was protecting her.
"You cannot be whole and rule," my father once told me. "An emperor must be a circle burned hard. No cracks."
"I could be burned into something good," I said, but I lied.
Hilary, in time, grew possessive. When I visited other courtiers she would bolt like a fawn and attack me with words.
"You left me," she would say. "You left me with my skirts in the dark."
One night she refused to reconcile. I, stupid like a child, said a foolish thing. "If you force me to stay away from you," I told her hotly, "I will not return."
Her face quieted into something unreadable.
Later that evening I walked the corridors and found her not sleeping. She was in the center of the room, kneeling as if before a shrine. She looked up, and her face was terrible.
"I hate you," she said, and the voice was small and wide and true.
"Why?" I asked, the air a blade.
"Because you are both liar and coward," she said. "Because you let me stand where I must, and you give my life to maps."
"I am trying to keep you," I blurted.
"For what?" she asked. "To be another man told to bow? I will not be a throne's pet."
I left with my pride like a stone.
Later I found a book hidden under her pillow—thin paper, vulgar stories. "What is this?" I asked.
She shrugged. "Entertainment."
I took it away, angry and small.
In a banquet she joked and sang and looked full of life. I think I wanted her to be more naive then, for my guilt to be less.
"You're different when no one watches," I murmured once at the feast.
"And you're different when you think no one listens," she said.
The first clear crack came when I saw her strike Giselle in public. Hilary's hand had a strange edge—mockery in the corner of her mouth. She pushed Giselle and the crowd gasped; my stomach twisted.
"Why did you hit her?" I demanded later in private.
"She smiled too easily," Hilary said. "She wears her freedom like a weapon."
"She is small," I said. "She laughs because she can."
Hilary's eyes went cold. "Then keep her from laughing," she said.
From then on every small argument became harder. One night, sleepless, I walked to Hilary's rooms and found the door closed. When she did not answer, I ordered the guards to pry the latch. The light spilled out and there she was—pale, refusing to meet my eyes.
"Come inside," I said in a voice I didn't trust.
"I am not your thing," she replied. "You have already chosen."
My anger was a sudden animal. I took her then with a kind of roughness that frightened me later. She did not fight with fury; she drew herself small, held tight to whatever anger she had left. I left with the taste of iron in my mouth and a new, colder quiet in my chest.
"Tell me if I have been wrong," I told my steward, Fletcher, later. "Is there a right and a wrong here?"
Fletcher lowered his eyes. "You are the emperor. You decide."
The weeks unraveled. I signed edicts without seeing the edges. I allowed a plan—dark orders—to move like shadow.
"Destroy the Wei household," a whisper told me. "They will not rise again."
I remember sitting with a cup of tea and hearing that sentence as if someone read the future aloud. I did not stop it.
When the traps were sprung, the city turned red. The market where children ran became a line of still things. The men from the Wei house were dragged like broken furniture. I gave the orders and the court obeyed.
"Kill them all," someone said. "Spare none."
I signed until the paper turned into a moat of ink.
The punishment that followed those who conspired against the throne—the ones who had framed my mother years back—was public and terrible. I had promised myself justice for her, and the men who had plotted in the old rooms were brought to the great hall a month later to answer.
"You will see how a kingdom handles traitors," I told Fletcher when he brought them forth. "You will know that no darkness goes unpunished."
They were made to stand in the square at midday. A crowd gathered—merchants, servants, women carrying children, a sea of eyes. The sun cut like a blade. The conspirators were dragged before a raised platform where I sat under a canopy. Fletcher and Johann stood to the side. Cyrus Ferrell, the chief among them, had his hands bound; he was the one who had once smiled politely in council and buried poison in paper.
"Tell the people why you did it!" Johann shouted.
Cyrus lifted his chin. "I served the realm," he said in a voice that tried to be honest.
"Lie," a woman in the crowd spat.
I ordered their confessions read aloud. Fletcher unfolded a thick bundle of letters and documents—evidence. The crowd leaned forward.
"These men wrote the edict," Fletcher read. "They framed my mother to seize favor and property. They traded lives like coin."
The murmurs became sharp. "Criminal!" someone shouted. "Cowards!"
Cyrus tried to hold his face. At first he was tight with pride, fingers white against the rope. "You will not break me," he said.
"Do you deny your hand?" I asked, my voice low but clear enough for the square.
"No," Cyrus said. "I—"
People around us began to chant. "Shame! Shame!"
They were made to wear the signs of their crimes: scorched cloth wrapped around their wrists, placards naming their deeds hung from their necks. The most damning documents were nailed to wooden stakes in the center of the square for all to read. Mothers covered children's eyes. Old friends of the men looked away with faces of sorrow and anger. Someone in the crowd ripped a letter and set it to flame. The conspirators' faces changed—first a stiffness of denial, then disbelief as the pages burned, then a thin, animal fear as the crowd moved closer.
"Forgive me!" one of them blurted, voice cracked. "Your Highness, I—"
"Silence!" Johann said. "You killed a woman who had done no harm."
The men began to beg. The first cried out, "It was politics! We were told—"
"But you put poison in a child's life," a merchant said. "You called death necessary."
Another conspirator tried to force himself into explanation, but the crowd's mood was water, pressing inward. Someone threw a handful of dirt at Cyrus. The dirt struck his brow and fell into his eyes. The old power in his face flinched.
A small girl in the front—no more than seven—held up a scrap of silk, the same pattern my mother used to wear. "You hurt my home," she cried, and the ring of people around them echoed with that one word, grief.
Cyrus's composure faltered. "I did what I thought would help the realm," he said. It sounded like a child trying to explain a broken toy.
"Is this how you help?" a woman shouted. "With graves for mothers?"
Now they were not pleading to me so much as pleading to the crowd. I watched as the conspirators shrank under the weight of faces that had lost loved ones. An elderly man who had once broken bread with them spat at Cyrus's shoes. A woman took a torch and brushed its flame dangerously near the papers nailed to the stake. The conspirators screamed as their records were burned, the smoke smelling like a city's fury.
"Look at what you've built," Johann said quietly as the men trembled, "and know it's the same ash your lies have made."
Cyrus's face dissolved into an expression I had not expected. He had been cruel, yes, but he was human; he started to shake, fingers convulsing. "No! No!" he cried, and then he was silent as the crowd's murmurs swallowed him.
The day's punishment kept changing shape. Some in the crowd demanded physical punishment—rods, public lashes. Some wanted them banished, exiled with nothing. The magistrates turned and took notes. In the end, the sentences were severe: public humiliation, property confiscation, exile of their families, and a public reading of their crimes day after day for a month. The men were paraded through the market at noon each day, placards on their chests. The people saw them. The merchants spat. Children pointed and asked their mothers why men could be so cruel.
Cyrus's change was visible. From haughty conspirator he became a hollow man. He tried at times to lift his head, to say something noble, but the words wouldn't hold. Once a woman from the crowd hissed, "You thought it was a game." Cyrus looked at her and could not meet her. "I thought—" He tried to say he had been mistaken, but the crowd threw back their answers. They had lost more than he had imagined.
"Shame," they chanted again and again. "Shame!"
By the end of the month, Cyrus had lost everything—home, title, friends. He was exiled to the borderlands where only the wind would talk to him. The court said it was just. The people said it was not enough. I watched all of it and felt a hollow place open inside me. Justice had been served in their eyes, but I had cut deeper lines with my own hands.
I could not forget Giselle's face when she learned the truth of what I had done to the Wei household. I had thought I was protecting her; I had been protecting my fear.
The day the Wei household fell into ash I fled to the cold garden and passed out. I dreamed in that black place that I had killed my treasures and that Hilary's face was a flame. When I woke Giselle was at my side with cool cloths.
"Tell me one thing," I whispered to her when the world was a smear. "What was in the quarry by the temple when you took what you took?"
She looked at me slow. "You mean the jade?" she asked.
"Yes. There was a pendant."
Her face changed. "You mean the white pendant with a mark?"
"Yes. Who had it?" I asked with sudden fright.
She dropped my hand like a hot coal. "Matthias—" she said softly. "I—"
"You lied," I said. "You hid it."
"No. I did not," she snapped. "I would never take what is not mine."
"Then who—" My world swam. I could see, suddenly, as if through a thin curtain, a picture of my mother and men with smooth smiles, of night, of an order signed in ink that did not tremble.
That revelation did not save anyone. The fires I had set consumed more than I intended. The Wei household fell. I had ordered the edicts. I had whispered to Fletcher to move the court. I had given the signal.
Later, when the cold palace burned and the wind carried the smell of smoke to my bedchamber, I thought I would break. I went to Hilary's rooms again and found emptiness. People told me she left in the night. The palace gave way to a silence like a tide.
I could not bring them back.
"Why?" I begged the empty air. "Why did I let this be the way?"
"You always knew how to burn things," Fletcher said, his face drawn. "You have always been good at burning what you fear."
"I wanted to fix things," I said, but it was only noise.
The next months were a roughness of small deaths. I withdrew from the court. The old weight in my chest—disease left from the moment I saw the pendant—grew. I began to vomit blood once, twice. I felt a slow unthreading.
"I will go to the mountain," I told Giselle. "I will renounce it all."
"You can't run from what you carried," she replied, and her voice was a blade.
One night I dreamed of being in the cold palace again. I saw Hilary there, standing in flame and light. Her face was not angry but hollow like a shell, and she simply said, "Go."
I woke covered in sweat. I did not know whether the dream ordered me or freed me.
The end came with little theatrics. I arranged my letters, placed the pendant on a table, and lay down among the ashes of decisions. I thought I would feel peace, but only sorrow filled me.
"Forgive me," I whispered into the dark.
Giselle touched my hand then, with a touch softer than any armor. "You must forgive yourself if you ever want to be forgiven," she said.
I closed my eyes and let the world tilt.
I died thinking of two faces: the bright bell of Giselle's laugh, and Hilary's clear, fierce eyes. I had loved both in different ways and had destroyed both houses by being weak and strong in wrong balance. I thought I deserved nothing else.
If there is a next life, I promised in that thin place between breaths that I would learn what love asks, and not what power commands.
The End
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