Rebirth15 min read
Born Twice, Lucky Once: How I Rode a Wild Boar and Stole a Prince's Favor
ButterPicks15 views
I was born again into the Calhoun courtyard with an old man's memory in a baby's body.
"I can't see," I said, though my voice was a newborn's little cry. I sounded like any infant. Inside, I was thirty and stubborn and oddly amused.
"Where am I?" I tried to think. I remembered a car, a bright pain, and then darkness. Then a woman's voice cut through the dark like a bell.
"Push! Keep pushing!" someone cried.
I felt a tug and a breath of cool air. A woman's voice laughed with surprise.
"She's a girl! A proper little girl at last for the Calhouns," one neighbor said.
"Finally," another voice whispered. "We've all been waiting."
My grandfather, Dax Calhoun, stammered at the door. "Is she really—? Is she our daughter?"
"Yes," the midwife said, wrapping me in coarse cloth. "White and fat as bread. The Calhouns will turn their luck yet."
I heard the old household settle around me like a warm blanket. Someone hummed. Someone prayed. My eyes closed and opened on soft faces: my grandfather's rough hands, my grandmother's wet smile, and three brothers who looked at me the way people look at treasure.
"This one's name will be Jade," grandfather said, caressing the roundness of my cheek. "Jade Calhoun. She will sweeten our days."
"Jade," I said in my head and found the name fit. I liked it. It felt like honey.
"Don't be silly," my grandmother Isabela O'Brien protested, half laughing. "Say thank you to Kendra for helping at the birth."
Kendra Mathieu, the neighbor who had delivered me, waved me off.
"Only a neighbor's duty," she said. "But the child is special. Take care of her."
My brothers hovered around like errant stars. Phoenix Butler, Blaine Keller, and Teodoro Cline argued softly about who would be the first to change my swaddling. They had old faces for boys and big, honest hands. They promised everything in one breath.
"Tomorrow I will go to the hills," Phoenix insisted. "I'll fetch some game for mother."
"I'll go to the river," Blaine said. "I'll catch fish."
"And I'll stay," Teodoro pledged, proud and small, "I'll mind Jade and change her diaper."
"Good," my grandmother said, voice thick. "We have each other. We will be fine."
The house was poor. The rice bowl was thin. The mattress sagged. But the warmth in their eyes was fat with love. I, who had known crowds and emptiness in another life, decided that this life could be soft.
Days passed in a golden blur. Phoenix brought back a rabbit. Blaine returned with a heavy net full of fish. Teodoro practiced making tiny shirts for me, proud as if he'd stitched the whole world.
"She's bringing us luck," an old man in the yard murmured as he placed a chicken egg and some millet by our door. He was Emery Williams, the white-bearded wanderer everyone called the mad monk. "Don't waste it."
"Luck is not a thing to waste," Kendra replied. "Look at the way even the wild animals pause around your Jade."
The village began to murmur. "The Calhouns have a girl," they said. "Old fortune comes home." Housewives smiled when they saw me in the lane. Children pointed, wide-eyed.
Not everyone smiled. Sara Brady, neighbor next door, watched from behind shutters, her face like iron. Her husband, Carlo Thomas, muttered and muttered to himself on the path.
"Just because they have a baby now they think better," she spat once in the yard. "They will not keep their riches forever."
I watched her in my head then—curiosity, then a little pity. Jealousy is an ugly thing in people's eyes.
"Come on," Teodoro said one dawn as I tugged at the corner of my blanket. "Today we'll take Jade to the hill and show her where the birds sing."
We followed the boys while my father hobbled behind, carrying a cloth bundle that smelled like earth. The day was bright. People in the fields waved.
Suddenly Phoenix froze, pointing. "There's something huge in the field," he whispered.
A wild boar lay half asleep in our furrow, fat as a barrel. It wasn't for us; it had wandered from the wood. The village gathered like moths.
"That's ours if we take it," someone whispered.
"Take it!" my grandfather said, though his voice trembled with worry.
They bound it, they lifted it, they sang. That night, rabbit and boar and fish filled our table. That night we ate like kings we had never been.
"They say when the Calhouns have a girl, the land blesses them," an old neighbor said. "The mad monk said it too."
At first the days were simple and sweet. We sold some meat and kept some grains. We gave some to Kendra as thanks. Life creaked along its old tracks and we walked them together.
Then the dark thing happened.
"I saw her," Sara Brady hissed to Carlo as they passed our yard. "She rides beasts. She draws wolves."
Carlo's eyes glittered. "We could rid ourselves of that child's luck. We could take it away. If the Calhouns fall back into being poor—"
She did not finish. Her mouth had already made the plan.
Night fell like a blanket. I remember the knot in my stomach though I was only a baby in body. The yard smelled of rain and smoke. Someone moved at the back wall.
"Who's there?" Phoenix whispered, voice a thread.
Then two hands—old and cruel—pried at the latch. It was Carlo.
"Be silent!" he breathed. "Don't wake the whole house."
They wrapped my mouth, and if I could have screamed I would have; the world narrowed to a single point of cold. Something heavy lifted me. The air smelled of iron and wrongness.
I prayed. My heart was someone else's heart, but it thudded like a drum.
They threw me over the wall and ran.
They thought I would be eaten by wolves. They thought they had removed my luck.
They left me on the mountainside with a rope biting into my wrists and my legs numbed by chill.
I did not cry, because the small soul inside me had learned patience. I concentrated on breathing.
A small sound warmed the cold: a little puppy with gray fur nosed at my hands. He had eyes the color of river stones. He sniffed me, and then tore my gag away with determined little teeth.
"Thank you," I whispered, very small.
He whimpered as if he understood.
A short while later, a young wolf padded forward. Not sharp teeth, not bared fangs—those wolves bowed like elders. They nudged me and licked the tears I could not make.
They had been my guardians without my knowing. The wolf pup—my tiny savior—came back and pressed his head to my breast and slept. I slept too.
When dawn came, the valley had new noises: cries, men running. My family—my Phoenix, Blaine, Teodoro—had woken to the empty cot and flown to the mountains. They found me smiling and muddy, and a trail of wild chicken and rabbit behind me. Four wolves watched us respectfully at the tree line.
"You came back," my grandmother sobbed. "You came back to us."
The village came once more. Those who had wished us ill did not smile. Sara Brady and Carlo watched from their gate like wolves who had lost their teeth.
"Who did this?" Dax roared. "Who tried to harm my child?"
I looked at them all with the uncanniness of a thirty-year-old soul in a child’s body.
"Carlo! You—" Kendra said, voice low as thunder. The way she looked at him folded him small.
"Don't suppose for a moment we'll let this go," my grandfather said. "If I have to beat every rodent in the market, I will."
Carlo shuffled away. His arrogance was frayed now, his chest hollowed. That night, his bad luck began like a rain of small humiliations.
Days passed. Little prodigies followed the Calhouns. A pack of rabbits were left at our gate. A sweet herb—white and round and half-buried—was found by my chubby hands.
"What is that?" said Phoenix, wide-eyed. He was the first to suspect.
"That—" my grandfather breathed—"that might be ginseng."
We wrapped it and walked for a long day to the town. People stared. The physician in the shop, a sharp-eyed man named Emery Williams who had been a wandering healer for years, paled when he saw the root.
"This is no mere root," Emery said, reverence sewing his voice slow. "This is old. Very old. Take it to the capital. Take it to those who know."
We had a choice: sell it in our village and stay comfortable, or travel to the capital and risk it all for something that could change everything.
"To the capital," I told them, and they followed, trusting the little girl who thought in years she had not yet lived.
The road to the capital was long and full of strangers' faces. We met a troop of rough men once on a hillside. They could have been a threat. A small, cunning boy led them by the hand—he carried himself like the sort of child you see in fine houses.
"Leave them be," the boy said suddenly, and the leader froze. The boy's voice had the kind of steel that commands even the heartless. The leader bowed and muttered and ordered his men away.
"Who are you?" Phoenix asked the boy later.
"My name is Matteo Sun," the boy said very simply. "There is gold in your root."
"Matteo Sun," I repeated. The name sounded to me like a drum that keeps time. I liked him—an impossible little king among boys.
We arrived at the capital and were swallowed by its noise of shout and wheel. Matteo found us a place to stay and guided us to the grand hall of physicians.
We had only a sliver of hope. In the hall a man in an embroidered robe took one look at the ginseng and nearly cried.
"This is the kind that is spoken of in the palace," he said to us. "Take it to the palace. If the Empress is to be saved, this is what she needs."
"Take us in," Matteo said before I could speak.
The Empress lay frail and thin and more shadow than woman. When I was brought to her room she opened one small, watery eye.
"Child," she whispered. "You are like the spring after a long winter."
"I only picked a root in the hill," I told her, seat warm beneath me. "But I am glad you feel better."
The Empress smiled—a thin slice. The way her whole face shone told me how lucky we had been.
In the courtyard outside the palace, men and women gathered. Word of the root and the child who had found it spread. The Empress rose, steadier than any of us had seen her, and requested that we stay for a moment.
"By my command," the Empress said, slow and sure, "the Calhouns will be rewarded. Let it be known that the child is under my protection."
A great rustle swept like wind through the crowd. Dax bowed until his forehead kissed the stone.
"One must be generous," Matteo said quietly to me. "Come. We will make sure people treat you with care."
The Empress's favor rippled. Boxes came. Gold was spoken of. A royal edict would go down in the morning. The palace lights glowed brighter than the market that night.
But news travels unevenly. Sara Brady and Carlo Thomas heard the edict by rumour, and their envy gathered into a long-simmering poison.
I was told to rest. I did not rest. I watched Matteo from the window of our lodgings. He walked like a folded map: precise edges, quiet between. He had saved us without boasting and insisted we dine in the best hall.
"Why?" I asked him.
"Because you were honest," he said simply. "Because I liked the way you were not afraid to speak."
The next morning, an imperial carriage rolled through the capital and a herald read a scroll aloud. A crowd gathered outside our inn in a great crush.
"By decree of the Empress, the Calhouns are to receive provision and exemption, and their Jade is to be honored for her service," the herald read.
"It is true!" called Matteo. "They are to be supported by the crown."
The crowd cheered then. Laughter and joy pricked the cool morning. Men placed palms on chests and bowed. A few people who had treated us with scorn the week before now stood silent.
Sara Brady and Carlo Thomas came to the square anyway. They were not content to watch from afar. They wanted to shape the scene into disgrace.
"That choke of peasants!" Sara hissed. "A palace favor for a root and a girl's fortunes! We'll not have it."
And finally, we arrived at the market where our fate threaded with public eyes. This is where I will not spare ink—for something wicked done must be answered in a way everyone sees.
They called me forward for the formal thanks in the market square: the Empress’s envoys, the physician Emery Williams, Matteo Sun at my side. A great crowd spread out in the market. Vendors ceased hawking. Children balanced like notes on a wire. The sun lay heavy, and every eye found us like a needle.
Sara Brady pushed through the crowd, face red with fury. Carlo Thomas followed, posture belligerent. They mounted a low cart and tried to shout above everyone.
"What does a palace know? They will forget the Calhouns tomorrow," Carlo spat. He believed himself a judge in his own story.
"Bring them to me," Sara said, voice sharp as a sickle. "These people have stolen what belongs to us."
There was a murmur of confusion. Some people remembered the attempt on my life. Others had loved to gossip the Calhouns into small contempt. Now they saw Sara and Carlo step too close to our circle and felt, like breath on the back of the neck, the smell of old cruelty.
The herald, a man with a voice like a beetle shell, asked what this disturbance meant.
"This woman is accusing," Sara cried, pointing her finger at me. "She is a charlatan. She brought a root—maybe stolen, maybe planted. She broke hospitality. She is a thief."
"Stop!" Matteo's voice was steel. He stepped forward. "You will not shout lies in the market. Speak plainly, and to those who can receive your words."
"To the magistrate!" Sara sneered. "Bring a magistrate!"
Emery Williams, the healer who had recognized the root, stepped in with measured calm. "You had a chance to right your wrong when the child was taken. You did not. If you have complaints, bring proof. If you seek justice, we will hear it properly."
They had none. But Sara had a crowd on her side now—half of them hungry for spite. Spite makes a bonfire. It draws in even those who would not otherwise stoke flames.
"Fine!" Matteo said. "If you will make accusations, we will answer them publicly. Come forward and speak. We will summon the magistrate."
A magistrate came within the hour. People were gathered—vendors, travelers, the Empress's household staff who had wondered at the scene. The magistrate in his blue robe stood between the two factions and called the square to order.
"You, Sara Brady and Carlo Thomas, stand accused not by the crown but by the public," he said. "You will present your charge and your proof. Speak now."
Sara's eyes flashed. She lifted her chin, breath sharp and small. "This child—" she said. "She rides the animals. She steals luck. Her family has gained too much too fast. I accuse them of witchcraft and theft."
There was a gasp like wings. A murmur of fear traveled through the crowd. The magistrate's brows knit.
"Accusations of witchcraft are grave," he said. "Present evidence, or be judged for slander."
They had nothing. Only anger. Only envy.
The atmosphere turned and shifted. The crowd began to press closer, hungry for scandal. But Matteo stepped forward and produced the letter from the Empress—her seal pressed hot and real.
"The Empress bears witness that the root was brought by the Calhouns and was offered freely," Matteo said. "Her physician Emery here recognizes the root."
Emery stepped up, and with a voice not loud but precise, he described the root's properties and the chain of custody: how the child found it, how they brought it, how he verified it.
Sara and Carlo's faces, once flushed with fury, went pale.
You would have thought that would end it. The magistrate would bow and call for peace. But the crowd had teeth. They wanted a spectacle. And Sara, who had spent weeks sharpening her spite, refused to decline.
"If proof be given, then punish me if I lie," Sara said, the words like hot coals. "But if the Calhouns are praised falsely, then let them be punished until the market has no use for them."
Matteo's look rested on me for a moment. In my chest I felt a sudden heat, like the moment before the ocean licks your feet. Then he spoke.
"Then let there be a test," he said. "If your charge is false, you will stand in the square and admit it. If it is true, we will do as the law commands. But we will not have children accused without proof."
Sara had no proof. Carlo had none. They had only a grudge. They realized, perhaps for the first time, the scale of public exposure they were walking into.
"Then I was wrong," Sara started, with the kind of voice a man uses when a storm jumps to his head. "But I am not ashamed. I will...I will tell the truth."
They had to make a full confession in public. The crowd leaned forward. Some were shocked—others cheered. A public confession meant humiliation, and humiliation means correction when woven by the magistrate's law.
The magistrate ordered them to stand on the low wooden platform. A craftsman brought out a carved board and hung it about their necks: the market's denouncement. The sign read, plain and sharp: "Slanders and Attempted Murder—This Family Confessed." Two boys from the crowd tied nothing but awkward bands to their wrists as symbols of repentance.
Carlo's face first showed surprise, then outrage. "This is absurd," he barked. "You cannot do this!"
"By the magistrate and under the Empress's protection, we can," the magistrate said.
Sara's mouth began a script of denial and then confusion. She clutched at the edge of her mother's shawl—if she had had one. The street vendors folded their hands. People began to chant the magistrate's words: "Truth! Proof! Public justice!"
It was then the true punishment descended: not jail or a blade, but social unmasking. The magistrate made them recount, in full voice, what they had done: the theft, the throw that left a baby on the hill. They had to speak every cruel thought they had muttered and every action they had done to hide it.
"My hand slid," Carlo started, voice shaky. "I...I thought the luck would leave them and come to us."
"Go on," the magistrate commanded.
"I put her over the wall," Carlo said, each word a slow fall. "I thought wolves or something would take her. I thought we would—"
At first his words were arrogant; then confusion; then denial; then the flimsy paper of his bravado tore.
"No!" Carlo gasped. "No. I did not mean—"
He had meant it. He had wanted them to fall. He had been small and petty and wanting. The market listened and responded first with disbelief and then with a group reaction that was almost physical: anger.
"How could you?" someone cried.
"Heave him down!" another voice said in a commonplace way that was not lawful but was hungry.
But the magistrate held order. "Silence. You will answer for your deeds now."
People watched Sara's face change. At first she was smug—sure she could twist the story; then her eyes went blank; then she shouted denial; then she crumpled. It happened in a small, terrible progression: a proud woman reduced to the smallness of a child.
"You wanted the child's luck?" a vendor asked, unable not to ask.
"Yes," Sara said, voice small. "She—she had everything. I had nothing."
Then she burst into savage tears.
"Forgive me," she cried, kneeling on the planks. "Forgive me, forgive me. I am sorry. I am sorry."
Her admission was met with a hot silence. The market buzzed like a torn net. People began to spit out their old words of envy and line up with us. Kendra gripped my grandfather's hand.
Carlo went through the stages the magistrate had predicted: arrogance, surprise at being held to account, then denial, then panic. He tried to drag his wife up.
"Don't!" he cried. "Don't leave me like this!"
"No!" Sara cried back. "I will do anything!"
They dropped to their knees. The crowd watched; some wept; some filmed with small angled mirrors and a child's polished bronze—they recorded the humiliation like a keepsake. It felt like a public unroaring: their lies, their attempt at murder, spread out like clothes on the line.
"Shame them," someone whispered. "Let them wear it."
And so they were ordered to stand in the square for three days and recite, to any who asked, what they had done and why. They were forbidden to trade until they made earnest amends and returned all they had stolen. They were to be the market's caution.
"What does it feel like?" a child asked, tugging at Sara's sleeve.
"It feels like everything slipping," Sara admitted. "It feels like my life is turning into things I have to pick up."
People's faces shifted: some spat, some shook their heads, others nodded. The magistrate's decision was not blood or life punishment. It was worse for the two: public unmasking, kneeling, and the people’s voices.
On the third day, as they begged the crowd and held up their callused hands, Carlo's knees buckled and he collapsed, begging for mercy, his breath thin and stuttering.
"Please," Carlo said, voice cracking like wood. "Please, we are sorry. Spare us."
No one beat them. No one slew them. But the market's verdict was final: they were known. When you become known for one thing, all other things are colored by it. People refused to take milk from Sara's stall or buy shirts she sewed. Carlo's cart would be empty because hands would not reach for his goods.
The Empress's envoy watched from the square corner and nodded at the magistrate's handling. It was not coronial justice; it was social justice. It was, in its slow awful way, far more permanent.
Afterwards, people came forward to us—some with food, some with apology. The suffering of the two neighbors went from arrogance to collapse to pleading. They lived with the market's memory of them like a visible mark. They repaid what they had taken; they asked for forgiveness; they received it slowly, with eyes like cups half-filled.
I stood in the square when it was over. Matteo was beside me, his hand steadying mine. Dax Calhoun and Isabela O'Brien and my three brothers were there, a circle of ordinary iron.
"Are you angry?" Matteo asked.
"No," I said honestly. "Anger would hollow me. I want them to change. To be less like this."
"And if they do not change?"
"Then the market will remember."
He nodded and pressed my fingers gently, something that made my cheeks warm in spite of everything.
We left the square with sacks of gifts from the Empress and the good will of most of the city. The Calhouns had, by the Empress's order, a small home put into their name and enough coin to rest and to set Phoenix and Blaine and Teodoro on lives with learning.
Years later, when people told the story, they did not forget the market. They told how the two who had tried to steal luck ended up on their knees, how the crowd turned, and how the little gray pup became a legend in the lanes.
I grew. I learned to sew, to bargain, and sometimes to hide the ache of remembering my other life. Matteo grew too—a young man who liked to keep his hands clean and his words kinder.
"Promise me one thing," Matteo would say as we walked through the palace gardens.
"No promises," I would answer, smiling. "I am a woman who keeps her own promises."
He laughed and that was the world.
One night, I sat in the kitchen and took the little gray pup into my lap. He had aged and gray exactly as the names he had lost. I ran my thumb on his paw and felt the smudge of the market’s dust.
"Remember," I whispered, "we rode a wild boar and found a root. We outran a jealous heart and sat in a palace. And you saved me."
He licked my hand, leaving a tiny print of fur. I kept that print in my palm like a tiny map.
When the Empress sent a final bowl of silk and a note of thanks, I wrote back with a child's neat hand and a woman's steady heart.
"Thank you," I wrote. "For seeing a girl and a root and letting both be more than they were."
Matteo read the note over my shoulder and smiled, and I thought then that luck could be made—by hands, by courage, by people who kept walking.
And if anyone ever asked me what kept the Calhouns safe after the mountain, I would show them the gray pup's pawprint pressed into my palm and say very plainly: "This story belongs to the square, to the market, and to the little things that remember us."
The End
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