Revenge15 min read
How I Saved Mother — and Made the Villains Pay
ButterPicks14 views
I was halfway through reheating tasteless takeout and ignoring a show everyone else in my dorm loved when the room exploded with noise.
"Did you see this? Did you see Li Qing—" the girl behind me started, voice high, breathless.
"What? Which Li?" someone else demanded.
"Not Li, Li—" she thrust a phone in my face. "This post says she was taken by some old man. Look—there are pictures."
The photos were grainy and embarrassing. The girl in the pictures wore a black dress, a makeup line so sharp it could have been a blade, and she climbed into a sedan with a suit-clad man who looked older than the campus gossip norm. My roommates laughed like a pack of gulls.
"Gross," one of them said. "No wonder her bags always look new."
I closed the takeout box slowly. Someone said my name and I turned with a smile I didn't feel. "Who is Li?"
"Li Qingrou," the voice behind me said. "You know, the local beauty? You were in the same high school, right?"
"Li... Qingrou?" The name landed like a pebble in my memory—then rolled into something else. "No," I said before thinking. It came out quiet. "She wouldn't do that."
They weren’t satisfied. "But look," they insisted. "There’s proof. See? She gets into the car."
They shoved the phone again. The girl in the picture had an air I recognized: perfect hair, the kind of cheekbones that spelled privilege. She used to smile at me in the hallway years ago. We were children in the same playground once. I’d thought her name was Li Xue. The change to Li Qingrou had never made sense until now.
"Search the owner of the car. Search the driver," I said suddenly, and their laughter died. A few heads tilted. "Look up the brand. The boss of Renxue dairy is called Li. Maybe ask his driver."
They blinked at me, the room falling asleep for a heartbeat. Then someone muttered, "Okay, yeah, sure," and they went back to their snacks.
I packed my box. I did not eat. I did not move quickly; I moved the way a person who is already a plan makes each step a small calculation.
When I left the dorm, someone said my name like a verdict. "She acts so pure," they said. "So high and mighty."
They didn't know the half of it.
*
When the world tilts into dream there is always that first sound—an electric beep, the soft mechanical rhythm the way clocks used to talk in every motel of my childhood. My head clears like fog lifting; then I taste iron, then dirt, then the click of a wooden fan.
"I'm awake," I told the woman sitting on my bed fanning me. Her face had that patient kindness I had learned to trust: quiet eyes, a steady hand.
"Time is short," she said. "Sleep more if you can."
I tried. The fan's rhythm cooed me like a babe. The first day after that, I woke to tea and a woman telling a story about soup to cool the summer. Someone taught me "milk-and-tea with ice and fruit," and a memory slid into place like a missing tile. The word milk tea—some small silly modern comfort—stole into the palace and lodged in my mind, and with it the idea that someone else might have arrived here from another world as well.
Her name, later, would be the center of a hundred plot twists: Kiana Serra.
Kiana came into the palace like a scent could: easy, layered, impossible to fully put down. Everyone thought she had just arrived. She had a brightness that reached the edges of rooms and softened the corners of men. She wore milk-sweet clothes and always, puzzlingly, knew which wines the guests liked. Men looked at her the way men lean toward brakes when a horse hears thunder.
Evangeline Drake—my mother—was another sort of brightness: steady, cool, embroidered hands and a voice that could hush a room. She loved quiet things; she loved me. I loved her back. We were both trapped in more ways than one.
"Do you think she is really from that brothel?" Jamie Sauer, my attendant, whispered one day when Kiana passed us, scented like spun honey.
"She has claws," Jamie added. Her voice held awe and a kind of quiet fear all at once.
"Everyone with claws says they were born this way," I told her. "Some with claws learned to sharpen them."
"Do you think she knows what's written?" Jamie's gaze cut me like a finger.
"I think she knows things no one should know," I said. "And she uses them like stakes in a game she calls fate."
*
"If I wanted to hurt you, I wouldn't use paper and rumor," Ethan Bennett said to me once, late and folded like smoke. He had a face at once boyish and untrustworthy: a man who could lull the court into drinking fruit wine while he picked their pockets. He called himself my uncle, though the way he referred to 'plans' made him sound like an architect of storms.
"You drugged the palace," I said. My chest tightened with a question I could not keep out: "Did you do it?"
He smiled like a man who had tucked a secret into his sleeve and planned to wear it like jewelry. "I wanted to make sure you were where I could find you," he said. "Trust me, I did what was necessary."
"No," I said. "You drugged my body to move me like a pawn."
"Sometimes a pawn must be repositioned," he said, and folded his fan. "You will be useful."
He had planned, schemed, and placed with a hand that never trembled. Everything he did had logic. Even cruelty, when you trace its edges, has logic.
"Why me?" I asked.
"Because you are stubborn. Because you listen in the right places. Because you make people careless." He flicked a speck of dust off his sleeve. "And because you are small enough to be underestimated."
He promised me posies when he wanted something. He promised a wish—something in return. He promised that he would keep Mother safe if I played along.
"Play along?" I said. "And when the game ends, if you turn the table, will you have the nerve to watch the pieces burn?"
Ethan's smile waned. "You still are a child," he said, and when he said it, I felt less insulted than certain.
*
"Do you love him?" I asked Evangeline one night when rain made a piano of the eaves.
"What a strange question," she said, threading gold between her fingers.
"Do you love Lord Gregory?" I named the man whose shadow fell across our lives: Gregory Avila—handsome, frightening, the man who could decide if a life would be comfortable and then decide otherwise.
Evangeline looked at me like someone who had carried a secret for a long time and had arranged it into a calm expression. "Love and safety are different things," she said finally. "One is warm, one is armor."
"Which are you wearing?"
"Both," she whispered, and then smiled the smile of someone who has learned what loss tastes like, and learns to save what she can.
She saved me.
I had decided, then, that I would learn to save the things I loved.
*
"Take her away," Gregory said the night of the banquet. His hands were capable hands: he could trim a branch of a tree and break a man's spine like broken wood. He moved like a man who had never had to be told no. The banquet broke like glass. Arrows, chaos, blood, and the color of wine tricked into a new, darker language—this is where the story I had read had thundered into us and tried to drown the world.
Someone had switched arrows. Someone had walked with a plan in a crowd.
"They were set," Gregory told the court later, voice low and clipped. "You were in the wrong place."
"Wrong place, wrong time," someone said, and the court exhaled a thousand tiny lies in unison.
Ethan watched the pieces move. He had an expression then that I have seen in men who are about to lose something: a careful smile, like sealing a letter before the envelope cracks. He whispered to the emperor in the hallways. He whispered to those who loved him and those who feared him. He whispered to me once when the sky collapsed into rain: "If he moves, I move."
"Will you save her?" Finlay Bryan—thin-limbed, a boy crowned too early—had asked me in a voice like glass.
"I will if I can," I answered. It was the truth that lasted—my promise then, the only thing I felt I could give.
*
They call it a court. They call it the place where judgment is made. It can be a puppet theater where rich men throw strings and call it law, and it can be an arena where the country gathers to spit at a villain.
Kiana Serra's trial—if one could call it that—was both. It lasted until the sun felt its way to the horizon and the torchlight began looking like a row of solemn stars.
The hall filled with courtiers, faces waxed and powdered until they shone like shells. The Ta Matriarch—an empress dowager whose voice could they used to slice paper—sat like a queen of broken seasons. On gallery benches, women in finery leaned forward. Men in velvet and iron stood at attention. Pages served tea that trembled from too many hands.
They brought Kiana in like a prize. Her hair had been stripped of adornment; her voice, usually sweet as caramel, hitched at the base when she was forced to speak.
"She hurt the lady," Jamie Sauer said to the crowd. She had been the first to see the blood, to fetch the dagger, to call for justice. "She tried to kill the girl to frame the side-wife."
"Kiana Serra," intoned the herald. "Answer."
She had been all razors and silk, all sugar and venom. Now the mask slid. The first hiss of disbelief—the thing that comes when people finally see truth—bridged the room.
Ethan stood aside, blade of a smile, his fingers like the ropes of a ship. He allowed the momentum of the room to carry the revelation.
"Do you confess?" the Matriarch asked.
Kiana's chest heaved. "I—" She steadied herself, eyes bright with defiance. "I did what I had to to keep what I deserved."
"It was you who fed the arrows," Jamie said. "It was you who arranged the substitution. You used the girl's name and put a corpse in her place to be burned. You led the men to the small house. You are the cause of the miscarriage."
That last word cut a sound like a bell through the chamber. Men shifted like branches in wind. They had thought only of courts and marriage alliances; they had not thought of a child's life being taken on the edge of their glory.
Kiana's reaction changed rapidly. First her expression held pride—victory, the author of this theater. Then confusion: a deep, small panic. "You twist—" she started.
"Twist what?" someone from the crowd shouted. "You embroidered the script yourself!"
"I wrote for myself!" she snarled. "What I write I own!"
"She wrote suffering and then fed it to others," the Matriarch said, dangerously soft. "She used the lives of women as plot devices."
"Isn't that what your kind do?" Kiana spat, but the room closed around her like curtains. People began to move—the first low noises of gossip unfurling.
"Guards," a noblewoman said, and two of the Matriarch's attendants stepped forward.
"They found letters," said a clerk, unrolling a scroll. The court leaned in as if the letters were the only light left in the room. "Pages where this woman wrote the fates of others as if she were God."
Kiana's face fluttered. Without the costume, without the authorial mask, she realized she was naked in a place where reputations were currency.
"Look," I said. My voice was small but it sliced like a jewel. "She wrote the scenes. She used our names and then tried to make them into the exact lives she described. She turned her cruelty into law."
The crowd's reaction widened. Some muttered "Monstrous." Others were more cautious: "Authors should not be punished for fiction."
Kiana's step-by-step collapse became a performance of its own. At first she laughed, big and brittle, attempting to reclaim the stage. Then she grew pale. Her eyelids fluttered; she started to tremble. She blinked rapidly, trying to control the panic, tried to invent new lines. The laughter died and her voice sank below a whisper.
She tried pleading then—a flash of bargaining. "I didn't do it alone!" she cried. "You can't—"
"Who else?" demanded a voice from the gallery. Men and women in the court leaned forward, hungry for the names that would fill in their fear.
Kiana's mouth formed words like decoded fingers. She said the name of a minor steward. She named a supplier. She tried to name the emperor himself, but her mouth fumbled. She went from defiance to frantic accusation to silence in the space of a breath. The crowd felt the slow steam of a trap closing.
"I wrote them because I wanted them to live in grandeur," she said finally, a childish, shattered sentence. "But the plot took on a life of its own."
"Enough," the Matriarch said. "The court will not be a theater for those who trade in real lives. You used the trust of a household, poisoned a child, and plotted violence. You will be stripped of rank, paraded, and exiled to the northern border with no attendants. The prison's gates will not see your face again."
At the word "paraded" something sharp rippled through the crowd. People who had once fawned at Kiana's jokes now took their chance to spit. Some pointed. Servants recorded, eyes like bees buzzing. Pages in the hall passed quills and the first drafts of next week’s tongues slipped under sleeves.
Kiana changed through the scene: from fury to disbelief, bargaining, pleading, and finally, a raw, animal panic. Tears tracked down her face but no one in that room felt pity. A woman who had used the bodies and fates of others had burned her credit with the public.
The guards moved. They took chains out with practiced care. They fastened them around her wrists. As she walked—her teatime dress turned shabby, the silk muddied—through the long hall, courtiers flung insults like flowers.
"Traitor!" someone shouted.
"She is a liar," another hissed.
"She is an author of broken lives!" Jamie said, voice shaking but ringing. "She put a story into a womb and stole a future."
The guards marched Kiana past rows of faces. Merchant wives who had once invited her for tea now spat on the floor as she passed. A pair of young pages pointed and tried to copy the sneer of a nobleman and failed; their faces paled when the Matriarch looked at them.
At the gate the Matriarch herself stepped forward for the first time since the proceedings began. She removed one of her gloves with the slow movement of someone taking off a mask. Her pale hand brushed Kiana's cheek like a benediction, and then, in front of everyone, she handed her an embroidered pouch.
"Take this north," she said. "Let the wind carry your scripts away."
Kiana's reaction was the final, public unraveling. She fell to her knees, the chain rasping. The Matriarch, who had been so cold, raised a finger.
"Let her sing the things she wrote," she said, and turned to the court. "Let the town memorize her cruelty so they will not forget."
Someone in the back began to clap. Others joined. The clapping became a peal of condemnation. I saw faces lift, struck by righteous fury. Some cried. Others took out their tablets and tablets of paper, hurriedly copying out parts of Kiana's pages to publish as examples. The poblication would be a warning.
When they led her away under escort, the courtyard gates closed and slammed. A boy in the gallery, eyes wide and wide still, mouthed, "Author," as if naming the sin.
Later, the riot of tongues would turn the parade into a cautionary tale: write carefully, for words shape real flesh.
*
This public shaming was not the end. Later the Matriarch would issue another decree: Kiana Serra's property was seized, her supporters punished as conspirators, and her name was to be struck from the rolls. The colors of the court cooled. Her allies, who had laughed with her over night tea and plots, discreetly stepped away. A few were arrested where they stood. The hush was so loud you could hear silk ripple.
When the Matriarch ordered exile, Kiana's face changed again. She had expected perhaps to be hidden in luxuries; she had not expected to be abandoned by the audience she had used. Her slide from stage to footnote became the court's favorite lesson.
I watched Ethan Bennett's face when Kiana was led away. It did not change much; a man who had designed storms rarely showed the weather after the fact. When the last echo of the crowd faded and the torchlight steadied into evening, he turned to me with a smile that had perfected its lines.
"You were useful," he said.
"Then you owe my mother more than words," I replied.
He bowed. "Rest, Isla. I will continue to write this play."
He had planned many things. He had planned to make people believe. He had not planned for the way a crowd can turn its hunger from spectacle to justice.
*
If Kiana received public humiliation, Gregory Avila was given the other kind of public punishment: the collapse of power that looks like a ruler's death.
When the rebellion failed and the palace was taken by the new coalition led by the emperor and those who had once dined at the table together, Gregory's last scene was not a private one. He was brought into the courtyard that had once applauded his victories. Now it looked like the bottom of a well: harsh stone, wet with rain and human breath.
They stripped his insignia off in public. The soldiers who had ranged beneath him spit into the dirt and turned away. The people who had once bowed in flattery stepped forward as if to take a souvenir and were held back by order.
Gregory's expressions in that last hour were a terrible gradation: first anger—white hot, bright like a struck iron; then disbelief—eyes wide as coins; then shame, like an old cloak hanging useless; and finally defeat, a resignation so absolute it made the air still.
"Ethan made sure you could be taken in the daylight," someone murmured to me. "He liked to keep certain ornaments around until he needed them."
Gregory's hand went to his chest as if he could keep his title there. He stood alone on a slab of stone and watched his house of cards dismantle. The humiliation broke him more than any blade would have. He asked for a public pardon at the last minute, tried to bargain, to give up others, to save himself with gossip and names, but there was nothing left to sell. The Matriarch decreed that his titles were forfeit, his armies disbanded, and he would be sent not to exile but to face a public hearing on charges of treason. The day he was led out, those who would have courted him earlier threw their roses in the gutter.
He begged. He sputtered. His face twisted. He tried to rise to fury but the crowd refused the drama. A few wept. Several applauded. The spectacle was his own making, and now the citizenry dissected it: How the powerful crumble. How the mighty become the lesson.
Later, a noose would not hang for him on the scaffold in the circle of the square; that finality seemed too neat. Instead, he was stripped of rank, shamed, and publicly humiliated until no army would follow him again. The man who once would have ordered people into soup would not find a single hand to lift him.
Two different punishments: one a parade of shame fitted for a woman who had traded with fates; the other a stripping of power that left a man hollow as a dying bell. Both were public. Both left a taste of copper in the tongue.
*
The emperor—Finlay Bryan—cradled my collapse after the fighting in a way that no one would have expected. He was boy-man who carried power like a bone in the throat. He arrived at the corridor when the world had split. His voice was small when he said, "You must not leave me. We will find her."
"Find who?" I asked between coughs of blood.
"My answer is you," he said simply. "For you I would cross the world."
I felt the words hang like paper lanterns. They were honest, and that was the strangest comfort I had.
"Ethan," I whispered later. "You promised safety."
"I promised what I could," he said. "I promised opportunities. I promised leverage. Safety is a myth in a palace; but I will use leverage, I will buy time."
He kept things for me. He kept me in motion until the war settled into a map of winners and losers. He kept my mother's whereabouts secret until the lines had been cleared. He refused to be kind without the calculation of kindness attached; yet there were moments—two steps in front of the prison, one time over a cup of milk tea when I spilled it by accident—when his hand warmed like a true thing.
On a green morning after a night where fire-screams had been planted in the city's heart, I walked toward an unfamiliar light. We had been back in the court's orbit long enough that the world seemed used again: the market sellers sold boiled sugar, the linen smells floated, and the fat moon earlier had been returned to the rim of the bowl.
Mother came back to me in a way the book never told me she would. Evangeline Drake—pale, knit-browed, and exhausted—walked into the carriage like someone who had put herself through a confining ritual and welded herself free.
We were both very small that afternoon, and yet the world felt enormous. She hugged me like the last hand on the deck, like a tether that could pull me out of storms. I wanted to ask her a thousand questions and had eleven minutes to say what would not be taken.
"Are you safe?" I asked, the smallest thing; I thought it would be my mother who told me to sleep again, but she laughed.
"I am safe if you are safe, child," she said. "We hold each other."
"I thought—" I stopped. Words were dangerous.
She pressed her mouth to my hair. "Do you think we are characters, child? Do you think our lines are set in stone?"
I thought of Kiana's pages. I thought of Gregory's ruin. I thought of Ethan’s cold architecture.
"No," I said, honest. "I think we are people trying to live."
She let out a breath like a tide. "Then live," she said, simple as a bell.
*
The scars would last. The court would write ballads and license. Kiana was carried away to some cold north; some days I still feel the sound of her chains like a distant drum. Gregory Avila's title was stripped; he lived out his days as a warning and a rumor. Ethan continued to balance favors like coins, always trading, always sharp. The emperor grew into a ruler who feared as much as he loved; he kept a box of milk tea warm for me when I visited him and would not let me go hungry of the small comforts.
And me? I learned how to place words where they hurt least and to keep a knife sheathed where it might have been used. I learned that being clever isn't enough; you need allies, and you need to know the shape of the world you stand in.
When the last page of the worst of it closed, the Matriarch called a council and announced a simple, strange decree: the palace would pass a law forbidding the use of private plots to shape other people's lives. The law had been made because a woman had tried to write sorrows and call it art, and the people had risen to say that real lives are not to be edited by someone's pen.
It was a small consolation. Still—there was consolation. There was also a small jar of milk tea with ice and fruit that someone placed at my feet one afternoon. It had been wrapped carefully, with a little note scribbled in a child's hand: "For when the world needs to taste sweetness after truth." I smiled and drank.
When I finally let myself rest, I lay on a small bench on the palace verandah and listened to the sound of a white rabbit chewing carrots from inside a wooden hutch. The rabbit—gift from the emperor—was small and red-eyed, and when it hopped over my lap I paused. Someone had given me a dangerous life and then offered me a harmless one.
I thought of the road behind us—arrows, a dagger, a broken vial of medicine that had faked my death—and the road ahead, with its small green comforts. I touched Evangeline’s hand and felt the warmth of a person who had refused the script and made a different ending.
"Why did you not leave earlier?" I once asked her, long before the world broke.
She had smiled, folded an embroidered thread. "We stayed because we loved the wrong man once. We left because we loved the right thing—each other."
That night, I drank milk tea with ice and fruit, tasting bitter and sweet in the same sip. The city exhaled like a sleeping beast. Children played at the steps. Lanterns swung like low moons.
"One more thing," Ethan Bennett said, when he came to leave one twilight and paused on the verandah.
"What?"
"Don't let anyone write you out."
I looked at him. "Then don't write anyone else out either."
He laughed—true laughter, this time. "Deal."
We both held our cups of cooling milk tea, a last ridiculous comfort in a palace full of broken scripts. The white rabbit thumped softly near my feet, and I felt, for the first time in a very long time, like someone who would be allowed to keep walking.
The End
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