Face-Slapping13 min read
I Died on the Winter Solstice — and They Came to Watch Me Burn
ButterPicks13 views
I died on the winter solstice.
"I am not cold," I told the snow, though my hands had no heat left to make the lie feel true.
They wrapped me in a straw mat and tried to carry me out before anyone noticed. The palace banners were being set for a ceremony for a favored consort; the city was busy. No one wanted the trouble of a grieving family or a scandal. So they bundled me like trash.
"Stop," I thought, but thought is not a hand and the straw smell was the only thing I could smell.
When precisely I began to tell my story I do not know. Memory keeps coming in shards: lantern light, the taste of bean paste, the smooth warmth of a hand that held mine, the way a man could be two faces at once.
"My name is Jayleen," I say now, and I say it firm because once I forgot my self in the palace and called myself by the name other people used. But I was Jayleen Martinelli before that. I had a father who read poetry and a mother who embroidered birds and lotus on my sleeves. I was pretty enough to turn men strange, and stubborn enough to love a poor scholar the way a child loves the brightest moon.
"He is called Alfonso," I told my father the night I insisted I would marry the scholar who bribed the lantern seller for two extra dumplings so he could sit next to our table.
"Alfonso Burch," I said, and my father frowned at the foreign ring of it, but the scholar smiled and told my father about a future he could give me, and that smile bent my world.
"Will you wait for me to pass the exam?" he asked under the lanterns.
"I will wait," I promised. I will wait for everything. I was foolish then.
We married on a winter day stamped full of joy. My mother stitched the wedding robe with two mandarin ducks and a pair of lotuses. "Wear them," she said, "and remember where you came from." I put the robe on and for a while I tried — I tried to be the daughter who never asked too much.
"Eat," Alfonso said as he put a plate to my lips. He had the gentle awkwardness of a man who had learned to empire at his father's knees and to hide hunger when he had been younger. "Eat, Jayleen. Do not waste your strength. A good wife saves her strength."
I did not know then how a man can both be savior and the first step toward your fall. I did not know how a throne can wear a man until it is empty of mercy.
The city changed. The crown prince died at a flower-boat and the emperor's heart clotted in grief. War drums and whispers took the palace halls. Men with sharp loyalties leaned closer to the emperor's ear. The scholar I married wore new names like armor. I learned later that the names had sharp edges.
"Alfonso," I started to call him sometimes when my lips mistook the titles. He would smile and brush my hair, and that smallness of him filled me.
"Do not call me that here," he would say. "You know why."
He had reasons that smelled like cedar and iron. He wanted to make a place for us. He wanted order. He wanted his enemies cut down like sick reeds.
"Trust me," he said.
I tried. I believed him in small gestures: he would send for a silver fox shawl when I shivered, he would put his sleeve over my shoulders when I stepped into a crowd, he would laugh at a joke when others did not. Those moments were few and bright, like a single candle in a vast room.
"Nobody smiles at me like that," my maid Fiona once told the other girls.
"Keep the secret," I told her, and I meant it. It is strange how the world will accept a simple secret if it thinks it has bought you.
Then the trouble began. The queen's daughters and the great families circled like vultures. "A throne should not rest on a borrowed favor," said one of them, and that voice belonged to Natalya Barrett — she had a smile that could be a knife. She wore aristocratic silk and looked like she believed the palace was a stage and she the only actress with a right to speak.
"What do you think of her?" Natalya said once in a way I could not answer.
"She is bitter," I heard someone whisper. "She is hungry."
They spoke my name like a rumor. They stitched stories that fit the palace needle. A woman named Viktoria Henry smiled from a distance and practiced tears in front of her little hand mirror. She had a way of folding her grief into other people’s laps. They came with small jabs: a slap, a rumor, a stolen letter. Little things that gather into a trap.
"What do you want?" I asked her once in the dim of the silk hall.
"To be safe," she said. "To carry a name that will not fall."
It hurt like the knife of a cold wind.
"Why is the court so cruel to you?" my mother asked when she was summoned to the palace. "You were always a simple child of the south."
"They think a pretty woman can be useful," Alfonso said that night when he came back late and I pretended to sleep. His voice had a hardness that surprised me. "They think I will be kind to them if I give them something to hope for."
They used me as bait. I was a bright coin to being passed so men could trade for power. I knew that and I let it be because love and a strange kind of faith because sometimes he would lay his forehead in my palm and say:
"I would die for you."
"I will not let you die."
Words are small when iron is at the gate.
Then my father left for the south. My Bastian Johnston — he had been raised to be careful and loved books more than gossip. "Do some service," Alfonso said quietly. "It will build you a name in the court."
"It is dangerous," my mother Ginevra warned. "Why would any lord send him anywhere risky?"
"It is politics and politics eats the small," Alfonso said with his scholar's voice. "I will send protection."
"Protect him?" I asked him. I did not trust the word the way I had once.
"Protect," he said, and he did what men do: he sent soldiers and promises. Those promises were words pinned on a cloak.
My father's carriage never reached the ferry. A few days later a messenger arrived with a bundle and eyes full of apologies. They told us that his body had been pulled from the river and he had drowned under the strain of grief and fever. They said it was the robber bands. They said the world was cruel.
I saw the robe they wrapped him in. I saw the numbness in my mother's hands. I felt a cold that no robe could touch.
"You sent him," I said to Alfonso. It was less an accusation than a fact. The palace is full of those facts.
"I did what I must," he said. "I thought I could protect him."
"You thought."
The word "thought" is an ugly thing when used as a shield.
After that, I stopped sleeping well. The palace seemed to sway. Men of power, like Mauricio Castro — who liked to smile with his heart closed — began to toddle the marionette strings. Natalya's father had weight, and she did what she could: she licked old wounds and salted them.
One night, I woke to the bitter smell of fruit. Someone had put sweetened fruit on my pillow. I ate one and I felt the air go thin. I did not know then the taste of poison — it arrived with a slow dizziness, a little like sorrow, and then a white bloom behind the eyes.
"Who gave you that?" Alfonso asked when he found me on the floor. He carried me and I could feel his hands shake.
"Did you not see?" I whispered. "They want us dead."
"Do not scare me," he said and slammed his fist on the table. His hands became fists because men learn fists first when they stand before a crown. "Find them."
They called it an accident. The palace's words rolled and softened the truth until the edges were gone. The doctors came with their small jars and their loud faces. They said my child was threatened. My child — already small and curled like a tiny promise — was lost. I felt it like a cold hand hitting my chest and the world blurred.
"You will live," he said, and there was an edge in it that time. "You will live and I will make them pay."
"I will never want your ring again," I told him. I meant it as a simple fact, not a dare.
He forced me to stay. He wrapped me in silk and called me by an emperor's titles sometimes when the court was listening. He called the favors and the ministers and asked for loyalty. He had grown into names like a man slipping into armor: Alfonso, Your Majesty, Sire. The scholar had become something that ate mercy.
"They poison you and you feast us with kindness," Natalya said in the hall, not quiet as she should have been. "A pretty woman for a crown to wear. It will not last."
"I will make them pay," Alfonso promised in the quiet that followed.
He did not make them pay in private. He made them pay with the law and with a public spectacle. But first things had to be arranged: letters forged, false evidence planted, a slow, perfect machinery of accusation turned.
"You are cruel to think the worst of me," I told him once, naked of anger and only honest.
"I know who they are," he said. "I will expose them."
He did expose them. He took the proofs — some true, some sharpened — and stood in the court with his chest full of cold iron.
"Bring them," he said. His voice in court sounded like a blade being drawn.
The fall of the Wang family — and the way the great ones paid — is the part all the city will go on about. I had thought, once upon a time, that proofs could heal. I learned what a public punishment tastes like when it is served for hunger, not justice.
It happened in the great square by the imperial gate. The snow had not yet melted and the court called everyone to see. They arranged a platform where the accused would stand, and they brought in flags and drums. People came because people love to see the high fall.
"Bring forward Wang Qian's men," Alfonso said. He read the charges: embezzlement, the selling of army grain, the false arrest of honest men, and the murder that had an ugly ledger behind it.
Natalya Barrett — who had struck my face with a palm once to prove rank and had smiled like a queen of knives — was there with her father. They had expected pity, or at least the usual backroom compromises. They were not prepared for the public eye.
"Are you guilty?" Alfonso asked, and the square was a held breath.
Natalya laughed at first. "This is theater," she said. "You will play with men and make a show."
The laughter died when he displayed the papers — ledgers that showed transfers, testimonies of captains who had been forced to lie, lists of names. The people around us began to murmur: the sold grain, the orphaned troops, the families who starved while sacks left the granaries. Eyes that had looked away now found a face to fix upon.
"Not guilty!" Natalya shouted, nerves thin. Her hand that had struck me trembled. Her father Mauricio Castro's face went a color that I had only seen once before: the color of a man who realized he had miscounted his life.
"Is this true?" one of the captains asked when brought forth. He spat into the snow and told the court how tokens had been taken from his men and sold to the market.
"Where is your shame?" Alfonso said. His voice did not rise. It sharpened instead, and each word carried the sound of a verdict.
They tried to deny. At first: "We were deceived." Then: "These are lies." And finally: "We have been framed." The arc is always the same because pride has the same steps to fall.
"Look at them," said a woman in the crowd. "They ate what our boys died protecting."
The punishment came in stages so each man fell in a new way. The punishments were designed to break not just body but trust — to make public who they had harmed and to show the city how brittle privilege could be.
Natalya Barrett — the woman who loved status more than mercy — had something she feared most: her reputation. We placed her upon a raised bench, in the center of the square, and the city council read aloud her crimes and the men who had suffered. They had the right to speak. So the long list of women who had been forced from farms by soldiers who answered to her father were called forth. They came slow, one by one, in the wind and the cold, and each woman told a small story of theft, of a cornfield seized, of a son gone.
"Did you see me as nothing?" one mother asked. She held up a tattered scarf and for a second I saw my father's hands in the scarf's threads.
Natalya's face drained color. The crowd's mood changed from curious cruelty to something like a hunger for truth. Cameras were not the tools of our time, but the court scribes wrote everything, and the city would remember. The woman who had struck me with a hard palm at the palace was now listening as a dozen voices dismantled her lies. It is a slow kill.
Her father's punishment was different: he had money. He had power. To undo those, Alfonso ordered property confiscated and positions lost. Yet the most cutting blade to a proud official is exposure and the cut of scorn. Mauricio Castro was forced to kneel in the market lane and answer accusations. He had to apologize publicly. He had to sign under witness to the ledgers he claimed not to know. Pride unfastened like a belt and slipped away.
"It is a shame!" he cried, voice thin with the realization that he had misjudged the world. The crowd spat, some clapped — cruelty loves performance — and some wept for what was lost behind those ledgers.
But the most complete undoing was saved for the captain who had been paid to silence men. He stood tall and tried to hold the crowd with bravado. Alfonso had come prepared: he had men who had proof, the men whose names had been erased and whose families starved. They returned to claim their night. The captain's public disgrace was different; he did not lose goods, he lost the only thing he had left that mattered in a soldier's life — honor. They cut his sword belt and made him kneel as those he had wronged stepped before him and named what he had done.
"My hand did what I was told," he said. "I was afraid."
"Afraid of what?" someone answered. "Of a man with more coin? Of a belly that wanted filling?"
He broke. He begged for mercy. They offered him justice: he would face a garrison in the border where the absent would be made present, and there he would work the fields he once raided. He became, in a way, what his crimes had made others: a laborer paid in sweat rather than coin.
The different punishments made them understand that empire rewards only those who play the dangerous game well — but also that the game can be set to end with public shame. Nothing is more final to a family like the Wangs than a broken name and a public accounting of theft. Some were exiled with chains; some had to carry their shame upon the palace steps; others were forced into service among the people they had harmed. Each head bowed in a different way.
The crowd watched. Faces changed. The proud first laughed "This will teach them!" and then later, in the quiet of their homes, wondered if their riches would protect them, wondered if a ledger could be found to twist their names into a noose.
They asked for mercy and they got the city. The city had teeth.
When the dust settled and the snow had not yet melted, the imperial edicts came down. Property was redistributed. The men who had been sold by those ledgers were given land. The families that had starved received grain. It did not bring my father back. It did not unfasten the hours I had spent sleeping in fear. But it made the palace crooked for a moment, and in the crookedness came truth. People who had been told men were infallible saw how fragile their crown was.
I lay in my bed when they came for me. I was tired of threats. I was tired of being a cause in a chess game. I refused to be a pawn.
"Do not weep," I told the maid who knelt near my bed. "If I have to leave, I will leave on my feet."
"Do not die," Fiona whispered, and she meant it like a prayer.
I did not live to see all the punishments take their shapes. I slept and then I did not wake. The palace called it an accident of weather and a long thread of misfortune. A few men in the shadow burned incense and wrote epigraphs. Alfonso went quiet for a time, and then he went to the open square and made them look. He made them look at those he deemed responsible and he let the city decide how to cut them down.
"Why did you not save me?" I asked him in my last clear hours of thought. He bent and kissed my brow and whispered: "I tried."
"Your tried did not keep my father," I said. I do not remember his reply. Perhaps he said it then as he later proclaimed it: "I will clear your name."
He cleared names like a surgeon cutting old flesh. He made them public. He had the power and he used it in ways that fed a new shape of reign — a reign of law as spectacle. The men who had once used us were remade into cautionary tales. Some of them walked away hollow-cheeked; some went quietly into exile. Natalya Barrett was left with a name that could not be explained away with beauty.
The palace never forgave easily; it stores memory like iron. Yet when winter ended the last of the Wangs were led beyond the northern gates, and their banners were taken down. People said the emperor had been merciful; some said he had been ruthless. Both words are true.
There is another thing the city forgot. They taught their children to clap when the mighty fall, but they did not teach them to look at the small hands that had borne the weight of a crown. They did not teach them how to be tender. They do not teach how to return.
After I died, the emperor held a mourning like a mountain of ash. He placed my portrait among the honored, built a small tomb, and for a time he would go to it with the face of a man who had learned something of grief. The law changed; the soldiers who had been corrupted were replaced. Some of my friends were allowed to go back to the south with small stipends; my mother went to a quiet place where the river would not forget her name. Alfonso kept his place and the new boy who came to him — the one born to another favored concubine — took a lesser title than the world had expected because the court no longer trusted easy births.
They said that was my revenge on the palace: to make them see that a human life could be the truth that unspools all their petty games. The Wangs' ruin was loud and public and beautiful to some and ugly to others. To me it was empty. To my father it came too late.
In the years that followed, Alfonso would sometimes walk in the gardens where lotus pressed the water like white teeth. He would sit near the white tiger skin we had once laughed on, and he would whisper "Jayleen" as if a name could spool back time.
People told the story differently. Some said I had been a witch who tempted a scholar to power. Some said I had been a saint who paid with my life to make justice done. The truth, like all truths, was both and neither: I loved, I feared, I was used, and in the end I was unwilling to bend my neck quietly.
On winter nights I can hear the laughter of the market women who helped me with small goods long ago and the whistle of the wind on the palace eaves. The white tiger pelt still smells of my skin. There are small things that belong to me: a carved charm, a scrap of blue thread, a single lotus pastry recipe that some maids keep near their sleeves.
If you ask me whether the fall of the Wangs comforted me, I will say: it taught the court to be careful. It taught my mother to sleep. It taught some men to look at the stitches they had cut. But it did not make everything right.
"Do you regret?" someone would ask Alfonso later, with ink and a pen between his fingers.
He would close his eyes and answer like a man who had learned the cost of power: "I regret what I could not keep."
I regret that my son or daughter never saw the sun. I regret that my father's hands went cold in a far river. I regret that sometimes a crown is a cold coin and not a hearth.
"Tell me one good thing," my maid once begged me before I left. "Tell me one bright thing and I will keep it."
"Remember the lanterns at the festival," I told her. "Remember the way the dumplings steamed in the night. Remember that for one moment someone smiled at you because he chose to."
They still tell my story in the market lanes. Some children look at the picture of a woman in a robe and point and say "She is the one who made them pay." Some older women shake their heads and say "She was as much a victim as anyone." Both are true.
"I died on the winter solstice," I say again. "And the snow remembered me."
When people pass the small stone I left in the soil — a little mound by the river, a token of a life unthreaded — they sometimes put pastry or lotus on it. Little hands leave small things. The emperor, sometimes, in the moonlight, walks there alone and hums the lullaby my mother used to hum.
"Do you see me?" I ask the river.
"Yes," the river answers with the voice of winter water. "You left tracks."
I will let you keep your verdict. Some will like me; some will say I was not all good. That is the nature of being a human in a court. But in the place where I am, the white tiger skin is a memory and the snow does not hurt. The laughter of the maids is light and the sound of a boat crossing the river is a tender bell.
If revenge meant making people look, then yes, revenge was served. If revenge meant bringing my father back, the sky did not reach that far.
I died on the winter solstice. They came to watch me burn with anger and with justice. The square was full of faces. Some watched because they wanted spectacle, some because they wanted truth, some because they wanted both.
"Will you be angry?" I asked Alfonso in my last clear hour.
He said nothing. He took my hand and pressed it to his face, and that counted more than a thousand proclamations.
— END OF STORY —
The End
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