Revenge16 min read
"I Give You One Chance" — The Queen I Raised, The Knife She Used
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"I will not stand for this," I said, and the cup hit the floor.
They all froze. The silk curtains barely moved. Greyson Porter looked at the shards like they were proof of my crime and not his.
"Emerald." He smiled the way a man smiles when he thinks he has already won. "Sit. Drink your tea."
I did not sit. I bent and picked up the broken cup. "This cup remembers how you used it," I said. "It remembers the last thing I tasted, the last breath I never got."
"Stop." He leaned forward as if my grief was a small bird he could catch. "You will make a scene."
"I already did," I said.
I am Emerald Armstrong. I once sat on a throne they called sacred. I once wore the robes that made people hush like wind through reed. I was a ruler in my time—tough and blunt and honest in ways a kingdom needed. I taught a young prince named Greyson Porter to read, to count, to look at a map and see not borders but a future. I believed I had made a man who could hold a country.
He made me a lesson instead.
He put the cup over my mouth so I could not taste the tea. He watched my face until it stopped moving. He put me down as gentle as a farmer burying a broken vase. He whispered, "I want you, not the dowager." He closed the lid on a life of twenty-eight years. He told the court, to their faces, that I had died of natural failure. They bowed. They wept. The world turned me into a memory.
Three years of dust and flowers and funeral songs later, I opened my eyes in another bed.
"Princess! Princess—wake!" someone screamed, and my new life began in a small, startled breath.
I looked at the slanted lid of the canopy and found a different face peering down: the face of Jin Dong's household that had been waiting for a child to die. They thought they were getting back their girl. They had no idea they were getting me.
"Where am I?" I asked.
"You are home," said Frederick Donovan. He looked like a man who had watched his house be taken. "You are our daughter. Rest."
"Am I dead?" I asked.
"No." He laughed in a way that made me know the world had not yet learned to fear me. "You are stubborn. You survived poison."
"Good," I said. "I mean, it is good to be alive. Tell me everything."
That was the beginning. I learned three things in quick order and I learned them through conversation.
"Greyson Porter is emperor," my new father said.
"Greyson." I tasted the name and found it sour. "He killed me."
"No one blames him," Celine Wright said softly. She held my hand like a woman who had been taught fear and could not stop.
"No," I said aloud. "They do not blame him because he took the throne."
I kept my voice soft, but I kept my plan loud with each small step.
"Do you remember anything?" my brother, Gage Chase, asked one night when he thought my head would not listen. He had the look of a son who had watched a sister almost die and been forced to pray.
"Some things," I said. "The big things. Faces. The feel of a knife." I made him swear I would not write to the emperor, not to make a move they could not undo. He swore.
"Avery Ford will help," they said when I asked about doctors. Avery Ford was the man who checked a pulse and could see a life like a book. He came, he left, he came again. "Your pulse is steady," he told them. "There is nothing physically wrong."
"Wrong with me?" I asked.
"Only memory," he said. "The poison did not break the body, only the store rooms of the mind. It is strange."
"Good," I said. "Then the pieces can be put back together with a plan."
I spent days listening. I let them speak of Greyson's rule, of how he had steadied the nation in three days and how the court had folded like paper. I let them tell me about the ban on the corn cake—the little cake that had been my favorite—destroyed by imperial order. I let them tell me that those who still dared to make it did so in secret, and would die for the crumbs.
"Why did you wake up in our house?" Frederick asked once. "If you are a revenant—"
"I am not a ghost," I cut in. "I am a woman with a memory who has a debt to pay. I woke here because a body more convenient to the court was waiting for me. Use that."
"I thought you would want to hide," Celine said.
"Hiding dies with people," I said. "Listen: I will go to the palace. I will take a place Greyson thinks small. I will watch. I will choose who to trust. I will climb back."
"Aren't you afraid?" Gage asked.
"Afraid of dull knives," I said. "And of being buried while alive."
I walked to the capital like a shadow that had learned court routes by heart in another life. The men who stood at the gates saw me and did not bow more than they had to. They thought they were dealing with the weak daughter of a fallen house. The emperor thought he could order my place with a single seal.
He could not.
"Emerald Armstrong?" a court woman said when I stepped beneath the palace eaves. She was large, bright, and soft as spilled honey. "You are small in person. Why didn't you ride the carriage?"
"I prefer to walk," I said. "I like to feel if the ground remembers me."
She laughed and led me to the place they had decided I would stay. "She will be assigned to the west wing," she said. "It is a quiet place for a new beauty."
Her name was Iris Jansson. She smiled like someone who had not yet learned how a crown can chew people alive. She became my first friend in the palace.
Then there was Oceane Bishop.
"Emerald!" she said with the voice of a woman who owed everything to me. "You saved me once. I am yours."
She said those words the way someone might claim a coin. I recalled the smell of the mountain that night; I remembered a bleeding man and a woman of barbarian blood, who had bent my sword to her cause and smiled at me as though I had given her the moon. I had thought her raw and grateful. I had thought I had built loyalty into her.
Greyson fell for her.
I watched that happen as if it were a play I knew the ending of. He would say the same words to Oceane he had once said to me: "You will be mine," and she would melt like new wax. She took his bed, his promises, his regard. When she knew his mind was hers to touch, she tightened around him, and then she tightened the trap that would take me out.
"Do you want to make enemy of the palace?" Iris whispered to me the night I decided I would go to the emperor. "He is dangerous."
"He is a man who learned how to kill while he practiced etiquette," I said.
"So go carefully."
"I do not have time for slow," I said. "I have a list."
My list grew with facts like scars. I learned, by listening in kitchens and in the slow crawl of palace gossip, what killed me. It was a perfume—an incense mixed with woods and a bitter seed. It smelled like victory and betrayal. Only a maker of scents artful and cruel could craft treatment that killed a person by placing a cup to her lips.
Oceane made scents. She learned from me. She learned too well.
"She will be the first to fall," I told Iris. "Not because she wronged me—because she thought I could not move."
It was time to move.
"You will need a doctor you can trust," I told Gage. "Avery Ford is useful and frightened. He will follow a plan."
He did. Avery had a small, honest voice. He came to the far away house I had been given and said, "Emerald, your pulse is steady. You have plans."
"Yes," I said. "I have a plan to be small, then large."
"You will not forget your fury," he said. "Not if you do this right."
I told Avery to burn a thing he owned.
"Burn it?" he asked.
"All similar roots, all similar leaves," I told him. "Burn them. If we do not destroy the copies of the key plant, they will be used against you."
He burned them quietly by moonlight. He later told me that the heat frightened him more than the order.
My first move true to plan was a small one. I feigned a faint heart. I covered my face with heat until I looked like someone who could fill a sudden need. That would bring to me the same doctor who had been tied to me in my past life.
Within the hour, Avery opened the garden gate of the palace and took my hand like he would take a pulse.
"Fever," he said. "We must be careful."
"You will stay," I told him.
"What if the emperor wants to punish me for making a house of medicine my shelter?" he asked.
"He will not punish a man who saves the life of a body the court might need," I said. "And if he punishes you, he punishes a man who carried a cup to your mouth before. He will not."
Avery stayed. He fed me water sugar and thin broth. He sat at my side and told me things with a voice so low the servants would think it was a prayer. He believed me. He would come to believe, later, that the woman who sat by his bedside had the voice of the dead queen.
"You once followed a cause," I said to him. "Now follow one again."
"Which?" he asked.
"Mine," I said. He had no money, no great patron. He had something worse and better: loyalty earned from a hand that had once been held.
I let the fevercraft and the slow burn of summer wash my face until I looked near death. I sent Gage and Iris and a plain-faced clerk named Rex Buckley to place a common root in the smoke of the emperor's favored wing. Get it found, I said. Let it fall at the feet of a keeper. Let them quarrel. Let them pick a fight.
They did.
In the smoke of their quarrel a man named Wu Ping, a sweeper at Oceane's gate, fell for it. He believed the smell was a piece of a cure. He fought for it with the man who usually counted the storage—Pang Lin, the man who owed everything to Oceane because she had once set him up as a little lord in her household.
Pang Lin lost his temper. They scuffled by the gate. Someone screamed. The three on the far side of the alley heard a sound like a body hitting the stone.
Next, a man was dead.
They called the emperor. He came like a wild god. He called for answers: who was which, who had spoken? He called the woman who had the court's favor: Oceane. She cried like a queen who had been slandered.
I sat and folded my hands. I watched Greyson pull his cloak around him and call for a calm few men to sweep through every corner of the palace. His eyes glanced at me, once. Nothing more. He had already made a choice. His hands moved and the law moved with him.
Then the wheel I had set in motion began to turn.
"Find the cause," Greyson said to Li Dong—Li Dong was a name I learned to call the commander of the palace guard, but in my world his name becomes "Glen Lombardi." He nodded and sent men into each hall.
I had expected all this, but I had not expected how raw the smell of blood would be when the crowd gathered.
Oceane went white as paper. She grew a face like a child at a festival when they think all lights are for them. She played shocked, then angry, then frightened. "Who would do this?" she cried. "Who would lay hands on my gate?"
"Someone who wanted you to speak," I thought.
Greyson's eyes were like a net. He watched the men and women who bent and then he watched the servants who shrank away. He stood and asked the question no one expected.
"Who fought?" he asked. It was the wrong question. It made people point.
Pang Lin pointed at Wu Ping because his hand had been hurt. Wu Ping died. He could not point back.
They put three people in the stocks in the outer yard. Greyson stamped and they begged. He had the power to decide guilt as if the court were a deck of cards.
It was then I chose to act.
I had the patience to watch a plot come to ruin a palace. I had also the rage to step into a ruin and make a brand.
I placed a note on the emperor's desk that night. A small note. "You killed me once," it said. "You sheltered the woman who used your cup. You will give me a public hour."
He came.
He did not come with a smile. He came with soldiers. He walked into the hall where the court sat with his boots on the floor and asked the room for witnesses. "Bring the woman who dared make perfume that kills," he said.
Oceane stood. She was small beside his power and large beside her own hope.
"She is innocent!" she cried to the crowd.
"Is she?" I asked from the back of the room. My voice was thin. It was enough.
Greyson looked at me and narrowed his eyes. "Emerald," he said. His voice was a blade disguised as silk. "You awake now. You will not play games."
"I will play to the end," I answered. "Bring the scents."
They did. They thought I had not seen the jars, the boxes. I had spent three years listening; I knew the names of flowers men could not pronounce. I knew which root made a throat close. I knew which powder made the heart stop.
"Open them," I said. "Open them in front of those who love her."
They did. The smell of crushed cedar and bitter seed poured out like a slow storm. People cough and turn.
"Who bought these?" Greyson asked.
"She did," Pang Lin said. He had been bribed by a whisper. He now had the look of someone who had eaten rotten fruit.
"She sold them," said another voice.
Oceane's face shifted. She screamed and denied until the sound left her throat ragged. "No!" she said. "No, I would never—"
"Prove it," I said. "If you are innocent, show us you are innocent."
She slapped a hand across her face. "You accuse without proof!"
"Then prove it," I said. "Prove that the incense that killed me is not your making. Prove that the powder that would have killed the emperor is not yours."
"Where will you find proof?" Greyson asked. He leaned back. "You want a drama."
"I want a public confession," I said. "I want everyone who watched me die to watch her kneel. I want to hear her say, in front of the court, that she mixed the oil and put it into the cup. Or I want her to show us the person who taught her such murder. Either way, I want the truth."
"Or what?" Greyson's voice turned smaller, thinner. He disliked threats, but he feared the truth more.
"Or I will open my mouth and name names," I said. "Names of those who helped. Names of those who took bribes. Names the court will want to hide."
Greyson's jaw tightened. He could not wipe away what he had been given—a woman who claimed to be the dead dowager. He could not easily call me liar. He could not easily ignore me.
"Bring her out," he said. "Bring Oceane out. We will decide now."
They brought her to the hall where fans could not hide smell. The room was full: officers, court women, scribes, servants. The air tasted like copper. "Emerald," Greyson said, "tell them what you think."
I stood. I walked to the middle of the court. People parted like reed. "You sold your body to his favor," I said to Oceane. "You sold your hands to make a murderer of me. Stand and tell them."
She looked at Greyson as if he were a god made soft by his moons. She smiled and said, "You flatter, my lady. I would never—"
"You will kneel," I said.
"Why should I kneel?" she spat. "How dare you—"
"Stop," Greyson said.
She looked at him like a queen. "I am his favorite."
"You will kneel," Greyson said, and because he said it, she did not. She did not at first. She waited for a hand to lift hers.
Then I spoke.
"Show them the cup," I said.
They brought the cup. Greyson's face did not change. "You will not touch the cup," he said.
"Why not?" I asked. "Does the cup protect the guilty? Is that your law?"
He looked to the side. He hated me enough to hide a glance.
"Open the jars," I said.
They opened them. Someone sneezed. A scribe dropped his brush. The scent of the powder filled the court.
"Who made this?" I asked.
They looked at Oceane. Her smile fell. "I did not," she said.
"Then show us the proof of your innocence," I said. "Or you will stand and tell the name of the man who taught you these scents."
The room readied for thunder.
She finally bowed her head.
"Give me an hour in the yard," I said. "One hour. Let the whole of the court watch what I will do to her."
Greyson's eyes narrowed to slits. He fought with himself. He could break me here and now—he had the law, the men with swords, the judges with blank faces. But the law had limits: a woman's honor, the need for a reason. He in doubt, he turned the wheel of court custom.
"Very well," he said. "One hour. But you do it in my garden. And if you lie, I will have your tongue."
"I will not lie," I said.
They took Oceane to the palace garden. She walked like a queen before the storm. Greyson sat in the hall and watched the sun go slow. The courtiers followed like gulls. They wanted the spectacle and the shame.
At the center of the garden was a small platform and a black table. People brought her forward. Greyson had ordered witnesses to stand. Monks. Scribes. Guards. A thousand faces bent.
"Speak," I said.
Oceane stood and opened her mouth. She began with denials and then with names of men who had sold her crowns. Her face broke twice, then crumbled.
"Admit," I said.
She looked at Greyson and suddenly, like a rope snapping, she confessed.
"You want to hear my voice?" she cried. "Yes. I made the incense for you. I mixed it. I slipped it in the cup. I thought—" She broke. She had the look of someone who had expected mercy and found none. "I thought it would make him choose me fully. I thought it would prove my worth."
"Why?" I asked. "Was the price to take a life worth the favor?"
"It was love," she said, then spat, "No. It was fear. I feared losing him. He is the sun."
The courtiers shuddered. Greyson did not move. He did not show anger. He only watched the woman he had loved confess the crime that had been hidden under his rule.
Then her tone changed. She became small. She saw the empty faces of the people. She realized what had happened.
"I did not mean to kill her," she said. "I meant to make him needy. I meant—"
"Stop," I said. "Tell them how you tested the cup and who helped you."
She named the perfumer, the keeper of stores, the man who had placed the cup. She named names and each name was struck from a list like a dead leaf. The witnesses shouted. The scribes wrote.
Then the punishment came, not as law—no law might make her kneel beneath me—but as the fiercest remedy for betrayal: the public collapse of a life.
I told Greyson to listen.
"She will kneel and beg," I said. "She will ask for forgiveness. She will find none. She will leave both of us."
He agreed.
They placed her at the center of the garden. The sunlight cut her shoulders into hard shapes. People circled. A servant brought forward a small bowl of water and a single red cloth.
"Oceane Bishop," I said, "kneel."
She fell on her knees, and at first she tried to grin as if at a stage trick.
"Why are you smiling?" I asked.
"The same way you smiled when you taught me," she whispered. "I thought I would be loved."
"Love is not a hazard to be won," I said. "Stand and say it again. Tell the court."
She looked up at Greyson. He watched her like someone watching a chess piece. She began to cry. The sound was a rusty bell.
She told the court everything: the mixing of the incense, the deliverer who put the cup to my lips, the way she had believed that taking me would keep her tied to him. Every confession came out in the open, and the court breathed in and out like a beast.
She fell to the ground then, and for the first time she flailed as if to make the air carry her. "I am sorry!" she screamed. "I am sorry! I am sorry!"
People started to take their phones—no, not phones, but hands to pockets, hands to sleeves—men and women signed the scene into memory. Someone laughed. Someone cried. Someone else recorded the whole thing into a scrap of paper and passed it down the rows like a hot stone. The courtyard went alive.
Her face shifted from bravado to blank, then to denial, then to savage terror: pride, then fear, then pleading.
"Forgive me," she said. "Forgive me! I will do anything. I will give him sons. I will do anything."
Greyson did not motion. He stood like a statue. "Get up," he said.
She crawled upright on her hands. She looked at him and stumbled. "I will be good. I will be—"
"You will leave the palace," he said. "You will be sent to a place where no favor can find you. You will be cut from the court. Your family will lose their posts. You will be named traitor in the books."
"No," she cried. "No! Greyson, don't—"
"It is done," he said.
She sank forward onto the stone and began to sob in a raw animal way. The crowd gathered like a tide to look down.
"All the women who thought he would save them," I told the courtiers, "remember this face."
She reached for Greyson's hand. He pulled his hand back and left it unheld.
She pleaded, "Greyson, I will serve you. I will live under your step. Just—"
The crowd watched the unraveling. A thousand small judgments sat on those faces. Some spat at her. Some took pity. The scribes turned their pages and wrote the final lines.
She tried to stand, and failed. She crawled. She clawed the earth like a woman who had finally discovered her own limits.
"Get her out," Greyson said, and two guards picked her up like a sack and left her in the passage that led away from the palace. The crowd followed until the gate swallowed her scream.
Later, they told stories. They said a woman who had known kings had been undone in the sun. They told how she had fallen into the mud and begged. They showed how the men of court had recorded it in margins of ledgers and the market vendors had passed the story along like bread. The story became a flavor, a thing they chewed.
I watched her go and the color left my hands. I felt the old thing settle—the weight of a life returned.
"She begged?" someone asked.
"She knelt," I said. "She crawled. She begged. She was stripped of any hope of returning to favor. Her family stripped of posts. She will live in a house none will visit. That is punishment enough."
"You will never forgive her?" Iris asked later, when the moon had come up and the palace fell to whispers. She held my hand like someone asking if they could borrow a life.
"No," I said. "I will never forgive her for a single reason: she wanted my life for herself. I took her pride and made it a public thing. If she dies in shame, it will be because she stepped into it."
"It was brutal," Iris said.
"Justice often is," I said.
We walked away from the garden and the smell of crushed incense. Greyson watched from his window like a man who had set a board on the table. He thought he had moved the pieces. He had not known who I was yet. He had not understood how close a hand could be and how cold it could go.
They called tonight a lesson. Some called it mercy. Some called it cruelty.
Back in the small house that smelled of linen and old books, Avery set down his bowl of tea.
"You think you did enough?" he asked.
"I think I did the right thing," I said.
"But he will strike," Iris warned.
"He may," I said calmly. "But when he strikes, let him strike with sight. Let the world see his hand."
Weeks afterward the court changed. Men who had smiled when power touched them found their smiles a little smaller. Oceane became a myth of shame a mother told her children to teach restraint. Her family lost lands. Men who had sold favors found their papers turned over in public. Greyson's rule had to show mercy to the household that mourned me, but I had set a lesson: you could take a life when people did not watch; you could not if the crowd was awake.
"Who is the bad person?" a scribe asked me at the end when I was asked to give a statement for the record.
"Oceane Bishop," I said.
"And where was her punishment?" the scribe asked.
"In the palace garden," I said. "In front of one thousand witnesses."
"How long was the scene?"
"Long enough," I said. "Longer than she could bear. She begged. She crawled. She was dragged from the gate. The scribes wrote it down. The crowd filmed it in ink and in memory. That is the punishment."
"And did she kneel, beg, break?"
"Yes. She knelt at my feet. She begged for Greyson's favor. She begged to be spared. She broke into words and names and then collapsed. The crowd there saw it. The guards carried her out like a thing to be removed."
"What did the emperor do?"
"He decreed her banishment, removed her family's posts, and ordered her possessions seized. He did it in public, because he could do it. He wanted the world to see that the palace was not above law—but he wanted to keep his hands clean."
"And did she beg for mercy?"
"She begged for the mercy she had already taken," I said.
They wrote the lines down. They added them to the lists of names. They posted them in the market.
That night I sat and watched the moon come up over stone roofs. Greyson's face turned in the window. I saw him as a man again, not the child I used to know. He had a look I had hoped to break. I had hoped he would kneel too. He did not.
"One day," I told Iris, "we will make him watch what he did."
"How?" she asked.
"By making him own it," I said. "By making him watch his own reflections come back to him like knives."
We smiled. We had a long road. We had a city to move across like ants carrying a line of sugar back to our house.
In the end, Oceane Bishop's punishment was not death. It was worse to some: she had to live in the memory of the court, watched by every marketwoman and handmaid. She knelt, begged, named names, and was driven from the palace with her honor in tatters. She fell from a place of power to a place of shame, and every voice in the city could say her name with scorn.
That was the beginning.
I had not yet finished.
The End
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