Revenge17 min read
"I once meant to kill an emperor — then I learned what I wanted to live for"
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I am telling the story in my own voice. I will not hide how small I felt, how angry I became, and how I let others believe they owned me until the moment I decided they would not.
"It is colder than your bones," Tobias said the first night he saw me.
"Then warm them," I snapped, but I was too weak for real anger to rise.
He lifted my chin with those pale fingers that looked like bone and paint and said, "Smile. Try a smile."
I thought: break that finger, make a new umbrella out of bone. I thought what a human thinks when hunger and blood are the only company left. Yet when he let me go, his eyes were soft with something I couldn't parse. "Your master is dead," he said. "From today, I am your master."
"You killed him," I said.
Tobias only tilted his head. "I saved you from him."
"You sold me," I said, because what else did it matter if both words meant the same to him?
He laughed like someone reading a page he had already marked, and he taught me to be other things.
"You will not drink," he said. "You will not think of your old songs. You will learn to play other tunes."
"You will not let me do as I please," I replied. I learned to bend. I learned to break and look like I was being mended. I learned to be useful in the way he had planned. When he braided my hair, he would look at the reflection in a copper mirror and say, "You look like her."
"Who?"
He would not say at first. He would only trace a place on my throat with the pad of a finger, where a small dark mole sat like a sign. "She liked peonies," he said, and I began to practice liking peonies.
The first time I entered the palace I thought the rooms would be full of soft carpets and silk and safety. I was younger and ignorant about a large house built to keep people small. In the palace, even the sunlight was careful about where it fell.
"You will be careful," Tobias warned.
"But I'm not always careful," I said, and my mouth betrayed me the way it always had when the blood in my past pressed at the skin.
"You will learn," he said, and he showed me the path of learning by slow degrees. He taught me music and manners and the exact way to fold a hand so that men felt invited to touch. He taught me how to bow until the knuckles ached. When I refused, he shut me in rooms and left me hungry for days, and I learned the shape of silence that made him smile.
"You are a good student," he told me one night, then corrected himself with a smile that was colder than the room. "You will do."
"You will do," I repeated, tasting the way he used "do" like a currency.
Tobias's promise came with a plan. "There is a thing," he said, "that, if done correctly, will make you free." He spoke like an architect of ruin. "You must go into the palace, and be like she was. You must be a face he remembers. When he trusts you, you will do what I ask."
"Kill him?" I asked.
He looked at me as if I had just suggested tea. "Do it for me," he said, and it meant more than a favor. It meant a life repaid.
When I arrived at court, they called me by the name Tobias gave me in the world he had made. "Ingrid," some said. "Bell of the garden," others whispered. The left chancellor, Edsel Andersson, had his own voice for me: "A useful instrument placed well."
Aurora Church pretended to be amused the first time we met.
"You are the new comrade of a favored sort," she said to me, her voice measured like a bell. "You shall want to learn many small things."
"I will learn," I said. I had practiced the word until it fit.
The emperor's first look at me was like frost. I had heard the world say how dangerous Amos Cornelius could be. They said he was quick with the blade and quicker with a sentence, that his face could look both boy and sovereign. They taught me to lower my eyes, to let the light of that face carve a place in me.
"Why do you speak like a soldier?" he asked later, when I made a careless remark in a corridor.
"I speak like one who survived," I said. "I speak like one refusing to be soft."
He laughed once, low and odd. "I like defiance," he said.
"You like it until it breaks things," I answered. "Whoever you are, there is killing in your hands."
His eyes flickered and softened for a fraction. "Good," he said. "Then you will not look away."
When my clothes were arranged for the feast and a maid called Finley Stewart fussed too much, Jean Perrin brought me small jars of sugared plums and smiled like someone without a knife under the robe. Jean called me "sister" more than once and told me stories of markets where ordinary women boiled candied fruit and called it a festival. Jean's small kindness felt like a thin bridge over cold water.
On the night the palace had its great banquet, there were many reasons to be afraid. A hush drifted over the hall as the emperor sat, a throne like a thing carved from moonlight and lead. Aurora took an interest in me, like a hawk considering a meal. Edsel watched as a man who keeps several chessboards in his head.
"Come here," Amos said to me with a cup. "Drink." He leaned close enough that his breath warmed my ear. "You look as if you expect to fall," he whispered.
I laughed. "Who would blame me?"
"Not I." He took my hand then, in public, and I felt the weight and warm of it, nothing like the light touch Tobias had used to coax me. "Stay."
"Do you like me," I asked him once in private, "because I look like her, or because I am myself?"
His expression tightened. "What is 'hers'?" he asked and, when I would not answer, he looked away. "You will be safe where I can watch."
"Safe?" I repeated. The word is a joke in court. "You can watch what you please, but watch me as a person, not a photograph."
His eyes were a poem I could not decode. He said, "I will be what I choose." He didn't say whether that included loving me for myself.
"I will not be anyone's prop," I said.
"You will be," Tobias reminded me later in the quiet of the garden, "until you have done what must be done."
So I tried.
When the moment came to poison, my pills were sewn into the skirt springing false merriment into a court's appetite. My throat tasted metallic, my heart a small, angry drum. The plan had been to slip the emperor a small thing in his cup, to tilt the balance and step away. "Do it," Tobias had said. "Do this and be free."
"Do you ever keep promises?" I asked coldly, because I had not yet found freedom to be purchased for anything.
Tobias's smile had no warmth. "You have been useful."
At the feast, thunder broke in the shape of a stab aimed at the emperor. The dancer—who had been a small figure in the procession—threw a hairpin. There was blood; there was chaos. I found myself holding a metal hairpin that no one had given me. Someone had tried to kill him. Someone had tried to make me look the murderer.
"You!" Aurora's voice cut like a knife. "Search her."
"A search," Amos said, and the hall turned like a living thing toward me.
They found the little pills, taken by the clever hands of those who had hidden them well. The left chancellor's men spread like wolves at work. My skirt was searched.
"Why would you try to kill His Majesty?" Aurora hissed.
"I would never," I said, and I picked up one of the fallen hairpins. I threw it with a small flick. It pierced a carved screen and stayed there like a sentence made true. "If I had wanted him dead, I would have done it well enough that no one would make me the clumsy stage."
People Rearranged Themselves as if a wind had blown. Some faces were incredulous. Others eager for blame.
"Search!" Edsel snapped.
"Not on my say," Amos answered. He was pale. "Search her later. For now—" He spoke in a voice that was a net, and with it he pulled my name out of the air and tied it to his hand.
"You are under house arrest," Amos told me, and he looked at me the way one might regard a caged bird. "You will be kept in the garden; no one may harm you."
When he left, Tobias moved within reach like a shadow.
"Did you think I would let him die?" he asked.
"You let everything," I said.
"You have no right," he said.
I understood then that I had been a tool in a power play between men who thought themselves gods. I resolved that when the time came, they would see how small a thing they had tried to own.
The next days were rumors and careful footfalls. Amos would come to the garden where I was held and sit with me wearing a surgeon's concern. "Drink," he would tell me, and bring wine that warmed like a hand. "Eat," he would say, and Jean would bring plums. When he spoke of battle and the general Emory Ash, his face would cloud and then return to clear.
"You saved me," I told him once.
"No," he said. "You kept me alive by existing."
"You are kind in spare measures," I said.
He smiled like a child who had found a stone he thought might be a gem. "Do you want to leave this place?"
"Every day," I answered.
He looked at me for so long that I feared what I might say and said, "If I leave, will you come with me?"
Amos's eyes startled like a fish. "I must sit on a throne," he said. "I am bound by duty."
"Then do you choose the throne over me?"
"I choose to do what must be done," he said, which wasn't an answer.
I learned things in the quiet. I learned the palace kept secrets older than all of us. I learned that Jean Perrin's soft hands hid folded anger and that Finley Stewart had been bribed to hide a pill in my clothing by a chancellor's order. I learned Tobias had friends in high places and that Edsel Andersson knew with whom to whisper. I learned Aurora had fed the emperor what she called "pleasures" to keep him tangled to her tablecloth.
"You poisoned many people," I said to Jean one night when she came with plums.
"I put fruit in jars," she said. "I did not choose kings."
"If you see something wrong, why did you not speak?" I asked.
"Who would hear me?" she asked back. "Who would let a kitchen woman speak against silk?"
"Then we will make them listen," I said. I had thought myself a woman who would die to be rid of those who had broken her. I was also a woman who could learn to strike.
The first part was small things: words in corridor, a scrap of servant's gossip sewn into a chambermaid's hem, a letter misplaced for a servant to find. The second part was slower: I found allies where I could, small people who would do a courageous thing for a measure of safety.
"You plot," Amos said once, "like an animal that is learning how to open a gate."
"I'm not an animal," I replied. "I am a woman who remembers she has hands."
He looked at me and said, "If it comes to a courtroom, I will hear you."
"Will you?" I asked. "Will you watch them when I call them to answer?"
His thumb rubbed the rim of my cup. "Tell me the truth," he said. "Tell me what they did."
So I told him, because there was no thing I had to lose by speaking the truth.
I told him about the mountain where I had been taught, how our master had been killed and the broken promises afterward, how Tobias had taken the method the master used to bind us and used it to make us his. I told him about the pill sewn into my skirt that night that was never meant to be mine. I told him about Edsel Andersson, who had sat at meetings that planned futures and had spoken of "cleaning" anything that might keep the throne from being planted. I told him of Aurora's haste to assign blame and of the small maid Finley who had been paid to hide a thing in my hem.
"You show me this," Amos said after I finished. "I will not let it be a whisper again."
The court that followed was not a trial in the way the city told stories. It was a ceremony shaped to reveal all that men feared in plain light. I had asked for it myself. "Public," I had said. "Let them be seen."
Edsel Andersson arrived wearing his officious robes. He smiled as if he had sat atop the sun and found it warm. Aurora Church wore jewels like miniature moons. Tobias came last, correcting the angle of a sleeve as if we were in a playing hall and not at the point where kings are remade.
"Why are you gathering the court?" Edsel asked when I stood to speak.
"Because the garden is full of truths," I said. "Because I have a telling to do."
"She is still under suspicion," Aurora said with a thin laugh that offered no solace. "Let us be careful we do not jump to the wrongness of the day."
Amos rose from his throne. "Hear her," he said. "I will not have rumors decide the fate of this house."
I looked at Tobias then. His voice when he spoke was quiet. "You should not have come," he said.
"You should not have thought I was a thing to be kept," I answered. "You are the one who kept the ledger open."
"What ledger?" Edsel asked, a frown tightening his brow.
I held up a small scroll. "This is the account of the bribes paid to silence servants," I said. "This is the list of the pills sewn beneath skirts. This is the note naming which rooms were to be left unguarded during the feast. Read."
Tobias's face drained a shade paler than the room. Edsel's hand trembled for a moment. Aurora's mouth opened as if to fashion a retort but stopped. They had been careful, and yet even careful hands leave fingerprints.
"Where did you get this?" Tobias asked.
"From where you thought no one would look." I did not say everything. I did not want to reveal my informants. They were small people who had nothing to lose and yet had given me everything. "You pinned your plans on my obedience. But you forgot that I still had a telling tongue."
Aurora sprang forward. "You lie!" she cried. "This is trickery."
"You will be quiet," Amos said. His voice was small but it had the firmness of a sword. "You will be silent until evidence is shown."
"Evidence," I said, and I unrolled parchment along a small table, laying piece upon piece where the court could see. "Here is the delivery of poison pills. Here is the scribe's note showing Edsel's instructions. Here is a list of the places we were told were 'open' during the banquet."
"Who wrote the scribe note?" Edsel's hand shook like a person who had been pushed into an icy lake.
I did not have to answer. Jean and Finley and others, each in hiding, stepped forward like a small wave. "We wrote," Jean said. "We bought the paper," Finley added. "We were paid, in secret. We were given silver for obedience."
The hall was suddenly a hive. The crowd's breath changed. Some gasped; some laughed like a thing that had been saved from an imagined hunger. Aurora's smile snapped. Tobias's jaw clenched.
"Confess," Amos said to Edsel. "Tell the court what you intended."
Edsel's color left his face as if someone had taken paint from his cheeks. "I—" he began, then stopped. He looked to Tobias as if for a cue, but Tobias did not give it. He had become a man whose scripts had been burned by a different fire.
"I thought to secure the line," Edsel said finally, voice small. "I thought—"
"You thought to bury people," I interrupted. "You thought to cut the rope that would bind the throne to those who might harm it. You thought it was easier to silence some than to govern fairly."
The crowd hummed. "Is this true, Tobias?" Amos asked.
Tobias's eyes sought mine as if he could find the answer in the pupil of my eye. "She was mine to use," he said. "Until she was not."
"You were not divine," I told him, loud enough that the chandeliers seemed to ring. "You sold the names of those who protected you. You put slaves in a line to take a fall. You took a mountain and made it a bargain."
He looked as if I had slapped him. His composure split. "You think you are righteous," he said. "You think yourself a savior."
"I think I survived," I said. "And yet I think I will see you undone."
Then Amos rose. "Edsel Andersson will be stripped of his office," he said.
"Wait!" Edsel cried. "Your Majesty—you cannot—"
"Everything." Amos's voice was iron. "Gone. All titles, all lands. He will be sent away from this court. He will be publicly shamed. He will never sit in my council again."
People reacted in a thousand ways. Some leant forward as if to catch the sound. Some closed mouths too tight. Edsel's face crumpled from certainty to denial to pleading within seconds.
"Do you have anything to plead?" Amos asked.
Edsel fell to his knees. "My life—" He spat out the words as if they cost him treasure. "My service—"
"Stand," Amos said. "You will be judged by the people you wronged." Then he turned his head to Aurora and Tobias. "Aurora Church," he said.
Aurora's breath left her. "You cannot—"
"You made an attempt to manipulate a throne for your convenience," Amos said. "You will be removed from your rank. Your jewels will be taken. You will stand before the people you mocked, and you will be required to give account of every favor you received."
Aurora's eyes flashed like a wounded bird. "You have no right," she whispered.
Amos looked at me and then at the hall. "And Tobias Carvalho," he said. "He will be exiled. He will be stripped of all privilege. He will be called before the people and shamed for his betrayals."
Tobias laughed for a moment that was too wild. "You cannot do this," he said. "You are bound by your own need."
Amos stood straighter. "I can, and I will. We will hold an open reckoning. The people will see and decide what remains."
Then the punishment began, and it was public in a way meant to crack the bones of arrogance and humiliate those who used others for profit.
The first punishment was a reading. "Let every name be read," Amos commanded. "Let every bribe be announced."
Voices were called: servants, scribes, kitchen hands. They came forward and read aloud ledger after ledger. The hall listened as the scale of the conspiracy unfolded—lists of payments, hours during which guards would be absent, names of those to be intimidated. The sound of the numbers was a kind of sentence.
Edsel crumpled harder. He shifted from denial to pleading in a breath. "It wasn't meant—" he said. "I only wanted security."
"Security is not bought by blood," I said.
The crowd hissed and some cried. Fingers pointed. Tobias's face turned a different color in stages: arrogance, then alarm, then a fierce denial. He tried to speak, to craft a rationale, but his words fell like thin ice into a wide river.
"Do you deny ordering the pills?" Amos asked, calm and lethal.
"I—" Tobias began, then his voice became a small thing squeaking under pressure. He moved through phases: at first he was cocky, then stung, then angry in a shallow way, then fumbling with excuses, then finally pleading. "It was for power," he said. "It was necessary."
"Necessary?" I repeated. "For whom?"
For a long minute he stared at the floor like a man trying to find a trapdoor. The court watched him. Some leaned forward to catch a detail. A few took out little fans to hide a smile. Edsel tried to gather himself, tears sliding from a face that had never shown humility before. Aurora, who had once swept a ballroom with a glance, now looked like someone deciding whether to flee.
Amos called for the guards. He did not order blood. He ordered exposure. "They will stand before the outer city gate at dawn," he said, "and every person they have wronged will stand and speak. If any of the families wish to demand punishment, they will be heard. If any servant wishes to spit, they may. No noble's tears will soften the sentence."
At dawn, the square was full. People had come because scenes like that become part of a nation's memory. They wanted to see men humbled. They wanted to see a machine fail. Edsel was placed upon a low platform. Tobias was placed in the center with no escort except two silent guards. Aurora had her hair braided down, the jewels gone.
The public punishment was a slow unmaking. It started with the reading of harms. Servants and those wronged came up and told the crowd what had been done: a brother fired without cause, a mother banished, a child left starving because an allowance had been cut to balance a bribe.
"You took our lives," a woman cried.
"You left us hungry for your table," said a man.
Tobias's expression changed as each testimony unfolded before him. He had been confident; by the time the fifth person spoke, there was a crack in that surface. He blinked. Then he shook his head and denied. "It was necessary," he said. "They were collateral."
People hissed. They booed softly at first, then with building volume. Aurora's face began to lose color, the softness she had used like a weapon now revealing a hardness beneath. Edsel went through more changes. He started proud, moved to denial, then to anger, then to shame. At one point he tried to gesture toward the crowd and say, "I only did what I must." His voice faltered. A child in the crowd spat at his boots.
"Let him speak," Amos ordered. Edsel tried to tell a tale with tears that had the smell of late apologies and political fear. Each attempt made the crowd louder, until they drowned him out.
When Tobias finally tried to mount a defense, he was a microcosm of collapse. He shifted from cold self-possession to blind assertion, then to frantic pleading. I watched him as he watched me, and for the first time I saw more than arrogance—he looked like a man who had finally been undone by his own smallness.
"Why did you choose her?" Tobias said at one point—suddenly, with all the rage he had not let himself feel before. "Why did you betray the one I meant to keep safe?"
I smiled in a way I had not been taught. "Because I am no one's thing," I said. "I am the one who tells."
Tobias's collapse completed itself. He sank into an almost animal terror, hands worked like a man trying to fend off invisible blows. Faces in the crowd changed from curiosity to scorn to an animal rejoicing at the fall of a great thing. Some shifted to pity, but the pity was not for him. It was for the shape of power that bends and breaks lives.
The punishments were varied. Edsel had his titles stripped and was sent away with a small retinue to a remote post where he would live but be forgotten. The court ordered that his records be made public, and any family that wished to reclaim fiefs could petition; the effect was to remove his wealth and his ability to wield influence.
Aurora lost the privileges she had smoothed into herself for years. The jewels she had worn were taken by the crown and distributed to the families of those she had wronged. She sat with her mouth pressed thin, moving through the motions of someone learning the cost of conspicuously thriving. Her public denials turned into tears, then pleas, then silence. People observed her like an object.
Tobias's punishment was more focused on erasure. He was exiled from the court, given no post, and forbidden to ever hold lands in the province again. The court stripped him of the rights he had used to manipulate others. At the edge of the city, people spat on his name. He was recorded in many logs now: name, offense, sign. His face became something the scribes copied for the record.
During the punishments, people's reactions made their own story. Some watched with the cold assessment of court functionaries. Some—those who had once bowed low to these men—turned away in sudden shame. Others used the hour to take a step toward justice: a family reclaimed what they'd lost; a woman took back the apron sold to pay an Edsel debt.
Edsel begged at the end, "I served to keep order!"
"You served to protect your own place," said a woman who had been a kitchen maid.
That was the last voice before the gates closed on them. Their pride had been taken by the force of truth, and in the quiet afterward, the court felt different. It was still the same room but the people within had been marked by what had been revealed.
When the day ended, Amos came to me and said, "You did not lie."
"I did not," I said.
"You should have come to me first," he said.
"I did not trust anyone," I admitted. "I trusted myself."
"You trusted me," he corrected.
"Until now," I said. "Now I know you will choose."
He looked at me as if weighing a heart against power, then he reached and took my hand in a way that no one had taken it before. "Stay with me," he said. "Not as a thing, but as you."
I looked at him for a long time. I saw the boy and the king in a single pair of eyes and then I answered, "I will stay, of my own accord."
That was my first true choice.
After the punishments, life rearranged. Edsel and Aurora were gone from their places of influence. Tobias vanished into a landscape of small men with no throne to tend. The court learned new care in its steps. Amos was not forgiven everything—no king is forgiven easily—but he had shown that when called to, he could choose the plain route of justice.
Tobias returned to me in time, months later, ragged and small and trying to bargain. He knelt in the garden like someone who kept bad habits when left alone. "Forgive me," he said.
"I don't forgive people who carve out lives from other people's bones," I answered.
He scraped for mercy. "I loved you."
"You loved the idea of an obedient thing," I said. "You loved that she resembled something you thought yourself to own."
He begged. The crowd—garden servants, passing officials—paused their work to watch. Their faces were hard, some angry, some sad. The man who once tried to buy mountains and title was reduced to a beggar for forgiveness. I turned my head. I let the sun, indifferent, watch him.
"You will be known for your betrayals," I said. "That is enough."
He tried to kneel lower; guards took him away.
The story of the Mountain and the woman who would not be sold continued, but the most important part is this: I chose. I chose life and a man who could be terrible but could also be corrected. I chose not to be a thing that could be sewn with pills and hidden in a skirt.
Later, evenings when Amos would feed me tea and we would trade small stories, I would sometimes catch Tobias working in the far distance, stripped of honors, learning the shape of loss. People took pictures in the salon—no, not pictures, but they wrote long scrolls of gossip. Some called it justice. Some called it theatre. Fewer of them saw what I had been through.
Jean made me a plum pudding once and smiled. "You are lighter," she said.
"I still have weight," I said. "But the weight is mine."
"That's worth knowing," she said.
I would not say I am healed. I would say I am awake. And when Amos looks at me across a table and says, "Tell me again about the place where you learned to make poison," I speak not to flirt with death but to remind him that I have a history and that history includes being owned until I claimed myself.
"Come away with me," he sometimes says at night when the lanterns burn low.
"Where would we go?" I ask.
"Anywhere you want," he answers. "Anywhere."
"I do not wish to be your shadow," I say.
"You would not be," he answers. "You would be my companion."
"Then we will see," I say. We both know freedom is not a place but a choice.
The End
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