Revenge16 min read
I Spoke, I Learned, I Tore Their Lies Down
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I woke in a courtyard that smelled like cold iron and old wool, my face bruised and my throat raw with silence that had once been my only refuge. I raised my hand and felt the ugly birthmark under my cheekbone, the one everyone used to point at like a scar that belonged to the world.
"Gunner," I said, forcing breath through broken cords. "Gunner, listen."
He stepped back as if my voice had become a blade. His mouth twisted into something like disgust and ownership at once. "Clementine," he spat, "shut your mouth. The child inside you is for Cassandra. You will live until she needs the child. That's all."
"You're lying," I croaked. "She is not sick. She lied to you."
Gunner's gloves curled into fists. "You insolent—"
I lunged, incapable of choosing what hurt more: the bruise on my cheek or the memory of a child bled to death for a promise. I hit him with the truth like a stone.
"Cassandra didn't save you in the cold pool!" My voice was thin and raw. "I did. I—"
He kicked me. I fell. He turned his back and left, the courtyard swallowing the hollow of his boots.
When they hauled me toward the inner rooms I thought about giving up. The cold in that place was deeper than winter. I thought of the boy once warm inside me, taken to cupboards of silver instruments while they watched like businessmen examing cattle. I thought of the first time blades bit his skin and no one called it crime. I thought of being pushed into the wolf yard that had eaten me alive in the life before.
I pushed my head into the table so hard the bone under my brow split.
"She's dead," I told the emptiness. "If I'm nothing but a trough, then we will both go, and there will be no trough for her."
They stormed in. Surprise, then frantic shouting. A healer—Atticus Barton—rushed, bandages and poultices in hand. They sewed me, they stitched, someone shouted about a doctor. I drifted like a lantern on black water, and then, when the dark was thickest, a warmth touched my forehead like a palm.
"You don't belong here," a woman in white said into the void. She looked like me and not me, younger and older at once, lab coat immaculate. "Live. You must live."
I woke gasping and alive, throat burning. I could speak. The first sound I made was wrong and ragged. It surprised them all.
"Clementine, you can speak?" Cassandra Perrin mocked, hands trembling like a reed. "How is that possible?"
"You lied," I said slowly. Each word scraped my throat raw. "You pretend to be ill to steal his pity. You do not need the child. You lied."
A small thing happened more dangerous than knives—Gunner hesitated. He had believed her for so long. The doubt was a sliver of cold between his ribs. But he stepped forward and said the exact thing he had practiced: "You are a liar and an ugly woman. You will bear the child. You will be caged until we take what we need."
I looked at him then and something I had fed through many nights—resentment that had curdled into hunger—flared. I wanted him to feel the ice that had kept me alive.
The white woman in my head had left me the knowledge of hands and herbs, of sutures and saline and how to make a cold fever live until dawn. There was a medicine pack on the ground that had not been there. A small grey chest with a white cross. I drank its clear bag like a vow. The fever that had eaten me slunk down, and I understood things that used to be secret.
"Who gave you that?" Gunner demanded later when he found me patching a wound on my lap with the same precise motions I had seen in dreams.
"It was here," I said. "It came. I learned."
He did not believe me. He believed the world the way a man believes the wall that keeps his house up. When doubt gnawed, he hit. When fear rose, he sent servants. When embarrassment would have been a teacher, he chose cruelty.
"You will be watched," he told the servants. "Do not harm the child. If the child dies—"
"I will leave before you ever get him," I answered. The word left me with no fear. "I will not be a trough."
That night, I almost ran.
A shadow waited outside my room. I grabbed a hairpin like an oath and struck blindly. The figure was quick but not quick enough; he flinched and I managed to slash the skin along his arm.
It was Gunner. "You dare wound me?" he hissed, a rich man's animal hurt. He forced my wrist down and laughed—a sharp ugly sound. "You, Clementine, think you can ruin me?"
"Why are you with her on our wedding night?" I said low, blood salt in my mouth. "Whose shadow was in my bed?"
He slapped me then, a brutal flat hand that knocked teeth and reason. "You have no face, no voice," he sneered. "You can't prove anything. It was Cassandra who saved me. She's honest. You will pay with your life when the time comes."
I bit back a cry and spat blood. My hand went to the hairpin in my sleeve and I thought of the white woman saying only two words: Live. Protect.
So I did.
When I could, I left the courtyard the way the wolves do—quiet as hunger. The beast yard was a misfortune in springtime and a tomb in winter. I pulled a few scraps of chicken from the kitchen, kept a knife in my fist and walked among the wolves like a ghost.
They smelled me as meat. They growled. The pack leader sprang and the rest surged like an ocean. I threw meat, I ran the edge of panic, and then the leader lunged for me and I lashed out. My hands moved as if the dream had taught them, and metal met bone and the wolf's throat gushed heat over my fingers. Blood sprayed my face and the moon watched me rise with arms and knife wet.
Their jaws fell in fear. Where before they had been jaws and hunger, now they bowed to the thing that had killed their leader. I opened the back gate with hands that could still shake and I ran, leaving the wolves to the silence.
I thought about where I would flee. I supposed men of war knew nothing of small cruelty, and so I ducked into a narrow house and found a man who wore a masked face—Aurelius Bengtsson, the regent. He had a face like a carved shadow and wore a golden mask that looked like a demon sleeping. He moved like danger and spoke like judgment.
"You will die if you tell anyone you saw me," he said. His hand clamped my mouth, then let go as if the motion itself had been a lesson. He held me by my wrist like an offering and I was small and naked in his presence.
"Please," I said, because saying anything else would be to spit in the wind. "Your arm—it's bleeding. If you do not stem it, it will rot. I can help."
He had been a blade in the day I escaped him. He softened like a tide. He let me do what I had promised the woman in white I would do: heal.
I bored like a bird into his wound, and the mask of him came away. He listened, he watched, he did not speak of the old night. He let me stitch and wash and wrap and give him a tincture that smelled like iron and pine. He let me breathe.
"Don't tell anyone you saw me," he said later, voice low and even. "Not a word. For your life, my domain."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because the man I am will not forgive the man I must be with," he said. "But," he added with a small, curious tilt, "you have used hands I keep for soldiers. You saved a man who matters. He will be in debt."
He called his guard and a litter and sent me out with a curfew and a warning. He placed a woman—Kora Mueller—at my side one minute and then he took back the night the next. I felt like a coin promised to two different hands.
Back in the house, the world had not changed. Gunner's face was still a map of displeasure. Cassandra stayed close to him like a clever bird. Atticus Barton, the old family doctor, was the one who smiled like a hyena whenever someone bled bright for a purpose.
Then the palace woke to a different fever: a small prince, Camden Zeng, had choked and turned purple. His skin was covered in angry red blisters. They cried "poison" and "murder." They made every face in the palace suspicious. Atticus raised his chin and declared it a deliberate crime.
"Who was last in the kitchens?" Gunner barked.
"Her," someone said, and they all looked at me the way a magistrate looks at a condemned man: eager to close the book.
I went to the child because there is a calculus to saving breath. I found his throat swollen like a bird's and his breath resembled a broken bell. I felt for the fast pulse and the shallow rise of lungs and I wished at that moment that I could be as delicate as I had been cruel.
"Move," I said to the throng, and when people would not move I shoved and pulled as if the house were my husband. I found a vial that smelled of green and clean things, pressed it into the child's mouth, felt a tiny frantic twitch and the skin begin to cool.
Atticus tsked and offered a large black pill like a stage trick and slipped it down the child's throat. The child gagged and then, blessed by miracle or poison, he resurfaced. He named me "savior" with a defiant breath, and Gunner glared as if that cost him something in the currency he valued most: reputation.
"A miracle?" they whispered. Atticus bowed and took what did not belong to him. "Healer, where did you learn?" they asked.
"From a man I owe," I said, and I could see tongues tasting the word "regent" like a dish they had not thought to cook.
They wanted to chain me to gratitude. Gunner wanted to cage me to a use. Cassandra wanted to keep her charade intact. The house wanted the bloodied page to return to its folding book.
I could have been grateful, been meek, but the woman in white would not allow my bones to become bookmarks. I began to learn in earnest: suture, silence, saline, patience. I mended hands that had killed boys on the field of battle and men who had bled for the crown. I relieved fever with cloth and cold and a steady hand. The regent's general—Cillian Fitzpatrick—almost made me retch when I saw him: mangled, poisoned, a map of rot and infection across his chest. They thought him doomed. The regent put him in my clasp like an undesired heir.
"Do whatever you must," Aurelius said, eyes cold as glass. "I will owe you a favor if he lives."
I sewed and I scraped and I worked until my knuckles burned. Blood and pus and maggot-caries were things I had seen in dreams and in the white woman's demonstrations. When I finished and wrapped and dripped a melt of tincture that sang like iron, the general breathed again. The regent watched without praise.
I stayed at the regent's house because there was safety beneath his roof—dangerous as it was. He watched me as a man keeps ledger: sometimes approving, sometimes balancing numbers; seldom human.
But even safety came with a price. People at the palace murmured. "She has the regent's eye," they said. I heard it said in taverns and at silk stalls and watched their faces when I trod the corridors. Cassandra's voice changed its tune, then, because panic squeezes the throat of the liar.
I wanted more. The white woman had given me tools and the regent had given me a stair. The wolf yard that had held my death now belonged to a man who loved his animal more than his woman. I took what I had and made the wolves bow to me once. I took what I had and walked into the center of a court to say the truth.
They had a festival of lights and a court gathering under hemp and porticoes. People took their seats like birds returning to branches. The head steward Pedro Lopez and a number of kitchen managers were present, as was Atticus Barton and Gunner Schulz in a robe bright as frost. Cassandra stood by him, hand fluttering in learned helplessness, smiling as if history owed her the gift of villainy. The hall hummed like a net.
I walked in leaning on my name and my oath. "I will speak," I had told myself every morning.
I stepped forward and said, loud enough for the tapestries to swallow it and for the guards to tilt, "Gunner. You do not need to pretend."
Silence, thin as ice, spread through the hall. The faces turned like sunflowers. "You dare—" Gunner began.
"This woman," I said, pointing at Cassandra, "lied about an illness. She took pity, bread, wine, and a child's blood as a right she has no claim to. You believed her because she can lie prettily. You believed her because she smiles with seams of poison."
Gasps. Cassandra's eyes flashed like mercury. "You cannot accuse—"
"I can show you receipts," I said. "I can show you accounts not kept at Gunner's own table. I can show you how the kitchen's best meats, the palace's best oil, disappeared and turned into a throne for your comfort. I can show you who gave Pedro Lopez and his men pouches for silence."
Pedro's face crumpled and he looked at the floor like a man asking the dirt to forgive him. "Sire—" he stammered. "I thought—"
"You thought of coin, not of children," I said. "You thought of comfort."
"Enough!" Gunner spat. He moved like storm. "You will produce evidence or be put to death for slander!"
"Then call the steward who keeps the ledgers," I said. "Call the man who moves inventories. Call Atticus, who smiles at other men's bills. Call—call anyone."
"Atticus!" he shouted. The old doctor came forward, cane clacking like a sentence. "You dare—"
"Ask him for the purchases," I said. "Ask him to name who ordered the fresh shrimp that poisoned the prince. Ask him to tell you why the food that should have been sent to Clementine—"
"—was diverted!" Atticus blurted then, and the world tilted. He tried to put his hands forward as if to make the heat go out, but his mouth had betrayed him.
The hall dissolved into the sound of voices like breaking glass. I let it happen. The regent sat back as if he had planned every pebble's roll.
"Tell them," Aurelius said quietly. His voice was small but the room heard it like a bell in granite. "Pedro. Present the ledgers."
Pedro trembled. He fumbled and laid out the ledger—ink faded like old blood. Names, quantities, shillings written in a hand that had been counting favors not food. There were lists of oysters and shrimps routed to Cassandra's floor. There were odd payments to a woman named Lin—that luscious manager—Moore? No, the signature was a curled "M." It matched the handwriting on the note that had sent cooks to the lady's rooms.
Gunner paled. Cassandra's smile contracted and crumpled like paper left in wet weather. The guards who stood for the court moved like a tide to the doorway. Every nobleman was suddenly a witness and every witness a judge.
"Public reckoning," Aurelius said without ceremony. "If the court will watch, the court will see." He raised his hand and the hall stilled to the cut of a knife. "Bring them forward: Pedro Lopez—who embezzled provisions; Atticus Barton—who manipulated diagnosis for money and glamour; Cassandra Perrin—who trafficked in lies to secure a man who had no need of her medicine."
They came forward as if dragged. There was no trial that night: the court's hunger for spectacle was a law all its own.
"These men and women," Aurelius said, "prostituted the lives of innocents for gain. They sold food and medicines that belonged to the household. They lied to a nobleman for affection and took a child's right as a promise due to them."
Cassandra's mascara ran. "You will not—"
"Silence," Aurelius said. "You will stand where the light can find you. Guards, take Pedro Lopez and place him upon the dais."
He was hoisted and bound where everyone could see the ledger flayed open at his feet.
"Pedro," I said, "tell them how many sacks of rice were rerouted. Tell them why the kitchen sent its best to Cassandra's rooms."
He sobbed like a man split in two. "The coins—the coins," he choked. "I took because I feared for my family. I took because the lady—Cassandra—promised gold and dismissal if I refused."
"Have you anything to say?" I asked, and he flapped both palms as if to wash away the filth of the act.
"I am sorry," he moaned. "I am sorry. I was weak."
They dragged Atticus forward then. "Doctor Atticus Barton," Aurelius intoned, "how many times did you diagnose falsehood for love of silver?"
Atticus swallowed and tried to hold his head high. He had always thought himself too clever for consequences. "I—there were medications. I gave them where they were requested."
"Who paid you?" I asked. He could not look me in the eye.
"L-ladies of the house—Cassandra—" he stuttered.
Then they turned to Cassandra.
She had the audacity to try to smile. "It was for the good," she said in a voice that sounded like silk dragged over a grave. "I needed to secure my life. Surely one small lie among so much kindness cannot be—"
"It cannot," Aurelius said, letting the word hang. "The court has watched this house turn children into instruments. The law will officiate."
Gunner's face had gone the color of old portraits when they rot. He had no protection now but the nobility's patience. He looked at me and his eyes shone with a kind of savage plea.
"Do you demand punishment?" Aurelius asked the court.
"Yes," voices cried. The court was hungry for justice; the people were quicker for the sight of a man toppled.
And so the punishment was laid out—not a private arrest, not a distant rumor—but a public penance. Pedro would stand on a raised stone, his ledger nailed beside him, and the servants would read the list of misdeeds aloud. He would be flogged for his theft in the courtyard, every lash described and meted by a magistrate, then he would be forced to work in the kitchens for the rest of the season—an honor to feed those he had starved.
Atticus would be stripped of his title as court healer—no noble's hand would ever bow to his diagnosis again. He would have to confess, publicly, the treatments he had given under duress for coin, and then spend a year in the infirmary under my supervision, treating men and women without status who had once been beneath his notice.
Cassandra—Cassandra would be the spectacle. They placed her on a stage of accusation. The tapestries were pulled away and she stood hungry in the open air. The court demanded to know whether she had knowingly lied to a man to steal a child's life.
"Do you confess?" Aurelius asked, and his voice was not merely a thing of court. It felt like winded justice.
She tried to smile. "I did what I had to," she said, voice cracking. "I loved him, and I wanted to live. I would have done anything to survive."
"Anything?" the magistrate asked, and the word hung over her like a verdict. The crowd cheered in hunger.
"We will have you apologize to the people," Aurelius said. "You will kneel with that child—Camden Zeng—beside you. You will confess, and the truth will be read into the public record. You will be stripped of your privileges. The household will take back its food and its coin. You will be barred from the court."
They made her kneel on the cold stone. Her hands trembled. She had never knelt before, not for anything she had not already bought with a plan. The priests read a list of every favor and every lie. Guards held her shoulders. The crowd hissed. They hissed for the child and for the little ones who had no one else.
She wept then, but not for the child. She wept for herself.
When she rose she was without ribbon and ring. They cut the cord of favor from her hair and announced in the hall that she would be sent away to a small house on the city's edge, where she would work and no longer own any household treasure. She would be watched. Her fortune would be stripped and placed into the palace fund for orphans.
Gunner? They did not fling him into the street. He had rank, after all, and rank had cold glass around it called protection. But his reputation—his commodity of choice—was shredded. The nobles would not take his side as long as the regent breathed. He was made to stand before the court and acknowledge negligence and poor stewardship; he was ordered to repay the stolen coin in public measures, to rebuild the kitchens he had robbed. Men spat into their palms and calculated his loss. The loss would be slow and bitter.
The courtyard was full of witnesses: guards and merchants, nobles and servants. People cheered when the ledger was opened and jeered when the name Cassandra slid out of the column of silence. The public watched the guilty kneel beneath the sun like hunks of old fruit. The spectacle was exact and heavy.
I watched them as if nothing could unmake the memory of what they had done. Atticus had to write down his sins. Pedro had to name who took the coin. Cassandra confessed and lost. Gunner promised to fund the kitchens and to keep his house clean forever or be fined.
It was not enough to unmake the past. It was not enough to quiet my bones. But it was a beginning. The wolves bowed for me once, and now the court had bowed for the one they had thought small.
After the public punishment, the world smelled of cold justice and lemon oil. The regent had done what he liked: settled a matter thoroughly.
They called me "the healer" and "the woman regent favored," and those titles were thin gilded cages.
I had to be careful. Gunner had learned he could be humiliated and yet stay fat on power. Cassandra had been made small and would spit poison from a lesser house. Atticus would nurse a wound of shame and perhaps become wiser. Pedro would keep his hands busy and never sleep.
But the wound in me—the one that had bled a child into medicine—would not stitch by other people's hands. My son had not returned. The claw of my loss scraped me like an old map. I could walk with the regent and stitch and learn; I could be safe in a manner of speaking; but trust is currency harder to earn than silver.
I walked at dusk from the court to the regent's house, where candles like needy stars burned on the wide table. Aurelius watched me with that unreadable hunger in his eyes. "You have a certain hunger," he said calmly. "You will be useful."
"I will accept nothing without its price," I told him. "If you help me—really help me—find the proof that the child you loved was killed for greed, find the men who sold children as instruments, then I will not be your slave. I will be your instrument."
He smiled like a sword being sheathed. "We both know how to bargain."
I had purchased a ladder to climb. I had sewn a patch on the sky and the hem of my life with the regent's thread. But the world was still full of knives. Gunner's face had grown a thin line of hatred for me. He came to me one night bleeding from a new wound where pride had been stabbed.
"Clementine," he said, voice shallow, "if you continue—if you are so bold—you will die. I did what I thought necessary. Cassandra was my anchor."
"An anchor that pulls you into the mud," I said. "You will have to choose what you love more: your lies or your name."
He laughed then, and the laugh was brittle. "You will never have him, Clementine. You will die and your name will be forgotten like a broken bowl."
That is what monsters say when men are investments. I wanted him to crumble, and yet I also wanted his eyes to see the abyss he had rolled us toward. I wanted him to know the taste of losing.
So I kept healing, and I kept my eyes open for the cracks in the palace ledger. I taught myself patience in cups of bitter tea and closings of doors. The regent's house smelled like iron and ash and orders. He spoke to me sometimes when the moon was small.
"Your child," he said once, "might not be the only thing they used as an instrument. There are records, unaccounted shipments, men who cross borders and never speak names."
"Find them," I breathed. "Let me see the network. Let me cut it."
He touched my hand once—an odd, quick thing like a judge touching a page—and then he left.
The rest of that season, I learned how to move like smoke. I learned technique and charade and how to bargain with a man who could crush a city with a look. I learned that revenge is not always a single sword but often a slow excision.
At noon, when the regent's servants brought bread and the city hummed outside the second gate, I sat with my hands and my memory and stitched children back together. I kept a ledger of my own.
"Why help me?" I asked Aurelius once as I packed some small vials into a box to go to a village beyond the river.
He looked at me like someone looking at a map where a country once lay. "Because," he said at last, "I need you. And perhaps, Clementine, because I'm damned if I let any man keep with him the right to turn a child's life into currency."
It was not exactly mercy. It was interest.
I answered him the only way I knew. "Keep your promises."
He inclined his head. "I will."
But promises are fragile things in a house of men who think themselves gods. The months ahead would reveal whether my steps had been cautious enough to walk across coals and not be burned. I had told the truth and saved a prince and a general. The public spectacle had cut a net into the house. It had pulled them taut. The guilty were punished and the hungry for spectacle had been fed.
Yet in the deep night, when memory rules the heart, I curled my hands and whispered to my own hollow womb, to the boy that had been and would never be, "I will find them all." I would make them kneel under public light and name the currency of their crimes. I would take back what they had claimed: dignity, and the right to live.
And if I could, I thought, in the ink of my vow, I would do worse than make them pay: I would make them watch what they had almost destroyed become stronger than they had ever imagined.
The End
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