Face-Slapping17 min read
“I Stole His Fish and Ate My Way into Trouble”
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"I can smell fish."
The dark grass rustled under my hands as I pushed myself up. My mouth was dry. My head was a mess of pain and other people's memories like a broken film. I blinked into the night and the smell hit me — warm, sharp, and impossible to ignore.
"Fish?" I whispered. "Yes. Fish."
They had left me tied to a tree. I had been left to die.
"Who would leave a woman here?" a voice muttered, low and amused.
I had been doing one thing well in my old life: closing other people's throats. I had been Lin Xuan once — a unit leader, a spy in the field. I had been good. I had been brave. Then I had been tricked, tied to a tree, and starved.
Now, the memories were wrong. My hands were smaller. My hair smelled of perfumes I did not know. My name in this new head was a name that did not fit my past.
I forced my body forward. I moved by reflex, not plan. I crawled toward the firelight where two men sat near a small open flame, turning two fish on a stick.
The man with the fish had a clean, quiet face. He handled the sticks with small, sure moves. He was not pleased by noise. Beside him, a man laughed like a bell and kept a sharp eye on the dark trees.
"You're good with that fire," the laughing man said. "It smells like a feast."
"It is food," the quiet man said. "Be patient."
My mouth throbbed. My hands trembled. I had eaten nothing for days in that other life. A hunger like a bone-cold thing sat in me. I watched the fish brown, the skin crisp. I saw the oil pop and the flesh glow.
"Who would steal our fish?" the laughing man said after a moment. "This valley is not without wolves."
I wrapped my fingers around a fist-sized stone. I had never been penitent about taking what I needed to survive. I threw.
The stone hit a hand and the laughter stopped.
"Who is there?" the laughing man snapped.
The quiet man took a thin stick from the fire and made another torch. He started toward the sound.
I darted. My new body was light, smaller than my old one, and faster in small spaces. I had to be. I pulled the twine binding my wrists, stumbled back when the rope tore at the skin, and moved like a shadow toward the fire.
The fish were ready. I seized them.
"Hey!" The bell-man's voice was angry and sharp. He lifted a stick — and then I stepped into the dark and slid between the brush. I ate.
The first bite was a rapture. The skin broke with a crisp sound. Warm flesh melted. I chewed like a wolf. I closed my eyes and let the taste pull me away from the dry ache in my chest.
"Who's stealing my fish?" someone shouted from the other side of the trees.
I froze. I swallowed, whole, and pressed my back to the grass. My fingers were greasy. The world smelled of smoke and the sea of frying oil. I had a foolish grin on my face when the memory attack hit — not just my memories but a cascade of other names and stories I did not own.
Janessa Cooper.
Not Janessa. That was the name of the body I now wore. That name belonged to the widowed merchant's daughter who had been made to carry favors and endure small cruelties. Janessa's life came to me in a rush: an arranged marriage she did not want, a sister who smiled venom, servants who plotted, and a dangerous man at court named Bennett Gibson.
I had died as Lin Xuan. I had awakened in Janessa Cooper's bones.
"He's here," Paolo Rasmussen said suddenly. "Someone's near the fire."
My body moved before my brain settled. I wrenched free of the last vine and slipped out from behind a haystump. There I was — me, but not — holding two cooked fish like a bandit caught with stolen bread.
Bennett Gibson stood a few feet away. He had the lean hard look of a man who ruled more than he taught. He wore a robe that caught moonlight and made him look as if he could command the wind.
"Who are you?" he asked. His voice was flat. It felt like a blade.
My heart hammering, I held up the fish like an offering.
"I—" I started. My voice sounded wrong in this skin. "I was starving."
Bennett's dark eyes cooled. Paolo laughed out loud, a soft, cruel sound that made my skin prickle. "You? A woman. With fish."
"She had a good throw," Paolo crowed, leaning on a stick. "A thief with aim."
I swallowed. I could have lied. I could have made up a sister or a noble who sent me. I chose raw truth. Hunger is an honest thing.
"I will cook for you," I blurted. "I know food. I can cook. I was a cook's apprentice as a child. Please—let me trade. I will cook and you will not kill me."
Bennett looked at Paolo, then at the fish. He did something small: he made a tiny motion with a stick to the fish pit. "Give me the fish," he said.
I held out one. He took it and tasted. He shut his eyes for a breath. "Not bad," he said.
Paolo smirked. "You dare to serve Bennett Gibson and call it 'not bad'?"
"Not bad," Bennett repeated. "It is… honest. Sit."
So I sat. I shared the fire with them and cooked a thin soup from bark and garlic that Janessa's body remembered from some childhood patch. I toasted corn like a child showing off a toy trick. Paolo declared I had talent. Bennett watched like a man who suspected a lie but liked the lie anyway.
"You are not from near here," Bennett said when the pot had gone thin. "Who are you in the valley?"
Janessa's memories had names. Janessa's mouth answered what it knew. "Janessa," I said. "Janessa Cooper. I was on the ridge when the horse bolted. I fell, I—"
"Then you are his betrothed," Paolo said with a flourish. "How lucky for you to meet the regent and the prince in the same night."
"Not our betrothed," Bennett said briefly. "She was given. She did not go alone."
My ribs tightened. Janessa had a ring of cold events around her: a title from the Empress, a forced step toward Bennett. The more I felt Janessa in my bones, the angrier I grew at the life she had been given.
We shared the fire. We shared words sharp as knives and warm as broth. Paolo was easy as wine. Bennett was a man in armor with a knife hidden in his smile.
Later, when they had left, I crept close to the hay where I had slept and listened. Paolo's voice faded, then Bennett's.
"He is careful," Bennett said. "Very careful."
"Too careful for a man who stands behind a throne," Paolo scoffed. "He is cold."
"He is not mere cold." Bennett's voice had changed. "He is a man with a ladder to climb and a ladder to keep. That is all."
The army came looking for them in the morning. My plan was simple: follow, watch, learn. I tied my hair up into a rough cap, took a hunter's cloak and dust, and slipped behind the searchers. Someone left a beard by the pond; I put it on. Whoever saw me took me for a tired stable hand.
When the crowd found Bennett and Paolo, they found them with two fish chewed into bones. They found me standing not far off, holding my borrowed fishing rod like a wooden sword.
"Miss Janessa!" a voice called. "We found you! The lady—"
I saw Bennett's eyes narrow. He took a step forward. He recognized me. He paused, then nodded once as if to say, "You have a way of surviving."
For days after, I watched the men move. I watched how Bennett sharpened his words into armor. I watched how Paolo used laugh as a blade.
I also watched the way Janessa's sister Clara Rinaldi looked at me. Pink silk, cool smiles, the way she pressed her face like a pearl to any man who could lift her. Clara's smile floated like oil on water; it was pretty to the eye and slick to the touch.
Clara's voice slid into the room like knives. "My sister," she said when I returned to the encampment's small tents, "you are lucky the regent rescued you. Remember your place."
I felt something low and dark spit out of me. "Keep your instructions for your servants," I said. Janessa's voice held mine, but the edge was me. "I'll remember."
Clara's face changed for a pulse — a flash of shock, like someone suddenly burned. She had not seen Janessa stand up until that night.
Later, when everyone left, I walked out and found a small pool near the tents. I had to find Janessa's clothes. They were hidden in the mud, wet and soiled. I stripped and slid into them, every inch of fabric an insult and a memory. My hands moved like those of a woman who had known how to clean armor. I dug a match from the grass and burned Janessa's old shirt that had stains that could mean a death sentence.
"Burn the past," I whispered. "But keep the meat."
Someone mocked me as I burned the shirt. I turned and saw a girl, a little servant, and I dropped a coin and told her to run to the kitchens and bring me anything warm.
I had to eat again.
Months passed like that — in the space between lies and the truth. I learned to use Janessa's name as a key. I used Janessa's silence to hear the court's dark wishes.
One night, in the tent hallway, Bennett cornered me.
"You kept your promise," he said.
"I told you I would cook in return," I said.
Bennett's jaw tightened. "You may think you owe me nothing. But you must know the power of a promise. A promise is a rope. Today you used it to live. Tomorrow it could be used to hang you."
"Then cut the rope," I said. "I have knives."
Bennett smiled in the way that men smile before they decide to test a blade on flesh. "Perhaps," he said. "But I would prefer to watch first."
My chest tightened. I thought of my old life — the missions where a wrong breath meant death. I thought of Janessa's life — threaded with debts and small cruelties. I thought of my own hunger and the taste of roasted fish that had woken me. I decided then that my life would not be a thread in someone else's knot. If they wanted a story about me, I would write it myself.
I found a thing Janessa possessed: a simple letter of favor, a scrap from the Empress. It was small, but it was a knife hidden in a shawl. I kept it like a secret.
A new threat arrived. One morning, a boy on a horse came to the lane and spat a name at the palace gate: "Bryson Weaver." He was young, lean, and raw with feeling. He would hunt Bennett.
He stopped outside the household and screamed at the hounds. "Bennett, you stole my father's honor! I will take it back!"
I could have ignored the boy. I watched him instead. He moved like a hungry man. His eyes were bright with pain. He did not speak out of idle anger. He wanted something that a man like Bennett had taken: a father's office, a father's life, a father's name.
"If you want someone to kill," I whispered to him one noon as he sat on a low wall, "you should not come here. Come when people are asleep."
Bryson looked at me like a boy who had found shade. "You speak as if you know sword," he said.
"Sometimes words cut," I said. "Sometimes they save."
He smiled then, a sharp thing, and formed a plan we both fed on. "If I take him," he said, "this crown of thorns will hurt less."
We made a small bargain: his anger, my head. He had reasons enough; I had survival. We agreed to meet at a low-walled house by the back lane where I would leave a note in case Bennett came.
Bennett came that night.
"You brought him to me," Bennett said later with a quiet laugh. His voice had the flat quality of confession. "You brought a man who wants my blood."
"He's a fool," I said. "He will be a lesson to you."
Bennett's hands were steady as he ordered his men into the lanes. He moved like water over stone. Bryson's men were not skilled. They were loud and wrong-footed. The night smelled of rain and dust and iron.
Then, something happened that no one saw coming but everyone was quick to use: Bryson was wounded. Arrows bit him. He fell. The trap was not as planned.
I ran.
I found Bryson at the bottom of the house stairs, his breath small as a bottle. He bled on the cold stone.
"I told you," he croaked. "Don't leave."
"I'm not leaving," I said. My hands had done this a hundred times before. I pulled out a bandage and pressed it into his arm. "You will not die here."
He looked at me like a man who had once seen a light in the dark. "Why help me?" he whispered.
"Because you owe a man nothing when he is dying," I said.
He smiled hard. "Then perhaps we'll owe each other later."
The day came when Clara's plan to remove me moved like a weather front. I had angered her too much for silence. She wanted the house, the silk, the small joys, and she would not let a simple stepdaughter stand in her way.
She sent men to the backlane. They stole my maid, Hanna Carter, and dragged her into the cold barn.
When Hanna did not return, I went to the barn and found it locked. I listened and heard soft breathing. I cried out and the cows stamped. The air smelled like straw and fear.
"Bring her out," I said to the men outside. "Give her back."
They laughed.
"Your husband would pay them coin to take her," someone said. The voice was cruel and soft as a scorpion.
I did not wait. I burst the door open and found Hanna with a bruise on her cheek and one eye swollen shut. Someone had tried to make her confess that I had stolen money, food, and the honor of the house. She said nothing. She only looked at me with that old, fierce loyalty.
"Let her go," I said.
They attacked.
I hit and blocked and moved the way my old body remembered. I was not gentle. I was precise. I used elbows, knives of knuckles, whatever I had. They fell back with broken faces and stunned arrogance.
I dragged Hanna out, wrapped her in my coat, and left the yard into the wet dawn. I felt the speed of revenge like a warm wind.
Back in the courtyard, I raised my voice.
"Who sent you?" I shouted into the grey morning. "Who ordered my maid taken?"
Clara stood in her doorway, silk like a wounded bird. Her face was painted, her hands soft. Her voice was sugar. "What proof do you have of anything?"
I had bread and memory, hunger and burns, a trail of lies she had left like breadcrumbs. I pulled one of them — her servant's watch — out of my pocket and flung it to the ground.
"Your servant took it," I said. "She sold it to a fence. She says you told her to take something of value to keep me under."
Gasps. The courtyard buzzed like a hive.
Clara's smile thinned. She moved to strike. She miscalculated.
I grabbed her wrist. "You will tell the truth."
She tried to break free but her silk was not as strong as the anger that came from a woman who had been hungry and used. I used Janessa's voice but with my teeth. "You will go to mother," I told her. "You will say all of it."
She spat and hissed, but she did as I said.
We marched to the main room where Clara's mother, Lady Rinaldi, sat like a slow god. The room smelled of incense. Clara knelt. The circle of servants gathered like a ring of loud flies.
"Mother," Clara said, voice quivering like a harp. "Janessa attacked me. She took from my hand."
Lady Rinaldi's face was still. She was a woman who measured currency in children and marriages. She listened.
I stepped forward. "Mother," I said. "You know I would not do this. I was not given any of your luxury. Your daughter planned this attack. She set men upon my maid. She took to the backlane to steal what she could."
Silence fell like cloth in the room.
"Is this true?" Lady Rinaldi asked slowly.
Clara's throat bobbed. She looked like someone who had fog in her eyes. "I—"
"Look at her," I said. "Her hands are soft. She never labored. She has never even seen a kitchen that was not ordered by a footman. She is the one who paid your men, not the one your men attacked."
A servant who had seen the backlane came forward. "Lady Rinaldi," he said, "we found your coin in the staller's hands. They told us it was for the girl who snuck the firewood. They told us it was for the girl who took your box."
I watched Lady Rinaldi. She was not a woman with mercy to spare. Her face sank into a slow, hard line.
"This is a serious charge," she said. "If it is true, you will be punished."
Clara's face changed like glass under heat. "Mother, listen. She threatens me. She—"
"Silence," Lady Rinaldi said. Her voice was small, then it became a blade. "You will not speak unless you speak truth."
Clara sputtered. The room turned cold.
"Take her," Lady Rinaldi ordered. "Strip her of her silks."
Clara's eyes widened in panic. "Mother—"
The servants moved with a slow, practiced cruelty. They stripped Clara of her fine robe and left her in a plain shift. They took the ring that once symbolized her safe place at the table and threw it into a bowl of cold water. The ring clanged like a prison bell.
Clara fell to her knees and wept, but not the right sort of tears. They were the thin, proud weeping of a woman losing theater props.
"Your house," Lady Rinaldi said with cold simplicity, "is for those who obey the rules. You are the daughter who made use of house power to hurt a servant. You will be given the punishment of humiliation and the public removal of favor."
Clara tried to speak, but Lady Rinaldi held up a hand. "We will make this public."
They dragged Clara to the front steps. The courtyard filled with voices. Word spread like an easy lie: the noble daughter who plotted and took the maid had been exposed.
They forced her to stand on a small platform. They read lists of her crimes aloud: the theft of a small coin purse, the hiring of rough hands, the order to take Janessa's maid. Each crime was small, but the list was long. It made a tower from a grain of sand.
As they read the names of the men who had done Clara's bidding, the men stepped forward. They would be named and punished. Guards moved through the crowd with unblinking noise. They seized the men and dragged them out into the market square where they were bound, made to kneel, and publicly lashed.
Clara watched, her face getting red with shame. Then a messenger came from the palace.
"Lady Rinaldi," he said, "the Empress has heard. The Empress will not abide nobles who pervert her gifts."
Clara's lips trembled.
They had learned everything: the lies to the Empress, the selling of favors, the bribes. One by one, witnesses spoke: the stableboy with a watch, the vendor with silks, the man who sold the stolen coin. Videos? No. But there were men with memory and witnesses and written notes and the habit of keeping records.
Lady Rinaldi's household collapsed like a house of old cards. Suddenly, their fine name had holes. Noble friends who had turned away before now had the chance to cut the rope for themselves.
Clara's father — a minor official who had been near the edge of falling from grace — arrived with a pale face. He heard the charges. He heard the Empress's messenger.
"You will bring ruin to us all," he said to his daughter. "You will not be her ruin. You will be mine."
Clara's wails turned high and animal. "Father, no!"
He stepped back and looked at the circle of men. He saw what he had to do. He had to throw his daughter to the wolves to save the rest of the house.
"You are set aside," he said. "You will go to the country. You will not hold your head with the Rinaldi name in the city again."
They stripped Clara of titles. They took away land. The house's merchant connections were severed. Lenders who had owed credit now called in loans. A public ledger that had once meant profit now spelled shame.
Clara fell to the ground, hands covering her face. She begged. She crawled. It did not stop the men from recording her shame with ink and paper. Some called for blood. Others called for exile. Her husband-to-be — a man whose name had been set in the wind across the city — came to speak with her father and withdrew his offer quietly like a man pulling a thread out of a dress.
By the end of the day, Clara had nothing but a straw bed waiting — and the name of her house stained in gossip. The servants who had helped her were left with broken bones and broken faces. They were a lesson in why power had teeth.
People watched and recorded. The men who had taken Hanna found their names blacklisted. They found that their wages were cut and their wives turned away by markets. One by one they lost small and large things until their life narrowed to a thin line of survival. The trader who had agreed to buy their stolen goods found his stalls empty of customers. The man who had sold a note to Clara lost the trust of the market. People who had once laughed at the Rinaldi house's games now scorned them, posted notes, told stories. It spread like a fire lit for sport that caught and burned the arbors.
Clara begged me for mercy.
"You said you would be kind," she cried as we watched her father turn away. "You promised mercy."
I had a choice: show mercy and be soft, or be the woman who would not be used. I looked at Hanna's bruised cheek. I looked at the man who had tried to take a coin from a servant and now had a wife who looked at him differently. I looked at the bowl that once had fed me.
"No," I said. "No more."
Clara's face contorted. She fell to the ground and pulled at my sleeves. She begged and cried. The courtyard filled with cameras and gossip. People came from yards away to watch the noble daughter who had used her rank being broken.
I watched until her pleas became the quiet sound of someone who had lost the last of her props. Then I turned and walked away.
Months later, I stood outside the palace gates and watched Bennett at a distance. I had played that game with pain and skill. Bennett's face was not like the faces of men in romances. It had a cold that suits the long-range planner. He looked at me like a chess player looking at a board.
"Why did you do that?" he asked once in my kitchen, the one the household had left me to command. He sat with a bowl in his hands and ate like a man who trusted no one but his appetite.
"Because the world is made of small debts," I said. "Because your bargains mean nothing until you sign them. Because I was tired of being taken."
He set down the bowl. "You put me in a strange place, Janessa."
"You call me Janessa," I said. "You do that when you want me to be small."
He smiled thinly. "And you are not small."
I cut a piece of bread and handed it to him. "You saved me from the cliff," I said. "Yet, you tried to take me once. You have a mind for keeping ladders. I would like to be a ladder that keeps itself upright."
Bennett's eyes softened then, and something unspoken passed between us. We were both men and women of habit and calculation. We were both used to winning by coldness.
"I like you," he said finally. "But liking you is a problem."
"You like me in a problem way," I said. "Good. We both have our faults."
Time thinned into other things. I trained with old soldiers in secret. I taught Hannah to cook better than any palace chef. I organized my servants like a war room. I watched Bryson heal and learn how to tie knots and stand still when told. He stayed faithful and angry in equal measures.
Paolo kept returning. He liked the kitchen because the food remembered him. He loved the little tricks I made. He laughed like a man who had been given a game. He would drink and sing. Bennett watched, sometimes with a long hunger in his look that made me uncomfortable, and other times like a man reviewing a ledger.
Then came the larger test. News arrived that a hidden paper had been found — a list of names that would topple a noble. The Empress wanted proof. Someone wanted to make sure the wrong household was being cut.
I had a chance to poison or to save a man. I had a chance to make words count.
I chose to speak.
"Tell the truth," I said to Bennett when he asked me about the list. "Keep your ladder. Let the truth fall on its own weight."
He looked at me. For once, he smiled and let himself be proud.
In the end, the list did not topple him. It toppled others. Some lost titles. Others found petitions turned against them. The Empress took the chance to tidy small things. That day, Bennett stood quiet and watched the court test the bones of everyone else.
Afterwards, when the smoke cleared, Bennett found me in the small garden behind our house.
"You are not like any woman I knew," he said.
"Good women are rare," I said. "So are dangerous ones."
He put his hand on my shoulder then, not strong, not tender, but steady enough. "Stay."
I thought of the night I ate two stolen fish in a valley and woke into a life that wasn't mine. I thought of the burned shirt by the pond and Hanna's bruised cheek. I thought of Bryson's stubborn hands. I thought of Clara's tearing and begging.
"I will stay," I said.
We stayed in the way that people who learn to trust a blade and a hearth do. He kept secrets, I sharpened knives. He watched the court, I watched the home.
Once, a year later, Clara returned. She had been given a small house and a small title. She had no suitor. Her face had grown older. She asked for forgiveness. She begged.
I thought of the rope, the ring, the ring of shame. I thought of Hanna. I thought of the men who now knew not to touch what was not theirs. I thought of the small justice that had tasted like roasted fish on the night I woke and decided to live.
"Get up," I told Clara.
She looked surprised.
"Go," I said. "Live. Work. You may start by sweeping the barn, and maybe then you will learn what you owe."
Clara was stunned, and then she bowed. She left, no sound like shame, no great cry. She left with the slow steps of someone who had been taught humility the hard way.
In the quiet after, Hanna came and sat beside me on the stairs.
"You could have asked for more," she said softly.
"I know," I said. "But revenge is a poor song. Music is better for kitchens than for punishments."
She smiled. "You used to be a spy," she said. "You must have wanted to cut every throat."
"I did," I admitted. "But I do not like the taste."
Bennett leaned on the doorway and watched us. Paolo's laugh drifted like wind from the next alley.
"Do you suppose," Bennett said, "you will ever sit in court and smile with the strength to tell a man no?"
"I already have," I said.
He smiled then, and it was the first warm smile he ever gave me. "Then stay with me," he said again, quieter this time. "Not because I command, but because you choose it."
I looked at the bowl of rice on the table, at the knives in the rack, at the small fire that had fed me both fish and truth. I breathed in the smell of the cabinet wood.
"I will cook," I said. "And I will stay."
Later, when the palace stories turned to tales of a woman who had stolen fish and made a prince laugh and a regent turn his head, I would sometimes wake in the night with the taste of roasted fish in my mouth.
Once, Paolo asked me if I ever missed my old life. I told him the truth.
"Sometimes," I said. "I miss the clean rules of death. But what I gained here is warmth that I stole first with my teeth."
He laughed and said, "Then steal it well."
So I did. I cooked and I kept quiet lies and sharp knives. I loved where I chose and I punished only those who would harm the small things — the maid who washed my pans, the boy who watched the food boil, the man who thought his hands could take what another's hands had kept.
And at night, when a wind came through the kitchen and the street was empty and the moon made little islands of light on the chopping board, I would look at Bennett Gibson and smile.
"Who are you now?" he asked one night.
"Me," I said. "Not Lin Xuan. Not Janessa. I am the woman who stole fish and kept her life. I am the woman who will not be taken."
He pulled me closer and said, "Then stay me, Janessa."
I tightened my arm around his coat. "Only if you promise to stay mine."
He promised, in a way he always promised: quietly, firmly, like an order given and kept. The world outside our small house still had teeth. The court still had knives. There would be trials and names and lists.
We had each other and a kitchen that knew how to hold heat.
I ate the last bit of fish, and the taste stayed.
The End
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