Face-Slapping18 min read
I Took the Palace and Kept the Tea: A Dowager’s Daily Revolt
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I: "Father wants me to go in my sister’s place."
"Do you mean—into the palace?" I asked, and heard the hope in my own voice before I could bury it in a sensible face.
"Elliot says it will secure the house," my eldest sister Juliana had told me when she handed along the letter. "It could be a better life. Think of it—no more worrying over empty bowls."
"I'll do it." I said it fast, the kind of quick promise the poor make to themselves and then work the rest of their life to prove true.
In the courtyard my father, Elliot Nilsson, stopped mid-stride. He had the look of a man who eats pride for breakfast and swallows wrath for supper. "Jocelyn," he said slowly, "are you sure?"
"I'm sure." I smiled like it was nothing. "Who wouldn't be?"
He left without another word. I didn't mind. I was twenty and tired of being hungry. I had watched my mother stitch until her fingers were soft and red, watched my sisters marry or be married off to half-measures. I had long since told myself that talent and verses won't fill bellies. Power does. Money does.
"So you're actually happy," he said later that night, more to his own unease than to calm me. "Not everyone would take that path."
"Some people prefer pride to bread," I answered. "I prefer both, if I can."
II
The man I married was an empire of wrinkles and weight. Hugo Mori carried age like a canopy. He moved slowly, spoke slower, and when he bowed his head to me in the inner court I had to stifle a laugh at my own fortune—forte enough to secure the family, yet easy enough not to demand more than my shoulders could bear.
"You're young," the minister said benignly when they delivered me into the palace rites. "The old emperor's marriage is for heaven's balance."
"Good," I thought. "Let heaven balance. I prefer tea and warm baths."
On the wedding night I learned a practical truth: an emperor can be old and still be an emperor, but an emperor's bed knows the truth of time. He was gentle as a winter plum—nothing like the hot, clumsy pities of youth. He fell asleep quickly and dreamed his own dreams. I fell asleep, too, with a feather in my chest and a plan in my head.
Palace life is a kind of velvet cage. You want for little—fine linens, food of many colors, servants that run like a small tide. You lack for certain freedoms—wind across your face that is not watched. I liked the food. I liked the quiet luxury. I also liked that I was not poor anymore.
"You're not meant to be an empress," the old emperor once said to me, eyes fogged cloudy with age. "You laugh like you have a market-breath and you spend like you have a poet's heart."
"Poets spend worse," I replied. "They spend what isn't theirs—imaginary coins to buy immortality."
He chuckled and that small, rare approval was enough.
III
Half a year in and the palace became my easiest mask. The old emperor ate with contentment until the day he did not. "He ate too much," the physicians said with a shrug that disbelieved itself.
He was gone forty‑eight hours after a feast. I was a queen in the morning and without the old vine that tied me to life before dusk. They wrapped him, they conducted rites, they whispered about omens. "Maybe," one maid suggested, "you were not meant to be a wife."
"But you have all you dreamed of?" someone else asked.
"Yes," I said, "and then some."
The coffin had cooled before the new titles warmed my robes. Xavier Ibarra, the sickly son of Hugo Mori, became emperor. He was a man younger than I thought was proper for my new station—if you count years as numbers—and yet older where it mattered: he carried the sort of caution that frightened me because it was quiet and watchful. He was gentle with me, distant in ways that suited a man who had grown up under other people's shadows.
"Why don't you come often?" I asked him once, in the vastness of the palace kitchen corridors where we couldn't pretend to be anything but ourselves.
"I come as I must," he said simply, and I understood he said it like a child reciting obligations.
He was relieved of many duties by a body that misbehaved. He fainted at news and coughed long into wintery nights. The court said he was fragile; I said he was saveable. He never came to the same bed twice in a row. I learned to like him without needing him; after all, power could be good company.
IV
The small prince arrived in my life like sun in a cold house. Desmond Flynn—four years old, round, and quick with laughter—appeared like a comet that stole my afternoons. We had languages all our own—he taught me how to fold paper boats, I taught him how to hide coins in a handkerchief.
"Don't call me your great-grandmother," he told me on our first afternoon, as if titles were bands on a leg.
"Then what should I be?" I asked.
"Your name," he decided. "You're Jocelyn."
"Not allowed by protocol," I said. "Call me what you like in the curtains, but not if there are windows."
He puffed out his little chest and promised to always come play. The palace suddenly belonged to me in places the emperor never visited. I had a co-conspirator who could keep secrets.
"You're my best friend," he said one day, and I put his hair behind his ear as if forever were a small thing.
V
Home news arrived in contradictory parcels. My eldest Juliana's children fared tolerably; my second, Bethany Perez, had fled and remarried a bitter, old man she had almost sworn to leave once before but could not. My third sister, Kaia Stewart—the one who had loved a poor scholar—was the reason I had been chosen.
"She wanted the book-boy, did she not?" Bethany said when her letter came.
"She sang to him in the courtyard," Juliana's lines read, "and the scholar answered in verses. They were foolishly in love."
Kaia had been sent away in humiliation when the scholar refused the household; she had come back pregnant, and, in a fit of temper, my father refused her. I knew the world of feelings and the world of survival were rarely the same. I had chosen my teeth and jaw over a song. That choice would shape things.
"Bring her here," I decided quietly to myself. "If the palace can give diapers and hot meals, I will be an empress who does small mercies."
When I acted my power—summoning a carriage, appointing attendants—my father wrote to me in furious ink. "You use your rank to shame us," he complained. "You have become what you argued against."
"Because you prefer scorn to food," I would have liked to write back. Instead I sent visitation money and a messenger with a list of things to fix the roof. Power, it turned out, bought you small quiet advantages. You could move people out of mud and into shelters, and no one would remember whose hand had pushed them forward.
VI
Politics swam under everything. The palace had currents you could not see: the seer Emilio Suzuki had been the one who told the old emperor to choose Kaia. "Her fate," Emilio had said in a hush, "will bring luck." So they had thought her the auspicious choice.
"Who knew it would be you instead?" I asked Emilio when he visited me after the funeral. He had a face like parchment, eyes wet with patience.
"Fates are strange," he said. "Sometimes the sign is misread. Sometimes the wind shifts."
"Can you see me?" I asked in a half-joke.
"Do you want to be seen?" He smiled. "Some things the sky keeps to itself."
He stayed longer than I expected, as if curious about what I would become. His manner never frightened me much; I had learned how to tilt life to my sides where I could keep warm. He left after a day, claiming that the heavens had no more to say. I wondered if he had guessed the old emperor's end, or merely wished to avoid the webs of gossip. He should not have stayed out of my trust; instead he chose to whisper truth, and later, to leave.
VII
The near-drowning of my little friend remains the one night that knitted me to the palace with a rope of white fear.
"He's to be watched," I kept saying. "The garden is open. The little pond is near."
"Four-year-olds fall," the guards muttered.
Desmond was feeding fish by the pond when a shadow moved; a hand reached, the small prince nearly toppled. A court official had sounded the alarm with a voice like a cracked bell; several men lunged. The scene unfolded like a painting ripped into action: a splash, a shout, a small body hauled out and coughing.
"Who pushed him?" I barked. "Who came close enough to do this?"
They dragged a small boy, a new attendant, shivering and shaking, a face like clay. Under him, we found traces—mud on his boots from the estate of the Prince of Ping. Rumors traveled on wings: the Prince had been disappointed in being left out of favor; he had allies. When interrogation turned feverish, names like Rhys Collins and a cluster of hangers-on showed up.
"He was sent by the Prince," the accused stammered. "He wanted to see if the child was... vulnerable."
"Who sent you?" I demanded, not caring for words like "vulnerable" anymore.
"A scholar—Garrett Diaz," the boy whispered, and the name hung there like a live coal.
Garrett Diaz was a small man with a little scholar's nose, the man who had once wooed my sister Kaia with folded paper and vows in the dark. I had crossed paths with him only rarely when he pretended to be loyal to the wrong house. Now he was the one finger that moved the strings. Somebody had found his greed and offered him a ladder. Garrett had climbed.
VIII — Punishment One: Garrett Diaz
The court day of Garrett's unmasking felt like a theater with all the seats open. The outer square hummed with gossip and curiosity; the magistrate's men escorted Garrett between two lines of servants and petitioners. I sat above in the hall as the crowd pressed close. The old emperor might have mattered once, but the people wanted to see a deception ended.
"Garrett Diaz," I called out when they brought him to the center. I kept my voice small, personal—so that when he looked up he saw the person who had once been his sister's sister-in-law, the woman whose sister he had betrayed.
"Your Grace," he stammered.
"Is this true?" I asked, voice calm enough that everyone felt the tension.
He smiled in a way that had once been charming. "I did what I could to survive."
"You 'survived' by selling your trust," I said. "You left Kaia with bruises. You took money from those who would buy your tongue. You used a child to test a conspiracy." My hands were steady. "Why?"
He took in the crowd—faces pressed for spectacle. "I needed patronage. I wanted a position, a seat of my own. They promised—"
"Power?" I cut him off. "They promised security. You promised more."
"Yes." He looked like a small animal that realized its trap too late. He had tried to bargain; he had been loud in the wrong rooms. It was the sort of small cowardice a man becomes if he believes his own lies.
"People watch," I said. "They see who you are. They see what you did."
The magistrate read the charges: conspiracy, betrayal, endangering a royal child. But courts cannot punish simply with words. We needed a public unmasking calibrated for humiliation and consequence.
They made Garrett kneel in the center of the courtyard. The crowd ringed around like a sea. I had not wanted to revel, but justice in the palace has to be seen to breathe. The magistrate's herald spoke of the betrayals, of secret letters sent from Garrett to those who sought advantage, of pagos of silver, of swapped favors. Each detail was another stone piled on his neck.
Garrett's face flickered through stages—first anger, then denial, then a desperate flurry of excuses. "It wasn't like that," he cried. "I did not mean such harm."
"Means are bridges," I said. "You burned them to cross."
They stripped him of his scholar's cap and barred him from the academy. The magistrate read a decree: Garrett's name would be struck from the registry of those eligible for office; his small wealth would be seized. He would be publicly paraded with his emblems removed, and those who had used him would not be spared.
The crowd reacted in measures—some applauded, wives folded aprons over mouths, maids clicked tongues, and two noble wives made the sign of cross and pointed at him. Several men recorded the spectacle in the margins of their notes. "So justice," one low voice said, "is at last exacted."
Garrett faltered, face ashen. He threw himself upon the ground and begged the emperor for mercy. "Have mercy," he cried. "I was weak."
"Mercy is not a ticket free from consequence," the magistrate replied. "You will work under order—no rank, no honors. Any favor returned to you will be court-annulled."
They dragged him from the square while the crowd whispered. He was allowed no home-coming prayers. People who had once smiled with him in halls turned away. The worst punishments are not chains or death but being remembered by the wrong people on the right day.
When they took him, I watched the shock turn to a slow make-up of despair. "This is your doing," he spat at me from a distance. "You who could avert all storms, how small your revenge."
"I do not revel," I said, but my voice carried. "I prevent the next one."
His pleading dissolved into the dust. The crowd's mood shifted from spectacle to satisfaction—the sort of mass approval that tastes like coal. I felt empty inside, oddly cleansed. The court had seen its scapegoat. The palace took a breath.
IX — Punishment Two: The Prince of Ping and His Circle
Punishing the real architect meant something else. The Prince of Ping—Rhys Collins—had clung to a sense of inheritance and used men like Garrett to push and test. We could not execute him without sparking ruin. The law and theater had rules. So we chose a punishment that would both strip prestige and enmesh him in the slow cold of public shame.
At dawn in the main square, the minister read the imperial edict. The throng had doubled. Rhys Collins arrived with a handful of retainers, their silk pale like the morning. He wore the expression of a man who believed his old blood would suffice as shield.
"By the emperor's order," the minister intoned, "because of sedition, because of attempts on a royal child, because of bringing instability to the court, the Prince of Ping and his direct household will be stripped of titles and exiled to guard the imperial mausoleums."
The words made a hush. Mausoleum-guard duty is a fate worse than death in public mind: isolation under a cold sky, to live where ghosts remember names that time won't.
Rhys's face changed—first flush of indignation, then disbelief. "You cannot do this," he said. "I am of royal blood."
"Blood is not immunity," I said from my seat. "It is placeholder for duty. You failed that duty."
The prince bowed with slow theatricality, then tried to bargain. "A lesser fine," he offered. "A temporary house arrest."
"Your house is no longer counted as ours," the minister said.
Guards took the prince's banners, his retinue, his horses. People who had once fed from his table watched him mount a simple cart—the most humiliating conveyance. His wives clung like paper dolls. As they passed the crowds, men spat and women crossed themselves; someone threw mud at a retainer who once lorded over markets. The prince did not weep. He looked as though his life had been putatively taken rather than robbed. The press of people made his carriage go slowly, and with each step someone shouted a litany of grievances. A child jutted forward and hurled a stone; it glanced off his shoulder. That image would live in folk memory: a prince in a cart, his banners stripped, with the smell of dust and stewardless meals in his wake.
The official edict read that his houses would be placed under the order of imperial guardians, his men distributed to border garrisons, his wealth forfeited to fund famine relief. The prince's sons were assigned to tomb duty; they would learn what it means to guard a dynasty with nothing to hold. This was a punishment that removed time and replaced it with labor—less dramatic than execution but more quietly endless.
The crowd reacted as though a festival had begun: some clapped, some wept at the loss of certainty; some muttered that the emperor finally swept palace rot. I felt a small satisfaction, followed by a chill. The prince's family would not die quickly; they would linger like a lesson. I had seen hardened men soften into penitent figures under long silence. That alone was sufficient.
X
Kaia came to me not long after, face a quiet thing wrapped in the thread of a woman who had been hurt and kept living. Her left cheek bore a scab where Garrett had struck when drunk. "He apologized," she said with the distracted loyalty I could not fathom.
"Apology does not stitch bone," I told her. "Do you still want him?"
"He was good once," she said. "He wrote me poetry."
"Poetry is a thin rope," I said. "And men may choose to hang themselves with it to prove a point."
She looked at me like a child who remembered a lullaby and thought the singer would return. "You were brave," she whispered, "to go into that place."
"I wanted to save us from hunger," I answered, because the truth is that almost everything I did was for warm bread and quiet nights. "The palace buys us things we cannot buy for ourselves. It also buys us shreds of choice like this: I can feed you. I can keep you warm. I cannot give you love."
She folded at that, but not into indignation. In the years it takes some women to harden, she kept pity and bad faith in equal measures.
XI
After the storms had settled, the country itself grew a little more fragile. A fever crept through the city in winter; we called it an "illness of the dark wind." It moved through servants and lesser halls fast and left old men coughing in lamp light. Those small hands who had fed the palace before fell ill. We were lucky: we had to ask the court's best physicians, and they gave us a concoction of rare herbs that only the court coffers could supply.
"It's a matter of who can pay," Bethany muttered, watching as the medicine was measured and administered to the emperor and the little ones first. "God, is that all it comes down to?"
"It is," I answered. "We buy life with money."
"Do you ever feel guilty?" she asked, folding wool like it could keep the world stitched together.
"Sometimes," I said. "But I feel hunger more often."
When the little prince Desmond fell feverish, my steps quickened. He grew thinner overnight, his cheeks like dim marbles. The court whispered that he would not survive the night. "He is your friend," the head nurse told me, "you must keep your courage."
I stayed nights on the bench by his bed, holding a cup to his lips, making him take sugar water. He smiled once, a small truth that traveled like light. "Will you always be here?" he asked.
"Yes," I promised. "I will live as long as a tea pot."
By morning his fever had broken, the medicine—rich and strong—having its say. The physicians cheered, the court breathed, and I felt a strange gratitude in my chest that seemed to have only one address: a palace that could ring up the money and buy the cure. I felt powerful in a new way—I could summon help and it arrived. That knowledge frightened me with the way it seduced.
XII
Emilio Suzuki returned some seasons later with a different tone. The country's seer had been quiet since the first days of my coming; now he paused in my audience chamber and asked, "Do you ever regret?"
"Regret is an ornamental thing," I said. "It doesn't keep roofs mended."
He smiled like a man who had not yet given his answer. "The emperor will seek a different life," he said carefully. "You know that?"
"I know much that gets told to me," I said.
"When a ruler steps away, they leave a crown empty of intention. It can roll in many hands."
"I would like it to rest gently," I lied.
He looked at me as if he knew the stories of my childhood; then he dropped his hand to his mouth for a moment as if to taste the air. "Do you want to know what I see?" he asked.
"Only if it makes the tea better," I joked.
He laughed then, openly, and it was gentle and human. "No more signs," he said. "Only this: sometimes what you'd defend becomes a prison; sometimes what you fear most becomes your kindness."
I thought about that long after his words. Where had fear become kindness? Where had my being small and bright become something that keeps others warm at my expense?
XIII
Years moved slow and then quick. Xavier Ibarra decided one summer to step down. "I will go to the country and breathe," he announced. "Let the young man learn the burden."
"And who is 'the young man'?" I asked, half curious, half amused.
He meant his son—Desmond—now a bundle of brimming mischief. The court fussed as if the pivot of age had been turned. There were ceremonies, apologies, and a subtle rearrangement of power that made my shoulders a little heavier and a little lighter at the same time. The old emperor returned to the country as the Taishang, an awkward title he wore like a rug. The new boy took the throne in a way that made the ministers nervous.
"I do not like change," one minister told me, lowering his voice. "But you manage change. How do you do it?"
"I have a long practice in convenience," I said. "I make small trades: a favor for a favor. I test waters with coins and watch who swims."
He smiled. "Coins are small prayers," he said. "You throw them in and see little lights."
XIV
My father ended up poor in a beautiful place I had refused him years ago. He had been sent to a provincial post—remote, cold. He wrote to me, once furious and once grateful, two letters that could not decide whether he loved me for the fortune I had given him or scorned me for refusing the titles. I visited for a day with a suite and had the strange sensation of being both daughter and empress, both indebted and in debt. He would not take the offered honors. "I don't want to be collected by titles," he said. "I want to be left an honest man."
"I left the city to stitch new pockets for my family," I said, "not to stitch morals into your chest."
He shrugged. He had always been a man of ink and ideals, not of the animal necessity that runs through the poor. "My books do not pay for grain," he said.
"No," I agreed. "They buy a kind of immortality that we do not need."
He died years later on his little plot of land, writing letters about the things he still believed in. I sent people to stand at his grave and set up a small marker. It was not what he wanted, probably, but it was the best I could do between a palace and a puddle.
XV — The Little Things That Bind
Days became a succession of small pleasures: teaching Desmond rhymes he would forget in a week, letting him pluck flowers and smear jam onto my sleeve, sneaking him out to the market in the strictest shadow of dusk while he pretended to be a noble's son.
"How will you be when you have a crown?" I asked him once as we shared a sugar pastry.
"I will make everyone laugh," he declared solemnly. "Especially you."
I had a dozen such conversations with him in the late afternoons, and each one was a talisman against old loneliness. The palace was not a fortress so much as a village with gold spires: loud with gossip, soft with blankets, full of people who walked the same corners and never spoke the same truths.
XVI — Du Family and the Quiet Faucet of Betrayal
The Du family girl—Jacqueline Mohammed—came to me quietly as the winter deepened. "I want to make sure my child has a future," she said, eyes honest as a penny.
Jacqueline was a woman with a plan. She had been courted by Garrett Diaz, then used, then jilted; she loved the comforts that petty compromises bought. "Help my child," she asked. "Help him have a place."
Her plan involved words and dirt. She said she could persuade Garrett, that small seeds could be scattered to make Kaia feel slighted. She said she wanted only enough to feed her boy and to have no more stares in the market.
"What will you do?" I asked.
She smiled faintly. "I will plant doubts. A woman will whisper a word. A man will listen."
I considered this like a person considering a bridge they might cross. It was ugly work but effective. She offered me a straightforward exchange: money for a promise that I would ensure Kaia would be freed from a dangerous union. I knew that sometimes to take the thorn out took a knife.
"Do it," I said.
She was efficient. The whisper spread, thin and poisonous. Garrett's vanity proved easy to provoke; he took the bait and completed his own ruin. Kaia witnessed the sale of jewels and the presence of another man's child and snapped out of illusions. She left. The world built around her unravelled.
"In the end I helped three women," Jacqueline told me later, eyes steady. "I kept my boy. And you kept your sister safe."
"You made others suffer to keep your child safe," I said. "They will remember."
"And you?" she asked with a small laugh, "Do you think you'll sleep differently?"
"Only with more blankets," I answered.
She left then, the sound of her heels echoing like a measure.
XVII
Years passed in small cycles. The little prince grew into a young man with humor and hunger; the emperor grew older and kinder by degrees; the court rearranged like seas conforming to moonlight. I kept buying trees in the palace garden because I liked shade and because the emperor had once joked the trees might be for his own comfort if he ever retired to a cooler breeze.
The palace was still a machine of favors and flattery, but it was also where I had learned to love a small child with a deck of trinkets. I had found niches where I could do good and disguised generosity as whim. The world, it seems, answers to bodies who move their hearts in the currency the world accepts: silver and spectacle.
XVIII — The End of an Era
Emilio Suzuki died one autumn when the sun was low. He had been old for a long time, and when he took to his bed he seemed more like an old lamp winding down than a man surrendered by fate. There were people who spoke of prophecy and lineage at his funeral; there were others who made quiet vows about time. I stood with my own thoughts and let him go. When the city mourned him, I felt strangely as if an old clock had finally stopped; the palace had to learn to keep time anew.
Garrett Diaz's fate remained an example. Rhys Collins and his house—stripped and sent to the cold task of guarding tombs—learned the expense of ambition.
Kaia remarried in a quiet house years after those storms. She raised her children with stories and poems. She called me once, and I was surprised at the heat in her voice. "We survived," she said. "He stays away."
"Is he forgotten?" I asked.
"No," she answered. "He is a memory. He will not hurt us again."
XIX — The Quiet Ending That Is Not a Usual Ending
I grew older in my crown without much fuss. I learned how to refuse ceremony sometimes. I learned how to receive letters with the same calm as a cup of tea: sip, swallow, set down.
Desmond—now not so small—stood beside me one spring and said, "I promise to protect our people. I will be a good emperor, Jocelyn."
"Then I will be a good dowager," I said, and we both laughed like two conspirators.
We planted a pear tree in the courtyard that year and watched it take root. It grew slowly and bore little fruit, the kind of humble reward that matters. When I sit by that tree and see children chase each other under its branches, I know I have done the good I could: keeping kin from hunger, learning where kindness must be stern, handing mercy when it heals and withholding it when it invites ruin.
When my time comes, I expect I will think of heatless tea and warm bread, of songs from my sisters and the face of Garrett Diaz in the dust. I expect I will remember the many small bargains that make a life: favors given, favors denied, hands that were held, and hands that were let go.
There was no dramatic final line. I folded my robe, I looked at my sisters in letters and in lonely visits, I whispered to the little ones who became tall men. I kept the palace like a house, with rooms that welcomed the needy and windows that let the wind in.
The last time I saw Xavier Ibarra—no, not the last: one of the last times—we sat under a tree and spoke of the absurd ways people try to make fate into a ledger. "We did what we thought best," he said, hand warm.
"Sometimes good," I replied, "is the opposite of reputations."
He nodded. "Sometimes," he said, "you must be comfortable with the small kindnesses you can afford."
I drank my tea and thought about the pear tree we had planted for no good reason at all. The fruit was small and a bit tart, but it fed those who needed it. I thought of my sisters—their mistakes and their recoveries—and of the men who had used them, and in my chest the great lesson sat quietly.
I kept it simple: an open cup, a child I'd taught to hide coins, a tree to shade other people. That was my kingdom.
The End
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