Revenge13 min read
I Took the Throne and He Took Me Back
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I was fourteen when I named him.
"Call him what you like," my grandfather said, the old man's voice rough with dust and battle. "He's in our house. Let it be a name that fits."
I looked at the small thing they had brought home from the border like a found colt. He stood thin and straight, clothes dark and dusty, pear petals caught in his hair like frost. He made the world seem taller.
"I'll name him York Dominguez," I said, and the sound was a small joke, but I meant it. "York—like a wind that stuns."
"He'll answer," Callahan Wolf said, pride softening him.
York looked at me with cold, clear eyes the first time I touched his hand. He pulled away as if he'd been burned, and yet he never left our courtyard after that day.
"Why did you choose the name?" my brother Eamon Durham asked later, poking me.
"Because he looked like wind," I said, and I couldn't hide the light in my voice.
"You always pick the strange ones," Eamon muttered, but he had a warm smile. He was a pale boy, cough in his chest, always with a sweet in his palm and a laugh like a late summer breeze. He was my brother and my weakness.
"He will be my companion scholar," I told my mother once. "He will learn beside our prince. It will be good for him."
"Maybe he will not want it," my mother warned, patting my head.
"Then he will fail to see an opportunity," I said, naive and certain. I was a princess; I thought life bent to my wishes.
York was not a companion for study. He was first a blade and then a storm. He refused the household ease and asked to join Callahan Wolf when the old man prepared for war. "I want to avenge my house," he told Callahan in a voice that belonged to desert nights and tight-throated vows.
Callahan looked hard at him, then told me, "If he follows me, he must guard you. If he wins his revenge, he is ours. If he fails—" His hand closed like a gate.
"He said he would be my husband if I wanted," I told York one evening when he shrugged off blood and armor, and the house smelled like herbs and cold.
He smiled then, and what I felt was harder than any armor. "I will follow you," he said.
"I should have the right to break him," I thought at times. I was a princess who had learned how to smile a court smile and how to wield an insult like a thin sword. I tested him, and he always stood uncowed. "If one day I tell you to die—" I teased him. "Would you?"
"For you, I would," he said quietly, and his eyes were not joking.
When Callahan led the army north, he took York with him. The reports returned like bright flares at first.
"York single-handedly cut down the left banner," courtiers said. "Callahan took three forts. The enemy was routed."
I read those lines and felt a small rising fire inside. Eamon and I grew used to hearing good news. Our mother smiled like summer.
Then one morning the court messenger wore a face like thunder.
"Callahan Wolf is gravely wounded," he announced. "York Dominguez is missing. The battle turned. Take care of the princess's peace."
My mother paled. "Do not tell my girl," she whispered, and we lied to her because a woman with a child in her womb must not be broken by the news of a dying general.
"Tell me," my mother said. "You are never good at lies, Aiko."
So I lied with a steadier heart than I felt. I told them York had gone on a scouting ride. I told them he would return. I told them men had fallen and that grief could be kept from our house.
Weeks crawled like cold insects. Eamon choked and wheezed, and my mother grew thin until the palace thought she would surely bear a son like the court had predicted: a sign, they whispered, of fortune.
Then the letters came. The enemy had struck at night. Callahan walked again only in dreams. My mother did not wake. The court tightened like a fist. My father Owen Dunn commanded silence at court, lest any word stir the delicate balance of the palace.
"They say York was a spy," someone whispered in a hall.
"A spy? For the enemy?" I demanded, cold as winter. "He who bled for us?"
"The rumors are rumors," Eamon said, rubbing at his throat.
I learned what rumor does: it eats a man alive.
My grandfather sank into a quiet sleep from which he did not wake. The house stacked its grief in corners. I carried a fake calm like armor. But at night I dreamed of hands that would not let me speak.
"Why did you not want the role of prince's companion?" I asked York once, when he came to report like he always did.
"I am not meant for reading halls," he answered. "I live where men become wolves. I am sharp for the field."
"You chose me," I said.
He looked at me with the deep, sure look he always had and said, "I chose you."
When the first of the quiet disasters happened—when our court learned a prince had died mysteriously—my hands shook and I learned the cruel craft of making poison into a wheel of luck.
"I cannot let my brother lose the future," I told York. "I will remove those who made my life a danger."
"You cannot paint your hands and not feel the stain," York answered softly.
"I can," I said, and I did.
I took a small sachet of poison York had brought from the desert, a spice that turned to smoke when burned and left no trace on a needle. I mixed it into the sleeping incense of the fourth prince, and slowly night by night it sank into him like a shadow.
"Why do this in secret?" Muriel Wong asked me once, voice small and sharp.
"Because he sleeps among my enemies," I said. "Because a direct strike would make them rally faster."
"That is too cruel."
"It is courtcraft," I told her, and I tasted a bitter coin.
When Boston Lebedev, the fourth prince, faltered and died after a slow fever, the court cried accident. I went to the cold palace where Irina Boyer had been pushed and bowed like an exhausted dog. I walked into the room dressed in red, and the servants around her sullenly watched me.
"Irina," I said, "did you ever think your tongue would be your undoing?"
"Princess, spare me," she croaked, all venom gone.
"You hurt my mother," I said. "You meant her ruin."
She spat, "You are a child playing at crowns."
"A child?" I heard my voice thin and bright. "Eamon, tell her how we have lost." Eamon knelt at my side, coughing, eyes full of pain. "Tell her."
Irina's hands shook. "She was my rival, and destiny... destiny decides."
"You pounded my mother until she bled out," I said. "You rejoiced at her mischance."
She swung between denial and lies, putting blame elsewhere. The court watched us. I set a cup of poisoned wine before her then. I did not force her to drink. Not yet.
"Drink," I said. "Speak the names you whispered in palace corridors to friends. Tell the court who you used."
She laughed at first, a sharp brittle thing, then faltered when Muriel took two steps forward and began to list servants who had been rewarded after conspiring with Irina. The list grew like a web.
"No," Irina hissed. "You cannot prove—"
"We can," I said.
She did not take the cup. She clawed at the floor as if an unseen wind tore at her heart. Her face moved through surprise, contempt, denial, and then something like fear.
They took her to the cold palace later, and she drank her own cup in private. That was swift and clean, and in the middle of the night the palace whispered that justice had been done. People sighed; some said the gods had judged at last.
But Irina's death was not enough for the court to feel the rawness of its mistakes. The court needs spectacle. It needs names burned in public. So I prepared one.
"Bring them all to the Hall of Ranks," I told York. "Bring the witnesses and the gifts and the proofs. We will hold an audience."
"You mean a trial," he asked simply.
"A performance," I corrected. "A trial makes them think of law. A performance will make them feel ashamed."
He nodded, but his eyes held worry. "You will stand alone?"
"Not alone," I said. "You will stand with me."
The Hall thrummed the morning they came. Eamon stood a step behind me, smaller in his robe but proud. Callahan Wolf had not died in vein; even in sleep he had taught men to honor our house. Now the hall filled with the curious and the cruel: ministers with their teeth like well-polished knives, palace ladies with their folding fans, guards who had watched too much.
Christoph Carter was first to be dragged in, slick as a frog. He had been my father's small official—his words had been honey in the right ears. He had whispered to men who wanted to rise. He had conspired to move grain and men at strange hours. He watched as I spoke.
"You helped them betray the city," I said, "and took money to look away."
Christoph smiled. "Princess, a man takes for his family."
"Your family fattened on fear," I said. "You will speak."
"Why speak?" he asked. "Who will believe a princess who cannot keep her hands clean?"
"I will speak," I replied.
"Then speak," he challenged.
So I did.
"Christoph Carter," I called. "You arranged a forged letter that sent aid away at dawn. You sold gates and men. You cut the rope that might have saved my nephew."
"False," he said, but his jaw trembled. I had proof: a ledger of inked hands, a list of shipments that had never arrived, sworn statements from guards who had been bribed by his gold.
They read the papers aloud. Voices rose. The hall hummed. Old friends of Christoph's heatedly protested. He sputtered, then laughed, then pleaded.
"What will you do?" he gasped. "I am a civil servant!"
"Not any more," I said. "You will be stripped of rank, publicly marched from the Hall with your ledger nailed to the boards for all to read. You will be sent beyond the northern passes to clear the roads with a blade until the frost eats your fingers."
"That's illegal," his lawyer hissed, but the crowd howled. They wanted spectacle.
I felt my voice like a knife. "We will not let you hide in law. You ate seeds that should have fed people. You sold safety."
He fell silent when the guards closed around him and bound his hands. The public humiliations had started. It pleased the watching crowd in a small barbaric way, but I felt nothing; I watched his face fold from haughty to horrified to pleading to treacherous.
Then Kira MANCINI—the sly woman who had smiled like honey while her son ate with the prince's servants—stepped forward. "Princess," she said, an oily bow, "you accuse me of what sin? Of wanting my child to rise?"
"You flattered the ministers," I said. "You asked for help when your son was ill. You promised gold for silence. You plotted marriages as if pieces on a chessboard."
She recoiled. "You cannot prove this."
"Aren't you tired of being polite?" I asked. "Stand up. Answer your debt to the court."
She looked to the crowd. Men who used to smile at her recoiled.
"Show them the letters," I insisted.
At my order, a small woman—Muriel Wong, who had been a servant in the Prince's quarters—came forward. Her hands trembled but she had kept a sheaf of ink-smudged letters hidden in a hollow of a pillar for months. She brought them to the dais and handed them to me.
"Read," I said.
I read letter after letter. Each one was a thread of honeyed promises and bribes. I read of midnight arrangements, of guards switched, of false alarms. Kira's face when the last letter was read was a portrait of horror turned to rage. She tried to laugh and failed.
"Do you deny?" I asked, my voice small and bright like a bell.
"No," she said finally. "I—" Her words slid into pleas, then into anger. "You cannot do this to me."
"I can," I said. "I will."
They dragged her, too, to the great courtyard. The sun was wide and the court had gathered. I made them parade her in front of every house. They stripped her of her badges. The crowd spat and laughed. Girls who had once curled her hair in giddy admiration now hissed.
"See her face," a noblewoman called out. "She who smiled at our lords!"
Kira's voice moved from arrogance to denial to frantic pleading. "It wasn't only me," she begged. "Do not shame my child! I did what a mother would do!"
"A mother would not sell a city," I answered. "Your child will live. You sold our safety."
She dropped to her knees on the flagstones, hands up, and the guards shoved her. They bound her in coarse ropes and marched her through the market. People threw rotten fruit, and someone slashed the hem of her robe. The spectacle was ugly and hot and satisfying. She fell into a heap at the gate, skin scraped and bright with shame.
They recorded it, and gossip traveled like sparks. Her reaction had stages: disbelief, rage, blustering denials, public pleading, a final, shaky collapse into pleading for mercy from the very people she had scorned. They recorded it, men copied it into journals. People took pictures on wood and traders told the story to customers. That is what a public punishment is: it does not just take a life; it takes the memory and forces it into shame.
Christoph's punishment was different. He was marched to the north with the ledger nailed to the board of his cell. He was forced to work roads until his hands bled. He learned hunger under a thin sky. He could not buy favor now. He begged in the cold, and I saw him once in market years after, walking haggard with a sack, his eyes hollow and used up. He had changed into a man who kept his head down.
But Kira's fall—her kneeling with the crowd pointing and laughing—was the scene everyone remembered. She had gone from silk and fans to a public open mouth, her voice raw, her hair tumbled like she'd been dragged through mud. There were at least five hundred words people still whispered of her pleading, and the witnesses were many: soldiers, traders, servants, children at windows.
After those punishments, the court calmed. The great dogs of rumor were silenced for a while. York stood by me in the morning's thin sun and did not speak.
"You made them see," he said finally. "They will think twice."
"I had to," I said. "If we do not burn the rot, it spreads."
He touched my wrist where I had the faintest scar, as if checking a wound. "You are colder."
"Harder," I corrected. "Necessary."
We moved like that for years. When York returned with a woman who carried life inside her beneath her belly, I felt something quake and then mend.
"You brought a child with you," I told him that day, sitting across the table in the council room. My voice was brittle but I kept my face smooth. I held the jade seal of state, a weight that meant everything.
"Bianca Lawrence is with child," he said calmly. "She aided in the campaign. She was wounded. She is to be protected."
"You are not honest," I said. "You promised me you loved only me."
"I do," he said. "I promised to be yours."
"Then why does another woman's belly hold your seed?" My words were small as knives.
York touched the blood on his brow from the day's fighting and brushed it away like a thing unimportant. "War takes its bargains. I used a ruse to protect the prince. There were twin births in the caravan. We used a decoy on the road. The woman ahead was a stage. The one who traveled with the main force is the true mother. I could not risk both."
"Was it a trick to make me jealous?" I demanded.
"It was a trick to save lives," he said. "Do you imagine I would betray my oath?"
"You said you would marry me," I accused. "You said you would not bring another here."
He closed his eyes for a breath. "I said I wanted to take only you. I have always wanted only you. But I could not leave Bianca to die, and her child is tied to this house now by oath and protection. I bring her here because I could not let a body die on the road."
"You could have asked me," I said, ashes thick in my throat.
"I was ashamed," he said simply. "I was afraid you would tell me to leave or send me away for making a choice in the storm."
I laughed then, a sound like a cracked bell. "I am your storm. You were supposed to stand in it."
He swallowed. "I stand in it."
The rest would be a softer binding. At his injury that day—there was blood on his forehead—I hit him with a jade seal in anger and he laughed, wiping the wet line away as if it was nothing.
"Do you not feel it?" I yelled, ridiculous with hurt. "Do you not think I have seen soldiers die? You bled on my map of lines and did not think to tell me what happened with this woman?"
He lifted my hand and put his face to my knuckles. "I am yours. My oath stands."
"Prove it," I said, and he did in ways small and loud: he stood by me through councils, he argued against the men who wanted to sell our grain, he rode at my command. He also set up defenses around Bianca and made a bed for the child. He moved like a man who had promised his life.
We married at last on the morning Bianca bore twins. The court waited for the proof of lineage to be known, but the child was safe and the sword of alliances had been sheathed by blood. On our wedding, I stood in the hall with pear blossoms at my side. York kissed my forehead in the sight of the court and then lifted my hand. "I choose you," he said. "In public and in storm."
After the wedding, there were peace years. We rebuilt, and I learned to rule with a hand that was both iron and a slow, warm palm. But the court never forgave itself easily. So when news came that some distant lord—Lord Christoph's old patron—was stirring rebels in the south, I tightened the roads. Men who thought to buy power found their gold worthless. I made the palace a sieve; nothing passed through unnoticed.
Once, in the small hours, I walked to the pear tree in Callahan Wolf's old garden. Snow lay like salt on its branches. York came and stood beside me.
"You named me once," he said.
"You? Named?" I laughed.
"You named me when a child. Now I carry your throne like an armor."
"Do you ever regret it?" I asked.
He did not answer for a long while. "No," he said finally. "Only that you had to do the things you did."
"I couldn't have asked a kinder man to have to live with," I said. "You are the only one not frightened of my decisions."
He took my hand and wiped his thumb across my brow where a thin scar had lived since the fire. "You have learned to make the world small enough to hold what you love," he said. "You have made the world wrong for those who hurt you."
"I will do more," I said. "For Eamon, for the dead. For the pears that fell."
He pressed his forehead to mine, the pear petals dusting our hair. "Then we do it together."
Years later, when the histories wrote called me a rebel-empress, they wrote of me in black ink and folded paper and said I had done terrible things. They called York a traitor for siding with a woman. They could not know how the night felt when a man holds your ribs like a fortress and says, "I will make the sky bow."
In the court, men who had once laughed at Kira now would whisper. Christoph had frozen his hands in roads outside the city and later returned with the color sucking from his life. Kira never rose again. Irina's last cry was private; the public cracks were open and the crowd had cheered. The punishments had been many and different. The men who had trusted in easy bribes left with hollow eyes.
"Do you want revenge?" Eamon asked me once.
"I want safety," I answered. "I want them to know the cost of licking at a nation's wounds."
"Will it stop you?" he said, coughing, a tired grin on his face.
"It never stops," I said. "It becomes a river you walk."
But there are moments I remember like a single pear blossom pressed between two pages: York's laugh after a battle; Eamon laying his head in my lap and whispering, "You are the bravest"; Muriel's small hands that once kept secrets and later kept my counsel.
"I am an emperor now," I told York once, sitting on the balcony when the snow melted into early spring. Pear petals drifted like pale coins.
"And I am still the fool who let you name me," he said.
"You were never a fool," I argued. "You were the one who pulled me out of the cold."
He brushed my hair away. "We said the same vow, remember? The world for you, and you belong to it."
"I belong to the throne," I said quietly. "And to you."
He kissed me then, an answer to all doubts. The pear tree dropped its last petal onto our hands.
And when I think of the years—of the hush and the shouting, of the public burnings of reputations and of private deaths—I think of the smell of the herb that left no trace and of the warmth of his thumb on my brow.
"You promised me this life," I told him on the night the city burned like dawn.
"I promised to break the dawn for you," he answered.
We kept our vows. I kept my crown. He kept me.
When the last bell in the city tolled, I touched the pear blossom in my palm and put it in the deepest drawer of my desk. I knew someday someone would find it and say, "This was the one who loved a man like winter and chose to be his light."
In the final record I left in the palace chambers, I wrote one sentence and sealed it with my hand. The ink dried like winter frost.
"I named him once," I wrote, "and he named me queen of his war."
The End
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