Rebirth16 min read
I Tried to Hang Myself — Then the Emperor Saved Me (and My Life Got Complicated)
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I lay on the redwood bed, the white silk folded in my shaking hands, and smiled like a woman who had finally found the exit.
"Forgive me, original owner," I told the quiet room. "You climbed to become empress by a long road. I begged for a quick finish for thirty wasteful years and finally—"
Footsteps outside. Voices. The silk slipped cold over my fingers like a promise. I breathed in the sandalwood smoke, pressed my cheek against the pillow, and let my body go slack.
"Bring the three-foot white silk. Immediately."
The voice came from the doorway and it did not belong to any servant. It was low and iron-quiet. Someone had answered the summons with no delay at all.
The palace attendants were like a tide around me—knees scraping the floor, faces wet with candlelight, whispers thick as thread. I blinked at the assembled cluster of bowed heads. One of them had called out, "The Empress wakes! Praise the heavens!" and had sounded so sincerely relieved that I almost believed them.
I did not wake into joy. I woke with the memory of a car's headlight, the violent arch of my body through air, organs burning, the sudden release that had finally felt like mercy in my last life. I had waited for that mercy, and now some fate had plucked me back again and set me inside the body of a woman named queen—empress, really—and expected me to volunteer for this farce.
The handmaiden closest to me—a girl with a middle-part so severe it looked sculpted—had the face of someone who had watched the world for the wrong reasons. She stared at me as if the only miracle she had known was my breath.
"Your Highness," she whimpered, "do not fuel the emperor's anger. The dragon seed is lost—" She choked and pressed her hand over her mouth as if to smother the name of the drowned foetus. "You must rest, Your Highness. Restore your body first."
She was clumsy with mercy. She was also useful. In that single hurried sentence she gave me everything I needed to know: I was the empress whose pregnancy had failed, there were rival women with motives, and people around me were brittle and fearful.
"Order white silk presented," I croaked in a voice I did not recognize. Sounding like the empress felt easier than sounding like myself. The handmaiden flinched; the whole room sucked in breath.
She was the first to go pale. "White silk...?"
"Yes. Prepare it. Now."
When the silk arrived it was folded in layers like some ritual treaty. The handmaiden bowed her head to the floor and began to sob as if her lungs would split. "My lady, do not—"
The silk lay in the red lacquer tray. My fingers shook as I touched it. The idea of dying held the same clean relief for me as it had the other lifetime: remove the ache, close the book. I hauled a chair under the beam, and every small motion hurt—my abdomen like a rebelling animal—but anything that promised finality was worth the cost.
I tied the knot clumsy and quick. I stepped onto the chair, arranged the silk around the beam, and set my jaw.
"Wait." The voice at the door cut through the straw-thin silence. I looked up and caught the flash of yellow gold in the doorway—embroidered dragon, heavy robe. Finn Perrin, the emperor, had the height and the stare of someone who expected absolute obedience and had rarely been refused.
"You?" I breathed. The knot had already tightened in my hands.
Finn’s expression split with something like shock, then annoyance. "You insane?"
I could not speak with the silk choking my throat. My eyes filled and I stared back like a cornered animal.
"You can't—" Finn barked. "Who ordered this?"
"He—" The handmaiden stammered. "She—your Highness—she said: 'white silk is another use.'"
Finn's face shifted, then snapped. He strode forward like a man crossing a border.
"Leave this room. Right now." His voice made the air around us pull taut.
"He tightened the decree like it was a blade. 'From today, no one in your quarters may leave your sight. If you die, every person in these rooms will die.'"
He sounded like a ruler, but with something else behind his words: fear, fierce and naked. He wanted to protect an image, to protect me, or to protect something we were both pretending to be. I did not know which worried me more.
Finn lit into the attendants with a ferocity that made them collapse further into themselves. He made a proclamation, his voice iron: "From this day, every person within the Xian An Palace will not leave the empress's sight. Should any harm come to the empress, those present will answer with their lives."
It read like a tyrant's rope—threatening, absolute, and holding me hostage.
"Do you see?" I managed finally. "Now I can't even die in peace."
He looked at me then with something that stopped being anger and became...interest. "You—"
A brood of courtiers and the weight of a kingdom hung in the doorway beyond him. I used the moment to test the breath of the room.
"You've made a mistake," I said slowly. "White silk has other uses."
"Step away," he ordered, but his eyes did not leave my face. He seemed to be groping for a reason to punish, a justification to act on the sudden grip the scandal had in his chest.
Three days passed in a stupor of physicians, incense, and watchful girls. The handmaiden—the one with the middle part and the fervent loyalty—wouldn't leave my side. She washed my face, fed me bitter tonics until my stomach rebelled, and cried for me every spare minute.
I wanted silence, a quick farewell to this borrowed life. But every time I thought I had found the method, something intervened.
When I attempted to make my second exit—this time going out the gates to ask the dowager empress for a permission to die—the palace would not allow me within the necessary rooms. Guards made monuments of themselves between me and the deadly solace.
Then there was the old "doctor." The first time he came he was more shadow than man—stooped, beard like salt on rock, coughing like a winter wind. He touched my wrists as if to test a current. "The empress's breath is shallow, but we have hope—"
"You saved me once already," I said, thinking of the silk rope. "Why?"
He watched me with a stillness that felt like the bottom of a pool. "Sometimes a man can only do what he must," he said and then coughed up something red into his handkerchief.
He left an herb recipe and some incense with my maid. They brewed it and rubbed it in, and slowly my body righted. I thought, briefly, that my plan had been foiled. But somewhere in that shifting of recovery there was a whisper: maybe this life wanted me to stay. That thought frightened me more than the noose ever had.
One day the river swallowed my plan whole.
I had decided to die with style. A stone for ballast, a quick push to the edge, and the black will come. I walked with the handmaiden toward the river that split the palace grounds. The palace, at its edges, kept the sort of chaos that kills your plans and feeds your fear—crowds of courtiers, trays of flowers, someone’s dog barking—noise that makes a knot in your throat seem extraordinary.
Kylie Marino—soft-dollar cheeks, the palace's favored consort—suddenly stood across the bridge with her retinue, petals in her hair like the blush of a visiting moon.
"Lady," she trilled, the sort of voice that had been polished for courts and betrayals. "How fare you?"
She was dangerous in the way flowers are: pretty, but with roots in a grave. Her followers bowed like reeds, and I noticed how the emperor's eyes found her, immediately softening.
"Step aside," I told them, but Kylie only smiled that practiced smile, and then she shoved me. It was a small action, but caught in the right moment it caused me to lurch and to fall—back over the stone and into the chill river below.
Kylie and her maidens cried out as if the gods had just been offended. "She pushed me!" someone gasped.
Soldiers dove. Finn arrived like thunder and hauled Kylie out from the swirl of the crowd, wrapped in floral robes and clinging to breath like a charm.
"You were with her," he said to me. "Why did you not help?"
Kylie's maid, quick and venomous, had an answer ready: "It was the empress who shoved the consort."
Finn looked at me then as if I had no deniable past. The river took me anyway, quiet and cold, and the last thing I registered was the Emperor's yellow robe a smear above me.
I had intended to sink. Instead I found a corpse tied to a stone on the riverbed: a bloated, pale thing that made my skin crawl. I fainted from the sight, and the men who rescued me practiced a kind of revival that made the hairline on my skull ache. They performed chest compression and forced breath, and Finn—god of protocol and unexpected tenderness—pressed his mouth to mine in a way that would have ruined a lesser man.
He shoved air into my chest like it was a puzzle he was obliged to solve. He should have known by then whether I was a woman who wanted to die or a woman who wanted to live. The way he breathed life into me felt like theft.
When I opened my eyes, Finn sat on the bedside. "You nearly killed yourself in front of me," he said. "What are you doing?"
"You ask the emperor that?" I croaked. "You say I nearly killed myself. How about this: why did you push me?"
He froze, then snatched at a story about "you pushed me." It became a tangle of blame and counterblame that left everyone dizzy.
Weeks passed. The fake doctor who had tended me was arrested. A dead body had been found in the river; officials had concluded the corpse was the real physician, and the man taken for trial confessed that he had been an itinerant practitioner and had been bribed by Kylie Marino to take a role to make the empress appear unstable.
It sounded neat. Too neat. Too much like silk wrapped around a lie.
"He's a charlatan," the head maid intoned when she told me. "He confessed. He named Kylie, and she is in the cold palace. All is right, Empress."
My stomach languished. I had been present at these incidents and had seen small things—a glance, a hand—with no understanding. The man in the prison was not the charlatan I'd expected. He had glassy, dark eyes, deep and oddly compassionate. He introduced himself as Daniel Schulz.
"Why are you here?" I asked him through the iron.
He laughed once, a short, disbelieving sound. "Because I did not hate enough to be brave." The laugh had an edge like a blade.
"Did you kill the physician? Did Kylie pay you to pretend?"
He tilted his head and smiled. "You think I am a lackey? I am no one's tool. But if I had to imagine a life where a woman like you was killed because of palaces and petals, I would have preferred it to be different."
We argued then—two people who had no arc together. I wanted to find out, finally, who had been honest.
"You could have killed the empress and called it fate—wouldn't that have been the end?" I demanded.
He did not answer directly. He told me how his family had been slaughtered in some old purge, how he'd come to the capital with eyes for vengeance and found instead medicine, knowledge, and subtle mockery. His words mapped a path that left a cold ache. He had been arrested for his role but had taken blame for things I could not prove.
The more I peered at the tapestry, the more its threads looked like strings tying me to a ship that would sink if I made the slightest move.
Then the fire.
Someone shouted from far away—"Cold palace! Fire!"—and I ran toward the smoke like a moth, more out of reflex than hope. When I arrived the cold palace courtyards were full of women in pale robes; Kylie was inside, hair disheveled, eyes like a war.
She claimed she would rather burn than be taken. When I pushed into her chamber she accosted me and began to choke at my throat, and I laughed in the strangest way because the world had become a stage and everyone had their lines memorized except me.
"You're the one who killed the child in her belly," I said suddenly. "You almost took that life and called it your own victory."
Her reaction ruptured like someone had lit a pin. Kylie stiffened, her fingers loosening on my windpipe. She laughed in a short, animal sound and then exploded into cries and confession, but not the kinds of confessions I expected.
"You think you know more than you do," she screamed, voice ragged. "I paid him? I brought in a doctor? You—" She staggered back and went white and then wild. She began to laugh and cry at the same time.
"It wasn't me," she said in a voice that alternated between triumph and self-immolation. "You killed your own child. You staged it. You wanted to be freed of a useless thing."
The words hit like fists. Pieces of the tangled story slotted into place. My life had not been simply a stolen body. The original owner had been a woman who had held, in secret, monstrous combinations of care and cruelty. My handmaid had been more devoted than I thought, and yet there were hints—subtle, poisonous—that implicated me in my own tragedies.
I could no longer be satisfied with unpicking strands. I wanted to see the spider burned in public.
Kylie and the man who had lied about his identity—Daniel—would be punished. I would not be satisfied with quiet justice. If I could not die clean, I wanted the world's view of her and him to be a confession too loud for the market.
I arranged a public day.
The square outside the Hall of Judgement filled like a basin with people. Ministers lined in their crimson collars, soldiers like trees in the wind. The sun slashed down, making the jade cupolas glitter. I put on the empress's clothing—heavy, opalescent, and utterly uncomfortable—and the crowd bowed as if to a world that had settled into place again.
First came Kylie. She was led in, near-broken but not yet broken in portrait. Her eyes darted to the emperor—now Patrick Johansen, the son grown up—and for the first time I saw a raw terror that wasn't merely costume. He stood in the front among the bench of officials, a strip of yellow more a strip of authority than any ornament. Patrick's stance was rigid; the people around him trembled with the kind of respect that is also fear.
The judges read the charges—poisoning, conspiracy, attempted murder of the empress, and the intricate charge that sent the crowd into a fever: "For collusion with a practicing surgeon to create falsified treatments causing the death of the royal embryonic seed."
Kylie stood with small hands tied behind her back. The head judge's voice was a bell: "How do you plead?"
She spat with the kind of force that startled the crowd. "I plead not guilty."
"Not guilty?" A ripple of derisive snorts. People love a speedy conclusion.
I rose then. I did not walk forward in dignity; I walked forward with the edge of a person who had seen too many doors and been picked back through them. I smiled at the gathered people—not the lovers of spectacle but the ordinary ones whose lives were squeezed by levies and drought—and said, "You watched while a woman burned and another wept. You watched while the river ate what we thought were two bodies. Now you will watch the truth."
They liked such pronouncements.
"Kylie," I said. "Tell them why you hired a doctor to play He."
Her voice came out like a cracked plate. Then she started to cry, and the truth she gave was not the neat narrative the court had been waiting for. She said she had not ordered the doctor's acts alone; she had been desperate, jealous, and used. She named names in an alarming cascade: bribes, whispers to soldiers, threats to other concubines. When she named me—"She made arrangements"—the crowd gasped.
"Empress—" the head judge intoned. "We will take testimony, but we will not allow slander."
Then we brought forward the doctor—Daniel Schulz. He had been kept in the "justice tent" in the market square. He limped out, his eyes dull but full of something like amusement. He had changed; the man I had seen in his thin cell looked even more composed in daylight.
They made him kneel and read the charges. He did not flinch.
"Why did you poison the incense?" the head judge demanded.
Daniel's answer was a small calm sound: "To end the chain. To make the powerful's life stop like a snapped thread."
His confession was not so much a confession as a philosophical pronouncement. People hate being philosophized to in public; they wanted gore, signs of repentance, a spectacle in which they play the role of the righteous.
"Kylie is accused of bribing you," I said, loud enough that the plaza hushed. "She is accused of turning a woman's suffering into a game. What did you get?"
Daniel's eyes flicked to me. "A debt paid," he said. "A name removed. A purpose." He smiled then, the sort of smile that made mothers draw their children nearer. The crowd grew quiet in a new way—the curiosity of the animal exposed to a thought experiment.
"Then let the market decide," I said to the head judge. "Let the people see, let the evidence be laid bare."
They produced the incense formula, piles of scrolls and receipts, testimony from gardeners and palace servants. The evidence was a mosaic; every piece fit a little and then refused to fit the next. Kylie cried and raved and confessed only to halves of things. Daniel spoke calmly and contradicted himself until his own words seemed to belong to many people at once.
Finally, I forced a moment I had kept for myself: I called the handmaid—Clarissa Chung—onto the dais.
She walked like someone who had been daundered into adulthood by servitude. When she spoke, she did not tremble. "I saw Kylie and the doctor together," she said. "I took them for herbs for the emperor. I did not know what those herbs would do."
"Did he—" I began.
"Yes." Clarissa's voice was a clear instrument. "He touched your silk in the palace the night before you attempted to hang yourself. He smelled of charcoal and sharpness. He took my hand in the yard and told me to watch the incense."
The square leaned forward like a wave. The crowd now smelled the tobacco of true conspiracy.
At that moment I turned not only to the judges but to the crowd. "You will see both of them endure their sentence. They will be punished where everyone can watch. They will taste the humiliation their hands forced on others."
What came next was not the usual legalistic cruelty. The palace had methods both public and tailored.
Kylie Marino's punishment would be made public and long, a theatrical unspooling of shame. She would be paraded through the markets in rags, her face painted with the ink they used to mark criminals. Servants would whisper her deeds into the ears of children, who would record the story and carry it forward. She would be taken to the square and have her hair shorn—a symbol of the loss of status—and have the embroidered edge of her robe cut so that the palace seamstress, for everyone to see, would pluck the gold threads like the life drained from a body. She would have to stand as the ministers read out the ledger of her briberies, the lists of the coins that passed from her hands to the doctor's. Traders threw rotten fruit. A few women spat.
I did not stop there.
Daniel Schulz's punishment would be different; I did not want the same cheap theatrics on both. For him it would be exposure: not physical torture but the slow nicking away of the one thing he had—his art of healing. I ordered that he be stripped of his tools, that the medicines he had once made be poured into the street, and that he be forced to work in the hospital with no title, cleaning out wards and sweeping up after the people he'd intended to play god with. Doctors must touch life daily; having one's hands perform humble service is a harsher sentence for a man who desired to rule death.
The day began to move.
Kylie, who had been all silks and strategic smiles, entered the square with hair shorn and face exposed. Her voice cracked as she tried to plead. The crowd hissed. "You are a jealous woman," a widow spat. "You tried to make the empress a carcass."
Kylie tried to say that things had been different, that she had been frightened and manipulated. Her story folded in on itself. I watched her face as shame moved through the stages: pride, denial, fear, bargaining, and finally a quiet, mechanical acceptance like someone who has been played out of a tune.
When they took the gold embroidery from her robe in public, the seamstress pinched each gold thread and shook it so everyone could see the metallic sheen. "These were paid for with the price of a child's life," someone called. "Remember her: the one who bought her coin with sorrow."
Daniel, on the other hand, stood aside as his tools were displayed: mortars, labeled jars, long surgical knives. People crowded to touch them, as if by touching a thing they could feel the sinister weight of intent. He knelt then, a small man among the great—no song, no tears, just the slow acceptance of a fate he had designed perhaps for himself all along.
He was sent off to the hospital, where he spent months cleaning vomit, bathing patients whose names he had never learned before, attending the dying with bare hands. The public watched him in the days following: a man who had performed faked rituals now learning the ordinary language of healing. The humiliation was surgical, surgical in the way a doctor would cut.
His change was not immediate. He at times showed the cycle I had expected from all villains: smug, stunned, denial, bargaining, and collapse. One day a street vendor threw a bowl of fish scales at him in anger. Later, a child he helped recover from a fever leaned on his knees and thanked him, and Daniel wept—silent, exhausted sobs that the crowd could not parse as either confession or an attempt to buy absolution.
Kylie, however, reacted unlike Daniel. She moved from face reddened with anger to face gray with the reconnaissance of a woman who had been caught in her own traps. She screamed, she denied; she begged; she even tried to turn the audience to laughter with a story about a rival's treachery. Yet each variation only tightened the net. When Patrick Johansen stood to give sentence he spoke with the gravity of a son who had seen a mother's place and wondered at his own.
"For the harms done to the palace and the crimes named," he intoned, "Kylie Marino is banished from court and confined to a distant estate. She will be forbidden to take position or favor. She will be remembered not as a consort but as the woman who endangered the life of the empress."
"That's it?" someone in the crowd snarled. "She bought the life of a child!"
Patrick looked at me, eyes hard. "Your Highness, the law is written. The harshest public penalties are for those who take life directly. For these acts, the law prescribes removal and public shame."
Kylie slumped, and the crowd booed. People like a clear moral chorus; if the law refused blood, they still wanted spectacle. They wanted to see scorn and righteousness in the same breath.
I stood then and cut into the silence with the only thing I had left: truth. "Listen," I said. "A court gives judgment. The people will interpret it how they wish. But I want—before she leaves the city—a clearer mark."
"Kylie," I said, and she looked up, and in that look there was a world. "Walk through the market. Hear what your name becomes."
They made her do it. The market was a revolution of sound. Vendors spat, mothers clutched children close, soldiers watched scowling faces and unblinking eyes. Someone threw scraps of onion. Babies wailed at the sight of a woman shorn of dignity. She walked the path, the stitches of gold in her sleeves cut away as the crowd watched. That procession was five hundred steps of slow misery. People recorded it on little scraps of paper, chanting in rhymes that children would learn as playground songs. She was a lesson in caution, not justice, and the people would carry it.
Daniel's punishment went on for months and was less salacious. The hospital staff learned to treat him as lowly, and he had to accept the small tasks. Over time, however, the thing I had not anticipated happened: working among the ordinary afflicted, the man whose hands had fashioned poison learned renunciation with the patient attention of someone who finally found a mirror for his crimes. He gave food to musicians who could not play, he cut bandages for children in a way that seemed almost elegant because his hands remembered marrow and tenderness. He was changed, but whether he was redeemed remained a question only the gods could weigh.
After the punishments, the palace returned to its terrible, stilted normal. I did not die. The emperor—now Patrick Johansen—served the throne that had shaped him into a rage, and yet I slowly observed him changing too. The boy who had once threatened to seat everyone in the dungeons became a ruler who considered counsel. He listened to secrets, tightened the treasury, encouraged the dikes and irrigation that his dead father had started. His changes were halting and earthly, the kind that keep a nation from vanishing.
Twenty years passed in a string of days. Patrick grew from a son with tantrums to a king with certain patient mercies. Mercy came in measures—open markets, rebuilding the canals, charity drives for those whose houses had been sun-swept into hunger. He married and fathered a son; the court calmed. My old vow to end myself lost its urgency because there were things to be done.
I watched them live—my hands full of work and the ache of borrowed time—until I grew old in the way that is both frightening and gentle. When my breath finally left me there was a ring of family around the bed. Patrick, the son who had once threatened to entomb people for my sake, now held my hand like a man pleading better with his own conscience than the world.
"Promise me you'll serve the people," I told him when my voice bent like an old reed.
"I will," he cried. "Mother, do not leave."
I smiled. Clarissa Chung—my handmaiden who had been a child when I nearly hanged myself—still knelt by my pillow, her hair greying but her loyalty intact. She mouthed adventures I did not have time to speak aloud. Outside the room the court bowed and the lamp smoke drifted in memory.
When I finally closed my eyes for the last time, I did not see the white silk. I did not see the river, or the doctor's handkerchief, or Kylie's embroidered sleeves. I saw a small, clear thing: the stone of a weir, the way water smoothed it, and then the steady patter of people working a dyke. The things that saved a nation are always small, repetitive tasks, not the grand gestures men like to celebrate. That was the last lesson I left.
The End
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