Revenge10 min read
I Wanted the Throne, I Wanted Him — and I Took Both
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I remember the first time I saw her in the light of the palace courtyard. She was a small, bright shape in peach silk, and the whole court seemed to slow to let her pass.
"Your Majesty, this is my sister," our mother said, and her smile softened in a way I had not seen in years.
"Come, meet your elder sister," she added, as if that could cover ten years of absence and a dozen secret lessons. I stepped forward and held the girl's hand.
"You are unexpectedly lovely," I said. "Peach hues suit you."
She smiled and her eyes lowered. "Elder sister flatters me. I am not worthy."
Her hand trembled when I squeezed it. She hid it quickly, as if she had practiced hiding agitation. I noticed the quick, careful manners. I smelled the river gardens in her skin and the salt of a distant harbor; she was a girl raised away from these tiles, but trained in all things court.
"Our mother has always been clever," I thought, and I let my smile stay pleasant. "Do be comfortable here."
After she had been set in the palace, winter parties arranged and pleasantries sung, the court murmured that my mother had brought someone back as a hedge. I kept my distance from faction, ripped up letters that begged me to stalk the alliances, and went to the academy to see Fionn.
"Princess, these are good pearls," she said, opening a small lacquer box one morning. "Perhaps you would wear them."
The pearls were the very kind our mother had had on the day she rose to the throne. I had once knelt and begged for one as a child and had been slapped, the sting of royal order and the shame remembered like a scar.
I kept my voice composed. "You have a good eye."
She dipped her head. "I only hope to please the court."
When she stumbled as we passed in the hall, I moved aside by reflex. A figure in moon-white waited at the temple, and he lifted her with easy strength. Fionn lifted her to her feet, and the wind lifted a few scattered petals.
"Is your visit for business?" he asked me, a hint of mockery on his lips that I did not like.
"It was nothing," I said, swallowing the rest.
He looked at Janessa and I at once. "LongPrincess, some girls keep to simpler things. Relax, smile more." His tone cut like a net.
That night I tasted a sour rust in my mouth. He had once promised as a boy, in a laughter-splashed room, "I will play the qin only for you." He had looked at me like that, and I had kept the image in my chest like a stored ember.
"Do you remember?" I asked, and he only smiled his easy, deliberate smile. I told myself the past was a past.
Weeks later the academy smelled of lacquer and chess dust when the palace alarm rang. "Fire at the Silver House! A child is trapped!" the eunuch shouted.
Fionn ran like a man with winged feet. I followed. In the smoke he carried Janessa out; her sleeves were ash, her arm grazed and red. He called to medics, and the court whispered like a great hive.
"He risked everything," someone breathed.
I turned away so they could not see my face. He tended to the newcomer as if the rest of the court were nothing. I fed myself a bitter thought: he cares for her in ways he never cared for me. My teeth cut into that thought like an accusation.
At my birthday banquet, I could not watch their closeness. "Would you, sister, not drink?" I said through a raised glass.
"My arm—" she protested.
"A single cup will not hurt," I said.
Fionn seized her cup and drained it. "If she must not drink, then I will drink for her," he said quietly. The nearest courtiers took note.
After the banquet she followed me into the rear garden and asked me an artful question.
"If you had to choose between the realm and Fionn—" she asked, sitting beneath a pale tree, "which would you choose?"
"I would choose the realm," I said without thinking, wanting to be the steel I had been forced to be.
She laughed high and bright, and then whispered, "And yet I want both." She left her words in my ear and ran to catch Fionn on the path.
He glanced at us and the light in his face carried a different softness when he said her pet name.
"She called him 'my lord,'" I repeated under my breath, and knew in the marrow that something had shifted. The thread between us thinned.
We were ordered to hold a contest. "The winner will remain in the capital; the loser will go to foreign court as bride," my mother announced. She said it casually, like one adjusts curtains. The Minister of State nodded. "It will settle a matter that sits heavy on the heart."
The contest was to be in the ring. The horses were sleek and the crowd thick. Janessa rode as if she had been trained at my mother’s side. Halfway through she fired a poisoned arrow towards me; a trick silver pin had been sewn to the shaft to hide the venom. My horse bucked. Pain flared in my shoulder and I fell.
I remember the taste of iron where blood reached my lips. I roared and took her horse, flinging her from the saddle. Up close she had the face of a hunted thing and the smile of a predator.
"You would kill me with my mother's token?" I hissed.
"It is the only way," she sobbed, then laughed, then lied: "I didn't mean it—"
I lashed her with my riding crop until the crowd fell silent. "So you think this is child's play?" I said. "You think you can play both roles, the sweet one and the killer?"
The whip left marks. The ministers muttered. The highest seat watched, and my mother did not stand between us. I left with the trophy: I had bested her.
After I had recovered, news came that my mother had decided: Janessa would go to the foreign court. "You will go to ensure our alliance," Danna Roux pronounced one morning with the lightness of someone who has chosen an instrument and plucked it.
I pressed the broken arrowhead into Janessa's hand before she left. "When you suffer in the far land, remember who struck the match," I said. She tried to lunge, to strike or to bite words, but swallowed them.
"She promised she'd take everything from me," she murmured. Her hands held the qin as if it were a child.
I left her in the carriage as the red banners rolled the length of the city. "Guard yourself," I said to the wind.
But a new danger moved like a shadow through the folded papers of the court. An advisor named Clement Estrada came to the capital bearing urgent papers about a flood in Jiang and pleas to open the grain stores. He argued loudly. "We must open the stores," he said before the hall. "The people will starve if we do not."
"I will not flush the treasury on a rumor of flood," I answered. "The stores are the nation's backbone."
Clement's eyes flicked to Fionn as he spoke, and Fionn’s face did not betray much. Yet there was a note in Clement's voice—too eager, too sharp. A spy network I had long kept at my side, the Skycloud watchers, sent word of a secret courier and letters smuggled in perfumed scrolls. Clement had papers from beyond the sea.
I called the court to order. "Bring me the letters," I said.
What followed in the main hall was not a moment I had expected to be proud of, but I had to claim it for the sake of my people and the truth. I had the letters spread, one by one, and I read each aloud.
"Here," I said, voice steady. "This man counseled us to empty our stores. He used foreign coin to bribe and to encourage collapse. He folded invitations into a plot."
Clement stood like a man who believed he could talk his way out of anything. He stepped forward. "Your Highness, you mistake me. I only sought the best for the people."
"Then explain these," I said, and held up a letter stamped with a foreign crest. "Explain how you wrote of dam breaches to come, and how you urged us to spend the reserves."
The hall tightened. "He was trying to help you see the next move," muttered a minister. "Perhaps he was right."
I did not flinch. "Read what else is here." I joined the letters. "These are not pleas for aid; they are instructions from foreign agents. They encourage mischief at the border. They promise reward for distraction."
He blanched, then tried to spin. "Forgive me, Majesty, I—"
"Did you write to them?" I asked.
"No!" His voice cracked, and the gloved hand that held his papers trembled. "Your Highness, you are a rumor-monger. I swore service to the realm."
The chamber shifted with a new sound: the scraping of benches, the intake of breath, the shuffle of trouble-soldiers. One by one men leaned in.
"Bring forward witnesses," I ordered. "Bring the servants and small hands that received coin."
Graham Baird stepped up as I needed him. "These leaves were found in the inn in the river town," he said. "The innkeepers named names. They remember the marks on the papers were foreign. They remember a man named by the crest with whom Clement consorted."
Clement's face moved through stages. First, surprise; second, calculation; third, a sudden insistence that he was being hunted. He tried to laugh. "You have no proof," he spat.
"Is this proof?" I said, and unfolded another page. "This letter tells how to push a levee and where to leave a gate unclosed. This is instruction for sabotage."
The hall grew louder. Someone started to cry; someone slammed his staff against the floor in anger. "Traitor!" they shouted.
Clement's knees buckled. He stammered the name of a friend to save himself, and that friend was dragged forward, a petty clerk who had never known the compass of power.
"Do you confess?" I asked Clement.
He laughed once, hollow. "I will never confess to a queen who thinks herself a judge," he said. "You have no right—"
"You are in my hall," I said. "You counsel the ruin of our grain during emergency. You wrote to our enemy. You traded our people's safety for coin. You chose treason."
Then the crowd began. It began slow, a ripple that became a wave: the sound of people who had been kept patient by starvation and by the steady pressure of living under siege of weather and war.
"Shame!" a voice cried.
"Hang his crest on the gate!" someone else called.
"Bring out his papers!" an officer barked.
Clement's bravado broke like thin ice. He staggered, clinging to the table, to the carved dragon, and for the first time I saw fear overtake his face.
"Spare me," he cried. "I will give all I have. I will sign anything. I will—"
"Apology is cheap," I said, feeling the old anger rise. "You sold a plan that would leave children to die. You thought to reforge the crown by destroying it."
Then I ordered it: his lands were seized, his house was opened to public inspection, his seal broken. Clement was made to stand beneath the dais while I read his correspondence aloud again, letter by letter. Courtiers and commoners alike leaned in to listen to each cruel phrase. The bailiffs dragged out silver chests and placed them on low benches. I directed that small items be taken to feed flood victims; those who had been paid by foreign coin were made to hand over jewels, and they passed through the hall like a shameful relay.
Clement's face turned first to red, then to white, then to a color like linen inside-out. He tried denial, then accusation, then begged for mercy. Men spat near him. A merchant took a ledger and marked down names and amounts, and a soldier murmured sentences of how many children could be fed with what had been lost.
The crowd's reaction was full and immediate. Many pointed and hissed. A lady in the front whispered a story of a cousin who had starved when the granaries were closed. Young guards queued to lay hands on the seized silver. Someone stood up and began to sing a song—an old tune about justice—while others chanted in answer. A child was there who had watched his father sell the last of his grain; he stamped his foot and called the traitor names.
Clement shifted through pride, accusation, bargaining, and finally collapse. He fell to the floor, hands clamping at his neck as if to throttle the shame.
"Mercy!" he screamed once to the rafters. "Mercy!"
No one answered with mercy. Only the clack of ledger pages and the low murmur of agreement. I ordered that he be held in the town ward until the council could decide. His name would be removed from rolls, and his household would be opened to service.
I had no pleasure in it. I had satisfaction cold as winter. The people needed a reckoning they could see. The ministers needed to know treason would not be dressed in fine words. Public punishment, raw and undeniable, is sometimes the only law that can straight a crooked world.
Weeks later I heard Clement had killed himself in a roadside inn. Men had stood under a cold wind and watched as a man who had once smiled in the court was dragged out in the grip of his own undoing. The court whispered that he had written confessions in his last hour. I did not celebrate. The punishment had not been my joy; it had been my duty.
Time slid. Fionn went off to the northern border to hold the line. "Go and hold them," I told him in the courtyard where the purple wood made a small cathedral of leaves. "Bring peace back."
He looked at me as if he wanted to stay. "I will return," he said. "If I return, will you—"
He did not finish. I nodded. "When you return, marry me."
He laughed, and for a moment the whole world was small enough to fit between our smiles.
The war burned on for two grueling years. Janessa rose like a black tide upon the field: she had returned from the far court and led the enemy as a cunning commander, hurling rumor and skill alike. She spurred the enemy, whispered promises, unraveled our alliances. The soldiers began to chant in camps, "Catch her! Kill her! End her!"
And then the end came in a cold, clear morning. A scout reported a small, desperate raid. Men had slipped into the enemy lines and struck. Janessa was found sitting in her palanquin, halfmad with fever or wine, clutching the qin I had seen her cradle.
When I came, she managed a smile that was part triumph, part confusion. "I lost," she said simply. "I thought I could take everything."
"You took many things," I answered. "You made many suffer."
She coughed blood and spat it on the sand between us. "You kept your composure, Irene," she said. "But you will know, even now—"
Her words broke. Her pursed mouth became a small, spent thing. She tilted her head toward where the palace rose. "I thought being born of what I am and of where I came from would give me everything."
"Why?" I asked. "Why so much hate?"
She looked at me with an exhausted honesty. "I was told I was nothing. I was told my birth was a lie. I wanted the proof of my worth. She loved another. I wanted what she wouldn't give."
She died before I could deliver what the court would have called a sentence. Soldiers buried her with little ceremony. I felt no exultation—only a thick sorrow for how small and bitter a life love had made her.
After the war ended and the banners folded, Fionn returned. A quiet morning found us by the purple tree where we had once stolen fruit. He had been tempered by war; the roughness in him had become a fine hardness.
"You kept the palace while I was away," he said softly. "You held the ground."
"You died enough a little at a time," I said.
He took my hand in both of his. "Irene, will you be my wife?"
I thought of the red silk he had chosen and the worn little box he'd buried under the old sycamore. I thought of the qin that had once been broken, of the arrowhead that sat in a velvet case in my chest like a secret.
"Yes," I said.
We married under a sky the color of old coin, and I wore the robe my mother had stitched, the fingers of her work rough from years of service. I had wanted the realm, and I had wanted him; in the end I kept both. It cost me nights of loneliness and a rage that had been a useful blade. It cost others grief and foolish courage. In the palace halls I learned a truth: to carve and keep a place is to keep a wound.
Years later, when I sit in the high dais and listen to petitions, I sometimes reach into the drawer by my desk. Inside there is a half-burnt arrowhead, the little red lacquer box, the gold-threaded robe my mother made. I turn the key Fionn gave me and I touch the fabric. The memory is not a promise or a threat; it is proof that I lived.
"Do you think of her?" Fionn asked once as he watched a sunset fall over the city roofs.
"Sometimes," I admitted. "I think of how thin the line is between hunger and having. I think of ashes."
He laid his hand on mine. "We will plant another tree," he said. "One that will grow wide enough for all of us to stand under."
I smiled. "Plant the sycamore," I said, and I put the arrowhead back into the drawer, closing it on the small bright things that kept my history threaded to my fingers.
The End
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