Face-Slapping10 min read
I Was Brought Back to Be a Pawn — So I Became the Queen
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They brought me back because a little corpse had left a throne empty. They thought I would be grateful. They thought I would fit neatly into the role they had carved out.
"I am Cataleya Allen," I said the first time I had to answer to a title that had once meant nothing to me.
"Not a title," my nurse Janessa Barrett whispered in my ear as I rode into the capital, "a sentence."
I laugh now when I remember that—how small the laugh was, how unreliable. The carriage was full of people who measured me with their eyes and decided whether I was pretty enough, obedient enough, useful enough. My mother, Hermione Jonsson, circled like a pale moon, smiling in a way that did not reach her eyes.
"Isabella," she would say, and the name rolled off her tongue like favor. "Look at your sister. Bring her to me."
"She stinks of the north," one maid muttered as I stepped down. "Putrid country air."
"Country clothes," Isabella Kuznetsov said, all honeyed poise. "Garth, see that she gets proper garments. We cannot—"
"You will go to the palace tomorrow," my father Decker Alvarado said with a smile that did not touch his mouth. "The world will change for you, Cataleya."
"I did not ask to be brought," I said quietly to the river behind our house, to the birch trees, to Cillian Hill who watched me like he watched the sunset. "Why did they bring me?"
"You should be glad," Elle Bright told me with her usual brittle cheer. "You will be a queen."
"A queen," I said the word like a bitter seed.
They put me into gowns. They taught me how a queen should carry a cup, how she should bow, how she should smile to make the courtiers forget anything that might be wrong with her. They told me to keep my hands small, my words smaller.
"Remember," Rosa Escobar said one night when she was alone with me, "power is a slow, cold thing. You either build a house of ice or you melt in someone's warmth."
"I do not want to melt," I said.
The first time I saw Ian McCormick he was folded in white like a monk who had gone out into sunlight and found he preferred it. He smiled at me once, the kind of half-smile that notices everything and forgives nothing.
"You are small for a queen," he said softly.
"I am what you wished," I answered.
"Then you must learn to wish better."
I learned. I learned to hold my hands in the right way, to move like music. I learned that a smile could be a weapon when turned just so.
"Tomorrow," Isabella said the night before my public entrance to the court, "you will walk with your head high. The empire must see you as a jewel."
"Isabella," I asked that night, because the first time I had believed the world was nicer than it was, because the last thread of childlike trust still tugged at my sleeves, "did you ever love anyone but the throne?"
She did not answer at once. She walked to the window and her face turned to something like a storm.
"I have always loved what keeps me alive," she said finally, not unkindly. "You will understand when you come to know how our house must survive. Love is a luxury for those who can afford error."
The next day the court was full. The Emperor—Ian McCormick—sat like a bright, distant star. The palace sang, the banners glowed. I walked slowly, my dress heavy with embroidery, my feet taught. My heart beat like a trapped bird.
"Stand tall," an attendant hissed.
"I will," I told myself and the bird fluttered.
We did the rituals. The Empress Dowager—Kennedi Schultz—watched from her chair like a judge with a fondness for theater. People bowed, whispered. My father's smile was a blade.
Later I would learn that Ian had not been blind to anything. He had watched me from the first moment I entered his garden, when he had fallen, coughing and pale, into the grass, and I had done the only small thing I could: I had loosened his collar and set the white jade rabbit he had been wearing aside on my lap.
"I found this," I said. "It is small and quiet."
Ian had laughed, a quick, surprised sound. "A rabbit," he said. "I am a man of oddities."
"You are also my emperor," I said, "and I am… whatever I must be."
He spoke softly on our first real conversation. "I have few sons," he said. "I have chosen you because you will not break the game."
"Then why give me the throne?" I asked. "Why not Isabella?"
He looked at me, and I felt a strange chill like wind through a field.
"Because the role of a queen is not merely to wear a crown," he said. "It is to contain everything. Some bodies fit better."
"Contain me," I repeated, tasting the word.
"Contain us," he replied.
*
When Jaxon Rizzo—the prince they called the King's brother, handsome and dangerous in ways the songs do not mend—first spoke to me, he did not lower himself. He leaned over a table at a tavern called Guiyun, grape juice in hand, and told me the truth as he liked to dress it.
"You're a target," he said. "You're soft meat set on a platter. Walk away."
"Or what?" I asked, the word sharper than a scythe.
"Or I ask for you," he said, "and I force the court to eat their own words."
He laughed and then, quick as the cut of a blade, his face turned serious. "I have hands in the world," he said. "I am not all revel and silk. I can be useful."
"You want me to leave," I told him.
"No," he said—slower, like a man tasting a plan. "I want you to be something that stings."
Everything after that was a slow tightening. My family turned on me like people revealing the true kitchen knives in their belts.
"You are a blight," my mother told me one afternoon, spitting the words like salt.
"You came back," Isabella cried, "and our sister soft as milk died!"
"She died because of her sickness," I whispered.
"She died because of you," they said together.
Dreams of justice that had felt like warmth hardened in me like ice. I could have let them shove me into the queen's chair, let them call me a jewel and then chip me when it suited them. But I had seen a small white rabbit bead of jade on my palm and I had met an emperor who chose me because I was small enough to hold everything. I had also met a prince who offered me knives.
"What do you want, Jaxon?" I asked once when he watched me from a place of shadow.
"A bargain," he said. "Help me shut certain doors. I help you break certain windows. We both survive."
It was not noble. It was not clean. It was exactly what the world offered.
So I learned to plot. I learned to watch the fever in Isabella's eyes. I learned to watch Hermione's hands tremble when someone praised Isabella too loudly. I learned who in our house whispered to whom and how often a certain steward, Garth Best, crossed the threshold to the Minister Olaf Pedersen's house.
And I learned how to protect the people who had never had a voice at all.
"Please," Janessa Barrett told me, "they have been dragged and beaten. They will not last in the dungeon."
"Then we must make them last," I said.
"How?" she asked.
"By making the court look away from them and at the people who broke the laws," I answered.
"That is dangerous," Cillian Hill said. He had come to the city with me and watched it like a younger brother ought. "It is a game with knives."
"So we will hold the knives for them," I said. "We will not die by their hands."
*
The punishment had to be public. That was Jaxon Rizzo's cruelty and his cunning. It had to be public for the shame to sting and for the truth to tumble like a dozen fallen coins across the court floor.
"Make it the assembly," Jaxon said. "Make it so that the sentries and the maids and the ministers and the men who sweep the stables watch. Make it so that every whisper becomes a roar."
"That is the one thing I fear," I said.
"Then have courage," he replied.
So we planned.
The assembly fell on a clear morning that felt like glass. Kennedi Schultz presided, an elder of the realm with a face like carved ivory. Ian McCormick sat in quiet, folded as ever but with sharpness in his gaze I had not seen before. He had given his consent in a way he never gave to trivial things—quiet, small, almost a stone turned in the water that sent out ripples.
"Today," I said aloud when my turn came, "we will speak of loyalty."
Isabella's face was a mask. Hermione was pale and controlled. They took their seats under banners that had once meant power. They did not expect what came.
"Your house," I told the gathered court, "is large. It has held honor. It has also broken promises."
Gasps fluttered like birds. The chamber leaned forward.
"You accuse us?" Isabella hissed, and her voice was silk and venom.
"You accused me at the least ceremony," I replied. "You accused me when your daughter died. You accused me when your words were better remembered than your actions. You accused me of killing a child."
"No!" Hermione's voice was suddenly the sound of a woman about to be unmasked. "You are shameless! You came back and—"
"Sit," Ian said. His voice was not loud, but when Ian spoke the palace listened. "Sit, Hermione Jonsson."
She obeyed as if someone had touched her with a hot brand.
"Speak," he said to me.
I showed the jade. I showed the ribbon, the sealed letters smuggled to the wrong minister. I showed the ledgers marked with small payments. The court watched the graft and the secret exchanges blossom like rot under fruit.
"Isabella Kuznetsov," I said, "you have been a beauty for this city. You have worn the best. But you have also signed for bribes. You arranged for doctors to be delayed. You have asked that certain medicines be mis-labelled. You testified that my sister was well-placed and then you moved the poison."
The sound in the room was like the slow clap of a distant storm. People who had eaten the house's rice turned their heads.
"Evidence," Isabella said, voice now the size of a brittle glass. "You have no proof."
"Then listen." I called witnesses—Garth Best, the steward who had been loyal to me since I arrived. "Here," he said, and he laid forth records of payments. "Here," an old midwife said, and her voice trembled as she described being paid to look away. "Here," Janessa Barrett said, and she relayed my nurse's notes of bruises and threats.
The crowd turned, a slowly rippling wave. Those who had whispered now had to meet eyes. Some hid, some murmured, some pulled out tablets to write.
"Isabella," Ian said quietly, "tell us what you did."
She faltered. The room grew colder.
"I—" she began, then changed. "I meant to protect the family."
"To protect," said Ian, folding the word as a talisman. "And the price?"
"It was necessary!" Hermione cried. The hand that had been steady now shook. "Did you not want your son to be safe? Did you not want your line—"
She stopped. Her voice broke into the air. The gathered courtiers looked at her as if she were a moon grown too near.
"Such things are punishable," Olaf Pedersen, the minister, said. "If proved, they are punishable by removal of rank, confiscation, and public censure."
"Then we shall do more than censure," Ian replied.
He spoke. He named crimes. He read letters that showed Isabella asking a physician to mislabel a treatment. He revealed payments that ran from a steward's purse to a distant house in the city where a middleman had received them.
"I did what my family asked!" Hermione wailed. Her face had changed with each revelation—pride to shock to denial to thin, disbelieving pleading. "No! None of it—"
The crowd was merciless. Men leaned forward. A handmaid stepped closer, eyes wide. Someone took out a stylus and scratched notes. A child in the gallery began to cry. Hands rose like seaweed.
"Take their ranks," Ian said. "Strip them of privileges. Confiscate their lands." His voice did not tremble. "Make them walk the city in the afternoon when the market will see them."
"Public!" someone shouted.
"Public," Ian said.
They were removed not in secret, but in procession, their collars loosened, fine robes exchanged for coarse linens. The crowd thronged the streets to watch as they were led out. People drew near. Some spat. Some recorded the moment with small wax tablets. Others cheered, quiet and hungry.
Isabella's face, which had been calm as marble, crumpled. She first clutched at the hem of her dress like a drowning thing. Then she laughed with a sound that was not laughter.
"It is a trick!" she cried. "A slander—"
"Look at them," the crowd said. "Once rulers now humbled."
Hermione fell apart more slowly. At first she was a stone; then she saw the children of her own servants staring from windows. She heard whispers she could not ignore. She moved from denial to disbelief; from disbelief to a fevered, angry denial. At last she tried to bargain, then pleaded, then begged.
"Forgive me," she begged in the market square, her voice raw. "Please. I—"
There was a sudden silence. A woman who had once cleaned for them stepped forward, spat into Hermione's face, and turned away. A man from the stables laughed. One by one, the people who had carried wood and bread for their house turned and looked at them as if they had been thieves, which, in a way, they had been.
Isabella's reaction changed more dramatically. At first burning indignation gave way to a pink fog of humiliation. She tried to command respect and was met by a child's chorus of "Look! The highborn cannot stand the rain." Then she tried to retreat to sorrow, to feigned frailty. Finally, when no route of pride remained, she broke down—thin, human, naked of dignity. She fell forward and beat the cobbles with her fists, then cowered as if expecting blows.
The crowd's reaction shifted with each metamorphosis. Some shed tears, some whispered, some took out pens and jotted the spectacle to make a coin of rumor. People took small statues from stalls and chucked them toward the walled carriage that carried them away—stones of scorn. The markets chanted. The palace servants watched from windows, their faces unreadable.
By the end of it, both women had been forced into complete humiliation. They were paraded with banners that told their crimes. Men who had once bared their teeth to them now smiled with clean faces and kept their distance. The scene lasted long enough for no rumor to recover; long enough for the smell of dust and sweat to mingle with the sting of shame.
When they were delivered to a small prison in the outskirts and the gates clanged shut, their faces had been transformed from tyrant to shell. Isabella clenched her jaw and then slid to the floor, rocking. Hermione sobbed until she lost her voice. It was not mercy that made the throng move away but a sense of finality—the spectacle had become a lesson.
"I did not want this to be forever," I told Ian later, standing in the quiet of his study. "But I could not leave them to hurt the ones I love."
"You did what you had to do," he said.
"I could have left," I said. "Why not? Why keep the throne?"
He watched me like someone watching a wolf choose its den.
"Because we are not one thing," he said. "We are both the things we build and the things that build us."
He put the white jade rabbit back into his hand. "Keep it," he said. "You will need reminders."
*
Later, in the hush after punishment—when people began to rearrange themselves like actors changing stagesets—I stood on the palace balcony and watched the sunset.
"Do you regret it?" Ian asked quietly beside me.
"No," I said. "But I am not yet done."
"Neither am I," he answered.
We had both had to make a bargain with the world. He kept the ritual of distance yet learned to trust me to hold the truth. I kept the crown yet learned to wield it in a manner they could not easily twist.
"One day," I said, feeling the white jade rabbit in my pocket, "they will know what it is like to be on the market in linen when once their silk had commanded the streets."
"Then let them," Ian said. "Let the world see what happens when a house chooses its own survival over people's lives."
I smiled then, a small, hard thing, not the warm laugh I had once wished for, but a sound that matched the new person I had decided to be.
"Tomorrow," Jaxon said when he found me later under a cherry tree, "we continue."
"Good," I said. "I was hoping you would."
"Not for glory," he said, "for payback. For keeping promises."
"Then we will keep them," I said. "And when I look down at the white rabbit, I will remember whose hands I keep close and whose hands I cut loose."
The rabbit fit in my palm like a secret. Ian had given me the throne. I had taken something else back: my choice. I had been a pawn. Now I intended to play a new game.
The End
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