Revenge16 min read
I Was Called Empress; I Was Called Mad
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"I am the youngest dowager in history," I said, and I could feel the heat of power like a sun on my cheek.
"You're choking me," Dalton Montgomery grunted, his voice rough and borrowed from a stranger. "Let go, woman. I'll strike someone."
"Strike me if you can," I snapped. "I dare you."
He twisted out of my arms and flipped the table, then slammed me down on top of it. He braced his weight across my chest, eyes dark as storm water.
"Emery—" he began.
"Call me Dowager," I hit his temple with a flat palm. "Call me Empress Dowager."
He smacked my hand away. He smiled once, thinly. "You still get punchy when you drink."
"I am the dowager," I said, lower, crueler. "You will remember it."
"You are impossible." He rose, dusted his robe, and left with a storm of servants trailing behind him.
"I am impossible and I am having the best time," I told the empty hall. "Being dowager is the best job I've ever had."
They obeyed me. I tested them that morning. I sent the chief eunuch, Julian Espinoza, to stand in the rain and regret his life choices. I gave my mother's household a hundred acres. I slapped a minor minister for having a smug face.
"You're not really happy," a voice said from the side.
Dalton had returned and stood like an accusation by the banister. "Are you satisfied now?"
"Delighted," I lied. "Why do you care?"
He coated his words with a coldness I had known well. "Because you look like a woman who wants things to be done her way, and I am tired of being told to wait."
"You forget," I said. "You were the one who left me. You were the one who cheated. I married your brother so I could forget you."
"You married my brother?" He lifted his chin. "You married Anders Fields?"
My hand froze on the teacup. Anders had been a world of quiet warmth and small graces. He had been a lighthouse. "Yes. Anders," I said.
Dalton's jaw tightened. "He loved you."
"He did," I replied, and even though I said it, something in me laughed. "He might still."
"You are mine to tolerate," Dalton said. "You created this. You will not ruin it."
I flung him back into my day. "Then don't be touchy. Let me be the dowager. Let me take my walks, take my wine, beat my servants. That's the throne you wanted, isn't it?"
He didn't answer but he watched me like a man listening for a secret.
*
People used to call me Emery Flynn. I used to believe I was Emery, daughter of gentle officials, favorite of Anders—his bride, his warmth. I used to remember the small hand he found in mine and how he kissed the seam of my sleeve before battle.
You don't always get to keep memory.
"Emery," Dalton would call out sometimes, and the sound of my name would set my back on fire. "Don't be stubborn. Let me comfort you." He used words like a man trying to stitch a wound, but sometimes his hands tightened to restrain, and I would bite and claw like an animal.
"Last night you said you love her," I hissed once, when I caught him watching the woman in the garden. "Who?"
Dalton's face darkened. "Who else? Summer Xia—no matter. It's not your concern."
"Don't say her name in my presence," I told him.
"Why so jealous?" He reached for my fan, then let his hand rest on it, not touching me. "You're the dowager. You should be above such things."
That was a joke we kept repeating, like a bet we played. I answered back with a slap. He returned it. We traded the same wounds with the same laugh.
*
"The list for the six palaces," said Julian one morning, handing me the scroll. "The candidates to be granted ranks."
I scanned the names and stopped cold. "Who wrote this?"
"The lists come from Palace Records," Julian said. "You can change, of course, Dowager."
"Change it," I said, and I struck the top line. "Cross it out. She is merely a 'beauty.'"
"A 'beauty'?" Dalton exploded. "Emilia—Em—Empress, that—"
"Call her nothing," I interrupted. "Call her a 'beauty' and mean it."
He came to my chair like a shadow. "She's my wife, Emery," he said low. "My proper wife."
"Did you love her when she stood between us the year I left?" I asked. "Did you love her when you tied the knot and pressed her hand in another man's?"
Dalton's expression hardened, older than his years. "You know why this is different."
"Then don't ask me to approve her," I said. "I dislike her. She will stay a beauty."
He pressed his fingers to his forehead, frustration small and tight. "You're being petty."
"I'm being honest."
He said, "Fine. We'll leave it. For now."
His hand brushed mine as he left. No apology. No tenderness. Just the last friction of a goodbye.
*
"You're not well," Fleming Gao told me. He was our chief physician, a man with practical eyes and a fondness for bad jokes.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"You look pale. Your pulse is uneven. Your tongue is coated."
"Am I dying?" I asked, though I knew the answer in the way my body dragged me in the mornings.
Fleming stepped back. He is a decent man. "You are with child."
My laugh was small and too bright. "Impossible."
Fleming's hand found mine. "You are very sensitive to small changes. I think you might be pregnant. If so, bless you. Keep quiet."
"Quiet?" I looked at Dalton's empty sleeve. I pictured him smiling in the garden, watching another woman. "If it's Anders's... then what?"
Fleming's face went flush. "Is he—"
"Yes." I closed my eyes. "Anders."
"I will keep your secret," Fleming said. "For a price."
"I will gift you my jade bracelet," I said.
"A fair bargain," he said, and bowed.
That passing moment of helpless hope stole a month of my life.
*
"She's with child," Dalton said when Fleming told him. He told it like he had a blade to bury.
"So?" I asked, blind with something like fear.
"So," Dalton said slowly, "if it's Anders's child, there is a problem."
"What problem?"
"One of three things," Dalton said. "You remove it. You marry me and I accept the child. Or... you run."
I swallowed. "I will not abort Anders's child."
"Then be my wife," Dalton said, hammer and sleep in the same words. "Let me make that child lawful. Let me raise him as my own."
"You want me to be your queen to protect my son?" I laughed at him until I tasted bile.
"Yes," Dalton said. "Yes, exactly."
I studied his face and saw, for a moment, not a king but a man counting losses. I thought of Anders then—Anders with patient hands, Anders who laughed at my worst jokes.
"You are cruel," I said. "And you think I would be grateful."
"You're stupid," he said. "And fragile."
"You forget the seasons I loved Anders," I whispered. "You forget what I lost when he died."
"I do not forget," Dalton said. "I never forgot. I just acted."
"What did you act?" I demanded.
"I acted to protect the realm," he said. "I acted to secure the throne."
"You had my family killed," I said, the words breaking loose like a dam.
Dalton didn't answer at once. He rubbed his cheek, slow with a child's shock. "I did terrible things."
He looked at me then as though he sought approval, or confession. "But I did what I thought was necessary."
"You pinned my father's head up like a warning," I said, lower, and the room grew cold.
"I thought—" he started.
"You thought you could tie ends by breaking the worst tie," I said. "You thought you could burn a house to warm yourself. And you still came to kiss me."
He said nothing. He had no script left.
*
I tried then to do what a woman with a secret must do. I planned. I bribed Fleming. I tried to make my way near the woman he loved. Everyone who helped—every servant, every eunuch—was a spoke in his network. The palace closed like a fist.
"Don't go near her," Dalton warned me. "Do not step into her rooms."
"I will," I said. "Because I am the dowager, and I have that right."
He looked at me with something like pity. "You don't understand what it will mean."
"If I die, I die," I said. "But Anders's blood will live."
He left. He always left when the subject cut too close.
*
But the palace is shrewd and people will sometimes put loyalty on the wrong scale for the wrong coin.
My plan to hurt the other woman failed. I could not even touch the hem of her sleeve. A thousand small hands—Dalton's hands—kept her safe.
I tried bribing Fleming to slip something into her tea. Fleming took the money; he came back with a hymn of reasons. He was loyal to me but also loyal to the world we moved in. He had a house to lose.
"You are asking me to kill a child," Fleming said, and for the first time he looked like a man praying in a quiet place.
"Not yet," I said. "Only a mischance. A fainting. A miscarriage. A reason for her to step back."
Fleming looked at me long. "I am a physician. I will not harm a child."
"Then help me leave this place," I said. "Give me a carriage and a safe road."
His fingers trembled. "You threaten me."
"You will remember the jade bracelet," I said. "And you will get an imperial favor. If you betray me—"
He chose the favor first, as men often do.
One black night I escaped by the back gate. Fleming had arranged a carriage. I had breath of freedom for only a few minutes when the carriage stopped and a man in armor opened the door.
"You are running," the man said with amusement.
"I am leaving," I said.
The door opened wider. Dalton climbed in, smiling like a man who had been waiting at the corner of a rotten secret.
"You would run from me?" he said. "Why so dramatic?"
I tried to laugh. "Because you frighten me."
He leaned close. "I would rather you stay," he whispered. "Stay and we will make this right."
"I will not be your queen by trickery," I said. "If you want my child to live, you should love me."
He looked at me with that look, the one a king uses to choose a path. "Do you hate me so much?"
"I hate you enough to not trust you with my son's blood," I said.
He took my hands. For one terrible second I felt the old thing—attraction, fear, something like tenderness. "Then stay," he said. "Be with me, Emery."
"I would rather break my own bones," I told him.
He carried me to his bedchamber. He held me like a man trying to keep a flame from blowing. He told me he would protect me. He told me he would never hurt my child.
He did all of these and then he did the other.
*
At first I believed Fleming. He said my child was safe. He told me the baby in my belly was a phantom—my brain held its ghost. The night I fell from the dais, when Agn Agneta Lawson shoved me, when blood ran, everything after had melted and broken my sense.
Fleming mended what he could. "You are not with child," he told me one afternoon. "The dreams you have are not uncommon in those who have suffered great shock."
I wanted to believe him. I wanted the story of Anders and me to be a safe truth. I wanted to be the Emery I had been.
Then one night I found the matchsticks—red-lined paper tucked in a drawer. It was a priest's contract: my name and Anders's name on columns, a match to link us. A marriage contract, paper sealed two years ago.
I turned. Dalton stood in the doorway, catching the paper in his hand as if it were a live coal.
"Where did you get that?" he asked.
"Why is our wedding written here?" I demanded.
"It is what it is," he said quietly. "It proves you were his wife."
"In that paper," I said, and my voice quivered, "you said you were his brother."
He smiled, then it became an entirely different expression. "I did what I had to," he said. "I played a part. If I told you everything at once, you'd break."
"Dalton," I said, and my fingers hovered. The room warred inside me. "Who are you?"
"Your husband," he said, plainly. "I am Anders."
The floor dropped to my knees.
"You are not Anders," I shouted. "You are Dalton. You are his brother."
"Anders had a sickness," he said. "He could not be what he needed to be. I—"
"Stop," I said. "Stop inventing excuses."
He stepped forward like a man holding an offering. "Remember this, Emery. I have been without you for years. I came back intending to save you, to save this house. I have done what I must. Do you not see?"
"You burned my family alive," I said.
"I burned what I thought was a threat," he said. "I thought I would save you from a worse end."
I felt something like a smile creep at the corners of my mouth. "You mean to tell me you burnt my father and mother and brother and weighed their heads on poles for my safety?"
"I regret it," he said. "I can never regret it enough."
"Regret?" I echoed, and then I laughed, a thin, broken thing. "You expect me to accept regret, Dalton? You expect me to forgive you because you say the word?"
"I expect you to survive," he said. "I will make you an empress again, Emery. I will give you everything."
"Give me nothing," I said. "Give me proof."
He turned away. "I can't give you that now."
"Then give me his head," I said. "Give me Anders."
"Stop it," he pleaded. "You are not yourself."
"Am I?" I asked. "Am I not the same woman who loved Anders and then lost him? Am I not the one who will take from you what you took from me?"
He tried to close the gap, to hold me, but I ran and found Fleming in the dawn and accused him of betraying me. He did not answer. He only looked at me with the face of a man who had feared, all along, this moment.
"You have been clever," I told him. "You gave me pills that made me see children. You told me I carried life. You let Dalton feed me poison by degrees."
He paled. "No."
"Then why did you lie?" I asked.
"Because I loved you," he said. "I thought if you had a child you would stay. I thought—"
"You thought?" I said. "You thought. You thought."
He put his head in his hands and for the first time I felt pity. "I wanted to keep you alive," he murmured. "I wanted to keep you safe."
"You kept me in a prison of lies," I said. "Now I will break out."
*
I did the one thing a woman in my place can still do. I planned a public undoing.
I rehearsed sentences until they felt like weapons. I ordered servants to clean my face and made sure my robes caught the light like a trap. I told Julian to read names, and to hold his tongue. I told Fleming to do as I asked one last time.
"Are you certain?" Fleming asked, in the inner rooms, hands pale.
"Yes," I said. "The poison is slow. It will make him weak. It will not kill him at once. But I need the stage."
"You're asking for a spectacle."
"I am asking for justice."
On the day I chose, the court was crowded. Ministers, generals, eunuchs and the palace people came because the rumor had spread: the dowager was to speak. The sun was thin and hard as bone.
Dalton arrived, all silk and armor, face made of stone. He moved like a man walking into a trap he had built for someone else.
"Empress Dowager," he said, with a bow that said nothing.
"You will listen to me," I said. My voice was steady. "You will watch me as I undo you."
Dalton smiled. "Undo me? You are unwell."
"Julian," I called. "Read the names."
Julian's voice carried. "First name: Summer Xia—no, agnate records say—"
"Read clearly!" I snapped.
"Records show: the house of Xia, the names charged, crimes found, executed. The date—"
I walked forward. "In the market, on bamboo poles, my father's head hung. My mother's. My brother's. You did this."
Dalton's face flushed. He moved without the ease he practiced. "You cannot prove this."
"Proof?" I lifted my sleeve and let a servant bring forth the letters, the sealed papers Anders once wrote and the labor notes recovered from the execution ground. "Do you remember these? These letters were found in my father's hand when he died."
People who had watched Dalton's rise shifted like a gull tide. Men murmured. Servants took out devices to record with their small glowing boxes. Faces leaned in.
"You killed them," I said. "You labeled them traitors. You told me to ride away, and when I did, you hung their heads."
Dalton tried to laugh. "You wound yourself with illusions, Empress."
"This is not illusion," I said. "This is the truth."
A voice from the crowd: "Is this true?"
Another shout: "Show us the letters!"
Julian displayed them. The seals were there, the marks of court. Men of rank stepped forward and squinted. They knew the handwriting of palace orders; the ink was fresh with the name that mattered: Dalton Montgomery.
His cheeks turned from color to ash. "You set a trap," he spat. "You play games."
"Games?" I said. "When I tell you I fed you your slow medicine, do you deny it?"
"You're a liar!" he cried. "A—"
"Is that all you have?" I said coldly. "Is that the defense you would use for the blood on your hands?"
He stepped closer, furious. "You would bring me low," he said. "You would ruin the throne for a grievance of the heart."
"Yes," I said. "For a grievance of the heart. For my father's head on a bamboo pole. Yes."
He drew his sword then, a ridiculous bright thing, and lifted it as though he might cut the air and silence the room. "Arrest her," he shouted. "Seize the dowager."
"Arrest who?" A captain moved forward, bewildered. Another officer's eyes flicked to the letters, to the crowd, to the faces. The outer courtiers looked at one another for signals.
I watched them and felt power in their hesitation. "Seize one of my accusers," I said. "Seize Julian if you wish. He has the scroll. Put him in irons."
The captain looked at me, then at Dalton, then at the scroll. He swallowed and gestured to the guards. "Men, hold!"
Dalton's hand shook. He lowered his sword.
"Is this the moment?" someone cried. "Is the emperor to be judged?"
"He confessed by ink," a minister said. "We shall not turn away."
Dalton's face was wet with sweat. He looked twenty years older in that instant. He opened his mouth and couldn't find a speech that would fly over the din.
I walked forward slowly, and when I was midway to his dais, Fleming followed me with a small bowl. "Your Highness," he said, and his voice was stage-quiet. "Take this. For your weakness."
Dalton looked at the bowl as if at a pit. "What is this?"
"Your medicine," Fleming said softly. "Your remedy."
He raised the bowl to his lips and drank in front of everyone, a foolish, dangerous thing, because it was the very broth he had drunk nightly.
"Stop him!" Dalton barked suddenly, but it was too late.
He coughed once, twice. The color leaked from his face. He swayed like a tall tree cut at the trunk. Servants reached for him; Julian shouted for help.
"Poison!" someone yelled. "The dowager has poisoned the emperor!"
"Guards!" Dalton bellowed, more animal than man.
And then the world did what I had planned it to do: it turned a gaze upon him.
You cannot hold a crown when every pair of eyes measures its metal and weighs its owner. Men stepped back like a wave hitting cliff.
Dalton tried to speak. His mouth moved. "No—Emery—" he breathed.
"Is he dying?" a woman in the crowd whispered.
"He will live or die by his own sins," I answered.
He clasped at the dais. "You will be tried," he croaked. "You will—"
"Silence!" the senior minister barked. "No one will be killed before the law speaks."
Dalton laughed then, a wet, bitter sound. "Law?" he rasped. "Who will speak for me?"
The crowd closed up. Some wept. Some turned away. A young soldier spat into the dust and cursed the name that had been praised in his ears all his life.
Dalton's body convulsed. He reached out for me with one pale hand. "Why?" he begged, like a pleading child.
I looked at him and for a second, nothing in me wanted the vengeance. I wanted Anders back. I wanted my parents alive. I wanted the kind hand of a man who used to tuck my hair behind my ear.
"Because you put their heads on stakes," I said. "Because you butchered my house and thought you could wear a crown over corpses."
He whimpered and then his eyes flew open one last time. They did not plead anymore. They only looked at me as if at a stranger who had done him a deed beyond imagining.
Then he slumped.
He was not dead yet when they carried him out. He would be put in irons, placed before the council, and later, because justice in our court is not efficient but it is public, he would be tried. I had given the court the evidence and the spectacle. I had given the people the ribbon they needed to pull the emperor down.
The punishment that followed was slow and didn't catch a breath for half an hour, then another, and then an eternity.
When the ministers read his mounts of orders—signed in his hand, stained with the red of execution—men gasped. The generals who had once saluted him hung their heads. Women in the galleries sobbed aloud. Scribes scratched as if their pens could unwrite the past.
Dalton was brought back into the hall on a litter, pale and chastened. Men who a week before would have died for a nod from his lips now pushed and elbowed to be the ones to restrain him. They offered no consolations.
"Emery," he whispered. "You have done it."
"Tell the people why you did it," I demanded.
"Because I had to," he said. "Because I had to hold the realm—"
"You held it with butchered heads and false oaths," I said. "You built your throne on ash."
He closed his eyes. "I thought it would make us safe," he said. "I thought the world would end otherwise."
"No," I said. "You made the world end."
The trial was a spectacle of humiliation. Men who had once bowed as he walked in bowed to the letters he had penned; those letters became evidence and his chains a new crownless ring.
They stripped him of his silk. They walked him through the markets with placards, his crimes read aloud. People spat where his carriage had passed. Children laughed as if at a story. Women unfurled the banners he had once raised.
He stood there while the crowd sorted him into a shape they could hate. He tried to explain. He tried to cry. He tried to bargain. When he reached for me, the captain shoved him back.
"Do you beg forgiveness?" a minister asked in the square.
"No," he said. "Yes." His words were little stones thrown without force.
The crowd threw the stones back at him.
"Say it," they shouted. "Admit. Admit it."
"I am sorry," he rasped finally, but the words were hollow as church bells.
"Not enough!" a voice shouted. "Not enough!"
They led him to the place of condemnation. It was public. The palace folk, the merchants, the soldiers—even the visiting minor nobility—had come to witness the collapse. They watched as they tied him to a post and read off his sentences.
I stood there and watched their faces. They stared at him and then at me—some in pity, some in fear, some in a strange satisfaction. The city had been fed drama and now it was digesting the consequences.
Dalton hung his head while they read out the names of those he had killed. He had no last words of kindness. He had no defiant charge. Only a lined face and the ragged breath of the man who had once worn the sun.
When it was done—when the last rope was cut and the last verdict declared—I stepped forward. I had planned to leave him there; leave justice to finish. But the sight of him, broken and alive because of my method, unmade whatever tiny shard of pardon still sat in me.
"You have blood on your hands," I said in a voice so even it frightened the listeners. "You have turned love into weapon. For that there is no answer but to be known for it."
He looked up at me. "Do you hate me?" he whispered.
"I loved you as the weather loves the sun," I said. "You stole everything and called it law."
He swore, then, to his last. "I never stopped—"
"Stop," I said. "Stop."
And then I turned and walked away.
*
They called me the youngest dowager after. They called me cruel. They called me mad. They called me many things that morning and that afternoon, when Dalton was carried off into the place where men pay for kingship sins.
But for the market people whose fathers had been conscripted into the schemes, for the mothers whose letters he had burned, I had delivered a day of judgment. For me, it was both a victory and a ruin.
At the funeral of the late Anders—who had been my husband in truth and not in court history—I kissed the linen that had warmed his face. I burned incense until the smoke hid the gilt of the palace.
"Why did you do it?" a child asked me in the crowd.
"Because some things are not forgiven," I said.
"And now?"
"Now I keep the childless cradle warm," I answered.
Julian came to my side and whispered, "People will talk. They will say you are a monster."
"Let them," I said. "Monsters keep what's left of us sometimes."
That night, I stroked the empty linen. I did not dream of Dalton. I did not dream of Anders. I dreamed instead of a child I never had—small hands that would never reach for me.
"Damn you," I whispered into the dark. "Damn us all."
The next morning the palace woke and the sun rose and men adjusted their collars. Life flowed like water over stone, smoothing and forgetting.
I wore my robe and went to the hall. There were petitions to sign and people to discipline. My hands shook sometimes, but they did their work. Justice in a court is a grinding wheel. Sometimes it makes diamonds. Sometimes it makes blood.
I walked the corridors with Fleming at my side. He had changed. He looked hollowed out, like a man who had pressed his thumb to a small coal and found the heat had burned part of him clean away.
"You will be remembered," he said slowly.
"I will be remembered," I agreed. "And they will say I was beautiful for a while, and then they will say I was ruin."
He bowed. "If you need aid—"
"I will need no help," I said. "I will need quiet and a ledger."
He smiled sadly. "Then go and sign the papers."
*
The world is not clean. You cannot take back any of it. My enemies were punished; my child never was. I kept the title and the weight. I kept the memory of Anders folded like a note in my sleeve, warm and secret.
People came to me looking for favor. They came to me with petitions and grievances and stories of injustice. I heard them all. I punished who I had to and spared who might yet be useful.
Sometimes, when rain came and the palace stones steamed, I would think the picture of Dalton flayed by his own choices would be enough.
But at night, sometimes, when the moon wavered and the courtyards were quiet, I would see him—not the man of the public square, but Anders's eyes reflected on a stranger's face. I would fling a cup at the screen and laugh, and then I would sleep like someone who had survived a war.
"Emery," someone would call. "Dowager."
"Yes," I would say. "I will go." And I would, because there was always a duty, and duties make the living keep on.
The End
— Thank you for reading —