Rebirth17 min read
I Was Supposed to Be a Shield — So I Became a Sword
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I woke to the sound of crying that had no business being mine to hear.
"Why are you still crying?" someone wailed. "Who taught you to make such a noise?"
"Quiet! Quiet!" an officious voice snapped, and the wailing turned into ritual laments — the practiced, mechanical grief that everybody in court had learned to show when the occasion demanded it.
I opened my eyes and I was not in my bed. I was floating above my own life, or what remained of it. The room was a black-and-white hall of mourning: paper banners, a table of offerings, a brazier with smoke that tasted like each lie I had been forced to swallow. People in mourning clothes thumped the floor with their foreheads in a beat that was more performance than sorrow. I could not feel my throat with which I had once laughed, sung, and begged; I could not wrench my hands from the ropes of emptiness that bound me to this place.
"Look," one of the women near the catafalque said, loud enough for everyone to hear, "she died with an arrow through her breast. So tragic."
"Ah, poor Consort Ye," another sniffed. "She saved the Emperor."
Saved the Emperor. The words hit me like a second arrow.
He was there, in a dragon robe of gold that ate the light in the hall. Gavin Price — my cousin and the man who had worn a crown the way a thief wears stolen silk — stepped toward the ancestral tablet. He placed his incense with a slow, ceremonial hand. He looked like he had practiced compassion a dozen times a day and had learned the smile that said, Sorry I hurt you, now story over.
"Emmalynn," he murmured. "You laid down your life for me. For this nation. Your sins are forgiven."
Forgiven. Forgiven by the same man who had used me as a shield.
I remembered the spear. I remembered the manic scream as the arrow parted air and my ribs. I remembered him pulling me forward — his hand like a rope — so that I would take the blow in his place. I remembered blood on my face, the world tilting into a tunnel of hot, slow pain. I remembered waking up to whips and cold needles and laughter that tasted like metal just before the last breath.
"How dare he," I wanted to say. "How dare he call this forgiveness."
I tried to move, to shout, to throw my body at him. My teeth chattered. Nothing emerged. I watched, demonlike, as everyone bowed and spun the lie into a narrative nobody would challenge. My eyes were hot with a need that was not grief; it was appetite, it was rage.
"He used me as a shield," I thought, my spirit grinding like a whetstone. "He pushed me forward. He let me die."
They wept. They smeared ash and pretended the tears were real. My mother — Victoria Abbott, the Empress Dowager — dabbed at her eyes with the perfumed handkerchief of a woman who had long since learned what cruelty could look like when wrapped in kindness.
"You did the right thing, my child," she said aloud, voice a silk trap. "You restored balance. You died well."
I wanted to spit. I wanted to tear down the silk. "Do not call this right," I wanted to tell her. "She poisoned me. She smiled as I burned."
But I had no body to speak with. I flung my ghost-self forward and the world folded like paper. Then something like a decision was made beyond grief and pain, and wind forced me back into the only place where vengeance could be born: a waking flesh.
I opened my eyes again.
A mirror showed me skin that had not been carved by an executioner's tang. Fingers — mine — whole and long. My throat did not ache with the taste of iron. The room smelled of warm broth, not the old stuff of ghosts. I looked down. My hands trembled with a trembling that was not from death.
"I lived," I whispered. "I am back."
Two months before my wedding. Two months before the ceremony that had sealed the chain of conspiracies. Two months before the bowl was forced to my lips. Two months before an arrow would find the place Gavin had wanted to preserve. I had been given a lifetime's second chance in the time it takes for an incense stick to burn.
"Master Lin," a voice that had belonged to a woman who had once been kind and then become a rat with lace — Sandra Franke, the housekeeper who had followed my childhood, but had eyes now like a hawk — entered with a basin. "Lady, you will be chilled without the tonic. Drink. The Empress Dowager insists."
"Let it be," the nurse lied. "Doctor says it will warm you."
I sat up, the memory of last life like a stone at my chest. My body did not know how to protest, but my mind had learned the shapes of violence. I looked at the cup with calm, and the world held its breath.
"Don't you dare," I told myself. "Not this time."
When my hand touched the cup, I did not drink. My servant Joselyn Huber — the girl who had been beaten to death in the memory that had haunted me — looked at me with sucking-in-of-lips fear. She had returned to me as if Fate had a sense of cruel humor. For once, I wanted to shelter rather than hurt.
"Impatient?" I heard a voice at the doorway.
He had the gravity of men who were carved to rule. Gavin Price filled the doorway like a portrait moved into the world. His eyes flicked over my face and the old, slow amusement I had seen a hundred times now touched his mouth.
"I came to check on you. They said you had a fever," he said, mild as a dove and cold as a winter night. "You look...better."
"You always come," I said. "To watch. To decide what I am allowed to be."
He smiled in a way that hid teeth. "Why so sharp, sweetheart? You insult my presence?"
I could have lied. I could have let the old smile pet the wound and let the cycle go on. But I had seen my own body in a casket. I had watched the way they wrote my death into righteousness. There was no indulgence left.
"You pushed me forward," I said, my voice flat like a blade. "You watched me bleed. You called it sacrifice."
Gavin's face tightened. "Those are ugly words."
"Are they?" I asked. "They are true."
He stepped closer, ignoring the curtains drawn tight, the servants who had learned to keep just the right distance. He reached for my hand — as if his hand could stitch up memory — and I slapped him so hard his cheek flashed red.
It landed with a sound that made the room inhale. "You slapped me," he breathed, so astonished his voice trembled.
"I did," I said. "Do you know how it feels to watch a curtain sewn into your gut? Do you know how it looks when people call you a saint and you know they are lying? You owe me an answer."
He pressed his fingertips against the stinging place and then laughed, sharp and ugly. "You will pay for that insolence."
"No," I said. "You will answer."
"Answer what? How I kept you alive? How I made you royal? I am the Emperor."
"You made me a corpse for show."
He moved to speak, lips forming a hundred practiced sentences, and I watched them collapse and shape into fury. "You be careful," he hissed.
"Make me quiet," I said. "Make me lovely. Put the cross of gratitude on my chest."
He might have had me killed then. He might have burned the palace down and pretended I had died in the fire. He had the means, and a crown will always protect the hand that spills the blood of those nobody would miss. But he did not kill me, because he needed me as a piece on a board. Slowly, carefully, the Emperor bowed his head as if the weight of my words was heavier than his pride.
"Bring me the register," he commanded, forcing a laugh he did not mean, "and put her under gentle watch."
The words felt like silk and shame. They meant a reprieve, not safety. I let the dismissal pass. I would not be kept docile like a flower in crystal. I had come back to rearrange iron.
I learned that living in a court is to live underwater, hearing everything muffled until you remember what you say in your own head and whisper it to the one person you trust.
"Grey," I said one night, whispering through a half-closed door, "come here."
Grey Maier was quiet as a kept secret. He wore the color of the inner palace and a look of someone who had survived more tricks than sorrow in his time. He had been the boy who once watered the orchids and who had been fierce enough to stand up to those who loved to torment him. He knelt when I motioned. He knelt because he had chosen to kneel to me, not to the crown that looked at him and saw only a servant.
"You're awake early," he said, his voice a thin thread of sound.
"I am awake for everything now," I said. "I remember the taste of all of it. The hurt, the lies. The bowl, the sickening smell of it." I almost retched. "If you want to keep serving me, Grey, you must be willing to do something I have never asked of anyone before."
"What?" he asked. He had a quietness like a blade on a counter.
"Bring me ink and paper. And you will tell me who arrives here and why. You will listen. You will watch. And if anyone reaches to undo my life, you will tell me at the first breath."
He bowed. "As you command, Lady."
"Call me Emmalynn."
He chuckled. "As you command, Emmalynn."
The palace is a place of small violences. Food arrives late. Servants whisper of bargains. Nurses bring tonics and wash them down with the same hands that braid your hair. There are a thousand little betrayals a woman can survive if she believes them to be accidents. But I had tasted the edge of my body in a coffin and I had come back to choose which accidents to allow and which to turn into strategy.
"Why do they hate you?" Joselyn asked once, a hand pressed to my sleeve. "Why did they do that to you before? Why did they—"
"Because they are cowards and because my good name made them feel small. Because men like Gavin Price will use women like me as cover when it suits them."
"Then you will not be alone," she said, fiercely. "They will pay."
"Not everyone deserves the sword," I said. "Some people only need their masks ripped off."
For weeks I learned the rhythm of the court again like a foreign language. I let the world believe me mild so I could listen. I allowed the Empress Dowager's gifts and the Emperor's smiles because I wanted to see who flinched when I did not. I noticed Jade Duffy, who laughed like a string of pearls but whose tongue was a poison. She had been the woman who had said things in corridors about what I could not bear. She hunted favors with a brightness that never reached her eyes.
"She said you cannot bear children," Jade said in a salon left open for gossip and for poison. "How unfortunate, dear."
"Our bodies are private," I said.
Jade smiled as if she had thought of a joke. "Not in the palace."
I could have let it slide. So many small arrows have to be accepted before a woman gets used to blood in her mouth. But she had been the one who spread the lie that became my prison. She had alchemized cruelty into rumor. She had planted the seed of the bowl's acceptance.
"Why don't you come closer and tell me what else you dream of?" I asked her, the words soft as boiling sugar.
She stepped toward me, arrogance in high heels. "Pretty things do not grow on you."
"Not as many as I plan to make them," I said. "Remember that."
Not long after, my chance arrived.
There was a ceremony in the main hall — a banquet that the Empress Dowager had arranged, ostensibly to celebrate the Empress' pregnancy. I had been coaxed to attend because the court loved a spectacle that could distract. The whole palace glittered: embroidered robes, incense, lacquer and gold. Everyone wanted to be remembered for being near a triumph. I wanted to be remembered for unmaking one.
"Emmalynn," Gavin said from across the table, "we are celebrating. Have you anything to say in honor of the queen?"
I took my cup, felt the weight of my second life pouring warmth into my fingers. "I do." I stood. I let my voice fill every corner the way a bell will fill a monastery. "I would like to raise my glass to the future of the crown. May the child to be born bring peace."
People clapped with the practiced applause of those who never mean it. The Empress smiled with porcelain patience. Somewhere in a corner, Jade Duffy's face twitched.
Then I asked for a favor. "May the court be permitted to read a truth?"
They blinked as if truth had been introduced into the room like an unwelcome guest.
"Fine," Gavin said, trying to make the moment funny. "You will embarrass us, dear? Go on."
"You will see." I had Grey Maier bring a slender scroll from the inner room while everyone watched the farce. He had taken it from the box where I had kept notes last life, a foolish little jar of memories I had hidden under the tapestries. On it were the names and the events — the reliance on a bowl, the recipe for the drink that made me barren, the signatures of those who had consented. I had proof of the past because I had never let it leave my mind. I had made Grey take cautious steps beyond his station to keep paper from sleeping in the wrong hands.
I unrolled the scroll.
"Read," I told the assembly. "Read the list of who instructed the 'tonic' that took my chance to be a mother. Read who wrote the letter that disguised a medicine as a blessing."
An old scribe stammered and then read. He read the way a man reads a death sentence written on sugar. He read my name and the names of those who had smiled at me as I withered.
"Victoria Abbott," he read out, and the Empress Dowager's hand trembled on her fan. "Grant Cao," he read, and my father's face went numb as if someone had pressed a cold palm to his heart. "Gavin Price," he said, and the Emperor's jaw flexed like a hinge.
A murmur became a storm.
"You lie," Gavin snapped. "All this is false. Who forged this script?"
"Who else had access to the prescription?" I demanded. "Who else would stand to gain from my silence?"
"You would ruin a dynasty." He smiled as he said it. Then the smile fell into the first stage of a different emotion: "stage one: smug."
"How dare you!" Victoria hissed, clutching the fan like a talisman.
"Stage two: confusion," I thought, watching their faces. "Stage three: denial."
"Fabricated! Faked! Treachery!" Grant Cao cried, voice high as a violin string.
"No," I said. "Stage four: it is the moment their practiced faces loosen. You see the first quiver. You hear them stammer."
"Give me back that scroll!" Gavin bellowed.
"Who would forge your handwriting?" I asked, colder than winter. "Who would plant the idea in your head that I must be made useless as a breeder so you can rule unthreatened? Who told the cooks to call it a tonic?"
"Listen to them," I said loudly, "people of the court, scribes and guards. Watch how quickly a family's honest greed cloaks itself in honor."
There was a sound like wind in leaves — the crowd leaning forward to listen. Pots clinked, a cup fell. The court's chatter turned to a scrape of wet nails on wood. Someone — an old lady from the grooms' quarter — covered her mouth and began to weep. Papers were taken from hands and passed along like the plague.
"Stop this," Victoria shrieked. "How dare you call my name!"
"You want to know who forced me to drink a poison and called it medicine?" I asked. The Emperor's face had gone pale as linen. He had been the final hand on my casket, the man who might order the town to sigh and call my murder a ritual. His pride had made him believe he could always set the terms. "Let us hear the truth."
An attendant stepped forward, a thin, trembling man with ink on his fingers. He had been a clerk for the house where the herbs were mixed. "I... I remember writing the list, my lady," he whispered. "The order was signed. The bowl's preparation was described in detail. Her name was crossed with... with a royal sigil."
"Stop!" Gavin said. "You will spread lies and you will be punished for defamation."
"Stage five," I thought, "the breakdown." Where a leopard might have launched, Gavin's hands began to shake. He clutched the edge of the table, the gold thread digging into his palms.
"You cannot smear me!" he roared. "You would have me go down as a monster. Take her away. Enough."
"Not before the court," I said. "Not before the people who stood with fanfare and turned away while I died. Not when they lift my name into a sermon."
A loud voice — one of the palace scribes — raised a petition. "Let it be recorded," he cried. "Let all that was written be copied to the royal archive. Let the ministers see this."
"No!" Victoria said again, but she no longer moved like the commander of fates. She moved like a woman spun in a trap. She had been the source of my 'tonic', the kiss of venomed care, the one who had wrapped cruelty in a mother's guise. And the crowd's eyes bored into her. They had the hunger of people hearing scandal that would make them feel something real for once. They leaned in.
"You lied," I said. "You signed that paper with your own flourish, Victoria. You wrote 'to ensure dynasty stability' — you believed that was a euphemism for killing my offspring."
She found a rope to hold, a line of denial. "I only sought what was best for the family! For the realm!"
"Then slay yourself with your own devotion." The words came out like knives. "Tell the people whose hearts you cared for so much that you were careful to make me childless for them. Tell them how noble you're willing to be."
The crowd's mood shifted. Scarcely anyone could be called 'loyal' when witness to betrayal of a beloved woman. A dozen murmurs became a roar. Someone clapped — one hand only — and then another. People took out their cloths and began to write, not with cameras, but with the surety of ink that carries farther than rumor.
Gavin's face had gone through the five stages all in one breath. He had begun smug, because he always thought himself untouchable. Then confusion, because paper and papermen were harder to spin than a whispered lie. Then denial, because kings are trained to deny before they think. Then shock, as the scribe read the facts back at the man who had stolen them with a mother's smile. Finally, collapse: he sank onto the throne's edge like a man who had had his world play a trick on him.
"No," he said, small and raw. "This cannot be. I did not—"
"You did," I said. "You and your mother and my father; you conspired while you smiled. You dressed guilt up as sacrifice and made me the altar."
The Emperor's roar turned to a noise that sounded suspiciously like a child's plea. He fell to his knees where the marbled floor shone. His robe crumpled. "Please," he begged, the word as small as dust. "Please, Emmalynn — please do not ruin my rule."
People murmured into their sleeves. An old woman in the third row began to clap, and the sound was not obscene; it was the thunder of satisfaction. A young soldier whispered and then raised his head with eyes like river stones. A party of scholars moved forward, not to defend him, but to steal the document and carry it to their record. There were no phones or cameras, but information in a palace moves like wildfire: the scribes will copy, the scholars will deliver transcriptions to the ministerial gates, the rumor-cryers will shout it across the market.
Gavin's face slid through states like a mask being peeled. He peered into me and tried to find a remnant he could hold: "You would shame the throne for pride!" he shouted. "You would unmake the dynasty because of a grudge!"
"Because of the truth," I said. "Because I will not give you my silence. Because I will not be made into a virtue so you can sleep."
He tried to rise. He failed. Then he crawled forward with hands that had once ordered lords to die. He looked down at me — the woman he'd used — and his voice cracked.
"Please," he said again, louder. Now there was no performance in it, only a man bared in the presence of a storm. "Please, Emmalynn, I can fix this. I can amend. I was... I was misguided."
People around us began to record the moment with the instruments they had: a court artist made a small painting; a scribe began to take down every breath and gesture. Women in the gallery gasped. A few people started to take notes that would reach the palace gates and the marketplaces. Voices raised. Someone shouted, "Arrest them!" Others whispered, "No, don't. The dynasty—"
Gavin's shoulders trembled. "I am sorry," he said, the words tumbling free like someone who had been made to stand naked in winter. He looked as if his spine had been taken, and all that remained was hunger.
"Beg," I told him, because I had watched kings in books and discovered their most human superstition: they never beg. When they do, they have lost something too dangerous for rulers to lose. I would not let him keep his dignity this time.
Gavin sank lower until his forehead touched the floor. "Forgive me," he breathed, and the court's breath stopped like a string cut.
The spectacle was not merely my satisfaction. It was a public undoing: the Empress Dowager's face paled; my father Grant Cao covered both hands over his mouth as if to muffle the sound of his own name; Jade Duffy hid her face and then started to whimper. The men who had taken my life in the name of security saw their illusions unravel and their skin become thin. Some among the crowd cheered; some wailed. One of the more practical ministers immediately ordered a seal to be placed on the record; another shouted for justice to follow the facts.
"They begged," I said, loud and slow. "They begged, and they will be judged."
Gavin's knees shook. His big hands clawed the floor. "Please," he said, fragile, "do not strip me publicly. I will step down, I will retire, I will be quiet. I will go home. Just do not humiliate me."
"Humiliation is the smallest of your debts," I told him. "Justice is the only currency left."
They removed the Emperor's signet from the ceremonial table that day. The nobles recorded testimonies. The city was whispering when the gates closed. It would take months for the scandal to settle, years to be written into law. But the important thing had happened: a man who had thought himself immortal had been made to unravel in front of his people, and the people had seen it.
"You are cruel," Victoria hissed.
"No," I said simply. "I am mindful."
That day, the palace found its records changed. Gavin Price never again wore his arrogance quite so openly. When people said my name afterwards, it was with a new tone between laudation and fear.
I did not gloat long. There was still the matter of a court that would require me to play a role: the widow who had saved the Emperor, the lady who had lost her chance to mother a child. I would use that role because what I had learned in the casket was not revenge as an explosion, but revenge as weather: slow, patient, and inevitable.
"Grey," I said later, when the moon hung over the palace like a pale coin, "you saw everything today. Will you keep it secret?"
He looked at me with the eyes of someone who had seen worse and decided to act better. "I will keep things that need keeping," he said.
"Then we begin again," I said.
The next months became a chessboard. I let the Emperor have his public penance and his private memory of his own humiliation. I let my father wring hands and make offers that were measuredly small. I let the Empress's allies believe that time would smooth wounds. All the while, I wove a network of truths: petitioners who had been bought and silenced were brought back to the record; corroded recipes for medicines were examined; the accounts of those who had prepared the bowl were recorded in my hand and in others'.
I surrounded myself with the brave and the honest: Joselyn, who had returned to me as a living, watchful helper; Hailey Gauthier, my old childhood hairdresser now assigned to me again, who could carry messages in the curl of a braid; Sandra Franke, who had never been utterly loyal but whose love of luxury could be steered; and Grey Maier, whose steadfastness could make a palace tremble.
We moved like a tide. When conspirators tried to plant more stories, a letter would arrive on a scribe's desk with the sort of detail that could only be honest: names, dates, witnesses. When insult was flung at my face, the thrower found themselves called to account by a minister who could not be bought.
Once, in the mouth of winter, Jade Duffy came into the corridor and tried to silk-speak me into a corner.
"Dearest," she said, chin high, needing an audience. "Anyone can make a story about...pain. You make too much noise."
"Noise is what wakes people," I said. "We are not here to sleep when we should fight."
She laughed, a sharp, brittle sound. "Men will always fear what they cannot bottle. You will tire."
"Then I will not tire," I said. "I have been carved, crushed, and sewn. I should be grateful for the chance to become whole again."
When I finally stood at the window that looked on the city, a month after the public disgrace, I felt the palace breathing differently. People spoke my name not as an epithet but with an eye toward something like respect. Not all things were fixed; the world is heavier than one scandal. But the scale had tilted.
"Emmalynn," Grey said from the doorway. "A courier has come from the western provinces. He brings a petition regarding the merchant guild, claiming partisan interference."
I turned. "Then we will read it."
"Does it bother you, sometimes?" Joselyn said later as she smoothed the cuff of my sleeve, "that they will always be able to say, 'Ah yes, the woman Emperor's fault'?"
"It will bother them more," I answered. "They will spend their lives trying to clean the face of a man whose hands will always be stained. My job is not to erase trace. My job is to make them count for every ledger that needs balancing."
The palace, for all its gilding and craft, remained a place where small human acts determined great fates. I continued to laugh, to be icy, to be generous when I chose. I let the rumor of my barrenness become an instrument on the table between us: men who thought me weak were more likely to underestimate me in the next round.
When summer came again, a public hearing was held for those accused of scheming. The square filled. The scrolls were read aloud. Gavin observed from a distance, a humbled figure who still held a throne but whose temper had been rattled by the public mirror.
"Because of you," he said once in a private moment, his voice a pale reed, "the court has more eyes."
"And because of you," I answered, "they have fewer illusions."
I did not seek his ruin. I sought his recognition that my life mattered beyond his convenience.
In the quiet hours of the night when the palace slept and the torches had guttered low, Grey would bring me the last of his reports and sit. He would fold his hands and say, "I never thought to serve anyone and mean it, Emmalynn."
"You serve because you choose to," I told him. "That is the noblest kind of service."
And in that, I found something like peace. I had been taken to the brink of death to be a symbol. I reclaimed the symbol and made it a weapon: truth.
When the story is told of me in kitchens and courtyards, it will be told in two halves: the half that paints me as a martyr, and the half that remembers how I made men kneel by showing them their own reflections. They will say I was cruel to do it. I will smile from whatever corner of the world hears me.
"You wanted to be remembered," Grey said once.
"I wanted them to know," I answered. "There is a difference."
I was not naive enough to believe the palace could be purified in a single season. But I had the steadiness now that comes from having seen the edge. I had the patience it takes to set a slow, precise fire.
That night, as the moon wrote its pale hand across the palace, I placed both hands on the sill and watched the city breathe. It had won my patience and my cunning, and I had claimed it in return.
It had been two marriages ago, two deaths ago. I had been dragged to a casket and told my end. Instead, I had been given the single most dangerous thing in the world: time.
"I will not be your shield again," I whispered to the quiet.
"No more shields," Grey replied from the dark, and I felt the old terror lift. The world was large, and the court was wide, and the knives were many. But my hands were ready now—and they would be the ones to choose where to strike.
The End
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