Revenge13 min read
I Was the Favored Daughter — Until They Brought a "Princess" Home
ButterPicks12 views
I was raised as the only daughter who mattered. The palace always felt like my skin—tight, familiar, protected. I learned early how the silk rustled, how footmen timed their bows to my laughter, how my father, the Emperor Cruz Roux, would incline his head just so when I entered a hall. They told me I was loved without measure.
Then one spring, they carried another girl into the palace and called her "returned." They called her Isabelle Vieira. They put her in gilded robes and named her "Princess Lean" in the court announcements. They gave her a palace, a title, an audience with my father that lasted longer than any of my childhood lessons. Everyone smiled at her.
"She looks like a poem," one court lady said as they led her past my chambers. "So gentle, so perfect."
I watched her smile. I watched her tread as if the tiles belonged only to her feet. And I watched the way my father looked—not the way he had always looked at me. The look had the same warmth but now it spread across another place at the table.
I remember the afternoon my sleeve lifted and the heirloom my mother had left me—an ivory comb, threaded with my mother's hair—was found crushed on the floor. I remember my hands, empty. I remember Isabelle at the foot of the dais, picking at a tea pet, smiling a small, slow smile.
"How careless," she murmured when others gasped.
"I didn't touch it," I said.
"She was always so quick with excuses," someone whispered.
My father did not listen. He saw the world through the new lens of a daughter returned, a debt repaid. He called me stubborn. He lifted a thin, wooden ruler and struck my palm ten times across the courtyard while servants watched and men whispered. The pain was a clean, physical thing that grounded me. When the ruler fell, I lifted my face to him.
"You will learn," he said. "You will learn to be gentle and useful."
"You believe her before me," I told him, though the ruler had already left a white ring on my palm where the blood had not come.
"She is your sister now," he said, "and the court will not be cruel in celebrating her."
Weeks bled into rumor. People said my name with different tones. Some pitied me, some watched for my collapse. They said I had been jealous and cruel. They said I had forced the newcomer down the steps, though I had merely argued. They said many things I had not done. Those words were knives dressed in silk.
"Elias," I told my tutor one night, the map of characters of the court spread open and useless on his table. "He will not believe me."
Elias Garnier lifted his tea, the lamplight making a small moon on the liquid. "He will believe what he hears," he said, "but not everything has to be believed forever."
"You do not understand," I said. "He used to be my shield."
"He still is a shield," Elias said quietly, "but a shield passed between two hands now. That is a skill of statesmen, not of fathers alone."
"Then teach me to be more than a spoiled daughter," I said.
Elias's voice was patient. "You can be a leader who knows how to be loved and how to rule. Learn, Corinna. Learn why people believe lies."
When Elias left the court in his official rounds, I thought he had abandoned me. He did not. He came around the edges of court whispers and taught me restraint by example. He refused to be dragged into dramas. He refused to kneel for any rumor. Once he said to me, "If they throw mud, let them. Then build a wall."
It was ironic, then, that the man I cared for, the one who had always seen me, became the wedge. Elias was not the only man who mattered. Kingston Ash had been my friend since childhood, a grin on a bad day, the only person who could make me laugh when everything inside me tightened like a coiled spring. He came to my rooms after the ruler incident with a wild look and a handful of rice cakes.
"You burned my things," I told him a few days later after the ash had cooled in a bronze bowl.
"You were too fine to keep," he said, snapping the lid to the box. "Old jewelry like that makes you think you can float. Let the world keep its dainty things. We'll go see what's real."
"You'll follow me if I leave?" I asked.
He looked at me as if I had suggested the simplest of plans, like stealing fruit from a terrace. "Where you go, I go. Don't make it dramatic."
I left the palace with a small retinue and a heart full of splintered things. Father let me go as if pushing me down a stair I must learn to climb. The world outside the palace was loud. Flood waters sank villages in the south. Rice fields were mud, and the people who knelt to eat their fill with trembling hands looked different from the court poets who wrote elegant odes to spring.
"We need grain moved north," the county magistrate, Frank Gomez, told me when I insisted on meeting officials. "Our roads are cut. People are dying."
"Then we move grain," I said. "Tell me which caravans to send. I will not be content to be an ornament."
Frank's brows lifted. "You're serious."
"I was a spoiled child," I said. "I will stop wearing the word 'spoiled' like armor."
We worked. I walked among the injured, rubbed ointment into sores, and watched a child ask me if the stories about daughters of the throne were true. They said we could drop gold and watch them fight for it like crows. I found that the farther I walked, the less I cared about who had schemed against me.
"It will be good for you to see the world," Kingston said, handing me a ladle of thin soup.
"It hurts," I admitted. "It hurts that I could have known none of this."
"It hurts because now you see past the silk," he said. "You used to be a garden only. Now you are a field."
Months passed in action, not in the soft blanket of the palace. We fixed levees, moved grain, taught villagers ways to boil water so their children would not fall sick. I stopped counting the tremble in my hands and started counting the number of people who actually smiled at the sight of clean porridge. It was strange, the way a small bowl of porridge could be more precious than a jeweled cup.
Back in the capital, a storm was building. Isabelle's wedding to Elias—no, wait—Elias was not the groom. I had once hoped Elias might choose to be more, but he had chosen the crown's obligations first. The prince's seat in court required a certain distance. He was proud, and I am proud enough to know that some things cannot be asked.
When I learned that Isabelle's marriage to a powerful court family was being prepared, I felt my teeth sharpen. "We must go back," I told Kingston. "Not to beg or to weep, but to find out who placed this woman where she stands."
"We go as traders," Kingston said with a smirk. "We walk unnoticed."
We returned in the disguise of merchants. I wore plain cloth and no hairpins. In the crowd of ten thousand, I watched the palace welcome the new daughter with music and red. The city was a river of voices. Then, at the center, the wedding tents opened like a mouth. Soldiers moved in the periphery as if rehearsed for a play.
"Here?" Kingston whispered.
"Here," I said.
At the precise moment when the ceremony should have felt the brightest, chaos erupted. Soldiers, many of them wearing the emperor's crest, poured into the courtyard. Men in armor closed ranks. A voice shouted, and the name Dominick Jonsson thundered through the tent like a drumbeat.
"Dominick Jonsson!" I called, standing on the steps, the plain cloth a sudden banner.
Everything turned sharp. Faces swung toward me with the astonished emptiness of people seeing something impossible. Isabelle's face was a mask of confusion and fear; she tore at her bridal veil as if it might peel the truth away. Dominick's jaw clenched as his plan cracked.
"You called me 'son' for years," Dominick shouted when his voice could find purchase again. "You fed me court favor, and I repaid you with what you deserved."
"Dominick," I said, and let my voice be smooth as a knife. "You raised a girl not of the blood to be your blade. You placed her in the halls of my fathers and taught her to smile like a queen. You drew the map and sent pawns. Why?"
He laughed, a sound too loud for the crimson silence. "Because this land needed new blood," he said. "Because the throne invited a different path."
"You will stand trial," a commander said, but it was not the commander who sealed his fate. It was the press of the crowd and the sight of Isabelle's fingers, which were not the hands of a sickly foundling but strong and callused like a person who trained with a sword.
"She was swapped," I said. "A child swapped. The real daughter died. You built a life on a lie."
Eyes widened. Voices rose. The court, which had once gathered to gossip about me, now had blood on its hand. The truth landed like a pebble in a quiet pond; everyone watched the ripples.
"Isabelle," I said to her, softer now. "Do you know what you are? Are you stunned to learn you have been someone else all your life?"
She looked at me as if seeing me for the first time and then at Dominick, and then her expression shifted through all the phases of grief—shock, denial, rage, and a frantic pleading. "No—no, you're wrong—" she cried.
"Then why did you set fires when I left?" I asked. "Why did you climb the steps to the temple with a false tear for public sympathy? Why did you train when they said no girls trained? Why did you corner the man who would have been mine and twist his head until he knelt?"
She flailed then, like a trapped animal. "He promised me—" she cried. "You stole from me."
"Stole?" a minister echoed. "You cannot steal what never belonged to you."
The crowd had gathered so close that breath mixed with breath. Someone in the crowd, a young scribe, pulled out a wooden tablet and began to scratch down the names and facts as they snapped into place. Another person reached for a harp to drown out the rising din; a miller pounded his fist into his palm, then covered his mouth in shock when he realized what his action might cause.
Dominick's face had gone from composed to caved in. He stared at the assembled soldiers and the emperor, who stood suddenly very still and very old.
"You—" Dominick started, then faltered. His confidence unraveled into disbelief. "You set me up. You used whispers."
I let the silence hold for a beat before speaking again. "You set everything in motion to remove the one person who could see through you. You replaced a dead child so you could place a living blade. You thought the palace would never look deeper."
The spectacle had become a theater of faces. Burgers, scribes, servants, noble ladies; they all leaned forward. The courtyard had become a chorus of watchers.
Dominick's smile cracked like painted porcelain. "You can't—"
"You will be taken to the hall," the captain said. "You will answer for treason."
He spat at me, but even the act looked small under the weight of what had been exposed.
Isabelle's transformation during that moment was brutal and public. She had learned to be a sovereign in parts—she had practiced the tilt of a chin, the narrowing of an eye. But when she was asked to be something she never truly was, the performance broke. Her eyes darted across faces, searching for Dominick's comfort, Dominick's plan, Dominick's next lie. When he was bound and led away by soldiers, she sank to her knees and began to howl as if the world itself had been stolen.
"How can I be nothing?" she wailed. "How do you ask me to be nothing?"
"Because what you were built on is false," I said. "And what is false cannot rule."
Crowds began to shout. Some spat. Some wept with a terrible satisfaction. Someone held up a scrap of torn silk from the wedding and shouted, "Justice!" Someone else unsheathed a small knife and began to distract the soldiers, and that action incited murmurs: were they cheering for the fall of power or the fall of an idea?
The punishment Dominc and his chief conspirators received began publicly and there was no mercy for stage villains. The emperor had decided to make the matter a lesson, public and plain, not secret and seething. Dominick was paraded into the center of the court and the emperor read aloud the chain of deceit and the testimony found by those who had tracked the years of payoff. Each lie was unspooled like a spool of thread, each betrayal named, each transaction and soldier's oath listed.
"You used a child's fate," the Emperor said, and his voice, though thin with age, struck like a gavel. "You used the people's trust. You used my table."
Dominick's eyes changed slowly during the emperor's reading: first the anger at being cornered; then the arrogance that had no escape; then a flash of fear that his plans were not only unraveling but were?
"What do you want?" he whispered, and for the first time his voice was small, unmanly.
"We will not kill you in the open," the Emperor said. "You will be stripped of honors. You will be publicly paraded through the city with the banner of your treason. At every guild and market, the town criers will call your crime. The soldiers you commanded will be reassigned and your properties seized. Your name will be tattooed on the scroll of traitors." The emperor's face did not change. "You will live to be a warning."
The crowd did not need more. Some cheered; some spat; many recorded the moment with chipped wooden tablets. Dominick's face went slack. He had imagined rebellion, quick victory, the crown in his hands. He had not imagined being cataloged. His pride was gone. He barked, protested, begged, but his voice sunk like stone into a well.
Isabelle watched him go and, with each step he was taken farther from her, she shrank. First she denied, then she tried to explain, then she accused me of cruelty, and then she begged for Dominick's mercy. The crowd watched the arc: dominion, confusion, outrage, collapse. She was no longer a queen; she was a woman whose whole life had been an artifice. Her reaction—loud, breathless, insane with grief—drew gasps.
People around us were muttering. Some cried. A merchant spat, "She deserves her fate too." A young woman who had seen her children fed by my charity whispered, "She will rot in that cell and think herself a princess still." A soldier muttered, "We thought we served the crown; we served a scheme."
Isabelle went from denial to lashing out. "You planned this," she shouted. "You wanted me to break!" She pointed at me, and for a heartbeat, she looked like a queen again—commanding, dangerous.
"No," I replied. "I wanted truth."
"You had the power!" she cried. "You could have spared me and yet—"
"I could spare you no more than I could spare the people you would have used," I said. "You learned to be cruel. You practiced lying and burning. You trained to be a queen without being one. That is not something I can forgive because you chose to hurt others."
She lunged toward me then, hands raised, hoping perhaps to strike the face that had pried her lie apart. Soldiers stopped her before the clumsiness of a blow could land. She kept crying, exhausted and raw, and the theater of public disgrace took its toll: a young woman screamed at the world for stripping her of a story she had been taught her whole life.
Her punishment was carried out in public because it had to be a lesson. The city criers read the verdict. The ministers announced confiscations. Merchants tipped over their baskets in relief. Neighbors who had once whispered in favor of Dominick now came forward, cancers of conspiracy exposed, and spat. Dominick, dragged to the city limits, had his banners burned before him. Isabelle was committed to a prison where she could no longer fashion herself a sovereign; she would be kept alive, clothed in the same coarse fabric my peasants wore, for she had to remember every day the cost of living in others' shadows.
The crowd watched as her sentence was carried out. Some booed. Some cheered. Some cried. For the people, this was not theater: this was the moment a web was cut and a life that had been woven from other people's plans unraveled. For me, as I stood in the center with the emperor at my back and Kingston at my side, I felt a complicated tide of pity and vindication.
"Let them see," I said quietly to Kingston when the cries started to fade. "Let them see what a lie does."
"They will remember," he answered.
"Will they remember me?" I asked, though my father had given me the answer when he stood to the side, his hand white on the arm of his throne, not because he wanted me to be punished and then elevated, but because the lesson required that my fall and return be visible for all.
"Yes," Kingston said, "they will remember you standing in the center when the sun dropped behind the gates. They will remember that you did not weep when the crowd hurled stones of rumor. You built roads. You gave food. You led with your hands."
After Dominick's arrest and the public shaming, after Isabelle's collapse and the sentence that would keep her power only in memories and madness, the court returned to a brittle calm. The emperor—my father, Cruz Roux—sat with a quiet I had not seen in years. He called me forward and spoke in a voice that had been practiced for decades but reserved fully, like a man who had read too many prophecies.
"Corinna," he said, and the hush that fell was as if the palace itself had braced. "You were made to be tested, and you were tested. You rose."
He smiled then, the smile that had once been mine alone, and placed the symbols of command into my hands. "Take them. Rule with care. You will be loved and watched, both."
"Father," I said, and then the words came out in a rush. "Why not tell me? Why not spare me the exile?"
"You needed to learn," he replied. "And I needed to know whether you would learn."
I knelt. The palace was a place of intricate plans and hard lessons. What I had once thought were betrayals became a forge. They hardened me. They taught me that to lead was to be loved and feared in measured parts, that to be alone sometimes meant being free, and that the truth, when spoken in the open, cuts cleaner than rumor.
There were losses. Elias Garnier, my teacher, watched from the side and said, "You have become the kind of woman I hoped you'd be. Strong enough to stand, kind enough to rule."
"You are mine no longer," I said. "This crown is not a favor to me. It is a duty."
He inclined his head, and his eyes were proud but set on other paths. He would be my chief advisor, not my husband. "You know what must be done," he said. "Do it."
I married Kingston Ash on the day the nation called for a new era. The wedding was not merely a tale of love but a binding of hands that had bled and built together. He still teased me about the embroidered satchel I had made for him—his silly request for gold, silk, all foolish things. I had given it to him with careful stitches, and the sight of him dancing in the palace courtyard with it tied to his belt made me laugh then, and now I keep that laugh.
But there were other roads ahead. Dominick's fall had been public. Isabelle's mind had broken like glass in the sun. The palace had learned that secrets could be unspooled. The public had seen justice. I had seen that power could be used to hurt, but also to mend. I had learned that fatherly decisions sometimes hide the hand that will forge the next leader. I had learned to be the sort of ruler who would not repeat the same blind mistakes.
There was more sorrow to come. Elias would stand later in a war to win borders; he would not return. He would be laid to rest at the frontier, and his gift to me, a carved hairpin with the word "AsYouWill," would be buried with him by a comrade who said, "He could not carry this farther." I put it into the ground where a man had given his life.
And I rebuilt. I reformed taxes to ease the burden on families. I opened channels of trade, fixed dikes, and taught younger magistrates how to listen to the murmur of streets. People who had seen me as a fragile darling or a tyrant now saw me as a ruler who had been forged in public fire.
Years later, on a cold autumn night, standing with Kingston on the city wall, looking out over thousands of warm lights like tiny stars, he leaned close and whispered, "You守护 this land; I守着 you."
"Good," I said. "Then neither of us will sleep easy, but we will do it together."
And I believed him.
The End
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