Face-Slapping14 min read
"I Will Keep This Child" — The Regent's Prisoner Who Played for Keeps
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"I won't drink that."
I jerk back from the bowl and spill hot broth on my hand.
"You'll do as you're told," Caspian Caruso snaps, his fingers clamping my jaw as if I were a loose thing. "Drink."
"I won't," I say again. My voice is small and raw. I can taste iron on my tongue. My sleeves are wet with other people's lies and a smell like old blood clings to me.
His face is closer than it has any right to be. "You will," he says, and then he forces the bowl into my mouth.
The liquid heats my throat. I cough, spit, and hit him before my strength leaves me. The slap lands and the room goes quiet.
Caspian stares like someone who just found his map had a road missing. "You hit me?"
"Let go," I say. I wrench an arm free. Pain lances through my shoulder. My arms scream; I know they're dislocated because of the old memory stitched into this body. The world tilts. My head fills with a second set of lungs taking breath that is not mine. I remember: this body is supposed to be a fool's shell. I remember why the fool was left to die.
"You know what you are doing," I whisper. "You want me to keep that child. Let me live and I will save you."
Caspian laughs like a bird pecking at a window. "Save me? From what?"
"From the pain that lives beneath your skin." I point at his ribs without meaning to. "I can take it. I can burn it out."
His eyes, which are usually lake-deep and cold, narrow. For a long moment he only looks at me. Then he lets out a single word that tastes like a blade.
"Prove it."
I bite my finger and press a drop of blood to his brow. The world tilts. Something black coils at his lower back like a snake trying to crawl inside him. I feel it with the sudden memory I was given: the fool's talent was never foolishness. It was a shield. It was the cost of protecting—someone—once.
"Stop!" one of his men shouts.
"Let me do it," I tell Caspian. "Or drag me to the cellar and end me. But if you want to live, trust me."
He hesitates in a way kings never do. "Why would I?"
"Because the sickness that eats you is not a lie. It will kill you in three winters if nothing changes. I can stop it, but I will pay for it."
Caspian tilts his head. He smells like iron and old scrolls. He asks one question that will set us both into motion.
"What do you want?"
"A paper," I say. "A paper that frees me from my vows. A paper that says, when this is over, I am no one to you."
"Divorce," he repeats, and for the first time I see actual hunger in his eyes—like a man looking at a wound that might be his if he looks away. "And the child?"
"Safe. My name cleared. If you live, I leave."
He thinks for a minute that feels like an hour. "If you fail—"
"I die," I finish.
He presses his thumb to my palm. For a pulse, I feel heat run through him. He looks broken and honest in the way only wounded things can be. "Do it, then," he says.
I do it.
I spend my strength and the little sound part of the original woman that pushed through me. Blood pours from my mouth and I almost fall but I force the seal. The black coil retreats like smoke chased by light. Caspian inhales and the world seems less sharp to him. He looks at me in a new way, like someone who owes a debt he cannot name.
"Send her to the inner rooms," he says without taking his eyes from where my fingers left a mark on his forehead. "And bring the physician."
I cough the last of the blood out and mouth the bargain one more time. "A paper when you are well."
He nods.
They carry me to the cold room and leave me to the one loyal girl who never changed sides—Ami Howard. She kneels and steadies my head.
"Miss?" she whispers. "You woke. You should not have used yourself so much."
"I have to save him, Ami," I say. "And the child."
She searches my face like she will find my name there. "You are not the same now," she says.
"No," I agree. "Good."
We sleep. I wake with bruises new and old. The wardens whisper. The court began to turn its face like a sun on a hinge.
"She will fail," someone says outside my door.
"She is a fool," says another voice—Leilani Oliver—the girl who used to pretend she was kind. She now preens at the idea of bumping me off the stage. "We will keep her humble."
They work best when they move in knots: Leilani with her small cruelty, Kristina Figueroa with a sharp appetite for rumor, and Clarissa Bittner, who runs the house like a bartered queen. Camila Benjamin, the pretty one who stepped into my bed when I couldn't stay, smiles like a clock.
The regent, my husband, has not yet chosen which of us to trust. He keeps me as a mirror and watches.
"She is dangerous," Camila whispers to him later with a woman's practiced, fake sympathy. "She reads... she thinks too fast for her standing."
He looks at Camila as if she might be better for him. That sight leaves a white ache in my ribs. He had once been cruel; now he is merely human and more dangerous for it.
Days pass and then my name is a rumor. The house turns on me in ways that smell like rot.
"She beat a maid," Leilani tells anyone who will listen. "She planned it."
"She stole from Song," Kristina says.
"She summoned ghosts," Clarissa adds with an oath.
They pull Ami from the rooms and lock her in the cellar for bargaining. I wake to the sound of stepping boots and a child's small sob on my door.
"Where's Ami?" I shout.
"Is she alive?" Camila says aloud, with mock concern. "Dahlia, you should know—"
My hand finds a shattered bowl and my voice finds a blade. I corner the woman who smiles like a pearl in a clutch of thieves.
"Where is Ami?" I ask.
"You will take responsibility," Camila says. "You will drink this or be beaten."
"They will take my child," I say, softer than I mean. "You will make sure a child dies for your lie?"
The lie rotates toward me like a hungry moth. They press their boots into my ribs. They push me to a gutter where they plan to pour pig's food into my face. The heap of garbage exists to humiliate me into silence. They press my head into it until the scent chokes me.
I do not scream for them to stop. I listen.
"She is still alive," Clarissa says, breath warm at my ear. "Her face will be ruined. She will be the fool again."
"Do it," Camila laughs.
They dunk me until the stench becomes a second skin. They laugh and the watchmen look away. I taste the iron of blood and a long slow warmth leaves my body. But underneath, in the place the original me kept safe, the ghost that gave up her life writhes like a candle until it can breathe again. I anchor it with the bargain I made in my first waking.
When they drag me out, I am wet and smelling like the worst banquet. They assume they have broken me.
They are wrong.
I cough once. I look at Leilani, Kristina, Clarissa, Camila—one by one. I press a paper into my palm and feel the memory of those women slip into my fingers. I toss the paper to the floor. The house watches.
"I will not be trampled," I tell them. "I will not be silent."
"She says she will not be silent!" someone says, and the house makes ready to laugh.
Instead I walk to where the servants gather and take a single step up on a barrel. I speak not to them but at them.
"You want a spectacle," I say. "Fine. I will give you one you will never forget."
I whisper once into the ear of the loyal house clerk and do the only thing the powerless can do when strength runs out—use people's own greed.
"Find the magistrate," I tell him. "Bring him this evening. Bring the watch. Bring everyone."
They think I am calling for help. I am calling for witnesses.
That night the magistrate—Harrison Bush—arrives with the pomp and a silvery hunger toward office. He brings grainy men who think of justice as a coin. The house is whispering into palms and pockets. Camila sits prettily at Caspian's side and watches me like a moth watches flame.
"Bring the maid," the magistrate says.
They do. Ami is dragged in like a rag. Her hair is wet. Her wrists bear marks. Her eyes are raw. She sees me and tries to smile. She does not know I will trade names for the child's life.
"Speak," Harrison Bush says, and he tastes the air like a man at a market.
"Ami," he says. "Tell the court what you saw."
She looks at the table where the jar of medicine sits—the bowl that was supposed to kill a maid. She looks at Camila and the housekeepers.
"It was Song—it was Camila," Ami says. "She gave me the dish to put on the table. She told me to leave it there. Clarissa told me to stay out of the way."
The room bursts. Camila's face folds like paper under water.
"What proof?" Harrison asks.
I slide forward and throw a map of names onto the floor—receipts, little notes, the charcoal from a ledger, and a paper where I have written down the medicine's source. "This house has records," I say. "You can see who borrowed what. You can see who walked in the servants' way that night."
The magistrate fumbles. His eyes shift between Caspian and Camila. Caspian does not move. He watches me like a man watching a fire he does not trust.
"Search," he orders, and when the search finds a line of small betrayals—jewelry swapped, a bowl hidden, a poison mixed in the kitchen—the room begins to smell of blood and iron.
Camila's mouth opens and closes. She splutters words like a bird outside winter. "I—she—"
"Silence," Caspian says. He stands and all the light in the room seems to narrow. "You will answer only to the magistrate."
The lies begin to peel under the magistrate's question like wet paint. The housekeepers crumble slowly at first, then faster. Clarissa's hands find their face and the face cracks.
"You framed me," I tell Camila, voice thin as wire. "You stole my things to make it look like I was reckless. You fed the regent's kitchen poison to bind him to you through fear. Why?"
Her face goes small and then red. "Because you were getting in the way," she snaps like a cornered thing. "Because you smiled too much when the regent had been mine to keep."
"Mine to keep," I repeat. It tastes of hypocrisy. "You wore my jewels and took my favors and still called me low. All to make him see you as the better match. All to keep your place."
Her eyes flare. "You think yourself better than me—"
She does not get to finish.
Harrison Bush clears his throat as if clearing a throat of many years of rotten favors. "Camila Benjamin," he says, "you are accused of attempted murder, conspiracy, theft, perverting the household. Clarissa Bittner, Leilani Oliver, Kristina Figueroa—you are complicit."
They hang together like a net.
"What proof do you have?" Camila asks in a voice that once convinced a man across a table of anything.
"Ami's testimony," I say. "The receipt that shows where that viper's tincture was bought. The ledger that names the hand who gave it. The watchmen saw one of you leave the kitchen at the hour the pot was seasoned."
The magistrate nods to the watchman. The watchman swears and the oath shakes the air.
"They will be held. They will be brought to the square at noon tomorrow," Harrison says. His voice becomes a sentence that will not be ignored. "If the court finds them guilty, they will be stripped of rank and goods, and the magistrate will see their punishment set for example."
They try to bribe him. They try to ask Caspian for mercy. Caspian stares at the paper where my blood once marked his brow and says nothing. That silence is a verdict.
The next day the square is full. The city loves scandal. They gather like bees for honey.
I stand from a balcony and watch. They stand at the steps below: Camila in a thin dress and false dignity, Clarissa limp with the weight of added shame, Leilani with the shame of a woman who has lost everything, and Kristina who cannot stop shaking. They have faces I helped them make possible but never thought they would pay me back with poison.
Harrison Bush reads the charges aloud. The crowd leans in. The magistrate's gavel is a small wood of so much sound.
"You stole a woman's jewels," he says. "You stole a woman's reputation. You attempted murder to secure your station. Do you deny it?"
Camila's mouth twitches like a bird. "I deny nothing."
"Very well," the magistrate says.
They strip them of their garments one by one—not in the cruel way of punishment but in the way that takes from them the false props they used to stand. The people hurl accusations, then stones of shame—literal and figurative.
"Look how the flower withers!" someone cries. "She hid her thorns!"
They drag Camila up for a final stake of humiliation. She tries to shriek. People record it and the record spreads.
"Stop!" she cries suddenly, and the sound breaks like a cup. "Please—my husband—my family!"
They rip the cloth from her hair to show the scar she tried to hide. They show the ledger. The magistrate strips the signet of any favor she held. He reads the names who bought poisons and the ledger cracks open to show the handwriting—a shaky, small scrawl that matches Camila's own recipe notes.
People shout. Men who once courted her now walk their horses to the other side of the street. Servants who used to lower their eyes to her now spit and turn away. The watchman shows a list of clients she had used as a favor exchange and the list is public now.
Her last defense is to throw herself at Caspian's feet. She claws at his coat like a beggar at a church.
"Forgive me," she wails. "I'll give you anything."
He looks down as if he had never seen this woman before. He says two words that thin the air like a blade.
"You wanted me to see you as mine," he says, "and you wanted to hold me with fear. You will have neither. Leave my sight."
She crumples and tries to hold onto his cloak. A crowd surges and they film. A child bows to me in the square, and the child has the look of someone who knows truth when she sees it.
The magistrate ensures they lose what they love. Camila is stripped of her household favor and taken to a prison workhouse. Clarissa and the others are penniless, branded as conspirators and fired from any place of service. They will not be trusted again. Songs are sung about them in the market: "The woman who used a kiss to buy a poison." They cannot leave without being followed. Their names are curses.
When the cameras of tongues and eyes pile onto them, their faces change—like flesh trying to remember what it means to be honest. They plead. They beg. They trade everything for one kind of mercy—a secret, the kind that costs others their lives; they offer names that will ruin other men and women. The court rejects their offers. The magistrate loves the example of fairness more than he loves the coin.
They go mad first in little ways. Clarissa claws at her own hands and cries like straw being crushed. Leilani bites her tongue until it bleeds and then keeps biting. Kristina stands at the edge of the dock and talks to a shadow no one else can see. Camila, stripped like a loaf of bread, is taken to work with the poor and learns what fear feels like under the sun.
All of it is witnessed. All of it is spoken and told again and again. Their names become warnings.
And yet the final cruelty—the one that makes people snap in their seats and look away—comes when the magistrate reads the last sentence.
"You will not only lose goods," he says. "You will lose station and any claim to petition this court. You will be barred from serving in any noble house. You will be shamed forever. If you possess any sons who take their mothers' names, they will never hold rank."
They fall like trees in a storm.
This is not mercy. This is not justice. This is truth.
When it is finished, I do not rejoice so much as I feel something heavy lift. Ami comes to me at dusk and presses her face to my shoulder like two birds in a sudden rain. She will live and she will be safe. The child is still inside me and quiet.
Caspian meets me later that night alone in the garden. He looks at me with the face of a man who has just been shown a new world.
"You kept your word," he says.
"I did," I answer. "You freed me from the cellar and the bowl. Now you must free me with a paper."
He hesitates, the only time I see a man think of being cowardly. "A paper makes things..." he says. He stops. "I am the best to be trusted when one owes me."
"You will sign," I say.
He moves and writes with such slowness that even a clock would have pity. He signs with his name as if a contract could be sewn back into the thing the world ripped out. I read it and the letters say: Dahlia Ferguson will be freed upon Caspian Caruso's full recovery and release of claims.
I store it in a place only I will know.
"You will not run," he says. "If you leave, I will have your head."
"You will find you miss the view," I reply. "You will find this house quieter. You will miss something you didn't know you had."
This does not satisfy him. He does not believe me yet. He keeps a watch of his own feelings.
Time passes. The seasons exchange coats. The child grows like an idea inside me until I can no longer pretend. The city grows fond of a story where a woman once thought to be foolish becomes the savior of a great man's life.
But the world does not forgive easily. There are those whose anger feeds on slow revenge.
They come for me through smaller knives—false reports, false witness, a magistrate who thinks he lost face before Caspian. The old court folds into its habits like a bad stitch. They want me to vanish.
They will not.
I plan like someone who has nothing left to lose. I build alliances with the ruined: the market women who no longer trust a fine cloak, the watchmen who like truth when it pays, and James Edwards—once a frightened gambler—who owes me his life. I teach him how to stand like a man who can hold a purse.
He helps me with the men who once wanted to have his body for a debt. We set a quiet trap. We do not kill; our work is more precise. We take their weapons and publish their names. We expose the men who blackmail others with secrets. We make them naked in paper and put paper on the courthouse table. We do not kill; we strip.
When a crown of men who thought themselves safe begins to wobble, they claw back. But their claws have been seen. The city will no longer let them sit on the same couch with respect.
Caspian watches it all with eyes full of a new language: gratitude braided with something that looks like regret. He apologizes in the ways a proud man can: he brings a physician when Ami's sickness reappears; he keeps a watch that does not pry but does not leave.
"I owe you nothing," he says once, in a room where the curtains are closed like teeth.
"You owe me my child's life," I answer. "That's enough."
He scoffs, then does something no man with his pride should—he bows his head for a second, just long enough for me to see the man behind the armor. "You saved me," he says. "I will not forget."
The city breathes. The household steadies but not as before. The house that nearly ate me now looks at me with a thin surprise.
When the child's first cry comes—Heath Clay's or mine, no one can tell at first—the world blinks and sees a fragile new thing in my arms. For a day, everyone remembers there is a child and a mother.
But my face has changed more than the town notices. I am no longer the fool. I do not smile foolishly. I smile as someone who knows the shape of debt and how to count it.
Camila's ruin becomes a bonfire of gossip. Clarissa begs in the street and is borne away to a place of work where men with sticks read her shame like a coin. Leilani folds into herself and vanishes. Kristina screams at the moon and is laughed at. Their houses are emptied and their names are echoes.
The court year closes and with it comes a summons to the capital. They must sign final papers, and there I stand as witness to my own fate. I have my paper. Caspian has his life. Heath Clay, who comes now and then like a tide, presses his knuckles to my palm and smiles like a man who believes in small things.
One day, Camila's kin come and try to trade money to restore her rank. The magistrate refuses. The court refuses. The city says no.
And the worst of all is the retaliation they thought to store for me: they wanted my child's life, my name, my peace. They took everything they could reach for and left me only a sharpened heart.
Years later, people will tell this story and call me a woman who fought. They will say the regent gave me a paper because he feared me. They will say I broke the house into pieces. They will say I took revenge.
But that is not the end.
On the day I finally leave the city, the square where they shamed Camila is a place where market women sell breads. I walk by with the child on my hip, and I see a woman with a face I do not know. Her hair is unkempt; she looks like a person who has been badly taught to live.
She lifts a cup. "Are you Dahlia Ferguson?" she asks.
"I am," I say.
She drops to her knees and puts coins into my hands. "You saved my sister," she says. "My sister was one of them."
I look at the child in my arms, who is asleep and smells of milk and sky. I think of Leilani, of Clarissa, of Kristina, of Camila—how they paid and how the city paid them back.
"You say my name like a blessing," I say. "Tell your sister to come work in my garden. She will be watched, not caged. She will earn back her breath."
The woman nods and cries. She leaves with a look like a promise.
Heath stands at the gate watching me with the child's small fist in his fingers. Caspian is across the city talking to men who will one day call the regent a fair man. He kept his word and did not, in the end, take the easy way. He paid taxes in a way only proud men can when they change: slowly, with small apologies.
I turn and walk down the road toward the river with my child on my hip. I will not return to the noise of the court. I will plant herbs and make medicine for those who need it. I will teach Lil the child's name—Heath or no, it will be his own name—and I will tell him the story of a woman who refused to be a pawn.
"Why did you stay?" Heath asks me later in the shade of the willow.
"I remembered," I say simply. "Someone died so I could keep this life. I owe that woman everything."
He brushes hair from the child's brow and kisses the crease between his eyebrow and the temple. "You are brave," he says like a child who cannot understand a whole war of choices.
"I was given a chance to choose," I tell him. "I chose a long, loud way."
The child sleeps and the sun laps at our feet.
At night, when the city is quiet and the leaves click, I hold the little hand and I whisper to the woman whose life made mine possible.
"I kept your child," I murmur into the dark.
And in the quiet I hear my voice answer back—no longer foolish, not entirely feral—full of the kind of small peace a woman wins when she plays the world at its own game and refuses to lose her child for the sake of someone else's comfort.
The End
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