Face-Slapping17 min read
I woke up a second time and smiled with murder in my mouth
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"I'll pour you tea," I hiss, and the cup hits Jules's hand before anyone can blink.
"Ow!" Jules Kuenz screams, the porcelain shattering on the floor. Her silk sleeve smokes where the scald touched it.
"You shouldn't have mocked me," I say, voice light like a child's, but my eyes are steady. "Do you remember the last time someone laughed at me?"
She glares. Zachary Yamada, the Crown Prince, shifts in his seat and leans forward with that slow hunger in his face. Isaac Chambers, my new husband and the Regent of the realm, stands in the doorway with a blade-laced calm that could freeze blood.
Someone laughs, someone's mouth opens and someone else turns away.
I taste iron — not from blood yet, but from old memory. "Drink your tea," I tell Jules. "You'll feel better."
"Get away from me!" Jules claws at my wrist and stumbles back, but I hold her with two fingers under the jaw. "You little—"
"Shut up," I whisper, and she does.
People think I'm broken. They call me simple because I smile the wrong way and blink slow. They forgot to watch my hands when I learned medicine behind closed doors. They never noticed the books hidden in my sleeves. They didn't see the second me that woke up the night of my death and hid like an animal until she learned the names of the people who killed her.
"This is my house," I say out loud. "Don't forget who you hurt."
Isaac's shadow falls across the floor. He keeps his hand where a gentleman keeps a secret — close to his coat. "Enough," he says, voice a clean winter wind. "This is my hall. You will not make a scene here."
I laugh softly. "Then don't let anyone here start one."
— The Past and the Joke
I remember dying with a scream and waking up in a different body. I remember being Jillian Novikov once — bright-blooded and dangerous — and then being cut apart for her gifts. I remember the Prince's hand through my throat and watching twenty-six faces I loved drop from the scaffold.
I remember the cold when my body was torn. I remember my soul floating like a loose coin until it found a new purse: Isla Ayers, the slow girl from a minor house who the world called "five years behind." Isla had a limp laugh and a blank stare people could push. Isla had a small kind heart and hands useless for war. Isla had the right face for being stepped on.
"You finally remembered how to smile," a woman whispered when I first woke in Isla's body. Her voice was soft, but I read like a book. Her name was Lea Boyer and she was my only true friend in this life. "You look like you're going to cry."
"I'm going to do better than cry," I said. "I'm going to take names."
"Names?" Lea blinked. "For what, lady?"
"For people who break bones as sport," I said. "For people who turn entire families into ash."
Lea nodded like she might understand. "If you want, I'll help."
"Good." I showed her the list I had folded into my sleeve that first morning: Zachary Yamada, Jules Kuenz, the soft-voiced fools who laughed when they thought I was split between the living and the dead. Isaac Chambers' name was on it too, but in a different column — "watchful" — because he had once given the dead a grave.
Lea swallowed. "You don't want to be violent, do you?"
"Violence is a kind of truth," I said. "And truth is what I owe the ones who are gone."
— The First Bite
"You can't touch a prince," Jules told me later, leaning close enough that I smelled the honey on her throat. "You are lucky to be given a roof." She laughed, perfectly small. "Do you know how many women would die to be in your place? You should be grateful."
"Grateful?" I smiled. "Who says I'm not?"
"You have the wrong idea of gratitude," she snapped.
I stood. "You haven't known grief," I said. "You have practiced being cruel."
Jules' hand moved for my face. I didn't move. I let her slap me.
"Why didn't you flinch?" she demanded.
"Because I wanted you to feel like the one who hurt me," I said. "A smart person learns this trick: people reveal their weight by how they wage grace."
She blinked, uncertain. "You're meant to be simple. Laugh at me again and I'll—"
"Try it," I said, and when she reached, I used the smallest twist of wrist and pressed a silver pin at a point under her ribs.
She dropped like a puppet whose strings were cut. She coughed and for the first time her face went pale as a dead leaf.
"How did you—" she tried to scream.
"Thank the gods for doctors who don't sleep," I said. "Now you will eat with a hand that trembles."
The hall went quiet. Even the Prince's smile dropped from his face into something smaller and meaner.
"You better stop," Isaac said softly, his voice wrapping around the silence like a rope. "You are in my house. You will not have other people's bodies used for your games."
"Oh, Regent," I said. "You think you've made me safe. You think a coffin will hold my memory. I dragged mine out of pieces."
He looked at me as if he were cataloguing a new kind of bird.
"Live here," he said. "Do not die, and you will be safer."
"Safe from what?" I asked. "From prying? From being burned? From the way men wear pity like a crown?"
Isaac's jaw tightened. He looked at the Prince as a man looks at a live wire—careful, and certain he won't be the first to touch it.
"Keep your jaws closed," he told the hall, then to me, "Keep your hands off people unless you mean to help. Anything else will be handled."
"Handled how?" I asked.
"By me." He moved like a shadow filling a doorway. "It's my job."
I watched him and made a small, private plan.
— The Tangle of Poison
The first night Isaac fell ill.
I watched him in the small bed he let me see: the man who smelled of old paper and cold iron, the man who had buried the dead and kept quiet about it. He blinked too fast, his hand curled like a fist inside his sleeve.
Lea froze. "He's burning."
"Not burning," I said. "Seizing."
"Seizing?"
"Poisoned," I finished. "Someone wrote a dangerous thing on a blade and placed it near his arm. I know the signature — an herb that makes men's blood race like thunder and makes them stand at the edge of reason. I've seen it before."
"Who? Who would do such a thing?"
I looked at the list in my mind: Zachary's flash, Jules' young cruelty, the old staff who watched the Prince like wolves. It was all too clean.
"Someone who wants me gone," I said.
Isaac's eyes found mine in the dark. "Who?"
"Someone who can't afford you to live," I said. "Someone who would rather see the house burn than you stand in their way."
He tried to rise and failed. I poured medicine, a bitter twist of herbs, and held his hand until dawn. His fingers were like stone. "Why?" he rasped.
"Because someone decided I was a tool."
"Am I such a tool?" His voice was tired.
"You were kind enough to carry a corpse once," I said.
His eyes, tired and sharp, saw straight through me. "Then be enough, Isla. Be enough to survive."
I was enough. I saved Isaac that night with herbs and breath and a promise I would repay him for that small mercy.
— The Saint's Game
The country called the selection the Saint Emissary contest. Once every five years the crown opened the chance to choose a person of rare gift — the kind the world then set above the rest. Win it, and your name would be carved into a stone in the palace and your house would not be touched for a generation.
For centuries only those born with a spark — a true root of power — were thought to stand a chance. But customs can be bent when ambition pulls hard.
Zachary planned to place his people like flags. He wanted Jules or her chosen to be the Saint and to get the Dragonstone that came with it. He wanted storybooks to sing his name.
When they announced the contest, an unexpected voice climbed a tree.
"Prince, I would like to join," I said.
A hush. People stared at the red mask I wore and the ribbon covering most of my face. I could have stepped back. I could have played the fool. I didn't.
"Isla Ayers," Jules sneered as I walked onto the stage. "The court's little joke."
"Funny," I said. "So many of you thought jokes couldn't win prizes."
The Prince's face darkened.
"You'll hurt someone," he warned.
"If I win," I said softly, "I take what I need."
They sampled contestants. One woman fainted; another clutched her heart. The prince smiled like a spider. They expected me to be easy — a distraction.
I took the whip out of my sleeve when they least expected it.
The whip — the Lunar Lash — had belonged to a name that made people blink: Jillian Novikov. I found it tied to a heap of scrap at the cliff when I fell and lived. The weapon remembered the hand that had snapped it. When it touched my palm, the leather hummed. I felt it choose spine and bone; I felt it remember old wars.
"That's her whip," Jules spat. "Give it back!"
"It will go where the true hand commands," I said, and the crowd tasted the threat.
When it whistled, it didn't sing like a whip. It cut air like a tongue telling truths. Jules tried to take it back. The Lash moved around her and struck itself on the stand of the prince — a neat glitter of shame. Jules tore her hair and screamed, and the Lash slapped her again. I didn't touch her.
People drew breath and backed away.
"Stop this," Zachary barked, red to the eyes. "This contest is for the worthy, not for theatrics!"
"Then watch worth," I said.
I fought, not as a genius burns, not as a child shreds — but like someone with a dead person's memory in her bones. I fought precise and clean. My strikes were not wild. My strikes removed limbs of vanity from the throne of pretense.
By the time the prince came for the Lash, the Dragonstone lay in my hand.
"You win," he said through teeth. "But know this — winners must kneel."
"I will choose when I kneel," I told him. "Names are different from faces."
He laughed a laugh that shook the banners.
"Go, then," Isaac said from the steps. He wore his dark patience like a warning. "But be careful. A living saint makes enemies quicker than a corpse."
— The Trap and the Fall
After the contest, my success only grew their hatred. The Prince seethed as if he'd been betrayed by his own shadow. Jules gathered allies. The prince's fingers found old favors. The court whispered that I had stolen the blade; that I had stolen the saint's place; that I had stolen their prince's dignity.
"It will be simple," Jules told her attendants. "Make her disappear. Make her remember she is a fool and nothing more."
They drugged my maid, Lea, on the way to take me home. They laughed behind curtains while the horses took us to a cliff where the world fell away.
"Look at the fool," one of his men said. "How the Prince's gifts get used."
"Let her breathe the last air," another said.
Lea woke with a mouth full of salt and a rope burning her wrists. I looked at the cliff and thought of twenty-six names and how cleanly they had been stolen from me once. The lunar lash rested at my hip like a sleeping thing.
"Jules," I called.
"Aren't you brave?" she cried, standing with other women who'd come to watch. "What a little joke."
"Tell me this," I said, voice thready, "Who buried Jillian Novikov when she died?"
Jules' face blanched. "What are you talking about?"
"You remember?" I smiled. "You watched the bones. You watched us go to the stake that night."
Her mouth opened with a sound like an animal. "No—"
I relaxed a finger and let it pull. The rope slipped from the ledge. For a second we all were falling and the world had a single thin line of light.
I didn't die. The Lash found the ledge with a single loop and caught me, and then it caught Jules' wrist and twisted until she shrieked.
She fell back and the whip tightened like a judge's hand. The whip pulled me back to the ledge and dragged Jules with me. We tumbled; Lea slipped free of ropes.
"You did that!" she shouted when the Lash settled and wrapped around my hand like a friend. "You jumped!"
"No," I told her. "You threw me."
She fainted then with the shame of a woman who'd lost everything without knowing why she tried to take it. Word spread. The prince's men went like dogs to fetch the witnesses and to squelch rumor.
For the first time, the Lash had shown itself more true to me than to the house I'd been given. The world watched in a shocked hush as the self-styled queen of small cruelty found the Lash would not obey her.
— The Web Tightens
They called the regent to take account. Isaac came as always: steady, colder than the winter stream.
"You are mine to answer for," he said to me, and when I opened my mouth to speak he paused, tapping the Lash in my hand as if making a promise.
"They wanted you dead," he said. "They wanted the Dragonstone, the Saint, everything you are."
"Then we must make them answer," I said.
"Not yet," he cautioned. "They will break quicker under a public weight."
I grinned. "Good. I like the idea of weight."
We moved like chess pieces. Lea acted like the orderly who knew no fear. The prince sharpened his anger, but his motions became sloppy with the strain of pretending peace.
I started to stitch a thread through the court: a servant here, a letter there, a forged token that smelled of Prince Zachary's arrogance. I found the nurse who'd handled the missing vial and bought her silence with the small truth of money. I perched in corners and listened. I learned where they buried their secrets and how they dressed them.
"You're going to burn them," Lea whispered one night.
"Only light," I said. "They'll burn themselves."
— The Big Room
We planned the feast as bait. The prince set a table for friends and allies. Isaac sat like a stone ready to roll. I walked in with the Dragonstone fastened at my throat like a hard promise.
"Isla Ayers is here," someone whispered.
The hall murmured. Many wore smiles like thin armor.
"To honor the Saint's new place," the prince said grandly. "We celebrate."
"To the Saint," the room echoed.
"To truth," I said.
He carried a poisoned cup across the room — a cliché he thought he could use against me. I let him offer it and took it like a scholar sampling an herb I had already cataloged.
"You're not afraid to drink," he accused.
"I'm not a child," I said. "Drink, Prince. You will need your voice if you expect to speak when the night is done."
He drank, sashaying with a false bravado I've watched men wear when the hole in their heart is deep enough to drown them. He laughed too loud. He did not see the messages I had let loose: witnesses called, a handmaiden sent to the stables with a list of names, a messenger to the border. I gave guests small tokens — a ring here, a comb there — each designed to force confession when handled.
"Play," I said to him from under a pool of candles. "Play the game you made."
"You're mad," Jules hissed.
"Mad people get what they want," I told her sweetly.
The first crack came with a wine cup turned up like an accusation.
"You call for truth?" I asked. "Let's begin with the first night their hands did the work."
I called out names and artifacts: the small tin that bore the Prince's seal, the dried leaf of the herb that had been in Isaac's wound, the letter handwriting that matched the prince's secretary. The hall went a slow, audible gasp.
"Lie!" Zachary howled at me. "Lies from a fool!"
I smiled. "Ask the room. Ask them who carried your orders to the cliff, Prince."
A servant stepped forward, pale as paper.
"It was me," he said. "I followed orders to take a carriage and throw them over the cliff. I was paid. I didn't know she would live."
"You will tell everything," I said.
"I will tell everything," he repeated, voice cracking.
The first blade did not strike yet. It was the first head in a line of dominoes.
— The Collapse
When the first servant confessed, the Prince's face went from color to ash. You know the sound a man makes the moment a world owns every shame he's hidden? The hall heard that sound like a struck bell.
"You cannot," he panted. "This is treason."
"It's truth," Isaac said coldly. "And I will not hide it."
"Regent!" Zachary bellowed, a tigress's fury, "You are making me lose face!"
"Face can be washed off," Isaac said. "Life cannot."
Then the proof came — a note hidden under a cushion, a branded pass from Zachary's seal used that night, a scrap of his sleeve torn where he'd cut himself when he used a blade and failed. Each piece laid on the table was a nail.
"Do you deny it?" I asked.
"No!" he screamed. "No!"
"Then tell them why my family was taken," I said.
The room froze. The prince's eyes flew open like a trapped animal's.
"You cannot," Darcy — a minister — said, throat working. "The Emperor—"
"The Emperor is ill," Isaac said. "You used time to hide your sins."
The prince's allies blinked and turned like roosters whose fences were gone. People whom the Prince had called friends pushed away.
"Jules," I said calmly, "Do you remember the night in the orchard? The chains?"
She tried to claim ignorance, but a handmaiden stepped forward and told of the chest with a broken lock and of the Prince's voice counting coins. A second witness disclosed that the Prince had shown his men the way to the old house.
He began to tremble. "No," he whispered, and then louder, "I never meant—"
"You never meant to be found out," I said. "You meant to have them gone forever."
"Stop!" he rasped.
He was not the only one. The press of noble faces broke into self-preservation. People who had helped him now found the court a dangerous place to be seen. A woman near the door folded a handkerchief over her mouth and put both hands on the Prince's arm. "Think, Zachary," she said. "We can manage this."
"Who will manage it?" I asked, and my voice carried. "When the people whisper 'murderer' in the market, when the foreign envoys refuse to grant you a place at their table, when the Emperor's advisors remove your patrons? Who will manage the truth then?"
They looked at the Prince like a man sinking in a quicksand of his own greed.
"You're mad," he said. "You can't—"
"Watch me," I said.
The Prince's guards moved. The Regent gave a single nod.
"Arrest him," Isaac said.
The men made for Zachary. He resisted like a cornered beast and struck out. Three guards held him while others made his servants confess. The boy who had once auctioned silks and secrets fell to his knees. He tried to call for help, but the cries of the crowd were louder now, filling the hall like thunder: shouts of betrayal, calls for justice, the sound of men turning their faces from him.
"Zachary Yamada," I said. "You will stand in the middle of the market tomorrow and be named for what you are."
They dragged him out. People were not quiet or gentle. A few of his cronies ran to his carriage and tried to drive him away. The regent barred the way and they bailed into the streets to shout and ransom lesser truths.
— The Public Unmaking
The next morning, the town square filled as if a storm had come overnight. Word traveled faster than any official notice. Stalls closed. People pressed in to watch the fall of the prince.
"I want him to speak," I told the crowd. "Let him see what looks like a life he ruined."
They dragged the prince through the square. The crowd came like a tide. He tried to shout his defenses but the words dissolved into the salt of accusation. I stood on the steps and unrolled evidence like a flag: names, dates, the small tokens he had given his men and the admissions written in fear.
"Zachary Yamada!" I shouted. "You called my family's deaths a necessity. You called them traitors. Tell the people why you slit the throat of Jillian Novikov's house!"
He flung his arms. "They were spies! They plotted—"
"Who gave you the knife?" a woman in the crowd asked. "Who paid the men?"
He looked at them and could not answer. A merchant spat. "There was a child in that house!" someone cried. "A child!"
"I ordered it," a low voice confessed from the rope-tied man at my feet. "I obeyed orders."
"Who sent orders?" the baker demanded.
"Zachary Yamada," the man said.
The crowd roared with a sound that had the shape of hunger.
"Your titles will be stripped," I said. "Your wealth will be sealed. Your patron's men will not serve you. Your name will be the shame others spit upon."
"Isla!" Isaac called quietly from the edge. "Don't."
"Let them see the end," I told him. "Let them see what a man's pride can buy."
They forced the prince to kneel in the mud. Jules balled her fists at the side and cried, and then she screamed as if claws inside her did begin to bleed.
"You will stand trial!" Isaac snapped. "And the court will make you pay."
"Pay?" he laughed, a broken thing. "You cannot undo what has happened."
"No," I said. "But we can make sure you live among people who see you as you are."
They took everything: titles revoked, lands seized, servants turned, alliances burned. The prince's closest friends told the court they would no longer keep his table. An envoy from a nearby lord publicly sent a letter that said he could not be associated. The man who had once dreamed of crowns sat like a child on the market's stone.
The Prince's wife — a woman of silent pride — found him and stepped away as if the warmth they'd shared had never been. She filed for a divorce within the week, a public act that left him without the last layer of dignity. The prince's father, an official who had once protected his son like a shield, fell into fevered shame and resigned his post. Merchants canceled their contracts. Routes of grain and silk that had flowed through the prince's patronage were rerouted overnight.
"Your name will be a lesson," I told him when they led him away. "You will taste ruin in so many small ways you will learn to fear being seen."
He knelt and screamed and pleaded and finally his voice went thin. The crowd started to throw mud. Men spat. Children who had once bowed now pointed and laughed.
You wanted worse? The prince did not die. He had to live under eyes he had once thought would look away. That was his punishment: a slow, consuming cold called disgrace.
— The Final Unraveling
When they tried to darken the truth with new lies, more came forward. A scribe who had hidden a ledger brought copies to the court. A woman who'd sewn the prince's sleeve swore she saw him mark a letter. The names piled like leaves.
Jules and her few allies found themselves cast out like weeds. Her reputation cracked. Men withdrew their friendship as if mercy were a coin to be spent where profit persisted. She begged. She knelt at doors and none opened.
"You are cruel," she whispered to me once, the last time I saw her in a small, hot windowless room. "You are not a saint."
"I'm not a saint," I said. "I'm a reckoning."
She screamed then and the guards put their hands over her mouth. The court had its fill.
— The Edge of Mercy
After all the breaking and the show, people asked Isaac why he had not executed the prince outright.
"Because I want the world to remember a different lesson," he said when we sat in a quiet room. "Not that one man can be killed for pride, but that a man can be burned by the very eyes that once admired him."
"Is that mercy?" I asked.
"Mercy is choosing a scar that everyone can see," he said. "To make sure they know the cost."
He looked at me then like a man who had carried a secret. "You did this," he said. "You were cunning."
"Someone had to be," I said. "Someone had to show what they were hungry for."
"Are you satisfied?" he asked quietly.
"Not yet," I answered. "There are other names."
— The Last Stage
The weeks after the Prince's ruin turned more of the court inside out than a long winter. Merchants closed doors to those who still wore his scent. Priests refused to pray in houses he had visited. An old ally of his was accused of taking bribes and was publicly stripped of office. A confederate's estate was seized. The courts that had once been silent whispered in full voice now.
They put posters in the market telling the story in plain words. "Who killed Jillian Novikov?" one read. "Who smiled as those twenty-six names fell?" People stood reading, faces set. Children asked their parents what it meant to be brave. Tradesmen told each other to beware of men whose appetites were claws.
Jules tried to fight back — bribery, feints, slanders whispered into light ears — but every step made her enemies sprout like thorns. The people who'd lined up to prop her up in the beginning realized propping is expensive and took their fingers away. She found herself not only poor, but despised. She lost her rank, her place at table, and her right to keep certain garments. Men who had once laughed at me now refused to let her cross their threshold.
"Make it worse," someone advised when the court counsel met. "Let the shame be complete. Let everyone know the depth."
"No," I told them. "Don't make them monsters by shutting them in a single place. Let them live and watch the world move past them."
They made her march through the market with a rope around her neck and the name "thief and liar" painted on a board she was forced to hold. Children pointed. Men spat. The priest refused to bless her when she fell to her knees. A woman once helped her stand and passed her by as if nothing had happened. She lost friends, property, patronage — every thing she'd ever thought she could buy returned to the sellers.
"Is that too small?" Lea asked one night, her voice shaking.
"No," I said. "This is exact."
— The Quiet Room
After everything, I stood where the Lash remembered the face of the hand that had once wrapped around it. The Moonlight came through the high window and fell across the table. I thought of the twenty-six names again. I thought of their small details — the way my mother's braid smelled like tea, the sound of my brother's laugh as he ran across a field.
Someone knocked on the door. It was Isaac.
"You could leave," he said.
"Where would I go?" I asked.
"Anywhere," he said.
"Stay here," I said. "But there are other things to do. The world doesn't fix itself because a prince fell."
He sat and put his hands together in a way that made him seem older than his years. "You're different," he said. "Not the kind different people use. The kind that changes things."
"That's the plan," I said.
Lea caught my eye in the doorway. She smiled like a thief. "We did it."
"We did," I agreed. Then I added, quietly, "But some things will not be unmade. The names won't come back."
"No," Lea said. "But we named them. You gave them a place."
— The End or the Beginning
I walked into the market the day after the Prince's trial. People watched me. Some looked at me like I was dangerous, some like I was the answer to a prayer. A child tugged his mother's sleeve and pointed: "It's the saint," he said. "The one who took the prince."
I stopped and turned to the boy.
"Did you know the story of twenty-six?" I asked.
He blinked. "No," he said. "Why?"
"Remember," I said. "Remember people who were stolen. Don't let a man hide behind a title again."
He nodded solemnly like someone too old for his years.
On my way back, I saw a post hung for a new trial and a notice that the court wished to investigate another conspiracy. I smiled because the work would be clean and necessary. I strapped the Lunar Lash at my hip. It was a tool like a pen now — it sparked when I touched it.
Isaac met me in the doorway and his hand brushed mine for a moment.
"You won't call me your husband," I said.
He smiled without humor. "Do you ever call me anything, Isla?"
"No," I told him. "But I'll call you when things burn."
He nodded. "Safe until they don't," he said.
I looked at him and, for the first time since I had come back into the world, the rage in me was not only fire. It was a thin, fierce kind of peace.
"Good," I said. "Then stay clean."
He looked at me like a man who has chosen a dangerous bed. "You, too."
We both laughed once, a brittle sound, and the market hum went on. People bickered, bargained, loved, and cursed. The world would never be quite as it was. Some things would always ache.
But the list in the corner of my mind — the names that had been stolen — had been given voice. That was enough for now.
And when the next name came up on the wind, I would be ready.
The End
— Thank you for reading —