Face-Slapping15 min read
My Eyes Were Bought, My Life Was Chosen
ButterPicks14 views
I woke up on the shortest day and thought I was already dead.
"Move, hurry up, finish the work before dark," a sharp voice barked above me.
My body felt like a stone. "Where…?" I tried to answer, but the world was a gray blur and my ribs ached as if knives cut through them.
"Get out! What are you looking for in a graveyard?" someone sneered.
"I thought there might be something—" another voice panted.
Hands—bodies—weight. I pushed, couldn't see, couldn't breathe. When they left, the earth around me felt cold and wrong. I crawled up, felt hair at my waist that didn't belong to my life, mud pasted on my face, and a hand—dead, I thought at first—brushed my palm. I scrambled backward until my back slammed against something solid.
"Stop whining and walk," a wind carried away those men.
I staggered through dusk. My last memory before this was a screaming crash and fluorescent lights. I fumbled for a face that wasn't mine, counted fingers, felt a scar along my back, and then it was night.
"Auntie! She woke!" an old voice said.
I pressed myself into a corner when a kindly woman bent over me. "Don't fear, child. I found you by the road. You look like you can't see—do you?"
"Where am I? Which country is this?" I managed.
"This is Daqi," she answered. "Child, your back is bleeding badly. Were you caught by bandits?"
A nurse came with congee, and I tasted hot rice that made me dizzy. The old woman whispered to someone in the courtyard: "This one will bring business to the Jade Fragrance House." Then the other woman laughed. "She's blind, maybe mute, and still pretty? Worth buying."
"I won't be doing charity," the matron said, and the hope I had of getting well slid away.
They did not bind me. They took me, washed the mud off my face, and, by accident of fate and poison, I became Lailah Christiansen—the girl they thought had died in that ugly accident. I lay on foreign straw and learned the sound of shuffling feet, the rhythm of a brothel's life that now swallowed me.
"You're for sale to the Jade Fragrance House. Behave yourself," the woman in loud robes said.
"Are you blind?" she asked and grabbed my face roughly.
I couldn't answer. I had no words for the dark that had settled in my eyes. I had another thing, though—memory of something modern and ordinary: I had been a university student, studying computers, living without parents, renting, surviving. Now there was a scarred body that had been beaten and flung into a mass grave.
"Don't worry," the old woman promised the new owners. "I'll send a doctor."
"Bring her to the West Garden and wrap those wounds," a young man with a grave voice instructed.
"Yes, sir," someone replied.
They carried me to a place called Cloudwater Pavilion. The air smelled of plants and incense. Two attendants dressed in soft blue put me on a bed and, when the cloth was pulled away, I saw the ragged scar down my arm; my body had been used and misused.
"Don't be afraid," said a gentle voice. "I'll dress this for you."
"Who are you?" I asked.
The woman clothed me in silence and left. The Pavilion moved like a breathing thing: quiet, spare, full of medicine.
A day later, "Lord Mu," the attendant, announced strangers. A small girl from the next room called out timidly. "Is someone there?"
"Yes," I answered. A voice answered back like a child.
"Someone once took me here and they gave me medicine. My father gambled and sold me," she said.
Later the doctor forced something down my throat. I tried not to bite. They bound me, then a stronger sensation took over: iron seemed to eat at my bones. I bled from my eyes and ears and fell into a sleep of fire.
"Is that it? Did it work?" a man asked with a strange excitement when I convulsed.
"Stabilize her. Care for her," the man called Mu said.
In dreams, a woman I called mother kissed me and left me. When I woke and the light hit my face, I could not see anything at all. The cavern of night had filled me.
"You're blind now," someone said later as if the word itself could finish me.
"Take her to the Cloudwater Pavilion," the pale, composed man said. "She'll be one of ours. She will live in our care."
"What's your name?" he asked when I later told him I had none left.
"Lailah," I whispered. "Lailah Christiansen."
He bowed as if I had handed him my life. "You will stay at Cloudwater. Our master will not harm you."
"But if I leave?" I asked.
"You begged me to save you," he replied. "Here you will be fed, not hunted. Here you will live. Until we find a cure." He gave me a small ration of hope like a bitter pill.
He told me of the master's ailment when he finally let me meet him: "Lord Cornelius Newton keeps his body in Cloudwater because the palace has eyed him for years. Keep his condition secret."
Cornelius Newton's hand was cool as he checked my eyelids. His presence was smaller than the power he held. He spoke slowly, and the voice matched a man who could measure the world with a single command.
"Your blindness is from poison," he said softly. "The cure lies in the palace. I will fetch it."
"Who—who are you?" I managed.
"Cornelius Newton," he said.
"Come back at the third dawn, be prepared for pain." He tasted my pulse, then smiled the smallest smile. "Rest."
When he fetched the remedy, I almost believed it would work. He was patient and practiced, with a hand that ruled over others and a kindness he never meant to waste. He was the kind of man who moved chess pieces in a quiet room while the empire burned elsewhere.
On the day I could open my eyes, "Preston Reid," his attendant, appeared and said, "Take her to the West Garden. Dress her. She comes to the capital with me."
"Why me?" I asked when Preston handed me a token—an Avila crest on a thin metal plate.
"Lailah, you must pretend to be the Avila heiress who vanished," Preston said, "the family needs you to find something called the Sky Star. The Regent believes it's crucial."
"You're asking me to be an impostor?" I blinked at him.
"You will be the face the Regent uses to find what he needs," Cornelius Newton said as if facts would soften the blade.
The Avila household was older and larger than anything I had known, and the life there felt like acting without a script. The Avila patriarch, Francisco Avila, received me with a thin smile and nerves made of silk.
"This is our guest," Jason Garza—my supposed cousin—said, offering a hand that trembled at the edges.
A young woman, Ximena Wallin, glanced at me and then at the token and flared like a storm. Her face gave nothing but a home for cruelty.
"She looks fake," Ximena said later. "I saw her slip from the back hill last night."
"She may be our heiress," Jason protested weakly. "Wait for my father."
"You stole our jewel. You must be punished if you are foreign," Ximena whispered to those near her. Her eyes were always hungry for someone to kick.
I played the role; I swallowed the act like bitter medicine. The household remembered the Avila girl as a child, but not enough. They feared the Sky Star more than a liar. The Avilas had a small trinket called the Dawn Pearl—small, alive—and it tracked the Sky Star's presence. They needed someone to look like the lost heiress to coax the Sky Star out. They chose me because I had foolishly bowed to Cornelius Newton. I had accepted a shelter and the chance to see again.
Cornelius Newton's help had a price: my body would be drained in part to stabilize his master. "A blood tether," Preston admitted. "Every month you'll give what they need. If you refuse, the pain comes. Take the cure when it is given."
"How long?" I asked.
"Until the antidote is found," Preston said.
"Or forever," Cornelius Newton added softly, watching my face as if he measured the goodness inside.
I had been a student who argued with code and coffee-stained nights. I had not imagined being traded for medicine and tokens. But I said yes.
"Your enemy is being cruel tonight," I whispered to myself.
It wasn't long before the Avilas and I were caught in a storm designed by kings.
"Keep her safe," Cornelius Newton told Preston before he left for the palace.
"Yes, sir," Preston replied.
On the road back from the capital, sharp attacks came like winter. Arrows rattled like rain. I felt a hand lift me down and fingers like ice press against my face. Cornelius Newton's skill revealed itself not in grand motions but in precision—he fought like a mind that had practiced the world.
"Stay low," he said, and a silver-hot needle flashed out of his sleeve and found a target's throat. When the last assailant fell or fled, the road was empty but for our breaths.
"You okay?" Preston asked, wiping soot from his brow.
"I—" I touched my chest and found oxygen.
Cornelius Newton wrapped his coat around me. "The Sky Star is the kind of prize that pulls men like wolves," he murmured. "You must not speak of us."
Days later, we reached the Avila estate. The Dawn Pearl that should have led men to the Sky Star fluttered like a living insect when the Sky Star was near. It did not glow yet. My fingers learned locks; I learned to be careful in halls with treasures. I learned there were ways to steal secrets if you had the patience.
At night, the Avila household whispered. Ximena's hands found ways to hurt the downtrodden. When she saw me, she took a whip like it belonged to her birthright. The household tolerated it. I tolerated it. For a while, I convinced myself I had chosen a role, like any other costume.
"Please, don't sell her," I whispered when a girl named Nicole Gardner—small as a sparrow, loyal as a shadow—was about to be driven out. I had taken her in once as a friend. "She will be lost."
"She's mine now," Ximena snapped, eyes like knives. "Teach her her place."
The Avila home smelled of medicine, secrets, and a regret I could not name.
Then the Dawn Pearl, that insect of green light, registered the Sky Star. It burned red when something near me bled and it pointed like truth to a place none of us expected: inside me.
"That can't be," Delphine Zaytsev—my guardian aunt in the house—said slowly. "If the Sky Star was taken into the body, then the Avilas have been damaged for a generation."
They told me the secret in pieces: the child the family had saved once had been dead; to bring her back, someone had used the Sky Star to revive her. She lived but stayed in a child's mind. Her name had been the one this body bore. My chest thudded with confusion. Maybe the strange softness in Delphine's voice was not feigned. Her hand shook when she spoke.
"What will we do?" I asked.
Cornelius Newton's eyes were a closed gate. "Show them we are honest with it. Make them see the Avila heart."
"Make a show of it?" Preston frowned.
"We will stage the Sky Star's sacrifice and generosity," Cornelius Newton said. "We will make the world see the Avilas gave everything and so merit neither pity nor plunder."
The plan was ugly theater: make a convincing performance that would save the Avilas' honor while bemoaning the Sky Star itself. We crafted a chipped red bead and smeared it with my blood. The Dawn Pearl turned red and sang.
Men came like hornets when the news of a Sky Star broke: masked, rough, greedy. We staged a theft on the road when Francisco Avila acted as if his life had been drained by villainous men. A blade, a cry, a false collapse—then Delphine and I enacted a scene of sorrow so real the crooks faltered.
"Use it on me," I yelled at Delphine with the false Sky Star pressed to my lips. "Bring him back!"
"Don't!" the attackers cried, thinking they'd profit. Then a lifeguard song: Cornelius Newton's blade met them. His figure was a storm. It looked like our skewed truth had been ripped apart and remade. The bead burned crimson as if it held the power of the dead. They hesitated. Men shifted. An army in the shadows decided this prize was a bone too stubborn to pull out.
When the attackers retreated, we staged the cure: they believed the Sky Star had been used to heal Francisco Avila. "He lives," we cried. "The Avilas gave this miracle to us!" The crowd cheered and scattered in two kinds of sorrow: those who envied and those who feared.
The deed bought us weeks of peace. But peace in a world built on lies is brittle.
Then came the night it all fell apart.
"I saw her at the back hill again," Ximena said first, loud enough for the whole great hall to hear. Her face was perfect with scorn. "She sneaked around the Avila grounds!"
"You are a liar," I said. I stepped forward. I had to. "I paid toll to enter. I do not sneak."
"She stole from us!" Ximena screamed.
"She tried to cut you!" cried a servant.
That was the spark. The Avila household's anger grew into a press of men. I felt knives of voices. They locked me in a dark storeroom while Ximena screamed for a public judgment. The house that had fed me turned its face like a coin.
"She is false," Ximena kept shouting. "She is a thief and an impostor. She is not our blood."
"Let us decide," Jason Garza mumbled and then acquiesced because the house needed a verdict.
They dragged me to the courtyard. The winter wind hit every face. There were dozens in the yard: servants, neighbors, a few riders who had been paid to watch the show. They wanted scandal and they wanted a scapegoat. The Avila crest hung like a judge.
"Let them fetch the nearest magistrate," someone suggested.
"No," Ximena hissed, "we will do this here. We will expose the impostor!"
I could say nothing because I had no proof and the Dawn Pearl would not glow in public.
"Ximena," Delphine said, studying the faces like a slow clock. "Enough. This is not how we do things."
"She came here in the night," Ximena insisted, too loud. "We found her by the back hill. She sneaks. She steals. She envies us all."
From the rafters the town's gossipers murmured like bees. Some pulled out slates and began making quick sketches of the drama. Others whispered to write it down and spread the tale. They leaned forward. The Avila house became a theater.
"Do you deny the theft?" Francisco Avila asked, voice failing with age and the weight of what had been stolen from him.
"I deny nothing," I said, my voice steady despite the cold. "Ask this girl here who holds a whip like a crown. Ask her how often she beats those beneath her."
"You have no evidence," Ximena snapped and smiled as a viper would. "You are a false queen of straw."
Delphine's hands tightened until her knuckles shone white. Her calm slipped.
"This will end," she said. "We will search the grounds and we will find truth."
They opened the storerooms, peered into trunks, overturned chests. servants gasped; neighbors craned necks. Every face was a judge. Then a commotion rose near the kitchen where the old madam Allison Simon had set up a coop of girls.
"She helped!" someone cried.
"What does that mean?" Ximena spat.
A meek voice rang from the crowd. Nicole Gardner stepped forward, small but steady.
"Ximena has hit me," she said. "She sold girls and hit them if they spoke. She sent one to the Jade Fragrance and the owner—" Nicole's voice broke—"the owner is dead."
"Who said that?" Ximena shrieked like a wounded thing. Her posture changed from smug to wide. "That's a lie! You lie!"
People who had once applauded her cruelty now shifted. "Is it true?" a man called.
A hundred eyes answered in quiet step-by-step steps: that it was true. Ximena's smile cracked. She had a thousand enemies in a thousand small corners of the world.
I heard a murmur: "The old mistress of Jade Fragrance died suddenly. She had enemies. Ximena scolded them often."
Ximena's face drained into a mask. "I—" she began.
"Then prove it," Delphine said. "If not—if not—then I will have you punished as we punish traitors."
Her voice was low and filled with real threat. Ximena's posture crumpled from triumph to panic.
"The law will decide," Jason Garza said quicksilver. "We will summon magistrates."
"No," Ximena cried. "You cannot—"
"Hold her," Delphine ordered.
Two servants seized Ximena by the arms. She tried to tear free, but the hands were weathered and strong.
"You can't do this!" she shrieked at Delphine, and then at me. "You fake! You stole our jewels! You are an impostor!"
I stepped forward and looked her dead in the eyes. "You beat the weak," I said. "You sold them. You thought no one would remember."
"She defames me!" Ximena wailed. She had been so sure of her power. Now there were not only whispers but people with pens and sticks and fierce faces. Men who had once liked watching her cruelty began to look like they might make a ledger of every cruelty she had ever done.
They forced her into the square with a rope across her shoulders like the yoke of a beast. "Let the neighbors judge," Delphine said.
"Now face the crowd," Francisco Avila commanded, though his voice shook. "We will end this."
Ximena's defiance was the first stage: she glared and spat toward some of the onlookers, seeking allies.
"She lies! She lies!" she hollered.
Then shock hit her when a neighbor—an old baker whose daughter she'd considered mere entertainment—spoke up.
"I saw her take money from the girl's purse," the baker said. He shook, but his hand didn't wobble.
Ximena's eyes went wide. "No—no, that is not true!" Her voice faltered into the second stage: denial.
Around us, people started to draw pictures, to write the facts down, to whisper to one another. A merchant took from his pocket a small notebook and scratched a careful entry. "We will tell the magistrate," he said, "but first the Guarantors say the house must judge itself."
Ximena's face drained. She had been the center of easy cruelty, the cruelty of someone who believed herself protected by name and lineage. Now she saw her hands covered with the red of those she had hurt.
"Beg him," Delphine commanded. "Beg them to forgive you. Make amends—publicly."
Ximena's expression creased and fell from denial to panic. She attempted to wriggle from the ropes and lunged for words, "No—it's a lie—the girls are lying!" Her throat tightened; the act of telling lies was thin.
The crowd's reaction changed like weather. At first they clutched their breath: some with curiosity, some with the low delight people feel watching a powerful person fall. Then came the murmur of disgrace: "We knew she was cruel." "She struck them for sport." "She sold girls to the Jade Fragrance?"
Someone in the crowd who had been scribbling a careful record stood and shouted, "She must confess!"
"Confess!" the crowd echoed.
Ximena's face shifted again—this time to the stage of crumbling. Her eyes went watery and she looked smaller than her words. "I—please—" Her voice broke. "I didn't mean—"
"Beg," a woman hissed. "Beg them to spare you."
Ximena bent her knees and fell to her knees in the mud. "Please," she sobbed. "Please, I didn't mean—"
No one reached for her. That was the worst part: the silence toward her pleas. Men with pens and who had once laughed as she struck others now turned away. A man who had owed her small favors spat into the gutter. A servant unclasped the laced gloves she had once worn as a mark of status and threw them into a fire.
"Tell them why you did it," Delphine demanded. "Why you hurt them."
Ximena cried and broke into a confession—half truth, half attempt to shift blame—then tried to beg for mercy. Her voice climbed: "It was survival. I needed what I had. I was jealous. I was afraid."
"Then make amends," Delphine said. "Pay them. Apologize to everyone here. And you will work as they worked—no pay, no comfort—until the magistrate hears you."
"Please," Ximena begged, and then, for the last act of collapse, she screamed, "Don't let them send me out! Don't let them make me beg on the road!"
No one reached for her. The crowd began to murmur and clap—clapping against cruelty was not applause for the fall but a release. People pulled out notepads to copy the scene, to spread it. "We'll remember," they said. "We will not let this happen again."
She had passed through the stages: arrogant, shocked, denial, collapse, desperate pleas. Around us were scribes and neighbors and those who had been hurt. They recorded every breath, every whimper. Some wept; some took quill to paper as if to preserve justice in ink.
"Her punishment will stand," Delphine said. "Public labor. She will care for those she hurt. She will pay with service. Let that be the lesson."
They shaved Ximena's hair and gave her the coarse cloth of servants. They led her to clean the stables, to mend the fences, to treat the wounds of the girls she had broken. The sight was disorienting: the one who had lashed now bent to mend the lashes she had cut into other people.
She begged and asked for mercy. People whispered and some recorded it all. When she passed, a child took a scrap of cloth and wiped her hands off her face, only to throw away the cloth and walk on. No one patted her shoulder. No one forgave her with smiles. Some wept for the cruelty she had shown; others clapped because cruelty had been closed down.
That night, as Ximena sat mending a torn sleeve, a group of women passed with nods of approval.
"She will not be the same," one said.
"Good," another answered.
I watched Ximena work by the light of a low lamp. She had been broken in front of the town. She had gone from triumph to ruin in the space of an hour, and everyone had seen the stages: the hiss of triumph, the blank look of shock, the harsh denial, the body folding inward, the pleading that fell on empty hands. The crowd's reactions—whispers, inked notes, stifled cries, even the slow clap of rough men—were everywhere. They recorded it, told it, and made sure no veil of pity would again cover her.
She knelt and tried to look at me. Her face was small and hollow. I did not feel triumph. I felt tired, and the cold inside me grew more certain. The Avila house was still fragile, but some of the ugliness had a face now and the people who suffered had names.
"Don't make spectacle of the wounded," Delphine told the crowd later. "Punish the deed, not the person entirely. Teach restitution."
So Ximena worked. People watched. Someone with a book wrote the whole thing down and made copies. Lines were drawn and the city remembered the day.
After that, life changed little by little. The Dawn Pearl kept its secrets. Cornelius Newton returned and smiled only once when the Avila house regained a fragile peace.
"You did well," he told me quietly. "You gave them a reason to spare a family that had been crushed."
"If the price is my blood, sir," I said, "I will pay—but not forever."
Cornelius Newton looked out over the courtyard, unblinking. He was used to chess boards and trades. "I will not harm you without cause. But the world is a ledger, Lailah. You have learned to survive on both sides."
"I have learned to lie as well as to live," I whispered.
"Then learn to be dangerous with pity," he said. "And when the time comes, use your eyes—both kinds."
I married him before the moon turned twice and found life was less a story and more a ledger of accounts and favors. I learned to talk, to be seen, to be used. Sometimes I hated him. Sometimes I understood him. Mostly I learned to count the days between needles and the nights when the antidote kept the pain from arriving.
But no matter how many stages Ximena passed through in the yard—arrogance, shock, denial, collapse, pleading—the crowd's judgment saved a dozen girls from her whip. The punishment was public, slow, and human. The magistrate later endorsed it as a lesson to the Avila house: cruelty will not hide among red silks.
And through all the scenes—the Sky Star and the Dawn Pearl, my black nights and the red bead—I found that the world was always watching. They would record and retell, and if a cruelty rose again, someone would remember the day they saw a girl's face change from queen to beggar and then to worker, under the light of a lantern and the scratch of a pen.
The End
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