Face-Slapping15 min read
My First Day Back: I Woke Up Human and Found Two Kids Who Called Me "Mother"
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I woke up by a stream and laughed like a madwoman.
"Finally," I said aloud, "finally I can be a person."
"Who are you talking to?" a breeze seemed to answer, but of course it didn't.
"I am Emilia De Luca," I announced, as if introducing myself at court. "And I am not going back to being a system."
Two men moved through the grass like shadows. They whispered, sharpening each syllable.
"Boss, she hasn't died yet. Shall we finish the job?" one hissed.
"Go on, then," the other said. "Don't waste time."
I stood, hands still trembling with a power I did not yet understand. I smiled at them, very openly, like a woman who had just discovered she could be dangerous.
"Are you looking for me?" I asked.
They froze.
"She—" one stammered, "she's so pretty. The madwoman suddenly became... beautiful!"
"Don't drool," the other snapped. "We're here for a job, remember?"
A child's cry cut through the field—small, clear, urgent.
"Waah—bad daddy! Xi Xi won't listen—"
A tiny, perfectly made bundle of humanity came pounding toward us, her bare feet slapping the grass. She was four years old and all kinds of trouble. Her lashes were long, her face the sort painters would envy, and when she stopped, she looked straight at me and said, plainly and without a flicker of caution:
"Mommy?"
I blinked. "You called me?"
"Mommy!" she confirmed, and then she flung herself into my arms like gravity had decided I was the center of the world.
I almost dropped her. "Wait—" I said. "I don't—"
"She's the emperor's daughter!" one assassin shouted, and then both of them were running like their shadows were on fire.
The small girl tucked her head against my neck and peered up. "Who are you?" she asked, sweet as sugar.
"Me?" I tried to sound natural. "I—" I had a system's memory and a stranger's body and five years of someone else's life stamped like a bruise on the back of my mind. "I am Emilia," I said, because a name should be honest.
"Mommy," she repeated, and hugged harder.
I wanted to flee. I wanted to run back to the stream and ask the sky why it had given me a body with memories and not a full instruction manual. Instead, I smelled blood on my dress—a lot of it—and the ruined hem told me the woman I had become had died not long ago.
"Don't worry," I told the little girl. "We'll find food. We'll find a reason to live. But you—stay hidden, okay?"
She nodded. "Xi Xi is four." She propped up four fingers with pride.
"Four," I echoed. "How... how do you not have a mother here?"
"My bad daddy," she sniffed. "He says Xi Xi doesn't have a mommy. But Xi Xi has you."
I laughed, because what else could I do? I had just learned to hold a teacup in this life and to nod and play the fool, and now a child had claimed me.
"Stay here," I told her, and slid into the courtyard the way a thief slips into a well-lit kitchen.
From behind a hedge came the thin voice of an old woman: "We couldn't finish. The girl is still alive."
I smiled at the voice like a cat amused by mice. It belonged to a housekeeper who had fed me rotten porridge and needle-made beds for years—Eve Beltran by the memory I could coax up. I walked into the rear yard and found Eve talking to two grim silhouettes.
"You are small-minded," I said, voice gentle. "Eve, you did this?"
She paled. "Young lady—"
"Eve," I said, clearer. "You have been faithful to the wrong people. Why?"
Her hand moved like an insect toward a hidden blade. I moved slower and then faster, and when the knife came out, my wrist twisted and the sound of bone disengaging echoed like a dry twig.
"Ah!" she choked, and the rest of the courtyard erupted into soldiers and blades.
I did not think about sparing them. I thought only, like a man learning to walk, about balance and where to put my foot. My sleeves became the wind, my foot became a hammer. Men hit the ground like bad dreams ending suddenly. The two assassins returned—more of them—and they thought numbers, but I had a mother's fury. In under a breath, there were bodies, and then silence.
"Why... why are you like this?" Eve croaked, blood at her lips.
I picked up a small dagger of antique design from the dirt, and turned it around under the sun. "Because someone taught me how," I said. "Because I refused to die twice."
I walked back to the hiding place. The girl, Claudia Edwards, peered out at me through her lashes.
"Claudia?" I tried the name, and it fit like a glove.
"Xi Xi," she corrected.
"Claudia," I said. "Stay. I will come for you."
She nodded and clung to the corner of a basket. I left the bodies wrapped in a curtain of wind and flowers, because children hate seeing blood.
The carriage that thundered into the yard had the sort of arrogance that announced itself with gold tassels and a man who spoke without wearing the weight of honesty. His voice slid into the air like oil.
"Emilia De Luca," he called. "I came to see you."
He had the hollow softness of a man who was used to being kissed by praise and was named Dylan Blair in the memory that faded across my mind. "Are you the one running the mischief in my house?" he asked.
"Who told you I was mischief?" I countered, smiling like a candle.
He smirked. "If you cannot be civil, I will."
"Will you go to the emperor with me?" I asked suddenly, because I had just tasted how a pen—the written word—could become a blade.
He flushed. "Who—did you just—"
I broke his smile with three strokes of ink and a bold word he had not expected. A scrap of paper that meant much more than paper in that world—"A letter of renunciation." I wrote it, signed it with a flourish I did not feel, and then placed it on his forehead like a crown of thorns.
Dylan turned from insult to panic quick as a match flares. "You cannot!" he barked. "This is the emperor's decree—our betrothal is by command!"
"Command can be revoked," I said. "Or it can be ignored."
He lunged like a man who had been told his wine was poisoned.
"Claudia," I whispered into my sleeve. "Make him wait."
She watched with wide eyes. When Dylan blustered forward, I picked him up—because some soldiers learn to fight and some learn to be yelling toys—and I launched him out of the courtyard like an angry comet. He crashed into the street and was barely coherent. The house burst into gossip. I had burned the bridge by smiling.
"Go," I told the servants. "Take the child inside. Do not let her see the blood."
"We will," an old maid said, trembling.
I walked the paths home the way one returns to a ruined palace and recognizes it anyway. Guards bowed with a surprise that tasted like caution. The woman who had become housemistress—Julianne Tarasov, dressed summer-bright as if the dawning sun had lent her beauty—stepped forward with a smile like a cracked plate.
"Welcome back," she said, cheap and practiced.
"Where is my mother," I asked. The word 'mother' was rope and river in my chest.
She made a face that mouthed care and meant calculation. "Child, don't you remember? You were ill."
I touched her hand. "Give me fifteen years," I said. "Give me the truth."
"How dare you—" Julianne began.
"Down," I said.
She did not. So I moved. Her arm snapped under my palm like a reed. She fell back and called for servants. They tried the usual indignities. I tested a wooden spear and snapped it into scrap.
More soon arrived. My small old house smelled of dust and too many false smiles. The corner rooms had been given to the servants who laughed at me before and then bowed. My old attendants—real ones—were gone, hidden or broken or dead. The new ones feared the one who had used my house like a palanquin of power. I found them and asked them where their loyalty had gone.
"To the mistress," they said.
"Whose mistress?"
"Julianne's."
I found the names had rotated like seasons. My father's favor had been a winter, and these women had folded themselves into the warm cloak of Julianne Tarasov.
"Bring back the women who used to serve me and stop that cruelty," I said, and when no one moved, I snapped a thin riding crop into the air and made a sound that meant I was not to be trifled with.
A chorus of pleading, and then a sharp, sharp change: the old servants came out, and when I saw their bruises and their cheeks hollowed by fear, my hands shook in a way that was not the power of a weapon but the power of sorrow.
I gave orders like one tries to fix a broken machine. Basic things: water, medicine, rest. I demanded respect, not because I craved it sweet, but because it kept cruelty from turning into habit.
"You did this," I told my half-sister, Felicity Chaney, later, watching her lean like a reed at the door.
"You're insane," she said with syrupy venom. "You return from the dead and lord it over us? We are the family now."
"You are the pretenders," I said. "You poisoned a girl for five years and called it care."
She blinked, and then, like the sort of person used to playing pieces rather than people, she said, "We did what our world required."
I laughed, short and raw. "Then you will do what my world requires."
Her hand closed on the table. "You have no right—"
I moved my hand like a bell. "You will come when I ask. You will do as I say."
She did not consent graciously. She knelt when I told her to, at first to stand and then when she did not show contrition, I made them feel the weight of being without grace.
"Forgive me," she said finally, voice thin.
"Enough," I said. "I will not make a show of mercy; I will show you the world you thought you owned."
She looked at me and saw that I meant it.
The next day I rode into the capital with two children at my elbow and a resolve like iron.
"Mother?" Claudia sang as we walked beneath flags. "We are going to the palace."
"Yes," I said. "We're going to meet some people."
"Will they like me?" she asked.
"They'll like you until they understand you," I told her. "Then they'll either love you or fear you. Both are useful."
The palace felt like a dream stitched from marble and the smell of incense. Women in silks whispered like wind chimes, and when Claudia called me 'mother' in the middle of the garden, I felt something uncrack in my chest.
"Her name's Claudia Edwards," I told a woman who looked like she had practiced aristocracy at length. "And I am her mother."
"You don't know what you claim," she said, patrician and sharp. "The emperor's children—"
"Then let's decide it simply," I suggested. "If you believe I am a fraud, make me prove it. We will do a blood-test."
A woman stepped forward with a smile like a knife. "Yes—let her bleed and place the drops in water. If the blood mixes, then—"
"And if it doesn't?" someone else asked, with delicious malice.
"Then we will laugh," she said. "And she will be humiliated."
"Fine," I said. "Prepare."
Claudia held my hand and stared at the needle like it might be a riddle. "It will hurt," I warned.
She shrugged. "Xi Xi brave."
We performed the test in the pavilion surrounded by a thousand delicate ears and eyes.
"Make a bowl of water," I told a palace maid.
"Here," she said, setting it down.
I caught the needle, cold and thin, and pricked my finger with the calm of someone who had counted their days. A bead of red swelled, and I let it fall into the bowl.
"Now your turn," I murmured to Claudia. She went pale, then bright, and held out the chubby finger with the kind of courage that is unlearned.
She pricked her finger, and a single drop plopped into the water. The crowd watched like an ocean of faces.
Nothing happened. The water sat, patient and clear for a breath. Then, because I had a mind to be theatrical, I blew, and the two drops slowly curled toward each other—then blurred. The two reds did not separate into different destinies. They found each other as if they recognized the same bloodline.
Gasps. A low murmur. The woman who had set the test gathered her skirts and smiled thinly. "So? Magic?" she asked.
I shrugged. "Either it is enough, or it is a trick." I had things that were not trick and things that were not yet explained. The ring in my finger hummed like a small engine, and I did not show it.
They accepted the test with small bows and whispered that the child had good eyes.
The palace watchers would pass the news like a coin. People made plays with little gestures and little murmurs. The story flew faster than any state's pigeon.
Then the important part came: punishment for those who had sought my death and the lives of my servants. Julianne and Felicity had gathered a small coterie of those who loved the taste of a person's failure. They thought they had enough witnesses. They had not counted on the public's appetite for drama.
"Tell everyone," I said. "Tell them the truth. Bring the evidence from the kitchen, the servants, the records."
They laughed at me. "You will produce what evidence? What proof, Emilia? You had been absent for five years—"
"Then we will show them," I said.
I arranged for a public audience in the hall where the emperor himself would pass by, at the midday procession. I told the palace chroniclers to stand where they could scratch the record. That isn't a photograph, but a good scribe is the old world's camera.
When the hall filled and when the emperor was due to pass, I entered.
"Lady Julianne," I said, face lit like a calm blade, "you have been a gracious host of my father's table. Tell me—whose hands mixed medicines for the household? Whose hands fed my bed? Who signed the orders to keep me away?"
"I—" Julianne blinked, then tried the old drum: "I gave her space because she was ill."
"Here," I said, and held up a scrap of paper that had been found in the servants' chest and signed in the sly hand of her clerk. "You complained my mother took too much up, and you arranged that I be given under-care in the outskirts. You sent men to make certain I never left."
The crowd stirred. "Is this true?" someone whispered.
"I admit," Julianne said quickly, voice far too smooth, "I—"
"You admit?" I smiled coldly. "Then tell them about the needles. Tell them who used the needles on my maids, on my servants."
Felicity flinched as if slapped. She looked around at the faces and tried denial. "I—no—"
"Stop," Julianne said, as if silence could mend crime. "You cannot produce proof. You cannot—"
"Bring the maids," I said. "Bring the ones you kept silent in the kitchen, the ones you forced to lie."
Some tried to leave. The doors would not hold them from the breath of truth. Servants stepped in, rag-wrapped and trembling, and burst into testimony.
"He—he told me to add a remedy to Mistress's broth that would make her forget to speak," a woman said, voice thin like a snapped reed. "He said if she ate it, she would sleep more. She coughed and sank lower."
Another woman stepped forward and spat, "She gave me orders to hide the letters Father received. She told me to slip them into the gardener's shed." The hall smelled like river-mud and old tears.
"All of this is a mistake," Julianne said, the first crack of panic splitting her practiced face into pieces. "We only—"
"Only what?" I said softly. "Only kept a woman in a cage until she was almost gone? Only let her life rot like fruit?"
A hush. You could hear a sparrow's wing.
Then the public punishment began. I had promised them a spectacle because nothing frees a house from rot like a clean wind of shame.
"Take them to the dais," I said.
They brought Julianne and Felicity to stand before the entire hall, the emperor's guards shedding their formal armor like a second skin as they prepared for order. A bowl was brought. Not water this time, but a pail of the house's refuse. The servants who had suffered were asked—no, given—the right to spit truth.
Julianne's eyes widened with the clear knowledge that this was not a private humiliation. "You cannot!" she shrieked. "You will not—"
"Silence," I said. "You decided to play mistress with other people's lives."
The woman who had been the chief scullion turned toward them. Her hands were raw from years of scrubbing. "You beat us for laughing," she said to Julianne. "You told us we were thieves when you had taken the key yourself to feed your daughter's vanity."
Felicity's mouth twisted. "This is—this is slander!"
"Then answer," I said. "Did you order the maids to serve moulded rice? Did you tell the physician to not check on the girl's fever because you 'preferred her quiet'?"
Felicity's face changed rapidly: smugness, anger, denial; then something that looked like fear. "No—I did not—"
"Then why did the girls break their silence only when asked by the chief scribe?" I asked, leaning close. "Because the scribe found ledger entries. Did you think your little notations about 'remove mouthwash' were clever?"
She laughed in a small animal way that made people look away. "I only did what was best for the house."
"Best how?" the scullion demanded. "You took a mother away from a child and called it order."
"I will not be talked to this way," Julianne said, her tone sharpening like a blade used to scare rather than cut. She looked around, and for a second she found some of the crowd nodding, some of them uncomfortable because power had once been on her side.
At the signal, the servants stepped forward. In front of a hundred witnesses they took the ladles and the soiled cloths and flung them at the pair. It would not be done in rage only; it would be order. The mud and the smell of used oil splattered, and the silk of their dresses grew filthy like facts revealing themselves.
Julianne staggered, and at first she laughed, a laugh that was not for joy. "What savagery—"
"Keep going," I said, and the maids set to work.
The bowl of refuse was heavy; it had old vegetable peelings and rotten bits that smelled of long days and little mercy. They smeared it on faces that had smiled over other bodies for years. They smeared the hair, they rubbed it into the hems.
Julianne's countenance slid from rage to disbelief to rage again. "You cannot do this in the emperor's hall! Soldiers—"
"Emperor's hall?" a woman in the crowd spit the words like a curse. "She took his house's honor and turned it into a grave!"
"Take them to the center," I said, and the guards moved with the same slow pity as snow. They forced both mother and daughter to kneel. The king's retinue had lined the hall; nobles and scribes leaned forward, some taking notes, others sketching the faces to make jest of the ruined vanity.
Julianne's face collapsed. Her eyes leapt to the ceiling as if to summon the sky's support. "Stop! I beg you! Majesty—" she choked out a plea like someone recalling an old coin.
"Beg for mercy and mean it," I said quietly. "Otherwise your begging will be only noise."
Her composure fell away like a worn garment. She knelt, her silk reduced to a smear, and the bystanders murmured and sharpened their blades of gossip. Some of them, stunned by the spectacle, took out their scribes and drew, and others sent runners with the day's accounts. That old world had its cameras—ink and memory.
Felicity's face was a broken thing. She had been pride personified until she realized she had no public to prop her up. She breathed and tried to bargain.
"Please," she begged, voice cracking, "I did it for our house. Father will be furious—"
"No one cares about your father when a child is suffering," the scullion said, voice high with the truth that only the wronged can wield. "You will learn the weight of doing nothing."
The crowd's reaction moved through those phases that kill a social predator: surprise, then a grim entertainment, then a moral assessment. Some watched with pity. Some laughed in the kind of low, ugly way people do when a gilded figure falls. Some sketched crude caricatures. A few took notes like priests of the new sermon.
Julianne's face went through a sequence: at first she was angry and outspoken; then shocked to clutching denial; then the bright mask dissolved and a private tremor exposed her like a peeled fruit. Felicity did not hold the mask as long; she paced between denial and frantic bargaining.
"Please," she said again, louder now, "your ladyship, I will do anything. Forgive me—"
I could see the change—the slow, awful movement from arrogance to supplication. Their supporters had backed away. The palace scribes would not be kind; their ink would be merciless.
"Get up," I said, and when they did, their silk was a joke; it hung like flags dead in a dry wind. They staggered toward the exit, pulled along by dignity that had run out. Some servants spat or hissed. Others whispered that the woman's sentence would be long in the tongues of the markets.
"You will apologize to everyone you wronged," I ordered. "You will be recorded. You will be banished from a number of households. You will be made to live with the labor you demanded of others."
They fell to shaking, the slow breakdown of those who had been secure. "No," Julianne whispered. "No—"
"Then begin your apology here, in front of those you hurt," I said.
She sobbed, and the sound tore the air because someone had been struck in the heart and found it still beating. She begged. The crowd shifted from shock to the complicated taste of watching a snake be skinned.
The punishment lasted as long as the crowd wanted it to—long enough for shame to seed into memory. They said every stage were there to watch: the smugness that had been present at their arrival; the shock at being confronted; the instant of denial and the intricate bows of the guilty; the collapse and a last, humiliating plea.
"What do you want me to do?" Julianne whimpered when it was over.
"Go," I said. "And do not show your face where order is needed."
They left, shoulders bent, and the courtiers whispered as if tasting a new delicacy. The chronicle would reflect this—ink would speak where rumor could not.
After, when the clean-up began and people picked the scullion's broom like a new standard, I took Claudia's small hand and walked to the gardens.
"Do you know what they called you?" a woman in the crowd asked, voice low and amazed.
"They called me a daughter," Claudia said, and then, with solemn pride, "and I said she is my mom."
I stroked the small wild hair at her temples and watched Everett Xiao—her twin’s older shadow, the little boy who thought himself a man of the world—watch me with a slow curiosity like a man holding a strange flower.
"This is only the start," I said to the two of them, and to myself. "The debts are many. The lies are many. But there is a particular pleasure in correcting the ledger."
"Will you make us go away?" Claudia asked, worried.
"No," I answered. "I will teach you names of herbs and how to take a breath when the house wants to break you. I will teach you which people to trust and which people to watch."
Everett looked at me like a small king measuring the reach of my fingers.
"Are you my mother?" he asked, blunt as a child.
"I am," I said. "And I will not let anyone take you."
We walked back toward the city, and as the sun set, the palace rumors began to braid into a different shape. They would write and erase and think and draw. They would whisper my name, sometimes with hope, sometimes with derision.
But the wounds on my servants healed, and the house breathed differently. I learned the ring on my finger—my mother's ring—was an instrument, not just an heirloom. It crafted small things out of the air, small darts that could wound without leaving tracks. I learned how to use it with care and with intention.
When dusk came, I sat with the two children beneath a lantern and told them the rules of a house I was building slower than light. "We will keep the truth," I said. "We will keep the people who love us. We will let the rest chase their own mirrors until they tire."
Claudia's head rested on my knee. "Is this forever?" she asked.
"It is as long as it has to be," I answered. "And if they ever try we will—"
"We will throw them into the mud." Everett finished, practiced with his small frown.
I laughed. "We will be kinder," I said. "Mostly."
But then I added, because the world does not bend to tenderness alone, "And we will make sure they do not hurt the people who belong to us."
They both nodded like little conspirators.
It was only the first day I had to be human, but I had the taste of power and mercy and the bright electric joy of two small people who thought me a harbor. I had my mother's ring, my old wounds, and a long list of debts.
"Tomorrow," I said, stroking Claudia's hair, "we go into the palace again. But this time we bring more proofs."
"Will there be cake?" she asked.
"There will be cake," I promised. "And justice."
The End
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