Face-Slapping11 min read
"My Hands Were Meant for Gentleness" — A Palace in Ashes
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"I am Jaylah Cherry," I said when they first asked my name in the East Court. "I am Canon David's wife."
"You're his white moon," Canon David whispered, fingers warm around my hand. "You will be—"
"I will be with you," I finished for him. "If you go, I go."
"You won't resent me?" he asked once, the day before the throne was publicly sealed and Kadence Brown was named Empress.
"I won't resent you," I answered with a smile that fixed the hurt somewhere below my ribs. "What you want, I shall walk with you."
"You said that on our wedding night," he murmured, and I remembered the moon, the hundred apricot trees, his boyish pride. He had once taken my pale hand and promised simple things. We kept those like small gifts.
"Do you remember the apricot grove?" I asked some nights later, when the court's noise had hollowed into distant drums.
He laughed, tender and unfinished. "You sat in my horse's shadow and called me clumsy."
"I called you many names," I said. "Some better, some worse."
"Only one mattered then," he answered. "You."
"I was nineteen then," I said, watching his face. "And father—" My voice broke. The world that kept my brothers alive broke the year it should have kept my child. I fell from the palace steps and lost the life that had been inside me. The physicians said I would never bear a child again.
Canon David would not leave me. He asked every physician in the city to help me. He carried me like a fragile thing he feared would shatter. He was tired and obstinate and tender. I kept promises because I had nothing else left that I could hold.
"Why do the new maids look at me like I'm an old trunk?" I joked once in the inner hall.
"You are not an old trunk," Florence Ash said, brushing my hair. "You are our lady."
"If they bow, they will get used to bowing to the wrong woman," I said. "Let them keep their practice."
Florence's face softened. "Lady, the Empress will be in the palace soon. She is strange, Miss Jaylah. Bright as paint, but she rides as a man rides."
"How many gifts has she sent now?" I asked.
"Too many," Florence replied, and she carried the latest box—an imperial jade bracelet—on her palms like a sin.
Kadence Brown’s gifts rolled into my rooms like snow. "A music box," she sent; "pearls," she sent; "fine silks." Each one arrived with a note that must have cost more than my dowry. She looked for ways to be near me, to make me used to the idea that she had the place at his side.
"Why do you give me so much?" I asked Kadence the first time we sat alone together in her pavilion.
"I was wrong," she admitted with a bow. "I did not know who he was. I did not know who I loved. I am sorry."
I nodded. "If bitterness will rot the house, let us not plant it here."
We talked—me, the tired one; she, the bright thing that had slipped into our garden. She had been younger by eight years; she had a laugh that left small dimples in her cheeks. She could ride, shoot a bow, and make a storm in men's eyes. Canon David took to the brightness as if it were light in a dark room; I could not fault him for it.
"You will not resent me?" he asked once more, that evening before the official proclamation.
"No," I said. "What you want, I will keep for you. I will be what I can."
"Then stay," he said, and the word wrapped me like a coat.
He crowned Kadence. He called me "noble consort" instead of Empress—an honor but not the crown. I kept my place. I played small. I fed the children of others crumbs and smiled.
"You will still be mine," he told me in the hush between court and bed.
"And you will still be mine?" I teased.
"I fell in love before I knew to be reasonable," he said. "I fell for you as boys fall—reckless, sure."
"Then be reckless," I said. "Be reckless and come back to me." I would fold what he returned into my chest and pretend it did not burn.
Kadence's pregnancy came like slow thunder, and the palace filled with the hush before storms: prayers, petitions, a thousand tiny hopes. The court leaned toward her belly and away from my empty arms. Canon David spent his days and nights with her. I stood aside, arranging roses and pressing my fingers to a string of keys that should have been mine.
"Will you play the qin tomorrow?" Kadence asked once, gentle as a child's question.
"I will," I promised, and I kept that promise.
The night the palace drums beat loud and the sky flashed, I was in my chamber. The Empress's retinue rushed in like a river. "She is ill!" they cried.
"She is in labor," Florence said, breathless. "The Empress—"
"The Empress had fainted," Canon David said when he arrived at my door, grabbing my wrist so hard I felt the bones click. "I cannot leave her."
"Go," I told him. "Go to her." In his haste he left, and rain came in sheets. Somewhere between the drums and the candles, chaos spread; a stranger's hands found the monastery and anchored a fuse beneath its floor.
"Stay," Florence whispered that night. "You must not go."
But no promise kept me from the world coming apart. There were men with knives and men with old oaths. An arrow, a scream. Florence—my Florence—should have been safe. She was not.
"She stepped in front," someone said later, dreadful and soft. "An arrow struck her to save the Empress."
Florence lay wrapped in cloth, her skin a map of battles she had never planned to fight. I held her and felt the heat leak away.
"Do not leave me," I said like a child.
She smiled, stubborn as always. "Stay for me," she breathed. "Play the qin. Don't let the palace eat you."
I promised what I could not keep.
"Who fired the arrow?" I demanded later, to all who would answer.
"No one found them," they said. "The streets are chaos. We suspect hired blades, but—"
"Find them," I whispered. "Find them, and I will thank you."
They found little. They found a name here, a seam there. They found a small torn cloth with a mark that meant nothing until my hands held it and I saw a scar like a crescent moon and remembered a face.
"Giselle David?" I breathed.
She used to teach me music, when we were young and careless. They said she had burned herself out of shame years ago. The city said she turned to ash like all the tragic heroes in verse—gone and not to be spoken of, a memory tightly wrapped. But she had come back like a wound that would not clot. She became the one the guards found at Huayin Temple; they said she tried to flee. They bound her rough. Her face was a map of fire, but the eyes were the same.
"Why?" I asked when I had her before me. "Why would you—"
She looked at me with a weariness carved out of years. "You won't believe me, Jaylah," she said. "You won't believe what they did."
"Tell me," I ordered. "Why burn the house that sheltered you? Why borrow death to make hate feel clean?"
She smiled like a broken coin. "You were all asleep. They crowned and lied. They cut down those who stood between them and the throne. I should have been a footnote. They made me a device."
"You arranged the attacks," I said. "You used men—"
"Men who were left over from the old fights," she said, words brittle. "Men who had nothing. I gave them a cause. I told them to make it noise enough to send Canon David to the temple. I told them to make him stay. And then I lit the bird-cage."
"And the Empress—"
"It was not the Empress I wanted, Jaylah. It was the lie. I wanted the truth to be seen, or else—" She laughed once, a sound like a snapped string. "And if the truth kills everyone, it kills everyone."
"What truth?" I demanded. My throat had gone all wrong. "What were you trying to prove?"
She ate her words like bitter fruit and gave me nothing more at first. I felt the world tilt on its pin. Canon David was ill in bed and the palace smelled of charred paper and wet wood. Bodies rolled like leaves on a street.
"Tell the court everything," I said. "If what you say is true and someone used a forged order to bury another's name—"
"Then the roof will cave," she said. "Then the house will show its rotten beams. I would rather bring it down than live beneath their lies."
"You risked my men," I said. "You risked Florence."
Her lips slackened. "I'm sorry. I never meant—"
My voice was steel. "You meant what you meant."
We took her before court. The palace filled like a held breath. The center hall smelled of incense and old wood. Official faces lay like masks. Canon David sat in his chair, pale and bone, shadows under his eyes. Barrett Kuznetsov, the chief investigator, stood with a ledger and a look that said he already believed what he hoped to believe.
"Giselle David," I called, and the room shut up like a fist.
She fell to her knees before the dais. "I—" she began.
"Tell the truth," Canon David said, voice like gravel. "Tell the court what you did and why."
"It was me who set the fuse at Huayin," she confessed. "I planned the arson at the temple. I rallied old men left to rot. I arranged the streets."
"Why should the court believe a woman with burned cheeks and bitter hands?" Barrett snapped, and there was the glint of triumph in his voice.
They sentenced her publicly, yet I had not expected the way jade and bronze watched when the truth was uncoiled. I had not expected the thousands of small faces pressed against the palace windows, the servants who had scraped bread together for the dead, the mothers who had once smiled at her in better days.
"Let her be taken to the great court at dawn," Canon David ordered. "Let the city see the cost of such designs. Let the judgment be public."
They dragged her through the outer gates at sunrise. I followed with a small retinue, though my legs felt like carved wood. The square flooded with people: merchants, wet-lipped servants, older women who had sold fig cakes outside our walls years ago. They surrounded the scaffold like a sea.
"Look!" a woman cried. "It's the traitor that burned the temple!"
"She is the reason my sons were conscripted!" another shouted.
"Execute her," someone else called, cruel and sudden.
They did not bind her to a stake as old tales promised, nor did they grant her mercy in whispered forms. They set the scene the way a market master sets up his stall: with a rope, with witnesses, with a proclamation read aloud.
"Giselle David," Barrett read the charge for all to hear, voice booming. "You stand accused of arson, conspiracy, and treason against the crown. You confessed. You admitted you lit the fires that killed many and attempted murder upon the Emperor. What do you plead?"
"Not guilty to murder," she said, voice small but steady. "Guilty to the rest."
"Let the witnesses speak," the magistrate ordered.
A hundred hands rose. A weaver told how Giselle had spoken of the old wounds. A palace guard said she had visited the temple days before the explosion. A child sold figs declared how she had handed coins to men with hollow eyes. Each voice was a small hammer. When one man—a soldier once spared by Canon David—stepped forward, the crowd drew breath.
"He sent us," the soldier said, pointing to no one but everything. "She gave the plan. We were the tools. She told us how to make the noise. She promised a reckoning."
"Pain has a long memory," Canon David said after the last witness. "Yet pain does not make law."
They led Giselle to a low platform. The magistrate put a sheet before the crowd and read the verdict: public humiliation, fines on her family—if any remained—and public exile at the least; but because it was a palace matter, the Emperor reserved the right to clemency or death. The crowd's mood folded like cloth—some wanted blood, some wanted spectacle.
"Canon David," Barrett called out, "the people demand justice."
"Justice," someone else echoed, and their voices swelled.
Canon David stood, and for the first time in months his voice found a sword. He named each crime, measured each lie, and in the span of his words I saw the man he had been and the man he might still be. "Giselle David," he said finally, "you broke the house. You lit a fire that ate the innocent." He paused. "You will be paraded through the city for three days. Let the people decide your fate by what their hearts say in the end."
The first day was a procession. They put a painted rope around her neck and led her through the bazaar. People spat; some cried. I heard Florence's name in hushed prayers. I watched faces I no longer recognized. "You should have killed us outright if you wanted release," a cat-caller shouted at her.
On the second day a mother I had once given tea to leaned forward and hissed. "You took my child," she said, words like knives.
On the third day, something unlooked-for happened. A boy, perhaps twelve, threw a single orange at her feet. "You burned what you could not own," he said. "But I also lost my teacher that day. Do not pretend there is nobility in your crimes."
Giselle's expression from the scaffold changed slowly—panic, then brittle defiance, then a kind of quiet like the last embers of a hearth. She knew the shape of ruin. She had made it.
When the procession stopped at the main square, Canon David spoke again. "You will be judged by the people." He laid no claim to cruelty, and there was cool in his voice that made even the magistrate bow a little lower. "Mercy will be given if repentance is seen. Otherwise—"
"Otherwise?" a farmer demanded.
"Otherwise," Canon David said, "the law must be made whole."
They lifted the sheet. The people had seen enough to know the depth. They chose exile, neither blood nor absolution. They forced her on a cart, bound, and took her to the edge of the city where the elders watch the land. There they abandoned her with a sheep-skin and a purse for a market. The crowd returned. Some patted their pockets as if to feel the weight of a verdict. A few turned away and washed their hands on the fountain stones.
Giselle never asked for me to plead. She looked at me once in the square with the same old expression, and I understood both of us had been playing parts written far earlier than either of us could alter. "Forgive me," she mouthed once, in a voice only the wind could carry, and then she was gone beyond the gates.
The punishment was public. The crowd's voices were loud enough to make children weep. I let the sound wash over me. I had thought vengeance would settle like dust. It did not.
In the weeks that followed, the court rearranged itself. Canon David sank and rose in equal measures; the child born of Kadence did not live long. Rumors shaped themselves like new bricks. I sat, banned from the court, yet holding a power given and then taken back.
"Why were you spared?" Florence asked me one evening when she came to the small chamber where I kept the wooden dolls.
"Because the emperor wants to close a wound by letting the light through," I answered, holding a small carved likeness of my brother. "Because it shows the house is still standing."
"You sound like someone who believes in buildings," she said with a smile I hadn't seen on her before.
"Someone told me once," I said, "that if you bend enough, you may never break in two."
Florence only laughed. "Then bend less, my lady."
I keep the small carved figures now—the ones Pavel Said made while he was alive—on a shelf where the sun can reach them. They are small and imperfect, and every morning I touch the grain where his fingers had smoothed the cheek. I light no incense for the Emperor's victories. I light one for the people who died because men could not hold their tongues.
"Do you hate him?" Kadence asked me once, when the palace felt like a funeral parlor and not like a home.
"Sometimes," I admitted. "Sometimes it's easier to hate the man who lost everything with you than to hate the loss itself."
"Will you throw yourself into the fire?" she asked, eyes like the lake after a storm.
"I have had my fires," I said. "I will never be the woman who dies to make others whole."
The palace is quieter now, but only in the way a bone is quieter than a body. The linen smells of smoke for longer than it should. Canon David's hands tremble sometimes when he writes. Azriel Payne—the child they took from me and then gave to another—learns to play at being a prince. He watches me sometimes and there is a question in his eyes I cannot answer.
"Play for me, Jaylah," Kadence said when the nights were raw and she thought she might drown in her own survivor's guilt.
I took the qin and played the old song I had never learned to finish. It was heartbreak in three movements. She leaned into me and rested her head on my shoulder, and I thought then that grief could be shared too, like bread.
The city will tell its own stories. Some will make me a saint, some a martyr, some a villain. I have no use for those titles. I am Jaylah Cherry. I kept my promises. I loved a man who loved another. I built a life from splinters.
"Did you ever want the crown?" Florence asked once as we stirred the soup.
"Once," I said, "But I wanted sun in the mornings more."
I still keep the tiny wooden man Pavel carved of my elder brother on the shelf. At night, sometimes I wake and imagine hands that are no longer warm smoothing the wood. I tell myself small truths.
"These hands were meant for gentleness," I whisper into the dark. "Even when they were forced to be otherwise."
The End
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