Revenge17 min read
My Son, My Sword, My Band — I Took Back Everything
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“Hands off my son!” I tore the cloth from my face and lunged forward.
“Silence,” Grey Fournier said, his voice flat as a blade. “You are the one who caused all this. Stay where you belong.”
They pushed past me like I was a piece of broken furniture. Daisy Muller laughed soft and false behind them. I felt the prayer beads of my old life slip through my fingers.
I hit the ground. A woman I did not know grabbed my hair and dragged me out of the hall. I tasted blood. Outside the gate, soldiers in cold mail stared as if I were already dead.
“Leona,” the woman spat, “you ruined the prince’s wedding. You brought a bastard into the house. Lock her in the cold yard.”
“Cold yard? You mean the place with one thin blanket?” I gasped. “You can’t keep a mother from her child.”
“You are the criminal,” she said. “You stabbed the new lady. The prince forgives only some sins.”
I laughed then, but the sound was thin. “Stabbed? I might have stood in a room with a knife, but I am not a killer.”
They forced me into the broken yard, slammed the door, sealed it with a heavy bolt, and left me there with a single candle guttering in the wind.
“Leona, please,” Dixie Chapman whispered, her small hands worried at my sleeve. “You must not make more trouble.”
“I need to see Emilian,” I said. “Where is my son?”
“You know he’s in the main house,” Dixie said. Her voice trembled. “They set guards. They won't let him out.”
I lay back against the cold stones and watched the red banners flutter in the distance. Inside I could hear laughter and the clink of cups. Grey's wedding—my wedding, but not my ceremony—went on like a wound stitched over with gold.
My wrist brushed the sleeve and the cold metal of the Moonlit Band flashed. I had found that blue band when I woke on the shore. It had come with me from whatever passed the edge of the world. I had no memory of everything before the drowning, but the band hummed like a promise.
“Leona?” a voice demanded outside. A rough hand shoved at the door, then a stronger voice barked, “Bring her.”
Grey stepped through, storm in clean clothes. His eyes, always too sharp, looked at me like a man who wonders what a dead thing might say if it could move.
“You should be on the bed with the bride,” he said. He tightened his fingers around my chin as if to test whether I could breathe. “Stay. If the girl in the red dies, so will you.”
I gritted my teeth. “You can choke a woman, Grey, but you cannot choke a child’s name out of his mouth. Emilian is my son.”
He let go suddenly and turned away. “You think yourself brave. You’ll pay.”
They left. The lock clicked. I breathed like a bell tolling. I tasted winter.
I had nothing but the band and this body. The woman they called “queen” had been stripped of her truth. I was called a butcher and a liar. I was a woman who had been given the worst of all punishments: to be alive where the world declared her dead.
Dixie knelt beside me. “We can’t leave, Miss Leona. They will kill us if they know you left.”
I touched the Moonlit Band. The blue lotus carved into it glowed faint. A memory flickered—small pills, a needle, a sealed chest. I closed my eyes and asked the band, like a tired child asking for light, what it carried.
The band answered in the only way it could: it opened a small space in my mind and showed me what it held. Shelves of small vials. Dried herbs. A cloth-wrapped box with coins. The band held a pocket of things, like a room hiding in a ring. I felt hope like heat.
“We will get food,” I said. “We will not starve so long as the band keeps its promise.”
Dixie’s face brightened like the day after rain. “Miss Leona, you will teach me to read?”
“I will teach Emilian too,” I said.
We planned two moves in a whisper. First: get food. Second: get Emilian’s name back into the world.
At dusk, someone knocked at the yard gate. A guard in plain clothes shifted his feet as if he had the will of a man forced. A young face under his hood looked at me and did not flinch.
“Tariq?” I said, because the name slid into the space where memory had been like a key. “Why are you here?”
His voice was small. “I’m not supposed to be. I am supposed to report. But—” He swallowed. “Please. I heard you could cure poison. The prince is poisoned. I can’t tell them the truth, but I can bring you things.”
“Bring them in the night,” I said. “Bring bread, bring a small bag. Bring news.”
He nodded like a boy and left. When the gate closed, Dixie and I broke our planning and laughed at the smallness of our hope.
The next evening, the gate scraped, and a figure full of dread and hunger handed over a bundle of food and a handful of coins. He looked proud and ashamed all at once.
“Tariq, you will help us,” I said, and laid my palm over his. “You will bring what you can. Keep your head low. If you get found out, you owe me your life.”
He grinned like a man who had just come across his first victory. “I owe you a dozen lives, Leona.”
I sent Dixie to shadow the kitchens while I checked the Moonlit Band. There were three vials of old medicine, enough to start. I swallowed two pills to keep from catching cold. The wooden bench by my broken bed creaked when I sat. My ribs itched. Grey had left a bruise like a black moon.
Two days later, the world shifted.
“King Grey is worse,” Tariq whispered when he snuck in. “They called for the city doctor. He is stumped. The prince cannot stay upright.”
Grey was a war man. He returned from the field with mud in his beard and orders in his pockets. No one knew how he took a wound that did not bleed, how his legs betrayed him. They called it poison because people needed a thing to name.
I breathed. I pulled the Moonlit Band over my palm and took out a small blue tablet that glimmered like a promise.
“How much?” I asked when the old steward, Vernon Rios, scrambled in like a rat. He had a face like dried leather and math in his head.
“Three hundred coins,” Vernon said like a priest chanting a debt. “You want the prince alive, you pay. Otherwise you get dragged as the suspect.”
I held his eyes. “Three hundred coins if I heal him.”
He laughed low. “You would ask that? You are crazy.”
“I am what I am,” I said. “If I can fix him, he owes me. Put it on my name.”
I took Grey's wrist. My fingers felt the hum of poison like a distant river. I cut his wrist in front of them to test the blood. The Moonlit Band soaked the blood and the carved lotuses pulsed. The poison ate like frost. The band told me the cure in images: seven herbs, roots and a specific brew.
I told Grey flatly, “I can pull the frost out.”
He smiled, dangerous and tired. “You want your pay.”
“I want quiet night for my child,” I said. “I want my son to not be hungry.”
He sneered at the smallness and the truth of it. “You will scrub the halls for a month. Your crime will still hang. But I will take the coin.”
He had no honor for me. He had one small thing: his word. He gave it like a trap.
I went to work.
I used the band. I used the medicine. Grey drank, coughed, went white, then blood warmed. His legs found feeling. The steward came in wiping his hands on his robe like he had not seen a miracle.
“Who did this?” Daisy asked along the door, feigning worry.
“You did not ask that,” I said. “I cured him.”
“You took payment for saving his life.”
“Yes.” I met Grey's eyes. “You keep your word.”
He commanded quietly to the room that I must sweep his halls alone. “And you will not be touched. Your son remains in my house. Do not expect more.”
I took the coin and the list of conditions and went home with Dixie and with two small parcels for Emilian.
Emilian—my son—was five and fierce. He crawled into my lap and called me “Mom” like it was a key. I could taste the guilt and love and the thing that made me stand up: he needed me.
“Kumiko?” I asked later, looking at the girl who had been sending bread like a small angel.
“I'm Kumiko Day,” she said. “I serve Daisy. I slipped the ointment. I slipped the bread.”
“You risked your life,” I said.
“They threatened to put me down the river if found,” Kumiko whispered. “I could not watch him starve.”
We fixed a small life in a cold room. We cooked on a brazier, taught Emilian letters, fed the guards a story of children and books. The Moonlit Band let me pull coins from the small room in my mind, enough to buy a crate of rice, a few loaves, and charcoal.
Word spread: the woman in the cold yard could mend a poisoned lord. People looked and murmured. Daisy's smile turned brittle. Grey's eyes watched more often.
Then the court burned.
On the morning the emperor’s court shattered, a man in armor, Roman Cooke, stormed the hall with accusations.
“Garrison Christiansen plotted with foreign powers,” he said in a voice like a hammer. “He and his men betrayed the crown. They are traitors.”
Garrison Christiansen—my father—had been dead on the field. The halls gasped. Papers unfolded. A name that had once fed the country was thrown like dung in the market.
“Findlay Marchetti verified it,” Roman said, showing a paper with a neat hand.
Findlay Marchetti was my uncle. He had taken my father's title five years before. He stepped forward and did not look at me.
“By the order of the throne, arrests will be made,” the emperor said.
Garrison’s household collapsed like a barn door in fire. Men were dragged from beds. Women screamed. The list ran like a blade: executions, property seized, lands burned. The city thrummed with the sound of judgment.
They came for us too.
A public edict declared my son and I under arrest. They announced that the exile, the traitor’s house, must be cleansed with fire. I took my son and my brother Findlay’s treacherous paper and I looked at Grey.
He placed a sealed slip into my hand.
“You are no longer my wife,” he said. “I need no ties to traitors.”
He turned to Daisy and put his hand in hers like a man who buries a sword in a grave. He left me with a scrap of paper and a small boy.
We were taken and then released by some strange mercy, but the court had done what courts do: it moved with momentum. My father's house was emptied. My mother Hilda Duncan—she had been quiet and proud—was taken into custody. I had a thin hope that someone had left my father a token. In the cell, a small note arrived, signed simply: “Master.”
“Master?” I said. My throat closed.
“Matthew Morgan,” said my brother Findlay's old friend when I asked. “He tends the east house.”
Matthew would not speak long. He appeared like a man who carries more than his shoulders allow. He gave me one look and—because he had taught me the way of the band long ago—he taught me how to use the blue ring better, how to hide it in plain sight.
“My girl,” he said as we sat in his low room and cracked bread, “they cut a man's name to save his head. That is the work of men who burn for gain. You want name back. You will need evidence and a crowd.”
“Show me,” I said.
He nodded. “You will go to the market. You will give a name to a man. You will stir the city. You will make them doubt their quiet.”
I did not want revenge like a fire. I wanted it like a blade: precise. I spent coin to feed the poor in town. I paid Tariq to talk to a cook at the back of the guardhouse. I bought Ale from a man called Vernon Rios who owed me a favor. Slowly the threads knotted.
One thread was simple: the paper that accused my father came from within Garrison household ledger, a ledger kept by Findlay. Findlay had signed as guardian of the title. The ledger had a mark only a family member would know. Tariq slipped into the archive and mailed me a scrap with the same ink. The mark was the very crest my father had given his children for years. Findlay’s hand was on the page.
But who stitched the rest? Roman Cooke had enemies and advantages. In the tavern, a man who had served with Roman whispered of a meeting where coin had passed hands between Roman and a masked agent who had promised rulership. I had a name in my hand: the agent had been working at the emperor’s stables under a false name. Tariq set a trap. He found the stableboy who recognized a coin from Findlay’s treasury exchange.
I started to understand a map of betrayal. Findlay had been asked: sign this and you keep a house. Sign this and we bury a rival. He signed. Roman gave him a nod. The agent took the incriminating papers and burned them in the courtyard. The emperor acted fast, like a man keen to end a fever.
I prepared the knife of truth.
“Leona,” Matthew said, “you must be ready to show proof in a public place. You will need evidence and witnesses.”
“I will make them watch,” I said. “I will make them burn.”
We set the trap in the hall of Grey Fournier’s own court. I had healed him once. I had ground herbs, the Moonlit Band holding the last of its medicine. I asked for one thing: a public audience for a thanks-giving the city would call “a feast for peace.” Grey laughed but could not refuse. He loved a story of his own valor.
On the day, I walked into the hall with my son Emilian, barefoot and plain. I wore no jewels. I looked like a woman who had been folded and ironed; the calm on my face was thick as leather.
Daisy smoothed her hair and smiled like a woman testing new poison.
“Leona,” she said, loud enough for the room, “what is this?”
I stepped forward. “I came to thank the prince and the court for their mercy on my house,” I said. “I came to tell a story and to ask a favor.”
Grey looked at me like a man seeing a shadow. “Speak then.”
I turned and looked at the crowd. “My father was a man of honor. Garrison Christiansen died on the field. They said he plotted. They said he betrayed his country. They burned his name. They gave us no trial. I ask: who benefits when a house is gone?”
No one answered, but dozens of eyes turned like sunflowers.
“Findlay Marchetti signed the paper against my father,” I said. “He did it to save himself. He signed his name in the ledger with the crest only family knew. Here is the ledger mark.” I set a scrap on the table with the mark the band had revealed to me. The public saw it.
A low murmur. Daisy’s smile faltered.
“I found a witness,” I said. “Tariq Elliot, steward, will tell of a meeting where coin changed hands for a false testimony.”
Tariq came forward, hands shaking, but he did not break.
“I saw the man Roman Cooke speak to a masked agent,” he said. “I saw the engine of this lie. I would die before I spoke free of threat.”
Roman Cooke’s jaw twitched. He had never wanted to be seen as the man who pulls strings; he wanted to be the sword. The sword trembled now.
“You speak from what you saw?” the steward asked.
“Yes,” Tariq said. “I will die if I lie.”
Grey’s face was stone. Daisy paled like milk. The hall shifted.
“I have more,” I said. “The agent who burned the papers is the same man seen buying fine cloth for Findlay’s household the night before the arrests. The merchant remembers the smell of this coin.”
A merchant in the crowd stood. “It is true,” he cried. “A man gave me coins stamped with Findlay’s seal.”
Findlay went white like a ghost. “You lie!” he barked. “This is false.”
I smiled then but not kindly. I reached into my sleeve and took out the Moonlit Band and set it on the table. The band glowed like an eye.
“This band holds medicine and proof,” I said. “It also holds the truth of those who steal. It kept coins for me when I had none. It has a way of making the small facts sing.”
I had arranged earlier that Matthew and Tariq would show the ledger and the merchant would speak. A dozen small witnesses had been fed with coin and turned into a chorus.
Findlay’s mouth worked. He made to run but he had forgotten something: every man in that hall who had trade with him now heard the sound of a future without his money. Loyalty melts.
“You conspired,” I said. “You signed to keep life and you killed a house. You took a child’s name and a mother’s honor.”
Findlay’s face contorted. “Traitor! I did what I needed to keep the house from ruin. My brothers...I had no choice.”
“You had bread. You had a plan. You stabbed with ink.”
He crumpled, then steadied and roared like an animal. “I will not be shamed by a woman who stabs others!”
“Stand down,” Grey said softly.
Findlay’s knees folded. He fell to the floor like a tired animal. Around him the room gasped.
“Confess,” I said. “Confess in front of all.”
The guards came. Findlay’s fingers clawed the floor. His voice cracked. “I signed,” he said hoarsely. “I signed to save my name. I thought—”
“You thought you could keep your name,” I said. “You thought you could kill a house and live like a god.”
At that, a sound I had waited for erupted: the crowd condemned him. “Traitor!” the merchants shouted. “Shame!” the servants cried. A child pointed.
Findlay’s face went red then gray. He pleaded for mercy, then for money, then for his life. He crumpled into a heap.
“Take him away,” Grey said.
But I stopped him. “No. Let him stand and hear what he has done.”
They dragged him to the center of the hall and put a low stool under his feet. I walked up. I wanted the world to hear the fall of his mask.
“You took everything,” I said. “Tell them how you sold papers for coin. Tell them who gave you the money.”
He stared like a man who sees no way out. “Roman paid me,” he said. “I thought—he said he would protect me.”
Roman’s face drained. He made an oath that clanged like iron.
“You will answer,” I said. “No hiding.”
Roman turned, furious. “You will buy your life, Leona. You think you can end me in a room with words?”
I laughed. “I will end you where everyone watches.”
That was the moment. The room watched as Roman Cooke’s own ledger was produced. Matthew had bought it from a tavern worker who owed him a life. In it Roman had scribbled instructions and a sum that matched a payment made to Findlay.
I could see Roman change beneath his armor. He blinked, then stepped back.
“Call the steward,” I said. “Call the emperor’s man.”
Vernon Rios shakily rose and called for the courier to bring an imperial clerk. He looked at Grey with both hatred and fear for how the day turned. The clerk ran in carrying the imperial seal.
Roman’s lips trembled. He tried to deny, to blame an unknown agent. The clerk produced a copy of the coin. It was stamped with the emperor’s house mark and a private seal that Roman had used to buy supplies. The proof was the net closing.
What I had wanted most was the public breaking of their masks. I wanted Findlay to be stripped in the sun. I wanted witnesses. I wanted him to stumble and be dragged by those he thought he could buy.
When the verdict came, it came like weather.
“You will be stripped of title,” the clerk read. “Assets forfeit. You will be cast from rank and name.”
Findlay buckled. He cried for his children and for mercy. He was dragged out as the crowd hissed and spat.
But the punishment alone would not satisfy what they had done. Rule calls for the face of the guilty to be broken in public. I asked Grey for one more mercy: make the punishment plain and complete.
Grey listened. He had been stung by my public test. He looked as if he might smile, but he did not.
“Bring the bells,” he said. “Call the lord’s men.”
They tied Findlay to the high platform in the square. I stood in the crowd and made sure the baker’s wife who had lost a child in the conflict was near. The herald announced the crimes. Findlay’s eyes found mine and he tried to beg, but the people had seen too much.
They stripped him of the fine things. They pulled the signet ring from his finger and threw it into the mud. They dragged his hair and shouted his crimes. He tried to deny but his voice was raw. He fell to his knees, weeping.
“Confess,” the crowd demanded.
“I was afraid,” he moaned. “I signed away my name to save a roof over our heads.”
“You gave up your father for a roof,” someone shouted. “Take him down.”
They set a cart and the city blacksmith came forward. He hammered his name into a post for shame. Men spat. Women tore at his robe. The crowd filmed it with their eyes and their voices. Children pointed. Old men shook their heads.
Findlay’s face collapsed. He clawed at the ground and apologized like a beggar. “Forgive me. Forgive me.”
They would not. That is the heart of public punishment: it mends order. The merchant guild refused the right to trade with him. His house was put under an order. His allies left. His wife—who had stayed in the high house—signed a paper and walked away with the new man, taking her gold.
The next days saw him collapse. Business partners called for his downfall. His fields were seized. His sons—if he had sons—would be shunned. He wandered with no title, a dead man in a living skin.
Roman Cooke was brought before the council. He tried to plead military necessity and wrote his own words as if he had no blood on his hands. The phrasing of law is a weak blade. I cut him down with witnesses and with the ledger.
He was stripped of command, his houses closed, his name besmirched. Men who had once bowed now spat as he walked past. His family was shunned. His honors were taken where they hung like winter fruit ready to fall.
The city watched.
I stood in the hall when the emperor signed. He looked at me with a face I did not know—tired and old and, for once, uncertain.
“You are no longer accused,” he said. “Your house will be restored in part. The crown will look into reparations.”
It was small. It was mine. I had my son. I had Matthew's loyalty. I had Tariq's courage.
But I wanted the final act. I wanted the person who had called me a murderer and made my child starve to feel what it is to be alone.
I walked back to the cold yard and took the Moonlit Band. It had been with me through all of it. I had used it to hide coin and to heal. It had been my spy and my home.
“Daisy,” I said later with Emilian at my side, “you are lovely in your gowns. You are fair in your smiles. You hid a knife too: you hid your greed in silk.”
She said nothing. Her hands shook when she picked at the hem.
“You called me a butcher,” I said. “You asked for me to be quiet. You asked Grey to leave me.”
She stepped forward like a woman who had been taught to be small and wanted to be liked. “I did what I was told. I did not scheme. I loved him.”
“You loved a man who wears his love like a sword,” I said. “But you were part of the lie.”
The court called for testimony. Daisy stood as one who had been in the wrong place. The crowd turned. She trembled. I had saved her eyes once with a salve when she pretended blindness at my sweeping, and she repaid me by taking bread from my child.
“Look at me,” I said. “Look at everyone.”
She did.
“You will lose what you gave to keep that greed,” I said. “You will lose the favor of this court.”
Daisy wept then, small and human. She fell to her knees before Grey and begged him to stop the persecution. “Please,” she said. “Please, he is an innocent.”
Grey glanced down, his face changing as if someone had turned a wheel within him. He had loved me in a way we both denied: when he was not ashamed he had cared enough to keep his word.
He nodded then, small and public. “This court will limit any harm. Daisy, you may leave my house. Find your place elsewhere.”
It was a mercy and also a shackle. She had to go. The next morning, her maids packed her things. Her jewels were stripped. Merchants who had once sought her favor closed their gates. She watched as her name dwindled to an address.
Findlay was the one who fell hardest, but Daisy and Roman were not spared. The circle of blame tightened until the center was bare.
I had my son. I had my mother returned from a brief holding. The emperor's word made a path to bread. We moved to a small house, not the manors the Christiansens had owned, but a home without a guard at the door.
I opened a small clinic with Matthew's help and the Moonlit Band kept a store I could not show. We healed soldiers and old women. We taught Emilian to write. He ate with a hunger like a small sun and grew fat on bread and spooned porridge like a bird.
People came. They called me the healer from the cold yard. They came with wounds and with secrets and left with stitches and gossip. My name—the word that had been used as a rope around my throat—became a place to bring the wounded.
Months later, the market knew me. Findlay was shunned, his house in ruins, his name taken. Roman's men were scattered. Grey had his honor muddied but intact. The emperor kept his peace and his laws like a man who wants the noise to stop.
One night, Grey arrived at my small door without his guards. He stood awkward, hands in his sleeves.
“Leona,” he said. “You did all that. You made me own the wrong in the court by forcing it out.”
“You forced it on the world,” I said. “You did not. You keep thinking you were not part. Men have a way of loving small comfort.”
He watched Emilian sleep and his jaw worked. “You asked only for food and safety.”
“I asked for my son to be named,” I said. “I did not want coin for revenge.”
He knelt there like a child. “I am sorry,” he said. “I took what I thought I was owed. I took your life. I thought it would not matter.”
“You were a man who could have looked before you burned a house,” I said. “You were king in small things. You were cruel when you could have been gentle.”
He bowed his head.
We never loved in the way books say. We were not meant to be. But I had a son, a ring that held food and medicine, a master who taught me how to turn talk into proof, and a city that had learned what truth looks like when you hold it up.
Years later I stood in a market lane and watched a man who had once spat at my name stoop and offer bread to a child of a foreign merchant. People called me healer. My son was tall and honest and read loud in the market. I taught him to say his name and to say the names of those who had been taken.
“Emilian,” I would say each day, “say your name.”
“Emilian David,” he would answer, loud and proud.
I would put my hand on the Moonlit Band and feel the room inside it hum like a heart.
The last time I saw Findlay, he sat by a small fire and stared at his hands. The city had taken what it wanted. He bowed his head when I passed. I felt no joy in his ruin, just the weight of truth.
Later, in a small feast with my friends—Dixie, Kumiko, Matthew, Tariq—I held my son’s hand and watched the light in his face.
“Tell me a rule,” Emilian said, because children love rules like maps.
I told him two: “Keep the band safe. Speak truth, even when it costs you.”
He laughed like a bell. “I will, Mama.”
I touched the Moonlit Band and felt it hum like a promise. I had been thrown out, locked away, branded a witch and a traitor. I had lost a father and my house had burned. I had seen public shaming and I had seen men fall.
But when the city watched, I had turned the shame around and made their judgment light a path for truth.
I looked at Grey once from the corner of my eye as he walked away with Daisy gone and his pride cut down. He had lost what he thought defined him. He stood smaller now. He had lost a woman who would bend like a reed, he had lost a name on a page, he had been forced to look at his choices. I felt no glee.
The city kept moving. I kept my small clinic. I kept the Moonlit Band.
At night, when Emilian slept with his small hand in mine, I would whisper, “We survived.”
He would breathe soft as a child, and I would feel my life knit tighter.
The last line I told him before sleep, under the small light of our room, was the only truth that mattered:
“Names and crowns can fall,” I said. “But you and I keep each other. That is enough.”
He squeezed my finger hard like he would hold me through any storm.
Outside, the city hummed like a living thing. Inside, I listened to my son breathe and thought how much a small room can hold: a band, a name, a court of people who learned to look.
—END—
The End
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