Revenge16 min read
She said, "She will be afraid" — and he chose her
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I remember the heat first, then his voice.
"He will come for her," Pascal murmured as smoke clawed at the rafters. "She will be afraid."
"You mean Catherine?" I coughed, the word scraping out of me like dry leaves.
"Yes." His answer was a stone. "She will be afraid."
I laughed once, a thin dry sound that might have been a cough.
"I won't be," I said. "I was already meant to die."
The roof fell in on that promise. The temple collapsed, and his shoulder slid out of my reach like a shadow. Pascal picked Catherine up as if she were made of spun silk. He did not hesitate.
"Isabelle," I rasped, and the smoke made everything after that sound like the wrong side of a bell. "Pascal—"
He cradled Catherine against his chest, eyes blank. "She will be afraid," he said again, and then he left.
Catherine's face was pale as paper. She cried small, terrified sounds that might have been prayers. I coughed another mouthful of ash, claws of heat burning the back of my throat, and because I had always been honest and because the truth is a small, cruel thing, I told her.
"Don't be afraid," I said. "He will come."
Pascal did come. For Catherine. For the future crown princess. For the bright face that had never had to learn the dirt under fingernails.
He hugged her to him and walked out of the burning temple with a steadiness I had once mistaken for devotion.
I woke up the next day with my cheek scorched and my chest heavy. He squeezed my fingers and said, "Forgive me, Isabelle. She is the crown's future. I could not risk—"
"If she were not who she is?" I forced the phrase through a dry throat.
He did not look at me. "She will be afraid," he said.
I had been keeping a secret. The poison had already crept into me. The poison was small and clever. It killed in increments: a cough today, numb fingers tomorrow, then a winter like a long white blade. There was no cure the physicians knew of. They said it had reached my bone. They said months. Six more months.
"Stay with me," I begged him later, when the world had fewer colors and more shadows. "Pascal, please. I'm scared."
He took my wrist between two fingers, cool and precise. "Someone went to fetch the doctor," he said. "What is there to be afraid of?"
I stared at his hand on my wrist until the embarrassment of begging burned hotter than the pain.
"Stay," I said again.
He let go.
After he left, I vomited blood into the basin and held still while the two little white lumps of fur—Isabelle and Pascal, my rabbits that had once been named YearYear and SuiSui—peeped from beneath the curtain.
They were his hunting gifts, brought to me as fragile bargains. I had named them after us: Isabelle, gentle and stubborn, Pascal, fierce and curious. Isabelle had died in mid-summer, warm and heavy in my arms on a day the sun smiled as if it meant nothing. That day I had cried until my face hurt. Pascal had called my grief a nuisance.
"Are you done?" he had pinched my chin then. "Isabelle, aren't you done?"
"Done crying?" I demanded through sobs.
"You'll be tired of it," he said. "You worry me."
I had raised those rabbits. I had fed them, warmed them, coaxed life back into them from ragged breaths. He forgot. He had stolen them from the hunt and thrust them at me like a trophy. When Isabelle died, the world lost something that breathed easy and I lost the rest with it.
When I told him, "Isabelle is gone," he moved like nothing had happened. "They're just rabbits," he said. "Pets. They die."
It is astonishing what cruelty can do when wrapped in a polite phrase.
He had promised to be different when he wrapped me in his arms after my father died—when, with the last of his fury against our enemies, he kept me from being taken. He had pressed me to his chest then and vowed, "No one will hurt you. I will avenge every slight."
So I believed him. For a while.
I was eight the year we met, and Pascal had been a boy who knelt in the dirt with his head bowed. I had found him there because my kite—bright as a summer scarlet—had snagged on the broken roof. I crawled through a small dog-hole and found him kneeling, punished for some youthful rebellion. He ignored me, and I left him a small cake by his hand.
The next morning he was still kneeling.
I brought more cakes.
He snatched them from me as violently as if food were the only truth in the world. He was proud and angry; he learned to be cruel for the sake of survival.
We grew close by habit. He became the only person who kept me from being swept away when our house fell into ruin. He promised me, when I had nothing left but a thin shadow of life, "I will avenge them. No one will hurt you."
When I married him, I believed him again for a sliver of time.
But people can be taught to love something they can control. Pascal loved power like a map of treasure, and Catherine—Catherine Johansson—was a thing both fragile and brilliant, and his tenderness turned toward her like water seeking a drain.
"It is not that I do not love you," he told me once in the still, golden hours. "But she is a different kind of need."
"Did I ever ask you not to love her?" I snapped. "Did I ever demand you?"
He smiled in the way that had once comforted me. "You never asked. You never needed to."
He told me I could not leave him.
"Where would you go?" he said, soft and patronizing.
"Anywhere but here," I said.
"You have nowhere," he answered, and his hand tightened in that small, systematic way that once felt like protection and now felt like a chain.
I tried to leave. I packed a little before dawn once with my maid Emmie—she could not speak but her hands spoke stronger than words—but we were intercepted. Emmie's chest heaved as a sword was pointed at her, and the boat that should have been our path away held his men. He sat there, waiting as if I would return because I always had.
"Isabelle," he said gently. "Where are you going?"
I sank into a chair in the boat and watched Emmie's mute fingers tremble as she set the bowl of rice before me.
"We are going," I said. "We are leaving."
"You cannot," he said, and the sword at Emmie's throat meant that I could not. I had been naïve to think that the man I loved would not use everything he had to keep me within his reach.
So I stayed.
That winter the poison took me like a thief. It hollowed me out from the inside and left me a hollow where laughter had been. I ate at the finest rooms, paid for the best cures, and still my bones rang like glass. I learned to love my own small pleasures because no one else would honor them: a room in a teahouse shaded from noise, a bowl of congee delivered to the alley kids, an hour with a book and the slow company of Jacob Crouch, the scrappy little boy who had once steadied me by the wall when I nearly hit the ground.
Jacob learned to read from me. I left him books and lessons and a promise—one that I would never see fulfilled.
"Will you come back?" he asked once, fingers clumsy on the strings of a small instrument.
"When the spring comes," I told him, and he believed it, the way children believe what we tell them because they have no experience of the ways promises bend and break.
Once, when my breath hurt, Pascal sat beside the bed and watched me. He stroked my hair as if loaves could be mended with attention.
"Don't push me away," he said. "Let me hold you."
I looked at his hand on my hair and felt a loneliness so thick it made my throat close.
"Do not pretend you are sad now," I told him. "You are not."
He flinched but then steadied.
"I do not know how else to be," he said.
There were so many small cruelties before the great ones. He belittled my tears over the rabbit. He scoffed at the books I loved. He would come home with Catherine's name on his lips and the ghost of a smile. Once he kissed my finger and told me he would stay; I believed it because I had to.
At Shimmering Temple, the year the winter came too early, we were trapped with Catherine by the fire that climbed through the rafters like hunger. I told her to be brave. I told her she would not be alone. I believed Pascal would come for both of us because that is what he had promised in the day when he bent and swore with his throat full of rage to protect me.
Instead he carried Catherine out as if she were the very thing he could save and walked past me while my side burned.
Afterwards, when my cheek had been flayed by a stray spark, he stared at me as if I had asked an impossible question.
"She is the future crown princess, Isabelle," he said. "I could not risk—"
"If she were not her," I demanded again, because there are truths that sound like knives that need to be asked aloud. "Would you come for me?"
He looked away.
"She will be afraid," was his answer, like a prayer and a verdict.
Time did not heal. Time only made the winter longer. The poison moved like a slow frost through my marrow. I counted breaths more than days. I painted my face to keep people from worrying when I went to the teahouse and taught Jacob. The paint hid nothing but it gave me a small dignity, and dignity is a stubborn, useful thing.
The prince—Boden Bradford—came and went like stormclouds, loving the daughter of the chancellor, Catherine, with an ardor that made the court sigh in small jealous sounds. He brought back another girl from the battlefield—Angelina Anderson—claiming she had saved him when his horse was broken and his men scattered. She was quiet and clever and marked with the kind of bravery that makes men forget the ones who sat with them in childhood.
Angelina had been brought to the palace as the prince's fall-back, as a consolation prize, as something to keep the court's stories interesting. She was made a side consort. The people whispered that the prince's heart had been set elsewhere, then not set elsewhere, and then set somewhere else entirely. The whole court became a weaving of small disasters, favors, and slighted promises.
It was a weaving that ended with three women tied to posts on a cliff.
Brock De Santis—an ambitious, ruthless general from a neighboring command—had stormed into our city with a plot as precise as a blade. He lined us against wooden stakes and drew bows from a cliff's edge. The prince shouted and pleaded. The general sneered and told the prince to watch.
"This is for truth," Brock told the men who worked for him. "We will find out which of these girls is the beloved and which the decoy."
"Release them," the prince begged. "Let them go."
Brock leaned over and spat into the wind. "If he truly loves one of them, he will show it," the general said. "If he does not—let the fool which kisses him keep his prize."
Arrows came then, cut through the air. The prince smashed forward. Pascal was quicker and fouler and knifed through the line with a speed that would have been impressive if I were anyone else but me.
One arrow caught me in the shoulder.
I remember thinking, more clearly than I had in months, that the world had a terrible sense of fairness. An arrow meant for one could find another, and the results were not impartial.
Later, in the snow, my bones cold, I woke to Emmie saying, "You have been asleep a long time."
Pascal came in with bowls of hot broth and a face like a constable's ledger: learned, unreadable.
"You are awake," he said.
"How long?" I asked. My voice was a dry reed.
"A long time," he repeated. He sat, gentled, and touched my hand as if it meant something beyond command.
"Do you know?" I asked. "Have you heard—what the doctors say? Will it get worse?"
He swallowed. "They say you will leave us in time." He had the politeness then to avert his eyes. "They say months, Isabelle."
"Then stay," I told him simply. "Stay and let me go in peace."
He clung to me more than he had before. He fed me a little, held my hand when the cold came, and for short shivered hours I believed I was loved.
When Catherine and the prince married, it was a fragile triumph for all involved. There was a rebellion and a night of slaughter and a sudden parade of favors. Pascal returned from the chaos with more weight in his pocket and a quieter face. He did not seize the throne. He left victory to the prince.
"Why did you not take it?" I asked him once when he came back, snow in his hair and the world thin behind his eyes.
"There were reasons," he said. "I could not risk it."
"Risk what?"
"Everything," he said. "Including things I wanted safe."
He folded himself up and pretended to be small and wounded. He had this habit of making decisions and then letting himself be surprised by their cost.
I grew thinner. The poison turned my bones to weather. I painted my face, as if the color could establish me as something that slept under blankets and did not belong to the cold. I wrote a note for Jacob—always a busy, bright child—and asked Emmie to carry my hopes for him.
"Tell him to study," I told Emmie the night before I left the house with my feet stiff from pain. "Tell him I will come when the spring comes."
Emmie nodded and touched my fingers. Her gesture said both love and grief without words.
I walked out into a snow that fell like a benediction.
I did not get far.
My knees buckled. The world narrowed to the snow on my lashes.
Pascal was there when I opened my eyes again. He knelt and took me in his arms like someone who had suddenly remembered how to hold a child.
"Isabelle," he said, voice torn. "You said you hated the cold. Get up. We'll go home. Let's go home, please."
It was the first time he had called me in a way that meant he saw the cold in me.
I smiled with a small miserable honesty. "I will not be cold again," I said. "You don't have to worry."
He wept. Not a manly, controlled damp at the eye—he shuddered and broke like a pressed reed. He called my name and said it again and again into the snow as if he could stitch me back together. He carried me to our bed and washed the blood from my face with hands that trembled and wiped at me like a woman in bed dying herself.
They put me in the ground the next day.
Pascal did not at first show grief the way one might expect. He went about the world with the slow efficiency of a man who believed in plans. He worked, and he attended court, and he made decisions like a man with a map and no compass.
Yet at odd hours he could not be kept from the house where I had lain. He would go and sit in the empty rooms as if trying to remember where my breath had been. Sometimes, after long workdays he would stagger back and, at dawn, speak my name like a prayer out of nervous habit.
Winter folded back into spring. The prince fell ill with a plague he could not outrun. Pascal used his chance and stepped into the space the prince left, assembling pieces of power with that same cold intelligence that had once made him household tyrant. He scaled higher and higher until people who had once bowed to him bowed because they had to.
Catherine stayed near him like a bloom forever in season, and the court began to murmur. The city did not forget the small cruelties, and yet the world is pragmatic: power speaks louder than sorrow.
Then came the night at the teahouse.
It is strange how the smallest things can be the undoing of the strongest men. A throw of a starved hand, a piece of food, a sudden flash. Pascal sat with a plate of chestnut rice cakes in front of him and watched them like a man watching a relic. A dart flew from a dark place and punched into the tender meat of his shoulder. He barely moved. He lifted his hand to the plate, cracked a half-smile, and collapsed.
The dart had poison upon it—the same poison that had crept into my bones months earlier.
The poison did not care for kings or usurpers. It cared only for marrow and breath. Serving him what he had used without thought—what he had used on others—was poetic cruelty. The world had a slow sense of justice that was sometimes more clever than any revenge I could have planned while I still walked.
They took Pascal in the end, not with a sword but with a public unmasking.
It began with a woman who had been a servant in the household of a minor noble. She had kept a ledger. The ledger contained lists: favors, bribes, shipments of strange powders that had names only whispered in the kitchens. When the ledger came to light, it revealed more than mere greed. It revealed the arc of my life and others: a purchase in a quiet alley, a payment transferred to the pocket of men who specialized in subtle endings, a pattern like a constellation too precise to be coincidence.
Brock was implicated by testimony that could not be explained away—men who had been promised positions, women who had been moved like chess pieces. The prince, cruelly pragmatic, used the ledger to strengthen his own place, and as power braided itself with accusation, the city came to a place it rarely reached: a place where a man of power would be held before all to be judged.
The day of Pascal's public reckoning the square was full. Flags flew limp in a grey sky. Snow remained in patches despite the thaw. People stood shoulder to shoulder, breath smoking, eyes harsh and glittering. There were nobles in embroidered robes, magistrates with their faces carved like tablets of law, and ordinary folk who had been touched by Pascal's caprice.
They led him in, hands restrained by gauntlets, not because they had the power to bind him but because they wished to see the show.
"Pascal Morgan," called the magistrate from the raised dais. "You stand accused by the ledger of poisoning, bribery, abduction, and crimes against the peace of this city. How do you plead?"
His shoulders were straight. His jaw, once forceful, trembled. He mouthed sounds that might have been defenses.
"Pascal," I had once whispered his surname like a blessing. Now it was a name on a whispering wind of accusation.
"Tell them," someone cried. "Tell them about Isabelle!"
He blinked as if someone had opened a window to a storm.
"Isabelle," the woman who had kept the ledger said, stepping forward. Her voice was small but the crowd made it into thunder. "He bought silence and sold death. See the list."
They showed the ledger. The ink had bled but the names remained. Isabelle Avila. Jacob Crouch. Emmie Shaw. The record of powder bought in the alley, the record of a payment to the man who had made a dart.
Pascal's face shifted. First it was disbelief, then a tightening, then something ugly and bright: anger.
"This is slander," he spat.
"Then explain," the magistrate said. "Explain why payments were sent to agents of poison? Explain why witnesses place your men at the border?"
He tried to explain. He tried to say that war demanded dirty hands, that enemies needed quiet ends, that his hands had been forced. He attempted to dress his arguments as necessity: a calculus of power where lives were units of cost. The crowd did not forgive the math.
Faces around him were not all the same. Some men who had once bowed to him stood with their mouths pursed and hard. Women who had once smiled at the favor of his patronage folded their arms like shutters. Jacob was there among them, older, bookish and angry. Emmie, mute but present, stood like a blade made of silence.
The change in Pascal happened in a dozen breaths. Pride slipped into denial. Denial slipped into pleading. Pleading soon became fury. He tried to bargain with promises of pay, of favors, of mercy. The magistrate shook his head.
"Pascal Morgan," he said, and a hush fell as if a snowflake had yet to melt. "The ledger proves intent. The witnesses prove action. You are stripped of rank and title. Your property is forfeited. You will be sent to labor in the northern mines."
The words landed like iron on coal.
Pascal's face drained of color, the last shades of dignity flaking away. He tried to make one last show of strength, to call them all insects, to point to his contributions to public order. Instead, he stumbled over his own voice. The crowd shifted; it could feel the man unravel.
"Mercy!" he cried, "You cannot—"
"Silence," called a magistrate cold as ice.
"Shame him!" someone else shouted. "Make him own what he did!"
There are punishments that are swift and there are punishments that burn slowly. The magistrate ordered Pascal to stand in the center of the square and recount out loud each misdeed, each payment, every transaction, each deceptive promise he had made. He had to say the names.
"Isabelle Avila," the crowd demanded, and the voice that once had been calm and practiced in bartering power broke into shards.
He denied at first. Then, under the weight of evidence and the clear, accusing stare of those he had wronged, he began to speak in fits.
"She was—she was inconvenient. She—" he rasped. "She stood in the way of... of arrangements."
"Speak," the magistrate commanded. "Say what you did."
He said it. He said names and times and the cold, clinical language of a man who had earlier looked at problems as if they were lines on a map and not people. He admitted to hiring men. He admitted to arranging the attack at the temple. He admitted to letting poison be used as a weapon, to buying it, to ensuring certain people would become too ill to be dangerous.
With each sentence, the crowd's reaction changed: at first whispers, then angry whispers, then a swelling chorus of spat hatred. People pointed fingers and some spat. A woman lifted her foot and stamped in the snow as if to break him. Jacob called his name and threw a book in his direction. Emmie stood with a fist clenched like a stone.
He moved from anger into bargaining to broken humiliation.
"Please," he said at last, voice thin as broken paper. "I was desperate. I loved—"
"Love?" a voice called from the crowd, sharp. "You used love as cover for murder."
He was left in the middle of the square, stripped of honor, stripped of clothes that once signified his rank, and given to the cold mercy of public scorn. They took him to the northern mines where the sun is a rumor. There he labored beneath the earth, and men spat at him when he walked, and the children of the city were taught to name him as a lesson: power without honor is a hollow thing.
This was the first punishment. It was not the only one. The general Brock De Santis, whose cruelty had set the cliff-abduction into motion, was found to have been acting on his own appetite for chaos. He was disgraced and sent to the frontier where pride is broken by distance and weather. Heartless agents who had taken payments disappeared into quiet graves or into exile.
Catherine kept her place beside the crown, but rumor and anger cut at the support that had once been solid around her. The prince was pained in ways that made his rule a bitterer thing; he learned that love that arrives in war can be a cloak for many things, and he made his peace by repairing the wrongs he had the power to fix.
As for me, my name lived like a small fire kept alive in the mouths of the people Jacob taught and Emmie tended. They told my story in simple words: Isabelle Avila, who gave bread to the poor, taught a child to read, and loved foolishly. They told of a woman who ate chestnuts and painted her face, who loved rabbits named after herself and the man who had betrayed her, and who left a ledger in the hands of a woman brave enough to show it.
My death had been a private cold. The punishment of Pascal was public and slow. In that, there was a balance of sorts.
At night, when the mines are silent and the thaw has started, I feel parallel things. I float through memory like a wind. I see Pascal in the snow, running to my body as if to make the world right with his arms, and I see him later, stripped and forced to say the names he had once given with such casual cruelty.
He had loved perhaps something unrecognizable: a hunger for control that he had mistaken for caring. That mistake cost him everything and corroded everyone he touched.
"Do you think I forgave him?" I am asked sometimes in the narrows of memory.
No. Forgiveness is too large a chest for a small honest heart. Instead, I watched the justice that unfolded and felt something close to peace. Not because he suffered—because suffering is hollow—but because the world remembered how to speak my name without swallowing it.
They buried me under an old tree with a small stone. Jacob brought a handful of books. Emmie brought the small things I had left for her. Emmie said nothing—she never had—but her face leaned very close as if to hear the last words said between friends.
Before I faded completely, Pascal found me one last time in a dream and at the edge of sleep. He saw me like the child who had saved him from shame and then had been discarded like a broken thing. He asked me to come back.
"I won't be cold anymore," I told him.
He wailed. He crumpled like a man who had mislaid a map and could not find his way home.
That night the snow fell heavy and blank. The wind wrote small footprints on the windows. The city moved on. But in small rooms and teahouses people spoke my name and told the story in the way the truth sometimes is told: messy and human, not wholly triumphant, but not wholly forgotten.
And if a child learns to read because I taught a small boy Jacob his letters, then perhaps something of me stayed: a trimmed light in a dark place.
The End
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