Revenge14 min read
Snow Night, Poisoned Promise
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I was supposed to marry once—once, in the simple way children bind futures with ink and promise.
"You will be his," my mother had whispered long ago. "And he will be ours."
"It will be all right," Fabian had said the day he asked my hand in that small, reckless way boys do in summer. He had been wearing the metal of a young guard then, sunlight catching the edge of his helmet. His voice had been steady. "Arianna, will you trust me?"
"I will," I told him. I was twelve. The word was small, but I meant it as much as a child can.
The first time the world shifted, the paper changed.
A folded parchment came to our hall framed with gold ink. Stefano Dixon handed it, his steps slow beneath the sun. "Imperial writ for Arianna Floyd," he said.
"You are to enter the palace as the emperor's consort," the paper read, and my heart forgot how to beat.
Fabian stood beside the doorway in the dying light, armor clinking. He set a smaller scroll in my hands—my child's contract transformed into a separate, crueler thing.
"I came to tell you myself," he said, voice low. "I asked you once in the field. I thought—"
"You thought wrong," the world had answered then. He mounted his horse and walked into sunset. Stefano bowed and urged him: "Go, Regent awaits; the princess is to wed."
I clutched the imperial seal until my fingers hurt. I watched them go and then watched them disappear at the lane's end, like a dream that had been taken away on purpose.
"Receive the order, my lady," Stefano told me, and I walked like someone in a sleep toward the palace.
"Why did he—?" I asked my nurse later, voice brittle. The nurse would not answer, only smoothing the collar of a gown like mending a wound.
"Smile," she said. "You are safe here."
A month turned like a wheel. The palace was colder than I had imagined. In the night the emperor, Robert Dalton, came to watch me like a man who had learned curiosity and turned it into ceremony.
"Stand," he said once, watching how the light fell across my throat. He named a poem—our poem—lines Fabian and I had once laughed over. "It is as if the stars are new tonight."
My skin prickled. His presence smelled of ash and policy, of a distant land and a scent I later learned was his: a perfume ground from a flower he favored in the imperial gardens.
"Do you know the name in my lips?" he asked, the first night when I lay too faint to speak. "Arianna, you will be safe. The frontier will be visited, your house will be cared for."
"You will let them return?" I asked, letting the words on someone else's breath seem like a bridge.
"Of course," he said. "You are my consort."
They came back—my father Edgar Morrison, my mother Karin Mills—when the summons arrived. They bent beneath candles in the palace hall and smiled, ashamed of the dust on their sleeves but warmed by the orange glow.
"You have the emperor's grace," Stefano told them, presentation even. "You may rest assured."
He opened two jugs—old wine, a gift for honored guests. My father raised his cup to his lips with the kind trust a soldier keeps for his sovereign.
"Drink, friend," he said. "We drink to our daughter's fortune."
I poured as ceremony asked. I dipped the ladle and let the liquor slide in, the color like summer petals. I thought of the fields at home, of the smell of roasted meat, and of Fabian saying, "Wait for me."
Three days later my house was dead.
"How is this possible?" I asked, kneeling at the window with my belly hard and my hands colder than I had ever known. Stefano stood at the threshold like a signpost.
"The letters were found," Stefano said. "Your family spoke with a foreign envoy. It was taken for treason."
My child kicked then and I felt nothing but emptiness. Stefano spoke softly: "It was for the safety of the realm."
"You killed them," I said. The words were a blade turned inward.
"They took the path they chose," the emperor told me later, voice thin and clinical. "They acted against the state. They chose to die to preserve honor."
I could not breathe. The world narrowed to the shape of a cup, to the line of a father's smile a day earlier.
Fabian disappeared. He came and went in fragments—rumors at the edges of court that he had gone north to quell bandits, that he had been made a prince of war. Once, a servant who smelled of parchment and cold told me he had been seen speaking with men in leather coats, men who smelled like iron and old maps.
"Fabian is not what he was," the servant had said.
"Is he the same man?" I whispered. "Is he my Fabian?"
He returned with men around him and a cold purpose. Where once he had been easy, he now moved as if the world owed him recompense—because perhaps it did. He had been denied me; he had watched the emperor give me a crown and then call me 'consort' with the same flat kindness he rescinded to others.
"Have you eaten?" Fabian asked once, when the palace was quiet and the shadow of river light lay on his face.
"No," I said. "I cannot eat."
"Can you forgive?" he asked, and the question landed into me like an arrow.
"It is not my forgiveness that was asked for," I said. "It was my life they bargained with."
Time slid. The palace became an island where news arrived like gulls—quick and full of sudden noise. One day the emperor, Robert Dalton, announced my elevation: my son would be heir. The court stirred and the air moved into a shape like hope.
"Is this true?" I asked Fabian when the proclamation echoed through marbled halls.
"It is true," Fabian said. "And I will watch over you."
He sat near me, and sometimes his hand brushed mine. The habit of a thousand small kindnesses had lived in him for years. He would walk me on the palace terraces and sometimes leave a scrap of paper folded with a poem. "Like this," he would say; and I would feel, stupidly, once again that old trust.
Then Fabian moved with celerity I had admired as a child. He gathered allies, old men with thick bellies of influence, boys he had grown up with now wearing banners. He spoke to Emmaline Wilson, my elder sister who had been married away to a foreign court long ago. She wrote to him in purple-inked letters and sent back promises. There were secret passes and nights of lamplight and unfamiliar names.
"Help me," Emmaline wrote in one letter. "For the family's honor. For the boy."
"Will you betray him?" I asked Fabian when the rumors soothed into a plan.
"To save our house," he said. "I will not let them trample what is left."
"I lost them already," I said. "What more do you want?"
"I want to take back what was stolen," he said. His voice was small and fierce.
The plan was simple on paper: Fabian and Emmaline would cut the palace heart out, take the emperor's power by force, then put it in what they called "righteous hands"—ours, his soldiers' hands, hands that had guarded frontier walls and understood bloodlines. I let the words move over me like wind.
The morning they struck, the sun was pale and the flags were still. Soldiers—soldiers with Fabian's sigil—moved through the capital like a flash of winter. They took the walls with a cold economy. In the first hours, men screamed. The emperor, Robert Dalton, was dragged into a courtyard where the world paused.
"Stand there," Fabian ordered.
"Why?" I cried, running to the courtyard. "What are you doing?"
Fabian looked older than I remembered. "For the world," he said. "For the house."
"Is this honor?" I demanded. "Is this my family's name on the scaffold?"
He did not answer.
They held the emperor and the princess—Isabella Howell—before the crowd. It should have been a triumph. The papers should have recorded a rescue. Instead something old and monstrously human had settled in the air: power smelled like blood now, and not just the state's.
"Speak," Fabian told the emperor in front of assembled courtiers and soldiers.
Robert Dalton's face was pale but his voice did not break. "Do you think you can wear the crown with your hands bloody?"
"We do not want a crown," Fabian answered. "We want justice."
"Justice?" Isabella spat. "You call this justice? You hang a crown of iron on the people's shame."
The crowd murmured. I felt my son's small body press against mine, because they had brought him, I think, to remind us all we were human things at the center of a political animal.
"What will you do?" I asked Fabian in a whisper.
"Remove a tyrant," Fabian said. "And put a man who understands war to protect the realm. A man who remembers the borders."
"At what cost?" I asked, voice shaking. "At the cost of blood?"
Fabian looked at me then, and something like the boy I loved flickered.
"I will not let you be hurt again," he said. "Not by him, not by anyone."
"Not by the one who took my family?" I asked. "You will not let me be hurt—unless you are the hand?"
He did not reply. The court's light narrowed.
The months following the coup were dark. Fabian sharpened his rule like a blade. Emmaline—my sister—lifted herself on the new order and claimed titles that made her eyes distant. Isabella Howell was beaten and left in a state that showed me how far men would go even after victory. Soldiers who had supported Fabian drank too deeply of newly offered power and began to take the pleasure that comes with command. The city trembled between celebration and fear.
"Fabian," I said one night when the wind pushed rain against my window. "You have taken the throne's shadow. Are you not afraid of what it will do to you?"
"It is not the throne," he said. "It is the country. I will not be afraid."
He began to change in ways subtle and then sharp. Where once his anger had been a quick flare, it became patient, methodical, like a man who had learned to wait for his turn to crush. He ordered public interrogations that looked more like shows—men tied and questioned and then broken; whispers that courtiers who did not bend would find doors closed; families moved in the night.
"All this for my safety," I told him. "All this for honor?"
He kissed my forehead once, and his mouth tasted of iron.
The more he promised to protect me, the more the palace corners filled with reports of cruelty. "He took the child," a woman told me in the weeds of the garden as if the saying of it required her to keep her voice small. "Fabian moved the boy. Kept him from you. He says it is for safety."
"Where is he?" I whispered.
"Not far," she said. "In a place that looks like our old camp, they say. Fabian made a shrine of sand and tents. He will keep him safe."
Days bled into a year of uneasy mornings—blunted laughter aimed at deflection, long silences meant as armor. I fed the emperor's heir, I tended the child, and each act was a paper bridge over an ocean of wrong.
Then I learned the truth of my family's death through a scrap of paper a servant had hidden in her sleeve. It was Fabian's handwriting on one of the edges—an agreement, a map, a trace. My father had been paged into the palace service that night and asked to drink. My mother had smiled and said, "Drink for your daughter's happiness." The cup had been turned by my own hand, a foolish service heavy with trust. The wine had bloomed red and fragrant later—not because of wine vendors. There was a poison that makes the mouth bleed and the breath stop three days later.
It had been delivered that night by Stefano, by the very people who had sworn safety. The emperor had told me they died of their own choosing; Fabian had argued it was a necessary purge. Emmaline had stood in a place that melted my trust.
You must understand: grief does not arrive like a thief. It is a slow, sensible thing that arranges itself, waits for you to notice and then shows its teeth.
I could have spun into ruin. I could have clasped at the world with the little of me that remained. I did not. I gathered instead. I learned spices and poisons and the ways the body trembles; I learned to step like a shadow. I remembered my father's advice about a soldier's patience, and my mother's steady scent of mending.
"I will not let this stand," I told Dylan Almeida and Anna Cook, the only ones who had not changed. "I will not be the kind of ghost that wails in a corner. If they call me traitor, then I will be treason with rhyme."
Dylan dropped her head and then took it up. "Miss," she said, "we are yours."
"Then work," I said.
For months I fed the tyrant his stories, my words like honey on sharpened wire. I knelt as a court lady and smiled and let them believe in me. I let Fabian think me pliant because he always imagined himself in a role where he could break and remake things.
"Why do you pretend?" Fabian asked me once in the light of a private room. His voice had a tiredness in it that made me think of the boy who had once braided a ribbon into my hair.
"Because pretending keeps us alive," I said. "Because I can play a part better than you can be a god."
He looked at me then as if trying to read my bones. "You are a liar, Arianna."
"I am an instrument," I said. "You have tuned me. I will play one last note."
The plan was not elegant. It was a heavy, small thing that required a sacrifice: a child's lullaby, a piece of incense, a night when all of the doors would be closed.
On the day of reckoning—I do not call it victory; the word would have been too bright—we did it. Fabian's men had grown arrogant. They strutted through courts and said the palace belonged to their sound. We fed them wine seasoned with a dust that slept the judgment of their hearts and made them stupid. The boy—my son—was in the chambers safe beneath watchful hands who believed in us. I carried a short sword hidden in my sleeve; the blade had once belonged to my father.
When Fabian realized the net had closed, he tried to speak to the crowd.
"People!" he cried. "I removed a corrupt man for you!"
"Did you protect us?" a market woman demanded from the line of faces. "Did you keep our brothers from being killed by whatever your justice is?"
Fabian's expression changed like weather. At first there was surprise—he had not expected such direct scorn. Then there was anger. Then denial, a quick litany of "This was for the realm" and "We did what had to be done." The crowd's voice turned on him as easily as a storm.
"Where were you when our children starved?" the woman shouted. "Where were you when men knocked on doors in the night?"
The gathered crowd—soldiers who had been promised pensions, merchants who had their carts burned—began to shout. Their faces were hard. The servants, the wives, the fathers, the ones Fabian had ignored, had gathered. They took the time to name those incidents, had the finance records, had the names of the men who had disappeared.
"Do you see now?" I called, stepping forward when the hush came like the breath before a wave. "Look at him. Look at what promises do to a man who believes himself above his own feet."
Fabian's face was red. "Arianna—"
"You took their lives and called it statecraft," I said.
He tried to turn the people, to point to me, to call me the fallen consort who loved power. "She stands with me!" he yelled, and his voice cracked.
"Is that so?" I said. "Then see us." I lifted the curtain that hid the mock camp Fabian had created in the palace garden—the sand, the tents, the little shrine. Guarded men flocked from that place in confusion. They had seen the boy, my son, sleeping beneath patched quilts. They saw the props of Fabians' glory: maps with sold states marked by ink that smelled of treason.
Then I unrolled letters—letters that Dylan had found hidden in vaults—letters from Fabian to Emmaline, letters that detailed binding deals to alienate provinces, letters that listed names to be removed "for the peace of the throne." Stefano Dixon, the eunuch who had been my friend, came forward and, with hands trembling, produced the jug I had used to pour wine on the night my family came. He had kept it, and when he turned it, people recognized that pale fragrance and the seeded red beneath the cork: the old poison.
The crowd heard it. A woman began to cry and then to sing out the names of those gone. The shouts grew like a tide.
Fabian's face went through a hard arithmetic. He was first scorned, then enraged, then pleading, then collapsing into denial. Men who had mocked him now spat.
"Fabian," they said, "you promised safety and gave us darkness."
"How can you justify murder?" a general cried.
"Do you deny the letters?" someone demanded.
"No!" Fabian hoarsely responded. "I did what I must. The throne—"
"The throne?" the crowd repeated. "Whose throne? Not ours."
For a long time he begged: "I did it for the realm. Listen to me."
There was no listening in the square. Men pushed forward, binding him with ropes ripped from tents. They tore the cords of his banners from his shoulders and shouted out the robberies of county after county. Isabella Howell, held in a corner in a shroud of blood and dust, spat at him.
"You set us all aflame, Fabian," she hissed. "We bled."
"You set us on fire," Fabian tried to say back. He was smaller now, stripped of the soldier's polish, brandished not as a leader but as an accused man.
"They will make you answer," a merchant said.
"Not in whispers," I said. "Here. Now."
They dragged him to the center. Someone fetched a bell and rang it. The plaza filled with faces: the same faces that had once cheered at trumpets, the faces that had fed their families at the market and now brought their lists of grievances. They lined up. One by one, they told what Fabian's men had done. One by one, they named names, read receipts, spoke of missing sons. The hours stretched.
Fabian's reaction shifted like a dying color. He began to deny with a different pitch—first fierce denial, then fragile hope that his past servitors would save him, then a slow, marrow-deep comprehension that he had been toppled not by court intrigue but by the many little betrayals he thought unseeable.
"You're all mistaken," he pleaded to one cluster of faces. "I did what I had to!"
"You did," a widow's voice said, flat as winter. "You did kill and call it statecraft."
The punishment they chose was public and full: not a quick, hidden execution. They stripped Fabian of rank, rolled his banners in mud, and led him through the city with the same men who had once saluted him. They made him stand beneath painted boards where the crimes were read aloud. They called for names and deeds—embezzlements, disappearances, the forced conscriptions—and each charge found a voice in the crowd.
Fabian's face went through stages. At first he barked orders that dissolved into sobs. Then he raged and tried to speak; his voice became raw. Then he sought to bargain—"Let me explain, let me at least be heard in court"—but the court was the street and the judges were those he had wronged. A girl whose brother had been taken from the docks spat in his face. A veteran I had once seen bow to him shoved a crude rope through the iron ring at Fabian's belt and tightened it until the man could only choke.
Tears brightened his lashes. He said the name of his childhood, the word for the boy he used to be, and for a second I saw him—the boy who had once held a torn kite and promised to share smuggled bread. Then he looked like a man pulled apart by what he had taken.
"Judge me," he begged finally, voice small. "Judge me in your law."
They judged. They made him kneel publicly, read out the list of his crimes in plain voices, and let those he had hurt speak truth to power.
"You thought you protected," a widow said. "But you were the storm."
"You thought you bore the sword to shelter us," the veteran said. "But you wielded it for yourself."
Fabian's last reactions were of collapse: the man first met the gaping look of those betrayed with disbelief, then denial, then an insistence that he had been acting for the greater good, then the small, final crumple when he understood he would not be believed.
The final act was humiliation rather than a quick killing. They shaved the banners from his shoulders, cut his hair, and stripped his armor in the public square. They paraded him past the houses of those he had hurt. People spat. Children threw mud. They made him watch families named and mourned.
He tried to plead with me once, looking at my face among the crowd.
"Do you forgive me?" he asked, voice cracking open. His pride had been stripped as surely as his armor.
"No," I answered. "I will never forgive this."
His face collapsed in that moment through every emotion: surprise, denial, pleading, and then a small, raw cracking where he had once made himself glass to the world. He broke, and when he did, I felt nothing like triumph. There was only a deep, cold stilling, like snow settling over ruins.
The punishment lasted hours. Soldiers who had once followed him now stood with lists, and the list read on. They did not arrest and hang him in a quiet court; they made sure the city watched. The crowd's verdict was merciless and final: exile for some of his men, public reparations where possible, and binding him to labor that stripped him of any power.
When they finally left him in the dust, a small knot of women from whose houses he had taken help came to stand near me. "This is for our sons," one said. "This is for what we can do."
Fabian was not executed in the square—there was an understanding even among the angry that the law must have limits. But his spirit and reputation were taken in plain view. His public body became a lesson: power can be given and taken, and the people will never forget those who turned authority into private hunger.
Later, in a quiet cell, I found him faint and broken. He had been humiliated for all to see. He looked at me through a window and said a single thing: "I thought—"
"You thought as you did," I said.
In that hour I did not slit him with the short sword I had kept beneath my robes. I did not give him the clean end of a revenge fantasy. Instead, I let the law do its work publicly, because I wanted every face who had loved him to see how a man who was once a boy could be unmade.
And then I went to the boy—my son—who had been found tucked in a tent like a secret and fed him, and I folded my life around him like a promise that had been kept at last.
Months later, the city still whispered. Many who had cheered us now felt the old guilt gnaw. Emmaline sent a small note from far away, the ink running with regret. Isabella Howell was alive, but different, and sometimes I saw her in the market, her hands stained with the work of mending a new life.
"Is it over?" Dylan asked me once under the eaves of my chamber.
"It is not over," I answered. "Nothing like this is over. But the list is read. They saw what happened. They saw his face. That keeps them honest for a time."
"Do you hate him?" she asked.
I thought of the boy who had once asked if I would trust him. I thought of the man who had engineered doom.
"I don't know," I said finally. "I am only sure of this—I will not be used. I will hold my son and teach him the names of the river and the names of the brave things. I will teach him how to be better."
Outside, snow began to fall—hard and clean—and the city looked as if someone were trying to wash the ink from its hands.
The End
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