Rebirth17 min read
Snow, Regret, and the One Burning Incense
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I remember the winter like a wound that never healed.
"The mountain trembled," I told them. "The sky opened its fist. Let it be a good year."
"It is a sign," the ministers said. "A blessing for the realm."
"I only asked one thing," I said to no one. "Only that she be well."
"She will be well, Your Majesty," Constance said beside me, folding the child's small robe with trembling hands.
"She will," I lied, because I had to keep some order in a palace that still needed an emperor's voice.
"Why so many layers?" Kaori laughed once, a small sound I keep like a coin in my palm.
"Stop whining," I said, but my voice cracked. "Stop thinking she'll leave us."
"She won't go," Kaori told me. "Not if you hold the gate shut."
I pressed my forehead against hers. "Hold it," I whispered.
"I will," she said. "Always."
Those words were a rope I clung to until it frayed.
"Did you ever think," Constance said softly as she smoothed a tiny sleeve, "that she liked all these silly trinkets? She never said it."
"She liked the cheap ones the most," I replied. "The ones that didn't shine properly."
"Those were the honest things," Constance murmured. "She made them honest."
"She made everything honest," I said, and the sound of my own voice surprised me. "Did you see the way she watched the court women, their jewels flashing? She would say 'I will be good' and then hide the smile."
Kaori laughed. "You are terrible. You could be a poet."
I pressed my face into her hair. "You give me too much credit."
That night she arranged the little belongings, folding each piece like a prayer. Her hands would pause, and for a long time neither of us said anything. The world outside the palace held its breath. The rest of the court pretended to move on.
"We must make plans," I told Constance later when we were alone. "For succession. For the boy. For the realm."
Constance's eyes flicked and then fixed. "For the child," she said. "Not for your pride."
"Yes," I said. "For the child."
"That little one will be safe," she promised.
We argued with each other in the softest of voices. Our disagreements were not against each other; they banked against memory and the ache of what we could not bring back. I thought if I could fix the statecraft, I could fix the rest.
"You want to make him crown prince," Constance said quietly. "You want what you cannot take back."
"I want—" I stopped. Saying the rest of it would pull apart what was left of my courage.
"You want their child to sit where she should have sat," she finished for me.
"I want to make it right," I said. "For her."
"Who is 'her'?" Constance asked.
Kaori's name would not leave my mouth easily anymore.
"Kaori," I said finally. "For Kaori."
Constance gave a tiny laugh, a sound like a small bell gone wrong. "You will not have her back that way."
"Then tell me what to do," I demanded. "Anything."
"It is not for me to tell," she said. "They had reasons."
"They were wrong," I said. "They all were."
We both fell silent.
The palace seemed to smell like old paper and the faint smoke of incense. I found myself walking alone along the outer wall, where the snow had not yet been trampled and looked like the inside of a held breath.
"Do you think she sits here sometimes?" I asked, voice low enough to be a secret even to the night.
Constance placed her lamp down and sat on the threshold. "She sat and waited," she said. "She believed. She hoped."
"She believed in me," I said.
"She believed you were better than you were that night," she answered.
I looked at the outline of the palace roofs in the snow, thinking of how small she had been when I first saw her with the half-mended flower on her hair. How she would stand in the crowd and look with hunger at the jewels she could not own and then, when I looked away, tell herself she had enough.
"I owe her everything," I said.
"Then pay the debt," Constance said, as if I had not already tried.
When the news arrived that the child Nova was gone, it was a stone dropped into a still well. The sound took my breath and the ripples never ceased.
"No," Kaori whispered when I told her. "She will come home. She must."
"She won't come back," I told her. "They are gone. All of them."
"They will come home," she said, and for a while she believed. For a few days we pretended the grief was something that could be moved around like bowls: set it on the shelf, pick it up later. Then the weight crushed the shelf.
Later, the man who had taught me to read, Dev Hoffmann, came with the strange thing.
"You have read this book," I said when I opened the folded paper he offered. "You, who have the patience of old wood. You have not wasted my time."
"I have read every word the people send," he said. "Some words better than others."
"Why give me this?" I asked.
Dev looked at me with the tired scholar's face. "Because you will read any magic if it helps you sleep. Because you will try anything."
He spoke of a man in the north, Zane Fuchs, who had the reputation of rubbing rare incense and calling the past like a guest. He brought the paper like a warning and like a hope.
"It is nonsense," Dev said. "But you asked me, and I listened. If it keeps you from falling apart, you will try."
"I will not be a fool," I told him.
"Yet you are already a fool for wanting it," he answered.
Two nights later Zane appeared at the foot of the palace like a shadow that did not belong. He bowed as if the world had taught him how to be small.
"Your Majesty," he said. "I have what you need."
"What is it?" I demanded.
"It is called the Regret Incense," Zane said. "Light it, and a single thread of time can be pulled. But one must be careful. There is a price."
"A price?"
"Yes," Zane said, and his hands did not rest. "Every borrowing of time takes something from a life. Ten years in the waking world. One flicker of memory. You must be willing."
"I will pay anything," I said. "For her."
Zane studied me as if weighing a coin. "If you burn it a moment, the world will be ten years less when you return."
"Ten years," I repeated. "I will be old when I come back."
"You will be older," he said. "You may lose the patience of youth. But you will have a chance."
"Then we burn," I said.
The ritual was simple to the point of cruelty. I sat and watched the curl of smoke take shape above the bowl. The scent was not sweet but like wet earth after rain, like an apology. Zane chanted in a voice that trembled as if remembering each word.
"Where do you wish to go?" he asked finally.
"To the night before the snow," I said. "To the night she sat and waited."
"Then steady yourself," he warned. "You will see what you cannot unsee."
I closed my eyes. The world loosened like a scarf slipping free, and away I went.
I woke to the smell of temple lamps and the soft clack of geta on a wooden board. The air was thinner, younger. When I opened my eyes I saw Kaori in a shabby skirt, hands nervous at her chest, stepping away from a temple bell.
"Are you lost?" she asked, and in that voice I became a man who had every chance.
"I am not lost," I said. "Where are you going?"
"Home," she said. "I thought to ask for a husband to find me. To ask for a man who will keep me."
"Then I will keep you," I said.
"You are not poor?" she asked, ever suspicious of what she could not see.
"I am a man who will try very hard," I said. "Sit. Tell me of the flowers you liked."
We walked and talked as though the last years had not happened in a cruel loop. The pain of memory was a cold rock lodged in my throat, but I held it there and watched her. Everything I had wished to change I could now change with careful fingers: not to hide the child's death, not to let the court lie to her, not to place duty above truth. The map of our life was small enough I could redraw it.
"I can save her," I told myself in the hush of the night. "I can keep her from waiting alone."
But time has ways of teaching that not all debts can be paid for money alone. The longer I stayed in those younger hours, the more I saw the small threads that lead to ruin. The jealous glances of a favored woman, the small cruelties that swell like frost until they crack a bone.
"Who is Imelda?" I asked one afternoon, when a woman in embroidered silk passed by and then smiled in a manner that made my stomach cold.
"She is the favorite," Kaori said. "She is splendid."
"Splendid," I echoed, and something like ice ran through me.
The palace was a living beast. Certain people wielded influence like claws. Imelda Cohen had the court wrapped around her finger. She gave out favors like poison wrapped in ribbons.
"Do not trust her," Constance told me once, a look of old hurt in her eyes. "She smiles like the world does not have teeth."
"I will protect you," I vowed to Kaori. "I will keep you safe."
"Keep me," she said simply. "Then I will sleep."
Weeks passed in that borrowed second life. The more I gave, the more I saw the lengths others would go to take. People who had smiled before found reasons to press their faces into my back and whisper. Imelda grew bolder; she asked for things and did not get them. Her smile soured into a small, persistent hunger.
"Can you refuse her?" I asked Dev one night across a low table. "She pushes and pushes."
"She is dangerous because she thinks she is owed," Dev said. "You cannot starve a woman of what she wants and expect her not to die slowly."
"Will she harm the harmless?" I asked.
"She will harm to preserve her place," Dev answered. "Such women have no mercy."
I thought the warnings were metaphors. I learned they were recipes.
Myrtle Schultz was a washerwoman, small and brave. She did not know court. She only knew sweat and the honest way of washing a child's robe until the tears dissolved into the water.
"Why take a life over a jewel?" I asked Myrtle later, and she only blinked.
"They thought it mattered," she said. "I thought it didn't."
A night came like a closed fist. Imelda stormed the servants' quarters with a retinue, and rumors slid like oil through the palace. Someone had accused the wrong person of theft of a jewel. Someone had been jealous and spoke out. Someone had been afraid of the child who smiled a free smile and didn't bend low enough.
Myrtle was found dead with a single wound. The palace woke in a press of panic so thick I could not breathe.
"You did not listen," Constance told me, voice a ribbon of fury. "You let them think your silence was consent."
"I thought I could stop it," I cried. "I thought!"
"You thought and people died," she said, softer now. "You are emperor only by name if you cannot stop such cruelty."
I felt the world fracture. I should have punished quickly, publicly. I did not. I feared the court, feared the ripple. I feared the spectacle. I was weak.
It was my indecision that built Imelda's confidence.
She began to move with brutal grace. She arranged favors, turned faces, and when she wanted a thing she made it appear that the thing belonged to her by right of smiling in front of witnesses until the witnesses started to believe. She smiled like a trap.
"I want her gone," she told a small, secretive circle, "so that the throne is not troubled."
"Who?" asked one of her followers, a man named Mark Dominguez who had been loyal once, then fearful.
"My rival," Imelda said. "The one who laughs too loud. The one the people watch with soft eyes."
"She is kind," Mark protested once. "Not a rival."
"Kindness is a weakness," Imelda said. "We cannot afford soft things on the court."
She turned the court into a theater of whispers. Enough whispers become a wave. The night of the storm, when the rain fell with the violence of guilt, Imelda sent men in the dark with gold in their hands and hatred in their mouths.
They struck. The palace shook as if the world itself objected.
When I received the news, I ran as if something alive had been stolen from me. The blood left stains no snow could hide. The court stood in stunned silence.
"Why did you not act sooner?" Constance asked me as I collapsed into the hall, besides myself.
"I tried to keep peace," I said. "I did not think they would go so far."
"You are an emperor," she said. "An emperor cannot be always thinking of peace when children die."
My failure had given those who liked the warmth of power the room to take more. Imelda took more until there was nothing left but ruin.
There were accusations, whispered confessions, and in a court hungry for order I contrived a public reckoning. If I had not done so out of urgency and shame, I would have done it to atone.
I called a council in the main yard at noon. The snow had melted into a hard crust and the sky was flat with light. The courtyard filled with faces — officials, servants, soldiers, and the many who once bowed but now watched with knives of suspicion behind their eyes.
"Bring Imelda," I told the guard.
They brought her, garlanded in a silk she had once chosen herself, her servants clustered like stars around her. Her eyes shone with arrogance at first. She thought she was the player and not the played.
"Why?" she asked when I stepped forward to face her.
"You know why," I said. "You know."
Her lips curled. "Do you mean to shame me in front of everyone, Your Majesty? Is that your plan?"
"It is not just shame I will consider," I said. "It is the truth."
"Truth is a strange thing," Imelda said. Her voice did not tremble. She looked at the crowd as if they were only props meant to applaud her. "You say many things now, Emperor. Where was your voice when small people were pushed aside?"
"Where was my voice?" I repeated. "You should answer that."
She blinked, then an expression flitted over her face: the faintest shock. Not because of guilt, but because someone had finally thrown down the gauntlet.
"Bring forward Mark and the witnesses," I ordered.
Mark Dominguez stepped forward, hands shaking. He had been Imelda's friend once. In his eyes was a storm of regret.
"Mark," Imelda said with a conversational ease. "You will not lie to protect me."
"I will tell the truth," Mark whispered. "I will tell the truth."
Mark's confession was the first crack. He told of the nights when favors were traded like currency, of how Imelda had tightened her net, and how he had helped because he feared what would happen if he did not. He told of the bribes he had taken and the words he had spoken to conceal truth.
Imelda's face changed. The proud mask slipped. She narrowed her eyes, tried to laugh it away. "You betray me for a little conscience?" she hissed.
"It is not conscience," Mark said. "It is shame."
One by one, others came forward. The palace can be a fearful place, but when the emperor stands and asks for truth, people move as if relieved from a weight. They spoke of midnight plans, of threats. They spoke of a woman who had grown ravenous for power and lost all care for cost.
Imelda's expression shifted again: from arrogance to agitation.
"This is a lie," she said sharply. "You were all jealous. You wanted my favor and did not get it."
"Then how do you explain the orders?" I asked. "How do you explain the men who went to the servants' quarters and left a trail of blood?"
She flinched at the word 'orders' as if it had a sting. Her mouth opened to deny. She said, "I never—"
"You did," Mark cut in. "You spoke the name in the privy room. I heard you. I brought the men because I feared your anger would ruin my house."
Imelda stepped back as if those words were a hand against her chest. For the first time she was quiet. The crowd hummed.
"Do you feel remorse?" I asked, keeping my voice low so every ear was forced to lean.
"My remorse is my own," she answered. "Not yours to collect."
"You will be judged in front of all," I said.
Her face hardened again. "You cannot do this. You are weak if you show mercy now. I will not kneel."
"Then you will stand and be made small," I said.
At my command, the chief steward unfastened the silk draperies from Imelda's shoulders and laid them on the ground. The crowd gasped — the favored had been stripped of honor in public. Her servants shrank into their cloaks.
"See," I said, "how quick a court can render its verdict when truth stands."
Imelda's face flushed with anger and then the first real fear. "You will not shame me," she spat.
"Shame and justice are different things," I said. "You took lives for power. You used fear and gold to get what you wanted. You will answer in the sight of those you used."
They pulled forward the bundle that contained Myrtle's stained linen, the child's tiny garments. The women who had once been quiet in the washroom came forward and wept in a line. The sight of the small, bloodied sleeve moved more than any argument.
Imelda staggered. Her supporters tried to intercede. One of them, a gentleman with an ashen face, went to her side and whispered. She slapped his hand aside and cried out loud.
"This is false," she howled. "They are jealous!" She stamped and clawed like an animal pressed in the open.
"No," I said. "You are found."
The crowd's reaction was a tide. Some shouted for immediate punishment. Some watched in silent horror. A few old women spat at Imelda's feet. A child pointed and called her name. "Look, that's the woman," he said, and his voice was small but fierce.
The most painful change was in her eyes. I had seen that look before: when a favored instrument fears being discarded. The colors shifted — first a thin high smile, then a flicker of denial, then a wildness.
"You will not take away everything," Imelda said, and the ringed hands at her throat trembled.
"Everything?" I asked. "You already took what cannot be given again. Now you will lose what you have."
"Do not do this!" She lunged toward the stewards. Guards closed on her like nets.
"Stop!" she screamed. "Stop! You are the emperor—"
"An emperor who failed," I answered. "And who now tries to be just."
She roared with the sound of someone unmasked. Then came tears, sudden and like an ugly confession.
"Forgive me," she begged, and in that moment she was not the polished woman that had steered court favors, but a person stripped raw. She dropped to her knees, shaking, reaching out to anyone who would hold her.
"Forgive me!" she cried. "I was hungry for more. For the place you gave me. I thought I would be safe. I thought if I had it, I could not lose."
There she was: from triumph to tremor in the span of a single breath.
"Forgiveness is not for the taking," Constance called out from the crowd. "It is for the earning."
People around us began to talk. Some whispered that she had played them, some that she had been made small by a harsher court. A group of palace women who had once smiled at Imelda's orders now pointed and spat words: "Murderer," "Coward," "You took a child's life for jewels."
There were those who had once bowed who now stood and left the field. Others came forward not to plead for her but to bear witness: the laundresses, the stable boys, the quiet cooks. One by one they told the small cruelties, the moments she had sharpened like knives. Their faces were plain with truth, and truth has more power in a crowd than any crown.
Imelda's reaction changed again. At first she was indignant. Then she was shocked. After shock came denial. She shouted, "This is a plot!"
"By whom?" I asked.
"By those who wish to see me fall!" she cried.
"Then tell them to stand," I said. "Let them stand now in front of us all."
None came forward.
Her shoulders sagged. The crowd's breath was like a cloth tucked between teeth. They had watched a favored woman be undone. They had watched a system that allowed greed to grow.
Imelda crawled on her knees to the center of the courtyard. For a moment she seemed small enough to be overlooked. The first spectators reached for poetry and for revenge. Some spat. Others wept. Many raised voices to talk at once about justice and example.
"You will be stripped of title," I said. "You will be sent from the palace, never to hold such favor again. You will be watched. You will answer to a court of law for your crimes."
"No!" she screamed. "No! I will not—"
"You will be judged," I said. "In public. For the people you have trampled."
As the officers took her away, Imelda began to beg. Her voice rose and fell like a bell sounding in a storm. "I did not mean—" she murmured, "I did not think—" then once more, "Forgive me."
The crowd's reaction shifted. Some hissed. Some were silent. A woman who had once been her handmaiden spat and then crossed herself. A young soldier who had served me in years gone by returned to salute me with a face older than his years.
When they led her beyond the gates, a dozen people crowded the gate to see her leave. Some laughed. A few watched as if they could not bear to look. It was not the execution the people clamored for, but the stripping of power can be a more terrible thing than death in a palace that runs on favor.
I did not rejoice. I only felt a hollow part of me fill with something like resolution.
Yet punishment, even public, did not restore what was gone. It only drew the wound into full view.
After that day, the court changed. Fear moved differently. People were quieter. The palace began to close itself in layers that felt like winter armor. The child Nova did not return. Myrtle's small voice never washed another robe. I had done a spectacle of chastening, and it had not set anything right. It had only put the wrongs on a stage.
When the ritual smoke guided me back to the later days — ten years shorter in the world because of what I had borrowed — I returned older in ways the mirror could not measure. I had given years to fix a single hour and found that debt had its own cost. I had preserved the lines of the realm, and I had punished the guilty, but I had not brought back what dies.
After I returned for good, I watched Kaori fold a tiny robe and then close her hands over it as if closing fate. "If I tell her the truth, will we be happier?"
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe we will be honest."
She looked at me with the old foolish faith that I had once lived by. "Will you stay?"
"I will try," I said.
But I knew. I had seen the thread of our life unspool in the hands of people who wanted to be warm and fed and applauded. I had acted too late before. I could not always be the man who could stop the wave before it broke.
So in the quiet that followed, I made a decision that was not for me.
"Kaori," I said one night, lit by a single lamp, "I will not bring you the throne's crown. You will not be a queen."
She blinked. "Why not? You will make me—"
"No," I said. "I will not make you a public thing for others to hunger after."
"You think they will harm me?" she asked.
"I know they will hunt what they cannot own," I said. "If I give you the seat, their teeth will find you. I cannot live with that again."
"Then what do you ask?" she whispered.
"That you go where they cannot reach so easily. That you live a life small and honest. That you be safe in the ways I failed to be before."
Her face changed, not with anger but with that old forgiving look. "You will hide me from the world you made?"
"I will build you a life away from the court," I said. "I will be with you as much as I can outside of the throne's glare. But I will not place your essence on the altar of politics again."
She put her hand on mine and squeezed, a gentle small stone. "I would rather eat and laugh and be yours than sit in cold gold."
"So do I," I said.
I thought of the incense and how it had given me a single chance. I thought of how the price had been years and memory's edges. I had used a life-bread to buy back a night. I had punished a monster in public and seen the soft faces of the people stand up. I had made a spectacle of justice and felt both relief and hollow.
In the years after, when complaint and compliment came, the court sometimes remembered the day Imelda was unmade. Men and women would nod and say, "It was a lesson." Sometimes I thought the lesson was only that power can be stripped if the right voice speaks. Sometimes it felt like the world learned more about fear than about mercy.
Kaori grew quieter and yet brighter. She made small gardens in the places I could not imagine before. She planted ordinary things that still grew, even in palace courtyards. The child Nova was never replaced, and the hole she left was a lamp in the dark that made the rest of us careful about how brightly we wanted to burn.
I have held a lot of regret in my hands. I have burned it to smoke and carried the ashes like a rosary. I did a public act that satisfied the crowd and struck fear into the bones of those who would use favor as a tool. Imelda's face when she fell from grace was one I will never forget: the arrogance gone, replaced by the raw stinging sound of someone who realizes they are not invincible. The crowd's shift from awe to contempt was a lesson carved in living flesh.
But there is a different lesson the incense taught me — one not decided by councils or punishments.
When I sat under the temple lamp and watched Kaori pray, I thought of the night I had burned the Regret Incense. I thought of the moment when I chose to give up the right to hold the crown over the woman I loved, because I watched the court's hunger and understood the price.
"Go," I told her once gently in the hush of stone and snow. "If it is safer to be small and alive than large and used, I will choose small with you."
She laughed, and in that laugh I heard the wind over a field of flowers. "You are a strange emperor."
"A necessary one," I said.
She leaned into me. "Then stay strange."
I did not know if my choices made a perfect repair. Nothing can mend a dead child's laugh or the empty stitch of a woman's hand. But I learned two things: that public punishment can expose a rot and that personal mercy sometimes means denying oneself a throne.
Once, long after, a child I did not know brought me a small cloth with a crude little flower sewn onto it.
"What is this?" I asked.
"It is what my mother wears when she thinks of you," the child said. "She says you were never cruel to her when it mattered."
I folded it carefully and kept it in a drawer. Later, when I was old enough to forget some smaller pains, I would take it out and smell faintly of rain and incense and the memory of snow.
I lit the last of the Regret Incense one evening when the palace was quiet. The smoke rose, thin and honest, a single ribbon of apology burning itself into the air. I watched it until it faded and thought of the choices — the one that had given me a chance to burn the past to make a single night right, and the one I made after to keep her away from the hunger of the court.
"I could have kept you a queen," I told Kaori once.
"You kept me alive," she replied. "That's enough."
The last line I remember is the sound of the incense when it finished: a soft, final sigh. It smelled like wet earth, like mending, and I listened to it as if it were the only honest thing left in a palace of pretended light.
The End
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