Revenge17 min read
Snow, River-Lamps, and the Painted Poem
ButterPicks16 views
I carried him through the snow.
"It is heavy." I said nothing else, because the city had already turned its face. Snow fell in deep, soft sheets and hid my footprints as if it would hide the world’s opinion of us both.
"Do not let go," I told the corpse, though I did not know if he could hear. My fingers had stopped feeling because the cold wanted everything and gave nothing back.
They said the snow was a good omen. "A good harvest," the town criers shouted on the warm days before the storm. I had learned to suspect omens. The city’s pleasure in this snow tasted like mockery.
They called him a monster. They called us friends. They called me the one who found him. None of those names fit. I only had my hands full and a promise whispered into a dying ear: find the woman from the songhouse and see Governor Gustaf; they are friends of his, he said. They will see the arrangements.
"Who will bury him?" a singer, pale-masked, asked with more curiosity than sorrow.
"Who will not," I answered, and set the body down on straw.
Isabel Krause pressed her handkerchief to her face and whispered, "Is it true? He is dead?"
"Yes," I lied and meant nothing by it. I meant only the weight of the body and the ache beside my ribs. "He is dead."
Isabel sank down on a stool, tiny and bright, her face gone soft with grief in the way only performers can make grief beautiful. She was the head at the riverhouse. She knew every sad song in the city. She knew how to make a widow’s wail sound like a blessing.
Gustaf Jimenez arrived in a pall of candles and the seriousness of a man who had spent years convincing the court he was still useful. He took the fingers of the dead man between his own and did not look at me directly.
"He was young," Gustaf said. "He did more than a man his age should."
"Then bury him," I said. I set the corpse where he had chosen—on a hill the old gardener always said had a kind of luck. He wanted a place that faced the river. He had a way of choosing things like that.
They spoke of his sins like one lists goods at market. Nothing in their voices fit the truth. He had been cruel and ruthless and brilliant. He had been a blade and a smile wrapped in the same package.
"It is ink and song and coin," Isabel whispered to me later. "He bought people like others buy tea. And yet you... you sat with him nights, humored him, listened."
"I had no name," I told her, because it was the truth and also a way to explain what thought would not survive an explanation. "I didn't know a name to lose. I only knew my hunger and that he said he would take care of me."
She folded the handkerchief into a neat square. "He took you as a stray takes shelter. That is not a crime."
"It is not a pardon either," I murmured.
We met him, that young, cruel man, a year ago on a night the cicadas were still complaining about heat.
He came out of the moon shadow like a clean surprise. He walked like someone used to earning the world’s quiet. He wore a robe trimmed in a pattern so proud it could be a weapon. His boots had been embroidered into clouds; his blade was a promise carved bright.
"You are a stray," he said, and smiled when the moon made his teeth pale and fine.
"Who are you?" I asked because it was safer than saying I had no name.
He shrugged. "A dog of the court. Carlos Ferrara, once. You might like calling me dog."
He was younger than people said. Younger than I had expected. That strange smiling cruelty made me want to vanish.
"Where is your master?" he asked when he found the shack that smelled of smoke and old herbs.
I had come as part of a scheme. The man called Pax Blackburn—grim name, grimmer man—had told us to kill a magistrate and to use children of the street. Pax had a way with traps and powders. He called his trade "seeking bones." He promised safety in exchange for obedience—little men with bigger teeth.
"You are wrong," I told Carlos, or maybe myself. I had meant to obey. I had meant to be whatever Pax needed. But the moment his hand moved to check the breathing at my throat, I knew I did not want my final act to be obedience.
I remember the hand that put his face to mine, and the silver flash of an arrow. The arrow missed my heart because he moved with the sort of grace that had killed men in provinces I had only heard of. He bent the arrow aside easily, twisted the small blade from my hand and cracked a rib with the butt of his sword. He pinned me where I lay and smiled the smile that becomes law over a person.
"You belong to someone who is already broken," he said. "You are a soldier without a drum."
I thought of biting down the last of the poison I carried that night. "Kill me," I had said.
He watched me with the patience of a man who reads the weather. "To die is honest," he said. "But it is too easy."
"You have a name," I spat. "Tell me your name then."
He told me, with the pride of a man who believed that names could hold destiny. "Carlos Ferrara. I wear five claws of the imperial weave. I have done things for the emperor."
"Then you are a dog," I said, because it suited me.
He laughed. "A dog? Is that a man or a title?"
When a story is told, the first lies are the easiest ones. He told me he had saved the province of Beiqing at sixteen, he told me of briberies uncovered and taxes returned to the poor. He made himself a hero with one-line confessions. I wanted to hate him, but the shadow of his truth made mud of the sand I had built my rage upon.
"You mean the men you killed—" I started.
He tilted his head. "Which of my killings do you find unforgivable?"
I had been taught by Pax to call the spy a monster and be proud. Carlos’s voice bled a thousand tiny facts I could not balance with my hatred. He turned my world by telling me—this man who had driven the needle into my heart's compass—that the story Pax sold me was false. He said, "Pax is a butcher of children who made killers and called them sons."
"Then tell me where Pax is," I demanded, not yet certain which side a man can claim.
He said he did not know. "He is tricksy," Carlos admitted. "But I will find him."
"Find him?" I laughed to hide the truth. "You will find the one who raised me to a blade."
Time moves either like wind or like a blade. Carlos kept his blade moving. He was cunning. He said the name of my past like a shock to the skull until parts of memory cracked and spilled—images of a burned household, paintings, a poem that was inked into the back of my mind, the taste of a mother's name I could not say.
"You are not nothing," he told me once. "You were given away and given back, but you are not nothing."
There were many small gestures he made. He moved a cup closer when my hands shook. He refused to laugh when others cast us both in simple scripts. He once stopped my hands from scrambling up to bite my own tongue because the poison that cured Pax’s obedience was gnawing its last at me.
"Do you want the painting?" he asked all at once in the riverhouse, where Isabel sang of widows and loss.
I had gasped because the painting—old ink, a man with a hidden tune—had curled in my dreams. "It is mine," I said. "This painting belonged to my father if he had a name."
He watched it the way a man watches an old friend who is dying. Then he said something he never meant, perhaps, to give away: "You have a new name. Forrest Weaver. Keep it. It is less a burden."
Names are small warm things in the cold world. I took the name like one takes a cloak. It fit.
Under his watch, I learned to eat again. Under his watch, we visited the river lamps when the city asked ghosts safe passage. They said the second moon of the year would send flowers to the dead. There, I learned to place a lamp and write a small word on the paper: "Far-Quiet"—my prayer to the body of who I had been.
"Write something for me," Carlos asked.
I wrote two characters and, perhaps for the first time, called myself by them: "Far-Remind," because remembrance is a craft that can be given as a debt to the dead.
"You will promise," he said, because promises were small chains that kept us from being scattered to the wind.
"I promise," I said. It sounded foolish then. It sounded foolish still.
Winter came. Pax’s tracks had washed into rumor and ash. Carlos—tireless, stubborn—found a line of a path a half-year later, a burned-temple out beyond the city. He went alone. He should not have. "You promised you would not," I told him later, remembering the emptiness of waiting.
"I could not leave him to do this alone," he said. "It is not your fight. It is mine because of the oath."
"You are arrogant," I said softly. "You would rather die than let the crime go unpunished."
He came back broken. He came back with a blade snapped, lungs unconcerned with the world's mercy. He laughed at the break like a boy who had lost his toy. "He is dead," Carlos said, as if that would settle everything.
"I carried you," I said.
"You did," he answered. We were certain then: one dead man should be done on a stone hill, and one man would heal in the hands of the city’s doctors.
They were reverent at first, and then petty. Gustaf gave a speech. Isabel wept and sang. The city threw coins to his memory like an offering to a hero they wanted rather than the truth they had. I stayed by the bed where Carlos lay pale and still for a long while. The cost for killing Pax was high.
"He is gone," Gustaf said. "It was a mercy."
"What mercy," I whispered.
Carlos's ribs were broken. His arm hung like an unfinished line. The poison had tasted him. His face, even in sleep, kept that nagging cruel curl at the corner of his mouth. The surgeon’s bandages smelled of iron and hope.
I sat and spoke to him as if to a living friend. "Do you remember the painting?"
He opened his eyes and squinted at me like a man trying to read a phrase in a foreign dialect. "The poem," he said weakly. "It said—"
"‘Hidden desk, lone hawk gone; tune the distant crane and come back.’" I finished for him.
He smiled, not with the cruel smile but with something like relief. "You remember the second verse," he murmured. "Someone has to keep me honest."
"Then wake up," I told him. "Do not die like that."
He did not die. He made a noise like a child who had been startled from sleep and clung to breath like a bargain. For a long while after, he tested me with jokes that were too soft for the man who had once broken my ribs.
"Do you like being called dog?" he asked once, when he could stand for half an hour.
"I am used to puppets and dogs," I answered. "Which one are you?"
He smiled and let the world slide off his shoulders for a moment. "I am the one who broke his own rules."
We lived out a string of small days—more river-lamps, more quiet, Isabel’s songs like rain. Gustaf visited when he had the time and left with an extra bowl of medicine. The world turned and left us some corners where our little business could live: a small teahouse, a guest room in the riverhouse where I practiced names and Carlos practiced being less cruel.
"I will give you a trade," he said the day he walked me around the backyard of the riverhouse. "You cook for me. I will try to be softer."
"That is a horrible bargain," I said, because he could never keep promises easily.
One evening a merchant’s cry drew us all to the market. "Public confession today! Guilty one shall be shamed!" The city loved spectacle like a fever. I had never liked being the center of a thing I could not control.
Pax Blackburn—he who raised killers—was a shadow who had left scars on many. For months, rumor had turned into paper leads. Gustaf had his men. Isabel had her songs. No one expected how simple the truth would be when we gathered it.
That afternoon the square filled like a bowl too full. Stalls closed, faces leaned forward. "He will pay," someone shouted.
"Let them bring him out," another voice told the crowd. "If he is responsible, let him be seen."
A stage had been built—a low platform draped in red. Gustaf stood at one side with the cold convenience of someone who had spent his life convincing others of morality. Isabel held a shawl over her hands like a prayer. I stood on the side with Carlos, who could barely stand but who had long ago decided the world would be served its truth.
They brought Pax out, shackled but fat with the kind of smugness that lives in the mouths of men who think themselves clever. His hands were empty. His eyes darted. He wore the look of a man who had expected to bribe his way through the world.
"You who sold children," Gustaf's voice cut like a bell. "You who call your trade 'seeking bones'—come forward and tell us."
Pax smiled like a rat who had learned a new trick. "You have no proof," he crowed. "You have gossip and rumor and the bones of men who wanted revenge more than justice."
"Tell them the names," Isabel said quietly. "Who did you sell, Pax Blackburn? To whom? Which children?"
"For what does it profit me to speak," Pax hissed. "I am an honest merchant. I sell dangerous skills to those who can pay. I do not take joy in breaking bodies for coin."
He breathed cleanly then, as if his lies were fresh milk. The crowd tittered. They liked a show where the villain might slither free.
"Do you deny making the 'soul potion'?" Gustaf asked.
"Soul potion?" Pax scoffed. "Old wives' tales. Children eat bad herbs and forget."
Gustaf laid a small leather case on the table. He opened it with a mechanics' calm. Inside were jars and slips of paper—a ledger, receipts, coins clipped with a ledger that matched names to shipments.
"Here is your book," Gustaf said. "Do you know this handwriting?"
The crowd leaned in. Pax's face, which had been amused, twitched.
"You... you lie!" Pax cried, stepping back as several guards closed the circle. "Those are common names. Common accounts."
"Tell the crowd who is 'Far-Remind' then," Gustaf said, and the crowd murmured my old name like a secret.
"Tell them about the burned manor," Isabel sang suddenly, a soft line that made the crowd quiet as a pond. "Tell them about the painting with blood that bled."
She held up a scrap of faded cloth—cloth that Gustaf had torn from one of Pax’s old satchels. It had a smear of ink and a corner of a poem. Pax's eyes widened. For the first time his hands were not steady.
"How do you...?" His voice was thin.
"Gustaf and I tracked shipments," a guard said. "We followed a wagon to the temple. The men who carried them died later. Their children went missing."
"Pax," I said, and the word was small but true. "You sold them to fight, to become killers. You called it devotion."
The crowd hissed like a wave. Pax's mouth opened and closed. I watched him perform panic as if it were a costume. "You lie," he said. "They volunteered. They were paid. They were—"
"Do you remember the little ones?" Gustaf demanded. "Do you remember the boy with the painting, the boy who could not remember his name?"
The crowd’s murmur grew to a roar. Pax's face shifted through stages like a bad weather map: first a smirk, then annoyance, then the slow blench of someone losing the script they thought would save them.
"You—" he stammered. "You have no proof of murder. You have hearsay."
A woman pushed forward and shouted, "My nephew. He left in Pax’s wagons and never came back. He was never of age."
Another man cried, "My son came back with a white look and would not speak of home. He tried to bite off his tongue. He lived three days."
There were seventeen voices by the time the sun had gone low. The crowd’s counting turned to a chorus of children’s names and broken mothers. Pax’s chest leaked sweat. He had not expected names to hurt in public. He had expected coin to keep him safe.
"We tried to reason with you," Isabel said simply. "You told us there was no shame in the mind you created."
Pax laughed then, thin and obscene. "Create? I gave them trade. I gave them strength."
"Strength for what?" Gustaf asked.
"The work," Pax said. "You make work of them. You men of the court. They sell their loyalty for bread."
"Who are you to sell children?" I said. The crowd parted around me because they wanted me to speak, the one who had once been nameless. "You took their names away."
For a long minute, Pax looked like a man with nowhere to flee; then he tried the only escape he had left—denial with fury. "You will not take my life!"
"Take his book," Gustaf said. "Take his satchel. We will answer in law as the court allows."
That was when Pax snapped.
He lunged—not with a blade but with his hands, reaching for a garland and ripping it down to strike at the nearest witness. Guards seized him. The crowd surged. Hands grabbed, ropes pulled, and the man who had sold children became small in the center of the world he had thought to command.
"Shame!" someone shouted. "Shame on him!"
"Parade him," someone else said. "Make the market know his face."
They dragged him through the stalls, because public memory lives on a route. Pax screamed as his ledger was tied to his chest. It was crude, humiliating work, but justice can be crude.
They marched him to the old bell tower where the city’s petty punishments were held. The mayor—one of Gustaf’s allies—read out the charges: the buying and selling of children, poisoning minds, causing death by training killers. He spoke of the ledger, of receipts, of names, and the crowd hung on every line.
Pax’s expression ran through those stages again—first the bluster, then the slow, awful realization that people knew his measure. He first denied, then accused others, then shrieked when the women who had lost sons called his name out, loud and clear.
"Look!" shouted a townsman who had recognized a mark on Pax's sleeve. "That mark—his buyer was an officer in the north quarter. He sold to men of rank!"
The crowd became a living thing. Pax staggered under a shower of curses. One elderly woman spat upon him, calling him bastard of God. Children pelted him with rotten fruit. Someone produced a mirror and forced him to look at himself. The mirror showed a man pale and raw, ledger tied to his breast like a second skin.
He began to weep then, huge unhappy tears that seemed foreign in a man who had once sold souls like shoes. "I did not know—" he begged. "I did not know what they would... I only—"
"You knew," Gustaf replied. "You wrote the names. You numbered them. You marked them for delivery. Understand that the ledger is proof."
The onlookers watched. Some hated him. Some simply registered the slow unpeeling of a man who had tried to shape himself as a shark and had run ashore.
"Make him apologize," the mayor said.
Pax crumpled and confessed, or at least he delivered something that passed for confession. "I took boys and girls," he sobbed. "I sold them for coin. I—"
He tried to claim ignorance, to make his crimes sound like business. It did not work. A mother stepped forward and struck him with her free hand. The crack of palm against cheek echoed like a verdict.
"Tell them who else," Gustaf demanded. "Names. Names of buyers."
Pax clutched at his ledger as if it were a child; he had used it his way his whole life. Under pressure, he wrote someone’s name. Under more pressure, he listed others. The crowd recorded, the town crier wrote, and the ledger, once his tool, became a map of scandal.
Finally, the mayor pronounced a sentence fitting the market’s taste: public shaming followed by exile from the city. They would not kill him. The city wanted an example living enough to be hated and instruct a year of gossip.
As they bound him and led him away, Pax’s earlier bravado had shrunk to something like bargaining. He begged, he promised bribes—none were accepted. Gustaf left the final words to be spoken by those who had been robbed.
"Let the market remember," said an old woman, with the same calm way she would distribute bread. "When his name is called, let anyone who considered buying a child remember the faces he made disappear."
Pax’s reaction shifted in those last moments from denial to panic to a ragged, pleading surrender. He looked at me, and his eyes asked a thousand rewards for his silence. I said nothing. The crowd answered him.
"Shame," they sang, each word a small stone.
He was not dragged to death. He was dragged to life so the city could watch him shrink. They led him past windows where mothers eased their babies to safer arms. They paraded him past the riverhouses where songs turned hard against his face. He tried to find mercy in the faces of people who had lost and found none.
When he was gone, the square did not return to normal easily. People whispered the names he had confessed. Gustaf closed the ledger and placed it in the governor’s chest. "Make sure these names find courts," he said. "We cannot let them hide within palaces."
Isabel sat with me afterward. "You did well," she said.
"We did what needed doing," I corrected.
"But he looked so small," she added. "It is the work of shame to make tall men small."
"Did he scream?" I asked.
"He screamed like a child," she said. "And the crowd—" She shook her head.
The punishment had been ugly and public, longer than a sentence and cruel enough to satisfy people who wanted to see sin made into a spectacle. I watched Carlos as they led Pax away into exile. He stood silent, hands clenched, eyes unreadable.
"You killed him," a woman whispered as if accusing the quiet air.
"I did what had to be done," Carlos said later in the hush of our room.
"That is not for you to say," I replied.
He looked at me like a boy who had learned to do a thing and could no longer be surprised by the cost. "You think I liked it?"
"No," I said. "But you did it."
He touched my hand, fingers still stained with bandages. "You kept the lamp at the river," he said. "You wrote 'Far-Remind' and let the world know."
"I remembered," I said. "I still remember."
The months that followed were quieter. Pax's men scattered like shadow shells. Many were caught by the ledger’s trail. Some were tried; some fled the provinces. Gustaf used the scandal like a tool and drained the rot out of a corner of the city that had been feeding on stolen children.
We tried to breathe. Isabel sang the sorrow songs a little less often. Gustaf returned to his duties with less swagger. The painted poem—a small scrap on my wall—sat in a place of honor. Sometimes I traced the brushstrokes like a child afraid of forgetting.
"Do you ever want to leave?" Carlos asked once, in a night when the roof was leaking and the city seemed like a thing that would not end.
"Leave where?" I asked.
"Anywhere that is not all this."
"I have been nowhere else," I said. "Where would I go?"
He smiled and gave me the kind of grin that meant something small and dangerous. "We will build something then."
So we did. We took an empty teahouse near the river and called it a simple name: Clear Water Place. We gathered odd apprentices—one who could fry a fish until it tasted like heaven, another who could sew names into a curtain. Clara Flynn was the one who could make a bowl sing; Karter Carver was the quiet man who could carry water all day and never complain. Emmeline Dunn was the one who could beat dough into clouds.
"Do not make it a theater of strange things," Carlos warned, half-joking and half-serious.
"It will be a place where folks breathe," I said.
We built it like a house of second chances. We welcomed those the city had refused: orphans who needed work, old soldiers who needed a bowl of soup, anyone who wanted to earn bread.
Years passed like a soft cloth. We married arrangements—little domestic vows and laughter. Karter married Emmeline under the bright paper lanterns and Carlos stood by, a rare smile softening his jaw. Clara danced in the yard like a thing that had only just learned that joy was allowed.
"What will you write on your lamp this year?" I asked Carlos during the festival that smells of smoke and fried fish.
He looked at the river and shrugged. "Far-Remind," he said quietly. "It is still yours."
"Then why do you look like you intend to leave the world?"
He let the lantern drift. "Because I have owed a thousand debts," he said, with a kind of boyish cruelty relieved into truth. "Because once you see what is done, you cannot help but tally it."
I rested my head against him. For a long time, silence wrapped around us. We had both done things that had cost us sleep and names. We had both done things that had left us with blood beneath our nails. We had both, somehow, made a place for the other to be less alone.
On the last night of the festival we set a special lamp together. I whispered into the paper, "Long rest." He wrote beneath it, "Wind steady." We watched the lamp float among a thousand others like a small, defiant star.
"Do you regret it?" he asked.
"That we started?" I said. "No."
He stared at the light until the lantern's dot became indistinguishable from the others. "We have a painting," he said. "Keep it in the teahouse."
I had learned to keep small things safe: the painting, the porcelain cup that Gustaf had given as an apology, the ledger bound away for the courts. I kept them like a child keeps treasures in a hollow tree—somewhere that the world could not expect.
"Promise me one thing," he said suddenly, in that low voice he used when he practiced being honest.
"What?" I asked.
"Promise me you'll go sing for the dead sometimes. Not only for those you remember, but for those you could not save."
"I promise," I said. I meant it. I kept the promise more than once.
Years later, when I walk past the bell tower, I still sometimes see Pax in the empty spaces where rumor once traveled. I think about how small a man looked when the market turned against him. I think about the ledger in Gustaf’s chest and the names it circled like a net.
Once, by the river, a boy asked me if I knew the names of the stars.
"Some of them," I said, and I told him about the lamp we had set that carried a painting's poem. "There is one," I told him, "that sits a little longer than the rest. People call it 'Far-Remind' now."
He laughed like a child who had heard a beautiful lie and wished it true. "What will you put on the paper of your next lamp?" he asked.
I looked at Carlos then, who had become less cruel with years but still held the same habitual smile.
"Home," I said, and the word tasted like tea and fire. "The painting. And the cup that broke."
Carlos squeezed my hand. "Good," he said. "Say those things aloud. Let them have their names."
I did. I whispered them into the paper and watched the lamp float into the river’s slow mouth. The city hummed its old songs, and Isabel sang across the water, a voice the river kept.
When the lamp's dot disappeared into the mass of other lights, I felt a small ease like a knot finally untied. The painting and the porcelain and the ledger would all remain to remind the living of what they once were. The public punishment had been ugly and necessary; it had been long and cruel in its span. But the thing that surprised me was not the punishment—it was how quickly the city forgot to keep its attention on the living.
Carlos coughed and laughed and then coughed again. "Do you know," he said after a while, "that I think you sing better when you're tired?"
"You are kind," I said. "No. You are getting sentimental from old age."
"Or old battle scars," he answered.
There are a thousand small ways to keep a life clean. Mine was not clean. It had blood in pockets and names I could not wash out. But the painting's poem would remain—the ink that bled at the edge and the memory that came back like a lantern on water. If anyone asked what I had become, I would say, simply:
"I gave the lamp to the river and kept the painting."
The End
— Thank you for reading —