Revenge11 min read
The Cake, the Mask, and the Last Story
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I remember the first time Emiliano climbed the palace wall to peek at me. He laughed when he found me drunk in the courtyard, cheeks flushed, hair loose, a winepot in my hand. "You make a terrible bride," he said, and I wanted to tell him then that I would marry anyone who let me leave the palace alive.
"You are stubborn," I told him once, smiling because stubbornness had kept me alive longer than pity ever did.
He looked at me like a man seeing a map of someone he didn't need to understand. "Leighton," he said, and that single syllable sounded like an accusation. "Do you really mean to do everything you say?"
"I mean most of it," I answered. "Enough to make the pieces fall the way I need."
From the start, our marriage was a business with bad poetry: I, the princess who insisted on a name that carried weight; he, the general who wore duty like armor. We were not lovers. We were two people who understood that roles are sometimes stronger than hearts.
"Why marry her?" someone asked one evening when the court whispered like wind through chime. "She begged for it."
"She wanted it," Emiliano's mother said in a voice that tried not to tremble. "We accepted the crown's order."
I tasted that acceptance and found it sour. I had wanted to be loved, once, before politics taught me arithmetic of lives. I had wanted something called warmth. Instead I married a man who looked at me as if I were a riddle.
"You look at me like I'm a riddle because I keep answering the wrong way," I told him the first week we shared a house.
He pushed me away then, and I laughed—loud and bright. "You are a coward," I said. "You are afraid of what I might do with the truth."
"I am not afraid of truth," he said. "I am afraid of what truth will cost."
When Catalina first appeared at the gate, carrying the kind of soft smile that made mothers swoon and generals kneel, my pulse tripped. "Three-sister," I said, mocking tenderness. "What a surprise."
She fell into tears and Emiliano's face tightened like a drawn bow. "Leighton, your lady is unwell. Let her be."
"Unwell? Or untruthful?" I had the cruel felicity of being blunt. "You have been away. Your recollection grows thin."
I should have known then that the only thing more dangerous than jealousy was the comfort of secret things. I should have known that Emiliano would tilt like a scale and let private things outweigh the public oath.
The accusation came later in the night. "Leighton," Emiliano whispered in my cell, eyes raw. "Your cakes. Her miscarriage. The saffron."
"I?" I asked. "You would have me poison my sister? Do you think I am a child who kills for sport?"
He laughed then, a sound like iron grinding. "You killed for power."
"She plotted," I said. "She tried to bind me, to bend the court with a smile. I merely made sure she could never be a mother in the eyes of this city."
They called me monstrous in phrases that sounded like music when I had planned the notes. They brought the tortures, the burning irons, the questions that left me hollowed. Ivy—my maid, who had wiped my face when the fever came, who had carried my secret and my bread—was dragged before the interrogators. I begged for her, begged until my throat bled. I watched while she was made to wear the guilt that was not hers, because I had hidden the truth behind other doors.
"Confess!" the captain shouted. "Who put saffron in the pastry?"
I spat a laugh that tasted of iron. "Ask the one who buys the spices," I said. "Ask Petra."
They did ask—but not then. They punished the wrong one; the wrong one bled and died in a small cell with hands I had once warmed.
"Why?" Ivy whispered between her teeth when they led her away. "Why would you do this?"
I could not answer because the web I had woven was mine alone, and the truth would unravel me with it.
When the rumors of rebellion spread—when the throne rattled and my uncle's name went from whispered to cursed—I knew the stage would change. "We are leaving," I told Ivy. "Pack the potash and the wine. Pack anything that tastes like home."
We crawled out a dog-hole I had once dug for a childish escape. We slipped beneath the reeds and the city breath. A boot caught me, though, and hands lifted me by the collar.
"Leighton Clarke," Emiliano said, near enough to smell of smoke and battle. "You were always clever."
"You think it takes more than cleverness to survive?" I said. "It takes a stomach."
He left me in a dungeon, true to his duty. He let me be beaten until the bones remembered shame. They boiled questions like tea and drank my answers when they were wrung out. For days I saw only the barrel of a torch and the hand that held it.
Then came the turning point. When the midwife's story ripped open the stitched-together lies, the truth crawled up from the floorboards. They found Petra's purchases recorded in a ledger. Petra Gibson—the woman whose daughter had been a silk-tongued whisper behind the emperor's ear—sat pale-faced as a noon moon when the pages were read aloud.
"It was she who bought the saffron!" a clerk cried in court. "It was she who sent the woman to plant it!"
"Stop!" Catalina yelled, fingers trembling. "You lie! You set me up—"
"You assigned Ivy to carry the blame while you smiled at my husband," I said. "You took my childhood, and then you wanted my marriage as an instrument."
"She is the princess," Petra begged, and the word felt like a plea to the rafters.
"No," I said, and for the first time my voice held no more of the brittle queen and more of a woman who had starved for justice. "You are the traitor."
They dragged Petra into the public square that evening. The sun hung low; banners snapped in wind. The market thrummed; even bread sellers stopped their hands. I had not planned this to be my triumph, and yet here I was, watching the stage made of stone and witnesses.
"Petra Gibson!" the herald declared. "You are accused of conspiracy—of supplying a drug intended to end a life—of using a child to bind treason."
She flinched as if the words were blows. "This is slander," she cried. "My daughter—Catalina—was only a child."
"Did you not buy saffron that month?" someone read from the ledger. "Did you not pay the midwife you had once bribed? Did you not whisper to a woman to plant a poison?"
Petra's face threaded through all colors of shame and disbelief. "I—no—" she began, then tried to gather the sharpness of denial into a plea.
A crowd gathered. They ringed the square like an audience hungry for the reveal of truth. "Shame!" someone muttered. "Traitor!" someone else hissed.
Catalina went pale as paper. She stepped forward, hands clasped so hard her knuckles showed white. "You think I wanted this?" she cried. "I loved him! I wanted only—"
"You wanted the title and the child," I cut in. "You wanted the story that would make men fold like paper into your hands. You set a trap to make me fall."
"That's a lie!" Catalina screamed. "She made herself the villain!"
The crowd closed in like the sea. Fingers pointed. Some spat. A child climbed a cart and jeered. "Monstrous woman!" he called. "She killed for power!"
"You put the saffron in the cake!" I said, speaking now to the woman who had smiled at me as if our bond meant nothing. "You set Ivy up and let my servant die."
A murmur rose. Then a louder rise. "Petra did it!" an older woman cried. "We saw her with the apothecary!"
"We saw her give money to the midwife!" called another. "We will not forget her deals!"
Petra's face began to crumble. She rocked on her heels. "I—" she tried, then stopped. The ledger lay open, and the clerk read ledger entries one by one: dates, amounts, names of spices, a signature in a shaking hand.
Even Emiliano stood at the edge of the crowd, face hardened into a mask that betrayed nothing. He had not wanted to watch, yet his gaze found mine and did not look away.
"How could you?" he asked me then, but his voice was for himself more than for me. "How did we all fall so far?"
Petra's change came like a storm. At first she was proud and then frightened, then frantic, then pleading. Her mouth shaped denials that no longer had words. "I did it for my daughter," she said at last. "I did it to secure my blood."
A woman in the back spit and said, "You sold your soul for your child's place at court. You sold other people's children, too."
Petra's knees went soft. She fell to them in the dust. The crowd leaned in; the clerks leaned in. Someone produced the old midwife who had been paid—she stood shaking, the lines around her mouth deep as riverbeds.
"She paid me," the midwife said, voice like an old bell. "She promised me coin and place. I—"
"Enough!" I shouted, and the square gasped because a princess had used a voice that did not ask. I stepped from the line of witnesses and into the square's center, dust rising with each step.
"I did what was needed," I said. "I killed my enemy's future because she once destroyed mine. I was cruel. I was not innocent."
A hush fell like snow. They had come to see the traitor fall and instead found the one who confessed.
Petra's face lit with hope—"See? She confesses! She admits it!"—then comprehension crashed her smile. The crowd's emotion turned like a weather vane—some softened, seeing me own my crimes; most hardened, feeling betrayed by a princess who had confessed not to save a life but to justify what she had done.
People began to shout different things now. "Punish them both!" cried someone. "Let justice be blind!"
"They made a scapegoat," another said. "They killed an innocent maid."
There was a long moment when no one knew what to do, and then the magistrate, a man who had watched courts with a ruler's patience, spoke.
"Petra Gibson," he said, "for conspiring to deliver a substance intended to harm, for bribery of a midwife, for making instruments of suffering, the court strips you of rank and property. You will be led through the market to the river and publicly shorn of your hair. Your name will be read and your debts published. As for your daughter Catalina Alves, the court will decide her fate."
Petra's reaction moved through stages. First surprise—eyes wide, blank as a child's—that such consequence would fall. Then wounded denial—"No, no, I served the house!" Then fury: she spat at the magistrate and threatened curses. The crowd hissed. Then a collapse into pleading.
"Forgive me," she cried, "forgive me, I did for my child!"
"A parent's fear is no excuse for buying cruelty," someone answered coldly. "You sold lives. You will stand and be seen."
They led her through the market. I walked behind them because cowardice makes even the guilty spectator a part of the ritual. Vendors flung down their wares; a woman slammed shut a shop and spat. Children pointed. Men who had once bowed at Petra's door spat at her skirts. A dozen people took out tablets and began to record the event, faces lit by a fierce hunger to keep names in memory.
At the river, they forced Petra to kneel on the low stones. Her hair was cut and thrown into the water. "Let the river wash away your titles," someone said. She screamed when the scissors gleamed and fell like a bird with broken wings. Her final pleas turned thin.
"Leighton!" Catalina screamed then, voice ragged and raw. "You take away my life!"
"You took away others," I answered, and my voice had no softness left. "You took them with the same hands you use to cradle your husband."
Catalina's face bulged with fresh shame as men around her whispered of how she had smiled when Ivy was accused, how she had rallied sympathy and left others bleeding. Yet punishment meted out to the daughter could not pierce the way public disgrace now seeped into her—no title, no trust, only the long, slow unmasking of deeds.
When Petra's hair floated in the current, the crowd's reaction split. Some clapped like people freed from a cage. Some hissed like snakes deprived of prey. A few stood utterly silent, as if they had watched a tragedy and were not sure which side they lived on.
Emiliano stood at the river, hands clenched. He watched Petra's cry die in the water, and his face was a map of defeat. He did not look at me.
The punishments were public. They were messy. They did not fix what had been broken. People left with gossip for week-long grain, some pitying Petra and some hating her more. Catalina retreated to the house she had thought secure; people whispered when she walked the streets. Ivy's name went into the record as one wronged; her graveside was as small and bitter as a court eunuch's coin.
The square emptied, leaving behind a city that felt older by a century. I walked away from the river with the knowledge that punishment does not heal, even when it is long and noisy. It only exposes the rot. It lets those who stood in the sun squint and see.
I left the city soon after. Emiliano and Catalina stayed. Petra sat shorn and alone. Ivy was gone.
When at last I found town and clay and an oven, I opened a little shop. People came for pastry and stayed for stories. Tomas Mercier—the simple storyteller, the fool who had once sat under a curtain beside me and told the end of tales with the face of a child—came and sat at my counter as if no catastrophe had the right to reach him. "What happened to the end you promised?" a man asked one noon.
"It's different," Tomas said, chewing a sugared bun. "But endings change."
"Why did you leave?" someone asked me one rainy evening. "Why did a princess become a baker?"
"Because I wanted to make something that stayed sweet," I answered. "Because I wanted to own the shape of my hands."
People lined up for cake and story. I told the ending Tomas had once promised me—how love won out, how small fools had two children and a crooked house on a hill. They listened and wanted the comfort of that finish.
Emiliano seemed to remember me sometimes in the market; once a grizzled soldier looked up from a pastry and said, "There is a woman in these parts—grey-eyed, with a silver mask sometimes. She makes the best cake."
"Leighton?" Tomas asked me in the kitchen, and he put his hand on my shoulder like a child steering a boat.
"I tell the story to close the wound," I said. "I do not expect forgiveness."
At night I would take out the silver mask Emiliano had crafted for me—the one he once used to call me by name—and I would think of Petra's hair floating in the river, of Ivy's small hands, of the laugh of a fool who had once called himself mine. The oven's warmth softened my wrath. The stories softened my nights.
I had ruined a life; I had been ruined in return. The square's song of shame had been sung, but it did not make me whole. It only let the city see what we had been hiding behind powdered smiles and court music.
"Do you regret it?" Tomas asked once, polishing a tray.
"I regret the price," I said. "Regret the faces. Regret losing Ivy's laugh because my plan needed an edge."
He nodded, as if he had known the answer from the start.
"Then why?" he asked.
"Because I wanted a life that was mine," I answered, and the truth fell like sugar into the cup. "I wanted to taste something that wasn't court-sweet. I wanted the chance to choose which wrongs I would carry."
The little shop filled with customers and stories. My cakes became a kind of confession. People came to listen and then to leave, lighter for a while.
Sometimes, when the moon was a silver coin, I would take the mask down from the nail and press it to my face. It fit differently now—no longer a thing to wear in court, but a reminder of what I had been and of what I had chosen to become.
"Tell me the end again," a boy begged one night. "The one with the fool and the two children."
I laughed. "All right," I said. "Sit. This one ends with a biscuit on a sill and a man who learned how to hold a child."
When the candle burned low and the last bowl was licked clean, I would lock the door and walk into the dark. Sometimes, far away, I imagined a river carrying something away. Sometimes I imagined a market cheering. Sometimes I imagined a small grave whose name no one remembered.
I miss Ivy. I miss the fool who told me stories. I sometimes miss being a princess because it gave me a reason to be cruel that I could blame on honor.
"Do you think they are punished enough?" Tomas asked once, leaning on the kitchen door.
"Punished enough for what other people could see, maybe," I said. "Not for what they felt, not for the nights they will carry like stones. Public shame is a very thin blade."
He hummed and went to fetch more butter. I went to my window and watched the road unspool into distance. The city was behind me, with its squares and rivers, its market songs and its small, human cruelties.
I had my cakes, my tales, and the slow, stubborn work of living.
The End
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