Revenge13 min read
The Dowager, the Mad Prince, and the Kite That Wouldn't Die
ButterPicks16 views
I have a terrible talent for waking up in the plots of other people's tragedies.
"I think your mother was beautiful," he said, blood on his lips and a smile that did not reach his eyes.
I tightened my fingers so hard I left crescent moons in my palm. He wiped at the red and looked at me like a man naming a prize he already owned and decided he wanted to break.
"Shame it's not mine yet," he whispered.
"Not now," I breathed. "Not ever."
His laugh went thin and sharp. "What did you say?"
I swallowed a scream and answered with idiocy. "Nothing—nothing—everything's on sale, two for one, clear-out, good luck, may all your wishes come true—"
His stare sank into me, colder than winter, and I clamped my mouth shut. If transmigration was a lottery, I had drawn the ticket that read: die in chapter three.
I am Lily Vinogradov. I woke up one morning with the weight of a crown and the knowledge that I was supposed to be dead. The old emperor died on my first night. I did not even get to learn the palace rules. The regent, Cristian Martins, called me a "fortunate widow" in the kindest terms; he meant something else.
"Mother, what are you thinking?" Connor Zhao asked once, watching me practice calligraphy. He was easy to look at, the sort of man people called good without realizing it was a rarity.
Parker Freeman called it a test.
He would stand at my desk, idly winding a strand of my hair around his pale fingers, and grin like a girl who'd found a secret. "You think the regent will have us killed if you smile too much?"
I said the stupidest thing. "You sneak in so often, Parker, they're going to have you killed."
He smiled, small and cruel. "Then let me die happy."
I am not a heroine. I am not brave. The book I slipped into had no place for women like me. It liked blood and tidy ends. It liked heroes who died splendid deaths and villains who lived long enough to be hated. I knew the outlines: Parker was the second son, raised in war and frost, returned to court with a grin that had teeth like knives. He was meant to be cruel, a storm in a silk robe. In the printed lines, he would die at the end, with honor bought in ash. Connor Zhao, the eldest, was the sweet pawn who would be made a lesson of. Dyer Stevens, the youngest, would be the slender-headed emperor who slept in sunlight and smiled like a gull. Cristian Martins, the regent, would be the puppeteer with cold hands.
Once, when Parker first arrived at court, the regent and his men watched him like wolves. Parker saw me and said, "Is this my new mother?" His voice was a blade wrapped in velvet.
I should have knelt. I should have been a model widow with pearl in her hair. Instead, I asked the only question that felt human: "Are you hurt?"
He glanced at his own hand with a long scar. He had been carved by battle, and the scar was a map. He said, "Anything you want is mine."
I asked then the stupid question that got lodged in my mouth and would not come out as anything but nonsense. "Did it hurt?"
He looked at me like a curiosity and smiled like someone used to being ignored. "I'll obey," he said. "Your command."
I thought he was mocking. He wasn't. He meant it in a way books never taught me to expect.
A truth about court—it's a place where sleep is a risk and breath can be weaponized. Cristian had ways. He put a poison in my food that showed itself every half month as bleeding from every orifice if no antidote was taken. He told it as a mercy—told everyone it was for my protection—and called himself patient. I kept an empty chest of tricks against him: arrangements of dishes, precautions, and a private fear that I would be re-written out of the story before I could learn the names of the people I should trust.
One night, when the palace was a bowl of silver and breath, a hand knocked on my door and a maid whispered of a plot: "We must move now. The second prince will kill you if he finds you like this." The maid's name was Hazlee Silva, necklace clinking, eyes bright with a fear that was something like greed. She pushed me toward the window, toward a waiting guard. Behind her, a man lay half-naked on my bed. I thought, briefly and absurdly, that the palace must have the worst housekeeping in the world.
"Leave her," Parker said when the door cracked. He had come in like a shadow and now towered, all bone and sudden kindness. "Let her stay."
They tried to call the scene a trap. The maid's fingers were trembling when she lied. They called for my head like it was an ornament.
"Take off her jaw," Parker said, and the room shuddered.
They took her away. I did not see everything. I hid my face and let Parker put his cloak around me like a soft armor. He smelled of smoke and iron, and the warmth of his arms steadied me. He curled me against himself and brushed tears off my face as if it were something fragile and important. "Did I hurt you?" he asked quietly when the danger had passed.
"Only in dreams," I said. "I dreamed of a brother dying."
He let the confession be, and for a time he stayed. He was abrupt and odd with affection, like a wild animal that had been taught to tilt its head for treats. He kissed my clavicle like a benediction and then relented. "You are mine," he said one slow night. "I will have you."
"Are you mine?" I asked, because the book had made me certain of nothing.
"Yes," he said. "You are mine. I will keep you."
The poison marched in its two-week rhythm. One evening at a feast, I learned it moved beyond me. Cristian plotted an exposure: give Parker a glass with tainted wine, set up witnesses, and when Parker's body fell, crown the scene as proof of the madness and the danger of the house he came from. Cristian would use the chaos to tighten his grip.
I tried to stop it. "Don't drink!" I cried as Connor lifted the cup toward Parker, because I had an instinct I did not understand. "Don't—"
My scream came late. The world telescoped. Parker leaned forward, lips parted, and blood flecked his mouth. He pitched like a black flower and hit the table. Connor shouted. Dyer covered his face with a hand while staring with a child's clean horror. Cristian's smile was slow and carved. "We will restrain those who kill," he said, as if the word fit like a glove.
They put Parker in state as if he were gone. "He is dead," one courtier said. "He paid for his appetite."
The next morning, a girl fainted and the rumor began: the second prince died poisoned. I listened to the court gossip like reading a newspaper with trembling hands. I did not mourn at first. I could not. Then a thing happened: the curtains in my chamber were drawn, and someone came in with a bundle of rough cloth. A soldier leaned in and set it on my lap. Parker's handwriting scrawled across a tattered scrap like a promise: a marriage certificate he had had made and kept folded.
"Marry me," he had written in careful strokes, the language of battle and vows mixed. "If I fall, do not let them turn my name into a thing of shame."
I clutched that paper like a life preserver. When I opened my eyes, Parker was there, alive and limping, blood streaking a collar. He had not died. He had been staged dead to unmask Cristian's players. He stood among the people, a living ghost, and Cristan's mask slipped.
"How dare you?" Cristian shouted when the truth came out. "How dare you pretend to die to cause disorder?"
"Pretend?" Parker's voice was a dry crack. "I didn't pretend. You were foolish to think your cups could make me vanish."
The regent laughed without mercy and ordered the guards in a voice that shook the rafters. I realized then how close the book had pinned me to every fate line. We had to respond in ink, not in fear.
We planned a trap. I did the unthinkable: stood on a dais in the main hall, a small knife hidden in my sleeve, the marriage paper tucked against my heart. I held the boy emperor Dyer Stevens in front of me like a shield that no one could touch. "I will not be mocked," I said plainly. "If you accuse my house, prove it. If you lie, you will be shown."
Cristian's men moved like clockwork to seize me. Soldiers stepped forward, but when they saw Parker, alive at their flank, and Connor standing with a quiet blade in his hand, they hesitated. The hall filled with a roar, a tide of people pulling like wind toward a cliff. Rumors, long tucked away, unfurled like flags.
"Show them the letters!" I cried. "Show them the receipts of your bribes! Show them the women you have paid to lie!"
Parker's eyes found mine. He nodded once.
We accused Hazlee Silva in public. We produced witnesses who had been paid to lie. We produced receipts of the regent's gifts. The house of Cristian shook as if struck by a hammer. The crowd leaned in, hungry.
"You're playing with fire, woman," Cristian hissed.
"And you were playing with tongues," I replied.
Then we did the thing the book had never shown clearly enough: we let the crowd be the judge. What the court had not given the people, they took for themselves. The guards who had been Cristian's moved backwards, unwilling to slice at neighbors whose faces they remembered from markets. The accused regent's allies looked at one another and saw that the ship was sinking.
"Have you no shame?" I asked, holding the marriage paper like a talisman.
Cristian's face gave a blink of color. He had thought himself invisibly above the law. Now faces turned away.
"Prove it," he roared. "Prove that I ordered the maid's lies. Produce evidence."
Connor produced the evidence. He had the receipt books, the letters folded in envelopes, and the signatures that matched Cristian's seal. He handed them to the clerk with a steady hand. Dyer, childish and pale, read them aloud, and the words in his voice fell like stones. "Cristian Martins to Hazlee Silva," he said, "five gold pieces to stir a scandal. Fifty to bribe the kitchen staff."
The room shuddered. Cristian swallowed. For the first time someone saw him small.
"Traitors!" Cristian sputtered. "All of you—"
"And what will you do now?" Parker asked coldly, stepping up until he was a single breath from the man who had thought himself above rule. "Will you deny that you put poison in the cup? Will you pretend the cups were your test? Will you make a funeral of me now to buy your honor?"
Cristian's mask cracked. A vein at his temple jumped. "You fiend," he stammered. Then he tried the ancient trick of rage: "You deluded—"
"You plotted against the crown," I said. "You plotted against the boy on that throne. You poisoned women who could not fight back. You will not be lord of the court any longer."
A noise rose from the galleries — a child's cry, the rustle of silk, the metallic clack of a hundred shoes. People wanted spectacle, and now the spectacle they had been offered was a man collapsing under the weight of his own lies.
We bound Hazlee Silva and brought her forward. Her face was white with fear. "I didn't know it would go this far," she squealed. "They told me—"
"Who told you?" Connor demanded.
She pointed at Cristian like a traitor pointing to a king. "He paid me. He promised me safety."
Cristian's mouth opened and closed. At first he denied, loudly and furiously. "Lies! Lies! A conspiracy—"
Then they read aloud the receipts and the hairs on his collar stood up one by one. His voice dropped from fury into the brittle ranges of someone realizing their stage has ended.
We did not let the court perform the invented mercy. We staged a punishment that was public and the opposite of easy. The palace had a practice for traitors: shaming with forced confession followed by exile or execution. But the five-hundred-word requirement of my own mind insisted the villain pay in visibility, in the slow fall, not only a single blow.
They forced Cristian to stand on the dais. He wore his pride like a cloak. We unrolled the evidence, one by one, each paper a gill of air sucked out of him. "You bought maids' loyalties," Connor said. "You sent poison. You wrote cheques to men to silence witnesses."
Faces in the crowd hardened. "Kill him!" someone cried. Another voice said, "Strip him of rank. Let him taste what it is to be nobody."
Cristian's eyes darted. "You cannot—" He tried to invoke law, to invoke custom. "I served the throne."
"You served yourself," I said.
He lunged backward, tried to call for soldiers, but guards who had once obeyed him now lowered their weapons. Parker stepped forward and took Cristian's hand. There was no tenderness in it; it was the grip of a man who had cold things to do and no time left for sentiment. "On your knees," Parker said.
Cristian laughed, a short, jagged sound. "You would have me humiliate myself before the people—"
"Humiliation is the thing you gave others," Parker answered. "Kneel."
He did not kneel gracefully. His boots clapped against marble like thunder. For a breath the regent's face looked like old paper: brittle, ready to crumble. Then his features shifted through the classic stages: denial, rage, bargaining, collapse.
"This is a witch hunt," he croaked at first. "You can't do this. You are a woman—" He spat the last word.
Someone from the crowd threw their head back and laughed. "A woman saved the prince you wanted dead!" a woman said. The sound of laughter rippled and became a tide.
Cristian tried to plead. He called the witnesses liars. He accused Parker of staging. "You will all rot in hell for this," he hissed in a voice that had been taught to command not beg.
"Look at your supporters," Parker said quietly. "Look at your men." He pointed at the captains. "Do they still bow?"
A captain, once loyal, spit on the floor. "No," he said. "We have faces too."
The crowd, once a gray backdrop, moved into the circle. They had come to feast on court gossip; they found instead the unmaking of a man who had believed himself a sun. Their phones—no, the palace scribes—scratched notes. A woman pressed a hand to her mouth and wept. A child in the crowd said nothing but swallowed hard as if seeing an adult fall from a height.
"You will be stripped of rank," I said. "You will be dragged from the palace gate at dawn and made to stand in the market. Your name will be chanted as a warning."
Cristian's expression crumpled like paper. "No," he said. "You cannot—"
"Beg," Parker ordered.
He began to beg like a prisoner in a dream. "I—please," he mouthed. "I can explain. I served. I—" The words shrank into nothingness. A ripple of applause met him, but not the kind he'd wanted. People spat, they jeered, they took pictures of his fallen state. Some wept for the dignity lost to him. The cameras—scribes' sharp quills—made this scene immortal.
When he finally agreed to a public confession, they made him read his own letters aloud. His voice broke on the signatures that had once given him authority. He named the people he had bought, he named the cups he had corrupted. Each confession was a nail.
Then, the worst part for him and the only mercy for others, they humiliated his allies differently: some were banished, some made to stand in the market to be mocked, some stripped of titles. Hazlee Silva, the maid, had been the instrument. She was forced to wash the market stones with her own hands until the blood-red mud turned gray. She begged for forgiveness, eyes swollen with a brand-new fear.
Cristian fell into a spiral: pride, fury, denial, then a raw collapse and finally pleading. "I can give you more," he said, voice ragged. "Take land. Money. Don't—don't make me public."
People took out skirts and handkerchiefs and pointed. "Look at him," they said. "He bought lives. He bought lies."
Parker watched him and did not move to strike. He had stripped Cristian in a way steel could not—public visibility in place of power. The man had been made small and ordinary. He finally, broken, asked for mercy as if it were something wrong to ask.
They gave him legal punishment after that. The law took him: exile to a northern posting with no arm, no influence, a small home and nothing else. The crowd's satisfaction was not violent blood—but an erasure: a man used to having his name carved into history was told to sign nothing. He would live in a room that had no balcony, in a town where his title meant nothing. The court felt cleansed.
Hazlee's punishment had to be different. She was the tool, not the architect, and cruelty is gnawed at by pity. We held a public confession for her under the gate. The market folk crowded round. I watched as she recounted every lie, every bribe, every whisper that had stained my name. Her voice trembled, then steadied, and then broke. "I was told I'd be safe," she sobbed. "I took the gold. I'm sorry."
"Do you regret?" I asked, and my voice surprised me by being steady.
She nodded. "Yes."
"Then act like it," I said. "Stand here and work in the market for a year. Feed the children whose fields you ruined. Pay back as you can."
People in the crowd murmured. Some wanted worse. Some wanted nothing. I let the crowd's judgment be the medicine. She scrubbed stones, and her fingers blistered. At night she prayed. At dawn she scrubbed again. Her punishment was slow labor and the shame that would not let her forget. It was different from Cristian's fall, but it was public. It was enough to make a woman who had chosen money over truth know the taste of hunger when she had money. That is a punishment, too.
Cristian's final scene before exile was a collapse. He begged, then tried to bargain, then broke into incoherent pleas. People recorded his humiliation, laughed, pointed. "You had power once," someone said. "And you chose to poison." The man lost everything but his breath. That was the cruelest punishment of all: to be left with the awareness that his life had been hollow.
After the fall, life folded around me like soft cloth. People saw me differently. "She brought him down," they said. "The dowager." They called Parker mad and called him brave. They called Connor quiet and steady. They called Dyer the boy who had seen numbers and read names aloud. We were small things in a great machine, but for one evening, the machine spat out mercy.
When the dust settled, Parker and I had a small, strange moment. He had taken to sitting by my bedside like a guard and a lover stitched into one. "Why did you pretend?" I asked once, when he had been cured of the worst of his fever.
"Because I wanted to," he said simply. "Because you keep looking like you might break. Because you stood in the hall like you were daring them all. Because you are ridiculous and stubborn and you have the best laugh."
"You are a monster," I said tenderly.
"And you are my monster's favor," he answered and brushed my knuckles with his lips. "Marry me properly."
So I did. We signed the paper he had kept folded in his sleeve—his terrible, careful handwriting that promised a brittle sort of safety. "I will be yours," I said. "I promise to be the kind of woman who keeps a man alive."
He kissed me then, in a hurry, a thing that tasted like iron and wood smoke. "Then we'll leave," he whispered. "To the south. To the house I bought with crooked coin and honest hands."
We left the palace later, in a season that was still raw with scandal. People talked as we passed. Dyer Stevens watched us go with a face that was too young for the weight on it. Connor Zhao came to the gate and shook my hand like an old friend and then, in a small private moment, he said, "Keep him alive."
"I promise," I said.
At the end, in the backyard of a quiet house by river reeds, I kept the kite Connor had cut down from a tree the first day. It was a stupid thing, a child's toy. The paper was creased; the string was frayed. But our life had learned how to keep fragile things. Parker would sometimes stand on the small hill and fly the kite in defiance of whatever map the world had laid out for him. He would hum with it, dark eyes on the sky.
"Do you think they'll forget?" I asked once, tucking a sleeve into his.
"Let them," he said. Then he frowned and added, more quietly, "But let us not be forgotten badly."
We were not saints. We had done the thing the book wanted us to do: we turned the eyes of the court away from the death throes of power and toward the simple, stubborn work of living. I kept Parker's marriage paper folded in my sleeve, edges smudged, and sometimes at night I would pull it out, run my thumb over his handwriting, and think of the day the regent lost his throne and his name.
"You kept it," he would say.
"Yes," I would answer.
He would smile then, and the smile would be something like mercy. "Good," he'd say. "Because when the world forgets, I want the paper to remember."
The kite still hangs from the beams of our small hall, a laugh of color against the gray. When the wind rises, Parker holds my hand and we watch it pull against the sky, as defiant as a life two wounded people refuse to give up.
The End
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