Revenge16 min read
The Empress and the False Saint
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They said she had fallen out of the sky like a stray comet, that she cried like a child and laughed like a guest at a feast. They called her a saint. They called me a witch.
"I am Estelle," I told myself in the mirror. "I am the one who keeps the ledger of the palace and the lives of its people."
"Estelle," Jessalyn whispered from behind the curtains, "you've been at the accounts all night. Lie down."
"I cannot," I answered. "If I sleep, the rains will come and the granaries will be empty." I touched my belly with a hand that had grown rounder this winter. The child inside me moved like a small fire.
"Then let Finch stand watch," Jessalyn said. "He will not let anyone bring poisoned food."
"I thanked Finch," I said. "But I don't think Finch will ever forgive me for letting this woman call me 'evil' in public."
"Jenna has already told them," Francesca said when she swept into the sleeping room, hair pinned in quick knots, eyes as blunt as an arrow. "She said you are a supporting role in a story she read, that she is the heroine and you—"
"—am the villain," I finished for her.
Francesca laughed a dry, soft sound. "She told the guards she came from another age. From this thing she called a 'book'. She said the emperor is hers to win."
"You told her to kneel," Jessalyn reminded me.
"I had no choice," I said. "She mocked the court in my hall. She talked in ways that upset the ritual. I could not tolerate her insolence."
"She is still only a guest," Francesca said, "a woman with luck and tears. Why would the heavens grant her our emperor's heart?"
"You would ask why an emperor can love a new voice better than the one he has listened to for twelve years?" I said. "Ask the wind. Ask the people."
"Estelle—"
"Call me Empress when the court asks," I interrupted. "Call me Estelle when you steal me a cup of tea. I need both tonight."
We had been queens of duties for years. My father's line had defended the throne. My brother Salvador Larsson stood in council halls with a face that hardened men. My life had been a careful building of layers: a marriage at the right time, motherhood when needed, petitions pressed into the emperor's hand when drought hit the provinces. We did not play with hearts as if they were toys. We protected a nation.
"You called her a 'guest' just now," Jessalyn murmured.
"I did," I said. "But she has made herself a storm."
She had arrived at the prayer ceremony two years back—during the rare star alignment the astrologers whispered about—and from the moment she stood in the open court the clouds obeyed her. Rain fell for a month. They called her saint. The emperor's praise gilded her, and men forgot that awe could be purchased with attention.
"When your son was born—" I began.
"He was cradled in your arms like a future of bright things," Anton had said, and I had believed him. "We will rule together," he had promised, once, with the perfect gravity of twenty-something princes who think the sun rises for the two who stand in its path.
But promises are like paper lanterns; they burn bright and then fall.
"Why would he look at her like that?" I asked one night when Anton slipped past the curtains, as he sometimes did when business was thin and boredom long.
"He says comfort comes from new stories," Francesca said once, staring down at the miniature porcelain cup in her lap. "He says her tears are fresher."
"Because she is new," Jessalyn said. "Everything she says has the shine of the unfamiliar."
I rose to meet him in the court one night, a ledger still under my arm. I asked him, quietly, "Anton, why did you take her to the southern tour? Why did you let the people call her saint in my place?"
He did not raise his voice. He had always been soft at taking offense, and softer still at giving it.
"I wanted them soothed, Estelle," he said. "They needed a miracle on that day. She comforts them."
"She did not comfort them with donations," I said. "I did the work. Your coffers knew my hand. Your letter to the merchants acknowledged my family. And she—"
"She sings," Anton said. "She prays. She is a child of faith."
"Faith does not feed farmers," I said.
"You say that like farmers are less than prayer," he answered. "Perhaps faith and farming can both be true."
"They are both true when someone cares."
He put his hand on my shoulder and asked, soft as wind, "Am I not father to our children? Am I not your husband? Will you let me carry them both?"
"Ask me that when your eyes are mine," I told him.
And yet he would not look at me then, not truly. He looked at Jenna the way one looks at a bright painting while the painter waits for your praise.
When rumors rose that Jenna had said strange things—about being plucked from a "book" and about people being only puppet players in someone else's tale—people laughed. Then some believed. The public was hungry for wonder and for a whole tale. They took to chanting, "Saint! Saint!" when the caravan passed through market streets. I watched the people turn their faces, watched Anton's smile widen for another woman, and I felt the old bones of my family grind in the dark.
"She said you were the villain," Francesca told me, laying a cool palm against my brow. "She said it without shame."
"And the people believed her," I said. "They thought she had a destiny that made our years of service small."
We tightened our defenses. Finch Taylor stationed his men at the gates; he always stood like a wall, his face a granite cliff against any wind.
"You will not have me faint in the public square," I told Finch when he knelt once, a general moving with the slow surrender of a friend.
"Never," he said simply. "If you fall, I will gather the ground."
When harvest rains failed in the south, I stripped the palace spending to the bone. I moved coin from my personal stores. I persuaded my brother Salvador Larsson to press the ministers to back quick works of irrigation. We drew maps and plans and asked the empire's engineers to go south at once.
"You never asked for praise," Anton said one afternoon when I walked through the council halls with scrolls rolled under my arm.
"I do not need your praise," I said. "I need you to act."
"You always were practical," he answered. "Sometimes I think you are more ruler than wife."
"Then help me rule," I said.
He smiled in a way that made me remember our wedding night, the bright face that had promised to stand beside me. But smiles become habit. He smiled now with someone else in mind.
Jenna was brazen. She walked the halls with a kind of astonished innocence, saying to anyone who would listen that she had read the beginning of our story in an unread book and that it told her she must win the emperor.
"Isn't that odd?" she asked the steward in the corridor, a bowl of fruit balanced in her hands. "They are characters, you see. This world is a book. So I must make myself the heroine."
"A heroine needs skill," Francesca told her. "Tears are not all."
"I can learn," Jenna said.
"You will not learn how to be gentle with people," I thought. "You will only learn the gestures that please the emperor."
The first poison attempt came as a slow, silly thing—the kind of small mischief meant to frighten more than kill. Men in the kitchens grew sick for a night; a servant's tongue went numb. I felt fear like a stone in my throat and ordered Finch to guard every meal. Finch's men moved through the kitchen like owls.
"Who would poison the royal meals?" Anton demanded one evening, voice tight.
"A fool," Francesca said, but the fools were those bright with favor.
I suspected Jenna. Her eyes went wide with tears when the accusations were made. She folded her hands in a practice of innocence and drew gazes with her sob.
"She speaks of being from the future," Jessalyn told me, "and of a book where she is the heroine. She says the plot needs her to charm the emperor."
"Plot?" Anton asked, frowning.
"A tale," I said. "She claims there is a script for hearts."
He laughed once, a brittle sound. "Estelle, what harm can a woman do who has only words?"
That joke seemed to be the first of many I would never forgive.
When a second attempt came—this one more dangerous—we discovered it before breakfast. The pot of yam and red bean cake sat on the table with a ribbon. I had prepared it myself earlier that week in the palace kitchen, as a test of heart and food. I liked to make sweets when I was tired because small things kept me real.
"You always do this," Jessalyn said. "You bring food to people to see how they are."
"It makes them less afraid," I said. "Food is a truth."
Someone else had slipped a bitter herb into the batter that would make the throat close slowly. Finch found the herb when he tasted the cake. He nearly spat. He set the guards on higher watch.
Jenna pretended to be outraged. "Who would do such a thing to cause a royal family harm?" she cried. "I would die for our emperor."
"Die for him," I thought, "and take his life along with it."
She came to my rooms the night she accused me. Her voice was a strange thread of childlike and cunning. "You know," she said, sitting on the low stool opposite my bed, "I am not from here. I read maybe the starting pages. I know you are the bad one."
"You claim I am a character," I said softly. "What makes you think the author meant you to be beloved?"
"Because I win," she said. "That's how the books go."
"If books can choose us," I said, "then why would I accept being the villain in my own life?"
She laughed like someone half convinced.
This is where I drew a plan not cruel in its shape but clear in its lines. I would not let her scheme poison my child, my work, my house. I would not play the martyr and be stripped of authority by the emperor's indulgence of a favored woman. I would use the court's rules to test her.
One evening, I presented myself in the hall where all could see. "Your Majesty," I said aloud as Emperor Anton entered, with his usual retinue, "I ask that you come and judge this matter as ruler."
"He should not be the judge," Francesca worried, but I had already stood and called for Finch and for the guards.
Jenna knelt on the cold floor when I commanded it. No ritual, no grand speaking—just a woman bent in the public light.
"Why?" she whispered.
"You will explain yourself," I said.
She lifted her head and spoke to the court in a voice made of tears and simplicity. "I said I came from another place. I said some things about a story I read. I did not mean to harm the empress."
"You told us you were a heroine," Anton said slowly. "You told the people that your fate and the emperor's fate were one. That you were chosen."
"I was frightened," Jenna answered. "The book said I had to make him love me. I thought—"
"You thought to win a crown with a book?" I asked. "You thought to tear homes apart because your story wanted an ending?"
"I never meant to hurt anyone," she said. "I wanted only to be safe."
"Safe," I murmured. "You think a woman is made safe by the arm of an emperor? That is not safety. Safety is food in the barns, not a promise to hold you under a canopy."
A murmur rose from the crowd. Some people shifted. Some whispered that I was too hard. Some said I had no right to mock a saint.
Anton watched me with a strange face—part anger, part confusion, part something that had once been love.
"I will not let you harm my child, my people, or my house in order to win a role in a book," I said. "You have done damage by saying our lives are not real. You have led the people to follow you away from work and into chants. You have gotten men killed with your claims."
At that, the court's pressure changed. People wanted the truth. They wanted a living ruler that gave bread, not a thrill of marvel.
"Show us the proof," Anton said, finally. "If the empress accuses, we will see."
We organized a trial that was more reveal than court. I wanted public truth. My brother Salvador Larsson and the ministers would stand. Finch's men would testify about the herb. Cordelia, who had been gifted by Jenna with gold chests and trinkets, would speak on how Jenna tried to buy loyalty.
"It was a gift," Jenna whispered, "a gift of thanks."
"It was a bribe," Cordelia snapped. "You sent gold to men and begged their favor. You gave them money to say you were saintly. Saints do not buy worship."
The first punishment was simple by law: demotion in rank. For a woman of her position it meant moving from favored consort to a lesser title, away from the emperor's inner chambers. I made the choice to spare those who had been misled, to punish the instigating hands.
But the worst part had yet to come.
We uncovered the letters. Cordelia had hidden one away and handed it to me. It was a scrap—a note from a lord named Salvador Larsson—no, I will not pretend the name on the paper matters. The note laid bare the whisper that Jenna had cultivated among certain guards, the way she had promised praise and even kin to those who would help her. She had coaxed a soldier to place a bitter herb in my cake.
"You taught him the loop of affection?" Anton asked quietly, looking at the soldier. "You gave him his orders not by sword but by dream?"
"I thought she would be mine," the soldier said. "She cried. She promised life would be different."
"Promises do not make laws," I said.
When the soldier broke down and confessed, the court changed its tone. The emperor turned to the public galleries.
"Let the people decide," he said.
They did. A crowd was called into the great court, and men and women who had cheered the saint were asked to listen as evidence was laid out. The pulse of the city thrummed under the palace's pillars. Market women who had once lined the road chanting now stood sudden and uncertain. The sweet smell of the now-famous red bean cakes lingered in the air like irony.
Cordelia, Francesca, Jessalyn, and Finch stood near me. My son West Galli, small and solemn, watched from the entrance, his bright eyes wide.
"You hung a crown on a woman who said she was from another era," the stone of a minister's voice said. "You asked us to move from labor to prayer. Which of these saved the crops?"
"No one!" a farmer cried. "The work saved us."
Jenna sat in the center of the court, hands bound with a thin silk cord that did not hurt but that stopped her gestures. Her face was raw with fear.
"Did you instruct the soldier?" Anton asked.
She said, "I only wanted him to help the emperor see me. I gave him gifts to show I loved Anton. I told him to wait for a moment to frighten the empress so she would be humble. I never meant to hurt a child."
A woman in the crowd—an old woman who fed the palace with her egg pies—stepped forward.
"You sent us to chant her name instead of handing us grain," the old woman spat. "You called us unworthy to help our own homes. You stole our hands with your stories."
The crowd bristled. The mood was turning to anger. They wanted punishment but also spectacle—an exposed false saint would be the country's lesson.
"Let them see her act," I said.
"Act?" Anton repeated.
"Yes," I said. "I want them to watch the moment she thought she could make love a plot device and the moment she realized she cannot order life like a script."
They led Jenna to the balcony where the emperor had once waved to crowds. The sun slid down, burning the top of the palace with a soft light. People packed the square below like a living rug. Mothers held their children high. Men who had been beguiled by chanting now stood silent.
I could tell Jenna was frightened in a way her tears hadn't prepared her for.
"People," I called down. "You believed some things because they sounded like bread. But bread you cannot eat unless it is baked. Tonight we will look at truth."
The soldier who had admitted to tampering stood in the court and told everything. The words were blunt, like someone cutting rope. He named names. He named the silver given to him, the late-night meetings, the promises offered in whispers. Watching him speak, the crowd's breath hitching like a wave breaking, I saw pity for the man who had been used.
"She made me think she was a queen," he said. "She gave me sweets and told me the empress was the bad one. She said this was the way for a girl like me to rise. I took the herb and I put it in the cake."
"Why did you not refuse?" someone shouted.
"Because I was foolish," he said. "Because I wanted favor."
Jenna's lips trembled. Her eyes did not look at me but at the open faces of the crowd. Her voice, when it came, was small.
"I told him to frighten," she repeated. "I did not want a child harmed."
"You played with a child's life," I said, and my voice was not loud but it had the weight of a well-set law. "You turned people from work to worship. You made men steal for you."
The crowd's emotion turned hotter. They wanted not only to see punishment but to see the false saint unmasked.
"Let her speak to each of us," Anton said. "Let her stand where we can hear the truth."
The soldiers brought in men whose gratitude Jenna had bought. They had given their testimonies earlier, but the crowd needed to see the collapse.
One by one they stepped forward, and Jenna's eyes met the faces of those she had kissed with promises.
"Why did you say you were a saint?" a woman asked.
"To be believed," Jenna said. "To be safe."
"Safe from what?"
"Alone," she whispered.
The square below began to hiss and murmur. Some of those who loved her before—women who had followed her tears—looked away. Children clutched at their mothers. One man began to boo. Another wept.
"Jenna," Anton said, "do you understand the harm done?"
She opened her mouth and made a sound like a small animal caught in a fence. "I did not—"
"You will be punished by the law," he said. "You will be stripped of your rank and forced to live austere. Your gifts will be taken. You will be removed from the emperor's closeness."
"But—" Her voice broke. "Anton—"
He stood there like a man split by sorrow and duty. His hands curled into fists. I saw the old boy in him who once promised me a shared fate, and the man who would still rather have a story than a ruler's hard work.
"Let her be banished from the palace," I said. "Let her go to the home of a minor governor. She will not be killed. She will live, but without the chance to turn lives into tales."
"Is that enough?" someone in the crowd asked.
"No," I said.
The mood inside me had shifted. I wanted a public lesson that could not be forgotten. I wanted Jenna to look out and see all she had undone. I wanted her to feel the turn of the people's faces and the cold of being stripped of power.
"Then show them her true price," I said.
Anton hesitated. "What do you mean?"
"Make her stand before the people who once worshipped her and accept apology," I said. "Let her tell them what she did and let them respond." My hands were steady. "Let her see the sorrow she caused. Let some forgiveness be asked and either given or refused."
They bound Jenna in a simple robe, no jewels. Finch walked her to the balcony. The crowds quieted as if the air were a held breath. She stood under the sun like a small figure on a stage.
"Speak," I said.
She raised her head and said slowly: "To those I hurt, I am sorry. I wanted to be loved. I thought the only way was to be written into a story."
"Was it love you wanted or an ending?" a woman asked from the crowd.
"Both," Jenna answered. "I wanted a place. I wanted being seen."
"Then ask them to allow you back without plans," I said. "Ask, and they will decide."
She looked at the crowd. She opened her mouth and the words spilled.
"Please forgive me," she pleaded. "I will leave the palace if you want me gone. I will give up my title. I will not ask for your prayers. I will live quietly."
The response was a chorus of voices: some resolute, some harsh. An old man who had once counted coins for a grain buyer spat in the dust. "A saint who eats coin is false," he said.
Another woman, who had once hung out a banner for Jenna in the market, stepped forward with tears in her eyes. "Forgive me," she said, "for I loved the feeling of hope she gave. I was foolish."
When it came to judgment, we let the law speak. Jenna was stripped of her rank. She was given no belongings save a bundle of clothes. She was sent to a distant governor's house with the soldier who had done the act—he would also be punished for his violence and bribery, but he would live.
Publicly, the punishment satisfied many and unsettled others. They had watched the saint fall like a bright leaf. They had seen the tapestry of the court loosen. Some of them cheered; others muttered about cruelty.
Jenna's face folded and unfolded through these moments like a paper lantern. She went from fear, to shame, to defiance, to a thin kind of pleading. She tried to deny the worst and then begged, then screamed, then had no voice.
"How can you live with yourself?" a woman shouted as they led Jenna away.
"I will live with the truth," I said.
It was not enough to end the matter. Public punishment had peeled back layers, but the wounds of trust remained. The people needed to feel that justice was not capricious. So I ordered that work be shown side-by-side with words: a list of seedings, a tally of funds for flood works, a ledger of coin spent on relief. I had the ministers announce the plan to plant dikes and canals and hired laborers in public. I wanted to turn attention back to bread.
When Jenna was carried away on a simple litter, I saw the crowd's faces: some hardened, some still wondering. Anton watched in silence. His chin trembled once and then steadied, as if the wind had left him.
"Why did you stop me from sentencing her to death?" he asked me later in the private hall.
"You would have been the executioner of a story," I said. "I will not be the judge who kills the fragile. I will be the ruler who builds the bridge."
"You wanted them to see the harm," Anton said.
"I wanted them to see a ruler can choose mercy and justice both," I said.
"If she was a heroine in a book, did she change your story?" he asked, almost a whisper.
"She revealed weaknesses in it," I said. "But she did not write the end."
The public punishment—longer than a single proclamation, longer than a day—remained in the minds of the people. They retold how the saint had wept and how the empress had stood like a ledger, unblinking. They said the empress had been harsh; some called her wise. The markets returned their focus to seeds and not miracles. The canals were dug.
This judgment, vivid and public, had satisfied the rule of law in a way that wrote a sharper line between wonder and duty.
Afterward, when Anton stayed near me at the palace, we argued and spoke and tried to remember ourselves. He brought me oranges and his apologies, but our island had shifted. He tried to make up in action what he had given away in glance. He tried to guard our home in a way that had been mine for years.
"Stay," he begged once at the embroidery table. "Let us not estrange."
"Then be present," I answered. "Not for appearances, but for duty."
He tried. He faltered. He loved with the old ease and the new distractions. He loved so that often his heart had two rooms.
We repaired what we could. We built canals. We fed the south. My son, West Galli, grew into a careful boy who listened to the accounts. Finch Taylor was given a command in the field to sweep banditry aside. Salvador Larsson smiled with the calm of a man who had planted trees whose shade would be younger men’s rest. Cordelia Snyder and Francesca Cortez and Jessalyn Harris stayed by me. They knotted their strength to mine.
Jenna never returned to the palace. In time rumors came: that she had burned the small house where she had been housed, or that she had died in shame, or that she had left for a far shore. The rumors are the way stories like to finish themselves. I would not know the truth until another winter when a servant told me a man had seen her walking far from the city, thin and looking as if the wind had taken most of her color.
What mattered was that the people now saw canals and facts. They saw the lists of grain and of men sent to work. They saw the empress who had bled into the treasury her pride to pay for boats and dams. They watched the books and believed them as they once believed the saint.
Time, the slow weather of years, fixed some things. Anton became less foolishly bright and more a rule-bent man. He tried to be better. In time he grew old. He came to my court less in love and more in respect, like a student who had finally learned his lesson.
When the day came that he lay dying, his hands were thin and he asked for me. I went.
"I am sorry," he said, the emperor's voice now a thin reed. "I should have looked at you more."
"Look now," I said. "I have made the world you once promised."
He looked, and the look was a small mercy. He took my hand like a boy who had stolen peaches and been forgiven.
After his passing, I kept the palace and the plans. West Galli grew into power with a steady hand. Finch Taylor returned from his campaigns with a silvered hairline and a quiet smile. Salvador Larsson lived to see the canals fill and the fields green.
We never spoke of her as the one who could have changed everything into a story. We spoke of the cakes and the yam and red bean sweets I had once made by the kitchen lamp, the small things that kept me human. I told Jessalyn to keep the recipes. I told Cordelia to record the ledgers.
"A book may think it's written," I told Jessalyn one evening when the palace sat a little softer, "but we are very good at writing the next lines ourselves."
A child ran by, sticky fingers from cake, laughing. I watched him and felt a small happiness that was not owed to any man, any miracle, any saint. It was mine.
The End
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