Revenge13 min read
The Glass Box and the Promise I Carved
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I remember the color of the night when the palace told me that the Empress had burned. It was the kind of cold that made breath into thin glass; the hall candles were low and watery. When I slipped into the audience chamber, I found my brother, Emperor Daxton Braun, bent over piles of red ink and seals like a man trying to hold together a map whose rivers were already wrong.
"She burned herself?" I asked, because the rumor in my chest wanted to be named.
"She burned," he said without looking up. "Beverly is gone."
Christina Collins, the Empress's maid, knelt and wept on the polished floor. Her hair was singed at the edges; the smell of smoke clung to her like a confession.
"Long Princess," she said, and her voice broke. "She sent me away that night. I—I tried to go in, I could not—"
"Bring her," Daxton snapped. "Bring anyone who knows what was said."
The palace moved like a great wound. Guards hustled. Eunuchs fumbled. I went to the cold prison to find Christina; she grabbed the hem of my robe and clung like a child to a lantern.
"Ludmila visited her," she told me. "The Empress asked no one else to watch her. They spoke long into the night."
"Did she say anything? Did she leave instruction?" My voice was small, and it sounded like a frightened bird's.
Christina pressed her forehead to my sleeve. "She said… nothing to me. Only to Ludmila. Please, your grace—find the truth."
I wished then that truth were a single coin I could hand to my brother. Daxton looked older in the candlelight, as if the palace had etched worry into the lines at his mouth. He spoke to me, and for the first time I saw the man behind the crown.
"Jadyn," he said, voice thin, "if this is the world we live in—if cruelty is the price of thrones—tell me you will stand with me. Tell me we will hold to each other's hands."
"I will," I said, and I meant it. I always meant it when I spoke to him. "I am yours."
Later, in a room smelling faintly of tea and old ink, Christina told me what she had seen of Ludmila Hayes the day she visited the Empress. Ludmila was the kind of woman who wore restraint like a jewel; she bowed politely, touched no things, asked for no favors, and yet Christina said she had spoken with the Empress alone for hours. Between the lines of Christina's muttered sentences, a pattern began to show: the Empress was not a woman who would die on a whim. She was tired—wise and bitter and bitterly principled. She had told Ludmila that she would not be used as a pawn; she had said she would not submit to being anyone's token.
When I pressed Ludmila in her chambers, she received me as if I were a guest, offering tea with hands that did not tremble.
"I came to see her," she said simply when I asked the question plain. "She was cold with the court. She said she could not bear being a symbol or a shield for men who traded her like a chess piece. She asked me to promise—"
"To promise what?" I asked.
"To bury her name with dignity," Ludmila said softly. "She feared they'd make her a cautionary tale. I promised to keep her honor."
There are promises that comfort and promises that bind like chains. Ludmila's promise smelled of incense and courage. I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe in the goodness of any woman who would step forward in a palace of pretence. But palace shadows have teeth. That night, the truth began to unwrap like a sickly flower.
My father, Torsten Zimmerman, the man who raised the sword hand that should have guarded us, was a dark thing in his private rooms. He had a face that smiled over the table and a hand that broke things when he was displeased. I had watched that hand close on my mother's throat when I was a child. The wound never left me.
One evening, when my world felt unreal and thin as paper, Ludmila ran into the hall where my father was entertaining a cluster of courtiers. She slammed a small wooden screen down between them and then tore it back, revealing a crude painting she had kept on her lap.
"You dare keep calling her names," Ludmila said. Her voice carried across the chamber like a bell. "You unmade the thing that wore the state's name."
"Silence," Torsten snapped, and something in his eyes went steel-cold. The courtiers shied. "You overstep, Ludmila. You are a peacock prancing for a prince."
Ludmila's hand reached for a ceramic vase on the shelf. She hurled it like a spear. The vase burst and sprayed jade shards and boiling tea across the carpets. Everyone gasped.
"How dare you!" my father roared. "You will pay for that insolence—"
He advanced. Ludmila did not shriek. She moved like a woman who had rehearsed her courage a thousand times inside her palm. She unsheathed a hair-pin—one of the tiny, sharp metal ornaments women keep tucked away for their hair—and with a steady arm she struck his throat.
For a while there was confusion, as if the hall could not believe what it had seen. Men shouted. A servant fainted. Torsten staggered, hand to his neck, eyes like blown glass.
"This—this is treason!" the first guard cried, and the room erupted.
But the moment was public. There were dozens of witnesses: advisors, ladies in waiting, eunuchs, the chef who'd brought the tea. The scene would no longer live in whispered corners.
I will describe what followed because this is the part the histories compress into a sanitation. They call it the "sudden death of the king" but that smooths over the hot, jagged truth.
Huge, hulking men pushed forward while Ludmila stood there, face white and wet with her own tears—the kind that do not count for softness. She had chosen her moment in front of everyone because she knew the palace loved nothing so much as spectacle. She wanted the world to watch the end of a tyrant openly, so it could not be mislaid.
Torsten's voice came out in choked sounds. He had lived as if the world belonged to him; now he clawed at the air as if the air was not giving back. He bent and then fell, hand leaving a smear of blood on the rug. For a heartbeat, the great pillar behind him looked like a judges' gavel.
"Seize her!" a minister shouted.
I moved before I could think. "Stop!" I cried. "Everyone stop."
They did not stop. None of them ever do until the bell is rung in common. But my voice bent around those gathered and, perhaps because I was the Emperor's sister, or perhaps because everyone loves a live thing when a possibility of scandal threatens the throne—my brother's face went rigid and the crowd blinked.
Daxton came forward, carrying the weight of a crown and a tired mercy in his shoulders. He knelt by his father's body and looked not at Torsten's ruined face but at Ludmila. The room hushed, as if the frescoes on the walls themselves were leaning in to listen.
"Ludmila," he said in a voice that was not quite steady, "what have you done?"
She looked at him, and the rawness in her eyes said she had expected no different. "He made her a thing," she said. "He cracked a mother's ribs to order obedience. He thought he could preserve himself with jewels. He said we were like toys, and he would toss the broken away. I could not let him make a martyr of her and call it a consequence of her own desire."
"You have slain the king," one minister whispered, as if naming it made it less monstrous.
"Yes," Ludmila said, and then she added, "and he has slain a thousand he did not know were living."
I saw the room change: faces shifted from shock to a dangerous alignment. Some clutched necks; others drew breath like preparing arrows.
Then the punishment spectacle truly began.
First, Daxton stood. He spoke as a man aligning law to mercy. "This court will not be the setting of private vendettas," he said. "Torsten Zimmerman once wore the state's mantle; he also wore a beast behind closed doors. For his crimes, he shall be remembered. But I will not have this dynasty stained with secret brutality. For that reason, Ludmila will be held for counsel."
There was a murmur—relief among the families who feared the king and hated him in secret, the taste of justice. There was also outrage—those who had eaten at Torsten's table and called him master now bristled at the humiliation.
Ludmila made no attempt to flee. She allowed herself to be bounded at the wrists. The courtiers formed a ring. Someone struck a gong to summon scribes. A page brought wax and a seal. It was important for the palace to stage his discrediting: they painted a public ledger of his abuses. Stall after stall of testimony unfolded. Christina cried on the stand; she recounted how the Empress had been deprived of guards the night she burned, how certain bottles of oil had been found strewn near the Cold Palace steps. A retired soldier spoke of Torsten's spoken orders to twist soldiers' pay, to redirect grain; a craftsman spoke about how Torsten would laugh as he ordered the trimming of midwives' wages.
"Why are you all looking at her?" a noblewoman hissed at Ludmila, who remained calm.
"Because it is easier to punish a woman than a man," Ludmila answered, and her words set off a fresh ripple of shame and admiration.
The trial, such as it was, was public. No real court could call itself fair when the corpse lay warm in the chamber and the new emperor's hand still trembled; yet the people in that hall wanted to see the beast that had ruled them humiliated. The scribes wrote fast as Daxton read from the pages the list of Torsten's abuses. Each new charge made the nobles' faces blanch a degree more.
"How do you plead?" the chief minister asked Ludmila when at last they turned to her as an accused.
"Would you have preferred I learned patience?" she said. "Would you have preferred she lie and be trodden out? I do not deny killing him."
The court erupted.
"This is murder," hissed one of Torsten's old allies.
"No," Daxton said, and his voice gathered thunder. "It is a reckoning."
He made then a show of something I had never really seen him do: he invited all to look into the facts, to demand transparency. So they did. Evidence, witness, confession. Torsten's misdeeds were strung across the hall like lanterns in a parade—each witness's voice a light.
The true punishment was not merely Ludmila's own fate. The public unmasking served as collective catharsis. The King's retinue deserted his memory. His tapestries were hauled down and used to stoke kitchen fires; his portraits were cut from their frames and burned like broken talismans. The courtiers who once bowed before him now spat when they spoke his name. Children learned the story in the streets, and in the alehouses the balladmakers sang it as a caution.
Ludmila herself endured a public shaming—questions that probed her virtue and motives—but for every insult thrown at her, a thousand hands lifted to tell the truth of a household tormented by one man's appetite. She did not weep for herself; she only wept for those who had no voice. At one point, a woman in the third gallery began to clap until the clapping spread like wildfire. Others joined to condemn Torsten in the open air, to humiliate the image of a man who had used rule as an excuse to break what he loved.
When the day closed, Torsten was hauled away not to be buried with honors but to be stripped of title in a ceremony that all could watch. He tried to speak. His voice was thin.
"Daxton," he croaked, "I—"
"Silence," people cried. Then a woman, who had once heaped praise into his bowl, spat in his face. He staggered as if the act were wind.
In the end, the punishment was both savage and public: the throne he had desecrated was defended by a new narrative and his name was cleaved from glory. Those who had enabled him were named and shamed. The palace was cleansed by the light of many eyes.
For Ludmila, the price remained high. She paid an ambiguous cost: she had murdered a man who had murdered many others in private, and she had forced my brother's hand to make the wrong right, publicly. The people called her both villain and hero; some nights the guards still muttered in the corridors. But for me, standing and watching it all unfold, the lesson was searing: public punishment can be both a cure and a cost. The man who had taught me cruelty died, and yet in his death I felt no clear triumph—only the echo of a palace forced to look at itself.
After the turmoil, Daxton sat by the Empress's small, blackened shrine and traced the lines of his grief. "Jadyn," he murmured, "we can fix this by holding to each other. We can rebuild."
"I will stand with you," I said, though I knew our hands could not mend everything.
There were other cruelties that the palace kept as secret as a scar. The Empress, Annalise Bender, had not only been crushed by Torsten's hand; she had been trapped by the weight of duty. I learned that she had, in private, made a decision that startled me: to die rather than be used and paraded as a symbol to cover a greater betrayal. When I pressed Ludmila about what exactly had been said in the Cold Palace the day Annalise died, Ludmila looked at me like a woman who had been woken in winter and had to move fast.
"She said the state used her body for its politics," Ludmila told me. "She said she would not be weaponized." She bowed her head, and for once the steel in her voice softened. "She asked me to promise to keep her dignity. She wanted to end in a way that made their hypocrisy visible."
The palace's corruption had cracks in it that everything could fall through. Weeks later, the frontier pressure from the northern realm—North Wu—grew. They had long been a threat; now hunger and cunning pushed them to the bargaining table.
One morning a delegation arrived with terms that made my skin go thin: gold, silk, livestock—and a demand that I, Jadyn Lang, take the northern throne as a wife to the aged North Wu monarch. He was old, cruel, and rapacious. He was described in blunt words: a man with few teeth left, a roar for a laugh, and hands used to holding other men's women in contempt.
Daxton slammed the treaty down. "Never. I will not sell my sister to a hound."
"You would not have me die a thousand deaths while your people freeze?" I said, and for once my voice was the cool blade. "I will go."
He tried to bargain, to tear out the tender seams of the offer. Finally, I knelt and did the thing one does not do easily before a brother who holds the world: I performed the court's ritual, and I said, "Order my marriage to North Wu."
I remember the last night in the palace differently from how anyone else described it. I walked the stone causeway to the family graveyard—small stones, a few offerings, the Empress's charred shawl folded and laid like a ribbon. I left some of the jewels Ludmila had amassed for me by the gravestones, because I could not take all that glitter into Siberian snow. At Ludmila's grave I left hairpins and small glass boxes. Inside one I tucked the small double-edged thing I had found in the vaults—two tiny beetles alive in a sealed glass, an old superstition from a distant court: if one eats of the host, the other will die; if one dies, the signal is instant and unmistakable. I fed them my blood, so that the pact had me at its center.
"Brother," I told Daxton the next day, "if I die, this insect dies. Let it be the first message you receive."
He looked at the glass box with an odd mixture of horror and reverence. "You will not die," he said, but his voice was a promise, not a certainty.
In the cold of North Wu, the old willow of my homeland shrank in my memory until it was a line on a map. The sky there was thin and there was snow that never learned to melt. The emperor—an old, spiteful man—thought he could humiliate me to prove he had not been conquered. He denied me wood for the brazier and made me sit with no rugs; he thought to break me by turning the winter into something personal.
On my first night as someone else's trophy, he tried to make a mockery of desire. He looked at me like a miser at a coin and put his hand where he had no right. I had sworn to be an instrument of peace, not a sacrifice of dignity; still, there are limits to what you can survive alone. The man who had raised me taught me how the body surrenders before the will follows.
That night I shaped my own signal. I let him hold me as he fancied. When he relaxed—with the stupid arrogance of age—I struck. The hairpin was sharp enough for a desperate moment. It sank. He gurgled and staggered, clutching at his throat. The palace alarm sounded like something wailing.
They came to me with swords and decrees. I stepped back and opened my mouth to say that I had done what I must for my country, and a woman I loved—Callie Curtis—threw herself between me and the guards. Metal took her. She did not scream for herself; she cried for me.
"Go," she said through blood. "Go with the plan."
Ruben Vasquez, the man who once fought by Daxton's side and who had infiltrated the northern forces under another name, appeared in the courtyard like a ghost with an iron heart. He cut through the confusion, put a blade to the old emperor's throat, and took him down. He gave me a nod that said, without words, that the old man would be ended.
They did terrible things to the old emperor's honor in the name of retribution. I was certain wars were near; I had given my body and blood so my brother could be ready. When Daxton returned with the army, the northern ruler was no more.
There were funerals, proclamations, and a strange quiet at the heart of power. My name was carved into dynastic pages: "Jadyn Lang, Princess who gave herself for the state." The record was clean. It could not record the sharpness of the glass in my hand or Callie's warm weight on my chest as she bled away.
Later, when the war ended and the maps were redrawn, I heard, through courtiers and dispatches, that my brother had stood over the northern carcass and taken his justice. Ruben, to his credit, was made a border lord in compensation. He bore his scars with a smile as brittle as a winter branch.
There were nights when I woke and marveled at the box of insects in the palace—my spy that would cry out if the North moved like a cornered animal. Sometimes I thought I had given too much. Sometimes I thought I had given the only thing I could and that the rest would matter because of it.
And sometimes, in the quiet between the echoes, a small sound would come from the glass box—the tiny frantic steps of a living thing—and I would know that a signal had been sent, a promise kept. The sound was soft; it resembled the tick of a watch, like two insects applauding a single heartbeat.
I cannot say that all was healed. A throne cleansed itself with blood and declaration, but it did not wash away the small betrayals, the slow loneliness of the women who loved and then became memory. Names on stones did not comfort us; they kept the shape of our losses.
Once, in my last hours before leaving the northern court, a boy who swept the outer courtyards saw me and asked a blunt question.
"Princess," he said, "did you ever love someone for yourself and not for the realm?"
I looked at him and smiled. "Yes," I whispered, and I thought of Ludmila's hand on mine, of Callie's steady courage, and of Daxton's tired mercy. "I loved them more than the phrase 'for the realm'."
He blinked. "Then why did you go?"
I touched the glass box in my pocket, feeling the smoothness and the life inside it.
"Because sometimes the body pays the debt before the mind understands how to forgive," I said. "Because a promise, once made, is a small bridge for thousands to cross."
When the chronicles later wrote the formal lines—short and tidy as a finished seam—they missed the tremor in my voice when I knelt at my mother's small blackened grave. They missed the tear I left on Ludmila's hairpin where she had stabbed the tyrant. They missed Callie's name as I whispered it into the snow that first winter.
History will say the marriage was a bargain and the war ended. It will not tell you the sound of the beetles in the glass box when the signal goes out. It will not tell you the way a sister's hand can be a country, or the way a brother's sword can be a lullaby.
I learned the truth of what my mother once said: that the world is given to those who know how to bargain with it. I traded my comfort and my winter for a peace that allowed my brother to breathe, and that, in some way, felt like the only honest thing I could do.
In the last line I will write here—so the end is not the same as anyone else's—I set the glass box on the ledge of my final chamber and listened. The insect inside made a tiny, impatient sound, like a clock striking soft. I pressed my thumb to the lid until I felt the chill of its beating, then I closed my eyes and let the promise travel north.
The End
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