Revenge16 min read
The Jade Toad and the Magpie's Trick
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I had a habit of buying things nobody else wanted and seeing what stories they coughed up.
"I said, leave the stool by the door," I told Cash. "And put the scales on the table. Carefully."
Cash Bolton—my valet, my shadow, the only man who saw me when I dawdled—looked at me with those steady eyes of his and bowed. "Yes, sir. The scales are ready."
We were at the old village on the eastern edge of the district, where the road still remembered wheels and the plum trees still blushed at spring. I had a name in town for nosing around attics: Greyson Santoro. People thought I haunted auctions like a ghost. They were half right.
"Is the old woman in?" I called as the door opened a crack.
A woman with hair white as cotton set and eyes clouded with age peered out. She blinked as if waking from a distant dream. "You are from the Moon Studio?" she asked.
"That I am." I bowed, which amused her.
She led me into a plain room and took something from a blue cloth bundle. Inside, a small sandalwood box. She handed me a key on a red string and asked me to open it.
I did. Inside the box, wrapped in a green silk, sat a sculpted toad, carved of pale, soft jade. Two eyes that caught light. A mouth small and sealed. One of its front legs cradled its belly as if it were keeping a small secret.
The old woman's voice trembled when she touched it. "My grandfather gave this as part of my wedding things. He said it was Han work. We had fine houses then. I have nothing left but this."
I turned the jade over. The bottom bore a line of work too precise to be a child's craft. A faint groove. A mark that made the small hair at the back of my neck rise.
"Is something the matter?" she asked.
"Nothing for you to fear." I smiled and made an offer that must have sounded absurd enough to be generous. "Eighty silver taels for the toad."
She hesitated over the little box and then relented. "Take it. Keep it safe."
On the way back, Cash said, "Master, I think it's worth about sixty."
"Did you ever hear the Liu Sea Toad tale?" I asked him.
He frowned. "The woodcutter who mends a three-legged toad and ends up married to a beauty who spits gold? Yes."
"Exactly," I said. "The toad fits a plate I bought in Suzhou—wait till I see them together."
I placed the toad on the plate when we returned and waited. The jade felt cool in my fingers. "If this toad is a set," I told the empty room, "we do not sell a thing piece by piece."
The toad opened its mouth and, like a small moon being born, it gave me a golden bead that smelled faintly of spices. I turned it in my palm. It was a tight little thing, perfect and warm as a coin just struck.
"Cash," I said. "Lock this in the silver box and do not let the maid clean the shelves for a week."
A few days later a red invitation came from Henry Carpenter—my aunt by marriage had her daughter's wedding in the neighboring prefecture. The wife might appreciate a jewel on her daughter's cap. I told Cash to clear a place for the carriage. "We go," I said.
The house on the wedding day smelled like lacquer and incense. They carried in the bride under a red canopy, her face hidden with a silk veil like a secret. Henry's family had pressings to do honor: they wanted it done right. The groom—a pale young man with a stiff jaw and slow smile—bowed. "We have brought the bride in marriage," the chanter said.
In the hall, a man with an oily smile and a voice like wet cloth stood as guest-master. His eyes were not respectful. He said the odd, shameless lines at the bridal bed, chanting the old "sacrifice songs" meant for fun but used as instruments. Laughter bubbled around.
"What a shame to humiliate her," I said under my breath.
Hanna Hunter, the bride—her hands had trembled, but she had a beauty like a painting come alive. When the guest-master tossed fruits onto the bed and sang his lewd couplets, she lifted her head; for one terrible heartbeat I read something unforgiving in her eyes.
"Beast," she whispered.
Before anyone could move, she snatched a small shears from the sleeve of her robe and drove it forward with both hands. The man dropped as if struck by lightning. Blood came out in a spray across her cheeks. There was silence like the world had vanished a chord from itself.
"She killed him!" someone cried.
"Help! Murder!" the servants wailed and the courtyard filled with noise.
I stood frozen for a moment. "Hanna," I said softly. "Hanna, listen to me."
She sank to the floor, breathing as if she had run a great distance. Her eyes were bright and awful with grief. "He had me seized," she said when she could speak. "He took me. I woke and could not move. He did things—terrible things—until I thought I would die."
Henry stood white-faced. "Your wife, my daughter? She would not—"
"She killed him," the constable said. "She will be taken."
"Wait," I said. "Let me tell you what I saw last night."
Hanna's mother, Valerie Buchanan, clutched at me. "What?" she asked.
"Last night she wrote to me. Or rather, I found a neighbor report. There were songs outside her window—'spread the cloth' songs the spirits sing." I told them what I had heard of ghosts that lock the living into following them to the cold river.
Henry frowned. "Nonsense. Ghosts? You would have my house give up the law over ghosts?"
"The law is what it is," I said. "But if this is a spirit doing the killing, you will waste all efforts if you press a charge only at face value. Let us have them called: the monastery people who know about ghosts."
After talk, they consented to send for a Daoist from the temple the next day. "We will trust your judgment, nephew," Henry said. "If this saves her skin I shall be forever grateful."
"I am no saint," I told him. "But I am tired of innocent things dying for other people's sins."
We fetched Gideon Grant—the man with the slow eyes and easier hand who could read smoke. "Gideon," I said, "this is a matter of a spirit with a long grievance."
He cocked his head. "Show me the shoe she wore that night, the thing she slept in. Spirits anchor to small things."
A shoe, red and wet with an ugly brown stain, met the smoke test. "The smoke points east," Gideon said. "We must follow it."
"Then I go," I said. "I will go with the men to the place the smoke points."
We found the body in a shallow grave east of the house. A woman rose up like a wreath of cold wind. "My name is Marilyn George," the ghost said. Her face was the ghost of a girl you would have loved for her laugh. "They took me. I was ill, my husband would not spend for doctors, and they left me to die."
"Who took you?" Gideon asked.
"Xun—Grayson Murray," she said. "He used to pretend to care. He left me in the chest. He kept me like a thing."
"Grayson Murray." I had dealt with that name in rumor: a man who kept secrets in the pockets of his coat. He had the cash and the arrogance that goes with unearned power.
Gideon offered her a talisman. "Go speak to the magistrate," he said. "Go into one of the guard's bodies. Tell the truth."
She did. The next day the magistrate's office saw a spectacle no one expected: a public confession given by a trembling guard whose voice came through like a woman's wind. They dug where the spirit pointed and found bones and a coffin, and the funeral ringed the yard.
"Bring him," the magistrate said. "Bring Grayson."
They brought him. He entered the hall as if the place were a theatre and he a star. He walked upright and slow, hands folded as if praying. His face was flush and full of cocky air.
"You," cried the old father-of-the-victim, "you—"
"I?" Grayson gave a little smile. "I do not know what the fuss is about."
The officers laid out the proof: the bones, witnesses, the girl's belonging found in his warehouse. The crowd pressed forward. "Is this true?" someone asked point-blank.
Grayson laughed. "You always expect us to be monsters. I took a woman to my house. She grew ill. I cannot bear the faint-hearted. If she died, it was not my intention."
"You are a liar," Marilyn's old father said. He pointed at Grayson, who showed a careful disbelief.
"You were seen," a weeping neighbor said. "With the lanterns and rope. You have no shame."
Grayson's face changed. The arrogance drained away like paint in rain. "This is a conspiracy," he said. "A tale by bitter people. I own warehouses and houses—are you to ruin my name?"
"For one life?" the magistrate asked, sharp. "You are accused of murder. Do you deny it now? Are we to take you as one who would hide lawlessness behind wealth?"
"I deny it!" Grayson snapped. "I deny it and I will have you answer for this slander."
The magistrate set people with questions. Under pressure, Grayson's voice fluttered. "I did not mean for her to die. I took her away because she was pretty and would not listen. Perhaps I took her to teach her a lesson. But murder? Who would send a man to hang for that?"
A little boy in the crowd began to cry and say, "My auntma always said pigs like him would be turned to mud." The crowd's mood turned like weather.
"Confess," the magistrate said. "Confess, and we may consider mercy."
Grayson's face went white. "Confess? I... I do not do what I did with malice—"
"Your words will not stitch a body back together," said Henry, sharply. "You took a girl's breath from her."
A scribal clerk began to read testimony and each line tightened the noose. The townspeople leaned in. A woman spat. A neighbor who had once courted Grayson pushed forward and slapped him across the face. "You vile man!" she cried.
He swung his head. Shock turned to anger. "You have no right!"
"I have the right," she said. "You took my cousin's life and pretended to be a gentleman."
"Is this sure?" Grayson asked, suddenly pallid. "Are you claiming I dragged her into a trunk? That I—"
"Yes," the magistrate answered. "A trunk. The court found fragments of cloth in your warehouse consistent with the trunk you keep."
Grayson's hand trembled. He had always thought his money would make things soft; this was unfamiliar. People who had once smiled at his carriage turned to point.
"Look!" someone cried. "His ledger is open. He paid no physician money."
"Paid no physician!" Henry repeated. He stared at Grayson. "Is that your defense? That you are a miser with a pretty mouth?"
"I—" Grayson stammered, his voice breaking. He barked a laugh that sounded like a rusty hinge. "Is this all? I will not be made to suffer for a mistake. I never meant—"
"Then why did you leave her in a chest?" the magistrate asked.
Grayson couldn't answer. For the first time that day not a single person looked at him with respect. They looked with the raw hunger of those who had been wronged. His chest heaved. "You cannot—"
"What will you do now?" asked a woman who had lost a sister to a similar man. "Will you buy the doctors you cannot pay for? Will you go on with your ease? Or will you learn how your coin bites?"
Grayson's mask fell. He began to cry out for excuse, then for pardon. "Please," he mouthed, like a man on a stage looking for a door to slip out. "I am sorry. I will give money. I will give land. I will—"
The crowd scoffed. Scribes scratched notes of every failed promise. A boy set his shoe into his path and aimed his spittle at Grayson's boots. Men who had once shared his table stepped away.
The magistrate's sentence was not the only punishment. The market ran its own law.
"Take him out," someone barked. "Let the people see him be made small."
They led Grayson to the market square. There was a platform where merchants sold fabric. The magistrate ordered his ledger and deeds to be displayed and his people ordered to take off his robes. "Strip him of the things that held him up," said a woman. "Show he is no greater than the rest."
They unfastened his belt and his spent gold fell like rain. A dozen hands reached to divide the coins, each taking what matched their hunger. Grayson shrank. A woman spat on his sleeve and called him names. Children who had tugged at his sleeve when he offered them sweets now laughed and threw mud.
"Shame!" someone cried. "Shame on the man who made a woman into a thing."
Grayson tried to call for guards, to summon a lawyer, to buy his way back into dignity. His voice lost all armor. He sank to his knees when a former friend turned and spit in his face. "You have been a monster but for a fine carriage," the man said. "Now we see who you are."
Grayson tried to rise, his face wet, his pride ruined. "I will make amends," he said, voice cracked. "Please—"
"Your gold cannot buy a life back," Marilyn's father said. He stepped close, and the crowd parted for the two of them. "You meant to make her a thing. You made her a nothing. Let that be your punishment."
Grayson, the man who had always believed his holds and doors would hide him, began to shake. He begged. He pleaded. The crowd watched him break. The change was like seeing someone take a long fall and never reach the bottom.
"Beg," they said. "Beg harder."
"A theater is cruel," one man said bitterly, "but he made a woman vanish. Let the theater be the measure of his fear."
He begged as if pleading to a god. The man went from puffed chest to a soundless blend; his words fell into nothing. He kept reaching out, palms wide, for mercy that would not come. He crumpled under the weight of his own shame. The magistrate gave a sentence: the confiscation of his property, public restitution to the grieving family, and removal of certain rights. They named him, and placed a sign on his door—"Here lived a man guilty of neglect and theft of life."
That night the market emptied with whispers. Grayson's name would be a bruise on town lips for a long time.
I watched all of it from the magistrate's steps, and when the crowd dwindled I felt something like exhaustion. "You saw it," I said to Cash. "You saw how small worry makes us. He was a man who thought himself a mountain."
Cash only looked at me. "And the jade toad?" he asked.
"It gave us a coin," I said. "It brought me to this trouble and to this sight."
The bride—Hanna—was cleared when the magistrate saw the ghost's proof. She never smiled the same again. "I had to," she told me once, in a whisper where a moan should have been. "I had to keep them from taking anymore from us."
I gave the hundred taels she offered us for helping to Gideon and his explanation. "You're owed," I said. "And you saved a life."
"Not saved," Gideon said. "Just made a little more sense."
For a time the world settled. Then there was the night on the river when a woman with a box begged passage. We were five men on the boat and a stranger crept near me, speaking too kindly. "Sir, may I ride with you?" she asked.
"Yes," I said.
She sat opposite me and watched the river like a queen. She smiled. In the dark, she opened a small silver box and took something bitter, placed it like a gift in my palm. She moved like ease.
When I woke, I found I had been moved into a low-ceilinged cavernwhere silk and trinket hung. She sat across from me with a smile as if the world were a story in which she had the last line.
"Relax," she purred. "You are mine now."
I sat up sharply. "Who are you?" It felt stupid to sound brave when I was tied to a cushion.
"My name is Anastasia Munoz," she said. "You are a handsome man. I like handsome things." And she touched a box on the table that rattled with an odd noise like the sound when you shake a coin.
"You are a trickster," I said. I had made a plan for fools like her. "You took me because you thought I was soft."
She laughed and rose to kiss me, and I had to move like a man who is used to mischief. A small shadow moved across the slate floor, as if a bird had folded into the light. Clementine Vazquez—small, quick and a thing of bright eyes—landed between us.
"Let him go," she said, hawk quick.
The woman froze. "Who are you?"
"The answer is: you will let him go," Clementine said. Her voice was light but it had teeth. She walked forward and touched the woman's brow. The room smelled like damp leaves.
Anastasia's face changed as if a hand had wiped paint away. "You little thief," she hissed.
"I was sent to see what the woman would do," Clementine said. "She will take what she can. She will be left with less than a story."
Her tone had the authority of someone used to the world of things that hide. She was not human—not exactly. I had suspected she was something else. And when she stepped into the light, she was the loveliest thing I had ever seen—small, fierce, with a face that made men forget their reasons and women look twice.
"You dared steal from a man?" she said.
"I—it's not what you think," Anastasia said.
"Take your jewels and your illusions and leave." Clementine's small hands lifted like the chop of a conductor and the woman stumbled back and then ran.
I had never seen such besting in a person who seemed so fragile. "Who—what—are you?" I asked Clementine when she turned to me.
"Call me Clementine," she said. "You bought a toad. You missed the rest."
"What rest?" I asked.
"There's a plate for it from Suzhou," she said. "The toad is not whole without the plate. Also," she laughed, "you shouldn't accept offers on virtue. It makes the soul pay interest."
I looked at her and felt an odd sort of wariness and warmth. "You mean to tell me you are the one who found the plate?"
"No," she said. "But I know of toys and tricksters." She cocked her head. "You will take me with you."
"We are sworn to faithful service," I said. "My household would collapse if I took a bird or a spirit as a lodger."
"Then let it collapse," she said. "There are worse things than a wreck."
She came with us. She brought light where there should have been none. She taught me the way a thief looks at a knot and a seam. But the truth was, she was not just a thief. When I put both halves together—the plate and the toad—the jade kissed the porcelain and a coin appeared, gleaming like a small sun. Clementine laughed like a child. "See?" she said. "Not everything old is dead."
Business waited. I opened a small shop by the river for things most prized: mirrors, plates, boxes. Gideon came sometimes, and Jett Willis—the man people called the ice-smooth monk because his face never did anything dramatic—stopped by once to laugh over a bad tea. Jett had the strange air of someone who can keep his true feelings folded away like a letter.
Clementine and I were careless in different ways. I, because I liked the way the world unfolded around me. She, because she liked the world to unfold in ways that suited her.
One night a candle seller named Joel Stevens marched into my little shop in the evening and said, "I will not have your wife insulted in my theatre."
I asked him what he meant.
"There is a woman who sings in the market and a man who would slander her because she is not of his class. I will not have a war wake me up."
He brought a blade in his hand by the light. He had a habit of carrying a weapon that said 'I mean it' and not speaking that much. Later we found he was white-haired inside his temples but steady as a rock.
The city had ghosts in lanes and ugly things that dressed up as old women to eat unwary passengers. White Joel called them out that night, and others came to help—small, fierce lights in the dark. Clem and I watched the fight and I felt small and large at once: small because I had once thought the world was only made of money and big because I saw how other sorts of riches existed.
Weeks later we found a treasure: a gilded mirror, purple and gold and as cold as a pond in autumn. It was called by the old seller an heirloom. I saw, when Clementine turned it, the glass breathe out images like a living thing. She placed it on the shop counter.
"Some things show what you are," she warned me. "Other things show who you used to be."
I took it home and that night it slid from showing only myself to showing a room I had never seen, where a figure in purple combed hair like black silk. The figure turned. I had the oddest feeling as if someone else had ladled up a life and was spilling it out onto the glass.
"It is a looking thing," I told Clementine. "I prefer coins. Their truth is direct."
"Mirrors keep secrets. Toads keep promises," she said. "Both have mouths."
Our life swung from thrill to trial. The grave injustice of Marilyn's death hung like a net. Grayson was punished and stripped, but pity is a small thing for pain. Yet even as justice found its sound, other things angry the city. There were songs at night and men who misused and preyed. There were creatures who wore women's faces.
Clementine and I grew close with a strange speed. I liked how she argued about accounts with me with the same attention she gave to a lock, and how she laughed the way a small bell trembles.
"Tell me honestly," I said once at dusk when the river looked like old metal. "Do you love me, or do you love what I am?"
She looked at me like a child who had learnt a new word. "I like that you make mistakes I can tidy. And yes, I like you like a feast I have not yet eaten. Does that count?"
"It does," I said.
Then the magistrate sent word that a larger thing had been found: a case that required the attention of the temple masters. A man who called himself the star-priest of waters—someone with a face lovelier than proper—had been sighted. Jett Willis, the monk with the thin smile, and Gideon had once again found themselves in a court of questions. They went to speak with a figure called the Star of Water—one who loved his own face like a mirror loves light.
Clementine wanted to watch like a magpie watches a glitter. "Let me go," she said.
"No," I answered. "You will not be part of their ancient quarrels."
"Why not?" she asked, throwing her head back. "Because you are afraid to have me near danger?"
"Because you are needed here. Because I want to know you are safe."
She kissed me then, quick and sharp. "You are soft, Greyson Santoro. Bring me your softness."
The city went on. We had small pleasures. I taught her to run accounts. She taught me the measure of a seam. We took the toad out now and then, and every time it spit gold it would remind me of a coin you cannot spend without remembering why you wanted it.
Sometimes at night I worried about what would be revealed if she knew everything: that the toad had been my reason to come to the house where Hanna was nearly ruined; that my eyes could be used as greed and as kindness; that a man's hands do both rotten and fair things.
"You think too much," Clementine said one night, wrapping her thin fingers around my wrist as if to anchor me. "Some men die with their pockets full of rules."
I looked at her and felt, for the first time, the simple truth of living with someone who said "no" by stealing it back with a laugh. She was the kind of thing that made my merchant's mind open like a chest.
Then came the punishment that changed more than Grayson's ledger: a public retribution for others less rich. A wealthy guestmaster—Dennis Taylor—had walked the world thinking of women as applause. At Hanna's wedding he had been the first to overstep. His death at her hands became rumor and then truth. The hall had watched as his chest filled red and the laughter failed. People recorded what they had seen in whispers with the sort of relish that punishes more soullessly than law.
Dennis's downfall was not like Grayson's. He fell quick and loud and loud is not always a justice that heals. Still, it was a wound, and the wound burned with the smell of oil and blood. People clapped sometimes, and other times they looked away.
The world keeps being itself. I kept my shop and my odd little treasures. I kept the toad. Clementine and I married with no great rites; she refused to be told how to bind herself to me. We found, in the mess of the shop and the soft arms of the river nights, that having someone to sit with when a grave public drama burned gave even shame a place to sit down.
"Keep the purple-gold mirror," she said once as she wound my hair around her fingers. "It shows things we will not speak of."
"I will," I said. "But I will also close it sometimes. I like some secrets held the way birds hold seeds in their throats."
So we go on: the toad in its box; the mirror on the shelf; the stories folded like clothing in a drawer. People come and people leave. Some pay and some don't. Some confess and some are stripped in the square. I have done wrong. People have done wrong to me. We all have what we deserve.
Tonight, as I write this by the window where the willow throws its fringe like a curtain, I press the little jade toad back into its sandalwood box. Its cool surface fits my palm like a small confessor.
"Do you think it plans?" Clementine asks from behind, voice soft like someone closing a book.
"It plans nothing," I say, smiling. "It keeps quiet. That is its gift."
She leans her head on my shoulder. "Then keep it in the dark. Let those who used to want other people's things understand what it is to be held."
I close the lid. In the small room, the purple-gold mirror leans against a wall and watches like a patient thing. I think of the markets and the magistrate, the bride with unchanged grief, and the man who fell from wearing a fine robe to having the town throw his debts in his face.
"Tomorrow we open early," I say. "We have a plate to match and an entire town's worth of stories to exchange for tea."
"Good," Clementine says. "I will sweep the counters and break your bad habits."
"I would expect nothing less," I answer. "Now tell me which coin is the prettiest."
She laughs like a bird and runs her finger over the toad's box.
I set down the pen. The moon outside has bled into silver across the canal. I close my eyes and listen to the city breathe—like a wheel turning—like a toad asleep and dreaming of rivers.
The End
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