Revenge11 min read
The Last Mask I Wore
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They read the imperial edict aloud in the main hall, and the chancellor's lady—my stepmother in every meaning but name—rose so fast she sent the tray of incense clattering to the floor. She came at me with a fan in hand and struck my face with the flat of it.
"Jaylee Schulze," she spat, "your sister is dead. You will not gloat. You will not pretend to be pleased."
I held my cheek where it burned and let the hall watch me collect myself. "Do you think I am pleased?" I asked. "No. I am simply accepting what the world gives me."
"Accepting." She laughed like a cracked bell. "You, who grew in the servants' hall while my daughter lived like a jewel in sunlight. Do not you dare—"
"You forget your place," Hudson Brandt said from his seat. He was my father in blood, but not in kindness. He bowed to the throne and, by that bow, surrendered me to a fate I must dress as honor.
"Claire Cameron is gone," the edict had said. "By imperial will, Jaylee Schulze shall take the place of the late Crown Princess."
They thought they humiliated me. They only rearranged the ornaments.
Claire had been the chancellor's true daughter, the household's darling, and she died because someone with a soldier's lineage and too much pride wanted what she wanted. Polina Hunter—the general's daughter—loved the same man the crown loved, and when an obstacle remained, she removed it.
"People mistake kindness for weakness," I told myself that night as I lay on my pallet and counted the thin ceiling beams. "They mistake cautiousness for cowardice. I will not be mistaken again."
I was small when my mother died. My father married the daughter of a tutor and the rest of the household became a theater for my shame. My name, Jaylee Schulze, sounded like an ordinary girl's name, not a name like a banner. But now I had a banner to fly—or at least a place beneath one. The crown does not ask how a banner is raised. It only asks who holds it.
Bowen Gustafsson, the crown before he was emperor, loved Polina with a stubborn, foolish devotion. He loved her the way a man loves a particular song that hurts him every time he hears it. He would not marry Polina because of politics—the court would not permit a general's family to entangle its blood with the throne—so Claire was chosen. Polina would not accept losing. She poisoned Claire. That was the story the servants told in whispers, and the court had enough reason to believe it.
"Do not be proud," my stepmother told me again, the night before my wedding. "You did not climb to this by your virtue."
"Whatever I used," I answered, "is mine to keep."
Bowen did not come on our wedding night. He did not come for years. He came later, for other reasons, when ambition and guilt had braided themselves into his hands. He took me into his chambers only when a child—twins, as it turned out—was necessary for both our houses.
"You want a son, do you?" he asked in that dry voice he used when he wished to sound harmless.
"I want to hold my place," I said.
He grimaced but yielded because his hands were full with other ghosts—his love for Polina, and Polina's absence, which was a wound that never healed.
"Give me a son," I told him once in the hush after midnight. "If you want to keep Polina later, you must give me a son. A son will let me stand in daylight."
He did what a man does when he is balanced between spite and duty. He gave me a child. He gave me two. Chet Lange was a boy with my eyes and a will like a small, stubborn sparrow. Deanna Brantley was the other's mirror: soft, ingenious, and wary.
Bowen never looked at Chet. He tolerated Deanna. He brought Polina back to the court later, as a consolation for a long absence. He titled her Grand Consort Polina. The court cheered her new splendor; the palace stench was a new kind of sweetness.
I moved like armor over the years. I learned to bow in a way that made people think I had no interior steel. I built webs of favors, debts that did not show on paper but were tight about throats. I learned to plant whispers like seeds.
"Mother," Deanna asked once when she was six, small fingers curling around my braid, "why does the other mother make us feel cold?"
"Because she is afraid," I said. "Fear makes people cruel."
"Will you ever be afraid?"
"Only of losing you," I said. "And I will not lose you."
We kept our heads down while the court's tides shifted. Bowen succeeded his father—Antoine Thompson—on the throne. He was crowned and decorated with impossible names. The first thing he did was to summon Polina to the inner palace, name her Imperial Noble Consort, and give her a residence trimmed with jasmine.
"She will not be content," I told Bowen one afternoon in private. "You love her, and she returns it in her way—but love is not enough for the state."
He said, "You have been patient."
"Patience is a weapon if you know how to use it," I told him.
Polina became pregnant soon after. The entire court held its breath. She was thick with expectation, and the palace was a fortress of caution. The day she woke in labor and the child's health was poor, court physicians fretted. When the baby was stillborn, the palace did not weep for long—the court's games moved fast.
Later on, there was an accident at the imperial pool. Chet, the child who always found puddles and curiosity in a palace of rules, was accused of pushing the infant who was Polina's son into the water. That accusation came like a curtain dropping. The mother who wore pearls of rank pointed at my son.
"Your son caused this," Polina said, face pale as lacquer. "He must be punished."
I kneeled in her courtyard and begged for mercy. "Spare him," I said. "He is a child. Let me take the blame—"
"Take the blame?" She looked at me like I was a forgotten name. "No. Let him be corrected."
The correction turned into a funeral. I watched them close my son's wooden lid and set it in the shadow of the cypress. No officials came; politeness had its limits when the wind blew from the Consort's direction.
"Jaylee," Deanna whispered at the funeral, "did he fall?"
"He fell because someone wanted him to," I answered. "But falling makes no sound in a palace built of music."
That night I said the vow that would sit heavy on my tongue for the rest of my life: "Bowen, Polina, I will make you pay."
Time passed and the court's hatred and favor shifted. One death follows another. The third prince—Emery Barnes—died from poison. The evidence led to Polina. The queen mother, Irma Fontaine, whose temperments were never private, demanded justice. The court was a hive and the claim a match.
Bowen turned to me in that crisis and asked me to take the blame for Polina's supposed crimes. "Take the blame," he said, "and I will keep Deanna safe. I will ensure she never wants for anything."
I looked at his face—hardened like old leather, not cruel but not kind either—and I bowed. "For Deanna," I said.
It should have killed me to answer yes. Instead, I answered with a strategy. I owed Delphi's gift to my survival: men who believe in one truth are easily guided to another.
But fate, and fortune, are two hands of a scale. The father of the queen who had accused Polina—the Duke of Chen—brought evidence to court that proved Polina had conspired to kill the infant. The court held its breath. Polina was unsteady on the dais. Her face, once so polished and arrogant, had the translucence of someone unmoored.
The trial—what else can you call a theater where men in embroidered robes point with the certainty of judges—was not private. It took place in the Hall of Mirrors, where officials gathered and the river of court witnessed everything.
"Polina Hunter," declared the Empress Dowager, "you stand accused of murder and betrayal against the imperial line."
Polina's cheeks were white where rouge had been applied. She lifted her chin with a grace I'd always envied. "I deny it," she said. "I have loved the Crown Prince with a love that is made of night and wind, but I would never—"
"You plotted," the Duke of Chen spat, "and you poisoned the infant. We have witnesses. We have letters."
A servant blackened by fear produced a packet of sealed notes and read them aloud. They were crude, small scribbles, but the meaning slid through the assembly like cold oil. The hall filled with the sound of murmurs—sharp, hungry, then dull as the blows of mallets. Polina's hands trembled.
"These accusations are false!" she cried. "This is a plot, an attempt to see me ruined!"
"Then tell us," the Dowager commanded. "Tell us why the letters are in your hand. Tell us why your father's men were nearby the day of the poison."
"You cannot prove—" Polina broke off as a guard stepped forward with a cup.
"This cup," the guard said, "contains the veiling antidote. The accused shall drink before the court to prove her innocence."
The hall protested for the sake of ceremony, not because they thought it necessary for truth. The Empress Dowager had a way of making justice look tidy. Polina's face moved through the colors of the sky when a storm is coming. Her lips formed prayers. The crowd leaned forward as if to see the last act of a play.
"Drink," the Dowager said.
Polina shuddered but took the cup with hands that were now small and honest. She drank. Her eyes widened. She coughed. A thin scream escaped her, and then she crumpled.
I saw something break inside the hall then: the way people turned their faces, the crisp dropping of embroidered sleeves, the metallic clank of a chair being pushed back. Courtiers who had a hand in the plot stepped forward to ensure no rumor would escape them later. Servants gaped. A young page began to cry, his small cheeks wet.
Polina's collapse had that finality pages in histories speak of. She had been punished, and the punishment was spectacle. Her punishment was both quick and merciless, and I stood in that hall memorizing every detail like a map.
She had been proud and spoiled, then stripped of that skin in a single public ritual. When her mouth opened and closed like some trapped thing, she had a moment of clarity, a second where the sturdy mask she had worn was gone.
"You—" she said, and the word came out like someone trying to catch a bird with a fist. "You told them. You—"
The hall froze on that sentence and then looked away as the Dowager covered Polina's face with a silk scarf. Some courtiers applauded with the sound of gloved hands meant to be polite and not savage; some laughed; some whispered of the future. Polina's eyes had one last flash of accusation and then no more.
"Let this be a lesson," the Dowager said to the assembly. "To those who would strike at the throne: you will be met by justice. By my hand."
The crowd dispersed and the hall emptied with the slow, reverent slowness of a flock leaving one branch for another. I left last, breathing a madness of relief and grief. Polina's punishment had been public, complete, and absolute. It satisfied the court's thirst for order. It made me safer in the waking of its aftermath. But it also peeled something off my heart I would not get back.
I did not tell anyone then what I had done in the whispering wars behind those curtains. I did not tell them the ways I bent odds toward a design not of pure revenge but of survival. I had paid people in favors and coin, in secrets and pressure, and I had used the rumors about Polina to steer suspicion. I had fed the court's appetite for a scapegoat until they devoured her. The law had been a blade I turned on an enemy.
Years unfolded like a long, patient siege. The dowager's cup had drunk more than Polina; it had drunk any who tangled with us. Bowen became Emperor Antoine's heir without mercy. He sat at the dragon's seat, but the dragon's shadow is a thing that can be used or feared.
I took my part in governance with the hunger of a woman who had been kept to the margins all her life. I built schools for girls, raised levies of modest men who owed me, and rebuilt bridges that both moved grain and hearts. They called me a reformer, a matron. They also called me cunning. Both titles were true.
But power bends men. Grief molds you. I did things that later, in silence, I told myself were for the greater good. I plotted the downfall of families whose pride had eaten the poor. I arranged marriages that would tilt alliances. I spoke to men like Hudson Brandt and told them that their houses would not stand if they bared their teeth.
Once, on a night when the palace rain struck the eaves like a set of small drums, Bowen grew ill. The fever took him. The court whispered of poison again; the Dowager's voice had been harsh earlier about those who reach for the crown with small, permanent hands. Bowen's breath left him slowly. When he was dead, I took Deanna in, and I took the second prince into my lineage to secure the succession.
I could have stopped there. I could have let the world decide whether I was saint or villain. But power is a fire that warms and burns; I had learned to feed it.
I told my father not to press charges against the Hunter family, to show benevolence, and to protect the family at the same time. He obeyed because he wanted place and because he feared the less visible threats of being too honest.
The rest of the story is not gentle. I admitted, in the end, to using poison on a small scale—never to slay on a whim, but to steer. I told myself it was a surgeon's duty; sometimes a cut is needed to prevent gangrene.
When the house of Chen—the house that had accused Polina—produced evidence against the Imperial Noble Consort, the Dowager tasted vengeance. She thought she had purged the wrongs and had balanced her scales. She had not counted on how one woman learns to make the world move as she wills.
I watched the Dowager drink the same cup she had used as justice.
"Do you remember the jasmine that blooms in winter?" I whispered to Bowen in his last hour, a cruelty I do not try to disguise.
He glared at me. "You did all of this for your daughter," he said. "You schemed and you—I thought you had a limit."
"I have no limit when it is about keeping what I built," I said. "And I loved you, Bowen, in the way a general loves a certain map—by knowing its faults."
He tried to sit up and failed. "You will pay," he said.
"I already have," I told him.
I took his hand as if to mourn. I did not cry. Instead, I promised Deanna something with my lips.
"Rule kindly," I told her when I had the chance. "Rule with a stead hand and a hidden glove. Do not trust the warmth of a smile."
She looked at me with eyes I had made cautious and wise. "Mother," she said, "I only want you."
That was the end of my testament: love and cold politics braided into something that felt like a rope I wrapped and untied at the same time.
When the end of my life came—disease that no physician in the palace could cure—I lay in my bed and opened my old, private journal. I wrote down everything I had done and why. I wrote to name the sins and their reasons, the ways the palace had taught me to bite or be bitten.
I told Deanna the truth in the last hours, because she deserved to know the shape of the throne she would inherit.
"Did you do it for me?" she asked, small and fierce.
"Partly," I said. "But mostly I did it because I wanted to stop being the girl who watched from the margins."
She held my hand as the fever came like a white tide. "Will you be at peace?" she whispered.
"Perhaps," I said. "Perhaps in another life I will learn how to be loved without measuring it."
I closed my eyes, not with a sigh but with the dry contentment of a woman who had paid her dues and received her paper of deeds in return—some of it clean, some of it smeared.
When I died, history named me many things: Empress Mother, Regent, Reformer, Poisoner in the margins. Men wrote that I had been cruel, and women whispered my name like a warning. They included the Hall of Mirrors and Polina's collapse in the songs of scandal.
I had wanted peace, once, as a child. I had wanted it enough to build an empire around it. The jade hairpin my mother once tucked into my hair when I was small was the last thing I felt under my fingers. I kept it through all the marriages and edicts and executions. I held it now and thought about the little girl for whom my mother's hand had straightened the world.
If there is a next life, I thought, maybe I will trade crowns for a kitchen, or laughter that does not echo in courtyards. But even as I imagined a simpler life, I felt the story I told the court settle like a stone in the river: heavy enough to stop the current.
"Take the hairpin," I murmured. "Keep it as proof that I once wanted something that was not power."
Deanna took it and kissed my forehead. "You will watch over me," she said.
"I always did," I answered.
And then the palace closed its doors around a woman who had learned to pay for every slight in coin paid in measured cruelty, and the jade hairpin lay in Deanna's palm, unadorned and unmistakable—the last small thing that proved I had been both a mother and a strategist.
The End
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