Revenge17 min read
The Moon, the Soup, and the Two Sisters
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I remember the lanterns first. Hundreds of them, paper skins painted with cranes and mountains, swinging under every painted eave of the palace. The whole court was a river of color and music. Fireworks stitched the night into sudden blooms.
"Do you like it, Wan?" Hudson asked, smiling with that small, private look he never gave anyone but me.
"Yes," Emberly purred on his arm, lips wet with wine. "It is wonderful."
I watched them from the edge of the hall as I always did—my hands clean, a small bowl of clear broth cooling between my palms. "You should try some of the tea in the eastern pavilion," I told a maid who hovered. "It will take the chill away."
"Lady Daisy, you always think of others," she said.
"Someone has to," I answered, and the words were soft as steam.
Emberly ate with the abandon of a woman who has been given everything and is used to taking more. The emperor fed her deer meat with the same smug tenderness that had kept her in a gilded orbit for seasons. Every movement she made was a demonstration: how to be desired, how to command without moving a muscle.
"Have the palace cooks grown lazy?" Emberly said, smiling at Hudson. "I miss Longevity Rabbit the way my sister used to make it. The palace chefs are clever, but their hands are not hers."
I felt the heat of eyes turn in my direction. Emberly could say anything; no one contradicted her. The rumor that she had killed my father's rabbits spread like fuel—who else would dare touch a prized breeding?—and the court had already chewed it into a story. Still, when she said she missed something I had once made, the room tilted, and she leaned into the tilt.
"Then I will make it," I told her, simply. "If Your Majesty permits, I will cook it myself."
The emperor lifted a brow. "You? The Empress will?"
"Yes." I kept my voice steady. "It's my sister's day."
Emberly laughed, a sound like glass. "How bold of you, little sister."
I left the hall with my apron tied and my sleeves rolled. The cooks eyed me as if I were a child stealing a fire. "My lady, let the palace cooks—"
"I will do it," I said. "Please, help me."
They helped. I worked the rabbit, blanched it, layered spices like small promises: star anise, bay leaves, cinnamon. I forced myself not to watch the great hall while I cooked. I tasted the broth and added a little more salt, a little less smoke. For the finishing touch, I made a clear herb sauce—bright, cooling—a small thing of thyme and young pepper, and I boiled a simple bean-curd soup to follow: tofu, shredded bamboo, a handful of preserved pork. A child's soup—that was Emberly’s comfort when we were starving as children.
I carried the plates into the hall. Emberly’s face broke into that practiced, lethal beauty when she saw it. "Sister," she said, and her fingers touched the porcelain as if blessing.
"You always make things so pretty," she murmured. "Come sit. Tell me what you want more of."
I watched her eat every piece of rabbit until the plate was bare. She smiled after each bite, dabbed her mouth with perfumed linen, and turned to me. "No one cooks like you," she said. "This—this is honest food."
The night folded in and music rose again. We laughed. The emperor's smile softened. "You saved the evening," he told me. "You have a good hand."
"Thank you," I said. "I only want you to be pleased."
It was almost enough—the pleasure of another man, a simple blessing, could keep a body from dying the slow way fear kills you. But pleasure is a fragile thing. That very night, Emberly's fingers began to curl. Her color waned, like a candle finding a choke. She told a maid to fetch an ointment but could not lift the bowl. By midnight she was racked with spasms.
"Poison!" the maids cried.
"Poison?" Hudson's voice was nothing like his face; it was a sword. He strode in like a sudden thunderstorm. He seized Emberly's wrist; pale sweat streaked his knuckles.
"It was the Empress's soup," someone hissed. "She served it."
"Impossible," I said. "I made it myself."
The room went very quiet, like a pond on which no fish moved. The palace was full of mouths that wanted anything to be true that would break the quiet rule: the favored can be brought low.
"She is our sister," I said to the emperor. "I would never—"
"Would you not?" Hudson said, eyes hard, voice low. "Do you think I would have let you live if you had tried to poison my favored?"
"I wouldn't," I whispered. "For what would it serve me?"
The emperor's fingers tightened until they whitened. He released her wrist as if it burned him. "We will find whoever did this."
They took Emberly to the inner pavilion. Flasks were poured, syrups tasted, arteries felt. The physicians worked at odd herbs. They called for witnesses, and with each hour a different suspicion sharpened like a needle.
I found, to my dismay, that accusation sticks to those who stand nearest. My hands had been on the plate. My name was on the bowl. The maids wrung their hands and turned eyes away.
"She served it herself!" a woman cried. "Only someone who could be jealous would do such a thing."
"I made it," I said again, because saying the truth seemed like clinging to a rope. "She tasted it, she smiled—"
"Enough!" Hudson barked. "Search the kitchens."
They searched until dawn. Fingers found nothing at first. Then a cook remembered: a gift of live snow-frogs, rare and valued, given by a lady from the west. He pointed to the servant who had carried them. The servant trembled. "They were for the emperor's favored," he sobbed. "They were delivered last night."
"A gift," Emberly croaked from within the inner room, "from Lady Lenore."
Lenore Roussel. She was the one who smiled like a candle: bright, practiced, dangerous. She was married into influence, daughter of a minister who wanted more than his position allowed. She came into the court with carriage and quiet claws. She had been several steps ahead of everyone, a presence at the right entertainment, a whisper at the right ear. I had seen her fingers tug at silk and secrets.
"No," I said. "Lenore could not—"
"Could she?" a voice said. A page left the hall. "Lady Lenore sent word to a private garden meeting tonight. To the West Grove."
People were already leaning in. "Did she?" the emperor asked.
"Yes," said someone else. "And the man who met her... Callen Munoz, visiting prince. They were seen together."
Callen Munoz. A prince often away, with eyes that measured a woman like property, not a person. His presence made the court rumble with gossip even before war drums did. He had been seen speaking privately with Lenore. He had been seen crouched too close to her at the festival weeks before.
My stomach folded like paper.
Hudson's face was hard ice. "Bring them," he said.
The next day the court gathered, drawn by rumor and the emperor's fury. Lenore stood tall in pale blue, hair arranged with jewels, a mask of surprised hurt. Callen's jaw set; he had the look of a man who decides his own fate will not be small.
"Why bring them?" Lenore's voice floated like a silk streamer. "What proof do you have?"
"Your gifts," the emperor said, and then the room fell silent as a bell. "Your gifts went to my favored. My favored died after eating what she took."
Lenore's smile wavered. "I would never—"
"You would what?" Hudson stepped close. "Would you deny that you schemed against my household? That you sent frogs as trinkets? That men of your father's influence met with traitors?"
She blinked. "Traitor? Who you call traitor is a loyal man. Callen—"
Callen's face went white. "Your Majesty—"
"Silence!" Hudson thundered, and his fist struck the table. "You are to be searched. Everything you brought into the palace this month is to be laid out. We will hear witnesses."
They found small vials—little glass things wound in linen—hidden in the folds of Lenore's robe. There was the smell of something sickly sweet when a cup was opened. A kitchen maid coughed and stepped back.
"You—what is this?" Lenore said, but her hand trembled.
"Spices and oils," a servant insisted. "We thought them odd. It hurt the frogs' skin to touch for too long."
The emperor did not wait for verdicts. He ordered guards to detain her. He ordered to fetch the witnesses. The court spilled into the square outside the palace, and before the afternoon ended the case became a public showing.
I will not pretend I did not hope for justice. I hoped for something small: for the truth to be seen and Emberly to be safe. I did not anticipate what would happen when the court's hunger got taste of a bigger meal.
They bound Lenore and brought her to the terrace where the people could see. Word spread like smoke: the favored was poisoned, the emperor's household imperiled, a high lady suspected. Curious faces came from the city, merchants, servants, even children peeking between pillars. The magistrate stood at the top step with officials and the emperor's aides.
Lenore was made to kneel at the center. Her dress of many colors looked like a stage costume. Her eyes darted, but she carried herself as one who believed the crowd would bow at her feet. I watched from the shadows with a hand over my mouth, as if to hold my heart in place.
"This woman," the magistrate announced, "stands accused of poisoning the late favored of the emperor and of conspiring with a prince against the realm. We will hear her confession."
Lenore's mouth was dry. "I did not—"
"Then speak," the magistrate said, and the crowd murmured.
A servant who had tended the frogs that were sent forward came forward. He spoke of how the frogs had been lively and then, after being wrapped in the lady's linen, looked dull. He spoke of seeing Lenore meet with Callen in the West Grove where they exchanged powders hidden in a small box.
Callen shifted. His hands tried to keep his composure, but the crowd smelled blood now and his fingers shook.
The magistrate ordered Callen to be brought before the crowd as well. He arrived arrogant, thinking perhaps his title might turn the tide.
"Callen Munoz," the magistrate called, "you are accused of adultery with Lenore and of conspiring to weaken the throne. How do you answer?"
Callen's voice cracked. "I—" He swallowed. "I loved her."
A woman in the crowd hissed. "Love is not an excuse for treason!"
"Spare your flowery words," the emperor said quietly. "You will tell us what poison you used."
Callen's pride shattered in the light. "We meant only to scare," he said. "To shame the favored, so the court would notice the emptiness of her alliance. We never expected her to fall. We meant the frogs to be crippled, not kill."
The crowd's murmur turned into a hiss that became a roar.
Lenore's face was the color of washed salt. "No," she breathed. "Callen—"
"Silence!" the emperor snapped. "You will not trade blame now."
They dragged the case out like a net, casting it wider. The magistrate read lists of letters, of payments, of secret meetings. Names of those who had signed hospitality to Callen in hidden pavilions were pulled out. Nehemias Carver, a powerful minister whose ambition spread like ivy, was named as one who had sheltered meetings. A clerk brought forth ledgers with entries in his hand.
"Nehemias!" the emperor barked. "Do you deny lending your house to traitors?"
"It was for diplomacy," Nehemias said, white as tea. "I only—"
"Enough." The emperor lifted a hand. "You will all be judged."
The scandal broke the court into a thousand knives. But I needed more than conviction; I needed to clear Emberly's name from the wildest whisper. The servants said that Lenore's powders had been in the frogs' skins; the physicians said the toxin used was rare—something to eat that would feed into a body slowly, like a vine upon wood. They named it; I had heard of it only in the whispers of slave markets and mad old apothecaries.
Lenore sat beneath the scaffold of truth as witnesses spoke. Her reactions were chapters: first a hauteur that faltered, then a flash of anger—"I am not a criminal!"—then the thin, ugly self-preservation as she tried to barter names in exchange for mercy: "If you spare me, I'll tell all."
She told all, but she told more to save herself. She named merchants who had paid her and named scribes who had penned notes; she named sergeants who had measured fields where men would meet. The court expanded like a map of scars.
At midday the magistrate announced the punishments. The crowd surged closer, a living tide. I had to clench my teeth to keep from running forward. I thought only of Emberly: of the rabbit she had eaten, of the laugh she had given, and the sudden death that had taken her.
"They will be punished," the magistrate intoned. "For treason and murder."
First, Callen Munoz was led to the square at the outer gate. The sentence was swift and public: a prince's title stripped, his arms bound; the executioner stood waiting. His punishment was to be death before the city, at the place where ambassadors entered. He was to be a warning: no lover above the law. As they tied his hands, he looked at Lenore. She looked away.
"Callen!" someone screamed, a woman who had loved him from a market stall—there were always such women in crowds, ready to believe again. "Callen!"
He closed his eyes as the sword fell. The crowd breathed as if expelled by a great bell. Some cheered; some turned their faces.
But Lenore's punishment was not to be only death. The magistrate had to answer the court's hunger for spectacle—people wanted to see the proud humbled, the manipulator become small. They wanted the gilded wrong to be stripped down, and so Lenore's humiliation would be slow and public.
They brought her back to the terrace where merchants and officials watched. A table was placed before her with the trinkets and gifts she had sent, with the powders she had used. A scribe read aloud every exchange she had made for the past year. For every parchment, there was a witness who stepped forward to confirm. The emperor's voice stayed calm, but in it there was a winter edge.
"You used gifts to buy obedience," the magistrate read, "and poison to buy influence. You hid plans of the prince to unsettle the realm. You left a woman to die."
Lenore's fingers dug into the thin rope at her wrists. "I did it for my family—their futures," she said. "I needed to survive. I had no choice."
"No choice?" a merchant in the crowd shouted. "You chose your father's greed."
They made her confess publicly to each crime. She did so with a voice that changed from brittle to frenzied. At first she denied, then she named names in hope of mercy, then she began to beg.
"Spare me," she begged, and there was real terror in the plea.
But the people wanted to see the change: the smile that once opened doors was to be swallowed by shame. The magistrate had a different kind of punishment than death alone—something to unmask the vanity that had helped her climb.
They stripped her of her jewels and paraded them through the crowd. Children reached for them and were slapped back. Her hairpins were broken in the dust. The women in the crowd—wives of low officials and kitchen maids—took turns stepping forward to slap her face. Each slap was a sentence. The magistrate named each in front of the crowd: "For the maid you bought silence from; for the widow you stole bread from; for the girl whose dowry you delayed." Their hands were not gentle. Lenore shrank.
She was forced to walk through the market with a rope around her neck, the coins she had hoarded poured out in front of her like the spill of a small river. People spat at her. The emperor watched from a terrace above and said nothing. He had the look of a man who had sewn a coat for the winter and then found it full of moths.
Then the magistrate decreed that the families of her allies would be paraded—public disgrace rather than immediate execution for most. The minister Nehemias Carver, however, did not get mercy. His ledger betrayed him too often. The emperor tore his title from his chest, and he was dragged off to stand for sentence. The people jeered. The magistrate ordered his banishment and the stripping of his properties, and a few of his close kin were taken to prison.
For Lenore, the last part of her punishment was to place her palms upon Emberly's empty bowl and to say, aloud, what she had meant when she tucked poison into living skins.
"You wanted to remove a rival," the magistrate intoned. "You wanted to make room for your lovers and your patron. You wanted the emperor to turn to you."
Lenore's voice finally broke. "I was afraid of being nothing," she said. "I thought—if I could only make a space, I would be someone."
"Now you are someone," a woman in the crowd said. "Someone small."
The crowd roared approval. People took tokens from her hair and tore at the little things that had signaled her status. She was carried to the stocks for three days, forced to sit where flies could land. Food was thrown to her like garbage. Every day someone called out what she had done. Each time she flinched.
I watched all of it with a thin, careful rage. Lenore's punishment satisfied a public appetite, but the taste of retribution is never whole if the original crime is not fully avenged. The magistrate's verdict had shown her hand, and Callen had been executed. Nehemias had been stripped and cursed. But Emberly's death remained a raw wound in me.
When they took Emberly from the inner room, there was no grand procession. Her body was small and pale. I washed her as she had washed me when we were children. She was not beautiful now in the way she had been when she smiled at the emperor; she was fragile as a stolen coin.
"Do not think of me as a plotter," she whispered when I bent close. "I never turned against the one I loved."
"You loved him?" I asked.
She smiled the ghost of the old smile. "I did. I thought—if I could make him powerful, he would make me safe."
"Safe from what?" I asked.
"From being nothing," she said. "From being hungry."
Her hand gripped mine and then loosened. "Promise me," she breathed. "Promise me you'll be gentle with what you keep."
"I promise," I said, though I knew promises could be small paper boats.
Emberly did not wake again.
After the magistrate's punishments were done, the court quieted. But silence is a shadow that can hide new things. The emperor came to the private pavilion where I now slept less and watched more. He sat with a bowl of my simple soup—my bean-curd broth—the one that had already become a memory to him. He tasted it without comment.
"You cooked that for her," he said.
"Yes," I answered. "She loved it when we were small."
He set the bowl down, fingers trembling. "You have a quiet that makes me uneasy," he said. "You have always kept things."
"I keep what I can," I said.
"Do you want anything?" he asked abruptly.
"A child," I said. "I thought—if I had a child—"
"A child of mine?" he interrupted sharply. "You still cling to tricks."
"No." I swallowed. "A child to remember."
He barked a laugh. "You are strange. I have given you family titles. What more could you want?"
"I want you to remember," I said. "Not power, but—"
"It doesn't matter," he said, standing. "The realm needs no more sentiment."
He left me with my bowl. The taste of the soup sat in my mouth like a lullaby I could not finish.
The rest of the summer trailed into whispers of punishments and the quiet operation of new alliances. The emperor appeared to take consolation in the little acts: a gift here to a loyal, a title there, a cold smile everywhere. I was content to slip back to my small chores: a bowl for a sick servant, broth for a child. I kept to myself like a wound kept sterile.
And yet I had secrets of my own. Emberly had been more than her smiles. She had chosen our lives for us—she had learned to fight and to hunt because our father refused we should die begging. She asked to be his blade, and she had given everything. She had also loved a man who never gave her the name that would have kept her alive. I had been the sister who stayed soft, the one who would be forgiven in the eyes of the world.
I had told the emperor I wanted a child to hold as a memory. He thought it a petty wish. He did not know that I would be willing to put my body on a line to claim the one thing a woman in our position could own.
Two months after my father’s sudden death—when the mountain bandits took the escort and left only ruin—Hudson named the lands to others and gave speeches about justice. My father's death had been a cruel wind that left the family reeling. I drank tea and watched the court move like fish in an aquarium.
That night I invited the emperor to a moon-view in the eastern pavilion. The moon was a round white coin, and I set out a modest table. Emberly's favorite bean-curd soup sat on the low tray. He came and tasted and said nothing. The moon held its place. The palace was quiet.
"You have something on your sleeve," he said at last.
"You think I do?" I asked.
"You think you could be trusted?" he said. "You think I do not see you for what you are?"
"I would like to be seen for what I am," I said. "For once."
He laughed, thin and hard. "You are too strange, little Empress."
I drank. He broached the matter of reward—lands for my kin. I let his words fall like coins into a jar. "Thank you," I said.
He watched me, the emperor who would not keep an honest hand. "Do you know," he said, "that sometimes I imagine things done for me are done out of hunger?"
"Everything is done out of hunger," I replied.
The guards were in the garden in numbers I had requested for reasons of show; I had asked for extra men the week before as part of a ritual visit. When the time came, two small groups of men in black—what a stagecraft looks like—leapt from the hedge as if to test his mettle. The emperor called for protection and men swarmed, and then he saw them: not assassins, but disguised cutthroats. There were more than I had expected—some of them were caught, some of them lay still in their costumes.
His face changed then. He had been patient for a long time. "You tried to set up a trap at my moon-view," he said.
"I tried something," I answered, and my voice did not shake. "I tried a thing that would make you look."
"This is madness," he said. "Do you take me for—"
"Listen," I said softly. "I loved her, Emperor. She loved you. I made bargains you would never see. I lived small while she paid with her life."
His eyes flashed. "You mean Emberly."
"Yes." I said. "You never understood. She placed herself on a blade for you. I wanted you to keep something of her. I wanted you to remember."
His face went like iron. "You would put a trap in my garden—"
"No," I said. "I had men pretend to be actors. They were not to hurt you. They were to be the scene of a confession. Here is the truth—" I paused and drew out of my robe a small sealed sachet. "I put nothing lethal in the emperor's cup."
He took the sachet like it might bite him. "Then what did you do?"
"I put a bitter that will make a man remember the taste of the soup he ate the night Emberly died," I said. "It will bring ache and memory to him, like a vine of regret. It is not poison that kills. It is a medicine that loosens what he keeps inside. He will see what he has done."
He stood up so quickly the low table slid. "You dare—"
"Yes," I said. "I dare."
He stumbled. The bitter hit him like a hand. His face crumpled as if cut. He tried to say something and could not. I watched the light leave his eyes for a moment—rage, then memory, then something like a child remembering an unfair thing.
"Why?" he asked hoarsely. "Why would you—"
"For Emberly," I said. "For her rabbits. For her smiles. For all the things you keep as trophies."
He looked at me as if I had been some other creature who had risen in the night. He breathed, and then he laughed, a sound that was not merry. "You always were strange," he said. "You are a thorn in my hand."
He reached for his sword in a dizzy, sudden motion—too quick for thought and too clean for mercy. "You are dangerous to me," he said. "We have no more use for dangerous things."
He struck.
Steel found me.
Pain was a white star. I remember the hot iron of the blade and then a slide into a cold, lovely darkness where my sins and my sister's small joys came back to me like flash images: the stolen tofu, the rabbit we split, Emberly's first laugh the night she shot the tiger, Father's bark if we came home with mud; Emberly tying my hair with a scrap of ribbon; the way she once said, "Promise me you'll be gentle with what you keep."
My hand went to my belly, where for a short, stubborn season something I had hoped could outlive us pulsed like a secret drum. There was fear—so much fear—and then an odd clarity: memory tastes like that soup we drank, clear and thin and full of the things we ate when hungry.
I heard voices, the emperor's shout, the clamor of men. Someone shouted, "She is dying!"
I heard myself laugh, then cough. "Do not blame the emperor," I said, as if giving a final note in a score. "He loved her in his way."
"You have made a mess," someone said.
"It was always messy," I said. "Promise me—"
"Promise?" Hudson sounded like a man who had lost a bet.
"Promise you will remember the taste of the soup," I said. "Not the decorations. Not the doorways. The soup."
He bent over me then, his face a tangle of power and regret. "What have I done," he whispered.
"You loved the wrong way," I said. "You loved power."
He closed his eyes like a man in pain.
Lenore's punishment was public and raw, Callen's death before the gate likewise. For Nehemias and others, titles and lands were stripped, and some families were sent to be shorn of favor. The city spoke of justice for months. But justice does not bring back a sister who died with rabbits in her memory.
I let the thing inside me go as the fever took it and left me with a small, quiet bruise of grief. I thought of Emberly's hands, the way she had taught me to hold a knife, not for killing but for cutting bread. I thought of my own bowl of bean-curd soup, cooling on the pavilion table.
Far away, children were laughing; a vendor called for his wares. In my last seconds, the palace lights swung like the old lanterns, and the moon looked down at us both like a coin spent too often.
I thought of the promise I had made in a small room with a dying woman.
"Emberly," I whispered, though she was not there.
"Little sister," a voice said, but it was not my own.
Emberly had kept many promises too. She had kept the promise of being brave and of taking my place so I could be small and merciful. Now the last thing I tasted was the faint, clear broth of our youth—simple, thin, and real.
They say a life can be told by the food one shares. If stories are bowls, I hope mine is remembered by the warm cup I pressed to a king's hand and by the small, stubborn bean-curd soup the city will call "the sisters' broth."
In the square, the magistrate kept his lists. Lenore's name was blackened for generations. Callen's head rolled at the gate. Nehemias' house was stripped. The palace flamed on in its little ceremonies. People told the tale, and it grew into a lesson: do not make enemies with a woman who will die for someone she loves.
I do not ask for forgiveness. I ask only this: when you pass by a bowl of simple soup, remember the taste and the hand that ladled it. Remember Emberly, who ate with reckless joy, and my small, foolish attempt to keep a memory safe.
"Promise me," she had said once.
"I did," I answered.
I kept it in the only way I had left.
The End
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