Revenge12 min read
The Palace That Broke Open
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The door burst open.
"Mother, the city has fallen—" a eunuch's thin voice cracked in the hall and then stopped, like someone had cut a chord.
"Which prince?" Henley Huber stood up before she could think, mouth pinched by fear and duty.
"Eleven, by imperial order." The eunuch's eyes slid past the consorts and landed on me. "Eleven Prince carried out the command."
"Where is Prince Seven?" Loretta Simpson's hand closed on the eunuch's sleeve. "Answer me."
The heavy doors swung all the way, and a shadow filled them.
A young man, a sword in one hand and a head in the other, stepped in. Blood darkened the floor around the head's hair. He let the head slip and it thudded, wet and final. He smiled then, calm and small and terrible. He knelt where the cushions were thin and bowed to me.
"Mother," he said, voice as steady as a bell, "we have come home."
I am Martina Mortensen. I was fourteen when I first entered the palace.
"Your father is the Duke Xie?" the emperor asked me then, squinting like a man appraising a bird for its cage. He named my father without looking at the guest list.
"Yes." I answered.
"She will be fitted into the court," Henley told me later. "You are small-boned; the emperor favors small bones."
I lived in the side chamber of Lady Ruan—Henley Huber in the years I remember. Henley was a woman of old soldier blood, face cold but hands that did small mercies without noise. "People from the Lin family have rotten hearts," she once said and looked out the window, meaning more than one thing.
Three months after I arrived, a slave girl was beaten almost dead in the court.
"Who did this?" I whispered.
"Her child couldn't be born fully," Henley said. "The child would be foreign in blood, and the court fears a different flag in a true heir's veins."
"Is that fair?" I asked.
"This is the court," Henley said. "Fairness is a book for people who sleep at night."
The slave girl—元御女—was pulled from a cell in a cold dawn. Justine Morris was there in silk so thin it clung like a rumor. She whispered to the empress and laughed with the sound of a coin.
"Who accused her?" Loretta Simpson asked, royal as always.
"She was in the wrong place." Justine said, tiny lashes throwing down like fans. "Find the red powder in the west wing. That is the proof."
"Proof," the emperor said. "Let her be punished."
They took the girl out without trial. The courtyard turned to a theater.
"No!" a little voice screamed from the gallery. It belonged to a pale, barefoot child who had been watching from the shadows. He wouldn't stay hidden. He pushed past the ladies-in-waiting and the guards and fell on the steps.
"Eleven Prince," someone called. "You cannot—"
He pushed forward to his mother, the slave, sheltering her with his thin arms. "Don't, mother," he cried, clutching her like a shield.
"Take him away," the emperor said with calm fingers. The boy was dragged off; the girl was struck with the cane until blood pooled in her palms and her bones sang. The boy's cries faded as if the wind swallowed them.
That night the palace smelled of iron.
I had dreams for days of that slave woman's mouth moving, "Save me." She was never really gone from my sleep. Henley made me some restful soup, a soup that tasted of herbs and duty.
"People die in the palace," she said, but I did not get better.
On a spring morning I woke, and the voice in my head that had been crying went quiet. In its place was a small, warm hand.
"Please take care of him," the woman had said in my sleep.
"Who?" I had asked in the dark.
"Care for him," the woman smiled as if she had been clean in the world.
That very day, the emperor gave me a title and the boy was given to my care. "You are his foster mother," a scroll declared.
"You're only fourteen," Henley teased, but she poured me wine for the small celebration. "It might be difficult, but you'll have someone to keep you from being alone."
The first time I met Oscar Davis I saw him in a snowstorm, a slight figure standing in the courtyard, snow up to his ankles like a small sea.
"Who is he?" I called.
He looked up slowly, eyes hard as a child's, then colder. He did not answer. He didn't need to speak to make the whole courtyard feel smaller.
Later, during a ceremony when the court argued that a maid was the cause of the palace scandal, I watched the boy move like something wound too tightly. He saved the maid from a worse fate with a single, broken plea that did nothing.
"He's the son of a low-born stable woman," Justine said in the palace. "He is nothing."
"No," I thought, and later told him as much when he stood hammering on the wrong gate in the rain, fists raw.
"Open the gate," he said, voice hoarse. "Let me out."
"Your mother is gone," I told him, under my breath. He kept hammering.
"She should not be gone," he said. "She is cold and I cannot warm her."
He came to live in my small side room after that. He refused the bridesmaids' offers of a shared carriage and would follow the carts as a shadow. He refused my warmth like a boy who had learned the difference between pity and love.
One evening, when rain made the roofs sing, I knelt beside him outside the closed palace gate and handed him a handkerchief.
"Here," I said. "Wipe your hands."
He flinched, as if touching would stain.
"I am dirty," he whispered. "My blood is dirty."
"No," I said, and put my hand on his to bandage the cracked skin of his palm. "Children shouldn't think they are dirt."
He stared up like a small animal caught, and then, for the first time, smiled at me.
"Martina," he said softly, "will you be my mother?"
"Yes," I said, and the word made me brave.
We fumbled through the days. He learned to read from my slow lessons; he taught me to stand still under fury. We fought with the world and with small things: who could take the pillow, who would sit by the window. He wrote names in the wrong script and apologized like a prince and a pauper at once.
"Don't mock him for being small," Henley said once, watching him try to eat without orders. "He bears a storm."
"He's stubborn," I would answer. "But he is mine now."
At festival the palace shuddered with light and a new woman, Brielle Wagner, danced like something unearthly. The emperor's eyes, which could usually be polite to bone, turned hungry.
"Tonight I sleep with her," the emperor said softly, as if this were a thing to be arranged.
"Is that what is right?" Loretta whispered.
The court laughed like coins. We were told to praise the performer, to throw tiny awards as if we handed out bones. The emperor and the high ladies tossed golden tokens. The music rose.
I was handed one token, and for a moment I thought of the slave girl and how easy it had been to toss a woman's dignity on the floor.
"Do not throw it," Henley warned.
"Throw it," Justine said, as if daring me.
I clenched the token and threw it. It hit Brielle's head and left a dark, gleaming mark. She kept dancing, smiling, graceful even with that small bruise.
"You should not," Henley said after, but I only watched Brielle carefully. She was not what the gossip said.
A child learns much about danger from small gestures. Oscar saw that token hit the performer and he looked at the emperor's back with a deepening pain. Later he told me, "He threw her away."
Years passed, but for the most part they were the same small days: lessons, small kindnesses, the boy's stubborn face when he refused to beg, the way he would hum a broken song. I hid things in my pillow for him—rubbings from the parks, small pastries—so that when he woke alone he wouldn't feel too lonely.
Then war came. The city rims burned. Men with strange banners marched and the capital shook. Rumors ran like fever through the corridors. I had tried to keep Oscar indoors, to protect him with my small rank and Henley's old loyalty.
"Stay," I told him one morning.
"I am not a thing to be caged," he said. He left anyway, a boy with a sword that did not fit his hands.
When the gates fell and the hall filled with smoke, a figure strode in with a sword, blood like a dark river along its edge. He placed a severed head on the threshold and walked slowly toward me. Warmth moved through the room like a weather change.
"Mother," he said, and then bent at the knees.
It was Oscar, grown in the quick years of battle, no longer the small child who hid behind curtains. He had the same eyes, but now they were cut by steel.
I had to keep my balance on the cushion. Even Loretta's face, who had aged into a certain softness, narrowed to stone.
"Who did this?" she asked.
He looked as if he might say a thousand things and then said only, "For what she did."
"For whom?" the emperor said.
"For all the women you made into stories," Oscar said. "For the one whose mouth would not stop, for the child who will not have to be silent."
"A rebel," a minister hissed.
"Is this treason?" someone whispered.
"Why have you come here with a head?" Loretta asked, as if the answer could be civil.
Oscar rose slowly. He placed his sword point first into the polished floor and let it rest. "Because the palace needs to learn that the court cannot kill with impunity."
His voice carried. The courtyard had filled with soldiers who had been waiting for orders and women who had never expected to become witnesses. Justine's smile disappeared like a moth. Henley stood up straighter than I'd seen in years.
The emperor walked forward as though to take the boy's hand and call it a mistake. "You dare—"
"You have destroyed too many," Oscar said. "You have taken mothers and then claimed their sons."
"Enough," the emperor barked, red appearing in his face for the first time.
"I do not want to kill my blood," Oscar said, "but I will not let your crimes be a habit." He turned to the courtiers. "These women were silenced on your order. You will answer where there is light."
"What are you asking?" Loretta said. She did not tremble, but she sounded as if someone had stolen the ground from under her.
Oscar looked at me and then pointed to the benches. "Bring them all into the courtyard. Let every witness speak."
Guards hurried. The accused, those who had quietly whispered and arranged the punishments, were brought out one by one: Justine Morris, some eunuchs Henley had never liked, ministers who had sat in judgment. The courtyard, once a place of ritual, became a stage.
"Confess," Oscar said. "Tell the people what you did."
Justine's face was the first to change. There had been a glow of contempt on her earlier; now it slid into shock, then denial.
"I did what the court required. I only followed custom," she said. Her voice tried to be defiant, and then she laughed like a bird caught in a net. "You are mad. Who are you to command?"
"You told the emperor lies!" Oscar shouted, and his voice made the sun seem to lean toward us. "You told stories about red powder. You pointed at a poor woman to save your pride."
"Court custom is not a sin," she insisted.
"Then answer," he said, and he reached into his sleeve and gave the girl a token—I had seen that token before. "This is the one you dropped at her room. It was a mockery of her. You used it as a lever."
She went white. The eunuchs who had carried messages looked down, and one by one confessed that they had been given orders to find 'proof'. They had been paid and threatened.
The emperor's face, which had been swagger, flickered. "You lie—"
"You have the imperial seal," Oscar said. "You signed it."
"Our deeds are done in private," the emperor replied. "This is not a court. This is a ceremony of madness."
The crowd's murmurs grew into a roar.
"Shame!" one voice called. "Shame on the court!"
"You will be judged in the sunlight and the people will see," Oscar said. "No more hidden canes on cold steps. No more blood for treaties."
Justine's reaction changed like an actor flipping a page: first confusion, then fury, then frantic denial, then terror. "I did it for safety," she cried, stumbling. "I did it to keep favor. You can't—"
"Stand still," Oscar told her. He was not cruel. He simply set the facts down as if laying stones.
Guards moved in not to injure but to ensure order. They called in witnesses: the palace women who had been ordered to keep silent, eunuchs who had carried out nasty instructions, the kitchen maids who had seen the slave girl dragged. Each voice was small but the sum of them hit like thunder.
"As for the emperor's orders," a steward said, voice shaking, "we carried his seal. We thought it was his will. We were afraid."
The emperor's face crumbled into incredulous denial. "I never—" He swallowed. "I signed for security. This is treachery."
"Is it treachery to spare a life?" Oscar asked. "Or treachery to kill silently?"
The mothers who had lost children or lost sleep stood up like reeds. A woman who had been the emperor's favorite's chambermaid spoke and said plainly how the ruler had laughed at the misfortune of others. Another woman said how a token had been used as evidence to hide a scandal. The courtyard grew hotter with confession. The crowd swung between outrage and stunned hush.
Henley came forward, her old soldier voice steady. "The men who ordered the chains must answer," she said. "Do not hide behind the throne."
"Silence!" the emperor roared, and then the sound broke out of him like an exposed wire.
"Enough," Oscar said, and he demanded a public reckoning. He did not call for blood; he called for truth. He asked the ministers to read the logs. He asked the palace clerks to show who had been paid and why. The documents matched up with the eunuchs' story.
When they realized the paper trail existed, the accused shifted. Some tried to say the logs were forged, some blamed servants. The crowd hissed.
"Look at their faces," someone shouted. "Those who smiled when a woman was beaten!"
"Bring them to the east square and unmask them," Oscar said. "Let the people see the hands that struck."
They dragged the worst offenders—not fatally, but stripped of the luxurious silk that had been their camouflage—before those who had once been trampled. They were forced to stand where the slave girl had been struck. Musicians stopped playing. The city's folk, who had never been allowed into the inner sanctum, watched from the outer gates. Men of the palace lines pressed forward, eyes wide.
"What did you see?" a woman cried to one of the eunuchs. "Did you enjoy it?"
"I followed orders," he said.
"Take his badge," Oscar said. "Let him lose the honor he used to hurt."
I watched Justine shift from gilded arrogance to the slack face of someone unmade. She tried to speak of duty and ritual, of how custom had its reasons, but the words broke apart. She fumbled, then began to cry. "I did it to keep my place!" she wailed. "I thought—"
"Then you can leave," Oscar said. "Leave your place. Ask those you harmed for mercy."
"Mercy?" she begged. "I gave the orders to save myself. Please!"
Women in the gallery spat; some laughed softly. A handkerchief tried to catch the sound and failed.
I saw the emperor in the midst of it all, at first furious, then alight with denial, then desperately accusing his ministers. "My court," he said finally, voice raw. "You betray me!"
"You betrayed them first," Oscar answered. "You used law as a blade on the low. Now you must stand where you forced others to stand."
His reaction went from shock to frantic anger to denial to pleading speedily, like a man who had been forced out of a maze. He tried to blame misinterpretation, then claimed he had been advised wrong. He then tried to call for guards, but they looked to the boy who led them more than to the man whose crown had meant more than a chair.
The crowd watched the beating heart of the palace unfold. Men and women who had never expected to witness justice found that the act of truth felt heavy and good. Some wept, some clapped. Others took out simple wooden tablets and wrote down what they had heard. The names of the dead were spoken aloud and struck like small gongs.
Justine crumpled and covered her face. "I did what was given me," she sobbed. "I did not know—"
"You did," Henley said. "You made choice."
The emperor, left exposed without the comforts of his staged dignity, had the most terrible change. He had been a man used to making others disappear by dint of a hand sign. Here he learned what it felt to be seen naked by the many.
"I rescind nothing," he tried to say. "My power is absolute."
"It is not absolute over truth," Oscar replied.
The crowd, now emboldened, would not take the emperor's attempts to hold power through fear. "Public penance," someone called. "Do it where we can see you."
And so they brought him to stand where the slave girl had been struck, and the emperor, whose will had carved out many small deaths, was made to listen to the list of victims read aloud. He had to kneel briefly in a way no crown had taught him. He was asked to lay down an insignia and apologize, and his face, the one the court had learned to mimic, changed into an expression that looked like a child's first realization of consequence.
There were those who would have never let go of the old order. They hissed. They spat. But the thing the courtyard now held was not spectacle; it was a record. The men and women who had once been shadows now had names attached to their pain.
By the time the sun dipped low, the accused had been stripped of their titles or forced into exile. The emperor kept his crown, but his trust had fissured. He turned on the guards like a wounded lord, then folded into himself and retreated.
"Do not celebrate too soon," Henley said quietly to me. "Power is a stubborn weed."
"I know," I whispered.
Oscar looked at me then, tired and wild. "We have started something," he said.
"You did what needed doing," I answered.
He smiled once, small as before. "You told me to stand," he said. "I learned how."
The courtyard emptied slowly; the city outside had heard and would keep listening. People who had once been invisible walked taller. Some women planted small memorials beneath the old ginkgo tree. The palace, which had always felt like a cage, had opened a crack.
At night, Oscar sat by the low window where I had once bandaged his children's hands. "Do you regret it?" he asked.
"I regret how many had to pay the price for truth to be seen," I said. "But I do not regret that the truth came out."
He put his small hand in mine. "Then we move forward."
We did. The palace would never be the same. The emperor's rule frayed at the edges. Men who had once made rules in the dark were moved to the bright. Some fled. Some tried to rebuild. Oscar walked through the corridors with a different step. He did not seek spectacle; he sought balance.
Years later, in a quiet room where the wood smelled of old ink, I took out the torn songbook I had hidden under my pillow for him years ago—the one he had once shredded into paper birds. It was mended with thin stitches and looked every bit like the fragile thing it had always been.
"Remember how you cried when they burned her?" I asked.
"I remember," he said. "And I remember you telling me I was not filth."
"You were never filth," I answered. "You were a child who learned to be brave."
He touched the page, his finger tracing a line of a verse. "You kept the book."
"I kept it because it held your voice."
He smiled, the way he had the first rainy night, and then closed his hand over mine. Outside, the ginkgo whispered in the wind.
We had cracked a cage and learned there were many nails to pull out yet. But the sound of a single nail coming loose is a kind of music that never fades.
The End
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