Revenge13 min read
The Princess, the Three Jars, and the Promise of No More Marriages
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I remember the birthday banquet as a bright room full of candles and old soldiers’ laughter. I remember my father — Emperor Mario Montgomery — lifted on the throne like a giant who had carried us across a storm. I remember, most of all, the moment he folded as if a rope had been pulled from his knees.
"I will say it plain," he said first, breath rattling. "Keep things simple. No show."
"Father," Dalton Clemons answered, voice steady as he poured wine. "We will honor your wish."
He had always been steadier than I expected. Dalton had been small once, hiding behind a girl called Ximena Cleveland. That girl — Ximena — had been the bright thread through our household before the world tore her away.
"Where is Ping-an?" Father asked next, and the court froze.
"I—" I could not say her old name. I could only sit, breath stuck in my chest like a bird. He looked at the bed beside him as if he might find what he sought under the canopy. "Where is my Ping-an?"
"My Ping-an?" His voice was thin. "My Ping-an, where did she go?"
He saw me, and his tired face lit for a second. "Ximena," he said like a child calling for a lost kitten. "Ximena!"
Then he shook his head, small and trembling. "You are Aurora, not Ximena," he told me. He smiled in a way that split me open.
I fell onto him and cried so hard my shoulders shook.
Dalton's eyes shone. "Father, Ping-an is gone," he said. "She left us years ago."
Father grabbed Dalton's hand like an anchor. "Remember," he whispered, eyes wide and wild, "from now on, our daughters will never be traded away. Even if the kingdom must fall, we will never marry our girls into another land."
Dalton nodded until his jaw hurt. "I will remember," he said. "I swear I will remember."
Father breathed deep, smiled one last time, called out the missing name as if it would come back, and then, finally, he closed his eyes.
1
My name is Aurora Carson. When I tell this story, I tell it with my throat tight and my hands still smelling faintly of ink and thread. I tell it because promises must be kept, especially the ones made on a dying man's mouth.
We were not born into palace life. Our father was once a butcher from a poor street. When disaster found the old court and the hungry rose against the crown, he sold himself to a rebel band for fifteen copper coins. Maybe his hands, used to heavy knives and honest work, made him strong enough to lead. Maybe his laughter and blunt fairness made men trust him. He grew a following and finally, without firing a needless shot, walked through our city gate and put an end to an old, rotten reign.
Dalton became heir. I became a princess. Ximena, who had been the light of our little courtyard, became the reason our father left the pig stall and became the man who could rearrange the world.
"My Ximena," Father said often, when wine made his memory soft and his tongue loose. He meant the child who had called for "peace" with her baby voice. We all knew that Ximena — small, sharp-eyed, with a laugh that made men stop their grumbling. She could fix a torn shirt, soothe a frightened child, and make an old soldier sit still and drink his broth in peace. She could make the whole camp do its washing properly. To a troop of hardened men, she was a hearth.
If Father had not found Ximena, we might have starved. If he had not risen, Dalton would have been nothing more than a trough-boy. Ximena was the reason we were not dead.
2
Ximena grew up fast. When our mother died soon after I was born, she shifted into the role of elder sister without complaint. She was small, with large black eyes that seemed to swallow light. People would say, "Look at Ximena," and their tired faces would soften. She held me on her back while she cooked and kept a boyish bundle of puzzles in a pocket for me. When soldiers came to the camp, they called her "little cotton jacket" and let her lift their mood like a warm cup.
When Father returned to our village years later, he found Ximena waiting. He tried to speak and failed, like a man drunk on too many memories. She ran to him and fell into his arms. He left without fanfare, again the soldier with the same boot prints. He kissed her forehead and vanished into the night.
Later, when he became Emperor Mario Montgomery, he brought with him three jars of wine that he had hidden and buried years before. He said, "For my girl, when the day comes that she leaves, drink. Laugh, and remember." He named the palace in her honor. He called her "Princess of Peace," though she called herself Ximena and preferred to sit where the sun came through.
3
Ximena found someone. He was Enzo Johnston — light-footed, steady, and brave enough to laugh at danger. They were together like a pair of young dogs, fierce and soft. Enzo loved Ximena not for court ribbons but for the way she focused on small mercies — a warm bowl, a fixed shoe, the way she set a plain stitch straight. He came from the same camp as our father, and he had scars to show he had stood where the world broke its teeth.
When whispers came that an enemy to the north — the Khan of the Rugged Plains — demanded a princess as a pledge, our father's thick hands found the table and split it clean. "Anyone who thinks to take my Ximena," he roared, "first walk over my body."
Ximena surprised us all. She asked to go. "If I can keep people from starving," she said softly, "if my going can stop the slaughter, then I will go." Thousands of mouths might be pressed closed if one girl walked into a foreign court. Dalton tried to stop her. Enzo offered to fight rather than hand her over. Ximena only looked at both of them and said, "I will not let the harvest rot. I will keep the city alive if I can."
So she went. The whole city knelt on the road as the carriage departed. I remember her giving Father a small cloth pouch she had sewn with two birds entwined. "Wait for me," she said. "I will come back."
"You must come back," Enzo whispered at the riverbank that night. "I will find you. I will come and get you."
"Then come," she said. "Bring your sword. Bring your courage."
4
She left us. Days folded into one another. We kept his promise to think of her as a light. Father pressed his palm against the portrait on the palace wall and spoke to it as to a living thing.
Years later a messenger came. The words he brought were small knives. "She is gone," the messenger said. "She will not come back as she was."
We did not get to station ourselves under a sky of mourning softly. We were thrust into a storm. Father fell from his throne, hit the ground, and something inside him broke like thin glass. He hit himself until he bled because he could not bear the thought of what he had sold, thinking it would be a safer harbour. We dug up the three jars and drank until the lids rattled with grief.
Enzo did not sit. He called men and led them, like wildfire fed by a desire that was not mere revenge. "If my love was taken and made small, I will make sure their world trembles," he said. He trained day and night and turned into the man the camp had always known he might become: a leader who could not sleep for plans.
5
"War is an ugly thing," Dalton said to me before he left with the army, hands on my shoulders. "It will not bring her back. But it will make sure the guilty feel what they have done." He wore the face of a man who had carried a little sister's burden for decades. "Promise me," he said. "Keep the memory."
"I will," I said. But my promise was a small thing against what they would do.
When the army rode north, they did not think of mercy. The Rugged Plains had demanded our girl as a bauble; they had taken her and left bruises on her bones and silence in her letters. We had lost a sister. They had lost any right to call themselves men.
6 — The Return of the Jar and the Bone
Enzo returned first. He came like a storm and like a funeral. He had a wooden box with him, covered with cloth. In it was a small jar — one of Father's three jars — and inside that jar, a smaller jar: a bone box. Enzo stood in the hall and put the jar on the table without ceremony.
"This is what they brought home," he said, not looking at anyone. "This is Ximena."
The room went quiet. Dalton's jaw worked like a bellows. Father fell to his knees and struck the floor until dust flecked his hands. He rose and slapped himself each time his hand met his face. "I failed her," he cried. "I failed my girl."
I sat, hands folded, and watched him fold like a thin man. I wanted to hold him and shake him both at once.
7 — The Oath and the Law
After a night when the three jars were opened in Father’s presence and we drank until the bitterness burned like memory, Father declared a law from the wide chair of state.
"From this day," he said, each syllable like a weight, "the daughters of our house will never be given to other lands." The court echoed it back. "If the enemy comes to demand our daughters, let the earth cover us first."
Dalton wrote the decree and hammered it down like a last stallion shoe. In the years that followed, the law grew like a tree. The memory of Ximena took root in every hall and on every child's lips. Parents pointed to her portrait and said, "That is Ximena. She saved us by sacrificing herself."
8 — The Public Punishment(s)
War ended, but what the law demanded was not simply the marching of spears and the burning of the enemy's tents. It demanded justice seen by all, like a clear bell in the square.
Armando Black had been the old Khan, the first man who bought our princess and made a game of power. He struck his chest and lay drunk while his court cowered. He was punished on the field of justice in the capital, not alone, but in plain sight where mothers could watch.
The day the captives were paraded into the square, the air felt like a held breath. The crowd pressed close. Children sat on their fathers' shoulders. Women clutched cloths to their mouths. The ropes around the captives were short and rough. Armando stood in his embroidered coat, face ashen, trying to pull the hood over his head, to hide the way his eyes darted. A dozen soldiers pushed him forward. He was older than he had seemed from a distance; his curls had turned grey at the temples.
"Bring him," someone called, and a hush fell.
Enzo had asked for witnesses. Dalton had said, "No private guillotine," and I, who had only learned civil terms as a child, felt nothing but cold. This was not just revenge. This was a lesson spelled out in iron.
They set Armando on a simple wooden platform in the center of the square. The platform was low, so nobody would say the punishment was hidden. The palace drums beat once, and a magistrate read the charges aloud.
"You took our daughter," the magistrate said, voice clear, "You beat her. You allowed her to be broken. For this, the law finds you guilty of crimes against humanity and against the peace of the realm."
Armando tried to snarl. "I did what my place required," he said. His voice was thin. "I kept peace between my people and yours."
"Peace?" a woman in the crowd shouted. "You kept peace with your cane and bruises?"
A soldier shoved a basin of cold water under Armando's arms and splashed it on his face. The old man flinched. Someone in the crowd spat.
"Show us mercy," he whispered to Dalton, or maybe to Enzo; he could not tell, but the words were a coward's slime. "I was only a pawn. I obeyed my own lords."
Enzo stepped forward. "You were no pawn to the wounds you made," he said. "You chose to make a child's life a pawn on your gambling table." He did not raise his hand to hit; he did not need to. His voice alone carried like a blade. "Look at the hands you hurt. Look at what you gave back. Ashes."
Armando's face tightened, then reddened as the crowd turned its anger into chant. "Shame! Shame!" they cried. A dozen voices joined. They lifted up those two words and beat them down on Armando's chest.
He tried to deny; he tried to claim duty. His defiance dwindled like a reed in a river. He began to tremble.
"Do you feel anything?" Enzo asked, calm and wet with a grief he had carried too long.
Armando coughed blood. "No," he said. "No, I feel—"
"—You feel kingship without conscience," Enzo finished.
Enzo had prepared a display of the damage done to Ximena: not just word, but object. He took from under the cloth a small embroidered cloth Ximena had once made for a soldier's daughter; it was torn and stained. He held it up.
"Do you know this?" Enzo asked.
Armando's eyes met the cloth like a man blind who sees light, and then all at once his mouth opened and he vomited into the basin. The crowd leaned forward as if they were waiting for a confession. But Armando could not speak a truth that would comfort anyone; he could only groan and try to lift his chin.
"Let him be taken to the stocks," Dalton ordered. "Let those who lost daughters and brothers see that justice is done."
Armando was hauled to the stocks at the square's edge. There he stood, shamed, with children pointing, with mothers covering their faces, with men taking pictures on small contraptions brought to court by the new city scribes. People crowded around to speak: "He deserved more." "We saw the bruises in her letters." "How can any man hide behind command when he breaks a child's body?"
Armando's posture changed as the sun moved across the market square. At first he was defiant. Then his eyes grew wide and hungry for anyone's mercy. Then he pinched his lips and began to deny: "I did not—" He clutched his robe. "I only followed orders." The crowd drank those words like a bitter broth and spat them out.
A young mother who had lost her son in a campaign strode forward. She lifted a hand and slapped him hard across the face. The sound of the slap echoed. More hands slapped him. Some spat. A child kicked his boot. People shouted. "See him fall," they said. "See what comes when men trade daughters like stones."
The scene lasted the whole day. Witnesses recorded it, scribes wrote it into the scrolls, and the magistrate pronounced fines and disbursals to the families of the dead and wounded. Armando shrank as the crowd turned his story into a thousand small humiliations. He cried out, then begged, then denied, then slumped. At dusk he was carried away in a cart with men who would bind him to a distant labor camp. "Let his name be mud," the herald said. "Let this be a lesson."
This was the first public punishment. It was not simply a stroke of revenge. It was a teaching: that the empire would show its wounds and demand that others learn from them.
But there was another man — Arturo Morel — who had not been present in the first shame. He was a later lord, younger, slick, who had been given to charm and cruelty. When he was captured months later, his punishment had to be different. War teaches that every sin wears a different shape.
Arturo’s punishment was not stocks and slaps. The court took him to the riverside, where trade ships pulled in and people met arriving fish. The city set up a tribunal right by the quay, where merchants would pass and sailors would point. There, they assembled the women who had been servants saved from the Rugged Plains: those who had paled under beatings, those who could not speak the same tongue, those who had lost children. They stood with faces exposed.
"Name them," the magistrate said, and one by one they told brief scraps of truth: how Arturo had ordered them stripped, how he had mocked their prayers, how he had taken their children away as trophies. Each testimony was a small nail.
Arturo stood wrapped in fine cloth, clean and smiling at first. But as the tales grew, his smile thinned. A worker who had once been a cook folded forward and spat in his luxury robe. The crowd's hush turned into a dull roar. The sea breeze carried the sound of accusations to the ships.
Then the mayor stepped forward and read a decree: Arturo would be sent to return, under guard, to every village where his orders had caused pain, and he would be forced to undo the harm he could. He would rebuild what he had broken with his own hands. He would serve, in visible labor, polishing the roofs, carrying water, and rebuilding crumbling houses for a year. The public would watch. Every time he attempted to hide, he would be dragged back like a criminal to do the work.
"Public penance," the mayor said. "Let him taste the salt and the labor he denied to others."
Arturo's face crumpled like a page burned. He begged, he promised, he offered coin. "I will do it," he cried. "I will do anything. Spare me a life of shame."
"Not spare," a woman said coldly. "Make him learn in front of us."
So Arturo worked. Men and women watched him carry thatch on his back. Children pointed and old men spat as he drew water. He tried to meet eyes, to smile, but the gaze of the workhouse recovered every time. At the market, a fruit seller shoved him aside, and a neighbor who had once been robbed by his orders spat on his palms. This was different from Armando's shame. This was daily, slow — a punishment spread across time. His hands blistered, his clothes grew rough, and the memory of comfort gave way to raw nails and ache.
Where Armando had been crushed publicly in a day, Arturo became a living example for months. Every time he went to the square, people pointed, children called his name as if it were a fable. The magistrate recorded it all. The testimonies grew into scrolls that were taught in school: "How not to rule."
Both punishments worked. They were different in measure and in public shape, but both satisfied the law’s demand: that those who take flesh for bargaining must be seen and judged as men who had traded away their common humanity.
9 — Aftermath
There were other small scenes of justice. Corrupt ministers who had taken bribes for grain were made to hand sacks of flour to the starving. A treasury official, who had hoarded silver while villages starved, was tied to a wagon and made to hand out rice. People came to watch and sometimes cheered. The city healed with a slow, public kind of cleaning. We built memorials. We taught children the stories, as if scars could be turned into lessons.
10 — The Little Things That Stayed
Enzo married the memory of Ximena. He kept her cloth, her small scrap of embroidery, and he made the unit of soldiers she had loved into a force called "The Peace Guard." Dalton, growing into the crown, built schools and training halls where girls could learn to read and, if they wanted, to carry a spear. We planted a tree for Ximena in the palace garden.
"She saved more lives in dying than some kings do in war," Enzo said to me once, when we closed the palace gates and walked between the hedges. "She chose the world over a single heart."
"I know," I said. "Sometimes choice is all there is."
11 — Time and Memory
The years moved like a measured foot. Children were born and named with the "An" that means peace. The law held. The story of Ximena seeped into every household and was told beside many hearths. Statues of a calm woman, small and folded, appeared in courtyards. Parents pointed at her and said, "That was Ximena, who chose our safety." We did not forget.
When Father died, his last words were Ximena's name. Dalton, sick with age, gripped his son's hand and said, "Remember: never trade a girl for statecraft." The new emperor lifted his chin, silent and bright with tears. The law lived on.
12 — A Promise
The three jars of wine were opened sometimes, only on the gravest nights, and we drank and told the story again. Enzo would sit at the head and tell how he had failed and had tried to make up for it later. He never stopped blaming a world that thought a girl's life could be moved like a pawn. He never stopped building bridges over battlefields.
"She would have wanted us to grow kinder," he said once. "Not to pile shame on a man and say that is justice. Real justice heals. But we also needed the world to see the cost."
13 — The Last Scene
Years later, on a clear night when a small moon hung like a coin, I walked under the statue of Ximena and touched the carved hand. Children raced past with wood swords. A little girl stopped and looked up, mouth open.
"Who is she?" the child asked.
"She was Ximena Cleveland," I told her. "She was gentle and brave."
"Did she come back?" the child asked.
"No," I said, and my voice caught. "She came back as a small jar of bone and cloth. But she taught us more than any triumph. She taught us to name our daughters and keep them as our own."
The child nodded solemnly, as only children can when truth is big. "I will remember," she said.
I smiled and thought of Father on his bed, whispering Ximena's name like a prayer. I thought of the cups of wine and the jars and the law carved into stone. I thought of Enzo and Dalton and the way the city taught its children to look at a story and learn the pain inside.
"Promise me," I said to the child, a little foolishness in my voice.
"Yes," she said, until the word was a small bright thing. Then she ran to her friends and shouted, "We will not be gifts to others!" and they cheered like tiny soldiers.
The statue's shadow leaned to the lane. A street vendor shouted, a dog barked, and somewhere a small spoon clinked in a cup. In the court above, the three jars of wine leaned for a moment against each other, old friends. I walked home along the path, fingers touching the carved edge of the jar in my pocket — the one Ximena had given Father, the one Dalton kept through wars and laws.
"Goodnight," I said to the city. "Goodnight, Ximena." And I felt that the jars were not just about drink. They were about memory and the vow that a daughter is never a bargain.
The End
— Thank you for reading —