Face-Slapping14 min read
The Princess Who Wore the Private Seal
ButterPicks17 views
I woke to snow on my sleeves and a man kneeling in the courtyard refusing to stand.
"Get up," I told him, and the snow rimed his hair like a crown he had not wanted.
"Your Highness," he said, without looking up. "I cannot."
"Then I'll shelter your head from the cold." I held my umbrella over him because that was the only comfort I could spare.
"Your Highness," he said again, finally raising his eyes. "I already have someone I love. I cannot go through with the marriage."
I let out a small laugh that sounded stupidly light in the cold.
"If you can get my father's blessing, I have no objection," I said, as if I were bargaining over a teacup and not our future.
His face folded. "But you love someone else, Your Highness. Why insist on tying yourself to me?"
"I keep you," I said, quiet. "Your army steadies the court. My marriage to you is a promise to the realm. With you bound to the crown, no one will question my loyalty. I will not interfere in your life. Go to her. Bring her to our house when you wish. But if you refuse me and choose another alliance—" I let the unsaid hang cold between us. "I cannot promise any other princess would be so tolerant."
He swallowed. Snow dripped from his lashes.
"Then do what you must," I added, and pulled my cloak tight. I walked away because sudden decisions are often best walked into.
I am Kallie Ibarra, a princess in a court that ate honesty for breakfast and spat guile for dessert.
"It is the easiest way to live," I told myself as I dressed. "Be useful. Be seen. Hide what you cannot afford to lose."
I had been useful for years.
Arden Beasley had taken the throne by violence. My blood should have been a damning thing, a claim to be ended. He had not killed me because my mother made herself useful to him with shame and quiet, and because I learned the language of survival young. I learned to be the smiling daughter; I learned to be the soft cloth that took the blows.
But being safe is not the same as being in control.
Graham Nelson—my brother in name, lover when he wanted, tempest when he feared—was not a man to be bargained with. Forrest Amin, the chancellor's son, had been my private light for as long as memory allowed. Joel Cunningham, the man who had once bled for me in a cellar and later taught me to read the world, kept my pluck tethered to something steadier than whims. Crew Morozov—the general with tenderness like iron—married me out of necessity and remained faithful in ways many men could not be taught.
And Alayna Okada—sharp, hungry, brilliant—became the apprentice who would one day run her own market and close a deal with a look.
"Are you going to sleep now?" Graham asked me the night before I wed Crew.
"You sound like a brother," I said, rolling my eyes.
"Brothers must remind," he murmured, and then, almost tender, "When you go, do not undress in public."
"Brother," I teased, and we were those two who were one role by day and another by night.
The wedding was a pageant of red and drums, but the bedchamber belonged to simple misunderstandings and to my practiced face of composure.
"Back out," Crew said, breathless and very much embarrassed.
"Why?" I teased. "This is short and sweet. It's a single night—"
"You promised," he said.
I found his awkwardness almost comic. "You have a heart," I said to him, and he fled like a boy caught with a stolen flower.
I met Joel in the garden after. He had been gray and patient, hands that once held quill and later steadied kitchen tools, and eyes that remembered when he chose a sword to protect me. I draped my cloak over his shoulders because of course my first instinct was to make sure he was warm. He laughed softly.
"You sit where you like," I said, pouring a cup from the untouched wedding wine. "This bottle is ours for the price of one lie."
He looked at me, pity curled in his voice. "Kallie, you know I will not plead for you to be someone you are not."
"Good," I said, finishing my cup. "Because I don't regret it."
I had learned our court's rules early: move the pieces, not the players; put yourself where they least expect. I would marry Crew Morozov because a general's marriage steadied the court and kept suspicions at bay.
Seeing Forrest Amin—the chancellor's son—in the East Wing the next day and watching him return to his ordered life made something in me ache and resolve at once.
"You have the look of someone married to the truth and wearing a false smile," he said once, years ago, when he would not give me more than a glance. "Why wear it?"
"Because the truth kills the people I love," I answered.
The three months that followed were carefully arranged theater. Crew learned how to greet with ease. Alayna Okada learned how to count money and turn a market stall into a chain. I handed villagers and merchants small favors and watched tenderness root itself where old hunger had been.
"You're lucky he likes Alayna," I said to Crew once, deliberately magnanimous.
"You're the one who tied the knot," he muttered. "You thank me."
I had an army of small conspiracies and one very large plan. Joel spoke quietly in my study one evening, eyes dark with old courage.
"There's a crack in their focus," he said. "Arden fears what he cannot own. The Tartar raids pull the court to war. If you can secure the loyalty of the army, you can pull strings."
"I will not fight in open battle," I said. "I will move the heart."
"You've always been better with hearts than blades," he said.
He did not know how much I was willing to burn.
The court is a theater where faces are masks and masks are weapons. I had learned to wear mine well. I had also learned what a crown felt like in my fist: heavy in its silence, louder than any drum.
When I fell into the river at a festival—no accident, a shove from a jealous courtier—Graham dove in without hesitation. "You always find the worst weather," he scolded, hauling me to shore as if saving me was the easiest thing in the world.
"You're not allowed to be brave and cruel in the same lifetime," I told him from the warmth of his coat.
"Then be grateful," he said, and kissed my wet hair with a rough tenderness that had always been both comfort and confession. He handed me a small private seal later that night—a thin, worn thing that had once been his private token. "Keep this," he said. "If you ever need to move my men, press this and they will follow."
I kept the seal because I knew men who died for symbols would trust one.
The hunt, the poison pills the emperor swallowed each morning because he thought they restored his virility, the sudden favorings of mistresses who resembled the dead—these became my tools and his weaknesses. Joel told me the patterns; Forrest Amin wrote the false documents with a hand he could mimic; Crew Morozov kept his honor where I needed it. Alayna Okada, bless her, built a chain of businesses so my secret funds had cover. One by one, men who had thought themselves safe found their lines of credit and their peerage slipping.
"It is a strange way to win," Alayna said once, measuring out a ledger. "You win with kindness and then remove it as a debt."
"I win with paper and a promise," I said.
"You are not a woman to be trifled with," she smiled. "You are a storm in silk."
The day Arden Beasley fell began with a thinner sun and thicker whispers. I stood in my father's bedchamber and read a leaf of paper while he slept off the wine that had become his daily sleep.
"Wake me when he dies," he had told himself to sleep, and I, like the daughter I never really was, obliged.
At the State Council the next morning, I entered with resignation as my face. I had not yet shed the part of the lovable, half-witty princess in the whispering, gilded halls.
"Your Highness," the chancellor intoned, curious and careful.
"Father," I said, smooth. "May I speak in public?"
"Of course."
I had evidence in my hand: letters in Arden's hand that ordered thuggish arrests, notes of the poison shipments, and the private seal he had used to purchase certain medicines. The chancellor, Forrest Amin, looked at me like a ghost.
"Forrest," I said quietly, "please verify these signatures."
He took the papers, lips thinning. His eyes flicked to the seal and then to me, and in that little motion I saw all of my life: the taught restraint, the borrowed dignity, the private burns.
"I can," he said, and the room froze.
They expected whispers. They expected me to beg. They did not expect me to hold the court like a stage director and let the actors expose themselves.
"Your Highness," Arden's voice wavered, "what are you doing?"
"Reading," I answered. "And judging."
I walked to the dais with his own handwriting between my fingers, the proof of his private orders labeled in a way that could not be denied. "This, my father," I said, turning the paper to show the whole assembly, "is orders to poison a minister's food. This is a list—supplemented by the seal—of shipments of medicine that were not medicine at all."
"Treacherous lies!" a distant minister shouted.
"Look at the ink," I said. "Do not look at me. Look at him. He tried to have our house burned when he believed the lineage threatened. He took those who were innocent and accused them of treason. He sold the dowries of poor women for the right to certain beds."
The hall boiled. Men dropped their polite faces like masks. One by one, officials who owed Arden favors found they owed me more—my nets had been long prepared. Crew Morozov, who had sworn to defend the realm, stepped forward with a quiet I-have-been-wrong look.
"Your Highness," he said, voice steady. "If these are true, what is to be done?"
"Justice," I said simply.
The scene that followed was worse for them than death. I promised the court, and then I made them live the exposure.
"Bring forward Stella Sherman," I ordered—my father's favored who had slithered in with false devotion. She was the woman who had yelled at me by the pond, the one who had pushed me because she thought a reputation could be fixed by force.
She was dragged to the center of the hall by two guards. Her eyes were huge as she realized for the first time that the princes and ministers were not there to shield her anymore.
"You brought a side of my father his comforts," I said, voice loud enough so the galleries could hear every word. "You traded favors for promises. You took women into that man's bed and thought it your right to sleep with power."
"Princess—" Stella began, voice thin as a reed.
"You look surprised," I told her. "You should not have held such a belief in private when your acts were public."
She tried to smile. "I loved him—"
"Love?" I spat the word like a stone. "Love? You love an idea. You loved a chair that kept you warm at night, and you kept the chair supplied with lies."
Her face changed. At first she tried to be scandalized—then indignant—then haggard. The audience began to shift; they smelled blood and authority in a courtly place where both had been rare for decades.
"Now that you've been found greedy and cruel," I said, "you will stand in the square tomorrow and tell the city the truth. You will confess the names of the men you protected and the bribes you took. The people will decide your penalty."
She went pale, then red, then broken. "Kallie," she whispered. "Please—"
I waved off her plea. The crowd in the hall—sages, soldiers, clerks, even some children—had begun to take out their phones and slate-letters; news does not need a scroll anymore. Murmurs swelled into a tide of noise. Some clapped in satisfaction at the long-expected undoing of tyranny. Some recoiled at the spectacle. A dozen quill-holders made hurried notes.
"Next," I said, and with the sweep of my hand the guards brought Arden forward.
"You asked me to love you," he stammered, a small man before a world he had tried to make big.
"You took a throne by killing my father," I said. "You were soft with praise and brutal with poison. You thought grief would make you mad enough to justify your theft."
Arden's eyes sought allies, but they found only the waiting mirror of his own deeds reflected in the faces of those who had known him.
"Arden Beasley," I said, and it was as if the name had a weight now, "you are stripped of the robe of monarchy until the court can judge your actions. You will answer publicly for every one of these orders. You will sit on a low bench in the city square at dawn and read aloud every charge I now press against you."
He tried to strike back. "You will not—"
"Silence." My voice had the bite of winter wind. "You thought you could isolate me. You tried to name me a thing I was not. You tried to make me small. In public I will make you small as a caution."
The manner of their punishment was not a blade at the neck. It was worse for men who depended on face: a public inventory of shame and betrayal, with the world watching and with the former emperor watching his private life be catalogued by those he had once silenced.
Stella's day in the square turned into a three-hour confession where a chorus of witnesses—women who had lost dowries, clerks who had been paid for silence, cooks and attendants—recited the little cruelties that made a household cruel. She began by insisting on her innocence, then denial turned to anger, anger to bargaining, bargaining to collapse.
"Someone is filming," one observer muttered, and a ripple of cameras spread like moth wings.
"She said my father praised her beauty and that he promised to make her a duchess," another woman cried. "She said she would get me a place if I kept quiet."
A merchant stood up. "She told me to keep a ledger, and she paid me in silver to fabricate accounts. I lied. I lied to fill my pockets."
The crowd shifted and leaned in. I watched their faces carefully. Some were mouths in the wind, some were fist-thick with lawsuits. A few were children who would someday grow up thinking that power could be bent.
Stella's colors leeched out. She started to cry, a high pitch pounding against the stone of the square. "I loved him," she kept whispering, but every whisper made her more a caricature: a woman who had thought that her desires could be framed as nobility.
By noon, her petitions turned tinny. She tried to name powerful friends. One by one they shrugged. A man she had supported in the senate wiped his hands of her.
"I did what I had to do," he said, but the way he said it placed his hands where a judge's knife would be.
"Why are you cheering?" she latched onto a boy who had cheered at the start. "Do you not know me?"
The boy, only twelve, shook his head, bluntly innocent. "You were mean to my mother," he said. "She couldn't pay the taxes because you had her husband thrown away."
Stella's eyes opened to a new landscape: not a stage she could manipulate but a world where everyone's memory could be publicized and retold. Her collapse was two acts: first, denial; second, raw pleading; third, final collapse into silence. She tried to crawl back toward Arden and he pushed her away.
"Get up," he snapped—an order that had once felled men. "Stand and speak."
"Let them see me," she said. "Humiliate me if you must."
So I let them. I watched as the morning's uproar scorched their arrogance.
Arden's punishment ended the next day when the chancellor—Forrest Amin—came forward, not to save Arden but to present a ledger of his own. "The truth is heavy, and someone must carry it," he said.
Arden's face shivered through confidence into the brittle corners of shame. He stood at the square's center and read charges until he could no longer force coherence from the words he had once used to summon poison and favor.
"How can you make him do this?" a woman cried.
"Because he fears me," I said under my breath. "He fears the one person who can take his grand scene and fold it small."
The fall of Arden and Stella was immaculate cruelty: public exposure, the consciences they had scorned making them beg, the crowd that had once applauded now turning its gaze into a judge. Arden's voice broke halfway through reading a list he once signed with a bold hand. He stammered and then began to cough; he had aged years in two days.
They both tried variations of the same defense. Surprise—"You set me up." Denial—"I never gave that order." False piety—"God would not have me do such a thing."
The crowd hissed and took up the goods of evidence like victors picking through plunder. Some chanted for formal trial. Some called for exile. Others wanted more severe measures.
I do not claim that my method was merciful.
But it was effective.
After the punishments of the square—a day that would be retold for seasons—I tightened my grip on what remained: the private seal Graham had handed me, Joel's cautious counsel, Crew's quiet loyalty, Alayna's business acumen. Forrest Amin stood apart, the chancellor whose son had been my secret comfort, and yet now he had to help me bind the broken crown more securely than Arden ever had.
Graham returned to the city like a ghost with a private wound. He came into the court with a crown of decisions and the private seal trembling like a small sun between his fingers.
"Kallie," he said when he found me again. "I could not stay away."
"You left scars," I said, and his face shivered. "You should not have come back."
"Would you rather I had never come?" he asked, and there was pain not just from grief but from teeth grinding on regret.
He was followed by rumors of battle and trickery and by the private seal he pressed into my hand. "Keep it," he said. "If you ever need to call my men, press it and they will ride."
"I do not need your soldiers," I said, but I kept the seal. The world is full of instruments one keeps for the last argument.
The city changed quickly after that. With Arden's disgrace, the courtiers had to pick sides. I took mine. Crew commanded the army, Forrest reshaped the council, and Alayna's shops spread like a net into provinces. The crown weighed differently on my head: less the gilded promise of a child than the precise instrument of a plan.
I ruled not with the cry of tyrants but with a ledger and a list. I redistributed favors; I placed Joel back where he belonged; I gave Alayna land and a monopoly on certain imports. I took the small kindnesses that had kept me alive and turned them into institutions that would preserve my authority.
And yet there was a hollow where Graham's warmth had been.
One night, alone in the East Wing where he had often come to find me, I opened the private seal and held it to my palm. I pressed its soft metal to my forehead like a war prayer.
"Will you remember me?" I whispered to the empty silk and cold stone.
I had not yet learned that memory is a poor substitute for a person.
The punishment I had meted out had been public, the humiliation completed with witnesses and words. The worst part was seeing their faces change—pride gone to shock, then denial, then resignation, then broken pleading. Even the spectators changed, some filling with righteous rage, others with the uneasy feeling of having cheered too long for the wrong side. Some took out their tablets and filmed; others wept. The crowd's reaction varied like weather—hotly approving, disgusted, incredulous, finally tired.
For weeks after, the city smelled of burning paper and fresh paint, as if everyone had tried to repaint their memory. I kept working, sealing appointments, signing grants, giving an ear to a widow who once had been a court cook.
One day Joel found me stitching badly at a little sachet. "Why are you crying over someone who hurt you so?" he asked, gentle like he always was.
"Because I cannot stop remembering the way Graham used to press his thumb against my palm after reading a line of poetry," I said, and then, because the truth will always slip out, "and because sometimes, even the woman who pulled the lever feels the weight of the pull."
He put the sachet down, and for once he did not have a speech of logic. He only folded his hands and said, "You are a good liar, Kallie. You were always good at it. Let your truth be the truth of those you protect."
"You mean Joel's gentle lie," I said, and this time we both laughed.
It is true that I crafted the throne like a garment and then proceeded to wear it. I used men as tools, sure, but I also used kindness as a tool. I found a way to make the city look after itself, to send ships laden with grain when a famine loomed, to open schools for girls that would never kneel without a name of their own.
But I did not forget what made me ruthless: the taste of being threatened in a house where my blood was not enough to save me.
When the trial and punishment ended and the square grew quiet, I walked to the riverside and looked out at the water that had taken me once.
"I took a life and gave another a new order," I muttered. "Is that what being a ruler is?"
A voice at my shoulder said, "It is part of it."
I turned. Forrest Amin stood there with the evening papers in his hand. "You did what you had to," he said. "Now make sure you do right with what's left."
"I will," I said.
The private seal warmed itself in my palm like a sleeping animal. I had the shape of power now, and I planned to keep it. I would follow Joel's quiet counsel, Alayna's keen eye, Crew's steady muscle, and Forrest's pen. And if I had to be ruthless again, I would do so for an empire that would remember its colors and its people instead of its rulers' sins.
When I climbed the high stone step back into the palace that night, I folded my sachet into my pocket and pressed the private seal to it.
It was a small thing: a token in the shape of Graham's thumbprint, and in the folds of silk it would keep a memory.
At the throne, I held the seal like a relic, its metal cool and honest to the touch. "Remember the day," I told myself. "Remember the men who sat before you and the ones who stood with you."
That night I dreamed of a river that gave me back everything I had ever lost and demanded in exchange the faces of those who had once hurt me.
I woke before dawn.
Outside, the city was already stirring. A cart clattered by. A vendor shouted a rhyme. The world went on.
I brushed the little sachet against my heart.
I had won; I had punished. Now I had to govern.
And governing, I learned, is less about the final blow than about the quiet way you make people feel seen, fed, and safer than before.
The End
— Thank you for reading —