Revenge14 min read
The Queen's Long Game and the Broken Silver Hairpin
ButterPicks14 views
1
I eased myself into the inner chamber of the Hall of Clear Rule under the thin moonlight and the roof's shadow. The guard by the door saw me and stepped back without a sound.
"I brought a light," I whispered as I struck the tinder. "Keep watch."
"Yes, Your Majesty." Zeke Benton bowed and left me standing on the threshold.
I lit the foreign incense I'd smuggled from the western traders, the kind that smelled like sun-warmed wood and sea salt. The smoke rose slow and blue in the thin air. I waited and watched the man on the dragon couch.
He looked like sleep, but his brows were knotted. Even asleep he looked like an accusation.
"He'll wake," I told myself and smiled with a small, private cruelty. "Tonight I will win."
I slid off my outer robe and opened the yellow coverlet. The bed was warm. I put out the tinder and felt the warmth swallow me. Then a hand locked on my waist.
My pulse jumped. For a breath I thought of running. I had tried so many tricks already. I had bled my hands to embroider his handkerchief, warmed his pillow in winter, left notes in the books he read. Yet he would not touch any woman in three years. He resisted me like cold iron.
We were tangled when he suddenly stopped. His eyes snapped open, clear and terrible. He bared my name like a verdict.
"Florence!" he spat, and with a shove he threw me to the floor hard enough to bruise my backside. Pain flared. I gathered the coverlet around me like a child's defense.
"Majesty…do you require anything?" I played the obedient wife in a voice thin with fear.
"Get out." He pointed to the door like he dismissed a servant.
"Of course." I slid down the bed-post and wrapped myself. At the doorway I glanced at the still-cooling incense and at him, cheeks flushed, eyelids still bright from the drug. I dared a question.
"This incense…"
He didn't answer. He only glared and I slipped away.
I am Florence Lefebvre. I married Franklin Edwards, the emperor. My father's house is one of letters and law. I was chosen to be his empress. For three years I fed him smiles and schemes. For three years I tried to make him want me. He would not touch me. Sometimes I told myself he had some strange dread of women. The palace whispered it. The court physician hinted at phobias. But the truth turned out to be worse.
2
I went home to my chamber at the Phoenix Rest Hall. The lamps were low, the servants attentive. Kaleigh Corbett took my coverlet; she always moved as if she were afraid to break the world.
"You hungry?" she asked.
"A little." I let my face go blank and ate the small cakes. The incense I had left was now against me. The warmth came up inside me like a flame I could not put out. The drug's strength woke in the quiet room.
Zeke knew something was wrong. He went for cool water, whispered instructions to the maid, then stood guard outside. That night I spent in a cold tub while a servant prayed. I remember nearly lunging at a maid and being dragged back by shame. I cursed the emperor silently. I cursed myself for the plan.
The next day Zeke came with news. "Sire slept with a needle under his wrist," he said. "He soaked to stay clean."
That consolation was small. The Empress Dowager—my aunt, Francesca Herrera—sent for me and slid a sealed book across the table.
"This is the roster," she said. Her voice was a thin blade of amusement. "You will manage it."
"Yes, Mother," I said. I was called "mother" by that woman who had raised me up and who could crush me in the council chamber.
The roster had a red mark by one name. "Who is this?" I asked.
"Juliana Galli," she said softly. "Nolan Huber's daughter. Your emperor's childhood companion."
My fingers went cold. I had already crossed her name out once. I had bribed scribes, whispered in the halls, used my father's people to nix her. My mark had been a black X. How had her name come back cleansed and stamped in red?
"Will you take charge?" my aunt asked. She smiled a smile that meant the game continued.
"Yes," I said. Inside, I felt a spark. I am not patient by nature. I was not simply going to sit and be slighted.
3
On the day of selection I sat at the right hand of the throne and watched a line of awkward girls pass beneath the dragon banner. Franklin sat stiffly, face darkening with each parade. He barely blinked.
The second row contained her. Juliana stood like a woman out of a storybook—tall, straight-backed, and not fluttering like the rest. Her face had a small mouth and a brave jaw. He looked. I saw it. The line of his sternness broke; something eased in his expression.
"Who is she?" I whispered.
"Juliana Galli," said a clerk.
My stomach dropped. I had blacked her name out. I had even used my family's men in the household to press the lists. Yet here she stood, and on Franklin's face was a flicker of light that cut me.
He smiled at her once in a way he had not smiled at me in three years. The smile stung like a lash.
I had tried everything to bind him: embroidered cloth, gifts, cold baths, songs. None of it touched him. He was a firm, metal man. But he had never been iron to Juliana.
4
She became Jade Consort overnight. They carried her in a carriage like a small triumph, and I sat at the side watching him give her the green plaque. When the Dowager later took me aside and fed me melon, she said, "You must have a child, or your house will be ended."
"Yes," I answered. I put the thought away like a bone into the mouth of a dog. Of course I understood. If I bore a son, my father might keep his head. If not—if the empire decided to sweep my family away—then my blood would not save them.
I thought of the early nights when I first entered that man’s bed. I had been a shy girl with a veil and shaking hands. He had brushed my veil aside and then shoved me down. He had not touched me again. I had believed for a foolish moment that his glance had been a small tenderness. He had been confused once. He turned that confusion into a wall.
Now he held Juliana's waist in the moonlight. He did not resist her at all.
"Franklin," I whispered later, at the window paper I had punctured with a hairpin to spy. "Why do you let her be so close?"
He shrugged off my question. "Do not trouble yourself." But inside I saw the way he watched them.
"Does he love her?" I asked Juliana once, in her rooms, when she received me like a visitor.
She smiled a fox’s little smile. "Florence, you were born into the Lefebvre house. I envy you."
"Envy is not comfort," I said. "Do you love him?"
She sipped tea and laughed. "I love the sword. I love the story of the boy who became emperor. I love being the one beside him when he is not alone."
"Is that all?"
She looked at me with pity. "You have a heavy fate, Empress. Your aunt made you a shield. You do not see the chains."
I left smiling, but my hands shook.
5
When my father, Calhoun Sullivan, was accused of taking bribes and tampering with the exam lists, I felt the world hollow out. Sauls and Edsel and the court moved like a trap. My father was dragged to the Department of Punishment. I rode with Zeke and Kaleigh to the Hall of Clear Rule and was stopped from entering.
"Madam, the emperor orders none be allowed in." Edsel Doyle stood at the door.
"Let me in," I demanded. I had been empress long enough to know when a man was afraid of a woman's voice.
"You will anger him." Edsel's mouth trembled.
"Then I will anger him." I nearly pushed past but I was held back by guards. Inside Franklin thundered like a winter storm.
"Traitor!" he shouted. "Traitor! You, Calhoun—"
My throat closed. Inside the hall he accused my father with the heat of a burning thing. The Dowager did not defend him. She looked at me with the expression of a woman who had already placed the pieces on the board.
"Mother!" I called, kneeling at the palace gates. I begged on my knees that she would stop this. For hours I beat the stone. She would not come. Saul Gonzales opened the door only a crack and told me the truth in the smallest voice.
"Give him a child," Saul said. "She said, give him a child, and we will hold them back."
I held onto that promise like a drowning person clutches driftwood. If I could be pregnant, they could not kill my father. I swallowed my shame and went to find Juliana.
6
I found Juliana in her chamber. She looked surprised my suit had found her. She poured tea as if she poured poison.
"Tell me how," I said. "Tell me how you made him want you."
She laughed and leaned forward. "Did you think the emperor was broken? Did you think there was something sick in him that kept him from anyone? He is only careful with what could burn him. He avoids the wrong choice."
"What is wrong in me?" I asked. "Why am I wrong?"
"You are the wrong choice because you are a Lefebvre," she said. "You are a symbol—your father sits where he sits. To him, you are a map of power. You are not a person to be touched. I am merely a comrade from the training yard. I moved in like a shadow."
"Are you cruel?" I asked, surprised by how those words felt like poison in my mouth.
"I am not cruel," she said. "I am plain. I did not set out to burn the house. I only wanted a place. You should have been cleverer."
Her voice was flat and then sharp. "Do you know what I want, Empress?"
"What?" I asked.
"To be the only one he thinks of," she said. "To not have to share half of his carefulness."
She stood and pushed me with the back of her hand. "You should ask him gently, or not at all. A child is not a promise of love."
Her words were a blade. I left. I arranged for stronger incense and deeper sleep. I bribed a watchman. I did what the Dowager asked. I laid myself down like a soldier and let the drug do its work.
7
That night it worked. He moved toward me like a tide. He hissed my name, and for a moment his voice was torn and tender.
"Florence," he breathed.
"I am here," I said. I kissed him, told him I was cheaply everything. He gripped me hard and then softer. For two hours he gave me a body that felt almost like giving.
But when the drug wore off, he looked at me and said, "You are shameless." Then he pushed me away as he always had. I lay in the dark and wept into my sleeve.
Yet a month later the doctor confirmed what I had risked my soul for. I was with child. The Dowager smiled like a woman who had fixed a chessboard.
"For a month we hold," she told me. "We will not press the case."
8
The world turned for me bright and then black. I would sidle to the Hall of Clear Rule and prod the emperor with jokes and small sins. Sometimes he would take my hand and then look at it as if surprised. He would place his palm on my belly stiffly and then withdraw.
"There's a life in you," I joked once.
He did not laugh. His hand stayed there, heavy and uncertain.
"Is it his?" I asked the doctor once, when fear gnawed my sleep.
"Only time will tell."
9
Then came the worst thing. On a damp evening Juliana came to me again. "Do you really want to see your father?" she asked, eyes like flint.
We went to the Department of Punishment, a cold place of iron and damp chains. She walked me to a cell and opened the door.
Inside lay corpses.
My father, my mother—Colette McCormick—and the boy Damon Elliott. All three lay like rags. The scent of rot lifted like a mockery. I fell sick. I vomited bile at the sight. My hand clutched my belly and found only the nervous tightening of fear.
"They killed themselves," Juliana said calmly. "They could not stand the racks."
I wanted to claw her eyes out. I wanted the world to split.
"Why show me?" I hissed, and my fingers slid under my robe. "Why—"
She smiled like a snake. "Because now you will burn. The ember in your throat will be ash. You will be angry and you will not know where to strike."
She pushed me away. I staggered into the corridor and could not stand.
"Carry me," I told Zeke. He did not question. He bore me like a slow lamb to the emperor's study.
10
"How?" I demanded when he stood before me. "Tell me how my father died!"
Franklin looked at me in a way I had never seen. For a long time he did not speak. Then his voice was thick.
"They were guilty," he said. "They colluded. I ordered nothing. I punished what was clear—"
"Tell me how!" I shrieked and in a madness only a woman with nothing left can carry I pulled a silver hairpin from my sleeve and thrust it at his chest.
"Florence!" he cried. Blood welled. He gripped my wrist and did not let go even as the pin sank. He clutched me and ran, chanting for physicians. I felt a hot pain between my legs. I looked down. Blood.
He held me to the carriage and ran for the infirmary like a man carrying both his victim and his god. The tail of the world clattered behind us. Physicians swarmed. They told us what I had known: I had lost the child.
"He miscarried from grief and shock," they said. "Her fever, her violence—we blame emotion."
I felt nothing. The thing I had forged in secret—my father's last hope—slid out of me and with it the last soft part of my life.
11
They locked me in the Phoenix Rest Hall. The Dowager did not want me paraded. The court said I had gone mad. The public said the council had been just. Juliana was stripped of titles and sent to a cold place, or so the rumor said. The truth was worse: she smiled as if she had won.
I lay in bed and thought of burning the whole world. I thought of sitting on the roof and setting the rafters ablaze. The rage sat under my skin like live coals.
One night I did what I had told myself I would never do. I set a candle to the inner canopy and watched the flame grow. Smoke blackened the hall. The fire found the silk and ate it like a beast. I felt the heat and tasted ash and I felt my body go light.
Someone screamed—Kaleigh, Zeke. They were shouting and beating back flames with wet cloths. I heard Saul's voice, full of prayer, and the Dowager's thin exclamations. I heard steps trampling like panic. I felt a beam fall and the world turned cocoa-dark.
I should have died in that fire. I should have been a charred corpse the court could bury and forget. They found me, half-burned, and declared me dead, placed me in a coffin and carried me to the temple. The emperor wept over that coffin as if over the end of a country. He tore at his face, and his moans filled the Hall of Clear Rule.
12
But the world is a poorer place if it cannot stage lies. On the day my coffin reached the imperial tomb, the guards opened it only to find me thin and drugged but alive. While the world prayed I had been incinerated, Saul Gonzales and Zeke Benton and one small doctor that the Dowager trusted took me from the tomb. They swaddled me. They wrapped my face. They gave me a name of nothingness and walked me away under twilight.
"You will leave, Florence," the Dowager told me softly as we walked out of the palace walls under a borrowed hood. "You can choose to be nothing."
"I am called Florence Lefebvre," I said. My voice was a dry reed. "But I am not the woman on the coffin."
She looked at me long. "You can be less or you can begin again."
They took me to the frontier, to a town of salt and clay. There I hid. I wore a black cloak. I let my hair fall loose under a hood until the scarred face cooled.
13
Juliana Galli was punished. They did not string her up in the market as common thieves are strung. That would have been too small a thing. Instead, I insisted—when I still had breath and cunning—that she be punished in a way the court could not ignore.
This is the punishment I demanded and watched take place, and I will not spare a line: it took place before the Hall of Clear Rule, with ministers and silk-clad wives, with market folk stout and thin pressed against rails, and with the emperor himself pale and cold at the throne.
"Why are you doing this?" Juliana asked when they brought her out. Her hair was unbound, her sleeves loose. She looked like a hunted songbird.
"Because you led a bride to the prison and asked her to see the bones of her house," I said, stepping forward on the dais. I had come disguised at first, but then I stood and took off my hood. The court gasped. My face was bandaged, but my voice carried.
"You showed her the emptiness she could make," I said. "You used cruelty as a ladder. You put your hand on the rope and pulled."
"I wanted nothing but the emperor," she whispered.
"You wanted the emperor," I repeated. "And for that you ruined a family."
The emperor stood and his face was marble. He had the right to pronounce death by law, but he did not. He had the right to give no verdict and let the law work. Instead, I demanded—yes, demanded—that she be publicly stripped of the very thing she had used like a cloak: her favor.
"By decree," I said to the high chancellor, "let her lose her title and rank. Let her be placed in the summer house of the northern palace and stripped of all trappings. Let the market know she is no longer a jewel. Let every county messenger carry word."
The chancellor shook and read the decree. Juliana's mouth opened like a fish. The crowd murmured. The emperor's jaw tightened.
They took her to the steps. They cut the cords from her sash. The silk fell away like a lie. They placed a white sash on her shoulders—the color of exile—and led her around the courtyard.
"Do you regret it?" a woman in the crowd shouted. The woman in the crowd was one of my father's tenants whose boy had been passed over for exams. The woman wanted a spectacle.
Juliana's face changed. At first there was pride and then incredulity. She stepped forward and lifted her chin. "Do you regret what you asked?" she called. "If I am given a throne for a little love, would you not take it?"
There were snorts in the crowd. A clerk took out a small wooden tablet and started to record her words. The guards pushed her forward with the white sash.
Then the humiliation accelerated. They paraded her through the market. People spat. Children who had been fed crumbs of palace sweets pointed. Women who had sewn gowns for ministers snickered. A merchant tossed a rotten peach. Juliana recoiled and struck the merchant's hand but could not stop the wave.
Men took their ink stones and wrote new gossip and hawkers yelled the phrases. "She who stole a house!" "She who made the bride's father die!" Their voices built into a roof of shame.
Juliana's emotions shifted like a storm: at first defiance, then anger—her lips peeled back in a wild smile—then rebuttal and denial.
"It was not my hand!" she cried at one point, lifting a fist. "I only loved! I never ordered death!"
"Then why did you bring her to the cells?" someone shouted.
She had no answer that would heal the courtyard. Around her, grown men who had once bowed to jade-trimmed boxes turned their faces away. A childhood friend of hers, Nolan Huber, stood and lowered his head. Her father, who had spoken for her, had already been dismissed. The isolation closed in.
Finally, she stopped and could not speak. Her body gave signs of shaking like a bird whose wing had been snapped. She went white as a piece of bleached bone. The crowd's anger turned to fascination and then to revulsion. People took out their bowls of broth and recorded the sight with small tablets to be sent to relatives in the provinces.
In the end, Juliana's punishment was not a single rope or blade. It was the slow unmaking: the public unsealing of affection, the peal of gossip across the land, the removal of privileges, the freezing out of favor. She went mad at the city gate later, tearing at her hair and crying like a child, but that madness was the last stage of the punishment. The people who had once flattered her now turned away.
The sight was clean. It was terrible. I felt nothing but an enormous wash of emptiness as I watched her taken away. Who had won? Who had lost? The emperor's face was like stone as if his heart was a cold vault.
14
They sent some rumor that Juliana had been moved back to a small house after the emperor softened. For a time the court hummed with talk. But nothing came back my way. The Dowager had saved my family name by promises and misdirection. Sources in the capital said Calhoun's record had been reviewed and in part restored. The court forgave itself by saying justice had been messy but fair.
I did not come back. The Dowager, in her peculiar mercy, allowed me to leave the city as if I were someone who had been granted exile rather than a woman whose palace burned. They hid me in a border town among ironsmiths and stables. Zeke went with me. Kaleigh stayed, sent back to palace service.
15
There, under a broad sky that hid nothing, I learned to be a shadow. My face would no longer be honored. When children dared to peek under my veil and screamed, I would try to laugh. I learned to tie my hair so no one could see the scorched places. I learned that the body remembers flame the way a clock remembers hour.
At night I still dreamt of the incense smoke curling up and the small hole I had cut in the window paper to listen as if all my life had been prowling at edges. Sometimes I would pull out the silver hairpin and feel the weight that had driven me. Sometimes I thought about the emperor standing over a coffin and crying.
He had always chosen the state over love. He had chosen policies and the cold room of judgment. He had chosen to spare the realm and in so doing had killed the thing that could have softened him. He had loved me sometimes like a flicker and then buried that flicker beneath him as if it were a small flare that would burn his hand.
16
I will not end with a vow about future or with a promise to return. I will end with what I keep folded in the hem of my shawl: a small, blackened piece of paper torn from the window where I first pried a hole to listen; a silver hairpin, bent in the middle where I destroyed him and almost destroyed myself; and the memory of foreign incense that smelled like sea salt and sun-warmed wood.
Sometimes Zeke will come home from the smithy and tell me, "The court has turned, madam." He says it as if a thing can be measured. But when he says it I think of the fire and of how a single small flame can change a house forever.
I learned to be a widow of my own life and to wear exile like a heavy cloak. The city goes on with its trade. The emperor grows older and more careful. Juliana sits somewhere in a quiet house or perhaps she broke entirely. My father's name is written in a book with lines to mend.
I keep my hairpin under my pillow, bent and strange. At night I sometimes touch it and feel the cool curve and remember the moment I tried to make a child keep my family alive, and when that child spilled like blood into my hands I learned that a single act can make or unmake a nation.
I do not know if I forgive him. I do not know if I forgive myself. I only know that in a border town where the iron sings and the sun sets like an ember, I am still the woman who once pried a hole in paper and listened to the quiet between the breaths of the world.
The End
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