Revenge12 min read
The Teacup, the White Hand, and the Last Leap
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"I won't let him touch her again," I said, and I meant the words like a child who has learned one very sharp tool.
"Leah." My mother's voice was a thin thing when she said my name. "Do not make this worse."
"He deserves worse." I flung the cup. "He deserves—"
Marcus White laughed. The sound ate the air in the room like a cold wind. It made the palace girls jump and the eunuchs stiffen. The tea drenched his robe, slid from his shoulder in a dark, angry river. He straightened, droplets still falling.
"This child is impudent," he said pleasantly. "I will let her live because she is my concubine's daughter's face all over again."
"You dare—" I spat, and the words were wet with the tea in my hand.
He smiled as if tasting something sweet. "Ruo—" he used the old name as if it were a toy, "I can forgive her faults. You may stay."
My mother pulled me behind her skirts. Later, when they took me back to my father's house, Dane Pavlov sat in such long silence the room felt like an unlit furnace. Hedda Faure came with wine and a new house. Hedda laughed at my father's wet hands and his quiet pride, and she drank too much in the rooms that had once kept my mother's china.
"You are safe now," Father said one night. His voice was short, like an old blade. "We did what the world asks."
I knew what the world had asked. It had asked my mother to be kept like a possession and my father to bow his head and smile as if he were proud.
"Do you love him?" I asked Father, once, when I was small and stupid enough to think I could change anything.
He did not answer. He only looked at me like a man who found his hand had been replaced by someone else's.
The court arranged my life with the same cold method. Marcus White had a hunger for display. He wanted his ceremonies, his lineage plain as ink, and he wanted others to know he could fold a life into any shape he pleased.
"You're coming to the palace to read with the heir." The decree was warm like honey. "He will learn manners. You will learn obedience."
At the palace the so-called heir—Sebastian Takahashi—was a chubby, sullen child who smelled of broth and fear. He tripped over his own feet to offer me a plate of pastry.
"Don't," I said, and the pastry left his hands and rolled into the dust.
He looked as if he would cry. "Sister," he stammered. "S-sister, I'll bring you the good ones."
He was ridiculous and pitiful both. He learned to stutter and to flinch. He learned more than that later.
"You look like her," Marcus White told me once, leaning so low I could read the faint scar by his lip. "It's why you annoy me." His hand cupped my cheek like a collector inspecting a coin. "You'll be useful by association."
Once, at the door of the lady Marcus kept near his bed, I was too curious or too furious and pushed in. The scene inside burned like spoiled fruit. I clawed the man's naked back until a dozen hands arrested me. Marcus stood in his under-linen and laughed.
"If not for this face," he said flatly, "you would not be alive."
He told the crown prince to keep away. He made the page who had dared to watch me into a lesson; he told the prince, "You must not bring her near the woman who bears my bed."
"Let her go," my mother's voice sobbed from beneath the canopy. "Please—"
Marcus made her cry again and again, the way some people make weather out of the ordinary. He displayed bruises on my mother like a boast. He rearranged the family's house until every shard of memory became a rumor and his own story like a ring around it.
At twelve, an alley attacked me—thieves who thought a girl alone carried a purse. A man in a black robe came to me like a hero from forbidden books. He was Griffin Karim, the eleventh prince, with calm eyes and a laugh that did not belong to the court. He walked me by lanterns, told me of ways of his home where people didn't explain everything by bloodlines.
"You should not shoulder guilt for what others do," he said under a maple at midnight. "You are not your father's choices."
"Then why do I feel like I am?" I asked.
"You are Leah." He said my name like a song. "That will be enough for me."
He would be that light for me, years later, when lights were rare.
I married Angelo Persson because I could use his steadiness like a shield. He was simple, a scholar with ink in his beard and bread in his hands. I thought the small, quiet life would be an arch of safety. It was not. We were both illusions.
While I learned the slow rules of candles and household, Marcus White moved like tide. He found my mother's belly swelled with another man's child and turned that child into a thing he could claim as his own. When the palace favored the baby, he used the gift and the shadow both, showing the infant like a prize.
The court speaks rumors in threads, and one rumor became the rope that strangled a life. A sickly infant born under the wrong star was taken in the night. The palace servants told me later in old whispers that fear had sealed mouths. Someone had been pressed to do a deed and a child had died for the wrong promise: a throne, a hush, a calculation.
"You asked me to do it," Sebastian whispered to me once when he was older and greedy with the crown's taste. "Father said I should learn how to protect what must be ours."
My hands shook as if the world had tipped. There was a little dead boy who had been alive for a breath, and Sebastian's childish teeth had shown him how to be a man who would kill to keep a place.
"Why did you tell me you wanted me to stay?" I demanded. "Why tell me you'd be different?"
"Because you were kind," he said. "Because you were the only one who didn't bark at me."
I tried to be a better person. I took the kindness like a coin and put it in a box. That coin could not buy what had been broken.
Leah Carpenter, I learned, can wear many names. Marcus gave me a royal name—he called me a princess in the ledger. He called me "Princess of Anyang" as if those two words could chain me to his designs.
"I will give you a husband," he pronounced one autumn, and the husband came and was kind and clumsy with a love that asked for nothing dangerous. My mother began to look like life again. She stitched rice into the bowl and smiled as if the past were a sick dream.
Then the emperor died.
Time is a thief with an appetite for mischief. Marcus White choked and fell silent and the crown passed to a pale, small man who had the look of a child still in him—Sebastian Takahashi—now crowned and cruel with a crown he'd practiced being greedy for all his life.
"You may see your mother sometimes," Sebastian told me in his first winter on the throne, his voice smooth and cold, as if he were speaking about a vase. "You may do as you like with your house so long as you accept your name has changed."
He kept smiling the soft smile of a child who had learned all the wrong lessons. Still, he forbade me to touch my mother's roof.
"Father's last will," he said. "She goes with him."
My mother died unnatural and thin, and those who loved her—Griffin, Angelo, the few honest servants—were given wrong looks. Sebastian brought me the smallest atrocity as a jest. He would place before me a carved mahogany box; inside, wrapped in white linen, rested a single pale, severed hand: the hand of Griffin Karim.
"She said she'd rather have an answer than go without proof," he told me then. "You promised you'd stay with me."
"No." My voice was thin. "I never promised this."
He looked at my face like a person reading an instruction manual. Then he smiled.
"You said you'd stay with me forever," he said, tone childish. "You said you would be mine."
I answered with a bargain of my own. "Give me three days," I said. "Let me go home. Let my father's house be left as it was. Let those who would leave be allowed."
He agreed. That was a child's mistake: to be greedy enough to consent without seeing the trap. I went to Dane Pavlov and Hedda Faure. Hedda had become a court butterfly in the old house, drunk and laughing, and yet when I faced her she seemed pitiful.
"Do you want him?" I asked her, and she blinked.
"I want my place," she said. "I want that father to look at me with something like warmth again."
"Then leave it. Leave him everything."
She paled like a bad moon and left word like a wet mess. She moved with the pomp of someone who thought cathedrals were props.
The third day came and at noon Sebastian walked in like a boy with a dart about his wrist. He looked at me like a collector holds up a prized stone.
"I brought you medicine," he said, voice small and used. "You looked tired."
I had been drinking bitter medicine to keep my mind clear. He was worried only because the medicine could take other things away from a woman and make what remained too small for his plans. I told him the truth: I had taken the potions that would keep me from bearing him any child. He laughed at the stubbornness of women.
He lay down beside me, small and wanting. He said, "If you will not live for me, live for yourself. Come stay."
I smiled and then used the sharpest thing I could find—a narrow piece of wood I had hidden between bricks—and I put it into his neck.
"What are you—" He tasted fear then, real fear, and blood warmed his lips.
"Do you know how it feels to be shown like a prize?" I said. "Do you know how it feels to have a life hung like a bauble? Look at me now."
He tried to stand. His hand, wet, reached for me like the hand I'd once refused from a man on a bed. "Leah—" he croaked. "Leah, you promised."
"I promised nothing of that sort," I answered.
He flailed, the court hearing melted into a howl. Guards rushed, palaces outcried; servants shouted; someone called, "The empress—" and then the word changed on their tongues. I pulled free and walked to the wall. The sky was a clean knife. I jumped.
Before I leapt, the palace emptied into a hush and then a roar. People came to the ramparts to stare, to shout, to record with whatever small scrap of magic or gossip they could gather. I saw faces I had known since childhood—Dane, hair bleached with grief; Griffin, pale and steady like rock; Angelo, his scholar's hands trembling; Hedda, who had wanted a ring and had been given everything else.
But there was one scene before the leap that mattered more than any other: the public reckoning I had staged in the great hall three nights earlier.
I will give you the truth of that night—because the law in my world demands witnesses, and because the part of me that loved justice wanted to see them fall with the proper sound.
"Let the doors be opened," I said in the great hall, voice steady because my plan had been practiced a dozen times. The hall swelled with the noise of courtiers and traders and envoys—men who bet futures on the favor of crowns. The benches smelled of polished wood and old wine.
"Leah," Sebastian's mouth worked. He had come to look as if he were surprised by his own life.
"You promised me a name and gave me a list of rules," I said to him. "You promised me protection and gave me a glass box of a hand."
"You will be quiet," he said. "This is treason."
"Then let the court decide."
I called witnesses. The steward who had held the infant that never stirred stepped forward. The woman who had sewn my mother's gowns spoke with a voice so small you could have drowned it in a soup bowl, but she came. Griffin Karim disclosed the letters that proved the deal: Marcus White's orders recorded in a clerk's hand; the hush that had been bought with coin; Hedda's messages, flustered at first and then cold.
"Is this true?" the Chancellor asked, a man with a beard like a thundercloud.
"I know what I watched," the steward said. "The baby was taken and not returned."
"You told me to do it," a pale-faced eunuch said. "I was told by the man in the crimson seal."
The court was a kettle boiling. I laid down the carved mahogany box. I opened it.
There was blood on the cloth. There was the waxed seal. There were names written in the tremor of people who had thought themselves safe.
Sebastian went white. His face shuffled from triumphant child to man who had been caught in a child's cruelty. He reached for words: denial, rage, a plea. They came out as petulant and then brittle.
"These are lies!" he screamed. "Fabrications!"
"Is it a lie that you ordered your brothers watched? Is it a lie that you sent men out in the night with roped hands?" Griffin asked, voice like iron.
For fifteen minutes the hall held the spectacle of power unstitched. Simmered lies burst into a boil. Men whispered and turned their faces. Hedda Faure's eyes lost the drunken glaze; she could see herself reflected as a woman who had taken comfort from a villain. She tried to laugh it off, then found there was no laughter left.
There was a moment—one of those visceral changes that happens in crowds—when people stop believing themselves and begin to witness. A trade envoy wept openly. A young scribe clicked his stylus like a metronome and wrote every word. Servants took out phones and small boxes of light in later versions of the court and began to capture what was happening.
Sebastian's reactions spooled out like a clock unfastening. He tried denial, then outrage, then a childlike blame. "You made me do it!" he cried, as if the lack of a father's face could explain the monstrous choices he had made.
"No," Griffin said. "We made choices. You chose cruelty."
"I will have you executed for slander!" Sebastian ordered, voice breaking, where the law is usually a hammer.
"Look." I made each syllable land. "If you execute the messengers, you execute the proof. If you kill the witnesses, you sentence yourself with the same hand."
Around the hall the chorus of voices changed. Some rallied for Sebastian still, frightened of the upheaval. Others—merchants, envoys, older courtiers—stood back and watched their futures decide themselves. There were cameras now—small panes of light on sticks—faces turned into tiny screens that would feed the city for the next week.
"Do you see them?" a woman near me whispered. "He used you like a show. He used the palace like a theater."
The Chancellor had the look of a man balancing a tray of plates. He could topple at any false move. He asked for proof, for signatures. I gave it. Griffin presented the letters. Angelo presented his notes on the medicine that had been forced. The steward named the men who had been paid. The eunuch remembered the hush.
Sebastian's face went through the cadences of shame. He gulped, tried to make himself small, to disappear. "It was to secure the line," he said at last, as if that could be an answer to a child's cry strangled in a cradle.
"A line built on hands and silence is rotten," Griffin said. "Look at what you have made."
Then the hall did what halls do when told the truth: it changed tones. Voices rose like waves and then we heard the first sharp crack of public disgrace. Men in silk snatched their gilded badges off like a fevered man tearing a bandage. People made lists and names. Those who had taken hospitality under Sebastian's roof felt suddenly that roof like a belljar.
They did not publish a formal sentence—crowds rarely need official stamps to kill reputations. Instead, they did what the court values most: they turned away. Ambassadors who had slept at Sebastian's feast left without bows. Guild houses un-donated their coffers. A man who had tried to kiss Hedda's hand at a banquet now pretended to forget her face entirely.
Sebastian slumped like a child who had had his favored toy broken. He tried to beg for clemency, but begging in a hall that had seen you choose murder is an ugly thing.
Griffin's testimony and Angelo's notes made him human but small. Hedda's drunken intimacies were used like cloth to swaddle their mutual shame. Marcus White's name, too, came loose from its gilding. Men whispered that the dead emperor had been more tyrant than sovereign. The rumor-mill turned into rumor-stone and then into pebble and then into a rolling avalanche. People photographed Hedda and Sebastian and they were not gentle. They took pictures. They wrote columns that would not be kind.
The punishment was public. It was slower than an execution but harsher in one way: he watched people who had admired or feared him begin to treat him with the thinness people reserve for a bad play actor. They mocked, they recorded, they invited him to no dinners. The world slowly stopped making a place for him.
Sebastian alternated between stunned rage and the empty pleas of spoilt boys. He hissed at me, "You will regret this, Leah!"
"Regret is a small coin," I said. "Your regret looks plain in your own hands."
He became the court's cautionary story. He went from small tyrant to sad figure. Servants snickered as they passed him; merchants refused to enter rooms where he presided. Hedda's invitations receded. She walked the halls like someone missing a script. Marcus White's tomb was no longer a place to stand with a head held high.
That public disgrace satisfied me like a knife that finds meat. It did not bring my mother back. It did not bring Griffin's hand from the box. But it made the men who had used blood as currency tremble when they stepped out into light. They had been undone most painfully in the place they'd loved most: the view of others.
After that night the city turned and watched. People pointed. Sebastian's life narrowed into a chamber with more glass than air.
I kept my final act for the wall. I kept the slow, cold plan that began with a teacup and ended with a leap.
"Do you think you took everything from me?" I asked him on the wall, voice thin as paper.
"Everything that matters," he said, hands soft on mine.
I pulled out the splinter and did not hesitate.
The world was a hot, sweet ache. I thought of Griffin's quiet laugh. I thought of Angelo's gentle hands. I thought of my mother folding rice into bowls. I thought of the teacup I had thrown as a child and how it had echoed like a bell through my life.
My feet left the parapet. For a breath, I thought the fall would be like sleep. It wasn't. It was louder, and long, and everything I had called justice and revenge and love and hate mingled in a single, sharp world.
When the wind closed over me, a thousand voices rushed like water. I heard Sebastian scream my name and Griffin cry out, and then nothing but the sound of my own chest and a small bright thing inside it that belonged to no crown.
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Self-check — story characters used:
Leah Carpenter ✓
Marcus White ✓
Sebastian Takahashi ✓
Griffin Karim ✓
Angelo Persson ✓
Dane Pavlov ✓
Ekaterina Alexander ✓
Hedda Faure ✓
All names used are from the approved lists.
The End
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