Face-Slapping12 min read
They Argued How I Should Die While I Signed My Own Fate
ButterPicks15 views
They argued about my death like it was a lesson in courtly decorum while I sat on the dragon throne rubbing my temple.
"Cut your own throat, Your Majesty," said Keith Baird, palms pressed, eyes wet with the kind of loyalty that enjoys ceremony more than life.
"Poison," Chauncey Jacobs countered, "a cleaner end, less spectacle."
"Neither," Bernardo Becker snapped, "we need someone to hang. Public suffering keeps the rest in line."
I watched them like a woman watching weather change. "You all have such interesting proposals," I said. "Which one do you choose?"
They stared as if I had asked them to choose the color of the curtains.
"Your Majesty—" Keith began, then stopped.
"Your Majesty," Chauncey tried, "if you insist—"
I laughed. "I do not insist. I have plans."
Ulrich Ellis shuffled forward with a small lacquered box. "A choice, then, for the court."
I set the box on the table and slid a bright yellow edict out of my sleeve. "Who will read this for me? Tell them I adopt the leader of the rebels as my son, that I will cede the throne to him, on one condition: the nation's name shall not change, and I shall keep my title as the Empress Dowager."
They blinked as if I had landed a stone in the middle of the hall.
"Empress," Keith whispered, "you jest."
"Is this strategy?" Bernardo asked, head tilted like a curious bird.
"It is survival," I said.
I did not want to die.
"Why then adopt him?" Chauncey demanded. "Why give him legitimacy?"
"Because," I said quietly, "if I am to be killed, I want the world to know it was the only way, and not the simplest. If he earns the crown by taking it, he earns the debt. He will have to care for what he takes."
They made their faces of courtly grief and confusion, and left me to the pale lamps. I had rehearsed that night like a stage direction. It was not flippant; it was precise.
"You're not leaving?" Ulrich had asked when servants emptied the hall.
"I never planned to die tonight," I answered. "We are all poor actors if we die on cue."
When dawn came, the city burned with rumor. Burke Zimmermann stood at the head of his column as if he had always belonged there—soldier, wound-streaked, severe. He spoke once from outside the gates before he entered the palace and the gates gave just enough. "Your guards opened to me," he told me later. "It was not easy."
"You always were efficient," I said. "You do not mind early mornings, do you?"
"Do not flatter me with your memories," he said. "I am not the man you think."
"Then tell me who you are," I said.
We had met as children.
"I remember the silver spear," I told him once, speaking of the day in the garden of the East Peace household. "You were nine and I was seven. I climbed the lattice and announced you my future husband."
He didn't laugh. "You struck me with that spear."
"You deserved it."
"You deserved the three dozen lashes after," he answered, dry as bone. "And you sat under the sun with a paper umbrella."
"I was trying to be kind."
"You were trying to be dangerous." He watched the cup in his hand, the scar on his knuckle visible. "Maybe that day started the trouble."
Burke's family, the House of Zimmermann, had been torn down by Torsten Kato when Torsten feared power in other hands. Torsten Kato had learned how to break a kingdom like he broke a bone: one clean, cruel movement. He was the brother who had learned how to stay alive by killing first. Torsten had left a trail that made the royal lineage thin. Bernardo Becker had been the thrifty brother who had turned public works into vanity. Connor Daniel—who everyone spoke of in whispers—had been soft in the head since birth, a man who did not understand to run when it rained.
"Why did you come?" I asked Burke when the city was his and the palace still bore smoke from the fires he'd ordered put out.
"I came to right a wrong," he said. "I came because you kept a light in the dark."
"You used a spear once," I said. "You can call it a debt-collector's job."
He smiled once that night—a rare crease at the corner of his mouth that had thunder in it. "I will not be kind because you are kind. I will be kind because I choose you."
"Do you take me as queen?" I asked.
"Not queen. Empress by your will." He turned his face to mine, low and dark. "I will not force you. I will not force anyone."
"Our arrangement will be odd," I told him. "You lead the army. I keep my title. You will tread the halls and I will keep the rooms."
"You misjudge me," he said. "I am a soldier, yes. But I can be more."
On our first night after the change, the court supplied pictures of women for him to choose from. "Select a wife," the ministers urged, as if marriage were a household purchase.
He sat under the pavilioned garden, lotus steam curling from the bowl in front of him, the ministers in ranks below like obedient shrubs. "Why choose a consort for a throne that was given by a woman?" he asked. "You made a mistake. She is the one who wears the true crown."
The ministers' faces sank into wrinkles.
"Do not punish me on her account," he said, and they retreated like men who had been told to step off the cliff.
I drank at his mercy like a woman tasting springwater after a drought. "Thank you," I said, cheeks warm and stupid.
We were a contract first, and then more.
"It is practical," I said to him once, the fold of a map between us. "You need legitimacy. I need life."
"Does that sound like love?" he asked.
"Not yet," I answered. "But I will take a good alliance."
"Will you take anything less?" he asked, voice small.
I could not answer with certainty. Palace life had turned me brittle. The long empty nights had hammered me into a shape of suspicion.
"Does he love me?" I asked Ulrich one night when all else had left me to gnaw on my worries.
"Burke?" Ulrich said. "He holds your life in his hand but he did not crush it."
"That's not love."
"Love can be many things," Ulrich muttered. "It can be the stubbornness of someone who chooses to stay in a burning house with you."
We tried to settle into the curious arrangement. I tried to be an empress in my own way—keeping the court's dignity while he kept the city safe. He was strict and sometimes savage. He made my servants scrub the ink from the floor where I had spilled a stack of petitions—"To learn discipline," he said. He sent my childhood friend, Keith Baird, to a distant garrison to 'learn the world' after ministerial gossip wrapped him like a noose.
"Keith will return different," I said once.
"He will return strong," Burke replied. "Or broken. Either way, useful."
The parts of palace life I had been spared as a princess were now mine. I tried to be small and domestic: receiving handmaidens, smelling the incense, playing with the embroidered sachet I had once stitched badly and gifted to Burke years ago. He had thrown that sachet back at me once. Now he kept it on his table, a ridiculous, imperfect token.
One night at a banquet to bind the court to the new order, Kyler Boyd—a minister who had waited at the edge of change like a vulture—stood and presented his daughter, Marina Semyonov, as a suitable match to stabilize factions.
"She will please the eye," Kyler said loudly. "And is loyal to the house that will protect the realm."
"Is she the one you would put your daughter in service for?" Burke asked.
"Of course—" Kyler began.
Marina stepped forward at the edge of the dais, face pale and composed, and bowed.
At the table, the trays circled, wine ran, and the music slackened as Marina took the floor to dance. The room watched. Marina moved with an artful sadness.
Someone in the crowd hissed, "She is perfect on the outside."
"Keep watch," Kyler said to the servants. "Do not let petty jealousies spoil this."
I watched Marina and felt a spark like a match near dry lacquer. Hours later she clutched her throat and coughed blood into her hand. "Poison!" the crowd breathed.
"She must be saved!" someone cried.
"Who would poison her?" Kyler's voice climbed like a kettle. "There can be only one motive—jealousy from the Empress!" he cried, and points flew like knives.
"Kyler, stop," Marina choked. "Father—"
"They will say what they will," Kyler shouted. "But this is the sign!"
"Do not speak like that in front of the court!" Burke barked, but his face grew still after. "Is she safe?" he asked.
"She will perhaps live," the physician said. "But we will have to investigate."
They dragged a trembling pageboy forward and thrust a small cup into his hands. "He did it," they said. "She said the Empress gave him the task."
"I would not kill a child," I said. "I am not that weak."
"Every accusation finds air," Kyler spat. "Besides, who else had motive?"
They placed me under house arrest in the empty northern palace. The walls were bare as a birdcage. Ulrich tried to reassure me. "You will be cleared."
"How?" I asked.
"With truth or with force," he said. "Which does she prefer?"
I no longer trusted the slender mercy of words. I had to test loyalty. I had to see what Burke would do if the people I had called friends turned their faces against me.
"Do you think I will kill you?" I asked Burke through the shutters.
"If I thought you guilty, perhaps," he answered. "But you are not. And you will not die because of them."
"Why stand with me?" I pushed. "You have everything. A crown is heavy."
"Because I promised to stay," he said simply. "And because I decided to."
Days later, Kyler went too far. He ordered Marina to the hall in a forced recovery and then, in front of officers and ministers and the women who embroidered irises into pillows, he asked for the death of the Empress, for a trial that would be a spectacle and a lesson.
"Bring the Empress," Kyler demanded. "Let the people see justice."
I marched into the hall, cheeks hollowed, Ulrich at my elbow, Burke by the dragon pillar like an immovable rock.
"You will tell the truth now," Kyler said, smiling like a man who believed his own story. "We will show the nation what real justice looks like."
Burke stepped forward and spoke, and when he spoke, the room turned to weather.
"Kyler Boyd," he said, voice lower than a blade. "You built your fortune on whispers. You fed the court with poison of rumor. You used your daughter as bait for power. You will have your audience now."
Kyler's smile faltered. "I—"
"Silence." Burke's boot struck the floor.
Then the punishment began.
It was not a simple hanging or a private beating; I would not accept cheap theater. The crowd gathered like a storm over the square, soldiers lining the walls, merchants pressing forward, the court tokens blinking in the sunlight. Kyler was led out in ceremonial chains to the central platform under the great clock where the magistrates once judged. Marina sat on a dais nearby, face pale but steady, hands clenched.
"Kyler Boyd," Burke announced, "you stand accused not by rumor but by your actions. You conspired to force a narrative. You poisoned your own daughter to seize a crown. Confess."
Kyler's voice did not tremble at first. "You cannot—" he began.
"Listen," I said, and every ear turned. "You led a campaign of whispers, of bribes, of false witnesses. You thought my fall would make you safe."
A murmuring went through the crowd, expectant and vicious as a pack.
"First," Burke said, "we will undo what you did. You will name every man you paid, every watchman you bribed, every official you promised. Truth is the first penance."
Kyler sneered. "You cannot force men to speak truth."
"Let's try." Burke motioned. Soldiers seized Kyler and thrust a writing slate into his hands. "Write names."
Kyler's jaw clenched. He wrote slowly at first, thinking he could save some faces. Then Burke had young men hand the paper to the square's herald, who read the names aloud. Each name was a shock; each name meant another life of quiet compromise ending in open shame. Women in the crowd looked at one another and covered their mouths.
"Next," Burke said, "you shall be shown your deeds. Your accounts will be opened. Each bribe, each poison vial, each forged report will be displayed." The clerks unfolded scrolls like banners. The numbers were obscene. Kyler's palms sweated at the ink.
"Do not—" Kyler tried to bargain. "I serve the state's stability."
"You served yourself," I said, voice steady despite every old fear. "You used your child's body to play at a throne."
Marina's lips trembled but she did not cry out.
Then came the part that made the city hold its breath: the ritual of public restitution. The great bell tolled while men hauled open chests in the square. Kyler was forced to return the wealth he had stolen from the pockets of minor officials, the gold he had set aside to buy judges and scribes. The merchants counted aloud each coin. All was recited for the crowd.
"After returning that which you stole," Burke said, "you will stand on this platform and be denounced by those you wronged. They will spit, they will shout. You will feel their faces as if you stood at the edge of the world."
Kyler's face went from sneer to something raw and startled. He had imagined himself at the center, applauded. He had not imagined the long, plain road back.
He began to say names, at first small, names that held little shame. But as the hours passed and the afternoon sun sharpened into slanting knives, he confessed more. He named men high in the court; he named families who had taken his coin. With each name the crowd hissed, with each name a new life crumpled. Faces paled, jaws set. A young clerk who had earned a pittance for a bribe now watched his reputation melt.
At last, Kyler could not look at the crowd. He tried to reach for mercy. "Please," he whispered. "Forgive me. I have given you—"
"No," I said. "You ask forgiveness after you set others to be slain by your plots? You used your daughter—"
Kyler faltered. For a long moment, his bravado cracked into frightened human pieces. The crowd's mood turned from curiosity to vindictive sorrow. The men who had been named came forward and spat at Kyler. Women who had lost dowries in crooked deals shoved their palms into his face. One by one the worst of his allies stepped away; the safety he'd bought with coin collapsed into the public square.
"Look at them," Burke said, voice like winter. "Those who once dressed your wounds will now watch you bleed in humiliation. Their faces will be written in the pages of your guilt."
Kyler's reaction melted through stages as required: first shock, then outrage, then denial, then a crumpling, pleading collapse. He tried to say it was a mistake. "I was trying to save the realm," he wailed. "I wanted stability—"
"You wanted power," I interrupted.
"And now?" he begged. "Take my head! Take my wealth! Do not make me live with this."
"No," Burke said. "You will live, so that every day you see those you wronged, so that every night you sleep with their names ringing in your head."
"Let him be stripped of his ranks," I said. "Let him be expelled from the court. Let his name be a lesson carved in the logs of this city's memory."
"Let him be cast out," the crowd screamed, the word like a verdict they had been waiting to speak.
Kyler was led away in chains, stripped of titles, his wealth returned in public ceremony. He was paraded past the markets, past the poor families he had cheated, past the doors of those he had bribed, and each stopped to spit words of scorn into his face. He called out, "Justice! Justice!" but the city had learned a new word.
"Watch them," Burke said to me that night in the quiet of the palace. "Public disgrace kills more than a blade sometimes. It eats a man from the inside."
"Is this mercy?" I asked.
"It is justice," he answered.
Kyler's punishment satisfied much of the court's thirst, but not all. Some wanted blood; others wanted spectacle. The ministers who had plotted with him faded into rumor. Marina woke after days and, when she saw her father taken, she wept and touched my hand.
"I'm sorry," she said simply. "My father thought to make the ladder by removing the rung beneath him."
"You did not choose this," I answered. "No child chooses their inheritance."
Another man who had been the darkest of the conspirators was Torsten Kato, the brother who had killed without blinking. He had thought to set a false heir in the child of a poor stable and to force me aside. He had counted on the fear he could etch into the council. Torsten's punishment could not be the same as Kyler's. He had killed men; his punishment had to be the mirror of what he had done.
We brought Torsten into the great hall, where the banners had once flapped in pageantry. "You will stand," I said to the soldiers. "You will confess."
Torsten sneered. "You think you can touch me? I am blood of this house."
"You were blood enough to be spilled," Burke said. "You will answer, publicly, to the families you stole from. And you will watch their sons replace the banners you tore down."
Torsten's punishment was made to be a slow unmaking. He was stripped of rank and given to the families he had destroyed, sent to work in the very fields he had razed and the walls he had ordered raised. He was made to bear the goods he had stolen—haul stones, lay bricks, mend roofs. He who had never known honest labor now labored under the eyes of those he had wronged. Each stone he lifted was a memory.
Torsten went from fury—"You will not break me!"—to disbelief as hands that had once trembled before him now watched with steady, hard eyes. He begged, then sneered, then knelt; the transformation was public and long. The farmers spat, the wives whispered and wrote his names in the ledger of their children. The ministers muttered that Torsten's ruin was just. His panic was a private thing now made public.
When all was done and the square's dust settled, I sat in the small room that had once been mine and took out the shabby embroidered sachet I had made long ago. Burke picked it up and smiled at the ugly duck of a duck on the cloth.
"You kept it," I said.
"You threw it away once," he said. "I recovered it."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because you once cared enough to make something," he answered. "Now, when I see this poor duck, I remember why I stayed."
He did not say he loved me then, only that he would stand in the open with me.
"Do you still want the throne?" I asked later, leaning against the balcony that watched the city.
"No," he said. "I want you."
We did not say more. The war for the crown had been a battle of knives in the dark and we had turned it into a lit stage where lies were exposed in sun and shame. I had kept my life by bargaining with a man who had chosen to stay. He had not taken the crown to wear it alone. He had taken it to ensure I could leave if I wanted.
"Will you leave?" he asked me once, voice like the hush before rain.
"I do not know," I answered, fingers on the sash of the sachet. "I once tried to learn a craft and embroidered a duck. It came out bad and I threw it away. But someone kept it."
Burke looked at the duck, then at me. "I kept it because of you," he said.
That night, as lanterns in the palace glowed soft and the city murmured like a sleeping beast, I placed the sachet on the little wooden chessboard I had used the day Kyler came to gloat. The pieces were not fine, they were mismatched, but the board held the shape of a game.
"If you ever doubt me," Burke said, "look at this. It is small but true."
I nodded, and for the first time, I let the doubt drop like a bird and fly off.
The End
— Thank you for reading —