Revenge18 min read
They Forced the Crown Prince to Marry Me
ButterPicks12 views
I remember the night they forced me under the embroidered veil as if I were a thing to be placed on a shelf.
"Open your face, Ginevra Silva," Laurent Belyaev said, cold as winter. "Now that you've come to our Greatcourt, learn our rules. Don't drag your barbarian ways into our halls."
He spoke as though I had begged to come. I bit him. I aimed at his hand, the warm, careless hollow of his wrist, and bit hard.
He stared, stunned. I scrambled onto the bed and shoved myself into the furthest corner. "If you don't like it, bite me back!"
He looked like he wanted to—then changed. His fist twitched between clench and loosen. He didn't hit me. He called instead, "Heng!" the housemaid's name used like a bell.
"Hear me, Prince. Hear me!" Elisa Roberts crawled forward and knelt, pleading for mercy until her forehead nearly struck the floor.
I stepped in front of her without thinking. "Elisa is my person; you will not hurt her."
Laurent sneered. "Even you are my possession now. I do as I please."
I snapped, “I'm the Crown Princess. You don't get to bully me.”
The room tightened. The other servants couldn't look me in the eye. Footsteps thudded beyond the doors. I heard, then, the first thwack—a beaten butt colliding with board. A woman's voice creaked in pain and begging.
"Hush," I told myself. "Don't make it worse." But I was shaking. The thought of Elisa taking thirty lashes—my Elisa—made my throat close.
Laurent's face was unreadable as he watched the door to the inner hall, then looked down at me. "Ginevra, remember, the court has customs. Once you marry into Greatcourt, you obey our Order. Be meek. Obey."
Elisa's cries faded into the distance. I clung to Laurent's sleeve like it was the last tether. "Please… please, stop."
He met my eyes. "You will learn. If you do not, others will take your place."
They dragged Elisa away. The sound was a dull, stabbing rhythm that would haunt me for months. I pressed my face into Laurent's sleeve and tasted the bitter scent of his linen.
After that night, the palace became rules and shadows. I did not know their names for submission—three obediences, four virtues—and I could not speak the words other wives folded into their lives. I knew only this: if I defied, people I loved would be hurt.
The Empress—Dorothy Avila—was kinder than many. She smiled like a warm hearth. The Emperor—Sullivan Makarov—was stone and judgment, the same hardness that sat in Laurent's jaw.
"She is uncomfortable with our ceremonies," the Empress chided gently one morning. "We will teach her. Do not alarm her too much."
Laurent offered nothing but a cold bow. The quiet cruelty hung like a draft you could not find the source of.
I had traveled for many days from my own small kingdom, far south of these palace spires. I had left a father who led a land that listened to the songs of fields and rivers, not the clanging commands of capitals. I had left a mother who braided my hair for weddings with hands that trembled the night she kissed my brow and told me, "Live like the wind. Do not bind yourself to being small."
I had a companion—Elisa. She had left everything for me. She laughed soft and kept my secrets tucked like little stones in her pockets. She sang me lullabies at night—strange songs from the south, words full of spices and brief, laughing notes.
When Laurent brought into the palace a woman from the eastern family—Isabella Kaiser—dressed in roses and silk, I understood my punishment more clearly.
"She is for company," Laurent said without heat. "You will present her as sister and show her the courtesies of Greatcourt."
Isabella stood at the threshold like a blade of pale silk, watching Laurent with eyes that softened when he looked back. People murmured that she was the court's chosen: delicate, perfect, the sort of woman courtiers smile over like a sweet.
That first banquet with Isabella there, I pulled on my finery like a costume and barely kept my jaw from trembling. I had watched them place food in the bowls meant for me and for her. I did not, could not eat. I felt the bile rise when Isabella bowed and raised a cup for me. I sipped because custom required it—and when I tried to excuse myself, my stomach betrayed me. I retched, and my vomit landed on Isabella's robe.
Laurent slapped me then. I had never been struck like that. My cheeks burned. "You are a guest here," he said. "Behave."
I could have fought the whole court, but Elisa placed a hand at my back and dragged me away, whispering apologies for me to the walls.
The palace is quiet when you are shunned. People will not look you in the eyes. They whisper about broken brides. They say you brought it upon yourself by being different, by having the wrong habits.
I learned the rules quickly: stay small, stay polite. Pray. Sit. Allow them to decide things for you. If you are quiet, your punishments will be lighter. Or perhaps they will not come at all.
Months passed that were small and gray. I learned how to sew the court's collars and fold my face into a proper expression. I learned how to take the bitter scents of palace tea and swallow them without comment.
A hope began to breathe in me when Elisa slowly recovered from her injuries. She walked with a limp for a while, but her eyes were steadfast. "You must not be small," she said one evening as she braided my hair. "You must still be Ginevra. But you have to choose what to keep safe."
"I've tried," I told her. "I tried to stand up, and they punished us."
She hummed, then smiled. "We will find other ways."
That summer the palace bloomed in courtyard lanterns and songs because Isabella, the new favored consort, announced she was with child. It promised more company for me, in the way that jealousy promises consolation.
The day Isabella arrived into the palace with a rose-colored procession, I stood at the side, sleeves too tight, hands cramped. My stomach had learned its own tightness.
That night there was a feast for her. I helped, because the consort's reception required the Crown Princess's presence. All the courtiers smiled and drank and pretended we were an audience of a happy play.
I refused the soup. I could not keep food down. I watched as Isabella set out her robes like a promise. I tasted nothing, but because the world required it, I drank a cup of wine and then threw up into her lap.
Laurent's hand slammed into my cheek with the crack of a reed across a board. I ran away like a child.
That night I cried in my room until my eyes were raw. Only Elisa came and sat in the crooked slant of the bed. She sang the southern lullabies and told me stories of gulls and of home.
"I want to go back," I whispered into the dark. "I want to go home."
Elisa touched my fingers. "Home is where you are brave, my lady. We are not free to leave. But we might learn small freedoms."
I learned others. I learned to plant small potted herbs in a hidden alcove. I learned to train birds to carry notes. I learned to keep my heart from cracking.
And one morning, the palace became a place of sharp joy and sharp pain: I realized I was with child.
Laurent appeared at my door at night then, like a ghost. He would put his ear to my belly and listen as though it were a secret between them. For that one strange moment he would laugh—something like a relieved child. He would kiss my forehead and leave before the sun rose.
His father, the Emperor, looked on like a judge at a child's messy table. The Empress—Dorothy—pressed cool hands to my brow and gave me teas that smelled of jasmine.
"Keep this child safe," Dorothy whispered. "Children can be bridges."
I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe the child's kicks were proof of small miracles.
But the palace is a theater of fortunes shifting. When Isabella fell ill one afternoon—pale and weak, suddenly doubled over—Laurent's bright eyes grew frantic. "What have you done?" he asked, as if I could conjure illness.
They carried her away white and whispering. I remember water slipping along my face, and then hands under me—Pax Phillips's hands, steady and patient. He was the Prince of Qin, spry and oddly gentle, with a smile that steadied a trembling tea cup.
"You're all right," he said. "Get proper help." He shoved aside ministers with a roughness that shocked the court.
"Do not interfere in family matters," Laurent snapped at him. "This is my house."
Pax looked at me then, really looked, and his eyes became an island. He moved so the world might feel less sharp. "We call the matron," he said. "Do not fear."
It was Pax who had me pulled from the garden pool when I slipped and strained and sank. He seemed to always appear when the world forgot I might drown.
Later, when Isabella's condition was grave and blood stained the pool, the Emperor peered at me with the thin veil of accusation. "What did you do to her?"
"I didn't—" I began, but my voice cracked like dry wood.
"Silence!" He ordered then, and the word made the court shrink.
"You are the Crown Princess," he said. "This is a domestic issue. I will not have foreigners bringing curses into my house."
In the hush, Pax stood and moved to put himself between me and the Emperor. "Your Majesty," he said evenly, "we must have the physicians. The matter is medical first."
He had the grace to keep my name out of the accusations. He had the courage to stand. He irritated Laurent in a way that made Laurence's mouth thin.
"You are a meddling prince," Laurent flung at him.
"Better meddle than watch someone drown," Pax replied.
Isabella miscarried. The palace air grew sour and bitter, like rain gone wrong. She blamed me with a performance of grief that looked like the theater and a hatred that looked like a law.
"She is foreign," Isabella declared to anyone who would listen. "She brings strange storms."
The courtiers took her side. Rumors migrated like birds: that my letter to my home was not a letter at all but a signal; that my family had plans to poison the court; that my brother plotted rebellions. When I went to write home, Laurent found my letter and tore it to pieces. He crushed the carrier pigeon he had given me and watched the bird's neck twist under his hand.
"You would send messages like a traitor?" he sneered.
Green—green, he called it—"Do you want the Court to laugh? To call you unfaithful?" He pushed me away and I crawled to the floor and hid under the bed for hours because the world had turned and I could not find the seam of the day.
I did the only small thing I could do that felt like keeping the map of myself: I learned to raise pigeons. The old keeper—Denver Finch—was patient and showed me how to feed them, how to speak to them gently.
Pax came to the pigeon house one evening. He threw back his head and laughed when a bird landed unafraid on his finger.
"You ask for a favor?" he asked. "One that could ship you a song and your words out past these walls?"
"If you don't tell me your price," I said.
"I merely want truth," he answered. "For a friend."
We began to meet in small spaces—by the pigeon house, near the cold fountain. He was the first man besides Elisa who offered more than a glance. He said, once, softly, "I will help you send your letter home."
I wrote a short note. In the margins I wrote everything else I wanted to say and sealed it with trembling hands.
The next day, I awoke to find the letter gone and a new parcel at the foot of my bed. Pax had been beaten badly. A court official had found him, lied, and he had been accused of striking the Crown Prince. Pax had been punished—stripped of office, held in confinement for a year.
The palace has layers. For a while the offense of being kind is a treasonous thing. Pax was furious but he took no revenge. He smiled at me once with one side of his mouth as if to say that someday he would tell me something important about his heart.
In the chaos that followed, the Emperor's ministers started to move like wolves. People were arrested over letters. A gentle woman from the Emperor's private circle—Daniela Rose—was exposed for a private affair and then executed for it when ministers wanted to show their teeth.
The punishments came swift and public. They paraded her through the court and beat her until the pavement drank. The crowd watched, which is what turned shame into a kind of law.
I sat on the steps and tried not to watch. The children of the palace pointed. They took the corpse as an edict: obey or be crushed.
Later, Pax came to the nursery with a small hat for my son that looked as if it had been carved of laughter. "You will have to remember," he said, "that some people will tell you it's a mercy to be small."
I had my son—tiny and furious and red and screaming. I named him in secret, my own voice, and the nurse laughed. They called him a prince and the court gave him presents; the Empress teased me about letting her help raise him.
Against the greed of those who wanted to claim him, I held on. I watched as Laurent, who had been remote, slunk around like a ghost and began to come to the chamber at night. He would sit in the corner, watching the cradle like a man at a sermon.
"Is he… like me?" I asked him once, knowing it would be stupid to ask such a question.
"Like both of us," Laurent said, not smiling.
We lived in the thinness of an uneasy treaty: he loved the child and not the mother, he said nothing about the way he had struck me. He softened and yet stayed cold at the same time.
Then came the winter when everything we could not see in the dark happened. I learned that my father had fallen in battle. My country—my tiny kingdom—had been taken. They came for me because I represented an alliance, and when they took it from me, they took my name and my letters and the rope that had tied me to the world I had been.
I staggered as if someone had pushed me into the river. "My father—" I could not find the words. "My mother—"
Isabella had known and said nothing, or worse, celebrated. "We told you this would carry you away," she said, in the small moments people resemble a spear. "You were foreign. You were dangerous."
They told me my brother had attempted to kill Laurent. He had—Chester Hanson—had tried to stab Laurent in rage and been arrested. He was held in a dank cell with chains. I held a small knife beneath my pillow and thought of driving it through the door.
I found myself alone in a house made of rules. The letters from my mother were wet and blurred, and the keeper of the pigeons came with good news: "Chester is alive. He will be taken to a safe place for now."
He brought me a sealed envelope without name or return. The pigeons had been bribed or saved—someone had the humanity to be quiet. I held the paper like a door to my past.
When I confronted Laurent—knife hot in my fingers—I threatened to kill him if he did not release my brother. "If you do not set him free," I said, "I will take your life."
Laurent's response surprised me: he shrugged. "You will only ruin our child, and then both will suffer. I will not kneel to your vengeance."
We argued that night until the moon listened and turned away. He told me, oddly, that killing would do nothing. "You must think of the living," he said. "Of the child."
But I didn't believe him. What is a life to a child if built upon the bones of others? I moved through the palace like a person without a map. I carried a small sliver of something in my pocket—a token of my home, a silver bell my father had given me. It was my proof that I had not lost everything, though some days I could not remember the sound.
Pax, when he came back from banishment struck on his face, pulled me aside and said, "There are more of them. The ones who schemed to take your kingdom—they will be exposed. I will help you, quietly."
He had connections, he said. "But ask yourself this—what do you want? Vengeance that hollows you or justice that rebuilds?"
His words sat on my chest and made it harder to breathe. I had always wanted to tear down the house that had crushed my mother. But Pax taught me that justice required doing things differently: light instead of smoke.
We worked in whispers. Pax wrote petitions, bribed lower ministers, made allies out of small, forgotten people. I wrote letters—hands shaking at first, steadier as I learned—and sent birds with messages to men in the court who had grown tired of the Emperor's cruelty. I loaned favors that did not belong to me. I promised nothing but did what I could.
Slowly, a rope of truth was woven. The Emperor's men had, indeed, colluded with some merchants to blot my father’s forces. There had been bribed soldiers, forged orders, betrayal with ink and seals. Pax found records. These men had been thinking themselves safe, sure no one would notice the small things.
I knew if I revealed the evidence all at once, they would bury it. So Pax arranged a public hearing—an assembly that would not be controlled by the Emperor, where the Empress's mercy could be used like a blade. I sat in the back, clutching the silver bell, while men in the court strutted like cocks.
"Who will accuse?" asked a minister.
Pax rose. His body still bore the marks of his punishment—his jaw line was hard, his hand still bore the scar from an old fight—but his voice was steady. "I will," he said. "There is proof that the men who orchestrated the fall of the southern Kingdom colluded with court officials. I have the parchment."
The room murmured. The Emperor's face did not change, but those who had smiles began to lose them. The minister called for witnesses. Pax produced a folder. He set it on the dais like a tray.
"These papers show forged orders," Pax said. "They show the names of those who profited from war. They show how merchants conspired to benefit from a broken land."
A clerk read the names. I heard a name and did not know if my heart would catch. One by one, the names fell, like leaves from a tree in autumn.
There was a man—Cullen Ramos—who had been a minister for trade. There was Ernesto Fitzpatrick, a captain who sold the southern pass. There was also Daniela Rose, who had been intimate with some of the palace's men and who had used that intimacy to gain favors; she had already been punished, but there were others.
When the truth spilled, the court could no longer pretend.
"Take them," the Emperor finally intoned. "Bring them to the public steps."
The courtyard filled. Sunlight cut the columns into stripes. A crowd gathered, servants and pages and those who measured justice in public applause. I watched as the men were brought out. Their faces were pale; some had tried to pull a laugh as if disgrace could be laughed away.
"These men have traded lives for coin," Pax proclaimed to the public. "They conspired to hand over a sovereign people for profit. They sold the south into ruin."
A man tried to speak. "This is treason!" he shouted.
Pax replied, "It is truth. You took their gold. You took their lives. You must face what you did."
Cullen Ramos looked as if the sun had struck his face. "I did what was ordered," he said. "I obeyed the higher—"
"Orders made with falsified seals from you," Pax answered.
The crowd's reaction changed. Some who had looked complacent now cheered. Others ran to the shade.
The first punishment was what the court called a stripping of honor—titles torn in public, rings broken, a humiliating march through the corridors to the pillory. But Laurent and Pax wanted more. "They must be held as an example," Laurent said, in a voice that made people feel the crack of bone. "If men can profit from war, who is safe?"
I had thought I wanted them to die; but seeing them led out, the truth was complicated. A man—Ernesto Fitzpatrick—begged, his voice raw. "Please—my children—"
Children were dragged into the crowd. Women cried. The punishment that followed was neither secret nor entirely brutal. The court wanted the world to remember what happened when greed ate a land.
They were paraded: hands bound, garments torn. They were forced to kneel before the whole square. I watched their expression change in a pattern like a dying fire: first arrogance, then realization of eyes watching, then denial, then rage, and last surrender.
"Look upon your work," Pax said. "You reduced a nation to tokens."
People in the courtyard hissed and some spat. Then the magistrate read charges loudly and the sentence was to be potently humiliating: the men would have their names struck from the rolls and their property confiscated and their right to honor removed. Some who had been deep in the conspiracy were to be marched from the city and publicly stripped of their offices—not executed—but what made it a punishment was the loss of everything known to them. For proud men, reputation is air. Without it, men choke.
When the magistrate named Cullen, he wept—not from pain but from the knowledge of how much he had lost. "No one will marry my daughter now," he wailed. "My name—"
Men with authority escorted them to stations where papers were filed; the crowd recorded it with murmurs. I noticed cameras—no, not machines but scribes—scribbles that would become gossip in the morning.
At one point the crowd lifted its voice in a chorus of judgment. "Shame!" they shouted. "Shame!" Their voices were a beating drum.
Cullen's face soured. The crowd's jeers hardened into anger. He tried to speak again, to command the floor; his mouth flapped but no words made sense. The humiliation was worse than any lash.
"Was it your coin you loved more than their lives?" Pax asked, and the question landed on him like a net.
Cullen tried to nod toward his family but the public had turned. Children nearby clutched at their mothers' skirts. The court had decided to make this a spectacle so it could teach.
The worst reaction came when one of the men reached for the Emperor's chair as if to call for mercy. Someone in the crowd broke a clay pot and hurled it at him. It hit his shoulder with a dull crack. People screamed. The man staggered. He suddenly looked like a puppet with clipped threads.
I saw a line of faces shift from indifference to vindication. They had watched men buy wars and thought their own names were safe. Now those men were tied down and their accounts were to be emptied. The magistrate handed down the sentence.
The punished wept and ranted—first with arrogance, then disbelief, then bargaining. "I was following orders!" they cried. "You say you are just, but you had your hand in this too."
Elders stepped forward and hissed, "Then speak, and your deeds will be known. But now you are judged."
There was a moment when one of the men—Cullen—screamed, "Where is your mercy? We are your servants!"
A woman in the crowd, once a buyer of bread, spat on him. "Your servants sold our sons," she spat. "You serve coin."
The men bent and knew they were finished in a way that flesh cannot recover from.
I stood and listened as they were shaved of titles, and as their families were ordered to move from the city. Some attempted to kneel and beg for the Emperor's forgiveness. The Emperor turned away, his profile like a wall. There was no more mercy.
When it was over, the courtyard smelled of dust and of victory—a bitter smell, because what we had gained was not innocence but the uneasy knowledge that power could be accountable when enough people demanded it.
That public punishment lasted a long time, not merely in action but in the echo it left. People talked for weeks. Families rearranged. The papers printed ink and accusations. The names of some were ruined; they walked the city like shadows. Anyone who had believed they could profit from others without consequence now counted the cost and shrank.
I felt none of it as triumph. I felt only rawness and an interior emptiness like a furnace that had burned out. Having justice did not fill the gulf where my father's house used to be. It did not replace the lullabies that only he had known.
Yet, the punishment changed us. It loosened the ropes of a few men. It revealed a place where truth, if spoken loud enough, could ripple like water. Pax lost his title for a time for his role in naming men, but he gained a kind of respect. I felt him near, silent as always.
We had, in that courtyard, public humiliation which was ancient and yet modern. The punished went through the stages of disbelief, defiance, bargaining and then a grieving howl that shook the ears. The courtiers who had cheered began to shrink back. Some watched and realized their hands were not clean.
As for those who had abused me—Isabella, who had lain accusations like traps—they were not brought out to be flayed. The world had complicated tastes for liking or hating. Isabella's face grew colder, meaner. She continued to dress in roses and speak of my "foreign ways" with a smugness that made me bitter.
Time slid on and the household steadied into a new, shaky normal. I bore another child in spring. The delivery bloodied me like a battle. The child cried and we named him in the hush of a room lit by the Empress's hands.
It was not the ending I had imagined. I had thought I wanted to tear everything down and leave the court in ashes. Instead, I learned to hold the child, and the child's small hands came for my face, and for a time the pain eased.
Laurent changed too. He came to my bedstead at night, his eyes red and raw. He did not apologize for the early blows, but he began to watch the child as if the little one's breath were his reason. When he caught me watching him, he would only say, "Do not be foolish."
I saw in him a complexity I had not wanted to learn. Once, in a night when the moon lay like a silver coin, he knelt suddenly and wept—hard and shameful. "For you," he said. "For what I did."
I saw an arc of man who had been taught to take and now feared losing what he had gained. He loved the child; he had always loved a certain idea of power, and now that idea had softened into something like protectiveness.
In the end I learned that the world offers no single kind of justice. Some suffered the public humiliation that gave us a taste of retribution. Others—like Isabella—slid into the new seasons of favor and mischief. Pax came back, older and wiser. Chester was saved, in part due to quiet deals and in part because the truth had to be told: my brother had not been a murderer but a desperate man.
I would not say I was victorious. I would not say I had been broken and healed. I would say I had been forced into a house of rules and learned how to make a garden in a corner. I had lost nations and found small mercies.
One night, as the cradle rocked and the moths traced lazy circles around the lantern, I put the silver bell I had kept since my father gave it to me into the child’s hand. He clutched it and giggled.
Pax came and left a small note in my lap. "There are things I will tell you when the time is right," he wrote. "For now, live."
Laurent sat in a corner and watched. I bit my lip and looked him straight in the face. "Did you ever think you would love like this?" I asked.
He did not answer at first. Finally, he said, "Love is a strange tutor."
The palace, as always, did not end in a neat bow. It changed and remained cruel in some corners, kind in others. But when I lay my child's head against my breast and heard him breathe, I understood why I had been forced across million-mile roads: to learn how to hold it all—the grief and the tenderness—at once.
I kept the silver bell. When I walked in the palace gardens, the bell jingled softly in the folds of my sleeve. It was a sound that said I remembered where I had come from and who I had been. It was also a promise I could not be sure I intended—perhaps to the man I had not wished to love, or to the boy who had no palace behind him but only small, bright hands.
The world outside the palace still turned on greed and knives. Men who had their honor stripped walked like shadows to other towns. Isabella kept her perfume and her roses. Pax came and told me, finally, why he had done certain things—actions that had been a politician's iron and a friend's heart. He told me a secret about himself, a promise he had made years ago to a frightened little girl on a bridge. It was a story that warmed me and made me ache.
"One day," he said, "you will laugh about this. One day you'll tell your son stories about fields where women sing to the moon."
I laughed, then, a thin sound at first, and then deeper. I wonder now if the world I thought I wanted—the one where I could run back to the south and hear my mother's voice—was ever possible. Perhaps it was not. But I could weave my small grief into the life I had now.
Sometimes at night, when the palace slept and the curtains breathed and the child's soft whimpering filled the room, I would take the bell and hold it to my lips. I would press it to my ear, and I would imagine my father's hands, a memory like a small bright coin.
I did not say anything profound about love. I only learned to hold it. I learned that punishment can be a public thing with many faces—humiliation, law, removal of status. I learned that the men who commit cruel things will sometimes be made to stand in the sun with no crowns. I learned that a life is built from small mercies, not from sweeping triumphs.
If someone asked me if it was worth it—the loss of home, of my family, of the woman I'd once been—I would not say yes or no. I would only hand them the silver bell and let them hear.
The bell rings when the child laughs. It rings when Pax drops a note and leaves like a wind. It rings when Laurent sighs and looks at his own hands, which are no longer only tools but instruments he uses to build, in silence, something like care.
That is my life now. A bell in my son's small fist. A courtyard where truth once had to be shouted. A palace where some men were made to bend and then told they would not stand up again.
Perhaps one day the bell will rust. Perhaps one day my son will throw it into the river. But tonight it rings, and that sound is mine.
The End
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