Revenge12 min read
Three-Threes Make Nine — A Princess, Tea, and a Broken Promise
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I remember the snow on the day he said it.
"You picked the wrong day to marry me," Esteban Mori said, as if the cold could be blamed for what came after. He lay with his head against my chest, and he smiled with the kind of tired softness that made my heart go quiet.
"Why?" I whispered. "What day is better?"
"It shouldn't have been the fifth day of the winter month," he said. "It should have been the third day of the third month."
"Why?" I asked again. His fingers loosened in my hair. He laughed very small.
"Because three times three is nine," he said. "Three-threes make nine. Three makes it last."
He closed his eyes. I watched his chest stop moving. I watched him get colder. Snow drifted down past the eaves while I sat on the floor of the courtyard, holding a small red hairpin in my hand. The hairpin lay bright against the flagstone, its pearl gone, a tiny hollow where a jewel had been.
I did not speak. I let the sky crowd into the silence between my ribs. Then I stood up and left, and before the courtyard gate closed I looked back.
Snow blew in columns. My whole chest ached. I understood then, with a terrible clarity that felt like a punishment, why he had said that day mattered.
Three-threes make nine. Three-threes make it last.
1
My father disliked me.
That was the first thing I knew about the palace. He favored another woman — the late Consort of Celebration — and he disliked my mother because my face looked too close to my mother's. So he disliked me for that same reason. People in the palace began to call me "the Ninth Princess" more than they called me by my birth name.
"Nine," my mother said once, touching my head, "you will marry whoever you wish. I won't let anyone force you."
I loved my mother then because she had a voice that felt like a warm lamp. She gave me permission to be foolish, and that permission was the best gift.
2
I was clumsy at everything noble girls were supposed to know. Music, painting, chess — I tried all of them and failed at most. My mother never scolded me for failing. Her only rule was never to be arrogant because people liked me. Her favor was quiet and not like the emperor's attention.
She set me with friends she trusted. Kayla Klein and another girl named Bethany Patel — two bright girls who were better than me at everything. Kayla said, "It's fine, Ashlynn. You're kind and the world shouldn't punish you." Bethany said, "Your tea is better than ours together. Don't mind the others."
So tea became my thing. I learned to make a small world from boiling water and leaves. When a tea circle was held in the city, I begged to go. My mother found out I had sneaked out. She punished me — a week of facing the wall — and then, to my great surprise, gave me permission to go free again.
"Keep out of trouble," she said. "Bring me something to laugh about."
3
He was in white.
At the tea house he sat like a bright thread among drab robes — so clean and tall that I could not help staring. For a while I thought he was a city merchant's son; I lied that I was the daughter of a humble north-side family. He smiled and called me "Miss from the north," and then he put a little pouch of tea on the table and said it came from a place no respectable merchant would touch.
"Black market?" I asked, surprised.
He shrugged. "Some teas are worth the risk," he said. "Sit. I'll tell you stories."
He told me stories long and wandering as a river. He had seen places my life had not reached. He was Esteban Mori, the eldest son in the General's house, the story went — though at the time he let me believe my own story.
"Call me Third," he said later, when someone joked that he had the number three in household rank. "Call me Third if it pleases you."
"Third," I repeated, and the name lodged soft and bright in my mouth.
4
We met at tea circles and in the market. I learned his laugh, his odd touches — how he would crease his brow when something annoyed him, how he liked tea just-so. I told him stories I had not meant to share. He was the first person in a long while who made me feel like two people could be simply a pair, and not a piece on a chessboard.
"Will you come again?" he asked at one tea.
"I will," I said. "If you tell me more stories."
He grinned. "Deal."
5
Then everything shifted. My father died. My older brother took the throne. The palace became a net of urgent steps and whispered fear. The tea circle quieted. He stopped coming as often.
I stopped going to tea, because the days had grown tight with sorrow and duty. I think I felt the world snap smaller around me. Kayla's husband matter happened, and Bethany's smiles thinned; every face in the palace seemed to tuck itself into a new shape.
I thought he might have pulled away because his household had more burden now. I thought perhaps tea had been an easy pleasure he could no longer afford.
6
He found me the day of Bethany's small wedding.
"I didn't know you would be here," he said, and then he saw my face wet with salt. "You cried?"
"It isn't… I don't know why," I stammered. He took my hand, a rough, sure pressure. A maid cried out, and he let go because the world still had rules the way it always had.
"I thought you were the daughter of the north," he said, and in the way he said it I heard the ache of being tricked. He pulled back, and his face was suddenly unreadable.
"You're not what you said you were," he murmured. "You used me."
I swallowed the truth and watched his shoulders go. I felt a hole like an uprooted tree left inside me.
7
After that I grew quiet. I tried to learn what my mother wanted of a princess. I went often to the music rooms and sat like a statue. I made a show of being dignified.
Then the morning came when they asked me my consent to a marriage I had not imagined. My brother — the one who wore the imperial robe now — had decided to arrange a match for me. The proposal came from the same house as the young man in white.
"Do you consent?" my mother asked, and for the first time in my life I could say yes for my own reason. Everything inside me pulsed with the memory of his smile at the tea house. I said, "I do."
8
The wedding was set for the fifth day of the winter month. They put a jade bead on a hairpin on my head — a token he had given me. He teased me then, rough and light as a child.
"We will go hunt. We'll ride. We'll wear men's clothes sometimes," he said. "You are like a brother I married."
"Uncle!" I teased back.
We were small and loud and foolish, and the palace looked softer around us. People said we were a story, and for a moment I believed it.
9
Then the world buckled.
A plot grew like rot through the court. My husband's father — General Mauricio Dillon — moved troops. My brother took the throne and called us traitors. Houses that once bowed now turned like blades.
When I learned what my brother had done — when I saw the soldiers sack the regent's allies, when I saw how the palace halls turned into cages — I ran to find Esteban.
"What's happening?" I demanded. "Tell me."
"I had to," he said, as if the words tasted of iron. "My father asked. My name is his name. I cannot be his son and do nothing. I can't step aside."
"You're telling me you joined a coup?" I cried.
"I did what I was told," he said. "I came home. I could not refuse him. But I am still yours."
10
They came and took the house. The rebellion failed. I stood in the courtyard with my hairpin burning in my palm when they carried him back to me.
He was quiet. He smiled, the same tired smile I had loved.
"Why?" I said. "Why did you do this? You promised—"
"I am a child of storm and bone," he said. "I cannot change my lineage. I am the general's son, and the general chose the path. If I die, it will be simple. But I wanted you to know I chose you."
He pulled the hairpin from my hair. The jade bead — the one he had given to me — had dissolved into a bitter taste. He bit it off and swallowed. I screamed.
"You can't—"
He laid his head in my lap like a small animal. "It should not have been on the fifth day," he said, voice falling away. "It should have been the third day of the third month."
Snow began to fall as though the sky mourned. I sat on the flagstone until my knees grew numb, until the courtyard lamps blurred into a single smear. Then I stood, and I walked away from the place where he lay still.
11
After the smoke cleared and the swords were sheathed, there were many punishments.
My brother's power fell away in a day when his plan collapsed. He had thought himself sharp enough to wrench a crown, but crowns are not like ropes you can tug at without tearing something else.
He was brought into the great hall that once applauded him. They made him sit on a low stool while the throng gathered around. I was there, forced forward like everyone else, trembling on my feet. He looked up at me and his eyes were the same cold gray I had always feared.
"Ulrich Johnson," the chancellor said, "you stand accused of treason. You raised arms against the regency and endangered the realm."
Ulrich tried to speak. He stammered, then swallowed.
"Your crimes are many," the chancellor continued. "You have deceived family, you have led men to death, you have stained the honor of the house."
"Chancellor," Ulrich cut in, voice high, "I—"
"Silence!" a minister shouted. The hall fell into a brittle quiet.
I saw him change then. First a flash of fury, then a look of disbelief, then a small, animal panic as the crowd's eyes sharpened on him. He sank into himself like someone realizing that a warm room was actually a trap.
"Will you admit your guilt?" the chief minister asked.
"No," Ulrich said, through clenched teeth. "I did what a leader must. Did you think I wished harm? I did this for the throne."
"Then you have judged yourself," the minister said. "Strip him."
They stripped him not of clothes alone but of title. His robe was taken, replaced with coarse hemp. Soldiers led him through the main avenue, where once he had swung down in a litter to be praised. Children spat at his feet. Former allies turned away as if his shadow were enough to taint them.
People I had known since childhood whispered, "So this was the man," and a dozen voices murmured like bees. Nobody touched him. Some laughed. Some cried. A few recorded it in ink. His face changed again — first pride, then confusion, then a creeping shame, and finally a raw, thin terror. He fell to his knees where merchants and servants could see, and he called for mercy.
"Forgive me!" he begged, loud and desperate. "I did it for the family! I did it for our line!"
A shoe hit his shoulder. A market woman spat and said, "You should have thought of that before you broke homes."
Around us the crowd's reactions thickened — indignation, a kind of cruel satisfaction, the slow turning of fans to watch a spectacle. The chancellor ordered him exiled, his property seized, his name scrubbed from state records. Men who had once boasted him now pretended not to know him.
Ulrich's eyes found mine. He reached out as if to say something between us, some final defense. But the court was not for private things. The public unmasking consumed him, the shine gone from his eyes, leaving a raw human in his place.
"Don't you pity me?" he croaked.
"No," I heard myself say, cold and simple. "You chose this."
He crumpled. That was the end of him before the realm moved on.
12
Then there was Bethany.
She had been my friend since childhood. I had sat by her side through music lessons and laughed with her. Later I watched, numb, as she did something terrible and nearly killed Kayla. It took me a long time to understand why she had done it; she told me, in a voice that felt like glass, that men had made her believe they could decide her life.
"You knew he loved Kayla," I said to her once when she sat in the cold of the prison cell with a pale face. "You knew."
"I knew everything," she said. "And I knew nothing. He loved Kayla. He never told me. He left me to guess. I wanted him to know what it felt like."
"You hurt her," I said. "You made her forget, almost to kill her."
She had not yet been judged. Word had spread like oil. People wanted spectacle. They wanted to see truth stripped and thrown into the light. So they brought her out to the central square — not in chains, but in a chair, her hands bound with satin rather than iron. The sun was hard, and the crowd thick as harvest grain.
"Bethany Patel," declared the magistrate, "you stand accused of poisoning a noblewoman in a malicious attempt to remove her as a rival."
She was silent at first. I found my voice before I found mercy.
"You did it for revenge?" I asked.
"Yes," she said. Her voice did not tremble. "For revenge and for an answer. He loved her. He hid it. He left me to make sense of it."
"Why poison Kayla?" someone in the crowd shouted. "Why not speak?"
She looked out over the faces and something like a smile passed over her. "Would you believe him if he said I was wrong? Would you believe me if I spoke the truth? I wanted something final. I wanted to be seen."
The crowd shifted. There were murmurs of anger and of sympathy too. I felt sick. I could not forgive her. Not because she had acted — people do terrible things for terrible reasons — but because she had acted without regard for life.
"State what you wish to say," the magistrate ordered.
She did not deny what she had done. "I poisoned the tea," she said simply. "I thought if Kayla was gone, the world would be simpler. I thought then the rightful anger would break like a storm and he would see me."
Faces around us reacted. Some cursed; some watched with an eager cruelty. Someone in the crowd recorded her statement with a slate and a quick hand. A woman held up a child to show the child the meaning of consequence.
The magistrate then presented the evidence — the vial, the notes, witnesses who had seen Bethany near Kayla's cup. The proof was laid bare like a meal on a table.
They did not execute her by sword or by fire. They dismantled the life that made her complaint possible. She was stripped of any honorary rank. She would be sent to a convent to spend years in atonement. She would be kept where no man could use her name as a pawn. They required her to stand in the city gate, where anyone who passed could spit or hurl insults, and she had to recite what she did and why, each day until the assembly tired of her voice.
When they asked if she had remorse, she bowed her head.
"Yes," she said. "I regret what I did."
The crowd hissed. A few ladies of the court whispered, "She was always proud. Good."
No one clapped. The punishment was not blood, but exposure and the slow dissolution of a life. She knelt and wept openly. For a long time people watched in a kind of fascinated disgust. Some took her picture in scratch and ink. Others muttered about the cruelty of the law. Children passed by and learned that faces they had known could change.
Her reaction moved through a dozen stages. At first she tried to hold her chin high, but as whispers grew she looked thinner. Then she denied with a brittle hope that someone would not believe the proofs. When the proofs were read, she looked dazed. Later she broke. She begged, then curled into herself. She begged forgiveness from Kayla's small bed of friends as if a plea could stitch back the broken pieces.
"What I wanted was to be seen," she sobbed. "I wanted him to feel the burn I felt."
"That is not an excuse," I said to her once when I was allowed to visit in the prison yard. "It will never be an excuse."
She asked me, voice small and raw, "Will you forgive me?"
"No," I said quietly. "Not for that. But I will go tell Kayla your last words. I will carry them. The kingdom has no room for secrets like that."
People in the square wrote about her in columns for a week. She became an example, the subject of whispers in embroidery rooms, of lessons spoken in the hush of night. I read those notes and felt a hard, hot place in my chest where the memory of a friend should have been.
13
After the punishments, life rearranged itself like a room after a riot. Some chairs were gone. People walked with different steps. The chancellor rearranged marriages and titles. The regent — the quiet, sharp man who had watched the whole scene with a soldier's steady patience — had long cared for me in a way that had never shown itself in court rumor.
Later, I would learn that he had loved me since I was a child who fell from a swing. He had called himself my "little uncle" as a joke to make me feel safer. He had watched me learn tea and hide my sorrows.
He came to me in the months after everything fell and sat with me while I unmade a life that had been forfeit.
"You must be stronger than the world asks," he said once. "Or softer, sometimes. We do not get to choose many things, but we can choose who we keep near."
I thought of Esteban on the cold stone, and of the hairpin in my palm. The pearl was gone. The jade had dissolved. The memory of his smile stayed like a bruise.
14
When the snow thinned and spring hinted at the branches, I took that red hairpin — broken, small — and tucked it into the place where I kept small things that mattered. I whispered to it, "Three-threes make nine," like a charm, like a promise I could not be sure I wanted.
I learned to manage my grief like a recipe: a cup of duty, two spoons of memory, a pinch of stubbornness. The regent watched and helped. He taught me statecraft. He taught me how not to be used by men's plans. He showed me that kindness could be a strategy.
"I will not make you like me," he said once, sharp and gentle both. "But I will not let you be used."
I believed him then because belief is a warm thing and I was cold.
15
Years later, when the world had settled into a quieter danger, the town square had new markets. Kayla was healed. Bethany had faded into the memory of a lesson.
Sometimes at night I hold the hairpin and recite the rule Esteban said. Three-threes make nine. I do not know if it is a superstition, or if it is a tiny hinge on which fate turns. But I keep it, and I remember the warmth of a man's head on my breast and the way snow can fall in sunlight and look like forgiveness.
I do not wear the hairpin anymore. I keep it in a small red box, wrapped in cloth. It is heavy not for what it is, but for what it held.
That day of snow plays in my mind like a script that refuses to end. He said the wrong day was chosen. I know that now in ways I did not then. But the choice was ours in the small ways. We chose to laugh. We chose to love. We chose the moment we had.
Sometimes I speak aloud to the empty room and tell the hairpin, "You were right. Three-threes make it last." The pearl is gone, but the hollow holds memory. I think that might be enough.
The End
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