Revenge19 min read
When Rivers Turn Red: A Princess and Her War
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I woke to a desert sky so wide it swallowed my breath.
"Are you really going to run?" Corbin Collins asked, the guard who had ridden beside me until the road narrowed and the world felt small.
"I am," I said, and my voice did not tremble. "Tell those who sent me this far that I will not be their prize."
"Serena," he said, and there was pity in his tone that I couldn't bear. "Think of your mother."
"Think of my mother?" I laughed. "My mother disappeared so long ago that even the palace lanterns forget to mourn her. No—think of yourself. If you keep riding, you might live."
By the time the escort screamed and the horses reared, I had already drawn the little dagger I always kept at my waist. The two guards beside the carriage died before they could cry "Princess!" Blood splattered my hands and the scent of iron was the only prayer I knew how to say.
"Serena!" Hadley Koenig was behind me, screaming her throat raw, "Princess!"
She had been sent in the place of a real friend; Hadley had eyes that watched and a heart that belonged to someone else. She'd been placed at my shoulder like a stone to weigh me down. I cut the reins, vaulted the seat, and rode.
The road led to the mountain pass. I laughed out loud because there was no glory in fleeing; only the taste of sand on my teeth and the knowledge that I had been given away like a horse.
A man stood at the pass with blood on his sword and a calm that belonged in legends.
"That pearl at your ear," he said, stepping closer. "A royal thing. Are you of the palace, lady?"
I feigned the small voice we train for when kings approach: "If I were, would I beg on the roadside? That is a pearl taken from a dead woman, Sir. Take it if you like."
His fingers brushed mine when I handed it over. The touch surprised me. He caught my wrist, pulled me into his shadow, and the world narrowed to his palm at my cheek and his voice.
"You're not a beggar," he said. "You are the Princess of Fusang."
"You mean the late favored one turned outcast," I said. "Who would want such a life?"
"I do," he answered, and his eyes were black and a little wild. "My name is Arden Webb. You will go with me."
I had thought the safest lie would be to say yes and then kill him that night. I had practiced that perfect, cold strike in the dark a dozen times. But when he tightened his hand once around my throat, the world emptied and I thought of patience.
"I will delight you when I must," I said, and let him pull me to his horse.
He held me in front of him as we rode. It was humiliating and intimate, a posture that made my pulse thrum against his back.
"Run," he murmured later, that first night in the small town where a healer stitched our wounds. "Try, and you'll only make them send another to take your place."
"I tried," I told him. "They sent a replacement in a red gown and called her me. She wore my face and my name at the capital—so what do you do with faces they pretend are yours?"
"You keep truth," Arden said. "Tell me your truth."
I was not generous. I showed him my shoulder where his blade had ended and my blade had answered. A wide scar crossed my shoulder—the memory of a time when I had stabbed and not been stabbed back. I told him other truths in little pieces, only as proof that I had teeth.
"You are brave enough," he said, as though bravery were the only currency he knew. "Bravery can be turned into teeth."
There were bargains in the night: the promise of secrets for the promise of shelter. He seemed to delight in the theater of being cruel—cruel, loyal to the throne, but petulant like a caged animal when the world thinned to just him and me.
"You speak as if you are my match," I said. "You plan wars with your cup of tea."
"A war is a long thing to plan," he said. "You either learn to love the map, or the map eats you."
In the months I played the role he wanted—wild, impossible, a public danger—he sent me back to the capital in a carriage, claiming he had "found" me. The emperor received me with a look that said everything and saved nothing. Kenneth Lang, the old man on the dragon-throne, had eyes like fogged glass, as if he had always preferred to see through smoke.
"Is this the woman?" he asked with an elegiac chuckle, and his court roared to fill the silence. "So fierce, so fine—what a gift."
"She is the Princess of Fusang," Arden told the court with that calm I had learned to hate and the skill I secretly admired. "She was lost, and I found her."
"Bring the brides in," the old emperor said. "We will wed our countries with two names and one coin."
They paraded the substitute, and I stood at the edge and cracked my knuckles on the hilt of a knife until my palms bled.
"So you took to the stage," someone whispered.
"A princess who taught herself to kill always performs well," I said loud enough for the chamber to hear. That was the first of many public theatrics I would keep.
I had reasons to accept their staged weddings. Arden—Arden Webb—was not simply a prince full of dreams. He was a blade; precise, careful, and utterly ruthless. The rumor said he had men broken for him. The rumor was a child's game compared to what I saw.
"You can help me get my mother back," I told him.
"Name your price," Arden said, and the way his mouth twitched around that promise felt like a trap and a salvation both.
I fed him pieces of my plan. I fed him my hatred like tinder. He winked and said, "Then play your part."
The palace is a place where small cruelty is the law. I watched how a woman could be stripped of dignity and still be forced into a smile while men argued with the weight of nations between their fingers.
"Do you know who your enemies are?" Corbin Collins asked one evening. I had taken him into confidence; he was a strategist with a thousand small maps in his head.
"My enemies are everyone who smiles at me as if I needed their permission to breathe," I said.
"That is a wide list," he said. "Make it smaller."
"Start with the left—Elliott McCormick, Lord Wei Hang, who thinks daughters can be bartered like coin. Megan Jensen is his daughter. She will laugh at you until she throws you into the lake."
"She already tried," I said, and I did not hide the memory: Megan's hand on the bamboo pole, the shove, my cold plunge into the lotus lake, the taste of mud and copper and the sweet thinking of sleep. "She almost killed me."
Arden came that night and sat by the healing pool while my shoulder throbbed and the moon watched like a judge.
"She had better regret it," Arden said lightly. "I will have her punished as show for the court."
"Punished how?" I asked. There are many versions of justice. Many ways to make a person break.
"You watch the old man's face," Arden said. "He loves his ceremonies. He thinks himself the last arbiter. I will take his ceremonies and redress them into truth."
I should have known then that coming to him was to ride the edge of a river that would cut both banks. He promised me my mother, and he gave me the stage. I gave him my sword and my cunning.
Days became theater. I baited the right men, flattered the right councilors, and whispered to Corbin every move like a poet planning a heist.
"Do you ever think of stopping?" Corbin asked once, as we sat on a rooftop watching lanterns drift.
"Stop?" I said, and there was bitterness in my mouth like raw sugar. "Stop like a clock stops? I cannot. Too many of my pieces are broken inside me to let them rest."
We set a trap during the emperor's hunting—an archaic pageant of banners and flagons. I was supposed to be careful that day—Arden had given me two iron tokens, one black and one white, that could summon troops. He had told me they were for my protection.
"Keep them," he had said. "Trust me."
"Your trust is good for conversation," I replied.
But the day of the hunt, someone came with a darker idea—Coleman Morgan, the sixth prince, a man who looked like he had lived his entire life in broth and luxury but carried rage like a sharpened stone. He schemed to pin a crime on Arden by arranging an assassination during the hunt.
"Kill the emperor's favor," Coleman had whispered to his few conspirators. "Make it look like Arden stands against the throne."
He never dreamed how well the throne knew its own teeth.
The arrows flew, iron flashed, and men fell. I rode a horse in red and loosed an arrow toward a stag. It missed staggering by a breath, and then a different arrow whistled past and Arden struck it down with the flat of his blade.
"Who shot at the emperor?" the chamber cried.
"Protect him!" cried others. The field was chaos.
Then the palace bells rang false—someone had planned for this all along. Coleman’s men charged in with false banners, crying of treason. For a moment, I thought everything would topple.
Arden stood chest out, hand on mine despite the dust. He was a rock and a blade.
"Hold," he commanded, and his voice became a drum. "No one dies for lies this day."
When the palace guards came, ordered by old men who feared losing their seats, Arden raised both iron tokens and called the troops. He acted like a prince in fury and a god in calm.
Those who planned to frame him found themselves the ones dragged into the light.
Coleman Morgan, face pale as the inside of an egg, was arrested. Ethan—no, his name was Coleman—he screamed that he had been set up; he denied, he staggered, he pleaded. The crowd gathered, curious like wolves.
Arden brought Coleman into the center of the great hall. He did not speak at first. The emperor—Kenneth Lang—sat trembling on the throne, a figure both pathetic and terrifying. Arden looked down at him and then up at the room full of witnesses.
"This is not the day for secrets," Arden said softly. "You who wore the crown have wrapped yourself in such lies that your house decays from the inside. Let the truth be aired."
Coleman fell to his knees. "My lord, it was not me. I am loyal to the house—"
"Silence!" the emperor barked, but his voice shook.
I had planned to watch from a corner, but the stage chose me instead. I walked forward, letting the hem of my gown trace the stone like a knife.
"You will see what cowardice and commerce of favors have done," I said. "You traded daughters, dragged mothers into pits, watched broken women be laughed at as you counted your spoils. You will answer."
Eyes widened. Whispers threaded through the hall.
Arden tapped a sword on the floor. "You, Coleman Morgan, accused of incitement, attempted murder of the throne, and a thousand secret crimes—what say you?"
Coleman scrambled, fingers clawing at the stone. "I am a prince! I cannot—"
"Then let the people see," Arden said. He gestured. "Bring forward those who took the money."
When the chambers emptied and the public saw not a single hidden hand go unmasked, the realization swept in: the emperor had kept monsters in his sleeves for the warmth of his crown.
Arden's voice cut again. "Kenneth Lang, sit and watch your empire strip itself of rot."
The old man's lips quivered. "What of the law?" he asked, voice a thread.
"The law," Arden replied, and his voice turned like iron, "is what you pretend until you cannot."
He turned to the gathered courtiers. "Witness this: the crimes of treachery and abduction, the selling of daughters, the murder of those who spoke—will be answered."
A hundred hands raised like a sea, some in horror, some in sudden grief.
"Kenneth Lang, you have been the soft cover for these sins. You hid those who killed for your pleasure. Show us the truth in your face." Arden's face was a mask carved by violence and calculation.
The old emperor's expression broke like old paper. "No," he said at last, a lonely child in a crown. "No, I—"
"You will tell them," Arden commanded.
So the emperor rose, and his voice cracked into a confession that was rotten and reeked. He named names he had never named aloud. He admitted how he had ordered men to push daughters into wells, to send soldiers to the provinces to "teach lessons," to keep women like caged things for his amusement. He believed himself a scholar of power and discovered he had been a butcher instead.
A murmur rose. I remember Megan Jensen's hand over her mouth, her face ashen, and her father, Elliott McCormick, white to the lips. Many in the room cried out at the smell of their own corruption.
Then Arden spoke as though the court had suddenly turned into a tribunal and the old emperor into the accused man. "For hiding crimes and perverting justice," he declared, "for using your throne as a shield for blood, Kenneth Lang will answer."
Coleman grovelled and wept. "I—"
"Enough," Arden said. "You will watch while the truth is made public."
He ordered the guards to drag the files to the center; letters breathed like ghosts. He let each name be spoken, let each act be repeated. People who had smiled at many cups now found their laughter choked. Sobbing, curses, the click of quills as men recorded—this was a punishment not of chains but of exposure.
"See how they turn away," I said, and the hall turned into a theater of shame. Elders who had held themselves tall bowed their heads. A crowd gathered at windows, breathing in the fall like a storm.
Then Arden did something I had not expected.
"Kenneth Lang," he said, and his voice was quiet enough that I felt like a child hearing a tale. "You have one last chance. Speak the truth, tell them who you served, and maybe—maybe—this house will have a way forward."
Kenneth Lang, all his white hair trembling, began to babble. "I thought— I believed—"
"You thought of yourself and not of the people," Arden finished. Then he kneeled and placed his forehead on the steps before the throne.
"By our customs," Arden said, "the ruler who fails justice must be held up for all to decide. I place him before the people."
There was no formal jury; the room was too real for theater. People gathered, and each of those who had suffered or lost someone was allowed to step forward. They came with names, with cries, with stones and with proofs. They told of wells filled with girls' bodies, of cunning men given positions because they would take what they had wanted, of mothers with eyes gone hollow from seeing their daughters taken.
"Enough!" the emperor finally shrieked. "I beg—"
"No," Megan Jensen cried, and she was not the petulant maid anymore. She stood like someone who had learned to fight her own life. "No more of your 'begs.' You took my cousin, you took my sister—"
"And you will pay," Arden said, and his voice struck like the first sword.
People stood, voices weaving, and then the sentence was not only Arden's to give. The old emperor was stripped of his robes and his seals; his face shown to the sun. The crowd cheered and spat and wept as he was led out, no longer the man everyone had feared but a subject at last of the law he had twisted.
I watched as one of those who had smiled and dined with him now spat at his feet. "Do you feel better?" she shouted. "Does telling you make you clean?"
Kenneth Lang stumbled through answers, refused, begged, lied. Arden held the room. The burning thing between us changed shape that day, and I had never felt more like a puppet and a queen at once.
We did not kill the emperor within the palace that day; that would come later in a certain quieter, crueler moment. But public shaming works on men who live by theater. They had to see their names in the light. They had to feel the claws of shame.
The courtyard outside became a theater of judgments. Men were stripped of ranks, women of titles, and the list went on until night fell like a curtain.
The crowd had eyes like wolves. Some cheered for the new order; some wept inwardly because they realized how many had fed. There was no applause only. There were sobs and curses like pebbles thrown at portraits. My name was said—"She killed and escaped!"—and I let the word hang there like a price.
"Do you feel satisfied?" Arden asked me when we retreated, and there was a small, private softness in his voice that misled me into believing we had shared some truth.
"For now," I said.
The punishment had been public and severe. Those who had smiled over the hearth were now visible as men with hollow places where courage used to live. They shuffled and paid the price as the crowd looked on. They did not all die, but some died worse: they lost the only thing that had mattered to them—their masks.
The months that followed were a careful war of chess and whispers.
Coleman Morgan's name fell like a stone; he was sent into exile with a procession to show what happens when pedigree becomes crime. But people liked spectacle, and they liked seeing blood on the hands of those who wore fine cloth.
Megan Jensen—who had tried to drown me—was punished. She lost the social clout her father had bought. Her father, Elliott McCormick, lost office after secret ledgers were read aloud. They were not only toppled; they were unmasked, and the court cheered with a fierce joy I had come to understand as the pleasure of watching justice in slow motion.
Some men wept to the rafters. Some men pretended not to listen and walked outside into the rain to wash their hands of it.
"Good," I said to Arden that night, tasting ash. "Good. Now give me the rest."
"Patience," he said, but his patience was a net he had already thrown. "First we pull out the roots."
And so we did.
My mother was not in the capital. She had been hidden in a moonlit house by my father's own hand, kept alive to be sometimes used as punishment and sometimes as proof. When we found her—when I found her—her fingers were mangled and her hair thin as the year. She'd been forced to watch the ways I had been broken and the small cruelties we pretended to call law.
I held her hand and asked questions with the bluntness of a woman who had learned the nature of hurt.
"Why did you stay?" I asked.
"I thought the crown would see her worth," she whispered. "But a crown, my child, will weigh down any heart in the world. I stayed because I thought you would make it, and I promised myself I would watch."
"Watch what?" I said. "Her face had been like a memory I could not name."
"Watch that you did not forget you were human," she said, small and brave. "Even when you slit throats. You stay human."
I laughed because I had no laugh.
We took the army back to the border to take what had been promised in blood. Arden stood with a slow fire. He was not the man who had smiled at me in the pass, nor was he the madman of old stories. He was a man who could kill a kingdom with a handful of men if it came to it.
"You will let me kill him?" I asked one night. The question meant my father, now stranded in the capital that had once sold me like coin.
Arden's face softened. "You will get your mother back first."
"You promised me my mother," I said. "You promised with a smile that looked like an executioner."
"I promised," he said, and there was something like a prayer in his voice. "But I will ask for a vow."
"A vow? After all this?" I laughed.
"Yes," he said. "You will not kill me when this is done."
There was a bargain between us, and at the center of it, our hands touched like the hinge of a blade.
I took my armies and walked through the gates. The people of my land—what had been my land—sat in hovels and watched like a people awake after a long sleep. I reclaimed the palace. My father, the fool who had hidden my mother under the very floor he walked on, saw me and tried to bargain with me as though we still lived by the old rules.
"Give me the lives I need," I told him. "Give me the truth."
"I will give you everything," he whispered, clutching for the thread of his power.
"You will watch your kingdom burn," I said, and then I did it. But before burning, I did not silence him in a corner. I set him out to be seen—because punishments are better paid under moonlight with many witnesses.
There came a day when I returned to the capital with ten thousand men. Arden rode with me not as a prince but as something older. He had the look of someone who had stripped himself of pretences and chosen to either worship or kill. He chose to fight with me, and he chose to stand at my side.
The capital remembered me as a name that caused men to mutter.
"Do you want my head?" my father asked when we finally faced each other.
"I want my mother," I said.
He folded, and in the end we settled for symbolic gestures that still stung him more than a blade. He lost the throne to me in all but name. He would not be killed in private. I wanted him to taste being brought down before the very people who had cheered his decisions.
Arden and I rode through the capital and declared the tribunal in the Hall of Statutes. Men who had once feasted now stood before the people and were stripped of their honors. My father was required to speak his own crimes aloud. He had to tell the people how he had sold daughters and watched mothers go like dry leaves. He had to name the men who had done him favors for favors. He had to be seen and so he was.
I watched as he could not speak. His throat closed. He begged for mercy like a man who was suddenly very mortal. The crowd jeered. I gave him to the people who had lost the most. They carved sentences that meant more than any blade, and his name was dragged through the streets.
Publicly, he was shamed. I let the people have him. I watched his face as his bloodless pride was stripped down.
Punishment, when it is public, teaches a lesson that murder cannot: it makes men remember their faces reflected in other eyes.
Later, in a quieter room with only a handful of men watching, Arden leaned down and kissed my temple. "You did not make me promise for nothing," he said. "You will have more."
"I always do," I answered.
He tucked two more iron tokens into my hand and I kept them like prayer beads.
In the weeks that followed, other punishments were made public. Elliott McCormick's ledger was read aloud. Megan Jensen’s maiden station was revoked and she was left to live with the knowledge that the people who had once envied her now called her a murderer. Her father fell from power and was made to swear before the courtyard.
Coleman Morgan was exiled in a procession through the city, forced to state the crimes he could remember. The people spat on him and called him fool. His voice broke into a whine. Some men collapsed in their own filth of shame. Others simply walked away and pretended nothing had happened, as they had all the other times.
Arden had predicted the forms this would take. He knew how to turn ceremonial spectacles into a knife.
"Will you ever forgive me?" I asked him once when we stood on the city walls and watched the last of the flames go out.
"For what?" he asked.
"For using you," I said. "For stabbing you, for riding in your shadow."
He did not laugh. "You used what you had. I used you to get what I had."
We stood there in the half-light, the city breathing under us like a living thing that had learned to breathe again.
"You kept your promise," I said.
"I kept worse than a promise," he said. "I kept my hunger."
And then the empire shook again.
Coleman Morgan had been exiled, but those who feared the new order found new plots. A false rebellion was staged. The old palace walls echoed with the clatter of steel and the scream of men who discovered they had chosen a wrong side in a game they did not fully understand.
In the end, the old emperor—Kenneth Lang—was captured. Arden walked into the great hall like a man walking into a gallery to pick a painting. He stopped before the throne and looked up at the old man's face, which had become a mask of regret.
"You once made men murder for you," Arden said softly. "Now you will see how the world looks when your lies are particles in the wind."
He struck the old emperor in public. There was no formal trial, not in the end; there were only witnesses and a truth laid bare.
Arden drove his sword through him with a motion that was both surgical and worshipful. The old man's eyes went glassy; he clutched at the dagger that had originally been given to him by a lover and realized too late he had been loved by a monster.
The hall erupted. Some shouted for mercy, some cried in relief, some recorded the moment with ink and tongues. The punishment was final and public.
I had thought I would be satisfied when the last of my tormentors fell. I had thought revenge would feel like honey. It did not. It was salt. It was a bitter, clean thing that burned and then left me with nothing but my own hands.
After the killing, many expected me to fall into the arms of Arden Webb and thank him with a smile and quiet cups of wine. But life does not bend so neatly.
"Will you stay?" I asked him in the days that followed, my voice low as the river when snow melts.
"I will stay," he said, and his hands were steady, "if you want me."
"I want to be both your queen and your executioner," I told him. "I want to have the right to choose to slit your throat and the right to choose not to."
He smiled in a way that trembled on the edge of something like adoration. "Then stay by my side and come with me."
The war that followed to bring my country back into the fold of all our maps was not without its ironies. We marched like conquering lovers and took back the land I had once been born into—only to remake it into something cleaner.
"Why did you kneel?" Corbin Collins asked one night when we had taken the city and sat in the small room where a fan like bamboo leaned against a wall.
"Because kneeling is easier than explaining why you love someone whose hands have killed," I said.
He looked at Arden. Arden said nothing.
There were other reckonings. Corbin and I discovered that the man we'd thought an ally—Alvaro Gibbs—had been bought by other men. He paid the price in the market: he lost rank, name, and then, in the final humiliation, he was lashed to a post in the square and made to read aloud the letters he'd accepted. People laughed and spat. He begged us for mercy that was not mercy.
And so the game ended. Those who had smiled at the crown and turned their backs on the suffering learned that sometimes the crown has teeth.
"Do you regret it?" Arden asked me once as we stood in the rebuilt palace where the dragon-wood had been sanded and polished anew.
"No," I said, and I believed it. "I regret only that I had to learn the lesson like this."
He kissed me in the throne room, a brief press of lips before he knelt and offered to be my consort in front of the court. He gave me the world in the most dangerous, earnest way any man had ever offered a woman.
"Will you let me kill you when you have finished your revenge?" I asked.
He smiled with the sort of bravery that is also terrible. "If you must," he said. "I will return the favor."
Years later people would tell the story as though it were a myth: the princess who learned to kill, the prince who bent and broke, the old emperor who fell in the sunlight, and the quiet man who left like a gust of wind.
But I remember differently.
I remember the bamboo fan slid into Corbin's hand on a rain-slick afternoon, the way my mother had laughed once before she was hidden, the iron tokens heavy in my palm like two moons, Arden's black horse thudding across the border at dusk, and the way Mei—no, Megan Jensen—stood in the courtyard with her face ashen.
I remember the punishment that was public and necessary. I remember walking the line between mercy and justice and choosing the one that let me sleep. I remember the last time Arden dropped to his knee and begged as though the world would break if I did not take him.
"I will make a kingdom out of you," he said quietly once.
"You already have," I replied.
In the end I did take the crown, which is only another metal to hang on the wall. I kept the iron tokens in a chest that only I opened. I gave orders that made the people sway toward justice instead of toward fear. I taught the court that a woman's eyes could be as sharp as any blade.
And when the last of them begged me—when my father had been dragged and the old emperor lay swallowed in his own crimes—I went to the lake where once I had been shoved and I stood in the shallows.
"Serena," Arden said softly behind me. "Are you satisfied?"
"No," I said. "But I am less empty."
He took my hand and together we watched lotus leaves float by like small green boats.
"When you come back to kill me," Arden said with a little laugh, "remind me I asked for this."
"I will," I promised. "But for now, keep your place at my side."
He slid a chain from his pocket and let it fall across my wrist so that in the morning people would say I had bound him. It was a small ceremony and it meant everything—he was not a prisoner; he had consented to stay.
I kept all the iron tokens and the bamboo fan, the proof of schemes and the proof of rescue. They are in my chest still.
"Will you rule?" Corbin asked the first time he came to my council.
"I will," I said. "I will rule as someone who remembers what she felt in the water and what it is to walk with iron in her hand."
He nodded. "A queen who remembers how to drown."
"And how to save."
We sat together by the window and watched the sun rise in a country that finally learned to stare at its own reflection.
I breathed.
I had found my mother.
I had taken a throne.
I still wanted to kill Arden in a way that was too intimate to be only cruel.
But for now, the chain on his wrist glinted like a promise we both had the right to keep or break.
We had made a kingdom out of revenge and love and the rough work of rebuilding. We would learn to laugh at tea and sharpen blades when necessary. We would teach others that punishment must be public when the deceit is public, and that mercy is earned, not bought.
And on nights when the moon hung full and cold, I would take the bamboo fan from the chest and open it, feeling for the hidden sliver of silver at its spine—the silver that had once saved me.
It is the small things that keep a life together. The iron tokens, the fan, the chain on a wrist, and the memory of the lake where I almost slept forever.
I still have plans for those who smile too widely.
The End
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