Face-Slapping14 min read
"You Said the Queen Can't Be Me" — A Palace Reckoning
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I am Guadalupe Chen. I told myself once, many years ago, that I would never be the one to sit quietly while someone else took what should have been mine. I remember the exact taste of the crab puffs my father bought for my elder sister, Marine Bowers, and the hollow of envy that opened in my chest the day she smiled and ate while I watched. I remember the way my mother, Evelyn Everett, flinched at every request from my sister as if treading on glass. I learned then to make mischief and hide the crumbs. I learned how to bite and pout so no one would call it rebellion.
When Finlay Castro said to me with a grin, "The queen cannot be you," he did not expect I would answer with white silk.
"I told you," Marine said once, when she leaned against the porch column and watched fireflies. "People have places. You and I—different jars."
"Different jars rot differently," I said, but she only laughed, soft and patient, the way she always had the right smile for every occasion.
The court called Marine gentle and suitable; they called me a wilder thing. The difference mattered. When the Great Hall was set for marriages, the ministers said sound things about alliances and lines of blood. My father, Gonzalo Busch, who had bled and built borders for the realm, watched both his daughters as if balancing geography. He loved Marine in the easy way of a man who prized the neat and proper; with me, he had the rougher affection of someone who'd taught me to ride.
"You will sit well in the palace," he told me once. "You will learn manners."
I learned more than manners. I learned the small arithmetic of courts—what to say and what to hold back, how to smile as manners demanded and sharpen a plan as the candle burned. I married Finlay Castro because I made him believe he could use me. He was the younger prince, the one with a tender face and a lonely air, always looking at the wrong person. Gerardo Lemaire—my father had favored him for another alliance—waslyllis? No, that name doesn't belong here. Gerardo Lemaire was the other prince, the loud, gallant one, the kind who would press a plum-scented cake into a girl's hands and expect a grin. He gave me a little plum cake once. I still kept the paper.
"If you are married to me," Finlay told me in our bridal chamber, his voice low and vulnerable, "I will be yours."
"You will be mine if you are not a fool," I said, and he laughed and pretended he hadn't meant the other.
I was supposed to be the consolation prize. Marine was the delicate badge of a better alliance; she was woven of silk and pedigrees, the picture of what a good family made. I was the edge of the sword—sharp and ready. I thought I would be safe as Finlay's chosen, that being his would be enough to put me above the memory of crumbs and pushed toy carts. I half believed that if I made him need me to feel heroic, it would settle everything. But men like him are built of weather, not conviction. When a current turns, they drift.
"You always watch the wrong face," he said, one night when he thought I slept. He said it laughingly, like a game. "The one you want, the crown's eye is on someone else."
"The crown's eye," I answered, turning on my pillow, "looks at who will feed it better."
He did not love me. He loved Marine the way one loves an idea of peace. That is the most dangerous love—soft, over-idealizing, and sharp as any sword when crossed. He wanted what he could not have in any honest way, and when he could not have it, he turned to hunger.
"She is gentle," he said to me when the court listened. "She would be a softer queen."
"You will choose soft for the whole realm and call it strength," I said.
He smiled. "Not my fear."
We left the capital and went to an outlying dukedom where he could rule with the excuse of distance. He built a little court of pleasures and planted the idea in everyone that exile had made him contemplative, but he never ceased to steal glances toward Marine. He would ride to the stream and tell the men at their cups, "One day, perhaps a soft woman will be called to sit among iron," and they would laugh and call him a dreamer. He trained soldiers like an idle hobby until, one winter, rumor thickened and a blade slid into the seam of power.
"Are you planting traps or gardens?" I asked Dimitri Sutton once when I first saw the training at night, men sweating under oil lamps.
"We are building a path," he said, his voice like gravel. "Paths can be walked upon by many, or barricaded."
"I want a throne, not a trench," I said.
Dimitri's jaw tightened. He had first bowed to me in a dirt-road hospital, a man whose face had been halved by a wound and left beautiful in a savage way. "You gave me a name," he said quietly. "You saved me from those men in the lane. You offered me a place. I cannot repay with coin. I repay with loyalty. With the rest, I will do what you say."
"Then keep your promises," I whispered. "Keep your steel out of the sun until the day I say to blaze."
We used chess moves. I let him enter the duke's confidence, and when we needed men, he produced them like a conjurer. Finlay did not suspect because Finlay had dreamed himself worthy through his own sense of slight, not hatred. He thought he still had advantages: an ancestry, a line that believed in him when the center sagged. He thought he could bargain.
It is a quiet thing, to watch someone fall in love with the wrong memory. Finlay turned violent in the small ways first—he mocked my talk of the palace as if I had hunted queens, he tightened the leash on my freedom, he forbade letters. I pretended to be a good pawn. I let him think me pliable. Meanwhile, beneath the apple trees and in the wet of nights, Dimitri dug.
One winter's morning, the message came that the capital's old ruler had fallen sick, and the court's gears rattled toward succession. Finlay's eyes shone like a man who had just recalled how to breathe. "If the throne is empty," he said, "why should the crown not be ours?"
"Because men clutch crowns like they clutch memory," I said.
He smiled. "Then we will make this memory ours. You will be queen."
"You will put your sister-in-law on my head and call me blind," I said.
His arrogance made him blind. He took the crown no stronger by virtue than two men could give a child a crown, and when the old blade in the palace finally broke and the court chose a hurried raising, he rode in as if to a hunt. It was a short day before his appetite turned to hunger.
"Do you think you can control what men will say?" Marine asked once in a letter she sent, the paper flaking faint with old tears.
"I can control what I will do," I wrote back.
You cannot imagine the cold weight of standing in a hall full of men who will deal in sentences of life and death with the same breath. Finlay stood in the middle and claimed he had more right because he had the swords men behind him. He thought authority would clothe him better than character. He thought he could use me to solemnize his rule. He named me not queen but companion. "The queen cannot be you," he said in a voice that split like ice, once more, laughing as if it were a joke told too often.
That night I thought not of vengeance but of fairness. I dressed in white silk and cut the hem with small hands that had once sewn scraps of my childhood life into dolls. I wrapped the silk and walked beneath the lanterns toward the palace where he slept with the arrogance of a man who thinks fate is a bed he's laid.
"You are going to kill him," Dimitri whispered when he knelt at my feet, the white silk folded in his hands.
"Kill him?" I said and laughed, and the sound came out like a blade's ring. "I will make him answer. The difference is a word. They will see him for what he truly is."
"You cannot—"
"I can," I said. "You will stand with me. You know I saved you when the world turned its back. You said you would repay. Repay me with this, with the watching of men whose tongues have cause to close."
He would not say no. He had given me his oath in smoke and blood; he would not break it.
We walked into the soft night. The palace smelled of camphor and sleeping wood. Guards snored. In the outer courtyard someone tripped over a bucket. Nothing signaled the end of an age except the brave smallness of our plan.
The punishment had to be public. That was my rule—the wrongs done in the open could be unmade in the open. I would not whisper a death into the dark. I would place a truth upon his throat. I would make the court watch the man who had said, "The queen cannot be you," undone by the woman he had dismissed.
The next morning, the court was crowded. I walked in, draped in mourning white as if I had come to pray. There were ministers, gleaming with the false dullness of those who have been paid and yet are always hungry. There were ladies with fans and men with eyes like knives. I felt every gaze as if it were a tender on my skin. Some were hungry for scandal; some were steeped in duty; many just wanted distraction. I let them watch. I let them wait.
"Lady Guadalupe," one called, the speaker a small man who had always been kind to Marine. "You are late to court."
"Late for nothing," I answered. "I am early for what matters." My voice did not tremble.
Finlay sat enthroned by the regalia, the riser beneath him like a hearth that warmed more than his hands. He smiled because his smile still bought him things. "You are dressed for mourning," he said with a mock bow. "Do you grieve for someone?"
"For the idea that men think to tell women where their place is," I replied.
I stepped forward. The room flinched. I pulled the white silk from beneath my sleeve and offered it forward as one offers bread at a table. A hush fell like linen.
"You told me once," I said, "that the crown cannot sit upon me. You told me that I was not to be the woman at the heart of the house. Is that what you said, Finlay?"
He thought to laugh but the court's weight had shifted. "You could never fit complexities," he said. "You have always been coarser than the fabric of rule."
"Perhaps," I said softly. "But I will not let you speak worst of me and then sit upon a throne built with my hands."
"Your hands?" Finlay's face changed. His bravado curdled into uncertainty. "You—what have you done for me?"
"I gave you a map," I said. "I gave you men. I gave you plans. I gave you the bedrock you stand upon. I gave you what you needed to look bigger. What have you given me but a word? 'You cannot be.'"
There it was. A laugh ran like a ripple through the room. A minister called for order and stuttered, "My lady—this is not—"
"It is," I told him. "Hear me."
I turned to the assembly. "You have watched him make laws and let his hunger rule. You applauded. You took gold and were silent when the poor went without bread. Today I will end the silence."
Finlay's eyes darted. He moved to stand. "You will not—"
"I will," I answered. "You have taken from my family what you pleased. You put my father in harm's way and handed him to death. You set your hands on my father's blood. You dragged my sister to a place where she became small and then called her a better woman. You set your teeth on whatever served you. That will end."
He laughed then, a short hard sound. "You play at virtue now."
"Not play," I said. "I will perform justice."
He tried to call his guards, flinging words like commands. They moved too slow; their armor clanked like someone dressing for shame.
"Guards!" he barked. "Seize her!"
"Wait," Dimitri's voice rolled through the hall like thunder. He stepped forward at the edges of the crowd, helmet sparkling with chips of past battles. He had worn the look of a man who would rather die than bow twice. He caught the eyes of a dozen men at once and in a single breath they understood: they had been given a different order. A soldier at his side cried out, "We will not lay hands on her!"
All at once the room divided. Men who had once smiled at Finlay's wine now seemed to calculate whether their coin would last if they denied us. Finlay's face drained as he saw those whose support he had expected like ballast now thin as smoke.
"You turn on me," he said, voice small now, like a boy who had lost a favorite toy.
"No," I said. "I unmask you."
Then I did what I had planned. I bound the white silk around his throat, slow and deliberate, so the court would see every inch. His fingers clawed air. He tried to laugh and failed. "You cannot—" he gasped. "You promised—"
"I promised I would not let you take the world and call it your own," I said. "You promised to spare Gerardo Lemaire and you didn't. You promised the soldiers would not be used to burn towns and you did. You promised me the throne and you meant to hand it to someone else."
"I did what I must!" he rasped. He spat and the court recoiled as if at a leper's touch.
People started to murmur, then to cry, then to shout. "Treason!" cried the small man who had first spoken. "She strangles the king!"
"She kills a king!" another voice shrieked in horror.
"Hold!" I called. "Listen."
They did not want to, but they had to. In the riot of sound, some older man—one who had known the late ruler—raised a hand for silence. "Let her speak," he said. "If she will take his life in open sight, tell us why."
"A king who built his rule on theft and fear is not worth the breath of one single prayer," I answered. "He killed my father. He drove my sister to ruin and then scorned her. He beat the realm with his appetite and called it governance."
He tried to reach for me, to touch me, to claw a remembrance of his former worth. "You will die for this," he gasped. "You will be struck down!"
"Then let me be struck down by truth," I said, tightening the silk. He choked and coughed, and his face, which had always been so practiced for charm, reddened into a grotesque mask of fear.
Men were moving now—some to help, some to flee. A woman near the dais wept openly. A young guard dropped his spear. A herald grabbed at the silk and tried to free him; Dimitri stepped between the herald and the king with a blade that told the room he would not yield.
"Don't you see?" Finlay gasped, as if clinging to a final script. "You cannot rule like this and not pay—"
"Pay for what?" I said. "Pay for the father you made hollow? Pay for the children you've orphaned? You have no right in your hands but the right to be judged."
His face twitched. "You cannot—"
"I can," I said.
The last sounds are always the worst: the rattling, the little hopeful prayers that burst and then are no more. When Finlay's lips went slack and his eyes lost focus, those at the edges of the crowd cried out with some small mercy: "He dies like any man." A few spectators wept with relief as if some violent injustice had been undone. Others, who had loved him for the pomp he brought, looked like people robbed of a toy.
"Shame!" someone shouted. "Shame for a woman to hang a princeling!"
"No," an older general's voice said, and it was Dimitri who had the courage to speak it. "Shame on the man who made his own house a trap."
People began to speak in different tones: some with horror, some with relief, some with a new clarity. The chamber swelled with conversation that was almost argument: had justice been done, or had murder been committed? The answer lay in that him being exposed: his deeds, his calls for cruelties that had been whispered, everything he had pretended were the coins of rule were now the evidence of his hunger.
Finlay's chamberlain wept openly, his hands gripping hair. "My lord—" he cried. "This cannot—"
"It is too late for your protests," I said, but I felt none of the triumph I had expected. In his final eyes there had been a child's terror, and I realized then that all our lives had been imprisoned by habit. I had pierced a heart, but in doing so, I had opened the cage.
Dimitri folded the white silk and returned it to me when the tumult eased. He bowed once, head to ground. "You did what you needed," he said. "You did what I would have done a thousand times."
I could have called for blood—his family, for example, might have been dragged into the square. I could have demanded curses and retribution. Instead I spoke plainly, as if to bind a wound.
"Let the court decide," I said. "Let them decide by law and not by fear."
A hush clenched the room. Then Gerardo Lemaire, who had been watching, approached. He had always had gentleness in him like good bread—simple and necessary. "He has wronged many," he said. "But we must bind the wound with law."
"Law?" I asked, and my voice held a weary thing. "When law bends with coin, what is left?"
"Law must be mended," Gerardo said. "And we will mend it, if you let us try."
I looked at the faces: the chamberlain whose loyalty had been shaped by fear, the ministers practicing their speeches, the soldiers who had once trained under Finlay's command but were now uncertain of their oaths. Something like pity moved in me for these men who had only ever learned to bow.
"Then listen," I said. "There will be a mourning. There will be inquiry. We will not slit throats without reckoning. But he will not be honored. His name will not be set in stone as a king. Let that be the sentence."
They deliberated, and the court agreed—reluctantly, in pieces, and in part because a woman had stripped the mask from a man. But in that moment, the punishment was public, and with it came the crack in the court's complacency.
Later, when I sat with Marine as she bent down like a fallen oak, she took my hand and whispered, "You made them see."
"I made them feel," I corrected.
She smiled faintly. "That is worse for them."
We buried my father with honors that meant less than his deeds. We wrapped the memory of his leather hands around our sorrow like a scarf, and in the quiet nights I would think of the faces in the hall—the ones who slunk away, the ones who stayed—and wonder how many of them would learn to be less ravenous.
Dimitri stayed. He kept his oath. He guarded the child Mateo Bryant like he would guard the last fire before a storm. He taught the young prince the rudiments of duty and temper and, in secret, how to read the lean lines of a truthful face.
"Will you stay?" I asked Dimitri once as we watched the boy toss a wooden horse.
"I always will," he said simply.
"Why?" I pressed.
"Because you saved me," he said. "Because someone who is not afraid of what she must do deserves a man who is not afraid to pay his debts."
There are things one cannot unmake. There are also things one must do because the world will feed on weakness until nothing is left. I do not tell you that what I did was noble. I tell you that it was necessary. I tell you it was meant to make balance, not to become a mask of its own tyranny.
In time the court altered. Laws were twisted not into weapons but into ropes to hold the state steady. Mateo grew like a child should—laughing, thinking, careful. He called me aunt when he was small, and later emperor's aunt. He learned the names of gardeners and cooks. He was taught that a crown is a heavy thing that sits on a vulnerable head. He would inherit a realm frayed by appetite and mended with will.
Marine died in my arms the winter before Mateo's sixteenth year. Her last breath was quiet. She had been gentle all her life; her last cry was soft and afraid, but she told me before she left that my hands had steadied her when she couldn't be steadied. "You were always a blade," she whispered. "I was only the petal who kept you from being seen."
"Do not say such things," I said, and I meant it.
"You learned to make men answer," she said. "You will grow tired, and then you must sleep."
I did not sleep well afterward. I had imagined a life where the wrongs I had suffered could be turned into some neat ledger of right and wrong, but life has a taste of iron in its mouth even when justice is served. I learned that justice given publicly leaves the giver haunted. The man who refuses to be queen often refuses to be fully human when his appetite is starved.
In the end I learned something else: that hearts can be earned not by promises but by presence. Dimitri's loyalty became not a ledger but a daily bread. Gerardo's gentle sense of rightness became a steadying counsel. Mateo grew not into a tyrant but into a child who loved song and taught us to laugh in courtyards. The realm steadied. The court slowly learned that a woman's hands could not only stir a pot but steady a nation.
When I finally lay back on the pallet and felt the night close like a hand, I did not think of crowns. I thought of a simple plum cake paper, kept for a child who once ate while I watched. I thought, too, of the white silk, folded and put away, and the day the court saw that a woman could make a judgment as sharp as a blade and still—still—be saddened by the sight of a man gone wrong.
"Did you regret it?" Dimitri asked me once, long after the world had ceased to clang over the event.
"I regretted the way men had to die for others to see," I said. "I did not regret that they had to see."
He squeezed my hand. "Then we did right."
"Right and easy are different," I said. "Right is often heavy."
He nodded. "Then let us lighten what burdens we may."
We did what we could. We mended what the hunger had torn. We raised a child who would some day sit without hunger in his jaw. And when I wrote my sister's name in the last line of my private book, it felt like a benediction rather than a tally.
"Goodnight," I told the night I closed my eyes for the last time.
"Goodnight," Dimitri said, and his breath was warm and steady like a sentinel's.
I do not pretend the world became a better place because one man was undone by white silk. But the court saw a truth it had avoided: that words are power, and power must answer. I did not wear the crown some had promised me. I wore instead the weight of having faced a man who thought he could tell me where to stand and chosen, at last, to stand where I chose.
The End
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