Revenge15 min read
A Concubine’s Taste of Fire and Mercy
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I remember the weight of the wooden basin on my feet, the way the boards beneath me tilted as I pretended to gather lotuses.
"Smile, Leia," Lily whispered, pressing a sour plum into my palm.
"You sure this won't show?" I asked, tasting the puckering sweetness and feeling small relief. My belly was five months round, and every taste felt like a risk.
"Don't look so pale," Lily said. "You worry too much."
"Better to worry than to be careless," I answered. "Petra is not kind. You know her."
Lily nodded, then ducked her head and left for the court to carry food. The lotus basin was heavier than I remembered. People had come — many noble guests — and I had planned this small show to prove my face, to show my family had honor.
I poised on the basin, began my little dance, and then the world slipped.
The basin flipped. I fell among splashing water and silk, and the crowd laughed like knives.
"Drew will laugh at me," I thought, and then I saw the man I was promised to — not yet husband, not yet anything — vanish among the faces. The shame puckered my chest like an empty fist.
After that, my life was rearranged into two halves: the part where I kept my head down and hid my belly, and the part where I learned how to survive the household that had claimed me as a piece of dowry.
Petra Santiago was my elder sister by rights and cruelty. She was the one who had broken my first marriage promise, the one who had insisted I come into the Duke's house with her as a walking, breathing trinket. She had saved her own status by shredding others.
"Keep your head low, Leia," Lily said once, folding a small embroidered shirt I had stitched for the child I carried. "Let them think you nothing."
"But what if she harms the child?" I whispered. "You saw how she looked when she thought I might be pregnant with a son."
"Then we must be quieter," Lily said.
I swallowed my fear like a hard pill and did what I had to do. I learned the rooms, the schedules, the faces. I learned where the Duke's younger brother, Drew Chevalier, kept his books and how the thin sunlight slanted across his desk in the late afternoon. I learned the way he breathed when he read.
Once, in desperation, I sat outside his study with a wrapped parcel and knocked. His page opened the door and, eyes sharp, looked at me.
"Leia," he said cold as winter when he saw me — not the cold of disdain, but the distance of a man unused to being needed.
"He is the world of my child," I thought. "If anyone can buy back Lily, it is him."
"Sir," I said, voice raw. "Lily was taken. They say she stole jewels; they say she was sold."
Drew's expression did not change. "You come now with accusations and nothing else? You should present yourself right for asking favors."
I had no words. Only that small white dress I had sewn, only the handful of coins I had kept in a stitch of fabric. I had nothing but a trembling kind of courage. So I did what I had never done before. I stepped forward and rested my forehead against his sleeve.
"Please," I whispered. "Redeem Lily. I will pay."
He looked at me long, like a man who had just discovered an unexpected map. "You want to throw away your dignity for a servant?"
"My child is not safe if she is gone," I said. "I will do anything."
"Anything?" he said, and there was a flash in his eyes. "Then be careful what you offer."
Later he told me, quieter, "When you ask, do it like someone who knows her needs. Spare me the rhetoric."
I left his study with my mouth numb and my heart oddly awake. He had said more than he realized — or maybe he had said everything.
Lily came back not long after, thanks to a lady of age and influence, Vittoria Legrand, who took a liking to certain small gifts and to the quiet way I sewed. Lily was brought to the Dowager's rooms and saved from being sold away into some man's house. I was grateful and I was small with relief.
"Take these to the Dowager," I told Freja, who would pass them with a curtsey. "Tell her thank you."
"You are too kind," Freja said, eyes worried. "You hide your things too carefully. Keep something for yourself."
"I have you," I told her, and felt the truth of it like heat in my chest.
But gratitude can wear a thin face. Doom comes in a parade: first whispers, then the fall of plates, then the staged accident that breaks a child's life.
One night in winter, a dinner of celebration turned ugly. Two of the concubines, loud with the threat of position, lost their children suddenly. The household blamed food. The cook named Ruben Nichols was found to have used something that aggravated pregnancy and was paraded about the compound as a scapegoat.
"Why would Ruben do that?" I asked Freja, when we were alone.
"He didn't," Freja said. "Someone used him. Someone with access and motive."
"Petra," I breathed. "She would not tolerate a rival child."
"Then be careful," Freja said. "Watch the house. Watch the dowry, watch their faces."
I watched, and one by one, the conspirators revealed themselves not by evidence but by the way they smirked too long at my belly, or shifted too quickly away when I passed.
The worst violence happens when there are witnesses who refuse to see. I saved myself a dozen times by being unseen.
"Leia?" Drew asked once, appearing in the corridor, his voice softer than I had ever heard.
"Yes, sir?"
"You are different," he said. "You show no cunning. But you show courage in other ways."
"What would you have me do?" I asked.
"Be brave with me," he said. "Or not. Either way, do not die for pride."
I laughed a little, because pride had already killed my child many times over. "I am not proud," I said. "I am only trying to live."
He watched me with a strange, unreadable light in his eyes.
As spring leaned toward another year, Petra's plans sharpened. She could not abide even the idea of a child growing as a rival in the house. She had arranged men and stories before; she had also arranged my first broken engagement. She delighted in the precise cruelty of it.
On the day when my belly kicked and the house sang of births and prayers, I was sent to the family temple with the other concubines. The matron Blythe Hassan's voice was sharp; her orders sharper.
"All of you will pray," Blythe said. "Pray for the health of the mistress."
They herded us to our knees. Freja was at my side, holding my sleeve. Petra was there, smiling with a soft venom. I felt the room tilt.
"Be careful," Freja hissed. "If something happens, go to Helena. Go to the Dowager." Helena Hanyv — a loyal woman — would help.
I had barely murmured a blessing when Petra's hand slipped, and another's hand shoved. They began to quarrel, which in the cramped temple meant jostling and then falling.
"Mind your feet!" a woman shouted.
"I did not step on you!" Petra snapped, but the noise grew.
The world contracted to the size of my belly and the pressure against it. I pushed, out of reflex, trying to hold the weight of my child in place, and a body crashed into me.
I felt a sharp, hollowed out breaking inside that was more than pain — it was a silence. The air left me. Freja's face blurred. Someone screamed.
When the child came, it was only for a breath. I held him like a bird and then he was gone. I was empty and full in the same heartbeat.
"You?" Freja sobbed. "You are alive."
"I am alive," I managed. "He is not."
They called it fate. They called it dharma. Petra called it the hazard of being poor and low. She smiled as if eating bread.
"She is a plain concubine," someone whispered near the trays. "What could her child mean?"
"Let her be content," Petra said out loud, with a shine like oil in her eyes. "A servant's sorrow is a servant's only."
I did not cry at first. I held my child's small cold body and said one word, faint as a bell.
"Life."
They sewed the white away. They arranged the mourning in the proper manner, and I folded into the ritual until it became ritual.
Then something in me changed. If death could be disguised as accident, time could be spent in craft.
"I will not be killed quietly," I told Freja, folding a small scrap of writing into a ribbon. "If I cannot have what I deserve, I will take what I can."
She looked at me with fear and loyalty. "You mean—"
"Yes. I will get close to Drew," I said. "I will be obvious when it hurts Petra. I will be a light in his house and a thorn in hers."
And so I began to unseat Petra with the smallest of triumphs. I let myself be coquettish one afternoon in Drew's study when he asked me to help him with his clothes. I tripped on a sash and he corrected me; I pretended to be clumsy. When he scolded me, I pouted. It was a child’s game and he loved it.
"You're shameless," he said, half laugh, half reprimand, when I bent to help at his waist.
"You told me to know how to ask," I said, putting my hand near his chest. "You told me to be letter-perfect when asking."
He looked at me as if seeing a small candle's flame for the first time. "Then do not burn, Leia."
"But if I burn, will you not put out the fire?" I asked.
He did not answer with words; he answered with a gesture. And so he came more often to my rooms than to Petra's, and the other women began to notice.
I would sit with a scarf at the window, and when he passed I would slip a sign about a game and he would laugh and delay.
"She is different with you," one maid remarked. "He never smiles like that."
"Let him," I said. "Let him have his foolishness."
Power accumulates like frost. I grew friends with the other concubines. I gave small gifts, asked and received small favors, let my laughter be a new currency. Petra began to lose small threads of authority. She grew thin with rage. She accused me of taking what was hers, of wanting her place.
"It is time you stop," she hissed once in the hallway, face white. "You are a concubine. Know your place."
"No," I replied. "I will not."
That defiance became contagious. Freja and Lily and even some of Petra's own attendants began to orbit my rooms rather than hers.
Then came the great play: Petra's trap at the feast of the cloth. During a family visit to my maternal kin’s manor, someone’s jewel disappeared — a string of seven gems belonging to a visiting noblewoman. Petra’s mother, and the household, were in a fever; accusations spread.
A servant, instructed by Petra, planted the necklace in my mother's rooms — Alessandra Bruno — and a servant just as obedient presented it as found. At once, the house gasped. A voice rose.
"Who has done this?" the noblewoman demanded. "I had my seven jewels."
Blythe Hassan, who always sided with Petra, outflanked my mother in front of guests. "It was found on Madame Alessandra's maid," she intoned.
"You cannot!" I cried, stepping forward. "You are using the old trick."
"A trick?" Petra's mother said. "You are defending criminals."
I saw it all, like a chessboard revealed. I had a chance — if I could make the world see how easy it was to turn false evidence back on its own maker.
I whispered to Freja, "Find the guard with the net hair ribbon."
She vanished like a shadow and returned with a small man in black who had been our ally. He bowed and produced the necklace, lifted from the sleeve of another servant who had been planted to carry a false shame to Blythe.
"These were staged," Freja cried. "They were planted. We know who hid them."
"Who?" the noblewoman asked, eyes like hawks.
I stepped forward and said plainly, "They were planted to disgrace my mother and bind her to guilt so that the household would not suspect true thievery. The only reason is to manipulate dowry and influence."
The hall fell silent.
Petra's face, which had been smooth as glazed redware, split with something like fear.
"You accuse my family!" she said, with a voice that had been learned from servants. "How dare you!"
"Do you deny this?" I asked simply. "Do you deny planting a man in Alessandra's rooms?"
Petra's supporters shifted. Blythe's eyes flickered like a woman whose lamp was guttering. Vittoria Legrand, who had been watching nearby, inclined her head.
"Bring forth the witnesses," Vittoria said.
They did. At first it was small: a maid who had been instructed, then another, then a low man who confessed under the gentle pressure of machinery too well known to the Dowager.
Petra's mask fell.
That is when I decided to expose her entirely. It had to be public; it had to be complete.
"She will be shown in the courtyard," I told Freja. "She will not be allowed the comforts of privacy. The house must understand what it did."
And so the courtyard was filled. There were servants, town guards who recognized Drew, the bewildered visiting nobles, and a group of women from the household who could not believe what would happen next.
Petra was dragged out in her red, head high but face flushed. Blythe stood with her and shouted she had never done such a thing. But every face in the crowd had turned toward Petra and the house could feel the shift.
I had to speak. My voice kept shaking.
"Everyone," I said. "You have watched my son die, you have watched the house tremble. This is not a private matter. It is a lesson."
Petra spat. "You will not publicize my disgrace," she said. "You are a concubine. You have no rights."
"You had rights," I replied. "You used them like a hammer."
The courtyard was full. I walked close, so close my skirts nearly brushed her ankles. I had the letter, the evidence, the lacings, and the oldest servant who would attest to Petra's planned letters to her accomplice.
"Why did you do it?" asked a guest, loud enough for all to hear.
Petra's face showed for the first time something that felt like panic. "You do not know," she said, trying to gather words like armor. "You think you understand..."
"You planned to steal a woman's jewels to blacken my mother's name," I said. "You planned to sell a maid's life to keep your status. You bought a man's silence with coins."
The crowd murmured. Voices rose. Some stepped back; others leaned forward, indulgent like a pack watching a weaker wolf stumble.
"All the house has seen is your smile," I continued. "All the house has seen is the way you guided false rumors. You have bribed people, pushed things into pockets, written letters in false hands. You set my maid to be sold to avoid your shame. You did not only throw poison into pots; you made others swallow it."
Petra's eyes turned to me like a hunted bird's. "You liar!" she cried. "You are jealous!"
"Is that all?" I asked. "Then hear this: I will not ask for death. I ask for the truth to be shown to everyone. If you can stand with your deeds before these people and call them nothing, then I will kneel and beg your pardon."
Her face hardened. Blythe called for calm. But the courtyard was already the arena. Someone from the guard called for witnesses. A string of servants — some of whom Petra had earlier silenced — came forward one by one and told their tales.
"I was paid to plant," one said.
"I carried a jewel in a sleeve," another admitted.
"I was promised advancement," a third whispered.
The sound of confession broke Petra down in a way I had not expected. She had always been cruel with a mask of perfection, but that mask had not been forged to face crowds.
First: she flashed with disbelief, as if the story were a bad joke. "They lie!" she said, voice brittle.
Then: a flicker of anger rose, bright and hard. "They are mad," she declared, and struck at the man nearest her with a sudden hand.
He recoiled and people gasped. Guards moved. Petra's bravado began to crack.
Next came denial. "I never..." she began, but the words fell apart under witness after witness.
Then the collapse: her mouth opened, pupils widening as if the room had suddenly grown too large. Her cheeks blanched; her knuckles whitened as she tried to hold a pose and could not.
Finally, the plea. "I—please," she said, voice thin like string. "Do not cast me out. I was only afraid."
The crowd reacted as a living thing. Some hissed like disapproving cats. A woman in the back, previously silent, spat, "You always thought yourself above us."
Someone snapped a picture — no, not a picture, but a memory shared in the courtyard: a handmaid looked on with a displeased laugh, a man took out a pen and wrote a note, a neighbor whispered to another, "She got what she deserved."
Drew stood at the courtyard edge, eyes dark. He had watched this with a composed face, but when Petra's pleading turned to clamoring, his hand tightened on the rail.
"Petra Santiago," he said finally, voice like stone. "You will be removed from the household and your privileges rescinded. You will be tried by the elders to determine your fate."
"It is unfair!" she wailed.
"It is not unfair," Blythe said, but her voice held no warmth.
Petra's supporters found their courage thin. One by one they stepped back. A few who had aligned with her earlier turned away from her in the open air, exchanging looks that said, I had to survive.
Petra's face crumpled. She sank to her knees as the elders approached. The crowd closed in like a net; some clucked their tongues, some shook heads, some laughed softly.
"Do not humiliate me," Petra begged. "I will—"
"Silence," the elder said. "You have been seen."
They led her away in front of all. For the first time, the house saw the anatomy of her cruelty, piece by piece, until it was no longer a rumor but a record.
The punishment was public, humiliating in the way that made people remember it. Petra had her titles stripped before the servants and elders. Her silk was removed and replaced with coarse cloth. Her jewels were taken away and passed among the servants like a lesson. Blythe was dismissed from her honored place and sent to menial work. Petra's friends were obliged to stand in the courtyard and listen to those they had scorned recite how they had been treated. The noblewoman recovered her jewels and pressed them into my mother's hand with a cold dignity.
Petra's expression shifted from shock to denial to pleading to raw collapse in full view. Her voice faltered. "You can't do this," she said, eyes empty. "You were my sister."
"Once," I said softly. "Once you had that choice."
Around her, faces changed: some whispered, some spat, some clapped. A child in the crowd pointed and laughed. Freja stepped forward and spat in Petra's direction. "You will not walk among us again," she said.
There was no single moment of revenge, just a draining of power. People who had once courted Petra's favor now saw her hands empty and turned away. That was the cruelty I wanted: not death, but the slow collapse of every favor she had built. The elders gave her a small hearing, then moved to exile — not to the street, but to a distant house without influence. She tried to bargain, begged, promised. The crowd watched her change from a proud, sharp woman to someone who clutched at straw.
"Do you feel it?" I asked Freja later, voice low.
"What?" she answered.
"I feel like a different person," I said. "It is not pleasure. It is a settling."
Freja nodded. "It is a balance restored."
The house had been re-ordered. There were consequences: Petra's fall made room for my ascent, but not because I loved power. I wanted truth and safety, and the only way I found both was by pushing to the open air the things that had always been done in the shadows.
After Petra's removal, the house changed its rhythm. Dowager Vittoria was kind, and she took some interest in the way I stitched. Drew's attention, though complicated, became steady in some small way. I accepted a position as "side wife" by arrangement — a title that felt at once like a burden and a shield — and the child I lost became a private grief that transformed me into a harder, wiser woman.
One night, in the smoke of a bad year's end, I did something I had thought to do and yet never truly expected to commit. We had a feast for the child's first-year rites; I watched as Drew's son — Petra's son by law — reached for things on the table. The child's innocent action broke me wide open. I gathered small toys, lit a candle, and set them around me.
"This is a backwardness," I thought. "What use is grief if it does not become something else?"
I took things used for the child's ceremony and set them together with a trembling hand; then I lit the room.
"Leia!" Freja screamed. "What are you doing?"
"Let me," I said. "This is for him."
It was a blaze that surprised everyone. Drew, who had never been sentimental, smashed through the door and pulled me from the smoke. I clutched the charred wood of the beam and felt his arms like iron.
"Your son...?" he said, voice breaking, and for the first time I saw fear and love braided in his face.
"Your son?" I repeated. "You mean...?"
He had to tell me the thing I had suspected: the child I had lost — the child who had died that winter — was not who the house believed. The babies had been switched long ago by a hand cleverer than mine and by fear. Drew's voice when he told me was raw with sorrow and apology.
"I saw you before you were claimed," he said, lower now. "Years ago at a pond. You fell. You rose with a leaf on your hair. I loved you then."
I had been only a girl then. He had loved an image. The world rearranged itself around truth.
When he said, "That child, Leia, the one you had — he was mine," everything shifted. The household's conspiracies had been a tangle binding truth into knots. But with Petra gone, with some things seen, some apologies could be said.
We lay in the ruined room among ash and the smell of smoke. He held me like someone afraid to drop a fragile thing and then kissed me as if to anchor himself.
"I will keep you," he said. "I should have years ago."
I discovered then that grief and love can be braided into one rope of living, and I took his hand.
Months turned into years. We had more children; we buried fewer. I stitched and taught and kept watch.
Lily married well. Freja became my steward. My mother, Alessandra, was raised in respect because the household could not afford to dishonor blood. Blythe hated me still in small ways, but she had learned where power now resided.
As for Petra, she never returned to our house. She lived off the edges of whispered stories and regrets, and sometimes I would think of her kneeling in that courtyard, ungloved and small, and feel neither triumph nor mercy.
The Dowager once pulled me aside to say, "You are not what I expected."
"What did you expect?" I asked.
"That you would be a woman who took without thought," she said. "You took only to save what is yours. That is not a petty thing. That is a kind of wisdom."
I smiled, thinking of Lily's small hands, of my child's brief breath, of the way Drew's hand had first come down upon my sleeve. The house had been a slow, hard lesson. I had paid in small deaths and large courage, and I had learned the price of being seen.
Years later, our little son, Calloway, grew into a boy with his father's serious eyes and my stubborn mouth. He would one day tell a story of the day he saw a woman stand in a courtyard and not fall.
"I remember," he said, eyes wide as a boy can be, "the women at court told me stories. They told me of you."
I cupped his face. "And what did they say?"
"They said you never gave up," he said. "They said you made Petra feel small."
"Did they say why?" I asked.
He looked at me like a child does at a teacher. "Because you made everything honest," he said simply.
I laughed then, because there is an odd sweetness in being called honest by a child who will one day be a man in power.
We lived after that — not all peaceful, but steadier — and the fires I lit wound away into memory like the edges of old scars.
I learned to love simple things: the clasp of Drew's hand in the dark, the sound of Calloway's laugh, Lily's steady cookery, Freja's quick smile. I learned to sew new patterns into the family's life, and to guard the small ones who could be trampled in the rush for rank.
Above all, I learned that when ones around you fall, the price is often a public imagination — shame for the guilty, shame for the innocent. I had pulled things into light, and light has both warmth and sting.
Sometimes, when I walk past the courtyard where Petra once stood, I see a shadow and think of what might have been. I think of the basin breaking, of the Dowager's hand on my head, of Drew's awkward lean, of Lily's first grin.
"Remember the plum," Lily tells me sometimes, handing me one from the jar I learned to keep by the hearth.
"I do," I say, and the taste is still there — sour and bright — and it tastes like survival.
The End
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