Revenge14 min read
A Garden, a Dog, and the Pact I Made with Winter
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I was fifteen the year they brought me through the palace gate.
"My daughter must be careful," my mother had whispered as they braided my hair. "Speech is a blade in a strange court. Do not wave it."
"You will not starve," my father had said, forcing a brave face. "This is safer than the markets."
I had not wanted glory. I had wanted a small life: a courtyard where beans could be planted, a dog at my feet, the smell of stew in the evening. I got a courtyard, a small dog, and silence.
"You're a lowly talent," some girls in the hall had whispered. "You'll never rise. Good riddance."
I listened. I kept my head down. I learned the hours of the palace like a clock. I named my little mottled dog Bean and gave it the warm corner near my door. Bean wagged and followed me like a promise.
One night the eunuchs brought a lacquered chest and an officer said, "For the Emperor's pleasure." I hardly understood then what that phrase could twist into.
"You are afraid?" he asked when he stood over me.
"Yes," I answered, and my voice shook.
He laughed somewhere deep and low. "Good. Fear is honest."
That night he touched my face and called me "my little one." He never came again after that first night. He sent doctors and warm stoves. The palace whispered "blessing" and bowed to me, then turned away.
It is strange how a single moment can act like a hinge and swing your life.
Weeks later, in the snow, my maid Finley slipped on a patch by the road and spilled a basket meant for another lady. A courtwoman I had seen before—Giuliana—saw it and chose the shape of a blade.
"Let them kneel," Giuliana said, sniffing like a cat. "They soil my dress."
"Please," Finley said, terrified, "it was an accident."
"We shall teach them some humility," Giuliana answered. She smiled slow and wide. Some smiles are knives.
Bean barked when the beating began. I moved without thinking. I threw myself in front of the dog as men struck, as hands pushed, as the world narrowed to blows and the taste of copper. My back hummed for months. The palace told me it was someone's lesson. They warned me to keep quiet.
I did not keep quiet inside my ribcage. I learned the word "anger" like a new language.
"You want to live," a friend told me once. "Then move. Take footprints upward. More favor, more protection." I almost laughed. I did not think I could climb a mountain while bound by silk.
The Emperor—Klaus Morel—came for a bowl of red-bean soup I had made to test him.
"You wanted me?" I asked when he stepped into my room like a question.
"You said you wished for me," he said. "So I came."
"Why came at night?" I asked, and the truth of loneliness settled between us. He stayed. He laughed. He scolded me for sleeping with a gourd of water to cool my body. He carried me when I was drunk on my own plum wine. He saved me from humiliation in the spring when my hand was thrown to lady Giuliana in the hall and he clapped me into his arms instead of answering her cries.
I believed him, and I did not.
A year became two. Bean grew old; the garden filled with roses I planted badly and then learned to mend. I planted lilies that refused to bloom and then learned how to coax seedlings. The Emperor said I had a talent for life. He called me "my light" in sharp, private moments that tasted like summer.
"Will you protect me?" I asked him once.
His hand was warm. "I will try," he said, and the hesitation in that sentence would become a canyon later.
When I found out I was with child, I thought I had the world again. They announced the soup. They clapped. Love is strange: between this man and me, our child was something that named us both with a future. I named her in my heart before she was born: a small bright proof. I called her Daphne in my sleep—Daphne Gray—in a language of small promises.
Then Bean dug up a jade pendant by the pond. I kept it on my palm and did not know whose it was. That trinket would be a loose thread that tugged the curtain back on what others hid.
Giuliana was already watching. She wore envy like perfume.
"She must not keep what others own," Giuliana said to Astrid, who was her ally in those days. "It's like a theft of fortune."
Astrid agreed, thin and soft-tongued, always pretending to be above small cruelty. Cruelty likes a soft hand to hold it.
On a day of sunlight I thought ordinary, Giuliana and Astrid came to my quarters like weather.
"You took a pair of pearls from my sister," Giuliana said.
"I did not," I said, stunned.
"You were by the pond," Astrid added in a voice like sugar. "You had the time."
"She lied," Finley whispered, clutching my sleeve.
"You were seen near the pond. You became the story," Giuliana said. Her lips formed the words like a trap. "You have stolen my pearls."
"Not true!" I called out, the first time I fought in front of them.
Giuliana slapped me across the face so hard my cheek remembered it for years like a bruise. Men struck Bean. The dogs squealed and I cried.
"I am guilty," I thought later when I could nurse my back. "So what? Will I bow until I hollow out?"
I did not bow inwardly. I rose.
I listened. I watched. I kept close the small faithful ones—Finley and Patricia—and I learned the way of small weapons: gossip, timing, a smile given to the right person for a favor owed later.
They were that sort of war.
When Giuliana grew pregnant, she used the pregnancy as armor. The court protected her. She grew too confident, a vine too near the roof. She forgot how easy it was to cut down a vine that had climbed over a wall.
I had learned to let the Emperor see the truth in measured ways. I had learned his temper, his patience, how his pride could be crueler than his love. I used it like a needle under silk.
"Isabelle," he would say in the quiet, "what have you been doing while I am away?"
"Living," I said, and the tone the question hid was worse than the question itself.
When detention and rebuke came to me after an argument over Bean and a small garden accident where someone had accused my dog of cruelty, I took the punishment and looked outward like a woman turning a map. I knew who had placed the knife, and I put a hand to the place where a knife's handle would fit.
The plan was small and sharp. Accusation requires witnesses and evidence and a place where the Emperor's anger is clean and simple—where people will not complicate the verdict.
The moment came in the Imperial Garden on a chilly bright day, when the court came to see the suddenly rare golden chrysanthemum. The Emperor, the Empress, the ministers—crowds of courtiers were there, and I wore a gown that looked like decent peace. I walked slow, and Giuliana glanced at me as one looks at a piece of fruit.
I let Patricia stand where she could see and Finley be four steps away. I had asked Maria—the woman the court called the graceful one who had been a friend to many—to pour tea at my hand. Maria saw my small nod and played her part like a compass point.
"Isabelle," Giuliana said, when we were alone under the pergola, "you think you've found a place."
"I think I've kept a life," I answered.
"You think life is yours when it has been given by the Emperor? You think you can pocket another's jewels and name it luck?"
"For the gods, Giuliana—"
"Silence," she snapped. "You will learn."
Later, in the hall that glittered like a sun-split lake, I staggered and pretended to fall. A cup of tea slid. The doctors came. I gasped and coughed, and when a court doctor muttered that it smelled like poison in the cup, the sound cut like an axe.
"Poison!" someone shouted.
"Who poured the tea?" the Emperor demanded, and his voice was like closing gates.
Patricia stepped forward and did something that would bend the rest of Giuliana's life.
"She poured it," Patricia said, pointing. "We saw Giuliana bend and stir before she gave the cup."
"It is impossible," Giuliana cried, and her face began as a petal and ended as a stone. "I would never—"
They searched Giuliana and found a small packet hidden at her sash: a powder that the physician recognized by eye.
"You lie!" Giuliana wailed. "You lie for her!"
The Emperor's face went a color of cooled iron. He did not speak for a long time. He cradled me like I was a porcelain revelation.
"Giuliana Sommer," he said at length. "You betrayed this house. You betrayed a child that sleeps in her mother's womb."
"You—" she started. Her voice changed from the slow, cruel corridor warmth she had used to command servants to a frightened rodent's squeal. "You cannot—this is conspiracy. I did not—"
"Enough." The Emperor's hand crushed the cup in his palm until it made thin, cracking noises. "Guards, take her."
She was led away with the ropes of her own reputation slipping like wet silk. But that was not what I would do alone. I had been patient; now I had the Emperor's anger and a public turn of tide. But the rule of the palace is not so simple as a surrender.
Giuliana's punishment needed to be a lesson legible to the whole high hall.
I stood up. I asked the Emperor for one thing: to reveal what I've seen at the pond months before when I had risen to my chamber trembling, and a palace woman had whispered a story of seeing a child fall.
"You cannot wish blood," he said.
"I do not wish blood," I answered. "I wish truth, and that truth will be public."
He agreed. He had always agreed to things when he believed their logic would protect the realm or his honor. I appealed to both.
The day of public reckoning was set in the great hall where courtiers gathered, where the moonlight could chart each face like a ledger. The Emperor sat like a shadowed sun. The Empress sat stone-still as a seal. Ministers stood with folded hands. A hundred extra maids and eunuchs leaned at the doors. It was to be seen by many.
"Giuliana Sommer," the Emperor said, his voice carrying. "You are accused of attempted murder by poison and of a deeper crime—murder of the Princess. Tell us what you did."
Her face was powder and hair: a painted ruin. She had had a day to practice for the crowd. She came in with the small dignity of a woman who expected to cheat fate with lies.
"I am innocent!" she screamed. "I would never—"
"Speak the truth," the Emperor commanded. The room hummed. "Tell us why your maid confessed you poured the tea. Tell us why the packet of poison had your seal."
Giuliana's eyes darted like trapped birds. The first stage of her reaction was arrogance: "You are wrong," she said. "This is a lie, framed by fools."
The crowd shifted. Some murmured suspicion; others leaned forward, hungry.
"Do you deny being at the pond the night the child—" I said, and I named the place in the hall where it happened, letting the memory hang in the cold air. "—fell?"
She blinked. Denial thrummed in her, but the crowd wanted sound.
"No! I—"
"Then explain how you met with a woman who later claimed to have seen the child's fall." I named the servant who had been terrified. "Explain why witnesses reported you near the pond. Explain the packet with your pin."
She went through phases like a play. First, outrage: "You dare—" Then denial, louder. Then fear: her voice cracked and she suddenly whispered, "I didn't mean for it to happen." That was the first slip, and the hall inhaled.
"You didn't mean for it to happen?" a woman yelled. "You didn't mean for a child to drown?"
Giuliana's face flickered. The veil slipped to shock.
"I—" she choked. "I only sought to make her miserable. I would not have her child—" Her words came in splinters now, not polished armor. "She had everything. I wanted revenge, not death."
The crowd reacted like thunder. Someone sobbed aloud. A eunuch muttered, "The gods are cruel." A girl behind me took a step forward and pointed. "She pushed her!"—and pointed at a name I had not yet spoken but had known in the marrow.
Giuliana's denial mutated into a different terror: she began to accuse others with flailing, to throw blame like a cornered thing. "It was Astrid who told me! She said she'd put me in place—"
Astrid, standing on the side, went white and then red. She denied until her voice ground quiet.
"Silence!" the Emperor's voice cracked like an iron bell. "We have more than words. We have a witness who saw the push, and another who saw you slip poison into a cup. We have your confession. We have the child's wet footprints in your path."
Giuliana staggered as if pushed. Her composure—what little remained—crumbled. She clutched her robes. "No—" she whispered. "Do not—"
At that point, the crowd's reaction heated like a furnace. Heads turned to stare. A woman—one who had been a victim of Giuliana's jealousy years ago—stepped forward and spat her contempt: "You smiled at my ruin!" She began to weep and speak at once, naming wrongs Giuliana had done. Others nodded; a chorus of small grievances rose.
"How could you?" one noblewoman said, voice trembling. "You used pregnancy as a shield. You called yourself a mother and hid poison in your sash."
Giuliana's arrogance dissolved into pleading. "I had to—" she cried. "If I did not act, they would swallow my son. I was afraid of being nothing!"
The crowd became voyeur and judge in one. They wanted spectacle; human cruelty cuddled the thrill. Some wept for the lost child. Some murmured "justice." A few, not two, began to clap, slow and then louder, as if applauding the final collapse of a small tyrant.
"Do you beg mercy?" I asked when the Emperor signalled for more restraint.
She looked at me with a face wrenched by regret layered with venom. For a moment her reaction sifted into a last posture: hatred and a plea all mixed. "No," she said. "I do not beg."
"You will be stripped of title," the Emperor pronounced. "You will be sent to the coldest wing of the palace with no servants, and you will be held until we decide on your fate."
Her reaction then shifted to full collapse. She went pale as a peeled fruit, made no more protests, and fell forward in a faint. Guards lifted her like a crawling animal. The courtyard erupted into shouts, some furious, some relieved. Phones—no, not phones; I mean hands—grasped at robes to get a closer look. A woman took out a small writing slate and started to copy every word; another set down a small bowl of water and fanned herself like she had seen a ghost.
Later, when the guards dumped her in the cold cell and the doors clanged, people circled in little groups and compared notes. "She always had a hungry eye," one said. "I told you she would be the ruin of someone." "But not like this," another murmured. "Not with a child."
Giuliana's face had run through arrogance, denial, anger, frantic blame, pleading, and finally a broken quiet that looked like repentance but felt hollow. The public's faces were mirror shards held up.
This was not the end—because the palace loves an end to be intricate. Later, when she was fetched to be paraded before servants and those she humiliated, the spectacle took new turns. I watched as a hundred small people whom she had scorned walked by and spat at her shoes, or turned away with disgust. A young maid she had ruined years ago now stood tall, voice steady: "You took my honor," she said. "Look at what you did."
Giuliana tried to plead with them. Her voice shook: "I—please—" The reaction was not pity. It was a collective expulsion. The woman who used to order others about now saw the faces she had flattened look at her like strangers. Her movements stuttered. She tried to laugh it away, and it sounded like a blade against bone.
She attempted to turn to me, to crawl at my feet, to beg me in public to spare her from the harsher punishments. "Isabelle, I—" she whispered through the barred gate.
I looked at her, thinking of the little hands of Daphne in my lap, the way Bean used to sleep with his head on my knee. I felt a thin, terrible relief. I had become something the palace recognized: a woman who would not be erased.
"Get away from me," I said quietly. It was the only mercy I could afford: to refuse her the theater of my pity.
When the court finished, Giuliana was taken to the cold wing under watch. No one helped her up from the ground. No one wrote her letters. She had been stripped of title, of servants, of the soft warmth of other people's fear. She had lost friends. She had lost the son she clung to as excuse. She had been punished where everyone would see, and they did see. They watched her reaction change: from denial to rage to frantic accusations, to prayer, to a ragged collapse, and finally an empty, haunted stare. The crowd's response had been savage and complex: some cheered justice, some felt humility at the depth of envy made manifest, a few stared in silent satisfaction, as if the palace had set a fever and the fever had broken.
But punishment, however loud, was only part of the story. I too had changed. I had learned to bite. I had learned to hide a knife inside a handkerchief smile. I had done things I would not have believed possible when I was fifteen.
Daphne was born in spring, a small wrapped miracle. She slept like a bud, and when she opened her eyes they were ipecac bright. I named her Daphne Gray at the shrine, and the Emperor stood with his head bowed like a man who had carried a heavy thing. For a while, there was peace shaped like a child.
We lost her in an autumn that tasted of cold pond water and the hush of reeds. She slipped away too suddenly for my body to hold the pain. It felt like someone had cut out a part of me for the sky. I could not breathe for weeks. The one woman I had allowed myself to trust—Giuliana—was lying at the bottom of my hate. The truth had arrived too late.
The night I found out, I ran to the pond in dreams and woke in the dark, running barefoot, hands raw. A servant confessed she had seen Giuliana at the pond the day Daphne fell. The confession came like a bell in the godless air. I could have thrown myself into the water that minute, but instead I made a colder choice.
I had learned the Emperor's heart. I had learned his anger and his mercies. I had learned how much protection he would risk for me and when he would not risk it. I had learned the difference between his "I will try" and "I will act." I used both.
In the end, I acted with the patience of a woman who had been beaten but was still breathing for those whose backs she could ease.
Life after that was a slow unthreading. The palace moved around me like tides around a rock. People called me "composed," "stern," "wise." I learned not to let the wrong hands press too deep. I let the garden grow, though sometimes the lilies died inexplicably. I watched the Emperor age at the shoulders. Sometimes he would come to my side and stare at the pond as if he were looking for a lost reflection.
"Do you hate me?" he asked once in the cold of morning.
"Sometimes," I said. "Mostly I am tired."
"Stay," he asked.
"I have been staying for years," I said, and looked down at the tiny long-ago pendant Bean had found. I kept it wrapped in silk.
Years passed like folded notes. The throne bore him shallow and deep. The palace shed people like leaves. Many of the small cruelties turned into ash and faded. Some things did not.
When the Emperor lay dying, he left me and the boy Finn—our childlike ward, who had grown up between my laps and the gardens—the freedom to live outside the walls. He left a strange, heavy mercy: an order that I might retire with Finn to a house beyond the city.
I took that mercy. I carried Daphne's small wooden toy, a shard of a mother's remembered laugh. I took Bean's old blanket—Bean had long since closed his eyes—and I took a lighter heart. The palace had chewed on me, but it had made me also resolute like iron.
On the last morning I sat in the carriage and watched the high walls fall away like memory, the snow under the wheels. I said to Finn, who clutched my hand, "We will plant a garden where no one comes to judge our roses."
He nodded solemn, like a small man who understood grown-world bargains. "Mother—"
"Isabelle," I corrected, and he smiled.
As the palace receded, I took the little jade pendant out of my silk and pressed it to my palm. It was worn and warm from all the palms that had touched it. I thought of Bean and Daphne and the way the Emperor had tried and failed in equal measure.
"Do you regret?" Finn asked.
I looked at the carriage wheel turning, the snow melting in a thin line. "Sometimes," I said. "But regret is a house I do not live in. I live in the garden I make."
We passed under a low archway, and behind us the palace stood, silent and ornate and terrible. Before the carriage door closed I caught a sliver of sunlight on the jade, and in that flash was the memory of a hand—gentle, patient—as if the world would always offer a small and honest warmth if you kept your hands open.
Later, when Finn had a daughter of his own, he would call her with a small name that sounded like a promise. "Be kind," he told her when she was tiny. "Plant things. If the world takes them, plant again."
I smiled then and placed the jade pendant into the earth near the new rose, a tiny, buried witness to the things I had loved and lost.
And that is how I learned to live: with a dog that loved me, a garden that forgave me, a pendant that kept memory warm, and a choice each morning to stand or to bow. I often thought the palace had eaten the girl I once was and spat out someone who could stand in the sun. Perhaps it had, and perhaps I had wanted that survival.
On the first spring after we left, a small dog found the pendant again by the rose bush. It brought it to me, tail wagging with the old, honest devotion. I held it and let the past sit like a small stone in my palm—sharp, necessary, and oddly comforting.
"Bean," I said then—because in the end names did not matter to the parts of us that loved—and the dog licked my hand. The jade warmed under my fingers. Outside the walls, the world was larger and softer. Inside me, the story had a last line: I planted the pendant and the garden grew.
The End
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