Revenge16 min read
A Lotus, a Tiger Seal, and the Quiet War I Never Promised To Lose
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I am Ellianna Roussel. I have mastered the art of looking fragile.
"You mustn't make a scene." Luz Riley's voice trembled with loyalty and panic as she smoothed my sleeve.
"I only need to be convincingly faint," I said. "Please, Luz. Hold me up when I go down."
"Down?" Luz's eyes widened. "Miss, you're not—"
"A little pale, a little breathless—" I smiled and let the drama begin.
Aiden Mendes walked in that day with a stranger at his sleeve, and I felt the room tilt, as if the world were a bowl and I had been moved to its edge. The woman he brought was small and water-blue, the kind of meekness people mistake for weakness. People mistake, always.
Aiden's face betrayed him before his words did. He tried to reach for me. "Ellianna—"
"Don't, Aiden." I coughed, soft and practiced. "Give me space."
"She—" Aiden stuttered. "This is Bridget Moore. I met her during the campaign; she nursed me—"
"Nursed you?" I let a laugh come out like a sob. "Nursed you and earned a name. Very clever."
Bridget looked like someone ready to be grateful forever. "Ellianna, you—"
"—are my husband's wife? Of course," I murmured, lifting the embroidered cloth to my lips. "I will step aside for your gratitude."
Luz hissed under her breath. "Miss—"
"Let me do it," I whispered, and when I fell back into Luz's arms the courtyard had a new story: the grieving wife made faint by news of a rival.
Aiden's guilt showed in the way he let go before he realized he was letting go. "I only meant to—"
"You meant to give her a shelter," I said, with the small smile of someone who keeps the evidence of a wrong in their pocket. "Shelter is good. I'm glad she found one."
Bridget's cheeks flushed. "Song—" I corrected her thought with a glance—forgive me; this was Aiden, not Song—"Aiden said he'd give me a place. He said—"
"He promised you a name," I interrupted, and the coldness of my amusement pleased me.
Luz guided me from the room while the household murmured. My father, Evert Reid, met me at the gate like a man who had been rehearsing outrage.
"Ellianna!" His voice broke into clucks. "My daughter—who dares—"
"It's not so bad," I said, leaning into his hands. "I only went home to see mother."
"You didn't tell me she was back." Mother—Sophia Renard—squeezed me as if her hands could press courage into my bones. "You are pale. Did Aiden—"
"He brought a girl," I answered. "That is all."
"Traitor," father breathed, and then he did the thing fathers do best: turned duty into chess. The map on his table looked like a living thing under his finger.
"You must be patient, Ellianna." He lowered his voice. "There is a tiger's imprint hidden in the Palace Garden. If we control that, we control a sword no one else can wield."
"A tiger's seal?" I repeated, amused at how fate used treasure like a toy. "How romantic."
He was not amused. "You will go to the Lotus Viewing and find it. You are the only one I trust to be delicate enough not to be suspected and bold enough to pry a lock."
"Delicate and bold," Luz echoed, belying her worry.
The Lotus Viewing arrived like a blossom: token girls in gauze, men with heavy robes, and a sun that insisted on being bright. Aiden insisted on squeezing Bridget's hand in public as if that would pull him back to something he had already let go. I stood by the lake and watched one more godsend test reality.
"Aren't you distracted?" Luz whispered.
"No," I said. "Distracted is for the unprepared."
"Dorian Bowen is here," she added.
I turned. A man in white watched the planted lotuses as if they had secrets. His posture was measured, pale as stone, his eyes like ink wells. I had seen him before in a glance, an impression I couldn't shake. He looked toward the lake and then back at me, and something in the world rearranged itself.
"Isn't he the new advisor?" a lady near me breathed.
"Yes," someone else said. "They say he remembers every face, every step."
Dorian walked toward the dark corner by the gardens, then away, then toward the well-guarded patch of weeds that hid a dangerous trap. Later, I realized that day he had moved three breaths ahead of everyone else.
"I'll go," I told Luz. "I'll look for the seal."
"Not alone," she said, and her insistence was a small pledge of love. "What if—"
"I know what might come," I said. "But if I go and find nothing, I can say I tried."
The well—dark, humming, and ancient—was like a throat that swallowed heat. I threw my thousand-fold token into the dark and slid. The floor was bones and old rot. The first thing that hit me was the stink of old deaths and the second was the knowledge that someone had been here before me.
I found jewelry, and a box, and then the carved stone bed. One box spilled its glitter and the other kept its secrets.
"If you are a thief," I muttered to the empty room, "then you will be clever."
I tested the boxes with the old reasoning of one who has learned to read human greed. One box wide open, like a mouth that promises, meant trap. The other, plain and shut—if you sought power, you would look for the obvious and snare yourself. My hand brushed a white lotus hairpin in the closed box. It bore a faint mark like a paw—an impression half-hidden. I took it. The empty slot where the tiger-shaped hole should have housed the print was a cold hollow.
I looked up. The panel behind me opened as if pushed by a breath. Footsteps above. I readied myself.
Dorian appeared at the lip of the chamber, white and soft as driftwood. "You are not alone," he said.
"You came early," I replied, breathless and furious at being seen.
"You came late," Dorian answered. "There was a man before you; he left a print less clean."
"Did he take it?" I asked, suppressing the panic.
He didn't answer at once. He only looked at the empty slot and at my hand holding the lotus hairpin. His eyes flicked the same way they had at the Viewing; patient, clever.
"You should not be here," he said, finally. "But since you are, take this." He placed a folded slip in my palm—an invitation and a warning. "Come to my house. We will talk."
Later I learned that Dorian's memory was not a trick but a ledger. He saw patterns and stored them like a spider. He had been three steps ahead of me that afternoon. He knew someone had been to the Tiger Chamber, and he knew who had gone out ahead. The missing seal was not a matter of chance. The world had cogs, and every man who wanted power moved them.
"You shouldn't have come alone," he said, when I sat with him under a paper lantern.
"I do my best work when I'm underestimated," I told him. His mouth quirked the way a river does at a bend.
"Do you always make yourself so... fragile?" he asked, leaning closer than necessary.
"Fragile is a mask," I said. "Don't make it the only thing you think you know."
He smiled, and for the first time I felt the faint, dangerous warmth of being seen. Not for pity. Not for power. For a face like a mirror that returned me in a new light.
"You have a stubborn heart," he said softly.
"I learned to hide everything else," I answered. "I had to."
His nearness was not thunder but a steady pressure. He did not rescue me with gold or commands. He offered, in the quietest way, an alliance.
"I can find the seal," he promised.
"You can?" I demanded, astonished and immediately wary. "Why would a man of your position care about an old relic under a long-dead princess' prison?"
He gave me an answer that felt like a thread being tied: "Because the person who has the seal is about to use it for blood. And I don't like blood that tastes of treachery."
"Who?" I whispered.
"You will see," he said. "But be careful whom you call friend."
We went to the Lotus party together for appearances. Aiden and Bridget were a public pair now—awkward and plausible—and I kept my faintness as a talisman. People liked believing in a wronged wife. For the next week my life was a play and my lines were grief. I wore my illness as armor. I let people lean into their assumptions.
"Are you well enough to travel?" Luz asked me one night, when the moon carved a fine silver line across the yard.
"Enough," I said. "We go to Yunzhou. Follow if you must."
Conrad Burton was a prince whose face held the memory of someone I'd loved long ago. I did not know why my heart tripped when the Third Prince rode in with a cedar-starred escort. He was not a man of much parade but of iron steadiness.
"Miss Roussel," he said without ceremony. "Your father's counsel was wise."
"Your Highness," I answered. "You worry me: you have come so far."
"I've never been content to watch rivers drown people," Conrad said simply. "If people die and we keep quiet, then we are the same as those who buried them."
"Then you will not be," I said, and in those words I felt the future shift.
Clouds broke over Yunzhou and rain fell like a hand slapping at the land. The dam broke; water-lashed streets were teeth. Families clung to rooftops. Conrad and his men moved like a steady tide of rescue. I walked and passed out rice and medicine. Soldiers and the brave tried to do right. Then the truth arrived like a bone.
"They came," a woman told me, her voice raspy with hurt. "They put on robes and masks and took what they wanted."
"Who?" I demanded.
She spat on a scrap of cloth. "They had dark sleeves and gold thread at the hem. They called themselves not your army."
I looked at Dorian. He had been looking hard at the fabric before and now his jaw tightened. "Those are the Imperial cloaks. The embroidery is palace made."
"Dark-haired killers with palace sewing?" Conrad repeated slowly. "You mean—"
"Dark wing guards," Dorian said. "The Emperor's secret men. The dark羽 units."
"Why would they—" I could not finish. The idea of the Palace sending its men to strip a city was monstrous beyond policy.
"It isn't the Emperor," Dorian said. "Someone else commands them."
And then I knew the dam was not just a collapse of earth. It was a surgical cut. Someone had made the flood and then taken advantage of the drowned.
"Who profits?" I asked.
"Look where they dug," Conrad said. "They did not search for treasure. They dug like men who buried something big and did it under cover of flood."
We found pits like mouths. The earth had been peeled back in long, clean lines. Someone had hidden a thing there. Someone had meant to hide power until a day it could be used.
"You came for the seal," I accused a man with a torn robe, seeing his hand tremble. "Why?"
"He came for a toy," the woman said. "He wanted a war."
That night we found the third object. Between the ruins, under a cedar that had stood when the flood struck, some old woman—cloud of a woman, called Cloud-mother by half the town—revealed a secret that made the light in my mind angle differently. She had held a lotus pin and she carried a secret: a piece of an old seal. She recognized the hairpin that I kept: the same design as her lord's. She trembled and then her face cleared, recognition like a bell.
"She is the keeper," Dorian said. "She was the long-ignored handmaid of the long-dead Princess. She kept the thing out of greedless hands."
"Then she must be protected," I said.
"She will not be," Cloud-mother said. "They come tonight."
We waited at the tree. In the dark a figure moved like a shadow, and then seven silent men came—dark-cloaked, with long knives. They were the Emperor's hidden soldiers, but their orders were not the Emperor's. They moved as machines.
Cloud-mother was small and bent. She held the seal to her chest like a heart. They moved to take it.
They did not see us until one of them smiled and flicked his knife. "You are a relic," he said, cruel and flat. "You'll do nothing."
Dorian did not wait. He launched himself down like a blade through water. The fight was sudden and awful. The hidden men were trained machines and they cut human tissue like clean paper. Dorian bled. I fought with a small weapon: the lute I had learned to use as a hidden instrument. Music can be more than music. I shaped a tone and sent it out like a net. I cut the air and a man went down with his throat opened. Conrad moved with a deliberate cruelty, taking lives to buy time.
"Run!" I shouted to Cloud-mother. "Run!"
But she held back and, with a voice gone raw, spit in the nearest soldier's face. "I will not let them use her," she said.
They pinned her to a tree. A blade sliced shallowly across her cheek.
I remember the taste of iron in my mouth. I remember picking up a green thread the woman had used to bind the seal, and Dorian telling me to pull it. I watched him move through the blood and simply be incapable of being stopped. He had been hurt before. He had learned how to be invulnerable to certain things. He had been folded, hardened, and now he was a blade.
We saved Cloud-mother but not without cost. Dorian bled from a dozen places, his robe stiff with red.
"Why did you do it?" I demanded when we were alone and he sat staggered, wrapped in linen.
"Because I remember a promise," he said. "Because someone had to keep the line from becoming a circle of poison. Because if the seal is used by the wrong hand, there will be a puppet on the throne."
"You remember promises," I said, thinking of the young boy under the wutong tree who once handed me a chicken drumstick and asked me to wait. "You always did."
He looked at me like a thief finding the one thing stolen back. "You knew him," he said quietly.
"Who?" My voice was small.
"Conrad. He was there when I could not move. He saved me a long time ago. He kept breathing for me to wake."
My head felt strangely full at the thought that the men in my life had been threads of the same web. The third prince, who now stood by my hand, had saved Dorian when the world had been cruel. That made them, by degrees, my people.
"We must get the three parts together," Dorian said. "We must be ready."
I thought of the three shards like teeth of a tiger—one with the lotus hairpin, one with Cloud-mother, and one in a place I still did not know. The tiger seal could call the Red Flames—the legendary shadow soldiers who could make the difference between winning and slaughter.
We carried our prize back to the camp. Conrad protected me as if my bones were glass. Dorian sat pale and amused, like a scholar who had stepped into action.
"I like you when you argue," he said, pressing my hand.
"You're infuriating," I answered, meaning it.
Three days later we went to the capital because the Emperor called for our counsel for the flood and our rescue. I knew I would be called to the hall, to curtseys and honors, and quiet language about duties and brave women. I also knew there would be a moment when all of this would break.
The Grand Hall smelled of incense and old cloth. The Emperor—Henrik Feng—sat small on his chair, his breath like a smoky candle. On either side stood men who thought themselves fates: Dell Ferguson, the calculating Fifth Prince with eyes like broken flint, and Jonas Douglas, the powerful foreign negotiator whose arrogance carried a carved grin. They had allies: the foreign lord Jonas had sent ahead his star—an "Ah-sh" princess, dancing charm turned weapon.
They came to the Hall like actors waiting for the cue that would make history. The music began. A curvy flute, a soft cadence. The audience’s eyes closed and a sleep like fog fell. I felt my muscles go soft. Someone had scattered a charm in the tune.
"Wake!" Dorian hissed, and knocked a cup into the floor. The sound was clean and sharp. My limbs answered.
"Who are you?" Dell snarled at me. "You are a woman—"
"—with three broken promises," I said.
That was when things snapped.
The Ah-sh princess's tune became frenzy. Soldiers moved forward. A dark shape vaulted across the dais. Jonas stood like a brigand and grinned. It was a plot to overthrow the court in one clean sweep.
Conrad moved as steady as a mountain. He called his men. Dorian touched the tiger print in my pocket. He had found a way to join two shards. The Red Flames could be summoned—if the seal were complete.
"Now," Dorian said.
He and I turned the three pieces. I pressed the lotus hairpin into its place and the seal all but purred. The red lines inside it glowed like veins.
Conrad's men moved. The Red Flame soldiers were silent as ash and struck like lightning. The Hall became a theater of sudden death. Jonas's men fell with no sound. Dell's face, previously smug, contorted. The Ah-sh princess vanished like smoke.
Then the worst of them—traitors inside the court—were exposed. The Fifth Prince Dell had been trading with foreign blood. He had orchestrated the flood as a blade to be turned. He had used Jonas for the muscle. The dark-wing guards were not the Emperor's will. The Emperor's signet had been lent and then sold.
I watched Dell's expression move: from feigned righteousness to stunned outrage, to rage, to an animal terror as the Red Flames did not strike quickly but displayed evidence. They presented proof: a silk stitch from which a palace cloth had been torn, witnesses found alive in Yunzhou who attested to being attacked by men wearing Dell's symbol. The assembly became a jury of sight.
"Traitors!" Bishop-like clerks cried. "You have been judged by the seal's own light."
Dell's lips quivered. "I—" He could not find the words. He had been sure of a clean coup; he had not expected the Red Flames to show up the moment he lost control.
They dragged him from the dais and into the courtyard. The crowd gathered; this had to be seen. A man who makes a nation weep must be punished where men can watch.
The punishment I will never forget took place in the palace yard under a sky white as bone.
"Bring the Fifth Prince forward," the captain barked. "Bring the foreigners—Jonas—and the Ah-sh blood, and the men who sold the dark wings."
The courtyard swelled with faces. People leaned to see the fall of a man who had thought himself untouchable. Justice, when public, tastes like a balm.
"Dell Ferguson," I said. "Tell the people why you burned a city."
"You have no right—" he spat, but his voice was small.
"People," the herald said, "listen."
And then it began.
They placed him on a platform built for spectacle. He had always believed that men bowed only to power. Now the many who had been hurt by his greed stood. I had done nothing to gleam in the space; my role had been to make sure the world saw him for what he was.
"First," the herald intoned, "you drank the cup of silence. You will be stripped of rank. You will have your lands taken."
Dell's face went pale. "You cannot—"
"Stand down!" someone shouted.
People turned. A widow from Yunzhou stepped forward, her hair short and her hand trembling with a child's shoe. "My son drowned because your men took the boats," she said. "You call yourself noble?"
Crowd noise surged. Men took pictures with the newfangled boxes like shards of thunder: their faces were grim, their mouths open. They recorded, they whispered, they pointed. The cameras and the crowd made him small.
"Second," the herald said, "for theft and treason, you shall be publicly shorn of your honors. Your titles are burned before the crowd."
They took Dell's robe and made a bonfire of gold-threaded cloth. The thread hissed in the flame like a snake deprived of tongue. He screamed when they took his signet and crushed it, then dragged his face over the ashes and made him look at the ruin he had wished to cause in others.
"Third," the herald continued, "for the selling of guards and the murder of innocents, you will have your power publicly transferred to the people you ruined."
Dell's eyes flicked to the crowd like a beggar begging for a god. "No—please!"
A man in Yunzhou who had lost a brother dragged a bucket of mud and tipped it on Dell. The crowd spat and mocked. People who had been thirsty for justice were given it at last. They pounded his chest with words and some with hands; they called him coward and murderer and the sound of names sank into him.
He tried to kneel to me, to Aiden, to Conrad. "Spare me," he begged at one point, before the crowd drowned him in derision.
"No," I said quietly. "You were a hand that pulled the rope. You must show what you did."
And so the punishment continued; it was not one act but a unmaking. The people recited the names of the dead. The foreign Jonases and their allied brigands were forced to fall to their knees and promise never to raise arms again. Jonas Douglas's face showed something like regret, but his hands were still the hands of a man who chose gold once he had it. The Ah-sh princess had her magic measured and pinned; she fell into disgrace, used, and then tossed away.
They stripped Dell of his honors, made him bow before the women of Yunzhou, and then had him walk through the market, the very place he had taken for granted. They made him pass under the stares of the widows, the faces of the children. They filmed it. They wrote it down. The court made sure everyone would remember.
The most searing part was not the burning of his silk. It was the look that changed on his face when his allies turned away.
"You thought to buy allegiance," I said to him as the crowd circled. "You thought friendship could be sold with coin. Look now; your own men have learned what fear is, and they have bought their lives."
He tried to speak, to find the back of the crowd. "You—"
"Look at their faces," I insisted, and people pushed him closer. "Do you remember how you looked at them when you made your deals? You saw not men but numbers. Now you are a number too."
The watchers took his name and burned it with salt, a ritual to mark betrayal. They catalogued his crimes. He begged, then denied, then stared at me with the flicker of a fear that had never before passed his lips. The sound of his lobby crumbling reached a pitch when one of the young men who had once been his squire spat on him and walked away. Others filmed it, and then they sent the recordings down the avenues. He would be remembered by his ruin.
The public punishment lasted until the sun lowered and the crowd thinned, and the last thing he saw was his reflection in a puddle ringed by people whom he had wronged. In that puddle he did not look like a prince; he looked like what he’d always been: a shallow man hiding in gilding. That image would follow him forever.
But the punishments did not end with Dell. Jonas was forced to return all treasure looted from Yunzhou. His men were required to swear allegiance to the new order or be executed. The foreign pig-headedness in the palace was purged like rot. The Ah-sh princess was stripped of titles and exiled.
And the Five Prince—Dell—was left to the world he had made. He would end not with a noble's death but as a spectacle, small and hollow.
Later, in a quiet corridor, Conrad looked at me and said, "You did not have to humiliate him."
"Public punishment keeps people from pretending they did not know," I replied. "Power hidden is the worst poison. If those men could rule unseen, they'd still be killing."
"You have grown cunning," he said softly.
"Practice," I said, and touched the lotus hairpin in my chest. It felt impossibly small and heavy at once.
After that day the court realigned. Conrad took the throne with calm certainty which turned out to be something entirely different from cruelty. Henrik Feng fell, and Conrad Burton rose as an Emperor who wore the weight of the land like a thing he would carry, not a thing he would toy with. People cheered for his face, which bore the noble marks of one who had done the hard things.
In the new order, Aiden and I separated like two ships that had outlived their port. He had been fond and then turned to cowardice; that was his crime. He tried to return to me later, voice shaky, wanting to reclaim what he thought he'd lost. "Ellianna," he said once, clutching the edge of a door. "Come back with me."
"No," I said. "Go find humility. This is not a thing I can sew back on you."
He left quietly. Bridget Moore went to her family's house; she had not set out to be a ruin. Luz Riley stayed. Her hands stitched my life back together. Dorian Bowen became not merely a memory-holder but someone who stood with me in quiet rooms while the city slept. He never asked for titles.
Conrad's coronation was private in the way that mattered. He called me to his side and said, "You were a blade in a woman's hands. Will you stand with me again?"
"I will stand with the people," I said. "If that includes you, then yes."
That night I sat and looked at the lotus hairpin. It had the faint paw, the proof of the seal. I had kept it not as a trophy but because it reminded me the most dangerous things are not on throne rooms' maps. They are the bargains people make when the rivers are low.
Years later when I would tell this story, I would always end at the pin. People who live long enough collect such relics. They rub in their pocket the daily proof that they survived. I slid the hairpin back into its box and shut it, and in the quiet of a palace that no longer chose murder as policy, I allowed myself one small, private smile.
"Keep it," Dorian told me once, and I looked up. He was younger perhaps than his years, and he had the odd habit of thinking out loud in a low voice.
"I will," I said.
He smiled, and then we walked down the corridor where three banners flew: the Emperor's, the people's, and the little lotus pin that belonged to a woman who learned long ago how to be fragile and how to bite back.
The End
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