Face-Slapping11 min read
A Second Life, One True Promise
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I woke with a small, warm hand testing my forehead. "Her fever has broken," Anders Knight said softly, pleased.
I tried to move and a thousand memories flooded me — some from a life I had just lived, some from this life I had woken into. My name here was Brittany Larson, a merchant's youngest daughter; in another life I had called a different man husband, and I had loved him.
"You're awake," my mother, Aurelie Mortensen, whispered. Her voice wrapped around me like a shawl. "You frightened us for three nights."
I blinked. I was five or six again, a child's body warm beneath the quilt, but my mind carried the old woman's ache and the old woman's promises. I remembered the lake, the fall, the pain, and I remembered him — his name and face blurred in some parts, but the feeling of him was sharp.
"I remember him," I told nobody and everyone in the same breath. "I remember my husband."
Brecken Goncalves, my eldest surviving brother, laughed and then scolded me. "Brittany, if you talk nonsense again, Anders will send you to the temple for more incense than you can count."
"I want to wait," I said. "I want to wait for him."
"Wait?" Mother frowned. "For what? Suitors come like rivers. A merchant's daughter must take a good match."
"I will wait," I said again. "I will wait until spring, until the birds return."
Spring came, and with it an excursion to the temple that sits among peach orchards. Peach trees were in bloom like small blizzards of pink; petals drifted down like paper confetti. We had offered incense; we were stepping out to stroll when horse hooves thundered.
"Bandits!" someone shouted.
The crowd splintered into a panic. My breath came ragged; my brother grabbed my hand and we ran. A cluster of riders swept in fast, the world reduced to one hard, bright sound: hooves and men's laughter.
I hid between shrubs and felt hands moving and feet stamping. A man parted branches and found me. For a moment everything fell away — sound, motion — and his face filled my sight like someone had traced every familiar curve anew.
"Leonardo?" I whispered, forgetting I used his other name in a different life. He wore a different life on him: sun-darkened skin, a rougher laugh, but the same jaw I had loved.
"You!" he said, startled. "Why are you here?"
I had clung to his coat with shaking hands. "Husband," I breathed, and he pulled at my necklace as if irritated, as if I had called him by a joke.
"Stop it," he snapped, but his voice had the same cadence as before. I let a small smile come, and for the first time since waking in a child's form I felt whole.
He made a show, playing rogue and fool in front of the bandits, and then, to my shock, he bargained for me.
"Take her," another man said. "She's a pretty merchant's daughter."
Leonardo looked at me. "Fine," he quipped suddenly. "I'll take her."
I clung to him, trembling. "Leonardo," I said, "I am not afraid if you stay."
"You're a strange child," he muttered, but he loosened my bonds and poured me water. He was rough and a little unsteady, and he smelled of smoke and liquor. He made jokes and careful barbs; he lifted a chicken leg to me as if daring me to be grateful. When I claimed I remembered a life where we had been married, he laughed aloud.
"Married?" he echoed. "Are you mocking me?"
"I remember everything," I said, blunt. "We were married. I loved you."
He stared like the world was new to him. "Really?"
I nodded. "I will protect you. I will find a way to take you from this."
He watched me with an odd mix of amusement and the spark of something softer. "You sound like someone who's decided the shape of a thing."
"Then decide to help me," I said. "Help me get us out."
We were in a bandit camp, a loose knot of tents on a mountainside. I watched the women in a tent where they worked by day and were taken at night. They moved slowly, robbed of hope. One woman, red-headed with a cutting look, moved among them with the calm of authority. I thought I saw something in her hands — a scar, a callus — that told me she was different.
"She's the leader," I told Leonardo in a whisper that night.
He stiffened. "You saw her?"
"I think so."
He studied the camp and told me what he knew. "They have guards asleep in the later hours," he said. "If we can take a horse and slip through the ridge, we could get to a magistrate. Once the soldiers come, they'll clean this up."
I spoke of what I remembered and of the woman who led these people.
"Red-head?" he mused. "Sounds familiar. Could be an old river-woman."
We acted. Under the half-moon we slipped. We took a horse. We ran on rough road as the camp slept.
The raid the next dawn was clean. Soldiers with torches and an officer who moved like someone used to orders surrounded the camp. I watched Leonardo ride at the fore, a bright, steady spear in the dark. They rounded everyone in nets of rope. Leonardo found the tent where the women whispered and prayed and kept their eyes down.
They dragged Monika Dodson out as dawn painted the valleys. She walked like a queen still, wrapped in the air of command even as the ropes bit. People gathered from the nearby villages. Word flew: the bandit queen had been caught.
We marched back to town with the prisoners in the light of the day. I was there in the crowd; I had put on shoes I never wore, a dress that belonged to a merchant's display, and Leonardo stood by. He had imposed the black scarf over his face for safety in my shop later, but now he stood bare-faced, war-swept and quiet.
Valentin Foley, the magistrate's captain, arranged the men. "Bring her here," he said.
Monika stilled and smiled with a slow, terrible smile.
"You brought a court to my door," she said. "Do you think your little crowd will roast me?"
The crowd hissed. "She killed people!" someone yelled.
"She turned girls into slaves," cried another. "She pushed women off cliffs!"
Monika's smile hardened. "You think I acted alone? You think I made choices on a board with labels?" She shook herself as if shedding someone else's name. "You are farm hands and shopkeepers. You blame me because I was cunning enough to bend men to my will. Shame on you."
People spat. I felt a child's memory of fear ripple through me, but memory and the new bitterness of my second chance made my hands clamp into fists.
Valentin raised his hand. "We will have a public reckoning," he declared. "Let the town witness the truth."
They set up a platform in the market square. The town center filled: ladies with baskets, men with tools still splattered with last night's work, children pressed in the front rows. Leonardo stood near me; his hand found mine and held it, a small stubborn tether.
Valentin began to speak. "This woman led raids, took brides, beat and forced those she could. She used her charm to deceive and her cruelty to keep power."
Monika's face was a mask. She lifted her chin. "I led because I had to," she said. "A leader makes harsh choices. If you have done none, point fingers."
Someone from the crowd — a woman whose sister had vanished — shouted, "You told my sister she'd be sold for safety. You lied. You cut her hair. You made a mockery of mercy."
"Falsehood," Monika said, voice silk over steel. "I never—"
A chorus of voices rose. Valentin pulled forward a rope and a trunk of items recovered from the tents: trinkets, stolen cloth, a ledger filled with names and debts, a child's bracelet that belonged to one of the women. Each item was named by a voice who had lost something. Each voice stepped forward and said, "She took this."
I watched Monika's face change. The first line was confidence; then confusion as proofs were named; then a flash of anger as the ledger was read and her handwriting identified. Her eyes darted; she barked denials and then slowly, like sunlight trickling through clouds, her veneer cracked.
"You lie!" she shrieked. "All of you—liars!"
"Why did you make them kneel?" Valentin asked, holding up the ledger. "Why did you order the ones who resisted taken to the cliff?"
There was no answer. Monika's lips trembled. "You cannot prove—"
"We can," said Leonardo quietly. "You took them. I saw you make them quiet."
She turned to him. For the first time her mouth was a thin line. There was a tremor there, a recognition that she had been seen by someone she had not expected to be seen by.
"Leonardo," she spat. "You were always meddlesome. You think you can undo me with your honor and your army?"
He did not reply. He only looked at me and gave the slightest nod. I felt the nod like an anchor.
Valentin signaled the town crier. "Let the people judge," he said. "We will hear testimony. No private sentence. You will speak and then you will bear what the town decides."
They called the women who had been kept in the tents. They came slowly, some with eyes like stones, others trembling, a couple with fresh scars. One by one they spoke of threats, of promises broken, of nights where screams were answered by whips. The crowd listened, mouths opening and shutting like folded fans.
Monika Denied. At first the denial was proud. "I gave them food," she said. "I gave them shelter. They owe me for their lives."
"Then why did you sell the brave ones to coastal slavers?" someone asked. The answer was silence.
The first real crack came when the round-faced man, Cameron Wagner, who had been shown to be her puppet, was brought forward. He had been small in stature but brazen. He had laughed as if possession was his right. At the name of a village where he had taken a girl, a voice rose: "That was my sister."
Cameron flinched when the woman who had once been his victim stood and spat at his boots. "You used me to keep your crown," she said. "You are worse than she is."
He blurted a half-hearted, "She made me," and the lie splattered against the morning like mud.
The town decided loudly. "Let her be stripped of robes, her hair cut and braided back, let her be bound to the post of shame with rope, and let her confess in front of everyone. Let her name those who helped her."
Monika laughed at first, a bitter sound. "You will not break me with such theater."
They bound her wrists. The magistrate's men put her on a low platform. They cut the expensive ribbons from her hair and tied the remaining coil roughly. The crowd hissed at the sight, at the unraveling of a proud image. The rope bit into her skin.
"Speak," Valentin ordered.
She began with fury. "I did what I had to. I fed people. I kept them alive!"
"You kept them alive by making them pay with their bodies," Valentin said.
"Then you've found only liars," she snapped, and for a moment I saw real fear flash. She had been the one to make terror work for her, and terror slid away like sand through fingers.
"Name them," said a woman whose husband had been killed in a raid.
I watched the change happen. Monika's eyes went from conviction to calculation to panic. She tried to name the men who had helped her, the merchants who had bought stolen goods, the officials who had looked away. She named a few small-time collaborators — men who quivered and were taken into custody on the square — then lunged for a grander name.
"Not all are willing to be named," she said. "Some are above the law."
The crowd grew angry. "Name their faces!" someone screamed.
"Spare me!" she shrieked, then suddenly, as if exhausted by defense, she crumpled. The loud, theatrical defiance thinned into ragged breathing.
She started to sink into supplication. "Please," she said. "I... I did it to feed my people. I did it for revenge. I was wrong. Please, I can give you money. Let me live. Let me go."
Her voice changed as the crowd pressed in. The people who had lost sisters, sons, and jewelry moved closer. Some spat again. A mother who had come to watch because her daughter had vanished grabbed the rope and shook its end until Monika's balance failed. She fell to her knees on the muddy square.
"No more bargains," Valentin said. "You will restore what you can and name all collaborators."
Monika moaned. "I cannot. They will kill me."
"Then you will die carrying the memory of them," the crowd answered.
Her pleas shifted to a different register, the one of a trapped animal. "I was a leader because I had no other way. I was pushed. I am not the worst."
"Who is?" someone demanded.
Monika's mouth worked. She could not answer. The crowd, hungry for sharpness, found their voice. They wanted spectacle because they wanted closure. They wanted to be told that the world had been righted.
They paraded the men she named — two merchants, a guard — and the crowd booed. Monika's face changed again: from cunning to despair to pleading. She reached for anything, even the eyes of Leonardo as if he could rescue her with a glance.
He looked at her once, then turned away. He had seen enough of her cruelty. He had also seen me, and my life had tangled with his in a way that made choices simple. He did not go near her. He only stood with his jaw set, as if to say that the past could be faced and the present could be repaired.
When they led Monika out of the square, the crowd followed at a distance. Some shouted, some spat, some talked of how they would guard their daughters from now on. I felt exhausted and hollow and strangely vindicated. The punishment had been public, and Monika's arrogance had been stripped piece by piece until only a humanity too late remained.
I had wanted a different form of justice: one where she apologized to each woman and worked to repair the damage. What I got was human judgement in a town that had been hurt. It was ugly. It was necessary. It left a stain that would not wash clean soon.
Afterwards, they imprisoned Monika and paraded the goods through town. Leonardo helped, standing by while I clutched at his sleeve. "You should not have done that alone," he said softly.
"I could not not act," I said. "If I had waited, more girls would have vanished. I could not wait."
He looked at me with a slow, startled admiration. "You are stubborn."
"I remember loving you," I said, "and I remember not wanting you to die like you might. I will keep you."
He inhaled, then let it out. "Then don't let me die. Wait for me."
We returned to town with the soldiers, and only then did I understand how far my new life had shifted.
Valentin offered Leonardo a commission. "Come to the town watch," he said once, in a low voice. "We could use a man like you."
Leonardo hesitated. "I have a family somewhere," he muttered.
"Then bring them," Valentin said. "Bring the life you want."
When Leonardo and I walked together later, he told me suddenly, "You were brave, Brittany."
"You will not let me go again," I said.
He smiled, the kind that softened his features. "No. Not again."
Time folded. The soldiers' triumph over Monika changed the town. My family's shop flourished with stories of my bravery. Yet the wound of loss and memory stayed with each woman saved. They told their stories, and sometimes they cried. I listened and learned how small acts make a life of safety.
A year later, soldiers came to our home. "Leonardo Friedrich wishes to ask for your hand," they announced.
I smoothed my skirts and walked with Brecken to the courtyard where Leonardo stood, cleaned and ready in a soldier's coat. My chest tightened. I looked at him. "Will you come for me?" I asked quietly.
"Always," he said.
We married small at first, then properly under a canopy of peach blossoms. People remembered the bandits and the square and Monika's humiliation. They also remembered the ledger and the women who had come forward.
Later in my life, when someone asked if I had regretted the public punishment, I would say, "It was necessary and imperfect." The town needed to see. The women needed to be heard. Monika had once worn fear like armor; in the square the armor came off.
We kept a small chest in our house. Inside, a scrap of fabric from a robe that once belonged to Monika sat folded. Sometimes I would touch it and think of the day she fell, the way her face had passed from pride to panic. I knew punishment did not heal everything. It only announced a beginning.
Leonardo and I built a life in which he learned to soften duty with tenderness, and I learned to let love grow without swallowing myself. We argued and laughed. We waited together for small things — the tick of a clock, the cry of a newborn — and each time I felt the loop of my lives tighten into something like peace.
When the peach trees bloomed each year, we would go to the temple where once I had hidden in the shrubs. We would walk among the trees, Leonardo's hand in mine.
"Do you remember?" he would ask, sometimes with a smile that meant more than the word could cover.
"Yes," I would say. "I remember many things."
He would laugh. "Good. Then build me a life that matches the memory."
"I will," I would say. "I promise."
And somewhere between the vows and the small, sharp truth of the square, our life grew honest and stubborn and real.
The End
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