Rebirth13 min read
A Second Life, Two Deals, One Jade
ButterPicks15 views
I woke with the taste of metal and dust in my mouth, the room tilting as if the world were a poorly balanced scale. My hand was steady enough to find the bowl at the bedside, but when the man in black leaned over me and drove a blade across my wrist, I knew the past was not a dream.
"Don't move." A voice, cold as mountain snow, told me to be still. "Hold. Breathe."
I tasted blood and remembered everything. I remembered running from my home across the border, remembering the thrill and the foolishness of love. I remembered agreeing to be someone else's blood. I remembered the steady hands that had taken from me until my life was a thinned thread. I remembered the slow untying from life, the empty, stupid trust.
I tried to speak. The room narrowed into a single tunnel of light and dark and the knife's edge. The man who bled me like cattle — the prince, Cyrus Fontaine — came in as if he owned the room and the world. He did.
"This is for Snow," he said without looking at me, as if the bowl and the blood and the orders mattered more than the shape of my face. "More blood. She coughed up the potion. We need another bowl."
I kept my eyes on his. "She? You married me for that bowl?" I managed.
Cyrus's jaw went still. "Don't speak back. You'll die if you make me angry."
I swallowed a laugh that stung like iron. "I already died once for you." I let those words hang between us. They did not surprise him. They were my proof that I wasn't the same frightened girl who had followed him across borders.
Someone else made a noise beneath my blanket. A man's breath, rough with pain. His hand found mine and I could feel the signal of life — the proof that I had brought someone into my bed to stop the worst of what Cyrus could do. I squeezed the hand beneath my sheets, an absurd acid of shame and hope.
Cyrus moved as if to grab my wrist and force another cut, and the stranger beneath me spat, "She won't let you."
Cyrus sneered, because he was so used to being obeyed. "She can be useful and silent. Take her."
"I don't think so." I pulled up enough to look at the man's eyes. They were strange and terrible and calm.
"Who are you?" I whispered.
"Not important to you," he said. "Stay still."
I thought of the years I had lost after I died — the empty ruin of a soul drifting through old books and the learned lessons of a hermit healer. I remembered sick rooms and techniques and the courage that grows in a person who has nothing left to lose. I had been taught by a man I once called my teacher in another life. If I survived, I would owe him my life. If I survived, I would be careful.
Cyrus slashed, and the blood came. The bowl filled. He watched without pity. "Enough," he said when he was satisfied. He turned as if to leave and then paused.
"Don't forget why I married you," he said to me like a last mercy. "Never forget."
"Keep your memories," I said. "They're all you have." I swallowed and the floor steadied a little.
The man with me that night later stepped out into the cold courtyard and left a small object in my palm before he vanished into the dark. "Take this," he said. "I will come back for it."
It was a carved jade pendant with a single character cut in the face — 'Jin'. He promised to redeem it for coin one day, and I shoved it in the folds of my rags and lied to myself that it meant nothing. He had one of those faces: sharp, dangerous, a voice that could be medicine or poison. He said his name once, almost offhandedly, "Trey." I remembered it. Trey Cross. The name clung.
Loss and my knowledge of medicine hardened me. The world had a new set of rules: survive, remember, and never give your heart away again.
A week after the bowl, I found myself stood up against more cruelty. Cyrus Fontaine marched into the little room where the prince's household pretended to call me wife, and with him was the white-voiced girl the whole court preferred: Estrella Huber. She drifted like a delicate shadow; she smiled like glass.
"She deserts me," Cyrus said when I stepped toward his ward. "She plays at being useful and then refuses when the work is real."
"I'll have you put out," I said. I wasn't very brave. My voice was brittle. "If you want me gone, make it official."
Cyrus didn't expect me to answer like that. His brow tightened. He was used to honey and whimpering. "You want a divorce? Very well." He always thought his threats were like thunder and his promises were like the pull of the tide.
"Write it," I said. "Make it public. I will wait for your signature."
He did not expect I would call his bluff. He did not expect that I would take a bargain in exchange for my life.
But the world had given me another chance. I would not die twice for the same stupid truths.
*
"You are not who I thought you were," Estrella said to me in the courtyard later, as if she'd finally found the right word to tip a secret into a wound. "How could you be so cold? You were always supposed to fit the role."
"Who said I wanted it?" I asked.
"You were the image," she said, and then, innocently cruel, "You were supposed to play your part."
I laughed. "Your part was simpler. You had effortless charm, a voice, and a dozen servants to protect you. You think that was harder?"
She paled. "You should not mock me."
"I mock what kills people," I said. "And that includes hearts that break others."
She blinked, sharp. "Then you will watch me, Juliette? You will watch me act the suffering, and the prince will care?"
"I will not watch you," I said. "I will watch the truth."
A new arrival in the palace changed everything. The tall, elegant man who carried himself like a blade, Trey Cross, arrived in the prince's household like a gust of cold wind. He treated the court like a chessboard and people like pawns. He had a reputation, and rumors ran like dark threads behind him — that he was a master doctor and that he had been called by the emperor himself.
"Can I help you?" I asked him when he watched me with a detached amusement I couldn't read.
"A favor," he said. "You will help me with a question the court cannot answer."
"And in return?" I asked.
"In return," he said, "I promise one thing. I will not let Cyrus take what does not belong to him."
He was a strange bargain. I accepted him and learned his medicine and the late-night habits of the palace. He brought me a jade token once and tossed it across the table. "Keep this," he said. "When you are ready to make a choice, come find me."
I could not tell if he meant kindness or a snare.
*
At the imperial clinic, the 太医院, I was allowed in with strange reluctance by officials who thought they knew the world better than anyone. They had never seen a woman of foreign birth with my practical hands and cold patience.
"You're an odd fit," one senior medic said when I took office. "You are noble and yet you work like a commoner."
"I was trained with commoners," I said. "And commoners are honest. You can keep your honors."
There were times I taught and there were times I stitched and there were days I made poison and antidote both, because the emperor asked for weapons that could not be traced. I simmered roots and ground powders, and all the while I kept one foot outside the jail he could make of my name.
I grew a little bold in my new role. I had a tiny victory when I exposed Estrella's tricks in the court. That day I marched into the Great Hall with my sleeve still damp from concocting medicine. The emperor's voice still echoed from the throne when I stepped up.
"You did this?" he asked the room. "You, a prince's wife, accuse a woman of grievous crimes?"
"She played both parts," I answered. "She acted illness to gain blood. She is healthy. I will stand to prove it."
They called Estrella in.
"You belong to me," Cyrus begged at that moment in a public, choking, ridiculous way. His voice was practiced, but the words were thin like dried grass. "Spare her mercy."
In the hall they examined Estrella as if she were a fragile vase. "She is not ill," the chief physician said bluntly when he touched her pulse and looked into her eyes. Her color was good, her breath steady. The verdict fell like winter: she had lied to the house of the emperor.
"How dare you," Emperor Mitchell — Margaret Mitchell, the imperial matron seated beneath the dragon — said. "You used another woman's blood and you lied."
At that moment court murmurs spread. Scribes, who wrote the records of all noble crimes, leaned forward. A hush gathered like snow before the storm.
"To the stocks," she declared, and then, to everyone's shock, she added: "And let the case be public, with witnesses. Let the world see."
It is strange how quickly arrogance crumbles when it is held under the lamp of public eyes. Estrella's proud, pale face changed like weather. She blinked, then flushed. The crowd whooped and leaned forward. Some court attendants took out paper and quills to record every expression. Others murmured that a great fall from grace will teach more than a dozen polite lectures.
She was led into the center of the court square. The crowd pressed in a ring. "What treachery is this?" someone cried. "To pretend illness is to deceive the entire household."
Crying out, Estrella tried to speak firstly with defiance. "This is slander!" she spat. "You have no evidence!"
They held up sakers of recordings — the scribes' notes — and stepping forward was Preston Burns, the palace apothecary who had been bribed and had tried to poison the concubine for his gains. He had been cornered. "She paid me," he said in a voice that began as calm and then shattered. The crowd leaned in, an animal's hunger for the end of masks.
Estrella's face first lit with a stunned smile, as if she'd been handed a joke she was meant to be in on. "You dare—" she began in a voice with too much silk around the edges.
A page boy placed a small cloth-wrapped bundle onto the steps of the throne. Governor scribes unwrapped it. In the center, a small tray of blood-caked cakes sat like jewels. The stench rose and the room fell silent.
"You thought we wouldn't find the sieve through which poison flows?" Trey Cross's voice was like a blade. "You thought that because you had men to do your dirty work, you would go unmarked?"
Estrella's expression left pride and cracked into fear. Her rich gowns seemed suddenly cheap. She looked to Cyrus revealingly, as if begging that he would keep his promises, but he could not. He had learned the hard lesson of being exposed when he had placed someone else's life in his hands for convenience.
"You're making a mockery of the altar of healing," the emperor said. "You used people's sympathy to move men like Cyrus. The law requires we set an example."
Estrella's voice lost the glass. "It wasn't— I needed— I needed the place—"
"You needed blood," Preston Burns said, the confession making him small and huge at once. "She paid me in silver and silence. I ground what she told me. I placed it where it would be taken. It was easy because everyone wanted to pity her."
The crowd hushed. You could hear quills scratch. One or two women started to whisper about decency. Some handmaids cried. A small child started clapping before an older neighbor hushed him with a hand to his mouth.
Estrella's face changed again, the last stage of collapse. Fury, then the denial: "You're lying! I didn't—" She shrank as the accusation took its teeth.
"Your highness," someone gasped. "What will you do with her?"
The Emperor's gaze cut through the cluster of faces. "Justice will be served, and served openly so no one forgets." He motioned to the chamberlain.
Then the public spectacle began in full.
They first dragged a low stool under a single lamp so everyone could see. Estrella was made to stand upon it. Her voice faltered. "You can't—"
A man in a marshal's coat — a red-faced officer who looked like he had swallowed wind and vinegar — stepped forward and read the charges. The words burned like salt. "For deceiving staves, for promoting false illness to gain material advantage, for the attempt to jeopardize the health of others using poisoned goods, you are deprived of title, and you are to be paraded before the city gate, her robes stripped of their finery and replaced by the garb of the punished."
The first shift in her status came with the removal of the costly sash, then the jeweled brooch that marked her station. The crowd shifted to see the fall. Men gasped, scribes bent nearer to catch the image for the chronicle. A young maid began to weep. A woman in the front row crossed herself.
The officer called for evidence, and Preston Burns stepped forward and placed the silver in the emperor's lap. He then told the story in slow, tremulous detail. "She commanded me to lace the cakes, to add a small venom that causes fainting and convulsions. It would mimic illness and leave no trace at first. She paid me with jewels and promises."
Estrella's face went first from surprise to fury. "You lie!" she screamed. "You promised me—"
"Denial," the marshal intoned as a fact. "Next, public humiliation." The officer's voice was a hammer. "Proclaim the truth."
A page took a bell and rang it thrice. At the sound, citizens of the court spilled in like waters. A scribal official read from the records the charges again — so that the hearing could not be forgotten, and so that the truth would be set into the heart of history.
First she tried to plead with the emperor. "Mercy, my lord," she said, plaintive, the voice she had practiced to use on Cyrus. "I was weak. I was foolish."
Then she changed to fury: "This is a conspiracy — you all set me up! Cyrus, defend me!"
Cyrus's face had gone ash. The man who had commanded my blood like it was a dish now looked as if the world had closed in on him unexpectedly. The crowd smelled weakness. They began to look at Cyrus with something like hunger.
"Show us his complicity," shouted a woman. "If he used his power to make a woman bleed, let him answer now."
Cyrus's first reaction was a tight smile and a careless shake of the head. He tried to stand above the crowd, to be the bold man he had always pretended to be. "This," he said, "is darkness and slander."
But then the evidence came — the ledger of dinners, the notes from the quarters where Estrella's servants had seen Cyrus's men carry jars of marrow to her rooms, the testimony from a servant too frightened before but now willing to speak. The pieces fit. Cyrus's expression changed from bold to bewildered, from astonishment to denial. "No," he said, over and over, "that is not true. I did not—"
"He sold his mercy for company," someone hissed. A scribe read the names aloud, the steps that led to his approvals. The voice of the crowd rose like wind.
"They shouted he was a hypocrite. They spat, then they were drawn into a strange sympathy for the man who had used his power to command blood but who now could not stand under that same light."
Cyrus swelled with a last, fierce denial. "I never ordered her to be harmed," he told the emperor, voice breaking at the edges. "I only… only asked for what comfort I could from life. I did not know… I didn't know she would—"
And then he fell apart.
His confident posture collapsed into something small and animal. He took a step forward, then staggered back, the color crashing from his face. "Don't do this," he said softly, and the sentence shattered into a wail. He knelt — the proud prince forced to his knees by the spectacle of his own making — and the palace floor echoed with the sound of littered cloth and metal. Some noblewomen gasped. A courtier began to cry out the absurdities of loyalty betrayed.
He begged. He begged in a voice that broke through the guarded quiet: "Please. I'm sorry. I didn't know. I'm sorry. I will take anything. Just—spare her. Please!"
The crowd watched the transformation with a harsh, glaring fascination. People who had once wanted his approval saw him reduced to a trembling, pleading figure. Some of them sobbed with public joy at the spectacle. Others shook their heads and wrote.
"Look at him," someone muttered. "He kneels. He begs for the woman he used to treat like a tool."
Estrella had slid from arrogance to shock, then to rage and then to a final collapse. She tried to bargain, to name names, to deflect, but the court would not hold. The emperor pronounced sentence: she would be expelled from palace honor, paraded before the gates, and banished to a house in the outskirts to repay her debt by honest labor. Preston Burns was cashiered from his post and sentenced to a public penance.
The crowd reacted with the full bouquet of public feelings. Many cheered. A murmur of relief rippled through those who believed in rules. A few noblemen clucked their tongues at the spectacle. Pages scribbled. A woman in the third row clapped her hands once. Scribes shouted the decree to be written into the annals. Someone in the crowd — bold or cruel — spat toward the place where Cyrus had been kneeling. Others averted their faces.
Cyrus's descent had been complete: from surety to shame to denial to open pleading. Estrella's fall completed the arc the law demands. The public punishment satisfied something old and raw in the court — the need for honesty made visible, for sin to be shown and named.
When the procession left, the bell tolled once. People began to leave, murmuring. The emperor's attendants wiped their hands of the dirt of scandal. The scribes wrote as if to ensure no one would forget this day.
I had my part in it; I had come forward because I could, because the law and the emperor's ear were still the most reliable shelter. I had not expected to watch Cyrus's face crush into the sand of his own making. I had expected silence and secret retribution. The sight of it burned something cold and clean in my chest.
"I will not let you take my life again," I told Cyrus when we crossed near each other as the throng made way.
He looked at me like a man who had finally been shown the truth and had nowhere to hide. He did not answer.
*
After that day, the emperor offered me a dangerous gift and a restraint. "You will stay in the palace," he said. "You will not leave the city, Juliette. Your hands are needed for the health of the realm."
"I will stay," I said. "On two conditions."
"Name them," he said.
"You will not permit Cyrus to touch me," I said. "And you will not give my name away."
He thought about the second condition and nodded. He liked the first more than I thought.
So I remained at the imperial clinic as a woman with a token of favor that protected me — and as someone who owed a debt to the doctor who'd snatched me into his life-saving shadow. Trey Cross hovered at the edges like a guardian in plain clothes, giving me instructions that were often foreign.
"Your hands are quick," he told me once over a table of herbs. "But you need to be careful about who you heal. Some illnesses are used as weapons."
"I know," I said. "I've seen both sides."
"Then don't be fooled by salons of silk and tears," he said. "People will try to use your skills. They will make you complicit if you let them."
He taught me to treat more than just bodies. He taught me to read the politics of a fever and the motives of a cough. Those were deadly skills in the world we lived in.
And always I kept the jade pendant with 'Jin' in a small carved box in my sleeve. I found myself touching it often, like a prayer. The emperor's favor gave me breathing room, Trey's medicine gave me power, and the coalition of scribes and witnesses gave me the law as a blade.
I will not pretend everything settled. Cyrus still moved in the palace like a wounded animal; Estrella still seethed in exile. Preston Burns still ducked corners and muttered as if the eyes of the court burned him.
But I had a new plan. I was no longer a bowl of blood. I had a hand that could set the temperature of a nation's medicine. I had a teacher who could call me "wise" even when I did not believe it.
Above all, I had a jade pendant that I kept in my pocket like a promise I had never made to anyone.
"One day," Trey said once, leaning on the sill of the imperial balcony, "someone will pay for what they did to you."
"I intend to collect the ledger myself," I told him. "Slowly. Carefully."
He looked at me with something half-iron, half-something kind. "I will stand with you."
"Keep the pendant," I said. "If you ever forget who owes whom."
He smiled a crooked smile and the night folded around us like a hush.
The jade turned cold in my hand. I slipped it into its carved box again and felt the peace of its small, unbreakable weight.
The End
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