Revenge14 min read
A Thorn and a Rose
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I did not go to meet Reed Caldwell to beg him back. I went because I found out, by accident and sweating, that the man I was promised to had two plans at once: one plan for me, one plan to burn everything down.
"I won't stand with a conspirator," I told myself as I wrapped the letter I meant to deliver. The idea of Reed carving his way into rebellion and pulling everyone I loved into the fire made my stomach knot.
The garden room smelled of old paper and plum wine when I stepped inside. Reed was already there. He held a folded sheet like a judge holding a sentence; his fingers were white at the knuckles. Yet his face—God—his face was still flawless. Like a statue. Like something the sun could not touch.
"Zoya," he said, and his voice was small, the way a lid might click into place. "You came."
"I came to return what was promised," I said, trying to make my voice steady. "If what they say is true, it's safer for us to part."
He blinked. "Safer?" Reed's long lashes shadowed a look I did not understand. "You would give up—us—because of rumor and fear?"
"It is not rumor I fear," I answered. "It is the rope you may throw over us all."
He let out a sound like wind. "Then refuse me fairly. Take the paper." He offered the divorce parchment as if it were a trivial thing. His fingers tightened; the paper did not move. "If you do not want to be mine, Zoya, then we will be free."
I reached for it. His hand closed, white and hard. "You would end what we were for words whispered in courtyards?"
"Let us not pretend," I said, bowing my head in what I hoped was humility but felt like defeat. "We grew up close. We were family in a household of obligations. Better to part than to be a pair of hated ghosts."
Reed's mouth tilted. "Family." He sounded amused and tired. "You call it family?"
"Yes." I forced a little laugh. "I am overreaching. I cannot be your shield when the court drills holes in people's ribs."
"Zoya." He finally let the paper slide. When he did, his fingers unclenched and revealed a small tremor. "If you do not want me—tell me now."
"I do not." The words left me like plucked strings.
"Then we will end it cleanly." He looked at me like a man choosing a road. "I suppose I should be relieved."
I left the garden smelling of old paper and rain and that hollowness that eats at you when you have chosen safety over hunger. I thought then that the world had split and that both halves were cold.
Two months later the house was split open. Soldiers took every curtain and bowl. Men in chains were marched down the lane. Reed, in white linen that proved how well he had been made for display, was led away with shackles. The city crowd followed; they had been hungry for a story that justified gossip.
When the procession passed my carriage, I turned my face away. But then I saw Isabelle Ilyin at the edge of that crowd—white, distant, not looking at me. They said Reed favored Isabelle now. The rumor stabbed.
Half a day later the official line arrived: the Caldwell household had been implicated in treason and the family banished to the northern garrison of Ningbei. Reed's hands were cuffed, his step measured, and his face held that same unreadable calm. He did not meet me. He did not need to.
I should have felt triumph. I felt only a low burn of shame.
A flurry of events set my life like dominoes. The prince, Vijay Chase, who rarely smiled, took pity or strategy or some mixture of both and rescued me from the pile of angry tongues. "Come to the palace," he said in that quiet voice that always sounded like rain on thin glass. "Come and rest."
"I cannot take pity," I told him once, while grinding ink beside him in a windowed room as dusk deepened into blue. The prince barely glanced up. "You do not need favors from a condemned daughter."
"I am not giving charity," Vijay said, and there it was—an odd, small warmth. "Stay. Eat." He took my meal with the same indifferent hand most men reserved for business. Yet he asked me to stay, again and again, until the court began to whisper that the prince might be fond of me.
"Is it true?" people asked in corridors, lowering voices like curtains.
"What do you think?" I answered, but I was not sure how to answer. I did not trust any future that had so many watchers.
The Empress Dowager, Evelynn Colombo, called me to her presence like a matron testing a new bowl for cracks. "You are to be the prince's lady," she said with that smooth smile of hers. "We will take care of you."
"Care," I told myself afterward, sat on the stone bench outside the throne hall, "is a word with teeth."
In palace life there is a softness like a well-knit net: silk, cooked foods, servants who anticipate every discomfort. There is also a current that will eat you; a careless glance can be sharpened into an accusation. The Dowager's favors smelled like iron.
When I entered the prince's chambers as his wife in the ceremony that made my name ring in gilded halls, I thought the pain would lift a little. I made my hair and bowed. I felt like clay pressed into a mold, a puppet. "Zoya," Vijay murmured later as he gently removed a heavy hairpin. "Do not be afraid here."
The months folded and folded. He was kind in small ways: one night he tucked his fox fur about me as if I were a child. "Sleep," he said. "Do not go to the monastery."
"I would not be `going' anywhere without you," I told him, because even then, I felt ridiculous and stubborn. He laughed once and the laugh broke in the air.
I kept expecting pain, for the Dowager to decide I had outlived my usefulness. She came like weather.
On a spring pilgrimage to a temple, as my mother and I walked among peach trees, a man named Bruno Downs—drunk, dangerous, and ill-suited to kindness—attacked me. He lunged. I shouted. Time narrowed to a bright, sharp point of danger.
"Help!" I called, but a crowd muffled the sound.
He pressed himself against me; the world went small and sharp. I could feel the sick brush of his breath. In those seconds, the monastery felt a thousand miles away.
Then someone struck Bruno down. He collapsed like a puppet whose string had been cut. There was a figure in blue—Vijay—kneeling over him. He had saved me. And then, later, when I was in a cold, damp cell, it was Vijay who slipped through the doorway like a shadow and wrapped his cloak around me.
"It is my fault," he said. "I should have been there sooner."
The first time I let myself lean into him I felt everything crack. "You saved my life," I whispered, "and still I am lonely."
"You are not," he answered. When he said it, his voice didn't tremble. For a moment I clung to that simple truth like a rope.
But the court tastes rumor and turns it into monsters. People began to whisper that the prince wanted me as his chosen. The Empress Dowager, who feared anything that might upset the thread of power she spun, smiled as a spider does. "You will serve," she said to me once, handing down a list of tasks like a verdict. "Be grateful."
The Dowager's plotting has teeth. Her plan to pin a scandal on me was cruel and clever: a false accusation, a staged assault, falsified evidence of impropriety—all crafted to make me an object to be despised. On one night, a man collapsed near me—poisoned, they declared, and I was the source and he would be the proof. I was hauled to a damp cell with two rough guards who had eyes like blind dogs.
When they came near me, surprised, the guards fell dead—one after the other. I knelt in the cold and when I looked up through the window, there was Vijay, standing like an island.
"Don't speak," he said, pressing his cloak around me, and I did not.
We were married under a heavy red canopy days later—externally, it seemed the prince's care had made me safe. Under the surface, I had been made a chess piece. "Protect him," my father, Felix Box, warned over incense in the ancestral hall. "Do not bear his child."
"What?" I had flung my hands in disbelief. "He is all I have now."
"Not a son," my father said, and his voice was cracked with age. "Not yet."
I had grown hard then. Surviving makes a person different. I learned secrecy like a language. I learned to answer with one thing while meaning another. When the prince was wounded months later—hit by an arrow meant for me—he told me, splayed beneath a tree on a muddy field, "Get the knife. Pull it free."
"I don't know how," I cried.
"Then learn," he said, and held my hand steady. "Do not be afraid of blood, Zoya."
I pulled the arrow free. He saved me once again. He also saved me a thousand times in the small everyday ways that cannot be measured: a bowl of soup, a hand to steady me, a laugh in a day that otherwise only offered sorrow.
Then the lightning came. The palace burned. Someone set flame to the halls and the Empress Dowager stood among the chaos, her face fixed and calm. Vijay went in to pull others out. He coughed and coughed and later lay pale, every breath a battle. He would not die right away, but he left like a extinguished lantern months later and the court declared mourning like a flood. I knelt by his bed as the world narrowed to one small hand I held.
"I wanted to compensate you," he said once, and his voice was a paper whisper. "For the silence, the fear. For the things you suffered that were not your fault."
"Don't say it now," I begged. "Stay. Please stay."
He smiled with the faintest light and then, some nights later, he was gone.
After the funeral, the Dowager's face grew hard again. She had not finished. She wanted more than influence—she wanted to be iron on the throne. The months that followed were a catalogue of small cruelties she directed like a general. She had allies among eunuchs and ministers: Boyd Falk was one of them, a man whose loyalty bought him more power than a noble birth. He nodded and smiled while he plotted.
But the world is not purely cruel. You make allies where you can. Reed Caldwell came back.
He returned not as the white-clad figure I had once known but as a general with the cold weather in his eyes. There had been plans in Ningbei. For a year he had been building a force with the northern garrison. "We were planted like seeds," Reed told me just once, the day he returned to the capital and stood like a shadow in the garden where we had parted. "And now we bloom."
"You left," I said. "You left me to die."
"No," he said. "You left me first. You were right to. I would never ask you to be my shield. But now… now the shield is wasted on gods who do not deserve it."
Reed's return set the capital like tinder. The banners came out. People left their homes to see whether the tide would shift. Reed, with a voice like a bell, published paper after paper accusing Evelynn Colombo and her clan of lawless cruelty, naming names and listing grievances. He's a man of strategy, not speeches, but his words burned. Allies came forward too. Branch Rahman—an official who once muttered in the shadows—took his side. A chain pulled, and the Empress Dowager had fewer friends.
When the troops marched through the city it was not merely a battle for the throne; it was a moment where every insult and ridicule and wrong fell like rain upon a head that had smiled so long without consequence. The palace gates opened, and Reed came with banners. The Dowager did not flee. Pride keeps people in chairs; it saves them from running and dooms them to spectacle.
The public square filled. The market emptied. People clattered down from balconies and steps, faces drawn tight by curiosity and hunger for justice. I walked with Reed at his side. He had called me to stand there, not because he could not do it without me, but because he wanted the truth to be seen where it would matter.
"Bring her out," Reed said to the captors, his voice hard as flint. "Bring Evelynn to the square."
They brought her in like a queen who had been unearthed—robes smeared and hair knotted, though the jewels still clung like claws. Evelynn's eyes burned. She stood erect like a statue. "You have no justice," she said, but only a few could hear her. Her voice was small under the roar.
I did not expect to feel triumph. I expected only the flatness of a woman who had been spun through the gears of power and turned into something smaller. But what I felt in the square as the crowd pressed forward was clearer: the need for the Dowager to be seen as she had seen us—a person stripped of the illusion of invulnerability.
Reed spoke then, and the words cut the air. "Evelynn Colombo stands accused of treachery against the realm, of ordering murders to consolidate power, of sending men to kill in holy halls, of orchestrating false evidence and ruin. Let the people see the woman who did these things."
"Silence!" Evelynn's voice tried to become the familiar command, but it fell flat.
"Bring forth her papers," Reed ordered. Two clerks produced scrolls: lists of names, ledgers of bribes, and letters to and from eunuchs. Reed unfolded them with careful fingers. "She paid Boyd Falk and others with land and titles. She stirred disorder for her gain. She arranged murders of men who opposed her." Reed's eyes swept the crowd, then landed on Evelynn. "You used the law to swallow the innocent."
Evelynn's face shifted. At first a tiny blink of disgust, then anger flaring. "You lie," she hissed. "You have no proof!"
"Proof?" Reed's voice trembled only with cold. "These are your seals." He held up letters signed with her cipher. "This is the list of payments. These are the names of those you ordered killed." Reed read soft names, names that had been ours: men who had been stripped of life on a whisper.
The first crack in her composure came when the crowd let out a murmur of recognition. Faces around us creased. Mothers clutched their children. Men who had tasted her snares spat on the ground. The murmur swelled.
Evelynn stepped back and then, in a fury, tried to regain her posture. "This is rebellion!" she cried. "You are traitors all."
"Then let the people decide," Reed said. "If she is innocent, let her stand. If not, let justice have its voice."
They led Evelynn into the tall wooden scaffold placed for her humiliation—the same scaffolds the city used for public accounting of power. She was high above the crowd, like a bird in a cage. The captors dragged a table forward and set it with the ledger. Reed read each charge—bribery, murder, perverting justice, ordering assaults in sacred spaces—slowly, with the patience of someone reading a list to set a wrong right.
"Evelynn Colombo," Reed's voice rang out, "you used gold and fear to quiet men. You starved women of dignity until they bowed low to keep breath. You conspired to make the son of the late prince a puppet. You thought these hands would never be pried loose."
The crowd hissed. Some clapped. An old man at the front shouted: "Tell us the names!" A butcher kicked over a crate in excitement. A clerk snapped a fan.
The Dowager's brow twitched. At first she tried small denials. "You twist words!" she called down. "I loved the realm. I protected it."
And then Reed produced a name—a man who had been executed at her order; the scroll contained her own command. A woman in the crowd screamed. The clerk who had lost a brother stepped forward and spat in Evelynn's direction. The pattern was sharp: evidence, denial, proof, reaction. Evelynn's expressions began to crack in ways I'd never seen. At first she was angry; she peered down like a hawk whose prey had slipped. Then, as Reed read more—more letters, more transfers, more names—her face paled. There was no commanding tone left. Denial gave way to anger, anger to shock.
"These are fabrications!" she cried at one point, and there was a hollowness in it. "I did not—"
"But you did," Reed said. "You stood above the law."
She tried to weep, but even tears are rehearsed when you have power. The crowd turned to her as if they had a right to look. "You sent men to burn temples," a woman shouted, and a murmur spread like a wind down an alley. "You killed a prince's guard because he would not kneel to you."
Evelynn's eyes roamed wildly. She sought someone—an ally, a face she could trust. Boyd Falk, who stood near her side, suddenly looked away. When a man who had once accepted her bribes now spat on her, she staggered. The first public turn was a sharp intake—like the sound a person makes when they realize the ground is gone.
Then the crowd's voice rose. They called for penalties: for her to be stripped of rank, for her properties to be seized, for those she had ruined to be given recompense. People chanted the names of their dead. A merchant who had lost trade to her directives cried that his family starved while she kept wealth. A mother brought forward a baby whose father had been crushed. The emotion was raw.
Evelynn's posture broke entirely when Reed produced a final piece of evidence: a ledger with a seal only used by the imperial household and a list of purloined funds traced back to the Dowager's private coffers. When the seal was unrolled in the sun, a hush swept the square. A toddler began to cry. Even the pigeons seemed to stop and then, like thunder, the people's anger broke into a roar.
All her defenses collapsed in a single, public sequence. She was no longer a Dowager. She was only a woman on a raised platform, watched by thousands. Her face slid from angry to pleading to blank. She reached out for Reed with a trembling hand. "Please," she said, voice small and human. "You were children. Forgive me. I built a house and I tried to hold an empire together—"
The crowd jeered. A girl in the front row threw a handful of dust at her. It hit Evelynn like confetti. She coughed and spat, and her composure unraveled into an ugly, raw begging I had never seen. The progression was terrible and perfect: dominance, accusation, astonishment, denial, rage, collapse, begging.
Reed listened until the crowd’s noise rose and fell like a tide. "Justice will be done," he told the assembly. "But the law is not vengeance. The court will convene: a public tribunal. Let witnesses speak."
The tribunal convened in the square the next day. Documents were read aloud. Witnesses testified. We saw officials who had worked with Evelynn stand and say what they knew. Boyd Falk testified, voice thin, and his shifting eyes showed his conscience was costlier than his advancement. He described the meetings in rooms with low lamps and how the Dowager had shifted men like playing cards.
Evelynn was granted a defender—an appointed attorney who spoke in loops and strategies, but the evidence was too broad to be braided into a lie. When the sentence was read, it was not immediate death; Reed had insisted on public humiliation before legal consequence to expose her crimes to the people she had scorned. Hundreds watched as her rank was stripped in layers: jewelry removed, robes taken, the seal torn away. She was made to kneel on the same stone where her decrees had once been stamped.
"Let her atone before the court and the people," Reed said. "Let the names be spoken and let the debt be tallied."
"Evelynn!" she cried in one last burst, trying to gather the power of the woman whose whispered commands had once slotted men into place. "You will not have me die quietly!"
At that, the crowd turned not with pity but recognition: she had meant to live always at the summit. Now she had to understand what its absence meant.
When her sentence was announced—confiscation, public penance, exile to a temple where she would live under observation and make restitution—we all listened. The punishment was meant to cut pride into usable strips: she would not be executed in a show. Instead, she would stand in daylight and be ordered to restore what she had taken, to name the men she had harmed, to confess in public and write restitution checks or give land for the survivors. The people wanted more—many wanted the last humiliation to be a parade of those she had wronged—but Reed shaped it as law: visible shame, measured reparation.
Evelynn's reaction, during these formalities, moved from stunned rage to frantic bargaining to collapse into bitter laughter and then to abject, trembling pleading. The crowd's reaction moved, too: at first hungry, then vindictive, then almost tender in a strange way, as if a child who had bitten another child and had been punished made the wrong grown-up choice and could now be seen as a human being.
"It won't heal them all," I heard Reed whisper to me, when the tribunal ended. His voice was edged but soft. "But it is seen. That is the point."
I nodded, the square still crowded with people who had come to witness a phoenix pulled down from her loft. The crowd began to disperse, and months afterward, the city turned its eyes to rebuilding.
Peace came with cost. Families bore it; daughters and sons who had been wronged received distributions. Boyd Falk lost his posts. The Dowager—once untouchable—lived under watchful eyes in a small temple on the outskirts. People took to telling the story of the woman who had flown too high and who now had to learn to stand on the earth again.
For me, life moved on like a river after a dam breaks. Reed re-built an order with care. He was not triumphant in the comfortable way tyrants are triumphant; his victory had the sober look of someone who had paid dearly. I had my own debts to bear: the memory of a prince's hand, of his smile in a dying room, the child inside me who would be both a tie and an unknown.
"Do you forgive me?" Reed asked one night, when the city was quiet and only the dogs barked.
I looked at him. "I forgive what you had to do to survive," I said. "Forgiveness is a map, not a destination. We have to walk it."
He took my hand and did not speak for a long while. In the months after Evelynn's public judgment, the court changed: law mattered more. Reed took his place not as a bloodless leader but as someone who had learned the cost of power. He never again tried to hide the fact that people are complicated, and that justice is ugly and sometimes necessary.
I learned to carry my wounds like a woman who knows how to dress a bruise so it will not cost the world its breath. I still kept my father's teachings in my heart—honor, patience—and I kept a small rose Reed had given me the night we first met in the south market, tucked in a book. It was faded, pressed, a memory of a day when we were less than allies and more than strangers.
The city rebuilt. People who had been crushed found ways to stand. Men who had been used as pawns in houses of power went back to shopkeeping and teaching and making babies. Life resumed in a way that felt both brittle and real.
At the end of it all, when the markets were full of fruit and laughter, I walked through the same garden where Reed and I had met to sign a divorce. He joined me and, for once, did not wield a document or a weapon. He simply stood beside me, a man who had been made by loss and victory.
"Are you happy?" he asked, as if asking whether a wound could be beautiful.
"I'm alive," I answered, and that, for me, had to be enough.
The End
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