Revenge15 min read
Did the Pipa Spirit Win Her Revenge Tonight?
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The first breath I remember was thunder.
"I was supposed to be dead," I told the maid who wrapped me in blankets in the small room off my father's study.
"You were," she whispered, and then she let her hands tremble. "But the midwife said—there's a mark on your face. A tear mole. She said it means—"
"That I survived," I finished. I let the word sit like a stone in my mouth. "That I came back."
My name is Angelica Barrett. My mother was the daughter of the chancellor. My father is Ezio Otto, the Grand Diviner the city bowed to. He reads the world in bones and lines, in the angles of the earth and the folds of fate. He calls himself a servant of balance. The court calls him the man who named my destiny. The truth is, he named more than destinies.
"Angelica." He called me that on days when he wanted to sound kind. When he wanted to sound honest, he called me "my research." When he wanted to tuck me into his plans, he called me "a phoenix fortune." I learned to answer in the tones he liked.
"Father," I said softly and kept my hands folded on my lap. I would not show the flash of white hair at my temple. I would not show that four centuries of a song and a memory lived under my skin.
"Your birth was..." He hesitated as if choosing a flavor. "A miracle."
"A miracle with chickenpox," my mother said dryly, and for a moment they were ordinary, fumbling parents. Their smiles arrived classical, well placed, like candlelight.
"Do you remember anything?" Ezio asked, leaning close. Rain tapped the lattice like someone impatiently asking questions.
"I remember a song," I said. "A pipa. I remember arms that smelled like sandalwood. I remember falling, and then a face that bent close, and a promise I never kept." I let the last line hang like a line of music.
He looked at me with a scholar's curiosity. "Tell me everything."
So I did. Every half-sung phrase I remembered. Every ache that felt like memory. Every fragment of hunger for a warmth that wasn't mine by birth.
"You're fourteen," he reminded me, like a man reading notes. "Too young for—"
"—the world's kind looks?" I finished. "I know." I smiled with the patience of someone who has watched empires sleep and wake. "But some vows don't care about age."
"Your fate—" he started.
"Is phoenix-given," I said. "You told me. You sent me to the palace to be near the Empress and the Emperor, and then you sent me to his study. Why don't you just say it plain? You put me where the world could touch me."
He smiled, proud as a man who had set his chess pieces. "I wanted you to have a seat at the center. A position of influence. You—"
"You wanted the world to feed on me," I finished for him. "I know what you wanted, Father."
Levi Barlow—my father's gift to the Emperor, posted to me as a guard the palace called One-Five—watched us from the doorway. His hands were too big for gentle tasks, and his eyes were a clear, patient amber. He had been given to me because the Emperor needed men who would not notice. Levi had been given to me during the rain. He had refused to go when ordered once, and for that he had been allowed to remain. He had no name for the way that keeping him near had changed the way my chest no longer ached for the same things.
"Angelica," Levi said, quietly. "You shouldn't speak about these things in front of Father."
"I like to speak them out loud," I answered. "Sound has power."
Levi looked at me the way a man looks when he decides not to lie to a child he loves. "All right. But if you say you'll be careful—"
"I will be careful," I lied. He squeezed my hand briefly before he left. "Promise me, Levi," I added, and he left without answering.
The Emperor is Grant Franklin. He sits like a young god who learned how to laugh ages ago. The court whispered that he never aged past seventeen because he kept a piece of time private in his bones. He was thirty-one when the papers told of him, and still he looked like a boy in the painter's ledger. He called me "Ally" once in a private room and then corrected himself to "Angelica" with the patience of soft rain. He called to me with words that should have been for a lover but were said like a tutor's.
"You are thirteen, fourteen, sixteen—what is age to a song?" he asked once as he moved my hair away from my temples. "You have a pipa voice that holds hawks. Tell me its name."
"Green-Waist," I said. The name was his more than mine now. He had ordered a pipa to be carved from the kingwood in the diviner garden. "Green-Waist," I said again, letting the syllables fall like seeds. He smiled and took my hand as if I were a strange instrument.
"Play it," he said, and so I did.
When I played, birds came. That fact is true and stupidly pretty. On the day I climbed the highest tree of the imperial garden—Levi against me like a mount and grant beneath like the sun—I plucked one line. The string broke, and with the broken twang the sky answered with small feathers. People knelt as if a miracle had started.
"By the throne," the steward whispered. "Auspice."
This pleased my father and displeased him too. "Too many pipa songs," he said to the Emperor, a man who used to prefer quieter stringed instruments. "This is dangerous. Songs like these call more than birds."
"Music brings life," Grant answered simply. He looked at me as if the world outside could be solved by my playing. That made him beautiful and dangerous.
It was a delicate thing, what I needed: to take his life-silk and spin it into warmth for my bones. I told myself I would not make him suffer. I told myself I would be a careful thief. I told myself stories about how a child who loves saves another. The truth tasted different on my tongue at night.
"Why do you always ask if I'm 'the other one'?" Grant whispered one evening as moonlight pooled in his study like silver soup.
I touched the tiny mole by my eye. "Because someone called me that once," I said. "Because it felt like a name I hated and loved at once."
"You are not her," he said finally. "But you are like her in a way that hurts me."
"Good," I said. "Then you will need me."
The seasons moved like a breath and the palace became my proving ground. I learned the steps of those who hated me and those who loved me. I learned to pluck my instrument like a blade's edge, cutting clean, cutting so the world would not see the teeth behind it. I learned how to smile like a knife.
The truth came one washed-out morning when my father called the Emperor to the diviner hall, where jade lamps made the place smell like rain. He had asked for a private audience and the court slithered aside like a moat.
"His Majesty," Ezra—Ezio—said, lowering his voice as if the walls listened. "There is an object in my trust."
Grant's brows, fine and calm as a sculptor's, did not lift. "Tell me," he said simply.
Ezio drew from the cloth the instrument I had once known as a different thing: a pipa of bone. The light struck the carved ribs and turned them into filigree bones. People gasped. My father's chest swelled like a drum. He was proud of what he had made by taking from me.
"This is the pipa made from the corpse of the one you called 'that demon'," he said with a scholar's satisfaction. "It keeps a measure of power. It keeps a measure of youth. It is the reason I serve still."
My stomach folded like a map. The hall hummed. I did not move.
Grant placed a hand on the instrument as if it were a relic. His eyes narrowed and then filled with some private terror. He looked at me, as if asking why I had let this happen.
"You used her, Father," I said, slowly. I had learned to wear my rage like a robe: visible and dignified.
Ezio's smile froze. "Angelica, my daughter—"
"You took what I was," I cut. "You took pieces and called them destiny. You sold a girl's life for the sake of a charm."
There was a murmur like a shiver.
"Calm yourself," Grant said, but his voice had threads of ice.
Ezio, in a movement I would later recall like a struck animal, attempted a small charm. He raised a scent diffuser and whispered the diviner's sigils into the air. The bone pipa thrummed, and the court stilled like leaves at a winter wind.
I laughed then because the plan inside me needed a sound.
"Do you think you can own a song?" I asked him loud enough for everyone to hear. "Do you think making a bone pipa can steel youth from a girl and make you pure again?"
"A-orange," someone whispered from the crowd—no, that was Levi clearing his throat.
Ezio's face cracked. "Angelica, you speak as if—"
"As if you are a man," I finished. "Yes. As if you have any righteousness left."
His hands quivered. Grant's frown is a slow thing that can split cliffs. "Show me," he said, his voice just a thread.
I raised Green-Waist. The pipa's strings were polished by my touch. I remembered a tune that tasted like my childhood and like salt. I struck one cord.
Sound poured out of the wood and out of me. It braided into Ezio's magic and pulled at it like a hungry mouth. The bone instrument in his hands rattled. There was a flash—someone in the crowd screamed.
The sound I played did not just pluck notes. It showed people things. I had learned from the long memory under my skin how to shape a melody into a mirror.
As the notes spun, a picture unfurled in the air above the diviner's altar: white walls, candles, a woman bound with threads of silk. A knife. Ezio's hands, moving. My own face, blank as a doll. The scene played like a story scroll. The court gasped.
"Stop!" Ezio shouted. He lunged for the pipa, but the tune wrapped around his wrist like a cold vine and held him at the center of the music.
"Tell them," I said, and the strings drew words from my throat as much as flesh.
"You hunted me," I sang. "You burned pipa to ash. You took bone and song to keep your place. You named it divine work."
Ezio's face pockets of white as his charade slipped. "Lies," he spat. "You lie to save yourself. You witch—"
"Listen," I said, and the melody laid bare moments like glass. The crowd saw him leaning over burning wood. The wood caught, the flames licking like tongues. The bone instrument forming. The midwives whispering. The baby cries. My mother stepping back, shaking. The diviner's hands moving like a puppeteer.
"He's a liar," someone said. "He's deceitful," said another. The hall was a hive.
Ezio's carefully crafted calm collapsed. His face transitioned violently: first fury, then the old scholar's rational denial, then the incredulous panic of a man seeing his fortress crumble. He finally hit the sequence I had seen a thousand times: denial, anger, accusation. "You are a demon," he gasped. "You tempt men. You rot the soil."
People shifted. Grant's jaw tightened, then his shoulders dropped. "Enough," he said. "You will explain now before all."
"Explain," I repeated, letting the pipa's final chord fall like a guillotine.
Then the punishment began. The crowd pressed forward. The hall, meant for courtly whispers, became a public arena.
A thousand pairs of eyes watched as Ezio Otto, the man who had called himself keeper of truth, was forced into the light he thought he had tamed.
"Tell them," I said simply.
He fumbled for a defense that looked scholarly and ended up with a child's howl. "I did what any diviner must do," he protested. "I saved the realm from chaos. I used the fragments of danger to――"
"You saved yourself," someone spat.
Grant made a motion to the guards. "Seize his sigils and bind him," he ordered.
Levi stepped forward to help. He had never raised a hand in violence at my command. He took the diviner's talismans and, with the care of someone handling powder, laid them upon a slab of carved jade. "You will not use them," Levi said. His voice was small but merciless.
Ezio's demeanor rattled. He tried to rally charm and scholarship, then failed. He blinked at the eyes watching him. "You are my daughter," he said to me, voice hollow as a flute. "You will spare me."
"Sparence is for fathers," I said coldly. "You have been spared long enough."
Then the real punishment began—not a legal sentence but a public unmaking. I had prepared this; a performance of revelation could be justice, and sometimes it did more than the law.
First, his friends stepped back. The men who had bowed to his incense now looked at him like someone with a strange disease. They murmured, then they took out devices students now called "picture boxes"—flat things that could capture the scene and send it to others. Someone recorded his stumbling confession.
Ezio's face moved through its catalog of reactions: faux indignation, frightened denial, then fevered calculation, then raw panic, then the slow, brutal slide into shame. His hands trembled. A physician in the audience kvelled at the hemorrhaging truth in his bloodless face. "He lies cravenly. He knows he's lost the story."
The attendants laughed, a brittle sound edged with years of court boredom. "He steals from daughters," a woman cried. "He steals youth."
"Traitor," called another. The word glowed like hot stone.
He tried to claw back the narrative. "The city needed stability! I acted—" His voice dissolved into a choke. He could not anchor himself.
"Look at him," I instructed, and the crowd looked. Men with ink-stained sleeves called out details they had learned with the pipa's song: how he'd convened the burnings; how he'd falsified seers' notes; how he'd taken what he called "a dangerous relic" and made it his treasury.
"How could you?" my mother—no, my sister—Juliette Berry said, her voice splintering into a keening kind of sorrow. She had been Ezio's instrument and now lay broken at his feet. "How could you hide a child's fate? How could you—"
He sought mercy from the Emperor. "Grant—" he trembled.
Grant's face has always been soft. The eyes that had once desirably watched music now watched him like a blade of winter. "You told the city she was dead. You proclaimed a killer subdued. You sold a child's life for your comfort. Those are not the acts of a man who keeps faith."
For a moment I felt something like pity, like the shape of water in my chest. Then the pipa remembered hunger, and I let it remind me how many times I had wanted to die because of men who thought themselves gods.
The crowd's reaction matured into a chorus: some spat, some cried, some filmed. The chamber grew hot with rage. They wanted to witness the fall.
Ezio's voice cracked like dry twigs. "You framed me," he gasped, and he pointed at me. "You twisted memory! You are a witch!"
I laughed then, a small, precise sound. "I am a survivor," I said. "And I have the song to prove it."
He staggered like a puppet with the strings cut. A guard came forward, took his ceremonial staff, and snapped it. The sound was final. He had nothing left: no ornaments, no talismans, no words that could wrap him in respect.
"Take him to the public steps," Grant said. "Let the city decide."
So they did. They dragged him into the courtyard where the markets faced the palace. The clouds, which had been slow as velvet, now spilled a fine rain, making everything look like ink. Merchants, washerwomen, soldiers—people who had once read his charts—gathered.
Ezio had been made to carry a banner of his confession: the scribes had written his words large and pasted them like a blazon for everyone. "I used the bones of the dead," it read in the clear calligraphy they had once admired. "I hid the living child. I chose a lie for comfort."
"Shame!" cried a woman with flour on her sleeves. "Shame!" echoed the apprentices.
He moved through their jeers like a ghost who had been remembered too late. Then he saw Juliette—my sister—wrapped in a thin blanket and pale as old paper. She came forward on stumbling legs to kneel and press a face like porcelain to his, then she slapped him so hard his cheek stung.
"You made this bed!" she screamed. "You lied, you lied—"
His reactions here were like those I had watched in dreams: shock, flailing denial, then the old, cloying attempt at control—pleas, obsequiousness, bargaining. "Mercy," he begged. "Spare me a measure."
The crowd became a chorus of words. They demanded that he return all he had stolen: positions, titles, the weight of respect. They wanted a public ritual to unmake his power.
Grant did something subtle-seeming and final: he had scribes read aloud the ledger of Ezio's benefits. They read: donations, favors, appointments. For each entry, a citizen stepped forward and recited how the diviner's decisions had harmed them. A woman with a crooked son said his diviner's edicts had taken her land. A former soldier said false portents had kept his husband from returning.
Ezio's face changed again. "Those are lies," he rasped. "Collusion. They were—"
"They were your decisions," someone said. "And today we undo them."
When they finally bound him with linen strips, the fabric wasn't gentle; it had been soaked in the herbal bitter that cleansed illusion. The binders were not cruel men but careful ones, and still his body clenched. They took from his chambers his maps, his charted bones, his instruments, and burned them in a public fire. The bone pipa feebly cracked in the flames like a half-broken promise; when the heat took it the crowd broke into a bitter cheer.
He tried once more to twist the scene. "The Emperor promised—"
"No," Grant said, and the tone was the final toll of a bell. "I promised the city truth. It is your consecrated debt to return what you stole."
He was not executed that day. That had seemed too simple, too neat. Instead he was stripped of his title, stripped of his sigils, and banished to the outlands where the diviners' cottages had once been. The city would write down his sentence: exile and public restitution. The record was stamped and carried far and wide.
Throughout, his face walked a landscape of reactions: he had always been smug, then hurt, then sent into the ragged panoply of fear, denial, indignation, collapse. He begged at one point on his knees for my forgiveness. The crowd watched his hands shape the words like a child asking for bread.
"You will not have my mercy," I told him, and my voice was not loud but like a bellbroken tone. "You will have what everyone deserves: to be seen."
He tried to pull something back—his eyes, his dignity—and in the courtyard's pale rain they ebbed away like stain.
The punishment was public and long: his name blackened, the instruments burned, the pages of his predictions torn into confetti and scattered to the wind. People recorded, shouted, spat, some even dropped coins into a bowl offered by a scribe who promised to give the proceeds to those the diviner had harmed. The spectacle was revenge and a reckoning. It left him hollow.
Afterwards, as Levi walked me home and Grant watched from a lidless window, I sat with my pipa across my knees and thought of how the world learns.
"Was that cruel?" Levi asked, his hand steady on the pipa case.
"No," I said. My voice softened as the rain finished and a tempering sun began to clean the rooftops. "It was truth. And truth is always harder on those who built towns from lies."
He looked at me with the kind of affection that does not calculate. "And what of the Emperor? You used him as your harvest."
"He was a fruit I did not plan to sour," I answered. "He gave freely what I needed. I will not pretend my desire was a charity."
"You are terrible," he said, and it was almost a laugh.
"So are you," I said, and we both laughed, because the opal truth between us held us like a small bright thing.
There were wounds: the Emperor aged and grew weary, not from blows but from the quiet end of the magic he did not know how to keep. He kissed me sometimes in the dimming hours and would say, "You save me." I would smile and think of the price.
Levi stayed. He found ways to tend to me with salt poultices and serious looks, and one night he whispered, "Do you know why I couldn't leave?"
"Because you are stubborn," I said.
"Because you touched me first," he said. "You trusted me with your small pains. I couldn't abandon that."
I placed a soft hand on his cheek. "I thought I never loved anyone but my song."
"Does the song forgive?" he asked.
"It forgives me for wanting more than a song," I said.
Two months later, in the spring after Ezio's fall, I went to the small palace garden where the young Lord Landon Evans kept his music and his slow, thoughtful ways. He had told me once, simple and astonished, "I knew once when I was a child, I loved pipa sound. It hummed like a bell in sunlight."
"You are the one," I said to him then—no, I didn't say it outright. I let a gift rest in his hands instead: the Green-Waist pipa, carved again, made warm from my fingers.
He held it like someone who had been given the map to a lost city. "If this breaks—"
"You will not let it break," I answered. "And if you must go into danger, take it. It will keep you safe in small ways."
He looked at me in a manner that unsettled the way the sea unsettles the shore. "Angelica, are you—" he started, and then he stopped because the world taped its breath.
"I am what I must be," I said. "And I will always be your debt-holder. You were my first kindness, long ago, and now I will try to be yours."
He smiled, slow and bright. "Then let us both be kept a while."
I left him with a pipa and with a promise I couldn't say without singing. I left Levi with a name he never used aloud but kept in his pocket like a coin. I left the Emperor to his new, more honest aging.
At night, when I play, birds still answer. The music that saved me and unmade another grows. The Green-Waist rests across my lap like a contained storm. I pluck a string and hear the thunder again—not of wrath, but of consequence.
"Did I repay my debt?" I asked Levi once, under the eaves where rain smells like clean hands.
"You repaid nothing," he said. "You balanced a scale. You moved a mountain."
"Is that the same as success?"
"No," he said. "It's better."
So I keep playing. The pipa's body remembers the bone, but it is not bone. It is wood and song and a small mercy. When people ask me if I have won, I take the instrument and press it to my chest and say, "Listen."
The tune I play now is not just for stealing warmth. It is for making shelter, for calling no more bones into fiddles, for letting the Emperor show his true age and for letting Levi keep his patience, for letting Landon be alive and young and a friend.
"Will you ever stop?" Grant once asked, watching the small flock of birds circle and return.
"When I can," I said. "When the songs are quiet enough that they don't pull things from people like wolves."
Levi laughed. "Then never."
I smile. The pipa hums. The mole near my eye stains with a remembered drop now and then, not blood but ink, as if the memory has rewritten itself into a story. I tune one string and the Green-Waist answers like a friend.
"How will this end?" Landon asked once, when he clutched the pipa like a talisman.
"It will end like a song ends," I said. "Not on a promise, not on a law, but on a note long and true."
And if someone asks in the market, where gossip moves like wind, whether the pipa spirit repaid her debt—people will think it a small thing to have revenge done. But I know the debt never fully leaves. It becomes a measure. I become a measure.
At dawn each morning I stand on the palace balcony and let the last of the night's stars blush away. I pluck a single string in memory, loud enough for the world to hear, and I feel Levi's hand slide into mine and the shadow of Grant's presence recede like tide.
"Forever," he once said.
I do not answer with vows anymore.
I answer with a song.
The End
— Thank you for reading —