Revenge15 min read
Frost on the Fallen Lotus
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I was born the noon my mother died. They said it was proof of fate — a bitter circle sealed by a dying woman and the cold moon. They named me for a broken lotus in a muddy pond: Isabela Fitzpatrick. The name settled on my skin like a bruise.
"You give in to him, Isabela. You want power, don't you?" Cason Bowling had said that to me later, red-eyed and trembling like a man who could not imagine himself humbled. "I'll give you a seat in the palace. Be my queen. Call me brother once more, please."
He sounded like a ruler reduced to asking for a favor. Power wrapped itself in such ridiculous humility.
I put my hands on his throat, pressed, and smelled the stale breath of a prince. Then I leaned in and whispered close, smiling with a cruelty I'd been practicing for years: "You called me shameless and said I lived without honor. Prince, now you stand before your sister—naked and wanting. Who is the shameless one?"
He made a sound between a laugh and a sob. I held him there against the fake rock in the garden until his body stopped moving with the pretense of command.
That night moonlight silvered the frost on fallen leaves. I walked home with silk muddied, with my plan crawling under my ribs.
1.
My mother had been from a house of books; then poverty and a man with a ledger sent her to a room of silk and coin. People called her many things. I called her mother and felt the shame as a shape that followed me.
My half-sister, Valentina Evans, grew in silk and praise. She was the bright face of legitimacy — polished, beloved. I was the stain at the edge of the banquet—pretty enough to be looked at but always told my place.
"You're a courtesan's daughter," Valentina said once, fingernail scoring my cheek. "How dare you call the prince brother?"
"Your aunt is the Empress," I shot back, using the thunder in our house for a shield. "What right have I not to say what she says?"
2.
Cason Bowling had the practiced stillness of a man raised by tutors and statecraft. At the city festival, he told me off for daring to stand where noble girls stood. Every word was a lesson in humility for me, a lesson I was not invited to learn. He decreed I copy etiquette books until my wrists cramped.
"Do you know your station?" he asked, thin-lipped. "Do you know what you must not do?"
I should have been small and obedient. Instead, I said, explosive and foolish, "I will not be less than anyone because of the home I was born into."
He blushed like a child. He ordered the punishment into someone else's hands but watched.
3.
There was one boy who loved me in a way that was quiet and sharp. Penn Andreev was a scholar's son with thin hands and honest eyes. He said, "Wait for me. When I pass the exams, I'll take you away." He gave me a plum hairpin—cheap and earnest—and in that moment I believed that a future could be built on one stubborn promise.
"I will study until I no longer need to fear," he said, and I believed him like a prayer. I believed the wrong things for a long time.
4.
The world is small enough for cruelty to be ordinary. Valentina always had a reason to bruise me. She could not wear my face; she wore her pedigree like a crown. When I laughed at Cupid's banquet, she repaid with a palm full of shame. The house made room for her rage and dismissed mine.
When Cassian Guerrero first showed interest, he came with opulence and a mouth full of flattery. Cassian was the heir to a powerful house—loud, brutish, entitled. He began sending obscene booklets and crude poems. I retorted. He answered by dividing my nights.
5.
One winter afternoon Cassian crossed a line I had not known possible. He pressed me in a garden pavilion and said with a sneer, "You entice me with that voice of yours. What's a pretty thing worth if not to please men like me?"
I was thrust to stone, my clothes torn, the cold wind a foreign torment. I hollered and did not really know who I trusted enough to hear me. The world blurred: snow caught on my eyelashes like pins. Then Cason appeared, a white cloak around my shivering shoulders.
"Don't be afraid," I said, because he had saved me. "Thank you, brother." My knees knocked with more than cold.
6.
Penn came that night, light-footed and pale. His face had the look of someone who carried a future in his pocket and wasn't sure he had the right to open it.
"Will you wait?" he asked.
"I will," I said, stupid and faithful. I tied hope around my waist like a ribbon.
7.
We ran. Penn and I hid in a ruined temple for three days, the world outside white and cruel. My father—Benito Bradshaw—found us. He cursed and beat Penn until the scholar's son was blood and apology and failure.
"You are a stain," my father said to me once I cowered at his boot. "You shamed the family."
Penn's hair lay white with snow when they dragged him away. He coughed the words, "I'm sorry. I failed you." He went away to be pegged and bruised so his name would stop hanging around mine.
I tried to be small after that. I stayed inside and finished copying etiquette books, while Valentina took the world like she owned it.
8.
Hate is a slow thing and an efficient teacher. I wanted to rise above the way they spat at me. I wanted to make their laughter choked and brittle. If a skirt and a low bow could not carve a place for me, then my voice, my body, and my cunning would.
I planned my steps like a general.
9.
The festival of lotuses came, and Cason dropped by the household with his quiet airs. I offered a humble cup of tea as thanks for his previous help. He drank, careful and distant.
"Thank you for last winter," I said, with the innocence to ask a favor for a life. "May I offer you another cup?"
He did not want to. He feared impropriety and the eyes of the court. But he tasted the tea and did not know the mixture. When his face turned red and he became unsteady, I was waiting with a second cup. The first hidden with a forgetfulness he found convenient, the second laced with bitter powders I had studied in a book men sneered at—book husbandry of bodies and medicines.
I had promises in mind—small and sharp—and a desire to make them itch.
10.
He was seized with cramps and shame and rage. "You tricked me!" he spluttered. "You shameless—"
"Am I shameless for wanting a place?" I asked him. "I have nothing but this body and my voice. If it can buy me a foothold, so be it."
He was humiliated and violent. He promised me ruin if I spoke. When he threatened Penn and my family to silence me, for a moment I believed his threats were absolute. But I had already bet on something bigger than his threats: the court's hunger for voice and rumor.
11.
I was not naive. I knew Cason was an empire of lines and orders. He was the prince who would wear a crown and who had been taught to place duty and spectacle over mercy.
"Speak no more of this," he warned after escaping my trap. "If you make one word public, I will bury your house. I will make your life vanish."
Something cold and hard lodged in me at that promise. He meant it. His hands had always been clean in public and bloodied only in private. I wanted to show him that his clean hands could be stained by the very things he believed mere details: rumor, shame, and exposure.
12.
So I took a different path. I learned the rooms where people like me learned to earn a living under bright lamps and masked faces. I called myself "Pearl" there, and they taught me to move a body that had been taught to survive through song and guile. I started to collect silver, and with that silver I bought leverage.
13.
Then, the most dangerous thing happened: Valentina contrived a scheme. She wanted nothing more than to break the ladder beneath me. The house adored her, and she feared any rival, even one that sat in disgrace like I did.
She offered me a gift—something simple, a decorated hair box—and told me it had been made by her mother. She insisted I wear it at the family banquet for her birthday.
"Take it," she said, eyes like a lie. "It'll make you look grateful."
I refused. She forced the box into my hands and the world narrowed to the click of lacquer striking stone. In the struggle, the box fell and the lacquer scattered. Then, in shame and embarrassment, someone shoved, I slipped, and then I was in water. Cold took me like a spiteful hand.
When I woke, Cason's face hovered above me, more furious than he had any right to be.
"You wanted spectacle," he said. "You wanted to be noticed. Fine."
14.
He did not protect me. He used my shame as an argument against Valentina's greed and yet pointed the finger at me when the Empress demanded scandal be punished. The ritual of the court wanted someone to burn. The Empress wanted order. The Prince wanted to salvage honor.
They offered me an exchange: the life of my unborn child—because word had leaked of my other sin—and elevation instead. Marry the prince, take a noble title, the Empress promised, and the matter would be closed. I found out later it was a bargain made cold: my compliance for the protection of the royal family.
"You will drink the remedy and the child will no longer be," she told me, pressing the bowl into my hands like medicine is a verdict. "In return, you will be named a palace consort. Your family will be left in peace."
I stood up then, sudden and ridiculous as a child, and I ran.
"Take your honor then!" I shouted as guards reached for me. My belly hurt and the world blurred; the air tasted like iron.
They forced the remedy down me. I vomited and screamed. I thought I would die. I thought I had no right to a future.
15.
I imagined Penn's face and how the world had closed on him the day they dragged him off. I imagined his thin hands and how helpless they had been. I thought of the small thing moving under my ribs—my only real kin— and I fought with the desperation of a mother who had not yet held her child.
Layton Vinogradov, the second prince—smoother, gentler in a dangerous way—arrived like a salvage in a flood. He lifted me with surprising strength, and his eyes stayed on me like they aimed at the place where my shame lived.
"You are not to be thrown away," he said softly. "I will take you away from this."
He brought me back to his house and wrapped me in a red garment like a wedding to some version of mercy. He gave me jewels—gifts to close the mouth of rumor.
16.
They cried scandal in the city. They painted me as a wanton who had courted both princes. My father's rage returned, and he offered a dozen men to shout the shame into my ears any day of the week. It was nonsense and it hurt.
Then the imperial decree arrived: I was to be made Layton's side-consort. The world spoke in red ink and silk. I had been traded like a commodity. The promise that had once been a child's safe harbor—Penn's vow—was a memory softened by snow.
I wept for the baby I'd wanted and for the life I'd lost. I wept because I had been offered a golden cage in exchange for blood that I did not want to lose.
17.
The wedding was sudden and brilliant. Layton's court cheered. Valentina stared like a woman who had been outmaneuvered in a game she had always thought she controlled. Cason watched from the distance between duty and curiosity.
"Do you regret it?" he asked me once, when the moon hung over the garden like a cold coin.
I laughed then, because there is a kind of nerve in being hurt so often that you learn how to make the pain look like a joke.
"Regret is a luxury," I said. "I took what I needed."
He had no words for that. Men trained to be masters rarely learn the dialects of broken pride.
18.
But the palace does not forget unusual things. Men do not like to be mocked. Cassian Guerrero’s appetite for humiliation took a new shape: he tried to swagger above me only to find he had been branded by his own vice.
I had only wanted one thing: the faces of those who had mocked me to flatten and show me their fear. When the city learned that my name had been marked in the emperor's papers, when Layton chose me publically, whispers turned into a murmur and then into a roar.
19.
Valentina’s fall came in a crowded courtyard. She had arranged a scene that would best call me a liar: she drugged me, framed me, and sent a message to the Empress with a bottle and a story. It was the kind of petty cruelty the court takes as a given.
But the court also loves spectacle. So I turned her engine of small cruelties into a highway. I had kept a ledger of promises, names, and gifts; I had kept more secrets than a single woman should. When the Festival of Frost arrived, I summoned the household and the neighbors. I stepped into light and began to speak.
"You called me shameless," I said. "You said I had no right to any song or smile. You called me a courtesan's child. I have lived with your words on my skin for seventeen years. Today I will tell them whose hands are truly stained."
I let the crowd hang on my voice. I said each name that had crawled across my life into the present, the men who had touched me with rough hands, the briber who had given Cassian money to keep quiet, and the sister who had beaten and betrayed.
20.
Cassian Guerrero was dragged before the assembly. His face was a wine-warm red. He tried to laugh it off.
"This is a lie," he spat, standing tall, trying to make his voice a drumbeat of courage.
"Then prove it," I replied, calm as a judge. "Explain the ledger. Explain the notes. Explain the men who transferred silver into your hands and the songs you sang that were not meant for women."
He had no answer for the ledger because people had to be good at many things to be corrupt and they were rarely good at ledger-keeping.
Valentina stood with her throat tight, trying to look like the injured sister. The crowd's hunger for drama turned to open appetite. Cason — never a man of warm words — stood beside the Empress, and for once his gaze was focused and merciless.
21.
Then I gave them detail after detail. I told the story of the garden, of a hand clutching at my hair, of the song Cassian used to lure me, of how he hid payments beneath the floorboard of his house. I told how Valentina had whispered riffs of poison to the right eared uncle and how she had put a lacquer box into my hands before pushing me into a pond.
The crowd's faces shifted: whispering, then anger, then a slow, toxic satisfaction. People filmed me with their eyes: gossips, servants, even those who'd once pretended to ignore me.
"Cassian," I said slowly, "how comfortable do you feel now that your sins are aloud?"
He laughed and then faltered. "You set this up. You're a liar."
I let the room taste its fury.
22.
The punishment came in stages. For a man of his station, there were limits. Cassian Guerrero received a public sight of disgrace: not the gallows nor the slow hand of law, but a ritual unmasking.
First, in the market square, they stripped him of his title robes. His servants were dismissed before the crowd. His house was cataloged and its goods were listed aloud. The names of his lenders, the women he had debased, even the merchant who had sold him a bedspread with silk stolen from state stores—each item was read into the air like a confession.
Cassian's face went pale, then red, then hard with an expression I had never seen until it disintegrated.
"You're insane," he said. "You can't do this."
I kept my voice even. "Watch me."
23.
Then we brought him into the public hall. The magistrate—who had always been too polite to punish the rich—turned his face toward the crowd, and the crowd became a judge. They gathered around and watched as his honors were cut: his golden belt, his brocade slashed and hung up like a flag of shame. They led him to a low wooden stage where the petty thieves and seducers were made to stand.
He was forced to wear a simple hemp robe as the banner-bearers read aloud the debts he'd left and the women he'd harmed. Men in the crowd spat. Children pointed. A woman with a basket took off her apron and used it to wipe the blood from her palm where Cassian had once slapped her.
Cassian's bravado used to be an armor. On that stage it was a paper hat.
24.
He tried to plead. "I was drunk! I was given a false account!"
"Then you were drunk for life," I answered, because there was nothing to excuse the deliberate cruelty of a man who made predation a pastime.
He moved through the stages the law allowed: public disgrace, forced restitution to his victims, and the stripping of his hunting rights. The crowd watched as neighbors took what he owed. His name no longer protected him.
To see Cassian's changing expression—pride, then rage, then denial, then a feverish attempt at bargaining, finally a collapse into raw fear—was a kind of clean justice I had not dared hope for.
25.
Valentina's punishment could not mirror a man's; courts prefer theatrical punishments because sins of blood taste stronger when they are visible. For her, ruin had to be differently shaped, a slow public collapse.
On the day she thought she'd stand triumphant, I had arranged that the house's patron would speak at lunch. While she expected flattery, she got questions instead. The household gathered and I asked the patron—a man of taste—about Valentina's improprieties. The man, shocked, accused her of stealing from charities and forging the signatures of widows; small things to some, indelible proof of character to others.
Valentina's face drained. Then, because women in court have long memories and even longer tongues, I produced the lacquer box and the witness who had seen Valentina slip to the pond and whisper with the old wet-nurse. The witness was a woman who had always feared Valentina. She told what she saw and then, in front of the entire hall, spat on Valentina's hand.
"Do you feel it?" I asked. "Do you feel the faces turning?"
She left the hall trembling, the patrons muttering like bees. The governor canceled a marriage contract she had been promised. Her friends moved away even as she begged for cover.
The final humiliation: at a family gathering in the main hall — with guests, merchants, and the wives of officials — her pearl-studded robe was taken from her and used as the family's floor cloth. People stepped over her like a threshold. She shrieked and cried and clawed at the silk. Men took lanterns to point at the stain she had made upon herself.
Her reaction changed with each cruelty: first, disbelief and a sprout of arrogance; then anger and attempted bluster; then denial; then begging; finally a collapse into an animal I recognized because I had once been like her—the sound of a woman who had spent her life believing position vexed the world because she had been taught it did.
26.
Crowds circled us. "Shame!" they cried. "Shame on her!"
It was no small thing to see those who had raised their noses at me climb down. The household thrummed with a new pity for me; faces that once looked through me at parties looked at me now like people watch survivors and survivors watch each other.
I watched Valentina spin slowly from queen to jester. Her hair became disarrayed and she left the city a humiliated woman. She would carry the memory of that day longer than anything I could fashion out of silk. I had not intended for such cruelty, but the balance in a world structured by advantage cannot be rebalanced without someone falling.
27.
Cassian's final denial turned to groveling. He came to me on his knees in the market that same week, scrabbling for pardon and for anything he could salvage of a future. The crowd's faces sharpened with glee as he begged.
"Forgive me," he said. "I will repay. I will beg the prince for mercy."
I looked at him and saw a man unmade by consequences. "You chose your path," I told him. "Watch your rivals walk past you. I will not be your savior."
And all around, people clicked their tongues and recorded the fall.
28.
"Justice served" became a proverb in the city. The men who had thought their needs were rights echoed the lesson: public shame terrifies. Because I wanted revenge and because the law is a slow creature, I used the crowd as the law's accelerant.
I will not say I was gentle. I will not say I felt no pity. I had spent a lifetime being told to be less. I had spent a lifetime trying to climb and then being shoved back down. I let them fall.
29.
Afterwards, the court changed its tone toward me. Cason gave a stiff nod across the river of people. Penn returned from the provincial exams with his bonnet low and his eyes proud; he had passed and in the passages where men still whispered, he looked like a man who had been made solid by suffering.
Layton? Layton watched me with quiet patience. "You did what you had to, Isabela," he said in the garden one winter dusk. "I married you because I didn’t like how the world used you."
"You could have given me nothing but honesty and I would have taken that," I told him. "I took the rest because I was tired of being nothing."
He wrapped his scarf around my shoulders.
30.
Time does not heal everything. Some nights I still dream of blood and lacquer, of lantern light and wet silk. I dream of Penn's stolen letters, the plum hairpin he gave me, and the small secret laugh we shared under a ruined roof. I dream of the child who named me mother in a light and then left me alone.
"Do you regret the punishments?" Layton asked once, as we watched frost edge the courtyard pond.
"I have to live with the way I took power," I answered. "Regret is a luxury the powerless never have. We get to choose a night at a time to be cruel or kind."
"I like the night you choose to be kind," he said simply, and held my hand so I didn't have to answer where my kindness had gone and why.
31.
Cason Bowling watched from his carved window how Valentina's carriage left the city. His face remained unreadable, and once he came to my garden with a heavy look.
"Why did you do it, Isabela?" he asked at last, as a man who finally felt the weight of what he had allowed.
"Because I wanted to be seen," I replied. "Because no one else would make you answer."
He did not speak. He had that look of a man who'd been taught the world set him on a stage and that he would never be off.
32.
Some people called me monstrous. Others called me brave. Some called me someone the court would forget in ten years as they wore new gossip like new robes.
I kept a plum hairpin in my chest of drawers. Layton said one day in bed, "It looks like a small sword when you hold it." He made me laugh.
Penn Andreev married a far-off woman's daughter and wrote me letters full of small kindness: a poem tucked into a parcel of cloth, a single plum blossom sewn into a cuff. We both had failed beginnings. We both had quiet futures.
Cassian left the city with his head bowed. Valentina took the road to oblivion and later paid a price in poverty I'd rather not discuss. The punishments were public and they were finished.
33.
And in the end, the frost returned—the cold in October that tastes of iron. I sit now with my hands folded, and when the wind lifts the pond's surface the pattern looks like a broken coin. Once, I thought power would fill all empty things. Now I know it does not.
"Do you forgive them?" someone asked in the market, and I watched a child balancing a lantern.
"I forgive some things," I told the woman, "and forget others. But I will not forget how I smelled the palace that night—the lacquer, the fear, the cold. These things belong to me."
34.
Once, in the middle of a long winter, I went back to the ruined temple where Penn and I had hidden. I knelt and prayed with a book under my knees. I said the name of the child I had never held. I said, "May you be warm wherever you are."
Then I walked out under a sky so bright with stars it seemed stitched with silver thread. Layton walked with me in silence. He took my hand and did not try to answer the part of me that still ached.
When someone calls me by my name now—Isabela Fitzpatrick—they mean the woman who used a voice and a ledger and the truth to make men answer for their cruelties. That is not a title I'd embroidered on a gown. It is a mark engraved on years.
35.
I keep the plum hairpin where I can reach it. Some nights a wind shakes the trees in the courtyard and a single frost petal falls and rests on the hairpin. I touch it, and the cold bites like the memory of the pond. I think of the child in a white light, the one who once reached for me and called me mother for a breath.
"Will you ever be more than what they made you?" Layton asked once, after an argument I do not remember clearly.
"I am writing my own ledger now," I said.
He smiled, and for a long time we were only hands and hearth and the small, stubborn warmth that comes from making a private life in a public world.
The End
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