Revenge14 min read
How I Made My Marriage Truly Mine
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My name is Everleigh Berry, and my marriage was anything but what my name promised.
"I thought I would be happy," I said aloud once, sitting on the edge of my wedding bed with the silk folding over my knees, "but happiness is not what you ordered for me."
The palace had given me the title, the clan had given me the bridal clothes, and fate — or whatever clever hand stitched other people's plans together — had given me a husband who treated me like a scene in a play he could exit when bored.
"Everleigh," my mother said that morning, fingers trembling as she smoothed the veil, "this is what we've wished for. A prince's house, a name in the capital."
"Do you know I'm marrying Xander?" I said, meaning to answer mother with the truth, but the truth at that moment was heavier than the silk.
I had loved once before, in the way a young woman in the garrison town loves: all of my nights were full of him. I loved Griffin Webb — but I loved something else more stubbornly: the hope that a man's attention would warm the cold places inside me.
"He will keep you safe." Mother smiled.
"He will not keep me," I whispered.
The name of my husband was Nicolas Campos. He was called the Chu Prince in the capital, the sort of man people laced their stories around like beads. He had been kind in small performances — a look when courtiers watched, a small bow, gestures that were public and mean nothing close. But I believed his eyes once. I believed that when he spoke kindly, he meant it. I believed until the room spidered with secrets.
"Everleigh," Nicolas said the first night I wore the robe they had embroidered for seven years, "you have your palace now."
"You have given me everything but one thing," I answered, though my voice was small. "You have given me a name and a title. You have not given me your heart."
Nicolas tilted his chin and smiled with a small, practiced cruelty. "You have your family. That should be enough."
That moment was the first time I understood why some people pray to statues of saints: to think of a god given good by a human hand felt more honest than any speech from someone who called me wife and treated me like a stranger.
"He will be cold for many things," my friend Denver Flowers told me later, hands warm on mine as we sat on the garden stone. "But could you warm him?"
"I thought I could," I said. "I thought a woman could melt a stone."
I kept my hope and tended it like a sick plant. I cooked his favorite dishes with trembling fingers, pronouncing each step like a prayer.
"Try the scallion tofu," I said one night, watching the steam curl from the bowl. "I made it for you."
Nicolas put down his chopsticks without touching it. "I eat what my host puts before me," he said, "but I do not take your gifts."
The house learned to live with my ghostlike eagerness. I was there when news from the northern border came: thuds of drums, the shout of men, the praising of my father, Griffin Webb, who commanded troops at the frontier. I watched the court weigh things I could not. I watched supplies ride away with flags and promises.
Then the rumor came like a knife — whispered at dawn: Nicolas had been in danger at the northern pass and saved by my father's hand. When the emperor rewarded my father for saving the prince, the reward was to be given to me. I would be given as bride to Nicolas.
"Mother," I told her, breath bright with the naive joy of a woman certain this was destiny, "I will finally be his wife."
"You will be the Chu Prince's wife," Mother said again, all the right words lined up like ornaments, and I varnished them with my own belief.
On the day we were to be bound, the wedding music hit its notes and the whole house held its breath. I sat with the heavy headpiece I had embroidered for seven years, sweat in the hollow of my arms. When Nicolas walked into the room, my heart thudded.
He glanced at me and the expression on his face was not warmth but something like contempt. "You have had your name, Everleigh," he said too loudly. "You have had your title. This palace is yours — in everything but me."
He laughed once, and then left.
I stumbled after him, but my headpiece was too heavy. I fell hard on the courtyard stone and a hairpin pricked my forehead. Blood trickled down and the servants around me made noises about bad omens. "Blood on the new bride," someone said, hands flustered.
"Get it cleaned," another ordered, businesslike.
"Don't look!" I cried, because it hurt to be left, but he did not turn.
After that day, he left the bedchamber to the shadows. He lived in a study, rose with the dawn to ride the affairs of state, and returned only when the court required it.
I kept expecting him to come back the way other stories said he would: softened, professing secret devotion, bearing small mercy like gifts. I waited on the back steps until the tea grew cold in my hands, and I watched soldiers walk by and saw my father move like a man who swallowed the burden of his daughter.
The court is a hungry place for secrets. The emperor's woman asked me, "How are things in your house, child?"
"Fine," I lied. "We are fine."
The rumor mill is careless of people's hearts. I heard the phrase that cut like a clean blade: "No heir, no child." The word "childless" rolled under the palace rugs like tumbleweed.
When the emperor, who once smiled at my father the way men smile when they buy a favor, offered Nicolas permission to take a concubine, the world narrowed.
"What is your name?" he asked the woman set to be introduced as sidewife.
"Emmalyn Johansen," she said, voice soft, eyes unassuming. She had been sent back to the capital as if anyone's piety could weigh more than a wedding. She wore grey like a cloud and bowed as if she loved a god more than the world.
"You are a blessing for the prince," people said about Emmalyn. "She is gentle, she is clever, she is soft."
They said this and I tasted bile.
"She will not take him away from you," a courtier told me once. "Such things are arranged like chess."
"Then I will be the queen of the board," I answered, and I meant it.
Emmalyn's arrival was a kind deception. Where I had imagined ingratitude and spite, she gave me a kind face and a graceful pliancy that masked something cooperatively cruel.
"You are—" she murmured to me once in the quiet of the house shrines, "—your family is very honorable."
"Do you not prefer a life of peace?" I asked her. "Piety is a rare thing."
She smiled like a river. "Piety is a refuge. Men use it as skill."
One night I did not sleep. I waited by the window, and through the cold glass I heard a voice — Nicolas speaking softer than I had ever heard him.
"Emmalyn, at last," he breathed. "Your patience, your silence — I have carried it like a hidden blade."
"Prince," she answered, "the world is rough. Your warmth is the only truth I asked for."
They kissed. I pressed my forehead against the glass until it hurt.
I could have kept being small and patient. I could have knelt and begged the gods and pulled on the threads of fate like a woman who believed every story made her small. Instead, I learned to read the map of a man by the mud on his boots.
I found Nico laster——I mean, I found Nicolas' lies in small things. A scrap of red clay on his boot meant a place; a certain manner of mud meant a valley he visited. I put the evidence together the way a military man reads a terrain.
"There's a place eighty miles south of the capital," I told Denise — Denver Flowers — as we sat among my papers. "A valley called Windpool where the earth is red. He goes there more than once."
"To what end?" Denver asked.
"To keep soldiers." I said it slowly, feeling the heat of the truth in my throat.
"Do you have proof?" she asked.
I had the soldier manual from my grandfather's chest, pages annotated like the old man had been a careful chessmaster. I had notes on Nicolas' travels. I had the way his watch had his fingerprints on a certain map.
I told Xander Schmid — the King's brother and the man who would become my real future — what I'd pieced together. He came to the polo field in a surprise that felt like a warming sun.
"Are you sure?" Xander asked, sitting on his horse with a mallet in hand. "This is treason if true."
"I'm sure," I replied. "I have the mud pattern, the payments, a witness who saw soldiers unloading supplies."
We set a trap — not out of malice, but because the court needs pattern as proof. People who plan to take a man's throne often leave no paper trail. But they do leave men, and men gossip.
Someone found horse dung near a village in the south. Someone else saw soldiers who wore the northern banner but were not paid by the crown. Xander had reach. He moved quietly.
When the palace guard rode out to the valley, they found horses, weapons, an officer with a ledger listing names. Nicolas's men scattered like startled birds, but soldiers betray one another with words when they fear for their hides.
The scandal erupted. The court whispered my name as if it were a hot coal.
"You exposed him," someone hissed to me in the market, eyes dark with either admiration or envy.
"I did," I said. "He used my name as a bargaining chip."
Nicolas's face when the news came to the palace was colorless.
"How could she?" he snarled when he saw me in the great hall that day. "She was my bride!"
"You were my bed and not my husband," I answered. "You took my home and not my heart."
The public punishment came after the court had gathered facts. It was not a private inquiry or a rumor stifled — it was a show the emperor decided to make in order to stabilize the court. He asked for an open arraignment in the central square with many eyes attending.
When the day came, the square thrummed with a crowd: nobles in silk, merchants with coins clicking, soldiers in polished mail, common folk leaning from bamboo scaffolds. The air smelled of dust and tea. The sun struck the copper of the palace gates until it flickered like a blade.
"Bring him," commanded Griffith Green — the emperor — in a voice that did not cut but mapped boundaries instead. "Let the people see the consequences of treachery."
Nicolas came forward, his usual cold face stripped away like a cloak. He stood small under the sun, hands bound with rough chord, an officer at his elbow. He had lost the quiet poise that once charmed salons and war rooms. The contingent of officers who followed him wore expressions that had once matched his and now only matched a type of survival.
I stood at the perimeter, where a small platform had been made for me. The crowd pressed in like a tide, murmuring at first, then louder as if they were catching up with a suspenseful chord.
"Why are you doing this?" Nicolas asked once, voice thin with shock. "This is a public shame."
"Why did you do it?" I asked back, and for a second the whole square listened to the two of us in a silence like a held breath. "You married me, you used my name, you gambled my father's honor. Why?"
Nicolas's face unknotted — not into shame at first, but into a fury that had the thinness of a man who felt his plot's geography disintegrating. "You think you are clean?" he barked. "You think I meant you ill? I planned this for the good of the state. I have men, I have strength."
"You planned my father's humiliation," I said. "You planned to use my heart as bait to get soldiers. You used me."
He laughed, high and brittle. "You were foolish enough to fall. I used what could be used."
The crowd began to react then: a ripple of contempt moved through the merchants and the guards. Eyes shifted. Hands pointed. Women covered children's eyes, not because they flinched from the sight but because they refused their mouths to shout what was in them.
"This is treason and betrayal," Griffith Green pronounced. His voice was even but a weight to match the gravity of the situation. "A prince who organizes private levies under the pretense of state business will answer."
Nicolas seemed for a moment to defy the sentence with a half-smile. "I am a prince," he declared. "You will not disgrace me!"
"Disgrace is what you hand to yourself," Griffith answered. "Take him to the public stand."
They brought a low wooden platform and set Nicolas upon it. A trumpeter sounded. The crowd pressed closer. I moved down into the center like a woman stepping toward a flame she had kept under her thumb for months.
"Listen," the emperor said to the crowd. "Let it be known that none shall raise soldiers without the emperor's sanction."
They unfastened the next stage of the punishment. It was not whipping for the sake of cruelty; it was a humiliation tailored to the audience of courtiers and common folk. Nicolas's insignia were taken from him. The silk that embroidered his cloak was stripped and thrown to the side like autumn leaves. His attendants were dispersed.
"Let him be recorded as one who broke the trust of the throne," the emperor declared.
Nicolas's expression cracked. At first he was the haughty prince, then a man blinking in sunlight unfit for his skin. He sought to speak — to deny, to charm, to bargain — and the crowd turned like a tide, not to listen this time but to watch the fall.
"Is it true?" a woman shouted. "You took men into the hills to make a private army?"
"Yes," stablemen answered. "We were paid by the prince's ledgers."
"Then the prince begs forgiveness," another cried, trying to broker speech into mercy. "He is youth and hot-headed."
The expressions at first were of curiosity, then of slow unwrapping pity as people tasted the luxurious cruelty of ruin. Nicolas's color had fled. He tried once to step down the platform and appeal to those gathered by offering coins and titles, but officers seized him like a man trying to steal his own shadow.
"Remember," the emperor said, "the crown must be above personal schemes."
They led Nicolas bound through the square. People who had once bowed low now spat in the dust that his feet would touch. An old woman threw a bowl in front of him so his horse could step upon broken pottery. Children jeered and beat on drums. The nobles turned their backs, not daring to be seen in his grace.
Nicolas's face passed through stages: pride, confusion, strained defiance — "I did this for power" he called — then denial, "I never meant to harm," then a raw, human collapse.
His voice thinned into a plea I had waited years to hear but no longer wanted to receive. He fell to his knees before the emperor, head bowed.
"Forgive me," he gasped. "Please."
"Forgiveness is not a cloak," Griffith Green replied. "You will live as a man stripped of title. Your lands are to be confiscated and your name publicized."
"But—" Nicolas tried.
The crowd began to chant, at first a middle-toned crackle, then a harsher rhythm. "No more treason!" they cried. "No more hidden armies!"
Nicolas looked up at me then, and for a flash, the awful realness of human fear softened his eyes.
"Everleigh," he said, voice a thin thread. "I—"
"Stop," I said.
"You will not beg for me," I told him to the crowd. "Do you hear them? They see the truth. I will not take back what you took."
The crowd's reaction became part of the punishment: people shouted, some laughed, some cried, some spat. A merchant snapped a small purse at Nicolas' feet. A child pointed a stick and mimicked the prince's arrogance. The humiliation crawled into the squares and the lanes like ivy.
Nicolas stood again, but this time he left not with swagger but with a hollow face, the proud fabrics gone, attendants melted away. His reaction followed a pattern: at first a stiff jaw, then a flush of fury (a man who had always been able to buy his way), then a string of denials, then the first break. He tried to grin and failed. The crowd watched his shoulders curve like someone folding paper.
Later, when soldiers took him away to be reassigned to a distant border under watch, some said he had been saved from worse. I watched his back go away and felt nothing but the cold satisfaction of the truth told. The punishment was public, relentless, and exact. He had been made small in the way only the world can make those who are used to standing tall.
Emmalyn's fate was different, for she had used softness as a weapon. She had been rewarded publicly for piety, then hidden the blade. When the evidence of her involvement came — letters, payments slipped in night — she was not dragged into the square for floggings or public shaming. Her punishment was social but no less cruel.
They made a display of removing her honors. She was asked to step into a hall full of women who had once bowed and call herself by a new name: once a lady, now only a woman who had taken advantage of trust. The courtiers turned their backs. Her attendants left. She stood there like a small bird that had expected being fed and found the feeder empty.
The range of punishments was visible all at once — a fall from status, the severing of networks. People who had been allied with her slipped away, afraid to be seen with someone whose warm face had become a hint of treachery. Her posture collapsed from grace into the animal-level instinct to hide. She tried to plead once in the inner hall, "I wanted a life of peace," but the women around her answered coldly, "Peace built on lies is not peace."
"Your reverence was a costume," I told her quietly once in the hall. "Piety is not a stage you can step on, Emmalyn. It shows its true face."
Her reaction moved slow: at first shock, "No," then anger, "You can't do this," then scrambling, "I didn't—" and finally collapse, a wet breath and a shaking hands. A maid held her sleeve; the girl who had once smiled with her left looked away. The crowd of women made small noises of satisfaction; they had felt the sting of being used, and here was one of their own lessoned.
This entire public unmaking was not just for me. It was for every family that had been preyed upon by charm. In the square and the hall they learned that a title was no longer a free pass.
When the dust settled, I did not cheer. Punishment does not bring back what was taken; it only rebalances the measure.
After the spectacle, things changed. My father sat more tall at the table, walking through rooms as a man whose enemy was visible. The emperor looked at me with a different kind of regard.
"You did a clever thing," Griffith Green said later in the palace, handing me a cup of tea like an equal, "and yet you did not break into vindictiveness. That is rare."
"I wanted justice, not revenge," I told him, though my heart had stung with both.
The court whispered: the woman who had been married then publicly separated from her prince had done it by exposing a plot.
People have a hunger for transformation stories. They like to see the small become large, the meek become mighty. I had found my way from helplessness to work: I set fires in the markets and ignited trade routes, turning my shame into a net of businesses.
"Open the shops," I told Denver Flowers. "We will sell silk, tea, and the oddities of the frontier. I will not bend for him again."
Xander — the man who had watched me with a soft, steady light — stayed near. When he first spoke to me, it was like a hand extended in a world that had learned what weight was.
"Everleigh," he had said under the moon at the polo field where we both had gambled on a game, "you understand the world's balance. Will you let me be on your side?"
His words moved like warm breath across the cold of my scars.
He was not a man of easy passions; his tenderness was a practice. He noticed small things: that I liked a certain kind of tea, that I tightened my hand when I was angry, that I would step to the side when the world buzzed too loud.
"Will you ride with me?" he asked one day, handing me a mallet for the game where we pounded a ball across the field.
I laughed. "If I miss, you must buy the tea."
He bowed. "Deal."
He was the man who would later become my husband. Our courtship was not a sudden storm but a slow day where warmth snuck in.
He did not use fury or drama. He sat beside me at auctions where my tea house put up rare items: a gold-wood box, the first silk from a distant coast, a small blade that had been my first successful sale. He brought me gifts with the modesty of someone who wanted to be useful rather than in command.
"Why help me?" I asked him before we were a pair.
"Because you know how to build," he replied, "and I want to stand next to someone who knows how to make things last."
He married me later, after time had smoothed out the sharp edges of court. When Xander stood at the threshold on our wedding day, his face kind in a way Nicolas had never been, something inside me loosened.
"Are you afraid?" he whispered before we came before the guests.
"A little," I admitted. "I was married before, and I know what it is to be used."
"Then I'll not use you," he said, steady. "I'll keep you."
We married in spring, with tea-scent and with the people who had watched my life tilt. The day was gentle: no heavy headpiece, no harsh vows. He held my hand and told me he liked the way I plucked low notes from the qin when I was thinking. He made jokes and lost no parade, but it was enough that he was always present.
"He is not a prince who plays with hearts," my father told me once, nodding across the table. "He keeps true."
I had my tea house where I sold rare goods and held auctions for objects that had once been tokens in the market. I had the soldier manuscript to remind me of what it meant to fight and to command. I had the mallet from our polo game, a silly polished stick that reminded me of the day I decided to stop letting men give me a life.
People changed their minds about me once I had money and taste. They bowed, they praised, and sometimes they envied.
I looked at the crushed remains of the life with Nicolas like a tapestry I'd pulled down: it was no longer the thing that defined me. I would not be woman who spent nights waiting for a call that never came.
"Xander," I told him one night as we sat with our son sleeping at our feet, "we have done wrong and then done right. I have been a foolish woman who loved too much. I will not be foolish again."
He put his hand on mine and squeezed. "We will be clever together," he said, "and kind."
There is a small jade carving I kept — a carving of a small warrior my father had given me when I became a lady. I keep it on the shelf over the samovar in the tea house. Whenever I touch it, I think of the day I banged my mallet in the field and struck the ball into the sun. I think of the military book my grandfather wrote and the silk I sold for a living. I think of the gold Buddha we had polished and the way Emmalyn's mask finally came away.
I have my life now, threaded and stitched by my own hands. I have a husband who treats me as an equal, a son who sleeps with his thumb in his mouth, and a business that sits between the capital and the frontier like a small fortified house.
I stood in the market last spring, fingers wrapped around the handle of a tea chest, and saw a woman point at a broadsheet where Nicolas's name was printed in small letters as a man sent to a distant post, his honors reduced.
"Look," she said to the child in her arms. "Even big men fall."
I nodded to the child and let the wind dance the paper to the stone.
"My marriage is finally mine," I said, quiet as a bell. "Because I made it so."
The End
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