Revenge13 min read
I Came Back to a Double — Pears, Poison, and a Dried Flower
ButterPicks14 views
I had imagined the reunion a thousand different ways. In every one of them, Ace Simmons would meet me with the same fevered eyes, the same breathless promise he had made when he thought I might die at the edge of a battlefield. "One life, one pair," he’d said — the vow tasted like a warm thing I could hold. I thought he had kept it.
"You came back," his voice had said as if those two words were all the world. He had held me as if I were the reed of his breath and thought the wound to my ribs could be smoothed by wish and embrace.
But I came back to a courtyard that smelled of pear wine and a face that mirrored mine.
"Who is she?" I asked the first time I saw Kayleigh Cruz standing in my hall, palms pressed, head bowed like a willow. Her hair was different, behavior softer; she carried weakness like a shawl. She looked like me and unlike me at once.
Ace looked like he had been pulled tight then let go. He said, "Annalyse, you must not... she is sick. She is fragile. Let her be."
"Fragile enough to steal my place?" I asked.
"She's only been given refuge," he said. "She is poor, orphaned—" He found excuses like a man fumbling buttons.
Ingrid, my maid, spat low, "She wears your shadow and takes your light, my lady. She parades it as luck."
"Luck?" Kayleigh's voice was small. "Your Majesty has been kind. To be like the queen is my fortune."
"Fortune," I echoed, and the word tasted thin in my mouth. "Is being like me a favor? Or a theft?"
Ace's skin had warm memory in it — the same tilt of patience, an old shy smile when I teased him. He had been a bookish boy once, a youth who blushed when I scolded him for carrying his quill like a knight's sword. I had loved him for that trembling honesty. I had run into war and bled for that boy's life.
"Three years," I said one night, as he tried to rewrap my bandages, his fingers gentle. "Three years I lay with my breath wrenched out. Did you leave my bed to tend another?"
"What you ask is cruel," Ace said. He swallowed. "You were dead to me once. I mourned you. I have been faithful to your memory."
"You hung a mirror in my place," I said. "You painted my face into another. If that is faith, I do not want it."
He looked... broken in a way I'd only seen once before when the horse had fallen. "Annalyse," he whispered, and he tried to pull me in as he had before. I let him, for a moment. There are comforts that are muscle deep.
Later, Kayleigh fainted in the yard. She woke to find herself accused of cowardice and of worse things. People whispered that she used my face as a stage prop and my name as a ladder. I watched as she pressed her palms to the packed earth, weeping until her sleeves were dark.
"Your Majesty," she begged once, "I never meant—"
"Be quiet," I said, though my voice did not hold the steel it perhaps should have. "Pray be quiet and take your leave."
Ace promised she would be sent away. He promised and promised as men promise in the shade when they hope for soft outcomes. He walked up and down my hall like someone pacing the edge of a cliff.
"You speak of 'sending her away' as if she were a basket," I told him. "She was here in my absence. You kept her here."
"She is needy," he said. "You are noble. She cannot take you."
"Don't use 'need' to justify theft," I answered.
When Kayleigh slumped in the night and a rope was found about her neck, they cried foul in my courtyard. I had not touched her; I had only watched. But everyone knows the easiest story to believe is the one that keeps people asleep. The court rose against her. Some said she had attempted to hang herself to keep from disgrace; others said she had done it to shame me.
Ace held her — that old, uneven tenderness — and I saw his face as foreign. There was a hardness to his jaw I did not like. He barked at the physicians, "Bring the healers! See to her!"
Later he told me, "She will be sent away when she is well."
"Or when you are done with your pity," I said.
"Annalyse—"
"I will not be undone by a mirror," I said. "Not again."
*
Not all storms are made of thunder. Some are made of horses and wind.
On the day when the northern envoys came — when Luca Alvarado rode like a spear into our world — I sneaked out with Ingrid because the walls felt too small. I wanted to ride my old horse, Swiftwind, even though I had not been brave enough to ride for months.
"Miss, the capital air will peel your patience," Ingrid teased. "Ride? You look as if cords tie your feet."
"I want to see if I still know the wind," I said.
We rode out where the grass bowed like waves. Luca appeared like someone from the edges of a map — tall, with eyes like sun-in-hay, amused at my temper and delighted at my stubbornness. He had been a boy I'd once humiliated on a battlefield by stealing his banner and waving it like an insult. Now he smirked and called me a woman with war in her throat.
"Annalyse," he said, "challenge me to a race? If I win, you promise me one boast."
"You lost then," I snapped, galloping my horse forward.
We laughed. He pushed a hairpin into my hair with the insolence of foreign kindness. "Don't cry," he said once when he saw me blink away tears. "Take the pity you deserve."
He became a presence I did not notice gathering around me like a season. He stayed. He watched me from the stands when Ace convened a match. He rode beside me when the world felt sharp. Once he reached out quietly and took a bloody cloth from my cheek. His thumb brushed the split and did not flinch.
"You could have been killed," he said later, as we rode past cedars. He was laughable in his easy courage. "Do not make a habit of dying."
"You were always a fool," I said.
"I am your kind of fool if you'll have me," he answered, and his laugh cut like rain. At night he would claim he meant nothing and then give me a dried flower from home that smelled like frost. I kept one, brittle as a promise. It is this flower — a dried, frayed piece of the north — that I think of when I decide what to do with a life that keeps pulling me two directions.
*
Then the assassination attempt happened. Blades, knives, the sharp shout of horses, the rearing of a mare.
"To arms!" someone screamed.
My horse bolted. The air smelled of powder and panic. Kayleigh’s mare spooked as well and, in a breath, a hoof came down that could have broken my back. I saw the world tilt into a clean, thin line when her mare's foreleg struck.
"Annalyse!" Ace shouted.
He leapt, grabbing Kayleigh off her mount with a tenderness he had once given me, his arms a cradle. "Hold," he said to her with such urgency that for a moment I thought the world could be mended.
I did not think like that. I thought: why did he protect her before me? The question was a stone that sank through my ribs.
My horse went wild. I gripped the pommel. The saddle slipped. Swiftwind stumbled, panting. We flew toward a cliff. Luca's voice thundered behind me.
"Jump!" he yelled, but my foot was caught. Panic struck so sharp I could not breathe. Luca hurled his sword. I pressed it between my palms like a promise; I struck the horse's neck where necessity asked. The blood painted my cheek.
I had killed my own horse to save myself. I have always loved animals like kin. The act was sacrilege and survival braided into one.
Luca came to me after. He pressed a handkerchief to my face and said, "You are stubborn. That is why you survived. You did not think of yourself as a thing that should be spared."
"You think I'm foolish. Good. Keep thinking," I said, wiping the blood awkwardly with his hand.
Ace's face looked torn as if the whole of him had been reshaped by the sight of me covered in horse blood. He wanted to touch me, to ask forgiveness, to beg, to hold. I pulled away.
"You always know how to make me wrong," I told him.
He stared. "Annalyse—"
"Stop," I said. "You asked me to forgive when you made room for another. You cannot have both pity and my heart."
He looked as if he'd swallowed knives.
*
The evidence at the stables appeared like a sudden thunderclap.
"Look here," a groom announced, his voice bouncing off wooden rafters. He held up half an earring, tarnished. A child in the courtyard gasped. "We found this by the stall where Swiftwind slept. Ma'am Kayleigh's maid was seen near there."
"Where?" Ace demanded, face gray.
They brought Kayleigh out, her wrists bound, the dirt still clinging to the hem of her gown. Her hair hung like a curtain. The yard filled with faces, servants, men-at-arms, courtiers who had been at the match, women who had been gossiping by the pavilion, children who had been laughing. Everyone turned their compass to the smell of drama.
"She has been plotting," a steward announced in a voice that loved the sound of accusation. "We found her earring. We found her whisperings. Who else would seek to harm the queen?"
I had the sword already at my hip, a reflex from the old years. In the hush that slid over the yard, I stepped forward. "Bring her here," I said. My voice did not tremble.
They made her kneel in the dust. Ace watched, furious and afraid. Kayleigh lifted her face. Her eyes were the exact same brown as mine, but softer with someone else's sorrow.
"You did this?" I asked—short, blunt.
She flinched. "No—no, Majesty, it is not true—"
"Then why is the earring of your maid found at my horse's stall? Why was a rope found in your chamber? Why do men say you feigned your own death?"
"I would never lay a hand to the queen," she said. "I loved him—"
"Loved him." The word fell like a blade.
Ace, who had been watching everything as if from the furniture of a dream, finally moved. He stepped in front of her, as if shielding a page of his own writing. "She is innocent," he said.
"Innocent?" murmurs ran like wind. "Innocent of what? Treachery?" Someone near the gates began to hiss. "You are the Queen, Annalyse. You should be merciful."
I looked at the crowd: faces turned up like leaves to me, eager to leap at any sign of blood. I looked at Kayleigh: she trembled and kept repeating, "I did not—" Ace's hand was still protecting her, yet his mouth looked ashamed.
Then I pulled the sword from my hip and, without ceremony, I cut a length from my own robe and tossed it on the floor—on Kayleigh's knees. "This tear," I said, "was made not by me." My voice was small but clean. "Name the last person to tie knots in your hair."
She saw my face, saw the steadiness there, and she cracked like ice. "It was Master Haw, from the groom's house. He... he was paid."
"Paid?" someone whispered. "By whom?"
Kayleigh's eyes slid away. She began to babble. "I was told to make it seem like the queen's stable had been entered. I was told that if I played the weak wretch, I might be spared..." Her voice dropped to a thin thread. "They said they'd help me. They offered me a way out. I was afraid."
The yard held its breath. Men at arms shuffled their feet. A courtier laughed scornfully. "You used your resemblance for profit," he said. "You played on the emperor's pity."
It was a tidy accusation, a quick love for ruin. Kayleigh’s face whittled. She began to plead, then to sob, then to harden like a thing that had worn too many faces. She looked to Ace as if to be saved, then at me as if to drag me down by the knees.
"She staged it," Ace said at last, his voice hollow. "She thought to make herself necessary."
"You thought to play at death," I said. "And you thought the court would pity you rather than punish you."
The steward demanded sentence. Voices rose and fell. Someone called for the rack. Someone else pleaded for mercy.
Then I did something I had not planned. I walked to the center of that ring of eyes and spoke as queen and as woman who had been betrayed.
"Let there be a trial before the gates," I said. "Let the city decide."
A murmur. We dragged her into the courtyard where a hundred people could gaze. There was no law that matched the spectacle they craved. They wanted blood. They wanted theater.
The punishment I asked for was not the wheel nor the public lash; what I demanded was a truth exposed under sunlight. I wanted the court to see the faces of those who had used Kayleigh. I wanted the men who hatched the plot — the merchants, the courtiers who trafficked favors — to stand in the middle and be named.
"Bring Master Haw," I ordered. "Bring his employers. Let all who conspired be named in the open."
The court gathered like birds. Ace stood rigid and pale. Kayleigh's maid whimpered. Men were summoned. A silk merchant with a fat nose was brought forth by two guards. He fumbled his papers. The groom Haw was dragged into the ring, sweat slick on his forehead.
"Did you do this?" I asked Haw. The yard seemed to lean forward.
He swallowed. "Her ladyship hired me to leave a token — an earring. She said to make it look like a crime and the palace would decide her fate for the better. She promised me coin."
"Whose idea?" I pressed. He pointed, trembling, not at Kayleigh but at a man who had been whispering in the shadow: a council clerk who had benefited from Kayleigh’s worship in the past.
"That man," Haw stuttered, pointing.
The clerk's eyes widened. "I only thought—" he protested, voice slipping into panic. "It was a trick to force the Emperor's hand. I did not mean—"
"But you did," someone in the crowd said, and a wave of noise began.
I listened to them accuse each other until the truth unspooled: merchants who wanted influence, a low clerk grasping for advantage, a maid coerced by coin. Kayleigh had been a tool for others; she had also been desperate enough to play along.
"You used the pity of men to make yourself important," I told her.
She crumpled then. Her voice folded into its last whisper. "I only wanted to live."
At that moment, the crowd shifted from hungry to ravenous. The men who had conspired were dragged into the open. They turned from men who hatched plots into men whose wives and children were in the same market square. Faces I had smiled at before shrank under the consideration of their neighbors. Children stamped their feet. A woman flung her shawl to the ground and spat.
"Shame!" the crowd called. Some produced knives; more produced words. The merchants who had thought themselves untouchable were pressed into the center and forced to listen as hawkers cried out their crimes. The clerk was shamed with his ledger. The groom Haw cried and then, with a face like rain, fell to his knees in front of Kayleigh and begged.
"Forgive me," he said. "I was hungry."
"You will pay for your hunger," I answered. "You will give what gold you have to those you harmed. You will stand, publicly, at the gate, and confess your crime every dawn for thirty days. Let this be known."
The crowd cheered—not for violence but for spectacle. They wanted someone made small.
Kayleigh's face had about it every stage of collapse: at first a cunning triumph, then panic, then shame, then a long slow silence. She had been the bait; now the net was cast and snapped. She tried to bargain, to point fingers, to make me into the monster. She begged Ace to spare her. He folded his hands and could not speak.
In the end, the punishment was threefold: the chief conspirator, the silk merchant, lost his license and his stalls; Haw, the groom, was fined and set to public labor; Kayleigh was dragged before the magistrate and sent to the dungeons to await imperial judgment. The crowd wanted blood and did not get it, but the humiliation of being named and displayed satisfied them.
Kayleigh begged and raged and then quietly began to wait. The change in her eyes was a small collapse: where there had been cunning there was now a blankness as if someone had blown out the candles in her head. She went from defiance to pleading to hollow acceptance. The crowd who had been keen to see me humiliated now watched those who had fostered the plot undone — a short justice made of scandal rather than iron.
Ace looked at me then with an expression I cannot fully name. Regret sat like an old coat on him.
"Was this what you wanted?" he asked softly.
"Partly," I said. "But not all. I wanted truth before theater."
He took a step back and left, his face pale as if he had aged a full decade in an afternoon. The crowd dispersed, feeding the rumor mills, but I knew a thing had been shifted. The men who used pity as leverage were exposed. Kayleigh's fall had shown them as small and mean.
*
Weeks passed. Kayleigh grew sallow in the dungeon. The insult had been done in public; the private retribution came in a damp cell. She thrashed in fever some nights and coughed blood. Once she whispered to me while I visited, "He told me—he said he never loved you. He said I was a replacement."
"Who?" I asked.
"Your Emperor," she said. "Ace said he only took me because he could not touch what he loved. He said he only keeps the memory of you as an heirloom."
Her lips moved like someone tasting a bitter seed. Then a tremor ran through her. She clenched her hands as if feeling for a necklace that was not there. "I would make myself loved," she said. "I would be needed."
"That is not love," I said. "That is hunger dressed as warmth."
She croaked a laugh and then—strange mercy—fell silent.
A week later, Kayleigh died in that cell. They said an old poison, a ceremonial gu, had turned on its holder. She had been part of people who trafficked in old, wicked arts; the bite turned inward. It was not public theater; it was small and private and miserable. I felt no joy at the news, only a hollow that had nothing to do with triumph.
*
In the months that followed, Ace tried to make sanctuary of what remained of us. He brought me servants and titles and promises. He sat outside my door and waited for me to open it, the same way he had for nights before — a man afraid to make himself rude but unable to be graceful.
"Luca offered a different thing," I told him once in the dim. "He offered me a life where the sky is wide and the walls are low."
"You would leave?" Ace asked.
"I would not run," I said. "I would choose."
Ace's face crumpled. "I have been a bad man."
"You're a man," I corrected. "Not everything you do is your heart."
His hands trembled. He wanted forgiveness. He also wanted a life. I could not give both on demand.
In the end, I accepted Luca's bet.
"You will let me take you home?" he asked one evening, the dried northern flower between his fingers like a talisman. "Three years. Stay as my nominal wife. Live among my people. If at the end of it you are not changed, I will let you go."
"You ask me to be a bird that might not come back," I said.
"I ask you to fly," he corrected.
Ace came to me that night like a man admitting a penance. He offered freedom by another name. "If this is what you want," he said, "I will not stop you."
"Do not make your kindness a chain," I said. "I do not want a hand that will be counted later as a wound."
He looked like someone who had finally seen dawn after long night. "I loved you," he said simply, the weight of those words falling like wet cloth.
"I was a soldier who loved a book," I said. "That we both mistook each other does not make our years untrue. But I cannot be the same woman who gave a whole life because she had not yet learned to put herself first."
So I left. I left the palace with a handful of belongings and the dried flower Luca had given me. My father, Deacon Lebedev, raged and then, seeing me steady, promised to meet me in a different world.
I married Luca — a name that fit the sound of wind and horses. We crossed plains and slept beneath stars. The flower I kept in a small carved box. Sometimes, when the stars were frost and sharp, I took it out and thought of Ace Simmons, who had once promised me everything and instead had given me a truth I had to claim.
Luca watched me put the dried flower back and teased, "You keep broken things."
"They are not broken," I said. "They remember where they came from."
At night, he would say, "I will make you laugh until your chest hurts." He tried and sometimes he succeeded.
When I think of that courtyard — the pear wine, the rope, the crowd, the horse's blood on my face — I think of how public humiliation changes a person. Ace looked like a man remade by pity and mistake; Kayleigh like someone worn thin by choices she hadn't the courage to refuse; I like someone who had to choose again.
I keep the dried flower in a small box on the shelf by my bed. When the wind is gentle and the moon is high, I pull it out and breathe the memory. It smells faintly of frost and days I have survived.
"Do you miss him?" Luca asked me once, with the careful curiosity of someone who does not take love by theft.
"Sometimes," I said. "But what I miss is the possibility. Possibilities can belong to more than one future."
He nodded. "Then we will grow new ones."
The palace fades like a picture you don't want to burn. It is sometimes there in dreams — Ace's pale face, the clink of court dishes, the tumbling of a scandal. I do not go back. I hold my head. I have learned to be my own shelter.
And the dried flower? It is my small, stubborn proof that things once loved can be boxed and carried and not be the whole of you. I keep it because I like the weight of a promise, whether it was kept or broken. It tells me I can leave and still hold what once was without letting it become who I am.
The End
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