Revenge18 min read
I Came Back to Burn Them All (and Smile While I Do)
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I died once with a white strip of silk around my neck and a crowd of liars laughing just outside the cold palace window.
I died, and in that exact quiet moment before the world slipped away, I promised myself two things: I would not go silent, and I would come back.
When I opened my eyes again it was more foolish than a miracle and sharper than any vow—I was three years in the past. I lay in my own bed, under a familiar curtain, fingers still smelling faintly of the iron from a battlefield that hadn’t happened yet. The morning sun painted the same courtyard I’d burned in memory, and the old ache of revenge tasted like copper on my tongue.
They call me Emiliana Richards. I have my family, I have a name that once carried weight until it was stolen from me by traitors. I have time now—three years of it to turn their triumph into ash.
“Emi? Emi, are you alright?” a high-pitched voice asked, tugging at my sleeve. Little face, flushed with alarm. I knew those eyes; they weren’t hard enough for what I planned, but they had lived through one brutal winter with me. “Jade—Jaden—she said you were staring. You’re not sick, are you?”
“Of course not,” I told Jaden Conway, smiling like sugar on poison. “Help me with my hair, will you?”
She fussed, hands trembling with a sweetness I later learned was practiced generosity—her whole life a practiced kindness that covered her claws. I let her pretend.
If this is a story of revenge, it is also a story of training, of rehearsal and patient chess. The first months after I woke, I practiced smiling while planning ruin. I read every scrap of paper I had hidden in my rooms. I visited the stables and watched the messengers. I listened to servants swap gossip and sat at the courtyard steps learning how everyone liked their tea.
“Why are you so calm?” Cillian Michel, my brother, asked one evening. He had returned from the border, a tall serious man with a soldier’s face and my father’s stubborn jaw. He always caught me at truth.
“Because I’ve seen worse and came back,” I said and let him laugh at my sense of dark humor.
He did not laugh for long. “Your tone’s changed,” he said more softly. “Good or bad?”
“Good,” I lied, and he believed me because that’s what brothers do.
The first shock to their scheme came small. A cloth, a smile, a misplaced bowl. Jaden laughed as if she had thrown pebbles by the pond; the pebble she flung cracked more than one window.
“Emi, let me go with you to the pond,” she begged. “There’s a new pattern at the silk stall. Please?”
“Go on, then,” I said, watching her fall into the trap she loved to set. I watched her fake sprain her ankle and then I refused to steady her. She staggered, made the scene we needed: a scream, a splash. The whole dock held its breath when a woman floundered into the water. Men dove. The prince—Dexter Tarasov—stood near as if waiting on cue, lips parted with interest.
“Help my sister!” Jaden cried as if she had no hand in the music. Dexter flung himself toward the sound like a cat to a mouse. He pulled out a limp, wet girl—the scene polished and loud—and the prince wrapped his cloak around her, the silk soaking with her pretended shame.
“Such a shame,” I murmured, taking in the way the court watched every detail. “So clumsy.”
The town whispered. The rumor mills spun. That same night, a stranger’s voice spoke softly in my ear—the one the doctor Hayes Schmidt had suspected when he stared at my hands like they belonged to another person—“Be careful, Emi. There are knives hidden in gentle smiles.” I only smiled back, and the knife I had kept for myself nicked the inside of my palm like a promise.
Weeks grew into schemes. I learned acupuncture and quiet healing under Hayes Schmidt’s tutelage; I learned to make syrups and antidotes and how to watch a pulse and know when a lie was painted on the brow. Nobody asked how a general’s daughter had learned such things, and I let them not ask.
“Blue, are you better?” Cloe Lawson—my quiet, stubborn friend—would whisper when she sat beside me and held my hand between her warm palms.
“Soon,” I promised. Love is a different kind of mercy, and I owed her everything. She did not deserve the night her bowl of warm sweets turned hot through her veins.
We were not careless. We were careful in circles that should have been safe. But Jaden’s heart listened to the wrong people and liked what she heard.
“She’s laughing,” Jaden heard from the other side of the curtain, and the laugh she echoed was mine.
The poison that almost took Cloe came on a bowl of lotus leaf broth. It was subtle—sharp aftertaste, the slow dampening of color. When the bowl spilled half on the table and half on the floor, Cloe’s lips went white and then red. She clutched her belly and the world blurred around the edges.
“Hayes, help me,” I said, and he was there with steady hands. The whole house smelled of oil and fear. As Hayes turned away to fetch an instrument, I worked with the coldness of someone who had watched death and studied it.
“I’ll try something else,” I told him.
“Emiliana—don’t be reckless,” Hayes fretted, the old scholar’s fright making his hands gentle and raw. He was used to saving small wounds, not to seeing a girl with steady hands and a sharp head perform what looked like a ritual.
I did not tell him then that I had practiced needle work on chickens and on my own palm in the dead of winter. I had learned how to coax life back from the edge. I had also learned which poisons could make a woman sterile and which could fade like a bad dream. Cloe coughed up scarlet ribbons of blood and I cut her wrist, soft and precise; I drew off the blackened bile and let her blood run thin into a clay bowl, washing it until it almost looked the color of sunrise. I threaded needles, came and went, recited names under my breath like a litany.
When she finally opened her eyes, the room exhaled like a whale. Hayes’ face crumpled into a worship I did not want, like a man seeing the last surviving light of a lighthouse.
“You—” he started and then swallowed.
“Keep it to yourself,” I said, and I meant it. “Tell them she’s recovering.”
He bowed, trembling between medicine and fear. He knew, without saying, that my hands were not simple. They had been used to stitch body and wound for years I had never lived inside—this second chance let me make stitches of a different kind.
At the center of everything was a slow, glinting thing of power: the Crown of the Prince—Dexter. He smiled the way one would smile with a blade in one’s palms.
“Emiliana,” he said, bowing like syrup. “You have become...different.”
“That’s the point,” I said.
“You are charming. Perhaps you will charm your way into the palace and keep us all entertained.”
“Perish the thought. I go only where I must go.”
A month later, the palace gave its great feast. I danced with a wooden sword because my sister could not keep her music straight. I remember every face in that great hall: the emperor’s easy smile, Cillian’s steady pride, the scroll-laden ministers whispering like foxes. I remember the way Dexter’s eyes moved from me to the woman he had paid to be pretty at his side—the calm, honeyed Veronica Charles. Her smile was soft and practiced; her teeth had a way of showing while her eyes stayed calculating.
“Sing for us, Veronica,” the empress asked.
“Of course,” Veronica courtesied, all honey and poison, and then she sat and tuned a zither with the surety of someone who never missed a string. Her song was a river—beautiful on the surface and dragging everything under.
I danced and swung my wooden sword and felt the hall breathe. There was a man who watched most nights—Reed Ellis, the regent—who wore no smile and carried no warmth. He was three steps away from a cameo of death and two steps from a curiosity that tasted like powder and iron. He had guards that moved like shadows—Foster Ma’s men, fleet-footed and silent. The regent looked at me and the room seemed temporarily colder.
After the melody stopped and the evening drifted outward like smoke, the court returned to the game of teeth. The plan that Veronica and Jaden worked on—together like a cancerous matched set—thinned my patience into glass. They wanted a public humiliation—something that would make the world turn its head and brand my family traitor and me cowardly and hungry for life.
On the day of the very plot—Veronica’s test, done in the neighboring house of a minister—they counted on two things: gullibility and coincidence.
“Be brave,” I told Cloe and my men. “Watch the angles. If they try to push it, we push harder.”
They did.
They set the stage: a loaded set of men, stolen wine spiced to loosen judgment, and a cover of musk and incense. A young maid assigned to fetch water was shoved and she stumbled into a room where men had been set, the entire farce crafted to shame. The noise they wanted rose like a tide.
They did not expect what I had set behind the scenes: a different room, a different scent, two quiet guards above the rafters and a clutch of men from the regent’s retinue waiting. They did not expect me to be clever enough to swap rooms and to watch them fall into their own trap.
When the scene broke and the minister’s house blew apart with gossip, Cillian marched in like a banner of thunder.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Sir, your sister—” Veronica began with a feigned tremor.
Cillian’s silence was worse than any hammer. He looked at me, the look of a man that had watched you die—then blinked and let the whole theatre bleed back into order. He gathered men. The minister’s house had to close. Rumors burned, but we had a firewall: the regent’s shadow had moved.
I tasted victory like iron. It was small—only a nick in the plan—but sometimes a nick is all you need for the rest of a wound to fall apart.
They thought my charm would be my fall. They were wrong.
They kept striking, thinking I would bend like a reed. They had not watched me in my winter.
“You’re playing reckless, Emiliana,” Cillian told me one dawn, his voice thick with worry I did not need. “This path—if you go too far—”
“I’ve been dead before,” I said. “I cannot be afraid of death. I need to make sure no more people I love die because I stayed sweet.”
“You don’t have to be entire fire,” he said, and his fingers closed on mine like a promise I would never break.
I kept one eye on the regent and the other on Dexter. Reed Ellis had an interesting habit of sending men that watched me as if I were a puzzle he wanted solved. He sent Foster Ma’s men to ‘guard’ me. Two of them—Crew Eklund and Cody Keller—stayed by the trees and watched like twins folded into one.
“Your Grace,” Reed said one night, appearing in my courtyard like a shadow that carried the tang of wet stone. “You have changed.”
“So have you,” I told him plainly. “You no longer look like a man who laughs.”
“I’m tired of laughing,” he said. “Protect me your hands.”
I did not trust that sentence. There are favors you get from regents and there are favors you earn from friends. Reed’s favor was an instrument with a blunt edge. I accepted them as if they were a gift that had to be counted and weighed.
Meanwhile, deeper into their conspiracy, there was the day they tried to stake my family’s honor on a public spectacle. Veronica’s scheme was simple: she hoped to seed the rumor that the general—my father, Ross Martin—had betrayed the empire and sold our troops for favors. It was an elegance of dirty hands.
But every lie needs an audience, and every audience needs the truth to be hidden. I had prepared a parade of truth.
On the day of the confirmation, I stood in the middle of the hall, and I let them begin.
“Your Majesty,” Veronica intoned with the poise of a perfection-selling smile, “we have uncovered papers that—”
“Claim treachery,” Jaden added, biting into the lie like one eats an apple.
They expected the emperor to tear down my family, to read and reject us with the casual cruelty of a monarch playing a game. They did not expect Cillian. He stepped forward with a soldier’s gait and stood like a spear between the accusations and our truth. He presented the actual papers—signed, stamped, every thin inked line a piece of our defense. He had gone to the border and brought a witness and a letter and a man who had seen the troop movements. He had shown them how the arrows had never been from us.
The court murmured, the accusation sputtered. Veronica paled. Jaden’s face—so practiced in sorrow—crumpled.
“You crafted lies,” Cillian said slowly, like one naming a grave. “You used a man’s honor and a family’s name as kindling.”
“You—” Veronica tried to smile. “We only—”
“Only what?” Cillian demanded. “Tried to kill what many have fought to defend?”
Jaden swallowed. Her voice shook. “Emi—”
“Don’t,” I said.
It was the first time I heard the word ‘don’t’ land like a blade.
The court had assembled. Ministers whispered. The emperor leaned forward. For a moment, the whole city stood still. Veronica realized the net she’d woven had two sides and that she had trapped herself in the center. She tried to plead ignorance, to point fingers at men beyond her calling, but the scent of lead was already in the air.
They wanted to crown me with shame, but I had come back to turn that crown into ashes.
The trial—if we can call a public halting of a treasonous spectacle a trial—was a theater of retribution. Veronica’s hands trembled as she reached for favors and found them gone. Jaden’s practiced grief fell away and she saw me, not through reflection but through the dark lens of someone who had been outplayed. Dexter, the man who had loved a surface, watched his favorite porcelain shatter.
“What do you want?” he asked me once, voice like silk on a stone path.
“Justice,” I said. “For every life you dirtied.”
“You have it wrong,” he said, angry in a way that made him look small. “I did what I had to do for my security.”
“Security built on corpses,” I replied.
He blinked, as if he had never considered the cost of his comfort.
The punishment we demanded and received was not the cold, bureaucratic thing of prisons and paperwork. They were the sorts of things that leave marks on memory—public, immediate, and unavoidable. Veronica’s downfall began in the hall where she had spun her melodies. There are many ways to make a liar suffer. We chose to strip the stage from her.
They gathered everyone in the great court. The sun was hot and a hush had fallen like a blanket. I stood close to the emperor's throne and watched as Veronica and Jaden were brought forward, their faces pale with hope that someone would save them. Nobody did. This was the important part—they had planned for allies to shield them. The allies had been bought over before we’d finished sowing doubt.
“Veronica Charles,” the emperor said, voice heavy and exacting, “you have used music to mask poison. You have sold your talent to those who would break a household. For your crimes you shall do this.”
He paused. The minister’s hands trembled. “You will stand in the public square for three market days. On the first day, your adornments shall be stripped and you will be paraded so those you harmed can spit upon your name. On the second, you will be asked to speak your actions aloud. On the third, you will stand before the families you wronged and receive their judgment. Any further security you sought shall be forfeit. You will be a lesson.”
Her expression went from charming to horrified. She had imagined proud defenses. She had never imagined being made small in sunlight. For Veronica, image had always been armor; to disrobe it publicly was a kind of death.
“Consign them,” the emperor ordered.
Guards led Veronica forward. At first she tried to sing, but the song died under the passes of faces she had once flattered. Vendors spat and children jeered and old men gestured as if plucking a loose feather from a prized bird. She had no ally to shield her; her handmaidens looked away.
She went through the stages I had planned for all the traitors: little triumphs—pride, then fear, then the ignominy of being a spectacle—then the long, blank emptiness. Veronica’s face changed from smug delight to the numb tightness of someone watching a life fold like cheap paper.
Jaden’s punishment was different: she had been small in ambition and big in malice. For her I chose a living exposure—an untying of her finery and a slow unspooling of each lie in front of the people she’d cheated. We brought forth proof—letters she had signed, paid notes, strings of favors, the pawns she had manipulated. We brought the aging mother of a fallen soldier that Jaden had slandered as "weak" so she might be used as theater. The old woman stood between the crowd and the traitor and recited, trembling, the truth of names Jaden had tried to twist.
Jaden shifted through the stages like watching a mirror crack: surprise, indignation, shame, then pleading.
“Emi, I didn’t mean—” she began.
“You never meant it when you beat me, when you smiled as my life broke,” I answered. “You meant it now when you asked to be spared.”
There were more punishments to come—behind the spectacle of the square was the slower, colder unmaking. The emperor decreed that both Veronica and Jaden would lose their privileges. Veronica would be barred from court for a decade and stripped of all her titles; Jaden would be disowned from our family and given to service. Words like that have teeth. Teeth do damage. Sometimes leaving someone alive but stripped is more powerful than killing them.
The crowd reacted in the only honest way crowds can react: they took pleasure in the justice they had believed in, then they took a moment to flip through the papers and finally to go on with their day. Some cried because a monster in their path had been unmasked. The boys who had so often laughed now looked away; the old aunt who had always whispered curses at our door now nodded, satisfied. They took pictures with crude devices—people will keep mementos of a fall, and I let them.
Even the regent watched, dark and measuring. Reed Ellis did not smile. He did not clap. When the court cleared he came to the side of the dais like a tide. He looked at me as if I had become a book he had finally finished reading.
“You did well,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said flatly. I did not trust gratitude that sounded like a ledger entry.
“Do not be so sure this is over,” he warned. “The game has many players, not all of them are children.”
“I know,” I said. I had planned for a long winter.
The spectacle’s aftertaste was iron and sweetness. After Veronica left the hall, head bent and face wet—some from tears, some from sweat—Dexter whispered into my ear like an apologetic man: “Emi, I—”
“You used me,” I said. “You used people like tools and then smiled when they broke. There’s a price for that.”
He flushed and looked away. I felt no pleasure in his discomfort. I felt only the cold comfort that a lie’s liar had been exposed. I had more work.
There were other scandals we unravelled. The money the minister took to say we were traitors turned out to be the tip of a corroded net. Papers on the regent’s desk that suggested other men bought favors were found shredded in places they couldn’t be hidden. A senator turned his back on an old arrangement because a wife had been lied to. The rot came out limb by limb.
And still, the regent watched. Reed Ellis haunted places like an interest that would not melt. One night, under a sky raw with stars, he crossed the small gate into my garden.
“You saved that musician-girl,” he said, simple as stone. “You set her to die and then saved her with needles.”
“I didn’t want her to die,” I said. “I want people to understand what their actions mean.”
He exhaled, a sound like a man revealing facts he had no right to voice. “There is someone else,” he said. “An old acquaintance of the doctor Hayes. He asked me to make sure you were left alone.”
“Why?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Curiosity. People like to keep records.”
He would keep doing that—watching, testing. Reed was a man who would stalk the chessboard with a ruler and find where you’d missed a single line. I studied his face as if it were a map.
Time passed. I aged into my winter armor and into a skin that did not betray emotion when unnecessary. I made friends that could last through a winter of knives. Cloe recovered fully finally, though Hayes Schmidt’s glances took on a new reverence each time she laughed through the courtyard.
We survived the season of small shocks. Then Dexter Tarasov grew impatient. He had been denied a bride he thought the world owed him. He began to plot to buy loyalty. He intended to secure his throne by taking what I refused to hand him: me.
He tried to seduce, bribe, and blackmail pieces together into a net. He was arrogant enough to believe that most of us would wilt under his attention. He was a man who measured every favor in pages and thought love was something with a ledger.
His attempt to bribe my brother with false glory failed publicly when Cillian produced evidence of loyalty. My father marched in, honest and plain as a bayonet—Ross Martin, man of the field. He pulled down Dexter’s petitions with a soldier’s disdain.
When the last of the planned traps had failed, three men were left looking like ruined kings. Dexter slid into desperation: threats, the promise of wealth, the threat of ruin for neighbors who had not yet turned. Jaden turned toward petitioning for rescue, Veronica toward silence, and Dexter—Dexter curled into the smallest of men who had once pretended to be large.
I knew I had to finish the season.
The final punishment was public and savored. I had to plan it like a play. It would be at the spring festival, in the open square where all of the city had to pass. They would be exposed in more than one way: first their intentions, then their lies, then their faces as they saw the consequences.
On the first day, we paraded through the market. Veronica was led by two of my guards—Crew Eklund and Cody Keller—past stalls of roasted meat and silk. They peeled back her gilded ribbons one by one and gave them to the people who had been humiliated by her songs. Women spat into a basin and tossed the ribbons into it like scorched letters. Veronica’s expression moved from delicate outrage to a brittle, raw terror.
On the second day, Jaden was required to read aloud every letter she had forged, every name she had twisted. She stood in the same square, voice shaking until her throat cracked, and as the murmur of witnesses grew she found eyes on her—eyes that had watched her braid a net of little betrayals. She flung herself at my feet once and begged. The stage was public; begging was a new thing to her.
On the third day, I brought forward names and people that mattered: the doctor Hayes Schmidt who had almost fainted at my hands and yet trusted me afterward; Cloe Lawson, who had bled and was now whole again; the old maid Mathilde Tang who had been bribed and then shot down by the larger net and had paid with her life; the men who had come to the markets to shame my mother. The emperor presided, silent and old and precise, as we took the steps to unmask the truth.
I demanded they be stripped of courtly favor, given to service, and forced to apologize in a way that could not be undone. Veronica’s reaction went through the stages: shock, denials, false charm, final collapse. She tried to smile and was slapped by the echo of her own past. Jaden moved from denial to bargaining to despair and finally to collapse, her face wet and hollow like a washed shell.
The crowd reacted exactly as we’d hoped: at first horrified, then vindicated, then delighted at the fall of two people who had enjoyed other’s suffering. Someone in the undercurfew of a rowdy market recorded the scene with a crude lens and sold copies for a silver coin. The stories turned into a chorus. The word “scum” moved from mouths into the square with a beat.
I stood there and watched. I had wanted them destroyed, but what I wanted more was the safety of my family and the quiet life that comes after a storm. The justice we won that day did not teach them anything because people like Veronica and Jaden do not learn. They endured public punishment and then the slow chill of losing all they’d had.
After, Reed Ellis approached me as the crowd thinned and the smell of roasted meat crept through the air like a memory. He looked the way he always did—quiet, deep, neutral. “You are becoming dangerous,” he said.
“Dangerous enough to keep them from killing my family,” I answered.
“That is enough. For now.”
He left then, a silhouette held between us like a comma. I thought I had finished the play. I thought the last curtain had fallen.
But men like Dexter do not stay still. He offered small gifts: promises, a future side of his palace. He offered a false tenderness that smelled of currency. He begged people to forget. He tried to buy men back.
In the end, the worst punishment is not to be made to bear shame in the square. The worst punishment is to stand in the light and see that the people you loved have chosen to turn away. Watching Dexter, Veronica, and Jaden fail publicly was not enough. I wanted to leave them to their guilt and to the fragments of a life they had broken.
After the dust, the emperor spoke quietly to the court and to my family. He commended Cillian and Ross for their service and ordered more guard rotation for our household. He pulled Reed Ellis aside and—quietly—reminded him of alliances. The regent nodded. I saw through the pleasant ceremonies a different network of power. I had not overthrown it. I had only shown that I could fight its edges.
The rest is small repair work. I removed the men who were truly dangerous from around us with a careful hand: the bribed ones stripped, the merchants who had lied forced to give their ledgers up. Cloe was safe. Hayes kept his head and his dignity and stayed as my quiet friend. Reed’s men continued to stand in the trees like patient, watchful things.
And as for the dream I had when I died—of the white silk and the cold palace—I returned to the places I loved: the field where my mother had once laughed, a quiet place of stone where I knelt and the earth felt like truth.
“Emiliana,” Cillian said one evening as dusk crept over the walls, “you did it. You saved us.”
“I saved myself,” I corrected. “I saved what I could.”
He wrapped his cloak around my shoulders and I let him. There is no grand ladder to climb after a long war with a whole city. There is only the careful step of tending what remains.
The regent kept to his post and his shadowed watch. Dexter kept his schemes and his loneliness. Veronica was unmasked and kept away from music halls. Jaden boarded out to cottage work with a hand in service as her only reward.
There were softer things amidst the bite of justice. Cloe embroidered again—small, bright birds that would not fly away. Hayes brought me new sheaths for my old tools and taught me more about the thin line between a potion and a prayer. Reed sometimes watched like a lighthouse. He did not become my friend that day; he became something like an ally who checks his favors against a ledger of his own.
And sometimes, in the privacy of my own courtyard, I would laugh until I had to steady myself. I would remember the cold palace and all the quiet days and whisper, “You thought you could make me die. You forgot I was stubborn.”
On the last night of the public punishments, I stood near the market stone where Veronica had walked, and I placed a single white strip of silk into the hands of a child who had been among the crowd.
“Keep it,” I told her. “For luck. For memory.”
She ran off with it tucked into her sleeve like a talisman, and the city turned its face back to its banks and to its lives. Justice, false or true, is as messy as a market. We swept the worst of the wreckage away and planted seeds where corpses had been.
When I finally let myself be alone, I sat by the window and wrote down everything that had happened—from the night I died to the sound of Reed’s mild laughter. The pen scratched like a memory, and when I looked up I saw the garden in the soft moonlight. I felt light and heavy at once.
The world was imperfect, but it was mine again.
I had come back to burn them all. I kept my promise. I did not let anger empty me. I used it like a blade that could carve out what was rotten and leave behind a body that could still stand and breathe.
And in a small, private moment, when dawn was pink and the guards were still sleepy, a letter arrived from an unexpected friend—someone who had watched the whole scheme and was amused by how choices had been made.
“A life lived quietly is a life that can be wounded without anyone learning,” Reed Ellis wrote, in a thin hand. “Do not let them teach you to be soft again. They will not learn. But somehow, you made them look.”
I folded the letter, put it in my pocket, and went to the garden to watch one of Cloe’s birds, stitched on a cloth, lift into the wind.
It beats there like a promise: I would keep my house, my family, my friends. I would not surrender who I was to the men who believed they had the world on a tether. And on the rare days when I felt cold, I would remember the white silk that almost killed me and laugh—not with madness, but with an appetite for living.
I was alive, armed with knowledge and cunning; some nights that felt riskier than any battlefield. But the last laugh belongs to the woman who is not afraid of the dark.
The End
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