Revenge12 min read
I Fell Twice, But This Time I Choose Who Lives and Who Dies
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I woke to the sound of steel and the smell of blood. The wall below me was a painting of chaos: soldiers like shadows, the ground a map of bodies, and smoke blotting the sky. My hair was the same color it had always been — the color of winter wheat — but my heart felt hollow and ancient.
“I remember everything,” I said to no one, pressing my palm to the carved lintel. “I remember the poison. I remember the paper in his sleeve. I remember jumping and swearing to bury the world with my hatred.”
A girl in the courtyard, the one who had always bound my hair when I was small, stopped sweeping and tilted her head. “Ebba, you’re muttering again. Come in, child.”
“Don’t call me that.” I laughed, and the sound was thin. “Tell me, what year is it?”
“It is the sixteenth year of the reign, High Princess. Soon you will be seventeen.”
Seventeen. The same age as the last time. The same age as the moment I offered the world a bargain: I traded a man’s life for a monarchy, and he died with my name on his lips.
I should have cried. The old story says grief fills hollow eyes until there are no tears left. But I had cried so much last time that I had no salt left in my cheeks. When I climbed down from the tower and pressed my forehead to the cold stone of the palace, the world felt new and terrible. Then it did something impossible — the sky returned my breath, and I opened my eyes in my own bed.
“I’m reborn,” I told the small palace maid who came to fetch me, and when she smiled I almost cried from relief. “I’m reborn. This time, I will not be a sacrificial pet.”
“Princess?” her voice made me feel shameful and giddy at the same time. “Are you hungry?”
“Yes.” I let the words be small. I had plans that were not small at all.
“You asked for General Hayes?” the maid stammered. “He has been waiting under the peach tree since morning.”
I almost fell under the sheer force of the thought. Hayes Cook. His name had been a song I could not sing in my head without trembling. The soldier who once held the line for me, who had bled for a country he did not choose and for a girl who would betray him. The man whose eyes had been the last warm thing I ever saw before the cold came.
“Bring him,” I said. “No—call him ‘Hayes.’”
The peach tree was the same place as before. He stood there like a spear carved out of flesh and shadow. “Ebba,” he said, with that small inflection I knew better than my own name.
“Hayes.” I forgot to breathe. I ran like a child and threw myself against his chest. He stiffened and then wrapped me like a shield.
“Did that bastard trouble you again?” he demanded, voice low and furious.
“No,” I said, which was an enormous lie. “I just—” I faltered, then found the courage of the reborn. “Will you marry me?”
He blinked. I had planned to declare myself, to force fate to tremble. He looked at me as if I had asked the sky to fall. “Is this a joke?” he said finally, and I wanted to strangle him with my laughter.
“It is not a joke,” I said. “I will ask my father to give me to you on my seventeenth birthday. I will peel myself open like an onion and lay all my secrets bare until you believe me.”
He gave me a smile that was as small as a closed fist. “I accept, but only if the promise is true.”
“You will have no reason to doubt me,” I told him, and for the first time in a long time his face softened around the edges into something like a smile.
We walked and spoke like conspirators. I practiced how to be brave. I learned how to hide fury inside a curtsy. I learned the look that would make the whole court bend.
But a kingdom cannot be turned by a single whisper in a garden. My father — the emperor, Avery Mikhaylov — was not a man who would bend for anybody, even for me. He loved ceremony more than truth. I found that out when I marched into the Hall of State and declared, in the loudest voice I had: “I will be married to Hayes Cook on my birthday. I will have him as my husband.”
“High Princess,” the minister Ali Bush sputtered, dropping his papers. “This is…improper. Such things must be discussed with the Council.”
“My marriage is my business,” I shot back. “My heart, my choice.”
Avery sighed and folded his hands as if playing a tune with them. “Not to the son of none,” he said. “Not to a soldier. Not to a general bound to his duty. I cannot have the throne tied to a single man's oath.”
But I was not the same woman who had bowed and trusted words like paper. I had learned the shape of betrayals. I would not be bait again. I began to plant small knives of rumor, to pull threads from servants’ mouths and weave a net.
“You will go,” I told Hayes once more. “I will be by your side.”
He bowed, a warrior’s bow not a lover’s surrender. “I will go, Ebba,” he said. “But know this: I go because I would never let your life be taken over lies.”
The days skewered with plans. I learned the pattern of a court, what smile meant what favor, how a slight could breed a conspiracy. Gustaf Brandt — the man who had played me like a flute — was still at court, smiling and cruel. He had the looks that made women forget their dignity and men forget their purpose. He would be my first target. He would be my last, if I could keep Hayes alive long enough to see it through.
“You are dangerous, Princess,” whispered Jaqueline Vorobyov, my false sister with a candied smile that hid rust. She had liked to stand close to me the way a viper likes to warm itself on a stone. “Do not set me if you must break my toy.”
“Stay away,” I said coldly.
She laughed as if my words were feathers. “You have always been extravagant, Ebba. You believe yourself above consequences.”
I leaned forward, my voice soft. “If you put your hand on Hayes, I will remove your name from the palace records. If you think your father loves you, remember who raised your allowance.”
She turned as white as her powdered cheeks and left, and for the first time I felt the old, delicious power at the back of my throat — the power to ruin, the power to command. It tasted like iron and sugar.
We moved like actors on a stage. I arranged for Hayes to be given leave to escort Gustaf back to his homeland — the perfect trap: a delicate courtly duty, the kind that draped poison in silk ribbons. Gustaf, greedy and sure, took the bait. He believed the palace had finally forgiven him; he believed himself untouchable. He would find himself very wrong.
“The day we leave, stay close to me,” Hayes said when we prepared to ride out. “I will not let you go.”
“I will stay,” I promised. “I will not be foolish as before.”
The road was a river of dust. We rode in two parties — the ostentatious one to distract scouts, and the real one of a small dozen who moved like shadows. The night before we crossed into Gustaf’s land, he invited us all to a false feast. I smiled and ate and lay traps with a quiet hand. I watched his face; he did not notice the way my eyes slit to read him.
The ambush came before dawn. Gunfire of a different kind — not weapons but people. The moment someone's knife reached for Hayes, I threw myself between them. “No!” I screamed. Steel kissed my shoulder, but I kept my feet.
“Ebba!” Hayes’s voice was all the world. He struck with a ferocity that made men howl. The mountain bandits were ready — it was an ambush in a hundred hands. I fought like a woman who had nothing left to lose. When the captain of the bandits stood before me, I saw a face I would never forget: Dominic Tarasov, the man who would later pretend to be innocent and then strip me of everything. He had the kind of smile that opened closets filled with bones.
“You have courage,” he grunted. “A little too much for a princess.”
“I am not a princess today,” I spat. “I am alive.”
“You will be someone's bride by dawn,” he said. “And it will not be to a general.”
They took me anyway. The small, cold room where they stuffed me smelled of old linen and the animal iron you scrub with oil. Dominic — he told me his name later, leaning against my locked door — left me alone but for a single bowl.
“You could make a bargain,” Dominic said. “You could be sweet. You could be mine.”
“Not in this life,” I told him. “Not in any life you can imagine.”
He laughed and vanished into the night. He did not know what he had awakened.
Hayes burst into the compound with fury that made the moon pale. “Where is she?” he roared. “Where is Ebba?”
“You will never find her,” they said — and Hayes, the man who never lied, turned to me and promised a hundred things. That vow — the one carved into my bones — was enough to let me deform the rest of the world to save him.
We escaped. It was Hayes’s brutality and his tenderness together that unmade the mountain man’s plans. Dominic's men scattered like crows. But I had been inside a man’s coven once the night my throat missed a cut, and the smell of blood had stayed in my teeth. I could not unlearn it.
When we returned, the palace received us with a festival and false faces. Gustaf’s smugness did a shiver in my skin. Jaqueline’s mouth spread like an animal.
“Princess, you are home,” she said. “Your face looks pale. Did you have adventures?”
“Yes,” I said. “I had the most terrible amusement.”
Hayes’s shadow closed around me. “Do not touch her,” he warned Jaqueline, but she laughed and threw herself into a chair like a woman who had swallowed a wasp.
“You are mine if I call you mine,” she hissed later, in the privacy of a hall lined with ancient tapestries. She thought herself clever, but Jaqueline had been the smallest of my problems.
A few days later, I had them both where I wanted them: Gustaf in the audience of the great hall, the court in a roar of ceremony. I walked into the chamber and, with an easy voice, told the room a story.
“Your Majesty,” I said to Avery, “Gustaf Brandt has played with our lives. He has not only used me for sport, but he has conspired with foreign courts to undermine our defenses. I have the proof.”
“Ha!” Gustaf said, smiling, because he always smiled when the stage came on. “The princess would accuse me of treachery? What grace.”
I had my pages of parchment. Wind Burkes were not afraid to ask for the truth. I spoke the names of men who had bought secrets, the nights I caught whispers, the bribes I had traced. The court gasped. “Impossible,” breathed some. “It cannot be.”
“We have letters,” Hayes said, stepping forward. “Signed and dated.”
Gustaf’s face bled all his colors away. He went from silk-soft to raw in a heartbeat. He decried the accusations: “These are fabrications! You have seen the princess’s brow is bent; she is unstable.” But his mouth made him cruder and uglier with each sentence.
Then I pressed a handkerchief into the emperor’s palm — a handkerchief Gustaf had sent to my sister with promises and pictures. “He brought affairs into the palace,” I said. “He encouraged seduction. He promised Jaqueline a life on his arm and told her to remove any obstacle. When I refused, he arranged my death.”
“I never—” Gustaf began, and the veneer broke. “You lie!” He stumbled, then reached for a noble’s sympathy, for any anchor. The crowd turned like tides.
“Seize him,” Avery said at last, and the floor took a step closer to collapse under Gustaf’s feet.
What followed in that hall was a cruelty I had kept for years like a chokehold. There were rods of shame and a chair that tilted the accused into public scorn, and a contraption that forced Gustaf to stand in the center while the court recited his crimes aloud. I listened to the men list each bribery, each whisper, each promise that ruined fortunes. Their faces were small moons. Gustaf’s smile fled and then he fought to keep it, then denial, then the brittle pealing of panic.
“You cannot do this!” he cried. “I am of blood!”
“Not here,” I said. “Blood does not pay for what you took. You must stand as your crimes are known.”
“Nay!” Gustaf tried to plead with a woman with a thousand favors, then turned toward my father. “Your Majesty! Mercy!”
Avery, who had always cared more for ceremony than for temper, had the power and did what I needed. He stripped Gustaf of titles, declared him bannerman-born, and ordered that every noble who had accepted his counsel would sever ties. Gustaf’s name was no longer a key to power; it was a warning.
But words were not enough. The city must see the collapse of pride to believe it would never happen again. So the emperor ordered Gustaf to stand in the square at noon. His jewels were removed; his robes were turned into linings, his hair pulled back, and the crowd — oh, the crowd — pressed forward with torches like eyes. They spat and shouted and took great relish in turning a man who had used smiles into a man who begged.
I watched all of it as Hayes’s hand held mine. Gustaf went through the cycle of collapse I had taught him to perform in secret: first denial, then rage, then bargaining, then fear, and finally a brittle, humiliated pleading. He begged for my pity and got only the coldest thing: unblinking indifference. People who had once sent their daughters to his house now fingered their shawls and photographed the scene with their new pocket devices. The spectacle was a feast for the city’s revenge.
That punishment — public, thorough, and merciless — broke him. He was not flayed by blades, but by the thing that wrecks kingdoms: the knowledge that you mean nothing to the people you used. That is a death more lasting than any dagger.
Jaqueline’s punishment was of a different sort. She had schemed like a spider beneath silk and laces. She thought she was cunning enough to survive exile, but cunning dies in bright sun. After Gustaf’s collapse the court needed an example that would burn into the hearts of household women.
I made sure the evidence of her betrayal — the letters, the hidden coins, and her matchings with Gustaf — were laid out at a banquet. She sat in the front row, lip color perfect, face pale. I walked slowly toward her and, with a smile, asked the table a question only she could answer.
“Do you prefer falsehood or truth?” I asked, loud enough for the entire hall. The guests turned, spoiling their supper with breath.
Jaqueline stood, eyes fuming. “You cannot accuse me in such a manner,” she said. “I am your sister by the grace of this court.”
“You helped poison my reputation, stole my trinket that was a gift from another nation, and plotted with a foreigner to displace Hayes.” The words were soft but each one landed like a bell.
At once the maids whispered and the noblewomen sighed. A woman who had once been my familiar turned and smirked. Jaqueline’s cheeks turned the color of a guilty rose. I had a script in my head of the perfect humiliation tailored to her vanity. I would not kill her; I would strip her of what she craved most — her status.
The emperor stood and read out the charges. The court was stunned. “Jaqueline Vorobyov is stripped of all titles and thrown from the Privileged Roost,” he declared. “Her retainers are taken away. She will lose her privileges, her household, her right to enter the palace ever again. If she returns, she will be imprisoned.”
“A-are you mad?” she squealed. “Father! You cannot!”
“This is the end of your gilded life,” I said quietly. “You will walk among the common and learn the weight of every coin you once spent as if it were a jewel.”
They dragged her from the hall in her finery and in the square — where once girls had imitated her, where merchants had whispered her secrets to get a favor — they stripped her of the garments that marked her as a princess. Her hair fell loose, and her powdered face showed the black streaks where tears had been. The servants who had once kissed her hem spat. A child laughed. A man took a token from her necklace as if it were a mold proof.
It was public, ugly, and intimate. This punishment was not a simple fall from favor. It was watching a woman who had lived by silk and poison become a rumor. People that she had once ordered now found her a commodity. She staggered through the market with nothing but a thin robe and a handful of bread. The viewing crowd shouted not only condemnation but a fervor I had not imagined: “She stole from the princess!” “She betrayed the throne!” They were bloodthirsty only for image.
Jaqueline’s face finally opened into a new expression — the expression of someone who understands that the world will not let you back in. She wanted to die; instead she was forced to live and feel every small betrayal of that living, and that is an ache more enduring than any sword.
After both punishments, the city hummed with a new quiet. No one smiled the same way. The court adjusted. Hayes bowed and kissed my hand, and I let him because the man who stood then was not the man who had waited for a pawn. He was a man who had seen me fall and lived because he chose to hold me.
But punishment did not mean peace. We had pulled a thread and found an entire conspiracy woven between courts. Gustaf’s fall opened other doors; Dominic’s men grew bolder. There were visits and counterplots and nights when I lay awake thinking of the lake and two kinds of drowning.
“I will not go back to who I was,” I told Hayes one night, as the moon slotted itself between palace roofs. “If I must be cruel to save you and this country, then so be it.”
“You will not be cruel because you love it,” he said. “You will be cruel because you are necessary.”
“And if I love you?” I asked.
He took my hand and, without ceremony, kissed my knuckles. “Then I will be whatever you want me to be.”
He was not a man who promised because he wanted worship. He promised because he would believe my plans and stand behind them. That knowing shaped me. It warmed things that had been black. The feeling of his breath against my temple was a reed of hope.
When we rode to the border to return Gustaf’s goods to his court as a show of conscience, the road was quieter. We had leveled men and elevated reputations. The country hummed with a strange kind of safety.
Yet some hurts cut deeper than any public humiliation. There are people who flee the gallows and return as ghosts. There are conspirators you will not see until they step from behind curtains of ash. There are lovers you will find do not actually love you at all.
I had not forgiven myself for the things I did in my past life. But I had learned that the only fingers that might be clean are the ones that never touched power at all.
So I made a new vow under the peach tree and the man who would call me his: “I will carve a future from the bones of my past. I will tilt the world until it fits. And I will keep Hayes safe until the last star goes out.”
He smiled like a man who believes the impossible is probable. “Then go on,” he said. “Make me proud to be the man who keeps you.”
And so I began the slow work of war and tenderness, of plotting in the day and kissing in the dark. I learned the rhythm of revenge — not a sudden clap of thunder but a slow, precise pressure that breaks stone. I learned how to leave bread crumbs of truth so that when the palace door locked on the guilty, the people would gather, and the gate would stand open to a new sun.
In the end, my victory was not only in the public punishments that left Gustaf Brandt disgraced and Jaqueline Vorobyov stripped of everything. It was in the way Hayes and I built a life around the small, stubborn things: an embroidered sachet he kept at his belt, a bangle warm at my wrist, a peach tree that still carried fruit after winters of war. That little embroidered pouch — my insult to fate, my proof that I could stitch the world anew — would be the thing I kept until the end.
“You used to call me naive,” Hayes said once, pinning the fragrant sachet to his coat. “You were dangerous then, and you’re dangerous now.”
“And you?” I asked.
He looked at me with that solemn warmth and said, “I only love you — this one star — and I will trace the sky for you.”
I smiled because I had learned to survive, to punish, and to love under the same sky. We had fallen into the same river twice, and twice we drew back out to change everything.
The End
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