Revenge15 min read
"I Followed the Prince, Lost Everything, and Found My Own Life"
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"I followed him for three years," I said, and my voice was raw from repeating the truth to myself until it did not sound like a question.
"Three years," Wells said, counting on his fingers as if time could be measured that way. "And the Empress made you drink three bowls."
"I remember each bowl," I answered. "I remember the bitter, and I remember the way my body clenched after the third."
Wells Carr's face did not change much. He was a small man with steady hands. "You were never supposed to have a chance. You knew that."
"I knew nothing except his name," I said, and for a moment I let the memory of the first time I saw him live in my mouth like something hot. "I knew Galen Charles could be cruel and that he could be kind. I knew that when he smiled I would forget how cheap I felt."
Galen Charles, the prince, had a face that people talked about for a generation. He looked like the pictures of the Empress in the palace galleries—sharp, famous, almost impossible. I had watched him three years, memorized the tilt of his chin, the slow way he laughed. He found me in a tavern one autumn night and wrapped me in a story.
"You're brave," he had told me the day he first rescued me. "You have spirit."
"Can I be your woman?" I asked, stupid and hungry and brave all at once.
"How can I refuse?" he said, and that answer set the rest of my life in motion.
The price came in bitter bowls.
"You look paler," he said when I came back to the house after three days away. "You look thin."
"It was business," I lied. "I brought you the best lychees."
He only scoffed. "Why work? I give you everything."
"You give me a roof and coins," I said. "You don't give me a place."
He touched my cheek like he had the right. "Be sensible," he said. "Don't make waves."
And so I learned to be small. I learned to be the late-night warmth in his bed and nothing else. I learned to take the Empress's favors: a gift of land, trinkets heavy with gold. I learned to swallow the bowl of abortifacient tea each year the Empress sent it—"for the good of the realm," she said. I learned to put my hands over my stomach when the medicine burned through me.
"You're a merchant's daughter," people whispered. "You are not fit for the palace."
I let them whisper. It was safer.
"Do you ever wish for a name?" Mason Hoffman asked one night, after we'd been drinking at the tavern again. He had a rough laugh that somehow cut through the air. "A name that doesn't come with shame?"
"I have a name," I said. "Lila Beard is enough for my ledger. It keeps me alive."
Mason Hoffman—he was different from Galen. He was the wind after long heat, a friend who did not look at me like property. He had once laughed until he could not breathe, and the sound stayed in the room like sunlight. He would later do something that would break and then mend me in a way Galen never could.
The world was small around us. Du Kang House was my workshop and my armor. I cooked, I sold, I loved him in the way someone loves a storm—knowing it will pass and also wanting it to wash everything clean.
"You were with him," the woman in the empty pavilion said when I arrived that night with a crate of aged wine. The woman was all silk and perfume, and she threw her arms around the prince like a vine.
"I told you not to come," Galen said.
"I was bringing wine," I said, but my voice dried when I saw him hold her. He did not look at me like the rest of that night. He looked for comfort, ease, and in the moment he had both in the woman's arms.
"Who told you I was here?" he demanded.
"Someone did," I said. "Someone brought me."
"Who?" he barked.
"How would I know?" I wanted to scream. "Why would I want to do this to you? I brought wine because I remember you liking this vintage."
"You're a meddlesome thing," he said. He gripped my arm.
Wells stepped forward. "My lady, do not make a scene."
"Don't tell me not to make a scene," I said. "You make entire stages of my life a scene, with other women. You are the prince. You do what you please."
He released me with a look that tasted like disappointment. "You should be grateful. I keep you. I could let go."
That night, when the doors had closed and the candles were spent, he kissed me as though to erase the memory of the other woman. He said, "You're special," like a spell.
"If you mean what you say," I told the dark, "then prove it."
He never did. He pretended instead.
The one memory that burned the most was not the silk of a rival's gown or the taste of betrayal. It was the night men came for my life.
"I thought you'd learned to hide," the big man said the first time they came—the mountain robbers with rough eyes and worse hands. They grabbed, they tore, they laughed. I bit and kicked and the world went white with fury and shame. I remember thinking: if I die, at least he will know I had pride.
He arrived on horseback like a picture book save for the terror. Galen Charles came into the clearing with his men, and breathed the word that stopped them.
"Death," he said. "Throw them off the cliff."
They took the men away. I never asked how they were found. I do remember him wrapping his cloak around me like a priest.
"You're safe," he said. "I am here."
And I believed him.
The weeks that followed were intoxicated with the false comfort of being chosen. He piled coins, land, watches into my life. When he left, I waited. When he returned, I welcomed him.
"Stay tonight," I begged once, foolish and desperate.
"Stay," he said. "You are mine."
"My name is not yours," I answered, and his eyes darkened. He married me to a house and a routine and called it love.
It crumbled. The crack began small. He laughed over rumors about me and nearly strangled the laughter out of me. He told me I should not have friends—Mason Hoffman—like a jealous child. He told me to cut off ties because "men like Mason will ruin you."
"Why are you jealous about him?" I asked during a fight, the air thick with salt and spices from the kitchen we both pretended not to care for.
"Because he is a threat," he said. "Because you laugh with him, and when you laugh with him, you are not laughing for me."
"I laugh because I'm alive," I said. "Isn't that enough?"
But it was not enough. When Mason came to see me in Du Kang House, I felt the relief of someone who could breathe without fear of being judged for every little thing. He reached for my hand across the table once, and that touch was an anchor.
"You're better than what they say," Mason told me softly, and I felt my chest unclench.
"Don't say that," I said, frightened the words would be taken away.
When the tavern burned down—my tavern—when it burned and flame took the ledgers and the years I had built, Mason ran to my side and pulled me from the ruins. He did not ask me to kneel. He only said, "We start again." He was the first person who looked at me like I might be anything other than an ornament.
But then the lie surfaced. The mountain robbers came back into the edges of memory not as robbers, but as actors. Mason's face changed when one man recognized me in the street and begged for forgiveness. "They were paid," Mason said. "Paid by your prince."
"By Galen?" I hissed.
"He wanted to win a bet with me. He wanted to prove who could take the heart of a tavern girl first."
My hands shook. "You—what?"
"I didn't know," Mason said. "I am sorry. We were boys who argued for sport."
"People do not break like this for sport," I said.
I ran then, and the world fell in upon itself. I would not be the play. I could not be his game.
When I came home and found Dylan Carson—my friend, my woman who had braided my hair and helped me when I had fever—wrapped around Galen, something inside of me split open.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because he wanted me," Dylan said, smiling like a blade. "Because I wanted the life you have."
"You wore my dress," I said, and the way she laughed made bile rise.
"You are silly," Galen said to me. "You will always be foolish."
I struck him then.
"How dare you—" his voice rose.
"How dare you take what little heart I gave you and make a toy of it!" I shouted, and I slapped him so hard the echo rang in the room. The bruise on his face was my prize for three years of shame.
He left me. He called me mad. He called me ungrateful. He called me everything an empress might throw as a stone.
"Maybe it's time to end this," I told myself the night I met Wilder Cordova.
Wilder was a blunt man, quick to promise and quicker to keep the bargain. "You look like someone who needs a fortress," he said. "Have you thought of leaving?"
"I cannot have children," I said. "The Empress—Gloria Vorobyov—gave me tea. They said I could never bear a child."
"You can build a life," Wilder answered. "We can marry. We can keep your freedom."
"I will not be anyone's shield," I told him. "But I can use a partner."
So Wilder and I married in a blur. We were practical—our marriage was a ledger rather than a vow. He promised me security. I promised him trade. The city hummed and I began again.
Then I found out I was pregnant.
"The doctor is wrong," I said at first. "You cannot be right." I had taken the bitter cups until my belly remembered only hollowness. The thought of life inside me made my knees go weak.
"It is a pregnancy," a gentle healer told me. "You will be heavy, but the child seems alive."
I touched my stomach and felt the tick of small life. I wept and Wilder would have made a thousand deals for my peace.
I told no one, for a little while. I hid it because I knew the truth: I had been small for too long. I had given my light away like coins.
But the city is a small thing. Rumors swell into storms. The palace needed its heirs. Queen Gloria saw an opportunity.
"She's a merchant," the Empress said later, when she arrived with cold winds and colder promises. "She is dirt in fine cloth. The prince keeps her because he is soft. That will ruin us."
She sent her court. She sent a daughter from a noble household—Georgina Gomes would have filled the part, but the Empress picked another. The Empress wanted control, and she wanted it public.
"Be my witness," the Empress told me, when she offered me a way into the inner palace. "Be my handmaiden. Be there so I can watch you."
"I won't go," I said. "I will not be caged."
She smiled like a knife. "Then expect what happens to untrained dogs."
They burned my tavern, and the city turned its back on me. Street cries painted me a whore; bawdy pictures were drawn and stuck to doors. The Empress's ladies found my birthmark and showed it to the world like proof of guilt.
They hauled me into the square and lifted my robe until I cried out. Men laughed. Women spat.
"She's a whore!" one woman shrieked. "She seduced the prince!"
"Throw her to the pigs!" someone else said.
I wanted to die. I wanted the earth to open and swallow me. I would have, if not for the men who had once stood at his side.
Galen came back from the east with his armor on. He looked older, or perhaps it was the hard line in his face that had hardened. He looked at me like a man clearing a table he was tired of. He closed his hand around the name Lila Beard like it was a coin only he could spend.
"Who did this?" I demanded. I could not breathe.
"It was the Empress," Galen said. He had that slow voice that had kept me warm for years. "She thought to make me unfit to inherit. She thought if she crushed you, I would have no claim."
"Why? Why would she poison me? Why make me barren?"
He flinched like a struck animal. "I thought she did it because she hated the idea of you in the palace."
"You let her," I spat. "And you kept me like a dog while she fed me poisons."
He did not answer at first. Then he set his jaw. "I'll undo them."
He wanted to undo them by power, but power in the palace is a web where one pull breaks many things.
I worked with him more than I wanted to. I sifted through ledgers, bribed men, gave Wilder coin to follow threads. We found Jordan Herrera—the official who took bribes and colluded with the Empress. He had signed papers, he had taken gold, and he had lit the match for my tavern to be burned.
"Bring him," Galen said. "Publicly."
So we did. I had the evidence: ledgers, witnesses, the damnable paper with Jordan's signature. We walked into the market where the city came to buy and argue and spit. The plaza filled with those who could stare. Galen walked me in as though I were not the one the world had spat on but the woman who had led him to proof.
"Jordan Herrera," I called, "you signed. Where is your conscience?"
"You cannot speak to an official like that," he sneered.
"Watch," I said.
Wilder stood up on a crate and read the ledger. Mason Hoffman, who had watched me and loved me in whispers, stood beside him. Wells Carr, who had bent his head and served me without question, shouted the names of each bribe.
"The governor took money," Wilder announced. "The registrar took silver. Jordan Herrera received coin. He accepted bribes to burn property and smash reputations."
"False!" Jordan barked. "This is slander!"
"Then answer," Galen said, and he laid the papers on the crate for everyone to see.
The crowd moved forward like a wave. "Is it true?" they cried.
"True!" cried Mason.
The square became a court of its own. Men shouted. Women covered their mouths and then did not care. Jordan tried to stride away, but Galesen's men circled. The city watched as his face paled.
"You will be tried," Galen said. "By the king's court."
"No!" Jordan cried. "You have no right—"
Galen stepped forward. "I have enough right to take corruption from your hands. You will be punished."
The punishment was public. Jordan Herrera's property was seized; his titles were stripped. They dragged him through the streets, loudly reading his offenses. The crowds turned and spat; children jeered. He begged for mercy. He offered silver.
"Please, I have a family," Jordan said.
"Public shaming," the magistrate proclaimed. "You will stand in the market and have your crimes read aloud for three days. You will be fined, and the gold you took will be used to rebuild what you destroyed."
Jordan's face contorted with every step between the crate and the pillory. He tried to look brave, but the crowd had already decided he was garbage. They threw rotten fruit. A woman from the tavern who knew my hands spat at his feet.
"Your punishment is public," I told him. "Let it be a lesson."
Jordan fell to his knees and begged me. "Please, please. I will do anything."
"Anything?" I repeated. The roar of the plaza sharpened my tongue. "Anything includes confessing your crimes fully. Anyone you paid, tell us. Anyone who took coin and closed their eyes—tell."
He told. He named names. Men were dragged from their houses, stripped of office. The city relished the spectacle.
The sight of Jordan pleading did something to me I had not expected. The taste of sweet revenge was not enough. I wanted more than the man who lit the match; I wanted the woman who had handed me the bowl to burn in disgrace, too.
So I turned my eyes to the palace.
The Empress—Gloria Vorobyov—ruled a room the way she ruled a nation: with silk and poison. People feared her laughter more than her fury. I went to her chamber with a ledger and a calm face.
"Your Majesty," I said. "Do you remember me?"
Her eyes slid to me cold as a draught. "The merchant's woman. She has the gall to come here."
"I have proof," I said. "Your letters. Your payments. Your instructions." I placed the evidence on a table between us. "You told men to make trouble for me. You fed me tea to cut my chance of bearing a child. You burned my work with hired hands. You ruined me to make your son weak enough for your politics."
She laughed in that deadly way. "You are nothing in the order of things."
"Then watch," I said.
"Publicly expose me?" She leaned forward. "You must be very brave. Or very mad."
"Public," I said again, loud enough that the servants outside the doors turned their heads. "It will be before the court. It will be before the market. I will not whisper this in a backroom."
"Do you think you can stand against me?" she asked. "You are a woman of trade."
"I am a mother now," I said. The words were small and steady and true.
The court day came. The hall filled with those who owed favors and those who feared a fall. The Empress arrived like a storm, all robes and jewels. She looked at me like a judge would pity one who takes to the stand.
"You will be quiet," she told me.
"Watch the crown," I said. "Watch your hands."
I called the witnesses—Wells, Wilder, Mason. I produced the cups she had given me; I called the healers. I produced the receipts of the men she paid to burn the tavern. The room shifted. The nobles murmured. The Empress's face tightened.
"You accuse the mother of the prince of crimes that topple courts," she hissed. "What will the king think?"
"Let the king think what he will," I said. "Let him know the truth."
The court held its breath like a lake holding winter. The magistrate listened and then declared—because the papers could not be denied—that the Empress had acted against the law. He could not dethrone her in a day, but he could do the one thing worse for a ruling woman: he could make her fall from grace in quarters where everyone watched.
They read her letters aloud in the square. They took down her seals. They stripped her of households and honors for a time and bound her to public charity and penance.
She stood, white and trembling, as the crowd watched her stripped of favor. Women who had closed their mouths for fear now whispered freely. Children pointed.
"Is this enough?" she spat, looking at me like I had taken her heart.
"It is not for me to say," I answered. "It is for the people to watch whose hand is guiding the throne."
Her punishment was not the quick death she might have wished. It was the slow humiliation: a daily reading of her misdeeds, a removal of the servants who had trusted her, the trimming of her gardens and banners—done publicly. Each day a new thing was taken: a jewel, a chair, a deed. Crowds grew to watch the Empress learn what it is to be mortal.
She changed in stages: first denial, then fury, then cunning. She tried to bargain. She offered gold, favors, sons to people who would help her. She pleaded with the king. The final stage was the absolute: she could not regain the sheen that had once made the court obey her like wind.
The public exacted a different punishment than a blade. They took from her the one thing she valued—control. They returned it to the people. They spoke of her at market stalls, in beds, in kitchens. Children learned to mention her fall at play. That was the slowest guillotine.
But my revenge did not stop with the powerful. Dylan Carson—the woman who had slept in my bed and turned to him—she could not be paraded on a stage like the Empress. Her punishment had to be precise, and public.
We arranged a banquet—Galen's name day. I sent for a fine dress and Wilder, who had a sense for how to stage things. I sent an invitation for all who had wronged me, including Dylan. She came in silk, triumphant.
"You will sit in the chair of honor," I told the steward. "You, who thought you could take what was mine."
Dylan smiled with teeth that gleamed like knives. "I thought I would be his real woman."
"You thought wrong," I said. "Tonight we will play a small game."
At the center of the hall I had placed a mirror and an empty bowl.
"I will tell the truth," I said, looking at Dylan as the guests leaned forward. "You were paid to tempt him. You were given clothes and a promise. You thought you were clever. You thought you would rise."
The Hall quieted. Galen watched with eyes that felt like gravestones.
"You will stand," I told Dylan. "You will tell everyone why you wore my dress, why you let his hand come to you in my house. Then you will hand back each favor you took. You will name each person who benefited. If you lie, we will read your letters."
She trembled like a wounded bird at first, then regained the smile. "What do you want?"
"Confession," I said. "And public apology."
She went red all the way to the hairline. She listed names—madam merchants, men, a man who signed checks—and she confessed to every lie she had learned to love.
The guests gasped; he who had been my prince watched the woman who had betrayed me speak as if cleansed.
"Now," I said, "stand there. Let everyone take a look." I pointed to the mirror. "Look at yourself."
She turned slowly. The mirror showed the silk, the jewels, the mascara running where her smile had spilled. Men who had once whispered to her a promise now laughed. Women shook their heads.
"Is this the woman you wanted to be?" I asked.
She had no answer.
From that night, no one sat her at a place of honor. Men who had courted her left their faces to the gutter when she passed. The price of her betrayal was a lifetime of cold shoulders, the way people avoid puddles. She tried to buy reputation back with gold and favors. Gold does not buy what it cannot hold: trust. Her shame was public, sharp, and slow.
It tasted of ash to me, and yet I was not entirely satisfied. The world had a way of making space for the punished to rise again. It was not enough to have men and the Empress fall. I wanted to be more than the sum of my past.
So I left. I took Wilder's hands on marriage, I took his business knowledge and his patience. We carried my son—my small, fierce boy, who should have made me the soft thing the Empress tried to stop—onto a carriage and to the south.
I found peace in the river cities, in a house with white walls and fruit trees. I built a new ledger and a new circle. People came to buy what I sold. They came to gossip about the woman who had been a prince's plaything and who had walked away. They came for my wine, my candied fruit, my bread.
Galen came to me one last time before I left for good.
"I made mistakes," he said. "I am sorry."
"You loved me like a possession," I told him. "You loved whatever could be claimed. You were never taught how to keep it."
He pressed his hand to my son's small head and then to mine. "Then this will be my penance. I will be there any time you allow me to be. I will not take him from you."
We parted with a kiss that was not of fire but of ash. He returned to the palace, older and rawer. He still loved me, in the jagged way a man who had never been taught gentleness might love. I no longer wanted to be taught.
In the market of my new city, my son grew. Wilder taught him how to balance coins. He learned that mother's hands were steadier than any throne.
I learned, too. I learned to speak when wronged and to build when betrayed. The Empress's fall taught the court a lesson perhaps more useful than mine: power can be shaken. Jordan Herrera paid with his place and his pride, and Dylan Carson paid with the simple cruelty of being forgotten in rooms that mattered.
Once, in the quiet of the courtyard, Mason came and sat by me.
"Did you ever regret loving him?" he asked.
"No," I said, "I only regret not loving myself sooner."
He nodded, as if the words fit in his palm, and he placed his hand over mine like an old promise kept.
Sometimes, late at night, I think: what if the world had been kinder? But I do not belong to the "what ifs." My son and my ledgers and the smell of bread and Wilder's laugh all belong to the life I built.
"Do you think he learned?" Wells asked me once. "Galen, I mean."
"Maybe," I said. "He learned the cost of being loved like a toy. He learned, too late, perhaps. But he did not learn too late for me."
He had to pay for his mother and her schemes. He lost and he gained and he learned as we all must. In the end, I walked away with a child in my arms, a house at my back, and my name in my ledger.
I had been a merchant girl who followed a prince. I was now a woman who knew the value of her own hands. The city called my name sometimes with pity; sometimes with respect. I sold my wine and I kept my son. I kept my freedom.
And when the day came that the Empress's sentence ended and the old court tried to sew the seamless garments of power again, the people remembered that a single merchant with a ledger and a son had stood in the square and called out to the world: I will not be your toy. I will not hand my life away.
The End
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