Revenge14 min read
"I Had No Tears — I Had a Plan"
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1
"I don't want fuss," I told Jensen as she fussed with my sleeve.
"Not fuss?" Jensen scoffed. "You are a princess; fuss is the family profession."
"I mean real fuss. No screaming, no running into the courtyard. Let them kneel in the main hall. If they won't, have the guards take them," I said.
Jensen gave me a look that mixed pity with excitement. "You are calm," she said. "Too calm, my lady."
"I am tired," I said. "Lift me to my bed. Let them wait until I rise."
I lay down under three layers of silk and counted the softness until sleep took me. Outside, the rumor had arrived that Burke Harrison had come with a woman heavy with child, demanding that I permit him a concubine. The servants' whispers were sharp with outrage. Emmie, my chief attendant, had already cleared her throat twice to propose slapping Burke's mother two dozen times for insolence. Jensen wanted to storm the house and tear the pair limb from limb.
"I'll wait," I told them. "Let them kneel in the main hall. If they refuse, have the guards remind them how the order runs in my house."
Emmie hesitated, a smile like a blade at the corner of her mouth. "Yes, Princess," she said, and left with the efficient satisfaction of a woman who believes she holds the leash.
2
"My father—Earl Cowan—was a man who rose from the dirt," I said once, when Davis came to visit and we had tea. He tilted his head and sipped in silence, as guards do when they think about the right word. "He learned a few letters and then thought the world owed him a new order. He took ten thousand hungry men and a long patience and made a kingdom."
"He did well," Davis said. "You owe him nothing but truth, Princess Mathilde."
"I owe him the courage to be cruel when the shape of cruelty spins to justice," I said. "You do not have to approve; the law is odd sometimes."
When I was twelve I found a boy trapped in a pit in the hunting woods. He had a face that would make poets lazy; he had the air of being lost and offended by every rock. He pulled me down into the pit with him. He was clumsy and handsome and kept saying, "What is your name?" I lied and said, "Estrella," to amuse myself. He remembered the wrong name, and so did I, until years later when fate and poor luck and a string of bad decisions tied him to me by vows and taxes.
"You're whimsical," he told me on the night we married. "You like to break rules."
"I like to pick who breaks my rules," I answered.
3
"I married Burke because I wanted him," I say that in the rooms when women ask me if power or duty made me. "I was twelve and the world gave me a boy; he was a trap to my loneliness and I decided to keep it. My father gave dowry and men and dark warnings. He told me to guard myself with smiles and ledgers."
Burke was a scion, his family older than our new dynasty. He was a nice joke of a man who had been bred to smile at the right beat and sleep at the right hour. He was not cruel at first. He was merely lazy-hearted. The first nights after we wed, he told me that a boy's wrong step ruined his root and that he could not perform his duty. He said, "I fear my root is broken," with the calm of a man reciting a weather forecast. I pretended to pity him. I wrapped myself in the pretense and learned the taste of that pity on my tongue.
"Is it so bad?" he asked once.
"It is a disappointment," I said. "It is life."
4
"How long have they been kneeling?" I asked when Jensen brought the tea and the report.
"Two hours, my lady," she said. "They look wretched."
"Bring them in when I ask," I told her. "Let me see Sunday on their faces."
I dressed slowly. I chose the phoenix comb that my father had laughed at when I insisted on buying from a poor silversmith. I put on the shrimp-gold bracelets that clinked like small punishments. "You look radiant," Jensen murmured.
"Good." I smiled. "This is a small opera and I am the lead."
At the main hall, they were as I had imagined: Burke's mother, Martina, with her face red from being slapped at Emmie's recollection; Burke himself with two black foot prints on his white robe from when the guards had reminded him to kneel; and Estrella, the younger princess—thin, frightened, and carrying herself to keep a secret at her belly, swelling like a private moon.
"Princess," Emmie announced, "they present themselves."
"I see," I said.
Estrella's voice trembled. "Brother Burke," she said, "my belly—"
"Be quiet," I cut her off with a smile. "You are heavy in the belly? That is interesting. Surely you must know that a widow last year, and now you carry a seed. How odd."
Burke's eyes were stormy. "Mathilde," he said, and that name, the one I had chosen, sounded heavy in his mouth. "You have reached too far."
"I?" I laughed softly. "You dare? When you told me you could not perform the duties of husband, you offered me a life of silence. You accepted my title and my purse. Are you surprised I now collect what was promised me?"
Burke's chest tightened. "You have been cruel to her—"
"She forced a match upon me with no pity," I said. "She is my father's blood and your comfort. What is the crime? You fornicate in the poor houses; she returns the favour in our halls. They have the audacity to ask for a concubine? How gallant."
"Enough!" Burke tried to stand, but the guards restrained him. "You will not humiliate my mother." He said it in a voice that wanted to be thunder and came out as the sound of a man losing a pillow.
"Martina," Emmie said, her tone sharply sweet, "you are greeting the princess as befits you, and yet—"
The old woman tried to scream. The guards held her.
I leaned back and watched. "How long?" I asked softly.
"They brought the artisan," Emmie said with a tilt of her chin, and a cold joy lit her eyes.
"Bring the artisan in," I said.
5
When the artisan came, he carried a small carved piece of green stone. I knew it before he spoke; I had seen the mark when I was twelve and careless. "Take the lamp," I said. "Hold it high."
Burke, hands trembling, held the piece by the edge. The light made a name shine through the stone: a craftsman's signature. "For Mathilde. From Wu," he read aloud, voice like paper.
"You deposited your mother’s favor in the wrong lap," I said. "You returned what you found to the wrong person. Do you remember the pit, Burke? Do you remember the year you crawled out of a trap because a girl lied about her name?"
He looked at me like a man who had been struck with a memory made of lead. "You—"
I smiled. "You said you'd repay the favor. You repaid the wrong woman. Your memory is tidy, but not accurate."
Estrella paled.
"Wait," Burke breathed. "You people—"
"People?" Emmie said. "No, Burke. This is judgment."
6
"Take him," I said.
"Princess, this is extreme!" Burke roared. "You cannot—"
"I can," I said.
They dragged him. Martina clawed and shrieked. Estrella wept and folded and then, like poor veined silk, tore. The tray came in with three items laid like a funeral: white linen, an herbal porridge, and a knife.
"Princess, you cannot—" Estrella choked.
"I can," I said again. "My father and I already spoke."
The corridor smelled like boiled herbs and the salt of many men's fear. Davis stood at my shoulder. He had been the man who once crawled out of a pit because of a girl’s lie; he was the man who would kneel now in a different allegiance. "It is done by order," he said. "For the safety of the realm, for the honor of the house."
Estrella's voice was strangled. "Mathilde, please. For the child—"
"Your child is a consequence of your choices," I answered. "If you had refused him, could you blame the child? If you had warned me, would this happen? Fate's cruelty is personal and I am very public."
7
Weeks ago I had gone to Earl Cowan between drifts of documents. He smiled like a man who had used his hands to turn a kingdom and still smelled of the soil. "You have found the fault-line?" he asked.
"I have a plan," I said. "Not for revenge alone, but for closure, Father."
He looked at me in that way men look at a child who carries a weapon. "Be wise," he said. "You have power. Use it like a plow. Let it turn the earth but don't break the seed."
I had a different analogy in mind. "I will break them," I said. "For what else are laws? For justice that tastes of iron."
8
They made Estrella kneel when the potion worked—she went limp and pale, the world narrowed to a point. Burke, hands forced, watched like a man watching another play an instrument his fingers once held. Martina screamed at the injustice and at the shame. Guards tried to keep order. Courtiers filed in to watch—they always liked a scene.
I spoke slowly. "Estrella," I said, "you lit a match and then wept when your house burned. You made choices that brought fog into our halls. You will have a white linen shroud, the herbs that take life kindly, and the privacy of a woman's last hours. That is mercy."
She spit at me once. "You will not spend the night alone, Princess," she said with a hate-split voice.
"I have Davis," I said. "He makes the tea and keeps the knives for me."
"As for you," I told Burke, "we will let the law teach a lesson. You will be made to know what you have done in a way you cannot forget."
9
The public punishment was in the courtyard on a day when the market pulsed with the city's heartbeat. The emperor had been asked, letters had been read, and a crowd had gathered like hungry crows. They came for spectacle and for the sweet justice that tastes of shared anger.
"They want to see the fall of the proud," an old woman muttered to herself.
"They want to see the man who would spit on a princess' name castrated," snorted another.
I walked into the square like a woman who wears her name as armor. "Bring him," I said. "Bring Burke."
He came as a show of mud; his robe had been replaced with coarse cloth, the look of a man stripped for a lesson. Martina had been carted off before the crowd reached the steps; she had been made to crawl with a face that still screamed. Estrella was nowhere to be seen—her end was to be private—and that absence hummed in the air like the tail of a bell.
"Bring the instruments," I said.
The executioner was an old man with a patient face; he had done this work for years. He set the iron upon the block. The crowd fell like a held breath. "You have lungs," someone hissed. "Use them."
"Princess Mathilde," a voice called, "please be merciful."
"I am merciful," I said, and the crowd fluttered like the wings of a trapped bird. "Mercy is giving a snake its space to bite no more."
I had asked that Burke be paraded, that he be made to confess publicly his brazen crimes. He had spat at me once—"You are nothing"—and now he would say what he had done because his mouth had to move.
The magistrate read aloud. "Burke Harrison, scion of a noble house, guilty of dishonoring a princess, aiding treasonous talk against His Majesty, ordering arson on the princess's household, and taking another man's wife. For these crimes, the court sentences you to ceremonial castration and execution according to the laws of this realm."
A ripple of noise went through the plaza; people murmured, some with subdued joy.
"Do you have anything to say?" the magistrate asked.
Burke's head bowed like a man who thinks the sun has betrayed him. "I..." he began, and for the first time his voice cracked like a thin twig. "I loved you—" he said, looking at me like a supplicant.
"You loved yourself," I answered. "You loved the idea of having less to do and more to take."
"Oh," someone in the crowd gasped, "she speaks plainly."
He lashed out with denial then: "You are lying! She set me up! She stalked me! The princess plotted—"
"Hush," I said. "The stone will show. Your own hand put it to light."
The artisan's name had been carved inside the jade; the proof had already been displayed. The crowd shifted. "He lied," a woman cried. "He lied to all of us!"
"How do you plead?" the magistrate asked again.
"Guilty," he said finally, the word like dirt.
At the first stroke of the symbol’s public act, the executioner dealt the sentence. The crowd's quiet split into a thousand small sounds—some cried, some took hempy notes on the event as though cataloging for traders, some lifted children up to see. Burke's face changed as the blade passed—the rare look of a man who had thought himself untouchable and was touched by a knife he himself had made sharp.
He went through the phases I had promised to watch: his certainty, then denial, then pleading, then pleading to me directly—"Mathilde, please," he begged—then a new sound, raw and terrified, as the irreversible thing completed itself. I watched the crowd's faces: the merchant who sold fish, a swordsman, a woman who crocheted lace, all nodding with the relief of witnesses. A child screamed. Someone clapped as if this were a show. Someone turned a coin and tossed it into the air like a bargaining fate. Phones—no, not phones here—madmen with little paper fans took notes. Everyone had an opinion.
Burke's final look was not for himself. It was for the son he had never fathered and the wife he had never truly made love to. He saw the ruin at his feet and it tasted like nothing at all.
10
After Burke's fall, the Harrison house crumbled as I had designed; Earl Cowan's men sealed records, the market traders turned on them, and the old powers that had loved the family quietly fled. Martina Berry's relatives denounced her. She was dragged from house to house, laughed at and scorned, and finally left in the street with her ankles broken by the city's officers who had duties and little mercy.
Estrella's end had been private and therefore crueler in ways I accepted. She had taken the potion with a grace like fog wrapping a statue. She closed her eyes, and when the world shut its lids, she had no more complaint. I wondered about the child that never took breath and felt something like a hollow knot in my chest. Close to it was a small satisfaction.
"I did not cry," I told Davis later. "I didn't scream or rip silk at the moon."
"You never do," he said. "You are careful with your grief."
"I was not grieving," I admitted. "I was finishing a calculation."
11
Davis? He was the man who had once been a wounded messenger left to die on a lane. I had been there, a child who lied about her name and lent a hand. He repaid me now with obedience, with a loyalty I had cultivated and rewarded. He brought evidence, and he could be cruel when ordered, but he also bought me flower pastries from the market and left them at my door. Small things like that made his face honest when he spoke.
"Do you ever imagine a life unfeathered?" I asked him one evening as the sun dipped and the city made a crimson smear.
"I imagine nothing," he said. "I only serve what is necessary."
"I wish I could know what that would be," I said.
He laughed, a small thing. "You have chosen justice as a plow."
12
The papers—song-sellers in the streets recited my name as though I had become a legend. Some called me merciless. Some wrote that I had been patient, that I had used law instead of knives. The story grew like a shadow thrown long by the sinking sun. People whispered about the jade, about the artisan's mark, about the pit in the woods and the lost pendant. Traders wrote broadsides that said, "Princess Mathilde, the woman who eats poison and smiles." The city liked its stories with salt.
When the Harrison household fell, many small men cheered. "She has the teeth of a tiger," an innkeeper said as he slopped stew. "And a brain to sew the hunt."
13
At night I sat with Davis and let the quiet spin around me. "You never married," he said once.
"No," I replied. "I married a memory and a mistake. I broke them both for the sake of a house." I turned a small object in my hand. It was the jade pendant; the signature was visible under lamp-light. The stone had travelled through many hands and was now a proof and a scar.
"Do you regret the parts where you were unkind to her?" Davis asked.
"To Estrella?" I said. "I regret the small things. Not the plan. Not the law. We are measured by the choices we make, not the faces we save."
He looked at me, long and still. "You love control," he said softly.
"I love safety. For my people. For my father's name." I set the pendant on the table and watched the light travel.
14
Weeks later, Emperor Earl Cowan sat in his study and drank tea. "You knew," he said, sounding like wind in the eaves.
"I did," I said. "Justice is a stringed instrument. It must be tuned." He laughed like a man who had married the hard truth and found it warm. "You used the law the way a farmer uses a scythe." He set the cup down. "You were cruel, Mathilde. I am proud."
I smiled, but I tasted iron. "You stand behind me?"
"Always," he said, and the word was as solid as a stone.
"Then keep the court steady," I said. "And keep Davis fed."
15
I walked through the market on a cold morning and overheard two women speak. "She is a hard one," the first said. "She gave us the trade tax and then she took the last Harrison mills."
"She took them with the law," the other answered. "No blood on her hands, mostly."
"I saw the magistrate's face at the castration," the first woman said with a grin. "He was nearly sick."
"A pity," the other said. "I would have had more fun if she had shown mercy."
I stopped walking and turned to them. "Mercy," I said, "is often a luxury of ash and soft beds. I prefer things that keep the city standing."
They looked at me like they had seen a ghost with silk. I smiled and left them with their stew.
16
Time cleans a surface the way rain cleans a road. People go back to their trade. The Harrison name was not forgiven; the mills and lands were parceled out to those who kept their heads low and their tongues to their teeth. Martina Berry faded into the alleys with an ankle twisted and her pride gone. Estrella Foster's garden went wild and was turned over to an old widow. Davis finally took to making tea and bringing me the first bun every morning.
"Why do you stay?" he asked once, sitting opposite me with a cup.
"Why do you stay?" I asked back.
He folded his hands. "Because you needed someone to remember your first lie was kind."
"I lied to a man who asked my name," I said.
"You saved a life," he said. "That was the first debt."
17
People still tell the story of the jade. "If you hold it to the light," children say, "you can see names." They like the magical part. They enjoy the small wonder. I keep the pendant in a wooden box and sometimes open it. It is small, and it glows, and it reminds me that the world can be proved by small things.
"Do you ever fear a hand like yours in the hands of a worse woman?" Davis asked me once.
"That's the danger of any power," I said. "We must give it to honest hands. Mine are not always kind. They are efficient."
He smiled a little at that, then stared down into his cup as if to measure his own reflection.
18
I had my revenge. I had my law and my execution. The city moved on. People wrote new songs. Yet, sometimes at night, the bedroom felt too large and the quilts too smooth. I would take the pendant and hold it and remember the boy in the pit who had crawled and laughed and whom I had believed was mine once. The memory was not love so much as a bright, suburban fault line: it glittered and could not be built upon without men who would lie and break.
One evening, when the air tasted like lemon, I found Jensen waiting with a new letter. "From the southern merchants," she said. "They ask you to bless the new warehouse."
"Tell them they may build," I said. "But I will come inspect the beams."
She bowed and left. I rested the pendant in my palm. It felt like a small stone and a small truth.
19
On the day the new warehouse's beam was blessed, a child ran up to me and asked, "Princess, is it true you had a man cut for his crimes?"
"Yes," I said. "We chose law."
The child looked at me with the splendid honesty of small faces. "Are you happy now?"
"No," I said. "But I sleep better."
He nodded, satisfied with simplicity. I thought of the jade and the pit and the necklace that had been my lie. I closed my hand over the pendant and let the world turn.
20
Davis and I walked once more along the lane where I had lost the pendant as a child. "Do you ever want to run away from all this?" he asked me.
"Run?" I laughed. "To a place where a woman might be quiet?"
"Yes," he said.
"No," I said, and felt the truth in it like cold water. "I would be the same in any place. Power changes only the tools."
He took my hand for a second and, like a man used to duty, squeezed and let go. "I will always pull the rope that keeps you from falling into the wrong sea," he said.
"I will try to keep the sea small," I answered.
21
When the moon was small, I opened the pendant to the light and let the thin glow fall on my desk. There, among the ledgers and tea tins, the name carved inside the jade shone like a small promise: a child's trick, a truth given back. The city hummed outside with its ordinances and market cries. I stood and listened and felt, oddly, lighter for the weight of all I had done.
"Tell me," Davis said then, "do you regret not crying in the hall?"
"I do not regret it," I said. "I regret only what was wasted."
He nodded. "What do you mean?"
"What I had loved and threw away to mend a crooked crown," I said.
22
I kept the pendant locked and sometimes gave it to a child to hold. They laughed and thought it a talisman. No one knew the weight inside. No one needed to. I walked the thin line between justice and cruelty and learned that both are human tools.
"Will you tell me one night why you did not choose gentleness?" Davis asked.
"Because gentleness would have left me exposed," I said. "Because my father built a kingdom from dirt, and I learned that only the tempered hand keeps the rest alive."
He looked at me with something like sorrow for future selves. "Then I will temper my hands to yours," he said.
"Do not let them grow calloused," I warned.
"I cannot promise softness," he said. "Only steadiness."
23
The final ledger for the Harrison estate was filed with a small stamp of the court. I watched the scribe seal it and felt the sound like a closing gate. Life would go on. Some would insist I was monstrous, some would say I was fair. I would wear both claims like armor.
"Who counts the victories?" Jensen asked me when I sat alone and told her what I'd paid in the currency of conscience.
"The one who keeps watch," I said. "The one who counts the ghosts at night."
24
On a quiet spring morning I walked into my private garden. The wind moved leaves like a soft applause. I unfastened the wooden box and set the jade on my palm. I looked up at the sky and then down at the stone.
"It is small," I said to no one.
"It is you," Davis answered from the path behind me. "Small and hard to forget."
I closed my hand and put the pendant into the soil beneath an old plum tree. "Let it be a seed," I said. "Let that be the only story that must end with the ground."
He smiled, and for once, the smile did not need to be measured.
The End
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