Revenge20 min read
I Kissed Her with Poisoned Lips
ButterPicks17 views
The first time I died, my mouth tasted of iron and a thin, sweet wine.
"I thought I'd feel fear," I told the empty air of my old bedchamber, once. "I did not."
I am Giselle Stephens. I was an empress, and I died as an empress.
"Look at us now," Hermione said across the low table, and her voice sounded like it had always sounded ― even when our lives were knives. "Two ghosts sharing a room."
She smiled for the first time in years. It was cold and bright and almost reckless. "If we are dead, then death is a poor tutor. It repeats but it teaches less."
"Then let us learn faster," I answered.
When I opened my eyes the second time, Enoch Willis was beneath me in the familiar place that the dead leave for the living: the reflection on the wall, the echo in the courtyard, the man who had used our lives like a game board.
"Happy birthday, Aiko," Enoch said, smiling exactly how he always smiled when the world was a theater and he the playwright.
Hermione moved with a grace I remembered from a thousand years I had never lived. She lifted her teacup, set it to her lips, and said, "I thank Your Majesty and Her Majesty for remembering."
I stood and joined the farce. "For a day, why not be kind?"
Enoch's eyes flicked between us like a man counting cards. He did not know we had already tasted the last hand.
"Tonight," I said when the court left and the moon hung low, "we drank the same wine we drank when we died."
Hermione's head tilted. "Do you remember the moment?"
"I remember being pushed," I said. "I remember hands. I remember lips."
"You remember my lips," she said softly.
That was the truth. In my last breath there had been a kiss, forced and absurd, and then the world closed.
"Why did you come to my deathbed?" I asked, and the question was not merely curiosity.
Hermione's eyes went flat. "Because we were enemies who knew how to end one another. Because an enemy who sees you die has the right to say, 'We are even.' Because I did not win either, and it annoyed me."
I laughed without humor. "We died, and someone else took what should have been ours."
"Yes," Hermione said. "A niece. A pawn. A warm body to cover appetite."
"Our small histories are tied to men who will throw us away when their hunger finds new flavor," I said. "So this time we will not be thrown."
"Good," she answered. "We'll keep the turn of the board to ourselves."
We agreed, with cups and folded hands and conspiratorial smiles. We agreed to be cautious as foxes and patient as winter.
"To what end?" Hermione asked. "You want your father's name cleared. I want my brother's legs not to be a story used to blackmail me. We want to see Enoch blemished."
"Then we unmake what they made," I said. "We will take the niece, we will make her court-legend, and we will pull the string that burns them all."
"Do you mean we will burn her too?" Hermione's voice was the smallest shard of ice.
"No," I said sharply. "She is a tool. She is a lamb we will put in the wolves' den so the wolves will show themselves."
Hermione looked at me, slow. "You always did love a spectacle."
"Yes," I said. "Because spectacle leaves witnesses."
We set the plan into shape like hands knitting rope.
First, we brought Matilda Fournier inside. Matilda was a soft flower pulled too young from her branch. She walked like someone who had not yet discovered that the world could be cruel.
"Bring Matilda to me," I said to Kayleigh Dell, my chief maid.
"Yes, Your Majesty," Kayleigh answered. She bowed. "She is already here, daughter of a provincial house, fresh-faced."
"Let her be dazzled," I told Kayleigh. "Let her be clumsy and make mistakes. Let Enoch see her."
Hermione set her jaw. "And you will watch it burn?"
"I will watch it glitter first," I said. "Then I will watch it burn. That is the subtraction of a life."
They said nothing, though a long time passed like a spine cracking.
When Matilda arrived, she curtsied as if the world were only a bowl she should keep clean.
"Your Majesty," she said, and her voice trembled.
"Rise, Matilda," I told her. "You will learn a thousand rules."
Hermione entered the circle of light like a blade. "My dear," she said, and the word was honey and iron. "You must learn to please the Emperor."
Matilda nodded, eyes huge. "I will try, Consort."
It worked exactly as we had predicted. Enoch found her soft. He smiled at her like a man who discovers a small bright toy.
"You are gentle," he told her once in the garden alone, and he reached to touch a sleeve. She did not pull away quickly enough.
"Do you think of me, Enoch?" Hermione asked later that night when they were gone. "Do you think I am the one you love?"
"People like him love what they can use," I said. "He 'loves' the idea of being loved."
Then we made the garden.
We placed sweet herbs in a corner, little things to stir sleep and heat. Hermione wrote to her chambermaids to "accidentally" let Matilda and Enoch meet under the old artificial rock, the place the servants had used for lovers' whispers since the first Emperor came.
"It will be private, like a fruit," Hermione said, smiling.
"It will be public, like a crime," I replied.
I gave an order only once. "Watch the path, Kayleigh. Send the maid away when they are half the way."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
Everything went to plan until it went further. Matilda and Enoch were discovered embraced, the niece's embroidered scarf tangled at Enoch's belt.
"A scandal," a voice breathed through the garden. "The Emperor with a young lady!"
"Shame," someone else said.
I had never been so pleased. Hermione's face was a carved thing of triumph. She made no move to save her niece.
For a week Matilda's face swelled from public shame. She came to me one morning, eyes red.
"I am sorry," she said, bowing until her forehead almost touched the ground. "I did not mean—"
"Rise," I said. "You did mean. The world only moves when people mean."
"Can the Emperor forgive me?" she asked.
"The Emperor forgives as a man buys bread. There is no pity in him."
We set Matilda into a room and fed her, and we tended her as if we intended to harm her perversely.
"Why not punish her?" Hermione asked.
"Because a public humiliation will not break only a face," I said. "We want more than shame. We want a story of guilt that clings like tar."
"Then we make her fall again," Hermione said, eyes bright.
We watched Enoch squirm, and we watched officials whisper. The city's scribes scribbled. The hallways filled with side-glances like knives.
"Is this how we win?" Matilda asked me one night, voice small. "By being trampled?"
"Sometimes the trample is a lesson," I said. "Sometimes the trample hides a hand that lifts."
We fed her hope as a bait. "You will be tended under Hermione's wing," I told her, "and one day you will smile again."
"Thank you, Empress," she whispered, and she meant it like a child.
Weeks later, Hermione told me a secret. "I have been to the apothecary," she said. "I had some old medicine prepared. It is bitter. It is for the Empress Dowager."
My breath caught. "You would poison the Dowager?"
"Not poison," Hermione corrected. "A sickness that moves like sleep. If she grows ill, the court will be in panic. When people panic, men show their true hands."
"That will bring danger. The Dowager is a stone who can crush small things."
"True," Hermione said. "But it will also force Enoch's hands into the spotlight. If he calls the wrong man to action, if he protects his lovers and betrays his duties, he will be seen."
I listened. Her plan was dangerous in the most beautiful way. It would cast the Emperor either as savior or as culprit. It would set papers in order. It would create witnesses and faces that would not retract.
"Who will touch the cup?" I asked.
"Matilda," Hermione answered. "We will make it hers on paper."
My head spun. "You mean set her to carry the medicine? Make her the only one with access?"
Hermione nodded. "Yes. We will let her think she saves the Dowager, but in doing so she will be made the one who 'brought' the sickness."
"Then when the Dowager sputters and does not die, it will be Matilda's name on everyone's tongue," I said slowly. "And Enoch will have to choose whether to protect his lover or bow to the court."
"Exactly." Hermione tapped the table. "And when he chooses wrong, we will have his face."
I pressed my palms flat to the lacquer. "We must be careful. If the Dowager dies, we will be the mother of murder."
"She may not die," Hermione said. "We only need a faint that smells like poison."
We made the plan with the same calm as two women planning a harvest. We told Kayleigh and Luz Neal and two other maids. We told them in whispers, in the dark between the curtains. They will be our witnesses and our tools.
On the night we chose, the palace was a breathing animal. Torches scrawled shadows.
"Carry the cup," Hermione told Matilda in a voice like wind.
Matilda's face had a confusion that came from learning the first rules of being used. She took the cup with hands that trembled.
"Emperor," she said, and her voice shook, "This is for the Dowager."
Enoch took the cup as if it were a gift of simple fruit. He smiled at Matilda, then lifted his eyes to the Dowager, who watched from a seat like a cliff.
"To your health," he intoned. He raised the cup and then stopped, mid-movement, because Enoch loved to stop in the middle of things and see others wait.
The Dowager drank, a sip measured like a verdict. Her hand trembled. For a breath the room held itself.
The Dowager coughed. A dark color spread over her face like ink in water. Her attendants cried out. "She is ill!"
Matilda's lips were dry. "I didn't—" she tried to explain.
But the court had already made up a story. Men shouted. The physicians clustered, and their faces were thin knives. The strings of blame unfurled toward the girl who had carried the cup.
I did not expect Enoch to be so fast. He slapped Matilda with a face of controlled fury and saving, both mixed like bad paint.
"Get her," he said. "Take her away."
"My lord," Hermione whispered later, leaning to me only, "he will not save her. He distances himself so no one can importune him later."
I watched Enoch stand before the Dowager and issue orders, his voice precise. I watched him deliver proclamations that would later sound like self-justification.
In the days that followed, Matilda endured the court's knives. She pleaded her ignorance. She cried. Her body bore bruises not only from hands but from shame. People recorded the incident and handed papers to the officials.
"Poor child," whispered Kayleigh one night. "She looks broken."
"Good," I said flatly. "A broken thing cleans a stage."
It went as planned until it did not.
The Dowager's faint lingered and grew into weakness that doctors could not explain. People said poison. People said negligence. People said witchcraft.
Enoch's face hardened. "Find the spy," he ordered. "Find the traitor and I will break them."
The ministers straightened their backs. "It is the niece," said one brave man. "The one who brought the cup."
"She had access," said another. "She had motive to draw your favor."
Enoch looked at Hermione, and something moved in his eyes that I had seen all my life when a man is wondering which lie will buy him least trouble.
She folded her hands like an open fan. "My sister's daughter made a mistake," she said softly. "But I will take responsibility."
"No," I said immediately. "You will not."
He blinked at me, like a man whose map had been redrawn by a new coastline. "Giselle?"
"Matilda was used," I said. "You asked us to believe stories, and we do. But this is not her doing; it is a hand behind the curtain."
"Who?" Enoch demanded. He always demanded. It was his favorite pastime.
"You will find out when you look at those who smiled when the Dowager coughed," I answered.
That was true. The men who had been slow to help the Dowager were the men who stood to gain the most when Enoch looked weak.
As Matilda sat in the small cell the palace called a prison, she whispered, "I thought you helped me."
"I did," I said. "I helped you mean something to them. That is safer than being nothing."
She looked at me with the kind of child hurt that can navigate hope. "Will I die?"
"No," I said. "I will make sure you live a long, witnessed life."
"Why?" she asked. "You could have left me to rot."
"Because lives are useful," I said. "Because a life that is saved by hands like ours will remember who saved it."
We watched the court pick at its own scabs. Hermione gathered people around her as if she were a hearth. She fed Matilda, visited her, patted her hair gently. The servants whispered that she was tender. The court whispered that she was loyal. That was the first strand of our net.
Next, we fed the rumor-mill. We let conspirators overhear faux-quiet speeches about ancient medicines and about the way some servants had access to torches.
We placed letters where the right eyes would find them.
When the papers were read aloud in a council chamber, Enoch watched as the men who had supported him turned their heads toward him like dogs who smell a change in wind.
"What do you accuse me of?" he demanded at the council.
"Of protecting lovers over duty," said Javier Saleh, one of the leading ministers, his voice heavy. "Of making choices that favor private desire over the empire's laws."
"That is traitor talk," Enoch snapped.
"Traitors sometimes speak the truth," Javier said coolly. "We only call them traitors when the man in power refuses his duty."
Enoch's face was a mask of a man balancing on a blade.
"You will not make me—" he started.
"I will make you face witnesses," Javier said. "Let the palace speak."
The palace spoke. Witness after witness came forth: servants, courtiers, a priest who said he had heard whispered things at night. They told stories of Enoch's quiet visits, of appointed comforts, of haste and hesitation when the Dowager needed urgent attention.
Enoch's throat worked. He turned toward Hermione, pleading like a child. "You must say something."
She stood and looked at him like someone watching a play where a man finally drops his mask. "Your Majesty," she said quietly, "I loved a man who feared losing his pleasures more than he feared losing his throne."
The hall gasped. The ministers leaned forward. I watched Enoch's blush turn into something that looked dangerously like regret.
"Is this treachery?" he demanded. "Who will stand against me?"
"Those who stand for the crown," Javier said. "Not for the man who sits upon it."
Enoch cried out then, a sound I had never heard, the sound of someone who learns his rules are not absolute. "Do you mean to depose me?"
"Do you mean to make your lovers your throne?" Javier answered. "A man cannot be both a man and a law and then pretend which is which."
The court rose like a wave. Men who had whispered for years suddenly found courage when peers pushed them forward. They recited protocols, failures, nights when help came too late.
Enoch stumbled through his defenses. He denied and deflected. He cited loyalty and love and private counsel. He tried to make the arguments of a husband rather than an emperor, and there is no worse defense in a hall of officials.
When the hall demanded witnesses, I had prepared them, quietly, like laying down a trace of blood. Kayleigh stepped forward and narrated a pattern of unusual gifts, sudden appointments, and nights when Enoch would not leave the private gardens.
"Was the Dowager neglected?" she asked.
"Sometimes," Kayleigh said. "Sometimes the Emperor considered other comforts. Once, when the Dowager was in need, I saw a physician dismissed for a trifle while tears were wiped from a young face. I thought the household had simply 'given way' to human weakness. It seems now it was more."
The chamber boiled. Enoch lashed out. "You lie!" he shouted.
"I do not," Kayleigh replied coolly. "I only remember faces. And faces remember."
Hermione then spoke as if she had waited for the perfect moment. "If I am guilty of anything before this court," she said, "it is of loving in a world that forbids women love. But to stand as a queen and let a sick lady be abandoned to spectacle is not my way. I have cared for the Dowager when she required it."
Her voice held nothing but the truth she had chosen. Enoch's eyes darted, searching, failing.
"Is this a trap?" he hissed. "Who taught you to speak like a general?"
"Someone who did not want you to be safe from your own choices," I said, and I answered like a soldier.
That was how we began the exposure. It was not one thing but a hundred little things, like glass underfoot.
Enoch's protests fell like thin curtains. The ministers, once his shadows, now stood in light. The officials recorded minutes. They spoke of duty and the crown and the idea that a man must choose the throne over his appetites.
He tried to bargain. "I will step back on certain matters," he promised, voice small. "I will tender apologies. I will—"
"Apologies," Javier said with a cold smile, "are words. We need actions."
"What actions?" Enoch demanded. He looked humiliated and frightened, and the two together are a dangerous sight.
"You will relinquish some private prerogatives," Javier said. "You will forgo your private palaces without witness. You will grant the Dowager guardianship of the household. If you fail to comply, the council will recommend a regency until your judgment is clear."
Enoch faltered. "You cannot—"
The hall erupted. Men who had been quiet for years found their voice now, because once a court sees the possibility of a lesser tyrant, they will not let him regain absolute rule.
The punishment was slow and public. It was a guillotine of protocol rather than iron. But Enoch felt every cut.
"Arrest the man who sold the medicine," he demanded, frantic. "Find the witch who taught the girls."
The crowd cheered him like a drowning man screaming for help. It was a child's plea.
When the first arrest was made, the man was dragged in at dawn, bound and sweating. He was a merchant who had little to do with the Dowager but had sold herbs and tinctures to many. He denied knowledge. He kept saying he sold jars and spoons and nothing more. When Lydia Neal, one of the physician's apprentices, testified that the sachet matched a batch sold to a palace woman, the merchant's face went white.
"Who gave you the orders?" Javier asked. "Name names."
The merchant stared straight at Enoch and then at Hermione. His eyes slid like fish.
"They said it was a way to make the Dowager sleep," he said. "They said the Empress wanted it to seem like a faint. The lady who bought it said she was 'testing a theory.'"
"Which lady?" Javier asked.
Matilda's name trembled in the air for a moment; then the merchant's lips moved.
"The girl who served the cup," he said. "The niece."
Matilda's body stiffened like a reed. "I did not. I only held it."
"You lied to him," Kayleigh said. "You lied to save yourself."
Matilda's face cupped shame. "I lied because they taught me to lie."
The merchant was dragged away. Men shook their heads. The court's eyes had begun to look at the Emperor differently.
Enoch's punishment in those weeks was not a single dramatic act. It was humiliation stitched into months. He lost face before the officials. The regents' men took control of certain palace matters. He was told to spend his days visibly in the public apartments, while hermits of protocol watched his every move.
He tried to storm out, to flail and roar, but more and more he found his options clipped by cold policy decisions. Men who had once flattered him wore their duty on their faces and demanded accountings. He was forced to sign documents that limited his private authority and to bring his beloved to public audiences where she might be recognized as a guest, not a consort.
That was not enough for the crowd. They wanted spectacle. They wanted to see the man who had so easily used others be brought low. We had planned a public scene. We had planned something to force his face to break.
It occurred in the main hall on a morning when the sun poured like a slow coin through the high windows. The ministers assembled, the public was allowed in the galleries, and the Dowager, frail but upright, sat in a chair elevated so everyone could see.
"Let all speak," Javier said, and the document began to be read aloud that accused Enoch of negligence.
Enoch rose. "This is a politicized attack," he declared.
"Then answer to it," Javier said. "You summoned witnesses. We will hear them."
First they read the timeline of the Dowager's illness. They called the merchants. They called physicians. They called Kayleigh and Luz Neal. All painted the same picture: the Dowager had been left, treatments were delayed in favor of private comforts, a cup was served by a girl who had been coached to be in the right place at the right time.
Enoch's head thudded like a man whose helmet had been pried off. He looked around for an ally.
Then they called Hermione.
She rose slowly. The gallery was a sea of eyes. "Your Majesty," she said to Enoch, speaking plainly so all could hear, "you loved. You loved as a man starved for comfort loves. You did not put aside your comfort for the crown when the crown required it. You kept private favors and let a woman fall sick."
He laughed then, a brittle sound. "This is treason in character!"
"This is the chamber giving testimony," Javier answered. "We all have character. Some of us choose to hide ours in private rooms. We call for actions, not words."
Hermione's voice changed. "I had planned, with Giselle's agreement, to reveal this man not by killing him but by showing his choices. He has always been a man who believed himself untouchable. I wanted him to feel what it is to be watched."
The hall went quiet. Enoch's color drained. "You set me up," he said.
"Did I?" Hermione's smile was soft. "Or did you show me, in decades of small choices, how to be found out?"
He staggered. "You use a girl's shame and make me—"
"Yes," she said. "I used a girl's shame to show you."
That is when Enoch's face broke not into the bravado of an emperor but into the human thing beneath: the man who feared he had lost his place.
"Do you ask me to kneel?" he croaked.
"Not yet," Javier said. "We ask for accountability. We ask that you submit to a regency until the Dowager's health returns and your judgment is tested."
The ministers nodded. Men who had been his supporters before looked at him as if they were seeing a child's mischief finally examined. They would not declare him a tyrant outright; they would strip him of fruit slowly.
Enoch could not even plead properly. He kept asking what he had done wrong.
"You protected pleasure," Javier said. "You put private favors before public health."
The public punishment was not chains, but the slow, public reduction of privileges. He had to resign morning audiences. He had to yield certain seals. He had to let accountable men enter his private apartments. He was made to read aloud, in the hall, the items that were taken from his control.
When the final document was read, it was simple and clear. "By consensus of the council, and in the interest of the crown, Emperor Enoch Willis will be limited from exercising private prerogatives over the imperial household until further notice. All private appointments made within the last three years are subject to review. The Dowager will be given guardianship of certain household functions. The Emperor will make public the list of gifts he has bestowed on parties within the palace in the last year."
The gasp in the hall sounded like wind across bones. Enoch went as still as a man in a storm.
"What proof do you have?" he managed.
"Enough," Javier said. "Enough for the council. Enough for the people."
Enoch's face began to unfurl like paper. He went through the stages I had seen villains go through in plays: denial, anger, bargaining, delusion, collapse. He denied. He then tried to bargain by offering small changes. When that failed he begged, and finally he tried to create theater.
"If you strip me like this," he said, voice high and thin, "what will you have? A dead throne? A house of men who betray one another?"
"You will have a crown with law," Javier said coldly. "We will have a future."
Men in the galleries shouted approval. Women wept quietly; they had been waiting years to see a man like Enoch unmasked. It was not blood, but it was worse: it was a man who had to watch his power erased by ceremony.
When the council voted, the sound of the gavels was final. Enoch sank into his seat like a man folded: not broken by force, but by rules.
Later, after the council's decisions were published, after the men lowered their banners and the palace smelled for a day like fresh ink, there was another scene that overstepped even my plans.
Enoch walked the corridors like a wounded animal, and he came upon Matilda. She had been given little freedom, but she was washing a basin when he snapped at her.
"Why did you lie?" he spat.
She looked up, small and raw. "I did not mean to," she whispered. "They taught me to do so."
"Who taught you?" he demanded.
"I was told to carry the cup," she said. "I was told to serve with humility. I did."
He was then as far as any man can be from the throne: furious, humiliated, pleading, and in that mix he lashed out again.
"You will be punished," he said.
Matilda's face went blank. I stood near the archway and stepped forward.
"Stop," I said.
He snapped at me, "You set this in motion!"
"I set a stage," I said. "I wanted a mirror, and the mirror has shown so many faces. Your face has fractures."
He laughed without mirth. "So now you crow, Empress?"
"I watched you choose comfort over duty," I said. "I have watched you for years. You did this yourself."
He lunged as if to slap me, and the servants cried out. Before his hand reached my cheek, guards came and caught him by the arms. There is a strange poetry to being held when you imagine you are more free than you are.
They dragged him to the council where the men who had once bowed to his will read him his sins. The humiliation was public and sharp. He went through the motions: denial, denial, bargain, a plea of forgiveness.
The crowd watched as the man who had ordered my death in his careless game of state fretted like a wounded animal. "You must forgive me," he begged at one point.
"No," Hermione said quietly. "Forgiveness is a gift you never offered."
There was a time when I would have understood the emptiness of such a thing. But now I saw the advantage of drawing people's faces in the light.
By the time the council was done, Enoch's honors were pared down. He was left with a title and with the memory of being watched. He had no blood painted upon him in the way a mob demands, but his dignity was the part of manhood that matters to courtiers.
He went from a man whose every whim had been indulged to a man who had to ask permission to see his favorite rooms. He had to make his appointments in public lists.
Shells like that can feel cruel, but the court applauded. Witnesses clapped. People took out small papers and made notes. The servants who had once flattered him now kept distance.
That was not enough for some.
A few months later, in the great festival when the city celebrated the harvest and the Emperor had been allowed to officiate in public once more, there was another scene.
I had prepared for it. I had seen the way men behave when given a stage. I had placed witnesses in the gallery, had written letters to the provincial leaders so that some would be in the crowd. I had made sure certain faces would watch.
When Enoch walked onto the dais that morning, his face was learned kindness. He bowled forward with a speech about restoration and duty.
"You have my pledge," he said, and the crowd murmured.
Then Hermione stepped forward and did what no one expected her to do. "Your Majesty," she said, "will you show the people honesty?"
He blinked, puzzled, because in a hall such a question was a sword.
"Show them what?"
"Show them the list of gifts you gave in private − names and amounts," she said. "Show them where you put your favors so that we may see whether they were meant for the crown or for your appetites."
He hesitated. "That is a private record."
"Or it is a public ledger we had the right to see," she replied.
There was a shriek of sound in the gallery, like birds unsettled. Enoch's face went red and then white. "You defy me," he said.
"No," she said. "I ask you to prove you are not a man who hid hands."
There was a pause like a held breath, and then he collapsed under his own inability to find the answer. The crowd erupted. They demanded proof. They demanded names.
He could not stand before the tribunal of the public. He fumbled through his papers and then finally with a shaking hand produced the list. To the room's surprise, many names listed earlier times and small gifts. But hidden in the scribbles were larger entries assigned to a variety of people, some of whom had been promoted and now sat in the council.
People jeered. "Why was this hidden?" they asked. "Why so private?"
There was no easy answer.
The festival ended in a cacophony of chants demanding reform. Enoch stood there, a man paler and smaller than I had ever seen him. He had been punished by law and by spectacle. The council had limited his power, the ministers had turned their backs, and the public had watched his favors become an accounting.
The city had its joy. For me and Hermione, the point was not to kill but to show.
"Do you regret it?" Matilda asked me once, her voice thin, when the crowd's murmurs had died.
"I regret that young things must be used," I said. "I regret that the world is such that we had to make drama to teach a man. But I do not regret that he learned what it is to be seen."
She looked at Hermione and then at me. "And the Dowager?"
"She recovered," Hermione said. "Because the physicians did what physicians do when given permission. Because once the court acted the right way, the house righted itself."
"Was it worth it?" Matilda asked again.
"It was," I said simply. "We did not murder. We showed the pattern. We took away the private darkness he used like a cloak."
There is a quiet that comes after the storm. The palace adjusted. Men grew more careful. Enoch found solace in smaller pleasures, but visibly less. He kept the public as a mirror and learned to perform on it.
As for Hermione, she looked at me one evening as the moon slid across the curtain. "You have not forgiven me, have you?"
"No," I answered. "I have not. But I can keep you at my side."
She reached for my hand and held it as if it were proof two people could still share a secret that was not death.
"Do you think we are heroes now?" she asked.
"No," I said. "We are survivors who made a show."
She laughed, small. "Then I will take that."
The palace settled into a new rhythm. Matilda, rehabilitated, learned the palace rules properly and became careful in her steps. She never forgot the taste of the cup.
Enoch, stripped slowly of small prerogatives, survived. Publicly he learned to look and to be seen. Privately he grew angrier in ways we could not all control, but the law was between him and his impulses.
There remained one last act, the one that would close the circle and give the story a bookend.
One night, in my private chamber, I opened a small tin. It had been the first tool in that final dance: the lipstick tin that had once been used to smear poison on my lips. It was empty now.
"You kept this," Hermione said, surprised.
"I kept what I knew," I answered.
She looked at me like a woman who had spent years learning which pleasures were dangerous. "Will you ever use it again?"
"No." I closed the tin. "It is a relic. A reminder of how close we came to being the dead we once were."
She nodded and then said, softly, "When they tell this story in a hundred years, they might call us monsters."
"Maybe," I said. "Or they might call us survivors with sharper teeth."
She squeezed my hand and then, before the candle burned out, whispered, "You once kissed me with poison."
"I did," I said.
"And I kissed you back without fear," she said.
We both smiled. The handkerchief on my dressing table had a faint red stain from long ago. I wrapped it around the tin and put it in the drawer, a small thing to remember by.
Outside, the palace slept. Inside, in a room lit only by the moon, two women who had once died and come back put their mouths to each other without hiding anything. It was not about love or revenge alone. It was about proof. Proof that a woman could choose for herself and that the world could be made to look at the man who had thought himself unseen.
"Do you think he'll try to take back the things we took?" Hermione asked at last.
"Perhaps," I said. "But every time he moves, there will be witnesses."
She laughed softly. "Then we have done well."
We turned the light out.
The End
— Thank you for reading —