Revenge16 min read
"I Married the Sleeping General — and Everything Burned"
ButterPicks13 views
"My sister will not go."
Eaton Foster's voice hummed across the council hall.
"You think I don't know that?" I said. "Then I will go."
He blinked. "You— you would marry him?"
"I will," I said. "I, Genesis Cordova, will marry Cullen Bradley."
The hall held its breath. The ministerial eyes on me were knives. My father's face was a storm frozen into a mask.
Eaton took a step forward, then halted as if someone had struck him. "Princess— Genesis— you cannot mean it. The general is—"
"Comatose," I finished for him.
Eaton's mouth pressed into a line. "Then you will be a widow before the first dawn. Why—"
"Because Kinsley would not," I said.
"But you swore yourself to—"
"That was a child’s vow," I told him. "Let the law of crown and duty take care of vows."
Kinsley ran after me then, breathless and bright like someone who believed the world stayed friendly by default.
"Genesis, wait," she panted. "You can't! Cullen's still—"
"—still asleep," I repeated. "So notice how decisive my choice is."
She looked at me with that small, open face. "But you always said you would only—"
"My heart was a child's chest," I said softly. "Enough about my heart. Are you willing to take my place?"
Kinsley frowned. "You said you loved Eaton."
"Was," I said. "Is not."
Eaton stood there, cheeks flushing a color that wore him like an accusation.
"Are you really doing this?" he asked.
"Yes." I smiled, the smile of someone closing a deal.
"Then may your marriage be prosperous," he said, throat tight.
"I hope it will," I answered.
I am Genesis Cordova, daughter of the deposed consort. I grew up gilded and resented, loved and betrayed. My mother’s fall was my lesson—beauty and bedchambers can flame into ruin. I learned to read homage like a ledger and loyalty like a coin. I learned to bargain with pieces of myself.
My aunt, Empress Adriana Bianchi, softened her voice for me sometimes. She liked to press a hand to my head and coo about fate. She was good at appearing tender where it suited her most. The rest of the court learned to treat me like a joke and the people who laughed grew sure of their place.
Cullen Bradley had bled for the border until the horizon ran red. The enemy left him a body that would not wake. The emperor, Emmett Russo—my father—wanted to tie the general's loyalty to the throne with something that bound him, even if it bound someone else. He wanted Kinsley married; Eaton argued like a river but the court swayed. So I stepped forward. It was the simplest way to close the mouth of any insolence.
The wedding — ten miles of red, lanterns smothering the night — became a parade of things I had wanted and never tasted that were real. I opened my dowry chest and prowled the spoils like a merchant who had finally earned coin. Eaton stood nearby in an offended blush; he was part scholar, part weather, warm and too honest to be cruel. "You love Kinsley," I said to evoke him, to watch the muscle at his jaw tighten.
"Is that a jest?" he asked.
"Not tonight," I said.
They bore me to the bed chamber. Cullen lay there pale and distant. The veil masked him and his breath was shallow. The rooms hummed with whispers.
"She will be a widow the day after," said a whisper.
"A palace full of women always sleeps a little ready," another voice answered. I removed my veil, sat on the mattress, and looked at the man I had married.
He sweated. His brow was furrowed. I reached for a handkerchief and dipped it in wine to cool his skin. His fingers closed on my wrist like a trap.
"No— no," he muttered, voice broken. He rocked once, then cleared his throat like a man dragging a sword out of a wound.
"Have I married?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, because the truth was a useful thing.
"Cullen?" a far-off voice said. "Is that you?"
He stared at me, eyes tumbling like dice finding fate. "Genesis?"
"Kinsley was not the bride," I told him with a small laugh. "Surprised?"
"I married—?" He stopped, the question halfway down his throat.
"Me," I said.
For a man who had nearly died on the earth, he grew a will as green and sudden as spring. The next morning he sat up. The third day he walked with a cane. The fifth day he pretended to limp but his right foot was already beating time. He is a stubborn kind of courage, a thing that made him lovable to thousands and dangerous when his heart chose.
Word spread: the general had woken because the princess had married him. People adored stories. They needed stories. The border calmed; the enemy tasted fatigue and saw a different plot. The city began to shine again. I tasted a kind of triumph.
But the palace is a knot of schemes. Eaton preached at me with a softness that made me prick. "You made him wake," he said in court.
"I made him owe something to the throne," I answered. "Sometimes we trade souls with those we cannot trust."
"You promised…" Eaton's words fell away.
"What did I promise?" I asked.
He looked at me, pure and ironic. "Your heart."
I offered him a laugh and pushed him away. He loved Kinsley and that was a knot I couldn't untie without burning wood.
Cullen watched me then with a hard warmth. "Why did you wed me?" he asked one night when lantern light made his face a sculpture of dusk.
"Because Kinsley would not," I answered.
"And you called me poor and foolish."
"I called you honest," I replied.
He poured tea and crushed the cup with trembling fingers, hiding the way he feared being small.
"You asked me for three things," he said. "You forced me to promise a thing to the emperor."
"Have I lied?" I asked.
"You asked me to find money," Cullen said. "Ten thousand, then a hundred thousand. You asked me for other vows. I have kept my word."
"You did," I said, and let the silence fill the room with its heavy coin.
We were a joke to the court at first — the widow and the general who woke. But sometimes jokes make the house they live in burn.
Flynn Luo was the brutish man the house bought as muscle. He had scars across his face like a map of storms. He moved like a shadow and smelled faintly of soap pods and cold water. He had rescued me once from the river when the lantern festival made me laugh and the water opened its mouth. He had left before I could thank him. Years later, he came to the palace as a servant, two scars stitched to his cheek and something else hidden inside him.
Eaton adored Kinsley with the dull, steady hunger of scholars who become men. Kinsley — my sister — loved sometimes like a child presses a flower into the palm of a person she thinks is kind. She loved who she loved and her love was small and fierce and bright and ruinously honest.
Then the court's true poison began to show. The emperor's only son, Brad Bray, the prince— he schemed and he saw a path through Kinsley into power. He wanted to use marriage like a plow. He wanted to sell Kinsley as a piece of land and stand a throne atop it. Empress Adriana, my aunt, who had once pressed me to her with sugared words, wanted the same things in a way that shone with silk. Brad loved status. Adriana loved the reflection of her power.
They did not love my sister. They loved the shape of what she might yield.
I watched them. I learned.
I started to play a game as simple as a child moving a marble across tile. I bought favors. I made small lies bloom into stories. I slid Flynn closer to Kinsley like a hand at the corner of a chessboard and watched where people looked. I sent notes folded in red leaves to Kinsley, and left a trail the prince could taste.
Kinsley trusted everyone.
"Genesis," she said one afternoon in a garden, voice like a bell, "do you think Eaton will ever court me properly?"
"You mean, marry you because he loves you?" I asked.
She looked at me with faith. "I think he might."
"He will," I answered. "When he's sure you love him enough."
She laughed and reached for my sleeve.
But some stones were set and some traps were already laid.
At a court banquet meant to celebrate a treaty, the envoy spoke words about marriage to bind nations. The emperor, drunk and quick to want a sunrise story, murmured contracts and promises. Suddenly everything stood still — the idea of sending a princess in marriage to the foreign land was cast into the room like a hook.
Kinsley froze white.
"Is this your wish?" the prince asked the emperor, and the emperor gurgled like a man who'd swallowed a curse.
On the day that slick thing happened, I left the hall humored, and I found Eaton in the garden.
"Do you know?" he asked, blunt and cornered.
"No," I lied.
"Genesis—"
"You think I schemed," I said. "Maybe I did. Does it matter whether I pulled the strings or he walked into them?"
He looked at me and saw through something for a second, like a fisherman seeing a net. "You are cruel."
"You are young," I told him.
He smiled, the kind of thing that used to make me ache. "You are cruel to the wrong person."
The punishment we set by accident became a trap.
The prince and Empress Adriana conspired. Someone drugged Kinsley to make her appear unfit. Someone put a clumsy man in a bed with her. Rumors flew like swans. The city bloomed with talking mouths.
Finally everything erupted.
I came to the rooms where Kinsley lay, groggy and pale, and found the prince there, composed and hungry like a fox, and Eaton nearby like a priest. Kinsley clutched at air. The prince laughed in corners of his mouth.
I walked through the open door, and the scene unrolled in a theatre of light.
"This is a play," the prince said, calm. "Is it not amusing, Princess? The tragedies of youth?"
"Cut it out," I said. "Enough."
He smiled as if he had a match and a lantern. "You have curated this, haven't you? You like to slide marbles."
"Did I order this?" I asked again.
"Not necessary to order when the currents move for you," he said.
Eaton stepped forward then and gripped my arm. "Genesis, do not—"
"Let him speak," I said.
"I did it for power," the prince said, as if the court were a ledger to be balanced. "And to keep the throne safe. I am ambitious, yes."
"Ambition," I said, tasting the word. "Ambition never apologizes."
Eaton looked like he was going to say something he shouldn't have. Kinsley sat up and blinked and saw the man and began to cry.
I left the room, and the world moved like a great wheel. I went to my father. I took from my mother's chest a blood-stained page—the last letter my mother wrote with a trembling hand, full of curses and hope and the clear ink of a woman who had been betrayed. I held it out to Father.
"You are being poisoned," I told him, blunt as a knife. "They are trying to turn your court into a stage. They have been poisoning the house. Your medicines have been tampered with."
He looked at me and for the first time in years his face went all heat and cold at once.
"Who?" he asked.
"You are tired," I lied. "You are sick with deceit. The empire is rotting. They will trade daughters to save their skin."
He reached for the cup of wine on the table. I watched him.
"Don't," I said. "Taste it."
He smiled like a man who had settled an old math and took the cup anyway. He drank, and then he coughed. The physician paled as if seeing a ghost.
They found the drug. The court shuddered.
Then I did what had been my plan all along: I moved, and the board flipped.
I arranged a public hearing in the great hall. The courtiers came like moths. Eaton came. Kinsley sat hollowed. Flynn stood with his hands folded behind, the scent of soap pods clinging to him like a secret.
My father lay back like a man waiting for a verdict. The emperor's pulse dipped; he spoke but his words fuzzed like a distant bell.
"Bring in the accused," I said.
The doors opened and the prince walked in with a face like a fox in prey. Empress Adriana followed, wearing her silver smile like armor. They had all thought themselves safe.
They were not.
I placed the blood-written page on the long table and let it breathe beneath the polished lamps. I had made a copy for the hall, a scroll painted with the truth in ink that could not be erased.
"This is my mother's hand," I said. "She wrote of a plot. She wrote of medicine stolen and of certain vials switched. She wrote names."
The prince's face went pale and then burned.
"You accuse the prince," he spat. "You accuse my mother."
"No," I said. "I accuse two. I accuse the pair who manipulated you."
The Empress's smile tightened.
"You are mad," she said.
"Am I?" I answered. "Or am I the only one who knows how to hold a mirror to a king?"
I had arranged witnesses, and servants had been paid, and a physician had been bought early. The hall watched as we called the physician forward. He knelt on the floor like a frightened thing and recited what he had seen: a syringe, a bottle, the pills with the blackened veins. He said the names he had been threatened to sleep on. He named a midwife forced to lie, named men who had slipped poison into cups.
"Adriana Bianchi," I said, my voice like the crack of flint. "Brad Bray."
The prince's face convulsed. "You lie."
Then the Empress's hands trembled. She turned her face away. "This is slander," she whispered. "You want the throne."
"I want what is clean," I said. "I want the truth. I want my mother's name cleared."
"Your mother was—"
"Dead. Yes. Murdered," I said. "And for fifteen years you wrapped it in excuses."
The crowd shifted. Murmurs rose like a field of reeds. The men who had wanted me laughed at their dinner, and then they saw the governor's face grow slack. Women clapped hands to mouths. Some smiled thinly and began to take out their phones—no—palace scribes pulled out their notes, the modern courtiers cataloguing every word.
I had expected the prince to rage. Instead he did something worse: he tried to bargain.
"Emperor," he said. "We have served the throne—"
"Enough." My father, whose throne had always been a hotbed of cowardice and charm, spoke so soft his voice thinned. "Enough."
He staggered off the bench. Someone slipped a hand under his arm and helped him. He looked at me with a grief that made him small.
"How long did you know?" he asked.
"Long enough," I answered.
Then I ordered the punishment to begin.
I had not intended to let men die in blood that day. I intended to break them publicly, and I designed the breaking as a spectacle of justice.
"Brad Bray," I said. "You will be stripped of rank and title. You will be bound and paraded through the outer gates. Each city that receives a tax from the crown will watch you pass. You will carry a placard of your crime: traitor and poisoner. When you reach the marketplace of the capital, you will be turned from the gate. Merchants will refuse your coins. Your name will be taken from the official records. Guards will not salute you. You will kneel on salt for a full day and night. If you speak, you will be gagged. If you weep, you will be laughed at. If you bargain, your bones shall be considered. Finally, you will be put to public disgrace in the great square with a bell rung for every crime."
His face moved from arrogance to confusion to a brittle terror.
"Empress Adriana," I said. "You will be stripped of your title and the jewels you wore will be melted into metal for the hospitals. You will stand with him and confess the plots you engineered. The women of the court whom you harmed will name you. Your hair will be cut. You will be led through the same streets with the same signs. You will be given a sack to carry—one filled with the things you took from women who trusted you."
The Empress sagged like a curtain. She tried to stare at me with rank and command, but the grip of shame finished the gesture.
They wanted to bargain. They offered money, pleading words, conspirators to scapegoat. They tried to turn the halls into a market stall.
I did not relent.
The punishment began two days later in the great square. The weather was cold and pale. The city filled with people who made a feast of their curiosity. Market hawkers sold pastries and news. Monks walked by and inclined their heads. Every voice in the city chattered like birds.
Brad Bray was brought out in chains. He wore the robe of the prince but it had been cut down into a humbling strip of fabric. His hands bled at the cuffs. Empress Adriana came after, her silver hair shorn and her crown removed, carrying a cloth sack. She walked like a woman who had been taught every step of failure.
I stood on the palace balcony with men and women of the court below. Flynn stood silent under my feet. Eaton stood with his hands folded. Kinsley had come, eyes hollow and gone small, and she clutched a folded paper—my mother’s poem on a red leaf. She seemed older and younger than anyone I had ever seen.
"Speak!" shouted a merchant who had lost a son to the schemes of the court.
"Tell us your end!" cried a mother with a child on her hip.
The prince first tried to speak. "You have made a mockery—" he began.
Then he saw the faces in the crowd. He saw a woman he had humiliated clutching a handkerchief. He saw a soldier who'd lost pay to the empress's plots. He saw a child pointing.
The prince's voice broke. "I—" he started, then collapsed into denial.
Adriana tried to hold herself erect and instead her knees gave. The crowd hissed. Someone in the throng spat. Another laughed.
"You lied," I said into the hush. "You thought the throne was a garment. It is a skin. You tried to flay it for your comfort."
Brad Bray's mouth moved through the sequence of a man who had never been refused. His expression passed through stages. First there was swagger. Then fright, the kind of cold-faced change that came when a man sees his house burning. Then denial. "I did it for safety," he snapped. "I loved—"
"Love?" a woman in the crowd mocked. "You loved coin!"
He trembled. "I was protecting the realm."
"You protected your belly," I said.
He barked then, "You will regret this!"
"Regret will come free," I replied. "You traded your honor for a plan you could not keep."
He lurched forward and lunged toward a man who taunted him. Guards yanked him back, and his laugh was like someone cutting in water.
Adriana's face collapsed into confession. Her voice faltered as she mouthed apologies that were too late.
"Forgive me," she whispered.
The crowd answered with a swell of noise that sounded like applause and a pack of dogs baying. Some called for blood, some for mercy. Children pointed. Scribes scribbled. Someone photographed the moment despite the palace's ancient laws.
Then Brad Bray begged, and his begging was a spectacle. First he demanded everyone remember him as a prince. Then he begged to go home. Then he tried to bargain his shame for a few coins. A woman spit in his face and the sound echoed like a bell. He staggered, then broke into silence and sobbed. He had become small—an animal flattened by a boot.
Adriana, too, went through the stages. Her first reaction was anger—anger like a rooster. Then she tried to deny; she played the queen. When those failed she accused me of cruelty. When that ruse collapsed she clawed at memory for allies. When she couldn't find any she finally showed the last act: a woman who offered up the truth because there was nothing left to keep.
She fell to her knees before the mob in a performance that was not entirely feigned. "I took a wrong road," she said. "I am sorry."
The crowd spat. The children laughed. Someone struck her with a loaf of bread. The bread was soft but heavy as humiliation. She watched the faces, and then she bowed lower and lower until she was broken.
Later they placed a placard on Brad Bray's chest listing his crimes. People took pictures with it like they took pictures on festival days. They threw rotten fruit. Someone played the old game and lifted his crown into a fish-tank and let cold water claim it.
The punishments were not exact executions, but they were complete: the prince's records were stripped; his servants were dismissed; the merchant guild made public notices forbidding trade with any house that would harbor him. Adriana's jewelry was melted for the poor. The midwives she had used were called forth and pardoned. The court's laughter turned against those who had once laughed at me.
Brad Bray's emotions were a pageant. He went from arrogance to denial to pleading to humiliation to a hollow rage that made him suddenly small and hideous. The crowd felt it as a moral feast. Some perched on walls and recorded. Others slapped him with words until he could not find a voice.
Adriana's change was slower. She first attempted authority, then contempt, then hurt, then bargaining and finally collapse. She moved in the same arc as her husband-to-dramatic-ends. People clucked at her like hens. Some spat. Some cried. I watched the process with a coldness that felt like a scalpel.
I had wanted them unmasked, not destroyed. But the crowd wants to see justice worn like a mask and then snap. When it snaps, a man shows the hollow of himself and the people roar.
After that day, the palace smelled of smoke and of things swept under rugs. Brad Bray was escorted away under guard with signs of disgrace. Adriana lost everything she had paraded. My father's sickness became clearer; his breath thinned. He sat in a chair and watched us with eyes that had been only half there until then.
"Why did you do it?" Eaton asked me in a whisper later when the square had emptied and nothing remained but footprints and marks and the smell of bread.
"Because sometimes you must cut a rotten limb to save the tree," I said. "Because they killed my mother. Because I wanted the court to remember that when you betray a woman, you may not get away with it."
"You will be hated," Eaton said, looking at me like a man who had seen frost on very green leaves.
"Then let them hate me," I replied. "I did not expect affection in my life."
The emperor's days lowered like rain. He clutched at the edge of life by the time his hand was steady with nothing left to steady. In his last moments he forgave and he told me to be the thing he feared: a ruler who took what must be taken and paid the fee of loneliness.
"It is my worst fear," he said once when the breathing machines hummed. "A woman who will climb."
"I will climb, Father," I answered. "I will climb alone if I must."
He smiled as if a man seeing a thing he had planned all his life. He died in my arms with a small laugh that tasted of iron and regret.
After the funeral rites, the scrolls were written. The world turned like a puppet thread.
I became the heiress in a way that sat like a heavy jewel on my breast. The empire had always been a theater and suddenly I was behind the curtains holding the ropes.
Flynn stayed by me, his soap-pod scent a small comfort in the nights when my sheets were cold as marble. Eaton came sometimes and sat on the chairs, and we argued about the next fresh wound the palace would show. Kinsley left with Eaton to a home in the countryside where the grass was simple and not hungry for titles.
Cullen signed the papers of separation with a red hand. He wept like a man who had loved a story and lost a plot. He left his sword with Flynn and kissed my brow in a way that was not lover's but brother's.
One month after the public disgrace, the convicted prince was exiled to a cold place beyond our borders. Empress Adriana was given a small cell in a convent where she would sit and fold cloth and learn the humility of lack. People called it justice. Some called it final and many declared me merciless.
But there was one scene no one expected. The city had not forgiven easily.
At the very end, when the inkless night and the bitter rain soaked the streets, a rumor spread that Brad Bray had attempted to escape and had been beaten by the exiled guards. The rumor bloomed into songs. People began to sing my name in shrugs and fear.
I stood on the palace balcony again and held the yellow cloth box I had thrown my last care into that held my mother's things. I watched smoke drift across the horizon. The red-leaf poem Kinsley had kept was folded inside my bosom. Flynn's scarred face stood behind, lit by the lamp like a sentinel.
Eaton came up beside me. "Do you regret nothing?" he asked.
I thought of my mother, of the blood that had written the truth, of the yellow cloth I had put away in a tiny box and then later burned.
"No," I said at last. "I regret the softness I used to have."
He turned to me with a look like a question.
"What about love?" he asked.
I sank into the final thing I would do. I pulled my hand from his and took the box, and opening it I slid one thing out — the blood-streaked page, the red-leaf poem etched in a child's hand— and I set it on the balcony rail.
"Love," I said slowly, "is a thing you can bargain with or throw away. I chose the throne."
He nodded as if he had expected that answer, and then he smiled the tragic smile of men who know the facts and cannot tear themselves free.
In the end, I took the throne with a laugh like sharp glass. My coronation was a small, quiet thing in a world where so many dramas still thrummed. I would never be forgiven by everyone. I did not expect to be. But somewhere in the quiet of the palace, the scent of soap pods would remind me of Flynn's steady breath. The yellow cloth that had been my mother's last bright foolish thing would remain in a small drawer, kept like a coin that could buy nothing but memory.
And when late at night I would stand on the balcony and the city would be a scatter of lights, I would pick up the red-leaf poem and read it silently.
"鹅儿唼啑栀黄觜, 凤子轻盈腻粉腰," I would whisper to the wind, the nursery rhyme that meant nothing and everything.
Outside, the bells would chime for another day. Inside, my hands would close on the box.
"I married the general because Kinsley would not," I would say to myself in the dark, and the words would taste no sweeter than iron. But they were mine.
The End
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