Revenge16 min read
I traded a decade of my friend's love for one man — and the world followed
ButterPicks15 views
I never meant to marry a beggar.
"I will," I said in the incense-smoke light, "trade my lady's ten years of singleness for one man with eight-pack abs, pleasant voice, total devotion, no concubines, who does the housework, answers every need, vows only me, will help me seize power and even cut down an emperor if needed."
"A bold prayer," Ainsley Santos whispered, hands folded so her bracelets chimed like small bells. "And you? What do you really want, Daniela?"
"I want marriage," I said. "Not because my heart is soft, but because I need an excuse to go on a pilgrimage without my real face. I have work to do."
The little Buddha statue at the temple looked like a drunk man who had decided to sit cross-legged forever. That night, I dreamed the small god crossed his legs the other way and grinned. "Granted," he said, lighting a cigarette that smelled faintly of ash and mischief.
The next day the embroidered tossing ball—Ainsley’s token of fate—went flying through the air and struck a ragged man sweeping the market lane. He blinked at the embroidered sphere, then at the crowd. He was the kind of man who looked like the road had made him sharp: scars and lean muscles; a voice that came rough and warm.
My lord father discovered the hit and nearly pulled his own rafters down in fury. My lady’s mother wept as if the world itself were ending.
"Stop," I said. "I'll marry him."
My words scattered through the hall like coins. The household steward plopped down a small gilded plate as if to say, 'Thank you, Daniela.' Ainsley's fingers closed over the plate.
"I will," Ainsley said.
"You will what?" I asked, truly baffled.
She hugged the plate to her chest like it was her own beating heart. "Give me the money. I will marry the beggar."
I learned then how sharp the coin's promise could be. Holding a chunk of gold in the palm became a new kind of high: heavy, warm, real. It made Ainsley bright. It made her reckless. It made me curious.
"You're generous," I told her later as we stood beneath the eaves while servants argued and my father raged and my mother tried to hide in silk. "And selfish in the prettiest way."
Ainsley laughed and stepped back into the bustle with her new husband-to-be. I stayed, the stares like small knives.
The beggar's name was Gavin Sandberg. He swept his own floor, he cooked, he sang while he worked. He had a way of making a bowl of watered rice seem like the best thing that ever happened. He had broad shoulders, and when he spoke to me the first night in the little mud hut that became our home, his voice made my ribs want to rearrange.
"You eaten?" he asked.
I handed him a bowl. "Have you?"
He brushed his hand over mine as he took the bowl. The gesture was domestic, almost plain. "You are my wife now," he said. "No looking at other men. You mind the house. I will go find food."
I blinked. "You don't waste time proposing flowery nonsense."
He smiled. "I am a beggar. I have no time for it."
That night he stroked the bandage at his side. He had a long scar, pale and jagged, running across his ribs like someone had tried to write a secret on him.
"When did you get hurt?" I asked, curious in the way a hand pokes at a bruise.
"Stone," he said. "Tripped. Fell."
"Who trips on purpose?" I asked, but my voice had a softness that surprised me.
He bumped my shoulder. "You'd be surprised."
We were married by arrangement: Ainsley’s toss, my substitution. I took the cloth and the ring and left Ainsley's manifold jewels behind. I took the life that allowed me to bury a different face under a cheap hood and carry hidden knives inside my skirts.
"You're a real catch," Colin Floyd, my father's favored son, said when he barreled into the cottage, cheeks flushed. "You were supposed to be married to the right kind of man."
"I already married the right kind of man," I said, turning Gavin's wound so I could see the pale arc. "He has battle scars."
Colin blinked at the bandage as if expecting to find a badge. "But he's a beggar."
"He says I am allowed to look at him while we eat," I said. "That's devotion."
Colin tried to argue. Gavin flexed against the cloth and I laughed at something mean and small and childish and strange down in my chest.
We drank riverwater from the same cup and I measured the sound of his laughter against the sound of the coins I had tucked into my shoes that day. The coins were heavy and satisfactory. The laugh was lighter and more dangerous.
I had a job. Once upon a time I had a name: Ah Zhao. I had been born to something like hunger and then handed to another man. My real work made the palace tremble. I belonged to the Blade Hall, the guild that took orders from one who paid best. My task then was simple on paper: find the lost Second Prince and kill him. But real power doesn’t fit on paper.
"Why did they send me?" I asked my guild overseer, Kimberly Bolton, later, when she leaned in to inspect the stitches of my tradecraft.
"Because you are good," she said flatly. "You always were. Because you can pretend to love a lord and still carve his secrets out at night."
"Because I am expendable," I offered.
Kimberly smiled the way someone smiles at a joke that is also a verdict. "Because you are useful."
A month after I was married to Gavin, it started to unravel.
"You are slow," Ainsley whispered through a door one night as I changed a bloody bandage. "You act like you never want anything."
"I want the second prince dead," I said. "But I also want my own life."
"You can want both," Ainsley said. "You can have a little of both."
It was then that the little life bled open its seams. I found a bag of poisons in my wedding trunk; Ainsley pulled out a burlap bag of herbs—belladonna, aconite, foxglove—then we looked at one another and stopped smiling.
"If he makes you suffer," Ainsley said, "you kill him."
"I am not a murderer for hire at home," I said.
"You said you'd marry him for money," she said. "Now he is your husband. Old bargains change."
The beggar whose name was Gavin was not fully a beggar. He could read. He laughed at poetry. He made jokes about rice and romance and war. He surprised me by tying my sash into a neat knot when I left a slash in it. He hoarded old coins the way a cat hides dead mice.
"You're keeping secrets," I told him once, when we lay near as two hungry things that had finally learned the shape of warmth.
He kissed my shoulder, soft like a promise or a trap. "You do too."
I pressed the point of a hidden blade to his ribs once, in the dark, when fever made me say the names I should not. He only hummed a tune and turned so the blade missed bone, and then he laughed the small laugh he used for dangerous things.
"Who were you before?" I asked.
"No one," he said. "Or maybe I was always someone else."
My world tilted. I had been sent to kill the second prince, but inside my new home was a boy shaped like a man, and a man shaped like a prince.
"Go beg," I told him once, in earnest. "Eat my bread. Earn it. Don't let my people call you useless."
He kissed my forehead. "You are my wife now. I will do it."
Days passed in the rhythm of chores and shifts and slow lawlessness. I searched for the second prince as part of my orders, but I also began to build a private map of our small life: his laugh, the way he tied a rag to his wound, the secret place he hid his coins.
Then the order came down sharper than any blade: the palace wanted the Second Prince found. Kimberly Bolton shoved a petition into my palm and said, "Go. And remember, a dead prince brings favor. A living prince brings danger."
I left in disguise, as I had always done, and I followed a thin thread of rumor to a shabby shrine where a man had been seen resembling the lost prince. The shrine smelled of mildew and frog-song. There was a scuffle. I drew my blade and found a man who moved like a ghost.
He did not stagger under my throw. He dodged with the soft grace of someone who had learned to live between blades. I missed him and the knife of his shadow grazed my cheek. I tasted iron and humiliation.
The man who had run from me in the shrines and alleys—he had my face in his memory. He had the face from my childhood, a face I had always wanted to forget. He called me "Ah Zhao" once in delirium. He said words that made my ribs crack with something heavier than regret.
"Daniela," Gavin said one night when I woke in fever. "You called when you slept."
It should have been ordinary. It wasn't.
I remembered then the private boy who had once given me a name in the early days, the one I had clung to like a small flag. His name had been Shen Qingwu in the empire's books. But the man under Gavin's laughter was more. He carried himself like a soldier who had practiced smiling for battle. He had signed his letters "Gavin" like a man who had borrowed a name and kept the book.
I wanted to be simple. I wanted to sit in a kitchen and burn bread and never again put a blade into anything warm. But the world would not allow it. The palace's webs had thicker threads than my small bargains.
"People die in palaces," I said to Ainsley once, when she poured broth that tasted of too many spices. "They turn gardens into graves."
She gave me a ledger and a look, and then she pushed me out again. "Go find your prince," she said. "Or else find the man who knows where he is."
I found out that everyone around Gavin was not what they seemed. The man who had taken a child in and raised him had kept secrets. Esau Finley, the old tailor who snipped cloth like a man who had once seen too many garments used to smother kings, trembled and told me, "He would sit for hours teaching a boy the shape of letters."
"Where is the boy now?" I asked.
Esau looked at the hem of his sleeve and said, "Fifteen years old now. Good boy. Bright. Then..." He shook his head.
I went looking for proof. I stormed into the markets and into the eating houses, and the man's story spread: Gavin had found a child, nursed him, kept him alive through fever and theft and hunger. He had taught him to read by the light of a stolen candle. He had, people said, made him a son.
I felt my plan warp. I had been sent to slay a prince; I had been given a son.
"Do we keep him?" Gavin asked me one evening, hands wet from washing a plate. "Would you like to raise a child as my wife?"
"Do I have a choice?" I asked.
He grinned. "You always do." He dipped a scrap of bread into the broth and fed it to me like a man arguing for peace.
The empire turned its face toward danger. North Mountain King—Crosby Picard—tightened his fist around the court. His men took coin and kept secrets. The Dowager, Bonnie Yamaguchi, folded her skirts around power like a cloak. They all assumed the second prince dead or in hiding, a problem to be buried or to be used as a pawn.
When the Second Prince reappeared in the capital, it was not because I found him and killed him. It was because a soldier with the bearing of one who spent years in a different life marched him back in front of the court and laid him at the feet of the throne. The man was tall, sure-footed. He removed his hood with a soldier's motion and the crown-sparked hall turned to mud.
"Who brought him?" the emperor demanded, voice like iron rusted to copper.
"General Shen," the usher said. He looked at me, and my heart hiccuped.
I had known him in another life. I had loved that life in small, bright stolen pieces. His sword had once been my answer to everything. He had been supposed to die or disappear or become a shadow. He did not. He stood now with the prince at his side and something like pity made him human.
"Traitor!" someone shouted.
"Traitor?" I answered without meaning to. "He came back with the prince."
The room became a storm. Bonfires of accusation and denial flared.
General Shen's blade found the emperor before the emperor found a voice. The blade passed through flesh and idea and the old man's reign folded like paper. Blood fell; it splattered across my brow like a dark benediction. The emperor's crown tumbled between the hands of those who had raised their voices but had never lifted a knife.
"They say he is a traitor," someone gasped. "He is a criminal."
"Shen!" I heard my own voice call his name like a prayer and a blade.
He stopped when he passed me. For a breath, he looked like the same boy I had once known. He said, "You said a prayer at the temple. You wanted a husband who would change the world."
I remembered the Buddha’s cigarette-smoke grin and I laughed once, so quiet that nervous people thought it was a sob.
The palace turned into a battlefield of faces. The man who had laughed in mud and taught a child to read was now a king-maker. He took the crown and placed it where it belonged. The prince who had once been a lost child stood taller. The hall that had held the smell of incense for years now smelled of iron and wet banners.
After the dust settled, there was no simple triumph. There were bodies and betrayals, and people who had believed themselves clever woke to discover their clothes soaked in red.
"You always wanted to be useful," Gavin murmured, pressing his hand to my forehead as my brow dried.
"I wanted to be alive," I said.
But politics does not stop at weddings. If a crown changes hands, the men who had been wearing it and its false friends must answer for a lifetime of other people's suffering.
The day of punishment was planned like a festival.
"We will drag them before the city," General Shen—Gavin—said. "We will not smear them in private. They made fools of the city. Let the city make fools of them."
I hadn't intended to be the herald. I had thought to sit in the back, to keep my hands free of blood. But the ledger Ainsley gave me hums like a live thing in my chest. I had spent nights copying lines out of it and staining paper with the bad handwriting of the guilty. I knew names and dates and rooms and gifts. I had proof like a net.
The square was packed. Word traveled like the smell of soup. Merchants left their stalls. Mothers came with children on their hips. Soldiers in tidy lines watched from the sidelines, bored with uniforms and hungry for spectacle.
They brought them out—Crosby Picard walked with a bearing that had once flattened whole provinces; Bonnie Yamaguchi was draped in a robe that had cost more than the houses of those watching her. They expected a simple bow. They expected customary speeches and condemnations wrapped in silk. They did not expect the ledger and the faces of their neighbors.
I stood near the steps. "Bring the book," I instructed, and my voice was not soft.
They laid the ledger on a small table. I opened it and read.
"Here," I said, flat and steady. "Here is where Crosby Picard accepted coin and sent men to crush a village in return. Here is where Bonnie Yamaguchi signed paper to ignore cries for help. Here is where those who claim to love the realm fed on its children."
People gasped. A vendor began to jab at the ledger like a curious child, then stopped when he read the first line and his face changed.
"Shame on you!" a woman shouted.
"Look at them!" a man cried. "They sold our sons!"
Crosby Picard's face turned first to flint, then to something thinner and thinner—shock, then anger, then the bloom of panic. He stepped forward. "This is slander," he roared. "This is forgery, treason—"
"Is it forgery?" I asked. "Or is it accounting?"
He tried to laugh and his laugh sounded like a cracked bell. "You are a traitor's bride," he spat at Gavin.
"You were my beggar," Colin said from my side, a voice that no longer carried the arrogance of the governor's house. "You cleaned floors. Do you think you can buy men to save you?"
The crowd hissed. Fingers pointed. A child cried because his father pointed and the father clapped suddenly like a conductor.
Crosby flung back his cloak. "This is a lie!" he cried. "You have no proof!"
I passed the ledger to a woman who had been a mason before her son's wages were stolen. "Read," I said. "Read what your tax paid for."
She read, and the lines on her face deepened in places where anger and recognition made new grooves. "They took our payments and fed fat men," she said. "They took my neighbor's daughter to the palace and she never came back."
"How new," Bonnie Yamaguchi muttered, voice rising like a tide. "We acted for the crown. We were cautious."
"Cautious?" someone near the front shouted. "Your caution devoured us."
Crosby moved like a cornered animal. He lunged for the ledger as if to tear it. Soldiers grabbed his arms. For a second he screamed, as if sound could undo the ink.
"Look at them," I said. "Once they were men you bowed to. Now watch them become small."
His chest heaved. "You lie!"
"You took our grain," a man behind me said, voice thick. "You sold our sons to your friends."
"Silence!" Crosby tried to shout. "You cannot shame me in my own city!"
A teenager in the crowd swung a stick and clipped his knee. It made a sound that in another life might have been a jester's cymbal.
Crosby's fury dissolved in a dozen tiny ways. He switched from anger to denial, trying to point at someone else. He tried to bargain an apology. He tried to summon an old favor, a name from a ledger, a marriage, some thin rope to hang himself on. None of it held.
Someone in the crowd began to spit. Someone else began to laugh, low and hard. A hundred hands reached for the robe on his shoulders and tugged. They stripped the robe, then the embroidered undershirt. They exposed him in the sun like a counterfeit.
"Shame!" the child cried. "Shame!"
He dropped to his knees. The first change in him was the slackening of the jaw; surprise that the ground was not a cushion but a splintered truth. "I did nothing," he mouthed.
"You call for mercy?" I asked, watching him breathe. "You sold mercy to the highest bidder."
Bonnie tried another avenue. "You cannot humiliate the crown!" she cried.
"Which crown?" a man yelled. "The one that ate our sons?"
Her voice shifted from slippery arrogance into the slow panic of someone learning they are no longer carved in stone. Her hands fluttered to the front of her robe as if to feel for a name she could trade for safety.
"Please," she began, and at first it sounded like a plea for order.
"Please?" the crowd echoed. "Please what? Please be kinder as you eat?"
A mother whose boy had been taken to fight in a war looked Bonnie straight in the eye. "You put coins in your mouth and called it breakfast," she said. "You call that rule."
Bonnie's expression broke in tight, small pieces. She cried, "I was afraid."
"Afraid?" the same mother spat. "All of us were. You chose to hide the fear under silk and sell us."
I watched the arc: the swagger, the scorn, the fear, the pleading. Crosby went from red to pale, from fury to tears. He clawed for an explanation. The crowd's eyes ate him quiet.
They brought carts. They put the two in the middle, like goods. They rolled them through the market lanes. People who had once bowed now threw rotten fruit at them like a sport. Children shrieked.
At the city gates they untied their cloaks and tied them to a pole. "For the harvest," a farmer said, and he flung the goods—silk and coin—into the muck, then stomped on them. Women who had once been silenced called names with the ease of newly sharpened tools.
Crosby sank to the ground and wept, but it wasn't the kind of sound that buys forgiveness. It was the sound of someone being emptied of a role they had been allowed to believe was permanent.
"Begging would suit you better," someone muttered.
"Beg you fight me then," another shouted. "We will not be quiet."
They left them at the square until evening. The grand humiliation was not just in the displays: it was in the way people watched their leaders become small and human and unmade. Their reaction changed from curious to hungry to jubilant to almost tender in a sharp-edged way. They were watching themselves win a right: the right to say the truth out loud.
Crosby tried once more. He tried to request a magistrate. "This is illegal!" he cried.
"Why didn't you care when it was illegal for them to take our boys?" a man yelled back.
Crosby's face crumpled. He collapsed. He looked like straw. He reached toward Bonnie, who had curled into a shawl of her own making and trembled.
She lifted her hands and called my name because she remembered me from the court, from when I acted like a useful servant in both worlds. She whispered, "Daniela."
I walked up the steps until I stood beside her. Her pupils were wide and hard as an animal's.
"You were afraid," I said slowly. "You were afraid and you chose to hide in that fear with a robe. You used the robe to cut throats."
"Please," she breathed. "The court—"
"I have a ledger," I said, and it lay on the table like a small, ledgered landmine. "You signed on the line. You numbered the boys."
She flinched, the way a guilty person flinches at a name.
In the end, they were not executed. We were not monsters. We were citizens. We made them strip and parade and listen. We forced them to kneel and hear names they had priced and forgotten. We forced them to see faces of those they had harmed. Their punishment was a public, slow, humiliating unwinding that showed the city the truth of their deeds.
Crosby explained, protested, begged. His face moved from rage to stunned denial to frantic pleading to silent collapse. The crowd hissed and then burst into cries, then into laughter. Some spat. Some wept. Some took out their knives and whittled symbols into the pole that had held their coats.
Bonnie clutched at me at one point and said, "You will not let them hurt me."
I let my palm rest on her shoulder for only a moment. "You did hurt them," I said. "You did it to hide your own fear. You used the people as covers. You will be watched every day. You will be known. That is worse than death."
Her reaction changed then from pleading to rage to a small, fracturing acceptance. The crowd watched each flicker and fed on it. When she finally uttered the single most human sound—regret—it landed like a stone in pond. Ripples spread.
We did not kill them. We made them smaller than kings: people who had to answer for theft with the persistent, public truth. It was better than blood. It was more of a punishment because it was endless. It was the kind of thing that would keep their names warm in the mouths of women who had once had to bite theirs.
When the carts were gone, when the crowd had begun to thin, when the city smelled of crushed fruit and the salt of tears, Gavin took my hand. He did not need to say anything. He smiled at me, not as a general to a spy, not as a prince to a bride, but as the man who had wrapped me in a blanket when I had woken in fever.
"You made them answer," he said.
"I read their names," I replied. "I had copies hidden in many places. They cannot reconstruct their lies."
He kissed the top of my head like a promise. "You wanted a husband to change the world," he murmured. "I wanted to be a man who could stand in the light. We both got more than we ordered."
We built a life stitched out of contradictions. I set down the ledger and I opened a tavern with Ainsley. We named it "Paulownia Hall," for the two trees the groom had brought as a symbol at our second wedding. It smelled like wine and wood and the possibility of being small and happy.
Gavin—Shen Qingwu—kept the hall honest. He brought men back to their families. He tried to fix the damage his allies had done. He walked the alleys and listened to people complain.
Sometimes in the night, when everyone else slept, he would stand beneath the window and sing softly. Once he woke me and said, "Do you hear the city breathe when it sleeps?"
"It's loud," I answered.
"It is full of life," he said. "And you are too."
That was the strange bargain of our lives: a woman who could kill sent to be a wife; a man with a sword who learned to cook; a city that learned the price of candor.
Later, when I was heavy with child, I took a small walk on the roof and pressed my hand to the two paulownia saplings Gavin had planted for me. I laughed at how much the leaves looked like little hands.
"If you ever asked a god for one thing," I said to the wind, thinking of the temple and the drunken Buddha, "ask for the courage to be honest."
Below me, the square where the ledger had once been read was being swept. Someone had left a single coin there, polished by time, as if even the city could not give up the habit of trusting gold.
Gavin found me then, hands smelling of bread and iron. He kissed my brow and said, "The child will have a name."
"What if the child learns the ledger's habits?" I asked.
"Then we will teach him to read and to be ashamed," he said. "And then to act."
We laughed, because it was the only answer that fit both of us.
When I had first stood in the temple and offered ten years of my friend's singleness for a perfect husband, I had meant a selfish wish. The Buddha had smiled. The world had answered in a way too large for my life.
I would not change it.
I kept the ledger in a locked chest by the bar. Sometimes, a bell would ring and I would take it out and reread a name, and remember the day we turned rulers into people and let the city decide.
On nights when rain came like a long hand, I would touch the place on my brow where the emperor's blood had once bled into incense. It still left a small stain, darker than the rest of me.
"Do you regret it?" Gavin would ask.
"No," I would say. "But if I had one wish to ask again, I would ask differently."
"What then?"
"Not for one perfect husband," I would say, thinking of the ledger and the mothers and the small boy who once lived in a dirty corner and now read lines in a palace school. "I would ask for a ruler who loved the city like a son. I would ask for a nation that treats its people as if they were family."
Gavin would kiss the bruise and we would go back inside, where the hearth was warm and the ledger slept and the two paulownia trees outside caught the rain and shook it like laughter.
The End
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