Rebirth15 min read
I Wake Up in Red, But I Refuse to Be Weak
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I opened my eyes to red silk and a cold draft that smelled of too many candles and not enough kindness.
"Where am I?" I whispered.
"You are in the Snow-Bamboo Garden bridal chamber, Princess Clementine," a voice said from the dark. It was smooth and low and not gentle.
I sat up. The heavy wedding robes had been thrown off; I wore only a simple inner wrap and the aches of a body that had been hurt in ways my memory refused to explain. Scars and faded bruises lived under my skin like secret maps.
"Who are you?" I asked.
A shadow stepped forward. A man in black, one side of his face hidden behind a dark eyepiece, looked at me the way a hawk might regard a wounded sparrow. He did not smile.
"I asked that first," he said. "Who are you in my province at this hour?"
"I am—" I started, then stopped. Calling my name felt dangerous. "I am Clementine Berg."
"Clementine," he repeated, tasting it. He crouched so the light caught only his jaw. "You are small for a princess."
"Small for a lot of things," I said. My throat tightened. "Please—do not kill me."
He laughed, a sound with no humor. He pressed a cold blade to my throat, and only then did I remember how thin the line between breath and silence could be.
"Keep quiet," he said. "And the next time, do not be so careless."
I shut my mouth. I learned very quickly that in this world, survival looked a lot like pretending. I was a stranger in my own life — a modern self trapped in a fragile body's memory. I had fallen, I had died once before. I had been given a second chance. I would not throw it away without understanding the rules of this play.
"Get out," I said finally, voice small but steady. "Leave my room."
He paused. For one breath he seemed reluctant. Then he stepped back into the dark and was gone like a shadow swallowed.
After that night, the Snow-Bamboo Garden became both my prison and my training ground.
"I am called Kaelyn," said the young woman who came in with the morning tray. She was small, one foot bandaged, but she moved with an efficiency that suggested a long apprenticeship to patience.
"Your name?" she asked.
"Clementine," I said.
"Rest," she murmured, and left quietly. Her voice carried concern and loyalty. I would later learn that Kaelyn Cobb, with eyes like quick rain, owed the life she had to the man she served. She was the person who kept a constant warm bowl on my bedside and a watch on the door.
"Don't hide," said another voice from the doorway. "Eat."
I blinked. A childlike face, smeared with flour, peered at me and whispered, "Miss Clementine, the kitchen saved you some of the new foreign cakes. They're extra sweet today."
"Thank you," I said.
It felt absurd to be grateful for cakes while a man in black had tried to carve silence into the night. I tasted the sweetness anyway. Small comforts matter.
Days passed in a strange lull. I studied the garden’s map. I learned where the guards walked. I memorized the way the wind lifted the bamboo leaves. I learned to breathe slow enough that my chest did not betray the phantom pains that still laced me.
"You can't go out," Kaelyn said one morning. "Master Lucas forbade leave. For your safety."
"Master Lucas?" I repeated the name as if it might be a lie.
"Lucas Tran. He is the Prince in charge here. He married you. He does not like surprises."
"Oh."
I had expected violence from the world; I had not expected nuance. Lucas Tran's name rolled in my mouth like a foreign coin. The man I had met in the garden — cold, tall, wrapped in a soldier's stillness — was the Prince of war, they said. He came sometimes, like a tide, and watched me with a distance that could hurt.
"Does he hate me?" I asked Kaelyn one afternoon as she bandaged the bruise at my knee.
"He doesn't hate people lightly," Kaelyn said slowly. "He is careful. He watches. But he is not cruel without reason."
I didn't trust "not cruel without reason." I had lived a life in which reasons came wrapped as threats.
Weeks of quiet became my strategy. I ate when the servants brought food. I slept in daylight to warm my thin bones. I practiced — secretly — the simplest of strength exercises. Moving stones, lifting sacks that were only meant for servants, dragging a water bucket up the back steps: I rebuilt myself like a house rebuilt plank by plank.
"Why do you do this?" Kaelyn asked the first time she saw me lift a heavy stone.
"Because the world will not wait when you are too weak," I said.
"You worry too much." She smiled. "You are doing more than you realize."
She was right. My arms began to carry shape. My breath didn't catch as though pulled by a rope. Quiet victories stacked: a day without coughing blood, a week with no dizzying drops of lightness.
One morning, while I dozed in the swing-lattice and the sun was a soft hand on my face, a shadow fell over me. I opened my eyes and the man — Lucas Tran — had come again.
"Why do you keep coming here?" I asked. "You never came at the wedding. Why come now?"
He was nearer than before. He asked, "Why do you pretend to be afraid of me?"
"Because you are frightening," I said.
He looked down at me and for the first time I saw him look like a man who had to decide what to be. "Do you always run when you are frightened?"
"Usually," I said.
He crouched and the whole world seemed to change its scale for a second. "Get up."
"I can't."
He lifted me without pomp or tenderness, and for a blink my cheek hit his chest.
"Less theatrics," he said. "If you are weak, learn to stop falling."
"You're very kind for a warmonger."
He smirked, a small crooked thing. "I am not kind."
But kindness can come in many thin, ordinary shapes: giving directions, bringing more food, occupying a dangerous silence with presence. He began, strangely, to visit my small garden more often. He would lie in the other swing, looking at the newly set seedlings, and sometimes he spoke.
"You care for plants," he observed once.
"I care for survival," I said. "Plants are training."
He raised an eyebrow. "Survival is a word I respect."
I kept watch on people who watched me. I learned that Leonardo Kennedy — the Taishi who had once held authority like a fist — smiled like a man who thought he could buy anything. I learned that Diana Monteiro, the woman who wore silk as if it were armor and who called herself the house's mistress, liked to see people diminished.
"That woman hates you," Kaelyn whispered once. "She will not hide it."
I understood this in the quiet way survivors do: the small gestures, the way a hand reaches not to help but to control. Diana Monteiro's cruelty was a public favor she paid under the table of reputation.
"Don't go alone to the family compound," Kaelyn said. "You will be watched."
"I have to go," I said. "Lucas asked me to visit."
"Then take someone. Take Lorenzo Dixon."
Lorenzo Dixon was the one who appeared in memories and dreams: a man who had once rescued the broken young me when the world was willing to step on children. He had a calm that made choking fear loosen. He had been a friend to the other life my body remembered. He agreed to come.
Three days later we walked back through the gate of the Taishi house. Leonardo Kennedy welcomed me with all the show of a man who knew how to perform a fatherly mask.
"Clementine, my dear," he said with an ache-less smile. "You have been away. Let's have dinner."
"Dinner," I said, and every syllable tasted like a bartered thing.
Diana Monteiro, the stepmother, waited at her post of venom. When she saw me she narrowed her eyes.
"Back from your wilderness," she sneered. "Wedded and yet running off like a willful child."
"You forget your place, Diana," Leonardo said politely.
"It's important to know that place," she replied, and then — in a motion that revealed how she lived by small torments — she called for the servants.
A low girl knelt there, wrists bruised, eyes hollow and bleeding. Paola Barrett. The girl was called out as if for display and she winced under the weight of the household's contempt.
"She is my maid," I said.
"Your maid?" Diana laughed. "She is nothing but a simple servant."
"Don't touch her again," I said.
"How bold of you," Diana said. "And still, a wife of the Prince should not interrupt house teaching."
That was when the day tipped. I could have kept still. I could have let the house's cruelty do its work and gone back to Snow-Bamboo Garden. Instead, a spark — a stubborn shard from another life — flared.
"She is under my protection," I said.
"Protection?" Diana barked with amusement. She raised a foot; the next instant a hard kick struck me — not Paola but me — and I stumbled.
"How dare you?" Paola cried, but she was a servant and her voice trembled like a brittle bird's.
A commotion rose. Guards murmured. The house family gathered. In one breath the Taishi had played his piece: mock concern, a show of authority that hid a hundred small cruelties.
"Stop this," Lorenzo said quietly. He had arrived to escort me back, and his calm anger cut like a sharp edge. "This ends now."
"I will report this," Diana said, haughty. She expected the conversation to fold into the usual script.
But the tide had turned. Outside, a whisper had started to move. Our little island of outrage grew as others chose to see rather than look away.
"Take her away to be questioned," Diana ordered, hoping to make the story about obedience.
"No," I said. I stepped forward and the room watched while a princess — small, once-broken — stood up in front of the house that had made her bones into kindling.
"People," I said loudly, because I had been saving my voice for this. "If you call yourselves honorable, will you allow cruelty to be a feast?"
There was a stunned silence.
Leonardo's smile drooped as he realized that public attention was no longer his alone. The servants who had been forced to stand by shifted their weight, their faces a map of decision. A household's authority depends on people believing that the stage never changes. They do not plan for the actor who refuses to obey the script.
"Arrest her," Diana said. Her voice climbed into a high, absurd pitch. "She insults my household."
"No," Lorenzo said, joining beside me. "She speaks truth."
The crowd gathered was not small: gardeners, lower servants, the Taishi's kin, the Prince's guards who had come for protection. They watched Diana's face as it shifted.
At first, she smiled confidently — the smile of a woman who thought herself untouchable. She had always been safe behind her husband's power and behind the house's rituals. Her feet were steady; her voice was sharp.
Then the tide crept in.
"How dare you!" she cried, attempting feigned outrage, but now more people were watching and their eyes were no longer hers to command.
"What will you do? Call the guards?" someone murmured. "They are here to protect us all, not your temper."
"Is this what you teach your people?" asked another voice. "To crush those underfoot?"
Her arrogant composure began to fray. She glanced at Leonardo, but his face had gone pale — an old man confronting an old rumor stirred awake.
"No!" she said suddenly, a change of tone that was like a rope breaking. It began with surprise, moved to indignation, and then — very quickly — collapsed into panic.
"You're making scenes," she shrieked now. "You dare to make scenes!"
By the time she shouted, the courtyard had shifted from a theater of obedience into something else: a court of witnesses. Smartphones did not exist in this time, but hands had become eyes. The servants who had suffered in silence picked at their sleeves and found their tongues. The guards who had been told to protect the house looked at one another and then at her. The people who had come to watch the Taishi's generosity now watched a woman unravel.
She tried to deny it. "I did no wrong," she said, voice high and brittle.
"That is not what we saw," said Lorenzo, calmly.
Her face crumpled in the space between denial and collapse. "You are lying!" she cried. "You are all lying! Leonardo, help me!"
"Not today," Leonardo said. He had planned this stage, yet now his carefully arranged theater had become a mirror. "We will discuss this properly later, Diana."
Her eyes darted to the guards. The guards looked at the crowd and then at her. They were men who were paid to do what was lawful, and now the law looked like a lens that had changed its focus. They did not move to grab her.
"Please!" she begged, and the voice was suddenly small.
"Please?" someone in the doorway snorted. The servants' whispers swelled into a tide.
"Call the town watch," another man suggested, half to distance himself from the moment, half to break the spell.
At that, the woman who had dressed cruelty as grace bent. She tried to stand straight and could not. Her breath came fast and shallow. She moved through the arc the way an actor collapses into tears and expects the audience to clap in sympathy. The audience instead leaned forward.
She turned to the closest nobleman and grabbed the sleeve of his robe, her fingernails digging white crescents into his linen. "No!" she cried. "You cannot let them take me like this. I am a lady. I have obligations."
"Obligations?" asked Lorenzo very quietly. "You have obligations to be humane."
Faces around her hardened as if the courtyard air had been tempered.
"Mercy," she whispered, and then the word became a hollowness. People moved like a single tide. The house had been a place where she could throw her weight around. The public had eyes now, and that changed everything.
Someone began to recount quietly the things she had done to servants. Another raised the voice to include how she made a point of humiliating a girl who had been wounded. The story multiplied like reflections.
Her expression changed from arrogance to confusion, to thunderous denial, then to a raw, animal panic. "No, this is slander!" she wailed. "You are lying. You will all be punished for this!"
"Are you suggesting we are liars?" asked a servant, her voice surprisingly steady. "You told us to obey. We obeyed. Today we saw you strike the maid. You struck the Princess when she intervened. We saw with our eyes."
There was a slow, sickening realization in Diana's eyes. She had always assumed people would bow. Now people stared.
Her knees buckled. The silk of her gown puddled on the flagstones like a mockery. She fell to the ground in a heap that was both pitiful and rightful. The crowd did not move to help. They stood as if a small, unclean bird had been dropped into their midst and they wondered what they should think of it.
"Diana!" Leonardo cried, at last breaking the necklace of his restraint. He stepped forward, hands up in a gesture of command and embarrassment. "Diana, we will not make a public scandal. Get up and compose yourself."
"Get up?" she repeated. Her lips trembled. She made a desperate motion toward her shoes, but her limbs shook. "No."
Tears and breath came in big, hot ragged waves. She tried to plead. "Please! Please!"
But the crowd had learned to speak. A woman who had endured bruises for many years in silence called out, "Let her be seen for what she is."
Someone started to clap, not in praise but in a release of pressure — a bittersweet sound. Soon others joined, an awkward chorus that marked the end of her control.
She crawled to her feet, then fell back, sobbing. "I will not be shamed!" she gasped. Her voice then shrank into, "Please, I beg you, do not make me a spectacle."
A small, clear voice — mine — said, "Diana, stop now. You are done."
She looked up, astonishment raw and red.
"Please," she whispered. "You are the Princess."
"Yes," I said. "And I will not accept cruelty in my name."
Her face broke into a thousand pieces as she went from rage to pleading; then pleading to collapse; then to the final, desperate attempt at bargaining. She knelt. "Please," she begged. "Will you spare me? My reputation—"
"People's dignity matters more than any reputation," I said.
For a wild, wonderful second, the crowd seemed to remember that their yes or no mattered. Guards lowered their swords. Leonardo's hand hovered and then withdrew. People who had been fearful of speaking now spoke in small voices about kindness.
Diana crumpled, not as punishment ordained by law but as punishment given by truth. She vomited out the words she wanted to drown: "I didn't— I didn't—"
"Did you?" someone asked.
"No," she sobbed, then immediate denial, then "I—" She could not finish. Her proud mask, that had been built on other people's brokenness, cracked in the light.
"Begging me to forgive you won't undo what you have done," I said.
"Please!" she begged. "Please!"
The crowd watched as the woman — once lacquered with status and sharpness — was left naked before the truth she had thought invisible. People pointed, some whispered, others turned away. A few recorded the moment in small folds of memory, and later the tale would leave the courtyard like seeds on the wind. Her denial fractured into pleading. "No! Please! It isn't true!"
"No one is immune to seeing now," I said. "You will bow and apologize to Paola Barrett now, in front of everyone. You will ask forgiveness."
She collapsed into endless whimpers. "I'll do it," she choked.
"Say the words," Lorenzo said. "And say them honestly."
"Forgive me, Paola," she said, but the words were wet and empty. Paola — bruised and pale — stepped forward with trembling hands, and she said, "I accept nothing, Lady Diana. I accept truth."
At the end, Diana wept and begged and promised restitution. She crumpled on the marble, then crawled to the foot of her husband's chair. People murmured. Some shook their heads. Some spat.
Someone in the crowd took a small scrap of cloth and pressed it to her face, not to comfort her but because she was human. Others, who had never dared to speak, caught themselves laughing, nervous and bright.
In the days that followed, the tale of Diana Monteiro's fall from posture to plea was told in hushed tones. Servants who'd been punished found a measure of relief. The woman who had sought to crush anyone who displeased her had been rendered small, and that was a truth the house could not swallow whole.
I learned two lessons that day.
First: public witness is a blade you cannot always control. It can cut the powerful.
Second: cruelty breeds its own collapse, sometimes in the neatest theater, sometimes in the worst possible light.
After that, things shifted. The Taishi hushed his displays. Guards were ordered to be less eager with whips. Paola Barrett was allowed to recover with dignity. People smiled at me with a small new steadiness that felt like a beginning.
But power is a river. When one dam bursts, another current forms. That night, returning to Snow-Bamboo Garden, I found a note tucked under my pillow. A small crystal globe inside it smelled faintly of copper and old iron.
"Do not trust everyone," the note read in a neat, unfamiliar hand.
"Who sent this?" I asked Kaelyn.
"I don't know," she said. "But we will be careful."
The world had suddenly become louder. The masked assassin — the man who had tried to strangle me on my wedding night — had not been a single actor. I had met him again once, secretly, and he had shown me that not all danger was domestic. There were sharper, darker things outside court intrigues.
"Who is he?" I asked Lorenzo one evening as we sat under the winter sky.
"Nicolas Conley," Lorenzo said. "A blade who moves like wind. He is not good news."
"Teach me to fight," I said.
He smiled and called me forward. "You have been training in small ways. Now you will learn to be deliberate."
So I apprenticed. Nicolas taught me nothing — he was a different kind of threat, a person who made me make choices about where to fold and where to stand. Lorenzo taught me what to do with a hand on a sword. Lucas watched quietly while I learned to take and give a hurt that was not only physical.
"Are you sure you want this?" Lucas asked one evening, his voice softer than it had ever been when we had first met.
"Yes," I said. "I do not want to be fragile again."
He nodded once. "Then we will train together."
We built trust in small, stubborn ways. Sometimes we argued. Sometimes I hit him by accident while he demonstrated a defensive stance and he pretended it didn't hurt. We traded barbs like people trade flowers. Under the thin sunlight that filtered into Snow-Bamboo Garden, a small, impossible thing began to grow — not love at first bloom, but something raw and patient.
"Don't get used to me," he said one time when I caught him watching me from the doorway.
"I am used to being surprised," I said.
"That is a fair occupation," he answered.
There were plans to make, paths to walk. I had a father who smiled like a ledger, a stepmother who had been publicly humbled but remained dangerous in more subtle ways, a Prince who could be a tide, friends who were true. The sky over our small garden felt like a map; the stars did not give instructions, but they offered places for promises.
One late night, as winter turned the bamboo pale, I sat by the black unmarked stone in the back garden — the stone I had touched the first time and had felt a shock run through my skull. I ran my palm over its surface until my fingers found a shallow groove.
"This stone remembers," I told myself.
A tiny pink creature — my ragdoll I had sewn from leftover cloth and old spices, the "Lina Bebe" I had made to keep the dark out of my nights — sat on my lap. Its button eyes looked at me like small beacons.
I touched the toy and then the stone. The world did not change in some great theatrical way. There were no dragons. There were no sudden miracles. There was only the steady truth that I had a body, a life that could be rebuilt, and people who could be chosen.
"Where will you go?" Lorenzo asked softly.
"Where? I will go somewhere I can breathe," I said.
"With me?" he asked.
"No," I said. "Not yet."
"Then with Lucas?" he teased.
"Maybe," I said.
"Maybe," he echoed.
I stood, the toy in my hand, and listened to the bamboo scraping the sky like an old friend. The night was cold. My throat tightened with a feeling that was not quite fear, not quite hope. It was more honest — the sense of being alive and wanting fiercely to keep on living.
"Promise me one thing," Lucas said.
"I won't," I answered with a laugh. "I am terrible at promises."
He smiled, and the smile was a small surprise of warmth. "Then keep being difficult."
"I will," I said.
We walked back to the house. The lights inside were dim like candles being saved for a storm. Kaelyn and Paola were arranging herbs for tea. Lorenzo and I shared a look. There was a long road ahead, but the Snow-Bamboo Garden would be my refuge and my school. The black stone would be the witness.
I tucked Lina Bebe into my inner pocket and lay down, listening to the thin voice of the house settle around us. My last thought before sleep came was simple and stubborn.
"If anyone tries to erase me again," I thought, "I'll put them in the story I tell next."
I dreamed of the masked man once more, but this time I was not a helpless figure. In the dream I turned, and I smiled, small and fierce, at the man who thought he had power over me.
"Not this time," I said out loud, and in the morning my voice had the same honest strength as the stone.
The End
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