Rebirth13 min read
I Was a Cruel Princess, He Became the King — Our Last Arrow
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I remember the first time I decided to be cruel on purpose. The snow had not yet thawed and a hostage-prince knelt, pale and shivering like a statue that had been carved from ice. His lips trembled, a vein at his temple pulsing slow and red. He looked up at me as if he still believed mercy might be an option.
"Your Highness, I was wrong," he said, voice barely a rasp. "I know I was wrong."
I told a slave, "Beat him. Do it until you think he will die."
They did not refuse. They always obeyed my voice.
I was Clara Ayala: princess by blood, villain by design. I had come from another book, the author’s tired promise tucked like a coin into my pocket: finish the role, make the man an emperor, and I would be spared a cruel ending. I agreed because I had grown practiced at playing the monster. I wore cruelty like a cloak. It suited me.
"Is he dying?" I asked, more bored than cruel, and listened as Kaelyn Gonzales stuttered around her answer, all shawls and wet cheeks.
"Almost," she said finally. "But—perhaps—perhaps it's too much."
"Too much?" I smiled, a quick cold thing. "Then make it enough. Spare nothing."
The hostage—Francisco Xu—had the look of a boy forced into an armor too big for him. He was not of our line. He was the son of another realm's lowly concubine, sent here to hold a bargain like a pawn. The court mocked him. My siblings mocked him. I made them mock him. When a prince has nothing to lose in this court, it is easy for me to write him into ruin and call the scene finished.
"Do you hate them?" I asked him once, in private, when the court's torments had left him with more scars than flesh.
"I am grateful for your mercy," he answered. "For your saving me."
Gratitude like that tasted like salt on a wound to me. It made me laugh. I learned then what it meant for a man to be broken without bitterness, to be kind despite everything. It made me resolve a plan I had rehearsed in that other book: he would rise. When he rose, he would be sharp and terrible. He would not be my soft ornament. He would become the instrument that would break the men who had made him suffer—and then he would break me the way I would not allow pity to soften me.
"You like that broken look?" I mocked him one night. "You will learn to stop being soft. You'll learn ambition."
"I will," he said. He was a study in calm, like someone who had rehearsed patience until it was indistinguishable from strength.
So I fed the court's cruelty, made my siblings worse by suggestion, gave orders that cut deeper than necessary. They called me heartless. I nodded and lived up to it. The author’s promise kept a steady drumbeat in my head: you follow the role, you get what you want in the end. I wanted a "good ending." But the end I sought came at a cost I did not anticipate.
"Take care of him tonight," I told Kaelyn with a smile, handing over a small stack of herbs and a promise that sounded like a threat. "If he lives, I will reward you."
Kaelyn bowed so deep I thought her head would break. "I won't fail you, Your Highness," she whispered.
Later, in the cold wake of midnight, Kaelyn returned to my chamber and found me with a fur around my shoulders and the memory of a boy who clung to my wrist like a drowning thing.
"He has a fever," she said, eyes red. "He is burning."
"Then tell the physicians to come," I said with the fatigue of someone performing compassion as a duty.
"They won't," Kaelyn said. "They refuse to treat someone of his station tonight."
"Bring me a healer, then. I will go myself."
I did not want him to know how close I had felt to saving him. I was careful not to let the light in my chest catch on fire. I was careful with my hands when I placed cool cloths to his brow and laid herbs by his lips. He muttered through fever that he dreamt of me—"Your Highness—"—and I felt a small, savage pull like hunger and immediately denied it.
"You thought me kind," he murmured once, and I pressed harder to my theater.
"I gave you a chance," I said. "And you accepted it. That will do."
The weeks after his sickness were strange. He came to me often with books and questions. The court had always boxed him out of lessons, and he read the scraps of knowledge that fell to him like a starving dog. "Teach me," he would say, always with a quiet, crooked hope. I did. I taught him to read battles in the map like an artist reads a face. I corrected his posture at the bow. I watched his hands learn to command a horse.
"You improved," I told him once as he bent over ink. "Your calligraphy is good."
"Thank you," he said, and the look that crossed his features briefly unmade him. I saw in that pocket of softness an opportunity. I would shape him into what the story needed—a merciless king with a past that sharpened his rage.
At the spring hunt, my brother Fletcher Cameron—blotting arrogance all over his high collar—spat at him in front of everyone. "You and your people don't belong here," Fletcher said. His voice had the clean cruelty of a man used to power.
Francisco did not pounce. He did not plead. He took the strikes and then, when Fletcher had sharpened his knife for a mock execution, I stepped forward and slapped Francisco across the face so hard the hall held its breath.
"Apologize," I commanded. "Now."
Francisco bowed, blood and snow and the taste of iron in his mouth. "It was my fault," he said, low.
Fletcher's appetite for spectacle did not satiate. He wanted more. He moved to take Francisco's arm and cut it clean with a blade slipped from petty henchmen. I said nothing as the blood spread, until the cut was a shock.
"Stop!" I barked. "Enough!"
I told the guards they could take him back to the yard, to be bandaged. "He will walk away," I announced. "But let him not forget his place."
Later, outside the palace, Francisco limped. I watched him and felt a sharp pain I refused to name.
"You will use this," I told him once inside, when the men were gone and only Kaelyn remained to smooth the blankets. "Not as pity, but as coal."
"I will," he said. His voice had a new quality then—a steel folding inside a velvet sleeve.
Years folded over like pages. War came. Francisco slipped into a role I had helped write: stoic, focused, moving like a shadow through violence. He became something other than the quiet boy I had smacked and mocked. He became a prodigy soldier. Where once I had planned to have him crushed beneath the wheel of politics, I had instead given him the wheel to make him spin.
Then the arrow.
"You must learn to ride," I urged him in the spring, my voice sharp with that old maliciousness I wore as a test. He stumbled onto a bolting horse when an assassin's hand fed the beast a drug. The mount reared, and in the chaos he flung himself into motion, gripping me tight, steadying the reins with a hand that burned with cold and courage.
"Close your eyes," he whispered into my ear with a calm so certain it reached marrow. For one instant I closed my eyes and felt his palms like shelter.
He saved us both. The horse crashed; Francisco steadied us. We staggered, alive, and for the first time I felt gratitude that was not a tool.
"It was because you taught me," he said, when the adrenaline retreated. "Because you showed me."
"Don't flatter me," I said, but the corner of my lip betrayed me. He smiled, and in that little crooked smile there was a promise I would misinterpret for years.
The court turned, as courts do. News came: the rival country we called Qiye fell into chaos; the noble house there crumbled. I pressed deeper. I pushed Francisco into trials that taught him to be ruthless. When he returned with banners and captives, I would be there, the cruel princess, hissing suggestions and laughing when he punished the traitors.
Yet the thing I had rehearsed—the scene of him killing me at ultimate triumph—slipped like fog from my hands. He rose not to slay me but to sit where kings sit. He took the throne of a nation I had expected to be my stage; he took it for himself.
I thought that would be my satisfaction: that my villainy would have built him the empire he wore. And perhaps it did. But when triumph came to Francisco he did not become the monster I had begged him to be. He became a kind of monarch I had feared: cold, decisive, and burning with a private vendetta. He had learned to keep his own warmth for very few.
Our final fall came on a day that smelled of honey and gunpowder. I had practiced cruelty all my life; I had walked the part until my reflection took to echoing it back to me. The army in his banners came to my borders like iron rain. I watched from the palace while fires turned night to blood and ash. I gave way the realm in my hands.
"Bring me the seal," I told him when he entered the great hall. "Take it. Take them all."
He scooped the carved jade into his palm like a child with a toy and toyed with it. "Take care of my people," he told me, not meeting my eyes.
I handed him the sword myself. "Kill me then," I said, which was less brave than it sounded. I had never wanted to die except in a tidy, author-approved manner.
He looked at me and smiled with something like pity. "Is that what you want?"
"Yes," I said, and sank into the old habit of defiance because I did not know how to speak any other truth.
He could have killed me. He could have ended me in a hundred small, theatrical ways. Instead he took the sword and pressed it to my throat, making a show of a threat, and then he did not pull it. He made me live with the possibility that each morning might be my last. He made every step I took towards the throne feel like walking on a taut wire with no net. He became, in private, harsher than I had ever been in public.
War continued, and bodies piled like bad harvests. He grew into a ruler who spoke of mercy and then wielded iron. He lost brothers and took cities, and in the ache of it he became what I had always feared and wanted: a man-born monarch, not mine to command.
My cruelty found its end in a single private hurt. I had become pregnant—an accident of politics and worse. Kaelyn had brought herbs and tears. "If he spurns you," Kaelyn wept once, "you must remember what you asked for." I was mean enough to dismiss her. At dawn later, I went into labor alone, and the blood took more than it should.
I died with the taste of iron in my mouth and the muffled singing of Kaelyn’s voice. I had asked for no forgiveness. I whispered a single instruction to the midwife as the world slipped: "Tell him—do not forgive me."
Then I closed my eyes.
*
He buried me with cold hands and warmer vows. He would not have it said that the man he made would be undone by memory alone. He charted the map of his revenge in silence and in thunder. He raised banners that moved mountains and broke men; scars turned into crowns on his chest. If I had been cruel to build him, he used cruelty to carve a realm I had once dreamed of.
And yet, if you listen to the old tales, the one who tells the last page is never quite the one who lived it. Francisco—who had once been a kneeling boy—wrote himself over and over in solitude. In the years after I left, he sat nights with the jade seal in his hands and spoke to a small boy they called his son, and sometimes spoke my name as though naming a wound.
In his voice, there was no triumph and no gloating. There was a steady, aching sorrow that had learned how to command even its own grief.
When the people later dragged Fletcher Cameron through the markets and forced him to confess to crimes that had been long whispered, Francisco had him unseated and punished. But cruelty inside a ruler is surgical, not random. Francisco arranged a public humiliation so exacting and inevitable that it tore Fletcher down not with axe strikes but with the slow, public unmaking of a man.
[Public Punishment Scene — Fletcher Cameron (bad person) — 800+ words]
The day they brought Fletcher out into the market square, the sky was iron-stiff and unyielding. Word had been sent: come watch. Merchants let their carts sit, gossiping tongues sharpened, and the market filled like a mouth waiting to speak.
"Bring him," Francisco ordered from the raised dais. His voice—carried by men and banners—was steady as a river that had found a new channel. He did not shout; he conversed with the square as if with an assembly of judges.
Fletcher had thought himself clever for years. He had stood at the head of hunts, broken men on whims, and thought nobody could touch him. He arrived shackled but with a face like hasty bread—panicked when cool, but swelling with pride when no one stared. At the sight of the crowd, his bravado burst.
"Your Highness," he spat when he came under the arch. "Do you think the people will swallow this? They know me."
"They will know the truth," Francisco said simply. Two officers took Fletcher's arms. "Speak."
An officer dragged a stool into the center, and Fletcher was made to sit. Francisco walked among the judges and merchants, and when he stopped, he turned the dais so the crowd could see him. He held Fletcher's gaze like a ring holds a flame.
"Fletcher," Francisco began, his voice mild enough to be cruel in its calm. "You have stories. Tell us why you thought to toy with the life of a hostage. Tell us why you believed the realm was a toy."
Fletcher laughed, a brittle sound. "I'm a prince. I have done far worse."
"Do not confuse station with honor," Francisco said. He lifted a single hand. "Let us begin with proof."
Men in plain clothes—once servants to Fletcher's household—stepped forward. They laid down ledgers, lists of bribes, letters smudged with the same ink Fletcher used to sign his name on men’s fates. A mason, a woman who had once been Fletcher's concubine and had been thrown out to die, stepped with a cloth wound round her arm. She threw a pot of ashes, and the crowd recoiled. The accused's crimes unrolled like rotten cloth. Francisco did not shout; he let evidence breathe.
"Here," Francisco said, pointing to a ledger. "You sold favors to the captain who later led a battalion against our own. You wrote the orders that cost men their limbs for sport. You delighted in a child's suffering—"
Fletcher's face went white. He had not expected the ledger, nor the woman, nor the exactness of the accusations. He lashed out with denial—"Lies!"—but the crowd hummed like a hive, ready to feast.
Francisco's next move was surgical. "You will confess," he said, "not because I need your words to be true, but because a man who cannot name his crimes cannot change."
Fletcher stiffened. "I will not confess what I do not remember."
A murmur—some thought it theatrics. Francisco arranged for the murmur to be heard like a crowd answering his question. "Let the market judge."
A bench of common men—grain merchants, a retired captain, and women who had once borne Fletcher’s cruelty—were called to speak. They recited names of families ruined, of crops seized for the prince's whim, of boys thrown to dogs. Each testimony was a finger pressed into a wound. Fletcher's mouth opened and closed. He tried to court pity, stumbling through apologies as if they were patchwork bandages.
Then Francisco did what would be talked about for years: he took Fletcher's signet ring and placed it upon a small black board. "You have stolen food," he said. "You will redistribute what you have hoarded. You will kneel to those you wronged."
The crowd's first satisfaction was small, like the drop of a feast that had been denied. But Francisco pushed further. He ordered Fletcher to confess publicly, to name each household he had ruined and ask their forgiveness. He commanded Fletcher to stand on a raised platform for the market and to read aloud the names of those he had harmed, and for each name, he had a man throw a dish of their best grain to the public.
Fletcher trembled like a spoilt flag in a winter gale. He coughed, then began: "To the Menders' house I—" He could not finish the first sentence before a woman stepped forward and spat into his face. The crowd gasped; some cheered. A merchant began to beat a drum, slow and methodical. The spectacle transformed into a ritual. With each name he spoke, with each grain he returned, Fleming's facade peeled like burnt paper.
"Confess," Francisco said quietly at the end. "Name the lie you told most of all."
Fletcher's voice, when it came, was thin. His bravado had evaporated under the square's attention. "I took a life," he said, "I ordered a man's hassling... I broke children with cold games. For honor. For sport. For nothing."
The crowd's reaction was immediate: a roar of contempt, a rush of hands, a demand for physical cruelty. Francisco refused the urge toward blood. He wanted something deeper: social unmaking. He ordered Fletcher stripped of title, publicly paraded through the city, his name removed from all staircases of the palace, his likeness chiseled from family halls and paraded to the trash heap. He made Fletcher stand beneath banners with names of families he had ruined sewn across their lengths. He made Fletcher carry heavy sacks of grain through the market until his steps shook under the weight.
At each checkpoint, an injured family came forward. They touched his palms and spoke their losses into the record. Fletcher's shoulders buckled. His mouth filled with dust and tears. The man who had once ordered soldiers to die for a wager was reduced to apologizing to tailors, to farmers, to the children he had made to kneel. The punishment was not only for spectacle; it corrected a series of wrongs.
People who watched were not simply revenged—they saw something shift: a man who had never been made to account now had to meet the eyes of those he had bankrupted. He thought he would die on the scaffold of popular rage; instead Francisco made him live. That living—bearing the weight, washing the wounds of those he had wounded—was designed to be his true punishment.
There was a moment at the last well where Fletcher dropped to his knees and wept, the public finally seeing the man crumble. Some cheered for Michel’s fall; others whispered that mercy had been done. Francisco watched from his dais, hands folded. When Fletcher was led away, a woman in the crowd—someone whose child had been sold into a captain's wrong—stepped forward and spat at the prince's boots. The act was small and sharp; it resounded further than the drum. The square made a decision: the new order would be public accounting, humiliation measured, restitution ordered.
Fletcher's life after that public day unravelled not because he had been killed but because he had to survive every day with a memory of that market. His friends fled. His household dissolved. He begged to be allowed back into small trades, and the trades accepted him only when he returned what he had stolen. To some, that was cruelty enough. To Francisco, it had been a punishment both visible and precise: not spectacle for bloodlust, but a dismantling of pride.
When the city lights dimmed, Francisco left the square and walked beneath the banners he had chosen to hang like a promise. He looked at me once, not with mercy or with glee; only with the even warmth of a man who has set right a ledger and gone to sleep.
The punishment broke Fletcher not with a blade but with accountability—public, relentless, and shaped by the hands of those he had wronged. Around the public scaffold, people changed how they would act toward power: they saw that the new rule required that every deed be accounted for, and that cruelty would be returned with the slow, patient design of law.
*
They called me monstrous for years. They called Francisco tyrant for decades. History is made of names and who holds the pen. He ordered justice to be visible, not because he loved spectacle, but because he wanted cruelty to become painful not only to its victims but to the people who wielded it.
And yet, even with Fletcher broken in the square, even with my body gone, the story stitched itself into a shape that neither of us had plotted whole.
In the end, I did not see his coronation. I died bleeding and small in a dark room, whispering last curses that sounded like blessings. He rose, and his reign carved a country.
But somewhere in the quiet of his chambers, when the sword was upended and the maps were closed, Francisco would hold the arrow that had once pierced a drunk's hand for me and whisper a name.
"Clara," he would say, and in the echo of that name was every ledger and every punishment.
The End
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