Rebirth17 min read
I Was Betrayed, Reborn, and I Kept My Promise
ButterPicks13 views
I remember the smell of ink and blood before I remember anything else.
"I can't feel my legs," I said one morning, my voice a dry rasp that surprised even me.
"You must hold on," Justine said, her hand trembling in mine. "Master Tomas told us the herbs would come."
"Where are they?" I whispered.
"They're in the hands of Helena," she answered. "Helena Eaton has them. She won't return them."
I closed my eyes and felt my child's small kicks, the one thing that kept a sliver of warmth in me. I laughed, small and brittle.
"Fabian," I said once, and the name lodged in my throat like ice. "Fabian Weber promised—he promised me."
"He promised what?" Justine asked.
"Forever," I said. "He promised forever."
"Daniela," Tilda said softly from the doorway. Her voice always had that careful edge. "Don't speak of promises now. Rest."
I had been loved, adored, spoiled until I thought life was a river that could never run dry. I had been seventeen when I married Deacon Coulter, bright as spring and proud as any maiden with a home and a name. I was Daniela Richardson then — the daughter of a great house — clever at sixteen, famous for a smile that melted men and a mind that unnerved women.
I had trusted Helena Eaton with my secrets. We had played at sisterhood. I showed her my plans for the nursery. She called me "sister" and pressed flowers into my hands.
"Helena, she looks happy," A Tao said one cool afternoon as she set a vase near my bed.
"Like a fool who still believes in legends," Lan Zhi said only beneath her breath.
"You listen," Helena said when she crossed the threshold, the bell of her sleeves chiming. Her dress was water-red. "Your grace looks better. The empress's method worked."
"The empress?" I asked, puzzled.
"Yes," Helena laughed, a sound that had nothing of friends. "She said bright laughter would chase away your illness."
"You spoke with the empress?" I tried to hold onto that hope, to the idea that a remedy had been found.
"Of course." She took my hand in that poisonous way she used to. "She promises help. I will live at the crown's side and serve you more."
Lan Zhi stared at Helena like she'd seen a ghost. "You said you would help, Helena. You said—"
"Forgive me," Helena said, as if forgiveness were a thing to be traded like coins. "I had to accept the prince's offer. Deacon Coulter has promised me a place at the capital. I owe him my gratitude."
"You married him," I said. The words were small, but they felt like knives. "You married him."
"It is a good match," Helena sang. "The prince is generous. He will secure our house."
"Generous?" Justine hissed. "You stole her husband. You stole her remedy."
Helena smiled as if she had nothing to be ashamed of. "Sister, I am sorry. But fondness changes. It always does."
"Deacon," I said to the air, to the breath that once warmed my face and promised everything. "We promised forever."
He came that night like a bright thing, like a coin tossed into a well. He did not look like a man carved of marble; he looked like a man who traveled courts and favors, who knew the language of power.
"Daniela," Deacon Coulter said, with the casual cruelty of a man who always thinks himself right. "A prince cannot share his life with one rose alone. You should have known. Helena will be by your side to bring you joy and to remind you of our duty."
"Joy?" I said, and the sound in my throat broke. "You gave me vows, Deacon. You swore things."
"A promise is like a coin," he said carelessly. "It is useful until a need arrives to spend it differently."
I laughed then, a sudden rusty sound. "If a coin can be spent so easily, then it's not mine." My hands found my belly. I felt small fingers pushing out against my skin. "Promise me, Deacon. Promise my child."
"Your child has no claim to my future," he said. "I will name your child, if it is a girl, a little thing to make you smile."
"You—" My breath came out in a laugh that was more like a cough.
Lan Zhi had been my cousin, my nurse, my confidante. "My lady?" she said, and the plea was a wound. "If the remedy—"
"Helena said the herbs are safe now," Deacon replied. "A new life is starting."
Helena pressed her robe against me like a spider. "Think of me kindly, sister," she said.
I tried to scream, but my throat betrayed me. Her hand slipped something into my mouth. My world went black. When I woke again, there was a rope of fear wound round my ribs and the floor smelled of iron.
"Your family," Deacon said to me the next time I saw him, when guards dragged me to the outer pavilion. His voice had no tremor. "They have been detained."
"How?" I asked.
"For conspiracy," he said. "They were disloyal. I did this for our realm."
"Because I loved you?"
"You were naive," he said. "You must understand."
The next day I watched the men and women I had loved fall like apples from a tree. Their necks were crooked and shorn, and the crowd's chants embroidered the spectacle. Helena stood in Deacon's shadow, hands folded like a proper traitor, her face like a porcelain mask.
"They said it was treason," I croaked. "They lied, Deacon."
"You were a danger if your house remained," he said. "The throne clears itself."
I was taken that night to a room that had once been my nursery, and there I bled until I could no longer hold my mind. I had one thought that rose like a last prayer: if justice could not be had in life, perhaps some coin of vengeance would be left to the living.
I died then, with a curse whispered to high rafters: "If there is a next life, I will have you both."
When I opened my eyes, I lay on a hard bed and the wind smelled of pine. I did not know the name of the town. My hands were strong, my legs full of feeling. My scars were old as if from years. There was a man calling for "Axi, Axi, where are you?"
"Axi?" I answered, and the sound of a new name did not feel like a theft.
I had been given a second chance. I learned quickly that I now wore a new skin: I was Daniela's memory packed into the life of a country doctor's daughter, the child of Tomas Fischer. I had the same mind and a ledger of revenge to balance. I learned the maps of a new life and carried old names in my pocket like hot coals.
"Who are you?" Tomas asked the second day, a soft, worried man who smelled like tea and old paper.
"Your daughter," I answered. "Tomas, I am Axi. Tell me what herbs we have."
"You're odd," he said, fond and a little fearful. "But the herbs are in the back. We have purple glories and snowlotus, and the syringa—"
"Snowlotus," I said. "Yes. Good. Make the salve. We'll be busy."
In this life, I learned patience, craft, and how to hide grief under smiles. I practiced tongue and needle, I learned to sew the lids of wounds until the scar looked like learning rather than violence. I learned that a knife could be steady in the hand of a woman who was no longer willing to weep in public.
"You're not the same Axi my neighbors remember," my friend Gillian said once, a curious, frank girl. "You look at the world as if it were a chessboard."
"It is a chessboard," I said. "And I intend to learn pawn by pawn."
Word reached me that Helena Eaton had been elevated, that she married Deacon Coulter and moved into the capital's light. The wound stung like new. I learned Helena's kin were lodged in the province: the Eaton line had branches, and one sat near our borders. I learned the name that would later become more useful: Fox Conner — a man with the arrogance of position and the hunger of someone who wanted to sit closer to the throne. He was my first target not by name but by association.
"Will you tell me what you plan?" Gillian asked.
"I will need a network," I said. "I will need tools, men who think like men and women who play parts. I will teach them to sew, to set fractures, to keep secrets. I will use what I can: craft, trade, rumor."
"What of love?" she asked. "What of heart?"
I looked out the window at the stone road and answered, "I have loved and been betrayed. Now I trade in bargains. Hearts are expensive."
The man who would change everything came to my poor town as a rumor first: Fabian Weber, the exiled prince they called the Cold King, whose tilt of mouth never matched his deeds. He arrived in red and gunmetal, a storm wrapped in silk, and he saw me as one sees a possibility.
"You are not who they say," Fabian — Fabian Weber — said on our first real talk. He spoke like a man who measured syllables. "You are not only a healer."
"You wear court colors in a theater and ask questions," I said. "Why are you here?"
"Because a child's life matters," he said. "And because I like people who are not what the world expects."
"You are not a man who is easily pleased," I said.
"You are not a woman who is easily fooled," he said. "We shall have a good time, then."
He called me "Axi" because he found it good to say. He brought a dangerous intelligence with him — a knowledge of maps, routes, and the way men in high places traded favors. He had been expelled from the capital under a cloud: his station was both gift and punishment. He could have burned with bitterness, but he bent his talent toward the border like a chisel.
"We can do this together," he said one night, leaning against a table heavy with maps. "You want justice. I want a place to return to. If I restore this province, I win favor; if you remove the men who killed your old house, you win your peace."
"You make it sound tidy," I said.
"Plans rarely are," he replied. "But if we bake them right, they feed more than just one mouth."
We worked. I taught him subtlety of herb, and he taught me the dance of politics: how to place a rumor, how to seed a market with a crafted need, how to convert a commodity into leverage. We seeded the idea of craft towns and trade routes, we built demand where there had been none. We taught women to carve and men to join; we set up apprenticeships and made the world buy what it once thought worthless. Wood that had only burned now built houses. Red tubers became delicacies sold at booths. It was not merely profit — it was resources that could pay loyalties.
"Why help me?" I once asked, alone with him under a sky full of ice rods and cloud.
"Because you ask in the language of people who build, not beg," Fabian said. "And because I hate men like Deacon."
"Then hate alongside me."
He wrapped a hand around mine and said, "I will hate besides you, and I will bring cold reason to your fire."
We built, and the province changed. We taught men to march along new roads and women to run workshops where coins passed like small, warm ideas. The market became a pulsing thing; Deacon's reach thinned as our networks strengthened. Wealth bought us allies.
But revenge is a patient craft. It cannot be rushed. It wants witnesses, witnesses who can tell of the fall.
Fox Conner — the man who managed the local governorship like he managed his anger — was slow to see the shifting wind. He loved loud celebrations and loud promises. He thought gold could buy loyalty; he never understood that once you taught a town to weave, gold followed them.
"Daniela," Fox told me in the crowd, "Why have you stirred people to your plans?"
"They wanted to be fed," I said. "You failed them."
"We are ruling the border, girl," he spat. "Do not meddle."
"My name is Axi here," I corrected, but I let the mask of Daniela fall into the crowd. I wanted them to remember the old name — the one that once sorted crowns.
We used every tool: rumors to separate house from house, a whispered betrayal, an intercepted letter re-sewn, a steward bribed to sleep with doubt. I taught Marshall Craig, a steward with more fear than honor, that his life could be remade if he traded one name for another. He gave us a list of names, a ledger of promises.
"You're terrible," Gillian said one night, watching me smile at the inventory of sins.
"You mean efficient?" I answered.
"Call it what you like. You'll hurt people."
"I will hurt him," I said simply. "He will know he is hurt because he thought he could buy forever."
The day of the public unmaking was the day of the harvest festival. The town square hung with paper and lanterns. Merchants sang, children chased each other under the bellies of flags, and there were five hundred witnesses, perhaps more. The square bristled with servants and seamstresses, with the very people we had taught to work — my witnesses.
"I thought you'd be more subtle," Fabian said at my shoulder. We stood together, faces open, in the sun.
"We are done being subtle," I replied. "I want them to see him fall."
Fox Conner came in late, pompous and sober, his chest a swell of embroidered arrogance. He took the dais like a man used to having a voice. Deacon Coulter came with him, thin-lipped and bright in his noble vestments. Helena walked beside him, a bloom of silk. She smiled the cradle-smile of traitors.
"Let the show begin," I said low.
"Good," Fabian whispered. "When people are ready, put the record to the screen."
I had spent the winter weaving a proof — letters, purchases, the ledger that proved the bribe and the bed. I had bribed a servant to deliver a chest of letters to the city crier's booth. The chest held a sealed ledger. When the loudspeaker — the crier with a bell — opened the chest, the crowd grew quieter. Someone struck a drum, and every eye turned to the dais.
I stepped forward. "People of the square," I said. "You have eaten our bread and worked our wood. You have known labor and coin. You know what is owed to you. Today I name the men who bought promises with lies."
"Who are you to speak?" Fox Conner roared, his thin face purple.
"When I was a girl," I said, and the old name — the one that used to be honored — touched my tongue, "they called me Daniela Richardson. I loved a man who called himself honor. I was betrayed. My house was destroyed."
A hush so heavy fell that it sounded like the world choosing a side.
"You lie!" Deacon shouted.
"No," I said, and I drew the ledger out. "I will show you."
The ledger was a slow unspooling of proof. There were entries, nights, embroidered purchases, the names of stewards who had taken silver, the record of a bed that was purchased to silence a secret. The steward who sat in the second row had been paid to send a carriage; the watchman had been paid to blink. The ledger had brass stamps and folds of coin receipts; it smelled of money and ink and mean things.
"Where did you get this?" Fox demanded.
"From your house," I said. "From men you used. They told me to tell you: there is no favor that will keep your name from shame."
The crowd shifted. Phones and small sketch-pads would later be called a new plague, but their hands held the moment. People exchanged looks and took the ledger like bread.
Deacon Coulter's face blanched from a pale arrogance to a worse kind of deathly color. He tried to laugh. "This is fraud. You have no proof."
"We have witnesses," Fabian said calmly. He signaled three of our men — Marshall Craig among them — who came forward in coats stained from a thousand tasks. One by one they told of nights of coin and orders. One by one they pointed at Fox. "He took the ledger," one said. "He sold promises. He said the crown must be fed."
"No!" Fox snarled. He lurched forward. "You lie! Arrest her!"
"No." I stepped in front of him. "You will not further stain the lives of people."
Men in the crowd began to murmur. Some left in whispers. Some took out sharp tools of recording, trembling with delight. A few sobbed. Children clung to mothers.
Deacon's expression crumpled from cruel to bewildered to denial. He pointed at the guard who still attended to him. "This is treason. Arrest them!"
The guard coughed, then lowered his head. "Sir," he said, voice thin. "I serve the law. There is nothing in your chest but a king's court of excuses."
Deacon's eyes went from a hostile glare to a single pinpoint of desperation. "This is slander," he said. "You planned this—"
"Planned what?" I asked softly. "You planned that you could take a house and trade lives as if they were coins?"
He swore in a language that belonged to boys, then stumbled when the crowd booed.
"You staged it!" Fox shouted. "They're fabricators! Arrest them!"
But then something happened: the steward, white-faced, stepped forward with an envelope. He dropped it at my feet.
"These are the papers you keep," he said, voice shaking. "He gave them to me. I thought… I thought I could protect them. But I don't want to die for a lie."
"You're a coward," Fox hissed. "You sold your master's trust."
The steward's eyes left Fox and landed on Deacon. "I sold my fear," he said. "You bought it."
People gathered like flocks. Someone began to clap. First a single hand, then another. It became a ripple of shock turned to suspicion turned to open anger.
Deacon's face moved through a spectrum: arrogance, confusion, then the brittle slide into panic. He made a small, animal whine of denial. "I did what the court demanded. I did what the realm demanded."
"A realm demands justice, not theater," I said.
His voice broke into higher notes. He reached, feeble and furious, toward Helena, who had stood pale and perfect through the whole affair. "You promised me—"
"You promised us," she answered, and the word was like a dropped glass. "I made you a promise you never kept."
He tried to grab her sleeve. She did not look back. "You will be ruined for this," he spat.
"Not by me," she said. "By you."
The crowd drew closer. Someone knocked the dainty headdress from Helena's hair. Women in the crowd shouted, tweezers between their teeth, "Traitor!" Men hissed, "Bribe-taker!" Phones lifted and the air was full of a million small, shining witnesses, all hungry for spectacle.
Deacon staggered back as if pushed by hands. His mouth attempted new words, "Mercy. Mercy." His voice had the cracking edge of a man who had believed himself untouchable. He scanned the crowd for aid, for a signed retainer, for anything — and found only faces he had impoverished with commands.
"Do you deny that you signed these?" I asked, holding up page after page.
"I—" He could not finish. His jaw worked. "I—"
The crowd began to fill the squares with sound: outrage, an ugly glee. An old woman from the third row produced a wooden comb and snapped it like a judge's gavel. "Shame," she said. A dozen hands held up coins that once had been paid to men like Fox and Deacon. They were small things, but real. "Shame," they repeated.
"Do you have anything to say for yourself?" someone demanded.
Deacon curled his hands, knuckles white. "You don't understand," he tried. "I had to—"
"You had to betray them," I said. "You had to sell your coin so you could stand at a different corner of a throne."
The crowd closed in. Fox's face oscillated between defiance and the slow dawning that he had been found wanting. His throat began to move as if he were grasping for excuses to keep himself upright.
"Arrest her!" he screamed at last, in a voice that had once toppled men. "This woman and that prince will be executed for stirring sedition."
A young man in the audience stepped forward and took Deacon by the collar, shaking him until the thread of his doublet loosened. "You signed those seals," he said, voice shaking. "You wrote that my father's house was traitor."
Deacon looked at this man and then at the faces that had the ledger in their hands. The color had left his complexion. He crumpled, like paper subjected to water.
"I did what my lord told me," he begged, suddenly small. "My lords, please—"
"Beg," someone hissed. "Beg. You've learned the humility of paupers."
He fell to his knees on the hard paving stones. The square became a theater of his humiliation. He had once stood above us all; now he was on his knees with the sun making his scalp bright.
"Please," Deacon said, voice cracking into pieces. "Please don't—"
People laughed. Some cried. Women spat at his boots. A merchant held up a scrap of his old note and trampled it underfoot. The crowd pressed in hard, but not so close as to touch his hair; there remained a hesitation — sport, not bloodlust.
"Will you confess your crimes?" I asked, not softly.
He looked up. Panic and shame were so present they might have been a new religion to worship. "I—" He clawed at the hem of his robe. "I was told—"
"Tell them," someone called. "Tell them what you told your dealers."
So he told them. He described dinners where men drank and promised a future; he named names; he said privileged things in a voice that seemed to fracture with each syllable. The sound of his voice unraveling made people gape like those who watch a great curtain fall. He moved from denial to bargaining to plea to wail.
At the end, he was on his knees, the crown of his head rubbed raw by grit. Helena stood and turned away. "If you think I'm to be forgiven for being clever," she said coldly, "then you must think yourself cleverer still."
"Please," Deacon cried once more, throat ragged. "I can make restitution. I will pay. I will leave, I will leave the capital. Do not—"
"Leave," the crowd mimicked. "Leave where? Leave in disgrace?"
"No," I said, stepping close. "You will be remembered. You will be the cautionary tale mothers whisper to daughters."
Deacon's face hollowed. "I did what I thought necessary—"
"You killed a family," I said. "Not for state, but for greed."
He fell, sobbing. The square watched and recorded; someone took his image on a small glass plate, and the light recorded every line of shame. It would be shared, and the story would be told. His final pleas dissolved into a thin sound.
The humiliation had not been enough. I wanted the memory to last. So I ordered the steward to ring the bells. The crier called the names. Fox Conner was ordered from the dais and stood before us like a man called to judgement. We handed him his own ledger and watched his fingers tremble when he read the bills of sale his hand had signed.
Helena's smile had withered. She tried to regain some dignity but the crowd spat in her direction. Someone began to shout that her gowns were a mockery and must be torn, and women in the crowd obeyed. They stripped the fallen silk from her shoulders and tossed it in the mud. She shrank like a moth in a rainstorm.
Deacon begged. Fox whimpered. The crowd called them thieves and traitors. Men took out their little papers and wrote, "Let this be known: do not trust men who make castles with small coin."
When the city magistrate arrived, summoned by a dozen loud voices, he had no choice but to act. He placed Deacon under arrest for abuses of power. Fox Conner's offices were sealed pending inquiry. The steward who had helped them avoid the law was carried off in shackles. Helena was escorted, not as a guest, but as an accused conspirator.
Deacon on his knees had moved from arrogance to denial to pleading in less than an hour. His final posture was not righteous but small and broken. "Please," he murmured to anyone who would listen.
No one answered him with mercy. They answered him with history. They answered him with the ledger.
When he was hauled away, his clothes were filthy and his face smudged. He looked at me once through the crowd as if to find my eyes, to trace the line between the woman he had lied to and the woman who had orchestrated his humiliation.
"Forgive me," he said, voice thin.
"I will not," I said.
The crowd's cheers filled the square. The market sellers began trading again as if nothing had happened, which is to say, they began to profit from the new rumor. Someone lifted a glass to Fabian and me. Someone spat.
My satisfaction was not a bright thing. It was a small, cold stone that I set in my mouth and held.
After the square, after the magistrate's men had carried Deacon away and the city had published the first accounts, Helena Eaton was publicly shunned in every market and boudoir that would take a side. She tried to bargain, then to deny, then to cry. She begged on her knees. Women in the crowd took turns standing over her like judges pointing out the cracks: "You sold a sister!" "You took a home for silk!" "You made a bargain with a devil!"
She shrank. Her wedding ring — gifted by Deacon — was snatched off her finger and thrown into a dish of stew. No one dared harm her beyond humiliation; we had wanted to teach, not to spill blood. But we had taught her to know shame.
She turned toward the magistrate finally, but no plea could unmake the ledger. The magistrate, who was more a servant of law than of mercy, read out the charges. Helena's name was recorded. She was stripped of her titles and assigned to a remote estate as a penance. The story of her betrayal spread across the province like a stain.
"Do you feel better?" Fabian asked me later, when the bells had quieted and the lanterns were being taken down.
"No," I said. "But I feel more honest."
He nodded. "Justice makes enemies," he said.
"I know," I said. "We will meet them."
He took my hand in his and squeezed. "Then we will be ready."
Months passed in the way of plans: we built more workshops, made more trades, and the province began the slow, clumsy birthing of a new economy. Trade caravans came through the passes we had fortified; artisans found markets for their wares in far-off towns. We took small victories: a building here, a tax broken there. We taught people to expect a different life.
Fabian and I grew closer in ways that made the air between us both dangerous and tender. He revealed more of his history: a palace poisoned by envy, a fall from favor, exile he had learned to carry like an extra cloak. I learned his laughter and also the sharp, private grief that bent his shoulders when no one was watching. I learned to answer his jests and to stand when he needed steadiness.
"Do you want to return to the capital?" I asked one night as we walked under a canopy of stars.
"I want a place to stand that is mine," he said. "If to do that I must return, then I will build a path. If to do that I must burn bridges, I will."
"Will you burn Deacon?" I asked.
"Only if his name keeps poisoning things," he said. "You should not need to carry old fires into new ground."
I thought of the ledger and the faces in the square. "I do not want more blood," I said. "I want to be safe."
"You will be," he promised.
And so the wheel turned: trade, bargains, power. I watched as men shifted under the sun like mirage and learned to cut them down patiently. I learned when to strike and when to let a rumor do the work. I built a new identity on an old, broken promise. By teaching carpenters to carve tables and women to suture not only wounds but the seam of a town's economy, I took more than revenge: I took the means to rise.
When the time to return to the capital came, it would not be as a betrayed girl. It would be with a ledger of my own and a province behind me.
The End
— Thank you for reading —