Revenge16 min read
I Was the Mad Princess Who Refused to Die
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I woke up to the taste of iron and the sound of rain on a warped roof. I did not know my name then, not really. People called me names I did not remember wanting. They called me a madwoman, a witch, a danger to the household. I smiled the smile they expected and let them take my blood.
"Drink, Princess," the doctor said then, like a man reciting orders. "One cup, warm. It will help."
"It burns," I told him. I heard laughter.
"You are a stubborn thing," said the man who had the right to speak of me as if I were a thing. "You always were."
"Who are you?" I asked, but I already knew. The voice belonged to Grayson Bray, the war prince who had the power to order the night and the morning. He had the broad shoulders of a man who had learned to make people obey.
"Do not pretend," he said. "You know me."
I would learn later that he had taken my blood because of a promise, because of a bargain old as grief. I would learn later that he had ordered that I be kept between walls and windows and lit candles, that a hundred small cruelties be legalized by a single command. But the first days smelled of herbs and fear. They smelled of his hands.
"You won't die," Grayson told the physician. "If she dies, I lose my game."
"That is what you said before." The physician, Maddox Lefebvre, prodded my arm. "We take more tonight. Follow the old methods."
I was a thin shadow then, a woman hollowed by sleeplessness and nails and the shadow of a child whose name was gone to me. "Dad," I mouthed sometimes, as if my parents' faces might step out of the darkness. The house answered with cold.
"You should be grateful to have a bed and lanterns," the scolding voices said. "What is a madwoman to do but shriek? She was saved, after all."
"Saved?" I thought. Saving wore many faces. Once it was love. Once it was a hand that tucked my hair and called me foolish. Once it was a promise that became a blade.
"Is she improving?" a woman asked outside my door one day. I heard the soft clack of sandals and the humid sigh of servants arranged like chess pieces. "She has been delirious for months."
"Her family is gone," another answered. "Even if she recovers, what then? The humiliation—"
"And yet the prince visits," the first voice said. "That must mean something."
I had not the strength to imagine what it meant. They dressed me up some days, brushed my hair badly, tied ribbons where ribbons did not need to be tied. When he came, his boots made the house sound like thunder.
"Old routine," Grayson said once he stepped into the dim room. "The old practice."
"Yes, my lord." Maddox spoke as he did the work. The needle bit; the cup filled again.
"Your hands are cold," I said to Grayson once. My words were small spiders.
He looked at me then—properly looked—and for one poor second I felt the old warmth that had been present at our beginning. "Do you recall my face?" he asked.
I laughed, a thin clicking noise. "Faces fold together. Rain blurs things."
He grew impatient. "Sometimes I wonder if you actually went mad or simply learned how to act."
My laughter buckled. "It hurts," I admitted. "It is big."
He tightened his fingers on my jaw. "We will not let you die," he said. "I will not waste my entertainment."
The man I thought I would hate forever spoke as if I were a thing to be kept. And I listened. I did not know then that the toxic fog wrapped around my life would thicken until it covered everything.
"They said you murdered your child," the voice of Lillian Barton came once—soft and full of venom. She was fair and precise, the sort of woman who arranged her laughter like ornamental knives. "They said you wanted him gone."
"You were the one who put the bottle in my kitchen," I whispered. I could not bear to look at her. I had already been pushed into the edge of a well. My hands trembled.
"Did I?" she said, and the smile did not leave her face. A hundred conspiracies were in that smile. "Perhaps you were always so fragile."
The years unrolled like dry paper. Men drank, officials huddled, servants plotted in corners. Lillian whispered in ears, gave small coins, told small lies. She wore patience like a crown.
"You cannot stay here," she told them when the prince softened briefly. "You are a loose thing. You will ruin everything."
"She is the prince's wife," a maid protested—Halle Chapman—who had watched too long and grown hard. "She must be cared for."
"Do not speak too loudly," Lillian warned. "Do as I ask, or you will find yourselves hungry."
When I finally vanished from the house it was during a rain that battered the world into matching grief. They said I had run. They said the madwoman struck out and fled like a stray dog. The servants whispered, then saw the prince's face and fell silent. Grayson paced like a man with a rip in his bone.
"Find her," he barked. "Every hand. Do not let her leave the county."
They found me in a barn, dirt on my hair, blood on my temple. I remember being stooped and small and heaving and someone lifting me—Grayson, stubborn and brutal, picked me up without a single thought for how dirty I was, and carried me to the hall as if I were something precious and worthless at the same time.
"She looks wretched," he told his men once I was back in the house. "Clean her. Let her sleep."
He left me then with orders that were more mercy than they had been earlier. For one small day he seemed like a man who could care. "Kiss me," he pleaded once, bargaining sugar for obedience. "Kiss me for a sweet."
I did as he said. I pressed my lips to the cool of his hand like a beggar.
"Good," he murmured, and then, before I knew it, he closed his mouth over mine.
I slept that night while the world turned and a fire burned elsewhere. The next morning the servants were frantic because my bed was empty.
"She is gone!" cried Molly Chan. "The madwoman—"
"Find her," Grayson said. He went himself to search the ruins. He rushed into the nursery, the oily barns—they called and called. They moved like the tide.
They found remnants: scorched cloth, smoke-stained beams, a silver hairpin. They found despair. I had lit the tinder; I had been leaving instructions. I had set the fire and vanished into a washed-out secret.
"She must be dead," Lillian whispered like victory. "Finally."
Grayson did not accept that. He stood at the ruins and screamed until his voice was nothing but a cracked thing.
They dug while I crawled through a hidden corridor beneath the foundation, a secret passage that smelled of mold and old promises. I fell into the damp like a thing born into night and held on.
It was a miracle—unlikely and precise—that brought me into the path of Pax Nunez, the Yuwen prince's son, who passed by with his carriage and hands and eyes that measured people gently.
"Are you alive?" he asked, soft as water.
"I am," I breathed. "But I am ruined."
"You will come with me, then," he said. The carriage smelled like incense and order. He wrapped me in a cloak and took me away.
At the Yuwen residence I found hands that did not demand screams. Pax asked proper questions. "Tell me everything," he said.
"I lit the fire," I told him. "I thought death would be an answer."
He frowned. "You were stronger than that when I saw you. You are all wrong to think like that."
They healed me with patience, not sentences. Kaelyn Turner, Pax's attendant, brought warm broths and slippers. I slept, and in that sleep I dreamt of my fathers and mothers and their last words. I could keep the memories only in fragments—still I kept them.
"Do you want revenge?" Pax asked me one evening as we walked through the small, politely trimmed gardens.
"Yes," I said simply. "And I am out of time."
He studied me. "What would you ask?"
"Help," I said. "Make a stage. Show them what they are. Make Lillian suffer."
He laughed—soft and dangerous. "You are ruthless."
"I am honest," I told him.
The days turned into planning. Pax was a patient man; he valued fairness and cunning and he was not afraid to play the long game.
"Wait for the lantern festival," Pax said. "Crowds blind many things. People hide in light. I can arrange for you to be seen."
"And the poison?" I asked.
"It will reveal itself," Pax answered. He had notes from his own physician, and from talks in dusty libraries about rare toxins. He suspected the poison called "heart-madness," a rare royal toxin that only the court would have, the kind that gnaws children and makes men see false faces.
"Then we will unmask them," Pax promised.
While I rested, Grayson drank. Johann Atkinson—his steward—brought word. Arlo Chaney, his captain, kept an eye on guards.
"Lillian has no proof," Arlo told Grayson. "She only seeds whispers."
Grayson pulled himself together like a man with too many sharp edges. "Find me evidence. I will not be used as a fool."
He went to pieces about the length of a week, then collected himself. He hired the quiet men to search old ledgers. He sent men to examine who had bought what, who wrote what. Slowly, evidence drifted out like fish in a net. Coins traced. Messages surfaced between maidservants. It pointed in one cold, hard line to Lillian.
He came to my room then once, unasked. "They wrote that you were the one who tried to poison," he said. He handed me a small scrap of handwriting.
I read it. Lillian's script was like a smile on paper.
"You framed me," I said. I had wanted the world to end, but not like this.
"She lied," Grayson said. "She lied to me." He looked like a man who wanted everything he thought right to be true again. He wanted to believe the story of his life could be repaired with truth.
We planned a confrontation in the open—without masks, with lanterns. The festival would be the place where Lillian would either triumph or crumble. Pax arranged it. The city would come to the river that night like a deck of playing cards.
"Are you ready?" Pax asked me as he closed his cloak.
"Ready for what?" I said.
"To see what a crowd does," he answered.
The lanterns came like a tide of small suns. People thronged the quay. Stalls smelled of smoke and candied fruit. I could smell fear and sugar.
"Remember," Pax said. "You must seem to survive. Let them hear your voice, not your shame. You must be clear."
I went to the platform arranged by Pax, and he gave me a candle, a slender support. The water reflected a thousand lights. Lillian made her appearance as if she had been carved and set in motion. She wore silk like armor and a smile like a drawn sword.
The prince—Grayson—stood behind me, and my heart was a small bird in a cage. I had never intended to stay alive for the performance. I had intended to take vengeance, perhaps to die afterward. But my lungs were full of a strange wish to be alive a little longer.
"Lillian!" Grayson called. The crowd turned. A hundred faces looked to the stage like hungry dogs.
"You dare?" Lillian mocked across the distance. "You bring the madwoman out to the world?"
"You poisoned my wife," Grayson said. The voice that had been cold became a blade. "You thought you could bargain with death and hide."
"What proof?" Lillian asked, the crowd leaning in dialect like living things. She raised her chin. "What do you mean?"
A thin man I had once barely noticed stepped forward and produced the small bottle we had found in the servants' storeroom. "This came from Lillian's chest," he said. "And her name is on the ledger."
"Shame," I heard someone whisper near the front. "Do you hear that?"
Lillian laughed, and the laugh had been practiced in mirrors. "You will not ruin me in the light," she said. "You bring your theatrics and expect the people to merely clap."
"Let the people judge," Grayson said, and his hand brushed mine—an anchor. "Bring forward the witnesses."
Halle Chapman came forward then, shaking as if cold. Molly Chan and Gabrielle Chang followed. They told the small things—the secret deliveries, the late-night whispers, the needle that had been exchanged under covers. Each testimony was a match struck.
At first Lillian's face held contempt. She whispered that she had been misunderstood, that her care had been true. The crowd shifted.
"She is lying!" someone shouted. A murmur grew like a wave.
Lillian's posture changed. Her fingers trembled. "This is preposterous," she said. "I cared for her. I watched the prince. How—"
"But you paid the servants six silver coins each to say that the princess is mad," Halle said loudly. "We can tell you where the coins came from."
"Shame," a merchant called. "We would not let a traitor buy us."
The first flicker of fear crossed her face. She had always believed herself above the need of crowds. Now the crowd's appetite was real.
"Is this truly so?" Grayson demanded. "Do you deny the ledger?"
"I deny nothing!" Lillian hissed, then caught herself. For a bare second she smiled, attempting to be innocent. "I deny any intention to harm her. I only sought to—
"To rule him," a voice cried. "To have him choose you!"
I could see her cheeks losing their rigidity. Her voice lowered. "You lie," she cried. "You would have me poor before everyone!"
"Tell us," said Pax calmly into the small makeshift stage microphone—one of the city's heralds had lent his voice. "Did you put the drafts in her food? Did you bribe the maids?"
Lillian's lips parted. "How dare you ask me to—"
A boy in the crowd piped up and produced a scrap of cloth. "I saw the woman throw something in the kitchen," he said. "I thought it was a rat poison. But I kept it."
"Bring the boy forward," Grayson ordered.
They brought evidence, pieces, slivers. The crowd began to hiss. Eyes turned like hungry fish toward Lillian. Her face, once practiced and poised, collapsed inch by inch.
"Shut up!" she shouted. "You slander me. I am noble. I am—"
"Prove it," Grayson said. "Do you deny that you ordered the maids to pain her? Do you deny that you called the physician to take her blood on nights you were not sent for?"
She faltered again. "I did not," she said. "I—"
"Then show us otherwise," Pax urged.
At that, something broke.
In the space of a heartbeat, her smugness dissolved into fury, then into incredulity, then into a desperate scramble. "You cannot! You cannot all be fools!" she wailed. "This is a trap! You have been bought by that traitor and that foreign—"
She shrieked. The crowd hooted.
Her face flushed. She lunged toward the witnesses like a caged animal.
"Stop her!" someone cried. Guards moved. The crowd pressed forward with a hundred hands. "She's mad! She's mad!"
"Shame!" a woman cried, and a child echoed it like a bell.
Lillian's teeth gleamed when she tried to grin again. "I did not!"
"Then kneel!" Grayson demanded, low and contained. "Kneel and face the truth."
She refused.
They seized her. The verses of punishment had been said. She had been caught. She had been found with ledger, with coins, with poison, with a malicious litany of small cruelties. The people around us closed in. Old men spat. A few sneered and mimicked her earlier smiles. A woman fanned herself with a scrap to keep her composure. A merchant took a ledger and mocked the lines aloud.
"She is shameless!" someone laughed. "Rid her of privileges!"
"You can't do this!" Lillian cried, and then the mask fully dropped: she who had been the measured aristocrat now shrieked like an animal. "No! You don't understand! I saved him first—look, I saved his life, I earned him!"
"Your coin earned you nothing but contempt," said Halle. "You stabbed the child in the heart with your jealousy."
There was silence for a breathless second—the crowd tasted it. Then the surge began.
"They are calling for a public penalty," I heard a voice say. "Public shaming, fines, removal of rank."
"Bring forward the magistrate," Grayson ordered.
They brought the magistrate as if from a dream, a stern man with papers and a face that had known too many secrets. He read the evidence slowly, solemnly. The ledger, the bottle, the witnesses, the maids' confessions, the boy's fragment. The magistrate's words fell like stones. The crowd listened. They were hungry for a spectacle that tasted like justice.
"You stand accused," he said at last, "of poisoning attempts, of conspiring to harm, of incitement. Do you plead?"
Lillian's hands trembled violently. Her voice—a practiced comfort for the drawing room—was gone. She trembled through the steps of defiance: "I did not— I did not mean—"
"Enough," the magistrate said. "You are stripped of your household honours. You will be publicly paraded in the market. You will be made to wear shackles for a day. Your servants will speak of you freely. You will be fined and your land reassigned."
Her face passed through stages with a clarity that was almost clinical. First, she was smug, smiling with silent wine on her tongue. Then suspicion prickled as participants spoke. Shock—her hand flew to her mouth. Denial—"You cannot steal that from me"—and then collapse. She sank to her knees and clutched at the magistrate's skirts.
"Please," she cried. "I am noble. You are wrong—please—this will ruin me."
The crowd reacted in the exact choreography of a living beast. They leaned in. A murmur of surprise, a thousand renditions of shame. Some clapped because the world had finally given them a moment of justice. A few turned away, discomforted.
"Have mercy—" she pleaded and then shrieked, "Mercy! Mercy! I can repay you! I can give you coin—"
The magistrate's face was a mask of laws. "You were allowed your silver, Lillian Barton. You chose a path of poison and cruelty."
She began to beg, then to bargain, then to scream, and each stage produced a new sound from the crowd. Someone began to record details into a small leather book. A woman—young and furious—pulled out a scrap of her shawl and waved it like a flag. "Watch them," she hissed. "See her crumble."
"Do it!" a baker called. "Parade her up the quay!"
They did. They strapped small iron shackles to her wrists for the market's spectacle. The procession moved slowly, a river of eyes and whispers. Lillian's feet kicked. She tried to strike out at the maids who had accused her. They flinched and kept to their testimony.
At one point she saw me thrown into that procession as a witness to the truth—my name, the things that had happened, the child that had been lost. Her eyes burned with a hatred that would not burn away.
"Don't you dare!" she slithered at me. "This will not stand! I will have you—"
"Look at her," a child shouted. "She is all fury. She is all cowardice."
The humiliation went on. Men spat. Women whispered. Lillian's face turned from haughty to hollow to raw. She knelt in the market with the sheepish illusion of control wholly gone. A few of the onlookers took their notes and told passing friends. "She was guilty," they said, and the words passed like coins.
She begged, she screamed, she denied, she collapsed, she demanded fairness. She did everything the rulebook of a revealed villain entails: the boasts, the denials, the final plea. And when no hand reached out, she clung to the crowd and mouthed apologies that meant less with every breath.
"She was cruel," someone said. "What she did required a public show."
They dragged her to the magistrate's bench, threw the ledger into the pile of proofs. Lillian looked up at me once: her eyes had nothing left but a raw pleading that she had never expected to feel. For the first time she seemed small.
"Do you have anything to say?" the magistrate asked.
She was beyond artful answers. She could only beg. "Forgive me—no, do not— I did what I did for love—"
The crowd laughed. It was cold. People shouted things that would later be sung as gossip. A young woman spat in the dirt for hate of what Lillian had done. A child stepped forward and shoved the ledger into the magistrate's hand—proof, proof, proof.
The magistrate pronounced sentence: fines, public repayment, loss of rank, the ritual humiliation, and removal from the household of the prince. The crowd cheered.
At the end, when they led her away, Lillian's composure had cracked entirely. She sobbed and pressed herself to the guards and then, finally, gasped out words that were both accusation and final surrender.
"You will pay! You will pay!" she uttered. "You will answer for what you've done to me!"
"Not with coin," the crowd cried. "With justice."
She was hauled away. A hush fell in the market for a beat, as if the city itself drew breath. The lanterns swayed. I felt Grayson beside me like a weathered pillar.
"It was necessary," he said softly. "They needed to see."
"Did they?" I replied.
"They did."
Hours later, when the lanterns died down and the crowd dispersed back into the city, they carried her humiliation as a story to be repeated. People told their children. Songfounders coaxed the lines into tune. The world had witnessed Lillian's fall, the slow collapse of pride, the stages of denial, the final plea.
It satisfied something in me and left something else empty. Justice had been delivered in quite ordinary ways—a fine, a parade, a sentence—and yet there was another debt to settle that would not be paid in the market square.
"You have been brave," Pax said later, but his eyes were quaintly afraid. "You did right."
"I only wanted them to feel what I felt," I said.
"Feeling does not repair everything," he replied. "But it begins the measure."
I agreed with him enough to believe it, and yet the scale was not balanced. Lillian had been leveled in public. She had been reduced to every fear she had ever hidden. But she still lived, and that unsettled me. The true ending needed another note—something beyond a magistrate's pronouncement.
When I returned to the house, Grayson asked me to forgive him. He begged me to let him die for me—if necessary. He spoke of an old idea the physician had whispered: an old exchange, crude as iron. "There is a means," Maddox had told him, trembling at the edge of his medical knowledge: "A sacrifice may tether a life to another. A life for a life."
"If I wanted your death I would take it," I told Grayson bluntly. "But I will not be the one to take your life—unless you choose it."
He looked at me then like a man whose whole world had been simplified to one thing. "I will choose," he said.
On a cold night not long after, he bared his chest, set the blade deep, and the world tilted.
"I am sorry," he breathed.
"Grayson—"
"I do this so you live," he said. "I love you. From long ago. I never meant—"
He fell into the silence like a single tree. Pax and Maddox and all the physicians worked like gods with small hands. They did something that had never had a guarantee before: they tied his life to mine. The knot was not of magic, though it felt like it; it was of medical ferocity and a vow that matched the cruelty and love that had broken both of us.
"Your lives are linked now," Maddox told Pax when they had finished. "If he dies, you die, and if she dies, he dies. Live with that."
When Grayson finally opened his eyes, he saw me bent over him and smiled like a man seeing land after drowning.
"I told you," he said, "once and forever."
"I have seen both your worst and your best," I whispered.
He laughed, a breathless thing. "We will carry it," he said.
We survived the long days that followed; Pax quietly left with a promise: keep her safe, and if she values a life besides the prince's, she should take it. I chose to go forward with Pax for a time, to learn what living might be outside vengeance. In the end I accepted the safety of an odd house and the slow, loving care of a man who wanted nothing but to be by my side.
Years later, walking with a small child who called me "Mother" and held a little lantern, I saw Grayson across the lane. He looked at us and his face folded in a thousand slow feelings. He could not recapture the years he had ruined. He had not been punished for everything, perhaps, but life does not do perfect justice. He had paid a price.
"Do you pity me?" I once asked him.
He looked at the child and nodded. "I pity myself only in that I thought pain could be a ledger. You showed me that living is the only accountability."
He left that night with a hollow that the lanterns could not light. I kept the memory of the punishment in the market, the sight of Lillian's humiliation, the stages she walked through before the crowd. It was a public thing, and it changed the city like a fever. The wound healed, but its scar reminded us of what we had done and what we had failed to do.
And sometimes, when the river is still and the lanterns float slow, I remember the night Grayson held me and gave his life as if it were the only thing he had left to offer. I remember the market and the magistrate and the small leather book where a child's hand had put the proof. I remember Pax's quiet patience and how a life can be an exchange and also a promise.
When the child tugs at my sleeve and asks the merchant "Mama, who is the man by the bridge?" I answer plainly: "He once loved me. He made mistakes. He paid a price, and in the end he made a choice that changed us all."
And the child simply nods and holds the lantern up to the night.
The End
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