Face-Slapping11 min read
Is It Mercy or Trap?
ButterPicks14 views
I wake to someone breathing against my neck.
"Don't go," he mumbles.
I stare at the ceiling, at the green canopy, and the breath on my skin turns my anger into a cold, humming panic. I roll, push, shout—"Let go!"—but the arms around me only press tighter.
"Stop." My teeth find his forearm and I bite. He cries out, a small wounded sound that makes my whole body freeze.
"Mother—" he breathes in my neck, and the single syllable collapses me from fury into a hollow I didn't know I had.
"You're Judas and a liar," I say into the dark, and my voice cracks.
He is still then. For a long time he is still. I wait for the trap to snap again. When the sky at last lightens, I lift my head and find him looking at me as if he's never done anything wrong.
"You said I called you ‘mother’—" I say, and my cheeks hot with shame.
"You did," he answers. "You saved me once. You came back for me, and I—" He shuts his mouth. His fingers tighten around me. "Don't leave."
"How long are you going to hold me?" I say. "Let go."
"Later." He breathes. "My hand tingles."
He lets me up at last and I run.
Outside, the courtyard smells of bamboo and wet earth. A little parrot hangs on a perch, green and red, one leg locked to its cage. It turns its head at me as if it knows. I look at Jasper Conrad and the sight of the chained bird is a mirror. I spit, "What do you call this? Amusement?"
He tilts his head, bored. "If it's ugly, let it fly."
"Do you lock what you love, Jasper? Or do you lock what you own?"
He laughs like a blade, and for a moment I think killing him would be simple.
Farrell Wallace is under the willows, sword at his side, sweat on his brow. He watches me approach as if he's always been watching me.
"Good morning." I force a smile.
"Farrell." I drop my voice. "Is he dangerous?"
"Of course," he says, blunter than he means. "He is merciless. You shouldn't trust him."
"Did he—" My voice shakes. "Did he order the arrest? Did he…make sure I went to the cells?"
He looks away, then fixes me with an even gaze. "It was his scheme. He wanted to set people against each other. He wanted to force his road up from the mud. He used you as bait."
My knees go soft. "Why?"
"Power," Farrell says simply. "And because he is good at pretending."
I taste bile. I think of the nights I nursed him, the hands I used to steady the broken pieces of his body. I think of his low laugh as he pretended to need me. "I saved him," I whisper. "I could have left him."
"You did," Farrell says. "And that is why he didn't kill you outright. You are useful and dangerous."
"I want out." I say it like a prayer.
"Stay with me. I will watch." Farrell’s voice is steady. "You will be safe."
"Can you teach me a few moves?" I demand. "At least let me run."
He smiles once and shows me an elbow twist that is mostly smoke and bone. "Run when you can," he says. "Fight when you must."
We prepare to leave then. I pack Avery Castillo, the little child who sleeps heavy and warm. Jaida Flowers chattered like a small bird and Ellis Flores fusses like a mother hen. We move at dawn, leaving Jasper behind on his porch looking over the courtyard like a lord.
On the road a storm catches us. The tent smells of wet cloth and sickness. The baby burns, bright and fitful. Emmett Rousseau works a calm miracle with poultices and herbs. "Wind fever," he says, pinching the baby's toe. "Give him broth and hot cloth. He will be fine."
I do everything by hand until there is nothing else to do. I collapse with the child in my arms.
"Rest," Jaida says. "I'll watch."
But I never sleep sound for long. At midnight I wake choking on nausea and find Jasper Conrad seated near the fire, book in hand, the moon making him softer somehow.
"What are you doing here?" I hiss.
He straightens like a cat offended to be noticed. "You were crying in your sleep," he says. "I came to make sure you were not feverish."
"Really?" I bite the edge of a borrowed bowl. "You came to my tent to spy?"
He looks at my hands, the swollen joints I hide. He reaches out and brushes them with a touch that is literal and controlling at once. "Your fingers are hot," he says. "That's not good."
"Mind your own," I snap.
He doesn't. He brings a small pot and dabs at my joints with cooling paste. "It will help," he says, and his fingers are clumsy with concern. He doesn't say I am a pawn; he says he cares for me with the same hand that once plotted against me. I laugh without humor.
"Tell me why you set me up!" I demand.
"I didn't mean to harm you," he says. "It was a mistake. An accident in a plan."
"Do you think I will believe that?" I stand and throw myself at his throat. I feel as if I can crush him with my rage. He is not afraid. He takes me in his arms, calm as weather. "It was not my intention to kill you," he says. "But if something had been meant, you would be gone."
"You're a liar." I press my forehead to his. "A smooth, blessed liar."
He smiles slow and crooked. "You are like someone I once knew," he says. "You laugh like her. You look like her."
"Then leave me alone," I say. "I won't play the replacement."
He coughs. "I do not need to replace her. I need you to remain."
"Because you love me?" I spit.
"Because you are useful," he answers at last. "And perhaps because you are almost like love—"
I shove him away and storm out. The rain finds me. I cry in the downpour, furious and small, and then the fever takes me. I wake in a carriage with water sliding down the curtains and Jasper sitting like a carved thing beside me.
"You're awake," he says.
"Go." I try to push him and the world tilts.
"Eat," he says, passing tea. "You insult me like you always do."
"I do not owe you an explanation," I say. "I never did."
"You saved me," he says, slow and dangerous. "You are bound to me."
"Then cut the bonds," I say.
He smiles, and in that smile there is a promise to break me. "Not yet," he says.
We make camp in towns, and I listen as the army scythes through provinces. He is brilliant in battle and labors with a curse. He reads sutras and commands beheadings with the same hand. He is all art and force, a man who keeps two faces: one for the killing field, and one for the bed.
"Why did you stop the slaughter this time?" I ask once, watching him post edicts.
"Because you are looking," he answers. "Because I wanted to watch you look at me with less fear."
"I am not a prize," I tell him.
"Then be my reason," he says. "Stay because you want to."
I do not answer. I cannot.
Months later, as rumors grow, Farrell corners the right time. "There is a council in the city," he tells me. "Public grievances will be heard. That is where you want to be."
"Why?" I ask. "To show himself? To set a trap?"
"To give him a stage," Farrell says. "To make him either a god or a spectacle."
"I want him broken," I say. "But not simple."
"When you humiliate him, make all watch. Make the proud fall." He looks at me like he is counting cost. "I will be with you."
I plan the revelation with Farrell and Emmett. Jaida collects witnesses. Ellis tends Avery while I rehearse speeches that sting the ear but do not betray my heart entirely.
On the day of the market assembly, Jasper enters like a conqueror. "Hearken," he says, voice silk over iron. "I have brought order."
The crowd bows and claps. He is dazzling, his wounds like medals. He looks at me and a soft smile plays on his lips. "She stood with me," he tells them. "She saved my life."
"Not all truths are told," I call out from the crowd. "Not all kindness is kindness."
He blanches.
"You used me," I say. "You locked a child, a bird, a woman's life in your jar and shook it for sport. You set me in a cell to watch me die. You forced my neighbors into the blade to make your claim."
He steps forward. "You speak treason," he says.
"Look at the parrot," I shout. "He hands out trinkets of power and hides chains in velvet boxes."
Laughter at first. Then a murmur. Then a ripple. Jasper's jaw hardens.
"You lie!" he cries.
"Witness!" I say, and the crowd parts as Farrell and Jaida come forward, with Ellis and Emmett and town women who hold small embroidered shirts—stitching every one of them proof of who fed the prisoners, who smuggled medicine, who found the lost. "You can ask them," I say. "Ask who paid bribes, who took orders without mercy. Ask the prisoners. Ask the man with the black cloak," I point.
Seth Boyle steps from the shadow. He is Jasper's guard, the man who had smiled like a dog. He falters under the sun. "I served," he says. "I obeyed."
"Did you carry out orders?" I ask. "Did you set the arrest?"
He looks at Jasper whose face is slowly becoming something carved and old. "I…" He swallows. "I carried messages."
"Did you see him leave instructions to burn the letter that would have shown it was his doing?"
The guard trembles. "Yes."
"Then you will show the letter," I say. "You, man, bring what you've hidden."
Seth Boyle's hand goes to his coat in public as a crowd leans forward.
"Do it," Jasper hisses.
Seth spreads open his sleeves and from inside he draws a folded paper and, with trembling, hands it to a town clerk. The clerk reads and his face goes white. The paper names Jasper Conrad as architect of my arrest. It names payments. It names burned witnesses. It names the order for an ambush that would have killed the child he now pretends to pity.
"Traitor!" cries someone in the crowd.
Jasper's face goes from control to confusion to rage in a hair's breadth. He smiles once, too-wide. "Lies!" he says, striding forward.
I step up to the stone dais. "Tell them what you did," I say, voice calm as water. "Tell them how you used a girl's name to climb."
"She used me," he says, suddenly fierce. "She betrayed me. She pretended to help, only to make me look worse! I loved her—" His voice flips—"I loved her and she used me."
"Then confess now," I tell him. "Tell them you sent men disguised as rebels. Tell them you wrote the orders."
He laughs then, a short, brittle sound. "You dare ask me to confess before my men? You would have me bow?"
The townspeople begin to shout. "Show it! Show the proofs!"
Emmett steps forward, "We have receipts," he says. "We have witnesses who saw the money exchanged at inns."
Someone in the back cranes. "Where's the parrot?" The bird—small, green—squawks in its cage near the dais, its chain glinting. I point at it. "It was taken from a merchant who refused to obey," I say. "Do you remember? He cried at the bird's leash."
The councilman reads again. The parchment proves bribery. The crowd moves like a wave. A baker spits in the mud. A woman slaps the nearest nobleman's hand away. Faces I thought indifferent are hard with betrayal.
Jasper paces. "This is all theater!" he roars. "You fools! You heap shame on me and call it justice."
"On the contrary," Farrell says, stepping up. "You called it strategy. You called it necessary."
"Soldiers," Jasper cries. "Will you not trust me? I held cities! I commanded fires!"
A soldier in Jasper's retinue drops his spear and steps toward the crowd. "We were ordered to burn only to trap a larger force," he says. "We carried out orders."
"Those orders came from you," I say.
The soldier's eyes dart to Jasper then away.
Something cracks in the air then—the long, taut rope of Jasper's dignity snapping. His face flushes, a carnival of colors: red, then white, then a gray that looks like bones. His hand comes to his throat and he staggers, not because I hit him but because the weight of all those who trusted him has become a wall.
"You can't—" he whispers.
"Do you remember the woman you once loved?" I ask quietly, leaning close so the whole square hears. "Do you remember how you compared me to her? You said I was like a ghost you could keep. You had no right."
He laughs, a broken animal sound. "She abandoned me," he says. "She left this world. I only sought to make them feel what I felt."
"Then feel this," I say.
I tell the crowd the details—how he ordered the jailers to leave a door unlocked, how he bribed a priest to tamper with messages, how he meant to provoke a slaughter to flush a rival. I speak slowly, the way you feed a flame. I read the names I have learned, the places, the nights. People murmur. Children listen. His men look away.
At first he is defiant, chest a drumbeat of pride. "I am an emperor of my burdens!" he shouts. "I did what I must!"
Then a clerk mentions the burned letters again, and a widow steps forward with a bowl and names her husband taken on the night of Jasper's decree. "He sent men to seize him," she says, voice thin but loud.
The air turns cold. Jasper's hand trembles now as if the stage is a ship and the sea has struck. He goes through the stages like an animal: denials, then rage, then bargaining. "It wasn't meant to go that far!" he cries, "I didn't know—"
"Didn't know?" a woman spits. "You ordered the fires!"
Faces sour to disgust. Phones—no, people reach for what they have; someone starts banging a pot in fury. "Traitor!" they shout. "Monster!"
He admits things in fragments, once proud words whittled into smaller and smaller confessions. He tries to place blame—on subordinates, on fate, on me—but the paper, the witnesses, the tears of widows and the sight of the chained parrot are too much. He hears the city turn. Men he counted as his guards step away. A few try to hold him, to drag him to safety, but crowds are cunning. They form a ring.
"Do not touch me," he begs at one point, voice high and horrible. "You will not shame me like this!"
I raise my hand. "Stand," I say.
He tries to grin. It looks like a child's attempt at bravery. "I can fix this. I can give—"
"No," I say. "You do not get to give anything. You gave fire and order and point-blank betrayal."
His eyes go wet then, but not with remorse—fear. He bites his lip until blood beads. The guard who had once been closest to him takes off his cloak and throws it over Jasper's shoulders like a shroud.
"They will drag him to the magistrate," someone says. "They will remove his insignia." Others shout they will burn his banners. The parrot, green as a coin, screeches, and a child laughs meanly.
Jasper's face changes through the crowd's judgment: arrogant, enraged, denying, bargaining, collapsing. He falls on his knees in front of me, the ground wet with rain and people's spit.
"Forgive me," he says, voice cracking. "Forgive me. I loved you. I did it for you."
"You used love as a weapon," I say. "You turned people into steps and I into a stepping stone. There is no forgiveness that erases what you did." I hold his gaze. "You will stand before all of them and tell them who you were."
He starts to beg for faces he imagined would rescue him—"Mother! Lord!"—but no one answers. They take off the ribbon of office from his cloak and snap it in two. Someone throws the remains into the mud.
Crowd justice is messy and human. A woman grabs his sleeve and tears a lock from him, holding it up like proof. A soldier strips the rings from his fingers. His banners are unhitched and stomped. His nearest friends do not lift a hand to stop it. Cameras—lookouts with small boxes at their faces—record everything. Some laugh. Most look as if they have been cleansed.
He goes through a slow cascade: first denial, then rage, then a little senseless pleading. "It was for the future," he tells us. "For glory!" Then, "No one will follow me now." Then, "Please—"
They throw his medals into a well. Someone ties a strip of the parrot's chain around his wrist and circles him with the same chain like a dog. He thrashes and cries, and even then he doesn't yet show real fear—until the city folk begin to spit.
The guards drag him away. In the market square his men peel off one by one; no one fights for him. He is left to the crowd, and the crowd is a jury that does not remember mercy. He falls and curls like a small, frightened thing. He is finally human in a way that hurts.
I do not gloat. I stand and feel tired more than triumphant. The parrot screeches and flaps. A child in the crowd points at the green bird and laughs. Someone ties the parrot's chain to a stake; the bird squawks but does not break.
When all is done, when Jasper Conrad is taken to the magistrate under guard, when his banners hang shredded, and the city breathes as if released from a long, hot night, I feel the cheapness of victory and the depth of the loss.
"Are you satisfied?" Farrell asks quietly later, when the new quiet settles like dust.
"Not complete," I say. "But it's enough."
"Then rest," Ellis says, offering Avery Castillo back to me. "You look like a woman who has lost sleep for twenty years."
I take the child and hold him. The tiny embroidered shirt Jaida had made is damp with my sweat. The parrot's chain still rattles in my head.
At night I see Jasper's face in dreams—no longer grand, only human and broken. I remember the red mark on his neck he couldn't hide, the sutra he read in the carriage, and the small green parrot that turned its head each time he lied. I keep these things like stones in my palm.
"You did what you had to," Farrell says.
"I did what I had to," I answer.
There will be trials. There will be consequences beyond the square—orders to remove officers, hearings, the slow machinery of law. But the city witnessed him fall. That spectacle has a truth that a court sometimes cannot give: the eyes of a hundred people set like mirrors, reflecting back the face of a man who once deceived them.
At dawn I walk past the parrot's perch. The green bird looks at me with one black eye and tilts its head as if to ask a question. I touch the chain lightly. It does not bite. The repeated clink is small and steady.
"You were never a toy," I whisper. "Neither were we."
The parrot flutters and croaks a sound that might be laughter. I put my palm on the perch and think of the sutra, the childhood of the man who thought he owned his grief, and the little embroidered shirt that warmed a baby's chest.
Farrell falls into step beside me. "What now?" he asks.
I look at the battered city and the brightening sky. "We rebuild," I say. "Not for him. For those he broke."
He nods. "For them," he agrees.
And I take the embroidered shirt—Avery's little shirt—and fold it into my pocket. The chain of the green parrot tinkles in my mind like a new, careful heartbeat.
The End
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