Revenge13 min read
Locust-Bloom Nectar and the Monk Who Could Not Leave
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I run an inn on the border where humans and spirits meet. I say "I," because I am Jayden Foster, though most call me the locust-tree spirit from the low hills. I run a small, crooked place that takes in traveling pilgrims, lonely merchants, and the occasional lost soul. I take coin, I mend noses, I curse bad weather for a price. I have never begged for power — until the day a black-clad man tossed a round, dark bead into my palm and said, "Bring him to me."
"He will pay?" I asked, fixing my hair.
"He will pay," the man—Andre Oliver—said, voice soft like a knife. "A single spirit-pearled core is deposit enough. The rest is for you to do."
"I am Jayden," I said. "I don't sell bodies."
Andre smiled without warmth. "You don't sell bodies. You trade... favors." He folded back his hood. "Bring Davis Carter the monk to bed. Make him forget himself. Done, and you have a spirit core."
I thought of the core all day like a flame. A spirit core is the size of a child's fist and warm like sun. It will let one of us climb years in an instant. I told myself it would be for the clan—Felipe Finch would thank me, or so I told myself. I told myself all the lies one can make pretty.
Then one night, he walked into my inn.
He moved as if the air listened to him. His robes were humble. His face was clean and sharp as a carved pebble. His name I learned later: Davis Carter. He bowed once and then looked past me like he could see the world bent under truth.
"Traveler, will you take supper or stay for the night?" I called with a grin.
"You are Jayden?" he said. The word was not a question. "You run this place."
I laughed and dropped my act for a moment. He did not look away. His eyes cut through my tricks. "Master, I am only passing," he said. His voice was calm. "I eat and then continue."
I put my charm into play. "A little sauce to warm the bones, then?" I set a bowl of locust-bloom nectar before him and tried to lean close. "Master, the rain eats at your steps. Sit; warm yourself."
He glanced at the bowl, then up, all the time without heat. "I do not need it," he said.
"Of course not." I smiled wider and told myself I would be quicker than sorrow. I slid the bowl closer. "For a tired monk, a sip won't harm."
He took the bowl with two fingers. The liquid trembled like a hidden insect. He sipped, eyes lowered. He did not flinch. "You ought not waste such a thing."
"I brewed it for you." My voice was softer than I meant. "I am not wasted, only generous."
He set the bowl down. "Gratitude is not a debt, Jayden Foster."
I had practiced his name on my tongue in the mirror. He folded his hands and murmured one line of prayer. He did not watch me with desire. He watched me as if seeing a page he had read before.
"Do you know what I do?" he asked finally.
"What? Tell stories? Make rooms warm?" I dropped my mask and watched him.
"You are not what you seem," Davis said. "You are... a locust spirit."
"I am Jayden," I corrected him, because I could not help it. "Jayden Foster."
He made no answer to the correction, only a light exhale. "Then bring your gifts. Be careful."
"That is not what you said last night in your prayer."
He did not smile. He produced a string of small beads — purple wood, worn smooth.
"Take care," he said. "These are mine."
I laughed and reached for his wrist, testing him. My fingers brushed his skin. A light like iron moved under my ribs; I felt both heat and a hollow pulling at the same breath. The nectar in me uncoiled like an eager pet.
"You're cold," I whispered as a joke. "Let me warm you."
He did not step away. He closed his eyes, and then his fingers tightened around my waist so hard I thought they'd mark me. "Down," he said.
"Why are you so strict?" I teased, trying to soothe the fog.
"Because rules hold people."
I slid closer anyway and touched his chin. His lips were thin and dry. I kissed him because it was what I had promised Andre Oliver I would do. For a second he did nothing, then he inhaled like a man who had remembered an old hunger. He let me press myself to him. I thought I had won.
"Stop," he said suddenly, and his hand was not gentle. He pushed down on my wrist and took my other hand. "Listen to me."
I laughed through the fog. "Teach me to pray?"
He did not laugh. He fastened a small bead to my ankle with a string of his robe, and the bead burned like a coal. "Stay near," he said. "If you go farther than three length-steps from me, you will not be free. This will keep you from harm until you learn."
"I am not a child to be tied," I spat.
He did not argue. "I tie you to save you."
"Save me from what?"
"From what you ask me to become."
That night I was not certain who had saved whom. I slept with the bead hot on my skin and a memory like a splinter in my chest.
"Why did you help me?" I asked him when we were walking out the next day.
"You put my hands on you," he said softly. "I would not let what happened go on without consequence."
I thought: he despises me. I thought: he will keep me to punish me. I thought: he would not save me, not for me. I would not be built from piety.
We traveled together because he said it would be safer to go by the temple. When we entered the gates of the monastery, a crowd gathered like birds watching a snake.
"Who is this?" an old abbot barked. He was Edward Danielsson, larger than his robes. "What sin festers here?"
"She is Jayden Foster," Davis said. "She is under my charge."
"Jayden Foster!" a youth monk cried. "A spirit in the house? This is blasphemy."
"You will silence yourself," the abbot thundered.
"You are not my judge," Davis said. His voice had a tremor. "I brought her here for care. That is all."
They judged anyway. They dragged us into the hall where the monks keep discipline.
"You should be bound," the abbot declared.
"You should be exiled," another spat.
"She is a temptress!" someone shouted.
"She is a liar," someone else said.
"You are wrong," Davis said. He was not loud, but it cut through them like glass. "She did not tempt. I drank and dissented. I will accept my punishment. She will not."
"Punish him then." The abbot's finger hammered the air. "Let the monks do what is proper."
They lined up with sticks. I saw the anger on their faces and felt like a child at market, watched and judged for wearing bright shoes. They picked up their rods and circled Davis like crows. I could hear their mutterings like a fireplace of spite.
"You must suffer for breaking vows," the abbot said. "For this, you will be flogged."
I leapt forward. "No—" I had made hubs of words. "Stop!"
Davis did not look at me. "Jayden," he murmured. "Stay."
They struck. The rods fell and Davis bowed his shoulders and took it like a cliff taking the sea. His back bled red lines and the sound of flesh under a rod is a fierce sound in a quiet place. I screamed at them to stop, and then the air broke.
He coughed and staggered and then, with sudden strength, lifted me into his arms and barged out of the hall. The monks flailed and tried to drag him back, but a light—his will—flared like a bell. The hits that were meant for me flew and smashed against a bright shield. Their rods glanced off and one by one, the monks were thrown backward, colliding into benches, cursing, their eyes wide as fish.
Davis staggered out of the doorway carrying me, blood on his back, and the monks gaped at him as if they had seen a god fall and rise again. When he stopped, he set me gently on a stone and said in a voice rough with pain, "You did not run."
"You'd have left me," I said, tears in my eyes. "You'd have left me for your vows."
He looked at me like he had been asked a question he did not expect. "I would not," he said. "You are not a sin to me. You are a being who needs shelter. I take responsibility."
I remember how my heart slipped like a small animal into a warm den then. I remember his hands on my shoulder, shaking, and how I wanted to press closer and never let go. I thought he might smile, but he kept his face calm like a monk holding a dying lamp.
We left the monastery together, and the bead on my ankle burned every step.
I took to the road with Davis. People stared. I made my jokes. He would frown, then when my laughter softened into real talk, he would answer like a human who had not yet learned how to be kind.
"I will go back," I told him one night by the inn. "I'll take the spirit core and give it to Felipe Finch. We'll be ready."
He watched me with an odd sadness. "Do you believe all your anger will be solved by taking a core?"
"It will be a start."
"It may be a beginning that makes a worse end," he warned.
"What would you have me do? Let everything waste? My family—" My voice broke.
He placed a hand on my cheek with surprising gentleness. "Fight for them without turning yourself into a mirror of your enemies."
His touch was small but enough. "You touch and you look like you belong to no one else," I whispered. "Do you know how odd that is to me?"
He didn't answer with the pattern of monks. He only said, "Look to the living around you. They are the ones you can save."
I thought it was a sermon. It turned into a plan.
Andre Oliver, the black-clad man, had told me the location of a place where my people were bound. "They sell beauty and cure in one place," he had said. "They make it into anything they needed: medicine, power, arms. They use them like tools."
We went and found the camp. They had carted away my kin.
My hands shook as I walked through the ruined grove. "Where are they?" I asked in a small voice. "Where are my people?"
Davis's green eyes sharpened. "Tell me where."
"They're below, in the cellars," said a merchant, eyes going cold. "They made themselves comfortable—like flowers in a jar."
"Then we take them out," Davis said. "I will go in with you."
"You will not," I said hotly. "You will hide with the others."
"I will go in," he repeated. "You are not alone in this." He held my hand and the bead burned like a small sun.
We fought. I don't know how to tell it small; the memory is a tangle. In the end, we tore through men like paper. Davis moved like a man who had stepped out of prayer and learned a new language: his fists were steady, and his breath a calm bell. We rescued what we could. When we found them—skinned, bruised, eyes gone dim—something inside me turned to stone and then water.
I knelt and fed them nectar until they slept. I wanted to fix them all. Davis stood like a sentinel, both human and beyond. "You cannot save everyone," he said quietly.
"I will try," I said.
Word spread. The temple heard. The abbot, Edward Danielsson, came on a furious horse, and with him, other monks and a host of men who called themselves righteous. They marched, their robes whipping. They called me "temptress" and "monster" in the same breath. When they entered the ruined grove, the people who had been hurt watched them like prey watches a camouflaged hunter.
"You brought this on yourselves," a temple herald cried. "You who consort with spirits and trade with demons."
I looked up from my hands, and something in my chest snapped.
"Do you think you are pure?" I shouted back. "Do you think burning things called 'sin' makes your hands clean?"
"You killed our kind!" bellied the abbot. "You killed monks in your seduction and now you cloak yourself in pity."
"We killed nothing," Felipe Finch said, standing by my side now, his old voice like dried leaves. "They came for our blood."
The crowd swelled. The abbot pointed at me. "Bring the leader. We will hold a trial here!"
I smiled and stepped forward. "Trial by you?" I said. "Make it public. Let all see."
He agreed. He wanted blood in the open. He wanted the spectacle. The crowd gathered: monks, townspeople, the merchants who sell mirrors, families who wanted safety. I wanted to vomit.
They designed a punishment for me: burn the mark of the spirit and exile me. I had already expected worse.
"What do you intend?" the abbot asked.
"I intend to make you confess," I said.
"Confess what?"
"Confess the things you hid when you marched under the name of piety."
He laughed and then called for his instruments. The square filled with murmurs.
"Bring him forward," he said.
Bryant Leroy was the one who brokered many of the temple's secret trades. He had smiled at me in markets like a man who owns things and thinks matter. He had been one of the men who had bought my kin's labor. He strutted forward as if on a stage.
"You stand accused," I told him, "of taking those who heal and making them into weapons. You stand accused of selling sanctuary for coin. Do you deny it?"
Bryant steadied himself as if expecting a small trap. "I deny nothing," he said coolly. "We did what was required for the greater balance."
"Required for whose balance?" I demanded.
"Society's," he said with the arrogance of men who fold the world into accounts.
"Then say it out loud," I said. "In front of all these people. Say why you took them."
He looked at the abbot for support. The abbot's face was pale, the mask of righteousness slipping. The abbot had been part of every decision, but he would not speak.
"I will not confess to the crowd what I do for safety," Bryant said. "It is beneath me."
"Then you will be made to confess." I felt the bead on my ankle cool like iron. "I will make a trial that you cannot command."
"You cannot touch me!" Bryant barked.
"Watch," I said.
For the next hour I spoke and I unspooled what I had learned. "They took them to the cellar of the merchant house to sell to the highest bidder." I named the merchants. I told how they used the locust nectar as a drug to bolster warriors' bodies. I told the names of families who bought favor with the temple to take what they wanted.
Each name landed like a stone. Murmurs rose into protest. The crowd swelled and turned. "Is this true?" a woman cried.
A merchant named Kingston Long gasped and then admitted a trade. A guard confessed that he had helped move prisoners for coin. Another monk stammered a half-truth and then broke down. The abbot's face collapsed into ash.
Bryant's steps faltered as people began to scream and point. "Lies!" he shouted. "All lies!"
"You're a liar," I said. "And now you will pay in front of all."
He lunged, but Davis stepped forward and pressed him back with a single word.
"You are done," Davis said. "You will kneel and confess."
Bryant sneered. "You will not order me."
He did not have to. The crowd took him. The merchant's friends abandoned him when the ledger of his crimes was opened. He looked at them like a man who had been told the sun is not for him.
"Confess," Davis said.
"No—" Bryant spat.
"Admit how you sold our kin," I said.
A merchant threw a coin in the dirt and spat: "We bought because they were cheap and fattened for work!" He shouted and then the crowd's temper turned violent.
Bryant's voice trembled. He was used to writing checks and walking free. Now he was on his knees, the street around him noisy and hawkish. "I did it for the... greater good," he said at last. "For the balance of order."
A mother's voice cut him off. "Order! They sold my daughter!"
The crowd took up a chant. "Confess! Confess!"
Bryant tried to twist words. His face went white, then red, then wet. A trader called Jaxon Collier stepped forward with a ledger in hand and read passages of his deals aloud. Each line was shorter than the next. The sound of his own truth against his willness beat Bryant down.
"How could you?" a child called out.
"I had debts," Bryant croaked. "I had family to feed."
"We all have debts!" another merchant yelled.
"You chose to profit from bodies," I said. "You chose to sell life."
The crowd grew louder until the abbot sobbed openly and the monks around him swore they were ashamed. Some struck Bryant with bare palms, others spat. People who had been sheltered by him now refused to look at him.
"What shall we do with him?" a voice cried.
"We will make a public penance," the abbot whispered, voice void. "He will be marked and made an example."
"No," I said. "You will confess in the market what you've done. You will name each buyer, each ledger, each bribe. You will do it for as many hours as it takes until they vomit truth as you did when you were drunk."
Bryant's defiant glare melted. He began to read names. Shop by shop he named them. The crowd jeered. They hissed and cried. His lie, once robed in power, was now a thin cloth. Children pointed. Women clasped at their hair. Men cursed.
Finally, when his mouth was dry, when he had named every man and counted every coin, when the ledger was a splintered thing, an old woman shoved a scrap of wood into his hands and told him to build a small shelter with it, a lean-to with no roof.
"You will live there," she said. "You will eat what scraps we offer. You will be a living sign."
He built under the noon sun. People walked by and spat. Merchants would not sell to him. Guards would not answer his pleas. He crawled in and slept on straw. Once, he tried to stand tall and the market hissed. Once he wept, and a child threw a stone and laughed.
They made him public by tearing his profits apart and letting the city watch him. He became a lesson hung on a post. That was the punishment I wanted—one that hurt the proud more than the body.
The abbot said little. Edward Danielsson stood at the fringe, a man hollowed by his own shadow. I looked at him. "What will you do now?" I asked.
"I will clean," he said. "I will mend."
His voice was small. The monks around him clucked and shuffled. Some of them bent and picked up the discarded tools Bryant had used. The abbot turned to me. "Jayden, will you forgive us?"
I spat. "Forgiveness is not charity. You will do the work you ruined others' lives with. You will make it right, and you will do it publicly."
He bowed and promised. That was his fall.
By dusk, news of Bryant's fall spread. Buyers stopped coming. The merchants who had made fortunes from human plight were left margin by margin. They stared at their hands as if they had eaten something unwhole. A year later, some of them left the town. Many stayed and learned cold thrift. The little lean-to of Bryant became a spot children used for dares.
No single public punishment is perfect. People forget. They barter again. But that day, they saw one of their own stripped bare. They saw what greed looks like when it cannot be disguised by robes.
After Bryant’s ruin, I thought my revenge would be done. It was not. The ledger's ripple reached further. The abbot's vow to "mend" took a strange form: he walked into the market and started to teach, and then he left to minister to the wounded. He did not wholly leave his old ways, but he could not stand the same as before.
Davis stayed with me. We opened the inn again. He tied another small bead to his own wrist not to bind anyone but to remember. In the quiet hours, when the locust blossoms dropped their pale petals and the night smelled like old books, we sat and spoke.
"Do you love me?" I asked once, alone under the eaves with him.
He hesitated and then, almost aloof, said, "Love is a heavy thing. I think I am learning what you mean."
"That's not an answer," I said.
He reached and brushed my hand, callused and warm. "Maybe I will learn to say it. Maybe I already did."
His laugh was small, like a bell behind a door. It made a place in my chest ache and soften at once. It was one of those small heart moments I keep to myself: the way his brow unfurled when I stumbled with words; the way he would take off his outer robe and put it over my thin shoulders; the time he slipped a baked cake to me and then pretended it was for a stray dog. Those small things kept me near him when the world hissed.
Time passed. People changed. Bryant lived his lean life and ate his bread. The abbot died some years later and the temple shifted in ways I could not control. I grew older in some spirit-sense, though never in the way humans write years. I learned to plant my roots and not feed on others' grief.
Years after, a rumor came back to my inn: a man had regained memory—Findlay Olivier, one of the monks many had called by another name. He came to the gate of the temple where Davis had once stood as the image of a saint. And there, under the locust tree that had grown by the steps, he found me—older perhaps, but still watching.
He came and said very quietly, "Jayden."
I looked at him, and for a long breath I saw two men: the holy one and the one who had been my thorned lover. "You returned," I said.
He knelt like a man who finally remembered the right posture. "I returned to be with you," he said.
We let the world do what it would. Some people whispered in the market that a monk had left his vows. Some smiled, thinking the story tidy. We did not need their smiles. We had learned the price of truth and the cost of punishment, the hollow of anger and the smallness of a hand-held kindness.
I am Jayden Foster. I still keep one small jar of locust-bloom nectar on the shelf near the hearth. He tells me sometimes I owed him nothing; I tell him sometimes he owes me laughter. Once, when the night was thick and the temple bells sound reached my ears like a friend, I put a pair of little wooden beads, smooth and worn, into my palm. I slide them over my ankle and feel the memory of heat and the present of warmth.
"You tied me once," I said to him.
"You tied me too," he answered.
We laugh, and the bell strikes, and we eat two small cakes together under the tree, where petals fall like soft verdicts. We both know the ledger of the past is heavy; we both choose to keep opening the book.
The End
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