Revenge17 min read
Moonlight and Ashes
ButterPicks14 views
I was supposed to be the proud daughter of a great family—Estrella Larsson, the eldest granddaughter of a chancellor, raised to be admired and married for honor. Instead I became the second household’s shadow: a side consort in the East Palace, expected to keep my head bowed and my mouth closed.
"I don't understand why you look like that," Hailey said one afternoon, swatting at a pear. She was my brightest friend in the East Palace—Hailey Kozlov—who loved everything with a reckless, open heart. "Estrella, you always make everything feel serious."
"I am serious," I told her. "Serious about being who I have to be."
Hailey flopped back on the embroidered bench and laughed. "You're ridiculous. The prince can have his bloom. I'll have a gardener who brings me sugar cakes. We'll be fine."
She believed in laughing soft things into being. She loved the Crown Prince with the simple ferocity of a girl who had seen the image of a man and decided it was hers to love. That trust was what would break later.
"You should be jealous," she told me at times, leaning close. "You had him on your wedding night."
"I had a ceremony and a nightmare," I said, and the words felt like iron. I had been given the Prince in the same perfunctory way the palace handed out gifts. The night they gave him to me as a duty, he came reeking of wine and arrogance. He made the room his stage and me an unwanted prop.
"I told him my name that morning," I remembered to Hailey once. "Estrella Larsson, of the Larsson household."
"Did he answer?" Hailey asked.
"He said, 'You are mine tonight.' He was drunk enough to think that phrasing was courtly."
"I thought he loved his wife—Paula?" Hailey asked. "Isn't she the bright one with the small laugh? The prince looks at her like the sun."
"He does," I said. "I know that better than anyone."
He was beautiful when sober. He was dangerous when he was not. His name was Elden Dawson, the Crown Prince. He could be gentle and he could be cruel. On the night he taught me the difference between duty and violence, he had been a feral thing. That memory settled heavy in my chest.
"He apologized in the morning," Elden told me once later, in a way as casual as a man fingering his ring. "I was thoughtless. I am not proud of it."
"You want forgiveness like it costs nothing," I said. "You come with a soft face and expect tissue for everything you burn."
He looked at me without flinching. "Do you expect a different man from me, Estrella? Or do you secretly expect a miracle?"
"I expect no miracle. I expect him to be honest." I said the word as if it were a blade.
We have rules in the East Palace: doors bolted, gossip like water through the rice fields. I kept my mouth shut because my family expected silence. My grandfather’s name could purchase comfort. I had been matrimony’s instrument.
Hailey fell in love at first sight. Paula Green, the Crown Princess, fell in love in another way—soft, tremulous, and easily hurt. Paula was graceful and fragile and everyone wanted to clutch her like a rare bird.
"Paula and Elden are made of the same song," Hailey sighed. "They hum the same notes."
"They hum in public," I said. "At night, he is a different composer."
And then I was with child.
"I can't believe this," I said the first time the midwife told me. "I can't be the one who carries his child."
"But it's a child," Hailey said, half laughing, half crying.
"Elden sent gifts," I said. "Food in silver bowls, threads of silk. He sent everything but himself."
"That's all a man has to do," Hailey said. "If he sends the right things, he can be forgiven."
I was sick for months. The palace whispered that I was lucky. The Crown Princess's prayerful face grew grayer with worry. For all that, she would come to my bedside sometimes and ask what of the linen or the child's clothes struck her fancy. I found I liked her small kindnesses, even if they were born of image rather than heart.
"Estrella," Paula said once, soft as a breeze. "If you need anything, tell me."
"I need you to be honest," I said. "I need you to stop explaining him away."
She flinched, as if someone had struck her. "You are sharp."
"Sharp enough to cut truth," I replied.
The child was a girl. When she opened her eyes and wailed like a small bell, something inside me stopped being heavy. I kissed her and named her Jaina Davies—the name I chose from a list my grandmother would have approved. She became my small life shaped of possibility.
"Elden said she'll be a bright girl." He had stood at my bedside like a man who takes comfort in owning things. "We'll name her a princess. The Emperor and Empress will decide, but I'll insist."
He said it gently, as if governor and father were the same office. When the Emperor came to see the child, he smiled with that small father's astonishment and declared the child a joy.
Paula stood at a distance that was polite. She smiled and touched the child's tiny hand once as if testing the glass of a fine vase. She was polite and it comforted the court. I allowed appearances to remain.
Then Hailey grew thin and quieter.
"You're changing," I told Hailey one dusk. We were alone in a courtyard that smelled of tea. She always came to my rooms laughing like spring.
"I fell for him too quickly," she said. "I thought he'd see me. He sees Paula."
"Paula?" I asked. "You seemed to like him yesterday so much you made a fool of yourself at supper."
"I am a fool," she admitted. "I would rather be a fool than cold with no heart at all."
A week later she was sick. A rainstorm that day had drenched her as she ran to the Crown Prince's rooms with a pot of soup. She refused an umbrella because she wanted to go—she wanted to be near. She went home soaked, and two days later she could not rise.
Elden and Paula visited. He paced, indecisive and frantic and more beautiful than any grief. He held Hailey and promised to wait. Paula sat and smoothed Hailey's hair and said nothing that Ms. Hailey's illness needed to hear. I watched them, and I felt a small, terrible thing inside me soften for a moment—pity for the Prince who learned how to shake hands with regret.
"She will be all right," Elden told me. "I will not let pain take her."
Hailey died in my arms a week later, with a small, brave smile. "Tell Jaina to learn the songs," she whispered. "Tell her—" her voice faded—"tell her to live."
Her hand fell. The world was hollow for a little while after that. I made the funeral arrangements with an economy of movement. The Emperor insisted on honor, the Empress wept, and the court paraded sorrow like silk banners. The grief that had been mine turned into a cold fuel: there was injustice smoldering in Hailey’s death, and it lit a fire.
"It was more than rain," Hailey's maid, Jen Morin, told me when I took her aside. She came to my inner room on the day the servants were sending Hailey's dowry and trinkets home. "She came back drenched because she would not take shelter. She was proud. And the words she heard...The Princess said certain things about his and her destiny—said them loud enough."
"Paula?" I asked. "What sort of words?"
Jen's face was pinched. "She spoke of fate. She said aloud that some unions were made under the gods and that some people are meant to be together. She said those things in the prince's presence."
I thought of the night in the bedchamber. I had been there—so had Hailey. That night had been the turning wheel.
"Did Hailey say anything?" I asked.
"No," Jen said. "She believed them. She believed those words and let them wedge in her like a stone."
I closed my hand around the little cup of tea until the porcelain creaked. A plan began, cold and certain.
"You can go back home," I told Jen. "Take Hailey's things. Keep the papers. Keep your mouth until I tell you otherwise."
That night I did not sleep. The palace was full of small ironies: gifts and dinners and proclamations that women like me should be grateful for whatever crumbs of life were thrown at them. I decided I would not be content with crumbs.
I started quietly. First, I took the East Palace’s domestic reins the Empress granted me when the Crown Princess's health faltered—an official honor meant to bind me closer to Paula and to silence any ambition I might have to wield power. I accepted. I had learned to keep my hands busy.
"I will be visible and harmless," I told my steward. "Let them think I busy myself with stair counts and silk inventories."
But in the margins of mundane management, one can arrange for what looks like benign order to become a web of truth. I set people to watch doors. I set someone to check the medicine jars. I let my friend Lacey Hill—soft-voiced, resolute—befriend the palace apothecary’s kitchen staff.
"Find me the pattern," I told Lacey one morning as Jaina played at our feet. "We are not simple mice. We will be a storm."
Lacey nodded as if anything I asked was natural work. "I will be brave for you," she said. "For Hailey."
The first evidence came from a man who could not sleep at night. Douglas Munoz was the junior physician whose sister worked in the Crown Princess's quivering inner circle. The man had seen how carefully certain decoctions were dosed when the Crown Princess was pregnant, and how certain prescriptions were heavy with herbs that—if used too richly—could damage fertility. He came to me at midnight, frantic with conscience.
"They wanted a child at any cost," he told me in a whisper that shook. "She begged, but the doctor—my teacher—he gave what she demanded. The herbs were too strong. They spoke of speed, of urgency. The little girl—"
"He meant the Princess's child," I said. "But did he give poison?"
"Not outright," Douglas said. "No one would kill her and risk retribution. But he wrote instructions—advice that weakened the inner strength over months. He rationalized it. And then—then he was paid to keep quiet."
I felt bile rise. "Did he know about Hailey?" I asked.
"Who can know? He might not have understood the effect of certain words, only the weight of certain coins."
I kept a patient face. "Bring me the records," I commanded. "Bring the records and anyone else who remembers a phrase."
He left with the dawn. I arranged for Jays and maids to whisper when they were drunk. I listened to the palace like one listens to a river for hints of a submerged stone.
The plot unfurled—one hidden string at a time. There were letters. There were receipts in the apothecary book that had been altered and then altered again by a shaky hand. There were servants who remembered the Crown Princess speaking of fate in a temple, loudly, while Hailey sat close and emulated the sweetness of worship like a doe.
It took months. The East Palace believed the house of the Princess was safe from scandal. Her mother, a proud woman named Marina Clapp, was an angry, sharp-tongued lady who sewed favor like gold thread. She believed in clamps and leverage more than kindness. We were in her way.
At last I had what I needed. I held three things: Douglas's trembling testimony, a nurse’s account—Jen Morin’s steady confession about the Princess’ talk in the temple—and the apothecary book, signed and stamped.
"Are you certain?" Lacey asked me the night before I struck. Her hands hung around Jaina as if she intended to keep the child alive by sheer will.
"I am certain," I said. "We will not whisper. We will speak. We will make them lose the shelter of rumor."
On the morning of the imperial anniversary, when the court gathered to make proclamations and the city was decked in flags, I requested an audience with the Emperor. The hall was full: ministers, eunuchs, ladies, the Empress, the Crown Prince. The sun found all the gilded surfaces and turned them to bright shame.
"Estrella," Elden said when I entered. He looked surprised and then wary. "You called for the Emperor's time."
"I asked for what I had a right to ask," I said, and the court seemed to lean like a reed toward me.
The Emperor peered down. "Speak then."
I stepped forward. "Your Majesty," I began. "I stand here as a mother and as someone who has watched this palace accept tragedy and call it fate. I am no scholar of the gods. I know only the human cruelty that hides beneath devotional words."
"What is this?" Marina Clapp—Paula's mother—huffed from the side of the crown of ladies. "Is this the side consort accusing the Princess?"
"It is the grieving woman demanding justice," Hailey's maid Jen said from where she knelt, and the sound of her voice cut like a bell.
I did not win the room with theatrical fury. I walked the simple ladder: facts and witnesses.
"This morning a physician named Douglas Munoz will confess," I said. "He will testify to orders written to weaken a woman’s body to make conception and childbirth more certain, at cost to her health. This prescription was signed by the lady asked to carry the future of the throne. There are receipts for payments. There are witnesses who remember the Princess bringing a conversation about fate to a temple where a young noblewoman—Hailey—heard and suffered."
Marina's face went white. Paula sat forward as if a string had been cut.
"Estrella," the Emperor said slowly. "If you accuse, you must bring evidence. The people's whisper grows loud when accusation is careless."
"It will not be careless, Your Majesty," I said. "I will bring the physician."
I had arranged for Douglas to be escorted to the hall. He came, his eyes large and unsteady, hands trembling so he could hardly hold his papers.
"Douglas Munoz," I said. "Speak plainly."
He fell to his knees in the centre of the hall as the royal scribes drew closer. "My lord," he said, voice cracking. "I—"
Before he could finish, I stepped forward with the apothecary ledger. "Who altered that book?" I asked. "Whose name appears there, with the signature used to encourage stronger dosing?"
Douglas's throat worked. "It was—Mo—Mo… My master told me to put the notes as such. He said it would help, that the princess was desperate. He put the dates and described how to use herbs to encourage labor and weaken the womb's resilience if too much time passed. I signed the receipt for silver. I am ashamed."
"Who commanded the intensity of the prescriptions?" I asked, and the hall murmured.
Douglas's eyes rose to the dais, where Paula's face had lost every color. He answered shaky, "Her lady, the Princess asked the doctor to use all means. Her mother often begged for the speed of childbirth. They wanted a son. I—I followed orders."
Paula's hands were white on her knees. "This is a lie!" she cried. "I would never—"
"Enough!" Marina Clapp roared. She rose, robes sweeping like a stormcloud. "You dare accuse my daughter?"
"You will be heard," the Emperor said. "By law. If your daughter is innocent, she will stand cleared. If not, let justice measure both."
The court was a living thing: ministers exchanging looks; eunuchs sweating; a hush so thick you could hear silk fold. Elden stood up as if a wind had lifted him, and set his hands on the back of a chair.
"Is there no reason for this accusation?" he asked, though his voice was tight.
"I have reason," I said. "And I have a witness." Jen Morin, Hailey’s maid, rose slowly and took the centre. "I heard the Princess speak in a temple, loudly enough. I have sworn this. The Princess spoke of fate and of 'the rightful pair'—and Hailey returned home that day like one struck by the words. After that, she fell ill."
Paula's lips trembled. For a moment, the whole court watched in a stunned silence as the Princess's great composure buckled.
"What else?" the Emperor asked.
I handed the ledger to a senior minister. "Read the entries," I said.
One by one, the entries were read aloud: doses, herbs, the notes for 'increase to force.' The servants craned forward like birds. Some ministers whispered; some turned pale.
"Those are not words of healing," murmured a minister at my elbow. "They read like directions to break the body's reserves."
"Who wrote these?" the Emperor demanded, and the room seemed to clamp shut.
"It's the prescription book of the palace apothecary," the readout said. "The name signed in the instructions is of the physician who oversaw." Another page, and the name matched the man who had taught Douglas. And then a clerk found a ledger entry showing a silver payment from Marina Clapp's steward to a physician's hand.
Marina's face crumpled like painted paper forced under rain. "This is slander," she said. "I have only ever wished my daughter's happiness."
"And did Hailey's death bring you joy?" Hailey's maid demanded.
"Enough!" Paula screamed, unbalanced by pain and fear. "I did not—"
"A life is gone," I said, my voice even and cold. "I ask the court if fate or human craft took her. If your daughter's hearing of 'fate' opened a wound, and if your household supplied the bandage that maimed rather than mended, then the court must see who placed the needle."
The Emperor summoned the chief magistrate. "I order an immediate inquiry," he said. "All implicated shall be held. Let the physician be questioned. Bring witnesses. This court will not simple wash hands."
The chamber hummed. The most public part came not in words but in how the palace responded. There was no whisper I could not hear; by midday banners flew that usually flew for triumph. The Queen Mother was present, as was the head of the court. The accused were led out into the courtyard so that the palace staff and the city’s servants could see them.
It unfolded like a stage production.
The physicians were brought out first: the master physician, tall and hat-brushed, was made to stand. He had half a dozen of my banded receipts and some notes he had thought to hide in his robe. The magistrate read the charges.
"You have abused the trust placed in your station," the magistrate said. "You advised dangerous dosages. You accepted payment. What do you answer?"
"My lord," the man said, throat tight, "I advised what I thought would secure childbirth. I did not mean harm. I was told to—"
"You were told to offer counsel that would strain the woman's constitution," the magistrate interrupted. "You are guilty by counsel and by deed."
He was stripped of his post publicly, his ring taken cleanly from his finger. The crowd outside murmured and took note.
Then the Princess was called forward with her mother. Paula was pale and twisting her fingers. Marina kept her chin high.
"You are the mother," the magistrate said. "You took active measures to secure succession. Our laws do not forbid love, but they forbid endangering the lives of others for ambition. Did you order this?"
Marina’s voice was thin at first. "I wanted a grandchild for my daughter. I spoke strongly. But I did not mean—"
"You intended to play the game of a throne as if it were a child's toy," I said. "Tell us how often you visited the apothecary? How often was money transferred to those physicians?"
Marina's theatrical defense crumbled when the clerk read out the names on the receipts. There, in black and gray, was a trail of coin and instruction. She tried to deny, but a ring of palace servants—maids, stewards, and apothecary boys—marched forward at the Emperor’s sign and vowed they had seen exchanges.
"They paid for speed," Jen cried from the side, steady as steel now. "They asked for 'certainty'. Hailey listened to their fate talk in a temple and she saw an altar where she thought she might place herself."
It was terrible to watch. For the first time since Hailey's death, the palace met its own reflection. The crowd outside gasped, shifted, and some cried out.
Paula’s face broke. She sank to her knees.
"Paula," Elden said, rushing forward. "Paula, stand."
"Stand for what?" she cried. "Stand for the truth? Stand for humiliation?"
"You will be judged by law, not by private hearts," the Emperor said. "But no one who curates the death of another may remain in their station."
There were responses from the crowd: disbelief, shock, some applause that was like rain beginning. The magistrate announced judgments: the master physician was stripped of office and sentenced to public penance; the payer—Marina Clapp—was to be stripped of any household power, her title in the palace revoked, and she was to return to her family estate publicly escorted; the apothecary would lose his privileges. The Princess—Paula—was to be confined from public ceremony for a season, and her favor would be reviewed.
Paula’s mother wailed. "You shall not ruin my family," she screamed. "You cannot carve away our name!"
But she had already been carved by her own hands. Servants pointed and the crowd whispered. Cameras—well, scribes—memorized the day. Men and women in the courtyard photographed with ink and memory. The shame was legal, and the punishment was social and merciless.
Paula crumpled and then, in a sudden shame of sorrow, stood and faced me.
"Estrella," she said, small and raw. "Is this what you wanted? Is this what Hailey wanted?"
"I wanted truth," I replied. "Hailey wanted to live."
Her knees buckled. "I never meant—"
"You meant," I said, "for destiny to justify cruelty."
Her voice dissolved into a moan. Around us, the palace whooped with a satisfaction that felt both foreign and necessary. The people wanted a reckoning. They wanted to see that even silk and favor could not make every wrong right.
When the magistrate ordered Marina escorted from the East Palace, she was made to walk under the sun among the very staff she had once scolded. Servants spat in the dust while foreign envoys watched and whispered. She was a public image stripped of polish. Her face turned the color of old lacquer.
Elden stood by like a man who had been handed a lantern and now found it heavy. He looked from Paula, crouched and hollow-eyed, to me and back. He stepped forward and, for the first time with bare steadiness, spoke.
"Paula, I failed," he said. "I was foolish and thought my duty and my inclination could be separate. I misused my ignorance. I will bear this. I will ensure the law is followed."
His voice trembled. He held the exposed face of responsibility and did not shrink.
The courtyard buzzed. Some people cried for Hailey again, a ragged grief. Others murmured that justice had been served. Paula was led away in disgrace and sorrow.
She would later die a small, bitter death, as the apothecary had warned; the herbs and the strain had left her thinner than before, and her decline was a slow, private thing that became another palace whisper. Marina never again returned as an equal.
I thought I would feel triumph. I felt a weight lifted but also a darker sense: the emptiness after revenge has no echo of the laughter you once had. The courtyard had watched the punishment and it had felt righteous. But I had not been avenged alone. I had traded the bones of Hailey for Marina's exile; I had cut a vile thread from the tapestry and left a raw edge.
"Elden," I said to the Prince later, when the initial scandal had faded into carved records and new orders. "Does the law ever repair the life it kills?"
"It tries," he said. "It must try."
We changed the household. The apothecary was reformed. The physicians were inspected. We rearranged who bore power. I took more control of domestic matters than before. I did it not for vanity but because power is the only shelter over a child's head in the palace.
With whispered care I steadied Jaina and pressed her to my chest while she grew. I grew less certain of justice as a shape for the world and more certain of practical things: good food, careful medicine, loyal hands.
Years passed. Elden ascended the throne. He became Emperor. If a crown could change a man into something gentler, it did not wholly work on him. He became tired and older and less surprised by things. He grew fond of me. He sat often where Hailey had once dreamed, like a man reclaiming a song he had never learned to sing.
"Estrella," he said once in our bedchamber in those early years of being ruler, "I am tired of being afraid."
"Afraid of what?" I asked.
"Of losing everything I do not yet understand I might hold," he said. "Of the ghosts of things I have done."
"I have a child," I said. "And for that reason alone I will not let you raise your hands against me."
We survived the surgeries of palace life. The Emperor trusted me with duties. He asked my counsel. I was careful and paranoid because my past demanded a careful hand. I knew I had used cruelty to avenge cruelty. That knowledge hung low and dense around me like mist.
Several seasons later, there were more losses. Hailey's name was a hollow at the center of many nights. Paula's name was a folded letter. There was the boy who was said to be Elden's son—young Custodian of hope, frail and fragile. The more I tried to build a kind world for Jaina and the little prince who grew delicate under my watch, the more the past pressed. A child refuses to be the ledger of adult crimes; he will be who he is, and he did not ask me to be judge.
I lived a long while with that weight and the sheen of being Empress. I was often praised for decorum and fairness, and I was often afraid. Lacey remained near me—a woman who had once been timid and now bore the steadiness of temple bells. She took on service to Jaina and my household. We both prayed, sometimes, in secret.
"Will we ever be forgiven?" she asked once when a lamp guttered and it was only the two of us in the quiet corridor.
"Forgiveness is not a currency," I said. "I do not know if the gods measure debts in gold or in small mercy. I only know we must keep tending the little living things we have."
"I will try," she said.
Years dissolving into years, the palace shifted. Elden told me on a winter night he loved me as best as a man who had been high and reckless could love. I replied, weakly but true, that I could love him in the way a gardener loves a stubborn branch—cutting what had to be cut, tending what must remain.
"We have been burned," he said. "We survived."
We had both been burned and we had both survived. The court saw a queen in me and the little people saw a woman who met them with tokens. I wore that face like armor.
But envy and fear never die; they seep. In the end, the palace will always ask of its women one impossible thing: to be pure of spirit and clever as foxes. We complied the best way we knew how.
One cold night when the moon was low and the city hushed, I walked to the garden where Hailey had once loved to swing. The moon sat like a coin in the black water.
"I promised her something," I whispered to the glassy pond. "I promised her Jaina would be safe. I did not keep the promise the way she might have wanted, but I kept it."
A breeze moved, and the dolls on the terrace seemed to shiver.
"If there is a tally," I told the night, "it will be made in small things: a warm blanket, a careful herb, a day where a child learned to toddle without fear."
Maybe that is what justice becomes when you have carved and lost: small mercies. I do not think the gods had anything to do with it. I think we took our own absolution in the act of gentleness, and that is enough.
I do not pretend to have been innocent. Hailey's face will never leave me. Paula's voice will haunt the places between my ribs. Marina's disgraced walk under the sun is a gallery I cannot stop visiting in memory.
But I raised Jaina, and I taught her the songs Hailey wanted sung. I told her stories of foolishness and of courage and of how people are sometimes cruel when scared.
When she came to me years later and said the name of the man she loved—quiet, steadfast, a childhood scholar who loved the quiet of books—I took my hands off the loom and let her go.
"Take him," I told her. "Go. The world is not only for crowns."
She smiled with a small steady face and went, and I watched her walk away as if she were a ship on a bright sea.
The palace is the place of sharp bargains. We acquiesced, we struck, we saved, we destroyed. All of it is recorded in dust. I do not ask for absolution from what I did. I only ask the living to remember the cost.
Sometimes, on sleepless nights, I stand in my private garden and the moon finds my hair. I lay a small palm to the stone and whisper, "Hailey, forgive me." The wind answers, and sometimes, faint as a child's laugh, I think there is an answer.
The End
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