Revenge14 min read
My Red Veil and the Man Who Would Kneel
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I sat swaying on the scarlet carriage, heavy-lidded and half-asleep, listening to the streets' voices like a tide washing over old hurts.
"They married the princess to that monster," someone spat.
"No blessing, only spite," another answered.
"I would rather be forgotten than traded," I whispered to myself.
"You're Jocelyn George," I heard Dorian say once, many days earlier, and that single sound—soft, clipped, unexpected—had lodged like a stone in my chest.
My name is Jocelyn George. I grew up in the palace's shadow, a princess by paper and by robe yet less attended than the chief maid of a favored concubine. My mother died in my birth; my father had eyes that slid past me like a current. I had my wet nurse and a playmate once. Both were gone before I learned much of life. I was the kind of princess people said could be traded for stability.
"They want the throne steady," people whispered. "They want a leash." That leash became me.
On my first private audience with the aging Emperor, I tried to kneel properly. I failed spectacularly.
"Jocelyn," he said after the big eunuch reminded him, and it cracked something like sunlight between rain clouds. "You will go with this man. Behave like the royal flesh you are."
"Yes," I lied with a bow that unbalanced my skirts. He frowned. "You will not disgrace the house."
I learned the words of value: balance, leverage, tribute. I learned that a princess could be a tool as easily as a puzzle piece. What they did not know—and perhaps would never have guessed—was I knew value too. I learned to convert neglect into survival.
The wedding was a spectacle meant to seal deals. I was led by hands I did not know, and then I found him: not the twisted old hag-monger rumor had painted, but a young, foreign-looking man in crimson, hands long and pale, features clean and dangerous as frost. He moved like someone trained to be noticed, and yet his eyes were cool, almost disinterested.
"Dorian Ferrell," the herald intoned. "East Watch Supervisor."
I laughed once, in my head. East Watch? The state called him a eunuch who covered half the court's sins, someone feared, someone whispered as "nine-thousand-year-old," but in the flicker of torchlight he looked, to me, like a boy; a boy who had learned how to make the world obey him.
When the veil was lifted, I couldn't help myself. "You are very handsome," I blurted.
He only glanced at me. "Princess," he said, tone flat.
"Call me Jocelyn," I said before I could think, and then, "Call me by my childhood name. Call me Jocelyn."
There was a pause.
"Jocelyn," he tried, and the word sounded awkward, like a man still testing a language.
He is supposed to be my captor. He is supposed to be the instrument of a bargain. The stories said he killed for a smile, that his hands were used to cruelty. I pretended to be small because small kept me alive. But I had a stubbornness like a seed—one day, it would push through stone.
That night I crawled out of my bedding and slipped into his side of the room. He noticed.
"What are you doing?" His voice was a blade drawn at midnight.
"I'll warm you." I crawled under the sheet. "You're cold."
He was colder than anything I had known. He let me press against his back like a child seeking heat. "Do not make trouble," he warned.
"Then hold me instead?" I whispered. "Be gentle."
He swallowed, and then, in a corner of the moonlight, his shoulders loosened like a locked chest opening.
"What did the Emperor tell you to do?" he asked later, voice soft, suspicious.
"Be your wife," I answered. "Serve. Live."
"Any orders to spy?" His eyes were a blade that no rumor had prepared me to handle.
"Never," I said, which was a lie I was still learning to tell well.
We fell into a strange rhythm. I fawned—sometimes to hide, sometimes to learn. I sat beside him while he inked petitions, I fed him porridge when he returned cut from interrogations, I sat waiting for him like a small moon hangs by a river. People sniffed at the wedding cake crumbs in my hair, but I saved them like treasures.
"I think you like me for my usefulness," Dorian said one night, half smiling.
"I think you can be useful to me," I countered.
"Then use me well," he murmured, and for the first time I saw something like trust, terrified and tentative, in his eyes.
Weeks turned months. I learned the courtyard. I learned that when he laughed, which happened rarely, the laugh was like a cracked bell sounding through the hallways—strange and hollow. I learned the taste of his temper and the softness in his hands when he braided my hair.
"Don't leave me," I told him, one moonless night. "If the world turns its back on me, stay."
"I will," he said simply, and that promise anchored me.
Then the Emperor fell ill. He died without an heir capable of holding the state, and the court convulsed. The Chancellor, Maxwell Clark, moved like a spider—quiet strings, soft lies, steady claws. He brought his daughter, Laurel Copeland, into power as Empress Dowager, and the palace changed scent. Laurel was young, hungry. She wanted to be more than a regent; she wanted the golden threads of power to sew her into legend. Maxwell wanted legacy, and both looked at Dorian like a pawn to price.
"They are courting him," I said bitterly. "They want him by their side."
He only rubbed his temples. "They play at alliances."
"They play at using what can't leave," I said. "Like me."
Laurel came to Dorian under a silken umbrella one afternoon, a smile bright as a coin. "Dorian," she cooed. "We should be allies."
He let her speak and left the words unanswered, which was his way of refusing without making enemies. For all his ice, I knew him: a man who would rather fracture a thousand bones than make an improper promise.
But the Chancellor had teeth in every ear. The palace grew pressurized. Laurel's machinations pulled at threads we hadn't noticed, and the court began to split into axes.
"You will stand with me," Maxwell declared one day in a hall flooded with banners. He pointed at me like a brand. "We will consolidate."
I smiled the smile of someone who had learned how to fold. "If I stand, I wish a home."
Dorian's hand found mine in the crush of courtiers. "You have one," he murmured.
"A house can be taken," I said. "I want a place that cannot be put back out on the road."
He tilted his head. "Name it."
"I want the old princess house restored to me," I said. "My own rooms, my own gate."
He considered the request. A thousand courtiers listened, and the world tilted just enough for me to catch a foothold.
"Done," he said, briefly—then, after a long pause, "I will give you that."
When the edict came, gilded and horrid in its glory, I found my chest blooming with something like belonging. The palace built me a house. I walked its corridors like a child testing a new limb. For the first time in my life there was a key that fit only me.
But every key has a owner—and enemies have force.
Gerard Simon was a prince from the north, once my childhood friend. He had been sent away as a hostage a long time ago; he left me with a promise: "When I can, I will make sure you are never helpless." He gave me a messengerboy who became a foreman in my new garden. He gave me whispers. He gave me a plan: if Maxwell's teeth could be pulled out, if the Chancellor fell, Gerard could come forward and his forces would shift the balance. If I helped, he would befriend my reign, or at least break Maxwell's grip.
"Kill him," Gerard had said through the messenger at first, brash as a boy who had slaughtered men in his wake. "Remove the threat."
"That means blood," I replied, lowering my cup.
"It means stability for the next hundred years," Gerard promised.
There were long meetings I will not now detail line by line—because they were counted in small betrayals and cold calculations—but the result was this: I set a trap. I fed the court stories that stung, I let Maxwell's arrogance choke him into mistakes. I pretended to be the obedient royal pet while I pulled threads. I let Dorian see what I orchestrated.
"I know what you did," Dorian said one night, when the lanterns were low and the city breathed. "You used their hatred to your advantage."
"I used their hatred to unstick their hands from my life," I corrected. "You don't understand what it is to not belong."
He stared at me, fierce and sharp. "You could have had me."
"You have me," I said, and that answer was both true and false.
When Maxwell realized the trap, he leapt. He moved armies he thought were loyal; he tried to strike. The court fractured. Maxwell sent men into the palace halls with orders: take the young Emperor Jordan Brown, hold him as a hostage, force the court to bend. Laurel gasped and paled. Gerard's soldiers moved at a whisper. Dorian stood in the palace doorway like a column of winter.
"Don't use the child," I begged Dorian, when the moment sharpened.
"Then stand behind me," he said.
The hall turned into a blade. Soldiers moved, wooden shields clattered, and the small emperor's wail pierced my ribs.
"Jocelyn!" Dorian shouted. "Get him under the dais!"
I leapt and scooped the child into my arms, small and hot and real as breathing. He cowered into me. "Sister," he sobbed, the word like a counterfeit coin.
"Ssh," I murmured, lips pressed to his ear. "I'm here."
Maxwell's voice came like thunder. "Seize the traitors! Bring me the head of the eunuch who thinks himself royal!"
"Bring me the princess," Gerard's men crowed, thinking they had the world.
"Out!" Dorian barked. His voice was a different thing entirely now, not the varnished politeness I had learned to tolerate, but raw iron.
I did not know whether what I did next came from the years of being invisible or from a new throne rising inside me. I stepped up onto the dais with the Emperor in my arms, and I spoke.
"This court has been hollowed," I said. "This city has been bled. This man—" I pointed at Maxwell with fingers that did not tremble, "—has made his office a graveyard for the honest. He would kill a child to keep his teeth. He would trade our people for his name."
Gasps rippled. "Princess!" one minister cried.
"Is it true?" Laurel demanded, face like a flower stunned by frost.
"Yes," I said. "It's true, and there are witnesses."
"What witnesses?" Maxwell snarled.
I turned my head and looked across the hall where Dorian stood, hand at his sword-hilt. He bowed his head in a small, fatalistic way, and then, to everyone's shock, he did something no one expected: he kneeled.
"Dorian!" a voice wailed. "How dare you!"
He looked up at me, lines hard as cliffs. "Jocelyn," he said softly. "You called me your husband in the worst of times. Kneel to me once, as a servant to a queen—no. Kneel before what might be the only truth left. I kneel to your courage."
"Is he mad?" someone shouted.
"No," I said, and my voice rang caverns. "He is choosing."
Then the moment that sealed everything: I gave the signal we had planned—small, almost nothing, and the palace guard who had long been my secret turned and blocked Maxwell's route. Gerard's men found themselves ringed. The outer troops—my troops—arrived in silent ranks. The hall, which had thought it could decide everything, witnessed the unmasking.
Maxwell's face went through a death of expressions: surprise, then fury, then denial. He tried to shout commands. "Seize the usurper! Kill them!" His voice shattered.
"Everyone," I said to the hall, "look."
I produced from my sleeve the ledger of bribes, the lists of secret orders, the names the Chancellor had sold. I called witnesses—two dozen lowly clerks, a cook, a gardener—who stepped forward, shaking, each holding a scrap of paper, each ready to speak.
"You lied for coin," I told Maxwell, each word a hammer. "You had my house watched. You planned regency for your lineage. You poisoned the Empress's nights."
He laughed, short and brittle. "You are a child playing at war."
"Then die like a child," I said quietly.
That is when the public punishment began.
I forced Maxwell to stand in the center of the hall. "You," I told him, "will no longer be the Chancellor."
"Who are you to judge me?" his voice cracked, but he still tried the old arrogance.
"My name is Jocelyn George," I replied. "I am the woman you called a tool and put at auction. I am your queen."
He swore. "You cannot!"
"Watchers!" I commanded. "Strip his robes. Take him."
Guards rushed him—no reverence, only business. They stripped the silvered scarves of office and tore down the silk that declared his rank. The hall watched as the man who had stood at the center of many private crimes was turned into naked shame. They removed his ornate chain—the symbol of his power—and snapped it, like a jeweler breaking a fake gem. People in the galleries gasped. Clerks wept. Laurel watched with white knuckles.
"Let him speak," I ordered.
He spat at me. "Do it! Kill me and the country will split! The nobles will rise! You will drown!"
"Pick your fear," I said, and the court recorded every syllable.
Then I called for a public testimony. Witnesses stepped forward—each voice a nail as they detailed bribes, murders abetted, houses that vanished overnight at Maxwell's word. The crowd's reaction evolved like weather: surprise rippled into outrage, outrage into shouting, shouting into a kind of vindictive appetite.
"Take him to the main square," I commanded. "There, they will unmask him properly."
They carried Maxwell out into the cold light of day and left him on a dais where bread sellers and laundry women could see him. I wanted the people who had been scorned by his quiet cruelty to judge him. They arrived like a tide.
"Shame!" someone cried.
"Sack him!" a washerwoman bellowed.
Maxwell's face was pale under the noon sun. He tried to hold his chin but his knees gave. Someone in the crowd spat on the floor. "You sold my brother!" an old man shouted. "You took my daughter's dowry!"
Maxwell's demeanor went through the stages the court had often spared him: first arrogance, then shock, then pleading, then collapse. He flailed. "I served the realm!" he cried. "I did what was necessary!"
"Necessary?" the crowd repeated, tongues sharper than knives. "You were necessary to no one but yourself."
They stripped his noble markers in pieces—ribbons, seals, his feathered hat—each symbol torn away. They dragged him through the square where a thousand market voices could speak their verdict. Women threw scraps on him—rags of fabric, bitter herbs, rotten fruit. Children laughed and pointed. Someone slapped a placard on his chest: TREACHER. People took out tablets and scratched the story down for the town criers. They wrote songs about his fall. Cameras did not exist here, but tongues would carry the story farther than any official dispatch.
He begged. "I will give back my treasure! I will—"
A young mother spat at him. "We have nothing but misery. Your coins bought our children's silences."
Maxwell groaned as the people demanded restitution. He was made to stand in a public pillory for three days and nights at the main market, exposed, asked for accounting. On the third day, when the sun had burned his skin raw and his voice had become nothing but a croak, I ordered him exiled—not to mercy, but to a frontier where the road was full of thieves and the nights big with wolves.
"You will work houses," I said as he was led away, "and every year, on the same day, the town will ring the bell and read aloud the list of your betrayals. Let it be a lesson."
He howled. The city watched him led out. The crowd, which only yesterday had sheltered him by kneeling before his office for favors, now turned their faces away. The women who had had their sons taken for Maxwell's private wars spat and stomped and jeered. Clerks who had written false ledgers now burned what remained. Laurel stood with her hands clasped and eyes like wells. Maxwell's boast—his legacy—was unmade by the very population he had sought to buy.
But Maxwell's punishment alone was not enough. Gerard Simon—the conspirator from the north—was captured in the gardens by soldiers wearing my colors. He had believed himself a prince of destiny and deserved another fate. He wore the arrogance of a man who thought borders his to command.
"Prince," I said, for the first time in a long night we met face to face, "you taught me to dream of another life."
"You used me," he sneered. "You used my men."
"You used my memories," I answered. "You used my childhood."
He laughed. "You would not have had the throne without me."
"Without your knives, I might have been killed, true," I conceded. "But I was the one who signed the act. I was the one who chose tonight."
On the floor of the public square, where everyone could see, we arraigned Gerard. His offense was treason and attempted coup—serious things that demand a different spectacle.
"Let him speak," a merchant demanded.
Gerard tried arrogance. "You are a child-queen," he mocked. "You are a puppet with a crown."
Dorian's hand curled into a fist. He did not move. He only watched me. I walked up to Gerard, standing tall in the center of the square, and I said two sentences.
"You came to plunder a nation. You came to make me a means for your throne."
Gerard's face went from flash to numb. "What do you want of me?" he asked.
"Dying for your throne is boring," I said. "I will not lick blood. You will confess in front of everyone what you came to do. Then," I paused to let the crowd hound the word, "you will lose your title and honor. You will be carried not on a procession but in a cage, and every border town will be told why you fall. Your son—if you have one—will be shown this day and told: your father's name is a caution."
He spat. "You would brand me."
"I would have your men swear never to raise arms against this realm again. You will be exiled to your own lands without soldiers. You will watch the banners you wanted to fly burn."
That was his punishment: stripped of princely status, put in a traveling iron-cage and paraded through border towns so the peasantry could jeer at him. He endured that slow humiliation, watching from within the small bars as his men were reassigned, as his name was bandied like a swear. In public, he cried at last, for the first time realizing what loss meant. He begged to be killed rather than paraded. The crowd—guilty of the same hunger for spectacle that had always fed power—leaned in.
These public punishments were not quick strokes of justice. They were long, awful lessons. Maxwell was made to suffer the shriveling of public trust and the cold hard labor of exile; Gerard was stripped and paraded. The watchful populace who had once bowed learned this: power could be wrested from those who thought themselves above consequence.
After the dust settled, Dorian and I stood on the dais. He rose and did something no one expected—he kneeled. "Your Majesty," he said, then he corrected himself as if surprised by the word. "Jocelyn—" His voice cracked. "You have not just a house. You have a crown. I will be your man, by whatever name the realm gives."
My eyes stung. "You will be my husband in name alone, and my partner in what matters," I replied, and the crowd muddled through the new history.
"Will you keep me?" I asked him, simple and foolish.
He smiled a little. "I will keep you," he answered.
There are many ways a ruler grows. I learned tax ledgers and troop rotations. I learned to pronounce verdicts that saved lives and took them. Dorian taught me the mathematics of fear, the arithmetic of mercy. For all his past hand in cruelty, his hands had always been able to soothe. He would sit with me in the night and teach me to read the secret meanings in other people's faces.
"Do you regret?" I once asked him, pressed to the window of my own house.
"Regret?" He shrugged. "Perhaps a chess piece is better off without blood on its hands. But I regret less and love more."
"You love me?" I repeated, like testing a new thread for strength.
"Yes," he said, concise as if the word had been rehearsed and finally freed. "I do."
"Then why?" I asked, the old fear a shadow behind the question.
"Because you looked at me when no one else would," he said simply. "Because you warmed a body no one thought worth warmth."
We built our life in the palace courtyard and in my house with keys that belonged to me. He slept in the same room as I did, though never as my equal in the court's formal pages. We were an odd pair: a queen with a crown and a man who had been castrated by fate, with a tenderness that bled between the armor plates. It was not a perfect love. It was full of bargains and commerce. But it was ours.
Years later, the little emperor I had held under the dais grew into a man ruled by gentle lessons Dorian taught him. Jordan Brown called me sister still when the world wanted him to forget bloodlines. Laurel Copeland faded into politics and then into a pale private life. Gerard Simon's name became a cautionary tale.
The sugar candy I had smuggled to my garden when I was frightened remained in my memory as the worst-tasting sweetest thing—because it was where Dorian had once stolen a treat for me in the dusk of first strange affection. The red wedding veil I had worn to bed the night I first met him—the thread that had been both trap and gift—hung in my house as an odd relic.
One night, when an old ache rose in Dorian's chest from years at war and winter in border forts, he woke me with a whisper.
"Jocelyn," he said, voice thin. "Promise you'll not leave me."
"I won't," I murmured. "I won't."
He took my fingers and put them to his heart. "Keep it beating," he said, with a smile that was equal parts command and plea.
"Always," I said, and the word rode the night like a chant.
When he finally died, the world dimmed. I wrapped the red veil around the coffin as an absurd, private rebellion against the colors of politics. The people mourned a man who had been both monster and saint. They erected stones and sang the songs his enemies had sung to try him by. I burned his letters in the courtyard fire, keeping only a single scrap: a small paper with the words, "You looked when no one else would."
I read it until the ink blurred.
Some nights still, I take down the veil and place it against my face, feel the roughness of the thread, and remember the first time I called him "husband" and he answered with a kneel.
The End
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