Rebirth18 min read
My Second Birth in the Red House
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I remember the taste of the soup: bitter, thin, and wrong. I remember the anger on the old woman’s face when I refused the cup. I remember her hand—hard, small, and surprisingly gentle—when she steadied my wrist.
“You don’t have to drink,” she snapped once, then softer, “If you keep your memories, you can choose.”
I laughed, which surprised her. “Choose to be born as a princess?”
“That was the promise,” she muttered. “But you know gods, bargains... they slip.”
I was supposed to be a princess. I had ordered it like a child ordering a dress. Fate had given me a palace fold, a silver cradle. The midwife looked, sighed, and said, “A daughter.” Then a nurse ran in with a squalling boy and the room erupted. The palace whispered, and whispers turn to deeds: a child switched, a blanket wrapped, a body carried away.
They threw me out onto the street. They did not kill me; mercy wore the face of a maid who could not stand coldness in a child’s limbs. She placed me at the entrance of a house papered with paperlanterns and laughter.
“Who left a baby at the Red House?” she cooed, peering at me.
The women there laughed and pinched my cheeks. “A girl! How lucky.” They dressed me in bright scraps and carried me inside.
I had asked for a throne. I received a roof of satin and the honest stink of other people’s bodies. I was born as Laila Ward, and my mother at that house was Mercedes Burgess.
I remember thinking: this is not what I ordered.
“You should be grateful,” Mercedes said once, when I stomped about under a lantern. “You’re warm. You two can sing and eat. That’s enough.”
I was five and I learned to be clever because cleverness eats pity. I learned to sing breath by breath. I learned to count coins. I learned to rearrange hairpins like a surgeon arranges instruments.
“Don’t you sing?” the woman who first lifted my blanket asked. She wore a great purple flower in her hair. I learned her name later—Soledad Fields—and she taught me how to tilt my head so a man felt like the center of the world.
“You’ll be the next top,” she said with a smile that could split a melon. “You’ll not leave this place for a life of feeding babies and beating cloth. You’ll be crowned.”
I thought of palaces. I thought of silk and a velvet throne. I would not take the work of a smile for coin. But the world is tricky. I can hide a past life in my bones, but I cannot hide a present place. I learned to play at being what they wanted me to be, because the more I played, the fewer men they offered me to please.
When I was nine, another girl came in with haunted eyes. India Legrand was her name—everyone called her Yaya before they changed it to something proper. She believed her brother would come for her. She wailed into the pillow for three days. Mercedes and I fed her porridge until she stopped seeing ghosts in the corner. She grew into my friend; she grew into everything the house needed.
“So you’ll stay?” I asked her one night, when she had stopped expecting rescue and had started learning the steps.
“My money is worth nothing to them,” she said. “This is home.”
I had learned medicine once—once—long before this life. In my other life I had held scalpel and sutures and been the only woman in the palace clinic. I had been clever, and the emperor killed clever women. I remember being led to the block. I remember the taste of fear like iron in my mouth.
“Then keep your head down,” Mercedes said, with the kind of look that had once been tender. “This is how we survive.”
When I was twelve my songs and little poems were spread by town boys with coins and a bit of gossip. “The Red House’s new poet sings like spring,” they said. I wrote to keep my hands clean, to show Mercedes I was worth more than a guest on a pillow. I wrote to quiet the old ache of being stolen.
One night a quiet group of men came in. They sat like statues and watched me play. They were all neat and bright with the kind of money that does not make you loud. The man at the head—white robe, pale face, a look like a closed flower—lifted a cup and poured tea.
He spoke little. He sat like someone who had walked through many rooms without spending a breath. He was Finn Cordova.
“You sing as if you remember rain,” he said to me later, in the quiet after the candles burned low.
“How would I forget?” I kept my head bowed. “Songs are little things.”
He did something odd for a patron: he smiled. Not at the business, not at the delight of buying song for the night. He smiled at me as if at an old friend.
“You have a mark,” he said, as if to himself. He touched the faint pale birthmark on my shoulder—lotus-shaped, small. He pressed his thumb there as if in worship.
“You are too kind,” I said. I knew nothing of kindness then.
He became the hand that paid the house bills for a month. He bought me not in pieces but by time. He became the ghost at the corner of the house—present when grief came and silent when joy did. He brought people and sometimes brought nothing.
“He is the son of the chancellor,” Mercedes told me. “He has his reasons.”
“He has the look of someone who keeps nothing,” I answered.
“You must be careful with looks,” Mercedes said. “Looks are treasures others will steal.”
We grew. The Red House turned its songs into a sort of coin. We raised our heads for people who could give us more than that. When Soledad was taken as a concubine and then returned dead and stripped of any dignity by that woman’s jealousy, my mouth tasted iron with the urge to scream.
“When they killed her,” India said later as she sat with me and traced a pattern on a bowl, “you stayed. You are made of paperwork and patience.”
I had a secret then I did not speak: I could see more than disease. I had been to the other side. I had seen names on the ledger of living. I knew that my life had been stolen once and differently. I knew that the woman who had wanted to be my mother in the palace—someone called the chief concubine—had given away a child and replaced it with a son. I wondered if she ever stopped to think when she warmed that child in her lap.
Years passed. I became the house’s top singer and its face. Mercedes grew weaker and gave me the key to the house in her breath’s last fog. My throat had known a hundred songs and a thousand realizations. I had learned a different skill as well—one that had nothing to do with ribbons and kettles.
A quartet came to the house by a man’s arrangement. Their names, in this house, were a joke we kept: Beverly, Guadalupe, Haisley, and Morgan—four bright storms. Beverley had light and weather in her name; Guadalupe could read faces like maps; Haisley moved as if blades hung from her sleeves; Morgan—Morgan was full and sang like rain on a roof.
“They will bring people,” Finn told me quietly when he came again. “They are good at what they do.”
“They are from a life I do not understand,” I said. “They are not afraid.”
They arrived with laughter. Morgan, the head, didn’t shy from anything. Haisley taught me how to twist away from a grasp. Guadalupe and Beverly taught me herbs and the old reading of a face. They were not sent to spy, though Finn liked to joke that he sent them as his eyes. They were free enough.
I used what I was given—pity, coin, a reputation—and I let a prince see me. Reid Thomas, the sixth in a long line of sons who wear banners like weights, bought time with me in a way that asked for nothing but tenderness. We talked through the night on a boat once, and I told him I could help his sick mother if he needed.
“You can?” he asked. “You are…a miracle.”
I smiled, and I took the truth between my fingers. I told him the truth—a little unspoken thing: the woman who had the title and the illness was sick not of bed but of poison. “Someone uses gu,” I told him.
“Gu,” he whispered. “That word is a door.”
I went into palaces after that, carried by the strange combination of the Red House’s fame and Finn’s connections. Inside, the great woman lay white as a sheet. I sat by her bed with a handful of roots and an ear for rumor. When the room smelled of old silk and cold wealth, I felt the skin of my other life crawl.
And there was a presence everywhere—like a shadow with a face. He came into my life with a softness and a distance both. His shape was not quite human; he wore a wide hat that kept his face in a shadow I could not see. He stood there like a question.
“Him again?” I asked Finn once, when he stood near the window and watched the shadow in the courtyard.
“He calls himself Shadow,” Finn said. “He is never rude. I think he likes you.”
“Is he god or man?” I asked, though I already had a memory of the other life where such beings fell between definitions.
“He is trouble,” Finn answered, and I felt a chill. “He knows more than he says.”
Time drew us all to the border towns. A sickness fell over a place far to the west: sores that ate at skin, fevers that threw men onto their knees, white worms that died in light. It spread like despair. People said the gods had cursed the place. Priests came with candles and muttered. The street vendors ate their breakfasts in silence.
We left, a little group of us: Guadalupe with her books, Beverly with her wind-maps, Haisley with her knives tucked like secrets, Karen Everett—my little niece in the house who had learned tricks and the lift of a heavy tray—and I. Finn came later, at a slow pace, as if travel bored him enough to be a pleasure. Reid’s man took a slow wandering in the procession too.
The city had soldiers at the gate and a smell like damp straw. We walked into rows of tents where men with faces like pillows waited for someone with answers. There were others: healers who wore patience like armor, men with low eyes who scraped needles and ground roots until their hands trembled.
At the center of all this, a white-clad figure moved with the certainty of someone at the top of his stage. He had fans and a smile and a way of handling a man on the string like he was already made to follow.
His name, the people chanted like prayer, was Emanuel Wolff.
I had met him before, in another life’s rumor. He was a healer whose shadow was as long as the mountain. He worked like a god—he drew the poison out and set down his bowl and let the crowd kneel. They called him a master and he walked inside that name as if it belonged to him.
Only people I trusted looked at him and did not bow. Guadalupe frowned at his bowls with the care of a surgeon. Haisley watched how he accepted gratitude. Karen watched Emanuel with knees close together, like a girl about to step onto a stage.
“He does not fight,” I said once, watching Emanuel hold court.
“People like a grand answer,” Guadalupe said. “Even if it is wrapped in lies.”
We moved closer to his tent. Quietly, I began to work. I knew two things: make the gu reveal itself with blood and light, and do not let a stage of lies gather breath.
One night, I followed Emanuel into a back shed where he thought no one watched. There he fed the drunk and the desperate small packets of root wrapped in white. He smiled as the men’s sores calmed—because he also slipped a rezoned charm into their mouths that let the worms be coaxed out under his lights. The men healed by his magic and then kept returning like moths.
“He’s offering them both poison and cure,” I whispered to Guadalupe when we examined the traces. “He is feeding the hunger and taking the thanks.”
“You would rather he heal them entirely?” she said, though her voice was the sharp edge of what she felt.
“I would rather they be healed without a theater,” I said.
We could have kept the secret. Many disasters survive if no one yells. Emanuel grew successful while the city bowed. He was a god for men who liked gods that cheered them into donating.
I had a choice. I could let him stand on his stage and keep his power. Or I could pull the curtains and let the crowd see the wiring.
“You plan to expose him?” Finn asked, standing by the tent one night. He looked smaller in the dusk.
“I will,” I said, and I meant it like a promise.
They gathered that day in the central square. A market had been set up. Men with palms full of coin leaned in to watch Emanuel perform his miracle. He stood on a raised platform with bowls that steamed and a lantern in his hand like a crown.
I stepped up, with Karen by my side, Guadalupe holding jars that smelled of copper and rope, and Beverly and Haisley standing like shields at the edges.
“People of the city,” I called, and my voice cut through the murmur. “Listen.”
Emanuel saw me and did what great men do: he smiled like one who receives a minor insult and turns it into a jest.
“You are not supposed to be here,” he said, casually. “You are a housekeeper’s song.”
“Once, perhaps,” I said. “Once I was a woman who healed in palaces. Once I saw the same trick. Today I will show you the trick.”
The crowd laughed. They loved spectacle more than truth, and to accuse their god needed more than words.
I said, “Watch.”
I had arranged for a sick man who was near death to step forward. He was pale as linen and had a cough like a bell. Emanuel put a bowl under his chin and called for silence.
“Now,” I said.
I let the wind of a small jar Emanuel’s men were used to hiding open. The dried root Alejandro? (no, I cannot use that name) — the dried root with the formula Emanuel traded under the table—released a thin smoke that curled like fingers. Emanuel expected the silent thank you. But I had something else: a shard of glass with a mirror polished on one side and a small needle sheathed.
I leaned forward and pricked the man’s hand. The man gasped; the crowd drew breath. I held up a shard soaked with the man’s blood and touched the bowl Emanuel used for his cure. The blood painted a line on porcelain.
“See how the bowl reacts?” I said. “It shows the shape of the root Emanuel uses. He feeds them poison, then dances a cure.”
Emanuel’s smile did not break. He moved like a musician adjusting a frown of instrument. He called men to him, and they shouted back like defenders of a god. A small knot of his followers began to push forward.
“You lie,” Emanuel said, quiet enough for the front rows. “You are jealous. You are ugly.”
The crowd shifted. A few looked uncertain. A few cursed me in the way small crowds curse when their play gets complicated.
“You have made them patients for profit,” I said loud. “He brings the disease in his pockets, then sells you the cure. He feasts on your gratitude.”
Then Emanuel did something I had expected. He stepped forward, and in the blink of an eye, the mist of his followers closed like an umbrella. He had influence. His men moved like a tide.
“You are talking about a man who has saved thousands,” Emanuel said. “What proof do you have?”
“The proof is in the jars,” Guadalupe shouted. She flung down a jar and the air stank of something bitter and the crowd leaned back as if struck.
Beverly pulled off a cloth and opened a wooden box to show the ropes Emanuel used to stage the cures. Haisley moved alone to the side and nudged a man who ran a cart; the man’s hands shook and he opened his bag and from it spilled root and an amulet we recognized from Emanuel’s hidden chest.
A murmur rose. Men reached for their coins like in an auction.
“You will kill him like this?” a voice asked. “You will let the city despair?”
“No,” I said. “We will ask for justice.”
The scene grew louder. Some people cheered Emanuel because he had given them back their sons and daughters. Some of them wept because their children had been saved in the name of his theater. But a group of poor men—those who had been brought back twice and had paid thrice—stared like men who had been touched by a cold hand. Their faces were like carved wood.
I had thought many things before the day I stepped onto the platform. I had imagined I would turn a man’s hand and see him fall, or that he would fight me like a spider whose web was touched. Instead, his change came slow.
“You don’t understand the whole thing,” Emanuel said. He was not violent; he was amazed that his stage was a mirror now. “I build a path. They follow. They choose.”
The town had a judge that day. We dragged him into the square, and he stood like a sceptical pillar. “We will ask for a public renunciation,” he said finally. “You must answer for the lives you traded like strings.”
Emanuel’s face turned first to a soft comedy of disbelief, then to a firmness that looked like carved ivory. He denied. He denied with clever words and thin eyes. He said he had given them grace. He called us mad for seeing greed in a miracle.
“You built a kingdom of thanks,” I said when he was done. “You sold it with your hands. Your confession will not smooth wounds.”
Some of his followers cried. They called out for mercy. Others hissed.
“Take his stage,” the judge said. “Take his bowls. Show them what you used.”
They brought out the jars and the ropes and the burnt paper. The crowd pressed in and fingers reached. The men who had been healed came forward and took the objects like relics, smelling them, feeling the trick.
Emanuel’s expression went through a thousand small deaths: surprise, arrogance, anger, then denial. He raised his voice.
“You do not know what I do!” he cried. “You do not know the suffering I bear so these people are spared! You are blind to the good I have sewn!”
I watched him carefully. He kept looking to the crowd. He looked for the one face that would save him. He sought something like validation.
“You built your god on their pain,” I said. “You made them need you.”
His anger grew hot. He shouted about gratitude and the gratitude of cured men. His voice cracked on a name. “You—Laila—what would you know? You who have always been given blankets!”
“My blankets were given by a woman who loved me,” I said, and the name Mercedes rose like a small light in my head. “My life was not bought by lies.”
His eyes then looked at me differently. “You declare me the guilty one?” Emanuel said. “You will ruin everything.”
“What I will do,” I said, “is stop your pattern. You will not make a theater of death and expect applause.”
For fifteen minutes before them all, he tried to turn it. He tried to explain. He tried to twist the rope of truth into a scarf and wrap it around the judge’s neck and make it look like a compliment. But the judge held firm.
“You must be bound,” the judge said at last.
Emanuel’s face showed disbelief and then a kind of small, animal panic. He began to shout, “You fools! Without theater, who will save you? You will regret this!”
A mob is a weather. It has gusts and stillness. Someone grabbed Emanuel’s sleeves. He pulled free. He tried to run, but his robes snagged on the stage.
Then something happened I had never expected: a woman from the crowd stepped forward. It was Soledad’s mother, the house that had become a concubine’s hand. She had a face like a stone; she had eyes that the world had polished into iron. She spat at Emanuel and then, with a shaky hand, she pulled from her pocket a scrap of cloth—Soledad’s final scarf that had been found in the courtyard—and she slapped it into Emanuel’s face.
“You took her like you took my daughter,” she screamed. “You gave her thanks and took her life.”
The crowd changed like sand in a heavy boot. They saw a thread of connection: where there was profit, there had been a price paid in flesh.
“That is Soledad’s,” she repeated, and the judge—who had seen many such things—did not hesitate now.
“Then you will stand trial under the people’s law,” he said.
They took Emanuel. But punishment must be more than a removal of stage props. Bad men need a full showing: the unraveling of the story, the collapse of their mask. I wanted him to be seen exactly as he had been: preening, then exposed, then naked of all pretense.
We built a platform outside the city gate the next day. It was simple. It held a circle of truth. People came with torches and spoons and all the things that mark a public life. Emanuel was brought out in a robe that had once looked like a crown.
“Tell us who helped you,” the judge demanded. “Tell us the names you whispered in their ears.”
Emanuel’s face flickered. He denied at first, then the weight of a thousand eyes made him small. He named traders who had supplied the root. He named a ledger of payments that had gone into a carved chest. He named names of men who had watched and accepted the stage.
The crowd reacted. Many were stunned. Many wept. A pocket of his defenders howled and accused us of lying. I walked among them and showed the jars, the small amulets they had tied to their wrists, the receipts forged to look like charity.
“You made them your coin,” I told the crowd. “You treated their sickness as a commodity. You are not a healer. You are a peddler.”
Emanuel’s voice grew smaller as he realized his men had records. He tried to bargain with his tongue. He attempted the old trick of turning humiliation into martyrdom.
“Without me, many would die,” he said. “I kept them alive!”
“You kept them alive in your way,” I admitted. “But you also kept them needing you.”
At first there were gasps. Then—slowly—people began to shout. Some cursed Emanuel. Some crossed themselves and shook their heads. A few cried for the nurses who had died believing in him. Women who had once knelt in his tent spat. Men who had put their coins into his chest threw their money at his feet like rotten fruit.
Emanuel covered his face. He tried to fight, one last thing: “If I must fall, let it be only me. I will take it with me.”
But punishment in a public square is not a single moment. It is a long ladder of unmaking. We made him confront each life he had touched. Those men he’d “served” came forward, not as supplicants but as witnesses. They told the truth of payment and return. They told of hope purchased. As they spoke, the colour drained from Emanuel’s face.
His manner changed. He went from mockery, to outrage, to denial, to a brief blinding hope—then to the comprehension that the crowd had seen him. He begged. He called for compassion. He slapped at the judge. He cried. He tried to bargain with the names of the rich who had once kept him.
“I was a man,” he said at last, voice breaking. “I was trying to be more than a man. I thought—”
“Thought?” shouted a woman who had lost a child three times under his care. “You thought with coins!”
The crowd gathered close. They did not beat him with stones; they did what was worse for some men: they made him live fully visible. They paraded his receipts, read his lists, paraded the faces of those he’d used. They demanded he beg forgiveness in front of the beds of those he had saved and those he had failed. He did. He blustered and then he collapsed into the smallness of a man who had been loved for his magic now stripped.
Then came his most human moment: he reached his hands out to me and said in a voice that had no pride—“You must forgive me.”
I climbed down from the platform. I looked him in the eye until his gaze shrank.
“You will not get my forgiveness like a coat,” I said, “or like a song. You will earn it with truth and change.”
He shook. He promised and he promised and the promises were wet with fear.
We had the punishment we needed: exposure, the naming of debts in public, the seeing of their face not as saint but as man. When the judge declared Emanuel stripped of his stage and banished from the city, the man known as master left like a shadow flung from a lamp.
But one punishment is not enough for men who trafficked in pain. Braxton Ibrahim—who years ago had wronged Soledad and other women, whose gentility hid cruelty—needed his own unmasking. He had been the man who left Soledad to rot and had repaid his sin with a piece of ceremony. For him we had another kind of punishment: a day in the market where his debts were read aloud and where the women he harmed were invited to speak.
Braxton’s public fall was different. He was not stripped of a stage like Emanuel; rather, he was removed of the single thing he valued most: his social standing. His peers who had tolerated him turned away. Men who used to bow did not. Women spat. His supporters withdrew offers of silk and dinners. He watched as the world he had bought with small cruelties closed around him. He attempted to bribe and begged for mercy, but his pleas fell flat. The deepest suffering was not jail; it was being watched as a small, weak man by those he had always assumed beneath him. He begged to be let back into their circles; women on the market stage turned away, and a child who had once loved a song spat his name once into the dust. Braxton stood, a broken porcelain turned dull.
The punishments were different: Emanuel lost his stage and face in a public ritual of exposure; Braxton lost his respect, his standing, the thin threads that kept him whole. Both reacted: Emanuel went through phases—arrogance, denial, bargaining, begging; Braxton slid from smirk to pleading to a thin, sunken man. Each judgment had witnesses who clapped, who hissed, who cried, who took out phones—no, not phones, but today we call for people to write it down in the journals carried by market criers. The record of their fall was loud.
After that day the city breathed differently. There was a new quiet in the tented rows. People glared at every man who offered miracles. The Red House filled with new faces and those who needed their songs. Morgan the round planted a tree in our backyard—she had once been a living thing made by someone else; she chose to become herself and take the form she preferred. Beneath its branches we sang different songs.
Finn came to see me one evening at the Red House gate. He stood in shadow, a bundle of folded silence.
“You did what you had to,” he said.
“I did what I could,” I replied. “Both mean different things.”
He smiled then, a soft thing. “You are stubborn. You are feverish. You are a headache. You are a light.”
“Do you still fund this house?” I asked.
“No,” he said, and the truth rested like a paper boat on water. “I will hold it for you when need be.”
Time passed. The tree grew. Morgan made a swing and Haisley sat on it sometimes, arms bare, catching the summer air. Guadalupe mixed draughts for the city in a quiet room under the eaves. Karen learned to run and to be quick on a rooftop. Beverly hung ribbons and wind chimes.
Reid’s mother, the concubine who had once traded children like coins, lived yet, shadow-thin with her illness. I stood by her bed again and this time I did not plant more poison. I took the worms out and let them die in daylight and watched the old woman catch a little breath.
“I once thought I wanted everything,” I told Reid before I left the palace gate that afternoon. “Now I want things to be smaller.”
He nodded, looking like a prince who had learned how to be human. Finn walked with me to the city wall and we watched the sun fall like a stroke of copper.
“And Shadow?” I asked, thinking of the other being who had followed me like a secret.
“Henrik Fontaine?” Finn answered. “He left when the stage fell. He said the world was too loud for him. He is not dead. He was not the god you thought, only a fragment of someone.”
“What fragment?” I asked.
Finn only shrugged. He did not tell me everything, because Finn never tells everything. He is a man who's learned to keep one foot in the dark and one in the light.
We all learned to keep small things. The Red House is no palace. It never will be. But there is a tree that hums at night and a swing that sings with a low, slow memory. There are names written in the ledger by a woman who once knew the taste of buttermilk and blood and the edge of a blade.
I think of my other life sometimes—the hospital in which I stitched a princess with hands that would be taken from me. I think of the black-clothed god who had a face like the man we unmasked. I think of how I took a life and was given another.
One night, when moonlight rubbed the courtyard tender, Finn handed me a small thing wrapped in cloth. Inside, a silver key. Sleek, small, and perfect for a lock I could not name.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“A map,” he said. “To the places I keep for you.”
“You’ve kept much,” I said. “Why?”
“Because sometimes I like to feed my curiosity,” he said. “Sometimes because you are a difficult song I want to hear again.”
We stood a while like two things that could be more and were not. The bell at the Red House chimed. Morgan’s tree shadow lay across our feet, and the swing creaked one deep, honest note.
“I once asked for a throne,” I told him. “Now I will keep what is given and make it my own.”
Finn nodded, like someone who had learned that the world keeps no promises but often pays in small mercies.
That night I sat under Morgan’s tree and unwrapped the key. It was cool. It fit my palm like a secret. I closed my fingers around it and felt the soft scrape of a life that had been nearly unpaid for.
“Keep it,” I told the night. “I will keep the house. I will keep the songs. I will keep the truth.”
The swing moved in the breeze and the lanterns around the yard sputtered like small stars. The world was messy and loud and beautiful in a way no palace could teach. I had been given an order I did not get—a throne I did not sit in—and yet I had been given something better: the choice to open doors.
The End
— Thank you for reading —