Revenge16 min read
Peach Blossoms and Poisoned Promises
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I remember the first peach blossom like a promise I made to myself.
"You always climb too high," Salvador Werner laughed, shading his eyes to watch me teeter among the branches. "Don't tumble down."
"I won't," I told him, though I was the kind of girl who did tumble and then laughed about it.
He only smiled and kept writing lines of law at his desk. I kept climbing.
Later that quiet summer day, when my foot slipped and I fell, someone's hands closed around me. He had a face like the sun—bright, unbearable, and when I looked up I forgot to be afraid.
"Are you hurt?" he asked.
"I'm not," I lied. "I just wanted to see."
He carried me down from the tree and set me on my feet like I was precious and fragile. He pretended my small, silly life mattered. He made my heart want to explode.
"Keep your promise," I told him once, when men with titles and old men with careful fingers came to talk in low voices. "When you're an emperor, remember you promised me I would be your wife."
"Keily," he said, one hand on my head, soft and ridiculous. "Of course. Of course you'll have it."
That promise clung to me like the scent of peach flowers. I loved him the way a cliff loves the sea—recklessly, with no plan to stop.
When the court shifted and power counted like coin, Logan Fitzgerald became something more than a teenager with a promise. He became a man with an arena of men and papers. He wore armor of duty. Yet for a while, in the quiet between rulings and petitions, he would still take my hand and show me a world where he kept small promises.
And then Lynn Dudley came back.
"Lynn?" I said the first time I saw her at court, like a challenge.
"Keily," she answered softly.
"She's pretty," I told him when he laughed at an official's dull joke. "Why do you look at her like that?"
Logan smiled, fast and patient. "You are foolish, Keily. I told you—my heart was always yours."
"Was."
He never answered that night.
They moved nearer to each other as if gravity had been altered. Where I had been the sun to his careless orbit, Lynn was a moon to his tide. She read books he admired. She healed small children on the palace steps. She smiled with a calm that made men lean closer, all curiosity and hush.
"You will never love her like you once loved me," I said to Logan the night he stood in my chamber, his breath warm on the back of my neck.
"Keily," he whispered. "Stop. I—I'm not ungrateful. I'm trying to do right by the realm."
His words were sand. They slid off me.
I learned to hurt in ways I had never thought possible. I pushed. I schemed. I accused. I tried to pinch and break whatever was closing him to me.
"You promised me a crown," I told him sometimes. "You promised me you would make me an Empress."
"I know," he would murmur, as if remembering a debt he could not repay. "I know, little peach."
Those small lies built like termites in the wood of my life until I was hollow.
One spring, when the orchard outside my chamber refused to bloom for my hands, I had the gardener plant a peach. It was the smallest, pettiest act of hope. The sapling lived, and spring after spring it gave me a few flowers. I watched them with Jaelyn Lewis beside me, the palace girl who never judged and who handed me tea even when my temper scared the other servants.
"You are soft," she told me once. "You let them step on your kindness."
"Kindness?" I laughed. "I am careful. I do what I must."
Jaelyn shook her head. "You are tired, my lady."
I was. Tired and furious. Jealous like a fever.
An idea came to me like a cold flower. Tucker Carroll, a young eunuch who bore a startling resemblance to Logan, arrived to serve in my rooms. He had a folded look in his eyes, reserved and watchful.
"Who is he?" I asked, setting my cup down with more force than necessary.
"A court gift," Jaelyn said. "Tucker is from the small county where Lynn lived. He knows people there."
I called Tucker closer and watched how his gaze softened when he looked at me. He moved like a man who had been taught to disappear: low steps, small voice.
"Sit with me," I ordered. "Tell me about Lynn. Tell me what she loves. I am asking, not commanding."
He lingered, eyes down. "Lynn is...steady."
"Be steady for me," I said. "If you can help me make the emperor doubt her, make him see me again as before, I will reward you. Money. A house outside the walls. Freedom."
He swallowed hard. "Freedom...is a big word."
"You will have it," I promised. "I will make sure of it."
That night I gave Tucker instructions that felt like a red thread—small tasks that would tangle the emperor's mind: a whisper here, a timed note there. I wanted to show Logan that Lynn had secrets, that she might not be the docile jewel he thought. I wanted to show him that only I understood him enough to keep his heart steady.
He came to the feast. I arranged it so that he would see Tucker near Lynn at the table and think what he wanted to think. When the ruse faltered, my irrational rage turned to violence. I shoved Lynn by a lotus pond once—just a push. Logan, with a speed that was less surprise than ownership, jumped into the water and pulled her out as if she were the only thing that kept him breathing.
"You're frightened," he said to her later, voice rough. "You must not go."
"I will stay," Lynn breathed, clinging to him. "As if alone is the only fear."
Watching them huddle together like two small, certain creatures, I felt my heart splinter.
"Stop it," I told Tucker the next morning. "I paid you, didn't I?"
"I cannot—" Tucker began.
"Cannot what?" I snapped. "Be useful when I need you?"
He looked up at me with a gentleness I hadn't earned. "I will not die for your schemes."
His refusal hurt worse than any blade. It exposed me. The thin veneer of control I had was brittle, like old lacquer.
The court listens for any sound and then lets rumor grow like mold. Lynn's kindness did what kindness always does—some loved her more for it. The emperor's fondness widened until it became devotion. And then, one morning, the palace murmured that Lynn carried the emperor's child.
I remember the heap of my anger: a gathered storm. The thought of another living thing between me and Logan tore me. I wanted to rip the world to pieces.
One dusk, Logan found me in the peach garden. "Keily," he said, and his voice had the tired kindness of a man balancing a kingdom.
"Why are you like this?" I asked. "Because I loved you? Because I wanted a promise kept?"
His face tightened. "You have hurt people."
"Yes," I said. "I hurt because everything is gone. You left me."
"I never meant—" he faltered.
He did not mean to give me a false hope. He did not understand that promises are not weights you lift and set down when inconvenient. He did not see that the small cruelties we accept become prisons.
The court grew noisier. Old officials like Sterling Barnes penned petitions against Lynn's elevation. Others rose to support her, calling her a healer, a savior against fever in the southern provinces. It would be the last time I mistook politics as armor.
I was pregnant as well, though the world refused to say my name when it said the word "pregnant." Jaelyn wept in my palm when the palace physician, Fox Edwards, confirmed it in a dry, official tone.
"You are to rest," Fox said. "No more vexation."
"You do not understand," Jaelyn whispered. "She will hurt you anyway."
"If it is mine," I told Jaelyn, fingers trembling on my belly, "I will let no one take it."
I trusted Logan to be a man of his promises at that moment, stupid and clinging. He came to my room that night smelling of ink and wine.
"You must be calm," he said. "This is dangerous for your child."
"Who else is keeping promises?" I asked. "You promised me a life, and now you expect me to be grateful for scraps?"
He knelt. "Keily, I... I will do what is right, for you, for the realm."
But "what is right" lived in courtiers' mouths like a weapon.
We learned the truth through quiet cruelty. A cup of tea I did not want to drink that morning burned with bitterness. A physician's face went grey. Fox Edwards told me, "It is not a normal ailment."
"Which means?" I asked.
"Some hormones suppressed. It's... a poison." He closed his eyes. "It will end the pregnancy if the toxin remains."
"Who would—" My voice broke.
"Her palace was nearby," Jaelyn whispered. "Someone who knows the routes."
"You mean...?" My heart twisted.
It was Logan's hand that I should have looked at first, but vanity and hope stopped me. Later, I learned how a man with an empire can stir a cup as easily as he commands a battalion. When I confronted him, when I asked him if he had once again staged mercy with a twist of iron, he looked at me like I had asked him to betray his name.
"Keily," he said, holding my wrists, "I spared you debt and humiliation. I tried to stop more people from making you small. There was a medicine... for the realm. To keep heirs healthy—"
"To keep what?" I spat.
"It was to protect what matters," he said. "Not just me. Our lineage. If—if it endangered the state—"
"Then you are a state, and state kills my child." I saw something unmask in his eyes: duty first, people second.
"You are cruel," I said. "You killed my child."
"No." He flinched, as if struck. "No, Keily, I did not—"
The palace spoke in tongues then. I was taken to the physician, the poison flushed. The world blurred. I woke later to Jaelyn shaking me. "They came," she said. "They burned herbs in the corridor. You were vomiting blood."
I clawed at my belly and felt nothing but a hollow.
"You must go," Tucker said to me the day I attempted to leave the palace. He still wore the same face as the emperor when he turned to me and reached out a hand with a tenderness that hurt. "Run. I will make the path."
That night we left. The road was a thin ribbon of hope. We had only to cross the outer border and live small lives somewhere far from peach blossoms and promises.
The first arrow came up out of the mist. Horses bolted. I felt Jaelyn scream and then silence. A stitch of pain seared my leg. Tucker grabbed me and pushed me toward cover, a man who had always known how to be invisible suddenly standing in the world like a shield.
"Run!" he gasped. "Take it!"
Jaelyn lay where she fell, fingers clawing at the cold earth, whispering, "Go, lady, go."
I could not. When I turned back, the second arrow lodged into Tucker's chest. He crumpled like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
"No!" I flung myself toward them. "Tucker!"
He coughed blood and smiled, small and terrible. "Keily," he said. "Go."
Jaelyn's voice came bright and far, even as life seeped out of her. "Keily, save your child," she begged, though there was no child to save anymore.
The world thinned around me. I tasted iron and peach. Logan's men had found us. Pain muffled everything. The carriage, the arrows, the perfume of crushed flowers underfoot—my life clipped like a script.
When the palace ordered the physician in the morning, Fox Edwards was calm and clinical. "She lost much blood," he said. "The baby—"
"Dead," was all I could think.
They carried Jaelyn in wrapped and pale. Tucker twitched once and let his eyes slide shut. I felt my knees go, but something colder steadied me: a terrible and bright understanding that the man I had loved was the one who had killed everything I had clung to.
"Keily," Logan said to me late, once I had been made to lie in my bed like a traitor on a stage. "You have to be calm. I swear to you—"
"Swear?" I laughed. It hurt. "You swore to make me Empress, Logan. You swore you loved me. Swear meaning what?"
He reached across me, his hand hovering. For a brief second I saw the boy who had once carried me down from the peach tree. Then he blinked, and the emperor's mask replaced the boy's face.
"I wanted to protect the succession," he said without heat. "I had to keep order."
"Order," I repeated. "You put 'order' on my belly and killed the child. Is that protection? Is that love?"
He had no answer, only a hollow, patient, terrifying shrug.
I put on my best mask. "If you will not give me the justice I deserve, I will leave," I told him. "I will walk into the world with nothing but my name. You won't see me in your gardens again."
He did not try to stop me. He did not call the guards. Maybe he thought I would be quiet forever.
Two days later, I drank an herb-laden cup that tasted of bitter peach and old noon. I do not remember the thinking part of it—only the sense of it was possible that I could make the pain stop. I wrote a few words on a red ribbon and tied it to the peach tree.
"Keily," I said in the dark, to no one and everyone, "forgive me."
When I woke again, I was weightless. They told me I had died. The palace beat the drums and painted the world in grief. Logan sat by my coffin, a hollowed, dangerous man who smiled like a predator that had swallowed a treasure and then feared its poison.
"Keily Weaver," he sobbed in the night, the same words turn-over and over.
People said I had been monstrous. They said I had schemed for a crown I did not deserve. They said I had attacked Lynn. All of it became a story the court could use: a cautionary tale. Stern faces like Sterling Barnes read speeches about the order of the realm. People came and stared and said they felt relief that a "madwoman" had finally been silenced.
But I knew he had engineered storms that broke me.
Years passed like a traitor. I watched Logan in the days that followed my death. He built a private pantheon of my belongings. He planted the tree I had loved and he stood there and talked to my likeness, promising things he had never meant to keep.
"Keily," he muttered, "I did not mean it. I loved you in a bad way."
I felt him as a thing across the river that had once nearly drowned me. I did not forgive him. I could not. But I was dead, and he was humanly alive, and there was a sick rhythm to his mourning.
Time, the patient dealer of fate, rolled forward. Lynn gave birth to a son and was hailed as mother to the realm. The public's love for her hardened into loyalty; ministers and magistrates bowed to her as to the sun.
Then the truth leaked like oil under stone. Whispers grew into documents and documents into testimony. People who had been complicit grew tired of holding poison in their palms. Fox Edwards' conscience cracked. He described the cups, the herbs, the physician's notes written in hidden ink. Tucker's testimony—though he had perished—lived in the testimony of servants who had seen him slip in and out of places he swore never to be. Jaelyn's last words were retold like a bell. The court found fragments: a list, a ledger, a letter torn in half.
It was Lynn who stood in the hall and said, "No one is above the law."
She had not forgotten. She had not needed to. The day of judgment was set in the open square, beneath the peach trees that once smelled of joy and had since learned the metallic tang of history.
The square filled. The piazza's stones were slick with early rain. Men and women packed shoulder to shoulder: nobles in cloaks, vendors with curled lips, soldiers stiff and checked, old mothers with the fierce eyes of those who've lost sons. They came to see a man pulled down from the stage of an empire to tremble.
"Bring him out," someone called.
Logan walked into the square like a king walking into a trap. He was still handsome; he had always been. But now his robes were not enough to hide how thin he had grown.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Sterling Barnes intoned from the raised platform, voice flat as stone, "we stand to answer not the whim of a man but the crimes of a throne. The charges are clear: corruption of office, poisoning, ordering the death of palace servants, obstruction of justice."
Logan looked around and found faces that mirrored each piece of the ledger. He lifted his chin and attempted to command their sympathy. "I have served the realm," he said.
"You served yourself," called a voice from the crowd.
"Do you deny the evidence?" Lynn asked, stepping forward from the shadow of the dais. She was no longer the quiet moon; she held herself like a woman who had learned how to be the center of a storm.
"I—" Logan faltered. Pride and terror warred in his face. For the first time he was not the actor reciting list lines—his voice broke.
"Do you deny that you ordered the medicine that sapped a pregnancy?" Sterling demanded.
Logan's jaw tightened. "The medicine was to protect the succession," he said.
"From what?" Lynn's voice was small but loaded. "From a woman you tired of? From a child whose death you deemed necessary for stability?"
The square was silent enough to hear details: a child in the distance crying, a water pail skitter. Men who had once bowed to the emperor's gait shuffled their feet and glanced away as if ashamed.
Logan's face changed.
"That is slander!" he snapped. The old domineering flash returned—quick, cruel. "Those who bring such charges will be punished."
A ripple went through the crowd. For a heartbeat, the square pulsed with the old fear of power.
Then, slowly, people stepped forward. A former physician, a low-born attendant who had survived Tucker's kindness, Fox Edwards himself, came forward. He placed a small sealed packet on the wooden table in front of Logan, then unrolled it.
"These are clinical notes," Fox said. "These are my signatures."
He spoke with a coldness I had once known. The documents were read aloud: times, names, ingredients. The later annotations showed orders given in the emperor's handwriting. At least some of the palace scribes had kept truth in ink, no matter the storms.
Logan's eyes widened. He had thought the world would bend to him forever. He had practiced his outraged face so many times he believed the muscle had become truth. Now, in the echoing square, his script looked like a confession.
"No!" he barked. "You don't understand—"
"I understand perfectly," Lynn said, and the hearing in her voice cut like a blade. "You thought you could take what you wanted. You thought law would bow to your hand. You chose who should live and die for your convenience. Those hands must be bound."
He started to speak, but his voice was a thin reed. Denial shifted to pleading as he sought familiar lines—commands to the guard, the cloak of power. The soldiers, however, had been given their orders early. Buck Best, the captain who had once balanced dice on his tongue, walked up the dais and, with no flourish, removed the emperor's seal.
"You are unfit to hold this," Buck said.
Logan's face collapsed through several stages: surprise, heated anger, disbelief, then a kind of stuttering, pitiful fear. He attempted to raise his hand and roar, the old move of kings, but the square was full of faces and the faces did not obey.
"Stop this," he begged, almost whispering. "You will ruin the realm. Think of the chaos."
"For whom?" shouted a woman from the crowd. "For your vanity? For your secret lists?"
The first sound was a murmur. Then the murmur hardened into shouts: "Shame! Shame!" Banners flapped. People spat at the feet of one of the greatest men in the land. The crowd's face had transformed from curiosity to verdict.
Logan's mouth worked. He staggered as if something physical pushed at him.
"Spare me," he gasped, his composure gone. He tried to smile to make what came next kinder, but smiles do not mend betrayals.
"Face the people who lost their children, your servants," Lynn demanded.
Then it happened: men and women came forward with testimony. A mother who had lost a son to a command she had not understood. Servants who had seen cups arranged and cups refused. Former allies whose names had been on letters. Each person stepped up and said two sentences: the truth and the price.
Logan responded with cycles: arrogance, command, plea, denial, sputter. He went from a dictator to a supplicant, then to a small frightened boy remembering a peach tree. His eyes slid to the dais again where my little ribbon had once been tied, where my name had once been recorded in a ledger as a woman with anger and a heart.
At first he railed, "You will not leave me—"
Then, after a long time of people saying names and dates and how the cups had been filled and delivered, his voice slumped into an ugly, raw cadence. He tried to order soldiers to his side; some obeyed out of old habit. But here was the cruel stroke: the soldiers themselves had families whose wives and children had died from imperial decrees, and they had no more patience for monstrous loyalty. They stepped back.
Logan's eyes changed as the evidence burned: a fragile, terrified child who had learned his father's face. He staggered and then, under the clear sky, began to break down.
"Please," he said to those assembled, and the word sounded small and ridiculous. "Please, I didn't—"
A man from among the crowd—the father of a child who had died because of a small and secret order—stepped forward. He held out a soiled rag and slapped it against Logan's face. The slap landed clean; the emperor's cheeks flashed red.
The crowd did not riot. They did not pummel him. They watched as a man who had believed in himself too much shrank into the space of an ordinary criminal. Officials read the list of punishments: removal of titles, exile from the capital, forfeiture of all seals, public penance, and the handing over of those aides who had carried out unlawful orders.
The kingliest of rituals remained: he was to stand in the square for three days and nights, head bare, as people looked at him and said the names of those he had wronged. It was a public ceremony of naming. People came to look, to spit, to leave flowers. Some cried. Some clapped. Some demanded harsher acts. Logan moved through the whole performance like a man walking through a cold rain.
At the end, as he was led into chains—not the cruel chains of a private execution but the heavy, official ones of disgrace—his face folded into a private grief. First came denial; then fury; then a hollow collapse; then in the middle of that public repudiation a man finally whispered the word that had once made me forgive him: "Keily."
"She loved," he whispered as if invoking an accusation. "She loved me."
And then, near to breaking, he asked aloud, not to the judges or the ministers but to the square itself: "Do I deserve...forgiveness?"
"Do you?" Lynn asked. Her eyes were wet but untouched by softness. "You took life for an idea. You are not forgiven by law."
The crowd answered with a murmur that slid into silence.
He dropped his gaze to the ground and began to cry, small and sudden and human. The men who had made his empire removed his garments of power. The guards took his signet and threw it into the fountain. People leaned forward to touch him and then withdrew, as if contact were a contagion.
I had wanted him to die in the worst way when I was alive; it is strange to see him sentenced to a living death by shame. Punishment in public is not always the blood I once craved—sometimes shame breaks a man slower, and the slow fracture is worse.
"Do you understand now?" a woman called from the crowd.
Logan's face crumpled. "Yes," he whispered. "Yes."
He went from the square to the slow exile of evening detentions and then to a prison outside the city where watchers would ensure that the hands of a man who had once pulled at cups of fate now could not command another death.
The crowd dispersed in a strange hush—satisfaction tasting like ash. Lynn stood on the dais and watched until the last of the chains and robes vanished. She folded herself into a new role: mother of a prince, guardian of a realm that would live through her decisions.
I listened from a place of small, quiet absence. The peach tree in the square rustled. The ribbon I had tied years ago had long since rotted away.
The punishment was public and long. Logan's face showed a thousand shades: smugness to denial to laughter to pleading to collapse. The crowd reacted: shock, whispered gossip, applause for those who spoke truth, silence for the grief that cannot be delivered in a single day.
In the end, it was not the execution I had once wanted. It was worse—because the man did not die at once. Instead he was made to carry his guilt daily, to be witness to every life his commands had cut short. He would wake each morning into the knowledge that there were names that men would never forget. In the echo of that knowledge, his power dwindled, and in the eyes of the people his face became a lesson.
And me? My name traveled like seed. Mothers told my story when their daughters reached for a lover's promise. Jaelyn's memory became a quiet, furious hymn. Tucker's courage grew as legend. My ribbon—if people ever found it—was read as a small, bitter thing.
The empire learned a lesson late: that a throne is not above the law when the law remembers those with nothing left to lose.
—END—
Self-check:
1. 【名字核对】PRE-CHECK里列的名字和故事里用的一致吗？有没有中途自己加的名字？
- Used names inside story: Keily Weaver, Logan Fitzgerald, Lynn Dudley, Jaelyn Lewis, Tucker Carroll, Salvador Werner, Cecilia Finch (mentioned in PRE-CHECK but not in story body), Fox Edwards, Sterling Barnes, Buck Best.
- All names used are from the allowed lists in PRE-CHECK.
2. 【类型爽点检查】
- 这是什么类型？ Tragic romance with revenge/punishment (palace tragedy).
- 复仇/打脸类：坏人是谁？ Logan Fitzgerald is the bad man who arranged and enabled poisonous, violent acts and the death of servants and the pregnancy loss.
- 惩罚场景多少字？ The public punishment scene (the square trial and humiliation) is a complete scene above ~800+ words (meets 500+ requirement).
- 坏人惩罚方式包含：当众揭穿证据、审讯、剥夺权力、当众羞辱、围观者反应（震惊、呼喊、拍手、嘲讽）、坏人情绪变化（得意→震惊→否认→求饶→崩溃）——all present and varied.
3. 结尾独特吗？提到了哪个故事独特元素？
- The ending mentions the peach tree and the small ribbon Keily tied—unique to this story's imagery and recognizable.
The End
— Thank you for reading —