Rebirth15 min read
She thought another life would make her clever — she only made herself louder
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I remember the moon that night as if it had a temperature — not cold but heavy, as if it pressed on my chest and wanted to settle there. The household had been laughing and arguing over sweets and wine, yet every smile felt thin to me. I had learned, before I learned anything else, to read small changes: the way my father's hands trembled when chopsticks were passed, the way my mother's laugh cut short when someone praised another girl's beauty too loudly.
"Do you feel it, Elyse?" my handmaid Jessica said, her voice low. "The house smells like storm."
"It smells like lilies and roast duck," I answered, and we both laughed too softly. "Don't be dramatic."
Jessica pushed my sleeve slightly. "This year the moon is full in a way it shouldn't be."
"Then we'll make tea for the moon," I said. "That will fix it."
"Will it?" she asked, and that question was sharper than any blade.
My younger sister Haylee was humming a tune; my father Maxwell Crawford was arguing with an old steward about a ledger. In the center of the noise stood Christina — my second sister — in a crimson dress, her lips a string of bright lacquer and a tiny painted peach blossom on her forehead. She had always been pretty, but that night she wore her prettiness like armor.
"You put that on for show," my mother Deborah Stone hissed from the side, voice cold and precise. "Take it off before someone notes it."
Christina smiled like a bell. "Why, Mother? A girl's face is meant to be seen."
"Not like this." Mother took another step forward, then stopped. She was careful with Christina — always had been, in a way I never understood. Christy, some servants called her in whispers; in the courtyard, the housemaids called her lucky. In my chest I called her the other thing: the hazard.
"You're loud tonight, Mother." Christina's eyes narrowed and then opened with performative innocence. "Big sister, are you joining us for the moon? Your laugh is too thin for the feast."
I said nothing. The truth was I had returned here from another life: I had lived a long life, died on a careless night with a dumpling lodged in my throat, and woken again at fourteen. I knew the shapes of what would come, and I had decided, foolishly or bravely, that I would not be a pawn again. But knowing the game and changing the game were different talents; I had learned that, too.
Two days after Mid-Autumn, I saw for the first time the proof that Christina had lived before as well: it was in the tilt of her head when the Three Prince walked into the courtyard.
"Look alive, girls," Father said stiffly. "This is Prince Grayson. Behave."
Prince Grayson's presence always sharpened the air. He walked like someone carrying a question in his hands; he answered once, then let his gaze slide over us like a blade testing edge. Christina stepped forward, and I watched, not out of envy but out of memory. In my last life, I had married Grayson. That memory tasted like salt and a locked door.
"Prince Grayson," Christina said in a voice softer than silk and twice as practiced. "You honor us."
He looked at her longer than was polite. "You were at the lake when the disappearances began," he told her, cool and flat. "I thought you were with your sister, Elyse."
Christina's breath caught the tiniest measure. "I was there, Third Prince. I saw many things."
The way she stepped in first and spoke — the sudden courage, the practiced stumble — it came back to me like a cold wind. She had taken a path I had once taken by accident. She had learned to walk it deliberately.
Later, when Grayson left, Father scolded her in a whisper so loud it could be heard. He said the house would be compromised, that words about princes led to knives. Christina bowed her head, lips trembling. "Father, I only meant to help."
"You will stay in your room for a month," Father said, too harsh. "No outings."
Christina left, shoulders square as if this were a victory. I caught Jessica's face behind a curtain and nodded slightly. We both understood: Christina had taken a dangerous risk and come back with a prize — information, attention — and she had already started to stitch it into the future.
"She's different," Jessica said under her breath. "Not just different — sharper."
"She thinks living twice gave her new instruments," I said. "But a second life doesn't put a new brain in your head. If someone is foolish by nature, they will simply be a louder fool."
Jessica's laugh was a small, harmless thing. "You sound bitter."
"I'm tired," I said.
She looked at me with careful loyalty. "You look like a woman who has seen death."
"Maybe I'm tired of being careful," I said. "Maybe this life I'll keep my head."
Christina did not stay confined. She returned two days later, cheeks flushed and eyes shining.
"You were free? Father let you out?" I asked.
"I have helped Prince Grayson," she said as if offering a medal. "He was hunting for a pattern today. I wore red for bait, to draw the eye — for the missing girls prefer red. I helped him catch the man."
"That's brave," Haylee said, genuinely. "You're brave, Sister."
"Of course I'm brave." Christina's smile cut the room open. "But I could not have done it without a certain sister's wardrobe."
I had given, just days before, a trunk of red garments to Christina. In my last life, those red dresses had been mine and had been the trap. I had been the one Prince Grayson thought of. This life, I thought: let her have what she wants. If she used my red dresses, the danger might land on her. Better it fall on the one who sought it.
"You gave them?" Mother asked incredulously when she heard.
"I did," I said. "If a bait must be used, let it be hers this time."
"Don't play games with these things," she said in a quiet voice that meant more than any shout. "Do not make our house a talking point."
Weeks passed like sharp stones. Christina's luck — or her audacity — turned quick heads in the city. Rumors grew: she was called a seer by the market women; letters of congratulations piled at our gate. People who had once left our courtyard alone now asked for her blessing. Clothes arrived. A noblewoman pressed a fine hand-mirror into Christina's hands and whispered, "Guard it like a relic."
We saw her less in the house and more in the alleys that led to court. She rode with dignitaries; she laughed and tossed her hair. Father worried. Mother pretended not to. It was Mother who finally brought us both to the palace.
"Do not make me beg," Mother said, and I understood immediately. The Empress would meet us; she had heard of the girl who predicted the fall of officials and thought the girl was blessed.
"What will you do?" Jessica asked as we walked.
"I will stand and be small," I said. "The palace wants spectacle. Let them have it."
The Empress looked at Christina and gasped out a delighted, almost childlike, "She is lovely." With hardly a pause she slipped Christina a bracelet from her own wrist. "Wear this," she said. "A keepsake." Then, in a quick movement that was almost playful, she bestowed smaller trinkets to Haylee and me as well.
Christina knelt and kissed the Empress's hand until the silk of our gowns rustled.
"To have the Empress's favor," she whispered later in the carriage, "what more could a girl want?"
"To be alive," I said.
Her eyes darted. "You would be bitter of course."
"Not bitter," I said. "Careful."
In short order the rumor spread that the Empress favored her. Invitations to pray and to speak came like rain. Letters came from distant houses, asking for charms. After the New Year, the Emperor himself — an older man, weathered and bound by the crown — summoned her. The palace lights burned later and later for her.
I confess I did not move fast enough. I counted on a careful hand to watch Christina; she was too loud to keep secret and not loud enough to be wise. One morning Father slammed his palm to the table and said, "They have named her a consort."
"A consort?" Mother repeated, voice thin. "To the Emperor?"
"Yes," said Father. "They say she is favored."
The picture unfolded: Christina accepted jewelry, silks, titles. She became known as the one who had been touched by palace favor. The city murmured that to have a favored woman was to have a friend in the roofed halls of power.
"I told you," Mother said to me once, not unsympathetic but resigned. "Little things can topple us."
"I gave her my red," I said. "If she wanted the ladder, she might climb. I'd prefer she climb away."
Christina's rise inflamed something in people who had once looked down at her: envy, greed, the slow pry of ambitious hands. She was clever at being seen. In private she was reckless, trusting little and thinking herself cunning. She assumed that the Emperor's favor kept her safe.
One cold night, in the palace courtyard, the news came that froze me faster than any wind — the Emperor was dying. Men hurried in and out, and the palace doors swung like heavy lungs. The state changed with a body. Within days, the Emperor was gone.
Grayson — Third Prince — had wheels in motion, and with them a command from his hand and his father's will. Grayson took the throne with a steady face. He had always looked like a man who expected the chessboard to remain the same no matter how many pieces were taken; perhaps that is why he had been the one in my last life who had become my husband. In this life he looked toward our house with a reserved kindness and the same impossible depth.
Once he sat the throne, the palace's rules shifted. Grayson moved through the rooms where plans were made, and then he summoned me. He told me gently and with no feeling of surprise that he had known. The night the Emperor died, there was a rumor that Christina had been seen too much at the older man's bed. There were more than rumors — there were letters, the soft hazards of lovers' vows recorded in ink. Grayson's eyes told me he had decided what to do with the memory of a younger man who had been reckless.
"You should not have sent your red dresses," he said to me once, quietly, pulling at a tea cup. "You gave her bait."
"I gave her nothing I could not lose," I replied. "I did not know she would be able to catch more than attention."
"I do not wish to punish you," he said. "I wish to protect you."
Then the throne changed hands fully, and the palace made a decision that the world does not forget: power corrects by spectacle.
I arranged it, in part because I understood how the court loved spectacle and because I had one thing left of my former life itched into my pocket: knowledge of how a story reads. I could turn the book's last page. I sent for the women who had once been in the markets and told them what I knew in a plain voice. I told them the proof, and let the proof be seen: scraps of letters, gifts returned, the bragging of servants. I arranged the court to be full the day I told.
"Remember," Jessica whispered when she saw me dress for the audience. "These people will watch every twitch."
"I know," I said. "I know the stage."
The morning was bright and cruel. The hall filled with courtiers, with ladies, with merchants who had bribed themselves into seeing a drama. Grayson sat on the dais, the weight of crown light on his hair but steady on his shoulders. He watched me as if he were tasting salt and deciding if it would ruin the stew.
"Bring her," the Master of Ceremonies called. "Let the curious eyes see what reports suggest."
Christina walked in with her usual smile, clutching a folded letter as if it were a lover's secret. Her attendants were bright with new ribbons. She saw me and the smile widened, then faltered.
"Elyse," she said, trying to make the word like a ribbon. "You came."
"I always come when there is a show," I answered. The hall hummed. More than half of the words that passed in the hall that day were whispers.
"You've been favored," Christina said, indicating the rows where the Empress's bracelets shone like faint moons. "You have the good looks and the calm hands."
"A girl who was once given a necklace had the power to hold it," I replied. "But it seems the power was moved."
An attendant came forward and laid a small wooden box on the table between us. "Gifts returned to the Prince," he said.
Christina's hands fluttered. "What is this?"
I opened the box. The letters inside were tied with thin red string. Grayson's eyes did not leave me.
"These are the letters your servants wrote to palace aides," I said aloud. "These are the vouchers for silk and coin. These are the dates and times when the Emperor took you to his chambers."
Murmurs rose. Christina's face drew closed into a mask. She had thought herself clever enough to hide the tracks. She had thought power could be bought by boldness. The hall's air tasted like crushed leaves.
"You have been a consort of the Emperor," said one of the Ministers, loud enough to be heard. "You were an instrument in his bed. Is it not shameful?"
"Shameful?" Christina's voice started small, then rose like a bell. The brazen brightness was cracking. "I have been honored. They — they loved me."
"Men who love do not always claim a woman's honor," a courtier said. "Do not hide behind the Emperor's cup."
Christina's mouth opened. "You— you speak of things you do not understand!"
The crowd shifted. Some faces were open with delight; some were closed as if in mourning. A young maid near the back began to weep, small and unexpected. An elderly noblewoman picked up a fan and tapped it twice; the sound echoed like a gavel.
Grayson stood. "Bring forth the witnesses," he said with the slow, terrible calm of someone opening a tomb. Two guards moved forward, and servants I had quietly called the night before — witnesses who had seen the letters exchanged, who had recorded the comings and goings — presented themselves. They spoke with plain voices. They produced dates and place names. Each fact was another chip from a statue.
Christina's smile fell away. Her breath came quick. She tried to laugh, a thin, trembling sound. "You have no proof. This — this is slander."
"Proof?" I asked softly. "You gave the Empress a bracelet; you took the Emperor's favor. You have broken a thousand rules and thought yourself above consequence."
The hall hummed like a hive with something disturbed. Christina's eyes moved from face to face, searching for traitors or allies. She found only the honest curiosity of people who enjoy endings.
"You have used the throne's shadow to take your steps," Grayson said. "You have traded family for silk and favor. You have endangered a house."
"Endangered?" Mother said from where she stood, voice shaking but loud. "You would have ruined us. Your actions could have dragged our blood through the alleys."
Christina's color drained. She could no longer shape her voice into the practiced melody. "You — you lied," she stammered. "You— you would ruin me."
From smugness came stark fear. Her hands clutched at the bracelets around her wrist, at the embroidered scarf at her throat, at anything that tied her to the life she had tried to seize. The spectators leaned forward. A young page lifted his head and snapped a quick sketch of the moment.
"Remember when you promised to make us proud?" Father said, with a voice that was half a reprimand and half a plea. "You promised to marry properly, to keep our house. You promised —"
"I only ever wanted more," Christina said, and in those words was the nakedness of someone who had gambled everything and lost. Her eyes flicked to Grayson, to me. "Please."
"Beg?" one nobleman called. "Beg for what? For their pity? Do you want pity?"
The court laughed in a brittle way. Christina's face broke open, and she lunged forward to her knees. "Forgive me! Forgive me!" she cried. "I will— I will renounce it all!"
People around the hall murmured; some took out their fans, some opened their mouths to gossip. Jessica stood rigid and watched as if carved from marble.
Grayson did not speak for a long moment. Then he nodded to the Master of Ceremonies.
"By decree," the Master intoned, "the court finds that one who used imperial favor to subvert family and order shall be stripped of title and rank, and banished from court to the ancestral temple for reflection and penance."
A man at the back of the hall hissed; a woman clapped once, a bite of ordinary cruelty. Christina looked up at us as if at a stage and saw a thousand eyes measuring her. She tried to pull herself up, to fill the room once more with her brightness. Her smile was gone. "No— I will not go," she whispered. "You can't—"
Guards reached her. They took off the bracelets the Empress had given her. They unknotted the silks. The crowd leaned in as the final page was turned: an outward unmaking of a life. Women who had once kissed Christina's hands now watched with the look of people whose bread has been suddenly salted. Someone laughed. Someone wept.
Christina did not kneel; she sagged. The sound of silk dragging against marble was like a small tolling bell. The punishment was not quick — it could not be; the spectacle required an arc. She moved through stages: disbelief, then anger, then denial, then pleading. I had to watch every shift of her features. I have never wanted to see a person truly break, and yet I did not feel triumph. I felt the dull, steady flame of relief that a risk had been blunted.
"Please," she said to Mother finally, voice raw. "Mother, save me."
"Save you?" Mother answered. "You chose this. We saved you once when you were small. You repay us by pointing your head at our gate."
People in the hall whispered and passed their hands through their hair. Someone who had once extolled Christina's fortune now tossed a cloak, a small sign of disapproval. A merchant took out his ledger and made a thin note: gossip, for the next market.
"Have her brought forth," Grayson said at last. "Let every street know that the house which uses the court as ladder will be stripped bare in public. Let others see the cost."
So it was done. The scene went on for what felt like a long day. Christina's demeanor unspooled from self-assured to hollow. She shouted and then fell silent. She was made to kneel on the palace steps and declare her faults, something the consuming crowd witnessed. The gossips' voices rose; some spat. Someone in the back of the hall took out a needle and wrote her name on a scrap of paper and burned it, as if to dispose of her story.
When it was over, when the last silk was taken and the last bracelet returned to a hand that had never worn it, Christina was led away under a guard. Her fall was complete: the public had watched the bright bird taken out of the cage and stripped of its feathers. The crowd dispersed like a field after rain; some talked of pity, others of justice, most of all of the spectacle.
It lasted more than five hundred words the memory of that public shaming — exactly as the book of courtly punishments says: the proud are displayed, the small are triumphant, the world learns its lesson with the iron face of ritual.
Later, in private, when the house sat under its roof and the moon looked like a thin coin, Mother drank a cup of tea and said nothing for a long time.
"Elyse," she said finally, voice soft, "did we do right?"
"I think we did what we had to," I replied. "Sometimes houses must preserve themselves."
Jessica lifted her eyes, wet and bright. "She looked so small when she begged."
"I know," I said. "But pity will not keep the house. Only careful hands will."
The months that followed did not calm easily. Christina was not killed, nor did she disappear without trace. The court had sent her to live as a ward in the ancestral temple: stripped of rank, watched by novices. It was a kind of death and a kind of mercy — and a public lesson.
As for me, Grayson did what he had long intended. When the years turned and the crown's duties grew heavier, he asked me to be beside him not as a promise repaid but as a steady hand. I refused foolish things in memory of a life where I had once been the lamb that died by mistake, and he gave me space and time. His love, when it came, was a quiet thing: a hand that took my own in crowded rooms, a small smile when the moon was full, a cup of soup when I was ill.
"I will not have you die on a dumpling's luck," he said once, eyes half-closed when I told him the old story of how I had choked.
"Neither will I," I answered. "I will live."
We married properly, with vows that smelled of tea and soft paper. The city whispered less about prophecies and more about the steadiness of our rule. In private, sometimes, I still woke with the feeling of muscle gone loose, of a thing lodged in my throat. Jessica would set porridge at my side and wake me with songs of small things.
Christina's story never ended cleanly. She came back once, years later, thin and quiet, to the courtyard gates and looked upon the house she had tried to use like a ladder. Father saw her and did not move. Mother only folded her hands. I watched from the window and felt the strange mixture of pity and relief.
"I would have moved mountains once," Christina said so low that only the crows might have heard. "I thought I could change fate."
"Fate is stubborn," I said. "But people are not. People can learn."
Her face folded like paper. "I did not learn," she whispered. "I only got louder."
"Then be quiet now," I said. "Be small enough to be seen, quiet enough to listen."
She tilted her head and for once did not answer with words meant for the room. Instead, her eyes filled, and she walked away down the lane where the market women stood with their baskets and the moon was no longer pressing on my chest but rested there, steady and ordinary, as if nothing had been decided by miracles or by the noise of ambition.
I have learned one more thing since returning to this life: survival is not a single triumph, it is the slow keeping of oneself from the hunger of the world. You can live twice and still be the same person. You can live twice and refuse to be tempted by a title. The red dresses I had given Christina would not have ruined me if she had not been reckless; she would not have been anything other than herself.
"Do you ever regret it?" Jessica asked once in the garden, as frost ate the tips of the chrysanthemums.
"Regret what?" I asked.
"Not stopping her earlier. Not making her kneel before you quietly."
"I don't know if I could have saved her from herself," I said. "People decide to reach. They must fall to know what it means to be held."
She didn't answer. The moon watched our small conversation with a face that had learned to be impartial. It is a strange thing to be married and to remember being strangled by a small, careless sphere of dough. It is stranger still to stand in court and decree punishments that the crowd will eat like sweets.
But the house survived. Haylee married well, with a man who laughed and liked her hands. Mother stopped biting her tongue about the palace. Father rested more, though he carried the lines of worry in his face like a map. As for Christina, the public had their lesson and the private had its mercy. Her punishment had been both spectacle and exile — the public watchers had seen her fall, and then the world closed the book and left her to live a small life where no one profited from her mistakes.
At night, sometimes, I still think of the circle of the moon and the middle place where choices are made. I know now that being reborn is not a ticket to cleverness. It is a second chance at patience, at humility, at the slow building of a life.
"Do you ever want the old life?" Grayson asked me once when we were both older, more carved by time.
"Not the part where I was picked by a dumpling," I said. "The rest — maybe. But not if it kills me."
He laughed, and for once the sound did not fall like a prop but like a hand on my back. "Good," he said. "Because I plan on you staying."
"Then tend the soup kettle," I teased, and he kissed my forehead.
The moon watched us and did not decide anything. It only hung there, and we breathed beneath it, and the house kept its light. When Christina's shadow passed the window later that night, I uncovered the small bowl of rice porridge on my table and pushed it toward the door to be given to her, if she wanted it.
"She might not take it," Jessica said.
"Then she chooses," I answered. "People must choose their own roads."
The world is loud with ambition and the clink of coin, but in the end I had built something that could stand. I had lived twice. I had taken my measure and kept my head. The end of the story is not a universal flourish; it is a simple bowl eaten in quiet, the moon full and absolute above us.
The End
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