Revenge13 min read
Strings, Shadows, and One Last Performance
ButterPicks17 views
I remember the first time I learned how to bow until my knees hurt.
"Grandmother," I said, "will I be happy in the palace?"
"Child," Dorothy Corbett answered, "happiness is not promised to those who enter a court. Only purpose." Her hand tightened on mine. "You are our branch's hope."
They dressed me in a silk I did not choose. They taught me lines and the soft way to meet eyes and give answers no one could fault. At six I practiced the formal curtsies for a woman who would one day be a queen's mate. At twelve the world told me I was already promised. At nineteen I was made a palace wife.
"You look like a painted puppet," Aunties whispered, but they meant it as compliment and curse.
"Do you regret it, Aiden?" Kennedy Dean asked quietly the night the carriage took me inside the walls.
"No," I said, and I believed it. "Not yet."
Emerson Smirnov watched me as if I were a choice of tea. She was the older lady who had stood over more thrones than I could count. I learned to please her, because pleasing her kept my family safe.
"Remember," my grandfather, Viktor Mendes, warned before I entered the palace, "you are no longer only a girl. The house is counting."
All the years of training made me light-footed, precise, careful. They did not teach me how to hide the hollow feeling when laughter passed by and ignored me. They did not teach me how to make a man's eyes find me.
Gavin Blanc did not look my way for months. He passed through palaces like an autumn wind. He was the emperor by birth, tall and with a laugh like a brief sun. The court told stories of his temper, of his quickness to reward and quickness to leave. I let the world think I was content to be patient.
"You can bow when you must," Dorothy told me once. "But learn to keep one hand free."
When I learned that he favored Margarita Peters — that he truly favored her — I took the step everyone expected and said yes to being less than a queen.
"Will you be forgotten?" Kennedy asked when the court breathed around the news.
"No one who serves well is quite forgotten," I answered. "We are watches and bridges. We keep the house."
I tried to believe that. I practiced my music, I read books, I learned herbs. I had Kennedy, Susana Bengtsson, and Angela Fischer; they were my hands inside the palace. Kennedy watched the courtiers like a hawk and learned the slow moving clocks of loyalty. Angela kept the warmth of the rooms. Susana kept small secrets.
"You look tired," Gavin said once, suddenly close in the moonlight of the garden. He had come to the pavilion I often sat in to play. "Do you sleep enough?"
"I do," I lied. "I rest when ordered."
He smiled at that and sat very near. "Why do you hide so much?"
"Because the palace is hungry," I said, and he laughed.
"Then feed it something else," he said, and the laugh made me imagine a different life for one dizzy moment.
We had—what should I call it?—soft, stolen afternoons. They were not grand gestures, only small shared silences and a handful of evenings in which his attention stayed on me for longer than any other. He taught me to listen to the dust in the room, and I taught him a tune his mother had liked.
"You'll be lost to me if you think being lost helps anyone," he said once, touching the scar on my wrist where the past had left me a map of pain. "I will not lose you."
I kept those words like offerings.
Then the palace started to burn with the usual little wars. Margarita Peters played the expected part of the empress with the exquisite smile of a trained actor. She loved big courtesies and small triumphs. She smiled at the right times and struck at the wrong ones. We spoke in measured lines. We bowed and we watched.
"She is clever," Kennedy said one night. "She has knives folded in silk."
"Let her have her knives," I said. "My house has swords that do not show."
The first child came into the world like a storm. Amy Renard, the gentle consort called Shufei by most, bore a son that ought to have been celebrated and cuddled until every elder blessed the house. Then the house shook.
"Shufei's labor seems... difficult," a messenger told me breathless. "There's trouble in the birthing chamber."
I ran. I found the court in knots: a rushed doctor, a flushed crown. There were too many people who wanted one thing and not enough who could have saved it. When the shouting ended, the cradle was empty of an heir. Shufei had not simply lost a child; her womb was injured, the doctors said, and she was told she should rest until the world healed her. The palace had its grievances and its conspiracies.
"Someone has tampered," I told Gavin. "Find the truth."
He took two steps, and the palace took three. He turned away. The name of the surgeon, the courtesan at the pass, the mismatched bowl — strings that led to a worse knot of lies. I looked at Margarita. I looked at the empress' pale smile. I looked at the crumbs one leaves when they want to be blind.
"You cannot walk away," I said to Gavin. "This is not only about the child."
"I will do what is right," he promised. "Trust me."
"Trust," I said. "You have said that to me before."
Trust, as I would learn, is a fragile court item. It bends and breaks under the weight of ten thousand whispers.
When the next scandal came — the empress supposedly carrying a child late into the season — my world began to smell faintly of ash. Her illness, her faint, the solemn prayers of the court, all of it became an instrument.
"I hear she is with child," Susana said quietly as she handed me tea. "Some say it's true. Some say it is not."
"Rumors," Kennedy said. "Rumors are the palace's currency."
"It will be hard for her to carry a child and yet be forgiven so soon," Angela said. "She is quick to make enemies and quick to seethe."
I knew, as I had always known, that there are hands that will use the palace's pots and strings to make anyone fall. I also knew how to keep someone alive when they were in danger. So I taught myself to listen with more than ears. I watched hands. I watched faces. I learned to recognize a pattern in a medicine bowl, a gesture of exchange that would look like charity if no one knew better.
"Are you thinking of poison?" Gavin asked once, when my face had grown very still.
"No," I lied — and then I did think of it, because it was the palace's language.
When my child was pronounced gone — I cannot write that sentence without the taste of iron — the world narrowed to a single bright rage. I had swallowed the medicine asked of me. The woman in the shadows had been paid; the letters smoothed. The doctor, Andres Chandler, moved with his hands like a surgeon and with his heart like a man who loved a good order. When the truth came light, I knew I had to hold it like fire.
"Do you want revenge?" Kennedy asked me in the quiet hours when Susana had put wine by the bedside.
"No," I said. "I want the truth to have weight in the world."
"Those are not the same," she replied.
There came a day where I stood up and said exactly what needed saying. I walked into the great hall — the hall where three generations of crowns had heard confessions and verdicts — and I did not bow low enough to be erased. The dais was crowded: Emerson Smirnov watching like a moored ship, Eve Bonnet the empress dowager with the linen of her office, and Hugo—no—Hugh Dixon, the nervous steward, waiting to shuffle papers. The entire court waited with their breath in a single line.
"Your Majesty," I said. "If you will hear me."
Gavin looked surprised to see me, but he let me speak. Margarita sat above, fair in her jewels, the empress in the way the world called for.
"I will tell a short story and I will tell the truth," I said. "I was once a puppet who did not know her strings. I learned where they were tied. I learned who cut them, and I learned who bought scissors."
They laughed politely. It was a dangerous sound. I produced a handful of letters, each sealed with the red mark of a woman who now sat high.
"These orders were given in secret," I said. "Here are the medicines, measured and mixed for me. Here is the hand that guided the servant to place them." I laid out notes, a small carved box of the medicine's residue, and the receipt for a bribe.
"Explain," Margarita said. Her voice did not betray shock at first.
"I will explain," I answered. "The woman who cried for a child while plotting to end another's — that woman sat here. The pieces speak for themselves."
"These are lies!" Margarita snapped. "Lies and revenge from a woman who cannot bring life."
"Hold your rage for later," I said. "Hold your hand for the court."
I told them the story plainly: the secret help given to one surgeon, the bribe to a chambermaid, the replacement of a comfort draught with a slow-acting poison meant to interrupt growth. I showed receipts, letters, and a line of witnesses — servants who had been too afraid to speak until I offered them protection. I recounted each small step, each ledger entry, each whisper that matched the writing.
"Who charged you with this? Who gave you the right?" Margarita's voice thickened.
"I gave myself the right," I said. "When death walks in a court, silence is consent."
It felt like telling the truth in a storm. The room leaned in. Faces changed color. Some mouths hung open; some eyes sharpened like knives. Gavin's jaw clenched.
"Is this enough?" Emerson asked, and for the first time I saw pity in her eyes.
"It will be," I said.
Then I did the most dangerous thing: I unrolled the letters and read the names. I read them aloud, and each syllable was a small bell. I called witnesses forward: Angela whispered how she had been bought to swap a bowl; Kennedy swore that she had seen the hand that passed the vial; Susana had the shard of the box hidden in her sleeve. Andres Chandler, who had once mended my bones, stood and took the stand like a man who had always hated lies.
"She gave me coin and asked for a slow work," the woman who had hidden the box lied at first, then, when the court's silence weighed upon her, she broke. "She said it would make a clean story: the womb could not hold. I took the coin, I was frightened, but I tried to warn her. She took the draught from my hands and smiled."
Margarita's face went through a dozen shapes. At first she flashed anger — a controlled fire. Then astonishment, then something like fear. When the first person began to hiss accusations, the hall rippled: whispers and gasps and the sound of a door slammed somewhere in a palace.
"You're lying!" Margarita thundered. Her hands trembled.
"Then you will answer to the court," Emerson said, with the voice of an older winter that had seen the world fall apart and come back again.
"Look at her children!" Margarita cried suddenly, a cry that tried to collect the crowd. "Look at our history!"
"They are evidence, not arguments," I said. "Look at your own hands."
She stood. "You set a trap," she cried. "You play with your house like a child with fire."
"No," Gavin said. He stood up and his voice surprised the room because it was cold and final. "You ordered blood to be spilled for your convenience. The court will speak."
Margarita's face moved again. The performed empress mask slipped. For one terrible instant she was a woman who had been caught. She went through the stages I had once practiced in secret: denial, anger, bargaining, breakdown. First she denied everything, and then, as witness after witness stood, she screamed that she had proof, that the letters were forged. Her voice rose and fell like a wave.
"Is this true?" Gavin asked.
"No!" Margarita lunged at Gavin, hands clutching for the robe of state. "You promised me—"
"Enough." Gavin pulled away and had the authority of a man who had learned the cost of delay. "You will be tried. For now, you will be removed from your public honors and confined. Your family will be held to answer."
The murmurs changed into a roar of approval and consternation. The crowd had been waiting for a show of justice. Some clapped like wolves. Some wept. The faces of my enemies flickered like lanterns in wind.
Margarita's reaction was the most human thing I had seen in years: she went through delight, then horror, then a new kind of bargaining.
"Your Majesty," she begged, "I will confess nothing — I will talk to no one — spare my children—"
"Your children are not the point today," Emerson said. "You used a child as a pawn."
"I did not..." Margarita's voice began to unravel. Her hands gripped the throne rail as if to hold on to it.
Outside the hall a cluster of servants who had been listening in the collonades pressed close. One of them, a thin, worn woman who had once been bought and sold, stepped forward with a braid and a small sealed note. She handed it to Gavin and then collapsed into the arms of the nearest eunuch.
The court's reaction turned. Those who had once praised Margarita now turned away. Men who had courted favor now shifted. Some took out hidden devices, some began to take notes with the speed of scavengers. Someone in the back started to clap slowly; it spread like a contagion.
"You will be stripped of your eight-rank tokens," Gavin declared. "You will be placed under house arrest. You will stand before a formal commission. If you took a life, you will answer for that life."
Margarita's face went blank and then cracked.
"Do you hear that noise?" she murmured. "They are singing for me."
"No," I said. "They are singing for the wrongness to end."
Her denial changed into pleading. She begged for mercy in phrases she had used on supplicants. She promised to give up jewels, to leave the court, to be a good mother. She offered to perform every imaginable penance.
"Too late," Emerson said.
When they took her away, she screamed and sobbed and tried to call for my arrest as well. The crowd listened. The faces of the noblemen, the ladies, the eunuchs — some turned away in shame, some in triumph, some in a darker hunger. The palace had watched the fall of a queen's favored; they would watch it be done this time in public.
For three hours the court argued, punishing larger than the woman: supporters were humiliated, implicated, and publicly stripped of honors. A lord who had trafficked in the bribes had his name read aloud. A network of petty officials who had sold medicine and numbed justice were paraded and shamed. Each one reacted differently: some turned white and made false confessions; others tried to buy their way out with more promises. Some fainted. Some tried to lie. Some tried to flee. The crowd recorded every shame in their faces and hands.
I watched Margarita change, and I felt something like pity and a great, hot triumph. She began the day as an empress and ended it as a broken woman dragged under a wash of public scorn. That scorn was not only my doing; it was the sum of everyone's quiet waiting.
When at last the court's chanting slowed and the last petition was read, I stepped forward.
"Will the court allow me a word?" I asked.
"You may speak, Aiden Washington." Gavin said.
"I have wanted retribution," I said. "More than I wanted to hold another child. But what I learned today is that punishment is not a cure. It is theatre. So I ask the court to do what is useful, not simply what is satisfying. Remove those who did wrong from positions of power. Restore what can be restored. Let the victims sleep. And let the guilty learn what it means to be seen."
The assembly fell silent. The empress was taken away, her head bent, her jewels stripped. In the crowd, I saw faces I had not seen before: those who once sold small cruelties for favors, who now realized that the palace could also strip away a life of pampered power in one swift day.
Afterwards they sent word across the city. Margarita Peters and her kin were disgraced. Some supporters were exiled. Some were punished economically. They wept in courtyards. I heard the sound of people recording the verdict into their hearts.
When the doors closed and the court emptied like a drained riverbed, Gavin came to my side. He clasped my hand, and in that grasp I felt both the softness of a man who had loved and the steely chill of one who had seen too much.
"Will you stay?" he asked.
"I have always been here," I said. "But I will not be a puppet."
He bowed his head like a man very tired of crowns. "Then cut your own strings," he whispered. "Or let them be cut by your enemies."
I smiled, but it did not reach my eyes. "I will not be cut in shame," I answered.
The palace learned something that day: a well-kept secret can be a weapon, but truth is heavier. The people who had been ready to clap when a woman fell were now more thoughtful. The servants who had once bowed to emperors and empresses learned that their small acts mattered.
After a long night the court returned to its rhythms. Some things were changed forever; some things resumed their old slow conspiracies. I tended my wounds and my friends. Andres Chandler worked in the hospitals and told me small, bitter truths about healing. Kennedy kept her vigilant watch. Angela arranged for the small comforts. Susana hid a fragment of the red box in her sleeve for a time when we might need it again.
"Are you happy?" Kennedy asked me months later, when a softness had returned to the rooms.
"I am not a puppet," I said. "Happiness is for people who get to choose it with both hands. I chose the truth. That is not the same, and probably not as romantic."
"Then you are more dangerous," she said, smiling.
Months later, the palace sang new songs. Some kissed and some turned away. People praised me and cursed me. The empress who had stood so sure of herself was gone. Her family scattered. I walked the gardens at dusk and listened to the wind.
One night, in the quiet, Emerson Smirnov called me in and for a long while did not speak.
"You kept your head," she said finally. "And you kept your house."
"I kept myself," I answered.
She nodded like a woman who knew coins and bones. "Do you ever want to leave?"
"Sometimes," I said. "Sometimes I imagine myself out of the palace. But then I think of the strings. Someone must hold them for good or evil. If I leave them to others, they will be used."
"Then be careful," she said. "The longer you hold them, the more your hands roughen."
I took her hand and I understood the truth of her counsel. I learned to move like a woman who had been unmade and remade. I learned to keep my friends close and my enemies in their place.
Years would come and go. There would be other small cruelties and other sudden redemptions. But the day the empress fell was a ledger against which many later choices would be weighed.
I still wake sometimes hearing the clacking of a wooden stage. I still dream of being a puppet and the scissors hovering above my throat.
"Cut the strings," I tell myself now.
Sometimes a friend will laugh and say, "You make a fine ruler for a different kind of court."
"I orchestrate what I can," I say. "And I teach the servants to speak when they see a hand taking coin for a life."
One evening, long after the crowd had gone and the courtyard was a quiet sea, Gavin and I stood on the palace steps. He looked at the sky and said, "I feared losing you more than losing a kingdom."
"I feared being kept and not being known," I answered.
He put his hand over mine. The moonlight looked like a coin.
"Then keep your hands," he said softly. "Do not let them take you."
"I will keep them," I said.
And later, when men told my story they called me "the woman who pulled the strings." I thought of the puppet I once had been and of the stage where I had once danced for eyes that did not see me. I thought about the last time I had wished to be free.
In the end I kept my house and my name. I did not make every choice clean or painless. I did not save everyone. I pulled a few threads in the right directions. The palace continued its rounds of favors, and sometimes, still, I heard the creak of wooden joints and the whisper of silk.
"Do you feel like a puppet?" Gavin once asked me.
"Only when I remember the first dress," I answered. "But the rope is in my hand."
At night, when the theatre music drifts from the servants' quarters, I sit by the window and listen. The last time I saw a puppet, it was older than most of my maids and its strings were matted. A child came and tried to cut them with tiny scissors. The puppet did not fall. It only looked at the child and smiled like a woman who had just learned how to endure.
I smiled back.
The End
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