Revenge13 min read
The Beads and the Broken Red Robe
ButterPicks16 views
I have always known how to keep a face that hides a bruise.
"They said I was a daughter paid for and raised like an ornament," I told no one the morning they walked me out of the High house. "They said I was safe to be used; then, when the real daughter came back, there was no more use for me."
My name was Hattie Arellano, the child raised by the High family until the day their true blood returned. I learned manners, embroidery, the right way to curtsy for a prince I had not met. I learned how to fold my hope small enough to be kept in a chest. I learned how to laugh politely while my insides cracked.
"You must go," my father, Ruben Olivier, said in a voice that had been soft to me once. "They have claimed their daughter. You will shame us if you stay."
"Father—" I tried, but my voice used up all its courage on the first syllable.
They carted me off to a small estate at the edge of the county while the High household dressed their true daughter, Isabelle Denton, in coronets and a future. The years I had spent as a "daughter" meant nothing the moment Isabelle's carriage rolled back into town.
I lasted in the fields only as long as a season. They mocked me when the seam I worked on frayed, when my hands were rough. When the cold season came and my back ached, the only man who stopped to help was a poor scholar with callused hands and ink-stained sleeves—Atticus Bradley.
"You can't stay on my land and starve," I told him, more proud than I felt.
"I can't stay and watch you starve," he said. Atticus had a slow way of speaking, like words that had to be coaxed from a reluctant well. He was not handsome like the portraits in the High house; he was ordinary in his leather shoes and book-smeared cuffs. He owed me a coin or two, and we owed one another shelter. So we married, because marriage was the simplest cover.
"It isn't a proper marriage," people hissed once they learned. "A mock marriage between a noble's foster daughter and a penniless scholar."
"Then let it be our mock," Atticus had said. "Let it be ours."
He was the one who read beside the flicker of a lamp while I mended a shirt. He hummed a simple tune when he thought I slept. Somehow, that humming lodged itself inside me like a seed.
"I will go to the exam," he said once, and he did. He left in the spring with nothing but a satchel of books and this quiet insistence that he would return with ink on his name and a place on a roll. I waited outside the palace gates, hands on my belly—childless then, hopeful—watching the flagstones where official feet passed.
News runs fast in the capital. I heard the bells before I saw him: a proclamation, soldiers on the road, the court stirring.
"The son of the royal house has been found," someone whispered behind me. "He has been living under another name. They say he was a scholar who wandered the countryside."
My fingers tightened on my kerchief. I had married a scholar; I had married a man who joked about eating nothing but turnips. The proclamation sounded like thunder.
Then a carriage rolled by and the High family's ornately decorated sedan came into sight. Isabelle peered out, laughing, full of the pride that has teeth. I turned my face away.
I did not expect Atticus to be the one to come back as more than a dusty scholar. I certainly did not expect him to be the one in black silk—half his face in shadow, half in flame-light—who stopped the squad of palace guards as if they had cleared a way just for him.
It landed inside me like a cold thing. I had seen him care for me in a dozen small ways: a pinch of salt in my stew when my hand shook, a stitch tightened when a seam threatened. But I had never known he could stand with such authority.
"Lady Hattie." His voice when he bowed to me in that half-light cut the wind. "It seems the road has been long."
I laughed once, to prove I could. "You go on about your exams and return in a black robe."
"You never listen," he said. He wrote his name on my palm with cool fingers—Atticus Bradley—then added, quietly, like a secret between our bones, "My other name was not what mattered."
The palace was a beast of glitter and protocol. On the day Atticus was expected to meet his old debts and duties, the court was a sun of faces and jewels. He had an obligation to meet Isabelle in ceremony; the High house waited on foot to see their true daughter installed. I had my own small luggage and a small basket of coins—things I had sold to buy my escape.
"Leave, Hattie," Petra Espinoza, my handmaid, hissed as she pressed a small sealed pouch into my palm. "Go. Sell what you must and run."
I had nearly reached the carriage when Atticus came. He was still in the red and gold of someone who had meant to wed another; he was still wearing the color of promise, and he would not change it before he came after me.
"Atticus," I said hoarsely. "If we go, we must go now."
He blinked. Then his mouth hardened. "You wish to flee?"
"Yes," I said. "I cannot stay another hour and have Isabelle staring at me like a claim."
He gave me one look, and then, as if the world had dissolved into a single current, he carried me to his horse and we ran.
We took the road in a blur. My chest tightened with fear and something else: the baby I was carrying tightened and made itself known in an ugly, real way. I vomited onto the hem of his bright robe because the horse's motion pitched me and my stomach had revolted.
"Slow down," I begged once, but the man's hand on the reins was iron.
"Do you think time waits?" Atticus's voice was flat. "If we let the auspicious hour slip, what would you become in rumor?"
I thought of the woman in Isabelle's coach grin and the High house's jaws falling over me like a trap. I thought of the threads of my life being pulled one by one. I could only hold on as the world spun.
We reached a little way out from the city and the guards grew denser. Atticus guided me with a care that made my watery eyes sting.
"Change your robe," he told me once we stopped. "Don't make the whole court laugh."
"It's yours," I said, and I handed him torn coins, the few trinkets I had left.
The palace had always been a place of knives hidden in folds, and the night flesh of its politics tasted metallic. The Emperor—Ellis Davies—declared loudly and publicly that a long-lost son had been returned. A plan had been sewn: alliances to re-forge lineages, marriages to place like pins. And, like any such plot, it had room for people to be pinned.
"Do you remember when you used to teach me a wet-weather reading of a poem?" I whispered one night in the palace rooms where we pretended privacy. He smiled.
"I remember when you mended my shirt and I said your stitches were crooked."
"You always said that, just to get me to fix them again."
He leaned his head against mine. "I would wear crooked stitches forever if they were yours."
I knew that speech. I had heard many men promise many things in kitchens as warfare brewed in the halls. But his fingers were warm. Sometimes, that is enough.
Isabelle Denton would not be content to be a background note in the song of the court. She was not a woman to be patient. She had returned to what she believed was hers, and she would not let a "foster" daughter keep her light for long.
"You are still wearing white," Atticus told me one morning, a twinge in his voice. "Why white?"
"Because white was my favorite," I said. "And because once—"
He cut me off with a squeeze. "Promise me you will not use it to confuse the court."
What he did not know were the threads the High family had set into motion long before: whispered papers, penned lies, a confidant who would turn a rumor into a crime. For in a palace, a rumor is not merely speech; it is a weapon.
One night, the Emperor died.
"It was a fall," our court officials said, voices slow and careful. But words bind and can be bound. Benito Seidel, the Emperor's chief minister, presented a packet of accusations like a blade: "This woman is guilty. She conspired with her family to murder His Majesty."
I had a moment of private horror—a small bright animal in my chest. I had nothing to do with this. I had never touched the Emperor.
They showed me the page with my signature—where my hand had been forced to sign under threats, where my father's heavy hand had pressed my wrist to leave the mark of someone guilty. They made a theater of it: a confession in my own ink, signed beneath a hot lamp.
"They will burn us all," I whispered.
"They will burn truths to light a different lie," Atticus said softly, though his fingers gripped my hand like metal.
I was taken to a cold cell. The palace moved around me like tides. In the courthouse where no court sat, I had to watch the faces change. Friends turned their heads. The man who used to bring me pastries in the alleyway came once to look at me and then hurried away, ashamed.
Alec Kuznetsov—who had once promised me verses and gifts and who had been a courtier fond of telling stories—stood before my cell with a thin smile.
"You should have stayed where you belonged, Hattie," he said. "You made choices that cost us."
"I never asked for your help," I said, more angry than frightened.
"Yet you took what you could." He folded his arms. "The court is complicated. You were always a useful piece."
Isabelle stood not far from him, a portrait of icy triumph. Her hand smoothed her bodice. She had what she wanted in the beginning because she had planned and because others had lived. She had no mercy.
They dragged me before the court, and the charge was clear: I had poisoned the Emperor. The evidence looked like a story, stitched together with paper and lies.
Atticus did not rush in at first; he orchestrated his own entrance. He walked into the hall wearing a borrowed suit, no court gold, a look of someone who did not want to steal the show but knew how to stop a blade before it struck. The court fell still when he spoke.
"You cannot take her like this," he said simply.
"She killed the Emperor," Benito Seidel answered. "The proof is here."
"A piece of paper is not a life," Atticus replied. "Prove it. If you have proof, I will bring the harshest punishment for her."
Alec laughed. "And who will decide? You, the poor man cloaked as a prince? You?"
Atticus's jaw slackened, then set. "I will."
When the scandal burst into fire, when accusations ate away honor like rust, the High family's name—my makers—crumbled. They called for public hearings. They called for proof to be displayed where the populace could see.
I had imagined the worst: quiet executions in the dark where no one would hear my father's last breath. What unfolded instead was something gruesome in its theater—something they wanted to be seen.
The public punishment was designed to end them as a family and to make the rumor stick like pitch.
It began at dawn. The square outside the main gate swelled with voices, with eyes pressing like rain. People had been fed hints for weeks: the false parchment, the well-placed rumor that the High family meant to place their puppet on the throne. Word carried with it a taste for spectacle.
"Bring them out," Benito commanded with a face made for the scaffold. The crowd surged; someone thought it would be a public exoneration.
Isabelle came forward first, held by guards. Her hair was unbound—the official symbol of disgrace—yet she wore her face perfectly arranged. Alec followed, smirking, certain the tide had turned in his favor.
They made speeches. A herald read charges with a voice as ceremonial as a bell: "For treason, for plotting against the state, for the murder of His Majesty."
Then they opened the papers—one by one acts, letters, snap-revealed alliances that were, in truth, assembled and pinned together for the court's convenience. The High family's name was read aloud along with each contrived crime. People gasped, then leaned in. Cameras—scribes and onlookers with brass lenses and quick hands—scattered the words through the city.
Isabelle's expression faltered. For the first time, her rightness felt thin. Alec's smirk wavered.
"Is this true?" a woman in the crowd cried. "Did they—" She did not finish.
I watched from a shadow, hands folded in my lap, the iron band of my restraint a cold promise. Atticus was beside me, and though his face was steeled, I could see the storm behind his eyes.
"Speak," he said, quietly.
Isabelle's voice, when it came, was small. "I never—"
"Silence," came as a chant from the ministers, and a line of witnesses marched forward to threaten, to recall anonymous secrets, to regale the crowd with tales of greed and midnight letters. A puppet show was in motion, and the puppeteers smiled.
The crowd, hungry for concrete ruin, ate it. They wanted names, they wanted shame in living color. A scaffolding was raised for symbolic punishment—no blood, the ministers said, only humiliation and a public unmasking that would ensure the world never again considered the High line.
First, they unstitched the High crest from Isabelle's sleeve and dropped it into a brazier. The flames licked the silks, and the crowd made a wet, animal noise, as if satisfied.
"Look!" Benito cried. "She burned her own house's honor!"
Then they stripped titles one by one, calls like knives: "No more High privileges," "No land," "No freedom."
Isabelle crumpled like a doll. Alec's face twisted through stages: dominance, disbelief, desperate denial, and then the brittle snap of a man whose scaffolding is being sawed through. He barked at those around him, trying to sound a general's command.
"You lie!" he shouted at the herald. "These words are false!"
"Then produce the writer!" Atticus demanded, stepping forward as if his very stance could expose fraud. "Let them speak to the people. You claim truth—show it."
Alec turned to the crowd, his voice strangled to a whine. "They framed us. Noble strangers, whispered letters—"
"Then who benefits?" Atticus asked, cold. "Name the hand that wrote them."
Alec had no answer. He had been a man who lived by insinuation; he had never built a backbone for the daylight.
The ministers had staged it so that each accusation corresponded with a small, humiliating rite: the removal of fine shoes, the slicing of luxurious ribbons, the tearing of ornate sleeves. Guards took away Isabelle's comb and broke it before the crowd; they poured the contents of her jewelry box into the dust and let the people step on it. The point was not pain—it was total, public unmaking.
At one point they placed a page upon the stand that contained an eyewitness account—fabricated—of a meeting in the old High house where plots were made. The narrator, an actor dressed as an old servant, recited lines of treachery in a voice so wretchedly plausible that a hush fell. Isabelle began to shake. Alec tried once more to call for witnesses, but the crowd's appetite had become a beast.
Their faces went through the most cruel array. Alec's denial hardened into a mask, then cracked into a pleading boy. Isabelle's pride evaporated and left raw fear. For the people there—the merchants and maids and the small-kings of little stalls—the spectacle had given them a new reason to believe their rulers' decisions. They could not be told the truth in a whisper; they wanted a punishment they could see.
"Confess," Benito hissed at Isabelle. "Confess to the crimes you committed in secret."
She screamed then, a raw sound. "I did not!" The plea was human, jagged, and the crowd edged closer, the sound turning into a roar.
Atticus waited until the show was near its brink. Then he stood up with a book in his hand—the book he had used to study before the farm, the book that had once been his poor treasure. "If you have proof, let it be shown in the light and not in a theater," he said. "If you want justice, do not perform it. Let witnesses speak. Let judges judge."
He challenged them not because the truth would necessarily follow but because he would not be the author of another lie. The ministers' mouths tightened. Someone spat. The crowd, however, had tasted the spectacle and would not let it go.
And then the shift came.
A man in the crowd, a wiry soldier who had been quiet the whole time, called out a name. "The hand that benefits is the man who would place another on the throne!"
Heads turned. A dozen eyes found the man in the crowd who leaned forward like a hawk. It was enough to set the ministers off on a new cue. They wanted an enemy to mount so their own hands would be clean.
Alec staggered through the ropes of accusation until a line of guards led him away. He shouted—pleaded—for a better ending. Isabelle wept, at first just for herself; then her tears hardened into rage. They had been the instruments of their own rise, and now the instruments had become chains.
As they were walked in opposite directions—Alec toward a cell and Isabelle toward a less public removal—they passed under Atticus's gaze. He did not glare. He did not gloat. He merely looked as if he had been denied the right to trust someone and had to learn again to breathe.
The crowd dissolved like fog. People went home with their new certainty carved into bone. Some cheered. Some frowned with the discomfort of watching a family break. Some simply had the look of people who had been given a tidy narrative to take with them.
I watched it all and felt nothing and everything. They had been stripped before eyes that were hungry for proof. But stripping is not always truth. Stripping is sometimes a performance, and performances can be scheduled.
Later, when the iron quiet of the evening slid over the town, news came in whispers: the Emperor was not well. A plot was suspected. The ministers who had led the calls now began to speak of "national security." Papers were redrawn. Trials were planned and re-planned.
Within a week, the city had a new story. Alec Kuznetsov and Isabelle Denton were declared enemies of the state. They had been the architects—so the new narrative said—of schemes brilliant enough to remove a throne by poison and to set a woman up as scape. The public punishment had been a necessary step to ensure the people's faith.
When the worst had passed, I was led back to a small room at the palace with Atticus at my side. The Emperor's death and the unmasked conspirators had changed everything. Atticus no longer needed to live in hiding; he moved with the assurance of an heir.
He came and sat by the bed where I was confined for the protection of the court. I had been told I was to be watched until the child came. "You are safe here," he said.
"Safe?" I echoed. "For what? To be another ornament? To be a story the palace tells children at bedtime about treacherous families?"
He clasped my hand. "Let us be a new story then. I will not let them make you a ghost."
Later, when the uproar had shrunk into memory and the court rearranged the chess pieces, Atticus and I found what quiet we could steal. He hummed the same low tune that had first softened the edges of my anger, and I sewed; sometimes he corrected the stitch and made me laugh.
Time and politics tacked and shifted and new coronals were made. The High family was gone, executed or scattered. Alec's final plea, the one I heard in the cell when he came—he believes our child will be a leverage—was a bitter echo. Isabelle's stare in the public square remained in my bones for months.
I gave birth in a chamber that smelled of herbs and honey and Atticus's hand. He looked at the child as if a sun had returned. He looked at me like a man who had walked through fires and come out not unburnt but forged.
Later, when the white curtains had been drawn and our life settled into the small rebellions of the ordinary—feeding, cleaning, laughing at a terrible joke—I found my prayer beads. They had been given to me in another life: a string of tiny beads, worn and heavy with memory. Atticus had tightened them around my wrist once, a foolish little knot of a promise.
"Do you still remember the tune?" I asked him one evening as rain tapped on the panes.
He hummed it softly and kissed the hollow center of my palm. "Every note."
I let my hand rest on his chest and felt the steady rise and fall. The melody we had begun in the dark had become a quiet life. The public punishments had been seen; the conspirators had been unmade in the square, and the people had moved on. But for me, the thing that saved me was simple: a man who would not let me be erased and the small beads that proved I had sat and counted days and stitches and heartbeats.
"You were cruel to me once," I said, and he made a face.
"I was cruel to myself when I believed I could lose you and live," he answered. "I will take what you give me."
He gave me more than he could have known. He gave me the chance to love him in the honest, everyday way that does not require a stage.
And when at last the court sung a new song, I remembered the day of the beads—the day they scattered from my wrist on the road and I felt nothing more than the wind—and I tucked that memory into the drawer where I keep all the things I will not say aloud.
Because sometimes the only justice you will ever get is the simple one: to live and to hold your child and to teach him the tune his father hummed.
The End
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