Revenge14 min read
The Bell and the War: My Century's Choice
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I was born into the Martinez household's oldest line.
"I will marry a prince," my father told the court the day I could barely stand.
"That is how a house survives," he said, and I believed him because a house must be believed.
"Elena," my nurse had once whispered when I was small, pressing a sugar candy into my palm. "Pick a husband who will hold your hand when you are afraid."
"I pick him," I told everyone that morning, and the hall laughed and bowed and called it a childish whim. Then Calder Davidson was named the crown prince.
"It will be done," my father said, with a look that settled my life like a coin fixed in a slot.
"I will make you the prince's wife," the old men promised.
I wore the promise like a white dress I could not yet reach.
When my mother died and my father remarried, I learned how hands can belong to more than one person.
"Choose him," a boy had told me under the table the afternoon of the wedding gifts. He had a freckle at the left corner of his mouth and he gave me a sugar candy and his promise.
"Choose him," he said, and his hand was warm, and for a child warmth could stand for an oath.
"Who are you?" I asked him then.
"Call me Hudson," he said, and handed me a string of prayer beads. "Promise me you'll not forget to be brave."
I kept the beads all these years.
Years passed like seasons. I learned how to sit in a garden and drop food for fish while other girls practiced poems for a different kind of public.
"Your Highness," my little cousin Eri Donnelly teased once, "that girl at the festival sang back at your prince. People say the new talent—Justine Kuznetsov—knows every poem in the scrolls."
"Is that so?" I answered, and I felt the way a lake feels when a stone is thrown near its edge.
On the day of the great court festival, on the tenth year of our kingdom, they all came: foreign envoys, the three great houses, the grandchildren of generals, and two women in white whose names carried weight.
The crown prince, Calder Davidson, laughed with some new guest as I stepped into the hall.
"Elena, stop thinking," he said before I could greet him. "Just listen. Miss Kuznetsov speaks in a way that will open your eyes. You live behind curtains. Talk to her."
"Speak plainly," I replied. "A loud voice does not equal wisdom."
He rubbed his fingers, a nervous habit that had been with him since boyhood. "Don't be hard, Elena," Calder said. "You were raised in the inner house. She has a view of the public square. Learn."
"Heartless words sound thin on a throne," I answered, and walked away. The court watched the exchange and the hush held for them like an audience bending to hear the next line of a play.
Justine Kuznetsov stepped before me and bowed, white cloth smudged artistically. "Madam Elena," she said with a smile that had been practiced. "Your name carried in letters to my house. The stories are smaller than the woman."
"Flattery," I said simply. "Do not let it slip into habit."
Someone in the court tried to stir trouble. "It is odd for a noble daughter to offend a low-born girl," they whispered.
"In this hall, the low and high can both speak if the words are true," I said. "Settling this by insults is beneath both of us."
They pushed, the court and the new talent. Calder looked embarrassed and then protective. "Elena," he told me, "write lines as penance, recite them later."
"That will not be necessary," I told him. "If I am ignorant, I will learn. If I am not, I will not be lectured by a show."
Round after round the court watched, and the new girl tried to sharpen her voice into a weapon.
"You live sheltered," she told me one quiet evening by the lotus pond. "Your house controls our schools and our soldiers. You keep the country in a tight fist. Do you even know what life is like outside your garden?"
"Do you think you know better because you came from another time?" I said. "To change a world you must live in it, not tear through it like wind."
"Don't patronize me," she cried. "I am tired of being used as an example. I will not be quiet."
At the garden we watched the stone-skipping boys and the war prince in black—my childhood friend Hudson Schmitt—threw stones with a laugh and bad manners. He was rough and funny and dangerous like thunder.
"Let me teach you to skip stones," he said to me later, when we had the small privacy of reeds and old promises. He called himself "Hudson" and called me "Elena" as if the syllables could change fate.
"You are different from the prince," I said.
"I am only honest," he shot back and then, softer: "I was the boy you gave half of a birthday bell to. I never lost that bell either."
He lifted a small charm from his neck. It was worn; I had seen that bell before in my palm when I was five and he was ten. My breath caught. "You kept it."
"I kept it because I thought the promise mattered," he said.
We were careless with what we promised each other in those days.
The triumph of the festival turned sour soon after. Justine staged a public speech in the scholar's hall and called for the abolition of the great houses.
"Break the houses," she cried in a voice that echoed the crowd's unguarded resentments. "Open the offices. Let merit, not blood, decide this land."
Voices rose in anger and support like a storm. Calder heard of it and came to shield the newcomer. "She speaks for the poor," he said, "and Elena should see such courage."
"Is courage a ticket to rewrite law?" I asked the hall. "Does being new give a person the right to melt the anchors that keep our cities from drifting?"
A young scholar—Raj Meyer’s house protege—challenged her sharply, and the moment grew hot.
Hudson came down from the gallery and, with a single careless motion, knocked a tea pot toward her. Hot tea splashed across her gown and the court gasped.
"How dare you," Calder shouted. "What do you mean by this—"
"Just a test," Hudson said lazily. "A ringlet spot. She will not drown in a little water."
Eri Donnelly, my little cousin, could not stand it. She tipped the cups at the tables and laughed, and the new girl was soaked and the hall swayed with insults. Calder, red with fury or shame, sheltered her with a curtain as if she were a heirloom.
"Elena," he said when the crowds died down, "be reasonable. You raised this to make me look bad."
"You asked me to learn from her," I answered. "You asked for her company. You took me aside and told me her views would enlighten me, and now you brandish them as evidence that I cannot lead."
He stood there, the crown prince who had treated me like a sister and then a duty. "You are stubborn," he said, and I looked at him as if he had changed faces.
The court decided things quickly when a scandal would let them. I asked to be released.
"Please, father," I said that night. "Let me be free of the crown bond."
"Oh, my daughter," Raj Meyer sighed, "do you not know what you ask? But perhaps you are right. The boy is not full of king's stuff."
So it was that Calder was stripped of his heir's trappings and sent away. He left with Justine Kuznetsov—this newcomer who had shown impossible courage and terrible tactics both—and they left the city to gather forces among those who would follow a different dream.
When the land flushed with revolt, I kept my hands busy in the fields of the poor and the streets of refugee bowls. We took in the drowned and the starving into our houses. My house worked like a bell with many clappers, and the sound spread.
"Elena," a soldier shouted one night, "they are at the river. The dike—"
"The dike?" I asked.
They said the dike had been blown. They said that someone used knowledge and powder and broke the river's patience.
Justine's face appeared to me in the mud and fire. I remembered her voice, the way she had said "break" like it was a cure.
Her schemes sunk men.
We held three cities, but the enemy with strange black bombs had seized more and more ground. The crown prince had become a warlord for those who hated our system. In the fog of siege and flooded field, my hands found a way to keep soldiers safe: the old recipe hidden in temple scrolls, the mortar that binds grain and gunpowder alike. I needed Justine to make a choice.
I found her at the refugee camp where she lay between straw and fever, scarred and silent. Her arm was crushed and half her face had been burned by wartime accidents. "Give me the formula," I demanded, because the line between asking and commanding becomes thin during siege.
She laughed, like a bell with a cracked clapper. "You expect me to hand over the thing that will make you kill?" she said.
"Without it you're dead," I told her. "With it the enemies may be killed too, but at least we survive."
"You are right," she said finally. "If you are so keen, you will have it."
She gave me a scrap of paper and a weak smile. That night the enemy came with bombs, and our soldiers learned how to drown powder with water and to burn the enemy stores in the early morning. The war twisted and rewove itself, and once again the war prince Hudson Schmitt rode fast across the table of battle and led men like a hope.
At last, with the last battle on the riverbank, Hudson's troops turned the tide. The crown prince Calder Davidson was captured in the field, ragged and proud, alongside Justine Kuznetsov whose face was a map of her battles.
The court in the capital demanded justice. There was talk of hanging, of exile, of blood, but the people who had been watching for wrongs had learned a strange new appetite: they wanted public reckoning.
"Bring them to the plaza," the ministers said. "Let the world see what betrayals look like."
On the day of the public reckoning, I walked to the square with my house and the city and the survivors. The air was thin with wind, and the river had calmed like a beast that had eaten enough. The crowd closed in, thousands of voices like waves against a stone.
They brought Calder forward first. He had lost the softness of the boy I once knew. His robes were torn. He tried to stand like a prince still, though the leather of his boots were dusty and the crown was only in the mouths of men behind him.
"Calder Davidson!" the herald cried. "You who took a crown to sell to rebellion, what have you to say?"
He looked at the crowd, and in his eyes I watched a change unfurl. At first he held the old arrogance like a cloak. "I did what I must to make the realm—"
"To save your pride," someone in the crowd shouted. "To sleep in another man's bed," said another.
He tried to regain the lead. "Hear me! I sought to make necessary changes. The old order was brittle—"
"There is no excuse for killing your own people," a woman cried. "You sat at tables while men drowned," another said.
As the murmurs grew, Calder's face hardened. He tried a smile. "I was young. I could not bend under weight."
"Young enough to play with a girl's hand and cold enough to burn a city," someone hissed.
"You were told to be a ruler," I said quietly so only he might hear. "You were told to be a husband."
He lifted his chin. "You were to be my wife. I was to be—"
"You were to be a ruler." I answered loudly. "Instead you chose rebellion and left the city to flame."
He tried to turn the crowd. "I loved Justine—" he shouted.
They would not have it. The sound of "loved" in a city where thousands had lost husbands and sons was a provocation.
"Love? You call this love?" cried a woman whose son had been among the drowned. She stepped forward and spat onto the square. The crowd's reaction was instant and violent as a net closing.
Calder's bravado shifted. First defiance, then a flicker of panic, then the reflex of a cornered animal. "I had to—my father—"
"Your father did not march with a torch," someone called. "Your hand helped light it."
He tried to say that he had been led. "I only followed those who told me the truth—"
"Who told you that using foreign powder to flood our plains would help the realm?" a man in the front demanded. "Who told you that the people were to be used as chess pieces?"
The crowd roared; some threw stones, some shouted for knives, some cried. A magistrate stepped forward and read charges: treason, arson, sedition, the willful placing of bomb-work in civilian stores.
"Calder Davidson," the magistrate said, "for your crimes you are stripped of title, lands, and rights. You will stand publicly for three market days for all to testify your crimes."
"Three market days?" Calder mocked at first, then realized the weight of being seen, as if bright daylight could strip away a man's last pretensions.
On the first day, they played his actions back in crowd-sourced testimony. A fisherman told how he watched the dike tremble before the boom. A widow told how her son's coat came back with mud and a name. Each story stripped a layer of his honor. People snapped pictures on the crude cameras travelers had begun to carry; they drew caricatures and pinched the prince's shown face into memes that would travel to other towns.
"Look at him," a girl in the crowd said. "This is who kisses a lady and then burns a city."
Calder's transitions were visible: pride, to anger, to denial, to guilt, to collapse. On the second day, someone pushed the magistrate to have him plead. The prince tried to hold onto old arguments. "I did what was necessary," he said. "You who are in power have failed me—"
"You failed the people," a teacher shouted. "You used a girl as a shield and used fire as a ladder."
He flailed. "You don't know the cost I paid!" he cried, grabbing at his chest as if his ribs could hold an argument.
A schoolboy stepped forward with a torn piece of paper in his hand. "This is a list," he said. "This is who paid to supply your men. Look at the names." The names on the paper were noble or merchant names; some argued they were the same men who had always wanted more grain and fewer burdens.
The crowd shifted. People who had watched the war at a distance now saw the politics reach into their own backyards. Faces of those who had smiled at his wedding now blinked at images on a public board: images of burned farms, drowned children, the list of names.
On the third day, the magistrate invited survivors to tell their stories without interruption.
"Your son," a mother began, and the prince's eyes stung. He tried to interrupt and was hissed down each time.
He moved through the stages everyone had warned me about. That first day arrogance; the second, denial; the third, collapse. He tried to call for his old privileges. "You cannot—" he began.
"Shut up," a merchant snapped. "You sold the river."
He sank into a bench and began to weep. It was grotesque; the tears of a man who had watched his own stunt turn into a crime.
"Look how he has fallen," an old woman said, and the crowd laughed and then fell silent as the laughter turned into pity. The laughter was not cruel at first; it was a relief when the crowd realized that the mighty too could break. But then sympathy turned hard when a father of a dead soldier spat at Calder's feet.
Calder curled into himself as the crowd's words struck like cold rain. He tried to clasp a woman's hand and ask for forgiveness, but the hand belonged to a woman who had no lips left to move. A soldier who had survived the dike's flood pushed him back and shouted, "You will not touch the survivors."
At the end of the third day the magistrate declared the sentence: Calder Davidson would be stripped publicly of titles in the square and exiled to a border fortress under watch, and his captains would be tried and their lands redistributed. The sentence included that he would be required to attend the burial rites of the dead whose deaths had been caused by his acts, to name each victim aloud and to carry a memorial pound of earth to the river.
The public ceremony was not violent—there was no formal whipping—but it was thorough and designed to leave a mark. The magistrate read each charge aloud. Calder answered once with a thin voice, then silence. Spectators lined the route; some spat; some cried; many took out coins to give to survivors instead of shouting.
In the crowd I watched him change as the ritual unfolded. The crown prince, who had once laughed at my sugar candy and promised me stars, now bent to lift a sack of earth and carry it toward the river for each name: for children, for farmers, for soldiers, for a woman who had begged him to open a gate. He walked with a weight that no crown could teach.
"Look," a man murmured. "He is trying to put back what he took."
Calder's face shifted between rage at himself and a raw desire to be forgiven. He kneeled before the river and named each person softly. He could not stop the crowd's murmuring. Some iterator of justice felt relief, others felt the bitter aftertaste of revenge. The crowd split into those who cried for the fallen and those who cried for a lost boy. He pleaded. He was rejected.
When the magistrate then read the final decree—exile to the northern outpost with the banners of a minor lord to be his only company—he crumpled.
He dropped the coin he had once placed on my father's palm for my betrothal. The coin fell into the river. It sank and did not return.
That public unmaking was meant to be a lesson: betrayals are shown for what they truly are, not decorated by rank.
Justine Kuznetsov's punishment was different. She had been the mind behind certain reckless acts; she had been both prophet and arsonist and in the end, she had tried to throw herself from the city wall. She failed to die and instead gave us what she thought she could not: the formula.
Her own collapse was private and then public. The first day I saw her in the mud by the refugee tents; she had begged for absolution. The second day she stood before the council and said, "I misread the world I came to." She was not made to carry earth but was ordered to sit in the community kitchen for a year, feeding those harmed. She refused. The council then decided that she would be given labor among the survivors and the task of rebuilding what she had contributed to destroying.
She took the work. The first week she did not speak. The second week she did. She learned the names of people in the lines. She watched her hands make bread and mended roofs. She did not die, but she also did not recover her old theatrical smile.
Justice for the two of them was different because their crimes were different. One was a test of pride turned to treachery. One was a child of two times, who thought old answers could be brought like gifts to a new soil.
"Did you ever forgive Calder?" Eri asked me years later when we sat by a small bell in my room. The bell was the one Hudson had given me and I had kept.
"He paid a price in front of us," I said. "What forgiveness was left was small. He paid, and the city learned."
"Did you ever love him?" she asked, the curiosity of a girl who had seen too much and still wanted a plain answer.
"I loved the idea of being loved," I answered. "But schools teach us more than feelings do. I learned to love in the late light when men return."
Hudson Schmitt never needed public punishment. He returned scarred, not by guilt, but by a war's weather. He stood with me in the rebuilt hall and we married when the snow that year fell bright as paper.
"Promise me one thing," Hudson said at our wedding, fingers finding the small bell on my wrist. "Don't let the bell lose its sound."
"It answers," I said, wind cool on our faces. "It answers when I am afraid."
Our wedding was not a palace event for fawning, though it had splendor. It was a day for the people who picked up the broken things. The armies marched past, and the people who had survived came to see us step into a life that had been carved out of smoke.
"What about the houses?" a farmer asked in the crowd. "Are we free now? Is this the change she wanted?"
"We are careful now," I said. "We will share the schools, and we will teach more hands to govern."
The years that followed were a steady work: we read, we argued, we wrote new laws that let merit be seen but that also kept some anchors to prevent our cities from drifting into anarchy.
On the evening the final decree was signed dissolving Calder's remaining estates and redistributing some lands to the people who had lost them, I walked to the old pond.
"Do you remember the bell?" Hudson asked as he joined me.
"I remember," I said, and I took it off and set it on the water's edge. "This bell was once a child's gift. I keep the twin on a chain. Between them they told promises."
He took my hand. "I am not the boy who threw a stone," he said. "I am the man who rebuilds the bridge it broke."
We let the bell ring once more. The sound pulled the crowd to silence. It was a small sound, but the plaza heard it and for a moment the city remembered what had been, and what it chose to be.
We lived with a history that gave us marks. We bore the faces of those who had died, and we held the memory of what we had done and undone.
In the late years, sometimes I walked to the river, to the place where Calder's coin had fallen. I would wind the watch he once gave me—an old habit I kept—and the watch would tick like a small heartbeat.
"You have a habit of keeping small things," Hudson said once as I wound the watch and put the bell near my palm.
"I keep small things because they remember better than we do," I answered.
At the end, when a child would ask me about the great upheaval and the two women who came from other times, I would show them the bell.
"This is the bell," I would say. "The one he kept and the one I kept. We give the sound back to the city now."
And I would let the bell answer, a small single note that makes you remember a handsome freckled boy who promised and a man who came later and kept that promise true.
The End
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