Revenge16 min read
The Facade and the Throne
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I am Leilani Conti.
"I am the foot-washer's daughter, the one who knelt before our mistress and called her 'Miss' when the sun was harsh and the soles of my feet were raw," I say, and the memory tastes like cold water.
"Kirsten," they told me once, "you are my dog." She spat it like a curse. "Know your place."
"You'll be married to a good family one day," she promised in other tones—threats braided into false comfort. "If you step out of line, I'll have you paired with a mangy hound. Do you understand?"
"I understand," I answered then, because I had to, because there was a small woman at home who needed me: my mother, who had been a foot-washer in the big house until old age made her invisible. I said the right things to survive.
"You look too much like me," Kirsten always said. "You're a blemish on my perfection."
"She isn't perfect," I wanted to tell the palace air, but I learned to swallow.
"She has to be better than perfect," Martha Lucas, our house nurse, said once, when she grabbed my wrist and tightened it until my knuckles hurt. "If Lady Kirsten fails, every hand that touched her will be cut off. Do you hear me? You have a mouth; keep it closed."
"I'll keep it closed," I whispered then, because I would not trade my mother for defiance.
That night the Ninth Prince rode through the courtyard on purpose, or fate placed him there. "Who is the girl who paused at the jasmine?" he asked one of the servants by the gate, like the sort of question a knight asks when he's bored of the court’s gold.
"She is none of your concern," I told myself. But the prince—Yahir Dunn—looked up as if the world had shrunk to the curve of my jaw. He didn't avoid me; he smiled, and smiles make a person forget the size of their chains.
It might have stayed like that—harmless pinpricks of light—if not for a single decree that changed our lives: a summons for Lady Kirsten to the imperial selection.
"When you leave, take someone with you," Martha said, closing her eyes. "Take a maid that knows how to disappear for you. If you go alone and fail, we all fail."
"You will come," Kirsten said quickly. "You will keep watch. You will bring me news of Yahir."
She took me, and I did as any frightened thing does—follow. She dressed me sometimes in her leftover silks; sometimes she struck me so hard I thought a rib would crack. "You're my shadow," she told me. "You will always move behind me."
The day she was chosen for the palace selection the house held its breath. "You will be presented to the Empress Dowager's party," they said. "You will not lose."
"Of course I won't lose," Kirsten sang, though her voice sometimes found a broken seam. "Who would dare deny the Dowager's family?"
She left with a little procession—Martha, a maid named Audrey Cochran, and me. They loaded us with the airs of the household; strangers would have thought she loved me.
"You are going," she said to my face in the carriage, "so do not mistake anything. You will kneel when I kneel. You will be silent. And if you ever dare look at Yahir—"
"I will be silent," I said.
But fate, or sometimes coincidence woven by a darker hand, does not follow playlists. On the night the Emperor—Jared Dean—should have slept alone, Kirsten found her way to the Ninth Prince's garden. She tiptoed to him like she could charm the moon. She left the house empty.
"Someone must fill the bed," Martha hissed when the palace guards announced midnight: "Kirsten is missing."
"You will be killed if you let this spread," she said, and her eyes glinted like a hawk circling the last of a flock. "Find someone to lie."
"Not me," I pleaded. "If they find out... my mother—"
"You chose to be here," Kirsten's maid Audrey murmured as they stripped my garments from me, as if the blade of betrayal needed a polite handle.
"Then let the Emperor decide," I whispered to the dark.
They wrapped me in the silk of a woman they'd raised to be seen and sent me to the dragon bed.
I did not think the Emperor would notice. "He never notices," Martha had said, and I believed the world’s rules. Yet that night a tall shadow moved into the chamber.
"Are you awake?" he asked gently, and his voice smelled of iron and ink. He sat a moment, his head leaning. "Did I wake you?"
I breathed, and the room narrowed to his profile: clean as a coin, eyes black like packed earth. He smelled faintly of wine.
"No," I lied. "I was sleeping."
"You're honest," he said, with a tiny smile. "Tell me the truth, who are you?"
I should have lied the way they demanded—Kirsten's name on my lips like an amulet. But something in the dark permitted truth. "Leilani Conti," I whispered.
"Leilani," he said, testing the name and casually writing it across the palm of my hand. "Remember it. Jared. Jared Dean."
He pronounced his own name like it was a promise.
"I cannot be... I can't be anyone but what I am," I stammered. "The household will be ruined if this is discovered."
"Who would dare expose us?" he mused, then he turned his face and brushed his thumb across the moon-mark left by sleep on my cheek. "Who would dare?"
It was the first of many small mercies he gave me. "I'll tell no one," he said as if his word were a blanket. "Sleep."
He kissed me then, a slow thing that made the world tilt. I cried into his chest later that night, not because I had been taken but because for the first time someone looked like he wanted to keep me.
"What's your name?" he asked again, months later when the palace had learned me. "I want to know the one behind the face."
"Leilani," I said, and he smiled like he had discovered a secret map.
"You answered to another name before," he told me once with a soft impatience. "Does it matter?"
My chest folded; the world had become a dangerous star.
Kirsten blamed me for everything. "You took everything," she said, striking me until my ribs learned to count herself by breath. "You took my Prince, my place, my life."
I had never taken a thing from her. I had been a sister, a servant, a body to fill a bed. Yet she promised me only one thing if I obeyed her: "Bear my child." She wanted me to become a vessel so she could keep her title. "Do it," she hissed the night she dragged me into a hidden room and told me the plot: "Give the Emperor a child in my stead. Bring me a son. Then you will go, and my mother will free yours."
"What cruelty is this?" I asked. "You would make my life your ladder?"
She laughed and slapped my face. "A ladder is better than a chain," she said. "You will do this. You have no right to refuse."
I had no right to refuse. In secret we went through months of training so I could mimic her—how she held a teacup, the tilt of her chin. Audrey taught me how Kirsten smiled and how she scolded. Martha watched like hawk with the chill hands of one who had made bargains with fate.
"Just one baby. One boy," Kirsten said. "Then you'll be gone."
I agreed because my mother was still in the provincial house, because promises of freedom have teeth.
"What a long deceit," I thought in the pale hours, until the Emperor's hand on my waist felt like a harbor.
He asked me once in the soft predawn light, "Do you like Yahir Dunn?"
"No," I lied quickly. "He is kind, but I am a servant."
"Is there anyone else?" he asked, and the question had a thread—an edge of jealousy, a glimmer of hope.
"No," I said.
He held me differently after that. He made me laugh, he made me speak. Once, when he found me with fingers stiff from washing the palace linens, he said, "You have hands like someone who has worked too long. Let me care for them." He took my hand and rubbed them as if they belonged to a child.
"People will think I pamper you," he said, embarrassed.
"It doesn't matter," I confessed. "I wouldn't trade this warmth for anything."
We fell into small, quiet rituals. "You hum when you are nervous," he observed. "Stop it," he'd demand, and I would stop and smile.
Then the poison came like the end of a play—slow, then blinding.
On the hunt, the Ninth Prince spoke to me like a man who meant to move mountains. "If I win the contest," he promised in a voice that trembled, "I will ask the Emperor for your hand."
"You must not," I said. "You know what will happen to you and mine."
"It doesn't matter," he swore. "I'd rather be ruined with you than content without you."
Kirsten overheard their exchange. She thought she could erase me with a vial and a whisper. In the dark little cabin by the hunt, she had a plan: wound me with a slow poison that eats the senses. "You'll be unloveable," she told Audrey, and Audrey did not protest.
The poison was poured into my mouth when my head bowed in the cabin. I retched, but my eyes clenched open on recognition: the face of the Ninth Prince, stunned; Audrey's pale smile; Kirsten's hiss of triumph.
They left me to writhe. "You'll be dead enough," Kirsten chuckled. "Or worse. Either way, you're done."
It was the turning point. Pain sharp as knives made my limbs heavy, but something broke then that was not only flesh: my fear changed into a plan.
"You were always so petty," I said. I had to be calm. "You will pay for every slap and every night you screamed over me."
Audrey flinched. "But Miss—"
"You helped," I told her plainly. "You fed me the potion. You can undo it, or you can stand with her."
She hesitated like a child under a split sky. Then she made a choice.
"I can't bear another lash," Audrey said. "I was barely a child when I was taken in. Kirsten—she promised me jewels if I stayed. She hit me. I have nothing else."
She came forward and told everything—her small voice a thread that unraveled the tapestry of lies. "She had the powder in a porcelain bowl," Audrey said. "She forced Leilani to drink."
Martha's face folded. "I thought it would keep us safe," she confessed. "I thought I was saving a household." Her voice came out smaller than a mouse.
"All of you thought you would be spared," I said quietly. "You thought you could keep your places."
Jared Dean's eyes darkened; the court fell into a hush like storm clouds before thunder.
He did not shout. He did not pull out a sword. He did what the true ones do when they are quiet: he laid out the proof.
"Bring the porcelain bowl," he ordered slowly. "Bring every scrap of paper, every string of whispered favors."
Audrey pointed to the cabinet where the bowl had been hidden. The servants fetched it. Inside, a stain. "It looked like wine," Audrey whispered, "but it burned. Kirsten said it would ruin Leilani's eyes, make her unfit to be seen."
Jared lifted the bowl in the hall. "This is poison," he said. "This is treachery."
I thought then: if the Emperor chose to punish them behind closed doors, then the lesson might stay only in one house. But instead he decided to punish them under the sky where others would watch.
"We will speak in the Hall," Jared declared. "Let the court be a witness."
They brought us both to the Great Hall where courtiers, ministers, and the Dowager's relatives lined the mosaic floor. Torches leaned like watchful trees. I kept my head bowed; my body trembled, but my mouth had learned a steel thread.
"Leilani Conti," Jared said, and his voice rolled down the hall like a cleansing wind. He called me by my true name—my skin pricked. "Did you know you were being used?"
"No," I answered, and my voice was thin but the hall heard it. "I was terrified."
The ministers shifted. Someone whispered, "An accusation in court—this will cost a family."
Kirsten stood pale and defiant. Her hair was done as if for a celebration, her gown pristine. Audiences loved the clean patterns of cruelty shaped by silk.
"No," she said loudly. "She tricked me. She took my place. This is a forgery. She is my substitute. She stole my life."
"You commanded your servants to find a substitute in the garden," Jared said. "You ordered poison to be given." His eyes were coals. "Who helped you?"
Audrey sobbed then and confessed to every step. Martha, with lines carved deeper into her face by guilt, explained about the summons and the danger that made her hand tremble when she forced me. "I thought to save the household's necks," she said. "I was afraid."
"Afraid?" Kirsten barked. "I made choices because I had to keep my place. If I fall, the Dowager's party collapses."
"You fell," Jared said. "You chose cruelty. You ordered a poison meant to ruin a life in secret."
"She would have ruined me," Kirsten gasped. "She looked like me. She was a stain."
"Is a life a stain?" Jared asked, and the court felt like a blade being turned in.
The crowd murmured; a dozen voices became a tide.
"You put your own hand into a bowl of treachery," Jared continued. "You weaponized another body to save your status."
Kirsten's face moved through stages like a sun through clouds. "How dare you—" she began, then faltered. "No one can say this—no one will believe you."
"Audrey told us," Martha said. "I was wrong. I was wrong to be silent."
The first crack in Kirsten's composure came in the form of denial. "Audrey is lying," she said, claws out. "She wants my jewels. She is greedy."
"Are you telling the court that you forced a chambermaid to lie?" Jared asked quietly. The people in the hall leaned in. "Show us the documents, show us the bowl. Tell us why you would risk the household."
Kirsten's face whitened. Faces in the crowd shifted. Someone took out a small knife and sharpened it on a whetstone, an old habit of watching the law.
"Bring the letters," Jared commanded, and a clerk brought a bundle of notes: a ledger of bribes, a list of promises made to Audrey, relative names who had been told to be silent.
"I promised a place, I promised jewels," Kirsten said. Her voice lost its stage. "I did not mean to—"
"You meant to silence her," Jared finished. "You meant to destroy another human to save yourself."
Her breath hitched. Her denial shifted to rage. "You would humiliate me like this? Throw my house to the winds?"
The hall's air tasted like salt. For the first time I saw the pattern of her fear become naked: power had been her armor. When the armor broke, she bled shame.
"Look at them," Kirsten hissed at the crowd, voice breaking. "They bow and watch me like a spectacle."
The crowd did not bow. They gasped, they looked away, they whispered, and the whispers gathered like a storm of small stones. "How could she?" someone breathed. "A noble who poisons—"
"She threatened a mother," an older woman cried. "She would have killed a household for a chair."
Kirsten's reaction shifted—shock clashed with a brittle, frantic fury. She laced her fingers like a child holding on to a fraying rope.
"You're lying, all of you!" she screamed, but the words were uneven. "You will not take my life!"
Her face split into faces in quick succession: first the composed noble that had always been perfect for portraits, then the woman who had made poisons, then a small child in the middle of a parade who had been beaten until she learned to fear.
"Save me," she begged suddenly, and for a single slice of time there was the raw pleading of someone who had nothing else but the wheel of privilege to turn. "Please. I will make you queen. I can bribe, I can—"
A ripple of disgust ran through the hall. "You promised jewels," someone muttered.
"You can beg the Dowager," Jared said. "But the court will see. The people must see that cruelty meets consequence."
Her face crumpled, denial shredded into humiliation. She bowed suddenly, deeply, palms on the mosaic floor. "I am sorry," she said—a thread of real apology that tasted of fear more than remorse. The crowd's reaction hardened, then softened into a cold, fascinated pity.
"This is public," Jared declared. "You will be stripped of your title for treachery and deceit. You will be bound to the service ward and made to atone where everyone can see the price of choosing cruelty."
Kirsten lurched up like she might strike, then sagged. Her shoulders shook with the terror of what was coming. "No," she said into her hands. "No—"
She was led away to be stripped of her garments and her chain of rank removed in the same hall where she had once accepted ribbons. The crowd watched, some with eyes sharpened by justice, others with the quiet relish of spectators. "Servants will take your brocade," someone said.
Audrey watched, blinking as if she too had been scrubbed clean. "I—" she began. "I did not mean—"
"It is the court's business," Jared said. "You told the truth today. That is how we will decide your fate."
Kirsten's face moved through humiliation to shock, to denial, to pleading. She tried to retake the stage, screamed that she had been wronged, that levers had been pulled to make her fall. But the witnesses held steady. Martha wept openly; Audrey's voice was thin but honest.
When the sentence came, it was not a blade but designs that matched an empire's cruelty back on itself: Kirsten was stripped of rank at court, her family titles suspended, her patronage withdrawn, and she was to be publicly set to work in the palace infirmary, where those she had tormented would witness her toiling. "Let every person who suffered see them," Jared said. "Let no one think cruelty goes unpunished."
As they dragged her from the hall, people spat at her shoes. "You will learn," an old laundress said. "You will scrub the same dirt you threw at others."
Kirsten's voice broke at the edge of the doorway. "You will regret this!" she howled, casting all the venom she had within.
"Maybe," Jared answered, but he looked at me, and his hand reached for mine.
After the exposure, the world tilted. Some courtiers whispered about the Dowager's family losing face; others admired the Emperor for his fairness. The Ninth Prince sat with a face like a man who had nearly married a ghost. He stood and touched my shoulder once, only once, and said, "I would have stopped them if I had known."
"You stopped them," I told him. "By telling the truth, Audrey did."
Audrey fell on her knees at my feet afterward, the weight of her betrayal and salvation a double-edged thing. "I could not sleep," she said. "I saw what she did to the other children. I was so sick." She bowed her head. "Forgive me."
"I will not forget," I said quietly. "But I will not hate."
Time, however, is a patient thing. The Dowager demanded justice beyond the palace: settlements of land, public apologies that would strip names from ledgers and reduce the family's standing. When the official edicts went out, Kirsten's father—Brent Lindgren—saw the way the wind turned and his house shrank. He fell on his knees before the Emperor and scratched promises into the dust.
"It was only a household preserved," he said, thin as an old man. "We thought only of survival."
"Survival does not grant the right to ruin others," Jared replied, and the penalty was read: fines, loss of office, public censure. Men who had once bowed at table now stood with faces hollowed by shame when they passed me.
"You wanted me to be a tool," I told Kirsten the day she was led through the courtyard to begin her penance. "You wanted my life so you could build a throne of bones."
She laughed then—only a little, a cracked, ugly sound. "You used me too," she managed, voice high. "You pretended to be me. You took my name."
"I used no one," I said. "I never thought I would survive night's breath enough to be here and speak. But I can forgive actions and not accept them."
The public punishment changed her: from the day before—smug, cruel—to now—exposed, pleading, collapsing. When she looked up at the people she had once considered beneath her, there was no malice left, only a stunned and ragged regret that sometimes looks like repentance.
The crowd hissed and some laughed. "Justice," a vendor said. "Serves them right." Others only watched, the lesson settling like a long winter.
In the months that followed, the palace learned how small human cruelty can be and how dangerous it is when hidden.
"Did you ever want power?" Jared asked me, one night as he smoothed my hair.
"No," I said. "I wanted my mother to be safe."
"Why did you lie to him?" he asked then, and I realized the court did not know everything.
"Because they needed someone to be the face," I told him. "Because sometimes a body can be a weapon."
"You were the blade I didn't mean to hold," he said softly, and for the first time he said something that sounded like ownership and not like court business.
When the Dowager and her party saw me standing at Jared's side—no longer the foot-washer's daughter but a woman who had survived being used—they frowned and plotted as nobles do. "She is impertinent," someone muttered. "She must be taught restraint."
"What is more dangerous than being a servant?" one adviser asked out loud. "To be a servant with a crown's favor."
But the court could not reverse the live lesson: the hall had been witness, the people had watched, and justice had been made public. Kirsten washed linen by the infirmary windows, the same linen she had once looked down upon, and the infirmary's maids nudged each other when she fixed a mop and dropped her head. The world had turned and given her a mirror.
"You will not be my enemy, Kirsten," I told her once, and she choked on the kindness. "Keep your mind. Learn to be better."
"How can I?" she whispered. "When everything I was is gone."
"Because being human is the only thing that can be new," I said. "Not titles, not jewels."
Some weeks later I learned that Audrey had taken her earnings and vanished into the city to live with a cousin she had discovered in a market stall. Martha was quietly pensioned; the Dowager had lost more than face, and she taught her daughters—those who remained—how to measure cruelty with fear.
"And me?" I asked Jared on a clear morning when the river looked like polished glass. "What do they say of me now?"
"They used to say what they wanted," he answered. "Now they must say what is true. I wanted you to be seen for who you are. I wanted others to have no reason to lie about you."
He asked me to be his, not because I had been a tool, but because he wanted to. He took my hand in public—no longer a stolen bed but a chosen partner—and when the Dowager resisted, when the noble lines tried to formalize how a woman from a low house could ascend, Jared placed me before the court and declared me his. "She is Leilani Conti," he said, "and she is near me for reasons that have nothing to do with bargains."
That public declaration sealed something worse for those who had schemed: it turned the world from the shape of their fear into the shape of a new law. It made the cruelty they had measured in shadow into something that could be named in the light.
And in the end, when I sat under the palace's carved rafters as the Emperor's chosen—later named as Empress by those who govern such titles—Kirsten worked in the same palace, but with empty ribbons tied to a plain apron. Her public breaking had been severe: loss of home, loss of family influence, and the daily glare of the people who had once bowed to her.
The day the Dowager's party came to visit, they saw her in the infirmary, mopping and bearing a bowl of stew, head down as if learning humility with each stroke. People pointed and whispered; some felt justice, some felt pity. The woman who had once planned my ruin was diminished publicly: denied the place at the table, asked to answer for each small cruelty she'd done in front of a throng of witnesses who would not forget.
Kirsten's face changed more than once during her punishment: from composed, to shocked at exposure, to frantic denial, to begging, to collapsed shame. The crowd betrayed a range of reactions—some clapped when the Dowager's family took their losses, some hissed, some took out small ledgers and wrote news for the street criers.
"Look at them," an old kitchen woman said quietly to me as we passed. "They learned how it feels."
"Yes," I said. "They learned what it costs."
"Do you feel satisfaction?" she asked.
"No," I said. "I feel the weight of what we all almost were."
Later, when the Emperor and I walked along the gardens and watched the moon slice the river, he said to me, "You frightened me at first—not because you were dangerous, but because you were honest."
"I had to survive," I answered.
"So we will build a place where honesty matters," he said.
"I would rather build a place where mothers can be safe," I told him, thinking of my small, soft-featured mother who had been dragged into all of this because of the house's greed.
He smiled then, and he kissed me like someone pledging a small, stubborn oath.
I became more than a servant's daughter. I became his chosen, then his Empress. I kept my name—Leilani Conti—like a small coin sewn within my robes. It reminded me of hot water for blistered feet, of the hands that pained and mended, and of a mother who had taught me how to count heartbeats as a currency.
Kirsten's final change came quietly: in the infirmary window, she watched the moon write silver on the courtyard's tiles and picked at the hem of her apron. She no longer had the glow that power had given her; instead she had the tired, sober look of someone who had been taught by the sky.
"Will you forgive me?" she asked me once, voice so small I almost missed it.
"Forgiveness isn't a thing you spend freely," I said. "It is earned with the steadiness of repair."
"Can I begin?" she whispered.
"You can begin," I answered.
We let the public see her begin. We let the world judge whether she would finish.
The End
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