Revenge15 min read
The False Princess, the Letter, and the Fall of a King
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I remember the night Alessandro Avery first struck her in front of everyone.
"Is she a fake?" he barked, his voice cutting through the hall like a whip.
"She—" a new captive who had arrived with the envoys stuttered, "I saw her before. She is not the true princess from the south."
"Lie," Hazley whispered, barely audible.
"Tell me the truth," Alessandro said. "Are you the southern princess they brought as tribute?"
Hazley Schneider sank onto her knees. Her hands folded so perfectly, the way a lady in a palace had been taught.
"I am sorry," she said.
The whip in Alessandro's hand did not hesitate. He snapped it down, the leather singing. The first lash missed her face and tore the skin near her hairline, glancing through a jeweled pin and shredding it. She touched the side of her head and her palm came away wet and red.
"Stop!" I wanted to shout. "Stop!"
He didn't stop. He struck again, and again, and again. Each stroke landed with public, cruel precision. He was showing those new captives what happened to anyone who lied to him, to one of his people, to the man who bought silver and glory with blood and horses.
"He's doing this for show," I whispered to myself. "He always does this for show."
When the blows finally ceased, Hazley lay curled like a small animal. She did not cry out. She did not plead. She simply curled inward as if trying to hold a heat that would leave her.
"Take her to the stables," Alessandro said, dismissive, and he named her what he pleased.
"Bring the money back," he growled at the captives. "Tell your emperor: forty thousand taels, two weeks to deliver. Or my riders will take the capital."
Later, with the hall cleared and the banners dimmed, he called me over.
"Maureen," he said, rubbing his temple. "Why didn't she cry out?"
"I don't know, my lord," I answered. "She never did. Perhaps she is too proud to whine."
"You watch her," he said. "Make sure she lives."
"Yes, my lord."
I called for a healer and went to the stables, where Hazley was taken. She was pale, and the cruelty in her face was already becoming a quiet defeat.
"Thank you," she said when I dressed her wounds. "For being kind."
Her voice was soft. It had a lilt that made me think of small stream water and old songs. I had followed Alessandro for years. I knew how he took things from people. I also knew how he could be gentle—rare and foggy gentleness that only made his cruelty sharper when it appeared.
She—Hazley—had been brought as part of a deal: silver for peace. We had ridden into the southern city, demanded tribute, and a princess had been promised in exchange for a truce. Alessandro wanted the princess not only for the truce, but because a princess was a symbol. A real daughter of their emperor meant that they had humbled the south.
She came out of the carriage in pink silk, more delicate than anything the steppe knew. She bowed to Alessandro and whispered something that made his gray eyes soften. He took her hand with the care of a man who keeps an expensive knife in his sleeve.
"She will be mine," he said.
She served him with the light step of someone who learned to live under a shadow. She was not proud in the way the nobles were proud. She was not coarse. She moved through our camp and our tents with a small, careful courtesy. The soldiers liked her. I liked her.
But one night she vanished from the stables. People thought she had run away. She had not. We found her kneeling before Alessandro in his study.
"You promised," she said, voice thin with nerves. "You promised three years of peace."
"I promised the princess that," Alessandro said. "Not to a thief."
"I will die for it," she said in a rush. "I will die if that keeps the peace."
Alessandro laughed. "You can live," he said. "You are good at living. Stay alive."
She did not live on trickery or manipulation. She grew still. She began a hunger that looked like giving up. For three days she would not eat. The first time, I thought it was a test. The third day, I realized it might be a choice.
"Do you want to die?" I asked, handing her a cup of hot milk.
"Do you want to hear my story?" she whispered.
So she told me, her voice like a reed. She had been a servant in the palace of the southern capital. She loved a boy named Tucker Cross—he was a young commander then, a modest hero of the gates. "We swore by the courtyard trees," she said. "We planned a life of small things together. I had sewn my wedding dress by hand."
"When the war came, the emperor could not raise silver," she continued. "They said: let a princess be given to the horse people; three years and the peace will hold. They could not decide which daughter to send, so they told me to go in place of the true princess."
"You burned your dress?" I asked.
She nodded. "It was the only way to be sure. A promise of three years. I thought—if I live three years, the south can repair its soldiers, it will be fine."
Her eyes regarded me then, cold with a grief that was more wind than flame.
"Alessandro will never be soft to my people," she said. "But he is soft to me. Maybe that is all I can have."
She ate then, a little, because I convinced her there was still possibility in the world. I told her of men who failed yet rose again. She smiled weakly, and for a moment the light returned.
War came. Alessandro beat down the gates and took much as his due. He returned triumphant, with gold and horses and heads piled in boxes. At a victory feast, he handed her a box.
"From the field!" he said. "A token for the woman who danced for our men."
She opened it and screamed. A human head rolled out of the box, eyes open. It was Tucker Cross.
"Why?" she whispered. There was a madness in her voice I had never heard.
"Do you not like it?" Alessandro said. He laughed. "Send it home for silver. They will pay ten thousand for the head of that hero."
She cooled, calm as snow. "No, do not feed him to dogs. Send it back. Let his family have silver for his burial."
He clapped. "She is sensible. My woman is sensible."
After that night the tent we call the king's was quieter. He loved that dancer, and he loved his bounty. She loved another man, and that man was gone. Where was the justice? Where was the mercy? War had taken many things from many people.
Shortly after, she stabbed Alessandro in his own bed with a hairpin. The wound was shallow; he was a mountain, and the hairpin a pebble. He laughed, he roughed her up, he kept his power as if nothing had happened.
"Why?" he demanded. "Have you gone mad?"
"You killed him," she said. "You killed the only man who would have taken me home."
"I did not know," he said. But he did know.
She fell into a deeper sorrow. Her pregnancy came and went. She begged him, in the blood and the labor dream, to keep his promise—three years of peace so her family could breathe. He lied and said he would. He liked his child, and the child was his seed.
When the babe came, Alessandro named him Gonzalo Boone, like any proud father. He made Hazley a queen, or at least a title that meant she had been bought and elevated. For the child, he released some prisoners, and Hazley sent packages to a family in the ruined lands: small clothes, a letter, a poem. Each parcel was watched by Alessandro as if it might hide a dagger. He once told me to add coin to the parcel, five hundred taels. He was generous when he could be magnanimous; he was a ruler.
We kept going south, pressing on their borders. The war hardened everywhere. One morning, when the populace was drunk with fireworks and the baby celebrated, Alessandro called the troop to ride south again. Hazley stood at the edge of the camp like a ghost in white, and asked me in a hush, "Do you know my name?"
"Hazley Schneider," she said. She said it like a secret.
That time our campaign stalled. The south had learned. They burned the grain. They left nothing for our horses. The gates they once surrendered now held like steel. At the crucial pass, a young commander named Parker Cortez held his men like a wall.
"Who is your sister?" Alessandro sneered when we found a scrap of a name.
"My sister is no one to you," Parker shouted, spear leveled.
"She was a carriage girl," Alessandro said, but he did not laugh. There was discomfort behind his eyes when he heard the name Hazley.
I had to choose. I had Hazley whom I loved like a sister and Alessandro whom I had served for decades. If Alessandro took Parker's head and presented it to Hazley, would she be satisfied or broken beyond repair? I made a coward's choice in the end. I wrote Hazley a letter, "Your brother's pass will fall. Tell him to surrender, and your son's life will be safe."
That letter was my crime.
When the news came that Hazley and the child had vanished, Alessandro was frantic. We tracked them to a cliff outside the camp. The dogs barked; the air tasted of stone and salt. Alessandro tied a rope and descended. We waited with bleeding lungs for him to return.
When his scream came up from below, it was a sound that would live with me the rest of my days.
They were gone. Hazley had taken Gonzalo in her arms and walked to the edge. She kissed him, a fierce, wet kiss that was not for us to judge, and then she stepped.
"What had I done?" I whispered to the wind. "I had wanted to spare a man, and instead I had taken a life and more."
Her note—if we can call ink on cloth a devastation—was torn and found among her things. It said what she had always told me in whispers: "I am not the princess you think. I was a girl from the borderlands. I loved a man. I gave my life to buy a breathing space for my people. My son will be a man of the steppe or never at all."
Alessandro howled and stopped the campaign. Our army, leaderless, retreated. Parker Cortez struck like a thunderbolt. A rout followed, and our army returned crushed. Years of advance were undone in one night.
I learned then that Hazley had did more than dance and weep. In the ragged parcels she sent home, in the hems of Gonzalo's little shirts, she had sewn intelligence—maps and warnings in the needlework. She had been a spy who betrayed every secret she was forced to carry. She had not betrayed Alessandro for the love of a boy; she had betrayed him for her country.
She had been royalty of another kind.
When she chose to die with her son there was no triumph and no peace. It was a wound that cut everything in half.
Two years later Parker himself was taken by poison in a dungeon—the south could be cruel to its heroes. But the passage of time unevenly favors certain men's plans. Twelve years after Hazley's death, Alessandro rode into the capital and took it. The city that once spat at us now lay in ruins and then in surrender. Its nobles fell before him; he killed envoys and took what he wanted.
They brought the true princess forward. I stood in the court when Izabella Zhao was made to step before him.
"Do you weep?" Alessandro asked the true princess.
She could do nothing but weep. Izabella was soft where Hazley had been fierce. She had a kind of pale beauty, and the court cooed like birds. Alessandro asked her name and said it out loud, "Izabella," as if saying the name was like putting a coin in a pocket. He set her beside him and, one night, he told me in confidence, "She is mine now, in a different way."
In the end Alessandro got what he wanted: land, palace, blood-spattered thin silks called stability. He took the name Emperor later, when the court agreed. The great throne room favored him, and the lullabies he sang to his son were full of his pride.
I watched him rule and grow proud. He smiled sometimes and called Hazley by the name that belonged to the true princess, as if in memory he had not lost or had simply relabeled his past to fit his triumph. "Hazley was like the other girls," he would say, and my hands would grow cold. "She made me laugh. She made me kill to keep her."
Through all this, a fat arrogance grew around him like a cloak. He punished, he bought, he mocked. He took what he wanted. But cruelty leaves traces. The men and women whose homes were burned, whose loved ones were taken, kept them in their mouths like bitter seeds. They told stories in markets. They planted them in taverns. Over a dozen years, the empire had grown fat on its raids and its silver. The people who had lost everything had not forgotten Hazley, and they had not forgiven Alessandro.
People will hold memory like a weapon if no sword is given. The truth of Hazley's tale and the truth of Parker's heroism spread. Survivors carried the song of the young commander who'd held the pass, and they told also of the dancer who sewed maps into hems.
When the drought and poor harvests hit, when the tax collectors came to the poor houses and took what little there was, resentment swelled like a river behind a dam. Alessandro's rule had been strong in arms but brittle at the heart.
So when the day finally came and the crowds gathered in the imperial square, there were more men than usual with stones on their palms.
The rumor had come that the southern rebels had captured a convoy full of treasure that Alessandro had sent to the nobles. The nobility's coffers shrank. Taxes rose. People who had no bread saw the emperor's table groan with the wine and meat of conquest. They were tired of being a story in his mouth.
"Bring him out!" someone shouted in the square.
"What is this?" I said, sensing a change.
"They want to make an example," muttered an old soldier to me. "If the emperor keeps his hands stained, they will pull him into the light."
They dragged him out.
I did not like the way they bound him. I had lived beside him; I knew how his cheeks would burn when he was embarrassed. He looked at me as they walked him into the square, and our eyes met for a single instant that felt like a lifetime.
"Maureen," he said softly, as if he had thought to whisper a question. "Do you think they will remember me kindly?"
I could not speak.
In the square there were hundreds, thousands of faces. Some I had seen before—widows who remembered Hazley's name, men who had lost sons, women who had been taken in raids. Children pointed fingers and adults shouted long rehearsed phrases. The noise mounted. Someone called Hazley's name. The crowd answered with more than a scream; it answered with song.
They put him on a block of wood in the center. A single lantern swung above him. The magistrates who had once bowed to him now looked at him like strangers.
"Alessandro Avery!" the chief magistrate read a long list of crimes from a tablet. "You broke the peace. You took what was not yours. You sent men to die for silver. You delivered heads in boxes as gifts."
"We come for justice!" someone cried.
They forced him to kneel. They made the point of it: public. The square pulsed with the cadence of accusation.
"You took Hazley," a woman screamed, clutching a scrap of fabric. "You laughed as she bled. You called her names. You took her son, and she leapt for the cliff."
"I did what a king must do," he said, voice thin.
"Do you weep for him?" another cried. "Your son? The one who was taken from Hazley?"
"I have paid the price," Alessandro said. He lifted his chin. "I have built an empire."
"You will be made to show what kind of man you are," said the magistrate.
Then the punishment began. It was not a single blow; it was a ritual of unmaking the myth. They made him stand in the rain with his silver clothes removed. They took from him the banners that bore his house. They took his signet ring and showed it to the crowd. They displayed the heads of evidence: scrolls, parcels, the little shirt with needlework that had once been a cradle garment.
"Is that your custody of honor?" an old woman shouted. "Look. The maps she sewed in a child's shirt. Look."
Alessandro's face changed subtly. At first he bore it as a stubborn stone. He tried to pull his hand back when a youth pushed the hem of that little shirt into his open palm. He looked at the thread and at the small embroidered margin. For a moment, something broke in him.
"No," he said. "This is folly."
"Folly?" someone else shouted. "You sent a head as a gift. You thought it a jest."
A boy cried out then, naming Tucker Cross. "That was my father's friend! You brought his head in a box and laughed!"
Alessandro's voice shook then. He had a man's pride but this was not about pride. This was something that cut deeper. The crowd's faces were not only hungry for spectacle. They were full of a hunger that wanted truth on the air. To be shown the truth was to be delivered.
The magistrate read the list of victims and their families aloud. The crowd took up the names. "Tucker Cross!" they called. "Hazley Schneider! Parker Cortez!" The chanting made the square a hall of memory.
I watched Alessandro crumble, not because he had been killed—he was not—but because the people he had thought were his to scare and buy had become his jury. His shoulders fell. He tried to speak, but the words turned flat.
"Why did you not listen?" a woman said, stepping forward, the coronation crown's ribbons of gold in her hands. She forced it off the head of a wooden effigy nearby and placed it mockingly on his head.
"Is this the crown you wanted?" she said. "You wear it, but it is crown of bones."
The crowd jeered. They spat and threw small stones that thudded on the wood. For a long while they took no life. They were not there to kill him. They were there to unmake his image in front of them all. That is also punishment: to have your carefully constructed self broken before witnesses.
He tried to bargain. "I will give lands. I will lower taxes."
"No," the magistrate said. "You will do more. You will tell the truth to your people. You will open the imperial stores and release them to the poor. You will feed the widows of those you took."
"That is not punishment," he said weakly.
"It is the only way you can show wrong," the magistrate replied.
They ordered him to stand at the palace gates and publicly list, one by one, where each soldier had been taken. He had to confess which towns were burned and which families taken into bondage. He had to name the captains who had taken the girls and what they were paid. For a man of power, to speak the small details in front of those he'd harmed was a humiliation and a weapon. The crowd listened. They recorded his admission as if writing a ledger.
Alessandro's face, once implacable, wore a new map of age. The town crier recorded every word and hammered them into the public record. He wept when he had to say Tucker's name. He kept saying, "I thought I was building a future," as if that would excuse the present.
Around him, people reacted with a thousand small noises: someone clapped slowly, someone spat, others called out the names of those who had died. A child put a small stone at his feet. Another gave him a scraped bowl and drove it into his hands.
He was made then to return the silver he had promised as bounty. He cut the guaranteed spectacle of a triumph by ordering crews to rebuild a mill, to return a field. He had to sign on a long list of reparations.
At one point Alessandro knelt in the square and said, "I am sorry."
The sound of his apology was not triumphant. It was small and human and full of a kind of resignation I had never heard from him. The crowd was quiet for an instant, and in that instant I saw something like grief cross the ruler's face—real, not rehearsed.
"Do you think any pain can balance?" a widow cried.
"No," he said. "I do not think so."
Then they made him stand on the block again and listen as survivors came forward and told the stories he had written with other people's blood. He could look into their faces and see in them not beasts he led to take spoils, but daughters and sons. Each story became a lash that his conscience could not ward off.
The punishment lasted days. It was public, ritualized, and vital. The people wanted not only to break him but to make sure the record was set so no other man could do the same. They forced him to institute new laws against taking captives, to create courts for the wrongs of war. The glory of the past was turned into the mechanics of repair.
Throughout it all, Hazley's name kept surfacing. I watched the city blot out his triumph with namings: a fountain was called Hazley Spring, a bridge bore the carved face of Parker Cortez. They named a small square after the little boy Gonzalo, the symbol of a life taken. Those reminders were meant to shame as well as to remember.
When it was over, Alessandro looked older by ten years. He staggered back into the palace a man half-unkempt, his hair uncombed, his pride threadbare. He was not removed from the throne. The magistrates did not give themselves to blood. They gave him laws and books and the task of making restitution.
"Why did you not kill him?" someone asked me later.
"Would that have fixed anything?" I answered. "No. If he had been killed, the story would have become legend and the man might have been worshiped for martyrdom. What matters is that he was forced to face the harm in public and to be made to repair what he could."
Alessandro lived on and reigned. He consented to the laws. He opened the granaries some seasons and smiled at children, but there was a new edge in his eyes that belonged to a man who had been stripped of vanity.
I went back to the stables that night and placed a scrap of white cloth—Hazley's white—on a low beam. It fluttered in the wind like a small flag. People paused at it as if to remember that one human had brought the others into knowledge.
Later, in private when no one else came near, I heard Alessandro call Hazley's name and now say it with a pain that was closer to regret.
"She was a clever, stubborn thing," he said once to me. "She was like a reed. She could both bend and cut."
"She loved her people," I told him.
"Yes," he said. "She did. She gave everything."
If, after all this, the court again sang his praises, or if the true princess Izabella Zhao smiled shyly and took her place near him, those small joys were shaded by the public day when a crowd forced him to account for his bones.
"I will keep the laws," Alessandro promised the magistrates. "I will give the names to the record. I will try to fix what I broke."
He did not change his warlike nature overnight. He remained a man who loved banners. He remained a man who liked silver. But the scar of public judgment made him quieter, more likely to pause before he laughed at a head in a box.
"I will plant a tree," he told me one final winter. "For her and for what she lost."
It was a small thing for a man with an empire, but it was the kind of penance a crowd could watch.
Several years later, in the shining temple of his rule, he rose and told Izabella the story of Hazley as if it were a fable, and he pronounced the name Hazley Schneider like a bell. The court listened with polite silence. I watched him when he said it and knew the word would never leave him.
In the end, some things cannot be undone. Hazley was dead, Parker was dead, Tucker's head had been buried by a family with coin, and Gonzalo's grave lay down at the cliff, a small heap of stone and silence. The southern capital fell, and Izabella, who was not Hazley, wore silk and did what princesses do.
I returned to my duties with a weight that never quite lifted. I had told a false letter once, a coward's choice, and I had watched a life vanish because of it. I had seen a ruler able to crush cities be crushed by the smallest of things: public memory and the refusal to forget.
Years later, when travelers came to our capital and asked why a certain fountain was named for a woman who had danced and a bridge had Parker's carved face, people pointed and told the story as if it were a lesson. Children grew up calling the square "Hazley Square." When Alessandro passed the fountain, he would sometimes pause, sometimes lay a wreath. The punishment had not killed him; it had changed the air he breathed.
One night, as I walked under the clear star fields, I whispered her name.
"Hazley Schneider."
The wind answered by lifting the white cloth on the stable beam.
That cloth had a new function, more like memory than flag. It said, simply: we remember her.
The End
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