Revenge17 min read
The General, the Emperor, and the Green Tassel
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I never wanted the palace. I wanted the cold wind of the northern plain in my face, the clank of armor, the smell of damp earth and hot iron. I wanted a sword that answered when I called it. I wanted to stand where the maps started and the maps also feared.
"I know," Tristan said then, smiling with the careless softness that used to unsettle me. "But the court needs you."
"I did what I needed far from the court," I answered. "I don't belong behind silk."
He lifted a box, the kind with tight paper and a looped cord. "For you. I thought—"
"I don't like lotus pastries," I told him, and watched him frown as if the world had somehow betrayed him. His frown was more honest than his smiles.
"You should tell me everything, then."
"I told you." I kept the words blunt because tenderness here had a way of fogging every other sense. "I told you I would return to the lines."
"You don't have to do that." He reached for my hand but stopped. "Stay."
I did not stay. I had led men who had not eaten for two days. I had buried friends. I had slept with my armor on because the wolves outside the tent did not wait for civilized schedules. My body kept the memory of the north in its bones. I slipped out of the palace months later with callused fingers and a sword tassel from Per Bridges tied at my waist.
"Per trusted you," Per had said, voice like gravel. "Keep this. It will keep you from being careless."
"Is that what you call it?" I had laughed. "Careless or brave?"
Per didn't laugh. He only nodded and handed me the bright green tassel that had belonged to a friend who taught me how to aim at a man's throat and make it count.
"Keep your head low," he said. "Come home."
I kept my head low and came home to fire.
"You look like war," Graciela said when I entered the audience chamber. Her voice was not loud, but it had the power of an order. "And you smell like it. Have you eaten?"
"No," I said. "Not properly."
She made me sit. She folded the tassel in her palm and studied it like a relic. "You can go again," she told me. "You will go if you must."
"I must."
"I know." She smiled then, the smallest thing. The smile was a soldier's concession.
"I will take half a garrison," I said. "Give me a fortnight."
"A fortnight." Graciela made the sound of the word count like a promise. "Bring them back."
"Or else?"
"Or else you bring them back whole," she said. "Or you and your ghosts come back and I will bury you with my own hands."
I laughed at that and left with her blessing and the curse wrapped in the same sentence.
Cassandra came into the palace like a willow in spring—too soft, a mockery of names. Everyone said she looked like me, and I could see it: the same line of cheek, the same slope of brow. That likeness was a thing they used to amuse themselves, to pit one woman's beauty against another's. For a while the court ate it like candy.
"You are a warrior," Cassandra told me one morning when she found me reading by a small window. "You should be outside."
"You are fond of saying what I already know," I said.
"Then I shall say something new." She paused. "You are lonely."
I had laughed but not in derision. "Loneliness is a poor annalist, Cassandra. It writes only what it wants to be true."
She smiled, troubled. "Do you remember the last time you were here? You called me clumsy—"
"You called me stubborn."
"I did," she admitted. "We both were honest then."
Tristan used to come to me with cakes or tales of small things. "I rode a horse that bolted today," he'd say, as if that explained the storm in his eyes. "The stablemaster swore the horse had seen a ghost."
"Or you rode badly," I would answer.
One night he came to me with a look I had not seen before: distant, fever-bright. "Cassandra will be here soon," he said. "She needs counsel."
"I counsel soldiers," I said. "Not whisperers."
"Please."
He reached forward then and brushed a sleeve from my wrist. "Will you teach me a thing? How to stand straight when the world leans."
The old fissure opened and closed in me. I wanted to press my forehead to his and say: remember the frost in the north. I wanted to say: you cannot throw stones at an army and expect them to become flowers. But I only said, "Stand and do the work."
He took the words as a talisman. He used them later when he needed to steady himself.
Cassandra's rise was navigation in a storm. The court, which always thirsts for the new, lifted her to a place of honor within months. It was not the slow climb of merit; it was a sudden shift—favor given and favor forged. People whispered that Tristan favored her. He favored her in ways that made men and women look for reason.
"She is not of this world," one eunuch had told me, voice low. "She is like those tales, like wind."
"Wind dies down," I answered. "It leaves behind the broken and the bruised."
"Be careful," Kaydence whispered. Kaydence Fox had been with me since the gates of my first encampment—a small fierce thing who could stitch a wound with the same hand she used to scold a captain.
"I will be," I told Kaydence and left the tea.
I have never been ashamed of taking a small pleasure—sweet pastry, a quiet song—if it belonged to the rare moments where no one expected me to be anything else. When Tristan brought me a box of lotus pastry, Kaydence leapt as if the world had finally exploded right there and given her cake.
"Open it," Kaydence said, hands dancing. "He brought it for you!"
"I do not like lotus pastry," I told her again.
"He meant—" Tristan's voice came from the doorway. "I thought of you."
"Men are fond of thinking they are helpful," I said. "Pass the pastries to Kaydence."
He pretended to be wounded. "You wound me with pastry."
"Eat, or I will."
He laughed. He always did. Sometimes his laughter cracked and something else fell out with it. I learned to read that fissure.
"You will forgive me if I don't stay," I said to Tristan one dawn.
"Do as you must," he said, but he held my hand a fraction longer than etiquette allowed. "Promise you will come back."
"I promise nothing," I said. "Only that I will keep my sword sharp."
I left for the north. I left with the green tassel tied tight and Per's eyes heavy with things he would not say. I left with Raymond's face flash-still in my mind, the brother who had been sent to exile because men had made mistakes and then turned their backs. I left with Kaydence, who spoke to me like a constant: "You will come back," she said, tying my boot strings, which she always did wrong on purpose. "You will bring stories."
I came back with stories and empty sleeves.
They told me later, in pieces, the things that had happened in the palace when I was away. Tristan had been a child set loose on gold; he had stumbled into folly and found an embrace lighter than duty. Cassandra bloomed, carefully, like a flower that understands how to lift itself by the stem. She had given him laughter and her attention. She had said things he liked to hear: gentle words, a hand folded into his. It suited him. It flattered him. The court made room and the room made a throne within a throne.
"She is a willow," one court lady said with a sour smile. "She bends and he thinks he is a god."
"I don't care," I said to that woman. "If a man wants to bloom around a willow, let him."
But men do not like to share space they have been taught to own. Tristan's favor turned quickly like the weather in spring. "He has had his fun," he told people who came to whine. "Now he must govern."
They said Cassandra learned to mimic my ways. They said she tried to be strong in speech and soft in sleeve, and that the mimicry made everyone laugh at the thought of a woman who wanted to be a soldier. She laughed, too, until she did not.
One morning, we found her under a white cloth.
"She is unwell," someone stammered and then did not know how to continue.
"Where is Tristan?" I asked.
"Gone to the hall," another said. "He left early."
I walked to the hall, breathing like a bellows. Tristan sat upon the dragon throne as if the chair had eaten his bones and given him a smile hollowed out.
"Why is she dead?" I asked him before I had crafted the words into anything softer.
He looked up at me as a child looks when a toy is broken. "She was bothersome," he said. "She told me to be more than I wanted to be."
"She was a person," I said.
"Yesterday I liked her," Tristan said like a person naming a color. "Today I don't. The taste changed."
"He is your emperor," someone whispered. "He cannot—"
"Why not?" He laughed, but the laugh was not a thing that invited company. "Why not? I am tired of being told how to do things."
I watched the color drain from Cassandra's face in my mind. I wanted to make the world stop and point at him and say: this is what you have done. I wanted a sword in my hand and the support of men who believed that a man's hand could be measured by the depth of his mercy. Instead, I held back words as if those words were fragile things that might be stolen.
"He was there," Kaydence said to me that night, fingers trembling. "He was there. He laughed and he—"
"Stop," I told her. The court needed no more of this rumor. It needed the truth, but the truth would not come from whispers—only from action.
I said nothing for a long time. I rode north again because that was the part of me that knew what to do. I returned to fight. I returned to be broken.
The barbarians came with iron and hunger. Otto Bianchi led men who called themselves free in ways that were more horror than a name. Per Bridges rode with me. We took cities back. We took fields. We bled like everyone else. Per took a rain of arrows for us one day and did not rise again. I held the clay jar where his remains were kept under dirt and cold and I felt every weight.
"Per would have laughed at you keeping such a thing," Raymond said once when he visited, but his voice trembled. "He would have beat you with his boot and called you soft."
"He would have done that," I said. "And then sat with me until dawn."
We fought until the city gates, our city of rocks and weary men, fell into our hands only to be ripped apart again. Melody of arrows. Per's men were less men and more memory; I had to lead the living when the dead kept order.
I climbed into a pit once with only the will to breathe. They bound me. They said I would die where the vultures could feed. They left me to the beasts.
"You will not break me," I told the sun.
The sun did not answer. Vultures did.
I remember the pecking, the sound like a thousand coins. I remember deciding that if I had to die I would die as the woman who had chosen and not as the woman who had been chosen. I remember fighting like the last thing I was allowed to do. I remember blood and the way my hand trembled with every breath after it. I remember waking and finding wings of silence around me and a man in a fur cloak who said, "Run." I ran until the world blurred and then I fell off a cliff and woke again months later to my hands full of grit and the image of vultures like a crown.
Tristan, when he saw me the first time after I came back to the city, touched my arm.
"You came back," he said. "You came back whole."
"I am not whole," I told him. "My hands are not the same."
He lifted the sleeve and examined the scars as if they were the surface of a map.
"You are brave," he said, and for a moment something like respect flickered across his face. He called me "Wen-Wen" then—an old pet-name that felt to me like a small drop of rain on a burned field. "You must let me take care of you."
"Care and control are different words," I said, and smiled at him with a kind of cruelty. "You know them both."
He helped in small ways after the campaigns. He came to the camp and pulled a stone from the cook pot and put a cloth in his hands when he saw the blisters. He learned to bathe a wound. Those moments burned into me—an emperor who could wash and an emperor who could stifle. I should have known the two often walk the same shadowed path.
Graciela's disease took her quickly after we chased the barbarians back from the capital gate. She called me to her bed.
"If I die," she said, voice like paper, "Promise me you will not be a ghost."
"I promise," I said.
"Promise me you will not let the court make you small," she added.
"I promise that too."
When she died, something in Tristan tightened like a bowstring. He stood straighter. He read papers. He sat upon the throne like a man trying on clothes that did not fit. He kept the promise the world had made to him: to give duty a face and call it reformation.
For months he was alert. "We must rebuild," he said. "We must repair."
We did. We rebuilt walls and fed the poor and I taught young officers who had never known a sword how to hold one. He watched me with an intensity that was almost reverent.
"Stay," he said to me one evening by the wall's edge. The harvest moon was a thin coin in the sky. "Make this yours. Teach them."
"It is not mine," I said. "But I will teach."
And then the court changed again. New faces shimmered into favor. A soft woman named Ivy entered the halls like the scent of tea—quiet and dutiful. She bowed to me with all the deference of someone trying to untie the most dangerous knot without cutting it.
"Come," she said one day, holding flowers. "We could be friends."
"Friends are dangerous here," I told her frankly.
"I will be careful," she said, as if a promise could be woven from sugar.
I could sense the change. The palace had always been a place of people leaning toward warmth when it suited them. Now it bent like grass before a storm.
And then the truth came like a blade in broad daylight. The councilors were tired of a man who had been too cruel, too careless, too merciful at the wrong times. A woman had been killed in the halls, and the way Tristan had named his distaste for her—public and casual—was like the way a small town discovers a wolf in its midst and realizes it has always been there.
People gathered in the great hall. "We must speak," Per's envoy had said before he died. "We must put it forward."
I stood in the chamber where I had once stood learning the names of law and order. The benches creaked with the weight of many things: loyalty, fear, habit. Tristan sat upon the throne with an expression like a child waiting for permission to misbehave. I stood before him, and the room buzzed like a wasp's nest.
"Emperor Tristan," I began. "You killed Cassandra."
The words landed like stones. There were gasps, some small, some wounded.
"That is a lie," one minister said quickly.
"It's not a lie," Kaydence whispered from the crowd. "We saw her—"
"We saw the cloak," another voice said. "We found the marks." People in the pews stood. "Where was the emperor?"
"He was at the hall." Someone else's voice took over now. The court has its own hunger for stories that can be balanced on a scale. "He left early that morning. We were told he had business."
"Stop," Tristan said, and for the first time I saw a change across his face. "Stop this charade."
"This is not a charade," I said. "She was put under a cloth. She was dead. You spoke of wanting to be free and now you are free of consequence. You said yesterday you liked her, today you did not—" My voice rose. "You wield your favor like a blade and call it weather."
Tristan's eyes narrowed. "You are making accusations in the hall of the crown," he said. "You would subvert the throne."
"No." I stepped forward. "I would hold it to the sun."
He rose then, the sovereign motion like an animal unsettling itself. "Do you accuse me of murder?"
"I accuse you of killing a woman in your charge," I said. "I accuse you of confessing it casually. I accuse you of letting the crown cover your hands."
"Guards!" Tristan's voice cracked, the first clear sign of fear. "Remove her."
"They won't," said a voice from my left. Per Bridges' standard-bearer—one of the old captains who had known me in the north—stood. "Not in this court."
Tristan stared at the man as if he had grown hair on his palms. Then he did the strangest thing: he laughed, low and sharp. "You would stand against me?" he said to the captains. "You would make me a mockery?"
They would not be made mockery. Men who had bled under my command and men who had seen the empire's great danger and returned to call it by its name had their faces set in a way you do when you decide one thing is more important than your life.
"Tell us, Tristan," the senior councilor said quietly. "What happened the morning Cassandra died?"
Tristan blinked. He looked smaller than the throne. He looked like a boy who had received a slipper for the first time in a long time.
"She argued," he said finally. "She wouldn't listen. I struck her."
The room held its breath. For a moment it seemed the walls might cry.
"You struck her?" someone echoed.
"I meant to push her away," Tristan said, voice thin. "She fell. She hit her head on a low table. It was an accident."
"It was not an accident," I said. "An emperor's hand is no longer a private thing. It is an instrument of state. You cannot strike and then call it weather. You cannot kill and then tell us the moon has nothing to do with the tide."
"I didn't mean—" Tristan said. He blinked as if his words were fragile birds escaping him. "I didn't mean—"
"You didn't consider," I said. "You considered only that which muffles responsibility."
The crowd shifted. Some began to laugh, a thin, hysterical sound at first, then louder, then a wave of people who could not bear the lie. The ministers stepped back. The young pages blinked. Kaydence's hand found mine and squeezed.
"Strip him of his regalia!" someone cried. "He is no longer fit to wear the crown!"
"Wait!" Tristan shouted, and his voice rang with something like panic now. "You cannot! You cannot publicly disgrace a ruler like this—"
"Why not?" I asked. "Because you are feared? You forgot who keeps the walls. You forget who bleeds and who buries."
He staggered, visibly. "You would humiliate me!"
"You humiliated Cassandra."
There was a sound like a turning wheel in the room: the slow shift from denial to accusation to the concrete recognition that a man who had sat upon the highest seat had confessed, without calibration, to the taking of a life.
"He killed her," a woman said. "He said he didn't like her. How many are we to let die because a petulant man is tired of being told to be a better king?"
Tristan's expression crumbled in stages. First he looked enraged—"You are all traitors!"—then stunned—"How can you speak?"—then defensive—"I had reasons!"—then pleading—"You will remember what I've done for you!" Finally, he looked small and human and utterly desperate.
"I was your child," he said to the ministers. "I was the crown's charge."
"You were its danger," the chief justice replied.
Guards moved. They came not like beasts to seize but like officers to take a man who had been brought before the law of his people. They removed the heavy chain of office. People in the upper galleries leaned in, some with tears, some with the slow, cold look of those who have been waiting for something true. Someone took down the royal banner and it fell like a dark cloth between them.
Tristan had a moment where he begged. "Please," he said aloud, voice raw and torn. "Do not humiliate me. I will do penance. I will go to the front. I will—"
"You said you would govern," I said. "Not butcher."
The crowd's reaction ranged wide. Some shouted for immediate exile. Some demanded trial. Some simply stared, mouths open, to see their king reduced to a man.
Tristan's change was visible: the arrogance drained, the face reddened under the rush of color, then paling as if the blood had chosen not to stay. He tried to assert control; he failed. He tried to charm; his voice cracked. He tried to deny; he contradicted himself. Each new sentence he birthed fell like ceremony into a room that no longer reverenced him.
"Do as you must," he said finally, voice thin. "Lock me away if you must."
"No," I said. "We will not hide the truth behind a door. He must answer before all."
For three long hours they examined facts—his movements, the witnesses, the servants who had seen pieces of the morning unspool. For three long hours the public watched, the scribes wrote, the pages copied it for every corner of the realm. It was not a quiet punishment. It was a reckoning that happened in daylight so that the empire would never again mistake quiet cruelty for a private sorrow.
They did not drag him away in chains directly; they used humiliation that crawled under his skin like a frost. They ordered him to stand at the palace balcony while the people below sang the names of those he had slighted. They had him publicly stripped of the ornament that marked him as head of the watch: the ceremonial bow that only ruled families could carry. They made him carry a humble staff and walk the quarter where Cassandra had lived, where the servants scolded him openly and children spat toward the path he took. Men who had once bowed to him walked by with their backs straight. Women in the galleries clucked like hens; the courtiers took pictures of him, put notes in the markets.
He tried to laugh through it. He attempted to speak with the same softness he had once used to win me over—"See what I have learned?" he'd say. He would stand before the crowd with a smile that had become a mask and call for forgiveness.
The change in him was an arc the crowd watched avidly: from pride to denial, to shock, to denial again, to bargaining, then crumbling, and finally to a hollow, pleading sorrow. People held their breath as he sang small apologies that fell like feathers on stone. Some wept. Some cheered. The guards stood like the spine of the palace, unenthusiastic but obedient. The ministers ordered his removal from the center of power. He was exiled from certain ceremonies. He was compelled to release estates Cassandra might have lost. He was made to fund a charity for women wronged by violence—not as a favor to them, but as a public penance.
He tried every face of response—and all of them failed. Pride wept. Rage shrank. Begging grew tired. The final face he put on was one crafted of an obedient, broken man. The people watched the unmaking of someone they had once thought invincible and learned, slowly, that accountability could be as blinding as mercy.
When the crowd finally dispersed, some clapping like a verdict, some silent, some spitting because they could not spare an ounce of compassion, Tristan turned as if to find me. His eyes met mine across the square.
"Do you hate me?" he mouthed.
"I do not have time for personal hatred," I said then. "I have a task."
He did not fall at my feet. He bowed curtly instead—an action that felt like an echo of the man who once brought me pastries—and left the square with a posture that tried to be small and failed.
The punishment did not restore Cassandra. It did not heal the scar on my wrist. It did not bring Per back from the earth. But it made a future where the crown could be held up and asked to answer. It set a precedent: the man on the throne was accountable to those his hand could touch.
After that day, the court changed more than it had in a lifetime. Some who had been complicit stepped away to avoid the new light. Others embraced it. Ivy stayed close to me. Kaydence did not leave the palace for a long time; she slept in the servant corridors and made sure no child had to fear the hands of a man who would not apologize.
Tristan lived as a man who had had his collar unclasped. He seemed to learn many small things. He came to me more often in those months—some hours earnest, some empty. Once he brought chestnuts and no lotus pastry, and Kaydence cried with relief because chestnuts were an old good thing. He called me "Wen-Wen" with a voice less petulant and more ashamed.
"Why did you punish him so harshly?" some asked me later as if a woman had acted with too much fire when a child needed guidance.
"Because a crown is not an umbrella someone can hide behind," I said. "Because if you let the man who kills hide behind the man who rules, then the empire will dissolve as if in sugar."
"Was it revenge?"
"No." I paused. "It was justice."
He did not end up executed. I did not want his death. I wanted the empire to remember that being emperor was not a pass to cruelty. He lost more than a wreath; he gained a humility he had never asked for. He learned to be careful.
And I, when the storms were over and the walls rebuilt, returned to what I had loved: the command of soldiers, the slow build of discipline, the young faces that learned to place a blade true. I taught them to hold a sword, to speak plainly. I tied the green tassel around my own wrist again sometimes, and it brushed my palm like a prayer.
Tristan came to stand at the training yard more than he ever had before. He watched, and once he stepped forward to pull a stone from a pot for a blister, and for a moment everything held like the space before lightning. I looked up and he smiled—not the careless smile that had once calmed me, not the hollow one that had once charmed, but a small, earnest one.
"You break them like you will not be broken," he murmured once when a young recruit failed at a parry.
"Someone has to," I said. "If not me, who?"
"Then teach me," he said. "Teach me how to stand when the world leans."
"Teach," I told him. "Then learn."
We had moments that made breath catch, small and rare: his coat draped over my shoulders without question when a chill cut through the ranks; the way he watched a recruit take his first step and his jaw worked like a man thinking hard; the evening he sat on the wall and hummed a tune I had heard in a camp where rain smelled like iron. They were the heartbeats I had not expected to feel again.
We never repaired everything. We never erased the bruise on the palace where Cassandra had died. But the green tassel, which I tied and untied and wore like a small bridesmaid of memory, reminded me that every object can hold a promise or a warning.
When I finally walked the wall at dusk, the tassel flicked against my wrist like a metronome. Kaydence tended the lamps below. Raymond was back in the capital, painting sometimes, knitting the edges of his own new life. Per was not there to scold us, but his memory marched in lines that we learned to follow.
"Are you happy?" Tristan asked once as he stood by the training yard, watching a girl match a boy in footwork.
"Happiness is not a thing I collect," I said. "But there are days I wake, and I want to sharpen my sword. That is enough."
He nodded. He brought me a small box that had no lotus pastry in it, only a smooth stone.
"For learning," he said.
I slid the tassel back onto my waist and watched the sun go down. The green thread made a small, steady sound against steel.
It was my sound. It still is.
The End
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