Revenge13 min read
The Lotus Hole, the Talisman, and the Lantern I Keep
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I have kept my voice low for so many years that when it finally rose, it surprised even me.
"I am Hudson," I would say to the empty room sometimes, and my own name sounded foreign. "I am the crown's son."
My mother, Molly Bradford, wore the palace like a carved jade amulet—beautiful, heavy, and not always warm. My father, Gatlin Zimmerman, sat upon the throne and moved like winter light: necessary, distant, and sharp. They loved their youngest like a weather vane loves wind. Her name was Millicent Zeng. She was four when she learned how to hide a smile in her sleeve.
"Mother," Millicent would say, toddling into my mother's lap, "Millicent likes the little jade cake. Try it, please."
"Try it," my mother would hum, and for a moment the palace was smaller at the corners and softer underfoot. "I'll make you long noodles, my little peace."
I would watch from the shadows and call myself a brother, a man, a future ruler. "You must eat your noodles," I told her. "We all do."
"Brother," she said stubbornly, "I don't want noodles."
"Because?" I provoked.
"Because—" she puffed up her cheeks. "I like dumplings. You like dumplings!"
"You remember wrong," I teased, snatching her pudgy hand. "I like steamed buns."
"You're lying!" Millicent pouted. "You like crystal pork knuckle."
We laughed like the small things could hold the world together. For years, small things did.
The winter the lotus pond froze like a glass plate, my father did not come to Millicent's birthday. He had gone to visit a favored consort: Manon Komarov. My mother sat in silence and did not eat. Millicent, quick as a mischievous bird, hopped to her mother's side and forced a laugh between the gaps left by someone else's absence.
"An'an," my mother called her sometimes, as if the nickname could keep her near. My father returned with a safety talisman from the temple—an old thing tied in a little pouch. My mother tucked it into Millicent's sash and smiled for the first time that day.
That night the palace was colder than the talisman was warm. I told myself that fathers err and that talismans were talismans. I told myself I would take Millicent's second bowl of noodles next year.
I never got the chance. The next afternoon, a maid ran to my study in a panic. "Your Highness," she gasped. "The little princess—Millicent—has gone."
"Where?" I said, and my voice was steady because I wanted it to be.
"Found at the lotus pond, Your Highness. She... she is no longer breathing."
I ran. The lotus pond was cut with a hole of black like a missing tooth. The ice around it had been chipped. When I peered in, I saw the small, heavy shape of my sister beneath the dark. Her fingers still clenched the little pouch with the talisman inside. Her face was cold; her cheeks had gone the color of blue china.
"Mama!" I cried. "Mother, please."
My mother did not look at me at first. She sank and was swallowed in a wail. "My Millicent," she sobbed, "my little moon." She went weak and pale. She did not regain color.
In front of everyone my father said it was an accident. "She slipped," he said. "She fell into the pond." His voice was tight. "We will not stir court with cruel suspicions."
I saw the way his hands were still trembling when he left me. I saw, too, how quick he was to accept the palace's claimed accidents. I could not accept that. I wanted—no, needed—someone to answer.
At night I dreamed Millicent calling, "Brother, help me," under thin ice that cracked like a promise. I woke with my shirt wet and my palms raw from gripping railings. The palace murmured "sad accident" like a lullaby. I could not sleep on lullabies.
On the one hundredth day, my mother sat straight and fetched that thin voice of hers. "You are a man now," she said, patting my hand. "You must live."
"Mother," I returned, "I don't want to be a man if being a man means pretending."
She smiled with one corner of her mouth. "You must be brave, Hudson."
She left me within three heartbeats of that sentence. She leapt from the tower called the Star-Picker's Pavilion, and the wind took her like a thieving child. She left me without the chance to tell her what I had not the courage to say: that I had loved her, that I had been afraid, that I wanted to protect both her and Millicent and had failed.
Mourning after mourning, loss after loss. The court grew small, and my anger grew large and cold. Someone asked me why I did not simply grind my grief into duty and step into the future. "Duty will not stitch things," I said aloud. "Vengeance might."
I had a maid named Daphne Vieira who had been with me since I was small. She told me of the whisper among servants—that Manon Komarov's maids passed by the lotus garden more than they should. A girl from Manon's retinue used to sweep near the pond. A path could be stitched from rumor.
I asked for dark guards. Gatlin consented, but domestically and thinly. He never named the spider at the center. I pieced things together. Manon had a brother who led troops south to battle when the revolt flared; the favor flowed then. She had trinkets and means. Her name smelled of incense and fine cloth.
Daphne, under threat and with nothing left to hold besides her conscience, confessed: she had taken small gifts to a young weeper in the servant's lane who laughed when the palace smiled. She named the girl who had been near the pond on that bitter day. Under ministrations that turned nerves and will brittle, the girl broke. She had been paid to watch the pond and, on certain nights, to leave the gate open for a shadow.
I arranged my plan.
"I will go to the pond myself," I told Daphne.
"Don't," she begged. "You will be harmed."
"I need to see what they will do if they think I am dead," I said. "Watch, and if I am still breathing, pull me out."
That night I let them push me. A two-handed shove, a gasp, and then black water. I let my limbs do their small theatre of drowning. I did not bite the cold. I feigned the hands of a man who had never swum.
"Stop, stop!" someone cried, in real panic.
The hands that dragged me out were not those of Lady Manon. They belonged to men who served the crown—my secret guards. I crawled from the pond and coughed rain. Gatlin arrived as planned because I had whispered a false death scene to the palace. Manon was there too; she came with the calm face of someone who had nothing to fear.
"He's alive," she said in a voice like wind in bamboo. "He scared me."
"Who pushed him?" my father demanded.
Manon shrugged, small and pure. "I would not send my handmaiden to do such a thing," she said. "Our girls never appear at places like that at night."
"You saw one," I said, and I felt pleased with the way I could lie, because sometimes truth is the easiest mask. "The one who did it was wearing night clothing."
They searched the courtyards. They found—by design—an ill-making thread. My guards, under my orders, planted the bodice and the night-shroud in the well behind Manon's quarters. They found a girl there. She was bleeding and terrified and wearing the night clothing of a servant.
Manon stood very still as they dragged the girl before her. Her smile froze, and something small and mortal showed: a wrinkle between the brows, a sting of color leaving her cheek.
"You honor me with such suspicion," Manon said coolly. "I cannot believe—"
Her voice broke when the girl began to sputter. "She made me," the girl cried. "She told me to leave the gate. She said—she said the prince would fall, and she would look unwell and that would be good for Manon."
Around us the court swelled like a storm. There were whispers, faces, and the clatter of cups. "This is slander," Manon said. "These are lies."
"Then tell us," Father demanded, his voice louder than it had been in years. "Did you command any of your women to the pond last winter? Speak."
"No!" Manon snapped a smile that did not reach her eyes. "How could I stoop to such vulgarity?"
"Then let the court judge," my father said. "We cannot leave a charge this dark unaddressed."
They threw open Manon's private screens. They found letters that had been carefully hidden: notes written in a woman's hand, promises of favor tied to small gifts. They found embroidered trimming from the exact robe of the servant who had confessed. The palace gossip flavored every finding.
"She is guilty," someone hissed.
"Bind her," Father said.
Manon did not fall to the floor. She did not weep. She stood there the way a woman who had always kept her face practiced stillness. The court gathered like crows.
They made her stand at the Hall balcony so all might see. The sun sharpened the seams of people's faces. They tied a thread of red through her hair, a sign of disgrace; they stripped the ceremonial jewels from her throat. I watched her eyes swing like a trapped bird from face to face.
"Manon!" someone shouted. "You took a child's life!"
"It was an accident!" she answered, and for a flash I saw the old mask—fear beneath the silk. "You all have no proof."
"We have proof enough," Father intoned, and beneath his words the soldiers moved.
They made her kneel on the cold marble. "You will stand in the square," Father said, "and admit your guilt. The people will see what you have done."
She raised herself into a scream. "You cannot! My name—"
"Say it," Father ordered.
"I did not push the child, I did not—" She broke off. Her voice changed, thinned, and then hardened. "You will not buy me with your throne."
Around the square soldiers had formed a ring, and among the crowd sat merchants, maids, eunuchs, the chancellor's wives. People leaned forward, breath held. The magistrate read out the accusations. The girl from the well wept openly and pointed. "She gave me the money," the girl said. "She told me if I did not do it, she would ruin my family."
"I never spoke such words," Manon cried. The crowd hated her voice as if it had been a new coin minted with a hideous face.
"Then say your innocence now and I will pardon you," Father said, and the world of the court cracked into a small, terrible choice.
Manon laughed then, a thin, brittle sound. "Pardon?" she echoed. "You will pardon for what? For taking a child's life? For fashioning grief? Do you think you can wash this by my words alone?"
She looked at me, finally, and though I was supposed to be the cause, I felt the old, awful ache of emptiness. "You think you are hurt," she said. "You think you are the first to be bereaved by the court's cruelty. You think your mother's grief makes you unique."
Behind her words was a cunning I had only glimpsed in seamstresses who knew how to mend a crown. She knew the instruments of court. She knew how to use pain as a blade. "I saw what you had," she said. "A crown of frost. You would be king, Hudson. That makes you dangerous."
By the time the magistrate shouted for witnesses, the crowd had turned into a chorus of accusation. "Hang her colors," a noblewoman said. "Show her like a common thief."
"Bring the child's talisman," someone demanded.
They took the talisman—Millicent's talisman—from where it had been kept in the shrine. They placed it on the stone steps, fingers covering it as if it were the center of a ritual. "This was in her pocket," the girl insisted.
Manon made a sudden, jagged movement. "You all want a show," she hissed. "You make this a theater. You punish me in the square and you think it a lesson. But there will be other hands. There will be other ponds. There will be other children."
She spat the last words like a curse and then began to shake. It was not the shudder of a woman broken, but of someone unmasked; the act and the audience combined to break the brittle bonds she'd built. Her eyes grew wet and then furious. "You will pay for your ease," she whispered at my father. "You will pay with your peace."
The crowd hissed. Some pulled out small lanterns to light the scene—an act meant to put shame in bright light. People took out their small boxes of beads and began to slap coins on the marble in a strange, hungry ritual: they paid to see disgrace.
She was led away, but not before a thousand fingers pointed and a thousand voices declared their verdict. The magistrate pronounced exile to the cold rooms: a slow, public removal from court, followed by "detainment"—the kind of sentence that rots pride like rust. They placed a symbol on her door: a trimmed jade, inverted.
Manon did not scream. In the days that followed her name was spat at, and the court wrote satires of her like children drawing a dangerous figure in the dirt. The newscallers ran through the market with the story. People who had never seen Millicent cried anyway; people who had never lost a child felt burning righteousness in their chest.
I would have been satisfied to let the law do its work, to let her fade into silence. Instead, the night before her banishment, she went in front of the highest balcony and, in full view of the palace, she slit her garments and stepped down into the cold courtyard below.
They said she hanged herself in the cold rooms the next dawn. They said that she had strangled the last breath out of herself. I watched with a numbness that felt like a hard stone in my chest. Her death did not redeem anything. It did not fix Millicent's smile. It did not call back my mother.
The crowd had watched it all: accusation, trial, shame, and then the final vanishing. They had been the jury of a spectacle. They cried, they clucked, they noted time and place and who had said what. There were hands with knives and hands that simply clapped. Our palace had been the theater stage of justice and revenge. A woman fell from a height not because of law but because of the way law can be a hammer.
A punishment had been rendered. The court was satisfied. I had my vengeance, yet the taste in my mouth was not sweet.
I should have felt triumphant that day, but I felt an old, patient hunger I could not satiate. Power does not give warmth. It gives leverage, and with leverage you may move mountains or press bones. I moved the pieces as a king must. I gave orders, and men obeyed them. I tightened my circle and put people under my watch until the palace felt like a cage where I had placed myself.
I married because my father, in his last hours, feared a chancellor’s grasp and needed an alliance. I was not eager for marriage. I consented to a union to a daughter of a minister: Gabrielle Davis. She had the look of a sharp stone—beautiful, cold, and dangerous. She smiled in a way that measured favors. I watched her like one watches a blade.
But the side woman the court gave me—Lauren Bentley—was not the kind of courtflower you expect. She came soft, with a way of eating that was almost obscene to palace ideals. "She eats like she is saving the world," my brother Chen Reid said once, handing me a small cage of a spare mouse as if that could pull me out of thoughts.
"Is she a spy?" I asked, watching Lauren tear into rice like it were an unspoiled joy.
"Either a better spy than the whole of us," Chen said, "or a person who simply likes to eat."
I began to meet with her more under the pretense of inquiry. "You never ask me about your meals," she said once, mopping broth from her lips. "You always leave me half."
"Eat faster," I told her, and she flashed me a look that softened my stubbornness.
Weeks of shared bowls—of watching her eat, of watching her grin when she hid a piece for me—turned to something else. "You are clever," she told me one night when the palace was glass-calm. "You hide a storm behind your hands."
"Do I?" I said, surprised she saw it.
"You look like a man who was small once," she said. "A man who keeps a little dead thing and bakes it into the center of his life."
Her words were a mirror. I let myself step closer. She smelled like stew and honest work. She slept with her palms curled around the hem of her robe. I wanted someone to put a lantern on the path and say, "Walk slowly. We will not tread you down."
She was not naïve; she was book-smart and sly as a barn cat. We crept together like thieves, she and I. We planned and then unraveled plans, ate food in the dark, and laughed like small children.
I learned she had been born to a minor lord—someone my father had thought suspicious in a distant campaign. Her family had been scattered and left to die; she told me that once as if it were a fact that did not require much of me. "You would have eaten me the first night," she said, and meant that in the sharpest possible compliment.
When I finally unmasked the chancellor's reach—Gabrielle Davis's family—her ties reached further than I liked. She had plots in hand and friends in rooms none of us frequented. Yet each time I thought of anger, Lauren's laugh would pull me back. She tied my life to another life that could be soft, that could be outside of all duty.
"I cannot be the wife who wears a throne," she told me one quiet morning. "Promise me you will go away from this place one day."
"Where?" I asked.
"To the south," she said. "To the place with fruit that tastes like summers. I want seeds for the garden. A small house where people are not always watching."
I thought of Millicent's talisman and of my mother leaping like a brief song. I thought of the pond and the cold and how vengeance had made the palace rings of blame into a fine-sanded grindstone.
I did something that surprised even me. I wrote a decree of abdication the night before the new year. I wrote with a hand that trembled because power had a weight and I no longer wanted it to press the world into squares. I gave the throne to my brother Chen Reid with a whisper: "Take care of our people. Do not become our fathers."
"You're sure?" Chen said when I showed him.
"Yes," I said.
We rode to the south in secret, Lauren and I and a small train. I had given her silver and a carved hairpin of my own making and told her to take Fallon Beard with her for protection. "Take Fallon," I said. "Do not go alone."
"Take my talisman," she joked, holding up the hairpin like some cheap king's blessing. "You keep your talisman."
We left the palace on a winter night, with lantern bees lighting our way. When the river opened to the south and the air was warm like the mouth of a safe fire, I felt something chisel away inside me. For the first time in many years I saw my reflection as a man not made by grief.
"I will make you a garden," I told Lauren as we watched farmers string lanterns for new year festivals. "You will eat every day. We will put up a small lamp on our porch and I will call it 'Millicent's light.'"
She laughed and brushed rice from her lip. "Make it the size of a pond," she said. "And promise me, Hudson: no more ponds like the one you left."
"I promise," I said, though promises are soft things and the world is not.
We walked into a town where lanterns bobbed like wishful fish. Children ran past with paper dragons and ate sugared fruits. I kept my pocket closed around the memory of a talisman and my heart opened to something that could be like breathing instead of being under water.
"Why did you do it?" Lauren asked as we tied our small lamp to the gate. "Why give up a crown?"
"Because crowns are heavy," I said. "And because in the end, the only things worth keeping are small and warm. A child's laugh. A bowl of rice for someone you love. A lamp so you can find your way home."
She put her palm on my shoulder like a child seeking a story. "Then we will not look back, will we?"
We looked at the lotus pond only twice more: once in a dream, where I saw Millicent's small hand waving; once that evening when we lit the lamp and I felt the talisman's thread in my hand. I set it down on the post. The light trembled and the lantern held.
"Millicent," I whispered to the night, to the lantern, to the talisman, and to the small people walking home, "you will be safe now."
I do not know if those I hurt forgave me. I only know that when the lantern's paper caught the wind and the flame did not die, I felt the palace melt a little further away.
If the world remembers me as a king who punished and then fled, so be it. If the story writes me down as a man who lost and then chose a different losing—that will do. In the south, Lauren eats my portions and still hides me the best pieces. We plant a tiny lotus in our pond and hang a lamp each new year. I keep the talisman inside the hairpin she wears on her head.
"Do you regret?" she asked me once under the lantern flood, while children made lights like a small sea.
"Only sometimes," I said. "At dusk, when the pond is quiet, I regret I cannot change what happened there. But then a small hand pats my shoulder and someone calls me by a name that is not a title. That is enough."
The lantern buzzed soft and constant. I keep it lit.
The End
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