Revenge17 min read
The Magnolia Earrings and the Price of a Crown
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I remember the first time I heard the words that changed my life.
"You, go away," she said, standing with that same insolent tilt of chin she'd always had.
I lifted my skirt as I stepped into the carriage and smiled at her, calm as a coin. "Sorry. This seat is taken."
"What a game," someone nearby breathed.
"Isn't it?" I answered, because I had been playing it for ten years.
"Lenora, are you sure about this?" one of the ladies asked, voice small.
"I'm certain," I said.
"I'm Lenora Sims," I told the court later, when asked my name. I said it like a vow.
They called me the household's raised daughter, the daughter given back to life by a lord who had taken pity on a starving girl from the flood. Denali James, the Marquis, always said it with grand pride, as if a title could replace the graves he had left behind.
"You were saved by me," he told me the night I first knelt before him. "I gave you a name and a home."
"You gave me life," I said, and it was true and false at once.
"Good," he laughed then, loud enough for the officers to hear. "Ten years of grooming, and one day the prince will choose—"
"Will choose?" I corrected him in my head. "He will choose what I let him choose."
"You bow your head well," the steward murmured as he laid the magnolia earrings into a silk box. "They suit you."
"They belong to another," I said, but I put them on. I learned that night that I could wear someone else’s history and make it mine.
"Does she know how to smile like that?" somebody asked in a low voice that carried.
"I taught her," Denali said. "Use what you are given, girl."
I had learned to take what I needed.
"Do you know Giuliana Ali?" the prince asked me, once, watching me with that slow, careful attention princes reserve for possessions and puzzles both.
"I do not," I said.
"She has a lotus-shaped birthmark between her brows," he mused. "Funny how a thing like that can change a face."
"Some faces are spared nothing," I said lightly. "Besides, if she knew how handsome you are, she would not avoid you."
His laugh was quiet, bright. "You are brave."
"Enough to die?" I asked.
"Not for the right reasons," he said.
He said it and then watched me. He watched like a man learning a landscape he might one day own.
"She and I look a lot alike," Denali used to tell anyone who would listen. "The gods pity me."
"You owe me nothing," I told him once. "Save your pity."
"Good," he said.
By the time the spring banquet came, the prince had noticed me. For a long while he looked at the wrong woman in the wrong way, at a portrait he had made of a girl who never had to bargain for her place. For a long while I let him have that portrait.
"Try the chestnut in the chicken stew," he encouraged, placing a morsel before me. "It's from the imperial chef."
"I prefer my chestnuts without chicken," I replied.
He blinked and then smiled in a way I kept because it was my proof. "You and she are the same even in tastes."
The servants had been paid well to know what the other girl liked. I had memorized habits as if they were my prayers.
"How clever you are," he said once, and I almost believed him.
"Do not let talk hurt you, child," Denali would say when gossip ran like vermin through the lanes. "Let them bark."
"They bark a lot," I answered.
"Goddess of the magnolia," one of the dowagers said once at a feast, eyeing the simple jade magnolia my prince had sent. "You are modest."
"Modesty is easier when people hand you jewels," I said.
She laughed. "You would make a good daughter to anyone."
"If I am to be owned," I told Denali in private, "I would rather own what must be owned."
"Good," he said again.
Giuliana Ali watched us at the old dowager's poetry night and saw me gather the praise that had once been hers. When she said, loud enough for every guest to hear, "Those earrings are his gift," I bowed and smiled and did not take them off.
"You keep it?" she asked, finally meeting my eyes.
"Of course," I said, because I would not give the prince another reason to look away.
"You wore it like you were meant," someone whispered. "Who could fault a pretty replacement?"
"I am not a replacement," I told the sky that night, and the stars did not answer.
"She is a painted deer," Giuliana would say later, once her vanity had warmed to fury. "She is cheap."
"Giuliana," the aunt said, hands folded. "You are too proud. Humility is a shield."
"Humility won't have you crowned," Giuliana replied, and pride flared in her like a match tossed into straw.
"So," the aunt said, amused. "Let us see who is more useful."
"You smile easily," the prince told me once as he handed me a jade bracelet. "You are like a spring hill."
"Then let me be that hill," I said.
"Will you be mine?" he asked, mostly with curiosity.
"I would be equal parts yours and his," I said, hiding the knife in the fold of my voice.
"You smell of sea-salt and old ink," he said once, when he came to the hall and found me painting a small harvest scene. "Who taught you the strokes?"
"Life," I answered. "And practice."
"Show me," he said, and I handed him a brush, the world shifting, a small step at a time.
"You must learn to speak to the emperor," Denali told me before the final trial. "Say the right things. Remember the gods. Remember the family."
"I will speak what suits me," I said.
"Ten years of planning," Denali declared. "We will have our day."
"Ten years of practice," I thought. "We will have what I choose."
"What would you give up for him?" the emperor asked, later, quietly, eyes steel-bright.
"Everything, Your Majesty," I answered.
"Everything?" he repeated.
"Everything," I bowed, with both the truth and the lie in my mouth.
The prince watched while I knelt. He was silent, then he smiled. "You know how to speak in the right tone," he said.
"Does that mean I will stay?" I asked.
"If I do not want you gone," he said.
He leaned forward and offered me a bracelet, a pale band of carved white jade. "Only one of these exists," he murmured.
I accepted it like a sacrament.
After that, the world narrowed to the slow burn of court, the quiet quivers underneath velvet campaigns. Giuliana grew smaller in her smiles and sharper in her claws.
"She takes too many liberties," Giuliana hissed to me once at the lakeside while paper kites bobbed overhead. "You think you can just be me and take my part."
"I thought we were sisters," I told her. "You told me you would defend me."
"You are a thief," she spat.
"Then let the court decide," I said, and watched the light slide off her face like a blade.
The ice incident was an accident the way a set story can be an accident. She invited me to the frozen lake. She danced. She pulled me out to the center. She spun me until the ice cracked.
"Help!" she cried, fake and theatrical.
"You'll perish," she whispered to the prince later, and I let him see me fall.
I fell like a puppet cut loose. I grabbed a chunk of ice and clung to it until help came. It was the one time the prince came running without the restraint of duty.
"Lenora!" he called, breathless.
"He'll always come," I thought, and then I slid into the cold and bowed my head.
The cold was a confessional. I woke on Denali's floor with his hands like anchors and the prince beside me.
"Thank you," I said to the prince, and he took my hand like a lifeline.
"I should not have let you go," he said. "Did Giuliana—"
"She wanted me gone," I cut him off. "But she did not succeed."
"You should not face this alone," he murmured.
"Then stay," I said.
"Will you?" he asked, with the smallest falter I had heard from him.
"I will," I said, and the lean world shifted.
She came to me, sobbing once, then contrite, and I let her.
"You're my sister," she said, and I believed nothing in her voice.
"You say you will tell him the truth," I allowed. "Show the prince what you feel."
"I will," she said, and I watched her move with the practiced grace of the spoiled.
She tried to be good. She failed. She tried to write letters on my behalf and then wrote letters to Denali instead. She tried to be useful and could not be sincere.
"Do you know what she did?" Giuliana asked the prince one night, with the doe eyes turned to bait.
"She saves me from loneliness," he said softly.
"Would you let her betray you?" Giuliana demanded, and the prince's face tightened into stone.
He had loved Giuliana once the way a man loves an unreachable star—worshipful, from far off. But stars are cold. I warmed the bed.
"Disloyalty is worse than death," Giuliana told a servant once, swearing to dismantle me piece by piece.
"I will not be dismantled," I answered.
When the official lists came out, both our names were on them. The court was a tight orchard of knives ready to drop. I wore the magnolia earrings again and kept the white jade bracelet that declared ownership.
"Why would you wear them?" Giuliana asked, eyes flashing.
"They were his gift," I said, and the way I said it made the room quiet.
"I will make you pay," she warned.
"You can try," I replied.
On the day of the final trial, we stood before the emperor and the assembled household, exquisitely arranged like chess pieces. I told them the truth I had prepared.
"You can give up everything?" the Emperor asked.
"Yes," I said.
"And your feelings?" he queried.
"I pledge," I answered.
The prince was near, steady as a stone holding the tide.
"Will you be my wife?" he asked, later, in the private dark, where words become promises.
"I will try to be less a weapon," I said.
"You are not a weapon," he said then, with a tenderness that surprised me. "You are my choice."
It was one thing to be chosen; another to be trusted.
Soon Denali was made to march away with his banners and then, like a bad play, he did not return. The army he took was surrounded by men who once marched at their call. The houses that had supported him trembled when the Emperor's orders came down like wet clay.
"Traitor," the newsmen shouted. "Treason!"
"I did what I had to," I told myself.
When his courier came and Denali was taken, I watched him in the great hall below the palace, shackled and thin, and I felt the slow, steady turn of justice.
"You were a father to me," I told him in the cell where they placed us both—he in chains, I in silk.
"Only because you were useful," he sneered.
"I thank you for nothing," I said calmly. "You wanted power. You took it by paying bribes, by withholding help in the famine, by hoarding grain you were supposed to distribute. You stripped villages bare. My village—my family—died because of men like you."
He laughed then, a sound like old armor. "And you?"
"I learned from those who had less," I said. "I learned how to survive. I learned how to be dangerous."
His laugh stopped.
They brought us out into the open courtyard for a reading of charges. The emperor had decreed that traitors would be shamed publicly. They filled the square with townspeople, with soldiers, with scribes and ladies who had once courted favor with Denali.
"Denali James, you stand accused of betraying the crown, of hoarding relief payments, of collaboration with foreign merchants—"
"And of endangering the lives of the people under your command," someone shouted.
Denali turned his head, and his eyes found mine. For the first time in ten years, the proud carriage of his posture cracked.
"You fed me," he said to the crowd. "I raised her!"
"Raised her to be your mask," I said, voice even. "You used her to walk into the palace and hide what you were doing."
I could feel the crowd shift like a sea. "You claim to love your people, yet--"
"You fed me," Denali repeated, with a desperate accuracy. "You would not stand there like this if it were not for me."
"Bring forward the witnesses," the governor shouted.
They did. Families of fishermen, widows from the flood, men who carried Denali's banners and later found their villages emptied, stepped forward. One after another they told of soldiers who had been ordered away while the countryside burned, of requisitioned grain that never reached the sacks it was meant for, of bribes.
"Did you see this?" a woman from a hill shouted. "Did you see Denali's men at the storehouse when the carts were taken out?"
"Yes," the soldier said. "They counted the coin."
A young mother held up the tattered swaddling of a child lost in the mudslide. "My son was hungry," she said. "He is gone. He is the face of what you did."
Denali's face went from contempt to sharp fear.
"Is the Marquis's guilt proven by stories?" he snarled. "You tell lies!"
"Where are the records?" Denali demanded. "Where is the proof?"
"Here," I said, and stepped forward. "The ledger you thought burned—was kept in a hollowed beam. I smuggled a page out when I swept your study every week. I kept it because I was raised by those who do not forget."
Gasps rose like a wind. "You hid evidence," someone murmured.
"I have letters," another witness said, producing slips in trembling hands. Denali had written and ordered. He had arranged for supplies to be diverted. He had whispered with merchants who had shipped supplies abroad.
"You... you blackguard," Denali said, shaking.
"Shall we read them?" the governor asked.
They read. The crowd listened like a tide hearing a bell. Denali's name echoed in accusation, the ledger gave numbers, the letters gave signatures.
"You who loved to boast of your generosity," I said, voice sharp. "Look at what you did. Look at what your 'gifts' cost."
Denali turned to the people, to the ladies who once embroidered his cuffs, to the soldiers who had marched with him.
"Is it true?" a young officer asked, not daring to voice the question.
"It is true," the woman said. "We were hungry; you promised grain."
Denali's eyes were strips of ice. "I did what I had to."
"You starved them," I said. "You starved them to line your pockets."
He tried to twist the story, to say that the rebels had taken grain, that weather had ruined plans, that the emperor had lain blame unfairly.
"No," I said. "You took what was entrusted to you. You sold their bread. You sent men into battle unprepared. You spat on their faces and counted coins."
"Enough!" Denali roared.
The people laughed then, a brittle, dangerous sound. "We fed them!" cried one of the gathered. "We did what we could. But you? You hid, and you took."
Denali's face crumpled between rage and the sudden, cold knowledge that no one would speak for him. "You are my daughter!" he bellowed, a last flailing scrap of claim.
"I am the woman you used," I answered. "And I am the one who named you an enemy."
"Traitor!" he screamed.
"Look at him," I said, and the crowd moved, pressing closer. "Former marquis, hollowed by greed."
"You planted me like a token," Denali snarled. "You played your part and now you mock me in my shame."
"I taught you how to count," I said. "You taught me how to survive. The difference is I never took bread meant for others."
He lunged as if to strike me, but the soldiers held him. He shook, his chest heaving. The armor of his pride slipped. He looked smaller, suddenly human—afraid and useless in the face of the people he had betrayed.
"Your men—" he tried to bargain, but there were no men left who would bargain for him.
"He is going to be taken to the eastern tower," the governor declared. "He will be held for trial and for the families to see."
"Have mercy," Denali begged. "I served the realm."
"Mercy?" I echoed. "You show no mercy for those who died under your orders."
A woman in the crowd stepped forward and, her voice like a bell, said, "We want him publicly shamed, so no other lord will follow him."
So they bound his crest and hung his banner on the gallows poles, shreds of a great house turned to rags in one morning.
They made him walk past those whose children had died because of his greed. They made the governor read the ledger out loud in the square, names and numbers exposed, coin counts that sounded like curses when repeated.
Denali's expression changed as each witness spoke. It moved from arrogance to disbelief, to denial, to a wounded entreaty, and finally to collapse.
"Forgive me," he whispered, two words the size of a child's request.
"Do you think you can buy forgiveness with words?" the mother shouted.
"No," he said, and the words finally matched his fate.
The crowd turned on him, faces hard. The nobleman fell into himself like a ruined statue. The very servants who had once curtsied spat and turned away. Men who had once saluted him now pointed, some gesturing with contempt, some with the clear, cold satisfaction of men seeing a predator caught.
"Look at him," a child called out. "He is small."
Denali flinched, a thin, broken sound leaving him, as if his grandeur had been carved away.
They took him then to the eastern tower, not to some secret execution with velvet drapery but to a place where people could see the fall of a man who had once had everything. The governor decreed that his belongings be auctioned, the money returned where possible. The banners would be burned.
"My lord!" someone wailed. "You built houses—"
"And you broke lives," I answered.
He begged for more time, for a hearing, for the Emperor's mercy. No one listened.
Giuliana's punishment was different. She was a woman of beauty; her fall had to be visible where gossip gathered—on stages and in courts, where reputations are currency.
They led Giuliana into the court one bright morning with the windows open to the city. The prince stood near me, eyes like a man's, clarity steeled by the damage she had attempted.
"Giuliana Ali," the court announced, "you stand accused of attempting to discredit the crown's chosen—"
"She tried to drown me," I said, because her crime was not a single blow but the steady, jealous attempt to take a life that had been given to me.
"She schemed to remove a rival who had done her no mortal harm, and in doing so endangered the prince's heir apparent and the peace of the court," the governor read.
Giuliana tried to make a face—shock, then anger, then wounded dignity.
"You called her sister," one of the dowagers cried out. "You offered to protect her."
"I told the prince the truth!" Giuliana sobbed. "I did not—"
"You pushed her into the lake," one of the palace guards said bluntly. "We saw you near the edge."
"You plotted with merchants and letters," I said.
Giuliana's laughter now sounded like a bird trying to sing with a broken wing. "You think you are pure, Lenora? You wear my face."
"Do I?" I answered. "I wear his care."
"She tried to make me look like an impostor!" Giuliana cried, and she waved her hands in desperation.
"Step closer," the prince said, quiet but unyielding.
She stepped, brave in her fear, defiant enough for a moment. The court watched as the prince unfolded a set of letters.
"These are yours, Giuliana," he said. "You wrote them to Denali."
She paled. "I—people write many things."
"These are offers," the prince continued. "Offerings of aid in exchange for certain privileges. You asked Denali to place you in favorable light. You threatened to ruin Lenora to attain rank."
Giuliana's eyes flashed poison. "I only wanted him to see reason."
"By setting me into the ice?" I asked.
Her hands shook. "I never thought you would die."
"You didn't think at all," I said.
Giuliana looked smaller than she had ever looked. Her support in the court had collapsed—some had once flattered her; some once hoped to use her name for advantage. Now they turned their heads.
"Do you ask the prince for forgiveness?" the governor asked.
"If I sought forgiveness, who would speak for me?" Giuliana cried.
"Do you have friends?" someone muttered.
"No," she admitted in a thin voice.
"Then stand," the governor said. "You are stripped of your petitions for favor. Your household is put under watch. You will be made to do public service in the hospitals and granaries you once scorned. You will feed the very hands you used to take."
Giuliana tried to fling her head up, tried to seize dignity, but the court's laughter was a net.
"Let this be a lesson," the governor said. "If you aim at the chosen, you risk losing your place entirely."
Giuliana's face collapsed into a ruin of tears and pleading. The prince watched with an expression older than the years he had.
"Do you regret what you did?" he asked her.
"I regret nothing," she said, the lie like acid.
"You have much to learn," he said, voice iron. "And much to do to prove remorse."
The crowd's reaction was sharp. Some clucked, some stared with the cold fascination of an audience watching a play.
"She loses rank," one of the dowagers whispered. "She is disgraced."
"She is given work," another corrected. "She will see what it is to serve."
Giuliana's silver spoons, her fine robes, were taken. She was sent to tend at the granary on market days, to stand with the very families she had looked down upon. She had to hand out bread with hands that once toyed with lace. Her fall would be watched and chronicled.
"Do not look for pity," I said to her as the procession moved. "You made your choices."
"Lenora—" she reached for me.
"Do not touch me," I said. "You used me."
The prince's hand rested against my back then, sure and solid. He had seen the maze of plots and chosen me for what I had done and who I was. He had seen my past, my lies, my schemes. He saw that I had fought for something beyond personal triumph: for the memory of those buried because of men like Denali.
"He will not fail you," he whispered.
"No," I answered. "I will not fail him."
In the months that followed, Denali's trial unfolded under the open sky, with the masses in the square, the ledger read line by line, the soldiers who had marched under him testifying. He shrank under the weight of the words, from the boastful man who had once bargained in marble to a chastened figure who could not buy his way back.
He tried to bargain still. "You must consider," he hissed in the tower, the voice small. "All I know—"
"You know how to take," I said. "You know how to make sure the hungry have nothing. That is all you know."
He begged the emperor for leniency. "I built markets," he said. "I defended the border."
"You defended your own coin," I answered.
"No one defended for me," he argued. "You were my daughter."
"You were my jailer in a house of pity," I said. "And now you are a prisoner of your deeds."
At the end, when men who had watched him rise watched him fall, Denali pressed his palms to his face and found nothing. The soldiers who had once followed his banners stood and turned their backs. The nobles who had once courted him stayed away.
When the sentence came, it was not the quick justice of the pit they use for brigands. It was the slow stripping of power: titles revoked, lands returned, banners burned, accounts opened. The public saw the money Denali had spirited away flow back into the treasuries he had robbed. Families received pouches that would never replace the lives they had lost, but would at least buy a season of bread.
Denali's end was not theatrical; it was the long, quiet drain of respect and the realization of solitude in a life once loud. He tried to say, "You used me. You turned me in," but the words fell flat. He had used me first.
"Did you think I'd be merciful?" he whispered once in the corridor.
"I thought you might be humane," I said. "You were neither."
He collapsed then into his own rage, and the guards led him away.
From that day forward, the public no longer had illusions about Denali. They knew the price he had charged for his luxuries. They knew the names of the villages he had starved.
Giuliana's fall taught the court tenderness for authenticity. She learned the ache of manual work. She watched hands callous and roughen and realized how often she had sneered at the very people she would now feed.
"Do you regret the arrogance?" I asked her one afternoon, bringing a small cup of soup to the granary.
She stared at the soup like it might be poison. "I regret being exposed," she said, at last.
"Regret is a seed," I replied. "Some people plant it and nothing grows. Others bend it into something else."
She bent, finally, not toward contrition, but to labor. She scrubbed floors and stacked sacks and handed bread to the same families that had once hummed beneath her contempt. Her name lost its gilding. People remembered her as the woman who had tried to drown a rival and then, slowly, as the woman who fed their children.
"Do you watch me?" she asked quietly, once. "Do you watch to see me broken?"
"I watch because I know how much easier it is to be cruel than to be kind," I said. "I want to see if you will learn."
"I will learn," she said.
"Then learn to apologize without strings," I told her. "And do not touch the prince again with lies."
"I will not," she replied.
"Good," I said.
In the quiet of our halls, the prince and I turned from court to family. We spoke in small things. "What will you name him?" he asked one night when the fever had broken and our child slept.
"Shun," I said, feeling the syllable settle. "Shun for smoothness, for the path I wish for him."
"It is good," he said. "May he walk where we can rest."
"He will not have to be brave at the same cost," I whispered.
"You paid the cost enough," he said. "I will protect him."
"I protected the ones who could not protect themselves," I replied. "That is why I will not let him go hungry."
The magnolia earrings hung in a silk box after the storm, folded into quiet. The white jade bracelet remained at my wrist as a tether and a reminder.
"Was any of this worth it?" I asked myself sometimes.
The prince would take my hand and answer as if for both of us. "You made a choice. You saved a thousand women from hunger."
"I saved my family," I said.
"And made the country safer," he replied.
"One man paid for it," I said once, thinking of Denali, thinking of his punishments.
"He paid for his crimes," the prince said firmly. "And we will bury him without honor."
"Then bury him," I said. "But let the gardens be tended."
He smiled, a small, real smile, the one that belonged to us rather than to the crown.
Years later, when the child runs in the garden and presses a wild magnolia blossom to his cheek, I will watch him and remember that winter on the lake and the ledger read in the square.
"Shun," I murmur each time he laughs. "May your path be gentle and straight."
He looks up and laughs back, "Mother, look!"
I look at him, at the magnolia blossoms falling like small pale coins. In the end, I kept the earrings not as proof of favor but as proof of survival.
"Keep them safe," I say to Shun when he is old enough to ask.
"I will," he answers.
And when the court speaks of me in years to come, they will mention the magnolia earrings and the white jade bracelet. They will speak of the house that fell and the woman who stood.
"I am not who I was," I tell the prince sometimes.
"No one remains who they were," he answers. "But you are better."
He says it, and I believe him, for the man I loved and the man who watches our son pick petals knows the truth about me: I was forged by hunger and made strong by choices.
The court still whispers, because courts always whisper, but when I walk past the square where Denali’s banners were burned, women press their hands to their mouths in remembrance and in quiet thanks.
I had wanted revenge, yes. But I found something else—an authority not given by titles, but earned by the people who had lost so much.
"The magnolia earrings," I tell myself, as I close the silk box, "were never the point."
They were a proof that even things meant to be gifts can be turned toward justice.
The End
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