Revenge12 min read
The Palace That Loved Me and Tried to Break Me
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They said my mother was kept because she was beautiful.
"She was a treasure taken," people would murmur behind curtained doors. "A danger."
I was born into that danger. I grew into it the way ivy grows into stone—without asking. I have my mother's face. I have her fate.
"Jana," the servants whispered when I passed the hallways. "Princess—"
"Call me Jana," I told them once. "Not princess."
They would never obey that request for long. Nobility sticks. Titles clamp down like rings.
When the palace gates cracked and the cry of change rolled through the courtyards, I did not run.
"Leave," I told the girls who tended my hair. "Go. The palace cannot die because I stay."
"Princess—"
"Go."
They fled in a tumble of skirts and soft footsteps. I unfastened my hair, let it fall like a dark curtain, and put on simple mourning. The crown, the jeweled pins—gone. I sat at the center of the great hall like a statue of grief. The new dawn would make me no longer a princess.
"Do not humiliate me," I heard the thought like a prayer. I had learned that humiliation becomes rumor, and rumor becomes a rope.
I lifted the sword my mother had used the day she could no longer stand living there. I raised it to my throat.
"Die with me," I promised the empty hall.
A sound of armor on stone stopped me. A hand struck my wrist; the sword clattered away.
"Princess," a voice said, steady and rough. "I have come late."
He bled at the temple; his armor was the dark of coal and iron. Up close he smelled of cold wind and metal, a scent I would come to hate and remember.
"Who are you?" I asked, angry at being stopped.
"Orlando Hussein," he said, and knelt before me with a swagger that said he had not learned shame.
"Orlando," I repeated, and my mind—always foolish for names—filed him away.
He was the nephew of the great general who had once loved my mother. The general had died in grief when the emperor stole my mother away. People had expected the general to slice the palace down. They did not know how grief makes a man hollow instead of furious.
"Princess, you are beautiful like your mother," Orlando said, and the words were both hook and poison.
I did not expect him to be the one with the spear in hand when the palace fell. I did not expect him to take a crown.
He said, "I came late," and later he said, "I came to keep you."
He kept me in a gilded cage.
"Get up," he would say, and I would not move. The first time he touched my cheek, so rough that it left an ache, I slapped him.
"You insolent child," he laughed and brought his fingers to the bruise as if to read a map.
"Watch your hand," I said. "You would make yourself a villain before a court."
"Better to be villain and have you than be hero and lose you," he said.
He had a habit of breathing the air around me as if it were his prize.
"Orlando," I spat once. "You stole my mother. You unmade a man. You took everything that had held me."
He tilted his head like someone listening to a bird. "She loved him before. She loved you. Now she is gone. Be mine," he said, as though the world were a market where people are simply goods to be bought.
He planted himself in my palace. He called his court to mine. He wore the sun on his chest and offered me the moon in cups.
"Stay with me," he said one night, speaking close enough that the heat of his breath smelled of wine. "Stay and be mine."
"Never," I said. "If you wanted me, you should have taken me whole. Instead you took pages and leaves. You will not have my heart."
He smiled as if he had not heard. He took more than he said. He promised safety and delivered cages. He whispered of beauty and fed me with commands.
"You are a princess," he told his ministers. "A jewel of the old dynasty. Preserve her. Let her loved things remain."
"Are those words comfort?" I asked when he fed me a cup meant to calm the body.
"It is care," he said, and then pressed the cup to my lips himself. "Drink."
I learned how to taste betrayal in honey.
Once, he brought me to the prison yards where the ruined blood of the old court still hung in the corners. My brother—Bruno Diaz—sat like a man whose light had been burned out. He had the eyes of a man who had been awake to cruelty too many nights.
"Jana," he said when I found him. His voice had the soft strength of bone. "You look like her."
"Don't call me that," I breathed. "Call me Jana."
"You are my sister," he said simply. "Stay alive. Live for what remains."
He was the kind soul—my brother in the old line who never sought the crown for himself but who could shoulder it if the world asked him. He would later be the only man who softened my anger. For now, his words were a balm.
"You will not let them," I said.
"I cannot keep you safe if you choose to die," Bruno replied.
He is the kind of man who will caryte heavy things quietly, and that quiet made room for plans.
Orlando was not blind to my alliances. He used them like wedges.
"Let them speak," he said once, twining a red gem in my hair. "Let them think they may take you. You'll always be mine."
He made me wear jewels of my mother's as if they were chains.
"Why do you wear her things?" I asked him once when he pressed a jade pin to my brow.
"Because you are like her," Orlando said. "And because things of beauty belong with beauty."
I loathed him more with every syllable.
Sometimes, in the hush after he left, a different hand would bring me notes. Small, furious, loving lines written by a man named Gatlin Vargas. He was of the chancellor's line, the one sent to the long southern marches. Gatlin's letters were brief and brilliant like sparks.
"If you go tonight, you will reach the ash grove," one letter said. "If you go, take Kendra."
Kendra—my old maid—had grown up with me. She had been a simple servant who learned the weight of a sword. She had steel under the soft skin. She had the old promise of the general's coaching. When she moved, she became a shadow that saved my life.
"Did you betray him?" I asked Kendra once when she whispered of soldiers to come.
"No," she said, as she had for years. "I followed the man who kept me fed. Then I followed the woman I loved."
"You love me?"
She laughed—there is no word for that laugh. "You are the thing I have sworn to keep. Titles be damned."
Gatlin, Bruno, Grady Franklin—our general to the field—moved like secret currents under the surface. They made plans while Orlando drank.
"Tomorrow," Gatlin told me low. "We will take the smaller gate. The east battalion is loyal to me. We will not burn the people. We will take the palace with hands not meant to be cruel."
"Promises ease me," I said. "I'll do as you tell. I will not be bait."
Later, the day of the ceremony came. He had me changed into silk that felt like it weighed as much as guilt. He placed a heavy crown upon my brow. "You are mine in name," he told the court. "Let the sun mark this union."
I laughed, softly, because laughter is a small rebellion.
Outside the palace, the plan unfurled like a map. Gatlin's men took up position. Bruno stood with his small band by the old archway. Grady had his banners. The people were still uncertain; some believed in Orlando's promises. Others only wanted an end to blood.
"Move," Gatlin hissed. "Now."
The first clatter of steel was like thunder. The crowd pressed in, voices rivering. I stood at the center and watched the world shape itself into fight and fear.
"Jana," Bruno said, and his voice was the same as when we were children, and he tried to hide the tremor. "Go."
"I will not run," I said.
His hand gripped mine. "Then be smart."
The first wave crashed. Men fell. The guard who had once been my father's stood with a lowered sword and a face vacant with loss. We had friends and traitors; in a single breath the palace became a field.
Orlando walked through the smoke as if through sunlight, hair messy, smile creased into something like patience. He knelt before me then and touched my jaw.
"Your face is bloody," he said softly.
"Get away from me," I said, though the phrase was not what I meant.
He looked up at me and the smile shifted to something that looked like real pain. "Do you remember when you hit me the first time?"
I did. I had slapped him for how he stroked my cheek. He had bristled then, grand and offended. He wore offended like a cloth. "Yes," I said.
He held my eyes. The battle roared like a sea. Men cried for mercy, men cursed the gods, and children shouted from a distance.
"Jana," he whispered, "if you will not be my queen, be my death."
He lunged before I could think. My hands moved like heat memory. I had kept a small knife hidden in the hem of my sash for nothing at all. The blade found its way between his armor and flesh. It did not go clean—hall blades never do—but it went in.
He laughed.
"You think this will make you free?" he said, one hand sinking into the floor. Blood slicked the stone like a traitor's map.
"Do you know what you are?" I said. "You call it love, Orlando. You call it devotion. This is the same word people use for chains."
He coughed, a sound half choke, half amusement. "You think you can take my life and change the world?"
"You will bleed," I said.
He fell then, but not all men fall like quiet lamps. He fell like a king who has been given the right to scream.
"Gather!" he croaked.
Soldiers surged. The battle tilted. Gatlin's line broke and reformed. Grady drove men like a plow. Bruno cut a path.
There, on the stone, Orlando pressed a hand to his chest and stared at me as if I were suddenly a portrait.
"You... will not find peace," he said. "You will never forgive me."
"I didn't ask to forgive," I whispered. "I just asked to be left alone."
He closed his eyes, and for a breath the palace fell silent. Then a thousand people were suddenly the court I had always feared—soldiers, cooks, old maids who had once tucked my hair, scribes, men in silk, boys with drums—faces pressed to the yard.
"Look," someone said. "She did it."
"You brutes," hissed a woman I later learned was Frida Albert, Orlando's mother. "You made us prisoners."
"Is he dead?" someone else cried.
Orlando's face shifted—first indignation, then disbelief, then a flaring of denial. He spat blood and his eyes swam like a man catching his own reflection for the first time. "No," he whispered. "No. I am the sun."
"Aren't you?" someone mocked from the ranks. "The sun looks dim now."
He tried to speak grandly. "This means nothing—"
Around him, men who had followed him for bread and glory looked away. The ones who had loved the idea of his strength now weighed the cost.
"Lady," Bruno called from the broken line, voice thundered over men. "Hold him. Do not let them take him."
I had no plan to hold him. I had knife on bone and a heart hollow as a drum. But I was tired of ceremonies. I dragged his body away from the tide of soldiers, and for a moment every face in the yard pressed inward.
"Behold," someone whispered. "The princess who killed the king."
500+ words of punishment scene — the crowd part:
They pulled him up onto the stone dais as if making a show. Men who had once sworn fealty now stood with their helmets in their hands. Women who had once sewn him his banners muttered. The priests ceased their prayers. The market sellers in the square below the palace watched, their carts forgotten, bread cooling. Children clung to mothers' skirts and pointed. The city itself seemed to lean in to witness the fall.
"Look at him," Bruno said, voice thin as glass. "Look at what he used to be and what he has become."
Orlando's face, half wet with blood, tried to form the Emperor's smile—calm, assured, above all. At first his pride hardened him. He licked his lips and laughed, a rough brittle sound. "I am wronged," he said. "You will see the line of prophecy wronged."
"Prophecy?" scoffed a scarred sergeant at the edge, a woman who had seen too much to be moved by tales. "You moved armies for your pride."
He tried to grasp for old power—shouts ran down the crowd like wind through flutes.
"You traitor," the man nearest him spit. "You set brothers against brothers for your vanity!"
Orlando's eyes flickered. He smiled then in a way that made the cold run down one's back—an act of a man realizing his pantomime was over. "You will not stand," he said. "They will fall at my name."
Faces hardened. A thin girl who had once poured his wine—Bianca Durand, I later learned, the mother's rival—stared at him like one who had had every family member she loved taken. Her knuckles were white; she spat and turned her face away. "You are a beast," she muttered.
He shifted. The earlier arrogance curdled into fear. His mouth worked in denial. He tried to call for someone, any name that might bring a hand to his rescue. "You cannot do this. You are a child."
"I am not a child," I said, and the voice came like a bell. "And you are not a king."
The first crack in his demeanor was a small, human thing: a tremor in his jaw. Denial slid into bargaining. "I will pay," he offered suddenly. "I will return the lands. I will—"
"You stole her," cried a woman whose son had died at the first edict. "You took what was not yours."
"Spare him," a few timid voices pleaded. "Let the law decide."
Law had been hollowed by Orlando's hand a thousand days ago. There was no law left that could be trusted to be fair. But the crowd had its own hunger for reckoning.
"Bring chains!" someone barked. "Hang him at the gate, let the city remember."
No. This was not what I wanted. I wanted him to feel the public shame, the looks, the small wires of disgust that go through a man to the heart. I wanted him to watch the faces of every person he had used, and let them be his mirror.
He turned his eyes to me, and they were suddenly small and mortal. "Jana," he whispered. "You have killed me in pieces."
"See how you flinch," I said. "See how you are no longer sunlight."
The crowd, sensing the change, shifted from fury to a cold quiet feast of satisfaction. They hissed when a courtier tried to name him a wronged sovereign. Children chimed in with a jeering call. The priests looked on with folded lips. Orlando, who had stood at the center of so many tables and had recollected so many crowns, shrank beneath their gaze.
He tried to rise in words again. "I loved you. I—"
"Love kills," a woman murmured, and it landed like a stone.
"Don't speak for me," I said. He was a man of many masks, and one by one the crowd watched them lift to reveal nothing but bone and the rust of an ambition that devoured men like him.
Finally, when he hiccupped and stammered as one dying from fever, the soldiers stripped him of his finery. They placed simple cords on him, and the city hissed with a thousand private triumphs. He was displayed like a trophy no longer bright.
At last he broke into tears.
At first, they were not prayers. Then the change happened—denial, rage, bargaining, then tears that were the sound of a shell cracking. He was a man whose world had been made of crowns and commands. Stripped, he found his hands empty. The crowd watched him, not with mercy and not with help, but with the hard satisfaction of witnesses who had seen a fat thing fall. His face changed from mockery to a child's panic, as if he had been caught naked under a harsh and honest sun.
"Help me," he begged at the end, and no one did. If there was any kindness left among them, it was swallowed by the rightness of his ruin.
After the yard emptied, after the lines were drawn and the banners folded, I walked away from the dais. People would speak of it for years: how the girl with her mother's face stood at the center and put a blade through the tyrant's armor. They would tell it as justice, as an accident of war, as fate. Each telling would ration the cruelty in small, more bearable pieces.
But I had done it because I could not bear him. I had done it because the palace had been a cage for my mother, and for me. I had done it because he had touched me like violence and called it devotion. I had done it so that I could stop pretending I could live under his glare.
In the days that followed, there was a kind of washing. Bruno took on the stern task of rebuilding what could be rebuilt. Gatlin returned to his post, leaving me messages only he could take back and forth. Kendra—my shadow—stayed, though she was not mine. She had her orders from a token that Orlando had once given her as a child of the guard. She kept me alive.
"Where will you go?" Bruno asked me once when the city had quieted and the smell of smoke still clung to the corner stones.
"Anywhere," I said. "Everywhere."
He laughed softly. "You have a habit of running."
"So do you," I said. "You always come back."
"Then come with me," he offered. "Or leave the palace for what it is and don't look back."
"Will you promise to keep that vow?" I asked.
"I will," he said.
We left the court to its own ghosts. Maki Barnett—the woman who had become queen—left me a token. "You have what is yours," she said and pressed a red jade pin into my hand. "Leave when you must."
"Why help me?" I asked once, because she had less reason to care for me than any of them.
She smiled with a politeness that could kill. "Because some things are wrong, and some remedies are worse. I do not wish to be one of those remedies."
Bianca Durand, the mother who had once loathed me for my lineage and for my presence, passed by in the markets later with a look that had been carved into patience. She had wanted me dead in the name of state. She had not gotten her wish; the world had found another way.
Kendra told me of a place outside the city: a house in the south with cherry trees, where letters were kept on a shelf and wind loosened paper into the sky. Gatlin took me there once, after the dust had settled and the small wars had been catalogued.
"You will burn them," Gatlin said.
"Burn them," I told him.
We sat at a lake, and I watched willow catkins float like soft mistakes. Gatlin watched me with a tenderness that was not his to give, but he gave it anyway.
"Do you regret it?" he asked, sober and slow.
"I regret nothing in the way you mean," I said. "I regret the soft things that were broken. I regret the people who believed him. I regret the moments I will never get back. But I do not regret cutting his reach."
He nodded as a man who had known men like Orlando.
In the end, I walked south with Bruno and Gatlin at my side for a while. I walked until the palace shrank to a seam behind me. Spring came, and I stood among sailboats in rain, and the smell of willow and wet stone was new.
"Are you going back?" Gatlin asked.
"No," I said. "Tell Bruno he need not watch over me with a hard hand. Tell him to live. Tell him to keep his crown if fate gives it. Leave me a place in the letters and do not write me names that try to bind."
Gatlin laughed once. "You never stop giving orders."
"Someone has to," I said.
We burned the letters. The ash scattered into the river. Someone asked me then, a simple man with wood-smelling hands, "Why burn memories?"
"Because I can," I said. "Because some things must be forgiven with fire."
The years roll, and sometimes I think I see a dark man at the edge of a crowd. I tighten my hand on a sleeve and tell myself I am seeing ghosts. Once, I thought I saw Orlando on the banks of a river—a flash of old coat and the echo of a laugh. It was nothing.
But I keep a small jade, warm from palm and like the ones he once gave. Kendra tells me it came from him and that he wrote me every day in case one day he would not be him anymore. She says he kept writing until the ink ran out of his bravery.
"Burn them," I said.
And I did.
The End
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