Revenge19 min read
The Pillow, the Pearl, and the Last Promise
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I remember the thunder the night my son stopped breathing.
"I can't—" I tried to hold him upright, whispering nonsense that sounded like a spell. "Elias, don't go. Elias, don't go."
"Bring David!" I screamed until my throat tore. People rushed, lantern light cutting the rain into sharp knives.
"He must come," I begged the eunuchs. "Go—now!"
They ran and did not return with him. They returned with David Armstrong with someone else in his arms—Emerie Espinoza, pale as moonlight, her hair threaded with jasmine. He cradled her the way a man cradles a memory too soft to be set down.
"He stayed with her all night," I heard someone whisper over my shoulder. "He didn't leave her side."
"David," I said when finally he stepped into the room, rain like a scolding on his shoulders. "Elias—"
He took my wrist as though testing a pulse. "Isla, I will make this right."
"Right," I echoed, tasting the word like ash. "Right."
The next morning, the sun came out as if nothing terrible had happened.
1
"It is the Empress Dowager's sixtieth," they told me. "You must be gracious."
"Hannah Adams has been generous," I said, setting a tray on the table. "She raised him, after all."
"Some things cost more than gratitude," Connie Jimenez muttered as she tightened the ribbon on my sleeve.
"Do you think he'll come?" I asked, staring at my reflection in a lacquer bowl.
"He always comes, and he always comes late," Connie said. "But when Emerie arrived—"
"I was a placeholder," I told the carved screen. "I never wanted the palace. David chose me when he had to, maybe because the world told him to. But I took the place because it was my place to keep Elias safe."
On the day of Emerie's elevation, I had a strange urge to make everything beautiful for the ceremony. "If she truly is back for what belongs to her," I told myself, "then I will not bow to fear."
"I will not be a woman who loses her son and nothing else," I whispered, and the silk of my sleeve shivered.
When Emerie appeared at court draped in white silk, she wore a smile that belonged to another life.
"You are beautiful as your name promises," she said to David with the kind of ease I'd never been granted. "You should have chosen me first."
"Do not be insolent," one of the palace ladies tutted.
"Let her taste what she stole," someone else muttered. "She thinks the throne is a thing you can pick up with a pretty bow."
David's eyes slid from her face to mine and back again like a man checking two shadows.
"You will not have my son," I said later when she laughed too loud at a banquet, and she looked at me as if I had spoken a joke.
"Everything that is yours is only borrowed," she said, curling her wineglass. "Someday I'll take back what was mine. David owes me."
"Is that what you call justice?" I asked, and my hand went to the medicine pillow I'd sewn for him—the small, rough thing stuffed with herbs to ease his father's neck. It looked like nothing, but it had been made with my hands.
2
Late that evening, I sat with Elias at the window, teaching him to trace characters with a reed and ink.
"Go play," David said when he came in, voice clipped. "Elias, go out. I have business with your mother."
Elias blinked, uneasy. "Father, you are angry."
"I am not angry at the boy," David said. "But there are debts—"
"Whose debts?" I cut in.
"Some debts can only be paid by giving what you value in the open," he said, eyes narrowing.
"Do you want me to give you what you value?" I laughed then, the sound like glass. "Give me the proof."
Instead of answering, he slapped me once.
The sound was sharp. "You hit me?" I whispered, stunned.
"You touched her," he snapped back, "and I will not have it."
"You tell lies and call them rights," I spat. "You said you would protect us. You promised."
"I promised compensation to Emerie," he said. "You think I do not remember? Your aunt owed her too. We must—"
"So you will hurt your son and call it order." I stood so suddenly the cup rattled.
"Do not speak as if you know the world," he said, pinning me by the shoulder.
I thought about the medicine pillow and the way his neck favored mine when he was sick. "If she harms Elias," I said, "I will not stand by."
He pulled back like I'd surprised him. "Elias is my son too," he said. "I will not let you—"
He left then, with his cloak a dark bird behind him.
3
The palace became a house split into halves. "The Empress sits in one wing, the favorite in another. The emperor visits Emerie and stays, then returns," the maids said, gossiping in the corridors while I wrapped herbs for Elias's pillow.
"They say she smashed a vase in the Empress's chamber," Connie told me.
"Yes," I answered. "One of the old king's pieces. I had placed it there to remind me the past might be more forgiving than the present."
The maids lifted their skirts. "What will you do?"
"Watch," I said. "And keep Elias alive."
When Elias came to me, he asked, "Mother, is she mean?"
"She is only someone who would take and not give," I answered. "But we will be all right."
4
Once, when I entered David's hall with a pillow in my arms, he reached for me and then flinched, as if a distance had grown.
"Isla, you are thinner," he said, and my cheeks warmed, reflexively grateful for what had been.
"Winter makes all of us thin," I murmured. "David, will you ask Emerie to behave?"
He laughed a small, cruel laugh. "Ask my chosen companion to do anything? She has been wronged once. I will not take that from her."
"You tell me I must be patient," I said. "But patience costs Elias heat and laughter and a pocket of peace."
"Do not so loudly accuse your emperor," he warned.
"I'm not asking," I said. "I am telling."
Emerie swept in like a bloom. "My lord, you should come walk with me," she said. "You look dull here."
"Can't you see me?" I said. "Can't you see what you have done?"
"To whom do you speak, Empress?" she asked with a tilt that made me want to break things.
"To the woman who took my home and calls it reparations," I answered.
She gave a little laugh, the kind that made gentle women lean away. "You are funny."
5
The dog. That white dog of hers became a talisman.
"Elias found the dog in the gardens," I said when I found him that night with a scraped hand. "He was chasing it and it bit him."
"Your son is a child," David said. "He plays."
"He is not to be punished for a beast," I said. "Have the dog checked."
When the palace doctor examined the animal, his face changed in a way I would never forget.
"This wound," he said. "Not a child's stone. This is a sharp cut."
All eyes turned to Emerie. "I thought the child was rough," she said, white-lipped. "I would never have meant—"
"Apologize," I said. "Say it."
"I am a noblewoman," she cried. "I do not kneel to children."
"You will apologize," I repeated.
"They said she is above such things," a slave whispered.
I took a ruler from the table—one of those ceremonial things—because sometimes words are soft when the hand wants to be loud.
"Do you want me to count the strikes?" I told Emerie. "Or would you prefer I stop?"
Before I could tell myself not to, my hand rose. The first crack echoed. She fell and screamed, and a dozen attendants reached for us. David's voice was a thunderclap.
"Stop!" he roared, and for a moment his hand was gaunt and shaking with something like pity.
"She lied!" I hissed. "She has been lying all along."
David pulled me away, anger working at his face. "You have crossed a line," he said. "I warned you."
"I crossed it for Elias," I said. "For him."
6
After that night, everything changed. Emerie wrapped herself in feigned hurt and David in shame. "She fainted," he told the palace. "You must have injured her."
"I hold no regret," I told anybody who'd listen. "I will tear down any lie that harms my son."
He started to come less. That was the worst.
"Go," Connie would whisper. "Go to the places where he goes. Watch him."
"I went to the Yao Garden," I told her. "I thought it ours." The Yao Garden—David's constructed spring—was once our island of three: he, Elias, and I. "Now I find them there laughing and toasting, and I find my hand empty."
"You should burn it," Connie said.
"I burned part of it," I admitted. That bitter act gave me a small, shuddering joy when I saw the statues split where my hand and my son's used to touch the bronze. "I freed the part of us that was chained to him."
7
Emerie grew bolder. She trod like a storm through the corridors. She came to the room, cradled her white dog, and flung my handmade medicine pillow on the floor.
"Such a crude thing," she said, kicking the pillow until the herbs fell out like a little black rainfall. "You put such nonsense and call it love."
Connie's face went white. "My lady—"
She laughed. "Isla, you are so amused at your own poverty."
I watched her. My chest tightened. "If you think you can humiliate me in my own home," I said, and then the scissors lay in my hand by chance—an idle instrument for threads.
It should not have happened that way.
I moved without thinking. The dog yelped and then stopped. Blood spread like an insane star on the white fur.
"Isla!" someone screamed. "Isla, what have you done?"
Emerie staggered, eyes open, and then suddenly there was shouting at the gate: "The Emperor!"
She threw herself at David and buried her face in his chest.
"She tried to kill me," she sobbed. "She tried to kill me!"
"You are mad," David said to me, fury finally shedding restraint.
"Mad? I am mourning a son," I said.
He grabbed the shredded pillow and recognized the herbs. "This pillow—"
I threw it at his feet. "Keep your pillow. Keep her. Keep the dog you loved. Leave."
8
After that, things escalated. I forbade him my bed. He found his own company more comfortable—Emerie's eyes like knives across diplomacy.
"You're making enemies," the courtiers said. "You should bow."
"What would you have me bow to?" I asked. "A woman who stole nights and laughs? A man who lets it happen?"
The Empress Dowager called me to her chamber one night and scolded me to think of the clan.
"Hannah," I said. "What has your favor given me? It bought me a husband who forgets his promises."
"You are a symbol of our house's power," she reminded me. "Comport yourself."
"I will keep Elias," I whispered. "That is all."
9
Ramon Marshall—the border prince, my friend—brought me a present one day: a pearl the size of a bird's egg.
"For you," he said. "You asked once for a pearl like this when we were children. I kept my promise."
David snatched it in front of me. "Give it to Emerie. Her crown is short one jewel."
Ramon's face changed. "Isla, it was a gift to you."
"Keep it," I said, slipping it into my sleeve.
"Isla…" Ramon began. But words were small.
10
A terrible thing happened that winter. The young noblewoman who lived with child—the gentle one who had once called me sister—fell from the covered bridge. The child within her could not be saved. We held her cold hand as the palace spun around her.
"She accused Emerie," I whispered, until the priest said she gasped my name like a blessing. "Sister, if you can hear me, I swear—"
"Do not swear rashly," David said, his face a mask. "This wounds the balance."
"I will find out the truth," I said.
And I did not find the truth. I found a silence that rings like a broken bell.
Soon, Emerie announced her own pregnancy and pranced to the Empress Dowager, haughty as a hawk.
I delivered the bowl of broth to the Dowager's rooms when called. Emerie watched me like a cat seeing a bowl they wanted.
"You will drink?" she sneered. "You will show me if you're brave."
David stood behind her and said, "Let her taste it. I'll not have you say she is a criminal without proof."
He placed the cup at my feet. "You drink," he said. "Or I will pour it down her throat."
I looked into his face and knew he had made his choice plain.
"Then I drink," I said, and I drank the bowl down in front of them all. It was made of rare herbs—a potion meant for delicate women—and I put on a mocking smile as I swallowed. "There, now I have taken the royal soup and lived."
11
After that, for several months he came no more.
Elias snuck out—my son was small, brave, and foolish. He asked for air and ran toward the gardens, and somehow, Emerie's hand—so sure, so cruel—had him punished and hidden.
"Where is my son?" I sang out across the palace like a wind that breaks branches. "Where is he?"
She laughed, hands on her hips. "You beg me? Beg like a court lady?"
"If you would tell me, I will beg," I said, and I did. I fell to my knees in the main hall and begged Emerie to tell me where Elias was.
"Beg," she demanded. "Kneel properly."
I knelt. My heart was flat and bare and only that would do.
"Snow Garden," she said at last with a grape between her teeth. "He wandered there. It is a cold place."
"You're lying," I roared.
She only smirked. "Find your son, if you can."
12
I found Elias in an ice cellar. He'd chased butterflies of sun and found only darkness and blue.
He was small and trembling; he had been there for two hours. By the time we returned by lantern, he burned with fever that set like a star within him.
"Elias!" I cried. "Breathe!"
The palace doctor shook his head. "He needs the emperor," he said. "You must tell him now."
Connie ran in the rain. "The gates are locked," she said. "Emerie refused to let anyone summon the emperor. She said him being with her was more important."
"Then break the gates," I said.
We could not break fate. The fever took him by dawn. The rain was worst that night. I held him until the last breath and then I would not let him go.
"Give him to me," David begged when he arrived, unkempt and wild, and I felt a strange, hot thing. "Isla, hand him—"
"No!" I dug my fingers into the small shoulders. "Do not—"
"He is mine too," David said, voice softening into heartbreak. "Elias—"
"Do not touch him," I said. "No one touches him. No one touches my son."
He took my wrists and begged. "I will make amends."
"You will not," I said, and the world narrowed to the coldness of his hands. I bit into his fingers hard enough to taste blood.
He flinched but did not let go. "Isla—"
"You killed him," I whispered. "You let him starve in cold for favors. You let Emerie tell a man what to do."
He fell silent. I spat like a savage. "You are the one who promised 'We will be a family.' You were the father who failed."
13
He stayed for a while and then went away. Not forever, but long enough to let us ache.
Elias's funeral was a fevered thing. I would not let him into the royal tomb. I cradled his little body as if the world were a cruel judge. Ramon spoke softly and then produced a small casket—an urn—like all the world was a stage and the stage had rules.
I had the boy cremated and kept the ashes with me. My cough came harder. Blood came in little ribbons on my palm. The palace looked at me with different eyes: pity, fear, curiosity.
David came to the garden and put down bronze statues in the place he had promised would be ours. He set a hand with my fingerprint in the bronze of a figure meant to be our family. I had those parts cut.
"You cannot cut the past," he said bitterly.
"I can unmake the pieces that tied me to your heart," I answered.
He tried. He made small offerings; he had jewels made into my crown. He worked to please me until his body was thin.
"Let her sit in the ice cell for a day," I said. "Let her feel what my child felt."
He went. He came back shivering, feverish, and apologized the way a man who had been broken apologizes: raw, on threshing floors.
"I am punished," he said. "I am punished for what I have done."
I spat. "Good."
14
Now, the Empress Dowager fell ill and then died. I took her stew to her bed and I let her drink. She had been the tool that made my life a chain.
"Hannah," I asked. "Was your life worth it? Did you choose to tie us to your politics?"
She looked at me like a traitor might. "Do not speak treason."
I leaned close. "I have learned of your plots," I said. "Of the people you gave to die to raise us." I told her the names of the eunuchs I had bribed to speak the truth, of the midwife who had lied, and I told her everything I knew about the night my aunt had died.
She gasped and tried to grab me. Her body folded and she fell with the look of someone hearing their own bones crack. She died angry and unrepentant. The court whispered poison as the cause, but I had carved that hour with my own hands.
15
People started to look different then. David came back to the palace like a specter, hands that shook. He spoke to me, cried on the floor, told me he would dismantle his court, remove Emerie, free the women of the palace.
"Let this palace die," he said. "Let me die with you."
"You must die alone," I said harshly. "You must be hollowed out and given what you sought: loneliness. If loneliness is the price, then pay."
He obeyed and dismissed the harem. He gave them silver and sent Emerie to her own house. For a while it seemed the world had been rearranged.
But I was not finished.
16
One night, I could not sleep. The cough had grown worse. Blood like little rusted coins would come up.
"Ramon," I said. "Promise me one thing. If I go, scatter my ashes and Elias's into the river. Do not let them be bound to a tomb where men like David might bow and feel he is absolved."
Ramon took my hand. "I will do it."
"Good," I said. "And do not let him have a gravestone with our names side by side."
"Not if you do not want it."
The next day, Emerie went into labor.
"I want to be present," I told the midwife. "I want to see the child."
"I won't bear this," Emerie warned, to the point of sobbing.
"Do not act so fragile," I said. "Give birth."
I entered the room and forced the attendants out. "Tell me the truth," I said. "Did you hide Elias? Did you send him to the cellar?"
Emerie choked. "It was an accident," she sobbed. "I didn't—"
"Tell the truth," I said, and the blade in me started to unhinge.
I had her bound, not to hurt the child, but to ensure Emerie could not lie. I made her swallow cold tonics to keep her awake. I wanted to watch her face.
She screamed when I cut.
"You monster!" she screamed. "Don't! You're killing me!"
I felt hot and cold at once. I cut a path through the womb's fear—not to kill the baby but to take what belonged to David and put it where no one else could. I birthed the child with my own hands, and when it cried and when its small body slipped into David's arms, the world tilted.
"I promised not to harm his line," I told him, blood slick between my palms. "Take him."
He did not move for a long time. Then he slumped against the wall and wept like a man who had been struck by a god.
I passed out.
17
I woke to him kneeling at my bed, unkempt and wretched. "Isla," he whispered. "I will be alone. I will let them go. Please do not die."
"Die," I said, flat and precise. "Die and feel your loneliness."
He begged, he clawed, he scraped for forgiveness like a man who had not known how to do it before. I let him be diminished.
"Do you want me to let you kneel and feel the cold for what Elias felt?" I asked. "Do you want retribution?"
"I will do anything," he said.
"Go and kneel in the ice cell for a day," I told him. "Go and feel the memory."
He went and came back suffering. He coughed, feverish.
"I found nothing," he said when I brought broth to him. "Only time. Time will do it."
But I wanted more than time.
18 — The Public Punishment (Detailed, Public, 500+ Words)
They tried to make a funeral into a private sorrow. They succeeded poorly.
On the day of my formal interment, the palace thronged. It was meant to be a mourning so ornate it would seal memory like wax. The courtyard was full of servants and ministers, the hall crowded like a chest filled with coins. The Emperor, gaunt, stood on the dais. Emerie stood beside him, newly titled, her belly hidden beneath swaddling cloths and embroidered folds. She wore a smile that tried to be a mask of innocence.
I had asked for one thing before I died: that the truth be laid bare. My petition—my last, ragged command—was to place certain witnesses near the dais. Ramon Marshall and Connie Jimenez were there. The palace doctors—those who had tended Elias—stood with their faces pale and eyes like people who had seen a ghost.
"Bring Emerie forward," I had whispered to Ramon before I drew my last breath. He had nodded. He was a man who keeps his promises.
When the casket was raised and the priests chanted, a soldier stepped forward. He bore a small tray—on it, a pouch of tar-black hair, a little bell, a scrap of embroidered ribbon. The doctor cleared his throat, and the courtyard fell. Even the birds seemed to hesitate.
"Your Majesty," the doctor called, and he called like a surgeon calling an errand. "We must present evidence of criminal conduct."
David's face drained. Emerie took a step back. "This is a slander," she protested.
Ramon moved like a man who knows how to steer a ruin. "I have evidence," he said. "I have sworn statements that Emerie interfered with summons. I have notes from the gatekeepers. I have three women who will speak."
One by one, witnesses stepped forward. The gatekeeper, red-eyed, told how Emerie refused a messenger, how she had turned away the runners sent to fetch the palace doctor while Elias burned. The midwife, voice brittle, read the scrawl of notes: "Ordered to delay, to deny passage." The dog keeper trembled as he spoke about the cut wound and the false story made for a child's folly. Connie marched forward, her head held high, and presented a small scrap of cloth stained with white fur and blood. She held it up so everyone could see.
"She called my son 'a child's mischief' and refused to let help in," Connie said. "She laughed when the child was hidden. She mocked the Emperor's household to make herself rise."
A murmur rose like a rising tide. Emerie was pale as cotton, her mask cracking. "Lies!" she gasped. "I—"
"Speak your own words," Ramon said, and then he read aloud a note, written in Emerie's own hand, where she had boasted of changing the emperor's schedule to secure him at her side, where she had admitted she would displace whomever stood between them. The note was the luxury of hubris reduced to handwriting.
The courtyard turned. Servants began to whisper, some opened mouths to sigh who had clenched them closed for months.
David's fingers dug into the railing. His face was a map of confusion—hurt and surprise and something like recognition. "This cannot be—"
"You hid messengers," the gatekeeper said. "You ordered the doctor delayed. You told servants to keep the emperor close for comfort."
Emerie swayed. "I—I only sought favor," she said. "I only wanted what was mine."
"That's not how matters are," a minister said. "You played with lives for pleasure. You made a child's life a pawn."
Emerie's expression slid—entitlement to disbelief to fear. "You have no right!" she cried. "I am of rank!"
"Rank demands restraint," another minister said coldly. "It does not mince lives as a pastime."
A woman from the outer chamber stepped forward, one who had been a servant of Emerie and now stood like a comet pointing. She produced a braid—a strand of hair—and placed it on the tray. "At night she spoke of taking what was owed," she said. "She spoke of 'making space' in the court. When they were small, she said, one gives less to those who would be mean to one's future. She laughed while the boy was sick."
There were voices now—a growing chorus. "Shame!" "How could she—" "Kneel her!"
David's face went from white to hot red. He had been complicit, perhaps, in the silence, but the court needed a spectacle. The Empress Dowager's old allies smelled a chance to rearrange power. Emerie finally fell on her knees, not with the contrition of the guilty, but with the panic of one whose stage collapses beneath her.
"Rise," David said at first, as if commanding a piece in a game. "Rise, Emerie."
She did not move. Her hands shook; her false composure had been stripped.
Officials were called. The sentence, fierce and immediate, was not carried out by law but by the court's need for cleansing. She was stripped of her titles in the open air. The embroidered panels were torn, the sash of rank cut off, and they carried it away like a banner of disgrace. Men and women standing near the edges of the courtyard began to clap—some with righteous wrath, some with the bitter satisfaction of those who had suffered small cruelties for years.
Emerie went through the phases: at first, the sharp arrogance, then a sliver of shock, then denial—"This is a set-up!" she wailed, then shame—her mouth twisted and she hid her face, and finally a raw, broken panic. People—ladies who had once curtsied for her—stepped forward to hiss at her, to spit on her shoes, to take her hands and pull her up and shake her until she trembled. Children pointed at her like they point at a a cockatoo that has lost its feathers.
"Do not take me!" she cried to an empty sky. "David, you promised!"
He could not answer. His jaw worked. "You ruined a life," he said, more to himself than to her, then to the court: "You used my presence as bait. For that, you have no honor left."
"Look at her face!" one of the ministers called. "Let this be a lesson."
They confined her to a small wing of the palace, a place of public shame. They made her sit at the edge of the city square, under the hot sun and the people's stares, while petitions were read aloud charging her with interference in royal duty and cruel meddling with the child.
The reactions were like ripples. Some clapped and sighed; others pulled out scribes to take notes. A woman produced a rough sketch of the dog with a cut wound and held it up as proof. A group of young ladies took photographs on expensive glass plates to show their friends. A man recorded the spectacle with a chatterbox device; the sounds would echo in gossip halls for months.
Emerie's change was visible—her perky posture collapsed into trembling, then into prattlings and finally into pleading. "I am innocent," she said. "It was only for the Emperor!"
"It was at the expense of a child," the minister said. "You will be exiled to the outpost houses. You will lose rank and fortune. And know this—everywhere you step from now on, people will remember."
When they dragged her from the square, those who had once envied her lipsticked their satisfaction. The crowd thrummed like a hive. Some spat; some sang; some simply watched people fall from the height and felt the sweetness of being still breathing.
David stood dumbfounded. He had to answer to a court that demanded atonement. He had to reconcile his love—or what he called love—with what had been sacrificed. He had to see someone who'd used him be broken before the crowd.
The final humiliation—what I had asked for—was to have the Empress—before she was sent away—forced to confess the acts she had steered. Under the judgment of ministers and with the throng looking, she admitted in a voice that cracked:
"I kept him near me. I delayed physicians. I wanted his attention. It was a cruel thing. I am sorry for the child. I meant to secure favor; I meant no death."
Her hands shook like a beggar's as she dropped to her knees and raised them toward the heavens. The crowd hissed and clapped by turns.
"Let her feel it," Ramon said to me quietly. "Let the world see. Let her be shamed for the child."
And so Emerie was made to walk the length of the palace paths, exiled and penniless, head bowed, while those who had watched the child's life and mine be used as theater spat and then turned away. It did not bring Elias back. It did not mend what was torn. But the punishment was public, complete in its humiliation, and the crowd watched every change of her face.
19
I do not say this to gloat. I do not pretend revenge returns the dead. But the court needed its ritual of justice. The crowd needed to see a wrong named and marked. Emerie changed from triumphant to pleading to broken, and the people watched her peel their illusions. She tried to laugh; she tried to strike; she tried to bargain—but each time, the witnesses dinged another nail in the box of her lies.
That was her punishment: pride stripped before the public, friends turned into witnesses, the stage of her triumph invaded by sobs and confessions. She was pushed so low the court could imagine a new order where a child's life might count for more than a charm's worth.
20
I walked through those days like a woman half-formed. People came to me, some with flowers, some with silence. Ramon carried for me the urn with Elias's ashes when I finally could not. He was fierce silent in his protection.
David became a man hollowed out by what he'd seen. He came, he knelt outside my room once, and he said, "Make me live in the way you want me to."
"Leave me," I whispered. "Leave me like a punishment you have asked the world to watch."
He left. He did not disappear entirely; that would have been too simple. He stayed in shadows and promises, a penitent who could not be penanced.
21 — Final Days
The cough came. Blood came. The bed became a map of small deaths. On nights when thunder came, I would trace Elias's name on my palm and think of the soft thing he used to say when he wanted tea.
"Mother," he'd whisper. "I love you."
"I love you more," I'd say.
I asked Ramon to carry both our ashes to the river when I was gone. "Scatter us," I said. "Let the current keep our secrets so the palace cannot use us as ornaments."
He said he would.
David tried to clamber into my bed once, weeping in the corner. "I said I'd protect you," he murmured. "I promised."
"You lied," I said. "You promised what was convenient."
"I will kneel forever," he begged.
"Then kneel in an empty place," I said. "Kneel where nothing answers you."
I closed my eyes as the fever rose. I saw faces—my aunt and Elias and the small bronze plaque I had melted away from the Yao Garden statue that used to bind our hands. I saw the pillow that had smelled like herbs and his neck and the pearl, like a sunstone, hiding a boyhood promise.
I let my breath grow small, and there was some peace in that.
22 — The End
"I want you to take us to the water," I whispered once more when I felt the light leaving. "Put us in the river. Make sure the urn is mine."
Ramon carried us into a morning that was silver with mist. He cast our ashes into the current, and the river swallowed them like a secret.
David never fully recovered. He raged and then he bent. In the splintered days left to him, he fought with Ramon at my funeral—two men wrestling over a memory, and the court watched them like children watch falling stars.
"Let them fight," I thought, in a last flutter of brightness. "Let their fighting be the thing that keeps them from the dead."
My last image was that small medicine pillow on my bed, its herbs scattered like a constellation. My finger brushed the tiny bronze handprint that had once joined us, and I smiled, very small.
That pillow—torn, scented, full of the smell of the seasons—was the last small thing I owned that no one could quite strip from me.
The End
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