Revenge17 min read
The Plum Hairpin and the White Mare
ButterPicks18 views
I woke up with the taste of iron on my tongue and hands that belonged to a different life.
"Monica," someone said, voice low and patient. "Are you awake?"
I stared at the face over me—Avery Mahmoud's face—but when my hand flew to my throat to steady my breath, the fingers were mine. Not his. My heart kicked as if it had been hit with a mace.
"Are you hurt?" the face asked again.
"It hurts," I said, and the voice that came out was his. I looked down and saw the heavy cloak, the callused hands, the faint scar across the knuckles; I felt the shape of a soldier's chest beneath my palm. For a wild, falling second I thought I had died and been reborn into his body.
"Good," the voice said. "You opened your eyes."
I had woken into Avery's world and left my own behind.
We had been married four years. We had been young and reckless once, riding under the same sky in the Northern marches. We had promised each other everything with a plum hairpin and a laugh. I had thought those promises would hold me like armor.
He had thought otherwise.
"Estrella is at the manor," Avery said when the surprise settled into a tight stone inside my chest. "Mother said she should come for the welcome. I told her not to—"
"I heard her laugh through the yard," I—he—said. "She ran like a spring hare. She makes everyone look like a bird in a cage."
"I don't want to hear it," he—my mouth—growled. The voice came with ownership and a slow ache I recognized. He sounded tired. He sounded like someone who had been at the edge of a blade for years and had stopped noticing the cuts. "Monica, get dressed. There is etiquette. Mother expects you in the east parlor."
I mirrored what I knew of my life as Monica Crouch: the stable-born girl who once knew the scent of hay and the yield of a mare's flank better than velvet. I put on his clothes, smoothed hair that was not mine, and walked the house like a stranger in my own skin.
"We'll be from different houses now," Legacy Wagner said to me when I bowed. She was a woman with a small sharp mouth and the power to make rooms tremble. "A general's wife should look the part."
"Of course, Mother," I murmured, and the voice sounded wrong to my ears.
When I first married Avery—when we were two fools runaway under a moon—I had thought we would be each other's anchors. I had thought he would remember the smell of my father's leather harness, how I once pulled a filly's shoe, how I hated the slow rules of court and the way ladies sewed afternoons away. He had knelt in the winter rain for three nights outside my father's gate and my father had struck him with three short rods and still had married us off because the boy would not break.
And now he held a paper that said our marriage could be unmade.
"You never told me," Legacy Wagner said the first night Avery returned after the campaign, eyes wet, voice soft enough to make me want to forgive. "You have allowed strange women to sniff around this house."
"He told me," Estrella said as she trotted forward like a bright bird, "that your wife is... resilient. She will understand. She will be fine."
"Resilient?" My fingers closed on the plum hairpin I had kept in a secret drawer. It was a smooth white jade, carved with a tiny plum blossom Avery had once plucked from a tree and given to me in an absurd, glorious act of bravery. He had smuggled the plum across battlefields, bled for the horse that carried it, and sworn his name on it. I had slept with that pin at my side.
He had thrown that promise to the ground.
"You gave her a house," Legacy Wagner said to him over the rice. "You gave her honor and rank. Why would you not keep what you can expand? A gifted girl like Estrella—singing, daring—would bring glory."
"It is not that I wished it," Avery said with a sort of exhausted honesty that cut deeper than accusations. "She is easier in the wake. She fits the noises I like now."
I tasted bile. For a terrible moment I wanted nothing but to spit in the steaming bowl of soup and be done with the world. Instead, I took a breath and remembered something else: the day we married, and the boy who had promised he would never let me go.
"You will not," I said aloud. The voice was his, but the heat behind it was mine. "You will not make me 'fine' and then set me aside."
Avery blinked, not expecting resistance from his own mouth. "Monica—"
"Do not say my name like that if you plan on discarding it." My tone was small but it carried like a bell. People in the room glanced at us. Estrella lowered her eyes in a way that looked practiced, like she'd been schooled in every careless way a court butterfly could fold a gaze.
"It's settled," Legacy Wagner said. "My son will do as a son must."
"Monica," Avery said, softer. He always used that softer voice when he wanted me to see the young man he once was. I remembered that man. I could feel him in the way my hands trembled when I thought of the North wind and the sound of the white mare galloping. I had never wanted to hurt him. I wanted him to love me.
"Then do what a son must," I snapped. "But do it with your own spine."
He faltered, and that night—curious, terrible night—he left a restlessly written paper on the table: a small slip that said our marriage could be dissolved if that made us both happier. He pushed the paper toward me like a small stone.
I tore the paper with my own hands.
I did not know how to stay static in someone else's bones. I lay awake and felt the shape of the battle in my chest. I woke the next morning and the house moved differently—his servants greeted me with the caution of people walking around a sleeping tiger. I saw around me what my life had been: old slights and new scheming, the kind of palace cunning that took decades to polish into cunning knives.
Later, when it all fell apart, I would remember that moment as the first crack.
*
"We have traded our bodies," I told myself aloud and, because there was no one who could tell me otherwise, I made a plan.
"If you will have my life, I will have it fully," I muttered, and the words tasted like iron. "If you are to love another and call it the same name, I will make sure your new house knows what kind of man you are."
Bernardo Larsen was the one who saved me that night on the frozen road. He was a youth, scarred, steady, and he had a way of appearing where you needed a blade. He thrust himself between me and the man who had just delivered the worst joke: "You should be grateful. Estates want bright women—artists, singers. They bring fame. You are plain and stubborn, but she—Estrella will bring them songs."
Bernardo's eyes found mine when the words cut across the courtyard. He did not ask permission. He simply said, "That is not how people should be treated,"—then spit and walked away in a way that made everyone who watched think twice.
I watched Bernardo long after he left. He stood apart from the court, always leaning by the gate or listening to the wind as if he could read its letters. In the army his name was known: a brave young vice-commander who could sprint like lightning and wound the arrogance of a lesser man with one long lance. He had saved my life before, and in a way I owed him mine because I had spent half my days as a woman in that house trying to be small.
When I learned how to ride in Avery's boots, it was Bernardo who taught me the lustre of doing a thing well and the ruin of doing it halfheartedly. He taught me that a person does not have to be the same as before to be more.
"Will you stay?" I asked him once, late by the stables where light was a rumor.
"Until the last order is given," he said. "Then wherever you go, I will—"
"Do not say 'I will follow you,'" I cut in, because sometimes bravery looked like telling a man to mind his own course.
He smiled a painfully small smile. "Then even better. I'll go where I belong."
I kept that promise.
Months later, bodies still misaligned like a cracked mirror, war came again to the marches. We moved as one, but the world had taught me a new language. I learned to hold a spear, to read the maps, to count ration fires; I learned that a woman could do a soldier's labor if she had a soldier's stomach.
It was in a storm of smoke and iron that I first understood what it meant to be hated by those you loved.
My hand paused over a fallen foe, and for an instant the world narrowed into a single thought: I could kill and go home or I could not and bring shame to the man whose skin I wore. I could hear Bernardo shouting, Stefan Lemaire—our strategist—barking orders, and Dalton Beltran—our scout—calling the changes in the wind.
"Monica, down!" Bernardo's voice cracked almost into a laugh. He pushed me out of a path of flying iron and then leaned his lance into the throat of a mountain-demon of a soldier who fell into the snow like a wood cut. He came back with blood on his lips and something like relief in his jaw.
"You scream like a child," he said, smiling faintly. "But you can hold a blade."
"And you can miss being embarrassed by it when someone else uses it better," I fired back.
He only laughed, and said nothing of my voice being his that day. He called me "Monica" like a religion, and sometimes, in the dead of night when my throat ached and the starlight lay in the horses' manes like a prayer, I would wake to find him watching me with quiet hunger—hunger not for war but for a life that might have been ours.
I had vowed, the night I woke in his body, that I would not be a patient nothing. I would not be the woman everyone thought they could trade away for pretty songs.
So when victory lit our banners and rumors of our success spread to the capital, I began to plan a different kind of battle.
*
The capital welcomed us with fireworks and ribbons and the kind of sober joy that could pay taxes for a season. Avery had fought for the house's honor; he had been brave. He deserved the laurels—and yet when he rode through the streets, eyes on the crowd, my mouth felt like a shuttered window.
Estrella arrived like a moonbeam let loose. She sang in markets and read the skies, and people adored her because she was a thing that made their dull days brighter. She drew eyes like bees. She folded her laughter into the spaces of men who had already decided their futures did not include women like me.
"Monica," Estrella said one evening, voice honey-smooth as she adjusted a ribbon at Legacy Wagner's sleeve. "Do not be so grim. I am only a song. Your Avery will come back to his senses."
"Our house is not an inn," I said, keeping my tone light as a piece of paper. "Songs do not pay for grain."
Estrella gave me a bright, practiced smile. "My songs pay in a different coin," she said, and the household blinked like a field of white daisies in a windy sun.
It was in the midst of these bright days that I made the choice to strike at the one place where Avery's pride could not be hidden—the court.
There are many kinds of courts and many kinds of crowds, and one of them is the court of public opinion: an open square, lanterns high, the city gathered to cheer. People stood in rows and stared up, and what men fear most is being thought small before a hundred eyes.
I took my plum hairpin and I took the white mare—our mare Moonlight—and I rode into the square with Bernardo flanking me like a shadow.
"Your Grace!" someone cried as we entered. "The general's wife rides her own mount! What an image!"
I did not answer. I walked my mare to the center and dismounted. The throng hushed. Men leaned on elbows; women pulled children tighter.
Legacy Wagner was there, smaller than usual, and in her hands Estrella had arranged a perfect face: a face of accomplishment and soft eyes. Avery stood at her side like a flagpole, dignified. He turned at once when he saw me.
"Monica," he said, and the world stopped matching sound to sense.
"Will you speak for me?" I asked the crowd.
A murmur ran like a pebble through water. Everyone liked a public show. Avery looked like a man trying to convince himself he could breathe under a stone.
"I will," Bernardo said, and his voice rang without seeking permission. He took my hairpin from my hand and climbed a little crate, and then he pulled a bundle of letters—things people had written, things they had left unsaid—and he began to speak.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, voice clear. "We have come to celebrate the victory of those who fought for us. But we have a second matter. All of you gathered now know a man named Avery Mahmoud, a brave general. He fought bravely. Yet some of those who fought with him were led to do what any good soldier would do: they followed orders. Some were protected; some were abandoned. There is a thread beneath our honors."
Avery's face hardened. Legacy Wagner's hand clenched like a fist.
Bernardo's eyes found mine. "I will read what has been given to me," he said. "For there are stories so small they become like buried knives."
He read aloud. He read the whispers of the house: the missed letters, the paper slipped to the bedside, the nights when a woman knelt and prayed for a man who would not look up. He read about a pair of teeth marks left in a plum hairpin, the way a mare's mane carried scent like a diary. The crowd listened, leaning in.
Estrella's smile became a mask. Avery's mouth opened and closed like someone who cannot find a window to push against.
"You call this proof?" Legacy Wagner hissed. "Who gave you these lies?"
Bernardo dropped another letter on the crate with a theatrical thump. "The hands that wrote these letters do not lie," he said. "They were copied by a thousand eyes. They were paid for and traded. When a household trades dignity for gossip, the city should know."
The crowd's mood changed: curiosity to mockery to a hunger for justice. A street merchant laughed and then stopped when he realized he had nothing to laugh about. A woman in the front row, whose husband had been conscripted and left with one child, wiped her hand across her mouth and cried softly to herself.
Avery looked smaller and smaller. He took a step forward like a man who wanted to throw a knife but could not find his hands. "These are lies," he said. "They are rumors. I do not—"
"Enough," I said. The voice was quiet, but everyone heard it, because there is a kind of silence that falls like snow.
"You will listen," I said. "You will all listen. Hear this: I am Monica Crouch. I was a stable girl. I learned to make sutures of horse hide and mend hobble straps. I loved a man who knelt in winter rain. I thought allegiance was the glue of our house."
I paused and held up the white jade plum hairpin for everyone to see. The sun caught it; it flashed like a small, offended star.
"This hairpin," I said, "was given to me by Avery when he promised he would ride me across a thousand fields. He wrapped his fingers around it like a promise. I kept it. He would not look me in the eye when the market merchants came, and he would not object when they said I was less than. When his mother told lies, he told nothing. When he was offered a prettier life, he took the coin."
A murmur rose, then a shout. "Shame!" someone cried, and the call moved like a wave to both sides of the square.
Avery's face crumpled into something like bruise. 'Shame' is not a word men who have built themselves on honors want to hear. He tried to speak, to claim nuance, to say there had been confusion, that he had been a man at war, that Estrella had been nothing but a distraction. Estella—Estrella—took a step forward and said, "You misread the situation. I am not—"
"You spear my truth and call it rumor," I said, feeling every syllable like iron. "You thought you could gather songs like coins and string them around your neck when the weight of your choices grew too heavy. Legacy Wagner, you who broke our backs with your small joys, you who call me a peasant, stand and say before your house that you did not poison the well."
Legacy Wagner looked like someone who had been struck. Her mouth worked. She had not counted on public windows. There was an old belief in that house that the world would protect its small cruelties if they remained behind curtains. A public square is a kind of scouring lime.
Estrella tried to laugh, to charm, but the crowd would not give her the ease she'd practiced for years. She faltered when a woman with a child on her hip spat in the dirt. "No more of your pretty songs because they hide knives," the woman said.
I watched Avery change colors like fruit. First white, then red, then the ashen blue of a man who had lost his internal chart. He looked old. He tried to grasp at reason: "You are making a show."
"This is not a show," I said. "This is a reckoning."
Legacy Wagner opened her mouth, then closed it. Guilt is ugly to wear and heavier than any ceremonial robe. The crowd began to report memories: a night the house lacked bread, a night someone had been locked in cellars over rumor. The voices rose and the city leaned in.
Avery fell to his knees. "Monica," he said—no longer a polite name, but the oldest name he had, the name from a vow he had given in another life—"I—"
"Get up." My voice cut like a blade. The world felt narrow enough to be about one thing. "You will stand and say on public record what you did."
He looked at me and he looked at the crowd, as if sunlight had suddenly shown him how small he was. He took a breath. "I... allowed her into my house," he said in a voice that trembled. "I thought... I thought my feelings could be divided. I thought duty could be portioned out."
"Did you love me at all?" I asked.
He could not answer. He wrapped his hands into his hair and the crowd made a hush like a hand over glass.
"I put a piece of paper on our table," he said finally. "I..." He looked unmade. He tried to stand. He fell back to his knees. His hands reached toward me, and then he pushed them down. "Please... forgive me."
"Forgiveness requires something to be left to forgive," I said. "You cannot ask me to be small now."
Around us, people took sides. Some called for him to be stripped of his privileges. A few spoke for mercy because they remembered when he had been a boy and had knelt in the mud until his knees bled. A child in the front row threw a flower at his feet. The petals landed in the dirt.
Estrella's world dissolved like sugar in tea. She stepped back and then forward and then back again. Finally, with a gust of arrogance that only covers a panic, she said, "This is slander. You cannot prove anything."
Bernardo Lance—Bernardo Larsen—had anticipated that. He produced witnesses: letters torn between servants, a ledger with bribes, a maid who had been threatened into silence until the fear of punishment was greater than the fear of the law. One by one they stepped up and spoke. Each word peeled off another layer of false gilding.
The punishment did not come from a single judge. It came from the people's eyes. That is a judgment worse than any court, because it is not bound by law but by the slow arithmetic of shame.
Estrella's charm evaporated. Where she had once been luminous and untouchable, the crowd saw that she had been practiced at using men's hearts as ornaments. She tried to deny; she cried; she accused my name. When she called me a liar, a woman in the square, who had lost a brother to the same wars Avery had fought, spat in her face. The sound of spittle in public is between insult and ritual. A silence fell. Estrella's skin reddened, and then she balked.
Legacy Wagner, in full view, looked into her son's face and found it a stranger's. The woman who had given orders and tight smiles now felt the open air like a blade. The crowd recited what had been done under her roof. They recited how she had pushed a rumor and twisted deference into cruelty. She tried to justify, then denied, then collapsed into shock. The faces around her were not kind. They wanted accountability. They wanted her to see what she had set into motion.
"These are not small errors," someone cried. "You toyed with lives."
Estrella went pale. She tried to leave, but people blocked her. A small hand reached for my sleeve—Lynn Edwards, a young maid who had worked for years in our house, came to me and whispered, "They asked me to keep quiet. I was afraid. I am not now."
The crowd recorded everything: men who once courted her now averted their eyes; women who had been fanned by her songs hissed and folded their fans like knives. People took out little painted sticks and scratched on them a note to themselves, a warning: a bright woman who is also a liar can ruin a whole seedbed.
Estrella's face folded into many masks: denial, rage, pleading. She strode to the front and tore her sleeves as if unveiling truth. At first she cried "You made me a pawn!" and several people found themselves liking her again because she had the courage to beg. But the city is a stern teacher. It does not forgive those who have used others for applause.
She finally fell to her knees, and her voice broke. "I never meant—"
"Meaning does not undo what was done," I said. "You sold your smile for another man's comfort."
The crowd swayed, hungry with the spectacle of truth. Some applauded; others walked away. Yet the damage had been done in the open. Avery's rank remained; his honors did not wither immediately, but a fissure had opened that nothing in his house could pretend not to see again.
When the dust settled, Estrella had been shunned publicly: musicians no longer invited her; noblemen turned from her as if the air had been changed. Legacy Wagner's eyes hollowed; she went silent for a fortnight, and the house felt smaller. The servants who had lied to protect the household were dismissed or moved to less visible corners. Avery stood, hollow, looking smaller than the evidence of his guilt.
He tried to beg me for forgiveness in a small, private courtyard the next morning. He knelt, and this time it was not for a marriage promise but for the memory of a man who had lost himself. "I am ruined in the eyes of the people," he said. "I will repair it if you will let me."
"I do not want your repairs," I said. "I want the truth kept honest." I reached into my sleeve and removed the plum hairpin. "You can keep this," I said, handing it to him. "A reminder of what you gave away."
He pressed the pin to his chest. "I was a fool," he said, which is something many men say when they finally feel the weight of shame.
It is a public humiliation to be stripped of illusions in front of thousands. It is worse to feel it in those close quarters where once you had safe currencies. Avery lost more than a wife that day; he lost a certain kind of name. People will always remember that he had chosen ease over the harder, steadier love. The rest of his life would be a ledger: what he had gained by valor and what he had lost by cowardice.
As for Estrella, the city had a long memory. Her music became smaller. Her brightness dulled. She sold her diamonds to pay for roofs and rented rooms in a poorer district. Years later, during a festival when a rival singer staged a cruel parody of her old songs, Estrella stood in the crowd and wept. Men pointed and murmured that such was the price of being used as coin. It was not an immediate punishment; it was an unraveling: applause dried up; invitations ceased; the world she had bought with her art refused to buy her again.
Legacy Wagner remarried some of her authority to duty. She would not publicly ask for forgiveness; she learned to shrink. For a woman who had been cruel, the slow, grinding quiet is a special kind of punishment. To be left with old rooms and to have the city's gossip finger those rooms is a humbling that not all could bear.
Avery's reaction changed over months: from denial to anger to pleading to a hollow acceptance. Each stage was visible to those he met. At a banquet months later, when some young lord bowed to him with a smile that had once been kindly, Avery's hand trembled and he remembered the square and the smell of spilled bread and the cheap perfume of falseness. He understood, at last, that his acts had consequences he could not buy off.
"Do you feel triumphant?" someone asked me later as I packed my saddle.
"No," I answered. "I feel like a woman who has learned a hard lesson about where her life must go."
"Is he ruined?" they asked. "Is she lost?"
"People like to see drama," I said. "But the punishment was the public stripping of truth. It will not feed the poor. It will not stitch the wounds the war left. It will change the lives of three people forever. That is the point."
*
When the smoke cleared and the court had had its fill of drama, I made a different choice altogether.
"Leave the house," I told Avery. "Take what name you must. I will not be kept like an ornament."
He looked at me, at the mare Moonlight, at the plum hairpin.
"You will go back to the northern plains?"
"I will," I said. "I will take the stable and the people Avery forgot. I will not be a shadow in someone else's triumph."
Bernardo found me before we left. "Will you come back?" he asked, voice awkward as always.
"No," I said. "Or maybe. I don't know. But I will not be your consolation prize."
He laughed and then kissed my hand. "I will come where I can be honest," he said. "No lies. No second-hand songs."
The sun was bright the day we left. Moonlight snorted and stamped her hoof and then trotted forward. Bernardo and I rode side by side out the gates with the plum hairpin tucked into my braids.
Estella's voice could be heard once in the distance, singing for a small crowd that would not remember the perfect lights she once wore.
Avery stood at the gate, hands to his chest where the pin lay heavy, and watched us go.
The city looked like a place both full of stories and eager to forget them. The road northward lay open like a book with blank pages.
I was tired in a way that meant I could start over. I felt like the mare under me—a creature of steady hoof and patient strength. I had been made small and had chosen to be large instead. I had been swapped into a life that almost broke me and then given a chance to choose again.
"Will you come back and see us?" Bernardo asked, reaching for my hand.
"I will if the roads hold and the stars remember our names," I said.
He smiled like a boy, and then he rode with the kind of reckless grace that made me forget the night I woke in another body's skin.
On the last night in the city I slept on a bed that was not mine and dreamed of a field without fences. In the morning I took the plum hairpin out, split it like a small mercy and wrapped one half inside my cloak.
If one day anyone asked me where the other half went, I would tell them the truth: it stayed with the man who once loved me, or with the man who pretended to, or with a thousand small unnamed things. The hairpin would be both a memory and a tool. It would remind me and him of what we had been given and what we had thrown away.
Years later, when a child played in my stable and the mare's breath warmed my neck, I would take a little girl by the hand and show her how to wrap a hairpin in a braid.
"Keep this," I would say. "Keep your oath close."
She would look up at me and smile, and I would know the world had not ended. It had only taught us how to be wiser.
The End
— Thank you for reading —