Revenge12 min read
The Qilin Pavilion and the Two-Tone Jade
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He rode away at fifteen and I spent the same years inside the temple.
"He went to fight for the realm," I told the monks, "and I will keep him safe with prayers."
"I am Diane Devine," I told myself in the dark halls of Qilin Pavilion, tracing the carved roof beam with a finger.
"He will return to me," I whispered into the incense smoke, and the brass bell answered with a thin, faithful ring.
Years later he came back a hero. He came back with armor blackened by war and eyes that met the court with a soldier’s steadiness. He came back and took another woman’s hand and called her "wife" in front of my father, the Emperor, in front of the ministers, in front of the whole capital.
"Samuel Duran," he said, "I beg Your Majesty: grant me marriage to the one I care for."
He presented a girl in red beside him and called her by a name he gave in that moment.
I remember the taste of the world slipping. I remember the quiet clamp of my hand on the silk at my waist. I remember my brother's cough as he tried to speak for me. I remember smiling when my father agreed — smiling like a blade, like a careful mask.
"Let him be happy," I said aloud. "If this pleases the throne, let it be so."
After the ceremonies were over and the crowds dispersed, Samuel and his bride walked past the palace gate. I watched the two of them — his arm around her, the red skirt a banner — and my chest folded inward.
"She saved his life at the frontier," Samuel declared while the ministers looked on. "She is nameless no more. Call her Emilia."
"Emilia," I repeated with a slow, deliberate smile. "A fine name for an ordinary woman."
They were offered our treasures, and I had every item placed before them. I had kept his early gifts in a wooden chest in the hall. The courtiers drew near; the women whispered like silk on wind. I had the chests brought forward, and before Samuel could object I spoke.
"Since the general has found a heart elsewhere," I said, "we must return what was given in youth. Take back what you made mine when you were a boy."
"Burn it," Samuel said with an iron voice. "Or we will bear it home for posterity."
"Burn it," I repeated, and the torches caught the old ribbons and paper. The flames swallowed our memories.
When the fire had died, I walked to the girl Samuel had dragged into the light. I pulled from my arm a bracelet of pale jade — a gift long ago from Samuel’s mother when she had called me by another name, as if generosity could smooth a stranger’s place beside a soldier. I put the bracelet on Emilia’s wrist with my hands and said, "This belongs where it was meant to be."
Samuel’s mouth thinned. His face was a tide line drawn back hard.
"Do you have no shame?" I asked him, voice cool as glass. "You marched away and left promises to the wind? You served your banners and then bet your honor on a bargain? You forget how to keep your word?"
"You—" he barked. "You are unreasonable."
"I am Diane Devine," I said. "I do not bargain for what I cannot use."
He married her. The court murmured. Our people lifted their cups. He and Emilia received presents from my father. A month later, there were rumors: Emilia carried his child. They paraded the pregnant woman through the palace gardens and Samuel smiled as if he had the sun in his pocket.
"You wear someone else's future like a jewel," I told her once when she dared to stand near me. "You, who have no family, think to step into the center of a throne-room life?"
She laughed with a small, brittle sound. "I only take the place offered me," she said. "The rest is not for me to answer."
"Then you are small," I said. "And small people are easily moved."
My friend Ulrika Chavez, the daughter of a minister, sat with me once in my private garden and said, "Diane, the foreign princes are here. Don't waste your sorrow on a man who could not carry his vows."
"Do not say his name again," I replied, more tired than angry. "He is not the same boy I once knew."
The truth was not in the gardens or the whispers. It was written on paper and in the bones of maps kept at Qilin Pavilion: Samuel Duran had not merely found a woman to warm his bed. He had made a bargain with a western tribe for soldiers and a familiar face to secure a power base on our borders. He had promised, in ink and oath, that the tribe would be given rights and lands in exchange for support. He had used a nameless woman, Emilia, as the vessel for a child's blood that might seed claims and anchor loyalty.
"Do you think I did not notice?" I told Miles Dubois one night in the temple, when he arrived unexpectedly. He was called Miles in the name of a far country; he used the old name he had once kept in the temple until one day he laid it aside for the court. "Do you think I couldn't read the letters passed between their banners?"
"You acted with patience," he said softly. "You are made for chess, not for storms."
"I pretended to be a weather vane," I said. "I kept the world counting where I wanted it. He thought to pull the thread and untie a kingdom. He forgot there were hands on the other end."
We planned without drama. Quiet instructions were sent. Spies in the market, loyal captains on the border, the quiet placement of watchmen at the city gate; all the things a ruler knows by heart. I reduced the garrison in a way that looked like weakness, and I let the bait shine.
"When the trap is sprung," Miles said in a lowered voice, "will you be there to watch them hang themselves?"
"I will be there," I said. "But they will not hang themselves; they will kneel first and look for mercy in my eyes."
The day came like iron clouds. The palace gates were pierced by men in Samuel’s standards, and for a moment the city smelled of smoke and the clank of swords. Samuel returned with his father, Elmer Larson, and the old man shouted that his family would march upon the palace to save honor. They thought our weakened guard was truth.
"You will yield," Samuel said at the gate, pointing a finger that had once touched my hand in boyhood. "Come with us, Diane. Let us restore what we ought to have."
I stood in my armor at the front of the palace and looked him in the face. "You have already chosen a price," I said. "You sold your banner for a name and a promise."
We had the helmsmen wait. Miles came over the ridge with the banner of his house and cut off their line of retreat. The city’s loyal soldiers poured in and surrounded Samuel’s men. His father fell in a fever of arrows. Samuel was taken alive — and for that, he cursed me.
"You set me up," he told me once, blood running at his hairline. "You made the trap."
"And you walked willingly into it," I replied.
They dragged the household of Samuel into the court and laid them before a thousand eyes. Men in the palace chambers called for justice. I stood before the dais and ordered the prisoners to be placed with their faces turned to the sun.
"You betrayed the realm," I said, my voice loud so even the quartermasters could hear. "You hid treason in the folds of marriage. You used a woman and a child to anchor a foreign claim."
Samuel laughed then, a thin, incredulous sound. "You are no longer the quiet girl in the temple," he said. "You have learned to wear another face."
"I learned to wear a face that keeps this country whole," I told him. "You learned the price of ambition too late."
The punishment was public. I intended that every hand in that court should feel the heat of what betrayal brings.
The hall filled with murmurs when I began to speak the evidence aloud. "Here are letters," I said, and a clerk handed out slips one by one. "Here are the signatures of Elmer Larson and the unsigned marks of the western tribe. Here are witnesses who saw Samuel's envoys meet the tribe at dawn. Here is the oath that bound land and soldiers to his cause."
"How dare you!" Samuel shouted. "Those are for a family—"
"—for your ambition," I cut in.
He tried to deny. "I never thought—" he started, and his voice thinned.
"—you will be a traitor," I finished for him.
I will not spare the reader the scene I made then. It stretched as a slow, ordained thunderstorm across the hall.
"You gave me your word once," Samuel snarled to me as they bound him. "Do you remember the day I promised to return?"
"I remember," I said. "I remember also who I serve. Do not make the mistake of forgetting what you used people's lives for."
Then I told the court the worst of it: the bargain had intended the child's blood to seal an alliance, to make a claim that could not be easily broken. "A child," I said. "A child used as a pawn for banners."
Emilia stood pale and shaky beside him. She looked at me with terrified eyes. "Diane—" she begged. "It was not—"
"It was," I said. "You knew more than you let on. You held letters. You met the envoys. You waved them across our borders."
Her voice failed. Samuel reached out with a shaking hand and tried to take her arm. "She loved me," he said. "She was my cause."
"Love," I said coldly, "is not a claim deed."
The crowd swayed between fury and pity. Some pressed closer like waves, wanting the telltale sight of justice. Some looked away. Miles stood near me like a steady tree, watching with a face that had learned to mourn quietly.
Then began the punishments — not quick mentions of "he was arrested" or "she fled." They were theatrical, and they were designed to scald memory.
First, the sentence for Samuel Duran.
"This is not merely to kill a man," I said, standing on the dais. "This is to show the realm that treason will not hide in a soldier's cloaks."
"Samuel Duran," I called, and the guard pushed his head forward. "You betrayed us. You made bargains with foreign tribes whose standards you swore to hold as enemies. For that you shall be stripped of rank, cast into the shame of the city, and then executed by the blade at the public square."
He laughed at the blade. There was madness in his eyes now. "You—" he gasped. "You will not—"
"Watch and learn," I told him.
They took him from the hall chained and forced him to walk through the main thoroughfare of the capital that afternoon. The street was lined with people; the market stalls closed as citizens gathered. The city had never seen such a display. He was paraded beneath banners he once commanded, and each step he took the crowd counted his betrayals like beads. Children poked at his dusty boots. A woman spat and stained his hem. A veteran soldier who had once fought under him turned his back.
At the main square they set up a raised scaffold. "Kneel," the captain ordered, and Samuel fell to his knees, the chain clattering. He still tried to keep a soldier's dignity. He lifted his head to meet the crowd and found there nothing but cold faces.
I walked to the front of the scaffold. "Samuel Duran," I said, and my voice carried, "you used a marriage as a cloak. You used a woman as a token. You committed treason in the name of power. Let the people see the cost."
He had a moment of composure, the memory of past promises like a flicker in his throat. "Diane," he said, his voice cracking, "I loved you once."
"You loved yourself first," I replied.
He began to plead then, first for mercy, then for himself, then for his child's life. He called for his father, Elmer Larson, who lay dying in the infirmary, to be spared, called for his men to be pardoned, called for his wife to be spared her shame. "I did it for a throne," he said, then louder, "I did it for a future!" The crowd hissed. Some shouted for blood. Others remembered him as a boy chasing butterflies on the palace lawn and their faces softened for a breath.
At first he looked defiant, then startled, then the defiance cracked into pleading. He tried to deny the letters, claimed coercion, whispered that he had only meant to bargain for peace. "You expect me to believe that?" I said. "You traded the realm for land? For soldiers? For a rumor sealed with a child?" He could not hold the eyes of the thousands.
I turned and took from my pocket a small token — a two-tone jade pendant that had once been his mother's. I had kept it as a promise to myself. I held it up high. "This bracelet, this token, belonged to a woman who trusted you. You pledged it to me and to our house. You traded that trust away." I walked down from the dais, the crowd’s hush a living thing.
He could not meet my gaze as the blade was brought forward. He cursed, begged, wept, laughed in fits. There was every shade of a man unraveling on that platform. He tried one last lie, then his voice broke and he fell silent. The executioner did what the court had ordered. Samuel's head dropped. The crowd had been silent for a time; then a ripple of sound — not applause, but a low, stunned release — spread like water from a stone.
But one death did not satisfy the law nor the heart that knew the whole of the plot. Emilia had a different role; she had been used and she had chosen to be armature. Her punishment would be different, public but not a mirror of the soldier’s blade.
Emilia was made to stand in the same square, but her fate was to be unmade in a way the city could watch and understand. I ordered that she be stripped of any name and title and that her jewelry — including the jade bracelet I had placed on her once with a mocking courtesy — be removed and returned to the treasury. I decreed publicly that the child she carried would no longer be a token of Samuel’s claim. The child would be taken by decree of the throne and raised in the palace under the guardianship of a loyal minister; the child's blood would be part of the realm and not the property of a treacherous house.
Emilia's punishment began the moment the guards stepped close. "Emilia Baxter," I said plainly, "you shall be unmade from the court."
She tried to protest. "But—" she began.
"—you conspired," I answered. "You entertained envoys in your tent. You smuggled letters. You put a child in the balance."
They brought forward the jade bracelet. It was an ordinary thing made holy by history. I took it from the officer, and in front of the crowd I opened the lid and let the bracelet fall into my palm. I held it out like a judge holding a verdict.
"Emilia," a recorder called, "do you renounce knowledge of the plot? Do you swear you were coerced?"
She looked broken and shook her head. "I… I thought it was a way to survive," she whispered. "I thought—"
"You thought to be a wife and step into rank," I said. "You thought to anchor yourself to a soldier and be safe. But you also chose to bargain the realm. You chose to write our path in ink that burned."
The crowd watched her change color. A mixture of pity and contempt ran through them. Children pointed. A group of noblewomen turned away, heads lowered. Market sellers whispered into sleeves. Some of the old maids who had been kind to her years ago looked as if they would weep. She was not executed; instead, she was stripped of the trappings that had been given her and paraded, not along the main road like Samuel, but through the courtyard where the palace servants ate and cooked. Each step she took past the kitchen windows met with the faces of those she had once passed as a supposed equal. They spat, some threw barley. Someone whispered, "For using our child, for using our land."
Then they brought her child from a wet nurse's arms and lifted him for the crowd to see. He was innocent, a small, uncertain thing who blinked in the cold air. I had decreed that he would stay in the palace and be raised by the state; the mothers among the crowd gasped and then cried out — some in relief, some in anger. Emilia reached toward the child and was pulled back by a guard. She fell to her knees and clawed at the air.
"No!" she screamed. "That's mine!"
"That heir will be raised as part of the realm," I told her, voice sharpened to glass. "It will not belong to a traitor’s house."
She collapsed, sobbing, then looked up like a dog betrayed. The crowd watched the scene with a mixture of satisfaction and coldness. Some clapped, others turned away, but everyone remembered her face. They would remember it when she was led to exile.
Finally, she was stripped of her name. "You are to be known henceforth as 'No-Name of the West', and you will be sent to the border villages among those you thought to bind to our banners," I ordered. "You will labor to feed those you betrayed. You will live among them in the open, not as a noble, but as a servant."
Her reaction was a ragged scream that flipped between pleading and rage. She tried to make a last plea to me, "Diane—" she said. "Please—"
"Please what?" I asked. "Please not to be counted? Please not to be seen for what you are?"
She had no answer.
The spectacle did what it was meant to do. It made the city breathe out. It made traitors fear camouflage. It taught mothers that children belong to the realm. It taught soldiers that they cannot hide a bargain in a marriage and live.
People wrote verses about that day. Some praised it as justice. Some whispered that it was cruelty. I told myself that rulers must be cold in the furnace of consequence.
After the executions and the banishments, the court changed. Miles Dubois stood by me in public and private. Once a monk and later a prince who had renounced a crown, he called himself by simpler names and came back to our side when the hour needed him. We married — not in the loud way a victor might demand, but in the quiet rooms of the palace where vows are stitched with purpose. He did not promise me the whole world; he promised to be my anchor.
We had children: a son and then a daughter — a pair the realm joked had matching names. Life, as life does, moved on in the corridors. I handed the Qilin Pavilion its proper ledger and kept a steady hand on the throne's levers. I married not for duty alone but because the man at my side had chosen to stand with me when the city wavered. We rode back into the public eye as partners, a union solidified by purpose rather than by a bargain or the rush of youth.
Sometimes at night, when the candles were low, Miles would take my hand and say, "You were always the one to hold the gameboard steady."
"I only held it until I cut the strings," I would say, smiling, and he would press a kiss to my knuckles as if the memory of blade nor bracelet could ever fully fade.
There are days when a gust of wind carries the smell of smoke from across the river and for a moment I think of Samuel — of his laugh, of his promises, and of the boy who once taught me to hold a brush. I think of Emilia bending over a crib she did not get to keep. I think of the child raised under my charge, growing in gardens that remember both treason and mercy.
Once, in the Qilin Pavilion, I took out a small, two-tone jade pendant and turned it over in my palm. It had known the hands of many mouths and many lies. I set it finally into the pavilion's shrine, a relic and also a warning.
"Keep it," Miles said softly. "So we do not forget."
"I will," I answered. "And I will remember the sound of the bell in the temple — the answer of the brass — the sound that told me to wait."
I do not say now that everything was simple or that the heart is easily mended. I say only this: the realm was saved not by romance but by resolve; the people watched and learned; and in the private hours, with a man who had given up a title to be simply himself, I slept and dreamed of quieter things. The jade in the shrine catches the light, and the Qilin Pavilion keeps its ledger. That is how I keep the world.
The End
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