Rebirth13 min read
The Third Turn: How I Left the Palace
ButterPicks15 views
I died under a clear summer sky.
"I remember the swallows under the eaves," I said aloud to no one in particular, and the words sounded like they came from another life. "I remember the jade pendant."
Aviana Albert, my handmaid who had never left my side, stood by the window and lowered her voice. "Maggie, you slept for three days. Please—eat."
"I did eat," I said, lifting the bowl, but my fingers were still ghostly from the memory. "I remember the fire. I remember the smoke."
Aiden Olson came in with the tray and forced a smile. "You were very ill, my lady. The palace doctors said—"
"They said I would not wake," I finished for her. I closed my eyes and let the old grief settle in like a stone. In my last life the fire had taken everything: my family, our home, my name. In my last life I had burned inside the cold palace until the world stopped.
Then I woke three years earlier.
The palace was the same—lantern light, lacquered halls, the same swallows under the eaves—but I was still Empress. I still wore the phoenix robe. My mother, Lois O'Brien, still pressed a hand to my cheek. My father, Caleb Alvarado, still had that battle-scent in his eyes. Ludwig Peng and Dylan Watts, my brothers, still bickered like children as ever.
"I woke up," I told Aviana, and I watched her eyes widen.
"That's impossible," she whispered.
"It's true." I set down the cup. "And because it's true, I know what will happen if I do nothing."
"What will you do?" Aiden asked, always blunt. She had the fire of the old house, the one that once taught me how to handle a blade.
"Live differently." I looked at Aviana and Aiden. "And protect my family. There is a rope already tied around their necks. I will cut it before the noose tightens."
"How?" Aviana's hand trembled on the tray.
"By remembering everything. By being patient. By not being the woman I was."
I remembered being that woman; jealous, loud, a woman used to being loved and not being questioned. I remembered how easily I'd been baited, how I had loved a boy-then-man named Mark Olson believing his whispers were for me alone. I remembered the day he made me a target, the moment the world turned private into public and my family into instruments to be broken.
"Did he—" Aiden started.
"Yes," I said. "He loved another. He loved her openly as fate. Her name was Emilia Beil. She smiled like she had no bones, and she took what she wanted with small hands."
Aviana made a small noise like she might weep. "You have time," she said.
"I have three years to change everything," I answered. "Three years to stop the last ten."
That day, I stopped asking for permission. I sat at the blade until my fingers remembered the weight. I walked the gardens at dawn like a woman who knew she had new debts to repay: to the living and to the dead.
Weeks later, the palace ground hummed with its usual small cruelties. Maki Lindgren—small, sharp—came to present gossip like a gift. "You missed the feast," she cooed. "They said you were ill."
"Tell them I recovered," I said, and watched the ripple of disappointment pass across her face.
Audrey Harvey, the favored concubine with the slow, dangerous smile, watched me with the same old hunger. "You look different, Empress," she said one afternoon in the inner garden.
"Different how?" I set the teacup down with a careful clink.
"Calmer," she said. "Older."
"Calm is safer," I replied. "Old enough to know what will come."
Emilia Beil arrived most mornings in the high hall like a breath of perfumed danger. "My lady," she would say, curtsied, "you are radiant today."
"Thank you." I had learned to smile in ways they could not parse. "Do you think the Emperor will reward a brave heart?"
"Only for the right heart," she purrs. "Only for those who are quiet."
I kept my own counsel. Night after night I read the world like a book that had already been written. I watched Mark Olson, the man I once trusted, like a map. He never raised his voice in public. He smiled like a knife.
"Why do you study him so?" Aiden asked one night as she plaited my hair.
"Because he has a pattern," I said. "And patterns repeat if no one changes the beginning."
"Are you going to change it?" Aviana asked, lowering her whisper to a prayer.
"I am," I said. "But not by killing him. By making the truth impossible to ignore."
*
I used the little things first—making friends with Ellis Herve, the writer who had a thousand eyes and a thousand ways to speak truth wrapped in fiction. "Help me," I said once, and he handed me a thin, ink-stained pamphlet.
"What will you give me?" he asked.
"My gratitude," I said. "And a story."
He smiled. "Good stories get people to notice. You want people to notice?"
"Watch what happens when they do," I told him.
Soon, I had threads in every garden: a dancer who liked a drink too much, a eunuch named Sergei Finch who loved to hum tunes, Emmanuel Ray the old courtier who was more loyal to memory than to men. "You must watch who stands and who leaves when the music stops," Emmanuel told me.
"Who left you?" I asked.
"Those who once mattered," he said, and his eyes held ash and regret.
When the day came to call the court together, it was not by accident. The palace bloom of a rare double lotus in the imperial garden was an excuse. Mark Olson announced a banquet to honor the sight.
"They will come," I told Aviana. "They will come with pride."
"Are you sure?" Aiden's hand tightened on the hem of my dress.
"Yes. I will not speak yet. Let them speak for me."
That night, chandeliers hung like fallen stars. The table was a river of silk and wine. Mark Olson sat high, eyes unreadable. Emilia shimmered by his side like a polished coin.
"Empress," Audrey Harvey intoned with honeyed malice, "sleep well, I hope the lotus warms you."
"Sleep is for those who have no plans," I said, and the table coughed like a held breath.
Then I acted like a woman who had nothing left to lose.
"This banquet is beautiful," I said, and stood. "But if I may—there are some things we must make impossible to keep secret."
My voice was quiet, but the silk hushed.
Mark Olson's brow twitched. Emilia's lips pressed thin as an unnoticed storm.
"Emperor," I said, "may I present a matter of the heart... and the law?"
He inclined his head as if to humor a joke. "Speak," he said, almost softly.
"You know what happened to the little boy called Small-Blessing outside the cold gate?" I asked. "You know who brought him bread? A kitchen boy called Sergei Finch; he was kind. Do you remember who took him away from us, who crushed his smallness because he amused someone else?"
Silence became a physical thing. Heads turned, the chandeliers small eyes.
"I asked a woman named Emilia to betray a girl who trusted her," I said. "I asked her to plant lies, to starve a child, to steal away the small mercy that kept someone alive so she might be favored."
Emilia's fingers tightened on a wineglass until her knuckles white. "You lie," she said.
"Do I?" I walked slowly toward her. "Do you remember the bell? The red bell the girl wore—she lost it the day she was beaten in the yard. You took it. You said it would make you loved. You lied and left her to the cold."
"No—" Emilia's eyes darted. "I did not!"
"Do you deny that you ordered the guards to take the boy in the night he smuggled food?" I asked louder. "Do you deny it?"
She looked past me at Mark Olson, as if asking him to spin a shield of silence. He only watched, the emperor who could be tender and lethal in the same breath.
"He denies nothing," I said. "Do you?"
Emilia's false composure cracked. "I—"
"Stop," Mark said, but he sounded small.
"Let her speak," I said. "Let all this be counted."
Then I called for the court recorder, and I had Ellis hand in hand with a paper—witnesses signed, small notes of things a thousand small mouths had whispered. The servants who were tired of pretending, the kitchen girls who had dried their eyes—one by one I had asked them to leave notes in Ellis's book. They had nothing to lose.
"Read," I requested.
Ellis's voice was calm as he read: names, dates, a list of petty cruelties stitched together into a rope. "Emilia Beil," he read, "ordered the reduction of rations for the eastern wards. She requested that the child's food be taken. She asked the guard to bring the boy before dawn."
Emilia's face went pale as oil. "This is slander!" she cried, and someone at the back of the hall laughed like a brittle twig.
I waited for the slow unfolding. The court leaned in.
"And there is more," Ellis said. "She arranged for the dismissal of a guard who would not obey, offering a favor in exchange. She later benefited from that guard's absence."
A low murmur rose. Maki Lindgren looked down and suddenly found the beads in her sleeve fascinating.
Emilia's composure shattered. "You—" she flailed. "You have no proof!"
"I have proof," I said. "A witness." Aviana stepped forward. "I saw her. I was there when Emilia whispered to a guard. I heard her bargain for a child's silence. I saw the boy's bread taken and given to a favored maid."
Emilia's mouth opened and closed like a caged fish. "You lie! You lie!"
The crowd began to move. Someone behind me muttered, "She is brave," and another replied, "She is crazy."
"Bring forward the kitchen boy," I said.
"Who?" Mark asked, bewildered.
"Sergei Finch," I replied. "If he is alive, he can tell us." A single potter's boy, slip of a man, was hauled in. He trembled on the marble floor.
"Sergei," I asked, "did Emilia ask for the boy's rations to be taken?"
Sergei's forehead beaded. "Yes," he said, the word like a shard. "She said she must secure favor. She said she would reward me. She promised—"
His eyes slid past the hall to Mark, pleading with a god who had not come. A chorus rose—some clapped, some gasped, some snapped their fans open and shut like caged birds.
Emilia fell to her knees. "Your Majesty, it's not true! It's not true! I wanted favor—only favor!"
"For a child," I said, and let the silence grow deep and hard. "For a child, you took food."
"Stop!" Mark shouted, suddenly like an animal. "Stop this."
"Let them watch," I said. "Let them hear."
At that moment the hall was not only a hall but a stage for truth. "You profited on starvation," I told Emilia. "You used the hunger of the small to clothe yourself in roses."
She began to bargain like a drowning thing. "I will give back! I will restore it! I will—"
"You will be stripped of your rank," Mark said, and his voice carried beyond the wooden panels. "You will be shorn. You will lose place at court." There was a pause. "You will be made to stand in the marketplace at dawn and tell what you did."
Emilia's face paled like an onion. "You can't—"
"Watch how they look at you," I said. "Watch them remember."
At dawn the marketplace was full. I asked for it. The Emperor, with a face gone flayed by his own conscience, sat on a low stool. Audrey Harvey watched with narrowed eyes. Maki Lindgren stood like a spectator at a play.
They led Emilia out in her borrowed gowns. At the city gate, she had to discard each embroidered robe until she stood in a plain coarse smock. Soldiers had taken her hairpin and her mirror. The cook from the western kitchen spat into the dust. Children pointed. Mothers pulled shawls over their faces and whispered, while the gulls over the river seemed to laugh.
"Tell them," I had instructed.
"You sold a child’s bread," I listened as the city cried back to her. "You traded mercy for a crown."
Emilia's voice shook into the light. "I did what I had to," she said. "I did nothing—"
She was interrupted by a voice from the crowd—one of the guards who had been dismissed stood with a limp and shouted, "You had him fired. I have no house now because of you."
"Then remember," I said, and watched her eyes. "Remember what you set in motion."
Her face went through the stages I had learned to savor in my past life: the pretended hauteur, then shock, then denial, then pleading, then collapse.
"Please," she whimpered. "Please, Your Majesty."
"Stand," Mark said, a brittle command. "Tell them you took the bread."
Her knees buckled. "I—" she gasped. "I wanted favor!"
The crowd did not pity her. They had mouths that had been fed and mouths that had not been; they had watched the court for years seeking justice. They made sound—not only words, but the sound of iron cooling. People spit. A woman set a pot in front of Emilia's bare feet with bread and said, "Eat and remember."
Emilia's hands shook as she touched the bread. Her cheeks collapsed. She looked at me, and I saw, for the first time, a face raw with the exact terror I had once held.
"I have to live with what I did," she said. "I have to—"
"You will be made to do so," Mark said. "You will work the kitchens. You will give away what you take. You will be publicly humiliated so no one will forget."
The humiliation came in many small gradations. She was made to stand on the steps of the palace at midday as people walked past; her hair unbraided, her jewelry gone. Her former attendants refused to touch her. Maki Lindgren spat in her direction. Women who had once curtsied now pointed with small children on their hips.
Emilia tried a hundred denials, a hundred bargains—"I will give back; I will repay; I will—"—and each was a stitch torn by the crowd. The merchant women who had lost customers because guards were dismissed now walked by and said what they had seen: "She smiled when the child cried."
One of the old kitchen women slapped her hand and said, "Do not take a scrap from a child's lips again." The slap echoed like a verdict.
At noon, I watched her break. Her voice changed: first a roar of denial, then a brittle whisper, then a collapsing sob. She clawed at the courtyard stones. Around her, people took pictures on strange glass-boxes some merchants carried. A man filmed her with a small box and all of us saw the recording slide into a thousand other eyes.
Emilia's punishment was not a single blow or sentence; it was a stripping, a public dismantling of all the soft machines that had made her safe. She lost her place, her comfort, the protection of friends who had once bowed when she smiled. She was left with the rawness of being observed.
Her reactions moved through a pattern I knew well: beginning with the gorgeous pride, then the shock of unmaking, then denial, then bargaining, then hysteria, then a cold, terrible collapse. The crowd watched with the same relish people reserve for weather. Some called for blood; some celebrated justice; some merely gawked. A ring of women surrounded her and took turns accusing in plain words her cruelty; a boy she had once scorned spat near her feet.
"Remember what you did," I said quietly. "Remember."
She did. She would never again hide behind a polished face.
When Emilia fell to her knees and begged, men made room; women scandalized others by turning away. She was escorted to the kitchen, and the master cook, a blunt woman with scarred hands, set her to work. "Mend the wrong with your hands," the cook said.
They had seen the villain unmasked. They had watched the proud come down. It was not a tidy spectacle. The crowd's responses varied: some clapped like they had never clapped for a harvest; some took out chopsticks and pointed them like small spears. People whispered about what they had witnessed for months. The market bakers, the retainers, the servants—each had a voice.
In the end, what I had asked for was not the blood of a woman but the removal of the safety that enabled cruelty. Emilia would survive; in this life I was not a murderer. She would live small and seen. She would be forever a caution.
As for Mark Olson, he flinched at the sight of it all. He wore guilt like an old coat. He ordered her public degradation. He paid the price too: the grace with which he had carried himself grew a fissure. Men whispered: "He let it happen." Women who had once loved him lowered their eyes. His eyes darkened like someone who'd been told—too late—that the world is more complicated than a smile.
"Good," I said to Aviana later that night. "Good. People saw."
"I thought you wanted to kill her," Aiden said, softly.
"I don't," I said. "I wanted them to see. You can set fire to a house, and a town will mourn. Or you can pull down the curtain, show the rat in the corner, and watch how people turn from the woodwork."
*
The aftermath changed the palace's hum. Emilia kept her hands raw in the kitchens, her head bent. She was watched and remembered. Mark Olson’s shadowed face came less to my rooms. He muttered apologies that sounded like a drowning man making a speech.
"Why stay here?" Dylan asked when he visited in secret. "Why not leave? Why not run before they can string you?"
"Because," I said, and thought of the ten years I had lost. "Running was easy once. Facing it and making it impossible for them to do this again—that is the work. If I run now, they will move on and do to someone else what they did to mine."
Ludwig Peng nodded. "You are harder than I thought."
"I had to be," I said.
Days passed and I watched Mark fuss over court business, a man haunted and gentled. "I will not be fooled again," he told me one evening in a voice that trembled like a reed. "I cannot bear—"
"Then prove it," I said. "Make sure no child goes hungry in this palace again."
He leaned over and for the first time looked as if what he meant matched what he said. "I will."
"Good."
And yet I did not soften. Not yet. A promise from Mark was not a safeguard; a public humiliation had shown everyone how brittle our security was. There would be other knives.
So I planned more quietly—letters to my family, small gifts to servants who once feared for their jobs, a ring to my brother Dylan that made him proud and angry in equal measure. I taught Aviana to keep the ledger that mattered: who ate and who did not.
"I don't want to go back to the cold palace," she said once, tracing the lines on the paper.
"You won't," I said.
*
Months ran like a river. The double lotus faded from the garden as all flowers do. But the memory of its having bloomed remained sharp as a talon. I had torn one thread from the tapestry of cruelty; it showed that tapestry's fragility.
The road out of the palace opened for me not because I begged but because I arranged for it. Letters rode the wind to Caleb Alvarado; he retired in time. Lois O'Brien packed secrets into trunks of plain cloth. Ellis sold a book that no one called treason, only truth in the shape of a story. Sergei Finch, once a small eunuch, found his life altered in small mercies.
The night I left, Mark stood on the palace tower and watched me go.
"Will you ever return?" he asked.
"No," I said. "Not as before."
He searched my face. "Will you forgive me?"
"I will never again be small enough to forgive him with the soft mercy of the unhurt," I said. "But the world is wide and there are many kinds of endings. Mine will be with my family."
He did not say more. Men do not always say what we need them to. He bowed his head, and for the first time, I saw a man who had been a boy and had to make his choices.
I looked back once as the carriage rolled away. The palace receded like a dream. I had burned a life already; in the ashes I had learned to plant seeds. My family waited, and the river lay ahead.
At the market that day, children sold sugar figurines shaped like me. "Here, buy the brave lady-sugar," a child called, and I laughed with the tired joy of someone who had finally found a place to rest.
"Is it what you wanted?" Aviana asked as the carriage hummed on.
"Not revenge," I said. "Not ruin. I wanted the town to be quieter at night for my brothers and my mother to sleep without fear. That was what I wanted. The rest is noise."
Aiden squeezed my hand. "Then we have done enough."
"No," I corrected gently. "We have started. We have prevented an ending. That is a mercy."
We reached our country home in the early light. Lois O'Brien ran to me and wrapped me in arms that smelled of bread and washing soap. Caleb cried like a boy. Ludwig and Dylan—my stupid, wonderful brothers—argued about the best way to fish.
I sat on the porch with a book from Ellis and watched my family. The river glinted. The sun set like a promise.
I had left the palace, not by fleeing but by engineering the breaking of a slow machine. Emilia Beil had been brutalized publicly and forced to live with her shame. Mark Olson had been made to see himself, if only for a while. Some people would say I had been merciless. I would say I had been necessary. The poor must not be pawns for courtly amusements; some chessboards must be overturned.
"Do you ever miss it?" Aviana asked as night wrapped the house.
"Sometimes I miss the power," I admitted. "But I do not miss what power took from me."
"Then you have won," Aiden said.
"No," I said, looking toward the dark line of trees. "I have only changed the rules."
And that, for tonight at least, was enough.
The End
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