Revenge15 min read
The Tutor Who Volunteered at Court
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I remember the snow that day like a white shout across the world.
"Your Majesty, the princess—" Octavio White began, and everyone in the hall shifted like trapped fish.
"She must be married before the year turns," my father, Emperor Abraham Elliott, said. "A good match will settle the house."
"Good matches are rare, sire," Galen Evans muttered from where the generals clustered. "Even rarer is a man who will meet the princess on equal footing."
"It is settled, then," the emperor smiled at the hall. "Who will step forward to marry Frances?"
I was half-hidden at the pillar pretending to be a palace page, my small shoulders lost beneath a pale fur cloak. I liked a corner where the room's heat didn't reach me; I liked listening. I liked the idea of being able to slip away if someone decided I must be married.
"Your Majesty," Octavio said again, "the provinces contain many good men."
"Too far," the emperor waved. "I won't send my heart away."
A murmur rolled like a small tide. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. Let them name a duke from the far reaches. Let them offer me an army lord who smelled of horses and wine. I would tear out his beard myself.
"Minister Octavio," my father turned his small bright eyes on the chancellor. "Your counsel."
Octavio stepped forward like a careful clock. "There are scholars and bureaucrats, sire—men of learning."
"Learning alone won't charm my girl." Abraham laughed, then looked around with that sudden serious softness he kept for his children. "What about Kellan Schulze? He is young and upright."
Kellan stood near the tutors, hands at his back. He had that scholar's thin dignity—good posture, quiet hands, eyes like a steady winter river. I had seen him in the academy, pale and controlled, but he was not the type my heart had drawn when I dreamed of running with the wind. Still, he'd been promoted incidentally almost as if the world had made room for him.
Before anyone could press him, a clear voice rang from the bench where the writers sat.
"I volunteer," Kellan said.
Silence fell like another snow. Even the torches seemed to listen.
"Volunteer?" Octavio blinked. "Kellan? You're our tutor—"
"I volunteer to marry the princess," Kellan said, steady as a measure. "I will take her to my home and obey the rites."
I wanted to roar. I wanted to rip off my disguise then and there and tell him—tell everyone—how ridiculous this all was. Instead I did the only thing I could think of in the moment: I screamed.
"No! No, impossible!" I burst out, and the hall spun. Everyone looked at me. I had been hiding in the corner like a cat; in that instant my face and the cloak gave me away.
"Emanuel! Stop that!" The crown prince, Emanuel Porter, gave one of those disapproving looks he kept ready for me like a small weapon.
"Who is that?" Octavio barked.
I had to bow quickly, the rules of court scraping at me. "Your servants apologize, Your Majesty. The page—"
But the hall would not relent. Kellan looked at me with a clarity that seemed to slice the winter toward me. He stepped forward, politely calm.
"Your Majesty, I am serious. I request the emperor's leave."
My protest sputtered out. The emperor chuckled, a cruel and fond sort of sound. "Very well. It seems decided. We will set a marriage date. For now, we adjourn."
"Your servant is troublesome," my father said to Octavio as they rose; "keep her in line."
"Yes, sire." Octavio's face was pale. "We will keep her confined."
That night I hugged my purple-gold hand warmer tight and watched the snow tire itself out against the palace roof. Kellan's voice from that morning flared like a match. Volunteer. He'd put himself forward as if marrying me were a kindness he wished to perform.
"I'll make him regret it," I muttered. "I'll make the whole court regret this."
"You sound dangerous," Caitlin Ikeda, my chief maid, said from the doorway. "Dangerous is good, when used properly."
"Tonight I will find a way to make the chancellor's tea a little more lively," I promised. "I might not be a good daughter, but I am a fast one."
Days became a soft grind of nurses, tutors, and my father's tender inspections. I did not expect Kellan to visit often. I expected him to be a name long pinned on a scroll. But he came—he came every day, hands carrying medicines in earthen bowls.
"Princess," he would bow, "I have a decoction for your sleep."
"You came to give me broth," I said once, making a face at the bitter steam. "You could have sent a servant."
"It is proper I ensure you take it," he said, and his fingers brushed my wrist as he checked my pulse. His hands were cool, and my heartbeat betrayed me like a traitor. "If anything troubles you, tell me at once."
The palace liked to say I had been brittle since the fever when I was small. It was true in some ways: I had been broken and mended and then left stitched with the wrong color thread. I also had stubbornness—some thought of it as vice; I thought of it as the line I drew for myself.
"You're doing this because you want to be my husband," I accused one afternoon, the bitter taste of another concoction on my tongue.
Kellan smiled a small, dry smile. "And what's wrong if I do? I offer you honesty, not a title's fever-rush."
"You want a son for your house," I said. "You want to continue your line."
"I told Octavio my family has no heir," he said without surprise. "I've no more right to ask than anyone else."
That was when I made my plan. My true heart belonged to a memory, a boy from a white wood and a cold night—a soldier with a black mask, fierce and quiet. I had once been lost in a mountain storm and found warmth because of his fire. I had given him the name Winter then, and kept it in the pocket of my childhood like a lucky stone.
"I will find him. I will go north and find the black-armored general who rides like a storm," I told Caitlin.
"You mean the man they call the Black Marshal?" Caitlin's eyes widened.
"Yes. If I marry that scholar, I will never find Winter. So I'll trick them. I'll make every one of them hate me. I'll force them to throw Kellan from the post, and then I'll run north myself."
Caitlin sighed. "You do have a way with wrong plans."
I suppose I did. I drank the foul potions Kellan brought with a grim face and secret contempt. I pretended to faint frequently. I embroidered clumsy handkerchiefs like a woman who wished to be loved by another in the quiet way one knits rope around oneself. I could not foresee how the plan burned too close to my own heart.
Winter, as he existed in real life, was a myth. The frontier fighters called him the Black Marshal, and stories said he wore black armor and fought like a single storm. He had no title to offer; he had the narrowness of a camp and the taste of smoke. He was the right type for me.
"Have you never ridden beyond the palace wall, Princess?" Galen asked once, by my father's order, as if to chide me.
"Of course," I lied. "I ride every spring to see the new herbs."
He sent word to the marshals, and gossip bubbled in teahouses. Meanwhile Kellan kept at his patient task; he insisted on measuring for my blankets, on reheating my hand warmer, on correcting the angle of my wrist when I held a broom—a thousand tiny dovetail joints of attention.
"You have a flinty way of speaking," Kellan told me one dusk, curving his mouth like someone holding tea in a cup. "It will desert you before your enemies will."
"Enemies? I have none that I did not entice," I said. "I invited them."
He looked at me like someone listening to a distant bell. "Frances, why do you press so?"
"Because," I said, and the word in my mouth was both blunt and bright, "I have a memory to keep."
The months dragged. Spring warmed into a heavy summer. The palace grew green and thick. The emperor busied himself with festivals, and the court prepared a celebratory banquet. I used the invitation to arrange a dangerous thing: I asked that Bryce Renard, our provincial deputy general, be present. He was an awkward, large man who answered to the Black Marshal in battle and had seen him ride.
"Why would you invite him?" Caitlin asked.
"Because at night I dream," I said. "And dreams have ears."
On the night of the banquet I chose my corner and let my eyes sweep until they stopped at a dash of black across the marble floor. My heart stumbled.
"Lady Frances," Bryce came up, humble and nervous, "I—if it please—"
"You served under the Marshal?" I asked, suddenly sharp as a blade.
"Yes, Your Highness."
"Did he ever reveal his face?"
Bryce swallowed. "Never. But he changed his number to a winter mark, and he did save many men."
I let the truth lift inside me like a bird. Every small sign stepped into place. Moments later, as I rose to cross the hall in a practiced flourish, Kellan was behind me.
He stopped me with a hand at my elbow. "Where are you going?"
"To greet a friend," I lied. "I want him to pass me the bowl."
Kellan's grip shifted to be polite but firm. "You must not wander alone, Frances."
"I will not leave without you if you wish," I said, ignoring how the words fitted around us like a cord.
He hesitated just a breath and then stepped aside as if the court were a chessboard and he had chosen to surrender a piece to save the game.
That night, the talk in the tea houses took on rumors of a masked man roaming the city in black. I fed my hope like kindling. I let myself believe the Black Marshal could be the boy I had once known. The scholar's small kindnesses became a cage.
"Do you love him?" I asked Kellan brutally one evening, seeing him stitch a sleeve by lamplight.
"Who?" he asked.
"The Marshal. The soldier you pretend not to know."
Kellan's eyes darkened a fraction. "I have no wish to know such men. I have the court. I have books. I have my family."
"I thought you were lying when you said you wanted to marry me," I said.
"I thought you were hiding a storm in your pocket," he said. "Perhaps we both had secrets."
When the news came that the Black Marshal might be inside the city, my pulse beat a drum. I hid behind curtains and waited. Men moved like shadows, and then the noise began—screams, a crash, the howl of a small, bloody scuffle.
"Someone has stormed the house," a guard shouted.
I slipped to the window and peered. In the courtyard below, men in foreign garments scrambled, and at their center, in black armor, a figure moved like lightning. He had a helmet like a raven, but when he took it off for a breath it was Kellan. My throat closed.
"Kellan?" My voice broke like thin ice.
The courtyard became a ring. Men fell. A leader with foreign speech took a step forward and raised a blade to me, and Kellan moved like wind and stone—blade blind, fast, savage. He cut through the circle, saved me, and then, with a quiet face the color of a bruised moon, he ripped his helmet off and revealed the calm of his scholar features.
"Frances!" he said, as if he had only just remembered his own name had a gravity. "Stand back."
The leader surrendered when he saw him. The courtyard crowd pressed close; neighbors came to look. People whispered and pointed.
"Is that not the tutor who took the exam?" someone murmured.
"He wore armor!" a woman gasped.
Kellan stood in blood and winter air and said simply, "I will take her back to safety."
It should have been the end of a reveal. But as the emperor's men came, as Octavio ordered the captives bound, more truth came out like a slow sunrise. There were men inside the city pretending to be merchants and they had taken me by plan. The leader of the gang spoke of the Black Marshal as if they were baiting a snare; they meant to capture the marshal or kill him and use me as leverage.
I had been a pawn.
Later, confined in Octavio's study with bandages cooling the heat on my head, I stared at Kellan.
"You lied," I said. "You made yourself both tutor and soldier. Was any of it true?"
He looked weary. "I made choices because the world left me no blank spots. I taught and I trained. I studied here so I might walk to the border unseen. The day I volunteered, it was because I knew those others would come."
"You knew the snare?"
"I suspected," he admitted. "When you were a child, you were lost once. The emperor did not tell him then. I only found small signs; I followed guesses. I did not want you used as bait."
"And yet you let me drink bitter, ugly medicine. You let me think I would be trapped to make me break."
Kellan's hand found my one free wrist. "I did not want to break you. I wanted to mend you. I thought if you saw me as the one who steadies, you might trust me."
I wanted to shout that trust is earned, not arranged, but the words fell into the quiet. I had made a trap of my own.
Days passed. The emperor declared Kellan a hero for saving his daughter and then, like a man easily pleased, wanted visible punishment for traitors. The leader of the gang was dragged before the court; he had directions, coin, and a treacherous letter that tied them to a woman in our own household.
"Who did this come from?" Abraham demanded, his face hawk-bright. "Who raised a hand against my daughter?"
"Your Majesty," Octavio said, voice shaking around its edges, "there is evidence that the clerk of the chamberlain aided them. He named a co-conspirator—one who has access to the inner apartments."
The court leaned in.
Carolina Thomsen stepped forward as if from the shadow of the dais. She was pretty in a cool, steady way and had always been careful to sit where the light softened her. She knelt, contrite in the perfect way of practiced guilt.
"Your Majesty," she said, eyes too bright, "I—"
"Speak," the emperor ordered.
"You were seen in the eastern gardens the night of the first theft," one of the emperor's officials said. "You met with merchants who are now proven to be agents. We found this from their accounts."
Carolina's face held, then cracked to fear like ice in a pan. "I—no, Your Majesty, please—"
Kellan looked at her with something that was not quite pity. "Why?" he asked softly. "Why would you betray your cousin?"
Carolina's hands fluttered to her throat. She did not deny she had met them. "She is the princess's cousin," she said. "We grew up together. I was jealous. Families—people without favour—are overlooked. I thought—"
"Thought you could make your house rise," Octavio finished, the court's counsel voice bitter. "Thought you could sell your princess and your city to the highest bidder."
She looked at me, and for the first time her eyes were small and hard. "She took what I wanted. She stole people's heads with laughter. Who would look at me?"
"You sold your soul to men who would buy you and the empire's shame with a handful of silver," my father said. "For that there is only one course."
The court rose and murmured. The punishment, they decided in a chorus of gavelled voice and whispers, would be public. The Tamers of Shame were called: the emperor wanted a display that would unmake the traitor in the eyes of all.
I had not wanted to be cruel, ever. I wanted a life of my own, riding and laughing and following Winter. But seeing Carolina now—small, broken, trembling—something hot and ancient flared in me. In her attempt to cast me down, she had endangered every life in the city. She had planned with the enemy.
"Do it," I heard myself say, and the voice was not steady. "Let them do it where the streets are full."
They arranged it for the next market day—the busiest, when the city would press close to the palace walls to see a spectacle. A wooden scaffold was set in the square; banners snapped like admonishing tongues; officials took their stations.
"Your Majesty," Octavio said later, outside the chamber, his hand on my shoulder gentle as old wood, "you need not watch, but you asked to."
"I will not be a coward," I said.
On the appointed morning the square thrummed. People squinted up at the raised platform. Carolina was brought out in plain cloth, but the collars and sleeves were ragged in a way that had been chosen to humiliate. She knelt at the center like a trapped bird.
"Carolina Thomsen, daughter of a house that took by favor, you stand accused of treason, of collusion with foreign men plotting to seize the princess. What say you to these charges?" Octavio's voice carried.
Carolina looked out at the crowd, and that was when I saw the change. The moment for which she had conspired came unglued in her face: the arrogance faded, and only the small human remained. She tried to speak, to beg. "Your Majesty—"
The crowd started, somewhere between pity and hunger. Voices rose: "She must pay!" "Save the princess!" "Hang them!"
"Carolina," I said, and people looked to me because I was the princess, small under the sun. "Why did you do it?"
She stared hard at me. "Because for years you were the one who was praised," she said. "You took the emperor's smile. You were everything he saw. I saw myself fade."
"You put my life in the hands of men who kill for coin," I said. "You did not think of that."
"It was the only way!" she cried. "I—"
"Enough," Octavio said. "The emperor has decided that because you betrayed the crown and endangered the princess, your name shall be stripped from the registers. You shall kneel and confess your acts before the city. You will walk the circuit of shame."
A drumbeat started like a heart. They had chosen a punishment that would be more than decoction or exile; they would make her both witness and lesson.
"Carolina, you will stand atop the scaffold and speak the truth of your treason. Then you will kneel before the emperor and be publicly shunned. Your house will pay a fine, and you will be bound by oath not to enter the court again."
The first step was to make her voice a public thing. They guided her up the stairs. Her knees trembled so visibly people in the crowd began to feel a new, clumsy pity. She stood, hands tied, before the wide faces of the city.
"Look at her," someone hissed. "She looks thin."
"Justice," another answered. "She deserves it."
Then the spectacle turned into true punishment. A man took a charred rod and, standing before a hundred faces, pressed it lightly to her forearm, marking her with an ash sign of traitor's brand—not enough to maim, the law said, but enough for everyone to remember. The smoke curled and the pain was sharp and honest. Carolina's lips parted; a stranger in the crowd cried out.
She sobbed, a raw sound that cut the air. She tried to speak and no syllable fit her mouth.
"Why do you feel shame?" I asked, before I realized I had spoken aloud. My voice was steady, and the crowd hushed as if the wind had stopped.
"Because I was wrong," I said, and this time I raised my head to her in the full light. "You were jealous, and that made you taste bad bargains. You thought you could change fate by selling us all. So you will live with your choice under everyone's eyes."
The city's reaction was mixed and hot. Some spat at her. Others offered thin forgiveness. A child in the front row burst into tears and was pulled away by a mother, who muttered about the cruelty of grown games. A few men snapped wooden clappers in rhythm, delighted by the theater of it all.
Carolina's face crumpled through stages: defiance, realization, denial, pleading, then collapse. "No one knows the ache of being invisible," she cried. "I thought if I pushed, I'd be seen. I didn't think of killing—"
"You did," an old man said from the crowd. "You did it for yourself."
Her breathing grew shallow beneath the sun's noon. A woman opened a cloth and laid it over Carolina's bound hands; it was the last small mercy.
"Look at her," Kellan said softly to me, beside my dais. "This is the result of envy."
"Is that all?" I asked, more anger inside me now than sorrow. "Should there be more?"
Kellan's face was unreadable. "The law decides."
She was paraded; they cut her from the public registers; her family paid fines and worse—they were forced to send a younger son to serve at a frontier garrison as recompense for trusting their kin. Carolina's cries faded as she was led away, forever marked by a public sign and by the memory in the city's talk.
The crowd dispersed, some satisfied, some uneasy. I sat with my purple-gold hand warmer cool in my lap and felt too triumphant and too empty at once. I had wanted to be free of Kellan's careful hands; I had wanted Winter; I had orchestrated traps. But what I had not known was that I, too, risked becoming a small cruelty.
Kellan took my hand then, as if the day had not been bloody enough.
"Forgive me," he said quietly.
"For what?" I asked.
"For not telling you everything," he answered. "For making plans in shadow. For putting you where they could reach you."
"You saved me."
"I did what I must."
"And if I had died?" The thought made my throat close.
"Then I would have died with you," he said.
We did not dance in love's light that night. There was no sweeping surrender, no too-perfect bow. There were quiet steps: I agreed to go to his house once the emperor arranged that I should be married, to see what life beyond palace walls would taste like. He asked, in a small reckless way, whether I would give up my title and ride to the border with him if that was what I wished.
"Go where?" I asked, eyebrows up.
"To the north," he said, "where the wind has less regard for gowns and more for good shoes. Where a woman can ride, and a man can fight honestly."
It sounded like the old promise in the mountain, where Winter had told me he would return a different man. My pulse answered not to a past like a picture but to the road ahead.
And so we left, eventually—my purple-gold hand warmer tucked into my sleeve, Kellan with his bow slung over a shoulder, and in my mouth the taste of cold medicine and the taste of something like truce.
I never forgot the doglike way he tended me, nor the black mask he had thrown aside to become something more than the court had made of him. The town would still whisper about the day the tutor became a storm in black armor. Carolina's public shaming would be bread for the city's tongue for years. I would carry the burn mark of that courtyard in my memory—the reds and browns of blood on stone.
One late dusk as the world softened between day and sleep, I found the small, secret thing the mountain boy had once given me: a carved wooden bead, not precious, rubbed smooth by years. I kept it in my hand and thought of the snow, the place where I had been lost and found.
"Do you regret anything?" Kellan asked beside me.
I turned the bead in my fingers and smiled a small, private smile. "Only that I waited so long to learn that being brave does not mean pushing everyone away."
He took the bead and placed it in his own palm like a returned offering. "We will go north when you wish."
I looked up at him, the man who had once pretended to be a scholar without a sword and had become both savior and suitor. Outside the window a wind moved the branches and the city kept its own careful secrets.
"One day," I said, "if we meet the Black Marshal properly—if he is not a memory—I'll introduce you."
He laughed, a soft, uncertain thing. "I'll keep my helmet ready."
We sealed nothing but a promise in the quiet room: for now, we would walk forward, step by winter step, with the purple-gold hand warmer between us and the memory of the public square where Carolina had been stripped of titles and forced to stand. The punishment had been public; the consequences would be private and long.
When I put my head down that night, the warmth of the small hand warmer and the weight of the bead steadied me. The world outside was still loud, full of clatching carts and shouting vendors, but inside I had the steady smallness of one safe hand. I had been a runaway girl once in the mountain snow; now I was someone who had been found and chosen to stand.
And that was, for the first time in a long time, my own decision.
The End
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