Revenge14 min read
The Two Faces of the Prince and the Foolish Killer
ButterPicks15 views
"I cut meat for a living," I said, and the knife in my hand flashed like a promise. "I do not belong in a house of silk."
"You fuss like you do," my father said, spitting pork fat on his thumb. "But you can act the part for a day."
"I won't be a bird in a gilded cage," I told him.
"You will do as you're told," Finch Choi warned, and he did not bother to hide the way his voice shook. "You will go to Cooper Carr's house. They'll call you their daughter and you will wait. One year. Do the job and we'll survive."
"I am not afraid to die," I said, because I had been taught to say it. I had been taught to hide my breath inside my ribs, to bite the world and not let it bite back. I had been taught to count heartbeats like steps.
When Cooper Carr's men came, I was in the yard, cleaning a knife and thinking of my next mark.
"You picked well," the leader of the men said; he had a laugh like a closed hand. "A butcher's daughter with steel in her shoulders."
They brought me to the hall. "We have come to reclaim the girl," one of them said. "She is the lady's long-lost child."
"Long-lost?" I spat. "You bring ransom? I will cut your throat for the coin."
Marta Castro, the old nurse who had been a shadow in the household for years, saw my face and broke into sobs. "It is true. It is her."
"False," I snapped. "I am Finch Choi's girl. I smell of blood and smoke—but I do not want their house."
In the end the house won. A family that had been told of me for sixteen years could not be fooled. "Keep her," Cooper Carr said, not unkind. "If there is truth behind this, we will give it time."
Time began to weigh on me like iron. They polished the floors under my feet and put a silk ribbon on my hair. They told me I was a lady. I told them I liked the knife.
"You're unpolished," Kanako McCormick told me one evening, voice soft as a scold. "Don't be a buffoon."
"Who would want to be polished when polishing takes time?" I answered.
Days later, Finch's voice came like a bell in my ear: the Prince is coming to the capital. Emilian Smith, the son of the Pingnan Line, was to enter the city in a few weeks. The whole of the court brimmed with waiting mouths.
"He's the one," Katya Beatty said, smiling too brightly as she tucked away a vial into my belt. "You've always been lucky."
"What is this luck called?" I asked.
"Chance," Katya said. "And the chance means you get in."
I was a killer by oath—by the peach-mark I wore on my shoulder for the guild—and the order that would make my name rot or shine had been delivered months ago. "Take the Prince's head," the order read, and my throat closed around the blood that tasted like thunder.
"Do you hate me?" I asked Emilian the first night we met properly.
He tilted his head. "Why would I?"
"Because I am supposed to kill you," I said, steadying my voice.
Emilian smiled like moonlight on steel. "Then kill me and give me a good death."
"You smile as if the world is a well-tight cabinet," I told him.
"You like me too much to kill me," he replied.
He did not know the truth of his own smile. He did not know that his face had been the answer to all my late-night training sessions. He did not know the way my fingers had ached for the curve of his throat.
"In a month," I said.
He laughed, tangled my wrist to keep me close, and the laugh made the knife in my belt feel heavy.
"You always play at danger," he said. "Are you afraid I will take you away when I marry?"
"I will have you on the day you marry," I said, sharper than I meant. "The day you put on another woman's headpiece, that will be my best chance."
"You mean to say you are not jealous?" He teased.
"Jealous of a marriage I plan to make into a funeral," I said.
He laughed and kissed the corner of my mouth. "You bite words like a butcher bites meat."
"Careful," I murmured. "You may be the one who bleeds."
Weeks passed in a fog of silk and guarded smiles. I learned the steps of a lady, the little bows, the false delight. I learned also how to be near him, how to let him let me, how to touch and time a breath to the beat when the guards left.
"You are far too open with your hands," Alexander Edwards told me one day, watching my fingers while he bowed.
"I don't want my hands closed," I said.
He cocked his head, eyes like a child's betrayal. "You are reckless."
"Maybe," I said. "Reckless keeps you awake."
Alexander and the other guards—cold-blooded men who were children in armor—moved like clockwork around Emilian. They were the twelve shadows who would make killing him close to impossible: young, quick, and quietly cruel. One of them, the one I learned to call "Guyu," would become the seam that tore the secret open.
"I will enter his room one night," Katya told me in my sleep. "You will come to his study, leave a cup of tea near his desk. When he opens it, poison will be the last speech he hears. The rest I'll make sure to be accidents."
"He's sweet," I said.
"Do not let sweetness be foolishness," Katya warned. "We have one year. Do not waste it on moonlight. Your job is a head upon a spike."
He took my tea the night I left it for him. He sipped, and sighed, and looked at the cup as if considering the shape of the world.
"I saw you in the garden today," he said simply. "You leaned over a fountain as if listening for truth from the water."
"I was listening for the sound of a sword," I answered.
He reached out and tucked a stray hair behind my ear. "You are clumsy," he said. "But you do it with grace."
I laughed, almost choked on a lie.
There were nights when the assassin in me awoke like a drunk, when my jaw set and the world reduced to a clean path. There were nights when the girl who had eaten scraps and laughed at alley dogs loved the smell of his sleeve and stayed.
One night he asked a small thing that felt like a trap. "If I marry my betrothed and leave you, will you hate me?"
"Would you leave me?" I asked, heart like a frying pan skimming oil.
"If I left," he said, "I'd leave pieces of myself with people who do not know how to love them."
"Then stay," I whispered.
He answered by taking my mouth. It felt like knives folding into silence. I wanted to stab him then, just to see whether the steel would remember what it had been taught.
The plot moved its hands behind curtains. The court crackled like a hive. Three princes whispered to each other. The Prime House shifted its stance. Men who had eyes in the back of their heads looked at Emilian and measured him as if he were a toy to break or a throne to place.
A public feast was called in Emilian's honor. Lanterns dressed the night. I wore the guise of a waiting maid to the garden pavilion where he awaited guests. My feet were steady on the path.
From the rocks across the pond, I saw Isla Guerrero move like a reed—beautiful and poised. She had the sort of small, bright face that invited the eyes to fall in love. She was his appointed bride. She swept like a carved piece of moonlight into the pavilion.
"She is meant to be his," I murmured to no one, and then wondered whether it was true.
"You laugh at what's mine with too much teeth," Emilian said, taking my hand. He was careful, then, placing a bracelet on my wrist—a narrow band that had once belonged to his mother. "Take this," he told me. "So you know I'm not a fool."
"How sentimental," I said.
"Don't mock it," he replied softly. "Put it on."
I let the bracelet click, the metal cool against my skin, and for the first time, something inside me broke in a way that was not planned.
The lake night went black as the world remembered fire. A dance troupe on a rival boat burned into madness. Katya—my teacher, my old stage mother, masked as a beautiful dancer—threw herself into the chaos. She was a blade in silk. The music stopped while the boat caught flame.
"Burn!" Pint-sized men screamed. "Assassin!"
The dance was a distraction. I saw a hand flash, a blade cut, and the water drank three people into darkness. Five Prince, Edgar Boyd's man of favors, staggered blood into the lake. The fire bit wood and flesh both. A scream split the air.
"Get the Prince away from the water!" someone shouted.
Emilian grasped me as water and smoke thickened. Alexander leapt to his side. The boat we were on rocked as guards scrambled.
Katya twisted free of her mask and dragged me into the water, cold and carrying the taste of iron. She pushed me into a small skiff with one hand, then dove back, leaving a silver hair glint on the waves.
"Run!" she hissed under water. "Swim for the long reeds. I will pull a thread loose."
I obeyed. I pulled Emilian with me, and when I looked at him, he did not look like the cold, steady lord's son. His teeth were white with water. He looked like the child who had swallowed ice and learned how to breathe through frost.
He fell ill afterward. The doctors muttered of a rare toxin: coldseed—the kind that locks the blood like a winter night. It was a poison invented by the dead and perfected by mischief. He curled like a bird and slept for days.
In those days I paced like a caged tigress. My hands trembled with the thrill and the fear of my work. Had I helped? Had I been tricked? Rumors bloomed like mold. Three Prince had been seen with a secret letter. Five Prince lay without a limb. Men pointed at the Meihua Guild and whispered.
Then the palace rose like a damned mountain. Arrows flew; banners fell. The nameless plan that had been a soft hum resolved into a roar. The Pingnan army marched in, but it was not a steady war—only a poorly crafted revolt.
When the great hall filled, the moon cut a path of cold light across the stone floor. Men who had shared wine now shared accusations. The Prime House declared treason in the name of saving the realm.
"Traitor!" the minister shouted.
"Traitor!" the crowd echoed, a net closing sound.
And there, in the glare and the hush of the throne room where courtiers bent and the new king sat like a wax figure, Emilian rose.
"You," he said, and his voice had the kind of quiet that leaves no space to move. "You who burned the house, you who thought you could rise by cutting others down."
"Traitor! You are a traitor yourself!" Ernst Frank—Pingnan King, the man whose schemes had seeded war—shouted with a face like a man who had hoarded wind. He had been a giant until this very breath; now he was an animal caught with a trap on its paw.
"Stand down," Prime Minister begged, but the words had no hook in the air.
Ernst's eyes fell on me—Leoni—on the silk on my sleeve and the dirt under my nail. "So this is your trick," he said. "You used a servant to get close."
"You speak of tricks," Emilian answered. "You sent men to poison my house. You sent letters wrapped in hate. You raised an army against your own sovereign. I would have believed you loyal if you had not burned the mother who saved you."
"You kill me? You—" Ernst's voice frayed.
Emilian did not argue. He moved like someone who had learned how to cut ice without cracking it. He drew a blade and threw it at Ernst. It was clean as a child's question and twice as devastating.
Ernst staggered, the ruin of him unstitched in a heartbeat. He doubled with a sound that was as small as a breaking bowl.
"Stop!" ministers cried. "Seize him!"
The guards nearest Emilian froze, then stepped back as if a thread had lifted them. The Prince—my target—stood and looked at the fallen man. He was not triumphant; he was battered, bone weary, and his hands trembled.
"Why—" Ernst managed, blood frosting the corner of his mouth. He was a king of summers turned to a winter in an instant. "Why do you do this?"
"For my mother," Emilian said.
The court did not know how to fill the space between a confession and a death. A hundred pairs of eyes widened. Some gasped in horror; some cried out for justice; some, the small, angry men with long memories, began to weep.
Ernst's face burned with the color of shame. At first he was incredulous, then angry, then small. He tried to roll away. "I am the Pingnan! You cannot—"
"You are a murderer of women," Emilian said, voice no longer the pretty thing it had been. It was a woman's word in the throat of a man. "You took what you wanted, and left the rest to rot."
Ernst's mouth moved. "You—"
"Do not make me say the name," Emilian said.
Ernst's shoulders lost their grandness. He looked at the crowd: nobles, ministers, soldiers. They were not on his side. Many had his face once; many now feared the wind of a different king.
He reached out with the desperate claw of a dying thing. "See me! See me! I served the realm—I served—"
"See yourself," Emilian told him.
Ernst's expression telescoped from rage to bewilderment. The noise in the hall shifted: whispers replaced shouts. A man near the throne took out a handkerchief and dabbed his eyes. A child in the gallery stared with his jaw dropped. A woman laughed, thin and bright as a broken bell.
"He's lying," Ernst snarled, and tried to raise his voice. He reached up, as if to claw at a memory.
Emilian stepped forward, blade in hand. He did not hiss. He did not boast. He moved with a gravity that felt older than himself.
"By honor," Emilian said, and the word landed like a verdict, "you pay."
He thrust.
Ernst crumpled. The sound was human and terrible. The ministers recoiled, scrambling for the nearest rope of ceremony. The hall filled with the smell of iron and the sudden, shocking silence of a thing that was simply done and could not be undone by shouting.
People around us reacted like a church bell struck: some screamed, some prayed, some began to clap—like fists on a table—slowly, puzzled and then louder. "Justice!" a voice cried, and then another took it up. Others hissed like cats and spat.
Isla Guerrero gasped and covered her mouth with both hands. Crew Campos looked white as a sheet. Kanako McCormick's composure broke; she pushed behind Cooper Carr with a sob. Marta Castro's eyes were wet but blank, as if the world had removed everything she recognized.
Ernst's face was now an awful riddle: he had been a man of plans and plots, and now he was only a man who had lost their last mask. He tried to rise, clinging to a minister's sleeve, but his hands slid in blood. He tried to shout, but his voice had changed into a thin, endless string.
"Do not," Emilian said, lower than thunder, and he looked at me suddenly as if seeing me for the first time. "See what your line has done."
The watchers' expression shifted. Some understood new threads in the tapestry of loyalty. The guards flitted like moths whose wings had just burned.
It was not an execution by the letter of law. It was a punishment so sharp and public that everyone present became a witness who could never unsee the unmasking of a villain. For some, the shock made them weep; others clapped. Strangers recorded it with small boxes that clicked and flashed—capture for memory, for proof, for later mockery. Children under the galleries whispered the word "king-slayer" like a dare.
Ernst's face slackened finally. He stopped accusing, and his forehead folded into a line that might have once been grief. He tried to say a name—someone's name—and his mouth would not make it. He swallowed a last breath, and then he was gone.
A murmur spread, then a thunder of voices: questions, blame, relief, fear. The ministers shouted for order. The palace guards moved like a sea. Men who had once shared cigars with Ernst began to make open calculations, choosing where to stand.
Emilian stood, blade slick and steady, and his hands were shaking. Several people who had once mocked him earlier last year now fell to their knees. "Long live the new king," someone muttered, though no king had yet been named.
The punishment had been public. The villain had been stripped in view of his peers. He had moved from proud to ruined to pitiful in front of those who had once bowed. He had begged in silence, and found only cold eyes and the bright stare of a woman who had loved him and had been used as a pawn.
The crowd's mood changed faster than a weathered sail. Some cheered Emilian as the salvation of the city. Others watched him like a man who had crossed a line. The spectacle became a story that would be told many ways: as justice, as vengeance, as madness.
I felt none of those words that night, only the echo in my chest where a heart once lived. Emilian looked at me as if he judged himself too. "Leoni," he whispered.
I could not answer for a long time. I thought of my knife, of the promise that had a name and a truth.
"You did what you had to," I said, and my voice sounded far away.
The crowd outside tore itself into pieces. Houses whispered. Men were seized. The court, which had been a stage for wealthy actors, now watched a real play where people bled for reasons much older than them.
In the days that followed, more punishments were handed out. Traitors were stripped of rank and titles. Some wept for mercy in the market square, and those scenes were just as public—wives turned away from husbands, soldiers spat on those who had once been leaders, and those who had plotted found themselves naked of friends. Each punishment had a different shape: humiliation before a crowd, loss of rank, being publicly stripped of honors, or simply watching the world refuse to remember you.
Isla Guerrero's father, a man who had helped hide lies, was dragged before the city gates and told his crimes. "You pretended to be what you were not!" the crowd shouted. He tried to make a speech, hands fluttering like a captured bird. He made an apology, then begged. The faces in the square spat. Someone threw a rotten apple. He was forced to walk through the market with a painted crown of shame on his head while children threw mud at him. He went from proud to pleading in moments; the once-arrogant smile cracked and fell into a sob.
Crew Campos was placed in a public post for humiliation: he had to read a list of his own crimes as the crowd laughed. He shifted from denial to tears. "But they made me do it," he said. "Please—" He was drowned in a chorus of "No!" Then a woman who had lost her son in the fighting stepped forward and slapped him hard; he collapsed and the crowd watched his collapse like a bell ringing for a funeral.
Azariah Kozlov, the Three Prince, had his rank stripped before the court. He stood tall, then flailed as his support withered. He tried to bully the crowd into obedience but his voice grew thin. He was forced to kneel as servants poured cold water over his head, and the faces in the gallery were a wet wave of derision. He went from arrogant to shivering.
Each of these punishments had faces: initial smugness, then confusion, then panic, then the emptiness that follows being left alone before a crowd. Some begged. Some denied. Some pretended to faint. Some flew into violent rage then slumped, as if the soul inside them had been sold away.
I watched all of it as if through a glass. I felt emptier than any pit they dragged the dead into.
Days later, when the city cooled and the new ruler sat uncertain on a small, raw chair, Emilian and I walked beneath a shard of moon and spoke in whispers.
"Did you expect all this?" I asked.
"No," he said honestly. "But there is a debt, and some debts are paid in blood."
"And us?" My voice was small.
He took my hand. "Will you stay?"
"I don't know," I said. "I came to take your life. I think instead I took part of myself."
He laughed once, a dry little thing. "You always did make good bargains."
We walked in silence. A bracelet clicked against my wrist where he had given it. The metal was warm from my skin. I turned it round and round. It was simple. It was still the thing he had given me before everything bled.
"Why did you leave your pageant of smiles to stand with knives?" I asked.
He stopped and looked up at the sky, one hand going to the white hair that had once been black. "Because I wanted her to be safe," he said. "Because I wanted my mother's name cleared."
"Did you love me when the order came?" I said.
He looked at me, something like honesty breaking free. "When the order came, I thought I could be both. I am only one man."
"Then stop pretending to be two," I said.
He looked guilty as a child then resolute as a soldier. "I will not pretend. I will be the man I am. If that is a man who kills when justice is needed, so be it. If that is a man who loves you, so be it."
We had other days full of choices. Katya left like wind and shadow, taking debts with her. Finch Choi returned to the yard and laughed at a pig as if it were the only thing that had not betrayed him. Marta Castro took to staring into empty corners for reasons I could not know.
I left the city after the crowing of a new, odd king. I took with me Cooper Carr's old gun—an heirloom the house pressed on me in a strange good-bye—and the thought that my life had been a small, stubborn knife that cut the wrong thread.
"You are leaving?" Emilian asked.
"For now," I said.
He clasped my hand and held it like something fragile. "If ever you wish to be free of the promise, call my name."
"I will not call," I smiled. "I will write it on a rock and throw it in a river."
He laughed, and for an instant a memory of being a child in the rain hung between us.
When I stepped away, I put the bracelet in my pocket. It weighed oddly, like an accusation and a gift.
The city behind me was quieter. The punishment had been public. The villains had been made small. The crowd had watched and taken pictures and told stories. People would speak a new history now, and whether justice had been served would be argued in taverns and sleeping rooms for years.
I walked. I thought of knives, of bargains, of the many faces a man can wear. I thought of Emilian—of the way he had killed a man in front of an entire court and changed the fate of an empire.
I thought, too, of myself: a killer who had become a keeper of someone's heart by mistake.
At night, when the lanterns sputtered and the fields exhaled steam, I would take out the bracelet, touch it, and smile at the small, simple ring of metal.
"Keep it close," I told the night. "It is proof that even two faces can belong to one person."
The End
— Thank you for reading —