Rebirth16 min read
They Thought I Was a Wish-Granter—They Were Wrong
ButterPicks10 views
I woke up to a chorus of petty, greedy voices calling my name like I was some village relic.
"Janessa, take that jeweled collar for a week—I'll return it."
"Janessa, that embroidered gown belongs in my chest. I'll wear it tonight!"
"Janessa, that little inkstone—I'll gift it to the girl at the school, just lend it to me."
"Janessa, leave the gemstone bracelet. You'll make the ancestor proud."
My head banged against the carved bedhead. I tasted ash in my throat. When I forced my lids open, the room looked like the inside of an heiress's dream: yellow-hued huanghuali wood, neat displays, porcelain and carved screens. But the hands on my lap were soft—too soft.
"Who am I?" I muttered.
A small voice, a sob inside my skull, answered like a thread: "You came because I begged the gods. I'm Janessa Dalton. I died. I begged for one last chance and—"
I sat bolt upright. "You died at eighteen and woke at thirteen?"
"Yes! I—I can't live it right. Help me!" The voice trembled like a reed.
"Help? You handed over your life like a wish to a wishing well?" I snapped, and then, because habit kills fear, I said, "Fine. I'll run this life. I know how to survive. I will not be butchered again."
She sobbed into my head. "I left everything in ledgers and memories. Read them. Please."
I let the memories flood in—bit by bit revealing Janessa Dalton's life. A salt merchant's only daughter. Lavish trappings bought with her father's sweat. A guest in a marquis house, paraded as courtesy and slowly carved into meat.
"She was sweet," Janessa's echoes said. "She thought money buys safety."
"Money buys loaned safety," I corrected aloud. "Not loyalty."
I pulled on the embroidered sleeve that didn't fit my calluses. The fingertips were clean and delicate. My fingers itched to feel the weight of a spear, not the cool sheen of a hairpin. The face in the mirror was impossible—my own memories of a hard, wind-scoured face and the girl's milky features overlapped like two bad maps.
Outside the room a chorus resumed, and one name rose louder than the rest: the marquis's family—Felix Coelho's household. They were the wolves Janessa had fallen into.
"Janessa!" someone panicked. "Your trunk! Give it, give it, give it—"
I swung the door open. A line of ladies-in-waiting bowed by the futon, clutching handfuls of jewelry. Haisley Hudson's mouth was pursed with entitlement. Victoria Huber's hand hovered over a bracelet like a hawk. Linnea Mercier, the shy fourth, hovered behind, eyes big and hopeful.
"Put it down," I said.
There was a tiny, hollow silence. "Janessa—" Haisley spat like ivy, "how dare you speak so?"
"Put the things back." I threw a foot at the low stool by the bed and it flew in an arc, scatter-sounding like a trumpet. "Out the left door. Leave."
A shriek, a scramble, a cascade of silk. They dropped pearls. I sat and pretended to sip tea, watching them stumble out.
"Janessa!" a matron said, voice trembling. "You will insult our ladies? The marquis will hear. Your bragging will—"
"Write to my father," I said without looking up. "Have him send coin."
The original's voice in my ear went thin. "My father? He—he gave me thirty thousand in the capital when I came—"
"Thirty thousand?" My eyebrows lept. "Why didn't you say that before?"
"Because I thought money means you can buy their affection." Janessa's tears were embarrassment.
I laughed darkly. "Money buys nothing you hope for. But thirty thousand buys an army's rations. It buys food for men who hold spears for me. Good. I will use it better."
"Whom will you write to?" Lucille Oliver—the girl's old maid, small and fearless—kneeled by my feet. Her eyes were wet.
"Katherine?" Janessa's voice whispered inside. "Her name was Lucille. She called me Lady—"
"Lucille. Fetch me ink." I demanded. "And paper that isn't five taels an inch."
Lucille blinked and ran.
I had been a commander in a life that drooled blood and iron. Janessa had been a soft, good-natured fool. I did not have to be good-natured. I only had to survive and fix the wrongs piled like filth on her bones.
"Write, father," I dictated. "Felix Coelho. Send the money, fast. Tell him this house keeps me in name and strips me in practice."
"You're going to send him a letter?" Janessa's voice whispered, terrified and relieved all at once.
"Yes. And when he arrives, he'll be tempted to trade decency for appearances. We'll see which choice he makes."
"You're cruel," she said.
"Survival appears cruel from inside the mouth of comfort," I said. "Now be quiet." I dipped the brush and let powder-black ink drink the line: "Father, money, urgent—soldiers' pay."
Someone snatched the note away. "What are you writing? Janessa, we will have to make amends to the marquis. You owe—"
"Amends?" I laughed. "You owe nothing—except a reckoning."
That afternoon, the marquis household learned one lesson: never confuse a soft face with an iron fist.
I played Janessa poorly and perfectly. I laughed like Janessa when needed. I struck like the woman whose hands had held swords when needed. I wrote letter after letter until eight different couriers had them. I bought cheap, stout tea cups to throw when I was annoyed. I found the accounts ledger and began to read.
"You really think they'll just hand the receipts?" whispered Kaliyah Simmons, who had been Janessa's nurse in miniature.
"They will if they choose their misery," I said.
Haisley Hudson glared at me over a cup whose lip I had deliberately cracked the night before.
"You are insolent." Haisley hissed. "You are low born."
"Low born buys fewer illusions," I returned.
The court of small cruelties turned loud enough to make the marquis move. Gavin Black—no, not him. The marquis, Felix Coelho, summoned me to the hall.
"Janessa," he said with the oily smile of a man who had always eaten the marrow of someone else's work. "Your sudden rudeness has made the women of this house cry. You must learn your place."
"I must learn to protect what my father built," I said, cool as bone.
Felix's color darkened. "Your father offered his service to my house. You should be grateful."
"Your house took his coin," I said. "My letter names the gifts. It names dates and amounts. If you wish to keep this done by the book, we will. If you wish to throw dust, the book will still exist."
Felix's jaw twitched. He sniffed, and his servants shuffled, whispering. He looked small in his marquis chair. "You would make accusations?"
"Open the ledger," I said. "Or—"
"Or what?" Haisley leered.
I had already decided. There are ways to punish without a blade—ways that sting the mind and leave the body intact.
I sent for the marquis's cloister's guests and insisted the courtyard be cleared for a "family memorial." Word spread. The courtyard filled—servants, servants' children, neighbors, a town-merchant or two. People love spectacle. They love being witnesses.
I waited until the sun struck the brass beasts, and then I walked out with a tray.
"Your family is about to be thanked," I announced. "Please be present. Bring your phones—er, bring your eyes. Bring your tongues."
"Phones?" Lucille asked in a low voice, and I bit back a grin. "Eyes. Bring eyes."
Felix, with Haisley at his side and Victoria and Linnea arranged behind him like showpieces, watched me with a slow sourness that could curdle milk.
"I will read the list," I said. "I will read what your family has taken. I will name the years and amounts."
"Ridiculous," Haisley said, voice dripping with scorn. "What proof have you?"
"Proof," I said. I nodded to Lucille. She produced a bundle of Janessa's small family account books—inked pages with dates like gravestones. "You took these entries as payment for what you called 'hospitality'. You counted them as losses in your family ledger. You have, openly, called my father 'charitable padding'."
Felix's face folded into anger. "Those are business affairs! How dare—"
I read aloud the entries:
"Year One, five wagons of grain and two chests of silver to Coelho estate—received by Haisley Hudson on 3rd month.
Year Two, ten wagons of salted goods—received by Haisley Hudson.
Year Three, eight carts delivered; receipts signed by Victoria Huber. Year Four, fifteen carts, accounted by Linnea Mercier—"
The faces in the courtyard turned. The marquis's defenders shifted. The town merchants leaned in; they had known whispers. Janessa's book was a dry river of truth.
Felix started to laugh, but it was thin.
"This is—" he spluttered.
"Hear me," I said, and my voice didn't tremble. "You do not get to drain a father and call it compassion. You do not get to let a girl rot in your house and sell her father's coin when she still breathes."
At that, Haisley stepped forward, crown wobbling, fury in her eyes. "You liar! This is forgery. You think you can accuse a marquis of theft and—
"Stop," I said. "Walk back. Felix, have your steward cross-check these entries in the presence of your household and the neighbors. If any one of these entries is false, I shall—"
"Do what?" Felix sneered, hand on the pommel of his dignity. "How will you punish the house of Coelho?"
I had been a soldier long enough to know that sometimes the worst punishment isn't blood. It is exposure.
I reached into my sleeve and revealed one of Janessa's own handkerchiefs—stained, used, embroidered with a small, ridiculous symbol that Linnea always secreted. "This," I said, "came from Janessa's private chest. It has a mark your steward will recognize. It is written within that ledger that you moved this piece to your daughter's box. You took it as payment when Janessa was poor."
Felix's expression twitched. "You cannot—"
"Look at your own faces," I said to the crowd. "Do you want to be the family that honors guests by stealing the guest's father blind? Do you want to be the family that sells a girl's name for kicks?"
Felix's mouth opened, and what came out at first wasn't denial. A sharp, arrogant laugh. He stood, hands on hips. "This is preposterous. My house would never stoop—"
"Arrogance," I said, pushing. "Now watch disbelief."
I ordered Lucille to lay the ledger open in the sun. The ink dried like a map. A dozen entries matched small receipts, stamps, signatures. The steward's name appeared. A neighbor rose and said, "My cart took their grain. I was paid by Haisley Hudson's messenger."
Felix went still, like a colossus with a chipped base.
"You forged your own look of innocence for years," I told the crowd. "You counted the silver as present, but their bills show otherwise."
"He's lying!" Haisley cried, voice high.
"Denial," I said. "Notice the trembling. Notice the eyes looking not at you but at the exit."
Felix's face crumpled into fury-scarred disbelief. "You brought—"
"Yes," I said. "Janessa's papers and witnesses."
A neighbor—an old man who had sold a cart of grain years ago—stepped forward. "I remember the carts. They were full. But I never saw the pay. I was told to wait by the Coelho gate and I waited, for a week. I went hungry."
Shouts rose. Voices that had smiled at the Coelho gate now jabbed fingers at them. "Fraud!" "Shame!" "Where's the steward?" The marquis's servants shifted uneasily.
Felix's face went first white, then purple, then the deep sunburned red of a man who had swallowed his pride and found it bitterly bitter. "This is slander! Someone forge—"
"Shock," I whispered. "Now comes the denial."
The steward—Graham Clay, a thick man who had long drunk the household's deceptive wine—stood like a pillar, then began to stutter. "I—this is—impossible. There must be a mistake. The books—"
"Where's your account stamp?" I asked. "Where's your writ that authorized movement of funds?"
He could not answer.
"You're trembling now," I said, and the crowd laughed; cruel and sharp. "A man caught. The mouth that once called for Janessa's receipts to be filed away now denies basic arithmetic."
Haisley lunged. "You can't—"
"Denial gives way to begging," I said. "And you will see how fast the proud kneel."
Felix stumbled forward as if struck. He grabbed at my sleeve, fingers like claws. "Please," he croaked. "Please—this is a mistake. I will return the silver. I will—"
The crowd surged. "Return it!" someone shouted. "Return it now!"
Felix's voice broke. He dropped to his knees. "Please," he begged, in a hoarse, tiny voice. "Please, I am an old man. I did not—"
Haisley sobbed and then cowered; Victoria pressed lips white as bone. Linnea—oh, Linnea—stood there with eyes like peeled fruit, stunned. She had been part of this house's small cruelties. She had watched and accepted. She did not smile.
"Begging," I whispered. "See the arrogance slide into humiliation."
Felix touched the dirt with his forehead. "Forgive me," he said to everyone and no one. "Forgive me."
Nearby the servants laughed, nephews and villagers nodded, hundreds of eyes on the fallen marquis. Phones—people's sharp eyes—recorded the scene. Someone started chanting about a fair accounting. "Take it to the magistrate," another shouted. "Let the magistrate see these ledgers!"
The man who had once been big and fat on borrowed honor had shrunk into a traitor to his own house. He begged. He scraped. His daughters sobbed and tried to make distance. Haisley clutched at a pearl undone.
Then the crowd's mood changed; some recoiled, others took out coins and offered them to the steward and to Janessa's account. "I will be witness," said a linen merchant. "I saw the carts." The old neighbor who had waited for pay was given a small pouch of silver on the place. It was not full compensation, but the message was set.
Felix fell to his knees and made a public show of crumbling—first anger, then denial, then hysterical pleading.
"Please!" he wailed. "Please—I'll give whatever you want!"
People recorded it. People clucked. Someone slapped the steward on the back. The market would speak tomorrow.
I watched them perish in civility and want. The onlookers' faces had shifted from polite curiosity to righteous noise to murmur and to spectacle—phones recording, hands pointing, mouths echoing.
Felix's cheeks were wet with real tears now. "Please—please don't ruin us."
"That was the plan a long time," I said. "Sell a girl's life. Sell a father's sweat. You have already ruined yourself."
He then tried to deny again—"it's a mistake"—but the ledger, the neighbor, the steward's checked name, and Janessa's embroidered handkerchief stacked like legal bricks.
The cowardly little marquis family fell into the public scorn they had sought to keep hidden.
They begged then. They were exposed, embarrassed, stripped of pretense. The daughters' haughty cheeks had been slapped by the courtyard air; their royalty of small cruelties had melted.
The crowd's reactions were deliciously cruel. Some nodded and clucked. Some snapped pictures. People whispered and gossiped. A few older women beat their palms in satisfaction. The steward swore he had been misled. Felix gasped, then wailed, then crawled toward the gate, clutching at ankles, asking for deals.
"Please," Haisley gasped, falling face-first to the earth. "Please…"
But the market wouldn't be bought back. The steward put his hand to his mouth, then reached for the marquis's ledger, the one with the signatures. He laid the pages beneath the sun.
Felix's final change—collapse and begging—happened as if on cue. He was small, pitiful, a man who had spent a life stealing coin he called hospitality. The courtyard's eyes bore into him.
"Return it," I said, quietly.
Felix looked up, his voice broken. "Yes. Yes—I'll return it. I'll—"
Someone in the crowd applauded like the closing of a court case. Another laughed and let out a string of curses. People took photos. People gossiped. The scandal would travel.
For Janessa, who had once been sold down to this house, the courtyard applause felt like sunlight on old bones. She made a tiny sound inside me: "Thank you."
Later, when dust settled, when the marquis forensic accountants were summoned and the town officials wrote down witness statements, Felix Coelho did not die. He knelt and promised. But he learned something—how thin his prestige was, how raw the flesh of reputation when the ledger is opened.
He tried to deny it all the way down, then collapsed, then begged. The crowd filed away, buzzing. "I saw him kneel," someone said. "He begged." It would be on everyone's lips.
That night in the small bedchamber, Lucille lit a lamp and pressed the ledger to my chest. "You shamed them," she said, a fierce, tender pride in her voice.
"We only began," I answered.
"Then the rest?" Janessa asked in a whisper, no longer the terrified child.
"Then the rest is clean-up," I said. "And if anyone dares to call us thief, we'll show them the same pages. We'll burn that house down with truth."
"Will your father—Felix Coelho?—wait for you with carts?" Janessa murmured.
"Felix Coelho is the marquis," I corrected softly. "Your father is Felix Coelho's opposite. Your father will come. And he will bring coin, but he will not buy us like a trinket."
The next days became maneuvers—letters, soldiers' pay, quiet arrangements. I took five strong women from the market to stand at the gate. I kept one eye on the capital and another on the palace.
They were whispering about rebellion. A name reached my ears like frost: Gavin Black—Gavin was the man leading the storm in the palace. I had known him once as the wild warrior who would snarl like winter wind. He had been my comrade, if not exactly my friend. The old life flashed in my mind—war camps, quiet nights and the stench of powder—but now it fuzzed into the new: a city soaked in poison, an emperor dying in fits, a general gone mad with grief and power. A man named Gavin Black, a name that tasted of iron.
"Will he unwind our good work?" Janessa asked.
"No," I said. "He will not harm us tonight. He has other obsessions." I thought of a gaunt young man who paced in palace shadows, whispering to the dead. He was dangerous because he was a child in grief and a god in battle. "If he loves me, it will be the strangest gratitude."
"Will he love you for Janessa?" Lucille asked.
"He will love the face he knew. He will love a thing that resembles the ghost he mourns. And perhaps he will love something of the woman within."
When the palace's dark news seeped out—poison, an emperor forced to choke and cough at court, a general named Gavin Black pressing the palace into a bloody hush—people whispered our names like ledger entries. The man who had tried to rip Janessa's life into trinkets didn't have the power to stop a war.
Meanwhile, another man came into Janessa's story—Sebastien Allison. He burst into our life flaring and furious and with a horse's smell of leather. He had been the brother of the woman who had plotted, and yet he cut through bandit and blade like wind. He rescued three of the marquis daughters in the woods when a staged "robbery" went sideways. He had the blunt honesty of a man who believes in talent and saves only when it suits the soul.
"Which one do you want me to take as my wife?" he asked, the first day he appeared in our yard after the bandit affair.
"Which one do you like?" I said, deadpan.
"All of them," he said, solemn as a man who will take what's offered. He pointed at Linnea like a hand choosing bread.
Linnea's eyes flashed with a new hunger—the hunger for security. She was small and dangerous only in secret, not yet seeing how she'd been used.
"She will go with him," I said.
"Good." Sebastien's smile was a knife's clean bait. "Then keep the others quiet."
"I will," I said. "And if they move like wolves, I'll teach them to be sheep."
When you occupy a life that was not yours, the small cruelties and the large betrayals pile like corpses. You bite at them one by one.
I learned quickly how to toggle Janessa's voice and my own. Janessa wept when she must. I laughed when I must. And when I wanted to punish, I arranged daylight.
The palace didn't explode into a single night. It unraveled across nights, like a robe coming undone. General Gavin Black—the one who tasted like dust and smelled like war—had taken the emperor by the throat and began to play with the city like a child's chessboard. He was dangerous because, in his grief, he was supple and cunning. He wanted the world to feel what his world felt—hollow. He would stop at nothing.
"I will put him down," I told Janessa one night. "But not today."
"Why not now?" she asked. "He poisoned you."
"He poisoned me because a king with a crown is a man who fears the wrong hands on a sword. He thought I was ambitious. He was a coward who slithered a cup of poison and called it affection."
"You will make him feel small," she whispered. "You will make him know he's a liar."
"I will," I promised. "But my fights are not only for myself. For Janessa. For her father. For the soldiers who will starve if I die."
"Is it cruel to force a life someone did not choose?"
"It's necessary," I said. "Justice can taste cruel because it bites where it needs to bite."
When the palace shook and the city hummed with fever, I met Gavin under a plum tree he had cut down in his grief. He did not roar or demand. He tilted his head, peered at my face like a man seeing a map he couldn't quite read.
"You are like her," he said—saying her name as if it would conjure her back.
"I am not her," I told him. "But I can wear her face. That is enough for now."
His eyes narrowed to slits. "You were poisoned."
"You think so," I said. "But I have lived a life with poison in it. I know the taste."
He clenched his jaw. "Then you should have died."
"I almost did," I replied. "I chose not to. Now I will choose you as part of my plan—if you can be chosen."
He laughed—a short, strangled noise, bitter as old iron. "You ask much."
"I ask only that you keep your hands off the people who raised their knives at me for coin," I said.
He stared at me as if weighing a blade against a ribbon. "And why should I trust you?"
"Because I will have you trust me," I said simply. "Because if I fall you will be alone with all your ghosts. You will not want to be alone forever."
He looked at me a long time. Then, with the strange tilt of a man who breaks when he loves, he sat beside me and murmured, "Stay. Rest."
That night, he kept his word. He did not march the palace into ruin. He did not break into frenzy. He stood outside my yard with five men, quiet as stone.
"You say you'll take back everything," he whispered once when I walked past. "You will not be gentle."
"Never gentleness," I said. "Only justice."
Days blurred into mercies and war-scoutings. I wrote to my father, and Felix Coelho—no. My father—Felix Coelho?—no. My father's name was Felix Coelho, but he had the heart of a man who works salt and not a marquis. He came with coin, with ledgers true and fierce. He was a merchant who could count a man’s hunger in a glance. He arrived at the gates like a thunderhead and did not beg.
He paid the men that needed feed. He did not buy the marquis's mercy with empty smiles. He paid for loyalty and for truth.
"Is that all you needed?" Janessa asked, awed.
"No," I said. "But it buys us time."
In the end, cruelty and cunning must both be used as instruments. Some I pushed away. Some I pardoned. In public I dragged the guilty until they had no breath; in private I arranged meals for the hungry.
The marquis house never recovered its smugness. Haisley and Victoria put on dull robes and kept low as if someone might still yank off their crowns. Linnea married Sebastien and smiled like a woman given too much mercy. The steward quietly recanted at the magistrate, and the ledger's columns were corrected for public record.
Felix—Marquis Coelho—he had been humbled. He knelt in the courtyard, and people recorded his groveling. They called it justice. He did not die on his knees, but his bones learned the taste of dirt.
And I—now Kinley Volkov in a borrowed body that once belonged to Janessa Dalton—took the long view. There were poisons in the palace to weigh, crowns to pry apart, illusions to burn like old paper.
"Do you want revenge?" Janessa whispered at dusk.
"Revenge doesn't feed men," I said. "But justice pays for their bread."
She was silent then. I could feel her settling, like someone relieved of a weight.
"Tomorrow," I told Lucille as we sat in the courtyard with a pot of black tea, "we will move on the palace. We will ask questions. We will meet kings at their own tables."
Lucille bowed. "Yes, my lady."
"I am not your lady," I said.
"Aye," she said. "Then tell me what to do, and I'll do it."
And so we prepared, because a life stolen is not restored by one day of glory. It is restored by a thousand small mercies and a few public spectacles that strip the rot out from the center.
At night I kept my blade at my bedside. I smoked the smell of war out of my clothes with lantern-light. I thought of a handkerchief in the sun, of Janessa's tears turning into ledger ink, of a marquis's public collapse, and of a general named Gavin Black who would not slaughter tonight.
We had won a courtyard. We had not yet won a kingdom. But we had shown a town that teeth could bite back.
The next morning, I wrote another letter. This one was not for my father. It was for the palace, and for the man who once called himself brother and then lifted a poison cup.
I dipped the brush and wrote, not with Janessa's timid loops but with the blunt strokes of someone who had killed and survived.
"To the one who poured the cup,"
I wrote, and the sun tracked across the desk like a clock.
The work had only begun.
The End
— Thank you for reading —