Revenge13 min read
When the Princess Became the Storm
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I watched the Emperor kneel in a pool of his own surprise, and I felt nothing but glass-cold resolve.
"You are mistaken, Your Majesty," I said. "It was I who saved you. It was me—Jasmine Ford."
He blinked as if I had thrust a knife into his calm. Damon Myers, the man who sat on the dragon throne and called himself unshakable, looked at me like he had seen a ghost.
"You?" he said at last.
"It is true," I answered. "I pulled you from the water. I stoked your fever. I kept you breathing." My voice did not wobble. "I did what I did because my house once bowed to yours."
Damon's pupils contracted. He turned his head, and for the first time in three years I saw something fissure in him—something like recognition, something like a memory he could not name.
"Bring the bowl," the palace physician muttered, and a servant obeyed.
The old man held the steaming broth to my lips as if it were poison, and he said, "This will take your strength. It may be beyond saving."
I laughed, a sound like broken glass. "Beyond saving is what I asked for the night I married you," I said. "Drink, Damon. I will give you your cure with my own blood. From this day, we are even."
He did not move. He watched me with eyes that flitted between anger and a small, feral grief.
"My lord, the remedy demands heart-blood," the physician said softly. "It cannot be faked."
"Do it," Damon said, and his voice was all command.
They took a sliver of my sternum. I felt cold as they drew the first warm bead into the crystal vial. I felt everything at once—the weight of my father's favors, the quiet loyalty of my maid Eden Doyle, the lost smiles of my child that would never be—like a tide dragging me under.
"Look at me," I told Damon as the vial filled.
He looked. He took the medicine the physician made from my blood, and he did not cough. He did not die. He swallowed and, for a while, the room turned unbearably still.
After that, the world moved like a shattered mirror.
"Your Majesty," I begged once, while there was still a sliver of hope to hold, "spare my father. He is the last of my blood. Leave him be."
Damon's face folded into something I could not name. Then anger came like a blade.
"You asked to be spared?" he snapped. "You forget what your father did. You forget who paid for your crown."
"My father lent his armies so you could press a claim," I insisted, while the men around us shifted like startled birds. "He did not deserve—"
"You are the one who does not deserve anything," Damon said. He caught my jaw between two fingers, hard enough to make my teeth ache. "Do not pretend I did not remember his bargain." His voice was a knife.
"I won't..." I tried.
"You will watch him die," Damon told me. "You will watch him fall, and you will know why."
They brought him before us—Marshall Bennett, the last living man who had stood for my house. He was blind with sleep, bound, dignity frayed. He did not know the blade would come.
"Damon," I cried, "no—"
He set the sword.
"You will see," Damon said.
The blade came down so quick my mind tried to deny it. Blood—hot, terrifying—came at me. I crawled. Eden screamed. I remember the smell of iron and the taste of suddenly empty mornings. I remember pressing my mouth to my father's chest and finding nothing but the hollow cadence of absence.
"Forgive me," I whispered, but forgiveness was not mine to give.
That night, the palace was a house full of ghosts. They took me to the other side of the garden and left me on a bench. I heard footsteps recede like the closing of a door.
"Eden," I croaked. Eden Doyle knelt and took my hand.
"Princess," she said, voice splitting, "you must live."
"How, Eden?" I whispered. "They tore everything. They left me with only a heartbeat's worth of rebuke."
"Live to answer them," she said. "Live to show them how a throne built on cruelty falls."
I swallowed, tasted ash, stood. I learned then the small, mortal things of revenge: to feel a cold day and use it for a plan; to be tender with the people who stayed; to be like a blade folded into a sleeve until the time came.
Weeks later, Damon summoned me to the hall. I went because there was nowhere left to hide from his gaze.
"You're to be deposed from your post," Giovanna Khan said when she walked in like summer, all silk and smile. "Your garments are so somber, Your Grace. You must be tired."
I looked at her. Giovanna, the one whose face echoed another's, the woman Damon kept by his side because she resembled—too closely—the woman he had once wanted: a ghost called memory made flesh.
"I gave up myself," I said. "I gave my life over and you take what you like."
"You will have no child to hold yourself to, then," Giovanna purred instead of answering. She had come like a light that cleansed everything. "We are so pleased for Damon. A child is a blessing."
Damon bent to her then, an affection so cold it made my knees tremble. "She will be honored—or she will be gone," he said to me without moving his eyes from Giovanna. He left as if nothing at all had just been decided.
I went back to my rooms and slit the silk from my hair, pulled out the jeweled pins like old promises, and then I found myself humming an old lullaby my father had taught me. The next day I walked with Eden to my father’s little garden and we covered the place with soil. I put my hand on the stone and promised silently that I would not end here.
"Stay with me," I told Eden. She held my hand like a beacon.
"I will not let them take you," she said.
The palace continued to rot from the inside out. Damon smiled like a man who had swallowed a secret but did not want it to choke him. Giovanna carried her light like a torch. Jackson Rice, a noble whose letters were silk and poison, slid into the background and then forward again as if rehearsed.
That night my hand found the hairpin at my waist.
"You want me dead?" I shouted. "Come and take me, then."
I lunged, an animal that had given up soft things. Giovanna shrieked, Damon seized my arm, and the world collapsed.
He bound my wrists with leather. He told the guards to drag Eden away.
"Not Eden," I begged. "You promised."
"She will learn," Damon answered. "She will learn what obedience costs."
They dragged Eden out into the courtyard and we heard the echo of leather. The sound of weight on a body. Her voice—my Eden—cut through me like a bell.
"Stop!" I screamed. "You will not hurt her!"
But they did. They beat and broke her like a twig. She begged for me. I begged for her. They used her to teach me that my own life was theirs to command. I felt my entire world distill to one concentrated hatred.
Two months later, at dawn, a courier arrived from the Hall of Medicine with news that made my heart drop. The physician sent to be my counsel, Galileo Johnson, came with a thin packet of evidence and a silver pin blackened with poison.
"Jasmine," he whispered as he set the evidence on the table. "They poisoned the food. You have been given an antidote that weakens you but does not save you. They used something called 'Summer Woe'—a poison used by those who wish to convert suffering into cure."
"Who?" I demanded.
"It is not the Emperor's hand alone," he said. "Read these."
There, in letters penned in an author’s hand that had been intercepted, were proofs. Jackson Rice's neat script confided in Giovanna Khan's flourishes about "a plan to make him depend." In page after page, they wrote of deceits—of dosing the king, of making a cure that could only come from a heart that could afford to bleed.
I felt then the bowl of medicine scrape across my throat in slow motion. I remembered the vial. I remembered the physician saying it would take everything from me. I remembered the look in Damon’s eyes when he had watched me fall away and yet refused to look when Eden fell.
"Bring them forward," I said.
Galileo's face lit for the first time in months. "If you wish, we can make them pay in daylight," he said.
When I summoned the court, the palace hummed with gossip. Soldiers and ministers filled the hall like a sea of gray. I sat in place of my chair, no crown upon my hair, and I looked at the man who had called himself my lord.
"Why?" I asked Damon. "Why let them do this?"
He could answer with a lie and he chose to answer with silence. That silence was itself a verdict.
The scrolls were produced. I read the letters to the court, sounding each name as if they were coins I was tossing into a fountain of accusation.
"Jackson Rice wrote, 'A little darkness, a little remedy—she will obey.'"
"Giovanna wrote, 'We will save him and he will love me. He will not look back.'"
I watched them listen. I watched their faces go through stages. Shock. Disbelief. Then the slow, cruel tilt into fury at being made fools.
The punishment was a spectacle planned by Damon’s own hand—a reckoning in the Great Hall, watched by more than three hundred courtiers and sentries, a punishment that would not go away.
"Bring them," Damon ordered.
They came—Jackson Rice bound, Giovanna Khan in silks that mocked her situation. Jackson spat. Giovanna wept.
"You are accused," I said, my voice steady. "Do you deny these letters?"
Jackson sneered. "Foolish pages," he said. "Forgery."
"Giovanna?" I asked.
She smiled with a shake of her shoulders, a brittle thing. "I loved him," she said, and at that, a ripple of soft sympathy passed over half the room. It did not matter. Love and treachery can share a whisper; pity is a poor shield.
Damon stepped forward.
"You will confess in public," he said. "If you do not, I will make sure your names are stained longer than language."
Giovanna went pale. Jackson laughed once, loud and brittle, and then his laughter broke.
"See?" he shouted. "You see how they turn on one another!"
I let the hall boil in murmurs. I wanted the world outside to know. I wanted the soldiers in the outer gate to watch the fall of those who trusted the crown's favor to win them everything.
The first act was exposure. Galileo read the letters aloud, and then he produced witnesses—the servants who had been bribed, the apothecary who had mixed the vials, the courier who had moved the parcels at midnight.
"It is true," Giovanni said at last, voice hollow. She clutched at Jackson's sleeve as if to anchor herself. "We thought—"
"You thought to kill an entire line and make a crown your bed," I said. "You thought to buy love. You thought wrong."
Damon then enacted the second act: the public humiliation. A screen was lowered and before the wider court we played the evidence anew: the letters, the receipts, the sealed notes. Servants with trembling hands recounted the payments.
"Do you have anything to say?" Damon asked Giovanna.
She opened her mouth, closed it, tried again: "I tried to save the Emperor. I wanted him to see me as—"
"Silence," Damon said. "Guard, remove her fine headpiece."
They took her ornaments and Let them be poured into the center of the hall, crushed and trampled for all to see. Men in the gallery called out, "Shame!" and then pulled out their small devices and began to record. The clack of wood on the gallery echoed like applause.
Jackson's face changed. He had puffed up with court favor; now he frayed.
"Jackson Rice," Damon said quietly, "you took what did not belong to you. You paid to poison a sovereign."
"Don't," Jackson warned, but there was tremble under the bravado.
"You will pay where everyone can see."
They forced Jackson into public labor—stripped of title, his banners torn down, his coats taken and burned before the gates. They marched him through the courtyard, where servants spat and children pointed. He tried to meet the eyes of courtiers who had once praised him; they turned away.
Giovanna was dragged onto the dais and, before the assembly, made to kneel. They shaved her ornate hair, and as the silk was cut from her neck the crowd fell into a grim silence. A few of the youngest courtiers wept aloud; others filmed with trembling hands.
"Now you will be bound," Damon said, and the guards knotted leather around her wrists.
"Please!" Giovanna cried then, and the theater became a hurricane.
"Please don't," she sobbed. "I didn't—"
"Beg," I told her. "Beg and tell the truth."
She did. For the first time her voice had no armor. She begged for mercy, for a pardon, for the return of the life she had bartered for a throne. The crowd leaned closer, hungry for ruin.
Around us, courtiers whispered. A woman I had not met before took out a tiny lens and trained it on Giovanna's face. A man hissed curses. A boy nearby, curious and cruel, laughed.
Jackson's reaction followed a set the audience watched like a dreadful play: first, arrogance, then disbelief, then denial. "You cannot—" he said. Then his voice shrank. "This is a lie. I was set up."
"By whom?" Damon asked.
"By ambition," Jackson said, and the word was meant to cut me. It missed.
He knelt. His knees were scraped and raw. He tried to stand back up, but hands pushed him down. "Please," he whispered. "I did it for my family. I did—"
"Beg," I said again. "Beg for forgiveness. Beg and watch the faces of those you betrayed."
He did. At first he begged like one who could be bought; then the rawness in his voice broke something open. He clutched at his chest and began to cry. The crowd recorded him with a ferocious appetite.
The final act came when Damon pronounced sentence. He had a look that I had not seen before: a man who had tasted the bitter cost of his own crown and found it wanting.
"Jackson Rice," he said, "for conspiring to betray the crown and poison the sovereign, you will be stripped of lands, bound to public labor for two years, and your words placed in the market square for all to read."
The crowd howled. The punishment was civil and humiliating, and Jackson went limp, his face washed in misery.
"Giovanna Khan," Damon said, "for seducing the sovereign with lies and attempting to take his life by counsel and poison, you will be imprisoned and stripped of rank. You will be forced to make public confession in the square each morning, and your name will be called so all who never trusted you may be made safe."
She fell to her knees, sobbing as if the world had cleaved in two. The spectators cheered and hissed and took pictures. Some clapped. Some whispered that justice had happened in daylight.
They were not killed. The crowd wanted blood. They wanted spectacle. But Damon had been cruel in a different way: he had taken from them their short-cuts, their schemes, their easy purchase of favor. He had left them to live with the memory. He had left them to sit in the corner of shame where incandescence softens into rust.
They crumbled on their knees. Jackson’s grin turned to a small, animal sound. "Please," he begged, "I will do anything."
"Beg the emperor," Giovanna cried then, "beg for his mercy!"
"Beg everything," the crowd shouted.
They were exposed. The audience recorded, applauded, wept. They went through every stage: triumph, denial, collapse, plea. I watched their faces, the way they changed when power slipped through fingers like mud.
When the sun came down on their humiliation, they were carried away in chains and silence. A cluster of servants gathered, whispering, "Did you see? Did you see them beg?"
"Do you think they will recover?" someone asked.
"No," another answered. "Men like that never do."
Outside, among the crowds, people pointed and took tokens. A woman knelt by Eden’s grave with an offering. Soldiers looked at me with something that could have been respect.
"Do you feel better?" Eden asked later, though she had never left my side.
"No," I said. "Better is a small word. It is a thin ember. The place burned is still black."
The war did not stop with court punishments. Jackson's removal and Giovanna's disgrace bent the arcs of loyalty, but it did not erase what they had set in motion. There was still a king with a wound, an empire tired of both order and cruelty, and there was me—carrying a tally of debts that would not be measured in coin.
We turned our energies to the field. I rode at the front of our banner. Yousef Bloom, who had once been nothing more than a rumor of a commander, answered an old pledge and mustered the men who would be our foundation. Maxwell Galli, the young soldier with a face like iced glass, proved brave in a thousand small ways. Aliana Jesus, my sister—my blood—rose in strength until her courage frightened me.
We took ground one fortress at a time. The people we liberated—folk who had been flattened by tax and blade—sang for us, fed us, sheltered us. Soldiers who had once gone hungry under Damon’s banner came to our fires.
In the end, the crown came back to the place where it began: the palace where men had once thought to play with fate. Damon tried once more to govern by fear. He had murdered. He had coerced. He had lost a child and, in a fit of human contradiction, loved still the shape of what he had tried to own.
I stood beneath the gilded eaves of the throne room and I thought of all the buried things. Of Eden. Of Marshall Bennett. Of the swollen pit that had been my unborn child. I felt the weight of their ghosts and I felt a single, terrible clarity: revenge is a work of flint. It lights things. It burns them. It clears a place for new planting.
He expected me to end him there, in the center of the hall, with steel and a scream. I surprised him.
"This is yours to reclaim," Damon said, looking tired and strangely small.
"Not for me," I answered. "It is for all the people you hurt."
He smiled—half a smile—like a man who had counted on one outcome and found another. "Then take it."
I did not want the trappings. I wanted a place where no one could threaten a child with worms and say it was the price of an empire. I wanted a life where Eden's name could be spoken without trembling. So I chose differently. I named my sister to stand in the new seat as a steward. I told Maxwell and Yousef to take charge of the army as stewards, not masters. I set about rebuilding.
Damon fell away like a scar tissue. He did not become a monster that day nor a saint. He sat on the floor of our old chamber and we spoke—two people who had loved and been wronged. He told me, once, "I wanted you to forgive me."
"I wanted to die," I said.
"You did not," he replied. "You lived."
We made a bargain in less terrible words. He submitted to exile—not to die, but to the small and fierce thing of living out the rest of his days without power. He tended a garden by a river and learned how to set a table. Sometimes he would look at me from afar and smile with something like apology in it.
As for Giovanna and Jackson, their names became cautionary tales. They had been punished in sunlight, their pleadings recorded and replayed. They had been found not cheap and pale but ugly and small. They begged. They fell. They were remembered.
I burned the hairpin that had once tied me to them. I planted a peach tree over the grave where my father slept. I walked Eden's paths in the old garden and I learned to watch the seasons as if they were letters.
One day—years later—I stood beneath that peach tree and I ran my hand over its rough bark. The wood had grown knotted, the branches thick.
"I cut the first blossom," I said, remembering.
Eden Doyle's voice came from the doorway—she was older now, lines at her eyes like map routes—"And you will keep cutting them until this world remembers how cruel it once was."
I looked up. The air smelled of spring and iron and the faint, steady perfume of forgiveness. I did not pronounce miraculous mercy, nor do I pretend the past left no scars.
"I will bury the rest of what must be buried," I said. "And then I will plant again."
The peach tree trembled in the wind like a small, living banner. The people who had followed me stood a little apart, hands callused and faces sun-splashed. They waited. Justice had been done in daylight; restitution would take years.
"Your rule will be different," Maxwell said once, blunt as always.
"It will be," I answered. "It must be."
I wore no crown. I kept no throne in my heart. I learned that the fiercest thing a woman can do is choose peace on her own terms and hold her enemies to the light.
I am Jasmine Ford. I kept my vow.
The End
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