Revenge14 min read
Widow, Wolfhound, and the Crown
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I am Giulia Reid. I was, for a long time, a much-feared widow in the valley town of Yunxi.
"How many husbands have you had?" the butcher's wife hissed once, across a courtyard when she thought no official would hear.
"Five," I told her. "Five perfectly timed inheritances."
The truth was blunt and small: I had money, acres, a yard large enough to plant silence. I had a gold tea set that pleased no one but myself, and a mattress wide enough to sleep without dreaming.
"You're a witch," they said. "You're a curse."
I expected gossip. I did not expect assassination.
The first night someone came, I woke with the taste of iron and the impression of a blade. A stranger in black stood over my bed.
"Say your prayers," he breathed.
"Can we negotiate?" I asked.
He blinked. For a split second his hand loosened.
"No," he said. "You will die."
I slapped him. The slap surprised both of us. Then my dog—my enormous yellow mastiff, who slept at the foot of the bed—leapt. The assassin fled with a torn sleeve. The town then wagered whether my sixth husband would make it to the groomsman's table. The wager failed; the assassin vanished and the rumor spread that I ate husbands for breakfast.
By the tenth day I had hired twenty men to stand outside my gate. By the twentieth day I had dismissed them all.
"He couldn't even beat my dog," I told the steward. "Keep their wages. Tell them to fetch straw."
"Madam," Joy Luna—my small, sharp maid—said, handing me tea, "he's been there every night."
I looked out and watched the black-clad figure come. He fought poorly with my hound. The score was always the same. "Two hundred to naught," I joked. "Add a drumstick."
On the two-hundred-and-first night the man spat and said, "I will return."
"You'll do better tomorrow?" I asked.
He seemed embarrassed by the question. "I haven't actually tried."
"You're an assassin?" I asked, incredulous.
He straightened, like a child called out for lying. "Well, I try."
I found that oddly galling. I offered him honest work. "If you need a job, the cotton mill by the village hires for twenty copper per watch."
He scoffed. "I have a code."
Over time the code turned to gossip to wages. He told me his name was Ignacio Decker; no family, no house, a man with a pair of hands and a steadier set of knees. He had been hired through a middleman. When I offered him a direct purse—twenty times the original—he paused and laughed, then took the coins.
"Who hired you?" I demanded as a woman will when tired of fear.
He folded his hands. He would not say.
"Twenty times more if you tell me," I offered again, and Joy Luna, like a sprightly accomplice, pushed forward a second purse. Ignacio smiled. "There's always profit in the middle," he said, with a shrug that made me imagine his life as a long list of smaller losses and occasional wins.
He stayed in town, nominally to spin cotton. He also stayed near the gate with my dog, and once, when the dog bit him, he asked if he could eat at the dog's bowl and sleep in its shadow. I accepted. I liked his persistence.
Then they tried again. This time the attack on the carriage was plain and cruel. A blade took my coachman's throat as though a god had shrugged him away. Three men pressed the road; one cut the horse's leg.
I fell. I tasted dust and the curl of panic. I felt cold fingers at my throat. The voice over me said, "Do you have words for a god?"
"Yes," I said. "Enough."
Ignacio ran faster than I thought a man without pedigree should. He tore the three attackers with tricks that looked, at first, like luck. He flung grit at eyes, he lifted me and carried me like a child. When he had set me under a tree and stepped back to look, the ridiculous kindness of that action made me feel like collapsing into thunder.
"You run well," I managed when I'd stopped retching.
"I trained," he said, breathless. "To chase a mark you must first chase yourself."
The horse limped. The world continued. I decided then to leave the valley. "We will go to the capital," I told my steward. "Gather those who will come."
Three hundred men answered like a tide. They were not noble. They did not carry silk. But they carried willingness and things that could be forged into an army: a knife, a promise, a bruised elbow. I arranged them into six roads and sent them ahead.
We went. We passed towns where faces peeled like old wallpaper. We gave sacks of flour where villagers had no names for bread. In the southern county, a woman with mud on her knees served us a small basket of cracked cakes and we put coins into her hands and would not take shame.
"Why do you give so much?" Joy Luna asked that night as we sat beneath an odd foreign sky.
"Because they are people," I said. "And because when a crown is weak, the poor die on the road."
In the capital I waited. I met Abraham Daley—a soldier who moves like a mountain. He had been my grandfather's ally by the paper of the past, and he responded to a name written in the margins. Abraham became our anchor. He looked at me once and said, plainly, "You are not small." He had hands that had known only weight and wood; he fitted my plans like a ring.
Clancy Riley appeared later—an odd man who lived in the shadow of a pear orchard. He had been a eunuch who kept a garden of petals over memory. He moved like an animal who had learned masks. "Madam," he said the first time I met him in the old Longle Hall, "there's a thorn-prick of sorrow in the palace. It bleeds at the feet of men who will not look down."
"Will you help me?" I asked.
He smirked. "I help the comfortable die comfortably. I keep the eunuch's tally for the living."
"Then tally me in," I said.
Clancy laughed, but he helped. He was always at once near and obscure, like a ghost that keeps an old promise. He was ugly in ways that made people avoid his kindness. I liked how he smelled of woodsmoke and unsaid things.
I struck and failed. I led a night of blades to the palace and the moon found dust in its teeth. We burnt halls and lit smoke. We fell back—because the palace resources were not only iron but ritual and familiarity. Bowen Taylor—our emperor—was strong at ceremony; strong because he had learned masks older than nations. He captured me when the tide turned.
They put a collar on me that read "dog rebel" on one side and "mongrel" on the other. They paraded me through streets that threw rotten eggs and cheers in the same breath. Surprisingly, the cheers were louder than the rotten eggs. A woman shouted, "She comes to kill the dog emperor!" and the child beside her, eyes bright, answered, "Then let her."
They chained me in a cart and took me through the city. My guards lost faces like people misplace spoons; they died to duty and to the anger of those who would protect one state by their boots. Bowen Taylor watched the procession and then laughed at me. "You think you can be a crown?" he said when he had me in a cage.
"I think it belongs where it belongs," I said.
He tried to humiliate me—let them parade their worth and spoon me with disdain. But then, at the end, when the city and I had done the trick of turning ridicule into rumor, I was trapped in a cell with a faint light and a flea-bitten mattress. The hundredth guard paced past and I joked about his dance. He was a small man, a small performance in a small life, and I watched the rhythm of him until the right moment.
Ignacio did not break me out to flee. He broke the lock because he said, "You would burn less time with sorrow in the field than in a cage."
"Why?" I asked, because prisons make you ask everything.
"Because you're stubborn and it fits better on you than despair," he answered.
I planned the rest there, writing on his shirt with my own blood the maps of troop concentrations. I told him, "Go to the mountain temple and find Abraham Daley."
He hesitated. Then, with a laugh that smelled like a child's defiance, he said, "I will run at full speed. I learned from chasing markets."
I let him go. I stayed. I sent others while I pretended to be a prize bound in red. It was a lie the size of a kingdom. I let the enemy think me meek.
When the order came and the city gates were already tilting, we took a tiger's leap. Abraham Daley carried our flag. With the token Clancy had procured and the seal that belongs to a worn empire, we walked into the palace.
"Where is the emperor?" I asked one of the trembling palace pages.
"He hides," the page whispered. "He hides behind his robes."
We found Bowen Taylor on the throne, clutching the lacquer of an empire that had eaten its own teeth.
"Do you remember me?" I asked as I dragged him off the throne.
He had been a bully in childhood and a bore in manhood; he was a man who took other men's weaknesses as his weapons. "You will die," he whimpered.
"Not today," I said.
I set him down before the court and the ministers. Emmanuel Sullivan—the man who had argued for my death in whispers and petitions—stood with his hat crooked and his voice full of zeal.
"She is a monster," Emmanuel shouted. "This is sacrilege."
"Is it?" I asked. "Or is it simply a woman doing what the state refused to do?"
I made a choice. I had led men through losing winters. I had made too many sacrifices to be sentimental now. I raised my sword and said, "Whoever wants the spoils of the old order, step forward."
They did.
They did not do so out of loyalty to me. They did so out of hunger.
And then the punishment scene came—the punishment that I had promised myself long ago in the quiet of a courtyard, while my mother’s list of names sat in my lap like a map.
It was public. I dragged Emmanuel Sullivan to the center of the hall and placed him at the foot of the throne.
"Listen to me," I said.
"My lord," he cried. "You cannot—"
"Shush." I gestured to the crowd. "You spoke for the king. You told my father to extinguish me. You told of my 'danger to the realm.' You advised murder and a lifetime of small cruelties."
He opened his mouth, then closed it as if he had swallowed a gag.
"Tell them what you told the late emperor," I ordered.
He hesitated, eyes flitting. "I only spoke for the good of the realm," he said, a phrase meant for every coward to hide behind.
"Then tell them plainly," I said. "Say it now."
Emmanuel's facade cracked. "I… I said—" he stammered, then pulled himself together. "I urged measures for stability. I suggested removing—removing elements that threatened the order."
"Who are the elements?" The hall waited.
"You!" someone shouted. Others murmured. The crowd circled like hungry knives.
I gave Abraham a look. He nodded. The tribunal began.
For half an hour I made him recount upon oath all the letters, all the petitions, all the slanders he had authored. I had the papers I had taken from the archives; I read aloud his signatures. Emmanuel blanched. Each word he had once written to justify cruelty now sounded like a confession. He tried to laugh it off. He tried to blame memos and clerks. He fell into denial.
"Those were only suggestions!" he cried. "It was for order!"
"Order?" I repeated. "You call famine "order"? You call burned fields "order"? You call my mother a traitor and call your daily bread 'order'?"
"Madam," he sputtered, "the people—"
"They die," I said. "While you write pedantic lines."
Then I made him stand. I made him face the windows where the servants had been instructed to bring cloths. "You sought to destroy me for ambition," I told him. "Now, in public—we reverse the shame."
They unstitched his robes slowly, theatrically. He tried to cover himself. The crowd laughed and hissed. A woman spat in his face and someone else threw a heap of cold water. Emmanuel lost the last of his composure.
"Please, my lady," he begged. "For the love of the state—"
"The state loved you?" I asked. "Did it feed the children you passed each day? Did it mend the roofs of the poor houses?"
"No!" he cried. "No—"
The moment became a collapse of sound. Guards held him. They dragged him down the steps and made him stand before the outer gates. There I had prepared a small stage—no gallows, because a hangman is a convenience; rather, I wanted humiliation that matched the cruelty of his deeds.
I called on mothers among the crowd to step forward. "You who have lost sons to taxes," I said, "tell this man what his measures did."
One by one they came. They told stories: breadless winters, children with mouths like hollowed pumpkins, letters home that never got answered.
Emmanuel's face changed. He went from his usual polished smirk to pale to red to waxy. He denied and then tried to bargain; he promised to give up lands, to donate his titles, to go to monasteries. The pleas shortened and became smaller. The crowd jeered. Someone snapped a picture on a small glass lens—the new technology merchants had brought—someone else took a handkerchief and wiped the spittle from a child's lips.
At the peak of the unravelling, I had Abraham read out the ledger of the minister's property and charity—what he had kept and what he had withheld. Everyone in the square could see the difference: Emmanuel's houses, his wine, his daughters' trinkets, all measured against the single plate a widow had.
"Do you see?" I asked. "You made rules of order to keep your bowl full."
He crumpled. "I—" He began to tremble in earnest. "Forgive me. Forgive me, please."
The crowd's voice shifted. It doesn't take much to topple the edifice of a man who built his life with other people's hunger. They turned their backs. Some spat. Others raised fists. A student climbed atop a bench and cried, "Let the law decide!" An old soldier laughed and said, "This is not justice. This is an account."
I let the account stand. I let him be stripped of his titles in a ceremony conducted by those he had dismissed. Children mocked him. A woman took from a knapsack a child's boot and slapped it against his cheek. He tried to stand proud but had no place to plant his feet.
When I finally left him, he was kneeling, hands pressed to the earth, mouth moving in words he had no songs for. He would never again speak in the same assured tone in council. He would be a cautionary tale. He wept, then pitied himself. Around him, people argued and some cried; a few blessed him for the release of his status, but most simply walked away—no less hungry, but a little less afraid.
The punishment was not a public execution. It was worse for someone who had thrived by rules: it was exposure, a social unmaking. Emmanuel's every pompous phrase was turned and opened to show the emptiness inside. He had been a man of private cruelties; the punishment was a public mirror.
That was not all. I had several men who had profited by selling assassins and lies. Their punishments were different. One man, a broker who had introduced killers to middling merchants, was publicly shunned: he was forced to walk through the market with a bell tied to his neck, announcing every hour the cost of his sins. Another—an official who had taken bribes to sign death warrants—was stripped of his public face and made to work in the kitchens, chopping vegetables with a trembling hand while cooks spat ingredients at his feet. Each punishment fit the man's private cruelty.
When I returned to the throne room, blood still dried in patches, Bowen Taylor's corpse had been arranged as a last relic: a brutal season of justice had passed and we had ended it. I seated myself on the throne and felt the weight of a hundred people who had cursed me and then called my name.
"Will you be a tyrant?" a voice asked.
"No," I answered. "I have seen tyranny's teeth. I will be an emperor who taxes less, who keeps accounts open, who listens."
Clancy knelt by the throne and said, quietly, "You have done the unspeakable."
"I have done the necessary," I said. "Sometimes 'necessary' looks very like cruelty."
In the days after the change, I sat in the palace and learned to fold law into mercy. I issued a decree: three years of tax relief. I called Abraham to stand and traced the names in my mother's list—the list of those who had helped us before she had died. I gave back fields and promises.
Ignacio found his place close to me, not as a shadow but as a hand in the dark. He had been my assassin and my savior. One evening when the pear trees threw down petals like pale coins, he said, "Do you regret any of this?"
"Sometimes I regret the blood," I told him.
He looked at the petal in his hand. "Then don't make it more than necessary."
We laughed and the sound was small and brittle, like a teacup clinking.
We were not naive. Power attracts insects. The old court did not vanish with the body of Bowen Taylor. Men like Emmanuel swore to survive, to hide, to regrow. I watched carefully. I set up a network: Clancy in the garden, Abraham on the borders, Gunner Eklund to supervise the provinces we could trust.
Gunner was a man who loved strict things. "We must teach men to keep promises," he told me once, and he began to pull apart the tax houses one by one, forcing audits and handing out small punishments to those who cheated.
"Do not make martyrs of the weak," I cautioned.
"Neither will I spare the cruel," he said.
There were quieter scenes too. I found a child who had once laughed at me in the streets of Yunxi and gave him a small coin for bread. We reopened a market ordinance that forced nobles to trade with the poor. Slowly, like a low current pushing a river's bed, the city changed.
Joy Luna—my small maid—was always at my shoulder, proud as a sparrow. "Madam," she would say, "they used to run from your gate. Now they look to see what you give them."
"I give them relief," I told her. "I give them the chance to survive the day after."
Ignacio and I found what can grow between a woman who has seen murder and a man who has been paid to end life. It is not only tenderness; it is complicated by debts and by promises made with blood. I once said to him, "Be my husband, in name."
He didn't laugh. He placed his rough hand in mine. "I should think so," he said. "I like the idea of a steady roof. Also, you have good taste in tea."
We married in a small room with Clancy as witness and Abraham a silent guest. The dog lay at our feet. I put my hand on the old list my mother had given me—that roll of names, those debts and gifts—and told Ignacio, "Everything I take is owed to them."
He kissed my hand and said, "Then we will be two in debt and keep our names honest."
We ruled. It was not glory every day. Sometimes it was accounting. Sometimes it was picking a corrupt tax farmer out and making him stand in the market with a bell. People came and went; some celebrated us and some spat on the stones, but the city breathed easier.
In quiet hours, I would sit with the golden tea set and sip a tea that cost more than a peasant's harvest. I would think of the mother who had burned herself, of the dog who had bitten men for my sake, of the ragged men who had joined us as my guards. The past was a thread looped through even the finest silks of the present.
"Do you think the list has ended?" I asked Clancy once, pointing to the paper of names.
He polished a copper cup and replied, "Lists never end. They only change hands."
"But we can honor it," I said.
He looked up, and for a moment his face was soft and small. "You have already honored it by doing what you promised."
So I kept my promise. We ruled as we could. We punished the cruel publicly, we forbade unnecessary cruelty, we fed children, we ordered accounts. There were days I felt the itch of vengeance and days I felt the balm of mercy. The two coexisted like sun and shadow on the same floor.
Once, when the pear tree bloomed and the petals fell like a snow for the dead, I walked to the little place in the palace where Clancy had planted those trees. He stood beneath them, plucking blossoms like a man counting change.
"You keep the trees and I will keep the law," I told him.
He smiled. "Perhaps in time you will let the trees grow and not count."
"I will let them grow," I said. "But I will keep the ledger."
"Fair," he said. He bent and offered me a blossom. "For the ledger's first day."
I took it. I placed it on the roll of my mother's names. The edges of the paper softened.
We were, at last, what both the world and a woman like me could tolerate: a ruler who had learned the cost of crowns, a lover who had learned the cost of touch, a court that had been taught how to fear and how to feed.
The dog—my old big dog—still slept by the kitchen, still stole from plates and still loved me with an honesty no human could afford. The golden tea set stayed polished, and the mother's list lay under a weight of new names: those who taught, those who healed, those who had nothing and now had a knapsack with bread.
"Will you be remembered kindly?" Ignacio asked me once, late.
"I will be remembered completely," I said. "And that is enough."
The pear blossoms fell. The list of names remained. Once, before night swallowed the last light, I took up the little gold tea pot and set it near the mother's roster. I wound the ribbon and heard the faint click of the lid.
"Giulia," Ignacio said, "come see."
I went. He pointed at a small thing pinned to the roster: a child's boot, a scrap of a soldier's letter, a coin. Little markers of a life reclaimed. I touched them, and for the first time in many years, the ache in my chest eased enough to let me sleep.
We had re-made a kingdom. We had punished cruelty in public, in ways that stung merciless men for what they had done. I had been a widow who wore riches and suspicion; I became an empress who wore a ledger and sometimes a merciful hand. My mother's list had been the thread that stitched my mission. I kept it close. I kept the dog fed. I kept Ignacio's hand.
At dawn, in the pear orchard, I opened the roster and let a petal fall on my mother's handwriting. "We are home," I whispered.
And in the room where my golden tea set sat, I placed that petal on the lid. It made a small stain, like a memory that will not fade.
The End
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