The Secrets of Jin-Shei (11 page)

Tai paused, lifting her brush from the page of her journal, listening to the silence.

This was the first year that she had been in the Summer Palace without her mother—Rimshi had developed a debilitating cough and chest infection over the previous winter, and her physician, the healer Szewan who attended the women of the Imperial Court and who had been sent to take care of Rimshi by the Empress Yehonaia herself, had counseled against travel. But this was the second year of
jin-shei
between Tai and Antian, the Little Empress, and Tai had been invited along in her own right as a guest of the Court. She had not been given the quarters she and her mother usually occupied, out on the fringes of the Palace, in the outer courts. She had a room to herself this summer, close to Antian’s own suite—a room with a window that looked out into the garden, a room full of billowing curtains and soft cushions. There was even a servant who left a beaker of iced tea in the room every morning, when the heat came, as she did in all the women’s chambers.

Tai felt awkward accepting all this. She also felt isolated. That she was
jin-shei
to Antian was an open secret in the court—but there were times that the hallowed precepts of
jin-shei
did clash with the more traditional strictures of status and class, and many of the inhabitants of the plush women’s wing in the Palace did not much like it that a commoner was invited to live among them. Antian was of age now, however; Tai had been a guest at the Little Empress’s Xat-Wau ceremony only that spring, and was witness to Antian’s grandmother, the old and fragile Dowager Empress, placing the red lacquered hairpin through Antian’s lustrous piled-up black hair. Antian was an adult, according to Syai custom. She was also a senior member of the Imperial household, with her own personal court
which was now her responsibility. She had asked Tai to the Summer Palace, and the other women had to at least be polite.

Or that was the theory of it. Tai had learned to tell the difference between three very specific kinds of women in the Court where she was concerned. There were those who were genuinely pleasant, and offered a smile or a kind word in passing even when Tai was not accompanied by Antian and they felt constrained to be polite in the presence of Tai’s powerful friend and protector.

There were the ones who would pass Tai in silence if they came upon her alone, but smiled and fawned upon her when she was in Antian’s company; Tai soon learned to recognize a smile that did not reach the eyes and the touch of cold, reluctant fingers.

And then there was Liudan.

In the two years of her
jin-shei
tie to Antian, Tai had completely failed to get anything but cold hostility from Antian’s sister Liudan. It had started on the very first day of the
jin-shei,
when she and Antian had been walking in the very gardens that her room now gazed out into, when she had pointed at a flower and seen Liudan’s recoil from her.

That was my sister. My angry sister.

Antian had explained about Liudan, later.

“I was only two when she was born,” Antian had said, “but my mother was the Empress and everyone spoiled me. Every concubine’s child is taken to belong to the Empress, of course, but when Liudan was born, Cai—that’s her mother—did not wish to give her up to be raised by a wet nurse and then the court.”

“Which one is Cai? Have I met her?” Tai had asked.

“No,” Antian had said, shaking her head. “Cai is dead. She was at the Court for only a few years, but she lived her life like a comet.”

“Where did she come from?”

“She was a daughter of a poor farmer, up in the miserable rocks and stones of the north country. He could not afford to keep her—she was the ninth child in the family, the sixth daughter—and so he took her and two more of his daughters and brought them to Linh-an, and sold them into concubinage. Cai was the only one who made the Imperial Court.”

“What of her sisters?” Tai had asked, her eyes wide.

“Who knows? Cai never did, or at least never spoke of them after to anyone here in the Court.”

“So what happened?” Tai had asked, held rapt by the sorrow she could sense between the lines of this tale, by the tendrils with which this sorrow had snared Liudan herself.

“She might have been happy,” Antian had said. “I don’t know, I was only a child. Cai caught the Emperor’s eye quickly enough, but rumor had it not for long. She did bear him a daughter, though. One of only three daughters, including me, that he sired on his women. And we were all more or less born at the same time, too—there is just over a year between me and the next daughter, and then another year between her and Liudan. She’s the youngest of the female line. The rest, well, his line runs to boys. His sons, now, range from their twenties to babes in arms.”

Tai was old enough to do the numbers on this. Inheritance went through the female line in Syai; the Emperor might rule the land, being male and having that power vested in him, but he came into his power through the woman he had married and who had been his path to the throne, and his legacy rested in the daughters he had sired. So the Emperor had secured his succession, and then provided a couple of spare heirs to the Empire, two other daughters, in case anything happened to the Little Empress. The boys would be married off well, and were of no further importance.

But Liudan was the Second Spare, born of a mother who, once her duty was done, became a shadow in the Court, no longer noticed, no longer needed, supplanted by other women in the Emperor’s retinue of concubines. The only thing of value Cai would have had would have been her child … but Tai had extrapolated from Antian’s earlier words. Cai had not wished to let others raise her daughter—and perhaps, if she had borne a son, she would have been allowed to keep the child and rear him. But she had borne a potential heir—one twice removed from the throne, to be sure, but a potential heir nonetheless—and the child was taken away from her not long after it was born.

“She must have been very lonely,” Tai had said.

“She had two of us she grew up with,” Antian had said, misunderstanding and applying Tai’s words to Liudan, of whom she had just been speaking.

“I meant Cai,” Tai had said. “What happened to her after Liudan was born? When did she die?”

“I don’t really know,” Antian had said thoughtfully. “I do know they said that she was pregnant again less than a year after Liudan was born—but
after that, I don’t know. It may be that it was thus she died—in childbirth—her and the babe both because when she disappeared from the Court there was no child left in her wake that I know of, male or female. But then there were the rumors.”

“Of what?”

“She was in some sort of disgrace,” Antian had said. “I don’t recall what, but she had done something that reflected badly on her. And that meant on Liudan, too, on her child.”

And Tai had suddenly understood Liudan’s recoil in the garden. “She was the one left behind, wasn’t she?” Tai had whispered. “The child of the erring one. Without friends. Except you, Antian. Except you.”

Antian had looked at her with lustrous dark eyes. “You see? You always understand. Yes, she grew up as the Third Princess, the youngest in protocol, the last in line, the not-quite-needed. And her mother had fallen from grace, and nobody wanted any part of her other than her continued existence.”

“And she was afraid, wasn’t she? That morning in the garden, she was afraid that she would be the price of my coming into your life. She’d be abandoned if you chose another companion.”

“Oh, she was never a
companion
—not like that—she is my sister.”

“Is she mine, now, too?”

“No, the
jin-shei
bond doesn’t mean you have to take Liudan on,” Antian had said with a smile. “Not like that. She is my blood-sister, and that makes it different from the
jin-shei
bond. And she is wrong, in that I am not going to abandon her just because I have found a
jin-shei-bao
to share my heart with. But she has always felt the edge of the Court turned at her, and she has always been angry at the world. And she has grown up alone, for all that these halls are teeming with brothers, sisters, and women who had been her mother’s companions.”

“She is very pretty,” Tai had said.

“So was Cai,” Antian had said. “I don’t remember her, not really—but there is a portrait that the Emperor had done, on ivory—the miniature stands in the Palace back in Linh-an. I’ll show you some time. She was very beautiful.”

“It was a pity she was not loved,” Tai had said.

Antian had given her a strange look. “Yes,” she had said slowly. “It was a pity.”

It was the custom of the Court that one of the heirs always had to stay behind in Linh-an when the rest of the court came away to the Summer Palace—just in case of some calamity In the year that Tai and Antian entered into
jin-shei,
the third sister, Second Princess Oylian, had been the one to have remained in the sweltering capital city over that long hot summer. The year after that it had been Antian herself This third summer it was Liudan’s turn—and Tai, despite a guilty cast to her sense of relief, was not entirely unhappy that she did not have the angry Third Princess watching her and Antian together with smoldering, jealous eyes. Her feelings for Liudan ran the gamut from pity to deep resentment that she should be the focus of so much undeserved hatred for no better reason than that she was Antian’s chosen companion.

Second Princess Oylian was a gentle, pliant, pleasant girl who drifted through life—she was a stream of water which flowed around obstacles rather than try and shift them.

“The worst thing that could ever happen to Oylian and to Syai,” Antian had said to Tai once in a low whisper one early morning out on their balcony on the side of the mountain, “would be for her to ever become Empress. Whoever her Emperor proved to be, he could make her do whatever he said and she would do it to keep the peace. She was born to a family, not an Empire.”

But the Second Princess would smile at Tai, even if she didn’t have much to say to her. Liudan would simply sweep past and ignore her whenever she could. Tai was the danger—Tai was, like Liudan’s own mother had been, of common stock, only one step removed from Liudan’s own now-high station, a reminder of what she could easily have been if she had not been born royal. The Third Princess was a complex mixture of insecurities—left adrift because she was the second spare heiress and therefore less urgently needed than Oylian, left alone because of her mother’s fall from grace for reasons that even Liudan herself did not really understand, afraid of the thin veneer that separated her royalty from the land-grubbing poverty from which her mother’s family had come. Liudan wanted the royalty, needed it as a shield against all kinds of terrors—and it was a thin shield, barely there. She was only Third Princess, after all.

But this summer, the summer that Antian had invited Tai up to the Summer Palace as her guest, Liudan was mercifully absent, back in Linh-an, suffering the summer heat in the Imperial Palace—and probably doing it
with better grace than the other two would ever have done because at least it was a signifier of her status, an indication that she was important enough in the hierarchy to be preserved and sheltered against the potential of disaster. And her absence meant that Antian and Tai could laugh more freely, more often, without waiting for Liudan’s brooding presence to cut the laughter short when they met her eyes.

In a way, though, Liudan’s hostility was what made Tai aware of her own status in this court—although Liudan’s presence was uncomfortable, she and Tai were two points of the same star, both sisters to Antian after a fashion, balancing one another. Without the unconcealed hostility of that one among all the Imperial women, it was somehow harder for Tai to winnow the genuine from the sycophant in the rest of the Imperial royal women in the Summer Palace. It was as if, with Liudan there, Tai was on her guard against Liudan alone. With her gone, Tai was on her guard against everybody else.

But she was here, now, in the royal quarters, bent over her journal by candlelight even while the sky lightened in the east. She and Antian were to meet at their balcony that morning, later, but Tai had woken early, uncomfortable about something, not sure what had woken her—until she had picked up her inkwell and her brush and her journal and it had come into focus for her.

It is very quiet out there tonight.

She stared at the line she had written down, and became preternaturally aware of the stillness that had broken through the depths of sleep to wake her, the silence that surrounded her, the world holding its breath. She thought she heard, far away in a kennel somewhere, the despondent howl of a trapped dog, but even that was there and gone almost before she had had a chance to identify the sound. The silence was absolute.

And then the mountain shuddered, and crumbled.

I
n less time than it took to blink, silence was a memory. Masonry groaned; things skittered across the surface of the lacquered table, I or fell to the ground, leaving the floor strewn with debris. Above it all there was an indescribable sound that was half heard and half absorbed directly through bone and muscle—the roar of wounded stone.

Instinct had taken over in the first moment of terror, and Tai had streaked out of her room and into the garden, out under an open sky. She felt the ground shake under the soles of her bare feet, staggered to keep her balance, lost the battle, fell sideways into a bed of swaying flowers still closed in the pearly predawn gray darkness. Before Tai’s horrified eyes the tiered Summer Palace folded into itself as though it had been made of sticks and leaves, walls falling inward, tiles falling in slow motion and tumbling end over end before shattering into dust, columns snapping in two or falling sideways and knocking out the next column in line, collapsing them in turn like dominoes. Graceful arched windows and doorways became piles of broken brick and crumbs of plaster; wooden window frames snapped like matchsticks. Glass was a precious thing and not often found outside the Imperial Palaces, and even there rare and used sparingly; now, with the wooden frames bending and breaking, the night was alive with the eerie sound of breaking glass, like fairy chimes.