The Secrets of Jin-Shei (19 page)

It had been almost impertinent. She had practically interrupted him. But if she’d given him a fraction of a second more he would have graciously thanked her, told her to go home and pack up Szewan’s records, and hand them over to … to whichever Linh-an healer he picked to take her place.

At least she had made him stop and think. When she stole another look at his corpulent face, he was frowning, taping his chins with one pudgy finger.

“Yes, yes,” he said. There was a trace of impatience in his voice. “You say you were her partner?”

“Yes,
sei
,” Yuet said, digging her nails into the palm of her hand where he couldn’t see them behind the brocade sweep of her robe.

“You were the healer at the Summer Palace, were you not?” he asked suddenly, his eyes glittering.

Yuet forced herself to meet his gaze, although her heart suddenly skipped a beat. If he chose, he could find things in her actions on that dreadful day which would forever bar her from any access to the Court whatsoever. “Yes,
sei
Zibo,” she said, controlling her voice. “I was there. I was there when they found the body of the Emperor. I was with the Little Empress Antian when she died.”

Zibo stared at her for a long moment, his face inscrutable.

“We will honor Healer Szewan’s judgment for now,” he said at last. “You will have to present your credentials to us as soon as you have begun the formalities for her funeral ceremonies, of course. Your continued status will depend on those. For now, who knows but that a young healer might be exactly what we need. With the problem.”

“What,” said Yuet delicately, choosing to ignore the matter of the credentials for the moment, “is the problem?”

“Liudan. The Empress-Heir.” Zibo heaved a deep sigh, which made his chins cascade over his collar in interesting ways. “Well, I suppose there is
nothing for it—she insists that a healer examine her, after all, and you’re here. Follow me.”

“The Empress-Heir?” Yuet questioned as she fell into step two paces behind him, as protocol demanded. “But your messenger said something about an Imperial Council.”

“There will be a Council meeting,” Zibo said. “The Council awaits the results of your examination of the Empress-Heir.”

Mystified, but unable to ask any more questions to which Zibo obviously expected her to provide the answers, Yuet followed the Chancellor through sumptuously appointed corridors and chambers and up four flights of stairs until they finally arrived at a gilded set of gates guarded by a pair of female Imperial Guards.

“The Healer,” Chancellor Zibo said, making a gesture in Yuet’s direction. “Take her to the Empress-Heir. And when she is done, have someone conduct her to the Council Chamber. We will await her there. Healer, take what time you will need. Be aware we wait upon you.”

“Excellency,” said Yuet, offering another deep bow as he nodded to her and swept away.

One of the Guards opened the gilded door and motioned with her hand. “This way.”

Yuet followed her into a corridor whose costly glass windows, veiled with swathes of silk so fine that it was almost see-through, looked out onto yet another magnificent garden, this one a tapestry of willow and bamboo. The Guard led Yuet past half-open doors through which she could catch glimpses of richly appointed rooms, or hear murmurs of conversation or soft music, but they saw no other living human being until the Guard stopped at a firmly closed door twice the height of all the rest, gilded and carved with intertwined dragons, and knocked on it twice.

“Your Highness, the Healer.”

The door was opened by a young serving girl, dressed in white cotton leggings and a white robe which reached down to her mid-calves. Her feet were bare. She ducked her head at the Guard, in silence, and motioned Yuet inside. Yuet inclined her head at the Guard by way of thanks, and followed the summons.

The door opened into a small anteroom lit with candles, and the servant girl padded over to another door, twin to the first, in the far wall and pushed it open, motioning for Yuet to enter.

The many-paneled glass windows of the inner chamber opened like doors, out onto a wide balcony with a carved stone balustrade. Empress-Heir Liudan stood out on the balcony, her hair loose down her back, her feet thrust into thin slippers against the chill of the stone flags of the balcony, wrapped in a robe that tied around her waist with a broad sash. She had her back to the room, and her shoulders had a rigid set.

When she did turn to face Yuet, who stood waiting in silence to be acknowledged, it was in a swift savage whirl which set her hair swinging, and she was already speaking.

“I need your help, I need to ask you …” She faltered, her eyes narrowed. “You? I was expecting the old healer.”

“She was unavailable, Highness,” said Yuet carefully, offering a deep bow as she spoke. “May I be of assistance to you?”

Liudan chewed on her lip for a moment, thinking.

“Perhaps it is even better,” she said. “You would understand.”

“Understand what, Highness?”

“I have told them I have started my cycles,” Liudan said abruptly.

I should have known
, Yuet thought to herself. With hindsight, it was obvious—no cycles, no Xat-Wau, a regency until Liudan could prove herself to have reached physical adulthood. If she could convince the Council that she was, in fact, due her Xat-Wau ceremony immediately, there would be no regency.

“You told them you were bleeding, they wanted proof, you asked to be examined by a healer, hoping to convince the healer to go along with your story although it is not technically true?” Yuet said.

Liudan flashed her a look, somewhat startled. She had not expected it to be summed up so baldly, without even an honorific to soften it. “They are just waiting,” Liudan said, “to put me away again, somewhere safe, for Cahan alone knows how long. I’ve always been the Third, the spare, and now my own body is betraying me. It’s not as though I would be lying, it’s going to happen, isn’t it? It happens to everybody, after all, and I’m already old enough for it to have happened to me over and over again, but …”

“I understand,” Yuet said. “It never mattered, not with me, but I was your age, maybe only a few months off, when mine came.”

“So you’ll help me?”

“Princess,” said Yuet, meeting Liudan’s eyes squarely, “my assistance to you, however willingly offered, may be short-lived.”

“How so?”

“You spoke of having expected ‘the old one’—Healer Szewan is dead. She spoke to me only hours before she died of drawing up papers elevating me to full partner. She died before she did so, to the best of my knowledge. I have told the Chancellor that I
was
her partner, which is the only reason I am here at all—otherwise you would have been seeing a very different face before you right now. But he spoke of credentials, and I am meant to produce those for him before tomorrow. If I do not, then my words carry little weight. I have a witness,” Yuet said carefully, “who will swear of Szewan’s intent. But I need to find a notary willing to draw up the papers, now, after Szewan’s death.”

Liudan stared at her for a long moment. “I think I can help you with that,” she said at length. “If you do what I wish, I become Empress. If I become Empress, I can protect you. If I send you the notary before the day is out, will you tell the Chancellor that I am no longer the child that he believes me to be?”

“I will swear to it,” Yuet said calmly. “I will even produce proof of it if he demands it. I will take such proof away with me now.”

“What?” Liudan was not one to waste words.

“These are women’s quarters, someone here is into her cycles right now. If you can find me a woman who is bleeding, her rags will serve as your proof if necessary.”

Liudan considered this for a moment, and then strode across the room to pull a brocade ribbon that hung from the ceiling. It was a summons, and it quickly brought the servant girl from the anteroom. Liudan gave a series of swift signals with her hand, and the girl bowed and backed out again. Yuet watched with interest.

“Sign language?”

“She is deaf, and she cannot speak,” Liudan said. “There are times I find that useful. She and I communicate very well by sign.”

“What did you tell her to do?”

“Get your proof,” Liudan said. “It is something I had already considered, but they would not necessarily have taken my word for it, not when so much is at stake. I know that at least one of the Council princes was looking forward to a year or so of regency rule. I needed someone else’s backing.” Her eyes were smoldering with a slow anger. “They have always considered me someone they didn’t have to reckon with. All of them. Not a single person in this Court has ever cared about me.”

“Not all, Princess,” murmured Yuet.

Liudan whipped her head around. “What do you mean?”

“I was at the Summer Palace when they all died,” Yuet said, her voice very low. “I was with your sister, the Little Empress, when she drew her last breath; I wore the rush of her heart’s blood on my robe all that long awful day while we looked in the rubble for the bodies of the dead.”

“Antian,” Liudan said, with a sharp dismissive motion of her hand. But she had been an instant too late with the reaction, and Yuet could read a hurt there, the sense of abandonment.

“Her last words, if you did not know this, Princess, were about you,” Yuet said.

Liudan turned away, but not before Yuet had glimpsed the naked, raw need in her eyes. “They were?”

She would not ask what Antian had said. There was a carapace of pride which she wore like armor, and she would not let anyone past that. Not yet.

“She asked her
jin-shei-bao
to love you, in her name,” Yuet said.

Liudan broke away, walked with swift angry steps to the open balcony doors, and tugged them shut with a force that shivered the glass within them.

“She asked the one for whom she left me to
love
me?”

“Tai said you hated her.”

Liudan snorted inelegantly.

“Princess, she promised to do it. She has no idea how, but she promised. You will be doing her a kindness, and your royal sister honor, if you would meet with her.”

Liudan was watching her again, her eyes kindled. “And what is your stake in this?”

Yuet met her gaze squarely. “I watched Tai make a promise to a dying girl, and I watched her agonize over that promise afterward. I watched her perform a small miracle in the chaos of the earthquake’s aftermath, all in your sister’s name. If ever there was love between
jin-shei
sisters, it was there with these two. It made my heart ache to see her left alone, just as you have been.”

“I have not,” Liudan began haughtily, drawing herself up to her full height, her thin foxlike face sharpening into points and angles of outrage.

Yuet cut across the protest. “I don’t know if you have
jin-shei-bao,
Princess Liudan. Perhaps, if you do, you will begin to understand what it
took to make such a promise. And I … I promised my own
jin-shei-bao
that I would try and help her keep that promise. It is partly because of this that I am ready to help you with your plan now.”

“Because of Tai?” Liudan asked. “You are
jin-shei
to Tai, too?”

“We pledged after the earthquake, yes,” Yuet said.

“I suppose she wants
me
to pledge to her, too,” Liudan said. “She’s had a taste of Court, and she …”

“No, Highness. Not Tai. I wish you would meet with her. I wish that you did have a
jin-shei-bao
of your own. It would make what you face here easier for you.”

“There isn’t a woman in this Court …” Liudan’s eyes lost focus for a moment. She had stepped back into her own mind, into her own memories. Of a time
before,
when she was young, and when whispers of her mother’s fall from grace had wrapped Liudan in the shroud of Cai’s sins. Of the way that the women around her would be flawlessly correct to her, but none would smile at her with a genuine warmth—except the Empress once or twice, distantly—and except
her.
Antian. The lost sister who might have been the only person at the court to truly love Liudan.

But it was too late for that; that world had gone. What remained was only the protocol and the infinite politeness.

“There isn’t a woman in this Court with whom I would want to tie my fortunes in this way,” Liudan said, finishing her thought with a sharp cutting motion of one graceful hand. “I don’t trust any of them not to betray me at the first opportunity.”

“But you trust me,” Yuet murmured.

Liudan smiled, a smile that was not entirely pleasant. “But then you have just told me something that gives me a hold over you. I can destroy you if you betray me.”

“But it would have been nice to be able to trust without that safeguard, would it not?”

Liudan scowled. “What do you want of me?”

The servant girl returned, scuttling into the room, bearing something wrapped in scraps of material. Liudan motioned for the package to be handed over to Yuet, and the servant did so, bowed to Liudan, and departed once again.

“Will that do?” Liudan asked as Yuet lifted a corner of the wrapping and inspected the contents of the package.

“I think it will, yes,” Yuet said, letting the wrapping drop again. “I go to the Council now. They will no doubt return their verdict to you in good time. If I may take my leave?”

“Go,” said Liudan.

Yuet made a deep obeisance, and retreated. At the door, she turned and looked back; Liudan had not moved, standing stiffly in the center of her empty, opulent room. “I would have a few more of these on hand,” Yuet said softly, indicating the package she held. “Just in case. And if you retire to bed for a while and plead feeling unwell—offer an explanation, if you are pressed, that it is cramping—it will probably go further to prove your status.”

She bowed again and was about to depart when she heard Liudan say her name. She turned her head. Liudan’s shoulders had relaxed a little, and her face had softened into something resembling gratitude.

“Thank you,” she said. “I will not forget this.”

“Empress,” acknowledged Yuet with a small smile.