The Secrets of Jin-Shei (22 page)

A
utumn Court was understandably subdued the year of the earthquake. There were few large gatherings, and when Liudan appeared at those she was distant, withdrawn, and drab in her mourning garb. Rimshi’s artistry was little in evidence that year, although it pleased Liudan to wear an embroidered jacket in public—a jacket made from cream-colored linen and worked with dyed cotton, breaking no mourning attire rules by introducing so much as a silk embroidery thread but still sumptuous enough to cause whispering in the shadows of the Court. That had been Tai’s work, and partly Yuet’s—it had been Yuet who had procured the jacket, and Tai had worked her magic on it, and they had given it to Liudan on the occasion of her birthday. She was a Fire Cusp, born close to midnight on the last day of Kannaian, sharing the qualities of the Lion and the Dragon. Tai had worked both into the embroidery, lazily stretching tawny lions twined with long sinuous red-gold dragons with small red glass beads for their eyes, the only nod to the mourning rules an intricate pattern in white thread which wound its way about the sleeves. Liudan, accepting the gift, had actually been betrayed into a genuine smile.

“Whatever gave you the idea?” Tai had murmured to Yuet, at the Court occasion where the jacket made its first appearance. They had been watching some of the women as the jacket passed, the widening of eyes, the trail of whispers behind cupped hands.

Yuet shrugged. “You heard her yourself. She is nothing if not forthright, and total deep mourning for Liudan is nothing if not hypocritical. It would have been tough on her to survive this Court without at least a little defiance.”

“You understand her,” Tai said.

“I was orphaned at age four,” Yuet said. “My ‘official’ mourning lasted well into my seventh year, and I was too young to even remember my
parents properly. I remember resenting that, somehow. With her, it’s all magnified by the Imperial drama. If I showed defiance, I was chastised as unfilial; if Liudan does, she is both unfilial and unspeakably shocking. The whole country is staring at her right now. It can’t be comfortable.”

“So the jacket … ?”

“… is an escape,” Yuet said, grinning. “Look at her.”

Liudan was wearing the jacket as if it were dripping with gold and pearls, and once the initial shock had passed she had received a restrained compliment or two—at which it had pleased her to mention that the embroidery was a gift made by Tai. Before the end of the Court session Tai had been approached by two other Court women with veiled inquiries about the possibility of obtaining something similar. What the Empress wore was an immediate Court trend. Tai, letting her eyes slide past these potential customers for a moment, caught Liudan’s bright and sharply amused gaze. She had taken the opportunity to put a squirming Tai into the spotlight as part of the gift of the jacket.

Apart from the small scandal that the jacket had caused, it had been a slow and quiet Court, a mourning Court. The attire was muted by the mourning white; the galleries were empty of musicians; people spoke in even lower whispers than usual in the formal corridors of the Imperial Audience Chambers.

Khailin, bored, hoarding her last summer of freedom like a miser does his gold, seeking to make every moment count for something, coaxed a highly reluctant Nhia to attend Court with her—for no other reason except that she wanted to inject a bit of liveliness and controversy into the stuffy Court circles. Nhia had thrown increasingly desperate excuses at Khailin’s feet, but Khailin, with that inimitable and fairly frightening single-minded focus which sometimes drove her so hard, had managed to counter them all, either providing a solution Nhia could not counter or dismissing the “problem” out of hand. “I have nothing suitable to wear” had been met with one of Khailin’s own dresses; “I don’t know how to talk to anybody” had been roundly dismissed as Khailin pointed out that a great many people who had met Nhia at the Great Temple would disagree with that statement and Nhia’s corollary that the Temple was hardly the Imperial Court had been met with an acerbic demand for Nhia to provide her with the exact differences which made the Temple any more approachable than the Palace.

“I cannot walk so far, nor stand so long,” Nhia protested weakly in the end, throwing her physical infirmities into the fray.

“I’ll get you a cane,” Khailin said. “Consider it a belated birthday present. And you need something that fits your new stature anyway.”

“What new stature?”

“You’re a near-Sage in the Temple,” Khailin said, and there was a thin edge of something so like envy in her voice that Nhia stared at her in confusion. Khailin, envious of
her?
Of the poor washerwoman’s crippled child? In Cahan’s name, why would she be?

But Khailin had dismissed that, too. Within a few improbable days she had procured a finely carved mahogany cane with a heron’s head for a handle, the right size and weight, and presented it to Nhia without taking the least account of Nhia’s protests. Equipped with the cane, a silk dress which needed only a little bit of alteration (and Tai had gleefully obliged Nhia with that) and the addition of a white mourning ribbon to be presentable in Court, her hair piled up in an elaborate Court style arranged by Khailin’s own personal maid, Nhia found herself at an afternoon audience of the Autumn Court without quite knowing how she had got there. She hid her bewilderment well, but was betrayed every now and then into a double take over something she had never encountered before.

“Who was that?” she hissed at Khailin as a man dressed in bright brocades only nominally hemmed with a white ribbon swept past them on some urgent errand.

“Chehao, eunuch of the Women’s Quarters, Chief Eunuch Abahai’s right hand,” Khailin reported.

Nhia stared. “A real eunuch? I don’t think I’ve ever met one before.”

“Yes, a real one,” Khailin said, amused. “There are a number of them around here. The Imperial women needed a layer of guardians who were incapable of tasting the royal honey if they wanted to, hence the eunuchs. That’s also the reason for the female cadres of the Imperial Guard—their primary duty is guarding the women. From themselves, maybe.”

Nhia glared at her. “You’re going to be one of the Imperial women yourself in a few months,” she retorted.

Khailin’s smile disappeared. “I know.”

“And that? Who’s that?” Nhia said into the brooding silence, trying to distract Khailin from the gloomy prospects of her marital future.

“One of the Sages,” said Khailin, immediately diverted, as usual, by the appearance of real power. “Two of them, actually Look.”

“How in Cahan can you tell?” Nhia said, staring at the two gray-haired men who had entered the audience hall and stood talking quietly to each other in an unobtrusive corner, managing to give the impression that they were blissfully unaware of the attention they generated.

“They’re ancient,” Khailin retorted. “You won’t find many old men in this court. They’re on the Council or they are Sages … or they are eunuchs, but the eunuchs who reach that age, and they are rare, are gloriously fat and unable to move without a cart and horse.”

“Inside the Palace?” Nhia said, diverted once again.

Khailin snorted. “You will find that there are more asses inside the Palace than out. There are always enough to pull a cart.” She peered at the two Sages without giving the appearance that she was staring at them, a Court skill she had learned when very young. “Those are the Lion Sage and the Eagle Sage,” she said after she completed the scrutiny.

“How do you know?” Nhia asked, interested.

“Their robes. The pattern of the embroidery on the cuffs of their sleeves. And the rings.”

“What rings?”

“Each Sage wears the ring of his sign.” Khailin turned around in some perplexity. “You ought to know these things, Nhia! Rumor has it you’re practically a Sage yourself!”

“Hardly,” Nhia murmured. “I tell teaching stories at the Temple.”

“And your own teachers say you are a marvel.”

“How do you know that?” Nhia asked.

Khailin flushed. “I listen at doors.”

Nhia opened her mouth to say something but Khailin’s hand closed around her wrist in an almost painful grip. “Look who’s here.”

Nhia turned her head, and gasped.

She hadn’t laid eyes on the man in two years, and on this day, and for this occasion, he was dressed in far more sumptuous style than he had been that day at the Temple—but there was no mistaking Lihui, the Ninth Sage, the youngest Sage, the great lord who had once reached down to help a crippled child up in a Temple garden. His gaze had swept the room as he had entered, and did not linger on the two girls—but Nhia would have known those eyes anywhere. She still sometimes dreamed of them.

“Which is he?” Nhia asked.

“What?”

“Which Sage is he? If the other two are Lion and Eagle …”

Khailin tore her eyes from the three Sages with difficulty and faced Nhia. “There are nine Sages in the circle, and eight of them bear the rings of the creatures of their Element—Lion, Pike, Boar, Eagle, Hummingbird, Buffalo, Swan, Dragon. The Ninth Sage belongs to all the elements and to none of them. He is the highest of them, he rules them all … but you
know
all this.”

“I know of the Sages, Khailin,” Nhia said gently. “What you speak of is arcana. It’s like telling you that you know all about the Temple because you know which Gods and spirits live in which Circle. No, I don’t know it. I don’t even know how
you
know so much of it.”

Khailin stared at her. “I always thought that you knew more about the Way,” she said slowly. “I thought that was the reason he had stopped to speak with you that day in the Temple. Because you knew things. Because he wanted to …”

“
Who
spoke to me in the Temple?” Nhia said, confused.

“
Him
,” Khailin said, indicating Lihui with her chin.

“You were there?”

“I saw it happen.”

Nhia found herself recalling the meeting with Lihui in precise detail, the way her blood had surged when he had raised her up, the way she had almost stopped breathing when he had actually bowed to her in that Garden in the Temple, the way she hoarded the experience, sharing it only with Tai, not even with her mother, how she had analyzed it and poked it and prodded it and finally tried to forget it as fluke, as chance, as an accident of fate.

Khailin had been there.

Khailin had watched it, and analyzed it in her own way, it seemed. And made of it something quite other than what it had been.

“But it meant nothing at all! That brief encounter was all it ever was.” Nhia paused, her heart thumping painfully as something sharp and hard-edged sliced into her. “Is that the first time you knew I existed?” she asked. “Is that why you wanted to get to know me?”

Khailin pressed her lips together until they were a thin white line, squaring her jaw. “At first,” she admitted.

Nhia had looked away, but not before Khailin saw her eyes sparkle with sudden tears.

“Please don’t,” she said, genuinely upset, more upset than she had believed she could be. “I said, at first. After a while, I liked you—I really liked you. If it hadn’t been for that wretched Sage, I never would have known you existed, we never would have even met!”

“My foot hurts,” Nhia whispered, staggering backward a step to lean against a convenient wall.

She misjudged her angle, found her back slipping sideways on the smooth stone pillar, and only kept her balance through sheer force of will and by clinging to Khailin’s cane with a hand which showed white on the knuckles.
I am not, I am not going to make a spectacle of myself here,
she thought furiously as she struggled to stay on her feet.

A strong hand unobtrusively slipped behind her shoulder blade, straightening her up, and was instantly gone—so fast that Nhia was almost unable to swear that it had been there. But it had been—and it was the same hand that had been there once before. The Sage Lihui stepped up from behind and to the side of her, and offered both girls a delicate courtly bow.

“I seem to remember,” the Sage murmured, “another girl whom I helped to her feet once.
Nhia,
is it, as I recall?”

“Yes,
sei
,” Nhia gasped, astonished that he remembered her at all, stunned that he remembered her name.

He smiled. “I have been hearing that name,” he said. “The Temple Circles are humming with it. Do not blush, my dear; all I have heard has been a credit to you.” He turned his head marginally in Khailin’s direction, and she dropped into a deep obeisance. “And who is your companion?” Lihui inquired, his obsidian eyes serene.

Khailin looked up. “I am Khailin, daughter of Cheleh, Court Chronicler,” she said boldly.

“Ah,” said Lihui. “Yes.”

His simple reply seemed to imply that this, too, was a name he knew, but that the things he had heard about Khailin were not quite as bright and good as Nhia’s reputation.

“Well,” said Lihui pleasantly to both girls although his gaze lingered for a moment longer on Khailin, “it has been an unexpected pleasure meeting with you again, young Nhia. I have been keeping my eye on you for a while. Lady Khailin, I am delighted to make your acquaintance. Now, if
you will excuse me, I have an appointment I am already late for.” He gave them another slight bow, turned with a graceful courtier’s motion and was gone.

“You’re blushing,” Nhia said, looking at Khailin.

“Am I?” Khailin’s hands flew up to cover her face.

Nhia’s expression had passed from hurt to curious. “What is it that you thought you could gain, Khailin? I have no connections and no friends in high places, and I could never …”

“You do now,” Khailin said with a passion. “I’m sorry I made such a mess of things, but I’m not sorry that I made you my friend, my
jin-shei-bao.
There is always that, now, you know. That doesn’t dissolve.”

“I know,” Nhia said.

“I really did need you, Nhia,” Khailin said. “I still do.”

“I understand, I think. I really do.”

Khailin’s eyes now filled with unexpected tears, and Nhia sighed.