The Secrets of Jin-Shei (3 page)

“My mother has told me something of the Imperial Court,” Tai said. “Of the way things are done, they have to be done, the way everyone’s life is planned and controlled, the way you have to make sure your hair is in place and your hands are in position and you are not allowed to smile or to talk or to look where you are not supposed to look.”

“Yes,” said Antian, “I know.”

“I would have to be like that, too. And that would mean … I couldn’t watch the butterflies.”

“I know,” said Antian again, this time with a sigh. “You are right. It is a life that binds. You made the buffalo robe with vision but I will wear it
with ceremony. I was just wishing … for someone to let me see the things that ceremony makes me blind to.” She looked up at the battlements behind them, rising tier upon tier, and straightened. “I should probably go in now,” she said, suddenly reverting to a curious formality. “I will look forward to seeing you in the gardens again soon, Painter of Butterflies.”

“Wait,” said Tai impulsively as the princess turned to leave. Antian turned her head, watched as Tai fumbled within her sheaf of papers, extracted the drawing she had been working on the day Antian had first seen her in the gardens. She held it out, suddenly shy. “I’d like you … to have this … if you want to.”

Antian took the somewhat smudged drawing with a small smile. “Thank you,” she said. There was the slightest of hesitations, as though she had meant to say something else and caught herself, and then she merely inclined her head in a tiny regal motion and turned away.

Tai stayed on the balcony for a long time, alone, staring out into the valley.

“The Little Empress liked her gown,” Rimshi said to Tai when she returned to their room later that day after an afternoon fitting session with the princesses. “I told her it was mostly your work, and she was pleased to give me something for you.”

Tai looked up, wary. “For me?”

“So she said.” Rimshi raised her hand to cover her smile. “I have brought it to you, here. She said, ‘Tell your daughter that this is for the butterflies and for the golden river.’”

Tai took the small square package wrapped in an oddment of scarlet silk and unfolded the material to reveal a small book, a journal with a hundred pages gleaming white and blank and waiting to be filled with thoughts and visions, bound in soft, bright red leather with leather ties to hold it closed. Tai’s hands caressed the smooth binding, opened and closed the book several times. Tears which she could not explain stung her eyes. This, after she had told Antian
no
?

“This is a precious thing,” Rimshi said, observing her daughter’s reaction. “She thinks highly of you, it seems.”

“She likes what I see,” Tai murmured.

“Ah,” said Rimshi, still smiling. “Use it well, then, to share that vision.”

“Look,” Tai said suddenly, lifting a piece of very fine paper which had been laid between the last page and the back cover. “There is something else here. Look!”

“It looks like a letter,” Rimshi said.

Tai looked up in consternation. “I cannot read letters!”

“This one you can, I think,” Rimshi said. “She would have written in the women’s tongue.”

“
Jin-ashu
? The princesses know
jin-ashu,
too?”

“All women know
jin-ashu
,” murmured Rimshi. “It is our language, the language of
jin-shei
—passed from mother to daughter from the dawn of time, letting us speak freely of the thoughts and dreams and desires hidden deep in a woman’s heart. Of things men do not understand and do not need to know.”

Tai opened the folded piece of paper with reverence. “There is only one thing here,” she said.

“What does it say?” Rimshi asked, although she knew, and her heart leapt at what her daughter had just been given.

Tai lifted shining eyes. “
Jin-shei
,” she whispered.

So young
…

Rimshi had been twelve years old when she had exchanged her first
jin-shei
vow—with Meilin, the daughter and heir of a family which owned a thriving silk business in Linh-an. It was in their workshop that the young Rimshi had first seen silk thread, had first touched silk cloth, had embroidered her first clumsy sampler in silk—all when she was younger still, much younger than twelve years old. And then the friendship with Meilin had deepened into something else, and they had said the words to each other—
jin-shei.
After that Meilin, the elder by a handful of years and therefore more accomplished, saw to it that Rimshi’s talents were noticed, and she had been given training and instruction in the silk embroidery.

Jin-shei
had shaped Rimshi’s life—it was
jin-shei
that gave her the gift of her trade, and it
was jin-shei,
with another
jin-shei-bao
who had gone on to be an Emperor’s concubine, that had given her the place to practice it. Rimshi had told Tai about the second story and Tai knew all about the romance of it, the glory of the poor but beautiful girl being taken into the Imperial Palace to be a princess. Tai knew only the light of
jin-shei,
its joys; Rimshi had thought she would still have time to teach her daughter about its duties and its responsibilities. And now it was here, offered by a girl who would be Empress one day.

It could be refused, simply by making no response to the offer, by not accepting
jin-shei
by responding with the same words. But Rimshi looked at Tai’s face and the bright wide eyes and could think of no reason for her
to refuse this great gift that she had been offered. There would be time still, Cahan willing, to teach Tai about the true meaning of the sisterhood—time enough for everything.

But right now it was a star, a bright and glorious thing that lit up Tai and made her whole being glow with the joy of it.

“Jin-shei,”
Tai repeated, almost with awe. “The Little Empress wants me to be her friend.”

Rimshi slipped an arm around her daughter’s thin shoulders and hugged her into her side, tightly. “The Little Empress,” she said, “wants you to be her sister, my Tai.”

S
ummer wrapped Linh-an, the capital city of Syai, like a shroud. The walls of the city shimmered with it well before the bells of noon from the Great Temple. But summer or winter, the Imperial Guard compound had its routine. The trainees traditionally found something to whine about in every season of the year. Come late autumn they would complain about being expected to do their drills in the cold rain; in winter they would carp about chilblains and frostbite; now, with summer just beginning to settle in, they did their maneuvers in the cobbled practice yard, the heat reflecting off the gray compound walls, the straw-covered cobbles warm through the thin soles of their practice boots in which their feet slid and sweated. The orderly hierarchies were observed here as everywhere in Linh-an—the elite cohorts practiced in the cool of the early morning, or in the early evening when the evening breezes would start to cool their bare arms, sheened with sweat. They made it all look so easy—the choreographed fights with single blade, double blades, iron-tipped staves, unarmed wrestling in the corner of the yard where the ground was left unpaved to lessen risk of injury. They wore black pants, tucked into their boots, and black sleeveless practice singlets, men and women alike; a bandanna tied low on their forehead mopped up the sweat dripping into their eyes. These were the old pros, the survivors, their arms tattooed with the insignia of several Emperors. The oldest of them wore up to three or even four—the tusk for the Ivory Emperor, currently on Syai’s throne, then the sigils that had belonged to the Sapphire Emperor, the Serpent Emperor. Two even wore the sign of the Lapis Emperor—the oldest of the Guard, the best.

The current cadre, Guardsmen and Guardswomen with a single tattoo or maybe two, trained straight after the elite forces while the mornings were still as cool as they were going to be in that molten summer, or just before them, in the shimmering heat which pooled in the courtyards in
the late afternoon. That left the practice yard free for the rest of the day for the young ones, the children raised by the Guard to fill their ranks.

Often these were the sons and daughters of the Guard, but these children were not forced into their parents’ profession, and there were always gaps to be filled. With the unwanted, the orphaned, the abandoned—the ones adopted, clothed and fed by the Guard, the ones who owed their life to the Guard. It wasn’t indenture, quite, but in some ways it was worse. Although there was always a theoretical out for a child like this, they were never allowed to forget their debt to the Guard, and by the time they were old enough to choose for themselves they could not choose other than the only life they had ever known. Sometimes barely weaned babies, still in their swaddling clothes, were found abandoned on the doorstep of the Guard compound—orphans or children from families too poor to raise them. That had been Xaforn’s lineage.

The only thing Xaforn knew about herself was that she belonged to the Guard. There had been nothing left with her when she was found—no amulet, no word, not even a name. All of what she was, all of who she was, she owed to the Guard. She had started watching the elite forces at their daily drills when she was barely five years old, and by the time she was seven and her own cadre of youngsters had been started out on the basic falls, rolls and gymnastics training she had been practicing a few things on her own and shone out like a diamond. She was tough and wiry, long-legged, with promise of height; hard daily physical exercise kept her lean and limber. Within six months of starting training she had been plucked from the novices who were still stumbling around getting no more than bruises out of their early training and started as the youngest trainee in the cadre two levels above raw beginners. She was two, even three years younger than everyone else in her “class,” and the fact that she was better than many of them earned her few friends in the cadre. She preferred it that way. She was one of the few to take whatever the season threw at her without a word, without a whimper—summer sweats or winter chills, she was Guard, and she trained with a focus and a silent concentration which sometimes scared even her teachers.

“That one will kill early, or be killed,” they’d tell each other, watching Xaforn go through her exercises.

“Be killed in training,” they’d add, as they watched her challenge much more advanced opponents to practice fights, and lose, and challenge again
with her strategy and her movements changed from one fight to the next, learning from every defeat, every mistake.

“She scares me,” one of the three-tattoo elites had murmured once, watching Xaforn trying to perfect a particularly difficult kick, doing it again and again, losing her balance, refusing to accept defeat. “Give her a few more years in the practice yard, and I’d send Xaforn to guard the Palace alone against an invasion of barbarians from the plains. They’d be dead of exhaustion before any of them got close enough to wound her.”

Xaforn didn’t know about that remark, but she trained as though she was trying to live up to it. She trained as though she was preparing for some imminent war that only she could see coming.

Her only vanity was her hair. Most of the women in the Guard cut theirs short; it fit better under helmets and took less care. Xaforn’s was in a long braid which she usually wore wrapped tightly around her small head; but sometimes, when practicing alone, it was left to hang down her back and it whipped as she whirled and kicked and rolled her way through the fight exercises. For some reason this made her look even more dangerous. She was due to turn ten at the end of this long, hot summer, and already they were talking about promoting her up to yet another level in the coming autumn. She would be training with the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds, the class only a year away from full induction into the Guard.

She fully intended to join the Guard at the first opportunity offered to her. When she was fourteen, maybe; thirteen, even. There could be uses for someone as young and light on her feet as Xaforn was.

But, for now, she was still young, she was still a trainee, she was still fair game for chores and message-running if someone more senior managed to collar her before she gave them the slip. Leaving the practice yard, braid swinging, mopping the sweat glistening in the hollow of her throat, an equally sweaty and flushed Guardsman stopped her at the entrance to the compound.

“Ah. Good. You can run the errand for me, and I can get back to my business,” he said pleasantly. “Captain Aric is needed at the Palace. See that the message reaches him.”

“Where is he?” Xaforn shouted at the Guardsman’s retreating back.

“How should I know? That’s why I’m sending you,” he retorted, trotting away back to the group fencing with sword and dagger out in the yard.

Muttering imprecations under her breath, Xaforn broke into a jog and made for the inner compound where the living quarters were. She didn’t like that part of the compound—perhaps it reminded her too much of all that she had never known. Foundlings and orphans, the children left to the Guard to raise, were housed separately in their own dormitories; the closest they came to experiencing actual family life was observing the family compound, watching children sired or borne by individual guards tumbling around the inner courts while the women of the household squabbled and cooked and chased toddlers intent on finding trouble. There was a part of Xaforn that fiercely desired the closeness, the sense of belonging, that seemed to cling to these walls—and another part of her despised it for its weakness, its vulnerability, for being the soft underbelly of the Imperial Guard. For Xaforn, family meant only the cadre—the group of warriors that she had been raised to become a part of. She had never known a mother or a sibling; her life had been lived under discipline, not affection. She was incorruptible, unbribable, there was nobody whose welfare mattered to her enough to tempt her into betraying her calling—and she could see a Guardsman father hesitating at the threat of a knife held to the throat of one of these cherished children.