The Secrets of Jin-Shei (40 page)

“You didn’t tell
me
.”

“So I’m a coward,” he said quietly. “But I tried to stop them, for what it’s worth. One of them slugged me when I asked if he’d want his own sister treated that way.”

Tammary stared at him. “Someone hit you? Because of me?”

He shrugged. “Once.”

“Go away,” Tammary said, after staring at him in frank astonishment for a few seconds. “But you can come back and talk to me if you want,” she added. “As long as you stay two paces away at all times.”

He laughed. “Can you teach me to tame a falcon at that distance?”

“If I can’t, you won’t learn it from me,” she snapped.

They had started a wary friendship. Tammary realized that he too was something of an outcast, although not to nearly such a degree as herself, because he was far more interested in knowledge and learning than in carousing and the hunt—he would rather splint a wounded animal’s leg than kill it for a trophy, and he had made his preferences obvious. They had called him Yeporuk, Pretty Hands, and the only reason he had not fared worse as the whipping boy of the wild crowd was that he was one of the rare ones with the kind of eidetic memory which would make him into a clan chronicler some day. He was being trained by the current chronicler, an old man who was still hanging on to life by a thread, it seemed, only long enough to put his successor in place.

“Every five years,” his old mentor had told him, “all the chroniclers gather together in a secret place, and when I am gone it is you who will go. There is a great Book there, the Book of the Clans, where it is all set down—all of us come and we tell what is in our memories and it is all preserved there against our forgetting, and dying, and the histories fading away like leaves in the wind. But for those five years, you are the Book of the Clans. You remember, for everyone.”

It was in this old man’s memory, quite some time after he had first spoken to Tammary on the mountain, that Raian had learned the truth about her family—about the girl named Sevanna who had gone out to become a healer in a city called Linh-an, and, at the last, about Jokhara and her tryst with the Ivory Emperor.

When Tammary had sought him out at the fair and taken him over, ostensibly for lunch, to a table near where her aunt was sitting with the two
chayan
women, Raian had—perhaps foolishly—suspected nothing at first. But he quickly realized that Tammary was listening to the conversation at the other table, and before he had had a chance to do anything other than allow his own attention to be focused there for a moment, Jessenia had uttered her bombshell, and Tammary had gasped as though she had been stabbed to the heart.

“Are you all right?” Raian had asked, his attention quickly shifting to his companion.

“Did you hear? Did you hear what she
said?
”

Raian, confused, nodded. “I heard.”

“My mother … my mother bore me to the
Imperator!
”

“Yes,” Raian said without thinking, “I know.”

She rounded on him in savage fury. “You knew? How long have you known?”

“Amri, you know I study the clan histories,” Raian said. “This is part of it all.”

“Does everyone know except me?”

She had unfolded her long legs from the bench and ran from him, from all of them, and he had been left sitting frozen in place. The younger
chayan
woman, who had noticed Tammary’s flight, said something Raian did not hear to the other two women, and they all rose hastily and departed without looking back.

“She had no idea,” Raian murmured to himself, staring after Tammary “No idea why they hid her.”

Tammary had fled alone into her beloved mountain, which had always been there to shelter her before—but this was not her own village, and these were not her own familiar haunts. This time there was no peace to be found here. She ran through the pine woods until the ground started climbing, and then clawed her way up an increasingly steep slope until her breath grated harshly in her own ears.

I cannot go back home … I cannot. How can I live in her house again? How can I look her in the face again? She lied to me … she lied to me … they all lied to me. Oh, aunt Jessy, why didn’t you tell me, why didn’t you just tell me? If they knew, if they all knew, they would never have dared to lay a hand on me.

She stopped, wheezing, leaning against a pine tree to catch her breath, skating over the inconsistencies of her chaotic thoughts—they all knew, but if they had all known she would have been treated differently so they didn’t know at all. She was angry at her family, bitterly wounded by what she saw as Raian’s treachery, raging with impotent fury at her mother, at the Emperor himself, at whoever had conspired to make her life this convoluted spiral and then abandoned her here to deal with it in ignorance and the innocence of the fool.

The day had darkened around her, and she looked up, confused, realizing too late that the weather had changed and a quick spring storm was gathering around the mountain. She also realized that she was out of the woods and in an open area of only a few scarred, scattered trees with no shelter closer than the woods she had left behind or an outcrop of granite overhang just ahead of her. As she hesitated, the first hard drops of rain broke on the thin layer of pine needles below the tree she was leaning on, spattering on her bare arms and her face. It was a cold rain, a remnant of winter, and it came down fast; within a few short moments Tammary was drenched and shivering. A sharp crack of thunder decided her against trees and woods, and she loped off to the rocks, hoping for at least some cover and a tiny dry spot out of the wind where she could wait this out and think about what to do next.

She found a dry ledge, but its price seemed to be that the wind curled around the mountainside right there at this outcrop, licking into the overhang where Tammary crouched, plastering her wet hair and soaked blouse and skirts to her body.

I can’t go back. I can’t go back to being who I was. I can’t not know again.

Why did they come? Why did they come for me? I remember the young one. She was in the Palace that time. Who is she? What do they want?

I can’t go home. Not like this.

They are from the city.

They can take me to the city.

A jagged fork of lightning forked out of the sky and struck an isolated tree not a hundred paces from where Tammary cowered. She put her hands over her ringing ears and screamed, turning her face away from the tree, whose trunk had been neatly split by the strike. It was as though nature itself had gathered to give vent to her anger and sense of betrayal, but somehow the sight of the burning tree served to calm her own furies. She raised her face into the rain, looking up into the strange and yet so utterly familiar mountainside, so like the one where she had grown up and knew so well. The mountains of home, despite the pain with which the people of the mountain had inflicted upon her. People were insignificant on the scale on which the bones of the world were built. Tammary didn’t care about people. She would use them, as she had been used, and then she would walk away. To some other mountain. To a place where she didn’t have to be anything, not Traveler, not
chayan.
Just herself.

She stayed there for the next hour, until the storm blew itself out, and then scrambled out of her shelter, stretching her arms up to the sky. Somewhere, high up, she heard the cry of a circling hawk, and laughed through a film of tears.

“You’re on your own now, Lastreb,” she whispered, naming her own half-wild companion whom she had taught to come to a whistle and to the sound of his name. “You’re free. I have to go.”

Tammary made her way back to the village, soaked to the skin, feeling light-headed and feverish, and stumbled through the still dripping fair tents toward her aunt’s booth at the back.

It was Tai who saw her first, but Yuet, the healer, who ran to throw a blanket around her shoulders and help her make the last few steps to the shelter of the stretched-out waterproof canvas. Tammary had to consciously stop her teeth from chattering as she looked up, clutching the blanket around her, and locked eyes with Yuet.

“I’m coming back with you,” she said. “To the city.”

Yuet and Tai exchanged looks over her head.

“If you don’t take me,” Tammy said, “I will come anyway, alone if I need to. I am not staying here. I can’t.”

She would not look at her aunt, who was standing helplessly by, biting her lip.

“I was trying to protect you,” she said.

“From what?” Tammary said desperately. “You told me nothing. And because I knew nothing I believed everyone else’s lies.”

“You are an Emperor’s daughter,” Yuet said. “The city is a danger.”

“But I will go there,” Tammary said stubbornly.

“Do you know,” Tai said unexpectedly, coming down on one knee beside her where she sat wrapped in her blanket on a small wooden stool, “what
jin-shei
means?”

Tammary stared at her. “I know what the words mean. It has never meant anything more to me. It was never part of my world—it is a
chayan
thing.”

“You may understand the words, but not what they signify.
Jin-shei
means ‘sister of the heart.’ It means that two women who are not bound by ties of blood choose to help and protect one another out in the world,” Tai said, offering up the deepest secret of her life. “If you must come to the city, be mine. Be my
jin-shei,
and I will take you and find a way to shelter you from what waits for you there.”

“Why would you do a thing like that?” said Tammary, her voice cold. “Nothing is free. What is the cost for me?”

“I do it because I promised a
jin-shei-bao
of my own, one whom I loved dearly, that I would take care of her sister,” Tai said. “And you and she are sisters. You share the same father on this earth.”

“You are a sister to an Emperor’s daughter?” Tammary said, confused. “How is this possible?”

“It’s possible, in that other world of which you know nothing,” Tai said. “Say the words to me, and it is done.”

“What words?
Jin-shei?
” Tammary said.

“Tai, do you know what you are doing?” Yuet said carefully.

“It is done,” Tai said, getting to her feet. “And I will see it done. Like Antian asked of me in her dream. We will take her back to Linh-an with us. You’ve been carping endlessly about wanting an assistant, Yuet—I think you just found one.”

O
n their way back to Linh-an, at an overnight stop at a roadside hostelry and with Tammary asleep in the room they had taken for the night, Yuet took Tai out to the vine-hung porch of the tiny inn and they sat there in a pair of fading wicker chairs, watching the fireflies dancing in the night.

“I am not sure this was such a good idea, Tai,” Yuet said. “The closer we get to the city, the worse I feel about it, actually. I can’t help wondering if we’re setting up a disaster here.”

“Nhia would call it bringing a serpent into Cahan,” Tai said, with infuriating tranquility.

“You see, you aren’t so sure yourself,” Yuet said, pouncing on the words and not on their delivery.

But she was wrong in trying to see her own misgivings in Tai. The younger girl’s eyes were calm, her face tranquil, her whole presence filled with the kind of serenity that many achieved only after hours of focused meditation.

“And if we had left her where we found her and turned out backs on her, and she took her destiny into her own hands, how would it have been better?” Tai asked. “This is meant to be, Yuet. I know it. Antian knew it when she came to me in that dream.”

“What are we going to tell Liudan?”

“Why are we going to tell Liudan anything?” Tai said. “You can train Amri to help you, to do things that will be useful to you. We will be given some sort of a chance to get to know her a bit better while she is in your house, so we will also have some idea of where she is going. We will understand who she is and what she wants. If she doesn’t stay with you, then she is on her own—but at least we know where she is. And if things turn out badly, that is a lot better than dealing with something unknown that hates you, isn’t it?”

“I still feel like I’m committing some kind of treachery,” Yuet said.

“You committed
that
the moment you realized the truth and told Liudan nothing,” said Tai. “There was no going back to innocence after that.”

“Ouch,” said Yuet in a small voice.

“You aren’t alone,” Tai said after a pause.

“Will she even want to learn the things I have to teach her?” Yuet murmured, speaking of Tammary again, sliding off the subject of Liudan and what she didn’t know.

“‘The healer is compassionate, treating all patients in the same way, be they wealthy or poor, high rank or low rank, adult or child, sympathetic or repellent, intelligent or foolish; the healer goes forth when summoned, laboring day and night, ignoring hunger, thirst, fatigue, heat, or cold. The healer tends to the patient with all of his heart,’” Tai quoted. “The healer’s oath is for the healers, Yuet. It’s for you. She may not wish to
be
a healer—all she needs to know for now is how to prepare a poultice from aloe leaves or brew a
QianHu
tea. That’s her task; that’s her cover. As for the rest—I don’t know if someone with her past, with her burdens, can find in her the healer’s compassion that lies in you, Yuet. Perhaps she may surprise us all.”

They had left it at that, and Yuet decided to make the best of it. But in the first fractious weeks of her arrival in Linh-an Tammary seemed to go out of her way to prove every one of Yuet’s initial misgivings to have been wholly justified. Tammary was a creature of the open sky. She did not know what to expect from living in a city the size of Linh-an, and what she did find only served to make her feel trapped and powerless. That feeling surfaced in sulkiness and defiance.

“No,” Yuet would sigh for the tenth time, “that is willow oak bark, and that is red oak bark. One is a contraceptive, the other is used in a physick against infection. Cahan help you if you mix them up and some woman has the baby you promised her she would not have.”