The Secrets of Jin-Shei (44 page)

“Whoever taught you how to do that,” Lihui had snarled at last, “taught you far more than fighting skills,
Guard.
You are using the dark magic.
Never forget that you owe your reputation to the same thing you claim to abhor in me.”

He whirled, his dark cloak swinging around, and stalked away into the Palace.

Xaforn had not told Nhia about that little exchange, but the encounter had been reported to the rest of them, to Tai, to Yuet and Tammary, to Liudan. Tai had been jubilant at Lihui’s climb down, Tammary (who knew very little of the actual background) had been dutifully admiring, and Yuet had been congratulated all around for it had been her idea to split Nhia’s talisman into two and allow Xaforn to wear the second half, as Nhia’s protector and first line of defence.

Liudan had tapped her lip with her finger, in her customary gesture of contemplation.

“I told you that you should dismiss him,” Tai had said to her, unable to suppress the “I-told-you-so” impulse.

“I told you I couldn’t do that,” Liudan said. “However, he
has
spoken openly and before a witness about intent to do harm to one of my own people. For that, at least, I can call on the Circle of Sages to censure him. And I can make it clear that my displeasure will be great if they do not. And from now on I will have a Guard watching Lihui every minute of every day.”

“I thought you had already ordered that watch,” Yuet said.

“Ah,” Liudan said, “indeed. But it had been a discreet and cautious watch. This time I intend to make sure he knows he is being watched. The next time he makes a mistake like this—and he will, because people who are angry and frustrated inevitably do—there will be someone there to stop him.”

N
hia was on the point of snuffing the night’s hour-candle and retiring to bed when she heard a knock, so soft as to almost make her think that she had imagined it.

Her housekeeper nudged the door ajar when Nhia called out an invitation to enter.

“Begging your pardon, mistress,” Nhia’s housekeeper said, opening the door the merest crack, “I know it’s late, but your young friend Tai is here.”

“Tai? At this hour?” Nhia said, startled. “Send her in!”

The housekeeper ducked out and after a moment Tai entered, her eyes down, closing the door behind her with both hands, placed flat against the small of her back, and leaning against it.

“Do you have a moment, Nhia?”

“Of course. What is it? Has Rimshi … ?”

“No, no change,” Tai said. Rimshi had been drifting between deep sleep and a strange waking state where she wandered in her mind and often talked to people who were not there, including Tai’s long-dead father. Yuet kept her dosed with poppy as much as possible, keeping her comfortable—but they all knew it was only a matter of time. Maybe days, maybe only hours. “But that is what I’ve come to talk to you about. Sort of.”

“Tell me,” Nhia said, bringing the younger girl into the room and settling her into a comfortable chair while she lit another taper and planted it beside the night candle, casting more light on Tai’s pale face.

It was high summer, and a perfect night, complete with a full moon in the sky painting the land in silver. The air was warm, still holding the heat of the day, the shutters in Nhia’s rooms wide open and the faintest breath of wind stirring the painted silk curtains in the room. The scent of night jasmine drifted into the room on the back of the sound of a distant concert of cicadas. A brace of moths had set up a dance around the twin
flames of the candles on Nhia’s desk. But Tai was oblivious to it all, her hands clasped on her lap, her eyes still down.

“Tell me,” Nhia repeated, coming to sit beside her and reaching for one of those hands. “You know you are not alone,
jin-shei-bao.
What can I do to ease these days?”

“Nhia, you’ve always teased me about this before, but my mother is dying, and I want to …” She swallowed. “I want to do this properly. You know I have no blood family to ask, but you are my sister, and I want to ask you to take my
so ji
…”

Nhia smiled. “You want me to be your proxy to Kito?”

“He’s mentioned marriage to me,” Tai said quickly, “but I wouldn’t discuss it. I couldn’t. My mother needed me. But even Yuet says that she will be in Cahan and at rest soon, at long last. And I don’t want to be alone, Nhia.”

“Tai, Kito’s been waiting for this for years,” said Nhia, smiling although her eyes were full of tears. “Of course I will do it. Have you got a
so ji,
or must I put in an order for one tomorrow?”

Tai fumbled underneath her outer robe, bringing out a small silk-wrapped package she had been carrying in her purse. “I do. I have had this for almost a year now.”

Nhia pulled back a corner of the wrapping. “It’s so dark,” she said, rather tactlessly. The purest jades were the paler ones, and those were considered luckiest for the
so ji
sculptures—they were expensive, of course, but they were much sought after. But Tai merely smiled.

“I know. I wanted one that shade. He once said that he liked it.”

“You are a romantic after all,” Nhia said, and gave her a hard hug. “It seems like only yesterday that we were both children running barefoot in the back streets, and now I’m about to go out and arrange your wedding. It feels so strange, Tai. And so wonderful. Stay here tonight? It’s late, and you need to get back across town. And we can talk.”

Tai shook her head. “I left her asleep, Nhia, but I have to be there when she wakes. She is used to that.”

Yuet had already told Nhia that Rimshi often didn’t even know who was with her while she was awake—but this was not something that Nhia was about to pass on to Tai. In times like this, when the caregiver was helpless to do anything that would be of any measurable assistance to the person whom all knew was dying, it was comforting to cling to a few illusions.

“All right,” Nhia said. “I’ll get Xaforn to escort you back. And I’ll be round tomorrow, as soon as I’ve talked to Kito and his father.”

Unexpectedly, Tai lifted her head and kissed Nhia on the cheek. “Thank you.”

Nhia, feeling oddly protective and maternal for all that there were less than five years between them, smiled, smoothing Tai’s hair with a gentle palm. “I will arrange everything,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

Nhia sent for Xaforn, who turned up less than ten minutes after the summons looking as neatly turned out and pristine in her Guard uniform as though she had been waiting for this call and not about ready, like the rest of them, to go to bed.

“Make sure our soon-to-be-bride gets home safely,” Nhia said, and Xaforn’s eyes kindled.

“You’re getting married? When?”

“I don’t know,” Tai said, starting to laugh. “But I’ll make sure you are invited.”

Nhia’s morning was filled with appointments and Court business, and an emergency Council meeting was scheduled the late afternoon, when a delegation from the port city of Chirinaa was expected in Linh-an to discuss a minor trade crisis. But Nhia would have moved more than schedules around in order to get Tai’s errand done, even if she had not been asked to do so in the name of
jin-shei.
It was around noon the next day, delaying lunch for both herself and a half-heartedly grumbling Xaforn who was her escort, that she made her way to the Great Temple.

The crowds were bigger than usual, and Nhia quickly realized that not all of them were city folk. There were men and women here dressed in the peasant garb of the hill people from the north of Sei-lin, and the round-hatted farmers from the central plains, and even a brace of brightly garbed Southerners who might have been an advance guard for the delegation from Chirinaa. Nhia took a brisk walk around the Temple, and noted that all these assorted folk were buying incense and offerings, and scurrying off into the Inner Circles—laying bowls of food and rice wine at the feet of the weather spirits of the Second Circle, bowing in prayer before the Rulers of the Four Quarters and murmuring entreaties about salvation and good fortune upon themselves and their families.

The rains had been thin that year, and the year before that. Drought was beginning to bite in places. This would be the second year of a bad
harvest. Bad enough that people from some of the afflicted areas had spent good money to come here to Linh-an and petition the Gods and spirits here at the Great Temple. For the ordinary folk of the countryside, this was the Temple from which it was but a step into Cahan, the Temple which received all of the prayers sent in incense smoke from their own small temples scattered across the land, and processed them before deciding which of them would be deemed good enough to be passed on to the Gods. Things were bad enough that the poor were coming here to petition the Gods directly, by themselves, because their earlier prayers had obviously not been received.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Xaforn, trailing at her heels, whispered as she watched a couple of women laying stalks of withered barley on the altar of the Rain Spirit. One of them was crying—not loudly, not obviously, but with a silent trails of tears glistening on her cheeks.

“And getting worse, by all accounts,” Nhia said in a low voice. She had seen enough, and was heading for the gate back into the First Circle. “There has been talk of fires in the East.”

A young man suddenly bowed to Nhia, just as she was stepping back into the teeming commercial Circle of the Great Temple, and she returned the courtesy by reflex before she realized his identity, and could not help a small smile.

“Kito,” she said, ackowledging him. “I was just …”

“By your leave, Nhia, I have a favor to ask,” Kito said earnestly, not even aware that he had just interrupted Nhia. Her smile inched a little broader.

“And how may I be of assistance?”

“I know Tai’s mother is fading fast,” Kito said, his words slow and careful. “This is something that preoccupies her, and I understand that, and I respect it, but there is no need for her to bear such a burden on her own. As far as I know she has no other family, and it is all on her shoulders—but every time I have asked if I could help she has pushed me away … and with her mother her last living relative …” He swallowed. “Nhia, I wish to send a
so ji
to her, and ask her formally to marry me, but I don’t even know who should receive it. Would you take her my token? I know that you are her
jin-shei
sister, and that is as close a family member as she will have, after … I don’t want her to be alone, Nhia.”

Nhia was now smiling openly. “As it happens, I am here to speak to your father and yourself on a similar matter,” she said.

Kito blinked.

“If you would conduct me to your father,” Nhia said, with exaggerated courtesy, and Kito straightened up with a snap and offered her his arm. Xaforn, trying not to giggle, followed behind them.

They waited until So-Xan finished conducting his business with a client, and then Kito ushered Nhia into the booth.

“Properly speaking, I should have waited on you at your house, with a companion, and discussed the matter I bring to you now with the flowery speeches of the old courtesies,” Nhia said, her smile luminous now, “but I think that I am here merely as a messenger anyway. So-Xan, I come here on behalf of Tai, Rimshi’s daughter, who has charged me to bring this to your son.”

She extracted Tai’
so ji
from its wrappings of silk and offered it to the men laid flat on both open palms.

Kito gasped, and then started laughing. So-Xan’s eyes creased up into pools of glittering silent laughter, also, and he turned to his son. “Looks like she got there first, my boy,” he remarked, his voice bubbling with his laughter. “Well?”

Kito, still laughing, reached over and took the small sculpture with both his hands, offering Nhia a deep bow. “
So ji
,” he said. “As my beloved wishes. I accept this with joy, but I have made hers myself—take it to her from me, if you will, as my wedding gift to her.”

“It is a family of good reputation,” So-Xan said, as he and Nhia also exchanged bows. “I would have sent my sister-in-law to wait on her and exchange the bridal cakes, according to custom, but I understand that the young lady’s mother is ailing. How serious is the situation?”

“Very serious, So-Xan.”

“Nhia,” said Kito, interrupting again, “tell her, please tell her, there is no need to wait this out by herself. I want to help.”

“In that case I think we have a special case on our hands,” said So-Xan, as though his son had not spoken. “We will consider the wedding itself to be an auspicious occasion for the exchange of the proper gifts. So when shall we make the nuptials? If you were to ask me, I think we could safely say that this is a wedding with a betrothal which has already been completed—these two young fools have been circling each other for a long a time. It’s about time that they came to their senses.”

“I will find out when an auspicious date for a wedding is,” Nhia said. “I would prefer to arrange it as soon as I may, otherwise the mourning period might keep you apart for longer than either of you wishes.”

Kito drew a sharp breath, but So-Xan raised a hand to forestall him. “Fetch the
so ji
you made for your bride, my son.”

A luminous Kito pressed another small jade sculpture into Nhia’s hands. It was only a shade or so lighter than Tai’s had been, but its color was starting to shade into that pale green which was the mark of pure jade. Kito had carved smooth shapes of a buffalo and a boar, his and Tai’s respective signs, twined about one another. Nhia, wrapping the sculpture up carefully, smiled at him.

“That is very beautiful,” she said. “There is another thing. I know that it is traditional for the wedding to be at the house of the bridegroom, but Tai has a particular wish that her mother should be at her wedding, and it may be difficult to move her. Would you consider …”

“Nhia-
lama
, we will leave it in your hands,” So-Xan said. “This is a wedding that gives me joy because I see my son happy—but it has hardly been bound by tradition so far. We are happy to make sure that Kito’s bride is wed in the presence of her honored mother.”