The Secrets of Jin-Shei (57 page)

She was restlessly prowling the marketplace on her own one cloudy morning, her bright, revealing hair closely wrapped in a kerchief and then further concealed by the hood of a cloak, when she felt a light hand descend on her arm.

“Tammary,” the owner of the hand said in a low, almost pleading voice. “Talk to me. You used to be able to do that.”

Tammary shrank back, twisting out of the young man’s grasp. In the shadow of her hood, her eyes were burning. “How did you know it was me?”

“Of course I knew. I know the way you walk, the way you move. I know what is being talked of in the bazaars and in the Palace, but …”

“So, it’s true—it’s all true,” said Tammary. “Leave me be.”

“No,” he said tranquilly. “If indeed it was true, then now more than ever you need your friends. And somehow I have to make you understand that I am one.”

“If I am to believe the things that are being said,” Tammary said bleakly, “there are only two kinds of people in this world right now. One kind would agree with the Empress that I am a mortal danger and would want me dead, and the other kind would want to use me to gain her throne, and
then
might want me dead and conveniently out of the way.”

“I am neither of those,” Zhan said.

“And then there are the innocents who are tainted with the conspiracy brush by the very act of being seen talking to me,” Tammary said. “Go away, Zhan, and leave me alone, and hope you aren’t arrested and interrogated when you get home from this meeting.”

“Oh, my sweet bird of paradise,” Zhan murmured. “What have they done to you?”

Tammary’s every instinct was to run, to hide in the crowd, to find a small dark hole and curl up in it until she was sure that this man and his unexpected understanding and compassion were far away from her, where they could not touch her, where they could not endanger him. Instead, she simply buried her face in her hands and burst into tears.

When his arms came around her, it was a sweet release to crush handfuls of his outer tunic into her fists, twisting the material, pouring all her unresolved pain and frustration into the motion, her head pillowed against
his shoulder and her face against the hollow of his neck, feeling his pulse beat against her eyelids as her tears soaked into his collar.

“You choose,” he said quietly, bending his head so that his words were whispered directly into her ear. “Your home, my home, anywhere. But I need to get you off this street, and you need to talk to me. You need to tell something to somebody, and you’re going to do that, now.”

“But it’s …” Tammary sniffled.

“Dangerous, yes, I know. Living is dangerous. But you cannot hide away forever, Tammary. You don’t make my choices for me, I make them, and I choose the danger, if that is what it takes. Now tell me, which way?”

Tammary started walking, without looking up, and Zhan walked by her side, his arm around her waist, holding her to him and sharing his strength and his own resolve. When Tammary stopped and finally looked up, blinking, Zhan glanced around with some confusion.

“Here?” he asked. “What is this place? I thought you were staying at Yuet’s house in the city.”

But it was Tai’s house that Tammary’s feet had taken her to. Her other sanctuary. The place where she sometimes found a tiny shard of peace in the maelstrom of events. It might have been this, the subconscious connection between that peace and the sudden warm rush of security and support she was feeling at that moment, that had brought her to this place. But then, having raised her hand and almost knocked on the door, she let it drop again.

“I can’t bring you here,” Tammary said. “Liudan would make out that I was trying to …”

But Zhan lifted his own hand and knocked firmly on his own behalf.

“You felt it safe enough to come here. There could be worse places to go.”

A servant opened the door, ushering them inside, and then conducted them to an inner courtyard where a small stone fountain played, gesturing for them to wait there. After a moment they heard the whisper of slippers and then a small gasp.

“Amri?”

“I do not think we have ever been formally introduced,” Zhan said, bowing. “I am Zhan, a friend whom Tammary has been holding at arm’s length for far too long. I don’t know what, if anything, I can do to help matters—but I will do anything that is in my power. She needed removing from the public eye, and she brought us here. I hope that this is not an intrusion.”

“You are welcome,” Tai said warmly. “I have nut biscuits baking, Amri. Will you wait until they are done? They were always a favorite with you. May I offer you some green tea, Zhan? I think Amri could do with a cup.”

“Thank you,” he said, smiling, “yes.”

“If you will excuse me, then,” Tai murmured, bowing. “Please make yourself comfortable.”

It started to drizzle a few moments after Tai had withdrawn. Zhan guided Tammary into the sitting room through an archway opening from the courtyard. There were scrolls of poetry hanging from the walls, and Zhan glanced at them in passing.

“She is Kito-Tai, the poet, is she not?” he asked. “I have bought some of her poetry myself. I think you spoke of her before, but I don’t recall what your connection was?”

“She named me
jin-shei
when I came to the city,” Tammary said. “She seems to have this rare gift of the simple ability to be happy, and that’s something I’ve been searching for all my life. It’s a way of being content. Being with her is like sitting beside a deep pool of bright water and watching the waterlilies bloom, opening up petal by petal. She gives rest. She has this perfect life, this balance, the steady flame in the darkness. I don’t know if I could live it if it was handed to me, but I envy her for it sometimes.”

“She also gives a gift of poetic expression,” Zhan said, a little taken aback. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you speak in poetry before.”

“That wasn’t poetry,” Tammary said.

“No, perhaps not—not classical poetry, not in the way that you or I would define it, not in the sense that it could be transcribed and hung on a wall, like hers. But you feel deeply enough about her to wrap her in metaphor and dream-words. You see? There
are
other kinds of people in the world. Not all of them just want you dead or want you as a figurehead.” He had slipped the cloak off her shoulders and draped it over the back of a low chair, and now reached out a hesitant hand toward the scarf that confined her hair. “Do you feel safe enough here to remove the disguise? I dreamed of that hair, Tammary.”

Tammary’s hands flew to the sides of her head where the scarf was folded down against her temples, initially to protect it, to prevent it from being removed, but then she looked up and met Zhan’s eyes, and something she saw in them changed the motion and her fingers slipped the scarf back until it revealed the bright hair underneath. Zhan brushed it
with his fingers, very lightly, and then took his hand back with a self-conscious little wave before it dropped back to his side.

“I missed you,” he said simply “I never did understand why you chose to leave me, just as I was in the middle of falling in love.”

Tammary looked away sharply. “Don’t.”

“You choose,” he said again, repeating his earlier words. “I will be what I can be to you. But I heard it said in the Temple just the other day that memories are what the future is built upon. Keep that in mind, if you should ever want to start building a future which could help you escape from this trap.”

He was carefully not saying too much, but Tammary, turning back to stare at him, was suddenly aware that his reasons for doing so had less to do with his fear that she might accept any extravagant promises he might make than with the concern that she would be driven away by them, all over again. He knew that she was trapped, and did not want to lay another snare in her path. But Tammary was the one who had walked away from their earlier liaison. She had been the one still searching, still restless.

An echo of her own voice came back to her, a conversation she had once had with Tai:
Who would marry me?
The words mocked her, because she had already abandoned this man, the one man who might have wished to. Who now sat beside her on Tai’s futon, carefully guarding against showing too much of his soul in his eyes lest Tammary be spooked into flight again—but who would have had no trouble with answering that question.

Tammary suddenly reached out for him, folding graceful arms around his neck, burrowing her fingers into the hair on the back of his head, molding her body to his.

Why did I leave him?
Tammary asked herself as she looked up into a pair of carefully wary eyes which nonetheless could not prevent a tiny flame of an astonished joy dancing in the corners. Some day, perhaps she would remember. Perhaps it had even been a good reason, at the time. But the times had changed and, for now, it was enough that she was cherished.

“Hold me,” she whispered, her eyes suddenly very bright.

His arms came around her, one around her waist, the other over her shoulder so that he could mold his palm against the back of her head. “Oh, Tammary,” he whispered, his lips brushing hers. “All you had to do was call me.”

It was meant to be a gentle kiss, just a seal on a new bargain, a future beginning to be built on old memories. But they had both forgotten the
heat that had burned at the heart of their affair, and when their lips touched it was impossible to keep it just a light embrace. If their minds had forgotten, their bodies remembered all too well, and took them back to a shared passion that had consumed them both, once. Zhan’s palm slid from Tammary’s lower back around to her hip, cupping her hipbone, and she responded to the touch, bringing her leg up over his knees so that his hand continued on a slow downward glide, fingers caressing her thigh through the brocade of her robe. She could feel him stir beneath her leg, where her thigh rested on his pelvis. His hand traveled back upward again, a swift motion that swept past her hip and over her waist and came to rest on her ribs, with his thumb brushing the underside of her breast. Suddenly all the tunics and the outerwear and the formal brocades were in the way, and she craved the heat of skin against skin, the spill of her hair over his shoulders, the hardness of his hipbones against her own.

She remembered now—she
remembered …

Zhan had crossed Tammary’s path for the first time back when she had still been frequenting the teahouses of the aristocracy, right about the time that she was starting to get bored with them and their stiff rules, traditions, and attitudes. He had been young, younger than almost everyone else there, and he had shared a little of her frustrations with the situation—less so than herself, to be sure, since he was an aristocrat and much of those traditions and attitudes had been bred into him from the cradle. But there was enough wildness left in his spirit for it to kindle at Tammary’s presence. He had initially sought her out in the teahouses and they had talked, indulging both in the discussion of serious matters and in light banter and flirting wordplay.

But Tammary had already started exploring other places, had already started frequenting the more plebeian teahouses in the city. She had drifted away from high society, and their gathering places, and Zhan.

And then, one night, in a “water teahouse” in the city, Tammary had looked up as a young man ducked through the low front door, and met Zhan’s eyes again. And this time it was very different. Something had sparked between them in that long shared glance, and then Tammary had quite simply got to her feet, abandoning the company she was with, and crossed over to Zhan who had taken no more than three steps into the teahouse. He held out his hand, she took it, and for a while there had been no further visits to the city’s pleasure dens for either of them.

Zhan’s had been the nights of summer, and they had spent long sultry
evenings making love on a high balcony above the sleeping city, and he had told her that he could see the stars reflected in her dark eyes as she lay beside him, and he had told her …

Far away from that balcony, in Tai’s comfortable sitting room, Zhan lifted his head, very suddenly

“Oh, Cahan,” he breathed. “Tammary, this is not … I didn’t want to … I don’t want you to think that I only wanted …”

“I know,” she whispered. “I know.” She took his hand from beneath her breast and kissed his palm and folded his fingers over the kiss. “I know.” A breath against his neck as she laid her face on his shoulder, her lips against his throat.

A polite clearing of the throat made them both look up. Tai, who had entered bearing a tray with a chubby green-glazed teapot and a couple of small cups, stood looking at the two of them with a curious expression on her face—a mixture of a fiercely protective look at odds with a strange glint of delight. The pleasure won over when Tammary’s mouth curled into a slow, contented smile.

“Are you all right, Amri?” Tai asked, carefully.

“I think so,” Tammary replied.

Tai caught Zhan’s eye, but he said nothing. Court-trained, however, he managed to offer the equivalent of a graceful bow even while sitting on a low-slung couch with Tammary half-curled in his lap.

Tai laid the tray on the low table beside them.

“I think perhaps you may have things to talk over,” she said. “I will make sure that the children don’t disturb you. Call for me if you need anything.”

She left, closing the inside screens of the sitting room for privacy, and Tammary suddenly laughed.

“What is it?” Zhan said, sitting up.

“Tai treats all of us as her children sometimes,” Tammary said. “Yuet will still call me ‘Amri’ occasionally, but doesn’t do it often any more. Tai has hardly ever called me anything else. It’s my child name, the baby name that a small niece gave me when she couldn’t wrap her tongue around Tammary—but Tai always calls me that, and I let her because I know she does it with love. She’ll set Xaforn on you if you so much as think about walking away if she knows that I don’t want you to.”

“I have no idea how to do this traditionally or properly—how
do
they do it in the Traveler clans?—but I have so little intention of walking away that I’m going to ask you something now that I should have asked you a
long time ago,” Zhan said. “Marry me. As my wife, you will be protected; you cannot be used as anything in the way that Liudan fears if you are already legally wed. It will give you your freedom back … Amri.” He tried the name out, rolling it around in his mouth, a teasing, boyish grin on his face.