Heart and Soul (12 page)

Nigel nodded, thinking of it. “Yes, but all the same, I shouldn’t put you in further danger.”

Joe shrugged. “I have some magic. Not a lot. My family is not nearly so high up on the tree as yours. But I have enough to disguise your magic markers and some of your appearance, and to keep your dampers on that beautiful jewel there.”

“But why would you trust me over Her Majesty’s servants?”

Joe grinned. “Her Majesty never saved my life. And besides, I’ve never been one to care much what authority has to say to anything. If I’d listened to my father, my Charlotte would be married to some scrubby gardener, and I’d never have had the chance to watch my Hettie grow up.” His face became grave. “So you’ll lie there, Enoch, and take your ease until you’re recovered enough to continue your mission. And then you will go with my blessing.”

Nigel nodded, but one thought tortured him. “I dreamed of a Chinese angel. I guess I must truly have been feverish.”

Joe, already at the door, turned back, a wrinkle of thought on his forehead. “Well…I don’t know. It is possible you dreamed of the pirate girl. You talked of her enough. Uncommonly pretty, if I may say so, and I’ve wondered all along if you knew her, for her to do what she did for you.”

“What did she do for me?” Nigel asked.

“Why, she stopped the bleeding from your shoulder. Without it, you would have been dead in minutes. And I’ve never heard—though I don’t fly that part of the world much—of Chinese pirates being charitable before.”

TORTOISE AND BONE

Jade followed Third Lady along the edge of the
women’s quarters boat. The boats were now moored on the river, with the familiar plain around them, looking like nothing but regular barges, inhabited by tramps or subsistence crafters, but certainly not pirates.

Here, on familiar territory, the boats were moored end to end, their edges touching and the planks normally extended between the boats set across them, to allow people to walk across when they pleased.

Third Lady had brought dark cloaks and they were both enveloped in them. Now she pulled Jade aside, toward a thicket of woods. In the woods, cool shadows fell on one of the lifeboats that were normally inside the Dragon Boats. So small it would fit just the two of them, end on end, it was, like the Dragon Boats, charged with its own flying spell, activated by the emperor’s magic.

Jade looked at Third Lady. “I don’t understand,” she said. “If we must go at night, can’t I just fly? I could carry you—”

Third Lady shook her head. She put her finger to her lips, as though requesting that Jade speak softer, then spoke in a trickling whisper. “At night is safer because fewer people are awake. But if they should wake…” Third Lady smiled, a sparkling, naughty smile. “If they see a boat being rowed away with two cloaked figures in it, they’ll think it’s the men going off to the city for a tipple, as they’re likely to do in the evening when we’re moored.”

“They are?” Jade said.

“Oh, yes. Didn’t you know? They can’t go as dragons, not without explaining exactly where they come from, but our little boats are not the only charmed ones about. Every were-clan has them. People see rowboats in the sky all the time. Besides, my lady, if you’ll forgive me…they would recognize your dragon form, but no one will recognize your cloaked form on the boat.”

Jade shook her head. Another thought had intruded. This time she whispered, as she said, “But what about flying the boats? As the test of the new emperor’s power and the proof that he has the Mandate of Heaven to rule the Dragon Boats?”

Third Lady nodded. “Of course,” she said. “But all the clans swear allegiance to the Dragon Throne, so if the new emperor doesn’t make the boats fly again, they will be grounded, as they were at his father’s death.” She smiled. “But once he makes them fly—and I thank you for doing it for him, milady—then all the boats in all the clan holds will fly.”

“Oh,” Jade said, and stepped into the boat, picking up an oar. Third Lady had an oar, too, but she sat near the rudder of the boat, ready to steer. As with the barge poles, they had to work the oars hard at first, until they’d gained enough altitude over the trees and the lights beneath, which indicated peasant cook fires. But soon they were flying through a night of such a deep blue that it seemed like nothing so much as Wusih silk, spun very even and deep, and Jade could lay aside the oar.

Third Lady leaned on the rudder and steered with a practiced ease. Jade wanted to ask her if she often went out like this at night, but looking at the little triangular face in the moonlight, she thought that it wouldn’t be surprising if she did. It must be very hard on Third Lady to be imprisoned, a minor wife in a very formal household, and without even a child to take her attention and to keep her company. All alone, and with no distractions, she would be isolated in many ways, since most of the Dragon Clan, and even the Bear Clan, the Panda Clan and the Tiger Clan thought themselves by far superior to the Fox Clan. The foxes had a reputation throughout China as thieves, intriguers and tricksters, and where the peasants would shield a were-dragon, or even one of the other weres, they would only try to kill a discovered were-fox.

Jade frowned slightly at Third Lady as it occurred to her that she was entrusting her life and her honor to a member of the Fox Clan. She was sure everyone in all of China would laugh at her if she came to misadventure thereby.

Third Lady looked up, as though surprised at being so regarded, and Jade sighed. Because the other part of this was that she had known Third Lady for years, and she knew for a fact that she was the only one of Wen’s wives to truly care for him. “I was wondering,” she said to cover up her thoughts, “how difficult it was in the women’s boat for you, when you have no child and no particular vocation.”

Third Lady blushed a little. “Oh. Oh,” she said, as if it had just occurred to her that anyone might pity her, and the idea struck her as odd. “But it is not difficult at all. I have your brother, my lord. Oh, I know,” she said, catching the look in Jade’s eye, “he is often lost in his dreams, but I sit by him and hold his hands or…or hold him. He permits me to do so. And I wonder, you know, with Zhang gone…” She was quiet again. “I would not wish to malign the minister…”

“You may malign him as you wish,” Jade said, tartly. “He left the Dragon Boats against my will and went off to parts unknown. Probably to negotiate with the British, as you intimated earlier. It is perhaps not proof of treason, but it is close enough.”

“Yes, but this I never had proof of…” Third Lady said. “But I always thought…well, you know, that perhaps he was the one supplying my lord with opium.”

Jade sat up straighter. This connected with something in Zhang’s papers, a note about his receiving something from the English, something that was referred to only as “the packet.” Jade had imagined it to be one of the many trinkets that littered Zhang’s quarters, or perhaps strings of cash. But it might have been opium instead.

“Why do you think that?” she asked, almost breathless with sudden suspicion. Her father had trusted Zhang implicitly and Zhang could have done almost anything behind the emperor’s back.

Third Lady ducked her head. “It’s not that I think it,” she said. “Or not so much. It’s just that I’ve thought, you know, whom it might benefit to have your brother lost in a dream. And the only person I could think of was Zhang.”

“Oh,” Jade said. She would have liked to deny it, but it was so. Because as she had thought, if she—that is, if Wen’s power had failed to make the boats fly, then the Dragon Throne would have devolved upon Zhang, the descendant of the younger line. “But if it was…”

“If my lord doesn’t find another supplier, and I don’t think he will…for he is, you see, in general, aware that what he does is a bad thing and a betrayal of his rank and birth…if he doesn’t find another supplier, then he will surely end by recovering from…from his dreaming.”

“That,” Jade said, “would be a very good thing.”

“Yes. Oh, yes,” Third Lady said, and yet the eyes she turned to Jade looked haunted. “My only fear, my lady, is what that will do to the Dragon Boats.”

“What do you mean?” Jade asked.

“Well, I have seen what happens to people who get so far in the dreaming as my lord, your brother. And it is very difficult for them, painful even, to cure themselves of their need for opium. What happens, then, when his magic is thrown into turmoil by his recovery? What happens to the Dragon Boats?”

Jade opened her eyes wide. “I don’t know,” she said meekly.

“No, and neither do I,” Third Lady said. “And that’s something I, myself, intend to ask the Oracle of Bone.”

Jade squirmed. “I’ve heard…that is, I know what the Oracle of Bone is. Or at least, I am aware of its existence and have read about it, but…”

“But?”

“But I always thought it was something a little…shameful? Something that should not be done?”

Third Lady shrugged. “As to that,” she said, leaning slightly on her rudder and causing them to execute a gentle arc toward mountains that looked like a dragon asleep under the hills, “how can the daughter of the dragons avoid consulting the sleeping dragon?” She grinned suddenly, irrepressible, a more natural expression than she’d ever shown before. And then, as though feeling it was a great faux pas, added, “Milady, truly, this is the oracle of our kind, the priesthood composed entirely of weres. We ask the will of heaven and the mind of the Jade Emperor. But we ask it by intercession of the tortoise and the white tiger, the red bird and the dragon. Our noblemen—or rather, the foreign noblemen that rule over our people—might think this shameful. But this is the religion of the people of China, the people who came out of the Earth, the nine sons of the first dragon—our people, milady. What remains of the belief in our dynasty.”

And Jade, whose ideas on this were all confused—having learned from her father a lot of the more cultured beliefs of Chinese noblemen and from her mother that all Chinese belief was superstition—felt guilty for being out with a fox shape-shifter at all, much less out and searching for an ancient oracle that her people shouldn’t even consult.

But Third Lady inclined her head at Jade’s silence and steered the boat carefully toward a dark cave that seemed as though it were the mouth of the mountainous sleeping dragon. As they approached, Jade could see fires burning within the cave, and she frowned a little, but said nothing as Third Lady pulled out one of the oars and used it to row against the motion of the boat, thus bringing it down slowly, gently, onto what would be the tongue of the dragon, had the cave been its mouth.

There were fires burning around the edges of the cave, Jade perceived, though those looked more like braziers built in heavy dragon-shaped iron pots than open fires. Next to each of the braziers stood a person—Jade thought a young woman, but it was hard to tell, as the glowing coals cast more shadows than light.

Third Lady stepped out of the boat first, and threw her cowl back, extending her hand to help Jade climb from the boat. Jade pulled her own cowl back, feeling suddenly vulnerable and defenseless, as Third Lady announced in a ringing voice, “I am Precious Lotus, the third wife of the True Emperor of the Dragon Throne, the Right and Hereditary Ruler of All Under Heaven. And this is Red Jade, the daughter of the former Dragon Emperor, the sister of the current one. And we come to ask the decree of the Great Tortoise and to find the Mandate of Heaven.”

For a while, as Third Lady’s voice reverberated around the cave, no one moved. It seemed to Jade that she and Third Lady had mistakenly come to a cave where no human lived and where only some statues kept watch, from their niches in the walls, as incapable of movement and speech as the stones that surrounded them.