The Secrets of Jin-Shei (34 page)

T
he final day of the Autumn Court dawned with a chrysanthemum-yellow sun in a perfect, clear blue sky The early morning air was flavored very faintly with a breath of the chill to come, but the day warmed up quickly Yuet woke with a sense of danger and anticipation. This was the morning of the Closing Court. Liudan was out of time, out of all options. There would be a wedding this winter, and a new Emperor crowned in the spring when the New Year came. A new reign. A new dynasty.

Liudan was not scheduled to make her appearance until mid-morning, but Yuet, rising early and dressing into her most sumptous Court garb, decided to pay the Empress a private visit before her grand entrance. She gave her name to the Guards at the door, and was admitted by the little deaf girl who was Liudan’s personal servant. The girl smiled and beckoned, signing something. Yuet had been around her for long enough to get the gist of her motions: Liudan was still getting ready.

There were two handmaidens fussing around the Empress in her inner chamber, one brushing out her long hair and coiling it up into an elaborate Court headdress and the other mixing a batch of subtle powder makeup in a small pewter bowl.

“You aren’t supposed to wear makeup,” Yuet said conversationally.

“I am not supposed to do a lot of things,” Liudan said, in the same tone of voice. She turned her head, eliciting a squawk of consternation from her hairdresser as she disarranged a coil of hair before it had been properly pinned in place. “Oh, they
fuss
so,” Liudan said impatiently.

“They do it at your bidding, otherwise nobody would be mixing the forbidden makeup in your presence,” Yuet pointed out.

“Did you come to needle me?” Liudan said.

“No,” said Yuet, “but I’ve been out of touch of late.”

“I know. I have heard of your work. That was well done.” It was a rare word of praise from Liudan.

“I could not have the Empress unprotected,” Yuet murmured, “with all the Guards sick unto death from their bowels and too ill to care about your safety. Their lives are given to you, and I needed to make sure they were still useful to you when everything was over.”

Liudan flashed her a look. “You sound as though you mean to reproach me with something.”

“It is not my place,” Yuet said. “All I have done …” Her voice faded as she caught a glimpse of a painted miniature, a woman’s profile, lovingly rendered on a piece of creamy ivory in lifelike colors. It was a familiar profile—Liudan’s, but not quite; and Yuet had seen it often, in these past weeks, as Qiaan bent over some fractious patient in the Guard compound.

Liudan followed her gaze. “You have never seen my mother’s picture before?” she asked.

“That is your mother? You look very like her,” Yuet said, leaning forward for a closer look.

Liudan picked up the miniature, studied it for a moment, and then passed it over into Yuet’s hand. “Yes,” she said, “so I am told. I find it hard to tell, though. I don’t remember her at all.”

“Indeed,” said Yuet reflexively, “it is hard to see your own profile from an angle at which you can judge the resemblance, but from where I am sitting …” She raised the portrait so that it was level with Liudan’s face, and Liudan obligingly turned her profile. “Oh yes,” Yuet said softly. There was a third face there, in the shadows. If the woman on the painting had not given birth to Qiaan, then it had been her identical twin. The resemblance, so startling to Yuet at first glance, was astonishing when given actual evidence to compare with. “She was very beautiful, was she not?”

“So they tell me,” said Liudan, a shade coquettishly, a little sadly.

Yuet laid down the miniature near to Liudan’s hand.

“What do you mean to do, then?” Yuet asked, and realized that she was awaiting the answer with not a little fear touching the edges of her mind. “You cannot put them off again.”

“I do not mean to,” Liudan said. “Hence … this.” She raised her arms to indicate her finery, the elaborate hairstyle, the makeup. “I mean to dazzle them. I mean to walk in there and make them forget everything except that I am there.”

For the first time Yuet realized that there was something else about Liudan’s garb that was unusual. The colors she wore were red and gold—traditional colors for a wedding, true, but Yuet got a very real impression that this was not the point of the color scheme at this time. There was also no white. No ribbon of mourning in her hair, no white edging on the gown, not even white embroidery. The outer robe flamed with silk and jewels.

“But you aren’t out of mourning,” Yuet said, her eyes snapping back to Liudan’s face.

“Oh yes, I am,” Liudan said, her voice as silky as her gown. “If they wish me to marry they cannot expect me to do it while pouring ashes on my hair and bewailing my losses. If they want me to do this, I am out of mourning. If they want me to endure the full mourning period, they had better withdraw the suitors.”

“For the love of Cahan, Liudan, are you going to give them an ultimatum again?” Yuet said, and then added, indelicately, “Zibo will choke on a live toad. This I will pay money to see.”

“You do not have to. You know there is a place for you in the Court,” Liudan said, betrayed into a quick grin. “Is Tai coming? And Nhia?”

“Tai, I will be meeting at the audience chamber. I am not sure where Nhia is. I haven’t seen her for a while, but then I’ve been …”

“Preoccupied, I know,” said Liudan. “Well, then. If you will leave these two poor wretches some room to work in, I should be out there in less than an hour.”

It was a dismissal. Yuet rose, bobbed a courtesy, and then turned at the door, because she couldn’t help it. “You aren’t going to tell me, are you?”

Liudan’s profile, the classic profile of her mother that was painted on the ivory chip, the profile of a girl in the Guard compound who had spent sleepless nights caring for other people’s children over the past week or so, was turned to Yuet and Liudan did not reply, by word or by the smallest of motions. Only, perhaps, her mouth curled into a slight smile.

Yuet sighed and left the room.

The audience chamber was, predictably, packed. Yuet and Tai took their places, jostled by other impatient and excited courtiers. Over to one side the six named suitors, glittering with so many jewels that it was hard to find a patch of bare skin on them, stood waiting for Liudan’s choice to be announced. One of them would be Emperor in the spring; their expressions
were tense, their bodies taut with stress and anticipation beneath the weight of their Court garb. One or two stole apprising glances at others, weighing the impact of his own appearance against that of his rivals. Zibo, the High Chancellor, wore his highest collar, his chins overflowing from it into cascades of bountiful flesh, and looked rather self-satisfied. This would be a victory for him, the young Empress finally corraled into a position where he wished her to be. All six of the suitors, vetted by Court astrologers, were to a greater or lesser extent his own protégés, and would owe him their new status. There would be no regency, but there would definitely be favors.

A low murmur announced Liudan’s arrival, breaking into audible gasps as she swept into the audience chamber, looking neither left nor right, resplendent in her red and gold, as jeweled and glittering as any of the men who awaited her word. She paid them absolutely no attention as she swept up to the dais where the Imperial thrones were set, and sank into her seat with a rustle of silk and brocade.

Zibo looked startled, and perhaps a little afraid. He had not expected this. He had expected compliance, at last, but Liudan looked anything but compliant. She looked proud and confident, and there was a glint of definite satisfaction in her eyes. As though
she
had won, and not Chancellor Zibo.

The courtiers continued whispering to each other, like a field of grass stirred by the wind, until Liudan lifted her head after a moment and looked out over her audience. People stopped talking in mid-sentence, in mid-word.

“I have been on retreat,” Liudan spoke in a low voice, into silence, “and asked the advice of the Gods and of my
jin-shei
sisters on the matter of my marriage. I have meditated on this, and prayed about it, and taken the advice of Sages. I have discussed it with my Council, and with the astrologers.” So far so good, she was casting herself as supplicant, as penitent, as one asking for advice; some color returned to Zibo’s cheeks.

And then Liudan’s voice changed. Subtly. And everything was different. “And even with all this gathering of counsellors and protectors, something has gone wrong with the selection of suitors they presented me with. One, at least, was unwilling enough to be in his place to go out and take quite a different bride, to marry another woman secretly, in stealth and despair.”

The Court trembled for a moment, because there had been a cloud of ominous threat in those words, as though Liudan meant to exact punishment for this action. But her voice softened again.

“And I wish him well, in the choice he has made. And now it is time for
me
to make a choice.”

Yuet, always a people-watcher, was raking the faces of the crowd with her eyes. Liudan had them rapt; they were hanging onto her every word.

“First they asked me to choose from the Emperor-suitors which had been handpicked not for me but for my sister, Antian, the Little Empress, who was taken from us so tragically and too soon when the earthquake came down on the Summer Palace,” Liudan continued. “And I would not, for I am not Antian. Then they chose a new set of men, who the astrologers swore were a better match with my own stars. One, I already lost to another. The other six wait here today.” Her voice dropped even further. “If one was wrongly chosen, how do I trust the choice at all?”

Zibo could not suppress a gasp. There was a susurration among the group of suitors, a swell of whispers in the Court. But Liudan ignored them all.

“For three nights,” she said, “and I am told this is significant, I have had the same dream come to me. In the dream I am standing on the topmost peak of a mountain. Standing alone. Waiting. And as I wait I feel the mountain move beneath my feet.” Gasps, as she invoked the earthquake again, the one which had brought her to her throne. But Liudan spoke on, as though she had not been interrupted. “And the mountain moved, and I saw it uncoil, and I knew that I was standing on the back of a dragon, between wings of red and gold.”

She stood up, flung back the wings of her own outer robe, revealing an inner gown embroidered with vivid writhing dragons in scarlet silk and gold thread. Yuet caught Tai’s eye, and Tai nodded once, briefly—
yes, that is my work, but I didn’t know what
—and then both of them turned back to Liudan.

“The dream tells me this. I will take no Emperor to sit beside me on the throne of Syai. Let it be written: the new reign is mine alone. I am the Dragon Empress.”

K
hailin had taken Nhia up the stairs from Lihui’s workshop, surreptitiously, muffled in one of her own cloaks with the hood pulled forward as far as it would go. At the front door of the house, Khailin stopped.

“I may not even touch the doors,” she said, her voice bitter. “I pay for it with pain. My hands blister at the very contact, and then, later, when he comes back and the door tells him I had tried to lay my hand on it …”

“The
door
tells him?”

“This house is … is
him,
in some strange way. He knows what happens in it, and when. He knows this is happening now. You must go, Nhia. Before he meets you at the gates. Once he lays the interdict on you, you will never leave these halls.”

“Khailin, what will happen to you? If he knows you helped me …”

“I can handle it,” said Khailin after a short pause. “Go. At the gates, turn right, and keep walking. Whatever happens. Whatever you see. Don’t turn aside. Don’t stop. Not until you see the first place that you recognize as real, as somewhere you’ve been, a road you’ve walked or a door you have opened yourself and passed through and you know where it leads. Do not stop until you are absolutely certain, until you
know.
Go. Go now.”

“You disappeared. I tried to find you,” Nhia whispered. “I
tried
.”

“I know,” said Khailin. “Some day I will come home. He can’t keep me here forever. I will find a way to return. Now, for the love of Cahan, Nhia,
go!
”

Nhia drew breath to say something else, raised her hand to her neck to finger a thin silken cord which bore the strange amulet Khailin had given her, and then turned away without a word and slipped out of the house.