Chapter Fifteen. The Horse’s Mouth
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE HORSE’S MOUTH
Inside the car, a middle-aged man in a batik shirt reclined by the opposite window. “You know who I am?”
He had a long, smiling face and the shadow of a receding hairline, a pair of spectacles perched on his broad nose.
If not for the inked horses that cuffed both his forearms, and the cane with an ornately carved handle that rested against his door, she would have walked past him on the street and not spared a second glance.
“Three-Legged Lee.”
The smile pushed up his cheeks. “Good, you know how to call.”
“Where are you taking me?” Adeline asked, as the car purred to life beneath them.
“Scenic tour of Chinatown.” A terrible lie, even ironic—the rain had started to come, and it was rapidly progressing into a downpour.
Tian must have been caught out in it. Lee angled in his seat so he could face Adeline more properly.
His gaze trawled over her, but not in that leering way she’d become used to. “You don’t look like your mother.”
She’d expected this, to some measure, when his lackeys had identified her by surname. Yet it was unnerving anyhow to hear this stranger talk as if he had the right to know her mother so closely he could judge her presence in other people. “What do you know about her?”
“We grew up at the same time. Red Butterfly used to be much more powerful in the fifties, you know, when they were less afraid to burn things. Although which of us wasn’t more powerful back then?
War makes people desperate to be part of something—or makes them easier to be exploited.
Anyway, we all knew about the Butterfly girls.
I knew someone sweet on your mother, but he never would have dared to make a move.
No one was surprised she became Madam. It was a few more years before I took over Nine Horse. ”
“And ran it to the ground,” Adeline muttered.
“Imagine my surprise,” he continued, ignoring her, “when I send my second man to her funeral and he comes back telling me there’s a girl wearing the daughter’s badge.
And then imagine more of my surprise when I hear she’s been spotted around with Red Butterfly.
Is it true? You have fire and no tattoo? ”
He was too keen, all of a sudden. Adeline became very aware that she was locked in this car with him and his driver. Yet she instinctively wanted to keep the truth light. “I have one,” she said.
“Do you?” She wasn’t sure if he believed it, but he didn’t ask for proof. “And your mother—is it true that she had many of hers removed?”
Adeline didn’t respond, letting loyal silence cover the fact that she didn’t actually know.
She’d burned away the tattoo that anchored her mother to Lady Butterfly, that much she now understood, but she hadn’t looked for any others.
Her mother had never brought her to the swimming pool, or the beach—what Adeline had once assumed was a fear of water must inevitably have been a secrecy for fire instead, but she could not, as a result, have told if her mother’s tattoos had changed over the years.
Could she really have gone so far as to have them removed?
Far from becoming impatient, Three-Legged Lee seemed almost smug at provoking her thoughts. “Your mother should have stepped down after Bukit Ho Swee,” he said. “Saved her own face and saved you all this trouble.”
“She killed the Butterfly that did it. What was there to save?”
Lee shrugged. “She went too soft on her; lots of people were unhappy. Some people still believe she set the other woman up to do it. That fire was a god’s fire.
How else would the woman have gotten that much power?
Red Butterfly was fighting with the gang that controlled Ho Swee, at the time.
The motive was there. Some even say the government paid them to do it. ”
“It was ten years ago. People don’t have anything better to wonder about?”
“You wouldn’t forget it if you’d seen,” he replied simply.
“You girls already had a reputation for being demon women. After that, well. Even I had to wonder. You know they say that the woman ran through the houses and walls simply caught fire. She brushed past people and they simply collapsed. They say she was laughing as homes burned, that she wept tears of blood, that her skin bled without wounds, that she had wings. I don’t believe everything, of course, but I do believe that no ordinary person produces tales like that.
And now there’s you. Girl born with fire.
You can see why I had to come find out for myself. ”
“You signed the Act. You’re not part of this anymore.”
“A legitimate man can’t be curious?” They jerked to a stop at a traffic light. Stalled, the whole car hummed under them, the vibrations reaching through Adeline’s skin. “It works for us, you know. It can be a good deal, if you’re not hung up on tradition.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“I’ve made our god understand. I will not pass it on, so it will die on the mortal plane with me. I will make my penance, and we will make our peace.”
Adeline felt inexplicably disgusted. Three-Legged Lee smiled. “No, I wouldn’t expect you to understand. Not with that monster of a goddess you have.”
“Call her that again.”
“Monster,” he said slowly, “of a goddess.”
She jerked. Lee’s cane flashed out, slamming Adeline back against the seat. His lips peeled back over his teeth, and for a moment, nostrils flaring, there was a rearing stallion in his skin. The rain thundered outside, battering the windows.
But then he settled back down again, catching his cane and replacing it placidly over his lap, and he was just a man again.
“Don’t get me wrong, hor tiap. Lots of our gods are monsters, if you ask the right people.
Many of the jealous gods are fighters by nature, fueled by being surrounded by their kind.
The magic demands to be used. It demands its devotees persist. But you Butterfly girls and your conduits have always been even more different.
Something about the fire takes over. Those who try to keep it too long end up being consumed by it. ”
Lee spoke as if he knew better than the Butterflies themselves, and perhaps he did, because he’d seen it, hadn’t he?
He’d been around longer than they had. He’d known her mother and the Madam Butterfly before her, maybe even the one before that.
And yet—“Maybe it’s just that it has nowhere to go,” Adeline said sweetly, still unnerved.
“Maybe we should be burning more things down.”
“You’re not what you look like,” Lee said.
Despite his earlier disparaging remarks, it sounded like a grudging compliment.
“Your mother used to talk like that, too, like the rules didn’t deserve to apply to her.
That kind of talk makes you enemies. Tell me, how did Red Butterfly react, when they realized you wouldn’t simply give them whatever they wanted? ”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, that’s why they haven’t put up a new conduit yet, isn’t it? You haven’t decided.”
“The girls choose the new conduit,” Adeline said slowly.
Lee’s brows rose. “Well, in a way. But it’s your blood that decides it.
” He paused, realizing they were no longer trading jibes.
“You weren’t told? The next Madam Butterfly will need to take your blood.
Why do you think Fan Ge is going around bleeding out the tang ki ko he kills?
Kongsi have hidden and resurfaced over the decades, but the only way to truly end one is to kill the conduit and spoil the blood that’s left.
It can still work if it’s fresh enough.” He raised his cane and tapped Adeline on the wrist, on the blue of her veins.
If the Sons hadn’t told them first, the revelation about Three Steel’s executions might have been enough to throw her off.
It wasn’t common knowledge—official news, tabloids, and gossip networks talked variously about increasing fights, raids, and defectors being hunted down, but the exsanguination was a detail that they had still only heard that once.
She’d already had time to sit with that fate, though, and so it was the other implication that took hold.
Tian’s anxiety that she stay, Tian’s admission that the ascension wasn’t so simple as rallying the other girls into agreement—and above all, Tian’s unfaltering attention, and her private smiles, and her willingness to share her conspiracy with Adeline, all of which now felt like Adeline was a pig being raised for slaughter. “If I refuse?” she said tightly.
“Well, unless the conduit is already dead, it’s always been proper that the blood is given willingly. But they could simply take it from you.”
Tian dabbing at her mouth, casually taking her hand, pulling her through Bugis Street; her arms around Tian’s waist, leaning into curves, entire body pressed against her spine.
Adeline hadn’t realized how comfortable she’d grown in the reliability of Tian’s physical presence—safe, constant, unassuming, assuring, protective—until it warped at this very moment.
Understanding that all this fighting had not just been for what she represented, but what ran through her body, this substance under her skin that would have to be extracted, eventually, with some violence.
In some ways Adeline should have seen it coming, but it was impossible to remember anything as gentle now.
None of which she allowed herself to reveal. “We were worried Three Steel would come after me,” she said.
“What, because you have your mother’s blood?
I doubt it. Red Butterfly might need you for the ceremony, and you may technically be the goddess’s current conduit, but Fan Ge doesn’t see you as the tang ki chi.
The man is traditional in spite of the war—they tried very hard, you know, to stamp out all the remaining mainland rituals.
I would be surprised if he challenged Red Butterfly until there is a proper tang ki chi for him to control. ”
The car slowed, the outside a sheet of gray water. Lee jerked his head. “Go on. Show your sisters I promised no harm.”
Sisters? Adeline turned and found they had stopped outside the Butterfly house, and there, waiting in the five-foot way, were Tian and Pek Mun.
Lee sensed her hesitation. “Could I guess,” he mused, “who you want to give your blood to?”
Adeline banged the door open. Rain lashed in immediately. She got out and slammed the door with as much force, heading right into the dark corridor. Tian reached for her and she jerked away, a motion that she saw propel Tian’s alarm to urgent, worried heights.
“Adeline, what did he—”
“Don’t touch me.” Adeline was still drenched, clothes clinging to her, hair damp on her neck. “Is it true? You need to take my blood to make the next Madam Butterfly?”
Tian jolted. Adeline waited to be charmed.
For her mouth to open and to summon the girl who could get half of Chinatown to talk to her about anything, who always remembered the right details and said the right things, who produced knowingly flattered smiles and promised, without words, that you were the most important person in her world in that moment.
But instead, Tian looked guiltily at Pek Mun.
Adeline flinched. “What were you going to do if I didn’t agree with your choice?
” she spat. “Get all the girls to hold me down and get the knife out?” From Pek Mun’s expression it had clearly at least occurred to her, but Adeline wouldn’t have expected anything less.
She was really only demanding from Tian, who couldn’t meet her eyes.
“Did you think you could feed me and pet me and walk me around and I’d roll over like a dog? ”
“That’s not what it was,” Tian snapped. She’d never snapped before, but it was less intimidating and more desperate, a weakness that infuriated Adeline further.
“How long did it take you to realize you messed up when you told me that Pek Mun didn’t care about my mother’s death?
You just wanted someone to listen to you, and where did that get you?
I don’t need your food or your house or you, like you keep trying to tell me. You need me more than I need you.”
She dared Tian to say otherwise, or to admit it, or to fight her—but instead, Tian looked despairingly at Pek Mun once again. And so Adeline turned on her heel and walked off.
“Adeline!” Tian finally shouted, but when Adeline looked back she hadn’t moved, was still frozen by Pek Mun’s side.
“I don’t want anything to do with you. Burn for all I care.” Adeline pointed at Pek Mun. “She would kill Red Butterfly if you let her.”
Adeline marched on until the five-foot way broke for a junction.
She didn’t have anywhere else to go. But she couldn’t go back either, they’d never let her back in now without groveling, and she would not go back if she was just a vessel.
Let them regret it. Let them figure out what to do when they started bursting into flame again without her.
But her vindictiveness felt like an act even to herself. If they needed her so badly, why did it feel like she’d just cast herself out?
She turned around, and found no one there. Digging her nails into her palms, nearly hard enough to draw their precious blood, she crossed the street and walked.