Chapter 37 #2
Venus drops the mat, startled. A beat later, her hand lurches right back to the mat, flipping it over properly.
“I’m sorry, I suspect I am walking in circles over the snow.”
Venus doesn’t reply to this plea from her attendant. She can only stare at the blindfolded figurine pleading with her in frozen form. She’s beginning to suspect that something has gone awry. That there is a reason why her attendant cannot see a glaring red roof peeking out from the snow.
Though the word is written in ancient Talinese, it shares enough with their current script that she can understand it.
She likely would have understood it anyway, had their language evolved another hundred years, because it has been scrawled over and over on the temple floor beneath the mat, etched with such mania that the translation is unnecessary.
GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED. GREED.
Venus, gathering her will, plucks up the blindfolded figurine. Inexplicably, impossibly, the ceramic is scorching hot, but she keeps ahold of it anyway as she stands and marches to the door, exiting the temple.
Her attendant spots her immediately.
“Councilmember!” she cries, hovering beside a large mound of snow. “Where did you just emerge from?”
Venus shakes her head. “Get me a bag.” She lifts the figurine. It is burning her palm. “I’m bringing this down to the village.”
Venus makes her descent carefully.
She cradles the figurine close to her chest, tucked inside a burlap bag.
The paths are particularly icy on the way down.
When she was ten, she chipped the front tooth of her birth body by running too fast around a corner after a palace servant cleaned the floors.
It never healed properly because she’d had secret dental work done to avoid telling her father, walking herself to a dentist in Er with cash clutched in her hand.
The dentist had botched it because she rushed him, and then she told herself that the flaw in her tooth was for the better, because masculine bodies from the nobility went for outrageously high prices on the black market, and it seemed strange to have something of value lying around.
She didn’t care about how much the vessel would sell for: at a certain point, she just didn’t want to wear it anymore.
Being a Hailira meant that was fine. She had other options. The nobility in the Palace of Union would whisper about it, but they could not stop her, nor her father’s key in the Hailira vault to fetch a sum of money.
The Hailira vault is under the Crescents’ control now. Venus can’t think about it too hard—it is not as though she has a claim to it. She didn’t earn it. She was born into it.
She has no tie to anything of hers anymore, then.
“Councilmember, please be careful!”
Venus sidesteps a hunk of snow. They’re almost there. She has been shivering for so long that her fingers have frozen around her bag, practically melding to the burlap. Her thoughts are sluggish, in sync with her movements.
She does not react quickly enough when they finally reach the bottom of the mountain pass, and there are masked figures waiting around their carriage.
“What—”
“Don’t move!” one of the figures bellows. They’re dressed in white, blending with the snow, the mist, the dry plains. In synchrony, the group moves toward Venus, toward her attendants.
“Wait, wait,” Venus gasps. There’s nowhere to run. No chance of disappearing back up the mountain. “I am the councilmember of Rincun. I bring offerings.”
She hates how timid she sounds. Her father always said that would be the thing that ruined her.
Not her stolen body, not her young age. Her doubt.
She doesn’t sway any of their assailants.
One of them grabs Venus to steer her forward.
There’s a jangling behind her. The assailants are taking the bags from her attendants.
Somehow, it seems unlikely that this is a mere robbery, but Venus grapples rapidly with her own bag all the same, reaching for the figurine.
“Wait, please,” Venus says again. “If you want the valuables, we were already set to offer them to the yamen. They’re not going back to the capital with us. In fact—”
“Shut up,” the assailant holding her arm growls. “Enough.”
Venus can’t hold back the sob that claws up her throat.
“No!”
Her assailant goes flying into the snow.
It is an inconceivable turn of events—one second he is towering over her, each feature of his person covered under white fabric, and the next his shoulder skids and crunches beneath him, landing off the path with his limbs awry.
His mask tugs off, as does the cloak over his head.
When the assailant hurries to gather his bearings, he looks up with a shock of shoulder-length dark hair.
He is a perfectly normal man. A rural dweller who works on a farm, perhaps. Plenty of those in Rincun.
The scene falls dead silent. Her attendants do not dare move. The assailants are stock-still.
“What is that?” one of the masked strangers asks.
In the commotion, Venus had succeeded in pulling out the figurine. The ceramic does not sear her fingers anymore, as it did in the temple. Perhaps Venus has already lost too much feeling in her limbs.
“We brought it down,” she answers, “from the palace in the mountains. We wanted to retrieve offerings. Calla Tuoleimi sends her well wishes from San-Er, and wants the province to take back these valuables on its land.”
“How dare you,” her felled assailant says. His face has been uncovered already. Little good it would do to continue maintaining anonymity, so he speaks without hesitation. “That is sacred land in the mountains. It cannot be plundered as you wish.”
“No, I—” This isn’t how this was supposed to happen. Her breath clouds before her. “We come with the proposition of a treaty. We wished to speak to the yamen and the generals of the province.”
“There are no more generals of the province.”
This comes from another one of the assailants standing nearby.
Their voice feels familiar, though Venus cannot put her finger on why.
She has not spent long in West Capital. When they put Rincun on a voluntary confinement period, hoping that would protect the province against travelers seeking the divine crown, Venus was stationed in East Capital.
“I—I’m sorry,” Venus says. “What do you mean?”
The woman pulls off her mask, revealing her face. It is not one that Venus can immediately place, but she knows she has seen it before. Which wouldn’t make any sense, because why would she know the face of a rural rebel?
“Many of Rincun’s palace soldiers died in that qi attack,” the woman says. “Maybe you remember. You and the princess were here doing your little survey.”
Yes, Venus remembers. Did she meet this woman while she was here?