Chapter 11
THE CURRENCY OF THE PALACE
The eunuch was already smug when he entered my pavilion, but when he saw the black needle, his face lit up with a beaming smile. When I told him that I would accept his offer to be my chief eunuch, his smile turned positively radiant.
“But there are two conditions,” I said from my raised seat. I was finally beginning to feel better. At the very least, my head was clearing. Behind us, under the light of a scarce moon, the peacock battered its wings furiously against its cage.
Ciyi’s smile was gone. Clearly, he had not expected a simple rice farmer to know to bargain.
And I wouldn’t have, had it not been for him and the other women of the court. They had finally taught me that power was the currency of the palace. That, even if it didn’t feel like it, I held some of that currency in my hands.
“First, I’d like you to teach me to read.”
His expression turned instantly to horror. “But that is treason, Lady Yin! Surely you know what happens to women who are found to be literate!”
I did. Of course I did. I had seen those who tried in Guishan, strung up in the city square with lash marks bloodying their backs, dead or in the process of dying.
But this was not Guishan, this was the Azalea House, and my life was already in danger. From the prince, from the other concubines, from all those who would oppose Terren’s claim to the throne.
If I had to be in danger, better it be that of my own making.
“Why?” Ciyi pressed. “You already have a scribe. Why take such an unnecessary risk?”
It was not because of what I told Jia earlier, about wanting to be empress. Those had only been words said in the heat of anger.
When I had summoned Ciyi, having decided that I wanted to learn literomancy, it had only been because it was the last option I saw left to accomplish my real goal: to send Bao to school, and gifts to those who waited for me at home.
A goal that was not so easy, as I’d once thought, as simply becoming concubine.
The servants’ hesitancy, Terren’s cruelty, the smashed vase, the blackened needle—I had finally learned that if I wanted to send Blessings to Lu’an, the only way was to write them myself. Even at risk of being strung up.
That was the true reason, but it was not the one I said aloud.
“Because I have always wanted to learn,” I told the eunuch, lifting my chin. “Ever since I was little. And now that I am in the palace, now that I am Empress-in-Waiting, now that I have power and influence to trade, I intend to do what I never had the option to before.”
I hoped it was a plausible lie. I tried imagining a different version of me, cleverer and more daring, who had as a girl knelt beyond the fence of the school in Guishan and stolen lessons there, just like Har Asori.
Maybe she would have dreamed of going to school in the capital herself, instead of merely dreaming it for her brother.
Ciyi’s eyes bore into me, as hungry as when he’d entreated me the day of the selection.
I could almost see him weighing the possibilities in his head.
If he reported my treasonous words, no doubt he would gain a small reward.
He could even take his chances with whoever replaced me—Sun Jia, likely—by making a similar offer.
But somebody as powerful as the empress’s niece would not be half so easy to manipulate.
She would already have knowledge of the court.
She’d have her own opinions, allies, and political ties.
He would not be able to control her as completely as a helpless village girl, one whose life he believed depended entirely on him.
“We must keep it a secret,” Ciyi drawled at last. “If they find out I am teaching you, they will undoubtedly have my head too. Now, what is the second condition?”
I gestured at the cage sitting by the moonlit wall. “I’d like you to help me find somewhere to release that peacock. Somewhere safe and free.”
We started early the next day in my bedchamber, the dawn outside cold but gentle. I had told my servants to give us complete privacy, claiming that I needed time to strategize with my eunuch.
“Reading need not be daunting, Lady Yin.” Ciyi set down several empty papers and ink jars on the table.
“The characters are not random, but pieced together from smaller units of meaning.” He was a surprisingly patient teacher.
Though the language of our Ancestors had more than twenty thousand characters, each with their own set of strokes, pronunciations, and meanings, he knew how to break them down for me in a way that made sense.
“Some characters even look like what they represent. Let us begin with those.”
He wrote for me the word 鳥/Niao, like the spring swifts playing outside among the eaves.
山/Shan was like the peaks rising in the distance, and 木/Mu the cypresses swaying in the wind.
In Ciyi’s lively brushstrokes, I could see his 魚/Yu swimming in one of the palace’s many ponds, as slippery and free as the real thing.
When he wrote for me the character 女/Nü, I could see several different women in its gentle figure.
I saw, in turn, Ma washing our clothes in the creek; I saw Song Silian, elegant in her lotus gown, as she swept into the Palace of Blades.
女/Nü was Minma with the dangerous dream, and the empress with her sharp vermilion smile.
It was Sun Jia, lips twisted, calling me village filth.
It was Jin Veris, blinking innocently as she insisted I try her plum wine.
“What have you done with your poisoner?” Ciyi asked, during one of our dawn lessons.
I looked up from the inked paper spread out all over the floor. “What do you mean?”
My words must have revealed something like cluelessness, because my eunuch gained a sudden scowl. “Lady Yin! How could you let something like that go? You should have punished her! The crueler and more public the better!”
Punish. It had not even occurred to me that I could punish.
“You are soon to be empress,” Ciyi chastised me, the same way Uncle Rui did his young son Dan, whenever he ran too far into the woods. “You have power. It will do you good to wield it.”
“What should I have done?”
“Summon the entire Inner Court. Present the gift and the blackened needle as evidence. The usual punishment for an attempted assassination of a concubine is a painful death. Pick something gruesome and public—like Thousand Cuts or Slow Dismemberment.”
I stared at him in utter horror. What he had suggested was so different from what Ma had taught me that for a moment, I had no idea how to respond.
Ma had always told me to avoid trouble when I could help it.
To keep my head down and smile gently. Ma would have said that as long as I kept quiet about the poisoning, it would not happen again, because when Veris saw I was still alive and her ploy had not worked, she would simply give up.
“Or, at the very least, have her flayed to death in the courtyard and her body left for the sparrows.”
“No,” I said.
Ciyi’s brows knotted in frustration. He stood abruptly and started pacing the study, startling the willow-cat napping on the windowsill.
“Don’t you know why they dared to poison you so openly and shamelessly?
It was precisely because they knew they would succeed.
And even in the small chance they didn’t, they knew you would not retaliate!
They think so little of you because you are an ignorant villager.
They do not know that you have me.” He swiveled sharply to face me, the syrup-sweetness in his voice gone.
“It is not too late. Tomorrow you will use your authority to call a meeting. We will do as I say.”
“No,” I repeated, firmer now. My heart beat faster as I stood to face him.
“If I have power as you say, then you cannot make me do anything. Least of all kill someone.” It took all I had to keep my voice from wavering.
A real Empress-in-Waiting would not let her chief eunuch overrule her own desires.
“Lady Yin—”
“Veris may have stooped low enough to poison me, but I will not be like her. I will not be like anyone in the Azalea House. I refuse to be made cruel.”
I would not be like Empress Sun, who had sabotaged her competition to get to where she was. I would not be like the seal-bearing princes, who had fought their brothers for the Crown ever since they were children. Nothing the House could offer me could ever tempt me to be so heartless.
“You are still thinking like a villager, not an empress,” Ciyi snarled. “If you refuse to be cruel, someone will be cruel to you first. If you refuse to make others suffer, then you will be made to suffer first.” He was so angry he left before our lesson was finished.