Chapter 12
NIGHTS
Not long after the first night, Terren summoned me again. Before entering, I paused at the top of the tower to take several deep breaths, willing my pulse to steady and my hands to stop quivering.
There was no food on the table this time, only stacks and stacks of paper. A hundred lanterns sat flickering on the rug around the prince, and the room smelled of burning candles and fresh ink.
He was writing spells. I knew because every time he finished inking a line, the characters glowed, like the Blessings from the firecrackers did on New Year’s.
They were as beautiful as the Azalea House was terrible.
I imagined myself writing one just like it, for Bao and Rui Dan and all the other children.
It was going to be a harvest song, I’d already decided. A harvest song that could be heard all the way in Lu’an, one that would bring gifts to everyone.
Hope stirred through my fear, watching the prince work. Ciyi might have been teaching me how to read, but even he could not teach me literomancy. If I wanted to learn how to write my own Blessings, could I learn from a skilled literomancer himself?
Though I wanted nothing more than to squeeze my eyes shut and disappear, I forced myself to speak. “Your Highness.” I tried flattery, which had worked on Minma before. “You must be quite skilled, to write Blessings so quickly. I see there are already three completed verses at your side.”
His reply was calm, almost reasonable. “As Azalea House sons, one of our primary responsibilities is to contribute spells to the House’s stores.
Unlike other literomancers, our seals can help us.
Poems relating to our own affinities are the fastest and easiest, and it is no feat to compose three of them in a night.
” He finished another spell and unrolled a fresh scroll before him.
“You should know that the more you speak insincerely, the worse I will torture you. I receive enough flattery during the day that I grow impatient with it at night.”
His tone was not a threat, but his words were. My breathing became as fast as in my nightmares, and something deep in my stomach started churning.
If this night was anything like the last, or like the selection ceremony, then it was only a matter of time before the prince’s calm vanished and those storm clouds of cruelty came. I had to hurry if I wanted to get information out of him. “How do you know when you’ve come up with a spell?”
“Poetry is truth and emotion. Even a small child can recognize both those things instinctively. If you’ve ever heard an affecting poem, you would have felt that stirring in your heart.
Magic, waiting to free itself.” He paused to write a fresh character on his scroll with a water-brush.
“But some truths are easier to come by than others. Dao Blessings to me are like second nature. Ever since I was young, my blades have always been whispering to me, telling me what they know, guiding me towards their truths. Wei, would you like to see a spell?”
My heart sped up. Even trapped in a room with a man I was terrified of, what remained of the child inside me still remembered how to yearn for magic. “… Yes, Your Highness.”
He nodded. His sigil flashed, and the next moment a sword had drifted from the ceiling to hover in front of me.
It was an old sword, darkened with rust. Terren took one of the poems he had written from his stack and retraced it onto his rug—which was embroidered with a dozen fearsome, cloud-dancing dragons—with the tip of a second sword.
I could not tell what the characters said, and he did not read them for my benefit.
The Ancestors accepted the words. The entire poem flashed once, then became a flurry of sparks that shot up to embrace the rusted sword.
The sparks became white lilies, which folded delicately over its blade, and when they unfurled again the next moment, all the rust had vanished.
The sword had become as shiny as if freshly forged, reflecting the hundred lanterns in the room like a mirror.
“Fascinating, isn’t it?” His smile had become dark and terrible. “This one can go to Ji Province, perhaps. The ministers there keep pestering me for new weapons.” The paper in his hand did not disappear, I noticed, unlike the Blessings we had cast in Lu’an. He let it fall back onto the table.
“How many times can a Blessing be reused?” I hurried to ask, still not knowing when his cruelty would begin. I had previously thought each Blessing could be cast only once. But if the paper had not vanished, perhaps it could be given to the earth once again.
“Mmm. It depends. It could be once or hundreds of times, depending on the quality of the spell, its complexity, its length. But all literomancy has its limits. Each poem can only be used so many times before it loses its magic, before the Ancestors no longer find meaning in it, before its words become wiped from everyone’s memory.
” The hovering blade turned in the air until its hilt was facing me.
“This spell has at least five or six casts, but since it is one I just wrote, I do not yet know if it is good. Shall we test it out?”
He kept looking at me, as if he meant me to take the sword.
I reached for it hesitantly. It was lighter than I might have guessed, its grip brazier-hot.
“Make a cut,” Terren told me.
I searched the room for something to cut.
My gaze swept over the scrolls and lanterns splayed out around the room, the roses seeping out from beneath the moon-brushed windowsill, the young cathaya trees sprouting near the pillars and wall corners.
It did not seem prudent to destroy any of the prince’s belongings.
In the end, I cut the sash of my own gown. A band of green silk fluttered onto the rug.
Terren’s eyes never left me. “Wei,” he said, voice suddenly steel, “this is a sword, made for combat. We ought to test it on its intended target, not some arbitrary object.”
Intended target. My whole body turned to ice as I realized what he wanted. The storm clouds, the violence, they had come just as I’d predicted.
“Make a cut,” he repeated, louder.
Shaking, I pressed the sword’s glistening edge to the palm of my spare hand, wincing as it sank into my flesh. A red line welled where steel met skin.
“Not there.” He sounded irritated. “On the battlefield, do you suppose fighting men would aim for the hand?”
I tried to hold back a sob but could not, and a tiny sound struggled out of my lips. I had no idea where fighting men aimed on battlefields.
“Don’t worry,” he said, after I still had not moved. “My magic’s affinity is blades, and that also extends to mending wounds made by them. Now, go on.”
It was the same almost encouraging tone as he had used on Zhen. Don’t worry. My aim is not very good. Still shaking violently, I brought the sword tip to the softness of my stomach. Was this what he wanted?
Every part of my mind was screaming no, no, don’t do it, but I forced all my terror aside, squeezed my eyes shut, and shoved the sword towards me in one decisive motion.
It would not budge.
When I blinked open my eyes, I saw the prince’s seal was glowing. He must have used his magic to prevent the sword from moving.
“Not there either. A stomach wound is fatal, Wei. We are only testing my magic, not trying to have you dead. I said I can mend wounds, not work miracles.”
My heart pounded so hard I could feel my pulse against the grip. Swallowing, I brought the blade to my leg instead. When I thrust it into my thigh this time, nothing held it back.
The pain seared like hot iron. Something like a sob, or a gasp, found its way out of my throat—then another, then another.
“Deeper,” the prince said.
It hurt so terribly that my eyes went blurry with tears, and I was now crying uncontrollably. But still I obeyed. I did everything he asked, just like the first night, because what choice, really, did I have?
He did not plant me that night either.
Before we went to bed, he mended my wound with a spell from his stash, just like he’d promised. Then he lay down and did not speak to me again.
As I sat on the corner of the bed, watching the Aricine Ward swirl languidly around his sleeping figure, I wondered if he was hiding some terrible secret.
Maybe he was sick. Maybe someone had put a curse on him, one that made him unable to father a child.
Maybe he was really a demon beneath that wicked face, with the legs of a goat and the scaled belly of a snake, and nobody knew because nobody had seen him unclothed.
The skin on my leg was intact, as if nothing had happened, but I was not intact, I was broken and scared.
Even with magic, he could not put back all the blood I lost, and my head kept throbbing and throbbing.
Why was it not enough, I asked the Ancestors over and over, that I had lost Larkspur and all the others, that I had been born a girl worth nothing? Why must someone also have to hurt me?
Terren called on me often. Not every night, not even every week, but often enough that every day, when the afternoon light waned and the shadows of my windows’ lattices grew long on the floor, I would begin to breathe fast. My chest would tighten with the panicked hammering of my heart.
I would taste bitter bile in my mouth just anticipating Hesin’s knock on my door, which would surely be accompanied by the dreadful words His Highness calls you to his bedside.
What the astronomer had told us earlier, about the lunar cycle, was all a lie.
The prince did not spread his duty out among his Inner Court, according to the patterns of the moon.
He did not even call on his two Noble Consorts.
The only one he ever summoned was me. And when he did, it was never to do his duties and plant me, only to torture me cruelly.
One night, he filled a tub full of mudwater and sedges, the kind that grew wild in rice fields.
He then forced me to drink as much of it as possible without allowing me to a trip to the basin-room.
“I heard that a paddy needs flooding for rice to grow. As you are a paddy creature, born from the mud, I have supposed you must need to be similarly watered.”
Another night, he brought in a barrel full of a hundred starving rats.
“Since you have traveled so far from your village, I have brought for you a piece of home.” With a floating knife he smeared a stew of rancid meat all over me before forcing me into the barrel.
He then let the piece of home swarm all over me until I would never again forget their moist bodies, their pittering feet, or that gagging, gutter stench of fur and rot.
Another night, he took me to the Palisade Garden, the biggest garden in the East Palace.
“As you are not used to the House’s splendor, Wei, I wish to share with you all its beauty.
” He led me to the pond within the garden, swathed with mist and moonlight.
“Please, do admire the carp,” he said, as he floated three dozen swords to make a cage around me, force me underwater, and hold me there amidst the fish.
When I coughed or struggled, he told me that I was not appreciative enough, and had me admire the carp once again.
At first, I tried to figure him out. If there was a logic to his cruelty, I reasoned, possibly I could learn to avoid it.
But soon it became clear there was none.
If I spoke to him, he hurt me. If I refused to speak, he took it as a slight and hurt me.
He hated it when I acted terrified, and he hated it when I acted resentful, and he hated it when I tried to pretend I was neither and spoke kindly.
My ignorance provoked his knives, as did any hint of cleverness.
The days I cried, he hurt me worst of all.
Maybe hurting people was an itch for him.
An itch that kept digging and digging until he scratched it.
Maybe that was why he’d chosen me as his Empress-in-Waiting, the one person he could summon exclusively without raising eyebrows in court.
I had no powerful family backing me, no political ties.
He could hurt me and hurt me, and there was not a thing I could do but bear it.