Chapter 16 Malicious Intent
MALICIOUS INTENT
I sent Ciyi to fetch a doctor and rushed out the back door. Wren had laid Pima down beneath the cypresses, between two old roots. His blood pooled dark on the nest of daisies beneath him. “What happened?” I demanded.
It was hard to understand Wren through her sobs, but eventually I pieced it together.
Terren had been in a bad mood walking home from the Hall of Scholarly Cultivation.
Something about an ally withdrawing support, to favor his brother in the West Palace.
When he’d passed by Pima, who was on his way to deliver a message to me, he had taken it out on the scribe.
“Taken it out?” I bellowed. The scribe was almost dead.
Wren clutched her friend close to her and sobbed into his gown.
I stared at the unconscious eunuch as panic seized my own chest. I didn’t know much about medicine, but even I could tell that by the time Ciyi brought back a doctor, Pima would have bled to death.
The cuts on his body were deep. One under the other, in tidy rows, making it clear they were no accident.
Each bloom of blood bespoke malicious intent, an intent I had experienced firsthand.
“Wait,” I whispered, an idea springing to me. “I can help.”
Wren stared at me as I found a cypress branch and traced a poem in the grass quick as I could. It was the same poem I had seen Terren draw on his dragon rug, every night he had made me cut myself.
My magic’s affinity is blades, and that also extends to mending wounds made by them.
I didn’t even have time to doubt myself. The instant the last stroke was finished, the characters erupted into a spray of orange sparks. The sparks swarmed like fireflies onto Pima’s wounds, which closed like petals furling.
Wren gasped and shuffled backwards. A damp wind rustled the canopy above.
Only then did I realize what I had just revealed.
I had drawn those characters so quickly, so confidently, the way only someone who knew how to read could have done.
And the spell I had written was a Dao mending spell, one of the prince’s.
Only someone who had been tortured by him could have known it.
There was no time to think about that now. “Wren, is there anywhere we can hide Pima while he recovers?”
“The servants’ quarters,” she replied in a tiny voice. “Nobody goes to the cellars except for me and Duan, and I trust him.”
I lifted one of Pima’s arms and draped it over my shoulder.
“Help me, then. Before Ciyi returns. We’ll tell him that Pima died, and…
” The palace was built into the mountains.
Much of it was bordered by a sheer plunge into the valleys below.
“And we were afraid of the body, and didn’t know what to do, so we threw it off a cliff. ”
There was no way Ciyi could know about the mending or the torture. A literate woman was a crime, but a woman who cast spells was a danger to thousands of years of tradition. There was no telling how Ciyi would react. He might suddenly become afraid of me or decide I was not worth the risk.
And if he caught even the slightest hint that Terren tortured me—if he so much as suspected I had a reason to not want to wed the prince—he would betray me in an instant. He was only my ally because he wanted to rise with me as I became empress.
“Do not tell anyone what you learned tonight,” I pleaded to Wren.
She took Pima’s other arm and we lifted him to his feet. “That you can read? I already knew that.”
I was caught by surprise. “You did?”
Her voice became quiet, even bashful. “The scent of ink lingers in your bedchambers, Lady Yin. Even if you leave the windows open, it still stays on the silk. When I wash your bedsheets, I always make sure to wash them three times.”
With Pima supported between us, Wren and I slipped into the servants’ pavilion through a side door.
The cellar was filled with barrels of rice, grains, soybeans, dried fruit, and sweet wine.
We laid him on the wooden floor in the far corner, hidden behind a shelf.
Wren retrieved a blanket from it to warm him.
I checked the scribe’s breathing and thanked the Ancestors it was steady. “Once he recovers, find a way to sneak him out of the palace, into the valley. The capital is nearby. Since Pima will be presumed dead, none of Terren’s men will look for him.”
At this, Wren laughed—a soft, bitter sound.
“He won’t look for him regardless. I don’t even think the prince knows his name.
He had only wanted to hurt someone, anyone, and Pima was unlucky enough to be near.
It is not the first time he has done something like this, you know.
” She wiped at her eyes with a sleeve. “Oh, Lady Yin, he has killed so many of us. I am so afraid of him. We are all so afraid of him.”
My own eyes welled with tears. Now I realized with certainty how foolish I had been.
The day I moved into the Inner Court, how quickly I had decided all the servants hated me.
But it had never been about me at all. They were just as afraid as I was.
All those rumors of flayings, of cut-off tongues—hadn’t I heard the stories even before arriving in the palace?
Hadn’t I experienced his torture myself—concluded that he was a monster beyond logic, born to hurt things?
“The heart-spirit poem,” I whispered.
A love ballad on its surface, one so heartfelt that it could only be composed for someone whom one knows deeply.
But beneath, a spell that killed its subject.
One that could find its way straight into a heart, even one guarded by allies and spearmen and literomancers, even one belonging to a man with the powerful magic of blades.
They kept telling me it was not possible for Terren to die. But I had read all of The Annals, as a girl and a commoner, and now I had cast a Blessing too. I was beginning to believe in the impossible.
“Lady Yin?” Wren said, a question in her voice.
If he died, there would be no Dao seal amplified.
If he died, the nation would not become ruled by military, by war; the throne would fall to Maro, who could then begin a prosperous economic reign. The House would send my bride price back to Lu’an. My family would be saved.
If he died, there would be no more torture, no more pain, no more people cut apart by knives. The Cypress Pavilion servants would never have to be afraid again.
I would not have to be afraid.
When I spoke again, my voice was so dangerous I hardly recognized it. “Don’t worry. I am going to kill him.”