Chapter 18 Sanctuary
SANCTUARY
The decline of the Azalea Dynasty began with our prince’s grandfather. The Joy Emperor, they called him. His era name was Yonghuan: everlasting merriment.
I knew him as Jinzha.
I met him shortly after I came to the palace, after having been castrated at the age of six.
He was a year younger than me, a bright but spoiled child.
As a second-rank prince—the son of the emperor’s deceased brother—Jinzha had no interest in either his studies or the affairs of the court.
Instead, he spent all his days playing with me and the other young eunuchs.
One of his favorite places was a lake hidden halfway up the mountain. Lush and warm, with a huge waterfall plunging into it from one side, it was the perfect place for a prince to visit without being bothered. He called it his Secret Sanctuary. When we became older, it became simply Sanctuary.
“Hesin, come swim with me,” he would call to me, from where he treaded water deep in the lake. “It is a most magnificent summer day. Don’t tell me you plan to stay on those rocks all afternoon.”
If I refused, he would tease me relentlessly.
“Oh, Hesin.” He would laugh as he splashed cool water on me. “Does your deficiency make you less buoyant? Is that why you are so afraid of the water?”
Jinzha’s sigil was Qin. That was immediately obvious if you ever came near the palace during that era, because there was music everywhere.
Zithers constantly chorused from every pavilion and hall.
Nobody was there to pluck them; their strings danced on their own.
Bamboo flutes hanging from the eaves blew by themselves, playing joyful odes and mournful ballads in turn.
Even the magpies in the pines sang like they were larks.
The only time the music stopped was when Jinzha slept.
Once we came of age, I began to serve as his advisor.
I handled all the court affairs he loathed—similar to what I do for Terren now.
I managed all of Jinzha’s correspondences; I spoke to his guests; I made secret alliances and promised covert favors on his behalf.
Since he was only a second-rank prince at the time, his disinterest in politics did not concern me.
There was already another seal-bearing prince, the emperor’s heir Han, who was benevolent and could call down lightning.
Then Han and the emperor died, both on the same day.
They were fair deaths, no foul play involved.
Deaths on the battlefield. The Shouyuan Emperor had been leading a military campaign for the past decade, and he and his son had conquered most of the Highlands by then.
But before they could defeat the last of the Civid kings, an avalanche came crashing down the mountain and wiped out their entire camp.
“I am going to run away,” Jinzha told me, the night we received the news.
We were sitting on the rocks at the edge of the Sanctuary, bare feet dipped in the cool, clear water. Jinzha had tucked in his arms a mandolin, as round as the full moon above, and he was plucking at it absently.
“Your Highness,” I replied, “you know you cannot. You are the world’s last seal-bearer. If you do not take the Crown and rule the nation, who will? If you do not spread your seeds and produce sons, who will keep the magic of our dynasty alive?”
His plucking became more agitated. “Must there be someone commanding the Crown? Must there be more sons with Heaven’s magic?”
“Yes,” I said, baffled. “That is how our nation works, and has since the time of the First Emperor.”
He kicked the water angrily, and the ripples chopped up the moon’s reflection. “I do not care. I am going to run away, and I command you to come with me.”
“I cannot, Your Highness. If you must leave, then someone has to remain in the palace and clean up the mess you make of our nation.”
He was nearly in tears. “You really won’t let me go? After all you claim to care about me, you would force me to fight that ugly dragon? To take concubines?”
“I am not forcing you to do anything, Your Highness. You are the heir. You can do whatever you please.”
He threw his mandolin across the pool. It smashed apart on the rock, wood splintering into sharp pieces. A pair of mandarin ducks, screeching, took off into the sky.
He did not run away.
A few weeks later, we gathered in Heavenly Square to watch the coronation. Ten thousand onlookers crowded all of its three terraces to cheer as Jinzha—and his archers, cavalry, and swordsmen—took down the dragon.
After that, he filled his Inner Court. Beautiful women were carted in from far provinces, which he took two or three at a time.
He took them in the courtyard under the shedding magnolia trees, and he took them in the Sanctuary behind the waterfall, and he took them on the sloped rooftops of his moonlit pavilions.
Eventually, he would produce seven seal-bearing sons.
It would be the most of any Tenshan emperor in history.
Jinzha had followed my advice in the end. He had taken the Crown and spread his seeds.
But that was the last time he listened to me. Shortly after his ascension, he demoted me to a low-ranked palace manager and filled his Outer Court instead with sycophants. “Your beauty is as profound as your music,” the men would say in melodic voices, and Jinzha would laugh and laugh.
So it was that the Azalea Dynasty began to wither, like magnolia blossoms past their season.
Jinzha’s father might have reopened the Caeyang Corridor, and his father might have begun the golden age of literomancy, but the young emperor lived up to neither of those legacies.
The only thing he lived up to was his own era name.
Yonghuan. He threw extravagant parties, of music and nonstop feasts; he siphoned money from taxes to shower those who flattered him with lavish gifts.
From the northern borders, he pulled young men from defending the wall to have them dance for him instead.
He had changed. He was no longer Jinzha, the generous-hearted and spirited boy I knew, but the Yonghuan Emperor. He was corrupt and insatiable, imperious and proud. He was, above all else, merry.
It should come as no surprise to you then, Lady Yin, that his sons decided he needed to die.
If the dynasty had not been so strong to begin with—the strongest any had been in Tenshan history—then it surely would not have survived the Joy Emperor’s reign.
But an old and sturdy redwood takes many ax-cleaves to fell, and despite the constant raids in the Caeyang Corridor, despite our weakening border in the north and the invasions on our southern coasts, Tensha remained standing.
All this is to say that, when the civil war finally began, there was still some semblance of a nation to fight for.
I had tried to warn him.
I had tried to tell the Yonghuan Emperor that his eldest son was conspiring with his second to overthrow him.
That his sixth was courting one of the princesses of South Meir, an enemy nation.
I tried to tell him to be especially careful of his fifth son Muzha, whose conniving intelligence frightened even me.
“I have never seen someone so hungry for power, Your Majesty. He is a serpent waiting for a chance to ambush.”
He clapped me on the back and laughed uproariously.
“Ah, Hesin. Hesin Hesin Hesin. You’ve been this way since we were boys—always worrying over every little thing.
But why worry when you can be merry?” He turned to one of the women draped over his shoulder.
“Bixiu, sweetheart, fetch my mandolin for me, will you?” To the one on his other arm, he said, “Find some strong wine for my anxious friend, Nina-dear. The stronger the better.” To the third, with her head in his lap—“Are there any sweet gao from last night’s feast left? Please, Aellan, do find us some.”
When they were gone, I found myself alone with him for the first time in almost thirty years. “Jinzha.” I spoke with all the anger and urgency I could summon. “Your life is in danger.”
He only leaned back on his throne. That faraway smile never faded. “Let me tell you a secret, old friend. A secret that I have told nobody else.”
“Please,” I begged him, “listen to me. Your sons—”
“The secret is this: the dynasty will not fall so long as I am emperor. So long as I hold the Crown, nobody will kill me.”
“You cannot know that!”
“But I do. I made a deal.”
“Jinzha—”
“I spoke to Heaven.”
“Please—”
“I borrowed from the future.”
“What?”
But he never explained, because his concubines had returned.
They brought his moon mandolin—a new and bejeweled one, since his old one had broken; wine that smelled as strong as poison; and pastries that looked too colorful to be edible.
He asked me if I would stay and hear a new ballad he’d composed, but I was too angry so I turned and left.
That night, the coup happened.
The first son lit the palace on fire, and moments later, the second son betrayed and killed the first amidst the chaos.
I fled with Jinzha and his men down the mountain, the hot smoke choking us, all the way to the old capital.
We hid there as the Azalea Civil War raged on, as battle after battle erupted between the remaining seal-bearing sons.
We waited out the Siege of Long Peace, the Moonlight Maneuver, the Deception at Orchid Gate.
We bided our time, disguising ourselves as monks to hide from searching armies, as Guan blood was shed and the heads of fighting men fell like rain.
Muzha, as I’d predicted, came out on top.
After he killed all his remaining brothers—with the support of the Sun Clan’s massive army—he sent a battalion to the old capital.
He checked every man on every street until he found the one with the Qin seal, and then he marched his father—now gaunt and thin after his long exile—back to the palace.
“I will not kill you,” he told him, “for patricide is not the Aolian way.” He laid before the bound emperor a vial of nightshade, a white cord, and a blade so sharp it gleamed. “So you will do it yourself. Choose.”
The Yonghuan Emperor looked from the items to his remaining son to me, who was tied up at his side. “Actually,” he said quietly, “I would like to go for a swim.”
When I went with Muzha to fish his body out of the water, I found the Sanctuary tranquil and moon-flooded, just like the night we’d received news of the Shouyuan Emperor’s death. Mandarin ducks, bobbing in the calm water, made gentle circles around Jinzha’s pale corpse.
After we pulled him out, I knelt for a long time by his side.
I gripped his cold hand, thinking about how stale and lifeless the palace was without all that music, how strangled it had become under all that heavy silence.
A cowardly part of me wanted to go echo-step with him, to follow him into the afterlife, but Muzha would not let me.
“You have sworn an oath, Hesin,” he said. “You will live and serve me. Round up all our allies and remaining patriots, and help me tame the Crown.”
I did. He did. The dragon was subdued without complications, and Muzha became the Yongkai Emperor. Then the famine began.