Chapter 20 A Traveler’s Tale
A TRAVELER’S TALE
Terren was absolutely delighted when I entered. He even looked up from the dead peacock he had been skinning, by the blood light of the sunset, to meet my eyes. “How presumptuous of you, to think that you can see me whenever you please.”
No doubt he was so pleased because he saw, from my unusual request, an opening—to newer and even more creative torture methods.
I could not look at that horrible smile without remembering the feel of a knife in my thigh, or the burning in my lungs as I was held underwater, or the bitter taste of bile in my mouth. Or Pima, bleeding to death on that bed of daisies.
That peacock. I wondered if it was the same one I had released, and he had somehow tracked it down.
“You miss me so much that you are trembling,” he continued, almost giddy. “With excitement, I presume. This is one form of flattery I can appreciate.”
“There are doctors coming tomorrow, Your Highness. They will examine me to see whether we have been dutiful.”
His smile vanished at once. His eyes flashed something dark and terrible.
“So that is why I had to see you tonight. For our mutual benefit. Me to keep my head, and you to keep your position as heir.” I set the empress’s edict on the table.
That was the only thing I had in my favor: for how wicked he was, Terren was no fool. If he did not desire the throne, he would not have been so angry as to punish Pima when one of his allies withdrew their support. If he did not want to be heir, he would have ceded the position to Maro long ago.
His eyes brushed over the letter. Then he set down the peacock and rubbed the black blood off on his gown. In a voice chillingly calm, he said, “Shall we eat first?”
He didn’t even hurt me during dinner. Just sat across from me silently as he watched me pick at my bowl of pork-and-cabbage dumplings.
I had little appetite. And for the first time, it was not because of looming torture, but the childmaking activity itself. I might have prepared for it for a whole month, with all those lessons and demonstrations, but now that I was on the precipice of actually doing it, I was terrified.
What if it hurt?
What if it didn’t hurt, but Terren found a way to make it hurt anyway?
Terren was not eating either. He went only for his wine. He finished a whole jar, then went for another, and when that was done, he went for the next. Soon, the entire room reeked of fermented rice.
“Your Highness,” I ventured to say. “Perhaps you might consider—”
A knife flew by my ear, slamming into the wall behind me. I went ice-still.
He opened another jar of wine.
Perhaps I really was that undesirable, I thought. He could not even be himself when he took me.
At last, as the sun went down to a sliver, he wiped his drool with a sleeve and pushed himself unsteadily to his feet.
He summoned a sword from the wall and tried to use it to walk, but it wasn’t working.
The first step he tried to take, he fell to the ground with a thump.
I rushed to help him, but a hovering sword point stopped me from touching him.
“Go to my bed,” Terren slurred from where he was sprawled on the ground. “I will join you shortly.”
There was nothing to do but obey. I went to his bed, peeled apart its gray canopy of curtains, and sank into the cold sheets.
Around it, servants had already lit candles scented with cardamom and cacao.
An intoxicating night, the apothecary’s voice droned in my head.
One conducive to slow and sensual love, the kind that ripens magic like a flame-oven ripens a bun.
I untied the sash of my gown and let it fall loose in a pool around my bare knees.
Then I glanced at my hips. For a moment, I worried he would find those jutting bones unattractive and decide not to bed me after all.
Then I laughed. I was possibly going to die tomorrow, and I was worrying about whether he would like my hips.
When Terren finally joined me, he was somehow even more drunk than before. He threw himself heavily on the far side of his bed and lay there, not moving.
“My prince,” I whispered. “Your robes.”
He made a noise that didn’t sound like words.
Maybe he was incapable of undressing himself.
I crept closer to him on my knees, the bed creaking beneath me.
That wine smell made me even sicker than earlier, but I ignored it as I reached for his gown.
“Here, let me help.” The ward coiling above him glowed white, but did not stop me as my hand went trembling to the top knot.
He lay still as a corpse as I undid the first button, then the second, the third.
The silk fell loose, exposing a bare chest full of bizarre, three-pronged scars.
I could not fathom where they could have come from, unless a bird made of fire had trampled all over him.
But as I fumbled for the fourth and last clasp, his body jerked suddenly, making me flinch. “Don’t touch me. I’ll kill you.”
His eyes had flown open. His ward had lashed around my hands like a chain. I could not move them at all.
Belatedly, I realized there was a blade pressed against my throat.
“My prince—” I began, but cut off when I felt the sting of its edge in my flesh. I did not want to know how close it came to splitting open my life’s vein. For a moment, we stared at each other. I didn’t dare breathe.
It seemed like forever before he let the blade go.
It left my neck and dropped limply to the bed, flicking dark droplets onto the sheets. At the same time, the ward swirled loose. Abruptly Terren got up, stumbled towards the door, and left.
For a while I just sat there, stunned. I wiped at my throat with the back of my hand. It came back glistening wet.
What under Heaven had I done wrong?
If even giving myself to my torturer wasn’t enough to save me, what was I supposed to do?
“What am I supposed to do?” I screamed. I grabbed the knife from the bed and threw it as hard as I could. It bounced off the wisteria-covered wall and clattered uselessly to the ground.
I grabbed for my gown, threw it on, and went looking for Terren.
I found him deep in the Palisade Garden. He was crouched in the alley between two pavilions, amidst bushes of thistle. His head was buried in his arms.
“Your Highness.” It hurt to speak through the wound in my throat, but I forced the words out anyway.
“I know you do not wish me to die, or you would have killed me by now. I also know that you wish to keep your position as heir, because if you did not, you would not try so hard to keep up appearances. So please. I don’t want to do this either.
I am terrified of you, and I am bleeding from your knife, but we don’t have any choice.
I’m begging you. Just give me one night. Please.”
He didn’t respond.
He didn’t even seem awake.
For a long time, I could only stare at him, uncomprehending. It must be some sick joke from Heaven, that my life should be in the hands of a man too drunk to even look at me. That I should have to beg someone who had tortured me to avoid execution.
And the worst part was, when the doctors came tomorrow, it would be only me who died.
Terren might lose his throne, but that was all he would lose.
I was a girl, and replaceable, and once they found me undutiful, they could simply throw me away and find another. And I hated and hated that they could.
I left him there and ran, a choked sound escaping my throat. Maybe this was what the Ancestors had decided for me. Maybe I had been born only to suffer and then die, and that was why all this was happening to me.
Larkspur had been born to suffer and die. Even Ma, holding her tiny body in her arms, listening to her feeble puffs of breaths, held no hope in her gaunt eyes. Even Ma knew that there was nothing she could do when the Ancestors had already made their decision.
I didn’t know how far I ran, under the darkness of night. How many turns I made, how many bridges I crossed, how many beautiful and indifferent pavilions I passed. When I looked up again, I found myself in a bamboo grove at the edge of the palace, towering silver in the moonlight.
I slumped against one of the trees, tired to my bones.
My neck ached terribly.
When I had been young enough to believe I could become anything, I had imagined myself a traveler.
One with a rickety wagon and a thin but dependable horse, with no other purpose than to bring sundries and stories from afar.
Wherever I stopped, I would pass them around, both the sundries and the stories.
There are monsters in the bamboo forests, I would say to all the village children, as we all gathered around a warm fire.
Fanged demons with a face like an eyeless monkey’s and a body like a carp’s.
I have seen them myself: swimming through the air, tail moving back and forth as they weave through the dark trees.
Maybe some of them would be scared enough that they’d sleep holding their ma’s hand.
Maybe some of them would take it as a challenge and venture into the forest themselves, that very night, looking for the truth.
A wind shuffled the leaves overhead.
I looked up, at the canopy and the stars beyond, and that was when the idea came to me. A foolish one, but I was desperate enough that I would have done anything.
When Lady Chara had demonstrated all those techniques to us, she had used bamboo.
I didn’t know what the doctors would be looking for tomorrow when they examined me.
Maybe the childmaking act made a girl magic inside—and they would check to see whether I glowed.
Maybe they would stab a silver needle into my belly and see if it sprouted vines and blossomed flowers.
Maybe they would press their ear to my chest, listening for the hum of the act between my frantic heartbeats.
Whatever it was, I was not going to get it from Terren.
It did not take long before I found a stick about the size of the one Lady Chara had used. I used a rock to saw it to the right length, then I lay on the cold soil and pushed it beneath my gown.
It wouldn’t go in at first. I repositioned the stick and pushed some more.
When it still would not budge I pushed even harder, biting my lip against the pain.
I had no idea whether I was doing the right thing.
They had spent a month teaching us how to please a man, but nobody had ever mentioned how it was supposed to feel for a woman.
Ma had told me that the childmaking activity was only natural. That every girl in Tensha was born knowing how to do it.
Tears leaked from my eyes with every push. She had been lying. I knew that for certain now. If she had been telling the truth, it would not hurt as unbearably as it did.
I was not sure how much would satisfy the doctors—how much of it would make me glow, or make the needle blossom, or make my heart hum—so I kept shoving the bamboo inside me for as long as I could bear it. I did not stop until my insides burned like fire, until my hands were sticky with foul blood.
I couldn’t walk afterwards. I couldn’t even stand. For a long time I just lay there, curled in the dew as the night passed me by, crying softly enough that nobody could hear me.