Chapter 25 A Wicked Thing
A WICKED THING
Long after his brother stopped showing up, Terren still came by.
Every day, I would find him sitting in the same spot, under the shadow of the Palace of Everlasting Spring’s arched gate, hugging his knees as he waited for his brother to return.
But the longer Maro remained absent, the more agitated Terren seemed to become.
As the days passed, he cried even more than usual and spoke even less.
He began hiding from us. When he was not by the gates, I could not guess at where he was. The other scribes and I would search every corner of the peach garden, only to find him crouched deep inside a thornbush or a shadowed alley.
One afternoon, he creaked open my office door and poked his head inside.
“Your Highness?”
He flinched at my voice, as if he thought I was angry at him—but I was not angry, only concerned. “Is there something you need?” I asked.
His gaze drifted to my desk.
“Ah,” I said quietly. “Your friends.” He was seven now, far too big to be playing with his old toys, but I blew the dust off Tiger, Niu Niu, and Little Sparrow and handed them to him anyway. He took them into his arms without a word and retreated deep into the peach trees.
One of my subordinates, Taifong, looked up from the scroll he was copying and scoffed. “An Azalea prince nearly grown, yet he still acts like a baby. Even young Prince Isan doesn’t cry half as much as he does. Lady Autumn should be ashamed, for giving His Majesty such a disgraceful son.”
“Taifong,” I snapped, not knowing why I was suddenly so angry. “Terren is an imperial prince. The next time you speak ill of him, I will inform the emperor, who will behead you for it.”
Not long after that, Terren must have given up waiting for his brother, because eventually, he stopped coming to the garden too. With both the eldest princes having outgrown the palace, the visitors stopped coming and my colleagues moved out.
The years passed. The peach garden stood empty. Its blossoms fell with nobody to admire them.
The only one who came by was Isan. On windy, muted days when I went to feed the carp, I would sometimes catch the third son wandering the garden, alone.
Long after his brothers were gone, he would still climb the Century Peach, sit atop the golden pagoda, and watch the world turn from amidst the flurry of an unending spring.
Maro was ten when he came into his power.
When his sigil was revealed to be Lu—a much-needed one—the whole palace feasted and celebrated for three days.
Then the emperor sent him away to make use of it.
For weeks at a time, Maro was off in some remote province or another, building roads.
He carved navigable rivers through valleys, canals to connect cities to ports, and winding trails through dense and formerly impassable forests.
Trade slowly began to revitalize, the nation reawakening from its long recession.
One day, Muzha told me his most ambitious idea yet.
“My son will re-establish trade with the West,” he said.
“We will be as wealthy as when we still controlled the Caeyang Corridor.” The summer in the valley outside his bedchambers was lush and green, and a fresh wind came in through the lattice windows.
“He will carve a tunnel through the Fallen Sun Pass, which we shall call the Salt Road.”
I was not sure about the plan. It seemed overly bold; the terrain of the Eriet Mountains was known to be bitterly cold. The campaign would take several months at the very least, the work harrowing and at high altitude, and I worried for Maro’s safety.
But the emperor was right that it would breathe new life into our nation. It would give us a new route to the West, one that was not so far north that it could be contested by the desert states and the Lian. A route that would be all our own.
I said carefully, “Prince Terren is almost of age.”
The emperor responded to the reminder as I’d hoped. “Ah, yes. We should send my second son as well, in case he comes into his power during the campaign and can help.”
That was not the main reason I had suggested Terren go with Maro.
I still remembered the laughter and the love they shared in the peach garden, the days when the second prince—and everyone else in the palace, truthfully—seemed at their happiest. I had hoped that by putting the brothers on a campaign together, they would become as close as they had been when they were younger.
But my plan did not work. The second son did gain his own sigil sometime while in the mountains, but it turned out to be Dao. A power that pleased the emperor far more than his brother’s Lu, a power far more useful for our weakened empire, surrounded by enemies on all sides.
Perhaps Maro envied his brother. Perhaps Terren, having finally tasted power, had no more use for his brother’s companionship. I would never know why, but after the Salt Road campaign, they split apart. Maro returned to the capital to rest, while Terren continued northward to fight a war in Tieza.
They never spoke to each other kindly again.
When Terren came back from Tieza, he was no longer the gentle child he had been, the one who cowered behind loud noises. He was fearless, vicious, uncompromising. There was a new contempt in his eyes, I was horrified to find. He listened to no reason, answered to no one.
He’d begun to hurt things.
It started with birds, which he delighted in shooting out of the sky with his new magic.
Then it became ground creatures, squirrels and moonflower-rabbits, their dying squeaks making him cackle with laughter.
Then it was people. He found any excuse he could to torture or to behead, punishing servants for the smallest of faults.
When he was out on military campaigns, he would win battles for his father—but he won them by decimating armies and raining blades on streets full of civilians.
The summer he turned sixteen—just days before he finished the Aricine Ward and made himself invincible—he poisoned all the carp in the peach garden.
It had been a wet morning, the beeches and willows still trembling under the weight of recent rain. “Hesin.” Taifong had burst into my office, face red with fury. “The entire palace reeks of fish.”
When I arrived at the pond, I saw hundreds of carp bodies floating on the surface, all bent at unnatural angles. To this day I have no idea where he had gotten the poison from, to have killed so many at once.
I was shaking all over. I tried to tell myself they were only fish, even if they were the same ones I’d been feeding all these months.
There were many ponds in the House, and it would be no effort to replace the ones in here.
But there was no such thing as only fish. Terren himself had taught me that.
That little boy on the bridge, the one who had refused to let a carp die—where had he gone? The one who had written his first spell to save a small and exuberant life?
He-sin. Come see. My heart seared with the memory.
Taifong came up beside me. “This is the child you were so intent on defending,” he spat. “Do not speak ill of him, you once told me. Now you finally see what a monster he truly is.”
We had spoken in private, but Terren must have found out about our conversation somehow.
The next day, I found Taifong’s body in front of my office, cut into twenty pieces and arranged neatly so that they caught the sunlight.
A terrible wail escaped my throat. I dropped to my knees, cradled my colleague’s severed head, and cried until the sky turned dark.
That night, I pleaded with the emperor to stop this madness. “Everyone is terrified, Your Majesty.” I fought hard to keep my voice from quivering.
Muzha only waved a hand to dismiss me. “Good. We have many enemies. It is about time that the Azalea House is feared again.”
“Your Majesty, he killed—”
“Some fish, is it? A few servants? A handful of people while fighting a war for me? The First Emperor killed many more in his quest to unite the nation, and we all revere his name.”
I was stunned into silence. I had always known how ruthlessly utilitarian Muzha was, but I had never thought him heartless.
After I left him, my hands in fists, I went to the West Palace.
“Do something,” I begged Maro. “Your brother has killed my colleague of twenty years. Your father might not care, but I know that you are the kind of prince who would protect the innocent.”
Maro stood tall and graceful, his white-gold robe pooling in the moonlight pouring in from the window.
“He is not my brother any longer. Do not call him that.” Gone was the excitable boy he had been in his youth; in his place was a young man who looked every bit the future emperor, as noble as he was judicious.
“Whatever he is or is not, he must be stopped!”
“How? You know what his power is. I cannot win against him in a fight anymore.” His voice was calm, but a slight tremble of his lip betrayed his own helplessness. “If there was something I could have done, do you not think I would have done it already?”
I pointed at Taifong’s blood, still smeared all over my gown. “So you plan to just stand aside and do nothing? While he keeps on killing?”
“Not standing aside. Waiting.” Maro turned to face the moonlit lake outside. “Remember: I will be emperor one day. When I gain access to the Crown and the imperial armies, I will be strong enough to make a move against him. I am biding my time until then.”
“And you would bet everything on that?” I snapped. “Are you so sure the emperor will keep you as heir?”
His expression turned solemn. “For years, I’ve done everything he asked of me. I carved all those canals. I diverted the Aricine River. I built the Salt Road. He knows how much I’ve suffered for the nation.”
Maro might have been content to wait, but I could not.
The emperor was sick, it was true, but even so, it could take years or decades for him to finally die and pass down the Crown.
Who knew how many more loyal servants would be dead by then, at the second prince’s blade? How many more cities brutalized?
I went to the last person I could.
Deep within the cascading gardens of the Maple Pavilion, Lady Autumn was sharing tea with Sun Ai and Mingyue. Her cloak fluttered with red leaves as she rose to greet me. “Hesin. I have not seen you in the Inner Court for a long time.”
I fell onto my knees, weeping as I told her everything. “You are the last person he still loves.” He still invited her on his missions, still visited her in her pavilion. “He listens to you. Help guide him back onto the right path.”
Lady Autumn set down her tea and looked at me intently. “I’m curious, Hesin—what do you suppose the right path is?”
The question caught me off guard.
“Never mind,” she said, as I was still formulating my answer. “I will speak with him.”
She did. He killed her for it. Cut her across the throat and left her to bleed out on the blossoms.
When the Yongkai Emperor heard about what happened, he gave only a grunt of annoyance. “Now that the mother is dead, we need someone I trust to look after the son. Hesin, I appoint you to serve as his guardian and advisor.”
“So you see now, Lady Yin, power is such a wicked thing. Razing everything in its path, consuming all, leaving none untouched. Not even the kindest of souls among us are spared, once they have had so much as a taste.”