Chapter 27 Generous Gifts
GENEROUS GIFTS
By Mid-Autumn, the beginnings of an idea had come to me. It was a risky one, and foolish. If it failed I would likely be executed.
But time was not unlimited. The emperor lay dying on his bed. The Crown was about to pass on to a tyrant, and Terren was still hurting people. The heart-spirit poem was all I had. If I did not take risks for it, how else could I change my circumstances?
The palace’s main entrance had five gates, each as tall as three stories, and it was there we waited to begin the festivities.
The main entrance, in the middle, was for the emperor only; the two on either side were for princes and distinguished guests.
The gate at one far end was for the palace staff and lesser guests, and the gate at the other, the women.
It was at that last gate that the women of the House and our servants clustered, in preparation for the parade in the capital. The air was lively with laughter and excited chatter; even girls from the city must look forward to leaving the palace, after having been confined to it long enough.
“Lady Yin!” Wren announced. “Everything is ready!” She and Fern, Mo, and Duan from the Cypress Pavilion wheeled in a carriage, which was draped with autumn flowers.
Everyone else’s carriage was adorned in their own clan’s fashion. Silian’s was overflowing with Song lotuses; Veris’s carriage was curtained by the Jin golden plum. The Qi sisters, Nere and Rai, draped their carriage of nettle and sage with the seaside clan’s double fish emblem.
I did not have a clan of my own, so did not carry any emblem. Earlier, Ciyi had suggested that I use the Guan red azalea—You are betrothed to one of their sons, so it is not inappropriate, he’d said—but I had declined. To do so would have made me one of them.
I was not one of them.
“My distinguished dears,” the empress silenced the chatter by announcing, “it is time for one of the palace’s oldest traditions: the Mid-Autumn Parade.
While the men fight battles and handle affairs of state, we have our own duties to perform.
” She made a grand gesture with her sleeve, encompassing the valley beyond the gate.
“My husband, the Yongkai Emperor, has permitted us to leave the palace. Tonight, let us all enter the capital and give our gifts to the people of Tensha.”
He must have prepared that edict a long time ago. Since as long as I’d been at the palace, the emperor had been too sick to leave his bed.
The empress gave us the order of our procession. The few who remained from His Majesty’s Inner Court—herself, Lady Chara, and Lady Tang—would make up the front. Silian of the West Palace would be at the rear, and Terren’s twenty-eight remaining concubines would make up the middle.
“Except for Lady Yin,” she said suddenly, sweetly. Her eyes fell on me for the first time since I’d cut off her niece’s tongue. “Since she is Empress-in-Waiting, I invite her to ride next to me.”
Azalea guards led our horses, which had manes of oak branches and tails of golden larch, down the road to the capital, their hoofbeats muffled by autumn’s shed leaves.
I was silent as I rode next to the empress, our servants and carriages trailing us.
No doubt she had something she wished to say, to have wanted me next to her, but I was not about to begin that conversation.
Xilang, nested on the cloud-laced ridge yawning before us, was the biggest city in the nation.
The August Emperor, who had built the palace, had founded the city at the same time.
For years he had incentivized people to move there with subsidies, governmental positions, and carefully cultivated myths, in hopes it would grow as populous as the old capital.
It did, quickly. The rivers carried into its walls the magic of the House, and the lush winds from the nearby peaks brought in fertile rains.
Whispers of opportunity in the new capital spread throughout the nation.
Before long, Xilang blossomed with music and poetry.
It grew so much over the centuries that even the mountain could not contain its sprawl.
Like rainwater, its sea of gray roofs spilled downwards, towards the valley.
Now, it was home to more than two million people. So many that, as our procession made its way to the heart of the city, imperial guards had to hold back the crowd.
“Over here, Azalea ladies!” a girl laughed from atop her father’s shoulders, waving a sprig of crocuses in the air.
“No, no, over here!” a group of boys yelled from the opposite side. They raised their zodiac-shaped lanterns—monkeys, roosters, dragons—to compete for our attention.
Lanterns. There were more here than I could count.
They hung colorful and tasseled from roof eaves and bridge railings, from the arms of red maples and elms. The smell of street food mingled with the crowd of thousands, sizzling chive pancakes and spicy lotus root and tripe, and mountain dumplings drenched in Nanbo broth.
I understood now why poets sang about this city. Xilang, my heart, wrote Lao Shan; Ciliet called it the crossroads at the top of the empire. Tsao of the Liang Dynasty named it with fervent passion the childhood dream and final resting place of scholars.
The parade continued. While the ladies of the palace proceeded on our horses, our servants helped distribute our gifts.
Plum wine from the Jin Clan, colorful mooncakes from the Qi, fig candies that changed flavor the longer they stayed in our mouths from the Cao.
The Jiang were giving out lucky buns, decorated with the faces of zodiac animals; the Sun, prosperity candles.
Enchanted by clan literomancers to never burn out, each pair bore an auspicious couplet on their red stems. Long live the Emperor Yongkai, one candle said; the other, May the sweet azalea never die.
“Do you like them, dear?” the empress said, speaking to me for the first time. We rode close enough that nobody else could hear our conversation. “Perhaps we should save a pair for you, to light up the dreary Cypress Pavilion.”
“They are very generous gifts, Your Majesty.”
Singing yellow orioles, little echoes of the large one on the Sun emblem, delivered them into eager hands. I wondered if, when the recipients burned those candles, they were meant to remember the red azaleas or those yellow birds.
“Not as generous as yours.” She glanced back at my own carriage, where Wren and Duan were handing out heavy burlap bags. “Rice and soybeans, is it? I hear there is even a pinch of dried fruit scattered in there, like pigeon feed.”
I had never heard a voice so sweet drip with so much disdain.
They were hardly impressive gifts, I knew, but it was not like I had any choice. I had no clan to endorse me, no family to lend me help, and Prince Terren would have sooner gouged out my eyes than have provided me with anything to give away.
My servants and I had improvised. For the months leading up to the festival, we had all eaten less than our usual share.
Whatever we could scrounge from our storerooms, we saved for the parade.
Duan, who was in charge of our recordkeeping, had risked himself to inflate some numbers; Wren had used her connections with other attendants—and her old supervisor Bairon—to collect leftovers from their pavilions.
“This humble servant does not deserve such praise,” I replied, struggling to keep my voice pleasant.
“I am curious, though.” The empress leaned in.
“I would have supposed that since the prince loves you so dearly, he might have offered you something pretty. Perhaps even some spells. His skill with literomancy is known throughout the capital, after all. I should think the people would be heartbroken when they receive, in place of Blessings, something so disappointing as rice.”
Rice. I thought of Ba and the other uncles in Lu’an, stooped under a harsh sun, sweat shiny under their cone hats as they labored over a harvest. My blood was so hot it was hard to think straight.
“He did offer, Your Majesty. But I talked him out of it. Since we are in a famine, I had thought the common people would not appreciate Dao magic so much as they would something to eat.”
If she sensed my mounting anger, she gave no indication.
“How considerate of you, my dear. There is no famine in the capital, being next to the House and all its magic, but I suppose I cannot fault a village mind for not knowing better.” Her gaze brushed over my carriage.
“It is only a shame that people will not know who to thank for such thoughtfulness. After all, you carry no emblem.”
“I am not doing this for thanks, Your Majesty.”
“Oh? Then, what for?”
We turned a corner, onto an even larger street.
The crowd erupted with bickering laughter as they fought for wines and jostled each other for crates of mooncakes.
There were not so many who were reaching for the Cypress Pavilion’s rice, but I did spot Wren going to a small boy under a willow tree, dirty and hollow-cheeked.
When she placed a sagging bag in his thin arms, he clutched it like it was precious jade.
There is no famine in the capital, the empress had said, but how could that be true? There were people who suffered everywhere. It was only that here, they were easier to look past.
“What for?” she pressed, when I had not replied. “Why fight so desperately to keep your position of empress? Why let yourself be planted night after night, like wet soil, for the small chance at an imperial son?”
I could no longer keep my fury in check. “Perhaps you might know that reason already, Your Majesty,” I snapped. “After all, you are empress yourself.”
Her smile only sharpened. “You’re right,” she said, completely calm. “I do know.” She nodded behind us, at the second-rank concubine Wang Suwen waving at the crowd. Her servants were handing out chess sets of glazed ivory.
“The Wang Clan—pitiful. A shadow of its glorious Liang Dynasty days, when fifteen of its sons sat the throne, fat and sumptuous. If Suwen became empress, it would restore at least a little of her clan’s lost honor. No doubt that is why her father signed her up for the selection.”
She gestured towards Veris, whose servants were doling out jars of plum wine.
“The Jin are equally sad. They might be wealthy, but wealth is all they have. Though they control many districts outside the heartlands, they have never had much success inside the palace. They are desperate for prestige, like starved wolves. If the Jin girl ever became mother to a seal-bearing son, imagine how much they could raise the price of their wine.”
She then pointed a nail at Lady Chara, whose carriage bloomed with azaleas. From it, her servants were doling out jars of salt and spice.
“Chara may not have a clan, but she is a royal of Hai, a kingdom surrounded by enemies. I hear one of her brothers recently died in a battle. Heartbreaking.” She did not sound heartbroken.
“If Chara had given the House a prince with magic, she would have leverage to ask Tensha for military aid. But she did not, so she cannot.”
She turned back to me, her smile like a honed edge. “Now you understand, my dear. Power might be useful to the few of us, but it is only wasted on the likes of you. It seems you have cut off the tongue of a young girl—one with her whole life ahead of her—for no reason at all.”
But it wasn’t for no reason, I thought, panic rising. The empress did not know that if I ever tried to escape or get out of the betrothal, Terren would kill me. And I had to punish my enemies to deter them. Ciyi had told me so.
I had only been trying to survive.
Even as I told myself this, I could not stop myself from hearing Jia’s tongueless burbling, feeling that dark blood again on my hands.
“Or perhaps,” the empress continued sweetly, “you did it simply because you wanted to. Because it felt good. How warm was that blood? How soft was that tongue? You must have liked it very much.”
We turned a corner again. The sky had darkened now, the full moon enormous in the sky. Two men in the crowd were fighting each other over a porcelain tea set Liru Syra was giving out, pushing aside a girl with the head of a pig.
Not just her, I realized with horror. Everyone else, too. Pink and speechless and naked, flies skittering across their pale flesh.
I blinked and they were people again, limned by the moonlight. Stooped grandmothers, laughing children, husbands with a gentle arm around their wives.
I was going to be sick.
Empress Sun leaned closer, and her horse brushed right up against mine.
When she spoke, I could feel her warm breath on my neck.
“It seems, dear, that you are harder to kill than I thought. But I have no doubt that you will end up dead, one way or another. Girls like you, they never survive long in the palace.”