Chapter 28 A Thousand Lotuses
A THOUSAND LOTUSES
The parade ended when the gifts were gone. The concubines spent the rest of the evening wandering the markets by the slow river, laughing as they ate street food or admired the moon overhead. It was round, yellow, and so bright I could not see any stars.
“Lady Yin, you do not look so well.” Wren arrived with a plate of mooncakes. She offered one to me, but I did not take it.
“It was her.” I stared at the maple leaves drifting on the water.
“The empress. She was the one who told Sun Jia to spread the rumors.” It seems, dear, that you are harder to kill than I thought.
“It makes sense. Jia never wanted to hurt Terren. She wanted only to have me dead so she could become empress in my place. But Sun Ai? She has motive enough to also want to ruin the prince.”
Wren seated herself on the boardwalk beside me. Bulbul birds, white-crested, played above us from atop garlands of colorful lanterns. “Perhaps she is eyeing the throne for her own son. With the second son deposed, there would be one fewer prince between Ruyi and the Crown.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps it was also to avenge her friend, Lady Autumn.” It was only a guess, but in Hesin’s story, they had been close.
Strolling in the gardens, sharing tea in the Maple Pavilion, sitting together in the peach garden on sunny days.
“Perhaps after all these years, she has still not forgiven him for killing her.”
There could have been other reasons, too. Maybe she wanted to weaken the Guan Clan so that the Sun might sit the throne once again. Maybe she was working to remove Terren for the same simple reason I was—because he was wicked, violent, and unfit to rule.
It could have been anything, but the fact remained the same: she had no qualms about killing me for it then, and she had even more reason to want me dead now.
I knew she would not kill me outright—not while retaliation from Terren was a possibility.
But still, I could not shake the memory of my neck’s skin tingling, when she had whispered to me her threats.
“Did you get to see him tonight?” I asked Wren, to take my mind off the empress.
She brightened, nodded eagerly. “Pima was with his grandfather and sister, right where we’d agreed to meet. I gave his family two bags of rice.”
“Is he well?”
“I think so.” Then she hesitated. “Well, I should not hide anything from you, Lady Yin. To tell you the truth, he is not very happy. His neighbors find him so shameful they will not let their sons near him.”
I felt a heaviness settle in my chest. “Oh.”
“His neighbors say that a man ought to provide for his family—never mind that Pima is only half of one. They say it would have been more honorable to die in the palace, and let his family collect grave-money for his service, than to have run like a coward.”
I didn’t know what to say. It was hurting my heart, to think of Pima as half of anything.
Wren didn’t seem to have much to add either, because she ate the rest of her mooncake in silence.
Around us, everyone else continued to celebrate.
Fern and Mo were sharing a lively conversation with the guards, and Veris, Suwen, and a few other concubines were enjoying a street performer’s melancholic song.
It was later that I saw an opportunity to speak to Silian. She had been admiring the wares at the riverside market with her own servants and Lady Tang—brushing her fingers over textiles, agate hairpins, and palm-sized bronze mirrors—but was now breaking off from the group alone.
I went after her. She walked upstream, towards an emptier part of the city. It was darker here, the street lanterns sparser. The only light came from the moon, which spilled onto the ground so brightly that I mistook it at first for frost.
Silian knelt by the river. From her sleeve, she produced a lotus flower about the size of her hand and set it gently onto the water.
“Lady Song,” I said.
She did not look up. “The Mid-Autumn Festival is a day for remembering home, Lady Yin. The ancient poets say that when we look at the same moon as the ones we love, our hearts are connected through Heaven. No matter how far away we are.”
There was surprisingly little hatred in her voice, which was soft like silk. Just as Terren had stolen Maro’s position of heir, I had taken Silian’s position as future empress. I was shocked she did not push me into the river.
“Lu’an is not far from here, is it?” she continued. “Though I suppose when one cannot leave the palace, everything seems much farther.”
The drifting flowers broke up the moon’s reflection. In the ripples, I thought I could see my family, huddled around a sparse dinner table, Bao laughing as he clutched a prune in his hand. I missed them all fiercely.
I will see you soon, I thought. At the end of all this.
When I had first begun learning to read, it had been to write a Blessing to send home.
Now it was to kill someone who needed killing.
But either way, the result was the same.
The bride price I would receive would pay for Bao’s schooling, and I would marry a city boy. Nobody in Lu’an would be hungry again.
“Where do you come from?” I asked Silian, searching for an opening.
Her smile was polite but distant. “Yoor, in the Northeast.”
“That is a two-month journey from here, maybe three.” I knew a river from the capital led to it; I wondered if it was this one. “You must miss it a lot.”
“The palace is decadent enough to distract me.”
A light pulled my attention back to the water.
Her raft was magic. I did not know until I saw a new lotus flower curling into life, glowing even brighter than the moon’s reflection.
White sparks arced outward from the petals, to land in the surrounding waters, and from each of them sprouted new rafts and new flowers.
I sucked in a breath of awe. “Did Prince Maro write it?” There were other literomancers in the House, to make practical things, but this spell did not seem practical.
Her eyes shone—the first genuine emotion she’d shown all night. “Every year, for this very festival. It is the one thing I’ve ever asked of him. Every year, he asks me why I wish for them. Every year, I tell him it’s because they are lovely.”
They were. For a while, I sat next to her by the quiet river, watching the flowers multiply and multiply. A thousand shining lotuses, twice that if you counted their reflections, journeying somewhere far from the capital. Then I said, “How do you suppose I knew how far Yoor is?”
An arch of a brow told me she had wondered it herself. “Perhaps you heard it from a eunuch.”
“And if I have seen it on a map? If I have read about it in a book?”
Her face darkened with suspicion, but there was no turning back now. I had to push forward with my plan.
I had already thought it all through. Even if Silian outed me for my treason and managed to have me executed, Terren would simply replace me with someone else in his court and nothing would change for her.
But if she worked with me and I succeeded, the Mandate of Heaven would fall to her husband.
Maro would become emperor, Silian his empress.
If there was anything I’d learned at court, it was that I could rely on few things more than power and ambition. I told her everything.