Chapter 34
A CONCUBINE’S WEAPON
You must be more careful, Wei.
What you did today was not very wise.
All this time, I had been focused on defending myself from the other concubines, not knowing that with my wedding, I would enter a much bigger den of beasts.
Empress Sun. Maro. Terren. Hesin. They had all been playing the game far longer than I had, and I felt a lark foolish enough to fly among hawks.
Hesin. I had not seen it coming at all.
I am loyal only to the nation, the old eunuch had told me once. I must help the one who holds the Mandate of Heaven become emperor. As long as Terren was heir, he was oathbound to keep him alive. My intent to kill him meant Hesin was my enemy. Why hadn’t I realized it sooner?
“The Aricine River flows east,” sang the opera girl, “without so much as a glance behind it.”
With a painted face and a dress clattering with beads, she twirled from table to heaping banquet table inside the Hall of Heavenly Supremacy.
More dancers in flowing skirts trailed behind her, flitting among the wedding guests, weaving between the gold-engraved pillars, incense pots, and pomelo trees growing out of the ground.
“A long pilgrimage to the seas, where no more canyons would bind it.”
Was Jin Veris still scheming against me, too? Were any of the other concubines still trying to overthrow me? Prince Isan and Prince Kiran—what moves were their advisors pulling from the shadows?
Terren. What was he going to do to me once we were alone again? How was he going to punish me for my ties to Silian? I had not forgotten the malevolent look he’d worn today, or the fact that I had to enter his wedding chamber tonight.
“My dear friend’s sailboat drifts down its misty shore. He does not glance back either, and his shadow becomes no more.”
One of the generals laughed and raised his glass. “A farewell poem by Lao Shan—how classic. But why such a sad song on such a joyous occasion?”
“Yes, yes!” clamored a group of men around him. “Sing a happier song next!”
Had I even done the right thing, I wondered?
I might have saved the life of one maid, but in doing so, I had revealed to everyone that I was more than just an unassuming village girl—that I was capable of lying, scheming, and making my own allies.
I had just announced to an audience of thousands that I was a real player in the grand game of the palace.
Saving Maya might be what led to me getting caught—and thus the heart-spirit poem not finished, and Terren not killed. Saving her could mean a wicked man becoming emperor.
Maybe, I thought uneasily, I should have let her die. It frightened me that I was even in a position to choose.
A hand fell on mine. “Eat,” said Silian. She kept her eyes on me as I picked up a piece of gao made of rice and jujubes. “People like us only get married once. Regardless of whether you are happy with your husband, you ought to try to enjoy your wedding.”
“O Tensha, motherland!” Pressured by the guests around her, the singing girl had chosen an upbeat, patriotic song for her next piece. “Mountains echo with our poetry. Seas carve our songs in sand.”
The gao was sweet in a gentle, barely noticeable way. “What was yours like?”
“I do not know, Lady Yin. I am ashamed to say that I spent most of it weeping under an ormosia tree.”
“Weeping? Do you not love him?” My eyes went to Maro, who sat across the hall, drinking with his merchant allies and other influential friends.
All the Azalea sons might have stood near each other during the ceremony—the closest they had ever been to seeming like a family—but now they were separated again.
Isan and Kiran were fraternizing with their own courts.
The empress, with the little prince Ruyi cradled in her arms, had taken up an entire quadrant along with her Sun-bannered allies, and they were all laughing about something secret. Their glasses clinked.
Even a snap of a twig or the clinking of glass, Hesin had said, could startle him into tears.
And now he was afraid of nothing.
My husband—even thinking the word made my stomach twist with revulsion—sat alone on the dais, one hand cupped around an open jar of wine, the other holding a military treatise.
The Aricine Ward circling him like white chains—and the eight unsheathed swords he kept hovering around him—seemed to deter people from bothering him with platitudes.
“O Tensha, all under sky! The greatest nations will never fall. The greatest empires will never die.”
There were three empty jars of wine on the ground next to him already. Good, I thought. The more he drank, the less of a chance he would be awake when I went to our wedding chamber.
“I mean, I do now.” Silian gave a small laugh.
“But then? I was only fifteen, and so far from home. I didn’t even know what he looked like until I was standing up on that terrace, about to do my four pledges.
Every girl is a little frightened, I think, when they give themselves to a man.
Even a kind one. Even one she expected to marry since she was old enough to know what the word meant. ”
“You were expecting to marry him?”
“My cousin is a childhood friend of his. Just after I was born, my father paid a lot of money to my uncle, in hopes—”
“O Tensha, motherland! Enemies tremble before our might. Kingdoms fall at our command.”
Silian looked at the singing girl with distaste, even as the military men around her laughed and downed wine in praise of her performance. “I tire of this song. Shall we take a walk?”
We passed by Terren’s other concubines and my servants on our way out.
Ciyi had been in the middle of tearing into a chicken leg, next to Jin Veris’s scribe, Ah Ronta, but looked up when we passed by on our way out.
“I have never had such exquisite food before, Lady Yin! The last imperial wedding, I had not even been invited to the banquet!”
I could not help but smile, relieved that somebody, at least, was enjoying my wedding. “Take note of the dishes you like,” I told him. “I will have our cooks try to replicate them in the Cypress Pavilion.”
Day had passed into night. Outside, the snow had finally stopped, leaving behind only a coat of it on the ground that glowed pristine in the moonlight. Silian liked its softness. I could tell because she shuffled as she walked, leaving longer footprints than she needed to.
We went around the portico of the hall, towards the back gardens.
“Have you ever been in love?” Silian asked, after we were out of hearing range of everyone.
If the empress or anyone else had asked me that, I might have been on edge. But Silian already knew enough about me to convict me. She must have been merely curious. Possibly she wanted to know how much like her I was. I would have wondered too, had I been in her position.
“I think so,” I said, after a pause. Even now, I was not sure if that had truly been love, though I hoped it had.
“I had a friend called Cai Xi’er, in my village.
Sometimes we walked to the market together, just the two of us, to sell peppers and rice.
” I remembered thinking that he was funny and kind.
I remembered deciding that if he ever asked me to run away with him, into the clouds, I would have said yes in a heartbeat.
“But he was not a city boy,” I hurried to add, without really knowing why. “His family didn’t have much money.”
“Was he sorry when you left for the palace?”
“He … will be pleased to know I have made it, I think. He has given me necklaces to put in my offering basket, after all.” That cold morning in Guishan, the local officials had taken our baskets and promptly vanished.
I did not think the offering had even made it to the Azalea House.
“And I think he would be doubly pleased I returned with gifts.” The more I spoke, the more embarrassed about my inexperience I grew. “What about you?”
“Maybe a few martial heroes, from the stories.” She gave a sheepish smile, one that made her look young.
“When I was a girl, I owned a fan with a water-painting of Li Zhi the Lionheart. I spread it so often to look at it that the silk folds had become smooth over time. It didn’t matter that the heroes weren’t real.
In fact, it made marrying one seem even more possible.
If I were also not real, I remember thinking, I could fight demons with them all day long. ”
We both had a laugh at that, because it was true. There was not a child in Tensha who had never dreamed of being a hero, before we had learned to be practical.
“Thank you for corroborating my story today,” I told her.
“There are no altruists in the palace,” she replied modestly. “I needed to clear Maro’s name.”
“Allies come rare enough in the Azalea House. Altruists or not, I am still grateful for them.”
Her smile deepened as she turned onto another walkway, her lotus dress trailing behind her. Under the frosted balustrades, a pair of pine-feathered larks played in the snow. “Speaking of allies—how far have you gotten in your poem, now that you have Maro’s testimony?”
I was glad she asked. “A lot further, actually. His journals have given me a far more complete picture of Terren, from his childhood all the way to when he was sixteen.” The year the carp was poisoned, Taifong was found dead, and his mother had been killed—all in quick succession.
The year the brothers met in the peach garden for the last time.
“But my words are not magic yet. I am not sure what’s missing. ”
I had poured myself into reading and composing over the past month, writing and rewriting each verse.
On some days I swore I could feel “the warmth of magic under my pen,” as Maro had put it; on others, the ink remained cold and lifeless.
Working on the heart-spirit poem had made me empathize, viscerally, with Maro’s long struggle to write his first Blessing.
Especially since, like him, I had a deadline.
The emperor lay in bed, gravely ill. So ill that he had not even attended his own heir’s wedding.
His absence on Selection Day could have been explained away—the duties of the Inner Court were not in his domain but his empress’s, after all—but the dragon throne sitting empty today, in front of thousands of distinguished guests, confirmed just how serious his condition was.
Once the emperor died, the coronation would follow immediately after. It was the one opportunity I would ever have to kill my prince. The heart-spirit poem had to be ready by then.
“Hmm.” Silian had taken me to an empty courtyard, the sounds of the wedding far away. Not even a single guard stood watch here. Instead, there was only a huge ormosia tree, still green with leaves despite the winter. It was a small form of magic, the kind the palace had no shortage of.
She stood under it and looked up at its snow-laden branches, where clusters of shiny red beans peeked through a coat of white. “You know, Maro tried to write a heart-spirit poem for him too.”
“He did?” I should not have been as surprised as I was.
“He had the same plan as you—to kill him during the Taming of the Dragon. But he never managed to finish his spell. Do you know why?”
I shook my head. My mind was suddenly spinning with the implications, and they were hardly encouraging. Maro was a gifted literomancer, and he really had loved Terren. If even he could not write the prince’s heart-spirit poem, what hope did I have?
I had only learned to read a few months ago. I had only ever despised him.
“I do.” Silian turned sharply to me. “My husband is prideful. He has always assumed he knew his brother well enough, from their shared boyhood, to compose his poem. But seasons pass, people change, and Terren is not sixteen anymore. I do not think Maro has spoken an earnest word to him since then. I think he failed because he wrote the poem for who Terren was before, and not who he is now.”
A torturer, I thought reflexively. There is no more to him than that.
But at the same time, I knew with certainty that he was more than something that caused pain. I knew because while a hundred floating knives could hurt me just as badly, I could never hate those knives like I did Terren. I did not hate the hurt he inflicted. I hated the person he was.
“You think … I must speak earnest words to him.” Even the idea of it made me feel drowned.
“More than that. I think you must get him to speak them back. I think you must wield a concubine’s weapon.”
“A concubine’s weapon?”
“Wang Li became consort to an enemy king to end the invasion of her homeland. Empress Chena felled a corrupt dynasty and founded a new one with her paramour. Virtuous Beauty Tang manipulated two rebel generals into killing each other by claiming to love each of them. They have all used this weapon.” She took a step closer to me, eyes catching the moonlight.
“Here. I’ll show you.” And then she kissed me.
It was very gentle, not at all like the needle-precise techniques Lady Chara had taught us.
It was more like a butterfly landing, a petal on the wind.
Silian was sweet gao and lotus tea, she was moonlight and new snow.
It did not feel like a weapon. But I tried to learn it anyway, and kissed her back.
Nobody had ever taught me how. I just did. Maybe it was only natural, an act every girl in Tensha was born knowing how to do.