Chapter 44 Letters From Afar
LETTERS FROM AFAR
When I returned from my wedding retreat, there were letters waiting for me.
“Thousands of them!” Ciyi declared, pleased that his position of scribe had finally become important.
They sat stacked in my study, in the eastern section of the Cypress Pavilion. Ciyi had gone through them all in my absence. Most were formalities, ministers and other important men writing to express support and congratulations for the wedding. May Tensha prosper under your reign.
The letters came accompanied with gifts: jade necklaces, aged wine, a camellia bush in rare gold to plant in my garden.
“Now that you are officially wedded to the heir,” Ciyi said, eyes narrowing into crescent moons, “everyone wants to be in your good graces. In their eyes, the fight within the Inner Court is now over. You are now guaranteed to be the next empress.”
I picked up one of the letters, skimmed it, and set it aside.
Again, I had the feeling that this was not really happening, that I had only dreamed it all.
In my memories, the ministers were all of one sort, flush-faced and mean.
Riding into Lu’an to collect taxes every year, beating anyone who could not make their payments with a cane.
It seemed impossible that the same sort could have flowery words to say to me.
But not all letters were like those. I spotted, out of the corner of my eye, a letter that did not bear a seal, that was not addressed from a place I recognized. “Hand me that one,” I said to Ciyi. “I would like to have a look.”
He did, with some reluctance. I unfolded it and read:
Dear Lady Yin,
We write to you from Han Village. We have all pooled money to pay a scribe so that we may write this missive for you.
The famine has not been kind to us. The crops are failing, and we have lost several of the elders in our village and many young children.
We have prayed to the Ancestors for help, and they have answered through you.
When we learned our future empress would be a woman who is a farmer and a villager, that she would be one of us, we all hugged each other and shed many tears.
We write to you with hope in our hearts, that you would help speak with Prince Terren and the other Azalea sons to help us. The others in the palace may not care about people like us, but we know that you will.
There was a short list of requests at the bottom.
They wanted two years of tax forgiveness from the emperor, so that the village might have reprieve from the famine.
They asked for three knives from Prince Terren, to shear their sheep and cut vegetables.
They wanted six pears from Prince Isan, so that each child in the village might try a piece.
They wanted me to persuade the Azalea House to send representatives to the nearest city, Wenning, next Near Year’s to give out Blessings. The children keep going every year, the letter said. They are always so sad when nobody comes.
“Lady Yin.” Ciyi peered at me closely. “Are you crying?”
If I was, they were tears of anger. All those blades hanging in the House like teeth, but not one could be spared for a village that needed it.
All those pear trees growing all over the palace, so many that their fruit lay rotting on the ground for the sparrows, but not one could be sent to children who had never tasted pears in their life.
I set the letter aside. “Are there others like this one?”
There were. Many of them, all of the same nature, from Nangou and Liushu and Halfhill at Snake Bend.
Places I had never even seen on a map, let alone read about in a book.
They wanted a road from Prince Maro to shorten their half day’s walk to the well; they wanted a small rainstorm from Prince Kiran to refill their dried-up rice paddies.
They wanted famine relief. A few barrels of grain and rice from the storerooms near the capital.
They wanted debt forgiveness or an apple tree from Prince Isan.
They wanted some weapons, even rusted ones, from Prince Terren, so that they could defend against bandits.
It took me until morning, but I read every single one.
As I set down the last of them, Ciyi said to me, a little nervous, a little awed: “Do you know what they are beginning to call you? In the capital, especially, but places even farther away?”
“What do they call me?”
“Rice Wife. You see, you are the only peasant girl who has ever married the son of an Imperial House. You are the only one who has ever carried no emblem on Mid-Autumn’s Parade, and given out only the most basic of foodstuffs.
And there is an anonymous scribe in the capital writing about you, spreading your name. Lady Yin, you are becoming a legend.”
An anonymous scribe, I thought. Tel Pima. The startled-looking eunuch with the braid. I could not think of who else it might be.
I wondered if the passage of time had helped erase the shadows of the past, or if his neighbors still saw him as a source of shame.
That evening, I began doctoring edicts.
After Terren summoned me, after he had finished his usual nightly ritual of threatening to hurt me, actually hurting me, and mending me, I lay beside him until his ward told me he was asleep. Then I rose and crept to his desk.
By the moon’s light, I leafed carefully through his memorials.
They were all long essays, written by ministers or officials to propose one course of action or another, that had been sent to him for his review and approval.
If he stamped them with his imperial seal, they would be sent off to Hesin to be processed.
Rice Wife. Was that what they saw in me? It was not a title I would have chosen for myself. I could still remember that crippling sickness, that nauseating fire of pain, the first night Terren had summoned me. Rice was a way that he had, indelibly, hurt me.
But rice was also who I was, before the Azalea House. It was what I had sown in the terraces, with my family and the aunts and uncles of Lu’an, long before I knew the palace. Rice was warm meals and New Year’s, and gatherings, and livelihood. It was how I had kept the seasons and counted the years.
I looked through the memorials already stamped, searching for changes I could make.
Most of them were inane bureaucracy—requests from the Great Clans to enact regional policies, recommendations for scholars to court posts, judicial cases that concerned the lives of noblemen.
But there were a few of them, only a few, that concerned the common people—ones that proposed famine aid, new infrastructure, or tax relief.
I kept my changes simple. Small enough to be beneath the notice of the House, but large enough to make a difference to its recipients.
With just a few strokes of a brush, I could turn one year of tax breaks into three, one barrel of donated rice into ten.
Having lived in Lu’an, I knew that even one barrel of rice could mean the difference between a child buried and a child laughing as she caught catfish in the paddies.
Having lived in the palace, I knew that the same barrel would not even register in its treasury.
It was tempting to do more. I wanted to add the village names, from the letters, to the lists of places receiving aid; I wanted to write a whole memorial just for Lu’an itself, detailing all the things I wanted to give Bao and all the others.
But although I might be reckless, I was not that reckless.
I was not so arrogant as to think I could forge a minister’s calligraphy. Hesin would catch me immediately.
But an extra brushstroke or two? That was both easy and not noticeable.
The safest thing to do, of course, was nothing at all. To lie next to Terren and stare at the ceiling, like I had done all the nights in the past, praying that he would not wake up and hurt me.
But the letters had reminded me that I was not that girl anymore. That I was in a position of power, even if I had a hard time believing it. They told me that there were those in Tensha looking to me, the same way that I had once looked to the Azalea House.
I had to stop thinking like a villager. I had to start thinking like an empress.