Chapter 45 Butterflies in Jars
BUTTERFLIES IN JARS
For New Year’s there were more than a thousand plates on the table.
Spiced braised rabbit, salted duck egg, steamed crab with red claws poking out of their tureens: the cooks had brought them all to the empress’s Hall of Even Temperaments.
Giant bowls of soup, kept warm with lit candles beneath, filled the air with the scent of green onion and garlic.
Wines of rice, sorghum, plum, honey, and lychee sat plentiful in silver vessels.
The entire South Palace was filled with lit lanterns and festive banners, with musicians and dragon-dancers. Everyone in the Inner Court was celebrating—lighting firecrackers, playing courtyard games, exchanging red envelopes.
Sometime midmorning, Wang Suwen surprised me by coming up to me.
“May … may I speak with you alone?” When we stepped away from the group, her tone turned even more rushed.
“My brother is the only boy in my extended family. The honor of my relatives rests entirely on him. But he has not passed the imperial exam and cannot find respectable employment.”
I raised a brow. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you can do something about it.” We were still in public, so she did not kneel, although she looked like she desperately wanted to.
“Prince Terren has the power to grant him another attempt with just one edict, and you could whisper something in his ear while you bed him. I have always meant to do it myself, if I ever had a night with him, but … I do not think I will ever have the chance.”
“I see.” I swallowed a lump in my throat. How could I explain to her that I could not help her, without revealing the true nature of my relationship with the prince?
“Please,” she said in nearly a whisper. “My ba has been writing letters, urging me to hurry. He had bribed many people for my place in the selection, for the sole purpose of helping his son. Our household is deeply in debt. I am running out of time.”
“I … I shall do my best, Lady Wang.”
She gave a wan smile, dipped her head, and went back to the festivities.
I set the bowl I had been holding down, no longer in the mood for dumplings.
Now I understood why so many of the concubines resented me.
No doubt they had all come to the Inner Court for a purpose just as urgent, and I had—through no fault of my own—been their obstacle.
Maybe they even knew about Terren’s cruelty.
I had assumed, long ago, that the city girls thought themselves invincible.
But maybe that was not true at all. Maybe they did know the risk, same as me, and had judged that the gain was worth it.
Maybe none of us had very much to give to the world except for our bodies, and if being planted meant food on the table, or honor for the family, perhaps that was our way of leaving our mark on the dynasty.
Suwen was not the only one who came to me. Spurred on by my wedding, and possibly by the festive atmosphere of New Year’s, Liru Syra also pulled me aside.
“If you have a chance,” she said, eyes darting about, “please ask him to let the Liru Clan launch a strike against the Highlands. We control many military men, but they are stationed as mere city guards in Anyang. They hunger for glory and a chance to fight for the nation.” Her words sounded rehearsed, as if somebody had given them to her.
I wondered, idly, if Syra remembered our days in the Hall of Earthly Sanctity. Her and Lily and Minma, sharing tea under a pear tree, mocking me for wearing my sash on the wrong side. Those days seemed a lifetime ago. “What will happen to you if this request is not granted?”
She lowered her head. “I do not know, Lady Yin. After I told my clan I had only made third-rank concubine, none of my family has written me back. I was hoping that with enough success in the palace, I would hear from them again.”
The last girl to speak to me was Qin Chen.
“My grandfather is the Magistrate of Dusu.” She was nearly in tears.
“For ten years, he has been wrongfully imprisoned. They say that he was corrupt, that he took a large bribe, but that’s not true at all.
He’s the most honorable man I know. When I was little, he would not let me eat dinner until I had memorized a list of Aolian virtues. ”
“The Magistrate of Dusu,” I echoed. I vaguely remembered seeing a memorial mentioning him, buried deep on Terren’s desk. The prince received so many papers every day that some of them inevitably slipped his notice.
“As long as another trial is conducted, the truth will come to light. Our friends and family have enough evidence of his innocence. But”—her lip trembled—“the memorial for the appeal has not been approved for years. We … we have no idea why.”
“I can help,” I said, and marveled that it was, for the first time, true. It would be easy, too. I would not have to doctor anything. All I had to do was bring that one forgotten memorial to the prince’s attention—slip it somewhere near the top of his stack—and I could free an innocent man.
“Lady Yin.” Chen’s smile was as true as any in Lu’an. “Thank you.”
That afternoon, I finally found a chance to speak with the empress.
The firecrackers had made Prince Ruyi cry without end, and even his wet nurse could not calm him down. So eventually, Empress Sun sighed, set down her wine, and took him out to the gardens personally.
I followed her out and watched her try, unsuccessfully, to coax him into silence.
She looked up at me after a while. “If you are going to intrude in my gardens, at least have the decency to help me.”
She must have been truly desperate if she was asking me.
I took the tiny prince into my arms and rocked him the way I used to rock Bao when he was little, pacing gently around the garden and giving him little kisses on his forehead, his eyes, his nose.
All the while, I sang him a song I knew from Lu’an.
It was a wistful one, about a ghost-child who was lost in the rice paddies, looking for his way back to the Ancestors.
It took a long time for Ruyi to fall asleep. When I handed him back to the empress, she did not thank me.
“I take it you want something from me, Wei. Let me guess. You are here to talk about what I did during your wedding.”
“No.” I had about as little love for the empress as she held for me. There was one reason, and one reason only, why I would willingly speak with her, and that was to find material for my Blessing. “I wanted to ask about Lady Autumn.”
In Hesin’s account, she had hated her son. In Maro’s, she had supported him wholly, even going with him on his missions. I guessed that the truth was somewhere in between.
Getting earnest words out of Terren might be one part of finishing his poem, but I knew that this part of it lay with the empress.
She barked out a humorless laugh. “I have not heard her name in a long time. Just as well you ask—I am about to visit the one you speak of.”
We walked together, through the gardens. Ruyi remained asleep on his mother’s shoulder, ignorant of the magnolias and plum blossoms dotting the sky above. Winter was already going away, chased off by the eager winds of spring.
“She was many things, Wei. She was beautiful and vindictive, charming and hateful, clever and ruthless. When she was in a room, everyone was looking at her, wanting to speak to her. The way she carried herself, it was like … like she was not a real person. Like she was someone who existed only in legends.”
At first, I was surprised by how the empress spoke to me so freely.
But then I remembered Hesin. The eunuch had been so eager to tell Jinzha’s story, and that of his even more wicked son and grandson.
Maybe some stories were like jarred butterflies, I thought, fluttering free as soon as someone broke the glass.
Or maybe she suspected the truth.
Maybe she had guessed that I was using it to write a heart-spirit poem, to kill her friend’s killer, and this was her own way of helping me.
“All the same,” the empress continued, “we could not help but like her. Autumn was very good to us, the girls in the Inner Court. She was selfless, generous, and made no enemies; whenever she had the opportunity, she helped the other girls get ahead. Even though she came in without a clan, without a distinguished name, she was beloved by all in the palace.”
I had learned some of this already, just by asking around.
I had heard that she was the daughter of a merchant, from Angkin City in Tieza—although the claims conflicted.
Some said that she was not from a mercantile family but a family of herders.
Some said that she was not from Angkin but farther north, near Besh.
“Is it true that she is from Tieza?” I asked.
“She has ties there, certainly. It was one of the reasons why she kept visiting the district, with her son, even after his military campaigns were over. But I do not know much about her past. She did not speak of it.”
“You never asked?”
“I never felt the need to.”
I had the sense that it was not quite the truth—that there was something she was holding back—but I did not press her.
We passed under an arch, into a new section of the garden. There was still some snow here, dotted with the fresh hoofprints of deer.
“Our generation of concubines was different from yours, Wei. In our time, Muzha did not spend all his nights with one girl, but rather spread them out, the way it’s supposed to be.
We were all in fierce competition for a slice of our emperor’s nights.
But Autumn did not play the game the way it was supposed to be played.
She never competed with us. The emperor favored her very much initially, for her beauty and her charm, but unlike you, she never kept the favor for herself. ”