Chapter 45 Butterflies in Jars #2
Perhaps that was another reason why the empress loathed me. Not only had I gotten my position completely undeserved, over her own niece, it must have also appeared like I was hoarding my nights with Terren, the way a mouse hoarded stolen rice.
“She whispered flattering words in his ear, on behalf of me, Qin Rong, and many others, to help get him to bed us. Not only that, she helped us perform for him. We were all so frightened, coming into the palace so young, but she was patient as she held our hands and talked us through the activity.”
There was a waver of emotion in Empress Sun’s voice. Until that moment, I had no idea just how much Lady Autumn had meant to her.
“When I received notice, for the first time, that I would spend a night with Muzha, I was so nervous I cried all afternoon. She came to my pavilion and stayed with me for a long time, calming me. She told me that it was fine to hate him, to resent him, to feel disgusted by him—she held all those feelings too. She told me that I should look at it as duty. Men do difficult things all the time, she said, not because they like it, but because someone has deemed it necessary. She was as young as I was, but you would never be able to tell. She knew everything. All the techniques, all the wisdom, all the secrets—and she gave it all away freely.”
I thought of the way Lady Autumn schemed against Maro, in the Eriet Mountains. That version of her hardly matched the empress’s account. “If she was helping her competition, does that mean she did not desire power?”
“Not at first.” We were deep in the gardens now, in a grove of young maples with branches budding.
The empress looked into the distance beyond.
“But then Prince Terren came along, and something changed in her. I do not think she ever expected to have a seal-bearing son herself, but they say that once it happened, she immediately saw a path to climb higher. To use her son to become not only a concubine, not even worth a mention in history, but a mother to an emperor forever immortalized.”
“‘They say’?” I had not missed her hedging choice of words.
“That’s what everyone believes. But I knew her well.
I knew that the real reason she had become so ambitious was because she’d looked behind her and seen all that she had lost. For years, she had to service an awful, sickly man—a man who never saw us as people, only vessels to carry the dynasty’s magic.
Then she wasted the rest of her youth and beauty raising a son that she hated.
A son that nearly killed her the day he dug his way out of her womb, bloody and hideous.
In her eyes, if she did not keep playing and playing the game until she won, all that suffering would have been for nothing. ”
We reached the end of the path, behind a locked gate.
There was a secret shrine tucked at the edge of the garden, under a maple so thick I could not wrap my arms around its trunk.
Peonies and bright daffodils sprouted from the snow beneath its stone base.
The empress must have hired someone to put it there, so that she could honor her friend.
“So it’s true,” I said quietly. “She really did hate him.”
That timid and affectionate child, the one who wanted to heal and protect everything—nobody had loved him back. Not his mother, certainly not his father—and, at the end of it all, not even his brother.
“Can you blame her?” The empress lowered Ruyi into one arm.
She cupped a hand over the sleeping infant’s cheek, covering up his half-formed sigil.
“When I do this, I love him more. When I do this, I am not reminded of who his father is. Of how afraid I was every night, when I was summoned to his bedchambers. When I do this, I can forget the way he lay in bed like stone while I serviced him.”
I swallowed a painful lump in my throat. “Prince Ruyi is not even two years old. His Majesty must have been very sick when his last son was conceived.”
A bitter laugh. “He was barely even conscious. The entire room smelled of sickness and strong medicine, of rot and urine. I was gagging when I entered. I tried to tell his advisors, many times, that maybe I ought not to do it with my husband in the condition he was in, but they would not let me leave until I was successfully planted. The Azalea House needs more seal-bearing princes, they insisted. So I took Autumn’s advice from all those years ago, thought of it only as duty, and entered his bed.
It took all night—and he was too weak to help me, so I had to do all the work myself—but in the end, I managed it. ”
If only Empress Sun knew how much we had in common.
How much I also dreaded being called to my husband’s bedchamber.
How terrified I was whenever the call did happen.
I might not have undergone the childmaking activity like she had, but the fear, the helplessness, the enduring—they were all the same.
With her free hand, the empress fished a bundle of incense sticks and a fire-tube out of her pocket. “Help me.”
I lit the incense and gave it back to her.
She inserted the sticks in the snow, in front of the shrine, and, still cradling her son, got on her knees before the smoke.
“You know what the most interesting part about that night was?” she said with half a smile.
“He was murmuring her name the entire time.”
The shrine did not have a full name on its stone. There was only one large character engraved—秋/Qiu, for autumn. Underneath it were smaller ones that described, briefly, her life.
FIRST-RANK CONCUBINE OF THE YONGKAI EMPEROR
THE VIOLET HERON TOWER
ANGKIN CITY, TIEZA DISTRICT
The Violet Heron Tower, I thought. It must have been a place important to her, if the empress had ordered it carved on her grave. Graves were meant for the eyes of the Ancestors, and I knew they always told the most important truths.
Staring at those stone characters, I could not help but wonder what that place was, what secrets it held.