Chapter 46 Behind Blades
BEHIND BLADES
“Maro is out visiting the heartlands,” said Silian, during one of our many covert night meetings in her pavilion.
We met in a tucked-away pagoda, shaded by willows, sharing chrysanthemum tea on the shores of Thousand Lotus Lake.
“He is meeting with influential people in the city, trying to get them to pledge their support. Here is the route he is taking.”
She laid out a map on the table. It was annotated in red ink by one of Maro’s strategists.
“Yunan,” I read by a lantern’s light. “Cloud’s Landing. Mushenshan.…” I took notes on a roll of paper. “I’ll tell Terren about Mushenshan, I think. That is a small city in terms of population, but it contains an important military base. I think Terren would want to wrest it back under his control.”
There was a spark in her eyes as she nodded, a slight dimple in her cheek as she smiled. I could not help but remember my wedding night again, with the moonlight and the ormosia tree and the touch of her lips on my mouth.
As the spring winds became warmer and lusher, as snow melted into blossoms, Silian and I continued working together to gain Terren’s trust. To give the appearance I was spying for him, she fed me information from the West Palace, so that I could turn it to the East.
They were little truths. Significant enough to get me closer to Terren, but not so much that it would harm Maro and his allies’ overall efforts.
From me, Terren learned that the West Palace was in talks with the historically neutral Jin Clan, and was able to send an envoy with a counterproposition.
He learned that one of his armies had a spy in its ranks, and promptly sent his men to investigate.
He learned that Maro was importing new and expensive medicine from the West, in an attempt to extend the emperor’s life.
That every week, the first son had been visiting their father in his bedchambers, holding his hand while he spooned it to him.
Against the medicine, Terren did not take any action.
“It will never work,” he said with a derisive laugh.
“To this day, Maro clings to the hope that our father only chose me because he was sick and drug-addled. He thinks that if only he can cure him, if only he can make him wake up with a clear mind, the emperor will take back his decision. My brother is even more of a fool than I thought.”
Even so, the intelligence helped gain his trust. As he relied on me more, he hurt me less, both in frequency and in severity, until he seemed to have stopped entirely.
He even began to summon me during the day.
He bade me accompany him during mealtimes, while performing prayers or rituals, on long walks in the Palisade Garden.
He still did not trust me completely, nor did I think he even liked me, but at least he no longer felt the need to make me afraid of him.
It seemed a change in the right direction.
It was a change that everyone else sensed, too.
The empress became more wary of me, his other concubines more ingratiating.
My servants—with the exception of Hu and Wren—grew colder.
They started turning their heads away from me when I neared, whispering about me the moment they thought I’d gone.
They stopped inviting me to their meals and coming to my parlor to read.
“Do they actually believe I love him?” I asked Wren one night, frustrated.
She lowered her head. “Love, not so much. But there are other reasons you may choose to align yourself with a future emperor. You and I might know the real reason the two of you appear closer—but for everyone else, how can they tell whether you are one of us or one of them?”
Long after the other servants moved their lessons to their own pavilion, the elderly maid still let me hold her hand and teach her how to write.
“This is your name,” I said. “Hu. It can mean lake, or pelican, or fox—or even other things, should you wish it.” I wrote for her all the variations that I knew. “Hu.”
“H…” She pointed at the paper, then pointed at herself. “H…” Her eyes welled with tears.
All night, by candlelight, she wrote those same characters over and over again.
Hu, Hu, Hu.
A poem of love, I thought, for a man I hate.
I continued my work on the heart-spirit poem.
I added Maro’s piece, from his journals—the love and the resentment, the pride and the envy; I added Lady Autumn’s piece, from her description provided by the empress—her generosity and her ambition, her suffering and her hate.
The tapestry of Terren’s life was coming together, like a water-painting whose borders were becoming filled in.
The interior of it, I filled with Terren. As he had been before, and as he was now.
After Silian had encouraged me to use the concubine’s weapon, I paid more attention. Though I wrote about his cruelty and his violence, I tried to see past them too. There was a person hiding behind all those blades, and if I wanted to kill him, I had to find him first.
He liked his tea very hot.
He drank it the way it came, whenever I was the one who brought it to him, but when he was making it himself, he would put a candle under his cup to keep the water near boiling.
He picked all the skin off his chicken, the century eggs out of his congee, the seeds out of his pomegranate.
He did not pick the seeds out of his grapes, which he ate half at a time.
He never ate fish. He brightened whenever a new shipment of pistachios came in from the West, delighting in the opportunity to use a sword to magick the more stubborn shells open. He still adored mung bean cakes.
He fidgeted when he was nervous. I would catch him opening and closing his fists under the table while reviewing some of his more troubling memorials.
When he was in court, he did it under his sleeves so nobody could see.
When messengers came, reporting urgent rebellion in Ergou, he sent an army and Blessings to deal with it right away.
But when a messenger from Sial Province came begging for relief from a mountain earthquake, he laughed viciously and told them to go to Maro.
Late nights, when he had the spare time, he played chess against himself.
He did not move from his seat but instead rotated the board.
Sometimes he made thinking noises, as if truly perplexed by his “opponent’s” tactics.
When the game was over, he was always more frustrated to have lost than pleased to have won.
One time, when we were walking in the Palisade Garden, he stopped before a plum tree.
He brushed apart the flowers with an unsheathed blade, until he found a thrush’s nest behind it, and watched the tiny fledglings inside for a long time.
But then he noticed me observing him, and his expression darkened.
At once, he cut up the birds, smashed up their skulls, and smeared their brains all over the ground, as if to show me.
He was cruel to most birds, but he spared the cuckoos, the sparrows, and the bee-eaters. He would kill most ground critters absently, as soon as he noticed them, but geckos and snails he never touched.
In mid-spring he found a rare species of snail on his balcony, its spirals huge and vibrant. It was the most genuinely happy I’d ever seen him. “Wei!” he called to me. “Get some pen and ink for me, quick. I must write a poem for it.”