Chapter 54 Offerings #2
It was the last place I wanted to visit, the place that had made Terren so broken. But those years that he had spent in Tieza, missing from Maro’s and Hesin’s accounts—I needed to know what they were like, so that I could finish his poem.
She was sweating now, and dabbed at her forehead again. “Your Highness, the prince has not been here since he was sixteen. His chamber has not been used since then. It is … it is bound to have collected dust over the years.”
I said nothing, just looked at her, wielding silence like a weapon.
I did not even have to wait two heartbeats before she drew in a shivery breath and said, “Of course. I shall take you right away.”
It was down a long corridor and nestled deep in the mountain, so it had no windows, but it was filled with red lanterns.
Aunt Ahma lit them one by one, and by their blood light, I could see an enormous plush bed, several lacquered desks, murals of classical poetry, a dragon rug, and a fireplace that tunneled somewhere deep into the stone walls.
A few child-sized night robes hung on one wall.
It smelled of stale, long-ago incense.
The chamber had once been decorated with plants—potted bamboo, figs, and ancient cherry trees lined the walls—but they were all shriveled and dead.
I had no idea why she was afraid to show it to me. It was as luxurious as she claimed and completely innocuous.
Or perhaps it was the innocuousness of it that made it so wrong. One could give a prince the best silks and the best incense, but making him perform the childmaking duties against his will was still a cruelty.
I thought of the fear on the other concubines’ faces, the New Year’s they had come to me for help. How terrified I had been myself that first night, curled up against the cold walls of the Cypress Pavilion, awaiting my planting. The act may not have been magic, but it was often just as terrible.
I walked around the room, examining the bed, the furniture, the art on the walls, memorizing the texture of the velvet curtains for my poem.
The whole time, Aunt Ahma stood by the door, looking like she wanted to bolt the moment I allowed her.
When I reached the fireplace, which was full of ash, I spotted something shiny within it that caught the flickering lantern light.
I searched for something to fish it out and found a pair of golden tongs, sitting on the mantel. I picked them up—and paused.
The tongs were not ordinary ones. They were forked at one end, with three metallic prongs branching out from its center.
I had seen that pattern before.
That night I had begged Terren to plant me, I had managed to loosen three buttons on his gown before he’d stopped me. They had exposed a conflagration of three-pronged scars on his chest. As if a bird made of fire had trampled all over him, I recalled surmising.
I looked up at Aunt Ahma standing by the door. “Remember what I said about the truth?” There was no threat in my tone, but my words must have been threatening enough. She immediately burst into tears.
“It wasn’t me,” she sobbed, and fell onto her knees. “It was her, it was Qiu’er, never me. I never did anything. I never—”
She stopped speaking when she found me next to her, pointing a blade at her forehead. I had plucked it off my ceiling in the Cypress Pavilion before leaving.
If there was anything that I learned in the palace, it was that knives were more convincing than words. Aunt Ahma hadn’t listened to words, so I had little choice but to pull out a knife.
“The truth,” I said, and let its tip press into her skin.
The truth was, for seven years of his life, the young prince had been brought to the Violet Heron Tower. For seven years, his mother and Aunt Ahma had worked together to arrange the childmaking duties for him and teach him how to plant his seeds.
Arrange was the word Aunt Ahma had used, but what she really meant was force upon.
Teach him was what she’d said, but what she really meant was punish him—violently—when he couldn’t manage it.
He cried in the beginning.
In the beginning, they had to physically drag him into the room for his duties.
Several girls had to hold him down while he kept crying and kicking and screaming.
He grew calmer as time went on. He stopped resisting and took his treatment silent and still.
Sometimes he asked for one of his toys to hold.
They interfered with the act, so they did not always let him, but sometimes Lady Autumn was in a generous mood and indulged him.
The treatment lasted from when he was nine to when he was sixteen, the year she had died.
It was more intense for the first few years, when he was still in Tieza for the war, almost every day; after that, it had been a few weeks at a time, whenever he had a break from his campaigns or his obligations in the palace.
Lady Autumn had known how badly she was hurting him. She just hadn’t cared. We have done our duty for the nation already, she would say to excuse it. It is his turn to do his.
Aunt Ahma had found the enterprise profitable, so she had not cared either.
The shine in the fireplace was Niu Niu. When I fished the object out, I saw that it was a petrified snail shell.
Most of it was covered in soot, though a few of its crystal spirals were exposed.
I could only imagine that Tiger and Little Sparrow had been in that fireplace too, their fur and wood having caught fire much easier.
“Why did you have to burn his toys?” I asked Aunt Ahma, not kindly.
I was tremendously angry at her.
It was not a burning anger, one that would have made me want to cross the room and throw her against the wall, but a cold one. A frost-anger, an anger that permeated so deep it made me too numb to do anything, except perhaps step out of my body and marvel at it.
And it was not only because of the unforgivable cruelty of what she had done to a child—which was worth more than that kind of anger by itself—but the unfathomable shortsightedness of having done it to Terren, a prince, who held the magic of blades and the power of dynasties.
A thousand people like me could die and the world would not stop turning, but breaking one person like him could break a nation.
Aunt Ahma was still shaking, even though she no longer had a blade pointed at her head. “No,” she sobbed. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t burn the toys.”
“Then who?”
“He did.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “One day—it was just after he’d liberated Tieza—he came here, finished his duties, went to the fireplace without a word and … and threw them in. He didn’t even stay to watch them burn. I guessed he had finally grown out of them.”
I wanted to kill her, I really did. I went as far as to imagine how warm her blood would be on my hands when I sank my knife into her skull. But I had told her I would not hurt her or punish her, so long as she gave me the truth—and she had, in the end, even if it had been a hard road to get there.
I left her soon afterwards, having gathered everything I needed from the Violet Heron Tower. I did not want to be in that place a moment longer than I had to.
When I stepped outside its arched entrance, into the cool summer night and the gentle murmur of Angkin City’s commerce, I found a ghost.