Chapter 57 Duty and Shortcomings
DUTY AND SHORTCOMINGS
I woke to the cry of an enormous gray cuckoo, perched on my windowsill. When it spread its wings, its flight feathers were almost translucent against the summer sun. Bu-guu, it mourned. Bu-guu, bu-guu, like a haunting ghost.
It flew off somewhere into the canopy of cypresses.
I wasn’t dead, I was somewhat surprised to discover. I knew this because it still hurt everywhere, my body still searing with a flame-river of pain.
Mi Yung in her blue dress came to my bedside to bring me medicine and watery congee. She had to spoon it all into my mouth, since I could not move at all, and the whole time, I could not stop thinking about how little she had in common with Wren.
She only managed a few spoonfuls before my eyes closed and I sank back into the darkness.
Sometimes imperial doctors came by. Sometimes the other concubines did too, presenting little gifts, flowers, and trinkets.
Almost none of my other servants came to visit—they were all strangers, after all—but during nights, Hu would sit by my bed, silently holding my hand while we listened to birdsong and the rustling of summer cypresses.
Once or twice, I would wake to find a pot of ginger tea at my bedside table, with a candle under it to keep it boiling hot.
“How is my village doing?” I asked Mi Yung, when I was able to speak again.
This whole time in the palace, I may have been occupied with my own survival, but that did not mean I didn’t think of them often.
I missed home with a terrible, constant ache—an ache that was not noticed when there were more pressing pains, but when everything was calm again, on a day like this one, it was there waiting for me.
She sat on the rug next to my bed. “It’s … bad, Lady Yin. I will not mince words. Everyone is thin. Everyone is suffering.”
That did not surprise me. The past year of famine, I knew based on the reports I’d read, and my own trip to the north, had been particularly hard. “Tell me.”
“The rice harvest last year was three-quarters of the year before, according to reports. Central taxes were overall lower, but officials in Guishan District had levied even larger local taxes. It was all under the table, but there was nothing the villagers could do about it.” At my growing anger, she only shook her head.
“Last year, there were even some deaths. The first few people I asked would not give names, but I kept pressing until I got a report.”
“Tell me.”
“Lien Ina has passed away, of an infection brought on by hunger. Her husband followed not long after, since she had been his caretaker. Shu Monshu fainted last summer in the rice terraces, during a heat wave, and drowned in the water. Two newborn infants did not make it—I believe they were of the Tong family and the Gray family. And, there was a boy, seven years old…”
I went ice-cold.
No. Not Bao. It couldn’t be.
For a moment, my heart stopped beating. A thousand memories flashed at once.
Bao giggling as he splashed in the paddies while my family worked.
Bao hiding behind me by the bonfire, muffling the sounds of his crying with the back of my shirt, while Grandpa Har told an especially scary night-story.
Bao on New Year’s sucking on that sweet prune.
Bao staring bug-eyed when Prince Isan’s Blessing went to his heart, when Ba had told him he would grow up to become a great man.
Bao clinging to my legs, on the day I was to leave for—
“… named Rui Dan,” said Mi Yung.
Oh.
For a long time, I just sat there in silence, my mind blank with relief. I had forgotten that Bao was not seven anymore, he was nine; two birthdays of his had passed unnoticed in the year and a half since I’d come to the palace.
And then I thought, what an absolute monster I was. To learn of a child’s death and have the audacity, the sheer depravity, to be relieved.
“I told them,” I choked out—and maybe I was laughing, or sobbing, I didn’t know, it was all becoming the same. “I told the Rui sisters that Myrna’s milk was not for me. I told them to keep the goat for Dan, so that he could grow up lively and strong … I told them but they wouldn’t listen…”
Mi Yung said a few more things. She told me how happy my parents had been to see all those apples and barrels of soybeans.
How Bao had squealed and jumped for joy when he learned he was going to school.
How the Rui sisters had still been grateful in the end, because they had received money enough to buy medicine for their ailing father.
But I could not stop thinking about how Rui Dan was dead, dead, dead, just like Larkspur, just like the Cypress Pavilion, just like the pig at the wet market, just like a lot of things.
Soon, I was well enough again to work on the heart-spirit poem. Late one night, I was making final edits and additions when I heard footsteps outside my door. Heart hammering, I shoved it under my pillow just as Terren opened it.
He seemed surprised to find me awake. “Wei, I was just…”
I waited for him to finish his sentence, but he didn’t. I sat up in my bed and faced him. “The tea left on my bedside table. Was it from you?”
“No,” he said, too quickly. He was awful at lying. I had not realized it until that day. If he wanted to be even a little more convincing, he ought to have said something like What tea?
Perhaps since he had gained the Aricine Ward and become invincible, he had never needed to lie.
For a while we just looked at each other. We had not had a proper conversation since he had saved me from my exam, since I had returned to the palace. Since I had spent an evening with his ghost in the meadow, writing poetry among friends and fireflies.
Since he had slaughtered almost the entire Cypress Pavilion that misty morning. Organs and cut limbs strewn everywhere in the mud, blood staining the cobblestone. Wren’s hand still twitching when I found her.
I didn’t know what to say to him.
I already knew what I would do—which was throttle him, if his ward would ever let me—but as for what to say, I had not the first clue.
“You shouldn’t have done it,” I managed at last.
“Done what?”
“The treason you committed against the emperor. At the trial.” Even for Terren, those words had been too much. I had never known him to lose control like that, in a way that could turn the whole nation against him.
“They were about to kill you.”
“You should have let them.”
He gave me another one of his glass stares, the way he did whenever he thought I was being stupid. “I’m the only one who gets to take your life.”
It might have been the most romantic thing he’d ever said to me, and I was startled into bitter, self-pitying laughter.
Then I started coughing, because the pain came like a dagger between my ribs.
It was a while before I recovered enough to speak again.
“The level of treason you committed, the House will not let it go. Word will spread and all the Great Clans will turn against you. They will band together and overthrow you.”
At that, he actually smiled. He took a few steps inside until he was facing the window, with its lush summer cypresses and warm winds just beyond.
“You know, I’m beginning to suspect they won’t.
” My confusion must have shown plain on my face, because he said, “Hesin used to tell me the same thing. Be careful, Your Highness, he would always remind me. Watch yourself, and rein in your cruelty, lest even your allies betray you and destroy you. It used to frighten me, quite a bit—the threat of everyone rallying behind Maro, marching into the East Palace, and ending me. But not anymore. After I had gotten rid of that traitor eunuch, and that annoying buzzing in my ear was gone, I finally began to think for myself. And I thought, maybe they won’t do such a thing after all. ”
Two cuckoos chased each other just under the eaves. He watched them absently.
“It is true that if the whole nation worked together, it could defeat me. Even the combined army of six or seven of the biggest clans could overpower my blades and my ward. But that’s the thing.
I don’t think they are going to do that, work together.
The Sun Clan hates the Jin. The Wang can’t stand the Nian.
The Qi and the Miao have been fighting for control of the southeast coast for centuries.
The Shangtze Coalition might hate me, but they hate Maro more; Salt Road imports have destroyed their near monopoly on ivory.
“And don’t forget what I have done for the north.
You’ve seen those dragon statues; you know already what they think of me.
Do you think the herders in the mountains care whether a prince calls his father boiled radish?
Do you think wheat farmers would pick up their scythes, make the long march to the capital, and storm the palace in defense of the emperor’s dignity?
The north is too far away to care what happens here.
But war, occupiers, liberation—that is close enough to home to matter. ”
Dragon statues. I sat up straighter. So he already knew I had gone to Tieza.
Maybe that was why he’d saved me. He wanted me to explain myself, did not want me to die before I could. But then I remembered the tea he had been leaving on my table, and I thought, maybe not. Not entirely, anyway.
“You see now.” He turned back towards me, a twisted smile on his face.
“Nobody will challenge me. Nobody is brave enough—or foolish enough—to stand up to me. You and me, Wei, we can rule together for as long as I live. Our enemies will fear us, and the nation will kneel for us, and nobody in the world can ever hurt us.” The Aricine Ward flashed.
His smile vanished. “So long as you give the explanation you owe me.”
It was time for my lie. A lie that would never have worked before, but might work now.
One that was—as far as all my lies went—surprisingly close to the truth.
“It’s simple. I went to Tieza because I knew you had left a piece of yourself there.
” He stared at me blankly, but I kept speaking.
“During our wedding, I pledged to you, care. I knelt before your bed that night and told you that I wished to stand at your side. To love you. And I could not do so, not truly, without finding it.”
Half a year ago, he would have drawn knives at this. Now he just looked at me tiredly. “You have a roundabout way of speaking, Wei. Just tell me straight. What did you find?”
“The Violet Heron Tower.”
“Ah.” He was far more serene about it than I could have predicted. “Beautiful place, is it not? Quite a few poets frequent there.”
“I know what they did to you. How they made you fight. Your mother and everyone else—”
He cut me off almost immediately. “I cannot imagine you learned anything new. You are already well acquainted with my shortcomings—the best acquainted of anyone alive. I can only imagine you went to Angkin to spite me. To take pleasure in knowing precisely how deep those shortcomings go. Tell me, did it please you to know I had been undutiful even then?”
Shortcomings. Undutiful.
My mouth fell open. Did he really see Tieza as his own failure?
“Terren,” I said uncertainly. “What they made you do, it was not your duty. The burden of empire is not a child’s to bear.”
He blinked. “Of course it is. I am a prince with magic, and it is my duty to spread it. The House only needs more seal-bearing sons, so that the dynasty can become glorious and lasting.”
They were words given to him, not his own. I knew him well enough to know he would never, not in ten thousand years, speak that way. “Terren—”
“And if I had been stronger, less of a coward, I could have succeeded.” His breaths were coming faster now, his hands clenching and unclenching into fists.
“And maybe Father would have named me heir sooner and there would not have been a fight for the throne. And maybe Maro would not look down on me and hate me. And maybe Lady Autumn would not be dead. It’s my fault.
I couldn’t manage it. All the other princes, they sacrificed so much for the country, but I—”
“Terren.” All at once, I had tears in my eyes. I had no idea where they had come from. “What your mother did to you was cruel, and needless, and evil, and it was not your duty.”
They were the first words I had said to him, since I had begun writing the heart-spirit poem, that had not been for my survival or to gather material for it. They were earnest words.
He was shaking now. Sigil flickering like a wild flame. “Say one more word,” he said, burning and dangerous, “and I’ll kill you.”
“She failed you. They all failed you. Everyone who knew what was happening to you—”
“I’ll kill you!” he screamed. “Did you not hear me?”
“—but had not done a thing to stop it, because they saw you as not a person but a vessel carrying magic.”
He was breathing very, very fast. A knife had appeared in his hand.
“They were wrong, Terren. I was wrong. You are a person.” A monster, yes, but a person. “You deserve to be safe.”
“I mean it,” he whispered, lip quivering. “I’m going to kill you.”
“They should have protected you.”
“Don’t think I won’t do it.”
“You deserve to be safe.”
“Say one more word—”
“You deserve to be safe.”
The knife flew across the air and slammed into the wall, missing my neck by a breath. Terren let out a choked sound, threw his hands over his face, and ran.