Page 104 of The Poet Empress
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 berelieved.
“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 likeWhat 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 returnedto 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 woulddo—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.
