Page 106 of The Poet Empress
“—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.Iwas 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.
58CHASING AWAY MONSTERS
He was gone by the time I made it outside—my injury slowed me—but even so, it did not take long to find him.
When I passed the Palisade Garden, I noticed that it was missing its swords. Normally, there were thousands of them, half-buried in the ground, but they were all gone.
I unhooked a lantern from the eaves of a nearby pavilion and ventured into the cold fog; where the light shone, ghost cuckoos cried out with alarm and scattered back into the dark. It was deep into the garden that I found the swords: arranged densely in a giant dome-shaped cage, held together by their own weights, a dense tangle of lilies, and Dao magic.
“Terren,” I called.
When no answer came, I grabbed one of the swords by the hilt and pulled. It came away with some resistance, a tinytingbreaking the night’s quiet. I worked on prying more away—cutting myself several times in the process—until I had created an opening to the dark center of the cage.
By the red light of my lantern, I could see him. Curled up against one side, very small, his head buried in his knees. He was crying. I could tell by the way his shoulders shook.
“Terren, it’s me.”
No answer.
I crouched beside him in the small hollow, the way I had done with the boy in the meadow. “May I keep you company?”
No answer.
“I’d like to tell you a story, if you would hear it. It’s one that my Ma used to tell me.”
Silence. Not even the stirring of grass in the wind.
“There was a year, before I was born, in which many animals in Lu’an had vanished. Hens and ducks and rabbits, and even the milk goats had not been spared. It had been a desperate summer, a summer when the sun seared the land so dry the catfish were cooked alive right in their holes.”
I kept my eyes on him as I did the telling.
“Nobody knew why, except for an old man who came from the village over. He walked in a stooped shuffle, and his skin held many wrinkles, so we knew he was very wise. He told us that there was a fox spirit who lived in the hills. He said on dark nights, when even the stars were not visible, it would come out hunting; that was why our livestock disappeared.
“Everyone was infuriated. As you can imagine, our village was already suffering from the famine, so this loss was not small. We knew we had to drive the demon away before it could do more damage.
“We tried to set traps for it, the way we might trap a wolf, but the demon was not of this world and could not be contained by normal materials. We tried to lure it with meat and lay ambush in the shadows, but the demon was devious and avoided it. Ba and Uncle Tam even tried going up the hill, to chase it away with sickles, but they could not find it. You know what did work in the end?”
He said nothing, so I answered my own question: “We worked together, all of us, as a village. We picked a clear, windless day, and then we gathered all the scary things we could find. Torches and kites, pots and wood-drums, leftover firecrackers from New Year’s. We went to the hill. Everyone—from the children to the elderly—clapped and yelled and stomped our feet and told the demon to go awayor else. And, well, it really did grow afraid. It left our village for good, and from then on, no livestock was ever taken again.”
I finished the tale. The summer remained silent, except for the call of an owl, very far away. The fog hung cold in the darkness between us.
