Page 107 of The Poet Empress
For a while Terren was so still that I thought he hadn’t been listening, but then he said, his voice small and broken, “Why did you tell me this?”
I honestly didn’t know. There was no point to it, except that I wanted to take his mind somewhere else, a place where people were good. “Because these are the stories I grew up with,” I said, wishing I was more articulate. “Because they are lovely and I like them.”
“Demons are not real. Anyone who has spent a day in school or read a book knows that.”
“Then good thing I have done neither.”
“If there was any truth to what your ma told you, then it was probably road bandits who took your livestock. There were lots of them, in the early years of the famine.”
I had suspected as much already, having read the histories by now, the memorials, the records. “Perhaps. But I like my version better.”
At last, he lifted his face from his sleeves and wiped furiously at his eyes. His voice was still broken as he said, “I should have you beheaded for seeing me like this.”
It was another flat attempt to get me afraid of him—or perhaps merely a force of habit. But I knew the threat did not have his heart behind it. “Is that so?”
“Beheaded and worse.”
“Terren, it is not a weakness to be seen.”
There were no knives between us now, no fear, not even enough distance for a sparrow to spread its wings. I looked into his eyes, and though they were older and meaner, there was no question they were the same ones as on the boy I’d seen in the meadow. I looked into them and I saw him.
Maybe itwaspossible to love somebody that one hated.
Maybe, buried heart-deep, I really did love him. Not the kind of love a wife shared with her husband—that was not possible, after all he’d done to me; I might have borne no scars, but my body still remembered—but the kind of love one human could not help but feel for another when they had to pry away blades to find them.
I did not know what else to call it, if notlove.
“Wei.” Something in my words had made him start crying again. “I’m… I’m lost.”
“Don’t worry. I’m here.”
“Will you hold on to me?”
I was taken aback. “Will it help you?”
He didn’t answer, only cried harder, shoulders shuddering with every heaving sob. I put a gentle arm around him and brought him close, and his face fell wet onto my shoulder like he could hold it up no longer. “I don’tknow anymore,” he gasped into my gown. “I…” He was crying so hard he could barely speak. “I don’t know…”
He never managed to articulate what it was he didn’t know, but I knew his meaning.I don’t know how much suffering is normal.
How much was ordinary, expected, the price we paid to live.
How much was created by us, needless.
I didn’t blame him for not knowing. I didn’t think I knew either. I did the only thing I knew how, which was to sit with him in silence and hold him tight, the way Ma used to do for me. I let him pour his gasping sobs into my shoulder, each one like his whole body was fighting for air. They were the rawest, most heartrending sounds I had ever heard come out of a human. “I don’t know… I’m lost… I’m lost…”
He had done many evil deeds, I thought, but he had not doneeverythinghe’d been accused of. He might have been a monster, but not all the ugliness in the world was his fault.
I held on to him as the night turned around us, as the dim flame of the lantern brushed our wall of knives and outlined the small shape of him in red. At last, when the sky was beginning to lighten through the lattice of our cage, he finally seemed to run out of those sounds. And he whispered, so quietly I almost didn’t hear him, “I did do it. Lady Autumn. I killed her.”
Then he told me how it happened, and the words he spoke were earnest ones.
59THE RIGHT PATH
He never left the peach garden that day.
As he was running from the arrows, under the cover of mist, he had passed by one of his usual hiding places. An azalea bush, near the gate. He had thrown himself under its leaves and waited, breathless, for the men with swords to pass him by. His leg throbbed terribly. There was an arrow still stuck in it. Arrows were not quite blades, and even if he could bend them in the air with his sigil, he had not been able to mend a wound caused by one.
For days he hid there, while the sky battered the garden with cold rain, huddling in the scent of blood and wet earth. He would have hidden there forever, except on the fourth afternoon, when the sun finally broke through the clouds, someone found him.
