Page 117 of The Poet Empress
A series of devastatingboomsthundered from the arena. The dragon—now bearing a hundred, perhaps a thousand, blade wounds—was thrashing violently, thwacking its body against the barrier.Boom. Boom.Salt poured out of the holes in its body like bonedust, scattering in the wind like a sandstorm, blanketing the ground in white.
Somewhere in the dust was Terren. I could not see him at all.
Remember who you are doing this for, and you will not be lost.I had thought about it the night before, and had made my decision. The decision to let him live.
It had not been an easy one. It was possibly the hardest I’d ever made in my life. I had been fantasizing about his death for one and a half years,ever since the first night he had tortured me. And every time he had cut me, drowned me, choked me, stabbed me, or hurt one of my friends, the fantasies had only grown more vivid. The satisfaction and catharsis of finally ending his life—they had been such difficult things to relinquish.
And there was the matter of Tensha’s future, too, under the reign of the Dao sigil. That had been a hard image to stomach. To picture Terren’s power amplified a thousandfold, to have war and conquest become his legacy—that frightened me to no end. To think of cities pulverized by knives, the way that so many had been during the Winter Dragon’s northern campaign—that was absolutely terrifying.
But,I had bargained with myself,maybe it doesn’t have to be that way.
Maybe there did not have to be war, or conquest, or pain. Because I would be Terren’s empress. Because I was going to sit on the throne next to him, keep close to him, guide him onto a better path. Not the right one—that was overly ambitious, even for the best of us—but at the very least, a better one.
I had not becomesowicked in my heart that I had stopped believing people could change. If a gentle child could turn into a monster, I thought, then surely a monster could become gentle again.
You and me, Wei, we can rule together for as long as I live.
An earth-shaking crash. The dragon had fallen onto its belly on the near side of the arena. Salt had flooded the entire arena by now, dusting the smashed cobble in a coat of white—and I was reminded of the snow on my wedding day. Still more was pouring out of its myriad knife wounds, as if the entire, unmoving length of it was a punctured sack of flour. Amidst the settling dust, I spotted Terren again, limping towards the felled dragon. Seven of his swords were still around him; he used the eighth as a walking stick. His gown was tattered, his forehead covered in blood, and his back scored by a giant, raw slash. But he was still alive, had still won.
“Wei.”Silian had come to my table, her expression panicked. “It has been long enough by now for you to have cast it, has it not? Terren has subdued the dragon. He is going to tame it soon. We are running out of time!”
Around us, everyone else was too busy watching the arena to hear us. Their cheers were lost in the raging wind.
I slipped my pen back into my sleeve, stood to meet her eyes, and smiled. “No,youare.”
The characters I had been tracing on the ground were not my heart-spirit poem. They were not even poetry at all. They were just random words, words to make it seem like I was still going through with the plan.
At first she looked confused. Then the implication hit her, all at once, and her lower lip trembled with rage. “Have you forgotten who you are? That night we met on Mid-Autumn, you were so afraid. So desperate. You were practically begging me to work with you, to help you kill the evil man you were bound to, to prevent him from seizing the throne with his bloodthirsty hands. Have you changed so much since then? Have you been soseducedby power?”
My smile never faltered. “Silian, you say it like it is a bad thing.”
I had thought it through the night before, and I understood now. Power was not always evil, the pursuit of it not always selfish.
Being able to help one’s family, one’s village—that was power.
Having enough provisions to dole out to starving farmers in the north—that was power.
Holding the authority to question the wicked owner of a pleasure house, to seek out the truth, to protect the innocent—thatwas power.
Remember who you are doing this for, and you will not be lost.What Silian didn’t know was that my decision to spare Terren was not so that I could become empress. It was for me to become the Rice Wife. Someone in the palace who understood—viscerally—what it was like to languish in the famine. Someone who could answer letters from places not on maps, and change edicts, and write spells to turn blanched wheat fields golden.
The expression of shock and betrayal on Silian’s face, at that very moment—that wasalsopower. I broke into a grin. When Maro narrowed his eyes at us from where he was sitting beside his men, I grinned even wider.
Maro,I thought,how does it feel to have fought so long for nothing? To have betrayed your brother—and murdered your father—for absolutely nothing?It was a wicked thought, and it delighted me to no end. I was going to be laughing about it for years.
The crowd roared louder with excitement, and we turned back towardsthe arena. Terren had made it to the wounded dragon and was kneeling before its head. He produced a small silver dagger from his sleeve, plunged it into its snout, and kept his hand around its hilt. A moment later, his sigil flared; a river of brilliant red light flowed from his palm to the dagger to the Crown. He was really doing it. He was really about to tame the dragon all by himself.
Then, piercing above the cheering, one of Kiran’s men screamed, “The Crown is still awake!”
The dragon’s tail moved slightly. Terren, focused on channeling into the dragon, had not noticed. The shouts of excitement turned to shrieks of alarm, and a moment later, the tail whipped up with the speed of arrows andslammedinto him.
He was thrown across the arena. A terrifying distance, bouncing across the salt-smeared ground. When his body at last rolled to a stop—all the way on the opposite side of the square—he did not get up. His swords, which had been hovering midair, all dropped to the ground like stones.
“No,” I gasped.
Silian started to laugh—a vulture’s shriek. “Perhaps the nation did not need to rely on a lowly village girl after all. Perhaps the coronation itself shall be what kills the tyrant prince. After all, he is stupid enough to take on a whole dragon by himself.” The way her smile twisted her face then, I could not fathom why I had once admired it. Why I had once believed her afraid of nothing. “Stupid, also, is anyone depraved enough to support him. Did you really think the world could allow someone like him to live? Evil never wins in the end, Wei. Even children know this.”
With those last words, she went back to join those of the West Palace. I just stood there, too petrified with horror to speak.
